Civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan
Last May I pointed out that the Afghanistan conflict is unusual in the amount of attention American officials are giving to civilian casualties. The concern went beyond rhetoric and into policy. According to a recent UN report, the new policies are the likely cause of a 28% reduction in civilian deaths in 2009 caused by “pro-Government forces,” compared to 2008. The report adds the caveat that the methods most criticized (e.g. air strikes) continue to account accordingly for a large percentage of civilian deaths. Notably, these positive results are despite 2009 winning the award for most civilian casualties in the Afghanistan war.
Each specific scandal evokes the typical response, that the event is either just unfortunate or is not the result of systematic policy. Note also that the stated motivation for decreasing civilian casualties is that we must win the “hearts and minds” of the Afghan people. Wrongness, humanitarian standards, etc., are apparently not among the available justifications. But enough “idealistic slogans,” to borrow an old phrase.
The two cases prominently displayed in the news this week are the Wikileaks video depicting the attack on a group of men and children, two of them Iraqi reporters for Reuters, and the killing and subsequent cover-up in an especially visceral case involving two pregnant Afghan mothers, with 16 children between them.
The Iraq case: The NYT At War blog has a handy post collecting some comments by informed military bloggers about the Wikileaks case. I can discern at least three distinct issues arising from this event: (1) morally evil attitudes among soldiers (“Well it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle,” “Oh, yeah, look at those dead bastards,” etc.), (2) the nature and application of rules of engagement, and (3) implications for what goes on in the war generally.
I take it that (1) is more pervasive than we imagine, but I can’t think of any general way to de-incentivize the military for lovers of violence. It seems to me that there’s somewhat of a consensus on (2), that the soldiers can’t be plausibly faulted in terms of the rules of engagement. For one thing, as the video testifies, they requested and received authorization to engage. However, one question arises: if it is perfectly legitimate for soldiers to engage unidentified individuals who are neither firing upon them nor engaging in combat otherwise, what isn’t permitted? Much has been made of the proximity of a hostile engagement to this particular event, but I don’t understand the moral or legal relevance of this. I find (3) the most interesting. Given that Reuters was unable to acquire the video footage from the military, how many other cases are there of this sort? I don’t know of any place where such cases are gathered.
The Afghanistan case: I agree with Harry Shearer that this story is incomparably worse, despite its telling relative lack of attention. This story is more worrying (to me at least) for a few reasons. First, the details themselves are shocking and visceral in a way that the Iraqi details are not. Second, there appears to have been a fairly substantial cover-up, involving even a false story published by NATO. Third, as Shearer points out, this one wasn’t caught on video. I wonder, could it be that the military behaves better when the tape is rolling?
However I’m not sure that Shearer’s interpretation of the media attention is quite right. He suggests that the Iraq case is more prominently in the media because there is video. While that fact, plus the ancillary novelty of Wikileaks for new media, surely plays a role in attracting sensationalist journalists, I think there’s a deeper reason. The Afghan case comes in the midst of a public scuffle between the Obama administration and Hamid Karzai. Astute observers will recall that Karzai’s original sin, before becoming the problematically corrupt friend of the U.S., was his public outrage over civilian casualties. So the Afghan case is unacceptable for American ideology for two reasons: (1) The perpetrators can’t be plausibly defended on grounds of rules of engagement and (2) publicity of this event would add too much legitimacy to Karzai’s “anti-Western” statements. There is a third unsavory fact for journalists, which is that if the Afghan case were pursued, the (legitimate) demonization of several American soldiers would be inevitable. And that sort of attention, of course, is reserved for the bad guys.