If none of them wear uniforms, aren’t they all ‘civilians’?
In my opinion, we shouldn’t have troops in Afghanistan.
The country can’t be conquered or held, because it’s not a country. It’s a mountain range sparsely settled by a loose coalition of anarchist goatherds and opium farmers.
(If it works for them, I have no problem. Though I suspect it was a much nicer place back when women could hold jobs and go to school.)
Yes, Osama bin Laden and some of the surviving terrorists who arranged the attacks on the World Trade Center and other U.S. facilities are still harboring in the mountains on the Afghan-Pakistani border. As I’ve said before, the answer is to send in agricultural advisors from northern California to help these people produce more potent strains of hashish and opium, and then buy the stuff at wholesale, retailing it to the world. That’s the kind of thing Americans are good at. Once we’re their main buyer — and given our industrial-strength efficiency, we soon would be — offer them a million-dollar bonus and a free trip to Disney World if they bring in their next camel-load with bin Laden tied on top.
In addition to which — I realize this is just a technicality — has there been a Declaration of War? Did I miss that? We shouldn’t have troops killing people overseas without a Declaration of War, should we? It’s so confusing to the neutral nations. Another nice thing about a Declaration of War is that the Congress would have to specify who we’re at war with, and what our goal is — how we’re to know when we’ve won. If we’re at war with al-Qaida but not the Taliban, wouldn’t that be a good thing for our soldiers and Marines to know?
And by the way, if we have troops fighting in Afghanistan, which is a thoroughly landlocked country, how can they be “Marines”? Aren’t “Marines” supposed to be amphibious?
The best reason to want to stay in Iraq is that Iraq will become Barack Obama’s Vietnam, and we’d sure be better off without Barack Obama. But only if he were replaced with Ron Paul, or someone else who would shut down the Federal Reserve and give us back gold and silver money, before we see “bank holidays” and riots in the streets. Which he won’t be.
So let’s not sacrifice a single additional brave Marine to replace Barack Obama with another economically clueless agent of the Big Banksters.
That said, since we DO have troops in Afghanistan, it’s the job of our chain of command to protect their lives.
Since at least the 18th century, the rules of war have put increasing stress on uniforms. Not only do uniforms help prevent the good guys shooting each other, they also allow a clear distinction to be drawn between a uniformed combat unit cut off behind the lines — still entitled to be treated as prisoners of war — and spies and saboteurs purposely disguised as civilians, who are pretty much entitled to be lined up against the wall and shot.
A problem arises when you enter the Third World. In Vietnam, the local “civilian” barber who came onto the fire base during the day to give haircuts might well turn out to be the little guy in the black pajamas directing the mortar fire into the base that night.
In 1991, U.S. forces overran Iraq quickly. But then our troops noticed something odd.
Enemy artillery pieces appeared abandoned, but there seemed to be a lot of adult males of military age loafing around the area in civilian clothes. Once our troops passed by, these characters would run over and fire the artillery piece. What were they — soldiers, civilians, spies or saboteurs? If following such an event you chased down and shot an Iraqi male in a flowered shirt but wearing combat boots, was that a “war crime”? How come no one is ever put on trial and subsequently executed for the “war crime” of firing an artillery piece while wearing “street clothes”?
In the “asymmetrical” combat now typical of the Third World, the combatant-civilian distinction can be not only meaningless, but deadly to those who try to continue “playing by the rules” as learned back home.
What does it mean to imply something has gone wrong if an American rocket attack in Afghanistan causes “civilian casualties”? While no one wants to target or kill non-combatant women or children, the fact is the Taliban have little in the way of a standardized uniform. As in Vietnam, Taliban fighters can easily hide their rifles in the hut and pretend to be goatherds at convenience.
No one launches rockets in hope of blowing up landscape or innocent goats. The object is to blow up the enemy. You know: people. And in Afghanistan, the enemy often appear to be — by our ways of judging things — “civilians.”
On Sept. 4, the Taliban hijacked a pair of gasoline tankers, which could have been used as weapons of mass destruction. A U.S. airstrike hit the tankers at the Kunduz River, blowing them sky high. About 70 “civilians” were reported killed. Were they fighters? Hijackers? Non-combatants busily siphoning off some of the stolen fuel?
NATO investigators are now trying to figure that out. Why?
Did anyone care who died when a gasoline tanker got blown up by an American airstrike in Germany in 1944? Are we at war, here, or staging some kind of a ritual tea party?
On Sept. 8, Afghan forces and their U.S. trainers approached the Afghan village of Ganjgal. There, journalist Jonathan S. Landay of McClatchy Newspapers lived through a deadly firefight to report: “U.S. commanders, citing new rules to avoid civilian casualties, rejected repeated calls to unleash artillery rounds at attackers dug into the slopes and tree lines — despite being told repeatedly that they weren’t near the village.”
Four Marines died, largely because their remote commanders — be they U.S. or “NATO” — refused to provide air or artillery support, for fear of hurting “civilian” villagers.
According to the McClatchy report, there’s even considerable suspicion that Afghan villagers and allied “security personnel” were behind the Ganjgal ambush in the first place, and that women and children from the nearby village — the ones our Marine died lest anyone inconvenience — were actually re-supplying the Taliban fighters with ammunition.
Let us hear less of the pussy-footing about nuance, complexity, and “hearts and minds,” please. In North Africa in 1942, in Italy in 1943, in France in 1944, no American or British soldier set out to kill native civilians. But if the locals or their houses got in the way, we simply blew them up. No one “investigated,” unless it was to find out whether our fuzes were working properly. That’s modern war.
How the heck did these tiptoeing pussywillows wend their way into the chain of command? Are our boys now serving under the Belgians? If they’re not willing to accept some level of unintended collateral casualties, our commanders have no business sending American boys into harm’s way. Our troops will take their chances, so long as they know all available firepower is at their disposal to claw the enemy off their backs when needed.
It would be best to pull out of Afghanistan. Do we think we can do a better job of conquering the place because we’re more ruthless than the Russians? I think we just disproved that.
But so long as we’re there, the best way to limit noncombatant (“civilian”) casualties in the long run is to exert maximum power, killing lots of enemies, and thus winning the war as quickly as possible.
If you can’t win by killing lots of enemies, it’s not a job for armed forces, and they shouldn’t be there.
In the meantime, though, saving American lives comes first. That’s the deal.