Its the anniversary this month of the much talked about [url=http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,752310,00.html]photos in Der Spiegel[/url] last year.
For the ordinary Afghan, on the one side, there was the "Kill Team". A better description of the "Kill Team" activity in Maiwand in [url=http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-kill-team-20110327?print=true]in Rolling Stone.[/url]
[quote]Indeed, it would have been hard not to know about the murders, given that the soldiers of 3rd Platoon took scores of photographs chronicling their kills and their time in Afghanistan.
The photos, obtained by Rolling Stone, portray a front-line culture among U.S. troops in which killing Afghan civilians is less a reason for concern than a cause for celebration. "Most people within the unit disliked the Afghan people, whether it was the Afghan National Police, the Afghan National Army or locals," one soldier explained to investigators. "Everyone would say they're savages." One photo shows a hand missing a finger. Another depicts a severed head being maneuvered with a stick, and still more show bloody body parts, blown-apart legs, mutilated torsos. Several show dead Afghans, lying on the ground or on Stryker vehicles, with no weapons in view.
In many of the photos it is unclear whether the bodies are civilians or Taliban, and it is possible that the unidentified deaths involved no illegal acts by U.S. soldiers. But it is a violation of Army standards to take such photos of the dead, let alone share them with others. Among the soldiers, the collection was treated like a war memento. It was passed from man to man on thumb drives and hard drives, the gruesome images of corpses and war atrocities filed alongside clips of TV shows, UFC fights and films such as Iron Man 2. One soldier kept a complete set, which he made available to anyone who asked.
The collection also includes several videos shot by U.S. troops. In a jumpy, 30-minute clip titled "Motorcycle Kill," soldiers believed to be with another battalion in the Stryker Brigade gun down two Afghans on a motorcycle who may have been armed. One of the most chilling files shows two Afghans suspected of planting an IED being blown up in an airstrike. Shot through thermal imaging, the grainy footage has been edited into a music video, complete with a rock soundtrack and a title card that reads 'death zone.'[/quote]
A [url=http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/11/kill-team-calvin-gibbs-convicted]court-martial followed,[/url] and a conviction.
[quote]Gibbs was convicted of murder for inciting two soldiers to kill 15-year-old Gul Mudin as he worked in a field. The platoon commander gave a grenade to one of the soldiers, Jeremy Morlock, who threw it at Mudin. A second soldier, Andrew Holmes, then shot the boy. Gibbs played with the corpse of the teenager "as if it was a puppet", Morlock told the trial.
The staff sergeant was also convicted of shooting dead Marach Agha, a man sleeping by a roadside, and then planting a Kalashnikov next to the corpse to make it look as if he was a fighter. He kept part of the victim's skull as a trophy.
Gibbs was convicted on a third count of murder for killing a Muslim cleric, Mullah Adahdad, with a grenade and then shooting him. Two other soldiers, Morlock and Adam Winfield, have already pleaded guilty over their roles in the killing. Gibbs and other soldiers collected fingers, teeth and other body parts as trophies. They also took photographs of themselves posing next to their dead victims. In one of the pictures Morlock is seen lifting Mudin's head by its hair for the camera and smiling. The soldiers also took ghoulish pictures of themselves with dead combatants.[/quote]
In the end, though, [url=http://news.yahoo.com/us-soldier-gets-life-sentence-afghan-killings-024116265.html]]mercy towards the defendants prevailed[/url] out of consideration for an innocent son who needs his father.
[quote]The jury for the court martial at Joint Base Lewis-McChord south of Seattle sentenced Gibbs Thursday to life in prison, but he will be eligible for parole in less than nine years. The 26-year-old soldier was the highest ranking of five soldiers charged in the deaths of the unarmed men during patrols in Kandahar province early last year.
---
Gibbs' lawyer, Phil Stackhouse, asked for leniency — life with parole, instead of without it — and noted that Gibbs could be eligible for parole if they allowed it. "He'd like you to know he has had failures in his life and he's had a lot of time to think about them," Stackhouse said. "He wants you to know he's not the same person he was in Afghanistan. He doesn't want his wife to have to raise their son on her own."[/quote]
On the other side, [url=http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/7935362/Taliban-death-squad-kills-a-pregnant-woman-after-public-flogging.html]the Taliban.[/url]
[quote]Bibi Sanubar was held captive, beaten in front of a crowd before she was shot three times in the head on Sunday by an insurgent commander in the Qadis district of Badghis province, the Afghan police said. Ghulam Mohammad Sayeedi, deputy provincial police chief, said: "She was shot in the head in public while she was still pregnant." Mrs Sanubar had been accused of an illicit affair, while the man she had slept with had escaped punishment. Mr Sayeedi said a local Taliban commander, Mohammad Yousuf, carried out the execution before the woman's body was dumped in an area under government control. A purported spokesman for the Taliban movement denied any involvement and said the reports were police propaganda.
---
Insurgents were also accused of hanging a 7-year-old boy for spying earlier this year and shooting dead a young couple trying to elope last year.[/quote]
Is it any wonder the middle class has fled?
[img=440x440]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/aa/Andrew_Holmes_pulling_a_dead_Afghan_boy_by_the_hair_in_2010.jpg[/img]
Photo not embedding
(#276088)for some reason - is it a wikipedia problem?
literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it
I think I got it
(#276094)Not exactly sure what the problem was, but you may have linked to the wiki page with the image instead of directly to the image.
Oh OK,
(#276142)thanks.
literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it
On the Difficulty of Killing Fellow Human Beings....
(#276150)Dear manish:
I am not quite sure why this diary has received so little attention also. I suspect people are tired of the subject, or worse, they simply cannot figure out how to respond...the cognitive dissonance is jut to great to try to get a handle on.
Surprisingly, this is true for me also.
...even I have problems with this.
I like to think of myself as being able to ask the unasked questions, think the unthinkable, make the necessary connections, no matter how unpalatable they might be. For instance, in the end, for various policy reasons, we may decide not to kill all the clergy as I postulated in my thread....without anyone responding. People just can't think of this openly, even if certainly the Russians did it in 1917 and the French in the 1790's, as a necessary and proper precursor to the success of their enterprise.
Can you really drag every mullah out of their mosque and murder them in the street? Well, certainly you can, you may not want to for a bunch of reasons, but to properly frame the object of one's desires, it needs, I think, to be thought about...if only as a limiting fact of what might or might not be able to be accomplished.
I know that I am from another generation, 2 actually, of today's fighting men...but this behavior is incomprehensible to to me.
I just don't get it.
On so many levels.
On the one hand, just to be able to kill other human beings, (people being somewhat hardwired against this outcome), it is necessary for the killer to put some distance from his victim...this is absolutely necessary...this is why we call the enemy Huns, or Japs or Gooks...whatever.
I understand this. Does the Army? Do they train for this...inherent difficulty in the arts of killing?
When I was a Senior Drill Instructor sending men over the big pond to Viet Nam, I certainly taught this...and hopefully instilled a Warrior Ethos...of kill the enemy, remorsefully to be sure, but with honor also.
I just do not understand today's soldier, how they can do things like this.
I fault the Army and probably the entire US Military...
I'll think again the unthinkable....
There maybe needs to be 10,000 US Soldiers sentenced to long prison terms. No questions. This behavior is simply unacceptable.
In the same way I called for Everyone at Abu Ghraib, all the way up to, and especially, including General Janis Karpinski to be court martialed with long sentences, I think again this total breakdown of proper military discipline needs to be severely punished to put a stop to it.
In in fact this comes to mean that no one will stay in or join the military...then we have to face this honestly also and simply have a much smaller military.
The current troops in the field are unprofessional and need to cashiered and imprisoned immediately.
This would be better over all for our war efforts also.
Best Wishes, Traveller
The Russians were similar
(#276157)as discussed in the previous diary, and our military have certainly been responsible for atrocities in our Kashmir and North-East theatres. I certainly do not think that professional armies teach this kind of activity - at the least out of deference to modern media. But armies enlist violent men, of whom a subset would be expected to do this sort of thing - that's why there are ROE, courts-martial etc.
I'm trying to get a sense of the ordinary person's way of life in a war zone.
literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it
But it's not a military problem...
(#276185)It's a civilian problem. Our civilian leadership set the stage, encouraged, if not mandated, this behavior. Bush, Rumsfeld, and down the line. War criminals the lot of them. I'd rather see them in jail before 10,000 soldiers. Those guys -usual psychos excepted- need all the help they can get. They have been fubared in the head.
It's not that you don't understand our soldiers. You don't understand what happened to the country. That's OK, neither do I, though I'm pretty sure it has something to do with 60 years worth of massive exposure to television.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
It is both a civilian and military problem.
(#276227)Something had to be done in Afghanistan, after 9/11, I think we can all agree with that, and would have happened whoever was the civilian leader du jour.
[url=http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/12/world/asia/afghanistan-civilians-killed-american-soldier-held.html?hp]Why has it come to this, though?[/url]
[quote]PANJWAY, Afghanistan — A United States service member walked out of a military base in a rural district of southern Afghanistan on Sunday and opened fire on three nearby houses, killing at least 15 civilians, local villagers and provincial officials said.
---
In a separate incident, four Afghans were killed and three wounded on Friday when coalition helicopters apparently hunting Taliban insurgents fired instead on villagers in Kapisa province in eastern Afghanistan, according to Abdul Hakim Akhondzada, governor of Tagab district in Kapisa.[/quote]
literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it
US soldier opens fire on Afghan civilians
(#276226)[url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-17330641]at least 10 dead (auto-play video in link)[/url]
"I’m to believe that North Korea is so dangerously unhinged that they would attack without warning – yet so meek and easily cowed that they will sit quietly and not retaliate when we start bombing them."
Major Kong
I Blame the US Military for Much...but not for this...
(#276228)...this is a distinction with a difference.
The striker brigades were US Soldiers as murders.
This was a soldier, without the need for rhyme or reason....because there is none....who broke under the strain of war and went mad.
I don't really blame him for anything. It is bad what he did of course, terrible...but it is explicable, regrettable, but understandable....even by the Afghans themselves, I am certain.
Best Wishes, Traveller
Massacre in Kandahar (more than 1 soldier?)
(#276231)If NATO forces weren't already slated to withdraw from the country by 2014, I think this story would spell the end of the occupation. It might well yet, along with the idiotic Koran burning scandal, and the harrowing Stryker video scandal, hasten our departure.
The media reports are fairly uniform, but witnesses report something quite different from the official story, to absolutely no surprise from me. Reuters, getting its story from actual, you know, witnesses to the incident, originally reported that "coalition forces" had carried out the killings.
Well, well. I'm sure claiming this is the work of one rogue soldier who suffered a nervous breakdown is the story the Pentagon would much rather tell. Multiple troops acting in concert (like the Strykers) is quite a bit more damning to the occupation as a whole. Reuters has since backed all the way down, toeing the line of the official news organ.
Uh huh. I don't know whether I hope the truth comes out, or that NATO's PR people manage to manhandle the story into a neat little package of nothing to see here, so that we can finally put this little nation building experiment behind us.
M Aurelius was probably right.
Reuters headline story now says "one or more" US soldiers
(#276238)My impression of reuters is that it's pretty respectable.
Very prescient diary, manish
(#276239).
The NYT, Burning of Children Particulary Bad, Also See Comments
(#276242)...I am continually surprised how cogent and well written the comment section is at the NY Times...so much better than most news outlets, better than LAT comments, but CNN is a joke, as is becoming comments at the BBC also.
In any case, more details here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/12/world/asia/afghanistan-civilians-kille...
Bad stuff...but again, I do not blame the US Military, (yet), except for maybe not recognizing the need for psychological counseling for many, many soldiers.
At least this is my take so far and on available evidence.
(I do sometimes however wonder if something else is also going on....I would love to see the raw interrogation tapes, or transcripts thereof, concering this soldier.)
Best Wishes, Traveller
A Last Thought on the Stryker Problem....US Troops...
(#276265)...some of these soldiers may be on their 2nd, 3rd or even 4th deployment....much like when America moved West, one log fort after another, ....Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Arizona, out there by yourself....but at least with the intellectual support of Manifest Destiny and the lure of the waiting Pacific Ocean.
But this isn't your own country.
Who's going to be the last fool to die in Afghanistan?....every soldier is asking himself this question every day.
We don't have the...brutal fortitude to win, nor did the Russians....I'm talking millions of deaths and a concerted effort to change the society, and hence maybe also therefore take on all of Islam, a billion strong....
If this is true....what the hell are we doing there?
If necessary, we can always go back and kill many more people, but now....Out.
Traveller
Its interesting to compare the Fort Hood spree
(#276266)killings and the Stryker group as well, from the point of view of sentencing. I believe a majority of Americans support the death penalty for the Fort Hood perpetrator.
literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it
"I can't take their (stuff) anymore"
(#276273)Possibly relevant to this thread:
http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/01/19/of_alexander_gods_and_bathrooms_why_the_afghans_can_t_get_their_shit_together
Our intervention in Afghanistan has been all clueless, all the time, starting from day one.
Trying to impose liberal democracy on the Afghans is as hopeless as trying to explain to your cat why s/he shouldn't throw up on the carpet.
.Divine Spinoza, forgive me. I have become a fool.
Sold!
(#276274)Happy to partner with the "Afghans are primitive" crowd if it gets us out of endless war in Afghanistan.
primitive?
(#276311)Your word, not mine.
Why is it so hard for guys like you to talk to guys like me without resorting to insulting caricature?
.Divine Spinoza, forgive me. I have become a fool.
Because you troll for it?
(#276320)Did I type that out loud?
M Aurelius was probably right.
You know, Jordan...
(#276327)...that's actually a plausible hypothesis.
Do I deliberately try to provoke my interlocutors into intemperate speech? Am I passively aggressive?
Hmmm...I'll have to think about that one.
.Divine Spinoza, forgive me. I have become a fool.
Fits all provided data.
(#276330)Accords with a certain admitted taste for drama. Not an entirely implausible conclusion.
M Aurelius was probably right.
I'd say melodrama nt
(#276339).
I blame it all on the Internet
I've been on board with the
(#276277)"you need a functioning civil society before you can hope to build democracy" camp for years. Note no racist assumptions about Afghans required to reach this conclusion.
M Aurelius was probably right.
You need reasonable levels of literacy
(#276292)You need reasonable levels of literacy before you can build a functioning civil society. After 10 years of occupation, literacy levels could be higher.
You will kill 10 of our men, and we will kill 1 of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it. - Ho Chi Minh
No, you don't.
(#276298)There've been hundreds of civil societies whose populations were largely illiterate.
You just need a social system that extends beyond the village and kinship level, recognition of distant authority, and social institutions to sustain those relationships (post offices, transit systems, etc.). Really just minimal levels of all of that...Afghanistan has none and never did.
M Aurelius was probably right.
hundreds?
(#276310)really?
.Divine Spinoza, forgive me. I have become a fool.
the kindest way to inculcate American values
(#276380)I can't see the justification for creating transit systems and post offices in a nation where literacy levels are as low as they are in Afghanistan. And I don't think Afghanistan's problems stem from a lack of recognition of distant authorities. I doubt illiteracy is the cause of Afghanistan's troubles either, but that is not my point.
I thought USA lost an opportunity after they invaded. My idea, and I remember raising it at the time, was to bring over the most promising students over to study in American universities and send them back after graduating. Maybe Afghanistan could be capable of sending some 1000 students each year. American civil servants stationed in Afghanistan could set exams to choose the most promising. The USA would fit the bill entirely. This would be the kindest way to inculcate American values in such a place. The notion is based on the exam system that was in place in China I think from the Tang Dynasty. You know maybe that when the Mongols invaded and took over China, they retained this system and within a couple generations the Mongols themselves were completely sinicized, notwithstanding Kublai's Christian (and unchinese) wife.
You will kill 10 of our men, and we will kill 1 of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it. - Ho Chi Minh
And a very good idea, too.
(#276384)Unfortunately, such ideas were not implemented. There may have been opposition by anti-affirmative action people in the USA, though. And also opposition from the people who would have been deprived of those same university places.
But what you say is from the point of an elite that wishes to colonise. And that's not what I feel Americans are, in general, comfortable with. Their intervention in AfPak was more in the way of eliminating a 'nest of vipers', speaking metaphorically. There is not much more interest than that.
literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it
Not a very effective way to rout al Qaeda
(#276386)and remove the Taliban as a national leadership willing to tolerate them (or unable to drive them out and unwilling to hand them over). Cultural exchange is the only way to bridge the kinds of divides that lead to war...but it takes a long time, and al Qaeda planning was at the 5 to 10 year phase, not the 100 year phase.
M Aurelius was probably right.
enmeshed in the Afghan culture
(#276510)The Taleban were routed in 2001 and the al qaeda havent managed to pull off an operation on American soil since the same time. That's more than a decade ago, enough time for a programme like mine to become enmeshed in the Afghan culture and start to bear fruit.
You will kill 10 of our men, and we will kill 1 of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it. - Ho Chi Minh
"no racist assumptions"
(#276309)Jordan, I am SO deeply impressed by your moral purity.
.Divine Spinoza, forgive me. I have become a fool.
Who said anything about morality?
(#276319)I just hate stupidity.
M Aurelius was probably right.
Have it your way, Jordan.
(#276326)I am deeply impressed by your ultra-high IQ.
Is that better?
.Divine Spinoza, forgive me. I have become a fool.
On day one, you were trying to impose an Islamic theocracy.
(#276301)Day one was in 1979, if you recall. Or had you forgotten?
Although, to be fair, it [i]was[/i] [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan_Doctrine]a long time ago,[/url] though not as long as when Avicenna was there, [url=http://www.ontology.co/avicenna.htm]struggling with his Aristotle[/url].
literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it
I was?
(#276307)How odd.
I do not, indeed, recall that.
I think maybe you've mixed me up with somebody else.
.Divine Spinoza, forgive me. I have become a fool.
Heh. You did say 'our'
(#276313)intervention. But perhaps you do not wish to be associated with the disastrous practices of the Cold War. Perhaps you think the Cold War a mistake. In which case, good for you!
literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it
It's very convenient
(#276315)to say "our" when it's the good aspects of something you want to asociate with (Christendom, the US, etc.) because it implies large popular support but then pivot to "my" when there are things you don't want to associate with. But consistency is much more persuasive and less confusing. Stick to "our" when you're talking about US policies, good and bad. Stick to "my" when it's your opinion.
I blame it all on the Internet
HankP, there seems to be...
(#276325)...some sort of deep misunderstanding going on here.
But it's been a long day, and I'm too worn out. Maybe tomorrow.
.Divine Spinoza, forgive me. I have become a fool.
Just basic rhetorical tricks nt
(#276329).
I blame it all on the Internet
Any way we could drop the NSFW picture
(#276290)below the fold on this diary?
M Aurelius was probably right.
Mods, please?
(#276300)-
literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it
The story is getting worse.
(#276350)http://www.dawn.com/2012/03/13/kandahar-killings.html
[quote]the Kandahar tragedy reflects the frustration of US military personnel. Joint Base Lewis-McChord, the military facility where the suspect is originally from in the US, has a history of violent incidents. Four soldiers from the base were convicted of deliberately killing Afghan civilians in 2010, while a number of soldiers at the base committed suicide after returning from foreign tours.[/quote]
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2012/03/afghans-want-know-if-us-so...
[quote]Questions remain This morning, Afghanistan's largest online news portal Khaarma Press reported that the killings have brought U.S.-Afghan relations to an "all-time low" with President Hamid Karzai issuing an "angry statement" denouncing the "unforgivable action." Afghan lawmakers have begun raising doubts that just one man carried out the killings. "It is not possible for only one American soldier to come out of his base, kill a number of people far away, burn the bodies, go to another house and kill civilians there, then walk at least 2 kilometers and enter another house, kill civilians and burn them," said Abdul Rahim Ayubi, a lawmaker from Kandahar province. He noted that the houses targeted were more than one mile apart. Kandahar parliamentarian Mullah Sayed Mohammed Akhund told The Wall Street Journal that local villagers witnessed more than one solider during the night and Afghan soliders said they heard simultaneous shootings coming from different locations. While U.S. officials insisted that there's no evidence suggesting more than one shooter, The Journal notes that the U.S. Embassy in Kabul seemed to open the possibility that additional accomplices could be involved with a statement saying "the individual or individuals responsible for this act will be identified and brought to justice."[/quote]
literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it
Story Getting Worse? Yes and No....
(#276351)As I wrote elsewhere:
Yes, I See That this has just come out....
Just bad karma coming down on us.
But, let me say again, for soldiers, a ten year war is a very long time....time enough to go crazy.
It is even kind of antithetical to the way war should be...go in kill a lot of people, be done with it.
This never ending war....is hard on people.
~~~~
Maybe you're right.
(#276435)We can see it was [url=http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/15/world/asia/disconnect-clear-in-us-bafflement-over-2-afghan-responses.html?pagewanted=2&hp#]a loner issue[/url].
[quote]Ahmad Nader Nadery, a human rights activist, said that when the heat of the moment settled, many Afghans would be ready to see the Kandahar massacre as the criminal act of a single individual, particularly because it did not come as part of a military operation.
Perhaps most important, however, is that civilian casualties have long since stopped being the particular province of foreign military forces, who were once responsible for 75 percent of them. Now the Taliban commit 75 percent of them, according to figures by the United Nations and Afghan rights groups. As one American military official said, “When have the Taliban ever apologized for killing?”[/quote]
literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it
I hope
(#276438)the US military isn't grading itself by comparisons to the Taliban.
I blame it all on the Internet
That base is about 50 miles south of Seattle
(#276352)they've had some issues down there. Their crime rate looks to be about 3 times the national average.
I blame it all on the Internet
Hehehe, Taliban Suspend Talking to the US...
(#276453)The Taliban in Afghanistan have suspended nascent talks with the US over opening an office in Qatar.
The US had been trying to set up a dialogue with the Taliban in the Gulf state for some time.
Meanwhile, President Hamid Karzai has called for Nato-led forces to move out of Afghan villages and rural areas after a US soldier killed 16 civilians.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-17379163
What does this tell you?
Who needs the talks, who has the itch?
Traveller