In trying to mop up the last of the Taleban and Al-Qaeda units on their territory, the Afghan government troops along with US and British Special Forces are clearly having a tough time. However, little hard news is coming out of Afghanistan about what is going on, and the tidbits that are emerging give cause for concern about what the Americans in particular are up to. Ever since a convoy containing tribal chiefs on their way to Kabul for the installation of President Hamid Karzai was shot up by US jets, it is clear that there has been a string of errors in which innocent Afghans have been killed by what the Americans, in a triumph of euphemism over reality, like to call “friendly fire”. Initially, before there were sufficient troops deployed on the ground, these killings came about because airborne attacks were either launched on faulty intelligence or perhaps because someone simply misread their map. However, now that large numbers of coalition troops are operating alongside Afghan government units, there ought to be more opportunity to verify that a target is indeed hostile before unleashing the full force of US armament upon it.
Yet, there are more and more reports of ordinary Afghans being caught up in the fighting and treated as if they were the enemy. One of the latest incidents concerns a US raid on the town of Oruzgan, in which 15 suspects were killed and 27 seized. Despite protesting their innocence, these men were taken to a US compound near Kandahar where they were beaten and brutalized for 16 days before being set free, with hardly an apology. One of the victims turned out to be the 60-year old Oruzgan police chief, who had his ribs kicked and broken.
True, in the tension of combat, mistakes do happen. But are the Americans working hard enough to avoid such errors? Are they genuinely liaising with the Afghan authorities on intelligence matters and are they actually listening to he advice and opinions that their Afghan hosts are giving them? Washington will probably say yes. But if that is true, how come the local police chief can be seized and brutalized for more than two weeks before anyone figured out who he was? And what right did the US military have to treat him and his fellow victims in that violent and callous fashion anyway?
Perhaps, the answer lies in the origin of that sinister expression “friendly fire”. It was coined by the Pentagon along with a lot of other euphemistic gobbledygook during the Vietnam War. One of the other, nastier words was “gook”. It started off as describing a member of the North Vietnamese Army. But gradually, it became harder for the ordinary GI to tell the good guys from the bad guys. Thus, ordinary US servicemen viewed ordinary South Vietnamese with the deepest suspicion and, time and again, fired first and asked questions afterward. In a war which came to be measured in body counts, the innocent dead counted every bit as much as those of the enemy. After all, the corpses all looked the same.
Could this be what is happening now in Afghanistan? Despite their high level of training, are the US Special Forces starting to think of every Afghan as a “gook”? If this is in any way true, the Pentagon needs to get a grip on their men — and quickly. More importantly, it should be listening carefully to the advice of the Afghan forces.
