There is no other explanation that I can think of:
NATO acknowledged Sunday that its troops killed five Afghans in a botched nighttime raid in February — after initially saying the civilians may have been victims of an “honor killing.”
Even though civilian casualties at the hands of NATO troops have fallen off in recent months, such incidents have strained relationship between Afghanistan and the Western nations that make up the International Security Assistance Force.
At the time of the February 12 incident, NATO said its troops went to a compound in the village of Khatabeh in the Paktia province, believing it to be a militant hideout.
A firefight ensued and several insurgents died, NATO said at the time.
When soldiers entered the compound, they found the bodies of two men and two women who had been shot “execution-style,” a senior U.S. military official said then.
“It has the earmarks of a traditional honor killing,” the official said, adding that the women were found bound and gagged.
How else does this story change so radically?
thomas Levenson
It doesn’t. SASQ.
Svensker
“The men were only trying to protect their families.”
None of them were “insurgents”, whatever that means at this point.
I’m trying to imagine if foreign troops were in my little town and they shot and killed the family next door, including the mom and the kids, then lied about it. How would our neighbors feel about that? Would they perhaps advocate taking up arms against those foreign troops? And would they then be considered insurgents?
“The men were only trying to protect their families.”
What the hell are we doing there?
Egypt Steve
Hmmmm … are they telling the truth even now? Or is this a new cover story? Were the people in the house bound, gagged and executed by NATO forces? The “misinterpreting burial customs” line sounds pretty lame. And the timeline is pretty vague.
SiubhanDuinne
I’m glad Canada’s getting out. Wish we were.
El Cid
Well,
If only we’d let President McCain end earmarks.
El Cid
On the binding & gagging:
Mum
It’s bad enough that such horrible things as “honor killings” actually do take place, probably on a much larger scale than those of us in the western world realize. But to use that real crime against humanity as a lie to cover up your own inhumanity is beyond despicable. If this indeed happened, there can be no other recourse but courts martial for all involved.
D-Chance.
Time to send in another 50,000 US troops… Oboy.
And, btw, this was a US cover-up, not necessarily a NATO one:
Afghan investigators have told a British newspaper that American Special Forces tried to cover up a botched raid in an Afghan village that resulted in the deaths of five civilians, and then lied to their superiors about it.
According to a report in The Times of London, investigators say American troops removed bullets from the bodies of the victims, which included two pregnant women, a teenage girl, a police officer and his brother.
The soldiers then cleaned the wounds with alcohol before telling their commanders the civilians had been discovered already dead for many hours, according to the Afghans, who spoke to The Times on condition of anonymity.
El Cid
You mean…
SUUUUUUURGE!
Svensker
Mum
No argument there, but… We are putting these kids into situations where they don’t know who the “enemy” is and have no idea what their mission is. All they know is they prefer that Other Guy be dead rather than risk their own or their buddies’ lives. So when something goes wrong, they panic and try to cover it up. Not particularly admirable, but can I honestly say I wouldn’t do the same thing, given the stress and fear and uncertainty?
Just read El Cid’s clip — can you imagine being a 20 year old, scared and full of adrenaline, and you fire into a house because you see guns and think there are insurgents. Then you go in and discover dead pregnant women, a kid, and a cop? I imagine “oh shit” was the first response and then total panic. We should not be there.
The ones who really need a courts martial are the leaders who are putting our kids in that position.
El Cid
Svensker: That should always be the major point — not the inability of troops to maintain a super-human level of control at all times under all situations, but to understand that these types of horrible actions are what occur in war and occupations. Supporters of war and occupation can rightly argue that such incidents are the exception, and not the rule, which is true and irrelevant.
[It’s the same mentality which tries to either avoid discussion of My Lai (or, in Colin Powell’s case, help in covering it up) or to pin the entirety of the blame on Lt Calley’s shoulders, rather than a general U.S. policy of declaring ‘free fire’ zones and repeatedly linking civilian support of guerrillas with a war strategy from which one can only conclude that South Vietnamese civilians are functionally part of the enemy guerrilla force. Yet in any particular horrible incident, the tendency is to discuss this as part of individual command responsibility or even individual troop response.]
Herb
El Cid is absolutely right that these things are inevitable in any war. But be a man about it.
“I will never forget that I am an American, fighting for freedom, responsible for my actions, and dedicated to the principles which made my country free.”
Surely these guys came across that somewhere during their training. What part of “responsible for my actions” did they not understand?
norbizness
Someday we’ll admit that we’re paying nearly a trillion dollars a year to the Pentagon to get absolutely nothing done apart from busy work.
jimBOB
I wish all that happened was busywork. The worst part of military budget bloat is that once you’ve bought all that shiny blow-shit-up equipment is that some idiot takes it into his head that since we have the stuff we just have to go out someplace and use it. Dropping a trillion on nothing would be far preferable to dropping it on gratuitous murder and mayhem.
Graeme
NATO was engaged in a tribal practice called ‘honor lying.’ It’s important to these tribal leaders to keep wars going by lying about how they’re faring in the fight.
liberal
El Cid wrote,
I strongly doubt they were the exception in Vietnam, depending on how you define “exception” of course.
liberal
D-Chance wrote,
Bu…bu…but Obama didn’t have a choice…he had to do that, because it was a campaign promise!!!!
El Cid
liberal:
I’m not a war supporter, and it would indeed depend on how you defined ‘exception’, but I’m sure it’d be fairly easy to define what are considered egregious actions outside what the command structure considers standard military operating procedure and the norms, and then show that the particularly egregious examples are a small percentage of overall military activity.
In other words, think not so much of how you or I might read the situation, but the sorts of pro-war propagandists and punditariat would justify the situation.
Using a higher standard, then, perhaps, the entire war itself is an egregious departure from recognized norms of how military actions should deal with civilians.
Uloborus
Look. First of all, these things DO happen in wars. Anybody who thinks Afghanistan is necessary and didn’t expect stuff like this to happen sometimes was lying to themselves. There is no possible way to make a war clean. There is only a lesser of two evils. It’s the lesser of two evils to stay, ensuring that a fundamentalist extremist group that the locals hate and are terrified of doesn’t take power again, because the Taliban does this kind of crap deliberately. All the time. It was the lesser of two evils to start this war, rather than sit back and let a foreign government attack our citizens with impunity through a third party they backed. It’s the lesser of two evils to ramp things up militarily because that’s part of the best plan we could come up with to stabilize the country and break the Taliban’s power permanently.
This story changes absolutely nothing. And assuming that this means our soldiers tied up civilians and then deliberately murdered them is ignoring the main point of this story – that in a war out in the middle of nowhere, most of what you get are garbled rumors, and our military is at least willing to go back and admit it when they find out they messed up.
liberal
Uloborus wrote,
Wrong. We’ll never stabilize Afghanistan. Even if you put aside the moral issue of murdering civilians, it’s a total waste of American lives and treasure at this point.
There was nothing immoral about us going in there to begin with, because as you point out we were attacked.
Doesn’t mean we have to stay forever, though.
Best option is to just declare victory and get the hell out of there.
liberal
El Cid wrote,
Yes, and that’s exactly what I’m not convinced was true—at all—in Vietnam.
IIRC huge swathes of countryside were essentially declared free-fire zones.
liberal
Uloborus claimed,
If they “admitted it” on their own, that’s great. But I doubt it—I wager they “admitted it” only after they were caught in their lies.
Glen Tomkins
Their job is to lie to us
Look, we have a perfectly good set of conventional armed forces. They are probably the best in the world at doing what we expect armed forces to do, defeat the armed forces of actual or potential enemy nations.
So why would we have any need for “special operations” forces, and the “black ops” that only they can perform? You could see how armed forces that were hopelessly behind the big players in conventional forces, might see a need to cut a few ethical corners, and go with forces that avoid dealing directly with the armed forces of enemy nations. If guerrillas are all you can field, you field guerrillas. Of course, they’re “terrorists” to anyone you’re fighting, so you better win.
But if a nation that can and does win all the conventional battles, can defeat enemy armed forces handily, resorts to maintaining its own corps of terrorists, forces whose job it is to do violence to “enemy” civilians rather than armed forces, we’re not talking about military necessity. The only reason a militarily successful nation institutionalizes special forces designed to operate outside the rules of warfare, is because it wants to be able to lie to itself. We want the Secretary to be able to disavow all knowledge.
Who could have predicted that such an arrangment would end with our terrorists lying to us? Well, except that it began with us lying to ourselves, and the whole point of having these forces is that they lie to us. Gee, now they’re lying to protect themsleves, to cover for their own mistakes, rather than their nation’s moral laxity and stupidity, like we want them to. Who could have predcited that people sent to do immoral things, like targeting non-combatants, in secret so that we could keep our consciences clean, would become a law unto themselves? Except that creating a sort of moral singularity was the whole point of having special forces and black ops capabilities.
Uloborus
Liberal:
Alright. I don’t agree that we can never stabilize Afghanistan – but it’s as good a belief as mine, because lord knows Bush screwed that pooch until no one would EVER marry her.
Obama seems to think we’ve got a shot, and should take it.
chrome agnomen
@uloborus
agree except with your note that our military is willing to go back and admit wrongdoing. no no no no no. only if they are caught in an out and out lie and coverup.without foreign, native, or independent followup to this war crime, this would with almost dead certainty have never seen the light of day. with no evidence whatsoever, i feel free to assert that thousands of our troops in the past and current wars will carry thousands of examples just like this to their graves
Svensker
Oh, bovine scat.
Afghanistan is divided up into thousands of small tribal units, many of which back the Taliban and many of which don’t. The Taliban aren’t good guys, but whether they rule the entire country or not should be up to the people there to decide, not us. We’re going to stay until they get a good government? Welcome to empire.
As for “the Taliban does this kind of crap deliberately”… You are saying since we “only” do it as collateral damage, we’re way better? Tell that to the family of the pregnant women who were just slaughtered by our guys. Tell that to the folks who’ve been shocked and awed for the last 8 years.
What is our mission there? How do we plan to accomplish it? What is the time frame? What is the budget?
Are there any answers to any of those questions?
In the meantime, pregnant women get slaughtered and we have a generation of young (mostly) men who have been scarred for life, the ones who still have all their body parts.
Heroine Attic
It’s poppy season in Afghanistan, expect more violence coming soon!
liberal
Uloborus wrote,
No, actually, it’s much better than yours, because it’s based on (a) the historical record of other great power attempts to “pacify” Afghanistan, and (b) the fact that we have nowhere near the number of troops required for a standard occupation(*)—remember, Afgh actually has a greater population than Iraq, and far less forgiving terrain. Yours is based on nothing, AFAICT, other than appeal to authority (see below), a time-honored logical fallacy.
OMG, then it must be true.
———–
(*) and will never have enough, given the domestic political realities
shep
If you were old enough to watch Vietnam go down the drain while hearing nothing but official lies, you’d know that just about everything following the words “Pentagon Spokesman” is probably outright bullshit. I think that Republican learned everything they know about political rhetoric from the CIA and military intelligence services.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/25/world/middleeast/25halberstam.html