Months ago, I received a not insignificant amount of hate mail (including from a surprising source) over a post in which I accused the military, and the many fawning and propagandistic bloggers and journalists who cover them unskeptically, of being too calloused toward the lives of innocent people during air strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I was falling, many said, for “Taliban propaganda,” in which they bait bombing sites with dead bodies to make it appear like innocents were killed, that the U.S. has no obligation to safeguard the lives of their families when trying to kill them, that they lie to reporters and we haven’t really killed anyone we shouldn’t.
I was, however, swayed to a large degree by the multiple people from the Army—who have worked in JOCs in CENTCOM and elsewhere, who assured me that the deepest care was taken to minimize damage, that they are paranoid about making sure their CERP circles contain below the Kabul-mandated casualty maximum, and so on. I even bought that their standards for “confirmed” intelligence was so high that they couldn’t authorize strikes without an overriding amount of evidence that the chosen target was the correct one.
Of course, then we hear about that horrible bombing run on the women and children of a wedding party in Nangarhar province. Remember, the one at the beginning of this month, where the U.S. killed more people than that horrible car bomb at the Indian embassy in Kabul? Where U.S. spokesmen, even days after the attack, insisted it was Taliban who were shooting at the plane and no innocent people were killed?
Despite the overheated writing and drama-queen panting, Tom Englehardt assembles a truly damning timeline of the attack and its aftermath, noting that the U.S. has a long history of bombing innocent people—a depressing number of them wedding parties—and claiming that the victims were really insurgents and they had good intelligence indicating there were bad guys in the area.
All these “incidents” have some obvious features in common: the almost immediate claims by the U.S. military, for instance, that those who have been hit were adversaries, not wedding parties; the ultimate dismissal of the killings as the usual “collateral damage” in wartime; and, above all, the striking fact that, for none of these slaughters of celebrating locals, did the U.S. ever offer a genuine apology…
As with the most recent Afghan wedding-party slaughter, such [news] pieces — generally wire service stories — are to be found deep inside American newspapers where only the news jockeys are reading. In fact, your basic wedding party wipe-out report is almost certain to share at least some space in the story with a mini-round-up of other kinds of recent death and mayhem in the region in question. The language in which such stories are written is generally humdrum and, in the military mode, death is sanitized.
We Americans have only had one experience of death delivered from the air since World War II — the attacks of September 11, 2001. As no one is likely to forget, they shocked us to our core. And you know how those deaths were covered, right down to the special pages filled with bios of civilians who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the repeated invocations of the barbarism of al-Qaeda’s killers (and barbarism it truly was).
These wedding parties, however, get no such treatment. Initially, they are automatically assumed to be malevolent — until the reports begin to filter in from the hospitals, the ruined villages, and the graveyards, and, by then, it’s usually too late for much press attention. When that does happen, their deaths are chalked up to an “errant bomb,” or that celebratory gunfire, or no explanation is even offered.
This strikes at the heart of why the U.S. has seen its campaign in Afghanistan falter. We are so skilled at invoking revenge when it comes to fighting our wars, whether we are remembering Pearl Harbor or the World Trade Center. But even when we acknowledge that revenge might play a role in other peoples’ decisions, we either badly miss the point or—even worse—passionately argue that no one else ever feels the need to enact revenge, and mock those who worry about its consequences.
In other words, to repeat what is now a refrain, we are our own worst enemy. But no one really wants to talk about it.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust