US Broke Own Rules Of Engagement In Afghan Bombings

By Steve Hynd

Yet more people-centric counter insurgency Epic Fail:

A military investigation has concluded that American personnel made significant errors in carrying out some of the airstrikes in western Afghanistan on May 4 that killed dozens of Afghan civilians, according to a senior American military official.

The official said the civilian death toll would probably have been reduced if American air crews and forces on the ground had followed strict rules devised to prevent civilian casualties. Had the rules been followed, at least some of the strikes by American warplanes against half a dozen targets over seven hours would have been aborted.

General McChrystal may say that American success in Afghanistan should be measured by “the number of Afghans shielded from violence,” not the number of enemy fighters killed - but as one observer noted just the other day:

Although the US is not technically losing, it would be extremely hard to argue that Afghanistan's safety has not been sacrificed due to the policies of a risk-averse American government. A basic premise of the US military's own strategy is that ultimate success is gained "by protecting the populace, not the counter-insurgency force". This principle is violated daily.

This is one of my major misgivings about the accepted COIN wisdom for Afghanistan. People-centric COIN looks great on paper - especially when that paper is written by COINdinistas prepared to swear blind to American politicians that America's current and future colonial wars of occupation can be won - but when push comes to shove people centric theory becomes force protection reality. The US military's new Twitter feed reinforces this realisation - it's purely a running body count. The mindset of counting combat kills as a metric of success really is entrenched...yet it's utterly against COIN doctrine.

Then there's the long-term habit of paying for information then not properly checking it (probably because there are precious few Humint assets in the region that aren't bounty payment ones).

"the CIA pays tribesmen to plant the electronic devices near farmhouses sheltering al-Qaida and Taliban commanders. Hours or days later, a drone, guided by the signal from the chip, destroys the building with a salvo of missiles."

That's going to work as well as the $5,000 bounty for handing over a terrorist to be locked up at Gitmo. Or as well as paying informants to finger Taliban for airstrikes. I.e. lots of innocents and wedding parties tagged with a chip to settle some old vendetta by American proxy.

It's an intrinsically rotten decision loop that leads to unscrupulous locals passing bogus information and use the US to settle scores. It's the same dumb thinking that filled Gitmo and Bagram and Abu Graib with those guilty simply of "walking while Moslem". The same dumb thinking is still the only thinking the military has, probably because it needs to "do something now" rather than spend years developing a real Humint network.

Airstrikes, force protection at the expense of civilian protection, buying dodgy information, super-embassies that scream "colonial occupation" to people with a history of colonial occupations, reconstruction that fails because inadequate oversight wastes what little money doesn't get siphoned back to the U.S. by contractors. These are all mistakes the U.S. keeps making despite saying it won't make them any more and the obvious hypocrisy of that becomes yet another spanner in the works. The evidence is that America can't do COIN.

Comments

[geoff]

I notice that there is no mention of any serious disciplinary actions against those that commit these mistakes, aka war crimes. I suspect that in most engagements US forces are involved that the rules of engagement are not followed as regards to avoiding the killing of innocents. I'm under the impression that most friendly fire incidents involving US troops interacting with allies the US troops have not followed the rules but no one is ever really punished. With no accountability why have any rules. For that matter why have any laws. It's a bit of a bizarre system which can lead to wondering why there is such an elaborate judicial system when accountability really appears to be simply an arbitrary concept - some are and some aren't depending on the time of day or week or year or some other magical idea.