Consider the following statement offered by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of
the joint chiefs of staff, at a news conference last week. He was discussing
Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks as well as the person who has taken
responsibility for the vast, still ongoing Afghan war document dump at that
site. "Mr Assange," Mullen commented, "can say whatever he likes about the
greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might
already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an
Afghan family."
Now, if you were the proverbial fair-minded visitor from Mars (who in school
civics texts of my childhood always seemed to land on Main Street, USA, to
survey the wonders of our American system), you might be a bit taken aback by
Mullen's statement. After all, one of the revelations in the trove of leaked
documents
Assange put online had to do with how much blood from innocent Afghan civilians
was already on American hands.
The UK's Guardian newspaper was one of three publications given early access to
the leaked archive, and it began its main article this way: "A huge cache of
secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing
war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of
civilians in unreported incidents. They range from the shootings of individual
innocents to the often massive loss of life from air strikes ... ".
Or as the paper added in a piece headlined "Secret CIA [Central Intelligence
Agency] paramilitaries' role in civilian deaths": "Behind the military jargon,
the war logs are littered with accounts of civilian tragedies. The 144 entries
in the logs recording some of these so-called ‘blue on white' events, cover a
wide spectrum of day-by-day assaults on Afghans, with hundreds of casualties."
Or as it also reported, when exploring documents related to Task Force 373, an
"undisclosed ‘black' unit" of US special operations forces focused on
assassinating Taliban and al-Qaeda "senior officials": "The logs reveal that TF
373 has also killed civilian men, women, and children and even Afghan police
officers who have strayed into its path."
Admittedly, the events recorded in the WikiLeaks archive took place between
2004 and the end of 2009, and so don't cover the last six months of the Barack
Obama administration's across-the-board surge in Afghanistan. Then again,
Admiral Mullen became chairman of the joint chiefs of staff in October 2007,
and so has been at the helm of the American war machine for more than two of
the years in question.
He was, for example, chairman in July 2008, when an American plane or planes
took out an Afghan bridal party - 70 to 90 strong and made up mostly of women -
on a road near the Pakistani border. They were "escorting the bride to meet her
groom as local tradition dictates". The bride, whose name we don't know, died,
as did at least 27 other members of the party, including children.
Mullen was similarly chairman in August 2008 when a memorial service for a
tribal leader in the village of Azizabad in Afghanistan's Herat province was
hit by repeated US air strikes that killed at least 90 civilians, including
perhaps 15 women and up to 60 children. Among the dead were 76 members of one
extended family, headed by Reza Khan, a "wealthy businessman with construction
and security contracts with the nearby American base at Shindand airport".
Mullen was still chairman in April 2009 when members of the family of Awal
Khan, an Afghan army artillery commander on duty elsewhere, were killed in a
US-led raid in Khost province in eastern Afghanistan. Among them were his
"schoolteacher wife, a 17-year-old daughter named Nadia, a 15-year-old son,
Aimal, and his brother, employed by a government department". Another daughter
was wounded and the pregnant wife of Khan's cousin was shot five times in the
abdomen.
Mullen remained chairman when, in November 2009, two relatives of Majidullah
Qarar, the spokesman for the Minister of Agriculture, were shot down in cold
blood in Ghazni City in a special operations night raid; as he was - and here
we move beyond the WikiLeaks time frame - when, in February 2010, US Special
Forces troops in helicopters struck a convoy of mini-buses, killing up to 27
civilians, including women and children; as he also was when, in that same
month, in a special operations night raid, two pregnant women and a teenage
girl, as well as a police officer and his brother, were shot to death in their
home in a village near Gardez, the capital of Paktia province.
After which, the soldiers reportedly dug the bullets out of the bodies, washed
the wounds with alcohol, and tried to cover the incident up. He was no less
chairman late last month when residents of a small town in Helmand province in
southern Afghanistan claimed that a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
missile attack had killed 52 civilians, an incident that, like just about every
other one mentioned above and so many more, was initially denied by US and NATO
spokespeople and is now being "investigated".
And this represents only a grim, minimalist highlight reel among rafts of such
incidents, including enough repeated killing or wounding of innocent civilians
at checkpoints that previous Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal
commented: "We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to
my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force."
In other words, if your basic Martian visitor were to take the concept of
command responsibility at all seriously, he might reasonably weigh actual blood
(those hundreds of unreported civilian casualties of the American war the
Guardian highlighted, for example) against prospective blood (possible Afghan
informers killed by the Taliban via names combed from the WikiLeaks documents)
and arrive at quite a different conclusion from Mullen.
In fact, being from another planet, he might even have picked up on something
that most Americans would be unlikely to notice - that, with only slight
alterations, Mullen's blistering comment about Assange could be applied
remarkably well to Mullen himself. "Chairman Mullen," that Martian might have
responded, "can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he is
doing, but the truth is he already has on his hands the blood of some young
soldiers and that of many Afghan families".
Killing fields, then and now
Fortunately, there are remarkably few Martians in America, as was apparent last
week when the WikiLeaks story broke. Certainly, they were in scarce supply in
the upper reaches of the Pentagon and, it seemed, hardly less scarce in the
mainstream media. If, for instance, you read the version of the WikiLeaks story
produced - with the same several weeks of special access - by the New York
Times, you might have been forgiven for thinking that the Times reporters had
accessed a different archive of documents than had the Guardian crew.
While the Guardian led with the central significance of those unreported
killings of Afghan civilians, the Times led with reports (mainly via Afghan
intelligence) on a Pakistani double-cross of the American war effort - of the
ties, that is, between Pakistan's intelligence agency, the Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI), and the Taliban. The paper's major sidebar piece concerned
the experiences and travails of Outpost Keating, an isolated American base in
Afghanistan. To stumble across the issue of civilian deaths at American hands
in the Times coverage, you had to make your way off the front page and through
two full four-column WikiLeaks-themed pages and deep into a third.
With rare exceptions, this was typical of initial American coverage of last
week's document dump. And if you think about it, it gives a certain grim
reportorial reality to the term Americans favor for the deaths of civilians at
the hands of our forces: "collateral damage" - that is, damage not central to
what's going down. The Guardian saw it differently, as undoubtedly do Afghans
(and Iraqis) who have experienced collateral damage first-hand.
The WikiLeaks leak story, in fact, remained a remarkably bloodless saga in the
US until Mullen and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (who has overseen the
Afghan war since he was confirmed in his post in December 2006) took control of
it and began focusing directly on blood - specifically, the blood on Julian
Assange's hands. Within a few days, that had become the WikiLeaks story, as
headlines like CNN's "Top military official: WikiLeaks founder may have 'blood'
on his hands" indicated. On ABC News, for instance, in a typical "bloody hands"
piece of reportage, the secretary of defense told interviewer Christiane
Amanpour that, whatever Assange's legal culpability might be, when it came to
"moral culpability ... that's where I think the verdict is guilty on
WikiLeaks."
From the Martian point of view, it might have been considered a curious phrase
from the lips of the man responsible for the last three and a half years of two
deeply destructive wars that have accomplished nothing and have been
responsible for killing, wounding, or driving into exile millions of ordinary
Iraqis and Afghans.
Given the reality of those wars, our increasingly wide-eyed visitor, now
undoubtedly camping out on the Washington Mall, might have been struck by the
selectivity of our sense of what constitutes blood and what constitutes
collateral damage. After all, one major American magazine did decide to put
civilian war damage front and center the very week the WikiLeaks archive went
up. With the headline "What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan", TIME magazine
featured a cover image of a young Afghan woman whose nose and ears had
reportedly been sliced off by a "local Taliban commander" as a punishment for
running away from an abusive home.
Indeed, the Taliban has regularly been responsible for the deaths of innocent
civilians, including women and children who, among other things, ride in
vehicles over its roadside bombs or suffer the results of suicide bombings
aimed at government figures or US and NATO forces. The Taliban also have their
own list of horrors and crimes for which it should be considered morally
culpable. In addition, the Taliban have reportedly threatened to go through the
WikiLeaks archive, ferret out the names of Afghan informers, and "punish" them,
undoubtedly spilling exactly the kind of "blood" Mullen has been talking about.
Our Martian might have noticed as well that the TIME cover wasn't a singular
event in the US. In recent years, Americans have often enough been focused on
the killing, wounding, or maiming of innocent civilians and have indeed been
quite capable of treating such acts as a central fact of war and policy-making.
Such deaths have, in fact, been seen as crucially important - as long as the
civilians weren't killed by Americans, in which case the incidents were the
understandable, if sad, byproduct of other, far more commendable plans and
desires. In this way, in Afghanistan, repeated attacks on wedding parties,
funerals, and even a baby-naming ceremony by the US Air Force or special
operations night raids have never been a subject of much concern or the
material for magazine covers.
On the other hand, the George W Bush administration (and Americans generally)
dealt with the 9/11 deaths of almost 3,000 innocent civilians in New York City
as the central and defining event of the 21st century. Each of those deaths was
memorialized in the papers. Relatives of the dead or those who survived were
paid huge sums to console them for the tragedy, and a billion-dollar memorial
was planned at what quickly became known as Ground Zero. In repeated rites of
mourning nationwide, their deaths were remembered as the central, animating
fact of American life. In addition, of course, the murder of those civilian
innocents officially sent the US military plunging into the "war on terror",
Afghanistan and then Iraq.
Similarly - though who remembers it now? - one key trump card played against
those who opposed the invasion of Iraq was Saddam Hussein's "killing fields".
The Iraqi dictator had indeed gassed Kurds and, with the help of military
targeting intelligence provided by his American allies, Iranian troops in his
war with Iran in the 1980s. After the first Gulf War in 1991, his forces had
brutally suppressed a Shi'ite uprising in the south of Iraq, murdering perhaps
tens of thousands of Shi'ites and, north and south, buried the dead in mass,
unmarked graves, some of which were uncovered after the US invasion of 2003. In
addition, Saddam's torture chambers and prisons had been busy places indeed.
His was a brutal regime; his killing fields were a moral nightmare; and in the
period leading up to the war (and after), they were also a central fact of
American life. On the other hand, however, many Iraqis died in those killing
fields, more would undoubtedly die in the years that followed, thanks to the
events loosed by the Bush administration's invasion.
That dying has yet to end, and seems once again to be on the rise. Yet those
deaths have never been a central fact of American life, nor an acceptable
argument for getting out of Iraq, nor an acknowledged responsibility of
Washington, nor of Mullen, Gates or any of their predecessors. They were just
collateral damage. Some of their survivors got, at best, tiny "solatia"
payments from the US military, and often enough the dead were buried in
unmarked graves or no graves at all.
Similarly, in Afghanistan in 2010, much attention and controversy surrounded
the decision of our previous war commander, McChrystal, to issue constraining
"rules of engagement" to try to cut down on civilian casualties by US troops as
part of his counter-insurgency strategy (COIN). The American question has been:
Was the general "handcuffing" American soldiers by making it ever harder for
them to call in air or artillery support when civilians might be in the area?
Was he, that is, just too COIN-ish and too tough on American troops? On the
other hand, little attention in the mainstream was paid to the way McChrystal
was ramping up special operations forces targeting Taliban leaders, forces
whose night raids were, as the WikiLeaks documents showed, repeatedly
responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians (and so for the anger of other
Afghans).
Collateral damage in America
Here, then, is a fact that our Martian (but few Americans) might notice: in
almost nine years of futile and brutal war in Afghanistan and more than seven
years of the same in Iraq, the US has filled metaphorical tower on tower with
the exceedingly unmetaphorical bodies of civilian innocents, via air attacks,
checkpoint shootings, night raids, artillery and missile fire, and in some
cases, the direct act of murder.
Afghans and Iraqis have died in numbers impossible to count (though some have
tried). Among those deaths was that of a good Samaritan who stopped his minivan
on a Baghdad street, in July 2007, to help transport Iraqis wounded by an
American Apache helicopter attack to the hospital. In repayment, he and his two
children were gunned down by that same Apache crew. (The children survived; the
event was covered up; typically, no American took responsibility for it; and,
despite the fact that two Reuters employees died, the case was not further
investigated, and no one was punished or even reprimanded.)
That was one of hundreds, or thousands, of similar events in both wars that
Americans have known little or nothing about. Now, Bradley Manning, a
22-year-old intelligence analyst deployed to eastern Baghdad, who reportedly
leaked the video of the event to WikiLeaks and may have been involved in
leaking those 92,000 documents as well, is preparing to face a court-martial
and on a suicide watch, branded a "traitor" by a US senator, his future
execution endorsed by the ranking minority member of the House of
Representatives' sub-committee on terrorism, and almost certain to find himself
behind bars for years or decades to come.
As for the men who oversaw the endless wars that produced that video (and,
without doubt, many similar ones similarly cloaked in the secrecy of "national
security"), their fates are no less sure.
When Mullen relinquishes his post and retires, he will undoubtedly have the
choice of lucrative corporate boards to sit on, and, if he cares to, lucrative
consulting to do for the Pentagon or eager defense contractors, as well as an
impressive pension to take home with him. Gates will undoubtedly leave his post
with a wide range of job offers to consider, and if he wishes, he will probably
get a million-dollar contract to write his memoirs. Both will be praised, no
matter what happens in or to their wars. Neither will be considered in any way
responsible for those tens of thousands of dead civilians in distant lands.
Moral culpability? It doesn't apply. Not to Americans - not unless they leak
military secrets. None of the men responsible will ever look at their hands and
experience an "out, damned spot!" moment. That's a guarantee. However, a young
man who, it seems, saw the blood and didn't want it on his hands, who found
himself "actively involved in something that I was completely against", who had
an urge to try to end two terrible wars, hoping his act would cause "worldwide
discussion, debates, and reforms", will pay the price for them. He will be
another body not to count in the collateral damage their wars have caused. He
will also be collateral damage to the Afghan anti-war movement that wasn't.
The men who led us down this path, the presidents who presided over our wars,
the military figures and secretaries of defense, the intelligence chiefs and
ambassadors who helped make them happen, will have libraries to inaugurate,
books to write, awards to accept, speeches to give, honors to receive. They
will be treated with great respect, while Americans - once we have finally left
the lands we insistently fought over - will undoubtedly feel little culpability
either. And if blowback comes to the United States, and the first suicide
drones arrive, everyone will be deeply puzzled and angered, but one thing is
certain, we will not consider any damage done to our society "collateral"
damage. So much blood. So many hands. So little culpability. No remorse.
(Note for readers: I would especially like to thank Juan Cole's Informed Comment
blog, Antiwar.com, and Paul Woodward's the War in Context website for helping
keep me up to date on America's ongoing wars. I couldn't do without them. A bow
of appreciation to all three.)
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
