Much attention is paid on this site to the brutality visited upon Iranian protesters by security forces, particularly when the soldiers go so far as to fire live rounds at the crowd. The world knows the names of the martyrs, such as Neda, created by such violence.
However, next door in Afghanistan, pro-government forces forces are also firing into crowds. Hunter-killer teams round up young men once their guilt seems sufficiently clear, and summarily execute them. Passenger cars are shot up on the slightest pretense.
These recent incidents shed light on the terror tactics systematically employed against the Afghan population by the occupiers. Lacking sufficient numbers to garrison the country, and faced with a hostile people, the occupiers inevitably resort to the tried and true strategy of historical imperialism, collective punishment reprisals and other deliberate brutality, in order to demonstrate their will to win and break the will of the occupied.
When an incident of particular brutality by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the American dominated military force currently waging a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan, attains a level of publicity, it follows a predictable pattern of denial, apologia and acceptance in the Western press, which is designed to help the public cope with any feelings of guilt or regret that might occur as a result of a particularly egregious excess of the occupation. First, it is blandly denied by the appropriate spokesperson and referred to a joint investigative committee, whose report is to be released many months later and forgotten long before that. And, as anyone familiar with the law and order society assumes, in the event the investigation shows that the tragedy at issue was caused by certain completely unauthorized actions of some bad apples within the ranks, the wrong doers will be appropriately disciplined after a lengthy procedurally immaculate trial.
This standard defense was employed in regard a December 27, 2009 incident during which 8 Afghan primary and secondary school students were executed in their village by unspecified American "non-military forces" during a night raid. The official ISAF response denied that any civilians were killed, and demanded a through investigation before anybody jumps to conclusions, while at the same time anonymous Pentagon officials and a local pro-Karzai warlord shared their conclusions that everybody killed was in all likelihood either Taliban or other bad guy.
However, the eyewitnesses told a different story:
The Afghan investigators believe that an Americans unit—they’re not sure which one, ... flew from Kabul to Narang district in Kunar province. They say—Assadullah Wafa, the former governor who led the investigation—they probably landed about two kilometers outside the village where these killings are alleged to have taken place and then walked on foot into the village.
They then say that when they got there—this is where the version of events vary. Some people say that the victims were killed in three separate buildings. Some say they were three separate rooms, all part of the same compound. What most of the people on the scene agree on, though, is that at least eight of them were schoolchildren enrolled in a local—in two schools, one—some in a local high school and some in a local primary school. One of the victims was apparently a local shepherd boy who was staying as a guest in the compound overnight. And the tenth victim was a farmer, a day laborer who was working on the nearby fields, who came out when he heard the shooting and was shot where he stood.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai, powerless and discredited following his stolen re-election, unable even to seat a cabinet of ministers, hopelessly protested the incident and demanded the handover of the perpetrators. Obviously the US is not going to be turning over some of its best trained killers over to some rough native justice. In fact, even the identities of the raiding party remain a mystery, in an indication of just how strange the Afghan war has become since the Democratic Administration escalated the combat mission and gave command to an enthusiastic proponent of covert Special Force raids and assassinations as the primary tools of counterinsurgency, the former JSOC commander General Stanley McChrystal. As pieced together by Times of London reporter who tried to follow this story down the rabbit hole, "The fact that, according to Afghan investigators, these troops appear to have flown to the scene from Kabul appears to confirm speculation that this was an operation carried out by some sort of Special Forces unit, possibly even by some sort of paramilitary unit attached to one of the intelligence agencies, the foreign intelligence agencies, which operate occasionally out of the capital." Speculations are all that there is, since the occupation forces do not feel themselves obligated to even dignify native demands for information with a direct response.
In reading the Western account of any incident in the global and open ended counterinsurgency campaign, such as the one by the Times of London, we see that the emphasis is on obsessively gathering the maximum amount of details about each incident, as a crime would be back home. Where were the school children shot, in one room or three? Were they handcuffed? But, even in an interview by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, a fairly radical program by American media standards, the assumption remains that such incidents are really some strange aberration, and the soldiers who carry them out are somehow out of control by the rigid military hierarchy which controls their every other step and delivers them to and from the area in which they then are supposed to carry out their random and deplorable excesses. As individual criminal acts then, they are worthy of investigation and prosecution, followed by some reform of the military rules of engagement or command and control techniques to prevent any further such mistakes from happening.
The official ISAF website exemplifies the official position of the inherent innocence of the American war machine as a whole regardless of the actions of its constituent members:
An initial review by a Government of Afghanistan delegation asserted that the dead were unarmed civilians removed by international forces from their homes and shot. While there is no direct evidence to substantiate these claims, ISAF has requested and welcomes an immediate joint investigation to reach an impartial and accurate determination of the events that occurred.
ISAF is a committed partner with the government and people of Afghanistan, and as such we embrace the responsibility to conduct our operations with the strictest degree of constraint to avoid civilian casualties. If we fail to meet this highest standard to which we subject ourselves, we will always look within to improve our capacity to avert unintended consequences in the future.
What is needed according to the Western command then is an increase in the occupation forces' capacity to avert unintended (but clearly anticipated) consequences of their own actions. However, this carefully constructed fiction crumbles when one understands the rigid hierarchic precision by which the machinery of occupation executed each night raid or other counterinsurgency operation. The mechanics are not hidden from the Afghans themselves, who have had much time to observe and learn about this phenomenon. In a report by the Western created Afghan watchdog agency the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, the standard operating procedure of night raids is described in perfect and clear detain, which matches exactly the conduct of the particular raid which the one which resulted in the executions of 8 school children in Kunar and so attracted so much unfortunate media attention.
NIGHT RAIDS
The AIHRC has documented many cases of house raids that seem to have involved unidentified military and paramilitary PGF (pro-government forces) Most of these house raids have occurred in provinces with high suspected insurgent activity. Most house raids are conducted in the nighttime. Witnesses usually report that they are carried out by a mixed group of Afghan and foreign armed men, and last a couple to a few hours. Some families appear to have been specifically targeted, while in other cases the target appeared to be several households within a community. A common pattern reported to AIHRC was for the armed men to separate the men from the women in the household, tie up the men, and often take one or more of the men with them when they left. There have been incidents where men were not taken but simply shot on site. While night searches may in several cases provide significant military intelligence and/or result in the capture of legitimate targets, there are also several cases in which there is significant evidence suggesting that the targeted individuals were not in any way linked to insurgent activities.
Note that the parts in bold, written many months ago, perfectly match the reported details of the Dec. 27 Kunar raid. This raid is neither unusual nor surprising to anyone even slightly familiar with what the Afghans have been saying about what is being done to their country. Naturally the veracity of this analysis was challenged at the time of its release by one of the Western generals on the ground. According to Canadian Brig.-Gen. Denis Thompson, commander of Task Force Kandahar, said that, while he himself was "philosophically against such raids," "in the cases where we actually go into a compound, it's either in self-defense or it's as a result of a long string of intelligence gathering that has led us to a certain compound."
Evidently a part within the Brigadier General considered this reassurance inadequate, because he then added a patently impossible statement, "And invariably when it comes time to execute the raid, there are no innocent civilians there – there are just bad guys." Invariably is one of those words, like clearly and obviously, that people use when they lack any proof for their statement. And in this situation of course this is obviously untrue, since the Western public never hear about such raids if they did not result in civilian casualties, so every instance known to us contradicts the assertion made by the occupation officer.
But one does not need to get into an argument about the accuracy of any particular report on the matter. Military operations are not natural phenomena occurring in accordance with immutable and purposeless physical principle, they are the products of the cooperation and hard work of dozens of people working within one of the most elaborate, vast and rigid hierarchical networks in the history of mankind, the Western military complex. Trying to reconstruct each raid based on incomplete eyewitness testimony rather than simply analyzing how and why it was envisioned, approved and implemented by this finely tuned intelligent human machine is an approach that cannot lead to anything except a maze of conjecture and reasonable doubt about any particular incident.
So let us start from the beginning. Raids as a tactic of counterinsurgency go back to at least last century's prolonged struggle against decolonization movements by the Western empires, Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal, Russia, and of course the US, which fought bitter and prolonged struggles against national liberation movements in its colonial territories of Cuba and the Philippines. Even before that, during the initial colonization phase, punitive raids were a favored tactic to obtain the submission of a population to a small group of conquistadors by terrorizing the maximal amount of natives without having to actually garrison every populated area in the occupied territories. Instead of having soldiers everywhere, it is effective to respond to any act of insurgency or disobedience by some of the natives through wholesale reprisals against chosen targets which are valuable to the insurgents and the conquered people as a whole. This tactic was effective, and was employed officially and without disguise by every world power of note. Of course, the effectiveness of this tactic means that it was not invented by the Europeans in the modern age, but has always been used by an occupier to keep the numerically greater but militarily weaker occupied population under control with only a minimal expenditure of occupation forces. Alexander the Great used this tactic on a grand scale to pacify Afghanistan more than 2,000 years ago, with only temporary success.
As recently as the late twentieth century, the British used collective punishment as an official policy to suppress anti colonial struggles in Iraq in the 1920s, in Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus in the 1950s, and generally wherever the natives challenged the white man's power. The lack of troops available for the British counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq was solved by Britain's greatest military minds by the use of poison gas against villages in terror operations launched in reprisal for insurgent activity. As Winston Churchill famously wrote at the time, " I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes." Before you judge the great Churchill too harshly, he did not say that because he enjoyed killing uncivilized tribssmen in the most gruesome way imaginable, entire villages writhing in clouds of mustard gas, mothers watching their children suffocating and vomiting blood. No, like any educated Englishman, Winston was a humanitarian. His point was simply that savages understand only force and brutality, and if you prove to them that you are the most forceful and brutal master, they will submit to you and open the way for progress to redeem their savage ways. And since you cannot go house by house to demonstrate this, since the masters are few and the slaves are many, you must make the most spectacular show of your strength and your resolve to use it, so as to reach the maximum number of people with the minimum number of demonstrations, ultimately minimizing the number of people you have to kill to make your point. This is the essence of Western humanity.
However, as the decolonization struggles spread and became ever more hapless and dehumanizing for the Western colonial powers, the practice of collective punishment and exemplary extermination went out of favor. First the gas had to go, and then the entire practice was eventually was banned by Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. A modern and sophisticated military would never therefore admit to resorting to this banned and brutal tactic. Instead, what we have are "night raids," set in motion, in the words of Brig.-Gen. Thompson, "either in self-defense or as a result of a long string of intelligence gathering that has led us to a certain compound." And of course at the compound, "invariably when it comes time to execute the raid, there are no innocent civilians there – there are just bad guys." And one must admit, if you define "bad guy" as any military age male (which age range has evidently now been expanded to include primary school students), then this statement can be true more often than not. However, this professed humanity might confuse our enemies into thinking that we are soft and therefore makes even more necessary a periodic demonstration of the white man's continued resolve to use his mighty weapons indiscriminately to rain death and misery not just on those who actively oppose him, but on all who question his authority. This becomes a delicate balancing act to be walked by only the best trained Pentagon spokesmen, to at once terrorize the occupied populations with regular displays of cruelty, while at the same time reassuring the public back home that such regular and methodical displays are nothing more than abominable accidents which will shortly be phased out.
Of all the white imperialists, the Russians, who possess an advanced military which they use to indulge their ambitions, but who have never grasped the fine points of Western liberal decorum, remain relatively open about the practice of collective punishment carried out via raids on villages suspected of harboring or cooperating with insurgents, and provide us with much invaluable data on the subject. In Russian such an operation, forming a major part of the counterinsurgency strategy employed in Afghanistan and Chechnya, is called "zachistka" from the root word "to cleanse." A village located in an area of high insurgent activity is "cleansed," sometimes many times, by the detention or execution of all of its fighting age men. The cleaning is usually done over the course of several sudden visits to the area designed to catch some of the higher echelons of the insurgency unprepared in their beds. The tactics employed escalate gradually, from warnings to detention and interrogation to "disappearances" to summary and exemplary executions, like the ones which recently took place in Kunar Province. The main purpose behind it is not to physically exterminate or round up the insurgents, a task which is manifestly impossible in a counterinsurgency, but to terrorize the population into fearing the coming of the counterinsurgents more than the insurgents, and into dropping out of the struggle to avoid the consequences that attracting the attention of the security apparatus entails.
This practice is widely known and its benefits and drawbacks were discussed in great detail in the Russian media and society during the recent Chechen Wars. The general consensus of the public, whose support for Putin's government increased steadily throughout the brutal slog in Chechnya, was that such tough measures were deplorable but necessary in view of the ruthlessness and barbarity of the enemy. This practice is also common knowledge among the Afghan people after centuries of British, Russia and American occupations, andt the Kunar incident did not result in any significant mass protests. Most Afghans, weary of decades of war, prefer to keep their heads down and not attract the attention of any of the men with guns infesting their country, and contented themselves with the noises of protest made by Karzai and the vague ISAF promise of a joint investigation.
However, in Helmand Province, only recently liberated by American Marines as part of the summer 2009 offensive for which President Obama had committed 24,000 combat forces (not to be confused with the impending Obama "surge" to which he has committed another 33,000 combat troops), the population has not yet fully submitted to the new freedom. To obtain this submission therefore, a demonstration of will became necessary. Greatly outnumbered by a restive population of mixed loyalties, the occupation forces under any textbook approach must carry out a terror campaign to make the people fear them more than the anti-government forces, so that the people refrain from interfering in the counterinsurgency struggle.
To that effect, in the course of a single week, in a single town in Helmand Province, civilian demonstrations protesting some alleged American excesses committed in the course of a night raid on a nearby village, have been fired upon twice by both Afghan and American pro government forces, resulting in at 13 dead and at least a dozen wounded during the first incident, and five wounded from the second incident. Following the first and more deadly incident, the American forces claimed that they had not taken part in firing on the crowd, which they blamed on the Afghan army. The fact that multiple witnesses observed firing coming from the American base was explained implausibly by admitting that the Americans were in fact firing in the direction of the crowd, but only at a sniper who was somewhere nearby, but insisting that none of that fire had hit the crowd, which was taking fire at the same time. So far the denial was in place and it was business as usual for the occupation, but the ambiguity left the demonstration of will unclear.
Therefore the protests did not die down, and the Afghan people once again marched on the American and Afghan bases to demonstrate the strength of their numbers and resolve. This was clearly a test of wills -- would the Americans, leery as they are of the bad publicity that follows the execution of civilians, dare to continue with the execution for a second day? And the US Marines answered the challenge resoundingly, in a way that should make any American patriot proud. Without this time any pretense of an accident, of "firing at a sniper" or of of being fired upon, the Marines once again opened fire upon the crowd. Not only did their fire on the crowd, but the Pentagon then fully acknowledged that they had done so, and praised them for their heroic actions. Here was a full and concise answer to the question of American will to win. Victory will be bought with the blood of as many Afghans as necessary, and no apologies will be forthcoming. The ISAF spokesman, in praising the Marines' actions, explained them as follows:
People started behaving dangerously and unfortunately things like this happen. Deliberative escalation of force procedures were followed, but one individual continued to ignore instructions, striking members of the combined force with a stick.
Notably during the two day process leading to the release of the ISAF statement, it was decided that the Western version would not invoke the usual justification that the soldiers were fired upon before opening fire, though this claim was left to be made by the Afghan provincial governor, whose words would still appear in all media reports on the incident, but could easily be disclaimed if the falsehood o the claim is demonstrated. The decision was evidently made that the message sent by opening fire on a crowd for two days in a row would be clearer if not pretense of self defense was made.
It is unclear why the ISAF spokesman introduced the strange flourish of "a man wielding a stick" as the catalyst for the actions of the Marines. It is not a necessary detail. Certainly it does not help explain the subsequent brutal actions by the US Marines. How a single individual armed only with a stick, who could have been instantly and harmlessly neutralized by the large force of Marines present, caused those Marines to begin firing live rounds into a milling crowd, is not explained. Perhaps it was felt that this odd fact might make the story appear more realistic. This strange detail has drawn the attention of many Western bloggers, but no further information has been forthcoming on this intriguing figure. Based on the statement we have, we can conclude that if such a man existed, he was one of the wounded protesters flown to a larger American base for treatment, and based on previous occupation practices, that, once mended, he will continue on to the black hole prisons around the main American base at Bagram for brutal interrogation and indefinite detention. Perhaps the oddity of his tale will draw the sustained attention of a Western journalist and we might learn more of his fate.
Perhaps this detail is included to start the conditioned minds of the Western readers on the path to understanding and condoning the terror tactics employed on our behalf by our heroic troops. The train of thought might go, "Well, one guy was hitting them with a stick, so the violence was mutual and the response was necessary. After all, this was not an act of savagery – a deliberative escalation of force procedures was after all followed. And how dare he raise his hand to those who bring him freedom? It is one thing to shoot at a soldier, but to hit him with a stick is just disrespectful! A demonstration had to be made, an example set, a line drawn" And a more atavistic, Churchillian part of the Western colonial mind whispers in the background, "In any event, the only thing these savages understand is force, so let this be a lesson to them to respect the US Marine."
This incident received wide media coverage, as it is unusual for the Pentagon to outright admit that its occupation forces are intentionally firing on Afghan civilians, and of course the stick wielding mystery man created a little interest. However, though most of the reports mentioned that in the day prior to this incident, 13 Afghans were killed in the same location by fire from pro-government forces, the ridiculous cover story given after the first incident - that Marines who were seen firing in the direction of the crowd as people within the crowd began to die of gunfire wounds, were firing not at the crowd but at a sniper near the crowd. Absent an official statement from the Pentagon, it would obviously be irresponsible and unobjective to deduce that the events on consecutive days had anything to do with each other, formed part of an intentional policy, or were carried out in accordance with the chain of command, like every other action by those same soldiers or any other occasion. No, the objective truth is that these are simply two isolated and tragic incidents, close to each other in time and space, but otherwise unrelated, during the first of which the American soldiers behaved in an exemplary fashion as always, while mistakes were made by their Afghan comrades (oh, those hapless Afghan troops, when will they start heeding our training?), and during the second individual mistakes were made by both the Afghans and certain American soldiers as well.
We, the recipients of this carefully massaged and tailored information stream, are forced to assume this contorted and submissive state of mind, because coming to any conclusions other than those which presume the innocence of the high command from any complicity in the repeated actions of its subordinates, makes one no longer a rational or credible human being, but instead a contemptible conspiracy theorist, muttering to himself about the fake moon landing. It is not far from such irresponsible speculation to voting for third party candidates or not at all, and to being less than enthusiastically cooperative during airport screenings. Therefore we are asked simultaneously to condemn the Iranian government for ordering its troops to fire on civilian demonstrations, to condemn those few American soldiers who, by firing on civilian demonstrations, sully the glowing reputation of the American soldier, and also to praise our soldiers for having the will to do what is necessary to win this brutal and vital war. However, if you find yourself feeling a bit confused and discombobulated by having to hold so accept contradictory positions at the same time, you must remember, you are only the secondary audience. The primary audience are the Afghans, who, lacking access to the carefully constructed Western media messaging on the subject, are left to draw their conclusions as they bury the people killed from yet another American execution. And though we do not know what exactly the people of Helmand learned from the two day long execution, we do know that there was no demonstration on the third day. It appears that whatever response the Afghans have to give will take a different form.