Controlling the uncontrollable
Righting wrongs during wartime
War is difficult to execute, and its costs are inevitable. Good people die, the innocent are hurt or killed, and the destructin – physical and otherwise – persists long after the fighting has stopped.
But that hasn’t prevented us from trying to limit the extent of war’s evil. New facts have surfaced with regard to a disturbing incident in Afghanistan that raise – again – the question of whether such attempts are simply a fool’s errand.
In February, three women were killed in an American Special Operations gaffe, although U.S. soldiers denied it at the time. Now an Afghani investigation has not only confirmed that American forces were responsible for the deaths, but that they attempted to actively hide their involvement. A chilling account in the New York Times reports evidence that Special Operations soldiers dug bullets out of the women in order to disguise the cause of death.
At least three things went wrong here:
1.) Members of an sanctioned military mission killed civilians, perhaps unintentionally
2.) Those same soldiers attempted to hide evidence of their crime
3.) Relevant authorities from the U.S. and NATO stood by the soldiers’ account, instead of aggressively opening an investigation
All three of these moral wrongs – which escalate in their gravity – bear personal and institutional traces.
Members of the armed forces should be held to the highest ethical standards, not only because they wield the violence allowed exclusively to the state, but also because they are already engaging in ethically dubious action.
However hard it is to fess up, these individuals had a duty to report what went wrong during their mission, and accept responsibility if an investigation were to determine they were at fault.
But the U.S. and NATO bear responsibility as well. No mission that could jeopardize civilians should be undertaken unless risks have been carefully assessed and controlled. After the fact, the U.S. and NATO command structures should be the most aggressive investigators – and prosecutors – of any potential malfeasance.
It doesn’t take an acute moral sense to understand that something went wrong here. What’s harder is finding a way to ensure that it never happens again.
-Sam
Related posts:
- It’s hard to be a saint in the (war-torn) city
- Flotilla folly
- The lessons of the Stephen Farrell rescue
- Was Fort Hood terrorism?
- Skirting the real question
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