Can we see the deliberate targeting of Afghan civilians as an inevitable result of a misguided policy?
A US soldier in Panjwai district, Kandahar, killed 16 defenceless civilians, mainly children and women.
A US soldier in Panjwai district, Kandahar, killed 16 defenceless civilians, mainly children and women. Predictably there has been an outpouring of anger and threats of revenge. There are calls for calm, but the situation is a tinderbox, and anything can spark a bloodbath.
The soldier who has turned himself in walked to Najiban and Alokzai villages on Mar. 12. Eyewitness reports say 11 of the dead were members of one family. As with all such cases there are rumours that the killing was the work of more than one US soldier. Villagers are insisting they heard helicopters. There is anger that while they cannot leave their villages after sun down, foreign troops have the freedom to go where they please. The two villages are very close to an installation jointly used by NATO/ISAF and Afghan forces.
Minister of Frontier Affairs and head of southern security affairs Asadullah Khaled visited the grieving survivors and promised a full investigation. Kandahar’s representative in Parliament has called for President Hamid Karzai’s resignation. The Afghan Parliament had cancelled its session in protest for one day with some MPs demanding that the killer be brought before an Afghan court.
Pinning responsibility
Western military and political officials have apologised but also called the incident “rogue” and “a first time”. The independent Afghan Analysts Network (AAN), a partner of Killid, has challenged the premise. AAN’s Thomas Ruttig in a blog wonders “whether it might be a freak, but somehow unavoidable outcome in a context of escalated violence, thinking in “friend-or-foe” categories, traumatisation – and a result of misguided policy…I, at least can’t see any big difference between this incident and the operations of the ‘kill team’ which also deliberately shot civilians, at random, in Kandahar province, in 2010, manipulated their bodies so that they looked like ‘legitimate targets’ and even took body parts as war trophies. Those US soldiers were convicted of murder.”
Ruttig like the villagers in Najiban and Alokzai asks how come the unidentified 38-year-old soldier was allowed to leave his base on his own with a gun, in the middle of the night and alone. He thinks this would be “even more significant” if the reports about the soldier’s prior health problems turn out to be true. The soldier who returned to his base after the killings, and surrendered, was deployed to Afghanistan after three tours in Iraq, according to a report that has not been officially confirmed.
Trained to kill
“On the face of it, calling the Panjwai killings a ‘rogue’ incident sounds like a way to wash someone’s hands of responsibility. This incident should simply not have happened at all,” writes Ruttig.
The deliberate killing of civilians by men deployed “to ensure the safety of the Afghan population” as ISAF commander General John Allen explained after the incident is according to Ruttig “symptom of a failed policy”. “The soldier’s superiors in the political sphere have sent soldiers to Iraq and Afghanistan on impossible missions. Armies simply are not the right instruments for fulfilling tasks they have been called on to do in situations like in Afghanistan … from killing the enemy to physical reconstruction, from protecting infrastructure to institution-building,” he writes.
Ruttig writes: “Will the Panjwai killings make negotiations about the US-Afghan strategic agreement more complicated? Certainly. But again that’s not the main point – because both sides want it, Karzai because he knows that he will have difficulties in surviving on his own, the US to keep an eye on Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan from close by.
The killings make life for ordinary Afghans even more unbearable. After all, in 2001, they set their hopes on the international intervention changing their lives for the better – an end to the war (not an escalation) and the building up of their country. Now they see the narcotecture palaces of the warlords and the hummers of the warlords’ sons on one side, and rising prices and no political alternative to the Taleban and the Karzai/warlords alliance on the other one. Whether the Western forces are friend or foe in this power-game, is getting increasingly unclear for them.”
