The Granai Airstrike: On May 4th 2009, a small village in Farah Province in the west of Afghanistan was rocked by a seven-hour long conflict between ISAF and ANSF troops and suspected Taliban militants. The struggle culminated in an airstrike campaign involving at least four strikes by aerial bombers, the last of which are believed to have killed up to 140 Afghani civilians (figures are disputed).
The bombers were responding to calls for help from some 200 Afghan soldiers, police officers and American advisers who had apparently been fired upon by Taliban fighters around building compounds in the small village of Granai.
A Pentagon report following an investigation
and military inquiry into the incident claims that F-18 fighters carried out
the first strike that only killed insurgents, and not civilians; however, it
was the subsequent attacks by an Air Force B-1 bomber, which dropped five 500
pound bombs and two 2,000 pound bombs onto the compound, which are believed to
have caused the civilian fatalities. According to the report, the military
personnel behind the strikes failed to discern whether Afghan civilians were in
the compound before carrying out the attack after tracking suspected Taliban
fighters into the building, in a manner that deviated from the established
rules that were designed to prevent these incidents. The
investigation points most clearly to one of the raids carried out by the B-1
Bomber, which, after being cleared to attack Taliban fighters, had had to
circle back to its position but failed to reconfirm a positive identification
of the target after this delay. Afghani civilian witnesses make a claim echoed
in the inquiry that it is possible that the militants identified as being at
the site of the attack had left, or civilians had entered during the time that
the strike was delayed.
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| Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press |
”American success in Afghanistan should be measured by the number of Afghans shielded from violence, not the number of enemy fighters killed.” LieutenantGeneral Stanley McChrystal testified before a Senate Armed Services Committee, saying that high numbers of casualties that fostered civilian resentment amongst Afghani citizens would be detrimental to American credibility in the region. Full hearing at http://www.c-span.org/video/?286758-1/military-nominations-hearing
General McChrystal’s tactical directives: in response to the Granai airstrike, Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal issued a list of new “tactical directives” as a means of discouraging ground troops from calling in air support when under fire from militants in heavily populated areas. These directives are just one in a line of similarly issued directives issued following similar attacks in Azizabad, and preceding the one in Kuzud just five months later. The directives issued by McChrystal was for US forces to ‘disengage’ and leave populated areas where they have come under fire from militants operating from civilian occupied buildings. Exceptions are available for US, NATO and Afghan forces in imminent danger, in which cases air power is reserved to provide cover, facilitate their escape, or to remove wounded troops from the area. McChrystal’s exception clause to the prohibition of air crew use in populated areas is a means of addressing the difficulties of US soldiers who must restrict the force used in civilian areas whilst trying to protect their own troops under fire from insurgents in these areas.
According to the Pentagon’s report, the strikes
likely to have caused the casualties would have been prohibited by the new
directives issued by McChrystal as the aim of the strikes was to target
militants in the area rather than to allow for the safe evacuation of military
forces.
“Popular support is the deciding factor
in this fight”
The declassified sections of
McChrystal’s tactical directives constantly reiterates the importance of
winning the popular support of the local population as the key aspect of
winning counterinsurgency campaigns. The basis of Neta Crawford’s moral argument on
the discourse used to conceptualise civilian deaths as collateral damage in
military objectives is that military leadership continues to consider the
protection of local non-combatants as “another tool employed in the service of
winning a war”, and by framing the aim in this way, contradicts the purpose of
civilian protection, making it inherently unstable. There are remarkable
similarities between the directives McChrystal issued after Granai (fig. 1-3)
and those issued by previous US and NATO commander General David McKiernan (fig. 4-5):
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| Fig 1 (McChrystal, 2009, on the importance of local support) |
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| Fig 2 (McChrystal, on proportional violence instrumentalising civilian support) |
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| Fig 3 (McChrystal, on restricted use of violence in residential areas) |
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| Fig 4 (McKiernan, 2008, on the importance of local support) |
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| Fig 5 (McKiernan, on restricting violence in civilian areas) |
General McChrystal emphasises the need
to make the principle of civilian protection central to the military’s
objectives, in a bid to reduce civilian casualties. Both McChrystal
and McKiernan constantly reiterate the need to protect civilians in Afghanistan
as a necessary aspect of winning the war through local support. How
effective can their directives be, considering the
strike in Kunduz barely five months later? The Kunduz strike
resulted in further directives issued to control the use
of force in civilian areas, making it obvious that perceiving civilian lives as
instrumental to the wider war effort, rather than inherently valuable, has
prevented effective limits to the use of force in civilian populated areas. The
instrumental calculative framing of civilian deaths as collateral damage is the
most obvious indicator of this, and the idea of military necessity is still
clearly pervasive in on the ground judgements of uses of force.
What this shows is, as Crawford puts
it, the inevitability or normalised view of civilian deaths in
counterinsurgency operations. Responsibility for civilian deaths is delineated
to an individualised level (which she states is shaped by the institutions of
war-making), shown not only through the Pentagon’s report pointing only to the
actions of the B-1 bomber rather than the erroneous misuse of airstrikes as a
whole, but with an erasure of organisational responsibility at the higher
levels of military planning for the deaths that occur because of the way in
which civilian deaths are made a systemic, normalised part of counterinsurgency
operations. When this normalisation occurs at organisational levels, inherent
in the action of war planning is the fact that collateral damage is foreseeable
and adjustable. The “rules of engagement” that troops are expected to abide by
are not contravened when civilian deaths occur; rather, they are a consequence
of these rules. The contraventions are said to occur where there are higher
numbers of casualties, but no deaths are not expected.
The attacks and subsequent military
responses show two things: civilian deaths are still perceived as an inevitable
part of COIN campaigns; and despite efforts to reduce casualty rates this
conceptualisation means there is lesser value placed on the lives of civilians,
and the fragmentary orders (FRAGOs) the military produces reflect the
fragmented, instrumental perception of civilian life in Afghanistan.
By Aneesha Parmar
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