>Shortly before 3 a.m. on July 19, 2016, American Special Operations forces bombed what they believed were three ISIS “staging areas” on the outskirts of Tokhar, a riverside hamlet in northern Syria. They reported 85 fighters killed. In fact, they hit houses far from the front line, where farmers, their families and other local people sought nighttime sanctuary from bombing and gunfire. More than 120 villagers were killed.
Are we the baddies?
P.S I wonder what was extracted in exchange for a Saturday publish date.
Combat veteran here. One time I almost killed a civilian due to a split second misidentification. I didn't shoot because something just seemed a little "off" but to this day I'm not sure what. I'm so glad that I didn't shoot. No normal person wants to kill someone, and especially not a bystander.
The problem is the people we fought did everything they could to look like civilians. They would carry trash bags full of bombs, and dress like women to hide weapons under loosely fitting clothing. This has the obvious effect of causing Americans to suspect normal, everyday activities as terrorist operations. Add to that the facts that things are hard to see at engagement distance and a failure to engage the enemy effectively will result in greater casualties on our side, and it's a recipe for misidentification.
It turns out the woman I almost killed was "washing" her dishes in a pothole of a road after a rainstorm. I had never seen someone do that before and her dish was a large metal bowl that resembled a common type of armor piercing IED. I don't know why I didn't kill her. I can't imagine the regret I would feel had I taken her life.
Thanks for sharing and I’m glad you and her are both okay. Well, who knows maybe somebody else ended up shooting her since the.
I can’t help but feel like you are blaming the victims. The bottom line is that those are civilians who were killed by US military. When the most powerful military in the world invades and occupies a country it can’t expect its people to fight according to its rules and expectations. And when those occupied people indeed fight back it does not justify the killing hundreds of thousands of civilians by the US military.
The most powerful military in the world doesn't mean it can identify citizen from enemy combatants 100% of time. A lot of this is kinda meaningless to discuss without some sort of comparison to what other militaries false-positive rates are. Where is the US rank in mis-identification and accidental civilian killings in modern wars?
It's not as simple as placing all blame on one side. Had guerrilla tactics not been used then collateral would be greatly reduced. Both sides have to be equally willing to kill civillians.
That too was my understanding for the longest time. However Jocko Wilink (today a podcaster, then a Seal commander fighting in Ramadi) specifically said that the people wanted them there and most of the people they fought were either teenagers being paid to plant IEDs (basically the same as the drugs gangs in the US who will pay teenagers to be lookouts and mules), former Sadam regime people or foreign fighters.
Maybe. But we need hard evidence which we can examine before we reject the most logical explanation wrt who is fighting the invading forces. Obviously we expect that the bulk of the fighters are the invaded are resisting the invaders.
Indeed, the bulk of the fighters were old Sadam people. When the US took over and destroyed the regime all of these people were out of a job, and used to being evil they began to fight back.
The most powerful military in the world is not powerful enough to be completely invincible to modern weapons accessible to guerilla fighters. They cannot just come close and check that the person they are facing is actually a peaceful bystander, and not a carefully concealed guerilla fighter waiting to hurt them. They could try to, but the casualties among them would be significant. US Marines are not WH40k Marines yet.
Yes, we are the baddies. This is where a large portion of our tax dollars go instead of providing the people in the US with universal healthcare, public housing, high-speed rail, etc.
Instead of building a better life for all the people, the US destroys the lives of others for some very small amount of people to become filthy rich.
Now on to the next manufactured conflict with China [0][1] and repeat what we have been doing for decades and well through the 20th century [2].
> where a large portion of our tax dollars go instead of providing the people in the US with universal healthcare, public housing, high-speed rail, etc.
23.4% of the FY2022 DoD budget is for direct payments to personnel. Including health insurance for military members and their families. 1.2% in family support programs: child care, schools, etc. With about 1/3 of total funding going to some sort of job or benefit.
> Instead of building a better life for all the people
Like the 0.5% dedicated to DARPA, which among other things funded research in 2013 into rapid development of novel vaccines using mRNA platforms under the ADEPT program?
... I won't say 100% of the DoD budget is morally pristine. Or even most of it.
But it's a huge budget, and it funds a ton of good work that wouldn't otherwise be palatable to the legislative branch, but magically becomes so "because military."
So as the quip goes, American defense spending is as much about social welfare and foreign aid as it is about bombs and bullets.
> American defense spending is as much about social welfare and foreign aid
So all the headlines regarding missing piles of cash and appeasements being given to local child-abusing warlords etc was just a one-time thing, or fake, or...
What do you think warlords do with piles of cash? Sit on them?
Foreign aid essentially forever has amounted to delivering money to the least bad options, so that some of it trickles out to the people who actually need it.
You may find that morally reprehensible, but what's your proposed alternative?
I agree with you that parent's post is lacking context and a bit crude on arguments, but i believe the message is pretty clear: it's bad doing violent and one could say anti-social politics instead of pro-social politics (whatever they are, let's not get into details). I fully believe that: yeah sure your opponents hide as civilians somehow because that's an effective tactic, so you have to admit you've lost: you cannot use force, because you're not able to (because you're too far, you're not understanding what's happening etc). Just stop doing wars you should have no business in. Eg in which your only business is just defending some aspect of your current power (some times completely unrelated to the proxy).
Believe it or not, the Arab world can develop their own home grown terrorists just we we can. Don’t lay the blame of every social I’ll on the west. The Arab governments themselves have been fighting domestic terrorists for decades.
Why might that be? Read up about how the West has been destabilising govt there for the best part of a century now, for oil (really accelerated after ww2, and what we did to Iran in the 60s...)
Domestic terrorists in the arab world isn't any of our (U.S.) business. They became our problem when we meddled in their business enough to motivate them to come after us. The US foreign policy created the problem, it could have largely been avoided.
No. ISIS would kill innocents in these kinds of numbers _on_purpose_. They also made a policy of hiding among civilians with the express intention of increasing the collateral damage. They're really, really bad.
We can and must do better. The brutality of an enemy doesn't justify this indifference to human life, nor the willful blindness, nor the dishonesty.
But I expect that the vast majority of people in the region are glad ISIS lost.
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ISIS took civilians as sex slaves, sold them internally and _bragged about it_, so most assuredly no. They threw people suspected of being homosexual of roofs, they killed suspected traitors by drowning them in an iron cage and, lets not forget, they cut the heads of westerners and bragged about it on TV.
Only difference between them and the Nazies was that they were only able to do this on a small scale and that the Nazis tried to cover up what they were doing.
When you go to war, there are likely going to be civilian casualties. We should understand every one of these cases, ensure that mistakes are prevented and if somebody didn't follow orders they are punished.
But if we are not willing to go to war over civilian casualties, those who don't care are going to rule everything.
And allies on the ground we worked with also had sex slaves..... [1]
The issue here is, there are no saints. And to claim any side if being saintly is throwing up blinders.
As a TLDR for the article. American soldier dismissed for incident involving an Afghan allie who spent money on "dancing boys" and had a young boy chained to a bed as a sex slave. Multiple incidents occured with other afghan militia allies, even on US Bases, US Military policy is essentially to ignore it.
Yes, we are, and people will literally bury their heads in the sand every time our government cries about Russia, Iran, or China (despite the fact that none of those are invading any other countries). Not saying those countries never do bad things, but we are way worse, and even worse, we try to justify our actions with words like "democracy" and "freedom" which actually hurts those causes.
There is so much innocent blood on America's hands from just the last two decades alone, its really quite something unfathomable everytime I hear one of those CIA people cry about what Russia or China is doing.
There isn't a single war without innocent civilian casualties caused by every side. At least this is under the guise of accidental, some nations do it on purpose.
I don't think that's better. I want failure modes to occur early and as loud as possible when it comes to this stuff; otherwise it's easy to get away with bombing the shit out of civilians for, oh, I dunno, seventy some aught years.
But hey, we had to put a stop to that darned ole communism, didn't we? Couldn't have that. wouldn't be profitable or godly.
You must be kidding or willfully ignoring the atrocities committed by Russia just in the last decade or two (occupying Crimea, Afghanistan, wars in Chechnya, Georgia and likely Kazakhstan sometime soon) or China (Uyghurs). All in the sole interest of continuing their highly oppressive, dictatorial regimes.
Well, the U.S. did torture priests in Latin America because of their social justice views. We’ve overthrown governments to support banana companies and had no problems supporting Saddam gassing Kurds since he was fighting the Iranians. We supported Papa Doc and for a while Noriega. Our government has experimented on it’s own people and has been involved in the drug trade. We’ve tortured innocent people with no one being held accountable. We spy on a grand scale on our own citizens. We’ve supported dictators and brutality when the people in power thought it beneficial to do so. I don’t think we can claim any sort of moral superiority over others. I’m not saying we are the worst but certainly we are no where close to the best. We are not a light on a hill as some of our presidents have proclaimed.
Hey, get it right, technically we paid and trained most of the right wing death squads who raped nuns and killed nuns and priests in Latin America, mostly at the School of the Americas.
If a terrorist group was formed in America, invaded surrounding countries then use American towns as bases to hide, then no, I’d say another country accidentally bombing civilians wouldn’t make them baddies.
I suspect this opinion will be unpopular, but I feel like this needs to be remembered- just a few months ago people were shitting all over the US military and the president for leaving Afghanistan. A bunch of people in this comment section are saying how horrible it is that these “systematic” failures could happen.
We can’t have it both ways. We can’t complain about civilian casualties and also say that the military should have continued to occupy Afghanistan. The US military are the best in the world but they aren’t perfect. If there is fighting in a place then people are going to die. There isn’t a system in the world with perfect precision and specificity.
So I guess what I’m trying to get at, is before you skewer some commander on the choices made in action or their findings in an investigation for scenarios that (statistically) more than 99% of us have no experience in, consider the alternative we have seen play out in the last few months. The Taliban took over at an astonishing pace. The Afghanistan Ministry of Women’s Affairs is now gone, and the Taliban Ministry of Vice and Virtue is back. The literal thought police are back in Afghanistan after the US military kept them at bay for 20 years. Those pilots and soldiers made mistakes, and it’s tragic for the families that lost a loved one. But just take a pause to consider the rest of the story and the alternative. And don’t say the alternative is a perfect utopia where bombs only get dropped on bad people.
>just a few months ago people were shitting all over the US military and the president for leaving Afghanistan
The complaints I remember - and the ones I hold - are about HOW we left Afghanistan. It was a chaotic train wreck. I'm glad we left, I think staying longer would have continued to risk innocent civilians, but I think our departure was a nightmare.
>And don’t say the alternative is a perfect utopia where bombs only get dropped on bad people.
I actually think that our technological advantage allows us to be VERY precise and gives me confidence that we have reduced collateral damage. We have missiles that take a bunch of pictures before blowing up, so can say "look, this really was a bad guy place and not a shoe factory". We have people embedded in the country so we can accurately say "the bad guy is in X room". We have really cool sniper weapons that automatically shoot guys that are deliberaly "tagged" as bad guys and avoid bystanders.
I'm proud of a lot of what we are able to do and not do. That being said, we blew up a car full of children and the response was "we thought there was 1 bad guy surrounded by 8 civilians, but it was just 9 civilians". This makes me sad.
> And don’t say the alternative is a perfect utopia where bombs only get dropped on bad people.
The alternative is that bombs don't get dropped at all. That means less US hegemony and more need for non-military solutions. Those also have their drawbacks, but to pretend those options don't even exist is nonsense.
That alternative you’re suggesting is the one we’re seeing right now with the Taliban. The one the citizens were so afraid of that they were filling planes to the brim to evacuate- something that didn’t happen when the US military was there. I wasn’t pretending that alternatives don’t exist, but make sure the alternative you’re suggesting is actually preferable.
I wonder if the bombing done by the Royal Dutch Airforce on instructions from the US allies on Hawija that caused 70 civilian deaths on accident, is part of this pattern. Thinking the strike was on a weapon depot.
>That strike was ordered by a top-secret strike cell called Talon Anvil that, according to people who worked with it, frequently sidestepped procedures meant to protect civilians
Is it just me, or reading the CIA document about sabotaging an organization and reading this link now, it's hard not to draw the conclusion that there are rogue elements in US military and government that have managed to subvert the hard work of the larger organization?
This sounds like exactly what our enemies would want us to do if i were reading this as someone looking in from China or Russia. Takes just one "incompetent" looking decision which could be malice that leads to hundreds of deaths and propagates the sentiment that EVERYTHING the US is doing is flawed.
I don't know if anyone else feels this way, but making documents like these public but behind a paywall is just really discouraging and seems contrary to public interest. When I tried to submit feedback to the Times, and the link to submit feedback is behind a paywall too.
I would even be okay if they asked to sign in to access the documents but not need to subscribe.
So, a few comments regarding this. A good amount of the money can come from most of the articles published summarizing and critiquing the records that they are publishing, and the investigations they did related to the records at question. I was really more focused on the source records themselves being available for download and viewing after all the articles about them were written.
I wasn't really sure how much retrieving the documents and hosting them would cost considering that smaller organizations like Wikileaks are able to publish much larger numbers of documents as a nonprofit and governmental agencies like archive.gov do keep documents like the Pentagon Papers hosted for free access. Although, granted, the Times must have put a lot more effort in evaluating and verifying the records and coming up with ideal ways to present them before publishing them.
It's not exactly that I myself don't want to subscribe, but my thought was that people who chose not to subscribe to the Times but other newspapers like Washington Post or USA Today and also journalism in general would probably benefit with non-paywalled access to the source records, even though this doesn't fully equate to a moral dimension, as a commenter below said. That's mostly what was going on in my mind when posting my comment.
You actually think that is the cost of digging up the information? If it were just a hosted text file I'm sure are tons of other places you can download it from.
I costs a fortune to run The New York Times. I’m sure they feel that most of their stuff is in the public interest, in one way or another. If they want to charge for access as part of their business plan, that’s really up to them. I don’t see that as having a moral dimension. That being said, they maintain a paywall that seems to be deliberately trivial to get around.
I don't know what people expect. This is a problem that goes beyond the armed forced. This is a general problem across the board as companies and governments are forced to recruit and hire people who are barely qualified.
Every time we have to drop requirements to appease some SIG we lose quality.
At one point I was told I would never be able to fly fighter aircraft because I didn't have 20/20 vision, however now a days, you can be completely blind and they will let you fly just to avoid discrimination lawsuits. Lol.
Are we the baddies?
P.S I wonder what was extracted in exchange for a Saturday publish date.