September 15, 2010

Eric Ruder reports on revelations of the barbaric murder of Afghan civilians--and why the atrocities are the latest in a stream of bad news for the Obama administration.

A GROUP of 12 U.S. soldiers from the 5th Stryker Brigade is facing trial in the murder and cover-up of three Afghan civilians in 2009. Five of the 12 are accused of killing the Afghan civilians "for sport" in three separate incidents, and seven are implicated in the cover-up.

While the U.S. media focused on a Florida pastor's aborted plan to burn copies of the Koran, the story of these shocking atrocities largely escaped their attention.

Members of the unit say that Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, the highest-ranking soldier facing charges, arrived at their base in Afghanistan last winter and boasted that it would be easy to "toss a grenade at someone and kill them."

Gibbs proceeded to create a "kill team" within the unit, according to troops. He is accused, along with other soldiers, of collecting fingers, leg bones and a tooth from the corpses of Afghans as trophies. Some reports also say the soldiers collected a skull and posed for photographs with the corpses.

One of the soldiers facing charges, Spc. Adam Winfield, wrote home to his parents after he heard about the first killing committed by his comrades. "I'm not sure what to do about something that happened out here, but I need to be secretive about this," he wrote in a Facebook message to his parents on January 15, 2009, the date of the first killing.

U.S. soldiers patrol Khowst Province in Afghanistan (Staff Sgt. Isaac A. Graham)

About a month later, he was finally able to give his parents the details. Soldiers in his unit had gone on a patrol and killed "some innocent guy about my age just farming," he said, adding that those who took part in the murder suggested he "get one of my own." This prompted Winfield's father, Christopher Winfield, to contact the Army through a hotline in order to ask military officials to investigate. But his pleas fell on deaf ears. Months later, two more Afghan civilians were dead.

Spc. Winfield also told his parents that he had "proof that they [the soldiers in his unit] are planning another one in the form of an AK-47 they want to drop on a guy." Winfield added that he feared for his personal safety if it was discovered that he reported the killings to authorities.

"Should I do the right thing and put myself in danger for it?" the troubled soldier asked his parents. "Or just shut up and deal with it," adding, "There are no more good men left here. It eats away at my conscience every day."

Winfield had good reason to worry. Another soldier in the same unit, Pfc. Justin Stoner, who told superiors about hashish smoking among soldiers was savagely beaten by several members of the platoon.

Staff Sgt. Gibbs and another soldier further intimidated Stoner by displaying on the floor a set of severed fingers, telling Stoner that "if I don't want to end up like that guy...shut the hell up." This led Stoner to tell investigators about the murders of the three Afghan civilians.

REPORTS OF these vicious killings come at a bad time for the Obama administration's faltering Afghanistan policy. But this certainly isn't the first time that U.S. forces have committed atrocities in Afghanistan. In fact, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the general formerly in charge of Afghan military operations, made the extraordinary admission earlier this year that:

We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number, and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force...To my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I've been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it.

With the midterm elections approaching, the Obama administration had wanted to be trumpeting the success of its troop surge in Afghanistan. Instead, administration officials face a steady stream of bad news on every front.

First of all, the number of U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan is now at the highest point since the beginning of the nine-year-old war. Already this year, 323 U.S. soldiers have been killed, surpassing the 317 soldiers killed in all of 2009.

And despite Obama's surge of U.S. troops, the military situation continues to deteriorate. According to the New York Times:

Even as more American troops flow into the country, Afghanistan is more dangerous than it has ever been during this war, with security deteriorating in recent months, according to international organizations and humanitarian groups. Large parts of the country that were once completely safe, like most of the northern provinces, now have a substantial Taliban presence--even in areas where there are few Pashtuns, who previously were the Taliban's only supporters. As NATO forces poured in and shifted to the south to battle the Taliban in their stronghold, the Taliban responded with a surge of their own, greatly increasing their activities in the north and parts of the east. Unarmed government employees can no longer travel safely in 30 percent of the country's 368 districts, according to published United Nations estimates, and there are districts deemed too dangerous to visit in all but one of the country's 34 provinces. The number of insurgent attacks has increased significantly; in August 2009, insurgents carried out 630 attacks. This August, they initiated at least 1,353, according to the Afghan NGO Safety Office, an independent organization financed by Western governments and agencies to monitor safety for aid workers.

And according to an opinion piece in the New York Times by Gilles Dorronsorois, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment:

The Taliban's control of the south is apparent in the inability of U.S. troops to extend any control beyond their bases. It takes them hours just to move hundreds of meters outside of the perimeters on patrol. This means that they have no contact with the population and have been unable to build strong ties with local groups. At this point, 80 percent of Afghanistan has no state structure left. This means that there is no credible Afghan partner for the United States to work with. And where the government has lost its grip and the American-led coalition is losing, the Taliban are filling the void. As the only effective force in many areas, the Taliban are beginning to build a shadow state. The services are limited but efficient, and the Kabul government is often nowhere to be seen.

COMPOUNDING THE problems on the military front are the stalled political efforts to cobble together a governing force that might be capable of taking control of the country's fractured political scene.

U.S. and NATO forces had hoped that upcoming September 18 elections to the lower house of parliament might help resolve the political impasse that has deadlocked Afghanistan's political system since the fraud-ridden presidential elections last year.

But the lack of security and inability of U.S. and NATO troops to get control of the military front has made such a political outcome even less likely.

"Taliban attacks and the broad lack of confidence in the Afghan government to conduct a secure election threatens its validity," said Rachel Reid, a Human Rights Watch researcher. "Insurgent violence, particularly against women candidates, was inevitable, but the government's weak response was not."

At the cost of immense civilian casualties, the lives of U.S. soldiers and a staggering $100 billion a year, the U.S. war in Afghanistan is a failure that is draining resources at a time when the urgent needs of people hurting in the U.S. are going unmet.

It's long past time for a withdrawal of all U.S. troops--and Obama deserves harsh criticism for one of the only campaign promises he kept: his pledge to escalate the war on Afghanistan.