Counterinsurgency fail:
After initially denying involvement or any cover-up in the deaths of three Afghan women during a badly bungled American Special Operations assault in February, the American-led military command in Kabul admitted late on Sunday that its forces had, in fact, killed the women during the nighttime raid.
[...]
A NATO official also said Sunday that an Afghan-led team of investigators had found signs of evidence tampering at the scene, including the removal of bullets from walls near where the women were killed. On Monday, however, a senior NATO official denied that any tampering had occurred.
NATO's International Security Assistance Force has admitted its role in the deaths, but it has denied that there was any evidence of tampering, although an anonymous NATO official tells The New York Times otherwise. The most gruesome element of the story is the possibility that the soldiers at the scene “dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath” and then tried to cover the evidence by pouring alcohol in the wounds. I'll just quote from Adm. Mike Mullen's piece on strategic communications in Afghanistan from last year:
We hurt ourselves more when our words don't align with our actions. Our enemies regularly monitor the news to discern coalition and American intent as weighed against the efforts of our forces. When they find a “say-do” gap—such as Abu Ghraib—they drive a truck right through it.
So should we, quite frankly. We must be vigilant about holding ourselves accountable to higher standards of conduct and closing any gaps, real or perceived, between what we say about ourselves and what we do to back it up.
In fact, I would argue that most strategic communication problems are not communication problems at all. They are policy and execution problems. Each time we fail to live up to our values or don't follow up on a promise, we look more and more like the arrogant Americans the enemy claims we
are.
This would be a significant "say-do" gap. While an isolated incident, it's the kind of thing that undermines the American mission in Afghanistan more broadly -- the killings of civilians are bad enough, but trying to obscure the nature of the deaths makes things even worse. It sows distrust among the Afghans at a time when American officials say trust is crucial to completing the mission, and strengthens the Taliban's narrative that they are the resistance fighting against a foreign oppressor, not the insurgent faction in an Afghan civil war.
Last month, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who has tried to prevent civilian deaths by minimizing the use of airstrikes noted, "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." As Michael Cohen wrote, "COIN is still war," and Afghan civilians being killed by American troops is an expected consequence of the U.S. being there. But denying responsibility or trying to cover up civilian deaths after the fact? These are things that can be avoided.
-- A. Serwer
