When Hamid Karzai issued his angry ultimatum to the United States over an airstrike that killed women and children in Helmand province on May 28, he left a crucial piece of the story out: The shooting death, also on May 28, of an anonymous U.S. Marine, which triggered the fighting that led to the airstrike. I think I’ve found out who the Marine was. The American killed in Helmand province on May 28 was Lance Cpl. Peter Clore. He was 23 years old. Only six weeks in Afghanistan, Clore and his war dog Duke were leading a patrol to clear improvised explosive devices.
After Clore was hit, his fellow Marines pursued the attackers, who took refuge in a compound where they continued to fire. The Marines subsequently called for an airstrike on the militants’ building.
This takes us to where the accepted narrative begins, the official story with its familiar prompts and conditioned reflexes: Women and children killed in a U.S. airstrike; Afghan outrage; an apology from the American command.
Lost in the diplomatic furor — along with the life of this young Marine — is the fact that in calling on Americans not to strike at Taliban-filled houses, Karzai is demanding a free-fire zone for insurgents.
That’s fine — for Karzai and Afghan forces. Let him send Afghans, not Americans, to patrol the IED-laced byways of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. Let’s see what that Potemkin Police Force and Ghost Army, which a delusional Pentagon and a snoring Congress think they have created with your money, can really do.
Why does the image of Bernie Madoff in uniform come to mind? Because this whole Afghan, nation-building misadventure is a mirage, a dream that young Americans in our armed forces are paying to perpetuate with their limbs, their lives — and that includes their own “hearts and minds” — in a nightmare many never wake from.
This is the part of the Afghan story that still escapes official notice. Even the latest figures on civilian casualties, as reported by the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, fail to interrupt the continuous loop of Afghan grievance and American guilt.
But here they are: In 2010, out of 2,777 civilian deaths in Afghanistan, the United Nations links “anti-government elements” to 2,080. Pro-government forces — that’s us — were linked to 440 civilian deaths.
To crunch the numbers further, 75 per cent of all civilian deaths in 2010 came at the hands of jihadist forces (up 28 per cent from 2009), while only 16 percent were linked to pro-government forces (down 26 percent from 2009).
You don’t have to be a believer in counterinsurgency (COIN) theory to realize that something very wrong happened when Karzai’s ultimatum regarding civilian casualties went unrebuffed.
To say that it was a slap at the all-out efforts of our armed forces is to say what their leaders should have said, rather than apologized.
But here’s the thing. If, rather than apologizing at every Karzai outrage, military leaders were to trumpet their own success, in this case, at reducing civilian casualties in Afghanistan, these COINdinistas would be blowing taps for their own strategy.
The fact that NATO forces are still despised from Helmand to Kunduz to Kabul despite reaching such a benchmark further reveals the extent to which nation building by winning “hearts and minds” by, in large part, reducing civilian casualties is a travesty.
Far better, they seem to think, to bow and scrape and let inertia takes its endless course. Otherwise, we, the people, just might conclude that an entirely different ultimatum is in order, one directed at our generals and their political sponsors: Get out, or else.
Examiner Columnist Diana West is syndicated nationally by United Media and is the author of “The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.”
