Killing Afghans

The concluding paragraphs of a recent article in The Globe and Mail offered some revealing insights into our Afghanistan adventure. An American soldier is describing a battle his platoon had fought to a Canadian soldier:

Even worse, he said, was trying to root out Taliban from a village in northern Zabul that sympathized with the insurgents. "Every day, it was all about survival," Lt. Edwards said. "My platoon was 27 or 28 guys, and every firefight they'd have 100 at least. We would just take human waves of assaults at our position, one after another after another."

He continued: "Fortunately we had a good piece of high ground, and we'd fend it off, day after day. . . . The problem was, that's where they lived. At lot of them, we'd kill them and their house was only 10 metres away. So you'd get the wife and kids out there going, 'Oh, you killed my husband! He was innocent!' And I'm going, 'Okay, so the machine gun in his hands right now is what? His innocence?' "

Both soldiers shared a laugh at the anecdote, but the Canadian chuckled with a little less mirth. His platoon's first grape field lay ahead of him.

Some observations:

• Killing men in their own backyards, in front of their wives and children, is unlikely to win hearts and minds. Nor is mocking the women as they lament the deaths of their husbands. As President Karzai has reminded us, when we kill Taliban we kill Afghans. In this case, local men. Every death creates a circle of hostility and hatred, among the men's wives and children, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, relatives, friends and neighbours. Thus insurgencies grow.
• By denying the man's innocence, the American implies he's guilty of something. But of what exactly? Of trying to drive a foreign army out of his village?
  
• The soldiers find the incident amusing. Killing the breadwinners of desperately poor families apparently has its humorous aspects. I guess you have to be a military man to understand. Islamist extremists, however, may not appreciate the joke.