Civilian "casualties" in enemy information ops

Ralph Peters:

COULD our troops be extreme cannibals who even eat the ground-up bones? That's the only conclusion I can reach - if I buy the civilian-casualty tales out of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Over and over again, terrorists and their sympathizers claim that every successful American air-strike or raid massacred a wedding party or a family gathering where innocent infants were quietly fondling their Kalashnikovs.

But we never see the bodies. How do they all disappear? Could human flesh really be tastier than our field rations? (I'm trying to be open-minded about this.)

The global media treat the terrorists' or local thugocracy's claims of American barbarism as incontestable facts. They dismiss our military's statements to the contrary as "obvious" propaganda.

The terrorists know what they're doing. They realize they can't beat our troops on the battlefield. But they're betting they can win in the media.

And they just might be right - given journalists' appetite for fantasies of American misdeeds and disinterest in evidence.

The latest claim of a US atrocity came late last month in Afghanistan. A carefully targeted air attack struck a Taliban compound near a village in Herat province, killing 30 to 35 fanatics, including a regional Taliban leader. Our military admitted - and regretted - that five civilian relatives of the Taliban chieftain were also killed.

Not good enough. The Taliban and local sympathizers announced that the attack killed 90 civilians. Make that 60. No, 90. Or some number in between - the Taliban mouthpieces couldn't agree. Nor could they agree on the circumstances, identities, ages or genders of the dead.

And they couldn't produce the bodies.

Didn't matter. Afghan President Karzai's political opponents took up the cry, hoping to undermine him. And, of course, the America-bashing UN reps in Afghanistan announced that they had "convincing evidence" that a large number of civilians died.

Except that they couldn't find the bodies, either.

It gets worse: Our own representative at the UN, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, waffled, blathering about the "fog of war" and joining the calls for an investigation.

...

Our military is the most scrupulous in history. War is terrible. Mistakes are made. Civilians do die. But our commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Dave McKiernan, is an honorable soldier who'd be the first to tell the truth if we accidentally killed 90 civilians.

But we didn't kill them. They never existed - except in the Taliban's propaganda dispatches and in the subsequent delighted news reports.

Many in the media simply despise our troops - and downright hate them for achieving success in Iraq and spoiling the Democrats' planned election theme. Now that Iraq's going embarrassingly well, the media have launched their own "surge" to portray Afghanistan as failing.

Those irresponsible reports are recruiting ads for the Taliban. They encourage violence against our soldiers. They undermine the elected government in Kabul. And they work against the welfare of the Afghan people.

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What our people in Afghanistan need to do is a better job of explaining enemy information ops to the media. Right now, those information ops are their only effective response to our use of air power to support our troops. It is ironic that a media that would be outraged if it were being manipulated by our forces has no outrage when enemy forces use them for their information operations. They find the enemy manipulation "interesting."

The charge in this particular case in Afghanistan is even more ridiculous. This was not a bombing on a compound based on some faulty intelligence as alleged by Karzai. The attack was by a special forces C-130 responding to a mission request from troops who were actually under fire from the compound that was hit. Civilians do not shoot at approaching troops or if they do they should not be surprised by the reaction.