Afghan rules of engagement become an issue

Washington Post:

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Mullen, in response to a question from Collins last week, said he expects that protecting civilians will eventually help reduce U.S. military casualties. But he added: "That doesn't mean that risk isn't up higher now, given the challenges that we have and the direction that McChrystal has laid out."

Collins asked Mullen, in particular, to respond to a letter she received in July from retired Marine Corps 1st Sgt. John Bernard, whose son was serving in the restive southern province of Helmand. In the letter, Bernard criticizes McChrystal's rules of engagement, calling them "nothing less than disgraceful, immoral and fatal for our Marines, sailors and soldiers on the ground."

"The Marines and soldiers that are 'holding' territories of dubious worth like Now Zad and Golestan without reinforcement, denial of fire-support and refusal to allow them to hunt and kill the very enemy we are there to confront are nothing more than sitting ducks," Bernard wrote. He denounced "the insanity of the current situation and the suicidal position this administration has placed these warriors in."

A month after Bernard wrote to Collins, his son, Lance Cpl. Joshua Bernard, was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade when Taliban insurgents ambushed his platoon. Bernard said that in one of his last phone calls from Afghanistan, his son had complained that his unit had been denied supporting fire and that Marines had been wounded.

"They are in between a rock and a hard place, with minimal support and maximum exposure," Bernard said in a telephone interview. "With 175 guys there and then to be denied fire missions is inexplicable," he said, describing his son's company, stationed near the Taliban sanctuary of Now Zad in Helmand. "We've hamstrung ourselves in fear of angering a population that hates us anyway."

Collins, who attended Joshua Bernard's funeral, said she supports the goal of protecting Afghan civilians. But, she said in an interview, "there is a tipping point."

"We know our troops are at great risk, but after a point, when you are asking them to be so cautious in their approach that you almost guarantee they will incur wounds or even be killed when they wouldn't have been, that's hard to accept," she said.

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A multitude of factors contribute to U.S. troop casualties, including the aggressiveness of military operations, the experience of the troops, intelligence, terrain, equipment, and insurgent tactics and weaponry. But by designating the use of air power and artillery against Afghan compounds a measure of last resort, McChrystal's directive suggests that more Taliban fighters who take shelter among Afghan civilians will survive.

McChrystal's logic, based on core counterinsurgency doctrine, is that by safeguarding civilians and gradually winning over the population, the coalition can eventually reap the intelligence and local cooperation vital to rooting out insurgents and stabilizing an area. If winning tactical battles means killing civilians, he argues in the assessment, "we run the risk of strategic defeat."

In the interim, however, coalition forces must face residents who are often wary, if not hostile, while working with Afghan security forces that are sometimes unreliable. For example, in an incident Sept. 8 in the eastern province of Konar, four U.S. Marines on a training team working with Afghan troops were killed in an insurgent ambush as their unit called for but was initially unable to obtain air or artillery support, according to family members and media reports from the scene.

"We heard they held back artillery. We also heard that as far as they were concerned, there were women and children feeding them [insurgents] ammunition," said a relative of one of the Marines killed. The family is "going to be asking a lot of questions" about the incident, said the relative, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of slowing efforts to find out more from the military about the circumstances of the death.

In Afghanistan, some U.S. commanders and troops say insurgents are taking advantage of the new rules, fighting from Afghan homes and moving unarmed between fighting positions. As thousands of Marines pushed into Taliban-held regions of Helmand in July soon after McChrystal issued his directive, Lt. Col. Christian Cabaniss, commander of 2nd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, remarked that the Taliban "know the directive better than we do."

If women and children are feeding ammo to the enemy they are combatants. If they are being forced into doing it, the enemy is engaging in a war crime. It is another example of our failure to call them on their crimes and endangerment of non combatants. Instead of having rules of engagement that reward the enemy for his war crimes, we should make it clear that those who help the enemy engage in combat will be treated as combatants and the enemy will be held responsible for their deaths or injuries.