US war crimes in Afghanistan have gone "uninvestigated and unpunished", says Amnesty International. Radio VR is looking into the issue with Olof Blomqvist, spokesperson for AI, and Ahmed Quraishi, Senior Research Fellow with Project For Pakistan In 21st Century.
The US military fails to hold its soldiers accountable for unlawful killings and other abuses in Afghanistan. This is the conclusion of the recent Amnesty International report released on 11 of August. The authors of the 84-page document titled LEFT IN THE DARK say that apparent war crimes have gone "uninvestigated and unpunished".
Coming to us with more details on the study is Olof Blomqvist, spokesperson for Amnesty International, just back from Kabul where he travelled to launch the report. So, the first question to him is – there any reason why the AI has chosen this particular moment to publish the report?
Olof Blomqvist: The report is focused on only the civilian casualties by the international forces in Afghanistan. So, we haven't covered the Afghan national security forces or groups like the Taliban. The reason for this is because the security transition is in full swing; the international troops are leaving Afghanistan. Many have already left and the Afghan national security forces are starting to take over.
So, we really thought it was important to highlight this issue of the lack of accountability and the lack of justice for the civilian killings on the hands of the international forces, before they leave the country. Otherwise, there was a real risk that the US and NATO countries would leave behind a legacy of impunity and resentment in Afghanistan.
How many civilians have been killed throughout this antiterrorist campaign in Afghanistan?
Olof Blomqvist: We haven't done our own quantitative research in the sense that we’ve counted the exact number of civilians killed since 2001. There are other organizations which keep track of that. The UN is the most notable, which releases a yearly review of civilian casualties in Afghanistan. But there is simply no precise estimate. The total estimate of 2001 is that thousands have been killed by the international forces. So, it is not very precise.
But we’ve talked in the report of the 4-year period in Afghanistan, from 2009 to 2013. And we estimated that about 1800 civilians have been killed by the international forces during that time. I should clarify here that under the international law not every killing of a civilian is unlawful. It is only when the civilians are killed indiscriminately or when they are directly targeted, that the international law says that killing of the civilians is in fact illegal.
What we’ve done in the report is: we focused on ten emblematic cases that involved killing of the civilians, mainly on the hands of the US troops. In these cases we’ve counted 140 civilians who have been killed and this includes 50 children.
But I think it is important to note that actually over the past few years the number of civilian deaths, caused by the international forces, has dropped pretty substantially in Afghanistan. So, there are essentially two reasons behind this.
One is that, to their credit, the NATO countries, including the US, have taken steps to protect the civilians better. They’ve cut down the practices like the air strikes, for example, which cost a huge amount of civilian deaths when they were used at most a couple of years ago. But another reason is that the international forces simply do less fighting, because the Afghan troops are taking over and are responsible for most of the security.
But even if we are seeing this drop in the actual number of the civilians being killed, it hasn’t been accompanied by accountability or justice for the victims. And that is really what our report focuses on. We’ve documented how thousands of Afghans have been left completely without justice, how the US military have simply ignored a very strong evidence of war crimes that we have documented, and even not carried out proper investigations.
In many of the cases we looked at, the US or NATO would admit to having possibly killed the civilians and announce that they were looking into it, and that they were carrying out their own investigations. But the problem is that they would often just go silent afterwards, there would be no more public communication on whether those investigations have taken place, what the conclusions have been.
So, the Afghan victims and the Afghan civilians were left completely in the dark. And that’s really what we are calling for in this report – we want to see these people get the justice they deserve which they currently are being denied.
Talking about those people being brought to justice, do you remember the Abu Ghraib case? Ultimately, there were some people punished for tortures and humiliation of prisoners etc. But somehow those were just the people on the ground, who did it all, right? But their superiors seem to have been immune, though, obviously, they were well aware of the practices.
Olof Blomqvist: One of the main focuses of our report (which is what you’ve touched upon when you’ve mentioned the Abu Ghraib camp) is the US military justice system and how that foments this kind of impunity around the cases. And it is often just in these very high-profile cases, when there is such an enormous amount of public pressure and media attention, that the US is sort of shamed into carrying out the actual investigation.
Like in our report, for example, during this period that we’ve focused on of over 4 years, even if we documented 1800 civilians’ deaths, we are only aware of 6 cases where the US soldiers actually faced prosecution over these deaths. The most high-profile is the killing of 16 civilians by sergeant Bales in Kandahar, for example.
And I think our conclusion in the report is that it is really down to a very sort of systemic and structural flaws in the US military justice system, that ensures that this kind of lack of accountability just goes on and is never addressed. The US military justice system is essentially a form of self-policing, it relies on the soldiers and commanders themselves to report human rights abuses. But there is an obvious conflict of interest there and that soldiers and commanders might end up criminalizing themselves, if they actually report abuses. So, there is very little incentive for them to do so.
And the US military personnel are also immune from prosecution in Afghanistan. So, the Afghan victims themselves have actually no legal recourse to even press for prosecution in these cases”.
Says Ahmed Quraishi, Senior Research Fellow with Pakistan Federal Reorganization Program Project For Pakistan In 21st Century:
“I think the latest Amnesty International report is a historical document. It marks the epic fail of the entire American freedom project in Afghanistan, the entire operation Enduring Freedom that began in 2001. I think we are seeing a damning indictment of what the US tried to do in Afghanistan. And I think that the details, if anyone were to read through the report, he would be horrified by the kinds of crimes that have been documented. And I think the Amnesty International team has done a terrific job in detailing and in documenting those incidents.
And I would just quickly refer to ten incidents that I was going through, that listed 140 civilians, not fighters, not the Taliban, not terrorist, but 140 Afghan civilians that were killed, including 50 children out of those 140 were killed in those ten incidents. So, I think the American freedom project, so to speak, in Afghanistan has been a huge failure.
And besides this report, I think there would be no other bigger indictment of this whole project – the American project in Afghanistan – than the case of the army sergeant Bergdahl who in 2009 deserted his military unit, because he disapproved of what the US Government and the US military were doing in Afghanistan.
Obviously, he was privy to a lot of details that, unfortunately, never came out. And for the next few years, probably, we may not be able to know exactly what were the real reasons, what those things were that army sergeant Bergdahl saw, that prompted him to desert his military unit and not wait for the end of his duty tenure in Afghanistan, to return to the US and maybe expose or reveal those things that he saw, that he objected to in Afghanistan.
So, this report is a historical document, indeed.
But, if I get it right, the civilian casualties inflicted by this antiterrorist campaign in Afghanistan, are not only limited to Afghanistan. Pakistan seems to have suffered, too.
Ahmed Quraishi: I think the US military and the intelligence units that were operating in Afghanistan played a key role in perpetuating the crisis in our region, and in multiplying it through the tactics that actually increased extremism in the region, instead of reducing it. And of course, one of the key reasons was the civilian deaths. Thanks to a large and wide international condemnation of the killing of civilians, we’ve seen a reduction in the US military operations that result in civilian deaths. But unfortunately, the pattern still continues and we are not seeing an end to that.
And I would just draw very quickly your attention to a reaction on that. We are seeing now a reaction. One sign of the reaction is what you call “friendly deaths”, where you are seeing more and more Afghan soldiers and Afghan policemen, trained by the US military, turning their guns on their trainers, on the US officials. And recently we had a US general who was killed. So, there is a reaction. And there is a reason for that.
And I think the Amnesty International just revealed the tip of the iceberg. And I think the level of anger inside Afghanistan on these civilian deaths is tremendous. And one reason why the US and the Afghan Government continues to grapple with the growing insurgency, and one reason for the insurgency is that the insurgents do find the support from segments of the Afghan population who are angry at these civilian deaths. So, basically, the US was its own biggest enemy in Afghanistan. Through the civilian deaths it undermined its own project there.
When we are talking about the civilian deaths, when we know that, at the same time, there are all kinds of high-precision weapons and the Americans and NATO forces are operating on the ground, which means that they can handle their operation way more accurately than they are doing, how do we explain such a huge number of civilian casualties. Is it just neglect or is it some kind of tactics? Because this is something we are also witnessing in Gaza, this is something we are witnessing in the south of Ukraine. I mean, civilians are getting killed in large numbers in the contemporary warfare.
Ahmed Quraishi: The international public opinion has given the US military a lot of benefit of the doubt over the last decade, in Afghanistan mainly. And we all, of course, tried to find, I would say, the pretexts or even excuses. Maybe the situation is very difficult, the terrain is very tough; they are dealing with a very tough and a ruthless enemy and so forth. And in some way all of us in the international public opinion, we partially justified what happened.
But I think the report that we are reading right now – the Amnesty International report – and other incidents that we now have concrete evidences on, I think it reveals beyond doubt that the civilian deaths, the casualties, this was all very systematic and it was planned. And the Amnesty International details systematic ways in which evidences were concealed, plans were put in place to punish the civilian population.
It is quite clear, I think, that time has come for us to put an end to this indirectly justifying the civilian deaths because of the toughness of the enemy that the forces face or because of the difficulty of the terrain. I think it is quite clear now that this was quite systematic.
In the case of Gaza, we are also reading now more and more reports that are emerging in the Israeli media and the international media, people who are now openly talking about how targeting civilians is actually no longer a neglect or something that happens because of an oversight but, unfortunately, there are segments in the military (that we’ve seen in the youths military, for example, in Afghanistan) that actually did incorporate punishing the civilian population as part of their wider military plans to defeat their enemies.
So, I think time has come for us to talk openly about how it is wrong to target civilians in any military operation. And I think it is quite clear from the Amnesty International report that the US military, the Pentagon has been clearly involved in targeting the civilians in Afghanistan, for which the US military is also getting a blowback now in the shape of the large and increasing number of Afghan soldiers, Afghan policemen who turn their guns on the US soldiers and the US generals whenever they get a chance.
And finally, what could be the outcome of this awakening of the international public opinion? Do you think that the Americans, who are responsible for the killings of civilians, are going to be held accountable in the long run?
Ahmed Quraishi: I was doing sort of a compilation or a comparison of the number of times that I’ve seen in the American media, for example, arguments that are usually used by the Pentagon to justify its own “mistakes” in war zones – the number of times that those arguments were made and were accepted in the American media. Of course, the level of acceptance was higher immediately after 9\11 and in the subsequent years not very far away from 2001.
But recently I see those people, for example, in the American media, who would justify and use arguments that are normally floated by the Pentagon, those people find themselves being besieged even within the American public opinion, let alone the international opinion.
So, the level of blowback, the level of anger is increasing and I think it is a very positive development, although it comes quite late, almost 13 years after the war in Afghanistan and wherever we saw the civilian deaths, in Iraq. It’s taken a long time, but I think the international public opinion is sort of jelling up, is getting strong, is speaking up.
And more importantly, we are seeing the apologists for the US military committing war crimes in war zones, specifically in Afghanistan and in Iraq, the apologists for the US military more and more find themselves being more and more besieged and isolated even within the American media.
So, I think we are seeing positive developments with the UN Human Rights Council, earlier this year passing a resolution against the wanton use of unmanned drones. I think the international community is moving very firmly in the direction of criminalizing the civilian deaths. And I think the Amnesty International report is definitely going to play a huge role in that.
And I look forward to the next month’s 27th session of the UN Human Rights Council. I look forward to seeing a reaction to the Amnesty International report. And I hope that the international community will be able to exert more pressure on the US to hold accountable those elements within the US military that have been found beyond doubt to have been involved in war crimes in Iraq and in Afghanistan”.
