This week’s readings have shed some light on the topic that admittedly has only occupied the periphery of my attention spotlight before. I found the New Yorker article particularly helpful in tracing the timeline of the war for its straightforward chronological structure and historical summary combined with telling a few specific stories of people on the ground. Having mostly been exposed to records of the Afghan War from the 80s due to the participation of the Soviet troops, I got to learn a lot about the uncertainty of the new war, or the twenty tumultuous years that locals call the American War.
Aside from reckoning with the fine line between foreign missions and occupying forces, the common thread of intelligence failures and civilian death tolls came up multiple times.
In his NYT investigation, Azmat Khan reveals the deceiving nature of “a precise war waged with all-seeing drones”. This image was sold to the American public and the world, convincing everybody of the protection this extraordinary technology would offer to regular civilians thrown into the war of someone else’s volition. In this heavily reliant on technology military operation, it wasn’t the bombs who malfunctioned, but people making the call. Khan documents numerous instances of sidestepping of required procedures and pushing decision-making down the chain of command. In some cases it was confirmation bias, in others – fatal misunderstanding of a cultural divide (labeling the quietness of Ramadan fasting as “no civilian presence”).
The absence of further investigations and disciplinary action for most such cases to me really reinforces the point on the possibility of justice from last week’s readings. Under the conditions of a war, how can we expect anybody to keep promises and abide by regulations imposed either by their own agencies or the international humanitarian law postulating the rules of military conduct? How can they account for unforeseeable decisions made in a split second and the flawed human element?
The dreariest revelation of the article was perhaps the impossibility of accounting for all civilian deaths. As Anand Gopal writes, “the vast majority of incidents involved one or two deaths—anonymous lives that were never reported on, never recorded by official organizations, and therefore never counted as part of the war’s civilian toll.” In a world where civilian deaths serve as a measure of the war’s deadliness and tend to determine the amount of media attention an event gets, how can we do justice to all the silent suffering and unknown victims?
The New York Times opinion video revealed at least 490 people missing and murdered on Taliban’s revenge spree of former American allies. While it’s more than enough to prove that they betrayed their amnesty pledge and lied to the face of international reporters, it’s obvious that this number is far from painting a full picture. With relatives afraid of speaking up in fear of retribution and revenge killers still rampaging, it’s hard to estimate how many stories may be forever lost.
