A Powerful, Implied Indictment in the New York Times

Remarkable reporting highlights American military mistakes, but the real villains are still clear.

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This newsletter is going to be just a bit different, especially for a piece so close to Christmas. But it’s about a topic of particular concern, and one that deserves more attention. It’s about our war on terror, how we fought, and why—despite all of our mistakes—our enemies bear the moral responsibility even for most of the innocent civilians who fell to American arms.

I still vividly remember the night I was almost responsible for the deaths of several young boys. It was a terrible night relatively early in my deployment. One of our soldiers had been killed in an IED attack, other soldiers were wounded, and medevac helicopters were on their way. 

There was one problem. According to drone footage, a small collection of what appeared to be men were lying in a prone position in a ditch, directly under the flight path of the incoming choppers. We couldn’t see any weapons, but the footage wasn’t sharp, and weapons were easy to hide.

Leave the men alone, and you risked turning a tragedy into a catastrophe, with helicopters shot down and multiple new casualties. Fire on the men with partial information, and you risked killing civilians—but how much risk was there, really? Why would a small collection of men be lying down in a ditch in a prone position after midnight? That looked more like “TTPs” (the military acronym for tactics, techniques, and procedures that mark military activity) than innocent behavior.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    David you bring a level of nuance and perspective to this topic that few do. Thank you.

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  2. Joe Bruno

    The New York Times stopped being a valid journalistic newspaper long ago.

    Instead of their old motto, "All the news that's fit to print," it's now "All the news that fits our ideology we print."

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    Tony Martyr

    Williamson’s First Law: “Everything is simple when you don’t know a f***ing thing about it.” I think it may also have been KDW (or Jonah?) who said that people have a tendency to have a conservative view in their areas of expertise.

    David is speaking here on things he has intimate knowledge of, and was involved in, hands-on - so he knows it's not simple, and his view is more aligned with a conservative viewpoint on foreign wars and rules of engagement.

    It behooves us all to keep that in mind when we're opining on anything at all. Not to resist opining - that's fine, we can all have a view. But we don't have any right to be taken seriously by people who are up to their armpits in it.

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    Richard

    I hope you publish this someplace with a wide distribution like, say, the New York Times.

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    Dave Conant - MO

    Well written analysis David as was the Times' piece. This is news, but not new; the Pentagon has behaved this way at least since Vietnam and probably as far back as Korea. I don't know that there is anything that will change the attitude that leads to the opaquing behavior of senior commanders who are caught between politics and military necessity.

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  6. Katie

    Thank you for this piece and the vital context it provides. I had already read the NYTimes article - across 3-4 days because it was so disturbing - before I read your caution about ISIS (and, by extension, the Taliban) not adhering to the LOAC. I think the reporters should have also provided this context to spare someone like me - unfamiliar with combat and the 'laws' governing it - from concluding that our military too often demonstrates a reckless unconcern for civilians. When combatants make no effort to distinguish themselves from civilians, of course, the toll on civilians will be dramatically higher.

    This is another example of why I read you: you often lead me to see things differently, overcoming what I admit is a confirmation bias on my part. Again, thank you.

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  7. Miles

    Another important thing to reflect on is whether we should ever enter into open-ended action or occupation versus taking on clear, short-term goals that are achievable by military might. Changing the culture of a country is not something any military can achieve. If we didn't deploy a huge amount of troops to Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place, many of these difficult choices between protecting soldiers and protecting civilians would not have come up in the first place. I'm not convinced that a large-scale deployment, especially to Iraq, was necessary to protect the US from future attacks (though I'm open to being convinced otherwise).

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  8. Vic

    Probably optimistic to think the New York Times would invest in a research article addressing the other side of this as David noted.

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  9. Tim Richardson

    Thanks, David. This is very helpful. Are you aware of any efforts by former ISIS or ISIS-sympathizers in the middle east to make the case against the necessity of and justification for terrorist tactics going forward? There must be many religious and political leaders over there calling for this change. In other words, what's the likelihood that majorities of people in these countries will stop countenancing terrorist tactics as somehow OK when engaging western soldiers in combat?

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    Rob Weiter

    After your excellent recommendation, I read and listened to the outstanding long-form article in NYTimes. I am still reacting, but that article alone seems worth my subscription price.

    Thank you David for pointing us to the article and for your lengthy discussion about the high price of withdrawal from Afghanistan.

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