A former adviser to the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff described the US military’s inability to protect civilians in conflict areas around the world as a “shameful failure”, and said that the United States’ moral and legal credibility is at risk.
Sarah Yager, a former senior human rights adviser in the Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in… article In the American magazine “Foreign Affairs” – that the US army had been engaged 8 years ago to take measures to investigate the deaths of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq as a result of the military operations it launched in the two countries, track their repercussions, and then compensate the victims.
She said that she had previously considered – in a previous article in the same magazine at the time – these measures were incomplete, “but they represented a marked improvement in the management of the war,” adding that although she praised the improvement in the performance of the American forces in protecting civilians, she was concerned that Those gains can be temporary if not permanent.
improvised experiments
It is painful – according to Sarah Yager, who currently manages the office of Human Rights Watch in Washington – that the lessons learned from the accumulation of US military experiences in wars were applied improvisedly, and that no one in the Ministry of Defense (the Pentagon) took responsibility Specific to monitor civilian harm or find ways to verify it.
In view of this, the US military was exposed to the possibility that the improvement in its efforts to protect civilians would be in vain.
And the writer moved to talk at length about the mistakes that marred the military operations on the battlefields in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. She said that the army established a top-secret offensive cell in 2014 to hunt down the Islamic State in Syria and target many of its sites within 5 years.
Pentagon denial
However, an investigation by the New York Times revealed that that cell also killed an unknown number of civilians, and that the deaths that occurred as a result of these operations were not officially counted and the US Department of Defense only recently acknowledged them, acquiescing to pressure from the media. , confirms Sarah Yager.
The writer adds that the unveiling of those strikes in Syria came just months after the US military admitted that it had launched a drone strike last August in Afghanistan that killed 10 civilians – including 7 children – not including a single “terrorist” as the Pentagon first claimed. command.
Last December, the New York Times published a collection of Pentagon documents on “reckless” targeting, civilian deaths, and little accountability in Washington.
Possible war crimes
Taken together, the documents assert that the US military’s record of harm to civilians is “shameful.” Many of these newly disclosed strikes involve violations of the laws of armed conflict, and others are potential war crimes, according to a Foreign Affairs article.
Last November, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stressed the need for the US military to work hard to reduce civilian casualties, according to the author of the article, who indicated that this was a promise US officials had made, but it is no longer enough.
To take Austin’s commitment seriously, the author went on to say that the US military should address its “systemic” mistakes and allow for an independent review of the harm its operations have inflicted on civilians.
America’s credibility is at stake
However, most importantly – in Sarah Yager’s opinion – that the credibility of the United States as a moral and legal party in armed conflicts is in danger, and that civilians will suffer in those conflicts. Power.
Although the US military confirms its compliance with international laws that seek to limit such harm to civilians, the evidence reveals “a pattern of suspicious compliance with those laws, repetition of mistakes, evidence of recklessness, and flagrant violations of laws.”
The article of the American magazine brought to mind the air strike that took place in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan last August, and the writer described it as another example of mistakes that lead to avoidable deaths among civilians, “and they are mistakes known to everyone who has been paying attention to civilian casualties for two decades.” the last two.”
The writer provided details of that raid on Kabul, saying that the operators of the American drone were tracking a man named Zammari Ahmadi for 8 hours, thinking that he was a terrorist, so they killed him and other civilians who were near him. But he was the wrong target. Ahmadi was an aid worker and was doing his usual job.
The reaction of the US Department of Defense to the incident was, at first glance, that it denied killing civilians, and days later described the raid as wrong and opened a secret investigation into it. In the end, it did not find any official or individual in the military service guilty, and declared that it did not bear responsibility for that. for anyone.
Failure to identify the perpetrators
Sarah Yager explained in her article that the most common pattern in American air raids is that rarely anyone is held responsible for the deaths of civilians, and that repeated internal investigations did not impose any punishment on the perpetrators, perhaps because their units sometimes conduct the investigations themselves.
The writer concludes by saying that the Pentagon and the White House in the eras of successive administrations have shown the inability to find lasting solutions to these problems, noting that there is no other choice but to look to Congress to take over this matter and hold those responsible for mistakes accountable.