Defending your country is not murder.

[Tez3]

I'm having to be careful here but there's nothing to say I can't post up a really good website in support of 5 Royal Marines who have been arrested and held for the 'murder' of an Afghan insurgent who was wounded while attacking them. During their tour in Afghan 42 Commando, which these men are from, lost 7 men and had many wounded including double and triple amputees. Any support for them, ie sign the petition, is gratefully received from any and everywhere. And if you could pass it on? You might not think it will do any good but any and all pressure on the government does help, they've backed down before on other subjects when the public pressure has been on.
http://supportthe7.co.uk/

 

[Sukerkin]

Done, my friend. I am sure there is more detail in the background of this story but the very idea that soldiers should have to operate under RoE that needlessly risks their lives makes me shake my head in disbelief.

 

[Tez3]

British troops are having to work to rules of engagement given out by Gen. McChrystal not to British rules of engagement. it means we can't shoot first basically when under threat, we have to wait till they've shot at us. You also can't shoot unless they are standing there shooting at you, if they are retreating you can't shoot them.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...iban-to-beat-rules-of-engagement-8082165.html

 

[oftheherd1]

I couldn't find anything that purported to give any facts of the incident so I can't comment on their actions. I certainly hope they committed no violations of law, for their sake, the sake of their mission, and the sake of their countrymen's pride in them.

Servicemen are often put in more harm's way by those over them. When I was in Vietnam, there was a time when President Nixon ordered that the enemy could not be fired on unless they were firing at the troops. Imagine their frustration on seeing a platoon or company of enemy walking across the rice paddies, not firing at any one (but who knew when later they would), and not being able to engage them. The idea mentioned in post #3 isn't any better. If the enemy finds themselves in an untenable position, even trapped, all they have to do is disengage and move away, then shazam! Immediate safety until the next time when they find themselves in a better position to ambush. Makes no sense at all.

 

[Tez3]

No 'fact's' will be reported now because of their arrest, it becomes sub judice here and nothing can be reported in the media until the trial, in their case it will be a court martial.
The troops accept the danger, they accept they may be killed or maimed but they do need a level playing field and not have to fight with one hand tied behind their backs.

 

[Tez3]

http://voiceinthecrowd.org/2012/10/...ged-with-murder-four-released-without-charge/

 

[oftheherd1]

No 'fact's' will be reported now because of their arrest, it becomes sub judice here and nothing can be reported in the media until the trial, in their case it will be a court martial.
The troops accept the danger, they accept they may be killed or maimed but they do need a level playing field and not have to fight with one hand tied behind their backs.

Trust me, I do understand.

I also, while hoping this is going to sort itself out in the favor the the Marines, must keep an open mind since I know soldiers are people, and people are capable of committing crimes and then denying it.

But sometimes in war time, care must be taken not to hold too high a standard against people who must dodge bullets while determining who is the enemy, and whether or not that enemy is the one engaged, or about to engage, in hostilities. Are those hands up to point out your position, or indicate surrender. When you literally have split seconds to decide and determine a course of action, there is potential for mistakes. In war time, the difference between a mistake causing death, and intentional killing of someone you don't have to kill, can be pretty thin, but does exist.

 

[Bill Mattocks]

I have found very little information on this other than the fact of the arrests and subsequent charges. The UK is very much unlike the US in this sense.

What little I have found seems to allude to a single act, involving a wounded insurgent, and a decision undertaken as to whether to render medical assistance or not; the insurgent subsequently died.

My sympathies are, as always, with our fighting men and women, both from the US and our allies. I am not sorry for insurgents and not broken-hearted when they die. They would, after all, gleefully kill us if they could, and that indeed is their intent.

One wonders what the exact circumstances were. Executing a prisoner, while understandable in the heat of battle, might be what happened here, and that sort of thing tends to not be defensible later. If that is indeed what happened, or something along those lines.

I am merely curious as to the events which took place, I of course do not take the dead insurgent's side.

 

[Tez3]

Once someone has been charged here with an offence there is no talking about it in the media, this incident happened well over a year ago though during a fire fight, I do know that. However as it's a court martial it's likely that what happened will never be told as it will come within the Official Secrets Act. It's likely that a lot of the court martial will be in camera too.
The Bootnecks from 42 who are campaigning for the guys know what happened and I doubt they would make such a public display of support if it were an illegal incident. When something has happened that was illegal the guys have said that trial and punishment was a fair cop they haven't made such a thing of it befoire. We all know things can happen and that not every service person is as clean as we'd like, in those cases there's been no demonstrations of support such as is going on now. It's like a reverse 'no smoke without fire' thing, they'd not make such a fuss if they thought it was a murder.

 

[Haakon]

British troops are having to work to rules of engagement given out by Gen. McChrystal not to British rules of engagement. it means we can't shoot first basically when under threat, we have to wait till they've shot at us. You also can't shoot unless they are standing there shooting at you, if they are retreating you can't shoot them.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...iban-to-beat-rules-of-engagement-8082165.html

Sounds like they're trying to apply US self defense laws to a war zone, which is absolutely insane.

 

[Makalakumu]

In the end, NATO is the aggressive force occupying Afghanistan. The people living there, with the drone strikes, the night raids, and wedding massacres, have every right to defend THEIR HOMES. They can change the rules and make whatever kind of crazy "rules of engagement" they want and it doesn't matter. NATO needs to do the right thing and leave Afghanistan. The people who put the troops in this situation need to be held responsible.

 

[billc]

Sorry, Makalakumu, the 9/11 attacks originated in Afghanistan under the tolerance of the taliban, they needed to be stopped and punished. Drone strikes, night raids are part of war. Wedding massacre...it is a war zone against an enemy that hides behind innocent civillians, whom they also torture and murder. War isn't easy, it isn't something that is ever going to be anything other than chaos and mayhem with innocents too often caught in the middle. Avoiding the killing of innocents is why our troops go to so many lengths to protect innocents caught in the middle. It is the radical, islamic jihadists who have put these innocent people in harms way, not us. If there were no jihadists, then we wouldn't be conducting drone attacks or night raids and innocents wouldn't be killed in the crossfire.

Once we leave, and the taliban reasserts control over the country, how will you stop terrorist training camps and support networks from starting up again? That is the one thing no one on the peacenik side can tell us. How do you stop attacks against us and how do you stop them from originating from Afghanistan once we leave?

 

[Makalakumu]

Look, Bill, the cavalier way you shrug off the war crimes is absolutely appalling. The drone strikes have a 2% success rate. The "double tap" strategy of bombing targets (wedding parties) and then coming back and bombing 20 minutes later kills anyone who is trying to help no matter who they are. When the night raids go down, no one in the houses knows what is going on. A typical Pashtun family expects the men to protect them, so they grab their kalashnikov and do what any red blooded man would do if their family was in danger. If this was Texas, and this was happening in your neighborhood, you'd shoot back

In the end, it doesn't matter how convoluted the rules of engagement have become. It's ******** because the whole reason we are there in the first place has been lost. Our very presence is wrong. Every action we take, no matter how "justified" is wrong. We can't even pretend to justify this and call ourselves the good guys anymore.

The worse part is that we created this problem with our series of failed foreign policy and now we think that our next foreign policy failure is going to fix it. Ninja please. We need to get out. The Taliban are going to reassertion control no matter what. NATO has lost and they've been negotiating with them for months, saying pretty please don't put Karzai's head on a pike when we actually do run out of the country with our tail between our legs. The best that our government is trying to achieve is leaving without looking like we lost. It's Vietnam 2.0.

At any rate, it's been ten years. Bin Laden is gone. The "Al Qaeda" who we don't control are dead. The only enemies left are people who been pissed off by our continued occupation. This includes the Afghans that NATO is training. How many "dinner parties" have trainers been invited to in order to get ambushed? Our government's continued interests in the region revolved around CIA control of opium and the massive amounts of rare earth elements that have been discovered. And now, that kind of foreign policy is being called into question because it's too expensive. We need to leave now. We needed to leave years ago.

 

[Josh Oakley]

I have to agree, makalakumu. Our involvement in Afghanistan has been touchy from the get go. We responded to the bombing of the world trade center by a lot of indiscriminate bombing that killed a lot of innocents , needlessly, which made the job on the ground that much more difficult. There were a lot of elements willing to overthrow the Taliban even at the beginning. Rather than work with these people we kept going our own route and it not only made the job harder for our soldiers, tens of thousands of innocents died.

We weren't even certain Al Qaeda was in Afghanistan when we initially went there, nor that the Taliban was harboring them, as they also weren't exactly close with them. In fact, the Taliban from what I remember had been initially willing to help us find those responsible.. then the bombings began and we made quick allies of the two camps. Our way of going about things in Afghanistan really wasn't that good. Then we went to Iraq, dividing the force, and it got even worse (we ended up CREATING a situation in Iraq where terrorists could flourish)

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[Josh Oakley]

But I doubt those responsible will ever be held to account. Look at what happened in south America. Same script, different players. The united states has NEVER admitted culpability, and the combined death to in Nicaragua, el salvador, Panama, Honduras, Columbia, and Venezuela was in the tens of millions.

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[Tgace]

http://www.theusreport.com/the-us-r...yker-brigade-observations-still-ring-tru.html

Col. Tunnell's letter is essential reading for Americans trying to understand why we are 11 years into a war against an illiterate enemy that has no air force, navy, or armor.

COIN cost U.S. war effort
Where did we go wrong? Tunnell said it's mainly because our senior leaders, who have less combat maneuver experience now than perhaps at any time in U.S. military history, are "unwilling to conduct operations that reflect sound military art and science."

Years ago, we abandoned our counterterrorism efforts in favor of counterinsurgency (COIN), a nebulous, and primarily political strategy aimed at protecting populations and addressing grievances. Killing the enemy and breaking their will to fight becomes secondary, and success hinges on an incredibly corrupt Afghan government.

Tunnell says that COIN "consists of musings from amateurs, contractors, plagiarized journal articles, etc." and has contributed to "needless American casualties":

COIN has become such a restrictive dogma that it cannot be questioned; any professional discussion about its strengths and weaknesses is discouraged. It has reached such a crisis that those who employ other Army doctrinal concepts do so at their own professional peril because they will be subject to censure for not adhering to COIN. This has created a dysfunctional and toxic leadership environment throughout our Army which has resulted in poor organization, unrealistic training, and indecisive battlefield performance.

​

Our military exists to protect American citizens, not Afghans. And if the Afghan people have grievances, that is their business – not ours. Our business should be to kill the terrorists that seek to kill Americans and then come home. The moment we quit doing that was the moment we abandoned our own best interests:

Our potential for greater coalition casualties does not have to be inevitable, but due to our flawed approach to operations we wind up enabling our enemy. The population-centric approach which places the population as the center of gravity is applied to the point of absurdity. The enemy is entrenching himself among the civilian population as we cede to him territory and lines of communication. […]

​

A gross lack of concern for subordinates manifests in guidance that "zero" civilian casualties are acceptable and coalition soldiers may have to be killed rather than defend themselves against a potential threat and risk being wrong and possibly resulting in injury or death of civilians...

If you are really interested in whats going on over there read this.

Im starting to agree with Maka. Once we stopped knowing exactly what our mission there was we should have left. COIN as we are fighting it has become voodoo instead of military science.

 

[Tgace]

http://www.michaelyon-online.com/images/pdf/secarmy_redacted-redux.pdf

When a Colonel is willing to toss his career by writing a letter like this...we should read it.

 

[Tgace]

A quote from the above linked article:

What is troubling is that the White House and Pentagon no doubt knew this from the beginning. But the political leadership decided that the narrative was more important than the reality, so we would train the Afghan army and police for the sake of training – you don't question COIN. Now we are approaching the point that the Afghans we train are as deadly to our troops as the Afghans we fight.

 

[Josh Oakley]

Interestingly, the Al Qaeda we fight was originally the Al Qaeda we trained, and even deployed.

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[Tgace]

I think you mean Taliban in this conversation.

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