tom's bits and bytes

Shorter than a blog post, longer than a tweet, mostly media.

The brutality of war

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The German news magazine Der Spiegel has just published a sample of 4,000 photographs taken by a group of US soldiers in Afghanistan who called themselves the "Kill Team" and which appear to show routine killing of civilians for sport. These images are important, not just for what it says about these particular soldiers, nor even for what it says about the US presence in Afghanistan, but for what it says about all war. Seymour Hersh says it best in The New Yorker:

Why photograph atrocities? And why pass them around to buddies back home or fellow soldiers in other units? How could the soldiers’ sense of what is unacceptable be so lost? No outsider can have a complete answer to such a question. As someone who has been writing about war crimes since My Lai, though, I have come to have a personal belief: these soldiers had come to accept the killing of civilians—recklessly, as payback, or just at random—as a facet of modern unconventional warfare. In other words, killing itself, whether in a firefight with the Taliban or in sport with innocent bystanders in a strange land with a strange language and strange customs, has become ordinary. In long, unsuccessful wars, in which the enemy—the people trying to kill you—do not wear uniforms and are seldom seen, soldiers can lose their bearings, moral and otherwise. The consequences of that lost bearing can be hideous. This is part of the toll wars take on the young people we send to fight them for us. The G.I.s in Afghanistan were responsible for their actions, of course. But it must be said that, in some cases, surely, as in Vietnam, the soldiers can also be victims.

The Der Spiegel photographs also help to explain why the American war in Afghanistan can probably never be “won,” in my view, just as we did not win in Vietnam. Terrible things happen in war, and terrible things are happening every day in Afghanistan, as Americans continue to conduct nightly assassination raids and have escalated the number of bombing sorties. There are also reports of suspected Taliban sympathizers we turn over to Afghan police and soldiers being tortured or worse. This will be a long haul; revenge in Afghan society does not have to come immediately. We could end up not knowing who hit us, or why, a decade or two from now.

Headline of the Day

I have a confession. I was just using that subject line to continue my infrequent series on this subject, but this is not really about a headline and it's not from today. It is the lede of an AP report yesterday and is so noteworthy I couldn't resist posting it:

"Egypt's military rulers are dissolving the parliament and suspending the constitution, meeting two key demands of pro-democracy protesters."

If you didn't understand the context wouldn't that be the oddest and most contradictory sentence you have ever read?