In my view, it was no coincidence that many of the Marines implicated in the Haditha atrocity had fought in the battle of Fallujah in November 2004. As another Marine, stationed near Ramadi in 2006, said to me scornfully, "The last time we were here, we were shooting everyone in every building we entered. And now they want us to pass out candy and soccer balls?"
While it is not known how many of the Marines implicated in the Nangarhar incident had served in Iraq, the unit was an elite special operations platoon that accepted only highly experienced Marines, so it's likely that many if not most of its members had done multiple tours in Iraq. This seems to point to a potential problem as the wars in both places drag on: Can a veteran of intense combat forget everything he has learned and participate in operations requiring "softer" tactics and a lower threshold of violence?
The Army, by contrast, has been dealing with a larger spectrum of operational environments and has had the luxury of developing what is, in many cases, a more nuanced counterinsurgency approach than the Marine Corps. The softer Army approach is best exemplified by the rise in Baghdad of the so-called Petraeus boys (in reference to the current U.S. general in Iraq, David Petraeus), including military commanders David Kilkullen, H.R. McMaster and John Nagl, who speak of counterinsurgency as "a thinking man's game" and focus on efforts to secure the safety and support of the local population. In 2006, I saw the disparity and resentment between the Army and Marines on display in Ramadi, a town overseen by an Army command, but under which many Marine units serve. One particularly outspoken Army captain declared his open distrust of Marines, calling them "the butchers of Haditha."
The Army-dominated Special Operations Command is known for its secrecy and lack of media transparency, so the publicity around the Marine unit's removal after Nangarhar was striking. Some observers have speculated that the unit was expelled from Afghanistan and its departure announced to the international media as a kind of gesture of goodwill to the people of Nangarhar -- an attempt to repair the political damage done. The move might also have been an attempt to forestall revenge attacks against the Marine unit.
Obviously, the innocent victims of these sorts of atrocities deserve our best sympathies, but whenever I speak with Americans about Iraq and Afghanistan, and everything we're doing wrong there, I also feel compelled to remind them that our troops are among the most disciplined and restrained that the world has ever seen. The American occupations in those countries are regularly compared to the French counterinsurgent campaign in Algeria from 1954 to 1962. It is worth remembering that France -- a country that never went through a period of self-examination as the United States did after Vietnam -- operated concentration camps for the most of the conflict, torturing and summarily executing hundreds of Algerian citizens that it found undesirable. American troops have committed some exceedingly bad errors of judgment in both Iraq and Afghanistan, but none of them approach what can be considered the historical norm for counterinsurgent wars.
It is also worth remembering that nearly 700 civilians were killed by the Taliban last year. According to the New York-based Human Rights Watch, the civilian death toll caused by militant Islamist groups is more than three times the total caused by U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. According to Joanne Mariner, the group's director on terrorism and counterterrorism, "The insurgents are increasingly committing war crimes, often by directly targeting civilians."
But an incident like Nangarhar causes outsized collateral damage, allowing for emphasis on the theme of American military power misapplied. On the whole, our sins in Iraq and Afghanistan have mostly been sins of ignorance and negligence rather than malice. The difference is that today's media-saturated world makes it nearly impossible to hide incidents in which the troops screw up badly.
Among many troops I have spoken to about U.S. atrocities, there is a sense of rank unfairness about the military justice system. With few notable exceptions, it is always lower-ranking enlisted men and most often infantrymen who stand accused. Pilots, artillerymen and officers above the rank of captain are almost never charged with war crimes -- never mind civilian leaders at the Pentagon, elected officials or members of the foreign policy establishment who advocated the wars in the first place. "Shit runs downhill," the saying goes, and as a rule in the military, it's true. To be sure, the commander and senior enlisted man of the Marine unit at Nangarhar were relieved of their command positions, but, as of yet, no charges have been filed against them. This repeats the same general pattern of prosecution at Haditha and at Abu Ghraib.
Our troops in the field have to be held to a standard of conduct, even if the enemy is not, and even if the military justice system has historically been stacked against them. Just because they might feel under siege does not relieve them of the responsibility to act morally and follow the rules of engagement. Nor are their leaders relieved of command responsibility if their troops in the field fail to do so. Failure at either level is not only immoral but counterproductive, and with enough repetition, could ultimately help lose the wars.
About the writer
David J. Morris is a former Marine officer and the author of "Storm on the Horizon: Khafji -- The Battle That Changed the Course of the Gulf War" (Free Press).
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