Gregory Thomas. Weaponizing Civilian Protection: Counterinsurgency and Collateral Damage in Afghanistan

For more than two decades, scholars working in the field of critical legal studies have been interested in the links between armed violence and law, questioning the latter’s capacity to ‘civilize’ international relations.1 Their research has shown in particular that, historically, law has been less ­concerned with eliminating war than with attempting to reduce its ­frequency – most notably, through the promotion of arbitration – and with trying to humanize it through the development of jus in bello. Further research has shown that, from the Vietnam War onwards and, more specifically, after the 1968 My Lai massacre, criticism of war has targeted military practices and abuses. It has therefore focused heavily on the issue of humanization and, in this respect, has contributed to the development of international humanitarian law.2 Non-governmental organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have also relayed these concerns about the humanization of conflicts in the public sphere. This has in turn resulted in heightened scrutiny of military operations, encouraging US armed forces and their allies to demonstrate that they are complying with legal rules and to seek to avoid killing or injuring civilians. Despite the persistent gap between representation and reality – since civilians continue to be wounded and killed during operations – a humanitarian ­imaginary of war took shape in the 1990s. This imaginary has contributed to legitimizing the use of force in the post-Cold War era. In the context of operations conducted in the name of the ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Palestine and the Sahel, US armed forces and their allies, as well as Israeli forces, were led to fight irregular adversaries who were operating within civilian populations. The actions of these armed forces regularly had dramatic consequences for those same populations. Bombings and drone strikes, for example, injured and killed civilians. In order to obtain intelligence, innocent people were also arbitrarily detained and tortured during the ‘war on terror’. These actions were nevertheless legitimized by legal experts working for governments and armed forces. As critical studies have clearly shown, these jurists have contributed to the ­normalization of such violence and participated in the perpetuation of a humanitarian representation of war, despite the gap between this representation and reality. Gradually, their justifications came to be incorporated into the strategic discourse itself.3 Gregory Thomas’ book on the war in Afghanistan fits squarely within this body of research. Its objective is to analyse ‘how coalition officials tried to re-imagine civilian casualties as a martial concern rather than a humanitarian consideration – as a problem that could imperil the mission and become an impediment to success’ (at 5). It situates itself within the field of critical legal studies scholarship. More specifically, ‘Weaponizing Civilian Protection draws on recent feminist and poststructuralist work that examines how the moral norms and legal codes that regulate contemporary conflicts work to enable and enhance the violence they are supposed to restrain, including the violence against civilians’ (at 6). The author chooses to study violence ‘upwards’, focusing on those who enable it, rather than ‘downwards’, as feminist studies tend to do (at 37). Empirically, the book draws on, among other things, an analysis of more than 100 declassified documents, interviews with more than 25 coalition members responsible for drafting and disseminating directives and interviews with members of non-governmental organizations (at 36). The argument is well documented, well structured and effective. The first chapter analyses the emergence of counter-insurgency discourse. The second focuses on legal obligations and establishes the theoretical framework. The following four chapters focus on the techniques adopted by the armed forces. It should also be noted that the book primarily consists of an analysis of military practices, with strictly legal issues not occupying a central place in the study. In the first chapter, the author shows that military personnel deployed in Afghanistan came to realize that, by wounding and killing civilians, they risked permanently alienating the population and thereby making victory unattainable. This realization did not, however, lead them to fundamentally question their mission. At no point did the military consider that they should cease using force. Instead, partly inspired by their rediscovery of counter-insurgency thinking developed during the colonial wars, they came to the conclusion that they needed to better ‘calibrate’ their use of violence. According to them, this calibration was intended to ‘win the hearts and minds’ of local populations and prevent them from turning against the coalition. Civilians thus became a ‘centre of gravity’ for military planners. The importance that Thomas attaches to this rediscovered body of military thought is therefore entirely justified as it extends well beyond the narrow question of civilian mortality. The issue points to two broader paradoxes at the heart of the Western intervention in Afghanistan. First, it is striking that this military thought was revived despite the fact that counter-insurgency had not only been used to legitimize abuses in previous wars but also failed to secure victory for the European powers and the USA in Indochina, Algeria or Vietnam. Even more strikingly, the US armed forces and those of their allies sought, through the process of ‘Afghanization’ in particular, to promote the development of democracy while relying on a military doctrine whose roots lay in deeply anti-liberal forms of colonial warfare. As several studies have emphasized, counter-insurgency doctrines were originally developed to discipline and control dominated societies.4 It is therefore deeply paradoxical that the USA should have revived these doctrines in the name of promoting democracy. In the second chapter, Thomas emphasizes that an analysis of international humanitarian law alone is insufficient to understand the coalition’s actions. In fact, mere compliance by the military with a body of law that was relatively permissive when it came to the use of force would not have provided an adequate response to the strategic problems encountered in Afghanistan. What the author highlights is that the military’s decisions regarding the ‘calibration’ of the use of force were driven by strategic rather than moral or legal considerations. This is why he refers to this approach as ‘weaponized civilian protection’. As he also demonstrates, however, the military did not consider avoiding the killing or wounding of civilians to be its central objective. It remained convinced that, under certain circumstances, it was legitimate to accept the risk of killing or injuring civilians. Moreover, this idea was normalized in military practices and doctrine. For Thomas, the coalition’s actions actually reflect a combination of counter-insurgent biopolitical objectives aimed at protecting populations and necro-political calculations concerning the use of force to kill. He adds that the measures taken to reduce civilian casualties also serve to align military action with the quasi-humanitarian objectives of the Bush administration (at 113). Indeed, for the latter, the war was not solely aimed at eliminating the ‘terrorists’; it was also intended to save Afghans from Taliban oppression. The point developed in this chapter is particularly relevant because it also contributes to demystifying the benign conception of counter-insurgency as a form of warfare supposedly intended to ensure the well-being of populations.5 In reality, the ‘war on terror’ – with the war in Afghanistan at its epicentre – constituted a vast, often lethal, global manhunt organized in the aftermath of 2001. As the book then shows in the third chapter, aerial operations had caused civilian casualties since the very beginning of the intervention. When documented, these casualties were presented by the Pentagon as regrettable accidents. The coalition forces eventually recognized that such casualties, even when they did not result from unlawful actions, were likely to turn the population against them. The Afghan authorities regularly criticized these incidents as well, and the coalition’s actions were also scrutinized by Human Rights Watch. The military’s response to this problem relied on the adoption of techniques – including bombing risk-assessment software – designed to limit the risk to civilians. New, more restrictive tactical directives were also developed, although these were relaxed after 2014. Overall, as data from the coalition and the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) attest, these measures had a positive impact on reducing civilian casualties (at 166–168). As Thomas highlights, however, officers nevertheless remained prepared to use airstrikes to accomplish their objectives, even when doing so entailed a potential risk of harm to civilians. Thomas’s analysis is once again entirely convincing on this point. It could, however, be further extended by considering the coalition’s efforts, over the course of the conflict, to strengthen the capabilities of the Afghan air forces – notably, by providing them with equipment. In this way, the coalition sought to establish a division of labour with regard to air support, increasingly delegating part of the provision of aerial violence to the Afghan forces. UNAMA’s reports to which Thomas refers also show that this transfer of air support capabilities resulted in numerous civilian casualties. More broadly, this raises the question of civilian mortality resulting from the delegation of violence to local actors supported by the coalition. Civilian casualties resulting from night raids are then addressed in the fourth chapter. These raids were often carried out by special forces. The population complained about their excessive use of force, particularly when soldiers entered homes, threatened inhabitants and caused property damage during searches. There was also widespread dissatisfaction with the impunity enjoyed by the soldiers conducting these operations. The coalition’s efforts to address this issue essentially relied on the adoption of more restrictive rules governing the use of force during raids. However, the strictness of these rules fluctuated over the course of the conflict, particularly when they were perceived as detrimental to operational effectiveness. The coalition also developed guidelines aimed at influencing soldiers’ behaviour in an attempt to make them more attentive to the fate of civilians. Thomas notes that, under certain circumstances, soldiers would exercise ‘courageous restraint’. Although exposed to risks from the enemy, soldiers were nevertheless not required to exercise such restraint. This clearly shows that military personnel remained willing to expose civilians to risks when they considered that it was necessary. Drawing on data produced by the coalition from mid-2008 onwards, as well as data from UNAMA, Thomas shows that the measures adopted in the context of night raids had a smaller impact on reducing civilian casualties than those implemented in the case of airstrikes (at 201, 208). Finally, the accounting for civilian casualties and the dissemination of the information collected are examined in the fifth chapter. It should be recalled that, at the beginning of the war, General Tommy Franks tersely announced that the armed forces did not conduct body counts (at 227). In reality, as Thomas documents, the military did conduct body counts, although these were sometimes incomplete. They were carried out in the context of battle damage assessments. The Pentagon, however, was reluctant to share the information collected through these assessments. In the context of counter-insurgency operations, a shift in attitude can be observed. The coalition’s approach relied on more systematic assessments of civilian casualties and on the dissemination of information about them. Civilian casualties were thus bureaucratically incorporated into operational planning and taken into account in the conduct of military operations. It is worth noting that Thomas does not fundamentally challenge the casualty figures produced by the military throughout the conflict. He does show, however, that these figures were instrumentalized by the military: they served to regulate what were perceived as legitimate uses of force. This system of accounting also proved useful to commanders when they were accused of causing large numbers of civilian deaths. In such cases, the official figures provided them with a tool for responding to these accusations. The function of civilian mortality figures is the subject of a particularly persuasive critical analysis, which draws on the work of anthropologists Sally Engle Merry and Arjun Appadurai.6 Thomas notes that, for Engle Merry, quantification ‘is appealing because it promises clear, concrete, and incontestable numerical information about complex political problems in a straightforward language that allows for comparison, evaluation, and assessment’ (at 242). This appeal is clearly present in the context of the war in Afghanistan. Thomas argues that, through the use of official figures, the military succeeded in imbuing its actions with an aura of control and objectivity. In other words, these figures contributed to the construction of an imaginary of bureaucratic control. In reality, however, these numbers provide only a simplified representation of what was taking place in Afghanistan. The final part of the book addresses the issue of compensation payments to the families of the Afghan victims. Thomas examines the military bureaucratic mechanisms through which the armed forces have provided compensation for deaths, injuries or property damage resulting from their activities. Some of these mechanisms already existed during the two World Wars, while others were established during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. As the study shows, these mechanisms were implemented primarily to maintain cordial relations with the local population. Furthermore, payments by the armed forces did not constitute an acknowledgement of wrongdoing on their part but, rather, an ‘expression of sympathy’. In general, the amounts offered in cases of death were relatively low, averaging around US$ 3,400. Moreover, the sums vary considerably depending on the circumstances. Thomas emphasizes here as well that these payments were not a moral instrument but, rather, a strategic tool intended to win the goodwill of local populations. The payments also reinforce the imaginary of humane warfare. Money thus becomes a combat system. Thomas has produced a thorough study of the place occupied by civilians in the coalition’s strategy in Afghanistan. It is based on a systematic examination of reports and testimonies. One of the book’s main strengths lies in the author’s ability to analyse military practices and discourses with precision and to interpret them in light of the critical literature. His book undoubtedly enriches the field of conflict studies. More substantively, his study convincingly exposes the paradox inherent in the measures adopted by the coalition to protect civilians. These measures have had tangible effects in terms of reducing civilian suffering. At the same time, however, they have helped consolidate a humanitarian representation of war, which in turn has contributed to justifying its continuation, thereby causing further civilian casualties. As the book clearly demonstrates, this paradox stems from the fact that civilian protection is approached from a strategic rather than a moral perspective. This argument also resonates with a broader body of research showing that the continued presence of the coalition steadily undermined the authority it sought to strengthen.7 Moreover, through its presence and actions and by relying on certain local actors, particularly ‘warlords’, the coalition contributed to polarizing the local situation. Its presence thus contributed to perpetuating and intensifying the very conflict it sought to bring to an end. Thomas’ book constitutes an important contribution to our understanding of the prolonged engagement in Afghanistan, which caused numerous casualties and ultimately ended with the withdrawal of the coalition.