It has a name: green-on-blue violence. But the label doesn't begin to suggest the seriousness of the increasingly common phenomenon of Afghan soldiers, policemen and security guards attacking their NATO or U.S. mentors, the people who are funding, supporting and teaching them. Think of it as death-by-ally.
Such incidents have occurred at least 21 times so far this year, resulting in 30 American and European deaths. That's the same number of green-on-blue attacks reported in all of 2011. And, according to the Associated Press, the U.S. and NATO don't always release news of the assaults unless they result in deaths, so the number could be higher.
There have been at least four incidents of green-on-blue violence this month. The initial one, on July 1, reportedly involved a member of the elite Afghan National Civil Order Police shooting down three British soldiers at a checkpoint in Helmand province, deep in the Taliban heartland of the country. The shooter was captured.
Two days later, a man the Associated Press said was in "an Afghan army uniform" turned his machine gun on U.S. troops just outside a NATO base in Wardak province, west of the Afghan capital, Kabul, wounding five before fleeing.
Then, on July 22, a security guard gunned down three police trainers — two former U.S. customs and border protection agents and a former United Kingdom revenue and customs officer. This happened at a police training facility near Herat inAfghanistan'sgenerally peaceful northwest near the Iranian border.
The next day, an Afghan soldier on a military base in Faryab province in the north of the country turned his gun on a group of American soldiers also evidently working as police trainers, wounding two before being killed by return fire.
In 2007-08, there were only four green-on-blue attacks, resulting in four deaths. When they started multiplying in 2010, the initial impulse of coalition spokespeople was to blame them on Taliban infiltrators (and the Taliban did take credit for most of them). Now, U.S. or NATO spokespeople tend to blame such violence on individual pique or some personal grievance against coalition forces rather than Taliban affiliation. They prefer to present each case as if it were a local oddity with little relation to any of the others.
In fact, there is a striking pattern at work that should be front-page news. The attacks appear not to be coordinated, but they nevertheless seem to represent a kind of collective rejection of what the U.S. and NATO are trying to accomplish, some kind of primal Afghan scream from an armed people who have known little but fighting, bloodshed and destruction for more than three decades.
The number of these events is startling, given that an Afghan who turns his weapon on well-armed American or European allies is likely to die. A small number of shooters have escaped and a few have been captured alive (including one recently sentenced to death in an Afghan court), but most are shot down. In a situation in which foreign advisors and troops are now distinctly on edge, however, these are essentially suicidal acts.
It's reasonable to assume that, for every Afghan who acts on such a violent impulse, there must be a larger pool who have similar feelings but don't act on them (or simply vote with their feet, like the 24,590 soldiers who deserted in the first six months of 2011 alone).
If the significance of green-on-blue violence hasn't quite sunk in yet here in the U.S., consider this: There is nothing in our historical record faintly comparable, no war in which our "native" allies have turned the weapons we supply on our forces in anything like these numbers — or, as far as I can tell, in any numbers at all. It didn't happen in the 18th and 19th century Indian wars, in the Philippine insurrection at the turn of the last century, in Korea during the early 1950s, Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s, or Iraq in this century. (In Vietnam, the only somewhat analogous set of events involved U.S. soldiers, not their South Vietnamese counterparts, turning their weapons on their own officers in acts that, like "green-on-blue" violence, got a label all their own: "fragging.")
Whatever the singular bitterness or complaint behind any specific green-on-blue attack, a cumulative message clearly lurks in them that theU.S. militaryand Washington would prefer not to hear. To do so would be to acknowledge the full-scale failure of the ongoing American mission in Afghanistan. After all, what could be more devastating 12 years after the U.S.-led invasion than having such attacks come not from the enemies the U.S. is officially fighting, but from the Afghans closest to us, the ones we have been training at a cost of nearly $50 billion to take over the country as U.S. combat troops are drawn down.
What we're seeing, in the most violent form imaginable, is a sweeping message from our Afghan allies, from the security forces Washington plans to continue supporting long after most American troops have been withdrawn. To the extent that bullets can be translated into words, that message would be something like "Your mission has failed; get out or die."
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com, in which a longer version of this piece appears. His latest book is "The United States of Fear."
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario