 | | Members of Australia's special forces conduct an exercise in Melbourne in March 2011.Mick Tsikas/Reuters |
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Modern war by its very nature contains behaviors that in other contexts would be crimes. The destruction of life and property inherent in aerial bombing and cruise missile strikes, along with the violence, detentions and egregious trespassing routine to ground fighting and patrolling — fundamental aspects of invasion and occupation — have been institutionally normalized and socially tolerated, even when civilians are incarcerated or killed. But they are at odds with what most people would accept, much less care to be party to, in almost any other circumstance. |
And yet after two decades of American-led war-making across swaths of Central Asia, the Middle East and parts of Africa have inured the public to cruelties and sorrows alike, news from the ground can still move past routine to repugnant. |
Such were the photographs published this week by Guardian Australia, which the accompanying article said showed an Australian commando drinking beer from a hollow prosthetic leg apparently taken in 2009 as a war trophy from a Taliban fighter. The artificial leg, used as a beer-drinking accessory for holiday celebrations or other occasions, was one of the props decorating an unauthorized bar that special operations troops called the Fat Lady’s Arms. (An Iron Cross — a formerly Prussian military decoration repurposed as a Nazi device and sometimes as a white supremacist symbol of hate — was another.) |
The article noted a long association of the prosthetic leg with Australia’s special forces soldiers in Afghanistan: “The leg traveled with the squadron at all times, one former trooper told the Guardian. ‘Wherever the Fat Lady’s Arms was set up, then that’s where the leg was kept and used occasionally for drinking out of,’ he said.” |
Australia, a close ally of the United States whose service members train and fight alongside American forces, has been shaken by public allegations of its special forces soldiers killing Afghan civilians and prisoners. Many details have been disclosed by the “Brereton report,” the result of a multiyear inspector general investigation into war crimes by Australian forces that was publicly released in redacted form last month. The photos published in Guardian Australia furthered an unmasking, offering glimpses of frat-bro exuberance amid moral rot and strategic drift in wars that the United States and its allies, all these years on, cannot win. |
In the case of the Afghan war, the Pentagon these days admits to what was clear long back: There will no victory. It’s more a matter of how to manage and label the loss. Speaking at a think tank event on Wednesday, Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke of the campaign, once the centerpiece of the Pentagon’s global war on terror, in the measured tones of a superpower’s stumped functionary. “We believe that now after 20 years — two decades of consistent effort there — we’ve achieved a modicum of success,” he said, adding, “We have been in a condition of strategic stalemate where the government of Afghanistan was never going to militarily defeat the Taliban, and the Taliban, as long as we were supporting the government of Afghanistan, is never going to military defeat the regime.” |
Official honesty has rarely been a feature of this war, which boosted the careers and public profiles of a generation of senior military officers while failing to achieve many of the Pentagon’s goals. So it was no surprise that the chairman’s “modicum” remark, if in spirit a shift from the rosy assessments or predictions of senior officers who preceded him, was roundly panned by many military veterans on social media, who saw even a frank admission of stalemate as more soft-pedaling by a military that lost its way long ago while wasting money, credibility and lives. This chorus sang from the gut. Is the American military — a vast set of lethal institutions, buoyed by what may be the world’s largest public-relations machine — incapable of straight talk, even in the face of what has been obvious for years? When your friends are dead and conscience strained, you know the answer before asking. |
There was, however, another way of looking at it. In the last weeks of 2020, a general late in the autumn of his own career had tiptoed toward something Washington otherwise has been unable to produce this fall: a concession speech — the implicit acknowledgment, by a loser, of math. |
Notable, yes. But small comfort. More bad news no doubt will come. And even if one day this may all be behind us, the damage will endure. |
C.J. Chivers is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. He received a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2017 and is the author of two books, including “The Fighters,” which chronicled the experiences of six American combatants in Afghanistan and Iraq. |
Afghan War Casualty Report: November 2020 |
 | | The site of a rocket attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Nov. 21.Hedayatullah Amid/EPA, via Shutterstock |
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At least 244 pro-government forces and 200 civilians were killed in Afghanistan in November. [Read the report.] |
Here are five articles from The Times that you might have missed. |
 | | Mr. Odachi at age 18, in his pilot uniform.Noriko Hayashi for The New York Times |
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“We weren’t destined to live long.” Kazuo Odachi is one of the last living members of a group never meant to survive. He wants to remind Japan that before its modern success came the sacrifices of the young pilots who gave their lives. [Read the article.] |
“The procedure including its preamble of the negotiation has been finalized.” On Wednesday, Afghan government and Taliban officials said they had finalized the terms to guide future talks, opening the door to a new phase of negotiations toward a long-term peace. [Read the article.] |
“The ship is not just a hunk of steel.” A U.S. Navy warship that was engulfed by a fire in July while docked in San Diego will be decommissioned instead of rebuilt, the Pentagon said Monday, deciding to forgo a repair project that could have surpassed $3 billion. [Read the article.] |
“I want to hope that we are seeing a learning process and a change in the Russian strategy in the post-Soviet space.” The vicious war between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh has settled into a tense truce enforced by Russian troops. For Russia, the peacemaker role is a switch — a test as the country struggles to hold its influence in the former Soviet lands. [Read the article.] |
“Our intention is to be candid about the challenges to NATO, with a tone of well-grounded optimism.” A high-level look at NATO’s next 10 years recommends significant changes to confront the new challenges of an aggressive Russia and a rising China, urging overhauls to fortify the alliance’s cohesion and to better coordinate with democratic allies around the world. [Read the article.] |
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