The Weaponisation of Ethics

I am currently in Canberra for the Ethics Under Fire: Issues and Challenges from Contemporary Warfare for the Australian Army workshop, which has been organised by the Australian Centre for the Study of Armed Conflict and Society. The keynote talk was delivered by Major General Charles Dunlap, who is perhaps best known for his concept of lawfare, which was coined to explain how enemy groups may manipulate the laws of armed conflict to undermine a state’s capacity to wage war. One of the reasons why I find his work so interesting – although perhaps not in the way he intended – is that it draws attention to the way in which international law and moral codes can be used to make war possible. Although we tend to view these rules and regulations as a powerful external restraint on war, limiting the death and destruction that can be caused by banning certain weapons, prohibiting certain attacks and protecting certain targets, Dunlap reminds us that we must also pay attention to what it permits. The laws of armed conflict are, he argues, a lot more permissive than many people assume, particularly when it comes to attacks on civilians.

His focus today was on what he referred to as the weaponisation of ethics, which has obvious overlaps with his worries about lawfare. His basic argument is that enemy groups have become particularly adept at turning our ethical codes against us and exploiting our distaste for civilian casualties. Because they know that any evidence of collateral damage will provoke public outrage, they now surround themselves with innocent civilians to protect themselves from attack. As a result, military commanders find themselves in an impossible situation. Either they use the force they are legally and morally entitled to use at the risk of being seen as unethical or they postpone their attack and allow an adversary to escape unharmed. The worry for Dunlap is that our obsession with avoiding civilian casualties is preventing the military from being an effective force, creating what he considers to be a dangerous moral hazard for military strategists. Fears that the public might perceive operations to be unethical means that troops are now failing to act to prevent enemy forces from doing greater harm. At the same time, he argues that this moral paranoia is having a detrimental impact on the lives of soldiers, who have become reluctant to act for ‘fear of upsetting liberals back home’. These misplaced concerns about the legitimacy of civilian harm – both in terms of ethics and in terms of international law – are undermining the effectiveness of the armed forces and giving the enemy a competitive edge.

I hardly think it is accurate to suggest that the military has been cowed into submission by a bunch of bleeding heart liberals like me, even if they have become more cautious when it comes to targeting. What really caught my attention during the talk was not his diagnosis of the problem but his solution. Given his concerns about the role of ethics in all of this, you might expect Dunlap to advocate for the abandonment of ethics or at least its depreciation. But rather than advocating for the marginalisation of these ethical codes, he argues that they should be actively inculcated within the ranks. His rationale is really quite straightforward: an ethically literate soldier is a more effective soldier because they will be more certain about when it is ok to kill and when it is not. Morality should not be seen, therefore, as a burden on a soldier but as something that gives them confidence, reassuring them that what they are doing is the right thing to do. If it is permissible for them to kill an enemy combatant, he wants them to know that it is permissible. If it is permissible for they to cause a certain amount of collateral damage, then he wants them to know that it is permissible. And if a colleague is doing something that is impermissible, he wants them to know that this is impermissible.

The implications of this argument are particularly significant for those of us interested in the relationship between ethics and war because it seems to upend conventional accounts, which assume that the former acts as some sort of external restraint on the latter. Far from limiting the violence inflicted on the battlefield, ethics might actually enable and even encourage it. There is an interesting but unintended overlap here with the excellent work that James Eastwood has been doing on the Israel Defence Force (IDF), which focuses on the ethics training provided at military academies. Rejecting the notion that ethics and war exist in some sort of antagonistic partnership, Eastwood claims that this ethics training forms an essential part of how recruits cultivate a sense of moral selfhood. These training rituals, he explains:

promote a regime of governmentality aimed at the formation of soldiers as ethical subjects who monitor and strive to enhance their conduct and who believe strongly in the righteousness of the army for which they fight. Ethical capacity has been added to physical fitness and battle-readiness as a feature of all-round military preparedness. This fos ters a kind of militarism in which what one does during military service becomes a barometer of character; it speaks a truth about the soldier as a subject.

I am sure I will be returning to this issue again and again as I try to understand how the principle of noncombatant immunity functions to legitimise certain acts of violence and render certain populations disposable. What matters in the short-term is that the ability of ethics to critique violence may not be as straightforward as is often assumed.

James Turner Johnson on Combatants and Noncombatants in Medieval Thought

James Turner Johnson’s survey of the just war tradition in Ideology, Reason, and the Limitation of War: Religious and Secular Concepts, 1200-1740 (IRW) and Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War: A Moral and Historical Inquiry (JWRW) provides some interesting insight into how different philosophers and theologians sought to separate combatants from noncombatants when discussing the principle of distinction. He begins by noting that early just war theorists, such as Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, had surprisingly little to say about jus in bello principles about the importance of distinction, as they were primarily concerned about the right to go to war in the first place (JWRW: 122-125). Moreover, the absolute conviction that one side was just and the other side was unjust meant that enemy civilians were often just as vulnerable as enemy combatants. Christian love could mean that, in practices, enemy civilians be killed deliberately in order to save them from their sins.

It is fair to say that the principle of noncombatant immunity is not something that emerges from the religious dimension of just war but the secular tradition. This does not mean, of course, that the Church had nothing to say about the principle of noncombatant immunity. The Truce of God, which dates back to the eleventh century, attempted to impose some limits on war by prohibiting certain weapons, banning conflict on certain days and ruling out certain categories of persons. Although it should be noted that these principles applied only to wars between Christians and could be disregarded in wars against non-Christians. Eight classes of persons are listed: clerics, monks, friars, other religious persons, pilgrims, travellers, merchants and peasants cultivating the social (it is necessary to distinguish here between the peasants cultivating the soil and those who have been enlisted into an army and no longer enjoy this protection). In addition, the Truce also protects animals and goods belonging to these groups, along with their land (JWRW: 128). What the Truce does not specify is why these particular groups should be protected, although their function or role within society clearly plays a major part: these groups are not involved in making war, so war should not be made against them in return.

 The list is also incomplete and there are groups of people that one might expect to be
protected that are not mentioned explicitly by the Church. A complete list would, as Johnson notes, have ‘to include women, children, the infirm, the aged, those of unsound mind and perhaps others – all of whom were, by the end of the Middle Ages, defined as non-combatants’ (JWRW: 132-133). There are a number of reasons, Johnson believes, that might explain the exclusion of these categories from the list. One possible explanation is that these groups were already protected by the chivalric code, which we will come to in a moment, so did not need to be mentioned explicitly by the Church. Another explanation is that nature of war in the Middle Ages clearly precluded certain groups from taking part. Medieval weapons were, he explains, ‘heavy and cumbersome and required considerable strength on the part of the bearer, [so] those who were physically too weak were natural noncombatants’ (JWRW: 133; IRW: 44-45). Because travellers, pilgrims and farmers were not ‘natural noncombatants’, their status as noncombatants had to be actively affirmed within canonical law.

It is difficult to figure out whether these rules and regulations were rooted in a moral desire to protect noncombatants from the excesses of war or to protect the Church’s own interests. Nevertheless, it is clear that the principle of distinction, which is so fundamental to modern accounts of just war, is drawn largely from secular sources rather than religious ones. Perhaps the most influential is the chivalric code, which was designed to regulate the conduct of knights on the battlefield. The assumption here was that conflict was the rightful preserve of a select group of individuals, bound by principles of loyalty, honour and courage. As such, those who were not knights had no business waging war and should therefore be protected from its touch. Certain classes of persons were not, as Johnson explains, ‘to be molested in the course of settling quarrels between knights; these persons – all non-knights – were thus in principle protected’ (JWRW: 47-48).

The list of those protected was further developed by Honoré Bonet, who expanded the categories of people protected to include women, pilgrims, doctors, woodsmen, along with the deaf, dumb and blind (JWRW: 141). As well as adding new categories to the list, Bonet also gave reasons why these people should be protected. In a rather amusing aside on the protections enjoyed by certain animals and not others, Bonet ponders why it is that oxen are traditionally spared from the horrors of war but asses are considered to be legitimate targets. As Bonet explains:

Whether in time of war the ass should have the privilege of the ox… We must consider for what reason oxen are privileged. Certainly the only reason is that they plough the soil. Now if a poor man has only one ox, and harnesses his ass along with the ox to plough, then, considering that the ass does the work of an ox, I hold that he must have the same privilege (IRW: 70).

His example may be playful but his argument is deadly serious. It is not who you are that matters but your social function. If you are in the business of war, then you should not be protected. If you are in the business of peace – either because of the office you hold or because you are simply unable to bear arms – then you should be protected. These sentiments are also echoed in the work of Christine de Pizan – of whom Johnson seems to have a very low opinion. But she opts for a much less specific definition of the civilian, referring to them simply as ‘common poor folk’ (IRW: 73-74; JWRW: 142).

Johnson’s survey of these medieval texts is important because it allows us to trace the historical roots of noncombatant immunity whilst remaining attentive to the political and professional pressures that shaped its formation. Although he argues that these medieval doctrines provide a ‘moral floor’ for the regulation of violence and the moderation of war, he warns against the idea that they represented some sort of ideal (JWRW: 160). What is interesting is that many of the challenges we face today, such as the difficulty distinguishing between combatants and noncombatants and the irregulars disguising themselves as civilians, were also problems back then. A common ruse in medieval combat, Johnson explains, ‘was to dress knights as monks, merchants, or pilgrims and thus gain the element of surprise over a foe’ (JWRW: 133). The idea that the increasingly blurry boundary between combatants and noncombatants is a distinctly modern problem is not borne out by the historical record.

There are still lots of interesting things to say about Johnson’s work, including his discussion of Vitoria, Suarez and Grotius, his commentary of the relationship between Lieber and Halleck, and his rather telling interventions into debates about the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. But I think I will have to save them for tomorrow.

Books

I have just come across this book by Janina Dill entitled Legitimate Targets? Social Construction, International Law and US Bombing (2014). Unfortunately it is going to take a few weeks to ship from the UK, which is a shame because it looks incredibly pertinent to my civilian casualties projects. As the publisher’s blurb makes clear:

Based on an innovative theory of international law, Janina Dill’s book investigates the effectiveness of international humanitarian law (IHL) in regulating the conduct of warfare. Through a comprehensive examination of the IHL defining a legitimate target of attack, Dill reveals a controversy among legal and military professionals about the ‘logic’ according to which belligerents ought to balance humanitarian and military imperatives: the logics of sufficiency or efficiency. Law prescribes the former, but increased recourse to international law in US air warfare has led to targeting in accordance with the logic of efficiency. The logic of sufficiency is morally less problematic, yet neither logic satisfies contemporary expectations of effective IHL or legitimate warfare. Those expectations demand that hostilities follow a logic of liability, which proves impracticable. This book proposes changes to international law, but concludes that according to widely shared normative beliefs, on the twenty-first-century battlefield there are no truly legitimate targets.

I also need to make sure that I add Michael L. Gross’ book Moral Dilemmas of Modern War (2010) to my order, along with Stephen Rockel and Rick Halpern’s edited volume Inventing Collateral Damage: Civilian Casualties, War and Empire (2009). Both books are reviewed by Charli Carpenter here.

Nomcombatant Immunity in the Work of James Turner Johnson

I have spent the past few days hiding in the library reacquainting myself with the work of James Turner Johnson, who is one of the leading authorities on the just war tradition. Unfortunately our library seems to have misplaced a number of his key works and others were never purchased at all but they did have a copy of Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War: A Moral and Historical Inquiry (1981), which has been a wealth of information on what is a very rich and complex set of ideas. What is particularly interesting about Johnson’s approach in this book and others is his refusal to treat just war theory as a fixed and static set of ideas that can simply be applied to a given conflict or problem. Instead, he argues that it should be seen as a ‘living organism’ that is in constant conversation with itself and with the circumstances that appear before it. Johnson also rejects the idea that that the principles of just war can be detached from the historical circumstances that governed their emergence and continue to shape how they are seen and understood. A fundamental assumption that underpins his approach is that

Human activity in the present and in history is reciprocal, not one of determination of the present by the past nor one of total freedom of the present from the past. We are our past, yet more; we shape our past in our memories. In a certain sense we find in history what we want to find there; yet we are restrained from the exercise of sheer imagination by the nexus of actual happenings. Our values, personal and cultural, arise in an effort to make a meaningful whole out of our history and to tell history in a way that is morally satisfactory.

I suspect that I will end up writing a fair amount about Johnson’s understanding of the just war tradition as part of my Marsden project on civilian casualties, as well as relying quite heavily on his interpretation of key figures – from Francisco de Vitoria to Paul Ramsey – as I trace the emergence of non-combatant immunity as a restraint on the use of force. His discussion about the complex interplay between Henry Halleck and Franz Lieber during the drafting of General Order No. 100 is rich with detail and will be particularly useful in tracing different the categories used when referring to noncombatants (see, for example, Halleck’s letter to Gen. Rosecrans). One thing that I found particularly interesting was his discussion of proportionality and discrimination in the writings of Vitoria because I had failed to appreciate some of the nuances around his understanding of noncombatant immunity. Vitoria had a fairly strict or absolute view on noncombatant immunity, identifying certain categories of people who should be protected at all times unless they took up arms and effectively abandoned their status as noncombatants. One major caveat is that Vitoria argued that it was permissible to kill civilians when besieging a city because it would be impossible to besiege a city without knowingly harming the civilians that live within its walls. A cannon, Vitoria argued, simply cannot discriminate between combatants and noncombatants so it is permissible to kill noncombatants ‘in virtue of collateral circumstances’.

My initial assumption was that Vitoria had justified this harm with reference to the doctrine of double-effect, which permits bad effects providing that the action itself is good or morally indifferent, the bad effect is not intended and the good effect outweighs the bad (i.e. the action is proportionate). The classical example here would be the targeting of a military installation located in the middle of a crowded city, the destruction of which would inevitably cause the deaths of countless civilians. Providing that the installation is a legitimate military target, the harm to civilians is not intended and this loss of life is not disproportionate to the military advantage achieved, then such an operation will be considered just, or at least excusable, under the doctrine of double-effect. But my initial assumption was wrong because Vitoria does not try to justify this violence on the basis of double-effect, but with reference to a very different set of standards instead, which focus on whether the war itself is just rather than assessing individual acts of violence. As Johnson explains:

In admitting collateral harm to noncombatants, he does not utilise the jus in bello sense of proportionality, which has to do with calculations of force necessary to subdue the enemy, but the jus ad bellum sense of this criterion, where the total evil of the war is compared to its total good.

What is interesting about this account is that Vitoria does not try to excuse the deaths of noncombatants by treating them to an unintended side-effect of war but regards them as an evil that may be pardoned if they ensure that ‘greater evils do not arise out of the war than the war would avert’. Vitoria is clear, however, that these evil acts can only be excused in conflicts where it is clear one side has a cause that is unquestionably just. If there is any uncertainty about the justice of the war, the principle of noncombatant immunity functions as an absolute.  As Johnson explains:

Either the war is known certainly to be just, and just on one side only, or it is not. Only in the former case is it allowable to kill noncombatants, even collaterally. In the latter case, regardless of the relative probability that one’s own cause is just as opposed to the enemy’s, since there is no certainty the immunity of noncombatants is owed them absolutely.

This emphasis on jus ad bellum proportionality should not be confused, however, with the argument that individual acts of evil are permissible if it will help subdue the enemy more quickly. His arguments cannot, Johnson suggests, be used to justify the use of atomic bombs against the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki because this kind of calculation would fall within the realms of jus in bello mathematics. Arguments have been made to suggest that the use of these weapons caused much less harm when compared to the possibility of a large-scale invasion, but these arguments are about different possible tactics and are distinct from questions about the justice of the war itself. Vitoria is only prepared to defend the harm to caused civilians in these circumstances when it is clear that there is no other way of waging a war that is clearly just, but it nevertheless functions to weaken the protections afforded to civilians in these kinds of conflicts.

I will be back tomorrow with an summary of the different definitions and categories of the civilian that Johnson identifies in his work, along with his rather worrying views the principle of noncombatant immunity in irregular warfare.

Emotions, Politics and War

Very excited to see that my co-edited book Emotions, Politics and War with Linda Ahall is finally out. It has been great fun putting this together despite us living on opposite sides of the world. More importantly, we had the opportunity to work with some amazing people and read some great chapters.

Here is the blurb and table of contents:

A growing number of scholars have sought to re-centre emotions in our study of international politics, however an overarching book on how emotions matter to the study of politics and war is yet to be published. This volume is aimed at filling that gap, proceeding from the assumption that a nuanced understanding of emotions can only enhance our engagement with contemporary conflict and war.

Providing a range of perspectives from a diversity of methodological approaches on the conditions, maintenance and interpretation of emotions, the contributors interrogate the multiple ways in which emotions function and matter to the study of global politics. Accordingly, the innovative contribution of this volume is its specific engagement with the role of emotions and constitution of emotional subjects in a range of different contexts of politics and war, including the gendered nature of war and security; war traumas; post-conflict reconstruction; and counterinsurgency operations.

Looking at how we analyse emotions in war, why it matters, and what emotions do in global politics, this volume will be of interest to students and scholars of critical security studies and international relations alike.

1. Introduction: Mapping emotions, politics and war – Linda Åhäll and Thomas Gregory A. Researching Emotions 2. The remains of the day – Brian Massumi, 3. Stories of pain and longing: reflecting on emotion, boundaries and feminism through Carrie Mathison and Carrie White – Marysia Zalewski 4. Human dignity, basal emotion and a global emotionology – Karin M. Fierke 5. Embodiment, emotions, and materialism in International Relations – Ty Solomon 6. Anger, war and feminist storytelling – Swati Parashar 7. On ’being bored’ – Street ethnography on emotions in Banda Acehafter the tsunami and conflict – Marjaana Jauhola 8. Experimenting with emotions – Rose McDermott B. Emotionality and War 9. Compassionate soldiering and comfort – Julia Welland 10. Waiting for war: Soldiering, temporality and the gendered politics of boredom and joy in military spaces – Victoria M. Basham 11. Making war work: Resilience, emotional fitness, and affective economies in Western militaries – Alison Howell 12. ‘Every man jack of them tried their damndest to control their emotions’: Grief in the 1982 Falklands war – Helen Parr 13. Constructing crises and articulating affect after 9/11 – Jack Holland 14. Photographing war: Don McCullin, Vietnam and the politics of emotion – Thomas Gregory 15. Exposed images of war – Emmanuel-Pierre Guittet and Andreja Zevnik 16. Grief and the transformation of emotions after war – Emma Hutchison and Roland Bleiker 17. Concluding reflection – Linda Åhäll and Thomas Gregory

Race and De-Coloniality in International Relations

Having just prepped my syllabus for my International Relations Theory paper to include a much more substantive discussion about questions of race – something that is particularly pertinent for my students here in Auckland given the recent publication of Robbie Shilliam’s astounding The Black Pacific: Anti-Colonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections and the powerful I, Too, Am Auckland campaign initiated by Maori and Pacific students at the University – it was great to receive a table of contents alert for the new special edition of Alternatives: Global, Local, Political on race and de-coloniality in IR.

The issue features papers tackling a range of different issues, from the legacies of colonial law on current land acquisition in India and the genealogy of citizenship that focuses on its racial exclusions to the films of Jean-Marie Teno and the ways in which they disrupt dominant images of Africa as a weak and failed continent. Although questions of race and racism have tended to be marginalised in traditional IR theory, it has, as Randolph B. Persaud and R. B. J.Walker argue, ‘become more difficult to ignore the role of racialised practices in contemporary political life’. At the same time, they argue it is also increasingly clear that ‘race cannot be treated as a monolithic category [or] set apart from all those other apparently discrete categories – class, gender, culture, economy, society, and so on – that necessarily bleed into each other in complex and ever-changing relations of coloniality’.

The renewed focus on the role of colonialism in the construction of both the international system and international politics as a field of study is incredibly important, but the task of de-colonising the discipline is likely to be much more difficult and meet a great deal of resistance. Having the privilege of being able to explore these debates whilst living in “the colonies” – whilst recognising that it is privilege is itself a product of past and present violences – certainly adds an interesting dimension to this experience.

Agamben on War

Stanford University Press have just announced details of new book by Giorgio Agamben called Stasis, which is due to be published later this year. Although the book is only 96 pages long, it looks like it will touch upon some important themes that have animated debates about contemporary conflict. As the blurb explains:

We can no longer speak of a state of war in any traditional sense, yet there is currently no viable theory to account for the manifold internal conflicts, or civil wars, that increasingly afflict the world’s populations. Meant as a first step toward such a theory, Giorgio Agamben’s latest book looks at how civil war was conceived of at two crucial moments in the history of Western thought: in ancient Athens (from which the political concept of stasis emerges) and later, in the work of Thomas Hobbes. It identifies civil war as the fundamental threshold of politicization in the West, an apparatus that over the course of history has alternately allowed for the de-politicization of citizenship and the mobilization of the unpolitical. The arguments herein, first conceived of in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, have become ever more relevant now that we have entered the age of planetary civil war.

‘Sterile Combat Zones’: Civilian Casualties and the Geography of Killing

I have just posted my first guest blog over at the Duck of Minerva on the UN report about Operation Protective Edge.

I have spent much of my time over the past few weeks trying to digest the United Nations report on Operation Protective Edge, which accuses both the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) and Hamas of committing war crimes during the conflict in Gaza last summer. Much of the media coverage has focused on the large numbers of civilians who were killed. Palestinian groups stand accused of firing approximately 4,881 rockets and 1,753 mortars at Israel, killing six civilians and injuring more than 1,600 people in the process. The report also expresses particular concern at the high casualty rate in Gaza, confirming that 2,251 Palestinians – including 1,462 civilians, 551 children – were killed in just 51 days of conflict. What has been overlooked in most of the coverage, however, is what the report has to say about the way in which the IDF sought to reclassify civilians as combatants by creating ‘sterile combat zones’ through the use of warnings. The assumption being that anyone who remained within a specific area after receiving a warning would qualify as a legitimate target.  

Keep reading…

Keep reading

Legal Accountability for Civilian Casualties in Afghanistan

The pain and suffering experienced by civilians continues to be a major point of contention in Afghanistan despite the slow but steady withdrawal of coalition troops. A recent report by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) found that 10,548 civilians were killed and injured (3,699 deaths, 6,849 injured) in 2014, which represents an increase of 22% compared to 2013. As Nicholas Haysom, UN Special representative of the Secretary-General in Afghanistan, argued:

The conflict took an extreme toll on civilians in 2014. Mortars, IEDs, gunfire and other explosives destroyed human life, stole limbs and ruined lives at unprecedented levels. The thousands of Afghan children, women and men killed and injured in 2014 attest to failures to protect civilians from harm. All parties must uphold the values they claim to defend and make protecting civilians their first priority.

The report attributes the rise to the increased use of high-explosive weaponry, such as mortars, rockets and grenades, in densely populated civilian areas. The overwhelming majority of civilian casualties (72%) were attributed to anti-government forces, but pro-government forces – which include international troops – were responsible for 14% of the attacks. Another 3% was blamed on ‘unattributed explosive remnants of war’, which probably includes the thousands of bright yellow cluster bombs that were left scattered across Afghanistan by the United States during the early stages of Operation Enduring Freedom.

The Costs of War project puts the total number of civilians killed at 21,000, although this data only runs up until 2011. With the conclusion of Operation Enduring Freedom and the start of Operation Resolute Support, the issue of civilian harm continues to be a contentious point. To coincide with the end of combat operations, Amnesty International published details of a lengthy investigation into non-combatant casualties caused by coalition troops.

The report, entitled “Left in the Dark: Failures of Accountability for Civilian Casualties Caused by Military Operations in Afghanistan”, details the myriad of problems that Afghan civilians face when trying to get justice for those killed in combat operations. These range from the failure of US forces to investigate incidents where civilians have been killed, to the almost total secrecy that surround those investigations that are underway.

Even in cases where there is clear evidence that the killings were unlawful, family members quickly discovered that they had no recourse to the law. On the one hand, coalition troops are immune from prosecution under Afghan law, which means that legal proceedings cannot be initiated with Afghanistan. On the other hand, Amnesty found that complaints to coalition authorities were often ignored, even when criminal investigations were promised. ‘In numerous cases in which there is credible evidence of unlawful killings of civilians, the military has failed to conduct prompt, thorough and impartial investigations’, the report argues.

The reason for this failure of accountability can be found in the ’structural flaws’ that underpin US military justice. The report argues that the justice system is ‘commander-driven’ to the extent that evidence of wrongdoing largely depends on observations made by soldiers of the ground. Not surprisingly, there is little incentive for soldiers to report evidence of wrongdoing that may incriminate themselves or their colleagues and the commanding officer has even less of an incentive to report possible violations that may reflect poorly on his or her own conduct. As the report makes clear, ‘it is only in the rarest of circumstances – where fellow soldiers are so appalled by another soldier’s behaviour that they insist on reporting it up the chain of command […] – that criminal cases involving civilian casualties go forward’.

The rest of the report consists of various case-studies that all illustrate the lack of accountability, from nine boys killed by a US helicopter in the province of Kunar to various night raids by special-ops that have resulted in death and injury. Based on interviews with survivors, family members and NGOs, the report documents the various failures of justice. In some cases news of civilian casualties was simply dismissed as Taliban propaganda and ignored; in others apologies were offered and investigations were promised. On a number of occasions, victims were so worried that their voices would be ignored that they loaded the dead bodies on to the back of a pick-up truck and transported them to the local authorities to provide physical evidence of the attacks (see also).

Despite this, the report makes clear that ‘very few cases involving the alleged unlawful killings of civilians in international military operations have led to prosecutions’ and that the relatives left behind ‘face numerous obstacles to justice, both structural and physical’. Investigators were aware of only six incidents that have gone to trial since 2009 and these were all high-profile incidents involving extraordinary acts of violence, such as the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians and subsequent desecration of their bodies by members of the Afghan Kill Team. It is easy to forget that the vast majority of civilians die a far less spectacular death and so tend to be ignored by both military investigators and the world’s media.