In May 2009, American B-1B bombers dropped 2,000-pound and
500-pound bombs in the village of Garani, Afghanistan following a
Taliban attack. The dead included anywhere from twenty five to over
one hundred civilians. The U.S. military went into damage control
mode, making numerous apologies to the Afghan government and the
townspeople. Afterward, the military announced that it would modify
its aerial support tactics. This episode was hardly an anomaly. As
anyone who has followed the Afghanistan war knows, these types of
incidents occur with depressing regularity. Indeed, as Neta
Crawford shows in Accountability for Killing, they are intrinsic to
the American way of warfare today. While the military has
prioritized reducing civilian casualties, it has not come close to
eliminating them despite significant progress in recent years, for
a very simple reason: American reliance on airpower and,
increasingly, drone technology, which is intended to reduce
American casualties. Yet the long distance from targets, the power
of the explosives, and the frequency of attacks necessarily
produces civilian casualties over the course of a long war. Working
from these basic facts, Crawford offers a sophisticated and
intellectually powerful analysis of culpability and moral
responsibility in war. The dominant paradigm of legal and moral
responsibility in war today stresses both intention and individual
accountability. Deliberate killing of civilians is outlawed and
international law blames individual soldiers and commanders for
such killing. But also under international law, civilian killing
may be forgiven if it was unintended and incidental to a militarily
necessary operation. Given the nature of contemporary war, though,
Crawford contends that this argument is no longer satisfactory. As
she demonstrates, 'unintended' deaths of civilians are too often
dismissed as unavoidable, inevitable, and accidental. Yet
essentially, the very law that protects noncombatants from
deliberate killing allows unintended killing. An individual soldier
may be sentenced life in prison or death for deliberately killing
even a small number of civilians, but the large scale killing of
dozens or even hundreds of civilians may be forgiven if it was
unintentional-'incidental' to a military operation. She focuses on
the causes of these many episodes of foreseeable collateral damage
and the moral responsibility for them. Why was there so much
unintended killing of civilians in the U.S. wars zones in
Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan? Is 'collateral damage' simply an
unavoidable consequence of all wars? Why, when the U.S. military
tries so hard to limit collateral damage, does so much of it seem
to occur? Trenchant, original, and ranging across security studies,
international law, ethics, and international relations,
Accountability for Killing will reshape our understanding of the
ethics of contemporary war.
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