This is the second of four installments of the interview with John Bernard. Readers who are interested may watch the entire interview on Vimeo, or in two parts on YouTube: Part 1 and Part 2. The full transcript is available here.
Interview With John Bernard, Part 2
Let Them Fight or Bring Them Home!
July 26, 2010
Can you give us a couple of examples of the rules of combat as they now apply in Afghanistan?
Absolutely. The rules of engagement — and again, this is a fluid document, it’s a fluid set of rules. They do change occasionally. The only thing people need to understand is that there’s nothing published, or nothing for public consumption. They reside inside a secret directive. So even getting this to the floor of Congress is difficult, because people who hold the keys, shall we say, to the chest of secrets do not want to let that directive out.
So instead all we can do is relay what we’ve been given by mouth, and we know that that’s correct, because that’s frankly the way the average soldier and Marine receives those orders as well. They may be written in some kind of localized document, but you’re not going to get them in anything that comes out of the Pentagon.
So, to give you an idea: when they were first released last year — released publicly, sometime around June of last year — one of the more egregious ones was that there weren’t going to be any more surprise night searches of civilian compounds within Afghanistan. I mean, that’s basically that you have to tell everybody in advance that you’re coming in to search their house, search a specific house, that you suspected of carrying weapons or materials that might be used by the Taliban.
Again: this is a war zone. This isn’t downtown Los Angeles. And even if it was, this particular Los Angeles does not reside within the borders of the United States. So it shouldn’t be governed by the Constitution; it should be governed by the rules of war.
You certainly have a legitimate concern that if somebody is either hiding Taliban, hiding weapons, hiding materials for war that can be used against you, you have a right — you’d think you have a right — to go in and find out what those are. So this thing basically set up the circuits for failure.
It then got further degraded to say that if you were going to do a search on a civilian home, you couldn’t do it at night, it couldn’t be a surprise, and — oh, by the way — Americans couldn’t do the search! The Taliban turned to, if Americans were going to search a house, they had to have either ANA or ANP [Afghan army or police] with them, and then they have to do the search. Furthermore, if it’s a house that is known to only have women, it can’t be men, it has to be females.
I mean, you’re setting up a set of rules that, frankly, if a police officer walked up to your house with a search warrant, he’s got far more authority to search your house than soldiers and Marines do in a war zone in Afghanistan.
Another one is, if you see an insurgent shooting at you, and he drops his weapon, you can’t shoot at him anymore. Now the reason this is particularly important is that under normal circumstances, people think that if he drops his weapon, he’s giving up. But this is not the case. Remember, this is not a disciplined, uniformed force. This is a group of civilians that don’t fight under any specific set of rules. They certainly don’t enforce or observe the Geneva Conventions. So what you’re talking about are Taliban who are warned that we won’t shoot at them if they drop their weapons. So they shoot at you — even if they kill some of you, you can’t return fire if they’ve dropped their weapon. What they’ve learned to do is drop their weapon, sometimes run, sometimes walk away from the weapon — giving obscene gestures in the process — and then go to a completely different location, pick up a completely different weapon, and start fighting again, start shooting again.
As long as they’ve got the weapon in hand, and you can engage them while they’ve got the weapon, you can shoot — unless, of course, there are civilians around, and this is the big critical issue here. If there are any civilians in the area, and you are receiving fire, you can’t return fire, under any circumstances. What you have to do is remove yourself from the engagement. And then it says, “if it’s safe to do so”, which suggests that if you’re getting some pretty accurate fire, you have to kind of wait until they run out of ammunition before you move. In other words, they’re allowing you not to die. I thought that was very kind of them.
Supporting fires, air, artillery, any kind of indirect fire weapons, including what we call organic weapons systems, 60-millimeter mortar, 81-millimeter mortar, any direct-fire systems we might have, SMAW rockets, M203 grenades, even the 5.56 rifles, the M-16 family of weapons, the M240 Gulf machine gun, [Mark 19] grenade launchers, all the things that are organic to grunts in the field, all those things you can’t use if there are any civilians around that might get hurt.
Understand that the Taliban hide in civilian territory. They’ve learned to do this — they were doing this before we came up with these ridiculous rules — and they’re exploiting it to their advantage now.
So, effectively what we’ve done is, we’ve taken one of the things you do with a force, which is to define the battlespace so you control it, and we’ve given control of the battlespace to the enemy. It means they can kill us, and we can’t kill them.
And if you can’t kill ’em — and oh, by the way, when you pull ’em in, when we take them in, there is a catch-and-release program, where you can only hold them for X number of hours before you have to release them. In other words, if you can’t feed them to the rear, so that they can be questioned and determine whether or not they are a problem, you can only hold them for so many hours. And that’s changed, and I can’t legitimately tell you what that’s changed to, but not that long ago it was 24 hours. They kicked it to 72; I’m not sure where it is right now. It might be 96.
In addition, those that we’ve chosen to hold, our great friend Hamid Karzai, in the last couple of weeks has released somewhere around a hundred Taliban back into civilian territory, on the promise that they wouldn’t be bad guys anymore.
So this whole thing is ludicrous; it’s insanity. It’s completely steeped against our guys. If our guys manage to shoot somebody in violation of one of these rules, they’re prosecuted. Good deal.
Part 3: Who set these rules of engagement?
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