According to the United Nations, death squads acting on orders from, and with the direct support of, NATO forces are carrying out "gratuitous civilian killings" in Afghanistan today. In a preliminary report issued recently, the UN special rapporteur on illegal killings, Philip Alston, complains that foreign forces "are wandering around conducting dangerous raids that too often result in killings without anyone taking responsibility." His examples include an attack by U.S. special forces which killed two brothers whom Afghan officials say had no links to the Taliban, and a "botched raid" by British soldiers who slit the throat of an Afghan man.
At a meeting I attended in April in Ottawa, the new commander of Canada's forces in Afghanistan, Brig.-Gen. Dennis Thompson, announced he could not say what Canadian special forces are doing in that country, but whatever it is, it is "very precise."
Outgoing Chief of the Defence Staff, Gen. Rick Hillier, later amplified, telling Legion magazine, "What we want to do is take out the commanders who are engaged in orchestrating, facilitating, paying, leading, planning and driving folks to attack us or attack the Afghans or attack the innocent. And our special forces are focused very much on that. ... I said, during a recent speech, that we had removed from the battlefield six commanders who were responsible for the deaths of 21 Canadian soldiers. Well that's changed. We've removed seven commanders who have been responsible for the deaths of 27 soldiers."
As they say in the British Army, you don't need the brains of an archbishop to work out what the generals' words mean. The only logical interpretation would seem to be that the Canadian Joint Task Force is carrying out a campaign of targeted killings in Afghanistan, assassinating Taliban officers in their homes or elsewhere.
If this is the case, it is a policy which has gone unnoticed by the media. Yet such methods are legally and ethically controversial, and their effectiveness is unproven.
The practice of assassinating suspected insurgents or terrorists whom it is too difficult to capture or put on trial is nothing new. During the War on Terror, the United States has assassinated numerous alleged enemies, most recently with the killing on May 1 of the Somali militia leader Aden Hashi Ayro, along with 10 other Somalis.
The first problem with this tactic is that the people being killed have not been convicted of any crime. Justifying the killing requires accepting that one is operating not in a law-enforcement environment, but rather in a state of war.
That, however, carries with it a whole series of legal ramifications, such as the granting of prisoner of war status to captured enemies, which, to date, no NATO members have been willing to accept.
The second problem is an ethical one. Targeted killings fail the test of the categorical imperative: Is this an activity one would wish to be universally practised? Let us imagine that during the 1980s the Indian government had decided that it wished to eliminate Sikh terrorists based in Canada, and had chosen to slit the throats of suspects living in Vancouver. Or let us imagine that the current Sri Lankan government were to launch missiles at Canadians suspected of links to Tamil terrorists.
The only way of overriding this objection is by recourse to consequentialist reasoning, and the argument that the consequences of targeted killing are so positive that they take priority in moral reasoning. This is a difficult case to make, as there appear to be no reliable data to support the proposition that targeted killing is an effective method of defeating insurgents.
(Some academics have examined the use of targeted killings by the Israelis, but their work is primarily impressionistic in nature, and they do not for the most part use verifiable statistics to correlate the assassinations to rises and falls in terrorist activity.)
There is, however, a heavy political price. As any student of counter-insurgency will know, in this type of conflict the primary battle is political, not military, in nature. The aim of all action must be to enhance the legitimacy of the government. Thus, the primary question one must ask about everything NATO does in Afghanistan is, "does it enhance the legitimacy of the Afghan government?"
Targeted killings do not. On the contrary, they underline the fact that the indigenous government is incapable of arresting and trying suspected criminals using due process. Worse still, the fact that these killings are being conducted by foreigners strengthens the impression that the regime lacks real power. The practice is therefore more likely to undermine support for the state than to reinforce it.
This has certainly been the result elsewhere. For instance, so-called "shoot-to-kill" policies pursued in Northern Ireland in the 1970s by British security forces, and later by Protestant paramilitaries, reinforced impressions among Catholics that the British state's authority was illegitimate..
At present, Prof. Alston notes, "the level of complacency in response to these killings is staggeringly high ... they (international military forces) have not taken the steps which are necessary to ensure a degree of transparency and accountability." He calls the deaths "completely unacceptable" and "outside the law."
Let us hope that Brig.-Gen. Thompson's "precise" operations are more carefully calibrated, and will not feature in Prof. Alston's full report, which will be released this autumn.
Paul Robinson is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. This column first appeared in the Ottawa Citizen.
