The U.S. military’s overdue reckoning with civilian casualties

This reckoning with the cost of war is overdue. For too long, the Pentagon rejected reports of civilian deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria as false claims or enemy propaganda. But it’s an admirable quality of the U.S. military that leaders such as Clarke have now acknowledged that something went badly wrong in casualty assessments and are trying to fix it.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin last week announced a new plan for “civilian harm mitigation,” to avoid disasters such as the August 2021 strike in Kabul that was meant to kill an Islamic State terrorist but instead struck a van carrying an innocent nongovernmental organization worker and seven children. That was just one notorious incident. Senior Pentagon officials know there were dozens, maybe hundreds more.

For officers such as Clarke, who commanded the warriors at the sharpest point of America’s military spear, this rethinking of civilian casualties goes to the heart of their profession as soldiers. He told me in an interview Friday that he had come to recognize that avoiding civilian harm is both an operational and moral imperative. The United States cannot fight the way Russia is doing in Ukraine, oblivious to the civilian cost, and succeed.

Clarke began our conversation by explaining the combat logic of avoiding civilian deaths. “If we work in and amongst the population in places like Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, our people on the ground, usually with partner forces, have to be trusted to do the right thing,” he said. “We cannot create another generation of terrorists because we have been lax in our procedures and have unnecessarily harmed civilian bystanders.”

Clarke then talked about the moral cost, not simply for the victims, but for the Americans who pulled the triggers. “You injure the individuals who are calling in those airstrikes,” he explained. “They have to live with themselves the rest of their lives. Living with that can sometimes have long-term effects resulting in behavioral and psychological issues that I don’t want our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines to have to go through.”

Clarke recalled the commander’s dilemma from his days as a two-star Army general when he oversaw U.S. and Iraqi troops pushing Islamic State fighters from the Euphrates Valley. He wanted to trust that Iraqi partners were accurate when they requested fire support against the enemy. “Time is of the essence, and you’re looking at targets through a soda straw to determine whether they are valid targets,” he recalled. Those assessments weren’t always right.

The Special Operations Forces that Clarke has led, known as “SOF” in Pentagonese, have carried the heaviest load in America’s Middle East wars. They did the toughest work of fighting and killing in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Sometimes, as in the case of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, the cycle of combat had a corrosive effect. Gallagher was convicted by a military court for posing in a trophy picture with the corpse of a dead Islamic State prisoner in Iraq. But he was hardly the only SOF warrior who crossed the lines in those 20 years.

“I believe that over 99 percent of the time, our Special Operations Forces did the right thing,” Clarke told me. “They made tough calls, and they dealt with the results afterwards. But mistakes inside our community are made sometimes. Humans are fallible.” The stresses were aggravated, he said, “because SOF’s capabilities were highly valued. We were spread pretty thin, constantly deployed throughout combat zones.”

After the Gallagher case made headlines in 2019, Clarke ordered a comprehensive review of SOCOM — SEALS, Army Rangers, Marine Raiders and other Special Forces. I described in a column last December how that review — and an intensive internal effort by SEALS commander Rear Adm. H. Wyman Howard III — helped restore standards within that elite Navy force.

America’s wars in the Middle East took a terrible toll. It’s good that one result is a new code that says, in the words of Austin’s directive last week: “The protection of civilians is a strategic priority as well as a moral imperative.” War changes countries, usually for the worse. But here’s one change that’s for the better.