Canadian Forces Video Montage

During 2006 Scott Kesterton emebed with Canadian troops in Afhganistan. Kesterton ended up spending a whole year embedded with mostly American troops and is soon to release a documentary called AtWar. Some of this footage of the Canadian Soldiers fighting the Taliban is included in the documentary.

During an interview in August 2006 Kesteron, a former American Soldier from Oregon, had this to say about his experience embedded with Canadian Soldiers:

"What has resulted is a bonding of U.S. and Canadian forces never before seen. They are not just our neighbour to the north; they have proven themselves to be fighters and soldiers worthy of the highest honours that the U.S. Army offers its own...

"On our first morning of being attacked, I found myself holding back tears as I filmed Canadians fighting a fight that began on American soil on Sept. 11, 2001. In interviews that followed, I discovered the depth of commitment that these soldiers held in their hearts, as they expressed their belief in purpose and shared their emotions, at times with tears. Two countries, each proud of their roots and history, unified across the border that distinguishes each of us ...

"From patrols to attacks, and an operational tempo that pushed us all to the point of exhaustion, and even the loss of one of my cameras following a fire fight, the Canadian soldiers and I became close friends, bridging into that place that only soldiers know... a band of brothers."

Kesterton continues: "In the last engagement working with the Canadian soldiers, we were ambushed in a small village. As three of us were making our way toward the enemy, a Canadian squad leader appeared at our right flank, killing a Taliban soldier who was poised to shoot us. The Canadian saved not only the lives of two of his fellow soldiers, but the life of this American photojournalist."

A few days later Kesterton asked Canadian soldiers how they felt about this war. The answers were virtually unanimous:

"It's time that someone else steps up. The United States shouldn't have to carry the fight alone. We may be Canadians, but the attack was an attack on our common values and beliefs -- 9/11 was an attack on all of us."

Apprently the above footage was the first combat footage Kesterton shot using actual military clips. He writes:

"My first military video using actual military clips, so go easy on the judgement ;). I purposely left the sound affects (gun shots, etc) in because I personally thought the sounds version was better than just music. Also on YouTube the audo and video aren't in sync as well as they are in the original file. All video footage is by photojournalist Scott Kesterson of: Alpha Company, 2nd Platoon "Red Devils" of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada in Afghanistan"

You can watch all three trailers for AtWar at: http://www.youtube.com/AtWarFilm

Staying the course in Afghanistan

I recently met a Canadian Soldier while we were both getting our hair cut at our local barber shop. He had just returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan. He is an infantry Soldier with the Queen's Own Rifles. He described the situation of the average Afghani citizen as desperate.

Thes people have virtually nothing and all that they want is to live their lives in peace, something the Taliban is determined ruin.

The chances of a NATO country stepping up to the plate to take Canada's combat role when our mandate runs out in February 2009 is slim to none. Those countries currently involved in fighting the Taliban, besides the Americans, are Britain, The Netherlands (which just recently extended their mission) and Denmark. The French and the Germans have decided to chicken out and hide on there bases in the secure north of the country.

The south is where the fighting is. The Canadian people need to be reminded what murderous scum the Taliban really are. Afghani citizens speaking in private with Canadian S0ldiers readily say that the Taliban are not Muslims. The Taliban do drugs and drink. They rape women and small boys. But the worst thing they do is torture and kill for offences that are as trivial as not having a long enough beard.

Our Canadian Soldiers are good at what they do. They volunteered for this mission. Canadian's need to know that there are Warriors among us who are ready and willing to fight, not only for the people of Afghanistan but for their country. For if the Taliban are allowed to return to power in Afghanistan then the entire Middle East dynamic will change for the worse.

Al-Qaeda will move back in with a vengeance and start training to fight a war with the west. We can not allow this to happen.

IN PRAISE OF MILITARY BLOGGERS

I've been following milblogs since I chanced upon Colby Buzell's blog in 2004. At that time it was called, MY WAR: Fear and Loathing in Iraq. Buzell had never written anything substantial prior to this. A friend let him in on the fact that you could write about what you were experiencing on the internet anonamously. He decided to check it out as a means to keep his sanity during very trying times and to his astonishment found that a stream of conciousness literary style of writing flowed through his fingers and onto the web, the result of which caused a number of significant reactions.

The first of these was that the Pentagon had been made aware of his writings and, rumor had it, Rummie himself was reading the blog. This led to much hand wringing at the pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of the Military with regard to just what the fuck this had to do with the war effort. The immediate effect was that Buzell's blog was shut down. (Unfortunately for him anonimity was a loose term if your writing was too explicit.) But the noteriety led to a book deal and the publishising of: MY WAR: Killing time in Iraq, for which he was awarded was awarded the £5000 Lulu Blooker prize, among other things.

Buzzell's book was reviewied by one of his literary heroes, Kurt Vonnegut:

"My War by Colby Buzzell is nothing less than the soul of an extremely interesting human being at war on our behalf in Iraq."- Kurt Vonnegut"

Black Flag's lead singer wrote of the book and blog:

"I remember reading Colby's journal entries on the internet when he was filing them from Iraq. I was amazed at how heavy the material was but what really knocked me out was how sharp and vividly intense his writing was. My War is the real deal reportage from the ground. There's no way any reporter could have brought this back. If you care about our brave soldiers in the fray and want to get an insight into what it's really like out there, My War is essential reading.” - Henry Rollins"

I've got the book. If you're into military history it's a must read. It is an important book, not just because it covered Buzell's experiences during the Iraq war circa 2004 but because it inspired so many other American Soldiers to start bloggin about their experiences in Iraq AS THEY WERE HAPPENING!!!!!

Try and imagine what an outlet for the stress of Soldiers in WWII or Vietnam if they could have written about their experiences just after they occurred! Military bloggers of today, writing form the front lines, is of historical signficance.

I follow many of these amazing young Soldiers daily. What I find so compelling about he writing is the quality of their dispatches. The talent of these young men and women often includes poetry, videography, photography and much, much more.

The muzzelled thinking of the bureaucrats at the Pentagon and senior army general staff after years of dithering have finally realized that Milblogs for the most part are a good thing. Never before in the history of warfare have the the thoughts and feelings of those caught up in the action been able to be disseminated to so many so soon after the events.

Although the Surge in Iraq is now seen to be by and large a success, the situation is still dangerous. One blogger who I have followed from his days in boot camp at Fort Lewis, Washington has just lost comrades in arms, one of whom was a close personal friend. You can follow his progress from boot camp to war zone by clicking on the link: THE UNLIKLEY SOLDIER listed near the bottom of the links on the right side of this page. Very talented. Very, very funny. Touchingly poignant.

Canada claims Victory in latest Afghan offensive

Matthew Fisher

CanWest News Service

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

KANDAHAR AIRFIELD -- Canada is claiming a major victory over the Taliban with its latest offensive, called Operation Honest Soldier, although one Canadian soldier was killed by an enemy mortar.

The Taliban "were surprised," Captain Stephane Masson, operations co-ordinator for Joint Task Force Afghanistan, told a briefing Wednesday. "We tightened the circle and they had to fight. We saw signs of panic."

The recently completed operation aimed to seize land to establish police checkpoints at strategically significant places throughout Panjwaii, an area long infested with insurgents, about 50 kilometres west of Kandahar City.

Operation Honest Soldier involved Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion of the Quebec-based Royal 22nd (Van Doos) Regiment, tanks from the Alberta-based Lord Strathcona's Horse, as well as Afghan army and police.

Corporal Nathan Hornburg, a reservist from Nanton, Alta., and the King's Own Calgary Regiment, who was attached to the Strathconas, died during the operation last week when he tried to repair a tank tread.

Other than confirming that there were insurgent casualties, the Canadian military, as is its policy, refused to reveal a body count.

Honest Soldier was designed to rationalize Afghan police checkpoints and convert them into more easily defended police substations.

Four of the stations have been completed. They were located in strategic locations near traffic arteries.

"The big conflict was last week. Since then contacts have dropped to about one a day," Capt. Masson said.

While the operation unfolded in Panjwaii, it also had an effect on the equally restive neighbouring district of Zhari.

There was already "a great intelligence improvement," as a result of establishing the police substations, said Capt. Masson, an artillery officer.

While the Van Doos fought in Panjwaii and Zhari, elements of the Quebec-based 12th Armoured Regiment helped Afghan authorities with what were described as "governance issues" in the eastern town of Spin Boldak, near the Pakistan border.

Meanwhile, Ahmed (Sorkai) Zia, the 12-year-old Afghan boy shot in the head by Canadian troops on a convoy on Tuesday, was doing "much better," a day after emergency surgery at NATO's hospital at the Kandahar Airfield, a military spokeswoman said.

The boy was in stable, non-life-threatening condition and had been placed in a medically induced coma to assist with his recovery, said Captain Josée Bilodeau, adding the child probably would remain in that state for at least three days.

Sorkai's older brother, Esmatullah, died instantly when he was also shot in the head in the same incident. The brothers had been riding a motorcycle near the convoy.
The shooting was an accident and "not the result of enemy activity," the Canadian military said on Tuesday.

However, military police are continuing to investigate the circumstances of the shooting, including suggestions that it may have been caused by an equipment malfunction.
After several weeks of calm, the Kandahar airfield, where many Canadian and other NATO troops are based, was hit several times by rockets on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Canadian soldier killed in volatile Afghan district

Matthew Fisher,

CanWest News ServicePublished: Tuesday, September 25, 2007

KANDAHAR -- A cattle rancher's son from Nanton, Alta., has become the latest Canadian to die in the dusty, volatile sweep of land to the west of Kandahar City that has become the main battle ground against the Taliban in this southern province.

Cpl. Nathan Hornburg, a 24-year-old mechanic with the King's Own Calgary Regiment, died when he was struck by fragments from a mortar fired by insurgents just before sundown Monday near a cluster of villages known as Zangabad in the Panjwaii district. He had dismounted from his Leopard tank to fix a tread that had come off the vehicle in what was described as very rough terrain.

Brig.-Gen. Guy Laroche, the Canadian commander, expressed his "sincere condolences" to the fallen soldier's family. "There is no way to comfort his family, friends and comrades today except to say that Cpl. Hornburg believed in the mission he was involved in," Laroche said.
Another soldier, a reservist attached to a squadron of the Edmonton-based Lord Strathcona's Horse squadron, was wounded in the same skirmish as Hornburg. Three other infantrymen, based in Quebec, were then wounded by rocket-propelled grenades when they engaged the insurgents who had fired at Hornburg as they tried to carry him away from the fighting. These soldiers were "doing well" and did not have life-threatening injuries, Laroche said.

On Tuesday, another Canadian soldier was seriously wounded in a Taliban ambush. The soldier, whose name was not released, was part of a joint patrol of Canadian army and Afghan police officers. The daylight attack, 42 kilometres west of Kandahar City, involved rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire. The soldier, a member of a Police Operational Mentor Liaison, was airlifted to a British military hospital at Camp Bastien in Helmand province for specialist care.

Hornburg was the first Canadian to have died in ground combat in Afghanistan since last October. Much more common are deaths by improvised explosive devices embedded in the road or by suicide bombers. More than half of the 71 Canadian soldiers who have now died in Afghanistan since 2002 have been killed in Panjwaii or the neighbouring district of Zhari.
On Monday, a battle group from Quebec's Royal 22nd Regiment, often referred to as the Van Doo, and tanks from the Strathconas, were conducting a daylong sweep dubbed Operation Sadiq Sarbaaz (Good Soldier) "to increase security in northern Panjwaii" and to establish a police station, Laroche said. The Van Doo reported several firefights during a long day of contact between the warring parties.

The fatal confrontation began close to the southern shore of the almost dry Arghandab River, about 47 kilometres west of Kandahar City. A Canadian army spokesman confirmed insurgents had also been killed during the exchanges, which involved small arms, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars. But, in line with Canadian and NATO policy, the spokesman declined further details on enemy casualties.

Although responsible for the entire province of Kandahar, Canadians have spent most of their time over the past two years trying to wrest control of Panjwaii and Zhari districts from the Taliban.

Panjwaii and Zhari are a warren of villages with thick mud walls surrounded by irrigated farms. There was a bumper crop of opium poppies in the area this year, but the main legal crops are wheat and grapes. The area has many grape-drying huts that have been used to hide fighters and their supplies.

A persistent haunt of the Taliban, the territory was also the scene of many battles in the 1980s between the Soviet Red Army and the mujahedeen, then backed by the U.S.
Laroche said Canada will never "definitively" dominate Panjwaii and Zhari because the insurgents are engaged in a classic counter-insurgency operation that makes them hard to locate and track.

"You have to find ways to reduce the threat and create reconstruction and development," he said. The Canadians occupied much of the two districts in the summer and fall of 2006, but eventually turned over partial control to the poorly trained Afghan police.

Several weeks ago, Canada began efforts to reestablish a greater presence in the area. Part of the initiative was to reopen abandoned checkpoints on the only main road.
The Taliban vowed to send more of its fighters into the area, Afghan sources said last week. The insurgents have seldom gathered large numbers of forces to fight the Canadians head-on since suffering heavy combat losses in Panjwaii and Zhari districts late last summer during what NATO called Operation Medusa.

Hornburg's death was the first of a Canadian in southern Afghanistan since two Valcartier, Que.,-based soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb Aug. 22. He was the 27th Canadian soldier to die in Afghanistan this year, compared to 36 last year and eight in total in the four preceding years. Canada has about 2,500 troops in Afghanistan.

With the 82nd Airborne in Baghdad

Michael J Totten, to those of you who don't know, is a very interesting blogger/journalist. He's a Democrat but genuinely, scrupulously objective on what he reports. He lived in Lebanon for 9 months and left a couple of months before Hezbollah started the war with Israel. (It was time to go home; he had no idea the war was coming, otherswise I suspect he would have stayed.)

He covered that war from the Israeli side. He's been to Iraqi Kurdistan a couple of times and now he's just back from an embed with the 82nd Airborne in Baghdad and very surprised at what he finds there.

What follows is just the first bit. Read the whole thing. It's worth it. American ingenuity! Solar Powered Street Lamps!! Learning Arabic on the fly!!

August 20, 2007

How to Spy in Iraq

By Michael J. Totten

BAGHDAD – American soldiers arrived in Iraq in 2003 with not much of a plan and little idea what to expect. The Iraqi government, military, and police were overthrown and disbanded under de-Baathification. Most Iraqis who knew how to run the country were either sent home or imprisoned. Americans were in charge of just about everything even though they had no experience running even their own country let alone a traumatized and suspicious Arab society. They were confounded by its exotic and dysfunctional ways. When Sunni and Shia militias launched wars against each other and against the Americans, confusion turned to bewilderment.

General David Petraeus fared better than other American commanders in cracking the code of Iraqi society and reducing the insurgency in Mosul from an explosion to a simmer. I saw some of the results of his strategy’s expansion to Baghdad with troops in the 82nd Airborne Division. Instead of staying on base and training Iraqis while security disintegrated outside the wire, they moved into a neighborhood in Baghdad where they now live and work among the civilian population 24 hours a day.

Clear, hold, and build is the strategy now. The Graya’at neighborhood has been cleared of active insurgents, although there still are dormant cells in the area. The Army is working on several modest community and urban renewal projects and is planning larger ones in the near future. Constant patrols and intelligence gathering are the two crucial pieces of the hold part of the strategy.

I went out one night with Lieutenant Larry Pitts and his men one of their intel gathering missions.

“We’ll collect info on Shias in Sunni areas and Sunnis in Shia areas,” he told me. “We make the best of it by going out and meeting the local people. It works because we have a decent reputation around here that we’ve been cultivating for a long time. Reporters would get it more if they were with us from the beginning.”

We saddled up in Humvees, drove down quiet residential streets, and dismounted on a street near a palm grove.

Children came out of their houses to meet us.

The rest is great reading here:http://michaeltotten.com/

Understanding Current Operations in Iraq

The following article was published by Colonel David Kilcullen (Ph. D), an Australian officer currently serving as senior advisor on counterinsurgency operations (COIN) to General David Petraeus in Iraq. The much anticipated 'surge' began on June 15, 2007.


I’ve spent much of the last six weeks out on the ground, working with Iraqi and U.S. combat units, civilian reconstruction teams, Iraqi administrators and tribal and community leaders. I’ve been away from e-mail a lot, so unable to post here at SWJ: but I’d like to make up for that now by providing colleagues with a basic understanding of what’s happening, right now, in Iraq.

This post is not about whether current ops are “working” — for us, here on the ground, time will tell, though some observers elsewhere seem to have already made up their minds (on the basis of what evidence, I’m not really sure). But for professional counterinsurgency operators such as our SWJ (Small Wars Journal) community, the thing to understand at this point is the intention and concept behind current ops in Iraq: if you grasp this, you can tell for yourself how the operations are going, without relying on armchair pundits. So in the interests of self-education (and cutting out the commentariat middlemen—sorry, guys) here is a field perspective on current operations.

Ten days ago, speaking with Austin Bay, I made the following comment:

“I know some people in the media are already starting to sort of write off the “surge” and say ‘Hey, hang on: we’ve been going since January, we haven’t seen a massive turnaround; it mustn’t be working’. What we’ve been doing to date is putting forces into position. We haven’t actually started what I would call the “surge” yet. All we’ve been doing is building up forces and trying to secure the population. And what I would say to people who say that it’s already failed is “watch this space”. Because you’re going to see, in fairly short order, some changes in the way we’re operating that will make what’s been happening over the past few months look like what it is—just a preliminary build up.”

The meaning of that comment should be clear by now to anyone tracking what is happening in Iraq. On June 15th we kicked off a major series of division-sized operations in Baghdad and the surrounding provinces. As General Odierno said, we have finished the build-up phase and are now beginning the actual “surge of operations”. I have often said that we need to give this time. That is still true. But this is the end of the beginning: we are now starting to put things onto a viable long-term footing.

These operations are qualitatively different from what we have done before. Our concept is to knock over several insurgent safe havens simultaneously, in order to prevent terrorists relocating their infrastructure from one to another, and to create an operational synergy between what we're doing in Baghdad and what's happening outside. Unlike on previous occasions, we don't plan to leave these areas once they’re secured. These ops will run over months, and the key activity is to stand up viable local security forces in partnership with Iraqi Army and Police, as well as political and economic programs, to permanently secure them. The really decisive activity will be police work, registration of the population and counterintelligence in these areas, to comb out the insurgent sleeper cells and political cells that have "gone quiet" as we moved in, but which will try to survive through the op and emerge later. This will take operational patience, and it will be intelligence-led, and Iraqi government-led. It will probably not make the news (the really important stuff rarely does) but it will be the truly decisive action.

When we speak of "clearing" an enemy safe haven, we are not talking about destroying the enemy in it; we are talking about rescuing the population in it from enemy intimidation. If we don't get every enemy cell in the initial operation, that's OK. The point of the operations is to lift the pall of fear from population groups that have been intimidated and exploited by terrorists to date, then win them over and work with them in partnership to clean out the cells that remain – as has happened in Al Anbar Province and can happen elsewhere in Iraq as well.

The "terrain" we are clearing is human terrain, not physical terrain. It is about marginalizing al Qa’ida, Shi’a extremist militias, and the other terrorist groups from the population they prey on. This is why claims that “80% of AQ leadership have fled” don’t overly disturb us: the aim is not to kill every last AQ leader, but rather to drive them off the population and keep them off, so that we can work with the community to prevent their return.

This is not some sort of kind-hearted, soft approach, as some fire-breathing polemicists have claimed (funnily enough, those who urge us to “just kill more bad guys” usually do so from a safe distance). It is not about being “nice” to the population and hoping they will somehow see us as the “good guys” and stop supporting insurgents. On the contrary, it is based on a hard-headed recognition of certain basic facts, to wit:

(a.) The enemy needs the people to act in certain ways (sympathy, acquiescence, silence, reaction to provocation) in order to survive and further his strategy. Unless the population acts in these ways, both insurgents and terrorists will wither, and the cycle of provocation and backlash that drives the sectarian conflict in Iraq will fail.

(b.) The enemy is fluid, but the population is fixed. (The enemy is fluid because he has no permanent installations he needs to defend, and can always run away to fight another day. But the population is fixed, because people are tied to their homes, businesses, farms, tribal areas, relatives etc). Therefore—and this is the major change in our strategy this year—protecting and controlling the population is do-able, but destroying the enemy is not. We can drive him off from the population, then introduce local security forces, population control, and economic and political development, and thereby "hard-wire" the enemy out of the environment, preventing his return. But chasing enemy cells around the countryside is not only a waste of time, it is precisely the sort of action he wants to provoke us into. That’s why AQ cells leaving an area are not the main game—they are a distraction. We played the enemy’s game for too long: not any more. Now it is time for him to play our game.

(c.) Being fluid, the enemy can control his loss rate and therefore can never be eradicated by purely enemy-centric means: he can just go to ground if the pressure becomes too much. BUT, because he needs the population to act in certain ways in order to survive, we can asphyxiate him by cutting him off from the people. And he can't just "go quiet" to avoid that threat. He has either to come out of the woodwork, fight us and be destroyed, or stay quiet and accept permanent marginalization from his former population base. That puts him on the horns of a lethal dilemma (which warms my heart, quite frankly, after the cynical obscenities these irhabi gang members have inflicted on the innocent Iraqi non-combatant population). That's the intent here.

(d.) The enemy may not be identifiable, but the population is. In any given area in Iraq, there are multiple threat groups but only one, or sometimes two main local population groups. We could do (and have done, in the past) enormous damage to potential supporters, "destroying the haystack to find the needle", but we don't need to: we know who the population is that we need to protect, we know where they live, and we can protect them without unbearable disruption to their lives. And more to the point, we can help them protect themselves, with our forces and ISF in overwatch.

Of course, we still go after all the terrorist and extremist leaders we can target and find, and life has become increasingly “nasty, brutish, and short” for this crowd. But we realize that this is just a shaping activity in support of the main effort, which is securing the Iraqi people from the terrorists, extremist militias, and insurgents who need them to survive.

Is there a strategic risk involved in this series of operations? Absolutely. Nothing in war is risk-free. We have chosen to accept and manage this risk, primarily because a low-risk option simply will not get us the operational effects that the strategic situation demands. We have to play the hand we have been dealt as intelligently as possible, so we're doing what has to be done. It still might not work, but "it is what it is" at this point.

So much for theory. The practice, as always, has been mixed. Personally, I think we are doing reasonably well and casualties have been lower so far than I feared. Every single loss is a tragedy. But so far, thank God, the loss rate has not been too terrible: casualties are up in absolute terms, but down as a proportion of troops deployed (in the fourth quarter of 2006 we had about 100,000 troops in country and casualties averaged 90 deaths a month; now we have almost 160,000 troops in country but deaths are under 120 per month, much less than a proportionate increase, which would have been around 150 a month). And last year we patrolled rarely, mainly in vehicles, and got hit almost every time we went out. Now we patrol all the time, on foot, by day and night with Iraqi units normally present as partners, and the chances of getting hit are much lower on each patrol. We are finally coming out of the "defensive crouch" with which we used to approach the environment, and it is starting to pay off.

It will be a long, hard summer, with much pain and loss to come, and things could still go either way. But the population-centric approach is the beginning of a process that aims to put the overall campaign onto a sustainable long-term footing. The politics of the matter then can be decisive, provided the Iraqis use the time we have bought for them to reach the essential accommodation. The Embassy and MNF-I continue to work on these issues at the highest levels but fundamentally, this is something that only Iraqis can resolve: our role is to provide an environment in which it becomes possible.

All this may change. These are long-term operations: the enemy will adapt and we'll have to adjust what we're doing over time. Baq’ubah, Arab Jabour and the western operations are progressing well, and additional security measures in place in Baghdad have successfully tamped down some of the spill-over of violence from other places. The relatively muted response (so far) to the second Samarra bombing is evidence of this. Time will tell, though....

Once again, none of this is intended to tell you “what to think” or “whether it’s working”. We’re all professional adults, and you can work that out for yourself. But this does, I hope, explain some of the thinking behind what we are doing, and it may therefore make it easier for people to come to their own judgment.

David Kilcullen is Senior Counterinsurgency Adviser, Multi-National Force—Iraq. These are his personal views only. http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/06/understanding-current-operatio/

Values Message from General David Petraeus

This was first posted on Michael Yon's sight. This letter from General Petraeus deserves the widest possible dissemination. It applies to Canadians as well as Americans in this valiant fight. It should be published widely, and posted on every headquarters wall, and read aloud by every troop in Iraq and Afghanistan. We can pummel al Qaeda and other terrorists mercilessly and grind them into the dirt, but we cannot afford to turn local populations against us while we do it.

From General Petraeus:

Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen serving in Multi-National Force-Iraq:

Our values and the laws governing warfare teach us to respect human dignity, maintain our integrity, and do what is right. Adherence to our values distinguishes us from our enemy. This fight depends on securing the population, which must understand that we—not our enemies—occupy the moral high ground. This strategy has shown results in recent months. Al Qaeda’s indiscriminate attacks, for example, have finally started to turn a substantial proportion ofthe Iraqi population against it.

In view of this, I was concerned by the results of a recently released survey conducted last fall in Iraq that revealed an apparent unwillingness on the part of some US personnel to report illegal actions taken by fellow members of their units. The study also indicated that a small percentage of those surveyed may have mistreated noncombatants. This survey should spur reflection on our conduct in combat.

I fully appreciate the emotions that one experiences in Iraq. I also know first hand the bonds between members of the ” brotherhood of the close fight. ” Seeing a fellow trooper killed by a barbaric enemy can spark frustration, anger, and a desire for immediate revenge. As hard as it might be, however, we must not let these emotions lead us—or our comrades in arrns—to commit hasty, illegal actions. In the event that we witness or hear of such actions, we must not let our bonds prevent us from speaking up.

Some may argue that we would be more effective if we sanctioned torture or other expedient methods to obtain information from the enemy. They would be wrong. Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary. Certainly, extreme physical action can make someone “talk;” however, what the individual says may be of questionable value. In fact, our experience in applying the interrogation standards laid out in the Army Field Manual (2-22.3) on Human Intelligence Collector Operations that was published last year shows that the techniques in the manual work effectively and humanely in eliciting information from detainees.

We are, indeed, warriors. We train to kill our enemies. We are engaged in combat, we must pursue the enemy relentlessly, and we must be violent at times. What sets us apart from our enemies in this fight, however, is how we behave. In everything we do, we must observe the standards and values that dictate that we treat noncombatants and detainees with dignity and respect. While we are warriors, we are also all human beings. Stress caused by lengthy deployments and combat is not a sign of weakness; it is a sign that we are human. If you feel such stress, do not hesitate to talk to your chain of command, your chaplain, or a medical expert.

We should use the survey results to renew our commitment to the values and standards that make us who we are and to spur re-examinat ion of these issues. Leaders, in part icular, need to discuss these issues with their troopers—and, as always, they need to set the right example and strive to ensure proper conduct. We should never underestimate the importance of good leadership and the difference it can make.

Thanks for what you continue to do. It is an honor to serve with each of you.

David H. Petraeus,
General, United States Army
Commanding