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[nenjin]

They may also be fined for essentially filing spurious and/or incorrect lawsuits.

[Lord Shonus]

Unless something's changed since I saw the story, permanent disbarment is on the table.

[feelotraveller]

Another unwanted gift from America to Afghanistan.

It's not Terrorism if we're killing civilians half a world away, right?

Some things never change. 

[Loud Whispers]

Another unwanted gift from America to Afghanistan.

It's not Terrorism if we're killing civilians half a world away, right?

Some things never change. 

Article about drone strike which isn't behind WaPo paywall

Talking about one of the younger boys, Farzad, a neighbour said: “We only found his legs.”

It seems the academics who feared drones would lower the threshold for violence by providing a sense of impunity have been vindicated most awfully. No doubt this has been excacerbated by Trump's decision to delegate full authority on drone strikes to local US commanders, but it wasn't exactly better under civilian leadership with Obama either.

Speaking of, there's also a great read here describing how the author believes the US civilian government may be steadily eroding its own authority by delegating piece by piece powers the US military is not supposed to have; eroding the distinction between policy maker and warfare officer.

[Starver]

From what little I read (not those above-linked articles, yet, so might no longer be 'true') it seems like the plan to get a suicide bomber into the airport/neighbouring crowd was to find a fully-accredited evacuee family with invotations/authorisations from the US to travel, and coerce them to embed at least one of the hostiles in their party.

In a movie, the Dad would go all "I have a specific set of skills", the boy would do things with marbles and swinging paint-tins and/or the mother would go all mediæval on the big-bad guy's ass with a forklift exoskeleton thing, and the plot would be foiled while the family learn to love each other anew (and the parents to dance a tango!), but if (if!) this was happening in RL and the authorities (or whoever it is who is still monitoring the ground) perhaps felt they had no better choice than to attack the preparing family to kill (them and) the bomber than to wait for it to happen as planned and have killed (them and) a whole crowd of queuers/checkpoint guards/boarding staff at the direct hands of the bomber at a point of his choosing.


Though I've also seen it said that it was Taliban information, ostensibly given to the US as some back-corridor action against someone from ISK (who hates them both), which may or may not have been too heedful of the intelligence about who else (those intending to flee from the Taliban) was present. Cynically, it could have even been information about a purely evacuating family made to look like an ISK operation (successfully drawing the US into having to make this bad decision), and I'm sure that's possible but not gonna be easy to confirm (or deny, at our level of understanding) so it might as well also be a film-plot (but only about half way through, when except perhapsi n the darker type of movie franchise, or just before the end of a film with a pre-planned sequel that resolves things as Part II).

Information from the ground is going to be patchy and a long time to understand completely, if ever. Whether truly awful error (or 'error') by the US or almost entirely nefarious scheming by one or more of the US's state/non-state enemies...  And I refuse to be drawn to which (though it sounds like at least partly it would be the former, even if just as the consequence of the latter).

[McTraveller]

Eh, drone strikes by a sovereign military are by definition not terrorist - they are acts of war.

One of the many reasons war sucks is because civilians people suffer, especially those that would rather not be involved in the war.  It's also essentially impossible to know if any particular individual is a civilian or not in war.  It doesn't help that there are some cultures that don't try to separate their active military from "civilians.*"

I do agree it's questionable to basically throw a drone over there as retaliation against the airport and other events.  It's not an action that will effectively increase the probability of stopping hostility sooner.

Spoiler: * (click to show/hide)

A stupid thought experiment - how would you feel in your country if they decided to just house the active military in general residential areas, just so that if anyone attacked the military they would with high probability also impact "civilians"?

[Loud Whispers]

I think it's not an issue over whether civilians will die due to acts of war. It is an unavoidable aspect of any operation conducted in wartime conditions; civilians will die, even your own soldiers will get killed by your own soldiers. The issue is when the threshold for violence is "suspected terrorist," and the intelligence used to justify that is paper thin. Everyone killed in that SUV was affiliated with the USA or the Afghan government. Even whilst the US Centcom assesses the "possibility" that civilians were in that car, we know there were civilians in the car. We don't know if there was a terrorist in the car, and the family denies it. But USA policy assumes that terrorists are present until proven otherwise, whereas civilians are suspected combatants until never. From the previous article:

Feroz, who published the German-language book Death at the Push of a Button in 2017, says the results of the US drone war can be seen on the streets of Kabul where high-ranking Taliban members, including some who had been reported “killed” multiple times have been roaming the capital since the group took control of the country.
“But the question no one seems to want to ask is who was killed instead of them?”

Confirmed dead Taliban roaming the streets whilst confirmed civilians lie in bits warrants some questions. Because even if we accept civilian casualties are unavoiable, we can also accept that the scale of death can be reduced, and there has to be some accountability in the decision making process of launching a drone strike. It's not an unrealistic demand to be met when human lives are at stake; this kind of fuckup where the carbomb turned out to be a family of refugees ought to be the exception, not the rule

[Gentlefish]

Eh, drone strikes by a sovereign military are by definition not terrorist - they are acts of war.

That's ridiculous. If that were the case, since the Taliban now control the Afghan government they're no longer terrorists.

It's equally ridiculous to say that America isn't a terrorist organization, at least in part - you should read up on all of our "interventionism" into democratically elected governments in South America.

[McTraveller]

I'm willing to disagree there; I happen to believe there are important differences between terrorism and acts of war.

The key technical difference is that terrorism is "unlawful" while acts of war are usually authorized by a legal authority.  I agree you get into areas of disagreement when it comes to international actions, because while actions may be considered legal in one area they may not be in another.

It's like how all murder is killing, but not all killing is murder - by definition.

[MrRoboto75]

The other issue with that is the US hasn't formally declared war since like WWII.

[Starver]

Eh, drone strikes by a sovereign military are by definition not terrorist - they are acts of war.

I really need to word this better, but the acts must surely must be against a state or its people as covered by the state-sanctioned umbrella. If the (intended) target was already one (theoretically) outlawed[1] by the state, probably an enemy of the Taliban already subject to legal sanctions that go at least up to judicious execution without prejudice by the state's own forces, then this is not war against the state. The state may even appreciate (at least secretly) the intervention, saving themselves at least the temporary worry of having had a non-state actor within their state and threatening the state of their state

For the (if there was one) non-Taliban intended killer, that is. The collateral damage to persons and property that were still state-covered is a different issue. It would be an issue under international law similar in style (but maybe not magnitude) to any other cross-border recklessness such as (non-belligerant) poisoning of waters that flow between the territories, or burning a forested area that recklessly crosses the borders. Or allowing a disfunctional plane to take off that then crashes onto a neighbouring (or further) territory. Getting the aim of a live-fire military exercise/missile test wrong, too near a border, might be closer still in equivalence (assuming no intention to 'accidentally' bombard the end-zone, something that might be the case for somewhere like Best Korea).

But IANAInternationalL.  The subtleties are also tied quite a bit to the respective policies and opinions between the sides involved (all three/four of them) and have surely been tried and tested with the likes of Mossad hit-squads on foreign soil (if not the kinds of people not entirely unlinked to a state of their own, part of the typical target-group for Mossad hit-squads upon mutually foreign soils, etc).  It could involve Strong Words™, or it could be taken up to the level of grounds for declared warfare.


In this case (based upon my current range of assumptions, as already outlined) the US is culpable for any number of things which certainly could lead to severe repurcussions from those countries which have enough clout to censure or even treat this as a permissive precedent of some kind, but the state of war between the US and the current Afghani state is unaltered (it may actually be consistently as 'on' as it managed to survive as a true war, even as the warred-against Talib were no longer a State to properly be at war with, but that's a question for someone with a Statesman's paygrade to think about, and a bunch of them from across various boundaries to try to develop an official concensus about) and what is left, from a purely Afghani point of view, is an International Incident where no serious declaration of war would be imagined by either party (the wronged or the wronger), although blowhards might try to capitalise upon the issue with rhetoric upon the issue.

IMO. Don't come to me to validate the legality of what I'm suggesting. Maybe the UN Secretary General (amongst others) has the contact details of those that could, but he's not likely to be browsing these forums and throwing around such opinions.

Much regards,
  António
-- (written on my iPad)



[1] In the classical sense of one not held to be protected by the standard measures of the law, rather than the somewhat similar and co-existing quality of being an on-the-run criminal for whom every act is effectively a continuing illegality requiring legal punishment at the earliest opportunity. Basically, Robin Hood was an outlaw because he had no recourse to the courts (to whatever extent he might have had otherwise) should he ever have a grievance to settle, not because of the acts of rampant longbowing he continued to inflict upon anyone else once declared outwith the law. Although the desire to continue to run amok certainly sustains the status.

[McTraveller]

My stance is this: the US is indeed terrifying but I wouldn't call it terrorist.

[Rolan7]

I think people may be conflating terrorism with insurrection, for "reasons".  (The reasons are that we've been trained to do so by the media arm of the war on "terror")

Terrorism is when political change is sought via terrorizing a populace.  Insurrection is when a group tries to overthrow their ""sovereign"" state.  Many, maybe most insurrections utilize terror.  But in my opinion it does not cease to be terrorism when it's done by a Great Power.

Edit: Re-reading the conversation though, I should clarify that drone strikes are not necessarily terrorism.  They can be legitimate acts of war, or they can be terrorism, or both depending on how they *appear* to the effected populace.

[Starver]

If there was no intention to terrify (and I don't count the effect on the people who are targets due to their own possibly-defined terrorising) is it terrorism?

Is it like whether you insult/offend someone, deliberately, or whether someone is insulted/offended, regardless?

Gulf War II had the concept of "Shock And Awe" which might have been Terrorism, or 'just' Shockism/Awism... Who is terrified of who, in this case. Do ordinary people have more terror of US-sourced Death From Above catching them due to error/wrong-place-wrong-time, or do they have more terror of those working for, with or under the ægis of the current ruling group of their own country? (And there are almost-ordinary people who clearly do have the kind of terror that may have led them to try to hang onto taxiing planes, with the opportunity.)

The terror of the local IS subgroup(s), etc, will also compete in the minds of the people there, and if the Talib can do something to suppress that threat (without over-reaching and extending disproportionate suppression over the innocent but implicated - as per the US's common error) then they might even earn Brownie points both internally and internationally. Poacher turned Gamekeeper (having previously been ineptly vicious gamekeeper and before that a much 'ept'er poacher-for-hire), you might say.

I'm not sure I would class the Talibs as Terrorist at the moment, but only because in a possible despotic autarchy (the jury is still out on that, or not even finished hearing the full case) you have plenty of other words to apply. If you class the US as terrorist for their prior/current military actions, you need to consider the Talib for their paramilitary/policing actions of the past eras, and summary executions/revenging that (despite the announced amnesty upon the "collaborators") we're hearing reports of. Maybe just rogue elements of the more friendly-faced new regime (comparatively!), in which case consider those rogues alone as terrorist-inclined, by common opinion.

Which is not to say that through 're-education' that The Great Satan cannot be made more of a bogeyman than the authoritarian state which is perhaps more responsible for local difficulties but propogandising that opinion (Iran, NK, bits of Russia/some other ex-Soviet areas, maybe). Then YMMV comes into play and your (generic 'you') opinion may be valid to you, even if it doesn't reflect objective and even majority view. But it doesn't mean anybody else should accept it if their subjectivity is not so (mis)directed.

[Frumple]

My stance is this: the US is indeed terrifying but I wouldn't call it terrorist.

I mean, I absolutely would. We've armed, trained, and let loose more than one batch over them over the years, nevermind the horseshit we've done more directly. We've been regularly committing or encouraging terrorist attacks on other countries for pretty much all my life, and by everything I'm aware of we were worse prior to it. Call a horse a horse, y'know?

It's just we're too goddamn big and violent for anyone to really call us on it.