The public inquiry into alleged SAS war crimes in Afghanistan hears fresh evidence this week. Lawyers representing Afghan families argue that up to 80 civilians may have been victims of ‘summary killings’ by UK special forces between 2010 and 2013 in night raids in search of Taliban fighters.
The inquiry has led to some debate about how possible it is to uphold the rules of war in a messy, overseas conflict. These quandaries are nothing new. When Lance Corporal George MacDonald Fraser’s Border Regiment were fighting through central Burma in April 1945, Fraser admitted that when they got into the swing of fighting, killing the Japanese was fun. ‘It was exciting; no other word for it, and no explanation needed, for honest folk,’ he wrote in 1992. ‘We all have kindly impulses’ he observed, ‘fostered by 2,000 years of Christian teaching, gentle Jesus, and love thy neighbour, but we have a killer instinct too…’
Experienced soldiers know that killing outside of combat is morally repugnant not merely because it is outside of the rules, but because the act of killing diminishes the humanity of the killer
As a young soldier he recognised this killer impulse in himself, and saw it in others. A thoughtful man, he knew that crossing the Rubicon of violence was a dangerous business. And that the rules of war, formalised in the nineteenth century, were designed to protect soldiers from having to make moral choices while channelling that violence for legal purposes.
I have experience of this myself. In May 1983 I was shot at by terrorists in an ambush in Northern Ireland. They missed. It was dusk. After the sudden rush of bullets I couldn’t see who had fired at me, all I could identify was the location they had fired from. By the rules of the Yellow Card (a summary of the soldiers’ legal use of force) I was not allowed to fire back. I could only do so if I was sure that in a subsequent court of law I could prove to a jury that I had spotted my attackers, with the evidence (a recovered weapon, or expended bullet cases, for example) to prove it.
Equally, as a trained soldier, I had no desire simply to fire in the direction of the shots. We were trained to shoot only when we knew we had a high chance of hitting the enemy. There was always a chance innocent civilians could be hit in a return of fire, and this would not have assisted the cause I served. At the time no one I knew griped about the Yellow Card. It was there to protect us, the people who were forced to live with this violence every day, and the cause we were fighting for in Northern Ireland. When these laws were egregiously broken, this was to the great detriment of the path to peace.
British soldiers are authorised by His Majesty’s Government to use violence for the purpose of national policy. A careful framework of law shapes that violence. It makes no sense – legally, logically or morally – for soldiers deliberately to break the very law they are sworn to uphold.
This equally applies to all soldiers, including the SAS. Members of the SAS are simply soldiers who have received the benefit of selection and training to undertake more onerous and specialised tasks than their comrades in, for example, an infantry battalion. Soldiers who have received levels of training above and beyond that of an ordinary soldier should also have higher levels of accountability.
All thinking soldiers believe that a civilised nation should abide by the rules of war. Any army that breaks this sacred bond opens the door to moral mayhem and legal chaos. We saw this with the Wehrmacht in the second world war and we’ve seen it recently, and horrifically, in Ukraine.
Killing in the heat of battle is what soldiers are tasked to do. But those who glory in it are few and to be pitied. Once the fighting is over the killing must, should and always stop. In my time as soldier I can’t think I came across anyone who did not hold to the maxim that killing outside of combat was murder, pure and simple.
Experienced soldiers know that killing outside of combat is morally repugnant not merely because it is outside of the rules, but because the act of killing diminishes the humanity of the killer. The rules exist to protect the soldier from moral harm. In the British Army this is a belief based on centuries of Christian indoctrination. Human life is precious, and it is protected by both moral and civil law. Killing in combat is the judicial exception to this rule, but even then it is recognised that the very act of killing another human – even in battle – should be something for regret. There is quite obviously a problem when a soldier wants to kill outside of combat.
It is for these reasons that the British Army, including the SAS, should welcome any scrutiny now of its actions in Afghanistan.
Source : THESPECTATOR
