By Spencer Ackerman October 14, 2010
Protecting the Afghan population around Kandahar was “pussyfooting,” according to the commander of the Army’s 5th Stryker Brigade. Better to “strike” and “destroy” the insurgents. Inside one of his platoons, a team of young soldiers went rogue, applying that guidance not to insurgents, but to unarmed civilians.
The looming question within Craig Whitlock’s excellent Washington Post piece on 5th Stryker’s commander, Colonel Harry D. Tunnell IV, is whether Tunnell’s distaste for counterinsurgency created an environment of callousness that led some of his soldiers to form a “Kill Team.” Tunnell himself had nothing to do with the murders of three Afghan civilians that the “Kill Team” is charged with committing. And there’s no evidence to date that he knew about the team’s alleged killings, corpse mutilations or hash smoking.
But Whitlock’s report — like Sean Naylor’s Army Times profile from January — shows that Tunnell quickly rejected the counterinsurgency strategy set by the U.S. military command. After the brigade arrived in Kandahar for a year-long tour in May 2009, civilian officials were surprised to hear Tunnell say, “Some of you might think I’m here to play this COIN game and just pussyfoot with the enemy. But that’s not what I’m doing,” a State Department official told Whitlock.
Instead, he was going after the insurgents — hard. Tunnell told Naylor, “if you degrade formations, supply chains and leadership near simultaneously, you’ll cause the enemy in the area to collapse, and that is what we’re trying to do here.” Some of his soldiers thought that approach would ultimately accomplish “absolutely nothing,” as a squad leader told Naylor. (See this Ink Spots post for more.)
Read More
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/10/did-disdain-for-counterinsurgency-breed-the-kill-team/