US commanders prosecuting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq make "macabre" calculations as to how many civilian casualties could be justified in taking out an enemy target.
NEW YORK: US commanders prosecuting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq make "macabre" calculations as to how many civilian casualties could be justified in taking out an enemy target.
If the number is higher, then they might be required to contact and get approval of the political leadership, CBS television network reported in its '60 Minutes' investigative report on Sunday.
The air strikes in both countries are planned in a highly classified facility in a Gulf country which the report did not identify for security reasons.
"There's this macabre kind of calculus that the military goes through on every air strike, where they try to figure out how many dead civilians is dead bad guy worth," Marc Garlasco, who knows the calculus of civilian casualties well, told CBS.
At the Pentagon, Garlasco was chief of high value targeting at the start of the Iraq war. He told 60 Minutes that his team was authorised to kill a set number of civilians around high-value targets -- targets like Saddam Hussein and his leadership.
"Our number was 30. So, for example, Saddam Hussein. If you're gonna kill up to 29 people in a strike against Saddam Hussein, that's not a problem," Garlasco explained. "But once you hit that number 30, we actually had to go to either President Bush, or (the then) Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld."
Before the invasion of Iraq, he said he recommended 50 air strikes aimed at high-value targets -- Iraqi officials.
But none of the targets on the list were actually killed, he admitted and said instead "a couple of hundred civilians at least" were killed.
Asked if so much care is being taken why so many civilians are getting killed, Garlasco said because the Taliban are violating international law and because the US just doesn't have enough troops on the ground. "You have the Taliban shielding in people's homes. And you have this small number of troops on the ground. And sometimes the only thing they can do is drop bombs," he said.
"I don't think people really appreciate the gymnastics that the US military goes through in order to make sure that they're not killing civilians," Garlasco points out.
Air Force Col Gary Crowder, deputy director of the Combined Air Operations Centre, told 60 Minutes, "We rely on ..commanders (in the field) to make the assessment at the time of what the requirement is. He assesses the proportionality.
He assesses the validity of the military target."
Asked what he means by "proportionality," Crowder replied, "If we know that there is a sniper on a roof and the roof is in the middle of a mosque which is a protected site or in the middle of a very populated area, then dropping a 2,000 pound weapon on that would not be proportional to going after the sniper."
"Two men with AK-47s run into a house. Do you bomb the house?" CBS asked.
"In some circumstances, we will bomb the house," said Crowder. "It is entirely dependent upon the circumstances on the ground, and the ground commander's assessment of that particular situation."
Asked how many times an strike is called off at the last minute, Crowder said, "thousands and thousands of times a month. We look very, very often, we tracked some of the insurgent leaders we will track for days and days on end. And we are prepared to strike them at any moment. But we can never get all of the criteria necessary to meet our rules of engagement."
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