Blood Money: Afghanistan’s Reparations Files | The Nation

Restrepo Revisited
 
Kunar Province’s remote Korengal Valley achieved some fame in the United States because of the 2010 documentary Restrepo and its companion book, Sebastian Junger’s War. Through both, the American public was offered a vivid view of what life was like for US soldiers serving on tiny firebases and combat outposts in the foothills of the Hindu Kush. What Junger and his reporting partner, the late Tim Hetherington, largely neglected, however, was what life was like for civilians living near heavily armed Americans who, as the film and book chronicle, often unleashed copious amounts of firepower in the tiny valley.

Solatia documents from the spring of 2009, about a year after Junger and Hetherington left the region, catalog the destruction visited on civilians. Although the documents contain only that fraction of cases that civilians managed to report and for which the Americans agreed to pay compensation, the records provide ample evidence of incidents in which US troops damaged property, slew or injured livestock, and wounded or killed villagers.

On April 3, for example, three bundles from a supply airdrop that was supposed to land at the US outpost missed the drop zone. One struck a home in the village of Babeyal, damaging the roof. Responding to an ambush between the villages of Aliabad and Laneyal on April 15, US troops responded with small arms, missiles and mortars, as well as three 500-pound bombs, killing four goats and damaging a truck. On April 23, three outposts came under enemy fire. The Americans replied with mortars and called in air support, killing livestock in Laui Kalay village. Four days later, US troops responded to enemy fire with mortars, damaging a home and injuring two cows. The next day, an American unit on patrol was ambushed in Laneyal. One of the mortar rounds fired to suppress the attack “experienced a failure,” according to the documents, landing in a nearby village, where it damaged several homes.

A voucher created on May 9, 2009, lists a $7,843.13 payment to a Korengal Valley resident in response to a “civilian casualty.” Two days later, Afghan army troops in Aliabad were attacked by insurgents, prompting return fire that caused property damage in Laneyal. On May 17, shrapnel from bombs dropped on a suspected enemy machine-gun nest killed several cows in Siapal village. A day later, US troops called in bombs and mortars on enemy fighters, killing seven goats belonging to local farmers. That same day, artillery fire on a suspected insurgent staging area near Divpat Mountain injured a farmer’s cow. On May 20, fire from one outpost damaged a shop in Aliabad. On May 23, a soldier shot and killed a charging bull belonging to a farmer in Laui Kalay. The next day, troops at one firebase responded to enemy fire with mortars, killing six goats in Kandalay village. And solatia documents dated May 26 chronicle thousands of dollars in payments by that same unit for otherwise unspecified “property damage.”

A Continuum of Suffering

When I asked Marine Col. Roger Turner, who commanded Regimental Combat Team 5 during 2011 and 2012, far from Kunar in southern Helmand Province, about his experience with doling out compensation, he told me about reparations paid in connection with a man who was shot and killed when he failed to respond to warnings upon entering a US base, and another who was wounded in a crossfire between the marines and Taliban fighters, as well as to people whose property was damaged during marine operations. “The affected families appreciate it and expect it, but it must be viewed in a larger context. We have a surplus of good will that has been established by marines doing the right thing over a period of years,” was how he put it. “The people here have endured the Soviet invasion and occupation, abuse by the mujahedeen warlords, brutality of the Taliban and the ISAF intervention. Many of them are now enjoying peace and security for the first time in their lives. Therefore, when these very rare events occurred, the people, elders, Afghan government officials and Afghan security officials viewed it as an anomaly in the larger context.”

Not all Afghans feel that way. Before Turner arrived in Helmand, in March 2010, British troops were stationed there. The night before one patrol, Grenadier Guardsman Daniel Crook had been treated by medics after consuming a “considerable quantity of vodka.” As a result, he’d been relieved of his rifle and left behind at the base, but armed with two grenades and a bayonet, he decided to join his unit. While attempting to catch up with it, Crook encountered 10-year-old Ghulam Nabi, who he later said had pestered him for chocolate. Crook responded by stabbing the boy in the back, leaving Nabi with wounds that would keep him out of school for months. Following the attack, the family was given a small amount of money to cover medical expenses. It wasn’t until August of 2012, after Crook pleaded guilty to attacking the boy at a court-martial, that the British military accepted responsibility and agreed to pay what it called “appropriate compensation…on receipt of medical reports.” The boy’s father, Shah Zada, bitterly told The Guardian that foreign troops were “in Afghanistan to build the country and remove insurgents, not to stab a child.”

A coalition soldier stabbing a young boy may be an anomaly, but the US military’s own records indicate that, in Kunar Province at least, Afghan civilians regularly suffered from coalition operations. And there’s little reason to believe that Kunar is an outlier. One day we may have a fuller picture of the day-to-day toll that the war inflicted on noncombatants. Until then, the reparations files offer a rare glimpse of the suffering endured by Afghan civilians caught in its path.

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