{"id":948107,"date":"2023-01-07T01:06:29","date_gmt":"2023-01-07T01:06:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dissidentvoice.org\/?p=136753"},"modified":"2023-01-07T01:06:29","modified_gmt":"2023-01-07T01:06:29","slug":"harrys-great-afghan-shooting-party","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/01\/07\/harrys-great-afghan-shooting-party\/","title":{"rendered":"Harry\u2019s Great Afghan Shooting Party"},"content":{"rendered":"

What to make of it? History is filled with the deeds of blood-thirsty princes bold in ambition and feeble of mind. Massacres make the man, though there is often little to merit the person behind it. The Duke of Sussex seemingly wishes to add his name to that list. In what can only be described as one of his \u201cNazi uniform\u201d moments, Prince Harry has revealed<\/a> in his memoir Spare<\/i> that he killed a number of Taliban fighters. (In the same memoir, the weak-willed royal blames his brother for the uniform idea, though not for organising the Afghan shooting party.) <\/p>\n

The prince, wishing to show that he was no toy soldier or ceremonial ornament of the British Army, puts the number of deaths at 25. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t a statistic that filled me with pride but nor did it make me ashamed.\u201d He recalls being \u201cplunged into the heat and confusion of battle\u201d, and how he \u201cdidn\u2019t think about those 25 people. You can\u2019t kill people if you see them as people.\u201d Doing so from the security of a murderous Apache helicopter certainly helps.<\/p>\n

The prince continues to show that he is nothing if not unworldly. \u201cIn truth, you can\u2019t hurt people if you see them as people. They were chess pieces off the board, bad guys eliminated before they kill good guys.\u201d Then comes a bit of cod social theory. \u201cThey trained me to \u2018other\u2019 them and they trained me well.\u201d A dash of Meghan; a smidgen of postcolonial theory. <\/p>\n

There it is: the killer aware about his Instagram moment, the social media miasma, the influence of cheap Hollywood tat via Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex. He killed but was merely performing his duty as conditioned by the Establishment or, to put it another way, the army of his late grandmother.<\/p>\n

The response from the Establishment was not one of praise. Adam Holloway MP, writing<\/a> in The Spectator<\/i>, did not find the statistic distasteful or troubling, but the fact that Prince Harry had mentioned it at all. Good soldiers did not publicise kills. \u201cIt\u2019s not about macho codes. It\u2019s about decency and respect for the lives you have taken.\u201d <\/p>\n

Retired British Army Colonel Tim Collins also seethed. \u201cThis is not how we behave in the Army,\u201d he tut-tutted<\/a> to Forces News<\/i>, \u201cit\u2019s not how we think.\u201d That\u2019s Prince Harry\u2019s point: more a doer than a thinker.<\/p>\n

That doing involved, as Collins put it, \u201ca tragic money-making scam to fund the lifestyle he can\u2019t afford and someone else has chosen.\u201d Harry had \u201cbadly let the side down. We don\u2019t do notches on the rifle butt. We never did.\u201d <\/p>\n

Collins became something of a poster boy for revived wars of adventurism in the Middle East with his speech to the 1st Battalion The Royal Irish Regiment (1 R IRISH) battle group in March 2003. It was the eve of an international crime: the invasion of a sovereign country by colonial powers old and new. As with any such crimes, notably of vast scale, it was justified in the name of principle and duty, otherwise known as the civilisational imperative. \u201cWe go to liberate,\u201d declared<\/a> Collins with evangelical purpose, \u201cnot to conquer. We will not fly our flags in their country. We are entering Iraq to free a people and the only flag which will be flown in that ancient land is their own.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the Middle East, and elsewhere, such gifts of imposed freedom by armed missionaries tend to go off. In July last year, the BBC news program Panorama<\/em> reported<\/a> that, \u201cSAS operatives in Afghanistan repeatedly killed detainees and unarmed men.\u201d The report disturbed the amnesiac effect of two investigations by military police that saw no reason to pursue prosecutions. But the allegations were sufficiently publicised to prompt the launching of an independent statutory inquiry<\/a> by the Ministry of Defence last December. \u201cThis will take into account the progress that has already been made across defence in holding our Armed Forces personnel to account for their actions, and the handling of allegations that were later found to have insufficient evidence for any prosecutions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Collins must also be aware that commencing a prosecution<\/a> against British army personnel operating overseas for war crimes, let alone succeeding in one, is nigh impossible. It\u2019s all marvellous to claim that the armed forces play by the book and operate to the sweet chords of justice, but it is rather easier to do so behind sheets of protective glass and exemptions.<\/p>\n

Australia, as one of Britain\u2019s partners in military adventurism, has also done its bit to bloat the war crimes files in its tours of Afghanistan. The four-year long investigation culminating in the Brereton Report<\/a> identified at least 39 alleged murders of captured Afghan troops and civilians, and cruel mistreatment of two more locals by SAS personnel. To date, however, the Office of the Special Investigator has made no referrals<\/a> to the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions, a tardiness that is likely to be repeated by British counterparts. <\/p>\n

The war criminality theme was bound to be picked up by Afghanistan\u2019s Taliban officials. Anas Haqqani, a senior Taliban figure, suggested<\/a> to the prince via Twitter that those he had slain \u201cwere not chess pieces, they were humans; they had families who were waiting for their return.\u201d But astute enough to sense a public relations moment for his government, Haqqani heaped mock praise. \u201cAmong the killers of Afghans, not many have your decency to reveal their conscience and confess to their war crimes.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this whole affair, Prince Harry did perform one useful function. He removed the fa\u00e7ade of decent soldiery, the mask of the supposedly noble liberator. On this occasion, it took a prince to tell the emperor he had no clothes. \u201cThe truth is what you\u2019ve said,\u201d continued<\/a> Haqqani, \u201c[o]ur innocent people were chess pieces to your soldiers, military and political leaders. Still, you were defeated in that \u2018game\u2019 of white & black \u2018square\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

We can certainly agree with Haqqani on one point: no tribunal will be chasing up the royal. \u201cI don\u2019t expect that the ICC [International Criminal Court] will summon you or the human rights activists will condemn you, because they are deaf and blind for you.\u201d Some of that deafness and blindness might have been ameliorated.<\/p>The post Harry\u2019s Great Afghan Shooting Party<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.\n

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What to make of it? History is filled with the deeds of blood-thirsty princes bold in ambition and feeble of mind. Massacres make the man, though there is often little to merit the person behind it. The Duke of Sussex seemingly wishes to add his name to that list. In what can only be described [\u2026]<\/p>\n

The post Harry\u2019s Great Afghan Shooting Party<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[186,55882,362,55884,2031],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/948107"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=948107"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/948107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":948108,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/948107\/revisions\/948108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=948107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=948107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=948107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}