We do not face that same understanding attitude in Afghanistan:
First of all, with regard to the ROEs [Rules of Engagement], as you can imagine, it was one of my first questions as well to Larry and other commanders: What's the impact here? And first of all, let me tell you that I understand and believe in what Stan McChrystal has done.
You know, in Iraq, you had what you call sort of the collateral damage of an attack. And in some cases we had to have that degree of collateral damage approved all the way up the Iraqi chain of command. But there was a mentality in Iraq that says, if you do proper compensation and make apology for loss of civilian life, then in some ways it's God's will; it's "insha'Allah."
That is not the attitude in Afghanistan. It's just a different culture. And if 15 Taliban run into a house and you put a bomb in the square of that thing and you kill a woman and child, it's not the Taliban's fault; it's your fault that you killed that woman and child, and you've got enemies for life.
So first of all, the thought process behind the ROE change I think is valid, and we've simply got to adjust. But I would offer to you that I think we have. We are pretty good at that business to begin with, okay? We tend to hit what we aim at, and we spend a lot of time in combined arms.
That's how we prefer to fight.
What has happened, if you talk to the commanders -- since the ROE have been introduced, the ROE change have been introduced -- is that we've proven ourselves.
And Larry Nicholson would tell you. If you ask him this question, he gets very little out of Baghram or higher headquarters about the bomb that they dropped last night, because we have reconnaissance Marines watching that site by and large for a couple two or three days. We patterned the life around it. We were certain that they were only bad guys. And we hit them.
Now, there will be popups and those kinds of things. When you have fire that hits you from a tree lying 150 meters away, you've got to be sure that you're only going to kill the enemy.
And our own people will be exercising that, with regard to the ROE. But it -- I think in a word, it is not as restrictive as perhaps we thought it might be at the outset.
Now, I will also offer that there is an investigation ongoing with the loss of some of our TTs, trainers, up in the 201st Corps. Sadly we lost four Marines up there in a fight. And there's some question, at least on the part of the reporter on hand, as to whether or not those fire missions that were being asked for arrived in a timely fashion.
That investigation is not yet done. But we will be very interested in that, to see if what we're applying down south applies everywhere to our Marines -- in the MARSOC [Marine Corps Special Operations Command], in the TTs [Training Teams] and so forth -- so that we don't have unnecessary loss of life.
The fact is, civilian casualties are far more unacceptable to Afghans than in Iraq. That's a fact of life we have to adapt to and not something we can ignore and scream about the "unfairness" of it all. We go to war with the Afghan attitudes we have and not the attitudes we wish they had.
That doesn't mean that the ROE can't be adjusted to learn from experience. It will be tweaked. And hopefully that will help us reduce friendly casualties without harming our effort to win the war. But always, the objective is to win the war--which reduces casualties in the long run, if it makes you feel better.
