Justice: As if fighting a war in Afghanistan isn't hard enough, ambitious
global prosecutors have rolled into Kabul looking to charge U.S. troops. At
about the time NATO's new secretary-general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, warned
NATO's European members against an early pullout, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the
top prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, whose body is charged
with looking for international war criminals, announced he was looking for
new "clients" from anyone with a grievance in Afghanistan.
At a briefing Wednesday in The Hague, Moreno-Ocampo said he had launched a
new war crimes inquiry, seeking information about "torture" especially - a
European obsession - and had already mined the human rights groups for
stories. He added he was also "very open" to more information from foreign
governments.
Oh, he'd been evenhanded in his Monday-morning battlefield quarterbacking of
course, promising he'd prosecute both Taliban and NATO troops as moral
equals.
But it doesn't take a genius to know what the spotlight-loving attorney (who
once launched his own reality TV show back in Argentina) is really after:
Americans in the dock as war criminals.
The atmosphere that makes a prosecutor like Moreno-Ocampo ambitious enough
to go after Americans instead of a real monster like, say, Fidel Castro, can
only occur when the West's will has weakened, as Rasmussen warned.
After all, if a war to defend our civilization can be reduced to a series of
police-brutality cases, then Afghanistan isn't about victory.
Moreno-Ocampo's entry into Afghanistan is a sign that legalism has begun to
overtake victory as a goal, at a time when our Taliban foes still believe in
victory.
On the battlefield, our troops are increasingly constrained by legalistic
rules of engagement.
Case in point: On Tuesday, four U.S. Marines and seven of their Afghani
allies walked into a well-planned ambush and were killed in the Kunar
province near the Pakistani border.
"We are pinned down. We are running low on ammo. We have no air. We've lost
today," Marine Maj. Kevin Williams, 37, told his Afghan counterpart,
responding to the latter's repeated demands for helicopters, McClatchy
Newspapers reported. |
