GROUND TRUTH: The moral component in contemporary British warfare.

Over a decade ago, towards the end of my tour in Helmand, a combined SAS and Afghan Special Forces team raided the property of Bebe Hazrata in the dead of night. Bebe and her extended family were rudely roused from their beds and corralled into the open courtyard at the centre of their home.

Accounts of what happened next vary.

According to the SAS, despite being surrounded and out-numbered, Bebe's three adult sons simultaneously reached under their night clothes for concealed weapons and were lawfully shot and killed in self defence.

According to their mother, her unarmed sons were cruelly and callously slain in cold blood with their hands in the air in front of their families.

The crystal truth of what actually happened that night was captured on the gun tape of an overhead aircraft but, for reasons that have never been disclosed, the SAS have refused to release it for scrutiny.

In the surreal world we inhabited where young men died violently every single day and even more young women died as a result of complications during pregnancy and childbirth,? Bebe's sons might quickly have become just another tragic but unremarkable statistic in the Afghan War.

However, the battlegroup to which I belonged maintained a patrol base in the village just a few hundred metres from Bebe’s home. Although the base had had no prior warning of the raid, and no intelligence to suggest that Bebe’s sons were anything other than subsistence farmers, they received an angry delegation the following morning demanding answers and justice.

Seeing all the hard fought effort he and his men had invested over the preceding months to win the hearts and minds of the village evaporate, the patrol base commander bitterly radioed battle group headquarters for some answers of his own.

I was given the task of liaising with the SAS to find out why they had conducted the raid. It was not an easy conversation. Initially I was told to f*** off. When I persisted, I was informed that Bebe’s sons were Taliban commanders and given the stock account of concealed weapons. When I asked to see the gun tapes I was accused of being a “Taliban loving apologist” and told to f*** off again.

When I raised my concerns with Task Force Helmand headquarters I was, rather more politely but no less forcefully, ordered to drop my enquiry. I’d been silenced by the Task Force Helmand top brass but the Village Elders remained determinedly voluble. Thanks to their persistence, three weeks later Bebe received an “assistance payment” of ￡3,364 from the UK Ministry of Defence. The Ministry denied this was compensation, claiming it did not constitute an admission of liability for the death of her sons.?

To everyone on the ground, including myself, it was nothing less than exactly this. So far as I knew, the Ministry of Defence was not in the habit of financially assisting the mothers of armed Taliban commanders legally killed in self defence - as the SAS had claimed.

Shockingly, no one was particularly shocked or even surprised. It was widely acknowledged that Special Forces were a law unto themselves. Based at Bagram Airfield, 500 kms to our north they had little, if any, situational awareness of events on the ground and no accountability to Task Force Helmand, reporting instead to an American led ‘Special Operations Force’ (SOF).?

SOF night raids like this one, boastfully described by one of General Petreus’ senior aides as an "industrial strength counter-terrorism killing machine" were commonplace right across Afghanistan. The prevalence with which lethal force was required to prevent concealed weapons being brought to bear was subject to much speculation. It seemed that special forces were not accountable to the same rules of engagement as the rest of us.

As Major General Adam Finlay, an Australian special forces officer himself, would later observe, the general consensus was that special forces soldiers were “self righteous entitled prick[s] who believed the rules of the regular army didn't apply to them.”

Ethics matter in war, principally because it's the difference between winning and losing.?

As one Danish officer I worked with observed, “ISAF won all the battles but NATO lost the war”. How was the most powerful military alliance on the planet defeated by a disorganised bunch of religious zealots, desperate bandits and illiterate farmers?

Perhaps more importantly, with war raging on its eastern border, how does NATO transform itself from a losing organisation into a winning one? The stakes could hardly be higher.

Today sees the publication of Ground Truth, an anthology in memory of Colonel David Benest, OBE soldier-scholar, inspiration, brother in arms and friend. Its many contributors examine the ethical deficiencies in the operational conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by Western armed forces and the consequences, not just for the military but for the democratic societies they serve to protect. It's an important volume to which I am honoured to have made a modest contribution.

This book is for you if you care about democracy, if you expect your military to be accountable for its actions on your behalf and, above all, if you want your armed forces, in the face of existential threats to our nation, to stand ready to fight and to win.

GROUND TRUTH: The moral component in contemporary British warfare.

UK Ministry of Defence NATO The British Army Royal United Services Institute 英国布里斯托大学 Bristol Community Ferry Boats Limited The Times and Sunday Times BBC News Wavell Room Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

George Arbuthnott Josh Glancy Hannah O'Grady David Collins Jonathan Beale Deborah Haynes Lucy Fisher Samantha Naila Haque Timo Kivim?ki Lily Hamourtziadou PhD Johnny Bowron DSO OBE Marc Overton CB TD DL VR Aaron Edwards Frank Ledwidge Nicholas Mercer Mike Martin Ben Wallace Rupert Clements Ed Murphy Rupert Pim Lee Bland GCGI VR Niels Klingenberg Vistisen Peter K. M. Edwin B. Nick Sturge MBE Monika Radclyffe Kimberley Brook Marty Reid Mike Paton Mustafa Rampuri Simon Hall Carey McClellan Tamsin Denbigh Roisin Tobin-Brooke Manoj Thacker Steve Pope Mike Glasspell Nicholas Tilley Ellen McWilliams James Crispin Swayne Guy Lock MBE Ruth Morris Anna Yerokhina Brian Sharkey Briony Phillips Professor Palie Smart Theo Farrell Christina Lamb OBE