SCOTTISH National Party defence spokesman Stewart McDonald is right to demand that the government bring forward legislation to “inject some much-needed accountability into the armed forces” in response to accusations of SAS killings of civilians in Afghanistan.
Nothing is more unlikely than it doing so. Boris Johnson sidestepped calls for an inquiry by saying that Parliament does not discuss questions relating to special forces.
A Conservative leadership contest makes the chance of an independent inquiry, as demanded by the SNP and Labour figures including ex-army officer Dan Jarvis, even slimmer.
Cold warrior extraordinaire Tom Tugendhat sees no need: the Ministry of Defence can certainly be trusted to “sort it out,” he says, though the ministry has reacted angrily to the claims, failing to respond to evidence presented in the BBC Panorama documentary that officers may have concealed these crimes from the Royal Military Police.
Vying to burnish their “patriotic” credentials, few rivals will risk looking less pro-military than ex-soldier Tugendhat.
Anyway the government is consistent in its efforts to shield the armed forces, or other state agents, from scrutiny.
Last year it published legislation making it harder to prosecute soldiers for crimes committed abroad.
It is seeking to pass a law with similar intent regarding crimes committed during the so-called “Troubles” in Northern Ireland, supposedly to protect soldiers from “vexatious” legal claims.
Its propaganda war against “lefty lawyers” does not simply apply to those trying to stop illegal deportations, but to anyone trying to hold power to account through the courts.
So we will not get an independent inquiry similar to Australia’s Brereton report, which found that special forces had killed at least 39 prisoners and civilians in cold blood in Afghanistan; at least without a level of political pressure that seems unlikely to come from the Labour front bench.
We are more likely to get demonisation and even punishment of those exposing these claims.
The shadow of the pending deportation of Julian Assange hangs over every discussion of this nature: he is wanted in the United States precisely for publishing details of that country’s war crimes, including direct cockpit video evidence of the massacre of civilians, and our government and courts have been shamefully willing to appease Washington in this matter.
Anyone claiming to be alarmed at reports of war crimes — rather than irritated at their being made public — should be challenged on what they are doing to stop Assange’s deportation.
Secondly, despite Tugendhat’s claim that the MoD can be relied on to “sort it out,” the cover-ups and obfuscation that appear to characterise the case dealt with in the Panorama claims — which relate to 54 alleged killings by one SAS unit in one year of the 20-year occupation — suggest that the scale of civilian killings by troops may have been far greater.
As with the police, exposure of any particular breach of the “rules” will be put down to “bad apples,” and MPs calling for an inquiry have been careful to first stress the usual platitudes about our armed forces being an example to the world.
But war is brutal and brutalising, and the reams of evidence of war crimes committed in the course of the Afghan and Iraq wars show that this is as true of our armed forces and our allies’ as it is of adversaries whose atrocities are taken for granted, like Russia.
The real lesson of exposés like Panorama’s is not to fall for the idea that British troop deployments are positive for the countries affected.
As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has prompted some on the left to park their criticisms of Nato, these reports demonstrate how important it is that we do not do so.
The legacy of our foreign wars over the last two decades is one of terror and bloodshed. The way to stop war crimes is to stop the wars.
