UK leaders warned over war crimes scrutiny

Serious UK prime ministers should be afraid to discipline special forces troops over war crimes because they are so popular with the public. That’s according to Dr. Simon Anglim, who wrote a lengthy essay on the UK’s new ranger and special operations units.

The essay makes a range of (in fairness, very interesting) points about shadowy deployments overseas — including to Ukraine. But the King’s College War Studies lecturer — yes, it’s the KCL War Studies people again — also warned that the current Haddon-Cave inquiry into war crimes in Afghanistan could have serious implications for the use of UK Special Forces (UKSF).

UKSF is distinct from the ranger units and remains heavily protected from even basic democratic scrutiny. The government refuses to comment on what they do — even in parliament.

It’s a distinctly British practice. None of our major allies refuse point blank to comment on their special forces operations. Yet we do. As the now-defunct Remote Control project pointed out in a 2016 report:

this blanket opacity policy is not standard practice, and the UK is lagging behind its allies on transparency over its use of Special Operations Forces (SOF). The US, Australia, and Canada are all more transparent about their deployment of SOF than the UK.

The practice is also deeply undemocratic:

This leaves the British public, and the parliament that represents them, among the least-informed of their foreign allies about the government’s current military activities in places like Syria and Libya stymying informed debate about the UK’s role in some of the most important conflicts of our age.

So what’s happening then?

Special Forces afraid of the light

Anglim said the threat of accountability over the Afghan allegations was “a shadow hanging over UKSF”:

The ongoing Inquiry, presided over by Lord Justice Haddon-Cave, investigating allegations that UKSF members committed unlawful killings in Afghanistan in 2010.

Ireland legacy allegations were also an issue. The SAS investigation:

runs concurrently with the Northern Ireland Coroner’s ruling that soldiers of 22 SAS were ‘not justified’ in killing three members of the Irish Republican Army in an ambush at Clonoe in Northern Ireland in 1992, and the stream of further allegations of unlawful conduct it has set off.

As Anglim pointed out, the cases are sub judice — ongoing — currently. But he expressed a concern they:

could strengthen demands for UKSF to face greater Parliamentary scrutiny, possibly via a Select Committee similar to the one overseeing Intelligence.

Clearly, public scrutiny is a terrifying prospect.

Scrutiny and pressure

This, Anglim said, could result in political pressures which might limit the use of SF:

Given the potential for security breaches and increased hostile scrutiny, this may have a freezing effect on future UKSF deployments and could alter the relationship between the Directorate and its political masters.

Presumably by ‘hostile scrutiny’ he means from the press and public. Anglim suggested he might write about it more once the cases are resolved:

but it is worth noting that, given their high status with the British public, no serious Prime Minister would want to impose collective punishment on Britain’s Special Forces and besides, they are too valuable as national assets to do this too severely if at all.

Anglim makes some very good points in his essay. He is also the definition of an establishment academic. He has worked with the US Department of Defence (currently ridiculously rebranded as the Department of War), the Sultanate of Oman, various establishment think-tanks and has given evidence on readiness to the defence committee.

Here he is talking about how Covid and Brexit affected the military:

But his warnings that some sort of basic accountability could reduce Britain’s ability to conduct secret military operations are telling. As with all things the British establishment says you must turn them upside down to understand them.

Public and journalistic scrutiny are good, actually, because they are a threat to the British ruling class’s hunger for war, war-profits — and for staying close to US imperial foreign policy whatever the cost and whoever is president. The more scrutiny, then, the better. And if ‘serious’ prime ministers would be afraid of the light of said scrutiny, let’s hope for an ‘unserious’ one.

Featured image via the Canary