McChrystal and McRaven had pressed Obama to surge US forces in Afghanistan and, along with other powerful US military figures, including Petraeus, convinced the new commander in chief that it was the right course. Obama and McRaven “actually have a fairly good relationship, and McRaven, when McChrystal was in Afghanistan, worked hand in glove with McChrystal, designing the counter al Qaeda strategies,” a source close to the administration told me at the time. McRaven “played a significant, hidden role in developing the McChrystal plan that Obama eventually signed off on.”
In December 2009, Obama announced a surge in Afghanistan. By the summer of 2010, Obama wanted to increase the number of US troops in the country from 68,000 to 100,000 US forces. Their goal, as President Obama explained in late 2009, was “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to prevent its capacity to threaten America and our allies in the future” and to “reverse the Taliban’s momentum.” Obama asserted that he was “convinced that our security is at stake” and “that new attacks are being plotted as I speak. This is no idle danger; no hypothetical threat.” To confront that “threat,” Obama chose General McChrystal as his man in Afghanistan.
In appointing McChrystal as the commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and commander of US forces in Afghanistan, Obama revealed the extent to which his counterterrorism policies centered on JSOC. Obama selected a man who was more closely aligned than almost any other figure with the most aggressive military policies of the Bush administration, except, perhaps, General Petraeus, to run the war Obama would soon claim as his own. “I was somewhat stunned when McChrystal was selected to be the commander in Afghanistan,” recalled Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who had struggled with JSOC’s secrecy during the Bush administration. “This guy has been kept away from the public. He’s been a clandestine operator. He’s a guy who’s used to direct action. He’s a guy who’s used to getting his own way. He’s a guy who’s used to having it all happen without any transparency.”
Other sources with whom I spoke put a different spin on McChrystal’s appointment. They pointed to the problems the conventional command had long had with JSOC’s forces conducting operations without informing them and observed that such actions were undermining the COIN, or counterinsurgency, strategy. “The Kabul Command just felt as if they were outside of the picture, JSOC was out doing its own show, JSOC wasn’t toeing the line with respect to counterinsurgency doctrine” and “most of the tactics that were being used by JSOC in fact did undermine the legitimacy of the [Afghan] government,” said Scott Horton, the human rights lawyer who has studied JSOC extensively. “So I think one way of reconciling these things, was in fact to put Stanley McChrystal in charge of the command in Kabul. And make him implement the counterinsurgency doctrine. Put in someone that JSOC would have to listen to.”
Although many of these Special Ops Forces operated outside of the coalition chain of command, in his review of the war effort in Afghanistan, McChrystal made it clear that closer coordination with JSOC was among his key goals and that he sought to bring SOFs into the overall strategy of defeating the insurgency. Vice Admirals McRaven and Robert Harward (a JSOC veteran and the head of a new detention task force), were brought into the White House Afghanistan strategy meetings in the fall of 2009. Like McChrystal, McRaven and Harward pressed for a “heavy, heavy, heavy COIN presence” in major population centers, while using CT teams to stalk targets throughout the country. The region near the border with Pakistan was to receive renewed attention, and McRaven also wanted to be sure that operations inside of Pakistan would not be off the table. “They’re focusing on the main population centers that they think they can save with manpower on the ground, and everything else will be cross border,” a staffer on the NSC told journalist Spencer Ackerman in November 2009. “JSOC is already ramping up for that.”
As the man credited with systematizing the mass killing and detention of suspected insurgents in Iraq, McChrystal may have seemed an unlikely champion of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. But he made a show of embracing its core tenets, such as a significant troop surge and a renewed focus on securing population centers and promoting good governance. During his confirmation hearing in June, McChrystal had stressed that bringing down coalition-caused deaths and injuries was “essential to [the] credibility” of the mission, and that a tactical victory there would be “hollow and unsustainable” if it resulted in popular outrage. The “complete elimination of al-Qaeda” from Pakistan and Afghanistan was still a primary goal. However, he said, the metric of success in Afghanistan would “not be [the number of] enemy killed” but “the number of Afghans shielded from violence.” McChrystal issued directives that significantly reduced air strikes in Afghanistan, which had been associated with a staggering number of civilian deaths. In May 2009—a month before McChrystal’s confirmation—a US air strike killed more than ninety-seven Afghan civilians in Farah Province, many of them women and children. McChrystal also developed new rules for house raids that required that “any entry into an Afghan house should always be accomplished by Afghan National Security Forces, with the support of local authorities.”
While McChrystal and the “COIN Doctrine” received much hype in the media, the reality on the ground was that the United States was simultaneously escalating two wars in Afghanistan: the public COIN-centric campaign of the conventional military forces and the covert war being waged by Special Ops Forces. The week that McChrystal was confirmed as the Afghan war commander, 1,000 Special Operations Forces and supporting personnel deployed to the country, bringing the total number of SOFs in Afghanistan to about 5,000. JSOC’s High Value Target list was no longer limited to al Qaeda; McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy needed teeth, and as conventional forces worked to secure the cities and towns, the SOF teams set to mowing down the midrank Taliban leadership as well as other militant groups such as the Haqqani network. “By any objective reckoning [McChrystal] was absolutely unqualified to do anything except carry out targeted killing. That’s all he had done for five years, from 2003 to 2008,” historian Gareth Porter told me. Porter, who spent extensive time in Afghanistan during McChrystal’s tenure, said that putting McChrystal in charge of the war “really sent the signal that the United States was going to in fact be putting more and more emphasis on targeted killing in Afghanistan. It’s as simple as that—and that’s exactly, of course, what happened.”
Upon assuming command in Afghanistan, McChrystal escalated JSOC-style night raids and expanded the list of names on the kill list in the country. By October 2009, there were more than 2,000 people on the Joint Prioritized Effects List. In May 2009, Special Ops Forces were conducting about twenty raids a month in Afghanistan. By November, under McChrystal, that had increased to ninety and was climbing steadily. Afghan forces would be used to gain entry, but according to the new rules, these raids were conducted by US Special Forces. By December 2009, the number of raids carried out by JSOC each month had increased fourfold. “This is Gen. McChrystal’s play,” a senior US official told the Los Angeles Times, “They have to show they can reverse momentum. He has to show he is making headway.” The uptick in raids also resulted in a swelling of the ranks of prisoners taken into custody.
As in Iraq years earlier, JSOC ran its own detainee operations in Afghanistan. Prisoners they believed had intelligence that could lead to HVTs were taken to secretive US-run detention centers, known as Field Detention Sites, situated on US bases throughout Afghanistan. Although NATO had guidelines limiting the detention of militants by coalition forces to ninety-six hours, Special Ops Forces could find ways to hold detainees at interim detention facilities for up to nine weeks. There was also a secret prison within the larger Bagram prison, known as the Black Jail, for holding HVTs. As with Camp NAMA in Iraq, the Black Jail was off-limits to the Red Cross. Human rights workers who investigated the facility reported forced nudity, environmental manipulation and solitary confinement, and former prisoners described b
eing beaten while in custody.
Although Obama had pledged to defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan, McChrystal’s time at the helm during the war would see a notable rise in support for the Taliban and a record number of US soldiers killed.
OBAMA’S EMERGING TWILIGHT WARS in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia received very little media attention in the early stages of his presidency. The overwhelming focus was on Afghanistan and the debate over the troop surge, but there was a far more significant development in the works. The White House, working closely with General McChrystal, began to apply its emerging global kill list doctrine inside Afghanistan, buried within the larger, public war involving conventional US forces. When I visited Afghanistan in 2010, Afghan police commanders told me that US Special Ops teams would enter their areas of responsibility without coordinating with local authorities or informing the main US military bases in the area. They would conduct operations, sometimes killing people in night raids or snatching people and flying them to other provinces. The raids, the commanders explained, were causing a major backlash against the conventional US forces and the US-supported Afghan police units. They told me that the night raids were actually helping the Taliban.
The White House was well aware by that point of how serious the damage was in Afghanistan. In September 2009, a senior US diplomat in Afghanistan submitted a letter of resignation, in which he delivered a stinging indictment of the US war. Matthew Hoh, a decorated combat marine who had done multiple tours in Iraq and went on to serve as the top US civilian official in Zabul Province in Afghanistan, asserted that the “U.S. and NATO presence and operations in Pashtun valleys and villages” amounted to “an occupation force against which the insurgency is justified.” In a letter to the State Department, Hoh stated bluntly, “The United States military presence in Afghanistan greatly contributes to the legitimacy and strategic message of the Pashtun insurgency.” He wrote:
I find specious the reasons we ask for bloodshed and sacrifice from our young men and women in Afghanistan. If honest, our stated strategy of securing Afghanistan to prevent al-Qaeda resurgence or regrouping would require us to additionally invade and occupy western Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, etc. Our presence in Afghanistan has only increased destabilization and insurgency in Pakistan where we rightly fear a toppled or weakened Pakistani government may lose control of its nuclear weapons.
The Washington Post reported that Hoh’s letter “sent ripples all the way to the White House.” Senior US officials, including the US ambassador and Obama’s Af/Pak envoy, Richard Holbrooke, tried to offer Hoh other jobs to keep him from resigning. Holbrooke told the Post that he asked Hoh, “If he really wanted to affect policy and help reduce the cost of the war on lives and treasure,” shouldn’t he be “inside the building, rather than outside, where you can get a lot of attention but you won’t have the same political impact?” Hoh ultimately declined the job offers and went public with his opposition to the war.
When I met Hoh soon after his resignation, we discussed the night raids and the role JSOC was playing in Afghanistan. Hoh made clear that he had tremendous respect for Special Ops teams and that he believed there are dangerous people who “need to be killed.” But Hoh questioned the use of such an elite force to fight against what had effectively become a popular insurgency against a foreign occupation. JSOC, he said, is “the best strike force the world’s ever known,” yet “we’ve got them in Afghanistan chasing after mid-level Taliban leaders who are not threatening the United States, who are only fighting us really because we’re in their valley.” Hoh told me, “We found ourselves in this Special Operations form of attrition warfare.” He estimated that there were “fifty to a hundred” al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan at the time.
Under McChrystal, the pace of night raids accelerated as JSOC mowed its way down a kill list that seemed bottomless. McChrystal knew how to promote his agenda with the White House, and when he fought for his vision to be embraced, he did so “with the same fearlessness he used to track down terrorists in Iraq: Figure out how your enemy operates, be faster and more ruthless than everybody else, then take the fuckers out,” noted journalist Michael Hastings, who traveled with McChrystal and spent time in Afghanistan. McChrystal and McRaven’s Special Ops task forces began expanding the target list, going after Taliban “facilitators” and “suspected militants.” The intelligence feeding the operations relied heavily on Afghan sources. Hoh told me it was common for Afghans to accuse their enemies of being Taliban operatives to settle grudges over land disputes or tribal conflicts. The feeding of such false intel to the American forces, in turn, created an environment in which a tremendous number of innocent Afghans found themselves facing US commandos bursting into their homes in the middle of the night, snatching or killing people. “A lot of times, yeah, the right guys would get targeted and the right guys would get killed,” Hoh recalled. “And then, plenty of other times, the wrong people would get killed. Sometimes it’d be innocent families. Other times it would be people and their families who had been turned in because of grudges or because of rivalries that existed well before we showed up. It was very much, whoever got to the Americans first was the person who turned his rival, or his enemy, or his antagonist in.”
Hoh said there were also times when a JSOC task force “would kill someone who was important to us. They would kill a tribal leader or some type of government administrator who was working with us or we were making inroads with. In the middle of the night, you end up shooting the guy.” He added: “There’s nothing like going into a village in the middle of the night, knocking a door down and killing a woman or child to just undo” any progress civilian or conventional military officials had made in areas around Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, I investigated several botched night raids, in which it was clear that innocent people had been targeted. None of them was more gruesome than what happened just outside of Gardez in Paktia Province, in February 2010.
ON FEBRUARY 12, 2010, Mohammed Daoud Sharabuddin had much to celebrate. He was a respected police officer who had recently received an important promotion, becoming head of intelligence in one of the districts of Paktia Province, in southeast Afghanistan. He was also the father of a newborn son. That night, Daoud and his family were celebrating the naming of the boy, a ritual that takes place on the sixth day of a child’s life. The party was taking place at their compound, in the village of Khataba, a short distance from Gardez, the capital of Paktia. There were two dozen people at their home for the celebration, along with three musicians. “We invited many guests and had music,” Daoud’s brother-in-law Mohammed Tahir told me when I visited the family. “During the party, people were dancing our traditional dance, the Attan.”
The Sharabuddin family was not ethnic Pashtun, the dominant—almost exclusive—ethnicity of the Taliban. Their main language was Dari. Many of the men in the family were clean-shaven, or wore only mustaches. They had long opposed the Taliban. Daoud, the police commander, had gone through dozens of US training programs, and his home was filled with photos of himself with American soldiers. Another family member was a prosecutor for the US-backed local government, and a third was the vice chancellor at the local university. The area where they lived was near a Taliban stronghold, and the Haqqani network—an insurgent group that the United States alleged had close ties to al Qaeda and Pakistan’s ISI spy organization—had been staging attacks against government and NATO forces. So when they began to notice something was amiss outside their compound, the family feared it might be a Taliban attack on their home.
It was around 3:30 a.m., as the celebration was winding down, that the family and their guests noticed the main light to the compound had been shut off by someone outside the party. Around that time, one of the musicians went into the courtyard to use the outhouse and saw lasers scoping the grounds from the perimeter. The man ran back inside and told the others. “Daoud went to see what was happening,” Tahir told me. “He thought the Taliban had come. They were already on the roof.” As soon
as Daoud and his fifteen-year-old son, Sediqullah, stepped out into the courtyard, they were both hit by sniper rounds and fell to the ground. The family began hearing the voices of their attackers. Some were shouting commands in English, others in Pashtun. The family suspected the attackers were Americans.
Panic broke out inside the house.
“All the children were shouting, ‘Daoud is shot! Daoud is shot!’” Tahir recalled. Daoud’s eldest son was behind his father and younger brother when they were hit. “When my father went down, I screamed,” he told me. “Everybody—my uncles, the women, everybody came out of the home and ran to the corridors of the house. I sprinted to them and warned them not to come out as there were Americans attacking and they would kill them.” Meanwhile, Daoud’s brothers, Mohammed Saranwal Zahir and Mohammed Sabir, tried to come to his aid. “When I ran outside, Daoud was lying here,” Mohammed Sabir told me as we stood in the dusty courtyard at the very spot where Daoud was shot. “We carried Daoud inside.”
As Daoud lay bleeding out on the floor in a hallway inside the compound, his brother Zahir said he was going to try to stop the attack by speaking to the Americans. He was a local district attorney and knew some English. “We work for the government!” he shouted outside. “Look at our police vehicles. You have wounded a police commander!” Three women from the family, Bibi Saleha, aged thirty-seven, and Bibi Shirin, aged twenty-two, and Gulalai, aged eighteen, clutched at Zahir’s clothes, pleading with him not to step outside. It didn’t make a difference. Zahir was gunned down where he stood, with sniper rounds hitting him and the three women. Zahir, Bibi Saleha and Bibi Shirin died quickly. Gulalai and Daoud held on for hours, but their besieged family members could do nothing for them and they eventually died from their injuries.
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