Dirty Wars

by Jeremy Scahill

  Weeks later, in early April, Starkey received an unexpected phone call. “NATO phoned me up,” Starkey told me, “and they said, ‘Jerome, we just wanted to let you know that we’re preparing to put out a press release. We’re changing our version of events.’” A so-called joint investigation had “determined that international forces were responsible for the deaths of three women who were in the same compound where two men were killed by the joint Afghan-international patrol searching for a Taliban insurgent.” The report added, “While investigators could not conclusively determine how or when the women died, due to lack of forensic evidence, they concluded that the women were accidentally killed as a result of the joint force firing at the men.”

  The statement maintained that the men had shown “hostile intent” but were “later determined not to be insurgents.” “The [original] statement noted the women had been bound and gagged, but this information was taken from an initial report by the international members of the joint force who were not familiar with Islamic burial customs,” the statement said. When Starkey received the phone call, he had just filed another story for the Times of London. This was his most explosive story to date, based on a conversation with a senior Afghan official involved in the government investigation, as well as members of the family.

  The delegation had finished its report, and McChrystal was briefed on the findings as well. The press release, followed by news that McChrystal was ordering a second review of the incident, was meant to preempt a gruesome revelation. “US special forces soldiers dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath of the botched night raid, then washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened,” Starkey asserted in his story, which came out the following day. Afghan investigators told Starkey that the US soldiers had also removed bullets from the scene. Their investigation had determined that eleven bullets were fired, but only seven had been found. The missing bullets, combined with photographic evidence and witness testimony, had brought them to their conclusion about what the US Special Forces had done. “In what culture in the world do you invite...people for a party and meanwhile kill three women?” the senior Afghan official told Starkey. “The dead bodies were just eight meters from where they were preparing the food. The Americans, they told us the women were dead for 14 hours.” The Afghan government investigators had confirmed what the family had told Starkey—and later me—about the US forces digging bullets out of the women’s bodies. “Because we were aware that what we were looking into was potentially so controversial, we wanted to make sure that we were on solid ground,” Starkey told me, referring to the digging out of the bullets. “That allegation I left out of my original story. But when I heard it again, from this very senior, very credible Afghan source, we published that.”

  THAT SAME DAY, the New York Times reported some of the conclusions of the Afghan investigation. “We came to the conclusion that the NATO patrol was responsible for the killing of the two men and the three women, and that there was evidence of tampering in the corridor inside the compound by the members” of the assault team, said the lead investigator, Merza Mohammed Yarmad. “There was a mess at the scene.” NATO said the allegations had prompted another investigation but nonetheless rejected them outright. “We strongly deny having dug any bullets out of bodies. There simply is no evidence,” said a NATO military official. The officer appointed to conduct the second review was put under McChrystal’s direct “operational control” while still conducting the investigation. The results remained classified, but NATO continued to insist that there was “no evidence of a cover-up.”

  AS RAGE IN AFGHANISTAN MOUNTED over civilian deaths in raids like that in Gardez, there was a fierce debate within NATO about how to respond. At one point there was a plan for General McChrystal to travel to the village to personally apologize to the family. Instead, the actual commander of the force responsible for the raid would travel to Gardez and in the process reveal exactly which unit was behind the gruesome killings and cover-up of the massacre. It would also publicly reveal the face of JSOC. On the morning of April 8, shortly after 11:00, Admiral William McRaven, JSOC’s secretive commander, pulled up to the gates of the Sharabuddin compound.

  The family had been told the night before that they would be receiving an important visitor. They thought it would be McChrystal himself. Mohammed Sabir and other family members told me that they had actually discussed killing McChrystal when he came the next day, but their local imam counseled them to instead show him hospitality and listen to him. Faced with this imminent meeting, the family decided to call an international witness: Jerome Starkey. NATO had tried to conceal the details and timing of the visit, but once Starkey got the call, he began the half-day drive to Gardez from Kabul. “We were obviously very keen to make sure that we were there when it happened and that was very, very difficult because nobody wanted to tell us. And I think, from the sort of PR spin side of things, that the image management within NATO probably didn’t really want to draw attention,” he told me. “They admitted they’d got it wrong. Again they were hoping it was going to go away but it wasn’t.”

  Starkey arrived at the family compound early in the morning and was sitting with the family drinking tea and talking. “At about eleven o’clock, up rolls a huge convoy of massive American armored cars, armored land cruisers, countless, I mean literally countless Afghan officers and soldiers,” Starkey recalled. “And among them is a man wearing a uniform that I recognized as sort of U.S. Marines, but it says U.S. Navy on his lapel.” His name tag simply read “McRaven.” “I didn’t know who he was at that stage,” said Starkey, one of the most experienced Western reporters in Afghanistan at the time. “And so, there unfolded perhaps one of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever seen in Afghanistan as they off-loaded a sheep from the back of an Afghan Army pickup truck. And three Afghan soldiers knelt on this sheep on the street outside the home where this operation had taken place, in the exact same place where these soldiers had been when they started the raid. And there with a knife, they sharpened the knife and there was an Afghan Army mullah who started praying and they were offering to sacrifice this sheep.”

  Hajji Sharabuddin, the family elder, intervened. “Don’t do it,” he told the soldiers. Starkey said that the Afghan forces and McRaven’s men had put the family in a difficult position. “When people come to your gate and ask forgiveness, according to Afghan law, it’s difficult to reject them,” Sharabuddin told Starkey, who added that the practice was “an ancient Afghan ritual known as nanawate where you offer to sacrifice a sheep at somebody’s door in order to ask for forgiveness.” The family, Starkey said, “was left with no option, no honorable dignified option other than to let these men into [their] house.”

  The Afghan soldiers tried to prevent Starkey’s photographer, Jeremy Kelly, from taking photos and to expel Starkey from the room once McRaven had entered. But the family insisted he remain. Otherwise, there would have been no evidence that this extraordinary event occurred, no proof of who the killers were. Inside the house, the commander of JSOC stood face-to-face with the survivors of the raid, including the fathers and husbands of the women his men had killed. “Admiral McRaven stood up and he gave an extraordinary speech. He drew similarities between himself and Hajji Sharabuddin, and he described them both as spiritual men, as men of God. He drew comparisons and found similarities between Christianity and Islam,” Starkey recalled. “Sir, you and I are very different,” McRaven told Sharabuddin. “You are a family man with many children and many friends. I am a soldier. I have spent most of my career overseas away from my family, but I have children as well and my heart grieves for you. But we have one thing in common. We have the same god. He is a god who shows great love and compassion. I pray for you today, sir, that in your grief he will show you love and compassion and ease your pain. I also pray today that he will show mercy on me and my men for this awful tragedy.” Starkey said McRaven then told the family, “My soldiers w
ere responsible for deaths of these members of your family,” and then apologized. The Afghan generals handed the family a pile of money—almost $30,000, according to relatives. Major international news outlets reported that Hajji Sharabuddin had accepted McRaven’s apology.

  Months later, when I sat with Sharabuddin at his home, his anger seemed only to have hardened. “I don’t accept their apology. I would not trade my sons for the whole kingdom of the United States,” he told me, holding up a picture of his sons. “Initially, we were thinking that Americans were the friends of Afghans, but now we think that Americans themselves are terrorists. Americans are our enemy. They bring terror and destruction. Americans not only destroyed my house, they destroyed my family. The Americans unleashed the Special Forces on us. These Special Forces, with the long beards, did cruel, criminal things.”

  “We call them the American Taliban,” added Mohammed Tahir, the father of Gulalai, one of the slain women. As I spoke to other family members, Mohammed Sabir, whose brothers and wife were killed, approached me with his six-year-old daughter, Tamana. He told me that we should leave soon and head back to Kabul because the Taliban control the roads at night. As we stood there, he asked his daughter, “Tamana, who did the Americans kill?” She bounced against her father’s legs as she recited the list of dead. She then stared into the distance, blankly. “She remembers everything from that night,” Sabir told me. “The Americans’ arrival, their shootings, the destruction, everything.” As we loaded up the car, he told me, “I have this message to people of America to help us: take these special forces of theirs back, and have them sentenced because they are killing innocent people.”

  FOR MORE THAN A YEAR, I tried to get access to any documents the US military had about the incident at Gardez. I asked for the “after action” reports and for any information on any disciplinary actions taken against the soldiers who killed the three women and two men and then dug the bullets from the women’s bodies. I filed Freedom of Information Act requests that were bounced around the military before ending up in an unnamed “agency” awaiting review. As of this writing, in early 2013, I have received no documents. Starkey told me his attempts to get documents had met the same fate.

  Not long after I returned from Afghanistan in late 2010, I met with General Hugh Shelton, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and asked him about the Gardez incident. He told me he was not familiar with all of the details. And though he said that an internal review should be done on behalf of the commander to determine what happened and if any soldiers should face a court martial, he said he believed that it should not be investigated further. “If that police chief [Daoud], and those two pregnant women were killed, as a result of JSOC, based on all the intelligence that they had pointing to this is going to be a terrorist operation that’s taking place here, and if they go flying in, and try to get to this place, and meet any kind of resistance at all—I mean, shots are fired—then I’m sorry that they got killed,” he told me. “But in the wrong place, at the wrong time, our guys were doing what they thought they should do, and protecting themselves and their buddies in the process. I’m OK with that. I don’t think it ought to be investigated; I think you write it off as one of those damn acts of war.”

  The fact that Daoud was a US-trained police commander meant little to Shelton. “Now, just because he’s a police chief, he could have been a terrorist as well. He could have been working both sides,” he told me. “The two pregnant women? The fact that they were pregnant is very, very unfortunate. But it’s also unfortunate that they were women. But on the other hand, I’ve been shot at by women myself. So, that doesn’t—and I mean shot at. So that doesn’t excuse them. They die just like men do if they shoot at us.”

  As the pace of night raids increased in Afghanistan under McChrystal, the Special Ops Forces continued to enjoy the freedom to operate with no accountability for their actions, a fact that did not seem lost on McChrystal. “You better be out there hitting four or five targets tonight,” McChrystal would tell a Navy SEAL in Afghanistan, before adding, “I’m going to have to scold you in the morning for it, though.” But with each new raid, more protests began spreading across Afghanistan.

  The conditions that drove Matt Hoh to resign his State Department post in protest in late 2009 persisted in 2010. If anything, things had gotten worse. Civilian deaths from NATO operations had killed upward of ninety civilians in the first few months of 2010, a 75 percent increase from the previous year. And it wasn’t just in night raids. More than thirty Afghans were killed at checkpoint shootings from the time McChrystal took charge in Afghanistan to the spring of 2010. “In the nine-plus months I’ve been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it,” McChrystal conceded in March 2010, during a teleconference with US troops. “We’ve shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat.”

  While McChrystal ostensibly put in place greater restrictions on night raids and almost entirely stopped air strikes, the ground truth was still the same: innocent people were dying and Afghans were growing ever more enraged. By May 2010, the United States was conducting as many as 1,000 night raids a month. US Special Ops Forces “were authorized to shoot any armed man on sight,” reported Gareth Porter, “so the raids were resulting in many Afghan civilians being killed during the raids, all of whom were automatically categorized by SOF as insurgents.”

  When I met with Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the former Taliban spokesperson, in late 2010, he told me bluntly that the US raids were aiding the Taliban, just as Hoh alleged. “They are encouraging the people to become extremist,” he said as we sat in his home in Kabul, where he was under de facto house arrest, being watched day and night by Afghan police officers positioned outside his building. US political and military leaders, he said, “are thinking, ‘When we scare the people, they should be quiet.’ But this is a different nation. When you are killing one person, four or five others rise against you. If you are killing five people, twenty, at least, are rising against you. When you are disrespecting the people or the honor of the people in one village, the whole village becomes against you. This is creating hatred against Americans.”

  The US killing of civilians, combined with a widely held perception that the Afghan government existed only for facilitating the corruption of powerful warlords, drug dealers and war criminals, had produced a situation in which the Taliban and the Haqqani network gained support from communities in the Pashtun heartland that would not otherwise be backing them. Zaeef told me that since 2005, when he was released from the US prison at Guantánamo, “the Taliban have become stronger.” “Are the Taliban coming from the sky?” Zaeef asked. “No, it’s new people.”

  When I asked Hoh what he thought of Zaeef’s comments, he said they were accurate. “I think we’re engendering more hostility. We’re wasting a lot of very good assets going after midlevel guys who don’t threaten the United States or have no capacity to threaten the United States,” he told me. “If we say that al Qaeda recruits based on an ideology that they are defending the Muslim world against Western attack, this only feeds into that ideology.”

  By June 2010, Afghanistan had become the longest-running war in American history. That summer, the number of US dead passed the 1,000 mark. From June 2009 to May 2010, the number of improvised explosive device attacks had swelled from 250 per month to more than 900. As the situation in Afghanistan deteriorated and the Taliban and other insurgent groups gained ground, a stunning scandal rocked the US military and the Special Ops community that would ultimately lead to the resignation and retirement of General McChrystal, one of the architects of the post-9/11 US killing machine. But his demise had nothing to do with any of his actions with JSOC in Iraq or his involvement in covering up the friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman, the former NFL player turned Army Ranger i
n Afghanistan in 2004 or his role in transforming JSOC into a global hit squad. Instead, McChrystal was brought down by an article in Rolling Stone magazine written by Michael Hastings that captured McChrystal and his inner circle making disparaging remarks about President Obama, Vice President Biden and other top US civilian officials. Before the issue of Rolling Stone even hit newsstands, excerpts of it boomeranged throughout the chambers of power and the media in Washington. McChrystal was finished, his run as the commander of the most elite units in the US military brought down by a story published in an issue of a magazine that featured on its cover an almost naked Lady Gaga sporting a brassiere with two rifles protruding from it.