Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins

by Andrew Cockburn

  All of which leaves us with the question: What was the intended effect of the high-value-target kill/capture program in Afghanistan? Superficially, the object was straightforward and obvious: kill the enemy. Petraeus put it this way: “If you’re trying to take down an insurgency, you take away its safe havens; you take away its leaders.” In a slightly more detailed explanation, a lower-ranking official told me: “The intended effect was to disorganize the Taliban and put their leaders in fear, make them want to negotiate or surrender for fear of their lives. To put such a hurt on them that they would have to come to the negotiations table.” Marine Major General Richard Mills evoked a bucolic note, declaring in May 2011 that the aim was to make the Taliban “go back to their old way of life and put the rifle down and pick up a spade.”

  The actual effects were certainly audible to anyone who heard Afghans expressing outrage at the violation of their homes by what some took to calling “the American Taliban,” especially when they arrested or killed civilians with no connection to the insurgents. In August 2008, the United States had obligingly bombed a family memorial service in Azizabad, a village near Herat, on the basis of a malign tip-off from a family enemy that this gathering was a major Taliban get-together. At least ninety people were killed, including sixty children. In an infamous February 2010 incident in Gardez, south of Kabul, a JSOC raid killed seven people, including three women, a district attorney, and a police commander. In an attempt to cover up the fiasco once they realized their error, the elite commandos used their knives to cut the bullets out of the women’s bodies and concocted a preposterous story about the women having been murdered by their own relatives in an “honor killing.”

  In the Gardez case, as in Azizabad, the botched intelligence came not from esoteric telephone intercepts and social-network analysis but from some local rival of the murdered family. The May 2012 B-1 strike in Paktia Province that deftly obliterated a family of seven was reportedly also prompted by malign intelligence from a local source. “The bottom line is we have been played like pawns in a very deliberate power-grab scheme by mafia-like warlords,” an officer of great experience wrote me from Afghanistan in a bitter email in 2013 referencing such bloody mishaps. “It is like watching a gang war unfold between the Bloods, Crips, Hells Angels, Aryan Nation, etc.,… and we are prosecuting targets in support of all four gangs. Why? Because we like prosecuting targets as a military. It briefs well. And good briefs = good reputations = good career opportunities. Also, we like people who like us.”

  Whether people were being killed as a result of these malign power plays or misplaced faith in technical intelligence, the United States paid a price with the civilian population. One measure of the cost to the overall U.S. war effort of the obsessive targeting of Taliban “leaders and facilitators” was unearthed by historian Gareth Porter, who noted a direct correlation between a stepped-up rate of raids in Kandahar Province in southern Afghanistan and the number of homemade roadside bombs reported by locals to the American forces. The turn-in rate had been averaging 3.5 percent between November 2009 and March 2010, according to the Joint IED Defeat Organization, which kept track of such matters. But as the Special Operations forces began their onslaught in Kandahar, the percentage of bombs voluntarily reported by locals fell like a stone to 1.5 percent and stayed at that level.

  Clearly, the high-value targeting was counterproductive in terms of winning hearts and minds among the Afghan population, especially in view of the large number of innocents who were gunned down or blown apart. But the campaign did succeed in killing a large number of intended targets. Unfortunately these victims were less likely to be senior Taliban leaders, who for the most part survived in sheltered safety in Pakistan, unmolested by the CIA’s drone campaign, and much more likely to be lower-level provincial and district commanders. These were indeed slaughtered in large numbers, either by air strikes of the kind that dispatched Zabet Amanullah or by ground assaults by the Navy Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU), formerly Seal Team 6, and other Special Operations units. In a series of media interviews in August 2010, for example, Petraeus claimed that in almost 3,000 night raids over 90 days between May and July that year, no less than 365 “insurgent leaders” had been killed or captured, 1,355 Taliban “rank and file” fighters captured, and 1,031 killed. Leaving aside the number of innocent civilians represented in those figures (20 dead for every insurgent leader killed in July 2010, for example), there was clearly a high Taliban loss rate as a result of the escalating campaign. In the northern Afghanistan province of Kunduz, Task Force 373 began a sustained campaign against the Taliban in December 2009. Up until that point the enemy leadership there had been left entirely unmolested by SOF and had become used to the idea that they were invulnerable in their well-guarded compounds. But by the following fall, two successive generations of leaders had been eliminated, and the third was uneasily taking office. By October, seventeen commanders had been killed.

  Special Operations had achieved similar results in Iraq, wiping out hundreds of insurgents thanks to McChrystal’s “industrial counterterrorism.” But, as we have seen, the effects of the operations were not necessarily as advertised. Rivolo’s analysis of 200 high-value-target eliminations had demonstrated that dead or captured Taliban commanders were quickly replaced, almost invariably by someone more aggressive. Just as in Iraq, the insurgency did not “fold in on itself,” despite claims to the contrary from U.S. headquarters. The presumed objective of the campaign was to make the Taliban less effective as a fighting force, but apart from occasional disruptions, there was little sign of this happening. Squadron Leader Keith Dear, a British military intelligence officer who later commanded the Operational Intelligence Support Group at NATO headquarters in Kabul, wrote in 2011: “the Taliban … today conduct attacks as complex, if not more so, than ever before, and continue to show the capability to coordinate and conduct attacks across a wide geographic area simultaneously.” Meanwhile, two years of the targeted-killing campaign had cost the Taliban in many parts of Afghanistan an entire generation of leaders. In many cases, the dead men were locally born and bred, and had ties to their communities; the new commanders, however, often tended to be outsiders appointed by the leadership in Pakistan. They were also younger: Task Force 373’s 2010 campaign in the north reduced the average age of commanders from thirty-five to twenty-five. A twelve-month onslaught in Helmand had similarly brought the average age down by May 2011 from thirty-five to twenty-three. “The Taliban leadership in 2011 is younger, more radical, more violent and less discriminate than in 2001, because of targeted killing,” Squadron Leader Dear bluntly concluded. “This new in-country leadership has increasingly adopted Al Qaeda’s terrorist tactics and have deeper links with Al Qaeda than their predecessors.”

  It appeared that the equation Rivolo had discerned years before with regard to the narcotics business—that targeted killing had little effect on a leadership impervious to risk—still held true in Afghanistan, as it had in Iraq. The young fighters taking command were very unlikely to “pick up a spade.” Most of them had been fighting their entire adult lives. “This is Juma Khan, one of our distinguished commanders,” a Taliban commander named Khalid Amin, recently promoted from foot soldier following the deaths of two predecessors, explained as he guided a visiting film crew around a Taliban cemetery in Baghlan Province in 2011. “He was killed on the front line. This is Maulvi Jabar, our district chief. He was killed with 30 others in a night raid. When he died, the enemy said the Taliban was finished here. But three months later, our Islamic emirate is still strong. We have many more fighters than back then.… These night raids cannot annihilate us. We want to die anyway, so those destined for martyrdom will die in the raids and the rest will continue to fight without fear.”

  “That’s why the Special Forces guys call it ‘mowing the grass,’” Matthew Hoh, who resigned his foreign-service position in Afghanistan in protest at the futility of the war, told me. “They know that the dead leaders will just
be replaced.”

  A marine officer who served two tours in the lethally dangerous neighborhood of Sangin, in northern Helmand Province, gave me a powerful analogy during a long discussion on the drawbacks of high-value targeting. “Insurgencies are like a starfish,” he said thoughtfully. “You cut off one of the legs of a starfish and within weeks it can regrow and become more resilient and be smarter about defending itself. I saw multiple Taliban commanders come in and out. The turnover rate was cyclic. So even if I kill one, it only took two weeks before the next guy came in. They didn’t miss a beat. You replace one guy, chances are the guy that’s coming in is more lethal, has less restraint and is more apt to make a name for himself and go above and beyond than if you had just left the first guy in there.

  “The commander down here [Sangin] when I first got there had been around for years. He had become one of the water-walkers among the Taliban community, very popular amongst the people. We picked him off in an air strike with a group of ten on the other side of the Helmand River one day, standing around with their AK-47s planning their next operation. There was a good three-week period where nothing happened. It was eerie. But then we started to see some outside influence, maybe from Pakistan. The new commander was either taken from a different region and put in here, or a younger guy who was promoted and brought up to speed, he was more aggressive more radical, more ready to prove himself worthy. The amount of pressure plate IEDs [which go off when anyone steps on them] increased exponentially, to where little kids started to hit them. He wasn’t even letting the population know where they were, and while that was good for us because I could leverage the population that this young immature commander was more deadly to them than he was to me, it showed me that targeting these leaders made the problem ten times worse overall.”

  My friend, a remarkable officer who actually managed to suppress the Taliban in his particular area by the end of his first tour in 2012, thought that making the enemy even more vicious and unpleasant than they already were was ultimately unproductive. But strange rumors, based on off-the-record conversations with military officers and Special Forces officers out in the field, were circulating that making the Taliban even more cruel might actually be official policy. If so, it certainly succeeded. By 2011 the Taliban were deploying eight-year-old children as involuntary suicide bombers, while in May 2014, a small group of young Taliban gunmen stormed a Kabul hotel and executed nine people in the restaurant. Three of the victims were children, including a two-year-old, shot in the face.

  Among COIN (counterinsurgency) theoreticians, then ascendant in the U.S. Army, the rise of the young commanders was seen as a positive development. “That’s a win for us,” John Nagl, a former army officer and the coauthor of the U.S. Army’s counterinsurgency manual, told me. “We want to see younger commanders take over. They have less experience, they’re more inclined to mess up.” In fact, young men such as Khalid Amin, who had declared “we all want to die,” had a great deal of experience despite their tender years, having never known any life but war. Nor did it require a great deal of expertise to construct a $10 pressure-plate IED.

  It is possible, however, that there was indeed an underlying Machiavellian element to the targeted-killing strategy: actually to encourage the already cruel Taliban to become even more vicious and barbaric. The rationale, so Special Operations officers would explain in discreet off-the-record conversations, was based on the success of the Iraq surge. The key development of that operation had been the pivot of the Sunni population, or at least their tribal leaders, from insurgency to support of the occupation forces, a development attributed to the adoption of COIN as a doctrine, not to mention the strategic genius of those who had introduced it. Hugely important in inducing the Sunnis’ change of heart, along with wads of cash handed to tribal leaders, had been their revulsion at the arrogance and cruelty of al-Qaeda in the areas where it had come to dominate, such as attempts in the al-Adhamiya district of Baghdad in 2006–2007 to force each family to give up a son as an al-Qaeda recruit or the shooting of barbers for giving un-Islamic haircuts, not to mention cutting off the fingers of smokers.

  The triumph of the surge, which put a welcome gloss on the overall disaster of the invasion and occupation, was still very fresh in the minds of the U.S. national security establishment, particularly the army, when attention began shifting to Afghanistan in 2008. If the increased unpopularity of al-Qaeda had led to its defeat in Iraq, so, the thinking reportedly went, what was needed in Afghanistan was a really unpopular, “radicalized” Taliban, to be generated by killing off the (slightly) more moderate field commanders. Thereby afflicted, the population would, hopefully, rally to the Americans, or at least to the government of Hamid Karzai. In other words, eliminating Taliban leaders and other supposedly key individuals across the length and breadth of Afghanistan was not merely mindless slaughter but an effects-based operation.

  Colonel Gian Gentile, the Iraq combat veteran and former West Point history professor known for his pungent critiques of COIN and its practitioners, thought that the scheme, of which he had no personal knowledge, sounded “like the typical pop sociological/anthropological nonsense and over thinking that many army officers have gotten themselves into. It also might indicate a rabid belief that the Iraq Surge could be made to work in Afghanistan along with its techniques and methods. “It just shows you,” he lamented to me in an email, “how far off the deep end the American army has gone.”

  Dr. Peter Lavoy is one of the little-known but dependable officials who keep the wheels of the U.S. national security machine in motion. Deemed an expert in such recondite subjects as the use of biological and nuclear weapons and asymmetric warfare, he rose steadily through the ranks of intelligence and into the wider realm of policy making. By 2008 he was national intelligence officer for South Asia in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and as such was delegated to brief NATO allies on the U.S. intelligence assessment of the security situation in Afghanistan, which he described as “bleak,” according to the record of his November 25 address that year, classified “Secret” but subsequently released by Wikileaks.

  The Taliban, said Lavoy, were making significant gains. Attacks were up 40 percent in a year, largely thanks to the failure of the Afghan government to deliver any services to the rural population while the Taliban were “mediating local disputes … offering the population at least an elementary level of access to justice.” In conclusion, he told the NATO meeting, “[T]he international community should put intense pressure on the Taliban in 2009 in order to bring out their more violent and ideologically radical tendencies (author’s emphasis). This will alienate the population and give us an opportunity to separate the Taliban from the population.”

  Many greet the notion that U.S. policy makers and commanders would have been capable of thinking through second-order effects in this fashion with unbridled skepticism. Matthew Hoh, the state department official who gave up his career in protest of the Afghan war, told me that he had indeed heard about this plan but not until after targeted killing had the effect of radicalizing the Taliban. “I simply doubt our ability to be that prescient and competent,” he told me. “I haven’t seen it in other situations and I don’t see it here. I think this is, by and large, people and agencies trying to take credit for an unintended consequence.”

  An officer serving in Afghanistan in 2014 had much the same reaction. “I don’t think that it was (or currently is) a ‘strategy’ across the board,” he wrote me. “I have yet to see one of those out here. No part of my ‘welcome aboard’ to Afghanistan included a history/analysis of the area … to include sources of instability and power players. At no time was I told ‘the strategy is to isolate X, while infiltrating Y and containing Z.’ Is that an effects-based strategy? Only if the effect you want is to generate chaos.”

  But generating chaos can be a hard habit to break.

  12

  DRONES, BABY, DRONES!

  The Richard M. Helms Award dinner
, held annually at a major Washington hotel, is among the highlights of the intelligence community’s social calendar. Hosted by the CIA Officers Memorial Foundation, the event raises and distributes money to aid families of officers killed in action, whose sacrifice is commemorated in the rows of stars carved into the wall of the foyer at agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The venue for the 2011 event, held on March 30, was the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Pentagon City, and as usual it attracted hundreds of intelligence luminaries, current and former. Joining them were senior executives of various defense corporations—Lockheed, SAIC, Booz Allen, General Atomics, and others—who had generously sponsored tables at the event.

  There was much to celebrate. President Barack Obama, who had run a quasi-antiwar liberal campaign for the White House, had embraced the assassination program and had decreed, “the CIA gets what it wants.” Intelligence budgets were maintaining the steep upward curve that had started in 2001, and while all agencies were benefiting, none had done as well as the CIA. At just under $15 billion, the agency’s budget had climbed by 56 percent just since 2004.

  Decades earlier, Richard Helms, the CIA director for whom the event was named, would customarily refer to the defense contractors who pressured him to spend his budget on their wares as “those bastards.” Such disdain for commerce in the world of spooks was now long gone, as demonstrated by the corporate sponsorship of the tables jammed into the Grand Ballroom that evening. The executives, many of whom had passed through the revolving door from government service, were there to rub shoulders with old friends and current partners. “It was totally garish,” one attendee told me afterward. “It seemed like every arms manufacturer in the country had taken a table. Everyone was doing business, right and left.”