The Wrong Enemy

by Carlotta Gall

  The planes worked the skies for two hours. The AC-130 airplanes attacked four villages in the area, and a B-52 bomber dropped a two-thousand-pound bomb on a hillside in a show of force. Troops then entered the village on foot. Yet they found no Taliban positions in Kakrak. No heavy machine gun was found there, a U.S. military spokesman said afterward. Kakrak was indeed loyal to Karzai.

  The two targets of the operation were Mullah Omar and his operational commander, Mullah Baradar, who had been reported to be sheltering further north, American officials said. Local Afghan officials were incredulous. “If Mullah Omar and Mullah Baradar were sitting up the road with a whole load of soldiers, would we be sitting here?” Abdul Rahim, the district chief of Deh Rawud and a longtime opponent of the Taliban, asked.1

  There were sporadic reports of senior Taliban figures moving around the remoter parts of southern Afghanistan. They always proved elusive. One of the villagers in Kakrak, a taxi driver, said he had seen Taliban vehicles on the road to Kandahar a couple of months earlier. Afghan workers from an aid group saw a convoy of Taliban vehicles passing through a nearby area just three days before the Kakrak bombing. The convoy was traveling through the northern Helmand district of Baghran, across the Helmand River Valley from Deh Rawud. Taliban guards ordered drivers off the road at gunpoint as the thirty-two-car convoy, with black windows and armed guards, swept past.2 The convoy may have belonged to Abdul Waheed Baghrani, the man who negotiated the surrender of Kandahar with Hamid Karzai in 2001. The Baghran Valley was his home region. Yet the size of the convoy suggests that he was escorting senior leaders and as many as two hundred men.

  The failure to catch any significant Taliban figures at Kakrak and its neighboring villages, combined with the devastating death toll, revealed the ineffectiveness of heavy-handed military forays when a police or intelligence operation would have been more appropriate. Afghan villagers and officials asked the question that would dog the NATO coalition for the rest of the decade, and to which Afghans have never received a satisfactory response: were the airstrikes proportional to the threat? Abdul Rahim said he asked that question of an American commander who visited the scene. “Mullah Omar and Mullah Baradar are just two people and you bombed four villages. Why?”

  The wedding party bombing, as it became known, was not the first deadly mistake U.S. forces had made in Afghanistan. Hamid Karzai narrowly missed being killed in a misguided airstrike in Uruzgan in December 2001. Sixty-five tribal elders traveling to Karzai’s inauguration were killed when their convoy was mistakenly bombed that same month. Twenty-one commanders and fighters loyal to Karzai were killed in raids in Khas Uruzgan just one month later. The latter two mistakes were both cases of faulty intelligence fed by local enemies.

  Yet Kakrak was particularly shocking for its level of violence and the high death toll of women and children. Afghan leaders reacted angrily. President Karzai remonstrated with the American commander of coalition forces, Lieutenant General Dan K. McNeill, who promised an investigation. Abdullah Abdullah, the Afghan foreign minister, warned that it would turn the people against the government and play into the hands of al Qaeda. Provincial leaders demanded an end to air raids. Afghans had been subjected to relentless bombing for ten years by Soviet forces, and the experience had left deep scars in the population: a permanent hatred of the Russians as well as devastating destruction and impoverishment to the country. Whole valleys were turned into dust bowls in the 1980s. Centuries-old irrigation systems were destroyed forever. Villages were smashed and abandoned, and orchards and vineyards blasted in that merciless war.

  A third of the population, five million people, had been forced to flee the country. An estimated one million died, the vast majority of them civilians. Men abandoned their livelihoods and education and took up weapons. Women wove pictures of enemy jets and helicopters into their carpets. Karzai and Abdullah had lived through the Soviet occupation and knew that their people would not tolerate being bombed again. “The enemies of peace and stability could utilize this situation,” Abdullah warned. “Our people were victims of al Qaeda, and it is not fair that they should be victims of the American campaign.”

  He cautioned that U.S. forces had to check their intelligence more carefully before conducting airstrikes. “We have no doubts for a single second of the coalition’s objectives to eradicate al Qaeda, which poses a threat to our country. But what is needed is for strong measures to be taken to avoid civilian casualties,” he said. “Mistakes can take place, human errors are possible, but our people should be assured that every measure was taken to avoid incidents,” he added. “It must come to an end. It will not be acceptable for the people of Afghanistan if that becomes a pattern.”

  Yet the U.S.-led military force struggled to change the way it fought. Military officials promised better coordination with Afghan officials, but they continued to operate alone and circumvent Afghan officials they considered unreliable. Commanders often tightened the rules of engagement, or paused operations after a particular calamity, yet they never contemplated operating without air support or rethinking their counterterrorism operations. The Americans started conducting joint investigations, but Afghan officials came to view them as an attempt to control the message.

  The U.S. and NATO forces on the ground displayed too great a readiness in their use of devastating firepower. Whenever forces were ambushed or pinned down by enemy fire, they called in airstrikes. Special forces troops especially went looking to provoke insurgents into fights and then requested air support. Sometimes troops pulled back from the firefight and called in airstrikes on the Taliban firing positions, even though they were no longer in danger. Villagers often complained that planes struck after the Taliban had left the area, or they destroyed a whole house in pursuit of a single gunman. On the occasions when we were able to reach bomb sites, we frequently found that they had hit the wrong targets.

  In 2004, nine children and a teenager were killed in front of a house in Ghazni. Seven small boys were playing marbles in the dirt, and two little girls were fetching water from the stream. The teenager was walking beside the house. By the time we arrived at the village, hours after the attack, they had been buried but their rubber galoshes and embroidered caps, shredded with shrapnel, lay in the dust beside caked pools of blood. The owner of the house, a suspected Taliban facilitator, was not even at home, American soldiers at the scene told me. American officials told President Karzai they had not noticed the children when they fired the missiles.

  From the beginning of the war, coalition operations all over the Pashtun lands of southern and eastern Afghanistan killed one to two thousand Afghans every year. The number climbed relentlessly as fighting intensified, and we started hearing of young men running off to join the Taliban to take revenge for the deaths of relatives.

  A frustrated Afghan official once asked me if the British Army would be allowed to bomb a house in Northern Ireland because it suspected an IRA gunman was inside. So why did it think it could do so in Afghanistan, he asked. The level of the insurgency in 2002 was so low that security operations should have shifted to a more careful intelligence and police operation. “If you are looking for one man you should not use a B-52. You should use spies, not bombs,” Abdul Manan, the owner of a teahouse in Ghazni, told me when we stopped for lunch on one of our many trips across the country.

  Yet it was many years before the American military changed its approach. After he retired, General McNeill told me in an interview that the human loss at Kakrak was one of the things that lived on in his thoughts from his two tours in Afghanistan. The mistake, he said, had been to keep pursuing the people fleeing into the fields.

  It took the military most of the decade to adopt a counterinsurgency strategy that would scale back its use of airpower and put massive levels of troops on the ground to protect the population. McNeill did not stop using big military sweeps to disrupt the increasingly active insurgents, or airstrikes to take out Taliban firing positions. He had no mandate to act acro
ss the border in Pakistan to get at the source of the militancy, so he did what he could in Afghanistan, he said.

  Karzai early on protested the high number of civilian casualties and warned American officials to be wary of false intelligence. He pleaded with Afghan villagers not to harbor Taliban or fire weapons, and asked American and NATO forces to be more careful, to work with Afghan officials, and to stop raiding homes. Over time, his repeated protests sounded hollow to his countrymen and only emphasized his powerlessness to prevent the airstrikes and casualties. As the violence spread and the casualties escalated, Karzai became more strident in his criticism. The frustration among the population was growing. Karzai began to complain that the U.S. Army and NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) were targeting the Afghan public as a whole, while the source of the insurgency was in the training camps, madrassas, and even the headquarters of the ISI in Pakistan. Diplomats explained away his criticisms as nationalist grandstanding. Yet Karzai was right, and official American accounts were often short on the truth. The U.S. military routinely denied casualties or confirmed much lower figures than Afghans reported—often because they did not have access on the ground. As the dispute grew, the United Nations began gathering information about casualties and produced reports that showed much higher casualty rates than the military was acknowledging.

  Six years after the Kakrak wedding party bombing, I was walking through another bombed village in western Afghanistan, inspecting the destroyed houses and counting the freshly laid graves on the edge of the settlement. In the dust and rubble of a small house, the smell of decaying bodies was overpowering. The villagers began to dig into the rubble. They uncovered the body of a tiny baby, tucked tightly into the corner of the ruins of a room, its skull crushed and its body caked in pale golden dust. Missed by the first rescuers, the baby was the ninety-second victim of a raid ten days earlier by a U.S. Marine Special Operations Company.3

  The U.S. military command had been insisting that only five to seven civilians and thirty to thirty-five militants were killed in what it called a successful operation against the Taliban: a special operations ground mission backed up by American air support. But gradually the weight of evidence, wounded survivors, eyewitness accounts, cell phone footage of bodies laid out in the mosque, and freshly dug graves, many of them belonging to women and children, forced the military to open an investigation.

  We were in western Afghanistan, in the district of Shindand, south of the cultured and largely peaceful city of Herat. I had been reporting in the same area just over a year earlier. When a similar raid by U.S. forces had killed fifty-seven people, U.S. and NATO commanders tightened rules on calling in airstrikes on village houses. This time the damage was done by a team from the Marine special operations command. They were following a tip that a Taliban commander, Mullah Sadiq, was in the village. They had been misled by a business rival of the main family in the village, officials and villagers said. There was a particularly troubling detail. A female survivor had described how American troops and armed Afghans had entered the village on foot and executed her male relatives, the villagers told me. Karzai’s officials also interviewed the woman and sent her to India for medical treatment. When I later asked a presidential aide if he believed the woman’s story, he told me he did. “We have heard worse things than that,” he said.

  As we toured the bombed-out ruins, we heard the same complaint that I had heard so many times before. “This is not fair to kill ninety people for one Mullah Sadiq,” said Lal Mohammad Umarzai, the district chief. “If they continue like this, they will lose the people’s confidence in the government and the coalition forces.” Another member of the presidential staff told me, “People are sick of hearing there is another case of civilian casualties.”

  Karzai by this time was sounding like a broken record. “It seriously undermines our efforts to have an effective campaign against terrorism,” he told me in an interview earlier that year. “I am not happy with civilian casualties coming down; I want an end to civilian casualties,” he said. “As much as one may argue it’s difficult, I don’t accept that argument.” He said that American officials had been trying to reduce casualties, and he commended them for it. But his main complaint was always the same: the United States was bombing Afghan villages when the source of the insurgency was in Pakistan. “Because the war against terrorism is not in Afghan villages, the war against terrorism is elsewhere, and that’s where the war should go.”4

  The casualties did not stop, however. In 2009 in another western district, U.S. planes bombed the village of Granai, killing 147 men, women, and children in the worst single incident of civilian casualties of the war. A group of Taliban had been fighting from the village but they withdrew before the bombers pulverized the place with thousands of pounds of explosives. One family of refugees had called a relative in panic during the bombing, but when he reached Granai, he never found their bodies. All trace of them had been erased.

  “Why do they target the Taliban inside the village? Why don’t they bomb them when they are outside the village?” a villager, Sayed Malham, asked wearily as he sat beside his wounded daughter in a hospital. Seven members of his family had been killed and four wounded. “The foreigners are guilty,” he continued. “Why don’t they bomb their targets? Instead they come and bomb our houses.”

  It was not until General Stanley A. McChrystal took over command in Afghanistan in 2009, with General David Petraeus at the helm of U.S. Central Command, that U.S. forces switched to a counterinsurgency campaign centered around protecting the civilian population. McChrystal, more than anyone, ended the litany of mistakes, enforcing very strict rules of engagement that demanded that soldiers take much more risk on the battlefield before calling in airstrikes. Petraeus described it to me as a completely different approach. But by then the damage was done. The Taliban were so deeply entrenched in the southern provinces that to clear them was going to demand intense firepower and destruction. The people of southern Afghanistan were close to the breaking point and no longer trusted their president or the Americans.

  McChrystal’s arrival also brought a new development: a dramatic increase in night raids in the form of airborne assaults by special operations forces teams who dropped into villages and compounds to capture or kill Taliban commanders and affiliates. Special operations forces made scores of raids a week, with teams going out sometimes several times a night to roll up cells and whole networks of Taliban across the country. Afghan officials in the regions often praised the campaign for its accuracy and the devastating effect it had on the Taliban leaders. But reports filtered out that the teams were on kill missions, executing people as they slept, shooting unarmed villagers without warning. The military insisted that they were more interested in taking people alive, since they could glean intelligence from them on the wider circle of operatives. Yet the reports kept coming: a provincial police chief in Ghazni, troubled by the slaying of a woman alongside her husband, leaving four orphaned children and no relatives; three women, two of them pregnant mothers, killed along with their husbands, who were government officials, in a raid on a house in Paktia; several cases of angry villagers bringing the corpses of the latest massacre on tractors to the doors of provincial authorities.

  The military often questioned the veracity of the Afghan accounts. Yet whenever I or other reporters managed to reach the scene and interview eyewitnesses, we found their accounts were straightforward and checked out. Soldiers, we found, were not always truthful in their reports.5

  One day an Afghan I knew and trusted told me a story he had never dared tell anyone, even his closest family. He had worked as an interpreter for the U.S. military for several years. One night he had accompanied U.S. special operations commandos on a raid. Helicopters dropped off the team a mile or so from their target village, and they hiked in silence to its edge. The unit split up, and the interpreter went with a group of four men to a house in the center of the village. Two men were in front of him a
nd two behind, armed with American assault weapons with silencers attached. They moved without noise, communicating with hand signals. They kicked in the door of the house and entered a room. A gas lamp was burning very low but enough for the interpreter to see the astonished faces of a young couple in their twenties as they leapt up from their bed on the floor. “Why? Why are you shooting?” the man asked. The Americans did not answer. They crouched and shot them both. They fired four or five rounds, the silencers making a dull “tick, tick” sound. As the woman fell, she let out a dying gasp. A child sleeping beside them began to cry. The Americans moved straight on to the next room. The translator began to shake. This time he did not enter the room but stopped at the door. He saw four people by the lamplight. A grandmother stood, her head uncovered, and asked, “What’s happening? Why?” Three teenagers, a boy and two girls, were cowering on the floor, wordless, trying to hide among their bedclothes. The Americans did not speak. They fired two or three rounds. The translator did not see who was shot. He was never asked to translate anything. “You have to wait until they ask. If you say anything, or translate anything, they say ‘Shut up, motherfucker, or I’ll shoot you.’”

  December 2002. A year after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan seemed to be regaining a measure of peace. Karzai had been in office a year. His position had been confirmed by a loya jirga, a grand assembly of 1,500 elders and tribal representatives gathered in Kabul from all over the country. A commission was working on a new constitution. Elections were set for 2004. The country was setting itself to rights and breathing with relief. A seven-year-long drought had broken, and the harvest had been good. In eastern Afghanistan, the Taliban had been gone for months, and a power struggle led by a maverick royalist tribal commander, Bacha Khan Zadran, was over. The nation dared to hope that a durable peace was attainable. The Muslim festival of Eid al-Fitr, celebrating the end of Ramadan, was approaching. Shoppers were cramming the towns and bazaars to buy sugar and sweets for the traditional three days of entertaining and feasting. The roads were full with families on their way to visit relatives and workers traveling home.