Taliban (24 page)

I checked these startling figures later and found them to be only broadly correct, although Zaeef’s point was still well made. ISAF’s ‘condolence fund’ typically paid out
2,000 per innocent victim, not
200; while in 2003, Libya paid an astonishing
2.16 billion in
compensation to the families of the 270 Lockerbie dead, or
8 million each. ISAF, of course, could not afford such generosity even if it wanted to. According to UNAMA (the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan) figures, 2,139 civilians were accidentally killed by ‘pro-government forces’ between 2006 and October 2009.
⁶
What Zaeef didn’t say was that, according to the same source, almost twice as many civilians were killed by ‘anti-government forces’: 3,959 of them. But the fact remains that at Lockerbie rates, ISAF’s condolence fund would have had to pay out over
17 billion.

The greatest cause for Afghan fury with Nato in the past had been the misapplication of airpower. With too few troops on the ground, ISAF tended to fall back on air support to get their men out of trouble – and bombs in built-up areas too often meant ‘collateral damage’. There had been some truly horrendous incidents. In July 2008 in Herat province, for instance, an air strike killed forty-seven members of a wedding party. These were prone to misinterpretation by Westerners, because Afghans traditionally celebrate a marriage by shooting guns and RPGs into the air. In another high-profile incident in September 2009 in Kunduz, German troops called in US jets to destroy two stolen fuel transporters. The bombs killed at least forty villagers, possibly many more, who had approached the trucks hoping to siphon off some fuel for themselves. The German Defence Minister, Franz Josef Jung, allegedly suppressed this information at first, prompting calls for his resignation and a rethink of the entire German engagement in Afghanistan – which, considering that the Bundeswehr was the third biggest ISAF troop contributor, was significant.

Zaeef, however, was not complaining about Nato airpower but about ‘night raids’, the intelligence-driven, Special Forces
operations designed to capture or kill insurgency leaders as they slept in their beds. This ‘decapitation’ strategy, as it was known, had been stepped up dramatically in recent months, but it came at a high cost to the hearts and minds campaign. A Pashtun’s home is his castle, and for an infidel soldier to violate it, particularly its inner sanctum inhabited by women, is considered the grossest cultural insult. Entire communities had been radicalized as a result, even when the intelligence prompting the raid was accurate – which it all too frequently was not.

The Western press had recently reported a string of disasters. At 3 a.m. on 27 December 2009, for instance, a ‘joint assault force’ landed by helicopter outside the remote village of Ghazi Khan in Kunar province to destroy an alleged bomb-making cell. Ten people were shot dead, most of them at close range in their beds. A Nato statement initially claimed their forces had come under fire from several buildings as they entered the village, and had found a substantial arms cache and bomb-making equipment in the targeted house. Eight weeks later, a Nato official effectively admitted that this was a lie. The victims turned out to be entirely innocent. Eight of them were schoolchildren, one of them as young as twelve.
⁷

In another incident at Khataba village in Paktia on 12 February, two pregnant women, a teenage girl, a police officer and his brother were killed. A spokesman at General McChrystal’s office initially said that the women had been ‘tied up, gagged and killed’ several hours before the raiders arrived. Eight weeks later, Nato officials admitted this was not the case. A senior Afghan investigator accused US Special Forces of a cover-up, even alleging that they had removed evidence by digging bullets out of the victims’ bodies. ‘I think the Special Forces lied to McChrystal,’ he said. Nato promised a forensic investigation, but later said this had proved
impossible because the bodies had been buried the same day in accordance with Islamic custom.
⁸

McChrystal, to his credit, understood the pitfalls of night raids and the damage they could do to the US’s reputation, and decreed in early 2010 that there would be no more of them unless absolutely necessary, and that they should be spearheaded by local forces if so: Afghan soldiers would in theory display a greater sense of Islamic propriety. ‘Think of how you would expect a foreign army to operate in your neighborhood, among your families and your children, and act accordingly,’ the general had told his troops in his
Counterinsurgency Guidance
. The night raids were continuing, however, along with official statements from Nato spokesmen seeking to justify them when they went wrong. I heard how misleading these could be for myself a few days later when I learned of another night raid, this time on a house in a village in Wardak province south of Kabul.
⁷
One man was shot and then savagely stabbed through the heart, while three others were arrested. From a distraught relative of the family, a friend of an Afghan friend of mine living in London, I learned (and was certain that it was true) that they were all shopkeepers and farmers, but the US military spokesman I telephoned claimed otherwise. He read from a text that was shocking in its brevity, his tone chillingly bland. The house, he said, had been occupied by a cell of fighters suspected of attacks on Coalition Forces; a substantial arms cache including RPGs was found; in the course of the operation, one man offered resistance and was killed.

The dead man had in fact been armed with a pistol, although this was hardly unusual in Afghanistan where the right to defend
one’s home is culturally enshrined. Besides, he had apparently offered no resistance at all. The detainees were all released without charge a few days later. Unlike the deadlier incidents in Kunar and Paktia, the affair went wholly unreported even in the local media. Such stories were so common they were no longer considered newsworthy.

Who was responsible? The Wardaki villagers claimed it was US Special Forces, although this was hard to prove. In the dark and confusion, no one had seen a uniform or insignia they could accurately describe later. US Special Forces were certainly involved in the Khataba incident, however. In an extraordinary scene on 8 April – and which proved that McChrystal’s approach was having at least some small effect – Vice-Admiral William McRaven of USSOCOM, the US Special Operations Command, went to Khataba to apologize to the bereaved family.

‘My heart grieves for you,’ he told Hajji Sharabuddin, whose two sons had been killed in the raid. ‘I pray today that [God] will show mercy on me and my men for this awful tragedy.’ (Some of his address, in which he emphasized that he and Sharabuddin ‘shared the same God’, might have surprised the southern Baptists of his own country, although he was technically correct: Muslims, Christians and indeed Jews all believe in the god of Abraham; Allah, Jehovah and Yahweh are the same person.) Then he underlined the point by handing over a carefully wrapped handkerchief that turned out to contain almost
30,000 – triple the usual compensation rate. Outside on Hajji Sharabuddin’s doorstep, the Afghan soldiers accompanying McRaven offered to slaughter a sheep, the traditional act of atonement according to the Pashtunwali.

It was a brave effort. For such a senior commander to apologize
in person in this way was without precedent. Even so, the ugly suspicion remained in Kabul that the Special Forces were only paying lip service to McChrystal’s attempts to rein in the night raiders. An investigation by the
Washington Post
later revealed that upon taking office, President Obama had secretly approved a huge increase in the number of ‘black ops’ search-and-destroy missions. After September 2009, when General Petraeus signed a Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force Executive Order, the number of special operations teams in Afghanistan doubled. Out of 13,000 US Special Forces deployed overseas, some 4,500 are in Afghanistan, with a similar number operating in Pakistan; they are now thought to be responsible for more than half of all combat operations in the Afghan warzone.
⁹

In a speech in Washington, Vice-Admiral McRaven’s boss, Admiral Eric Olson, the head of USSOCOM, revealed that his men were still being instructed in ‘direct action’ techniques that included ‘man-hunting, killing and capturing the enemy’ – or as he called it, ‘
habeas grabus
’.
¹⁰
Although Olson also acknowledged the greater importance of soft power, or ‘indirect action’, to the counter-insurgency, it seemed that McChrystal was struggling to turn the oil-tanker of American military culture – and for many Afghans it was simply a case of too little, too late. Hajji Sharabuddin told a reporter that he was happy McRaven had come, but nothing would bring back his dead sons or the pregnant women who had been killed. ‘I don’t care about the money,’ he told a reporter. What he really wanted was for the ‘spy’ who had told the Americans his family were Taliban to be brought to justice. ‘When they surrender the spy, then I will make a decision. Maybe I will forgive them,’ he said.
¹¹