'Ignorance' leads to botched Afghan raids
By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - A Special Operations Forces (SOF) raid on February 12 on what was
supposed to be the compound of a Taliban leader but killed three women and two
Afghan government officials demonstrated a fatal weakness of the United States
military engagement in Afghanistan: after eight years of operating there, the
US military still has no understanding of the personal, tribal and other
socio-political conflicts.
In targeting the suspected Taliban in such raids, therefore, the US military
command has been forced to rely on informants of unknown reliability - and
motives.
As a provincial council member from Gardez, near the scene of the botched raid,
declared bitterly last week, US Special Forces
"don't know who is the enemy and who isn't".
When the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, Admiral William
McRaven, went to the site of the raid to apologize, the head of the extended
family that lost five people to the SOF unit, Hajji Sharibuddin, demanded that
the US military turn over "the spy who gave the false information to the
Americans".
General Stanley McChrystal and his chief of intelligence, General Michael
Flynn, have admitted to the profound ignorance of the US military about Afghan
society, while avoiding the implications of that ignorance when it comes to the
issue of false intelligence on the Taliban.
McChrystal acknowledged in his "initial assessment" last August that his
command had to "acquire a far better understanding of Afghanistan and its
people".
In an interview with National Public Radio on August 13, Flynn admitted, "What
we really have not done to the degree that we need to is really truly
understand the population: the tribal dynamics, the tribal networks, the
ethnicity."
Such dynamics are different "from valley to valley", Flynn observed.
And in an unusual paper published by the Center for a New American Security
last October, Flynn was even more frank, saying, "I don't want to say we're
clueless, but we are. We're no more than fingernail deep in our understanding
the environment."
Flynn avoided any suggestion that this profound ignorance of the society in
which US troops are operating could affect targeting of suspected Taliban. He
asserted that the intelligence problem is not about the Taliban but about the
lack of knowledge about governance and development issues.
But a foreign military force that is so fundamentally ignorant of the
socio-political forces at play inevitably relies on local sources, which may
act in their own self-interest.
More often than not, the US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization have
depended heavily on ties with Afghan tribal leaders and warlords. That has
proven disastrous over and over again.
Colonel David Lamm, who was chief of staff for General David Barno, the top US
commander in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005, has said that it became clear to
top officials in the command that it should not make alliances with tribes to
obtain information on the Taliban.
It often turned out that a group a tribal leader said was the Taliban was
actually a competing tribe, Lamm recalled in a September 2008 interview with
Inter Press Service.
Barno also ordered his commanders to shun local police as intelligence sources
on the Taliban. "Local police were too close to the local elite," said Lamm.
Despite such warnings, however, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and military
intelligence operatives have continued to rely on tribal patriarchs and local
warlords as intelligence sources on the Taliban. As recently as December 2008,
US intelligence officials were telling Washington Post reporter Joby Warrick
that their operatives had been using gifts of Viagra, among other inducements,
to get warlords and tribal leaders to provide such intelligence.
The US military, including SOF units, have also relied on local warlords to
provide security for their bases and logistics, as documented by a study by the
Center on International Cooperation at New York University last September.
Those ties translate into channels for intelligence as well.
The most egregious example is the CIA's use of intelligence from Ahmed Wali
Karzai, the brother of President Hamid Karzai, the chairman of the Kandahar
province council and the most powerful figure in the province.
Rajiv Chandrasekaran reported in the Washington Post last September that US and
Canadian diplomats had not pressed Karzai to dismiss his brother from his
position, because he had provided "valuable intelligence" to the US military.
The inability of the US military to organize its own networks of reliable
agents has also led to a willingness to act with lethal force on the basis of
tips from dubious sources.
In the most widely known instance of mass civilian casualties from a US attack,
an air strike on the village of Azizabad in Herat province in August 2008,
Afghan officials expressed certainty that US commanders had been misled by a
rival of clan leader Timor Shah, who had died some months before.
An investigation of the incident by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights
Commission revealed that a former business partner of Timor's who still had
personal enmity toward the family - and who had been involved in various
criminal activities - had passed false information to Coalition Forces that
there would be a big gathering of Taliban fighters in Azizabad.
The US command carried out a devastating bombing on what turned out to have
been a memorial ceremony for Timor Shah. As many as 90 civilians, including 60
children, were killed in the attack.
United Nations rapporteur Philip Alston wrote in a May 2009 report that
"numerous government officials" had told him that "false tips" had "often"
caused night raids to result in the killing of innocent civilians. He reported
that one provincial governor had "stated that there were people in his province
who made a business acting as intermediaries who would give false tips to the
international forces in return for payment from individuals holding grudges".
Alston was told by a village elder in Nuristan that a district government had
fed false information to "international forces" that led to a raid targeting
his local opponents. He also said a similar incident in Nangarhar's Ghani Khel
district was reported to him.
Alston reported that a "senior official" who responded to his critical report
did not deny that "feuds" drive much of the identification of local Taliban
officials. Instead the official suggested that such "feuds" were simply "part
and parcel of the conflict between the Taliban and the government".
Instead of admitting that US intelligence was fatally flawed, the US military
command had simply adopted a justification that did not require any real
understanding of the society.
McChrystal, on the other hand, has lamented that ignorance but continues to
authorize raids that are based on the faulty intelligence it generates.
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing
in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book,
Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was
published in 2006.
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