American troops are "getting very good at this ... almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine." --- examples of kill/capture

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'KILL/CAPTURE' PROGRAM IN AFGHANISTAN GOES INEXPLICABLY ON

By Georgie Anne Geyer

 

 

WASHINGTON -- While the United States keeps trying to forget about Afghanistan -- and President Obama has quietly slipped the date for withdrawal three years ahead, from July 2011 to July 2014 -- a new secret program in Afghanistan is quietly boasting of bringing about an end to the decade-long war.

The program is "kill/capture," and it has been waged by the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, for the last year, with, according to PBS's excellent "Frontline," 3,000 operations in only the last 90 days. Essentially, it sends special forces out in the dark of night into slumbering Afghan villages to force Taliban leaders out of their hiding places and then shoot them or capture them.


There is only one major problem: It appears rather too often that the American intelligence planners are not certain that the men they are killing or capturing are really Taliban. There is, of course, a larger question: Why are we killing and capturing Taliban when this war was supposed to be about al-Qaida? But we'll set that aside for the moment.

Under Gen. David Petraeus, now named to be head of the CIA, the American forces have killed or captured more than 12,000 militants in the last year, according to "Frontline." Lt. Col. John Nagl, one of the officers involved in the campaign, is quoted as saying that these American troops are "getting very good at this ... almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine."

The pictures of the Americans on patrol that accompany the TV show are terrifying, as they break into mud houses in the middle of the night, dragging out men who may match the pictures they carry with them to identify the Taliban -- or may not. I surely couldn't tell.

Indeed, the examples of kill/capture are not reassuring. The first one shows the Americans in the 101st Airborne arriving in a village in Khost, the heartland of the vicious anti-American Haqqani network, which has its headquarters in Pakistan. But when the American troops arrive there, with a picture of the sought-after Afghan Taliban, they find instead a village elder and his family asleep in the designated mud house.

After some back-and-forth conversing in the darkness about the situation, the Americans decide to take the village elder anyway, because they have found a small cache of weapons there. He gets noticeably peeved about it, saying repeatedly through the Afghan translators: "This is very bad. This is why the people are against you. It's disrespecting us." After some hours, the elder is let go, saying angrily, "This will have consequences." Bad sport.

In the other major example offered by the show, which was many months in the making and did not appear to be ideologically motivated or to be anti-military, it turns out that a bus bombed to smithereens because it was filled with Taliban men was actually full of enthusiastic election workers.

"They killed ordinary people," a local teacher says, sadly viewing the twisted ruins of the bus, with the random hands and feet of its passengers strewn across the barren northern desert.

The U.S. military commanders insist they have "very precise intelligence" that leads to these raids, which have helped make the last year the most violent of the entire war. The Americans "acknowledge that the raids may radicalize Afghans, but this is part of the larger campaign of rolling back the Taliban."

Most important of all, as then-New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins says in the documentary, "What the Americans have not demonstrated is, 'Can we hand it over to the Afghans?' It is far from clear what the results of that will be."

Forgive me for asking, but why we are doing this at all?

When we swept into Afghanistan right after 9/11 -- yes, that was now almost 10 years ago -- we backed the well-trained forces of the Northern Alliance and took Kabul swiftly; we had special forces on horseback racing across the Afghan plateaus and defeating the remaining Taliban with military finesse; then, when we had bin Laden cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora, the powers that be in Washington, filled with their own warrior grandiosity as they sat behind their desks, sidetracked the troops to Iraq. It was "Adios, bin Laden," as he escaped, until his great capture recently. Since that time in 2001, it's been pretty much of a draw.

We went into Afghanistan 10 years ago because al-Qaida was there. We detoured to Iraq for matters of personal egos. Today, by our own military's count, there are merely 50 to 100 members of al-Qaida in Afghanistan -- their headquarters are in Pakistan. And by our kill/capture campaign in Afghanistan -- which American military thinkers strangely enough see as part of the counterinsurgency campaign -- we are surely turning more and more of the locals against us.

In Vietnam, we also got sidetracked. After going there to fight the North Vietnamese, we ended up fighting the Vietcong -- and then the Laotians, and then the Cambodians -- and God only knows who else would have entered the equation had it gone on any longer. And now we are fighting madly in Afghanistan against the Taliban, instead of al-Qaida, and killing all kinds of people. As it goes on and on, the one question that nobody can really answer is ... Why?


:: Article nr. 78009 sent on 24-may-2011 04:39 ECT

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Link: news.yahoo.com/s/ucgg/20110520/cm_ucgg/killcaptureprograminafghanistangoesinexpl
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