Washington Smackdown: Petraeus vs. "Substantial Drawdown"

WASHINGTON/KABUL - The number of civilians killed in U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) raids last year was probably several times higher than the figure of 80 people cited in the U.N. report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan published last week, an IPS investigation has revealed.

The report also failed to apply the same humanitarian law standard for defining a civilian to its reporting on SOF raids that it applied to its accounting for Taliban assassinations.

The Mar. 9 report, produced by the Human Rights unit of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) jointly with the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), said a total of 80 civilians were killed in "search and seizure operations" by "Pro-Government Forces" in 2010.

But AIHRC Commissioner Nader Nadery told IPS the figure represented only the number of civilian deaths in night raids in the 13 incidents involving SOF units that the Commission had been able to investigate thoroughly.

Nadery said the AIHRC had received complaints from local people alleging civilian casualties in 60 additional incidents involving raids and other activities by Special Forces. "We did not include them in the report, because we were unable to collect the exact figures for casualties, which takes time," Nadery said.

The AIHRC is continuing to investigate those 60 events, according to Nadery, and will report on the results in the future.

The Mar. 9 report refers to "60 incidents of night raids that caused civilian casualties", but does not inform the reader that only a fraction of the total casualties alleged in those incidents were counted in the total.

At least one of the 13 incidents investigated by the AIHRC was an air strike called by an SOF unit. The 80 deaths from at most 12 incidents or less would suggest an average of at least seven civilians killed per incident. If the sample of night raids investigated is representative of the total of 60 incidents of SOF night raids about which civilian casualty complaints were generated, the total number of civilians killed would be around 420.

The UNAMA-AIHRC report shows a total 406 assassinations of civilians by "Anti-Government Elements" reported for 2010.

But the UNAMA-AIHRC report uses a strict humanitarian law definition of "civilian" in regard to victims of assassination by "Anti-Government Elements" which was not applied to victims of U.S. night raids. "If Afghan soldiers travelling from one place to another, on holiday, with no weapon and no uniform, are killed, we count them as civilians, and the same with policemen," Nadery told IPS.

Mayors and district chiefs, who participate in military planning with NATO military commanders, were also considered as civilian victims of assassination, according to Nadery.

A large proportion of those killed as "Taliban" in SOF night raids, however, would also qualify as civilians under this definition.

Matthew Hoh, formerly the senior U.S. foreign service officer in Zabul province before his 2009 resignation, was familiar with the target list for SOF kill or capture raids. He told IPS the list included Afghans holding every kind of non-combat function in the Taliban network, including propagandists and workers who make Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs).

UNAMA team leader Denise Lifton conceded that the report had made no effort to ascertain what positions had been occupied by those who had been killed in U.S. raids. "We have not looked at the functions, per se, of those [who are] accused of being Taliban and are killed," she said in an e-mail to IPS.

Night raids generally kill Taliban personnel in their own homes, and thus outside the context of a military operation. If the same humanitarian law criterion used in counting victims of Taliban assassinations were applied to the alleged Taliban targeted in SOF night raids, the victims of killings during those raids would have to be considered as civilian casualties.

U.S. Special Operations Forces acknowledge only 38 civilian casualties, including killed and wounded, as a result of night raids, as reported by Reuters Feb. 24.

Sunset Belinsky, a spokesperson for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), insisted in an e-mail to IPS that such raids are "intelligence driven", and that "there is a rigorous process involved in identifying targets".

But although Belinsky acknowledged to IPS last September that the total of 1,355 insurgents "captured" in the raids from May through July 2010 included "suspected insurgents", she was unable to provide any figures on how many of those 1,355 had later been released.

Belinsky did not respond directly to a request from IPS this week for the information on what proportion of insurgents captured in 2010 had turned out not to be insurgents. The continued refusal of ISAF, under the command of Gen. David Petraeus, to release that information suggests that it would reveal a very high proportion of the several thousand Afghans killed last year as "Taliban" were simply civilian supporters or victims of misidentification or a malicious intelligence tip.

The remarkably sharp rise in the number night raids carried out by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, ISAF commander until June 2010 - and the even more spectacular increase in the raids under Petraeus - in 2010 raises serious questions about how the U.S. military could avoid a massive increase in the killing of individuals with non-military functions in the Taliban as well as people with only tangential or no connection to the insurgency.

According to a document from the Afghanistan war logs released by Wikileaks last July, In October 2009, the target list for SOF night raids, called the Joint Prioritized Effects List (JPEL), included 2,058 names. That list provided the intelligence basis for a pace of some 90 raids per month in late 2009 – a huge increase from the 20 per month just six months earlier.

Significantly, at that moment, Gen. Petraeus was warning the White House against a strategy of relying on more SOF raids and a smaller conventional force footprint. "There's just a limit to how many precise targets you have at any one time…," Petraeus said, according to the account in Bob Woodward's book "Obama's Wars".

But from May through July 2010, according to ISAF figures, SOF units launched 3,000 night raids – a 50-fold increase over the rate of only a year earlier – in which they reported killing nearly 1,100 Taliban "leaders" and "rank and file".

A 10-fold increase in raids, which implied a similar increase in the size of the target list, could not have been carried out without a dramatic relaxation of the already very loose criteria for including someone on the JPEL, according to Matthew Hoh.

"Commanders are under pressure to find targets for these raids, because it has become a metric of success," Hoh told IPS. He likened that broadening of the targeting criteria to the CIA's getting much greater latitude on targeting of drone strikes in Northwest Pakistan in early 2008, expanding the target list from a handful of al Qaeda leaders to virtually anyone tangentially associated with either al Qaeda or the Taliban.

Hoh said one result of the frantic effort to expand the target list is bound to be an increased use of intelligence tips from individuals or tribal enemies.

That appears to have been a factor in the killing of President Hamid Karzai's cousin, Yar Mohammad Karzai, in a night raid in the Karzai ancestral home in Kandahar province, Mar. 9. The raiders also took his son away with a black bag over his head.

Yar Mohmmad Karzai had told relatives repeatedly over the years that he feared that another cousin of the president's, Hashmat Karzai, who had headed a large security firm for years and then ran unsuccessfully for parliament, would seek to arrange for a U.S. attack against him by planting false information with the Americans.

Shah Noori reported from Kabul. Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. 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.

by John Nichols

“There is simply no rationale for continuing American involvement with no end in sight, rising deaths for civilians and our brave soldiers, declining public sentiment, and serious economic pain at home,” Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich explained to his fellow House members during Thursday’s debate on ending the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan. “Continuing our involvement in Afghanistan is not affordable, it's not just, and it hurts American foreign policy interests. It's time to go."

That message, long true but truer now than ever, resonated with 92 other members of the House, who joined Kucinich in voting for a new bill to bring an end to the war in Afghanistan by the end of 2011.

At a time when President Obama and Republican congressional leaders are both peddling different versions of the fantasy that America is broke, an when Republican governors are claiming that states are facing such hard times that only busting unions will balance budgets, Kucinich and his colleagues have found the missing money. It’s being wasted on a war of whim in Afghanistan.

As Kucinich explains, “There is simply no rationale for continuing American involvement with no end in sight, rising deaths for civilians and our brave soldiers, declining public sentiment, and serious economic pain at home. Continuing our involvement in Afghanistan is not affordable, it's not just, and it hurts American foreign policy interests. It's time to go.”

“While Congress pulls unemployment benefits from suffering Ohio families and proposes slashing health care benefits, vital children's programs, and veterans' services all because we're "broke," it continues to fund a war that has cost us more than $455 billion. We are told we should cut funding for assistance to low-income families with one hand, while with the other hand tens of billions of dollars are approved for a war that does nothing to further our national security. The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation estimates that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost the average American family of four almost $13,000 last year,” adds Kucinich, who says: “Our priorities are simply out of sync. Desperately needed unemployment benefits were filibustered last year because the costs to provide them were not offset with spending cuts or revenue increases. But we are not required to offset the costs of war, even when the war is completely funded by borrowed money - money we have to pay back with interest on the backs of our children and grandchildren.”

That argument gained favor with 85 Democrats, including ranking members such as John Conyers of Michigan, Barney Frank of Massachusetts, Bob Filner and George Miller and Henry Waxman of California, and Charles Rangel of New York. Congressional Black Caucus chair Barbara Lee, D-California, joined them, as did Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Raul Grijalva of Arizona and Keith Ellison of Minnesota.

Eight Republicans voted for the resolution, as well. In addition to long-time opponents of unnecessary wars, such as Texas Congressman Ron Paul and Tennessee Congressman John Duncan Jr., a number of younger GOP conservatives with Tea Party ties, such as Utah’s Jason Chaffetz backed the proposal to remove the troops from Afghanistan.

The bipartisan support for the resolution was satisfying, if insufficient. The measure still lost 321 to 93. Especially disappointing was the vote of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-California, who sided with Republican leaders in voting “no.”

Still, the increased level of opposition to the war was notable, as it put more members of Congress in synch with the American people.

“The U.S. Congress continues to lag far behind American public opinion on the war in Afghanistan. Evidence from opinion surveys reveals that Americans have greatly shifted their opinion on the war, with a two-thirds majority now opposing the war,” notes Kucinich. “Nearly three-quarters -- an overwhelming majority -- want to withdraw substantial numbers of troops by this summer. The vote today illustrates that Congress is unfortunately out of step with the American people on the issue of the Afghanistan war. Nevertheless, the number of Members of Congress voting in favor of the resolution to end the Afghanistan war grew appreciably over a similar vote last year. Most of the increase was due to Democratic members who switched their position. Most new Republican Members of Congress unfortunately opposed the resolution, in spite of the considerable costs of the war.

“The cost of the war, both in terms of blood and treasure is unsustainable. We will renew our struggle to bring U.S. policy in line with American public opinion, and ensure that American lives are not put at risk, Afghan civilians are not put at risk and our ability to address the fiscal needs of America here at home are not put at risk.”

John Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation and associate editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. A co-founder of the media reform organization Free Press, Nichols is co-author with Robert W. McChesney of The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again and Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy. Nichols is also author of Dick: The Man Who is President and The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders' Cure for Royalism.

by Tom Gallagher

“These people weren’t gathering for a bake sale ... They were terrorists.”

So went the American response to Pakistan’s complaint that our drone-launched missiles killed mostly “peaceful citizens, including elders of the area” in an attack last week. Now, a decade of explanations that civilian deaths in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Pakistan were a regrettable (but inevitable) part of our War on Terror have pretty well inured me to government mendacity. But somehow, this one – well you know, it took the cake. “A bake sale” – No, they probably weren’t there for a bake sale. Bake sales are what they hold here in America to run the schools we don’t have enough money for. Making new enemies for this country is pretty expensive you know.

The story this time is that the missiles apparently killed 26 of 32 participants in a “jirga” called to settle a local dispute between two tribes in North Waziristan over the operation of the chromium mine. Their target was the local Taliban officials expected there to mediate in their role as the de facto local government. Pakistan’s Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani called the attack “carelessly and callously targeted with complete disregard to human life,” reporting that there were, in fact, 13 Taliban present, but 15 of those killed were not Taliban. Some locals claimed a death toll as high as 40. And the U.S. response was anonymous because officially we have never launched a missile into Pakistan. We’re not at war there, so that would be illegal. And the CIA would never do anything illegal.

If the military hasn’t yet created a decoration for arrogance, they should. Otherwise, a lot of lot of spectacular efforts – such as this one – will go unrewarded. Could we ever imagine another country killing American civilians because they were in proximity to government or military figures, and then telling the world, “Those people were criminals. That was no cattle show, you know”? Of course not – no country is capable of such an action, so why bother even imagining such a thing?

There may be no better measure of just how far gone this country has gone done the road of trying to bomb its way to peace and friendship in the Muslim and Arab worlds than our current decision to bomb another Muslim and Arab country. The proposition that Libya could do better than Muammar Gaddafi will get no argument here, nor will I try to predict the future. But consider the arrogance that it takes for us to decide that this latest attack constitutes a sensible American response to the situation.

The U.S. still maintains an occupying force of 50,000 troops in Iraq as a result of a war launched on grounds now generally conceded to have been fraudulent. A military force of over 100,000 is currently deployed in Afghanistan, even as the Secretary of Defense says that anyone who’d recommend an operation like that should “have his head examined.” As mentioned above, we are also waging undeclared war in Pakistan – and in Yemen, too, in similar fashion.

In the current political upheavals in the Middle East, American allies in the governments of Yemen and Bahrain have killed unarmed civilians – in the case of Bahrain with the aid of another ally – Saudi Arabia – none of which has moved our government to action. But when France and the United Kingdom, the former colonial powers in the oil-rich area, declare the need to aid a military uprising in Libya – obviously not an ally – why, the U.S. is right there.

Unfortunately, one of the most accurate reactions to recent events was probably that of the unnamed Pakistani resident who said of the missile attack on his region: “It will create resentment among the locals and everyone might turn into suicide bombers.” Meanwhile, they might want to get to minting those Presidential Medals of Arrogance.

Could we ever imagine another country killing American civilians because they were in proximity to government or military figures, and then telling the world, “Those people were criminals. That was no cattle show, you know”? Of course not – no country is capable of such an action, so why bother even imagining such a thing?

It happened on Dec. 7th, 1941 and again on Sept. 11, 2001.

When American forces captured Okinawa they were horrified at the way Japanese civilians engaged in suicide attacks against American forces. Because of the high military and civilian casualty rates studies were done to estimate losses resulting from an invasion of Japan. It was expected that total American losses would be anywhere from 500,000 to 4 million and the Japanese would lose 5 to 10 million. The atomic bombs were used as a last ditch effort to prevent the invasion of Japan due to the staggeringly high casualty rate that was expected based on what happened in Okinawa.

The atomic bombs killed 150,000 to 250,000 including those who died in the months after from injuries sustained during the bombings. Even assuming the highest death rate from the bombs and the lowest casualty rate from the invasion that mean those two bombs saved the lives of 5.25 million people.

500,000 Purple Hearts were manufactured in anticipation of the invasion of Japan. Thanks to Little Boy and Fat Man those medals were never needed.

A little history does go a long way.

You began:

When American forces captured Okinawa they were horrified at the way Japanese civilians engaged in suicide attacks against American forces.

I suggest that you go do a little research, then write a short report about how your first sentence is so internally contradictory that it betrayed your deep historical ignorance on this topic.

Post it and then I'll see if there's any point in further educational effort in the interest of relieving you from your historical illusions.

Japanese civilians on Okinawa would routinely pretend to surrender to American forces and then pull grenades and kill themselves and whatever soldiers happened to be around. Japanese civilians also commited suicide by throwing themselves off of cliffs rather than surrender. This kind of behavior was unseen anywhere else in the war. Based on casualties suffered by both Americans and the Japanese it was decided that the atomic bomb was a better course of action. And it was, those two bombs saved millions of people from being killed and millions more from being maimed or wounded.