US Army photo by Staff Sergeant Jeremy D. Cris
They hunt at night and in packs: special operations forces that track down Afghan insurgents. They surround the house of their intended target, announce their presence, and give the now wide-awake inhabitant a brief moment to surrender. 80 percent do, the other 20 percent are shot and killed.
Night raids by specially- trained ISAF and Afghan forces are an integral part of the American strategy to weaken the Taliban sting. Some say the strategy is working. Carlotta Gall reported in the NY Times yesterday that the killings of top insurgent commanders deep in the Taliban redoubt of Quetta, Pakistan, are being attributed to the raids:
No one seems to know for sure who is behind the killings. Members of the Taliban attribute them to American spies, running Pakistani and Afghan agents, in an extension of the American campaigns that have used night raids to track down and kill scores of midlevel Taliban commanders in Afghanistan and drone strikes to kill militants with links to Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
I am currently sitting in front of a computer in Brooklyn and get my Afghanistan news through a hodgepodge of secondary sources. It’s impossible for me to gauge how effective night operations are and whether their impact against the Taliban is worth the inevitable civilian casualties. But the operations do lead to inadvertent slaughter. In one botched operation in February of 2010, 23 young Afghan men were killed in Oruzgan Province by hellfire missiles and rockets fired from an attack helicopter because of faulty intelligence given by a drone operator. The operator deemed the trucks a potential threat to nearby special operations forces, even though the trucks were seven miles away and no weapons confirmed.
More than anything, I’m curious about the logistics of these raids. Who are the men that participate in them? How do they vet the intelligence used to determine who is to be targeted and as a result potentially killed? When a Taliban commander is captured or killed, does anger against the heavy-handed home invasions justify the tactical gain? Are the numbers of deaths caused by the raids, be it Taliban or other, going up or going down? Special operations forces seem to be operating inside Pakistan; is this being done with ISI knowledge and acquiescence?
I’ve contacted an ISAF press officer in Afghanistan for more information. We’ll see if a blogger merits a response. Regardless, more to come.
