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(Counter-insurgency apparently hasn't changed much since the war in
Vietnam. And Afghanistan will end up with the same results, a defeat for
imperialism.)
NY Times, Dec. 31, 2018
C.I.A.’s Afghan Forces Leave a Trail of Abuse and Anger
By Mujib Mashal
NADER SHAH KOT, Afghanistan — Razo Khan woke up suddenly to the sight of
assault rifles pointed at his face, and demands that he get out of bed
and onto the floor.
Within minutes, the armed raiders had separated the men from the women
and children. Then the shooting started.
As Mr. Khan was driven away for questioning, he watched his home go up
in flames. Within were the bodies of two of his brothers and of his
sister-in-law Khanzari, who was shot three times in the head. Villagers
who rushed to the home found the burned body of her 3-year-old daughter,
Marina, in a corner of a torched bedroom.
The men who raided the family’s home that March night, in the district
of Nader Shah Kot, were members of an Afghan strike force trained and
overseen by the Central Intelligence Agency in a parallel mission to the
United States military’s, but with looser rules of engagement.
Ostensibly, the force was searching for militants. But Mr. Khan and his
family had done nothing to put themselves in the cross hairs of the
C.I.A.-sponsored strike force, according to investigators.
It was clear that the raiding force had “committed an atrocity,” said
Jan-mir Zazai, a member of the Khost provincial council who was part of
the government investigating team. “Everyone we spoke to said they would
swear on the innocence of the victims.”
At a time when the conventional Afghan military and police forces are
being killed in record numbers across the country, the regional forces
overseen by the C.I.A. have managed to hold the line against the most
brutal militant groups, including the Haqqani wing of the Taliban and
also Islamic State loyalists.
But the units have also operated unconstrained by battlefield rules
designed to protect civilians, conducting night raids, torture and
killings with near impunity, in a covert campaign that some Afghan and
American officials say is undermining the wider American effort to
strengthen Afghan institutions.
Those abuses are actively pushing people toward the Taliban, the
officials say. And with only a relatively small American troop
contingent left — and that perhaps set to drop further on President
Trump’s orders — the strike forces are increasingly the way that a large
number of rural Afghans experience the American presence.
Many of the strike forces were officially put under the control of
Afghan intelligence starting in 2012. But senior Afghan and
international officials say that the two most effective and ruthless
forces, in Khost and Nangarhar Provinces, are still sponsored mainly by
the C.I.A.
Those fighting forces, also referred to as counterterrorism pursuit
teams, are recruited, trained and equipped by C.I.A. agents or
contractors who work closely with them on their bases, according to
several current and former senior Afghan security officials, and the
members are paid nearly three times as much as regular Afghan soldiers.
The Afghan ownership of those two units is only nominal, a liaison
relationship in which intelligence headquarters in Kabul has
representatives on the mission for coordination. But the required
pre-approval for raids is often last-minute, or skipped until afterward,
the officials say.
For months, The New York Times has investigated the human toll of the
C.I.A.-sponsored forces on communities. Times journalists researched
frequent complaints — at times almost weekly — that these units had
raided and killed civilians, and The Times went to the sites of half a
dozen of their raids, often less than 24 hours after the force had left.
The investigation found details of a C.I.A. mission with tactical
successes that have come at the cost of alienating the Afghan
population. One former senior Afghan security official bluntly accused
the strike forces of war crimes.
Often, the raids that resulted in civilian deaths were carried out not
far from police outposts or government offices, leaving those
American-supported officials humiliated in the villages they had been
trying to establish relationships with. And because the C.I.A.-sponsored
units often use English during operations, their abuses are even more
directly equated with the American presence, though claims that American
agents have sometimes been on the missions have not been confirmed.
“The dilemma is this: The C.I.A. needs to fight its wars in the
shadows,” said Karl Eikenberry, a former commander of American forces in
Afghanistan who later served as the United States ambassador to Kabul.
“But when the U.S. also takes on the mission of state-building, then the
contradictions between the two approaches — stealth, black ops, and
non-transparency vs. institution building, rule of law, and
accountability — become extraordinarily difficult to resolve, and our
standing as a nation suffers.”
United Nations reports have expressed concern about civilian deaths and
“consistent, credible accounts of intentional destruction of civilian
property, illegal detention, and other abuses” by the units. The United
Nations said the forces in Khost, in particular, operated outside the
Afghan government’s structure “with an absence of transparency and
ongoing impunity.”
In the village of Nader Shah Kot, the provincial official who helped
investigate the raid, Mr. Zazai, said the force’s impunity was
alienating residents from the government and increasing support for the
Taliban.
“If there had been arrests, if there had been justice, this wouldn’t
continue like this,” Mr. Zazai said. “But there is absolutely no justice.”
American defense officials in Washington say the C.I.A. operations in
Afghanistan are largely opaque to military generals operating in the war
zone. The C.I.A.’s level of partnership has been declining as the Afghan
intelligence agency and its forces grow more mature, the officials said.
But as American military forces are set to draw down, the role of the
Central Intelligence Agency is only likely to grow in importance.
A spokeswoman for the C.I.A. would not comment, nor would Afghans
directly involved with the forces. Afghan security officials in Kabul
tried to play down the level of the forces’ autonomy and the nature of
their abuses. When pressed with details of specific cases, they did not
respond.
The number of casualties varied among the cases The Times investigated.
In one, two brothers were killed as they watered their fields before
dawn after receiving permission from the local security outpost. In
another, a unit pursuit of a Taliban target went into the wrong house in
Laghman Province and killed 12 civilians, officials there said.
One of the most gruesome episodes examined by The Times was in Khogyani
District, in Nangarhar Province. The forces handcuffed and hooded two
brothers and, after a brief interrogation as their wives and children
watched, both men were dragged away and executed in a corner of a
bedroom that was then detonated over their heads, according to relatives
and villagers who pulled the bodies out of the rubble.
When Times journalists arrived at the house 16 hours after the raid, the
area was a scene of carnage with burned vehicles and crumbled walls. The
family’s patriarch, Hajji Hassan Jan, 60, said that a security outpost
overlooked their house, and that the district’s intelligence chief, who
was a regular guest for dinner, had no answer for why the house was
raided and his sons killed.
Still, he tried to guess: It was probably for feeding the Taliban. In
rural Afghanistan, traditions of hospitality demand that you feed
whoever knocks at your door. When those men are armed, there is little
choice.
“The forces once asked my son, ‘Why do you feed the Taliban — why cook
chicken for them, or bring them yogurt?’” Mr. Jan said. “My son told
them: ‘We made chicken for them. If you come, we will make an entire
lamb for you.’”
Rooted in Counterterrorism
The origin of C.I.A.-sponsored strike forces in Afghanistan was in the
early days of the American invasion in 2001, when the United States
allied with militia forces to help topple the Taliban regime.
Once the Taliban and Al Qaeda started fleeing, often across the border
into Pakistan, there was no organized Afghan force to create the needed
lines of defense.
In the eastern province of Khost, largely under the influence of the
Haqqani network, which had strong ties to Al Qaeda, the C.I.A. started
organizing local militias into a force that could strike at insurgents
as they tried to come in or out.
“These forces were created in border areas at first to stop Al Qaeda
fighters,” said Ghaffar Khan, a Czechoslovakia-trained police officer
from Soviet times whom the C.I.A. had recruited as one of the force’s
first commanders.
It was meant to be a stopgap program. But the force proved so effective,
even after the Taliban started coming hard at the government and the
American presence, that it kept expanding to other parts of the country.
In Khost, the so-called protection force was consolidated and based out
of Camp Chapman, the main C.I.A. outpost there. The unit in Khost still
has the largest number of fighters, though the exact count is unclear:
Officials put the number anywhere from 3,000 to over 10,000. It patrols
border areas and also runs its own network of informants.
Commander Ghafar said he believed the forces remained necessary,
otherwise the defense against Haqqani-run suicide bombers would buckle,
making it easier for attackers to reach Kabul. On the other hand, he
said, their abuses were taking a toll.
Former President Hamid Karzai spent years trying to rein in American
forces from carrying out night raids that angered villages and set them
against his government, only to realize that the C.I.A.’s Afghan forces
were doing the same.
One episode in particular made Mr. Karzai furious. In 2009, the strike
force in Kandahar tried to forcibly release one of its colleagues
detained by the police on criminal charges. When the most senior law
enforcement official in the province, Gen. Matiullah Qateh, resisted, he
and several of his officers were shot dead, former and current Afghan
officials say. The C.I.A. reluctantly surrendered the guards involved in
the killing of the general, after the Afghan leadership threatened to
use force.
Mr. Eikenberry, the former general and ambassador, said the
C.I.A.-sponsored forces “which operated outside of the framework that
governed those under sovereign control of the Afghan government” raised
concerns from the beginning.
“But Bin Laden was not yet found, Al Qaeda was active in the border
areas, and Afghanistan did not have forces capable of dealing with what
was regarded as an existential threat to the U.S. So the concerns never
led to action,” Mr. Eikenberry said. “The problem was one to be solved
later in the campaign, so to speak. And the C.I.A. was the dominant
voice in the chamber.”
A Surge of Abuse
Several current and former Afghan officials said that the C.I.A. still
largely commanded the strike forces in Khost and Nangarhar, effectively
putting the units above the law. American agents and contractors work
closely with them on their bases, develop the targets for them, and help
guide the operations from headquarters. And the Americans have a
presence at bases where detainees have accused the units of torture and
abuse, officials say.
In a period of a little over a year, human rights officials registered
at least 15 complaints of torture by the strike force based in Nangarhar
Province, which has roughly 1,000 fighters and is known as “02.”
At a September news conference in the city of Jalalabad, elders from
three districts of Nangarhar said that over 100 civilians were killed by
the 02 unit the month before. (That number could not be verified
independently.)
“Before the people start protests, before the people pick up weapons
against the government, the government needs to rein in these kind of
reckless operations,” said one tribal elder, Malik Zaman.
Mohammed Taher, from Khogyani District, said he and two of his brothers
were detained in a night raid last spring. He was held for three months
and five days, about a week of it at the air base in Nangarhar where the
strike force is based.
“They said, ‘We will drive a tank over you if you don’t say your
brothers are Taliban.’ I said, ‘If you have evidence that they are, show
me,’” Mr. Taher said. “They wanted me to say all that so they could take
a video of me saying it.”
Mr. Taher said Americans were present during the raid when he was
detained, but he did not see Americans during the questioning and the
torture at the base. His mistreatment stopped when he was handed over to
the regular Afghan intelligence force, he said.
“My hands were cuffed. They punctured these veins with needles and blood
was running,” he said.
Sabrina Hamidi, who leads the Afghan Human Rights Commission in the
east, said that during her 13 years of work at the commission she could
not recall a single example of access to the regional forces to examine
accusation of abuses.
“In their operations, most of the times the harm to civilians is
direct,” Ms. Hamidi said about the 02 unit. “When they make arrests,
there is usually torture involved, also.”
In nearly every case examined by The Times, the victims’ families said
they were at a loss for where to seek justice, or an explanation of why
they had been raided. And nearly every government official in those
areas expressed helplessness about the strike forces’ operations.
‘I Thought It Was the Caliphate’
In the Bati Kot district of Nangarhar Province, the strike forces
conducted a raid in May, leaving their headquarters at the air base in
Jalalabad and arriving in a convoy of several dozen vehicles at a
village surrounded by corn fields and orange orchards.
One resident, Khoshal Khan, who works at a medical university, thought
at first that the raid was an attack by the Islamic State.
“I ran and got my weapon — I thought it was the caliphate people. I
didn’t know it was the government,” Mr. Khan said. “Then they started
firing, and I heard the gate blown up. They were speaking English, also.”
The C.I.A.-sponsored force left behind torched cars and an
explosion-crumpled home in Khogyani.CreditJim Huylebroek for The New
York Times
Families often sleep outside because of the heat. One family patriarch,
Mohamed Taher, in his late 50s, was shot near his bed on the roof.
When Times journalists arrived the day after the raid, the bed was
broken, the mud roof under the bed patched with blood, just steps from
dried tomatoes sunning on a tarp.
One of Mr. Taher’s grandsons, Sekandar, 16, was visiting from Jalalabad
during a school break. He was sleeping in the yard and was awakened by
gunshots, he said, spotting the light from the raiders’ laser sights
racing around. Sekandar said the forces spoke both Pashto and English.
The strike force had climbed ladders and was on the walls of the house,
ordering Mr. Taher’s family to come out. But Sekandar said that when
they followed the order to come out with their hands up, one of Mr.
Taher’s sons, Naeem Shah, was shot in his left hand. Then a grandson,
Shaker Khan, was shot in the head.
“The women started crying. They called to be quiet, then they blew up
the gates and came in,” Sekandar said. His account matched those of
other family members and neighbors.
Another of Mr. Taher’s sons, Mohammed Raheem, had also been gunned down.
The remaining men were handcuffed, and the women and children were put
in one room.
Before the forces started leaving about two hours later, with Naeem Shah
still wounded, the fighters warned the family not to come out for an
hour after they had left, said Mr. Shah’s young son, Adel, 10.
“They said, ‘Don’t come out — if the airstrikes hit you, then don’t
complain,’” said Adel, whose face had shrapnel wounds from the raid.
While the family waited in the house, Adel’s father bled to death in the
yard.
The district governor’s office is just 100 yards from the house, and
there are two police outposts nearby.
Mohibullah, a relative of the dead, said that for him, there was no
difference between the C.I.A.-sponsored force and the Islamic State if
the result was to be attacked with no warning.
“What is the need for raiding me at night?” he said. “Send me a warrant.
If I didn’t show up, then you can bring your tanks and fly your planes
and destroy me.”
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