Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (31 page)

The meeting left Semple with the strong impression that it probably hadn’t been such a good idea to put Amin on the list in the first place, classifying him as a “gray area insurgent,” someone who was indeed fighting against the government and NATO but who was a “rational actor” with a plausible list of grievances who could potentially be reconciled to the Afghan government. “I did come to the conclusion that it had not been such a good idea to kill Amin and that he was much more useful alive than dead. Someone you could negotiate with,” Semple told me.

Being a Taliban “rational actor” in Afghanistan in 2010 was one quick way of climbing up the Joint Prioritized Effects List, which was numbered in order of priority. Meanwhile, despite what might seem to be Semple’s conclusive evidence that Mohammed Amin was alive and well, the military continued to insist they had “iron clad proof” that they had killed Amin but could not divulge what it was for fear of revealing “sensitive intelligence methods.” “On September 2, coalition forces did kill the targeted individual, Mohammed Amin, also known as Zabet Amanullah,” NATO spokesman Lieutenant Colonel John Dorrian told NPR in May 2011. “In this operation, multiple sources of intelligence confirm that coalition forces targeted the correct person.” Naturally, like any bureaucracy, the military is loath to admit mistakes, especially the secretive Joint Special Operations Command, with its useful cloak of mystery and omniscience.

However, it is quite possible that, beyond covering their collective behinds, the people who told Dorrian what to say and those who briefed Petraeus and Defense Secretary Gates did believe that all truth was contained in the plasma screens depicting that fatal SIM card’s movements. As we have seen, there is a recurrent pattern in which people become transfixed by what is on the screen, seeing what they want to see, especially when the screen—with a resolution equal to the legal definition of blindness for drivers—is representing people and events thousands of miles and several continents away. (It is not clear where, or in how many “nodes,” the analysis of Amin/Amanullah’s movements was made. It would certainly have been easier to ignore common sense if the fatal conclusions were being drawn at some distant point in the network.)

It had happened in Uruzgan in February 2010, when a Predator pilot in Nevada interpreted spots on a screen captured by an infrared camera fourteen thousand feet over Afghanistan as people praying, causing him to identify them as Taliban and therefore legitimate targets, while another, more open-minded observer, reviewing the same video concluded that the people in question “could just as easily be taking a piss.” Following Operation Anaconda, in February 2002, Special Operations commanders on an island off Oman, a thousand miles away from the battlefield, reviewed Predator video and thankfully concluded that one of their men that they had fought to rescue from an enemy-held mountaintop had died a heroic death, whereas in fact it was another American soldier, wounded and left for dead, who had fought on alone.

Some among the military are aware of the problem and strive to resist it. A-10 attack planes, for example, are, as noted, designed to afford the pilots the best possible direct view of the ground through their canopies. They do also carry video screens on their dashboards displaying infrared or daylight images from a camera-pod under the plane’s wing, but the pilots are trained to treat these as very much a secondary resource. “We call the screens ‘face magnets,’ Lieutenant Colonel Billy Smith, a veteran A-10 combat pilot, told me. “They tend to suck your face into the cockpit so you don’t pay attention to what’s going on outside.” Thus on May 26, 2012, a U.S. Air Force B-1 bomber, relying on a video image of the target (the weapons officer in a B-1 sits in an enclosed compartment with no view of the outside world), destroyed an Afghan farmer’s compound in Paktia Province in the belief that it contained hostile Taliban endangering U.S. forces. Minutes before, two A-10 pilots had refused orders to bomb the same target because they had scrutinized it closely with the aid of binoculars and concluded, correctly, that it contained only a farm couple and their children. Seven people, including a ten-month-old baby, died under the B-1’s multi-ton bomb load.

Neat computer-screen diagrams of Taliban or other insurgent networks based on the record of cell phone calls between their members can give a false impression of precision, making it all the easier to accept the impossible, such as the dual identity of Amin/Amanullah. The maze of ambiguous personal relationships based on shared histories, ancient enmities, and family and tribal ties in which Zabet Amanullah and Mohammed Amin moved would be impossible to reduce to a social-network chart, especially when based on imperfect intelligence. The imperfection was boosted by the policy of rounding up numbers of Afghans not because they were Taliban themselves but because they knew people who were. As Michael Semple remarked, many Afghans “have a few Taliban commander numbers saved in their mobile phone contacts” as a “survival mechanism.” These phone contacts would go into the social-network database but not necessarily with any indication of what their relationships actually were. So anyone with a lot of calls to numbers associated with people already on the JPEL in their phone record was at severe risk of going on the list themselves.

The whole complex effort was strongly reminiscent of the Operational Net Assessment approach to warfare promoted by the net-centric warriors in the 1990s, the notion that thanks to sensor, computer, and communications technology, all sources of intelligence and analysis could be usefully fused into a war-winning “shared knowledge of the adversary, the environment, and ourselves,” as an official manual put it. ONA was itself linked to the theories of effects-based operations (EBO), which, as we have seen, were defeated at the hands of Paul Van Riper in the Millennium Challenge war game. EBO had lost a little of its luster by the end of the decade, especially after General Mattis had banned the use of the term in his command in 2008. But the net-centric and target-list mind-set was very much alive, especially in the air force and in the rapidly expanding Special Operations Command. Stanley McChrystal himself, former chief of staff of Task Force 180, was fond of quoting (without attribution) the Rand pundit and netwar promoter John Arquilla’s aphorism “it takes a network to defeat a network.”

All of which leaves us with the question: What was the intended effect of the high-value-target kill/capture program in Afghanistan? Superficially, the object was straightforward and obvious: kill the enemy. Petraeus put it this way: “If you’re trying to take down an insurgency, you take away its safe havens; you take away its leaders.” In a slightly more detailed explanation, a lower-ranking official told me: “The intended effect was to disorganize the Taliban and put their leaders in fear, make them want to negotiate or surrender for fear of their lives. To put such a hurt on them that they would have to come to the negotiations table.” Marine Major General Richard Mills evoked a bucolic note, declaring in May 2011 that the aim was to make the Taliban “go back to their old way of life and put the rifle down and pick up a spade.”

The actual effects were certainly audible to anyone who heard Afghans expressing outrage at the violation of their homes by what some took to calling “the American Taliban,” especially when they arrested or killed civilians with no connection to the insurgents. In August 2008, the United States had obligingly bombed a family memorial service in Azizabad, a village near Herat, on the basis of a malign tip-off from a family enemy that this gathering was a major Taliban get-together. At least ninety people were killed, including sixty children. In an infamous February 2010 incident in Gardez, south of Kabul, a JSOC raid killed seven people, including three women, a district attorney, and a police commander. In an attempt to cover up the fiasco once they realized their error, the elite commandos used their knives to cut the bullets out of the women’s bodies and concocted a preposterous story about the women having been murdered by their own relatives in an “honor killing.”

In the Gardez case, as in Azizabad, the botched intelligence came not from esoteric telephone intercepts and social-network analysis but from some local rival of the murdered family. The May 2012 B-1 strike in Paktia Province that deftly obliterated a family of seven was reportedly also prompted by malign intelligence from a local source. “The bottom line is we have been played like pawns in a very deliberate power-grab scheme by mafia-like warlords,” an officer of great experience wrote me from Afghanistan in a bitter email in 2013 referencing such bloody mishaps. “It is like watching a gang war unfold between the Bloods, Crips, Hells Angels, Aryan Nation, etc.,… and we are prosecuting targets in support of all four gangs. Why? Because we like prosecuting targets as a military. It briefs well. And good briefs
=
good reputations
=
good career opportunities. Also, we like people who like us.”

Whether people were being killed as a result of these malign power plays or misplaced faith in technical intelligence, the United States paid a price with the civilian population. One measure of the cost to the overall U.S. war effort of the obsessive targeting of Taliban “leaders and facilitators” was unearthed by historian Gareth Porter, who noted a direct correlation between a stepped-up rate of raids in Kandahar Province in southern Afghanistan and the number of homemade roadside bombs reported by locals to the American forces. The turn-in rate had been averaging 3.5 percent between November 2009 and March 2010, according to the Joint IED Defeat Organization, which kept track of such matters. But as the Special Operations forces began their onslaught in Kandahar, the percentage of bombs voluntarily reported by locals fell like a stone to 1.5 percent and stayed at that level.

Clearly, the high-value targeting was counterproductive in terms of winning hearts and minds among the Afghan population, especially in view of the large number of innocents who were gunned down or blown apart. But the campaign did succeed in killing a large number of intended targets. Unfortunately these victims were less likely to be senior Taliban leaders, who for the most part survived in sheltered safety in Pakistan, unmolested by the CIA’s drone campaign, and much more likely to be lower-level provincial and district commanders. These were indeed slaughtered in large numbers, either by air strikes of the kind that dispatched Zabet Amanullah or by ground assaults by the Navy Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU), formerly Seal Team 6, and other Special Operations units. In a series of media interviews in August 2010, for example, Petraeus claimed that in almost 3,000 night raids over 90 days between May and July that year, no less than 365 “insurgent leaders” had been killed or captured, 1,355 Taliban “rank and file” fighters captured, and 1,031 killed. Leaving aside the number of innocent civilians represented in those figures (20 dead for every insurgent leader killed in July 2010, for example), there was clearly a high Taliban loss rate as a result of the escalating campaign. In the northern Afghanistan province of Kunduz, Task Force 373 began a sustained campaign against the Taliban in December 2009. Up until that point the enemy leadership there had been left entirely unmolested by SOF and had become used to the idea that they were invulnerable in their well-guarded compounds. But by the following fall, two successive generations of leaders had been eliminated, and the third was uneasily taking office. By October, seventeen commanders had been killed.

Special Operations had achieved similar results in Iraq, wiping out hundreds of insurgents thanks to McChrystal’s “industrial counterterrorism.” But, as we have seen, the
effects
of the operations were not necessarily as advertised. Rivolo’s analysis of 200 high-value-target eliminations had demonstrated that dead or captured Taliban commanders were quickly replaced, almost invariably by someone more aggressive. Just as in Iraq, the insurgency did not “fold in on itself,” despite claims to the contrary from U.S. headquarters. The presumed objective of the campaign was to make the Taliban less effective as a fighting force, but apart from occasional disruptions, there was little sign of this happening. Squadron Leader Keith Dear, a British military intelligence officer who later commanded the Operational Intelligence Support Group at NATO headquarters in Kabul, wrote in 2011: “the Taliban … today conduct attacks as complex, if not more so, than ever before, and continue to show the capability to coordinate and conduct attacks across a wide geographic area simultaneously.” Meanwhile, two years of the targeted-killing campaign had cost the Taliban in many parts of Afghanistan an entire generation of leaders. In many cases, the dead men were locally born and bred, and had ties to their communities; the new commanders, however, often tended to be outsiders appointed by the leadership in Pakistan. They were also younger: Task Force 373’s 2010 campaign in the north reduced the average age of commanders from thirty-five to twenty-five. A twelve-month onslaught in Helmand had similarly brought the average age down by May 2011 from thirty-five to twenty-three. “The Taliban leadership in 2011 is younger, more radical, more violent and less discriminate than in 2001, because of targeted killing,” Squadron Leader Dear bluntly concluded. “This new in-country leadership has increasingly adopted Al Qaeda’s terrorist tactics and have deeper links with Al Qaeda than their predecessors.”

It appeared that the equation Rivolo had discerned years before with regard to the narcotics business—that targeted killing had little effect on a leadership impervious to risk—still held true in Afghanistan, as it had in Iraq. The young fighters taking command were very unlikely to “pick up a spade.” Most of them had been fighting their entire adult lives. “This is Juma Khan, one of our distinguished commanders,” a Taliban commander named Khalid Amin, recently promoted from foot soldier following the deaths of two predecessors, explained as he guided a visiting film crew around a Taliban cemetery in Baghlan Province in 2011. “He was killed on the front line. This is Maulvi Jabar, our district chief. He was killed with 30 others in a night raid. When he died, the enemy said the Taliban was finished here. But three months later, our Islamic emirate is still strong. We have many more fighters than back then.… These night raids cannot annihilate us. We want to die anyway, so those destined for martyrdom will die in the raids and the rest will continue to fight without fear.”