A Coalition special operations forces (SOF) member discusses a clearance plan with Afghan National Army Commandos from the 8th Commando Kandak during a clearance operation in Akhtar Village, Arghandab district, Zabul province Afghanistan Jan. 11, 2012. Credit: U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Jacob L. Dillon

By Gareth Porter and Shah Noori
WASHINGTON/KABUL, Mar 10 2013 (IPS)

Two weeks after Afghan President Hamid Karzai demanded the withdrawal of all U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) from Wardak province by this date, the issue remains suspended in negotiations between U.S. and Afghan governments.

U.S. Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel planned to discuss the matter with Karzai Sunday, but the meeting was postponed after a security incident in Kabul.

Negotiations between the U.S. military command in Kabul and the Afghan government over Karzai’s demand were going on last week as an investigation by a joint team of Afghan and U.S. Special Forces officers into human rights abuses by forces said to be linked to the SOF unit in the province continues.

“I can tell you that ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] and Afghan leaders are meeting,” ISAF spokesman Air Force Lt. Col. Lester T. Carroll told IPS Friday, and that Karzai’s demand for SOF’s withdrawal from Wardak “is being discussed”.

Attaullah Khogiani, spokesman for the governor of Wardak province, told IPS Saturday that the U.S. SOF unit is still in its base in Maidan Shar district, and that a joint U.S. SOF-Afghan government investigating team looking into complaints by Wardak’s population about Afghan armed men linked to the SOF unit has demanded more time.

The Karzai government has given the team three days to complete its investigation, but the team is saying it needs more time than that, according to Khogiani. The joint team is meeting with the families of victims of the crimes by the mysterious armed force in the province that has been blamed on the SOF, he told IPS in an interview.

The identity of the Afghan forces that have imposed a reign of terror in Wardak that prompted President Karzai to demand the withdrawal of the SOF from the province remains a mystery to Afghan officials and residents there.

Khogiani and other officials and residents of Wardawk interviewed by IPS in recent days say the Afghans are certain that the armed Afghans who have carried out murder, torture and extrajudicial detention of civilians in Wardak have been working for the SOF unit stationed there. But they still don’t know who they are or where they came from.

U.S. SOF units have been responsible for recruiting, training, arming and monitoring Afghan Local Police (ALP), which have committed abuses in the past. But many people in Wardak believe the armed Afghans terrorising the villages could not be ALP, because they are not from the villages themselves and in fact appear not to be from Wardak province at all.

Abdul Rahman, who commands a police checkpoint and is a village elder and district development council member in Maidan Shar district, told IPS that the armed men behind the abuses in that district are believed to be from an Afghan task force organised and supported by SOF in Kandahar and Helmand provinces.

Mohammad Jan Sarwary, a tall young man working for a mobile phone
company who lives in Narkh district, told IPS the armed force that entered his village in mid-February are not local police recruited by the SOF but Afghan task forces who are staying with SOF in the base.

“The people say they are Afghans who had been trained by the Special Operations Forces,” said Sarwary. “From their dialect we believe they are from Kandahar or Helmand provinces.”

Sarwary said a relative in his village told him that the militiamen had forced one of the residents to sit on an improvised explosive device with a gun pointed at his head. They threatened that if any of the members of the force were attacked by anyone in the village, they would blow up that individual.

Another possibility, which has not been raised by Afghans, is that the “counterterrorism pursuit teams” trained by the CIA and acting outside any Afghan chain of command have been carrying out operations in Wardak.

Afghan presidential spokesman Aimal Faizi announced Feb. 24 that Karzai had ordered his ministry of defence to “kick out US special forces from Wardak…within two weeks.”

The spokesman said it had become “clear that armed individuals named as U.S. special force[s] stationed in Wardak province engage in harassing, annoying, torturing and even murdering innocent people.”

Faizi mentioned the disappearance of nine people in “an operation by this suspicious force” and a separate incident in which “a student was taken away at night from his home, whose tortured body with throat cut was found two days later under a bridge.”

The spokesman later clarified that he was referring to “[t]hose Afghans in these armed groups who are working with the U.S. special forces….”

ISAF spokesman Brigadier General Gunter Katz immediately claimed that a review had already confirmed that “no coalition forces have been involved in the alleged misconduct”.

But the Los Angeles Times reported a U.S. official as confirming that four of the nine had been seized in joint U.S.-Afghan raids last November and December.

SOF commanders have reportedly brushed off the charges of abuse. Coalition officials told the Wall Street Journal Feb. 25 that the accusations were part of a Taliban propaganda campaign. “The fact is,” one official was quoted as saying, “we are badly beating the Taliban there.”

Hazrat Mohammad Jan, deputy provincial council chief in Wardak, told IPS, “We have gotten many complains from people across Wardak, especially from Narkh and Maidan Shar districts, over the last five months.”

The complaints have involved both the unidentified Afghan forces and the SOF units. The Afghan intelligence agency, police and governor’s office were all aware that the SOF were conducting raids and detaining people, but were powerless to stop them, according to Jan.

The inability of the government to respond to people’s complaints has created distrust of the government, Jan said.

Jan said Afghan commanders in Wardak and Kabul brought in elders from the areas terrorised by the men allegedly associated with the SOF to meet with the SOF commander in Maidan Shar and tell him about the abuses they have been suffering. When that did not bring any improvement, Jan said, they went to Kabul to plead with the SOF commander in Kabul. That didn’t help either, according to Jan.

Finally a delegation of Wardak people went to Kabul and complained to Karzai himself. Karzai then sent a representative to Wardak to get detailed accounts of misconduct by SOF personnel in Narkh and Maidan Shar, Jan said. After an official of the attorney general’s office also visited the province and heard similar accounts, Karzai made the decision to order the SOF out of the province.

The perception that U.S.-sponsored militias from outside the province are committing widespread abuses has spawned conspiratorial explanations in Wardawk.

Police officer and village elder Rahman said he believes the SOF units are deliberately allowing the people they trained to carry out actions to “make people in the province insecure”, so that “the people will react strongly.”

“2014 is near and the SOF is going to leave,” Rahman said, “and that’s why they are turning people against government, and also disrupting the transitional process and bargaining to get permanent bases and immunity” – a reference to two issues still under negotiation.

Karzai’s comment on Sunday that the U.S. and the Taliban were colluding to create insecurity reflected a similar conspiracy theory.

In the background of the controversy, meanwhile, are negotiations between U.S. and Afghan officials on U.S. Special Forces operations after the 2014 transition begins.

A Memorandum of Understanding signed May 12, 2012 between the U.S. military and the Afghan Defence Ministry was trumpeted by the Obama administration as giving the Afghan government control over such operations.

But a little-noticed provision of the agreement defined the “special operations” covered by the agreement as those operations that are “approved by the Afghan Operational Coordination Group (OCG) and conducted by Afghan Forces with support from U.S. Forces in accordance with Afghan laws.”

That meant that the SOF was still free to carry out other raids without consultation with the Afghan government, leaving the issue of their future still to be determined.

*Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

Afghan National Police guard the office of the Governor of Bamyan Province, Afghanistan. Credit: UN Photo/Eric Kanalstein

By Gareth Porter and Shah Noori
WASHINGTON/KABUL, Sep 20 2012 (IPS)

Sharply increased attacks on U.S. and other NATO personnel by Afghan security forces, reflecting both infiltration of and Taliban influence on those forces, appear to have outflanked the U.S.-NATO command’s strategy for maintaining control of the insurgency.

The Taliban-instigated “insider attacks”, which have already killed 51 NATO troops in 2012 – already 45 percent more than in all of 2011 – have created such distrust of the Afghan National Army (ANA) and national police that the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) command has suspended joint operations by NATO forces with Afghan security units smaller than the 800-strong battalion of Kandak and vowed to limit them in the future.

ISAF had intended to carry out intensive partnering and advising of ANA and police units below battalion level through 2012 to get them ready to take responsibility for Afghan security. Now, however, that strategy appears to have been disrupted by the insider attacks, and Afghan military and civilian officials are seriously concerned.

Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta sought to minimise the crisis in U.S. war strategy Tuesday by calling the inside attacks on NATO troops the “last gasp” of a Taliban insurgency that has been “unable to regain any of the territory that they have lost.” The “last gasp” phrase recalls then Vice-President Dick Cheney’s infamous 2005 claim that the Iraqi insurgency was “in its last throes”.

But Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, who has no apparent personal stake in touting the existing strategy in Afghanistan, called the attacks “a very serious threat to the campaign” in an interview on Saturday.

“You can’t whitewash it,” said Dempsey. “We can’t convince ourselves that we just have to work harder to get through it. Something has to change.”

The ISAF command also tried to downplay the significance of the decision, portraying it as “temporary” and not unlike previous adjustments to high threat conditions. The ISAF press release vowed that it would “return to normal operations as soon as conditions warrant”.

But the Taliban have power over whether conditions return to a level that would allow resumption of the joint operations between NATO and Afghan forces, which have been touted as the key to preparing the ANA and the police to cope with the Taliban on their own. The Taliban have achieved a strategic coup by creating a high degree of U.S.-NATO fear and mistrust of the Afghan forces.

Even if some joint operations are resumed, moreover, they will be limited to those approved by regional commanders, according to the new policy. And White House spokesman Jay Carney appeared to contradict the ISAF “return to normal operations” language, telling reporters, “Most partnering and advising will now be at the battalion level and above.”

ISAF Commander Gen. John Allen has tried in the past to minimise the role of the Taliban in the insider killings, suggesting that as little as 10 percent of the Afghan soldiers and police who killed NATO troops were Taliban infiltrators. Most of the killers acted out of personal anger at their Western advisers, Allen argued.

But Allen also conceded that, in addition to Taliban infiltrators, some Afghan troops may have acted out of “radicalization or having become susceptible to extremist ideology.”

New evidence suggests that the Taliban had influenced a number of ANA and police who killed NATO personnel. Last month, the Taliban’s media arm released a video showing a Taliban commander in eastern Kunar province welcoming two ANA soldiers who they said had killed U.S. and Afghan troops earlier in the year. Based on the video, the Long War Journal judged that neither of the soldiers had been a Taliban infiltrator but had made the decision in response to Taliban urging.

Douglas Ollivant, who was senior counterinsurgency adviser to the U.S. commander of the regional command for eastern Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011, told IPS the evidence indicates that most Afghan personnel who killed NATO troops and were not already Taliban when they joined the security forces had later become “de facto infiltrators”.

In the Afghan rural social context, the local Taliban and the Afghan troops and soldiers “all know each other”, Ollivant said. “It’s not like they are from two different planets.”

Lt. Col. Danny Davis, who traveled extensively across Afghanistan during his 2010-2011 tour of duty there, found evidence that the Taliban had indeed achieved influence over the Afghan security forces who were supposed to be helping U.S.-NATO forces root out the insurgents.

In a draft report he wrote earlier this year, which had circulated within the U.S. government and was leaked to Rolling Stone magazine, Davis wrote, “In almost every combat outpost I visited this year, the troopers reported to me they had intercepted radio or other traffic between the ANSF and the local Taliban making essentially mini-nonaggression deals with each other.”

In Zharay district of Kandahar province, Davis wrote, he found the Afghan security forces were “in league with the Taliban”.

Taliban spiritual and political leader Mullah Omar issued a statement Aug. 16 saying the Taliban had “cleverly infiltrated the ranks of the enemy according to the plan given them last year.” Omar also called on Afghan security personnel to “defect and joint the Taliban as matter of religious duty”.

For many months the U.S. has been putting intense pressure on the Afghan government to prevent such killings by “revetting” the personnel files of ANA and police personnel. Just last week, the government announced that it had removed “hundreds” of security forces from its ranks.

But there is very little the Afghan government can do to ensure against Afghan troops turning against NATO. “Vetting is virtually impossible in a place like Afghanistan,” former British commander Col. Richard Kemp told the Guardian.

There are no detailed files on the young recruits into the army and police. The only information on the vast majority of new recruits is a statement from village elders vouching for them.

Retired Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, senior fellow and director of communications at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, told IPS that U.S. officers in Afghanistan don’t believe the Afghan government’s efforts to identify potential Taliban infiltrators or sympathisers will slow the pace of insider killings. “They are all saying it isn’t going to have any effect,” said Shaffer.

The decision by ISAF to pull back from joint operations with smaller Afghan units is regarded by Afghan officials and observers as a major boost to the Taliban and a potentially serious blow to the already shaky ANA and police.

Retired ANA Gen Atiqullah Amarkhail acknowledged in an interview with IPS that insider attacks “have destroyed the NATO trust in the Afghan security forces”. The halt in joint operations with Afghan security forces will “really embolden and raise the morale of the Taliban”, he said. “The Taliban consider that they have achieved the goal they have been working for and are proud that they made coalition forces stop helping Afghan security forces.”

Amarkhail said he doesn’t believe the ANA will be able to conduct operations without the help of NATO forces, because of poor coordination among Afghan security forces and its lack of modern weapons.

“If the foreign forces do not support and leave the Afghan Army in the present condition, things will get worse,” said Amarkhail. He expressed the fear that the result could be that different elements within the ANA will “turn their guns on each other”.

Dawoud Ahmadi, spokesman for Helmand Province Governor Mohammad Gulab Mangal, also expressed the fear that the ANA in the province will not be able to operate effectively against the Taliban if ISAF halts joint operations with the ANA at lower unit levels.

The spokesman told IPS, “We have problems in Helmand province, especially in the North. If NATO doesn’t help in conducting operations at lower level, the Afghan security forces will face problems, because they are not yet ready to launch operations on their own in that part of the province.”

*Shah Noori reported from Kabul. Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

By Gareth Porter and Shah Noori
WASHINGTON/KABUL, Feb 20 2012 (IPS)

Nearly a year after the Barack Obama administration began negotiations with the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai on a U.S. military presence in Afghanistan beyond 2014, both sides confirmed last week that the talks are still hung up over the Afghan demand that night raids by U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) either be ended or put under Afghan control.

Karzai has proposed the latter option, with Afghan forces carrying out most of the raids, but the U.S. military has rejected that possibility, according to sources at the U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Florida.

U.S. soldiers dismount from their vehicle and prepare to raid a series of compounds in the Maywand District of Afghanistan on Nov. 22, 2010. Credit: US Army/CC BY 2.0

Karzai’s persistence in pressing that demand reflects the widespread popular anger at night raids, which means that Karzai cannot give in to the U.S. insistence on continuing them without handing the Taliban a big advantage in the political-military maneuvering that will continue during peace talks.

The dilemma for both the United States and Karzai is that the United States has been planning to leave SOF units and U.S. airpower – the two intensely unpopular elements of U.S.-NATO presence in the country – as the only combat forces in Afghanistan beyond 2014.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal Wednesday, Karzai gave no evidence of backing down on his demand regarding night raids and the closely related issue of U.S. troops taking and holding Afghan prisoners. Karzai identified the issues involving “Afghan sovereignty” as “civilian casualties, attacks on Afghan homes, raids on Afghan homes, taking prisoners and keeping prisoners”.

Karzai warned there could be no “partnership” agreement with the United States until those issues were resolved.

Defence Secretary Leon Panetta had confirmed that fact in Congressional testimony Tuesday, admitting that U.S. and Afghan negotiators “still have difficulties” with the issues of night raids and the transfer of U.S.-run detention facility to the Afghan government.

Panetta said he was hopeful the two sides would work out a compromise on those issues in the coming weeks. 

In his speech to a Loya Jirga, or grand assembly of leaders from around the country, which he convened last November, Karzai said he would insist on “an end to night raids and to the detention of our countrymen” by the U.S. as conditions for a “partnership”.

The Jirga, which was generally considered to be packed with supporters of Karzai, approved those two conditions and called for U.S. troops who committed crimes to be held accountable in Afghan courts.

But Karzai has been warned by advisers that he cannot continue to insist on an end to night raids. He has little hope of surviving without continued U.S. military presence and large-scale assistance. And Panetta suggested last week that the Obama administration wants to end the U.S. combat role even before 2014, further weakening Karzai’s bargain hand with Washington.

In interviews with IPS, people close to the Karzai administration said they had advised Karzai that he must give in to the U.S. on the issue.

“We need (the U.S.) support and presence in Afghanistan,” said one unofficial adviser, “so Karzai should relent on the night raids issue.”

Instead of demanding an end to targeted raids, the adviser said, Karzai should propose that the U.S. train Afghan forces to carry out such operations.

In fact, Afghan Interior Minister Bismillah Khan Mohammadi revealed during a visit to Ghazni province in mid-January that Karzai had proposed that the United States turn over most targeted raids to Afghan forces, but that U.S. units would be allowed to carry them out, in cooperation with Afghan forces, in certain “urgent” circumstances.

But officials at the U.S. Central Command have vetoed ending the raids or putting them under Afghan control, according to a military source close to those officials.

“They’re not going to give them up,” the source said. “This is the last offensive tactic we will have available,” he added, “and the Taliban have yet to put anything on the table that would justify giving it up.”

Officials of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the U.S.-NATO military command in Afghanistan, claim to have responded to the Karzai government’s concerns by including Afghan units in nearly all of them. Last December, the spokesman for ISAF, German Brig. Gen. Carsten Jacobson, said, “Ninety-five percent of all night operations at this stage are already partnered.”

But Afghan officials complain that the Afghan forces are merely brought along on raids that are still based completely on U.S. targeting, planning and execution. The Afghan troops are not even told what the target will be before being taken along, the Afghan officials complain.

If Karzai does finally give in to U.S. insistence on the freedom of action for SOF units in Afghanistan, Afghans expect the night raids issue to play a key role in eventual negotiations on ending the war. One unofficial adviser told IPS that the Taliban will definitely demand an end to such raids, and said Karzai might support that demand in return for an end to Taliban suicide bombings, planting of mines and agreement to renounce Al-Qaeda.

Meanwhile, popular Afghan anger at U.S. night raids has continued to grow as the pace of those raids has risen steeply in recent years, and thousands of families still suffer the consequences of long-term detention because of the raids.

Haji-Niaz Akka, 48, a shopkeeper in Kandahar city, told IPS about a two a.m. raid on his home almost eight months ago in which U.S. forces tied up all four males in the house and took them away. Two of them were released two days later, but the other two, his nephew and son-in-law, were taken to Bagram air Base and remain in detention.

“These night raids violate our customs,” Akka said, expressing a common Afghan view. “It’s better to be killed than to be searched at night while sleeping with (one’s) wife and kids. This is absolutely unacceptable.”

Zahir Jan Ustad, a resident of Kandahar’s Panjwai district, is still angry about two of his brothers being detained in two separate night raids in Kandahar City and in Panjwai last September.

“We don’t know why the Americans are disturbing us by night raids which we hate,” he told IPS in an interview. “They are coming at night and searching our women. Our women are our honour, and we really hate (the U.S.) for that,” Usted said.

The Afghan anger at night raids is also a major factor in the antagonism felt by Afghan army officers and soldiers as well as police toward foreign troops that has resulted in 40 attacks by Afghan security personnel on U.S. troops since 2007, three-fourths of them in the past two years. Nearly 100 U.S. and NATO personnel have been killed or wounded in such attacks.

A study done for the U.S. military by behavioural scientist Jeffrey Bordin in late 2010 and early 2011 revealed that night raids and house searches were mentioned more frequently than any other issue by Afghan troops as a reason for serous altercations with U.S. forces.

The study, originally unclassified but classified by ISAF in the latter half of 2011, showed that more than one-third of the groups of participating Afghan security personnel in 19 locations in three Eastern provinces had recounted instances of serious altercations with U.S. troops over U.S. night raids and house searches.

The study reported that many Afghan troops and police expressed the view that U.S. troops, who they regard as “infidels”, should never enter an Afghan’s home. Most of the Afghan security personnel participating in the study expressed the view that any raids on homes should be led by Afghan police in the presence of local community leaders.

*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.

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