13. Afghanistan

Phyllis Bennis

The US war in Afghanistan was always an add-on war. Those in power in Washington—most especially the neoconservative warmongers who populated George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s White House, Pentagon, and beyond—saw the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, as an opportunity to justify a new era of global war. Their main international target would be Iraq, but Afghanistan, the temporary home of the al-Qaeda leadership who inspired the bombers, had to be attacked first.

The 9/11 attacks were shocking and terrifying for people in the US. There had not been such an attack on US soil, with so many killed in a single incident, in living memory. And the Bush administration provided only one choice in response: we either go to war, or we “let ’em get away with it.” The option of recognizing the attacks as an enormous crime against humanity that demanded not war but a globally collaborative response, relying on international law and a strengthened system of international justice, was never on the table. As a result, almost no one was prepared to say no to an immediate war—90 percent of the US public supported attacking Afghanistan. In contrast, by March 2011, 64 percent of Americans said the Afghanistan war “was not worth fighting.”

That does not mean there were no other options. In the WikiLeaks papers, a Congressional Research Service report describes the 9/11 attacks as

… the defining event that transformed the US counter terror effort from law-enforcement actions and limited military retaliation to a global war on terror. In this context, 9/11 triggered a series of government actions—to include the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq (despite the apparent lack of direct connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks). [CRS-RS21937]

What remained unstated in that careful CRS document was that George W. Bush and his administration were only too happy to transform US “counter-terror” efforts into a global war. While its ideological foundations differed, the escalatory decision in some ways paralleled Bush’s father’s decision to go to war against Iraq in 1990–91. In that case, the George H. W. Bush administration decided to use a real (but hardly unprecedented) violation of international law—Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait—as justification to lead “the world” (or at least a significant part of it) to war. The real reason for choosing to respond to the Iraqi move with full-scale war had far more to do with reasserting the US super-power identity as the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended than it did with punishing former US ally Saddam Hussein.

The war against Afghanistan was grounded in revenge, not justice. The 9/11 hijackers were not Afghans, but Egyptians and Saudis; they lived not in Afghanistan, but in Hamburg; they had not trained in Afghanistan, but in Florida; and they had attended flight school not in Afghanistan, but in Minnesota. So why the war? Largely because Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda’s leadership core was headquartered, was the target that made public sense—at least in the first instance. Going after Iraq immediately, as some in the administration urged, would have been harder—Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, there was no connection to al-Qaeda, and the false WMD argument would soon collapse. So they had to set the stage before going after the real target. Afghanistan was the overture.

The problem, of course, was that Afghanistan was not just the place where a radical government had allowed an even more radical movement to operate on its territory. Afghanistan was and is a real country where hundreds of thousands, millions of people with no connection to the 9/11 attacks, would be killed or see their lives and families destroyed because of a policy choice made half a world away. That was the part that too few people understood—and that was part of the reason why the WikiLeaks release of Afghanistan documents was so crucially important.

The war in Afghanistan, like the war in Iraq, was based on a host of lies. The WikiLeaks papers document what troops and commanders in the field report to other military officials—where they generally tell the truth. The realities of the wars in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan, like the realities and history of the Vietnam War, were hidden only from Americans. Neither the opposition fighters nor the countries’ populations ever needed Pentagon documents to know what US/NATO forces were doing in their countries.

The US invasion and occupation set in motion a devastating destruction of much of the traditional social fabric of the country. Efforts to use modern Western military force and regime change to liberate Afghanistan’s women or build new secular education systems largely failed. One might describe the US/NATO invasion and occupation as having

caused a diaspora of Afghanistan’s small educated and professional elite and the … collapse of most vestiges of the old order. The Afghan [government] attempted a number of social changes that under other circumstances would have been viewed as progressive, including measures to promote secular education and liberate women, but the … leaders, who came mainly from urban areas, had little understanding of the countryside or respect for rural traditions. Their clumsy efforts to overturn the social and political order in the tribal areas provoked widespread rebellion.

Kept secret, though not classified, until it was released as part of WikiLeaks’ Afghan War Diary, the passage reads like an intelligent and perhaps prescient description of the consequences of the still-new US occupation of Afghanistan. If its assessment had been acted upon, it might have led to a radically different set of decisions in a war that has now raged for more than thirteen years.

But, in fact, while that description came from a 2002 report prepared by the Congressional Research Service entitled “Afghanistan: Challenges and Options for Reconstructing a Stable and Moderate State” [CRS-RL31389], it referred to an entirely different era. The article retraced various periods of Afghan history, in this section critically examining the 1979–89 period of Soviet-influenced governments in Afghanistan, starting with the regime of Mohamed Daoud Khan, who had overthrown the Afghan king in 1973 and served as president until he was assassinated in 1978.

In full, the original paragraph reads:

Daoud’s overthrow and the Soviet invasion caused a diaspora of Afghanistan’s small educated and professional elite and the families associated with the rule of Zahir Shah, leading to the collapse of most vestiges of the old order. The Afghan communists attempted a number of social changes that under other circumstances would have been viewed as progressive, including measures to promote secular education and liberate women, but the PDPA [People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan] leaders, who came mainly from urban areas, had little understanding of the countryside or respect for rural traditions. Their clumsy efforts to overturn the social and political order in the tribal areas provoked widespread rebellion.

One might have hoped that access to such critical examination of the consequences of what were recognized as inappropriate efforts at modernization and Westernization might have helped lead to different decisions by US war strategists. But, instead, the United States and NATO installed pro-Western governments and schemes of social engineering in Afghanistan that, like those of their Soviet counterparts thirty years earlier, might “under other circumstances have been viewed as progressive, including measures to promote secular education and liberate women.” The United States and its chosen government in Kabul, like its Soviet predecessors, “had little understanding of the countryside or respect for rural traditions. Their clumsy efforts to overturn the social and political order in the tribal areas provoked widespread rebellion.”

It should not have been surprising to US planners that the Western-style “democratic” structures created and imposed by the terms of the international Bonn conference, set up in December 2001 to create an interim government in Afghanistan after the overthrow of the Taliban, never really worked. Unlike Iraq, where a similar model was imposed after the violent overthrow of the Iraqi regime in 2003, Afghanistan had no history of a dominant central government holding significant power over the whole territory. Traditional identity in Afghanistan was grounded far more in family, village, tribe, ethnic and linguistic affiliation, and religion, than it was in national identity—and power relationships were defined by these same categories. It was not accidental that one of numerous derogatory nicknames given to US-backed President Hamid Karzai was that of “mayor of Kabul”—reflecting the fact that his influence reached more or less to the city limits, but no further.

Once again, however, this historical reality was ignored. It is not that it was not known. In the same report on “Reconstructing a Stable and Moderate State” in Afghanistan, drafted in the very first months of the war, analysts recognized that one

element in past periods of stability has been comparative harmony between the state, whose officials staffed the central government ministries and the provincial administrations, and the tribal leaders, Muslim clerics, and other notables who constituted the local power centers outside the capital. This relationship was aided by the fact that relatively few demands were imposed by the central government, which carried out limited functions. Relations between the state and local forces had become progressively more difficult with the increase of modernization and economic development. The complete breakdown of any semblance of a functioning administration, starting with the Marxist coup in 1978, including the destruction of the central bureaucracy and the complete disappearance of [Kabul’s] involvement in provincial affairs, will make it very difficult to reestablish the structure of a functioning nation state. [CRS-RL31389]

The consequences that should have thus been expected immediately happened. Imposing a strong nationally centered government never really worked; ignoring “the social and political order in the tribal areas” did indeed “provoke widespread rebellion.” The war to destroy whatever remnants of al-Qaeda had not already decamped to Pakistan and to overthrow the Taliban quickly became a full-scale counter-insurgency operation.

But this effort did not work either. Under the Bush administration, early claims about the war in Afghanistan centered on bringing democracy, modernity, and women’s rights to a country about which most Americans knew virtually nothing, except that a US-Soviet proxy war had been fought there in the 1980s and that al-Qaeda had found a home there in the 1990s before attacking the United States. Those heady claims of democracy and beyond were never achieved. Instead, the real results of the war in Afghanistan—aside from preparing the way for the primary war to come in Iraq—had to do with killing everyone the US deemed “terrorists.” The fact that so many of the people killed were not terrorists—very often they were farmers, wedding guests, children—was less important than the body count of those who could be identified as bad guys. But selling the enterprise required the construction of a mythology that this US war of revenge would actually help the people of Afghanistan—make them safer, bring modern medicine, educate the children, liberate the women… A laundry list of justifications was there for the choosing.

In the real world, the vast chasm of contradiction between waging war and providing humanitarian assistance was obvious in the first weeks and months of the war, and could not be reconciled with the pursuit of a lethal counter-insurgency strategy. Even before the US invasion, Afghanistan already faced a humanitarian crisis driven by twenty-three years of war, abandonment by Cold War–era sponsors who had left behind only weapons, a continuing civil war, and five years of harsh Taliban rule and international sanctions. Refugees were fleeing even before the US attacks began, and hunger was endemic. International food shipments stopped in anticipation of the US bombing, and aid organizations withdrew their international staff.

Shortly after the bombing of Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001, the United States embarked on a major propaganda-driven exercise, air-dropping individual food packets wrapped in bright yellow (humanitarian daily rations, or HDRs) over isolated parts of the country. Experts in humanitarian crisis assistance were unanimous that air drops of food were too expensive and logistically difficult, often did not reach their intended target population, and did virtually nothing to address even the most immediate consequences of the near-starvation conditions prevailing throughout much of the country. But they looked good on CNN—and, as the military well knew, were a great way to publicize the supposed humanitarianism of the US/NATO war in Afghanistan, thereby “winning the perception and information war.” The problem was that the same bright-yellow plastic was used to wrap the bomblets contained in the cluster bombs that US war planes were dropping across Afghanistan.

A report prepared at the School of Advanced Military Studies of the US Army Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, dated December 2010 and released by WikiLeaks, provides a dry, clinical look at what happened next:

An element of the operation not considered by planners was the risk of the HDRs falling into areas containing unexploded ordinance. The yellow color of the HDRs added to that risk. Sources at Oxfam International, a multi-national aid and human right [sic] organization, publicly stated in an interview with CBS that there was a danger that Afghans attempting to recover the food could mistakenly enter one of the [country’s] numerous mined areas. Additionally, while MAF [Mobility Air Forces] transports delivered yellow HDRs, United States combat aircraft were delivering another yellow package in Afghanistan, the BLU 92 cluster bomb. [This created] a potentially hazardous situation for those that saw yellow objects in open fields. To mitigate this risk, United States forces transmitted messages in Persian and Pashto warning Afghans of the potential for confusion and how to identify whether … the yellow object is a bomb or food. The second order effect of the confusion between food and bombs was the reduced usage of the BLU 92 [cluster bombs] by order of the DoD. Additionally, a DoD press release covered by Reuters discussed the potential for confusion, resulting in producing negative strategic communications for the United States effort. In order to prevent this confusion in the future, the DoD directed that HDR packaging color changed from yellow to salmon.

…

The initial intent behind the airdrop was to feed Afghans located in hard to reach areas in northern areas of the country. Overall, MAF efforts were successful; people were fed and the local and global message of United States compassion for non-combatant Afghans was transmitted. This clearly occurred[,] with 2.5 million HDRs delivered during the initial days of the operation. MAF airdrop was not the desired delivery method for food and other vital supplies, but the nonexistent ground transportation systems and austere location of the people in need drove the requirement for airdrop[s]. However, having the capability to conduct those types of operations proved vital at the time to the overall United States strategy of defeating the support base for the terrorist organizations operating in Afghanistan. The hybrid power demonstrated by this operation ushered in an innovative way to combat an enemy while at the same time winning the perception and information war.¹

The danger caused by confusion between yellow-wrapped ration packages and yellow-wrapped cluster bombs led to serious embarrassment for the Pentagon. The radio broadcasts announced:

Attention people of Afghanistan! As you may have heard, the Partnership of Nations is dropping yellow Humanitarian Daily Rations … In areas far from where we are dropping food, we are dropping cluster bombs. Although it is unlikely, it is possible that not every bomb will explode on impact. These bombs are a yellow color … Please, please exercise caution when approaching unidentified yellow objects in areas that have been recently bombed.²

Another section of the same report even acknowledges:

Unfortunately, the HDR missions were not as successful as planners had hoped. A report written by a retired Army Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel for the non-governmental agency Partners International Foundation, documented several shortcomings of the operation. Those shortcomings included an incomplete understanding of the long-term concerns of the Afghans, failure of numerous ration containers to maintain their integrity during airdrop operations, and the inclusion of non-edible moisture absorbent packets [in] the meals. The result was the consumption of both contaminated food and non-edible materials. The first shortcoming occurred because planners failed to understand how the Afghanis were going to use the materials. Food was scarce in Northern Afghanistan and winter was about to begin, resulting in many Afghanis storing the food for future consumption. According to Benjamin Sklaver, a law and diplomacy graduate student at Tufts University, [HDRs] are meant to feed a population for a very short period—days to weeks at most. They enhance food security simply by putting a packet of food in the hands of malnourished recipients. The meals were designed to be consumed upon discovery, not as a food store for future sustenance. Additionally, Special Forces attached to the geographic area discovered that many of the packages were damaged during delivery and the food inside had spoiled. Another shortcoming was the usage of desiccant sachets, a material used to preserve freshness and reduce moisture in food. These packages were included in the packets with instructions graphically depicted (circle with a line through it) not to eat. The report cited that up to thirty-five Afghans complained of being ill after eating the substance.

On November 1, 2001, the Pentagon announced that it would change the food packets to blue. “It is unfortunate that the cluster bombs—the unexploded ones—are the same color as the food packets,” said General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He admitted the possibility that Afghan civilians might confuse a desperately anticipated meal with an unexploded cluster bomb. “Unfortunately, they get used to running to yellow,” he said. He did not, however, know how long it would take to change the colors. “That, obviously, will take some time, because there are many in the pipeline.” In a press conference with Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, General Myers also announced that the US did not intend to suspend the use of cluster bombs.

But for the Pentagon’s PR image, the problem was far graver than the calm language of the report would later indicate. The United States is one of very few countries that has refused to sign the Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel land mines. Like the broad issue of the US using cluster bombs in Afghanistan, the refusal to sign the treaty was known—though resulting in remarkably low-key media coverage that sparked very little outrage—at the time it was happening.

But the Afghan War Diary provides information that goes even further. In a December 2008 cable, US officials bemoan the problems they faced following an internationally welcomed conference to impose an outright ban on cluster munitions—a gruesome anti-personnel weapon under any circumstances. Afghanistan had decided to sign the new Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM). And since the convention banned the presence, as well as use, of cluster bombs, Washington suddenly faced the reality that it might have to deal with Afghan reluctance to continue allowing the Pentagon’s deadly cache of cluster bombs to remain in their country, let alone their continued use:

Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan joined 93 other states in signing the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), December 3–4, 2008 in Oslo, Norway. The United States did not sign the treaty as cluster munitions continue to have military utility. The US Government believes Article 21 of the Convention provides the flexibility for signatories to continue to cooperate and conduct operations with US forces, and in turn for US forces to store, transfer, and use US cluster munitions in the territory of a State Party. The Department requests that Post approach appropriate interlocutors at the Afghan Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defense to urge Kabul to interpret Article 21 in a similar manner, minimizing any potential impact of Afghanistan’s signature of the Convention on US operations and military cooperation. Given the political sensitivities in Afghanistan surrounding cluster munitions as well as air and artillery strikes in general, the Department believes that a low-profile approach will be the best way to ensure a common understanding that the CCM does not impede military planning and operations between our two governments. [08STATE134777]

Most of the cable refers to the claimed importance of cluster bombs in protecting US and NATO troops. But in the discussion points identified in the cable to be used in arguments with the Afghan government, the US analysts make the astonishing claim that using cluster bombs will actually prevent civilian casualties. This claim appears in the last of the talking points, designated “If Raised,” apparently cautioning that these arguments only be used if the contrary position has been expressed by Afghan interlocutors:

IF RAISED: The United States currently has a very small stockpile of cluster munitions in Afghanistan. In certain circumstances, they are the most effective system to use against light armor, wheeled vehicles, materiel, and personnel, while at the same time limiting collateral damage. Not allowing the use of cluster munitions will increase risk to coalition forces engaged in combat from enemy counter-fire, reduce responsiveness, decrease the number of different targets that can be attacked within a specified timeframe, and will substantially increase risks of collateral damage by requiring usage of a greater number of large, unitary warheads to accomplish the same mission.

Much of the cable’s text expresses irritation at the Afghan government’s decision to sign the cluster bomb treaty at all—particularly without the level of consultation with its US backers that Washington apparently deemed appropriate:

Despite assurances to the contrary from President Karzai and Foreign Minister Spanta to Ambassador Wood in February 2008, the GIRoA [Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan] joined 93 other states in signing the CCM, December 3–4, 2008 in Oslo, Norway. According to timely Post reporting, President Karzai decided at the last moment to overrule Spanta and sign the CCM without prior consultation with the USG or other key states engaged in operations in Afghanistan … Given the political sensitivities in Afghanistan surrounding cluster munitions as well as air and artillery strikes in general, the Department believes that a relatively low-profile dialogue at the sub-ministerial level will be the best way to ensure a common understanding between the USG and GIRoA that the CCM does not impede US and ISAF military planning and operations.

The fact that the United States remained an outlier, refusing to sign the cluster bomb ban, apparently did not prevent it from asserting the right to define what the convention did and did not prohibit for a country that had chosen to sign it.

Several years into the war, the longstanding debate inside the Bush administration over the nature of the war in Afghanistan shifted definitively away from the “winning hearts and minds” goals of counter-insurgency, in favor of counter-terrorism, eliminating any claim that the war had anything to do with protecting Afghans. Counter-terrorism essentially means that killing terrorists (with all the collateral damage that can result) is the only goal. In 2009–10, much was made of the new Obama administration’s claim that its Afghanistan war policy would shift to counter-insurgency. In theory, counter-insurgency operations are supposed to win public support from the local population for the government and its foreign backers, by providing them with, among other things, protection from so-called insurgent forces.

In Afghanistan, that would mean protecting local Afghans from attacks by the Taliban and other anti-government and anti-US/NATO forces. Counter-terrorism, on the other hand, is all about killing “the enemy”—the bad guys, as defined in this case by the US military. The problem, of course, was that the Pentagon’s bad guys were not necessarily bad guys in the local village or town. And protecting people from the Taliban did not provide any protection from becoming “collateral damage” in US/NATO air strikes and night raids.

The theoretical logic was clear: if your priority is to protect civilians, rather than to kill as many opponents as possible, you are much more likely to win support from the local population. But that theoretical logic leaves many questions unanswered when applied to the real world. The US counter-insurgency plan in Afghanistan, known as “clear, hold and build,” remained grounded in targeting and killing insurgents, whether Taliban or other armed opposition groups. “Clear” referred directly to “clearing” an area of armed opponents of the US and its Afghan allies—in many cases without consultation with local Afghan community leaders—by killing them. But even if someone on the US “kill or capture list” was sometimes successfully targeted, far greater numbers of civilians were killed in most attacks. As part of a plan to win local support, the kill-based strategy was always doomed.

And it remained unclear who was on the White House’s kill list, and why. Unlucky Afghans ratted out as “terrorists” to US soldiers were often just ordinary villagers struggling to make a living, who managed to get on somebody’s bad side and were suddenly named as bad guys. The source often earned US bounty money as a result. Among the released papers is a document prepared just a few months into the war—an official report to Congress making clear that it was already known that “Afghan warlords have been accused of causing mistaken attacks on civilians or pro-Karzai groups by providing false intelligence to American forces” [CRS-RL31389]. (It is worth noting that the US attacks are referred to here as “mistakes”—only the intelligence provided by the warlords is deemed “false.”)

Of course, while the Obama counter-insurgency plan was announced with great fanfare in spring 2009 as a plan to protect civilians, actual US operations on the ground continued to put civilians at enormous risk of attack by US airstrikes, crossfire between US and opposition forces, roadside bombs or other attacks meant for US or US-backed government troops, and Taliban and other insurgent forces punishing those believed to support the US and its allies.

In fact, the Obama administration’s claimed shift from counter-terrorism to counter-insurgency was never real. The general appointed to lead it, Stanley McChrystal, was supposed to represent a new kind of military strategist, who would focus not on tracking down and killing the enemy but on this ostensibly new strategy of winning hearts and minds and protecting civilians. But McChrystal’s own history belied that change. His earlier experience was in old-fashioned “get the bad guys” counter-terrorism, since his days in Vietnam. Before taking over the Afghanistan war in 2009, he spent most of five years commanding special forces units pursuing individual al-Qaeda and other insurgent leaders in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. That meant primarily air strikes and targeted raids—the traditional methods of counter-terrorism.

Senior Pentagon officials admitted that McChrystal’s approach would likely lead to “[e]scalating violence, an acceleration of targeted killings, and deniable attacks by US Special Forces on Taliban strong holds in Pakistan.” According to Richard Sale, defense correspondent for the Middle East Times, those Pentagon sources warned that McChrystal’s appointment “portends a much bloodier phase of the war … ‘McChrystal is an expert killer. That’s what the teams he heads are good at,’ said former senior DIA official Pat Lang.”³

CIVILIANS IN THE WAR

There were a lot of expert killers in Afghanistan. The Afghan War Diary did not reveal a war different from what we knew, but they provided a level of corroborating detail, often in clinically detached language. The huge number of civilian casualties was a known feature of the US war in Afghanistan from the beginning. The attacks on civilians have remained a huge crisis in the Afghanistan war—but much of the detail remained hidden. Just three weeks after Barack Obama was sworn in as president, in February 2009, WikiLeaks released a confidential NATO report revealing that civilian deaths in Afghanistan had increased by 46 percent during 2008.⁴

According to the WikiLeaks introduction, the report “shows a dramatic escalation of the war and civil disorder.” Attacks on US and NATO troops increased significantly, including a 27 percent rise in IED attacks, a 40 percent rise in rifle and rocket fire, and a 67 percent increase in surface-to-air fire against Coalition aircraft. All of that resulted in an increase in US/NATO military deaths of 35 percent, while kidnappings and assassinations rose by 50 percent, and attacks on the US-backed Afghan government more than doubled, rising by a massive 119 percent.

In the meantime, the report documents that only half of the families outside Kabul had access to even basic healthcare, and only half of the children had any access to a school.

But the report—drafted by the Pentagon’s Central Command, officially as the “International Security Assistance Force for Afghanistan” (ISAF)—was kept secret, designated “For Official Use Only.” One of the reasons it was kept secret may have been that the Pentagon’s count of the rise in civilian deaths—46 percent higher than the year before—was significantly higher even than the 40 percent escalation calculated by the United Nations.

From its beginning, the US war in Afghanistan included official reliance on torture, official violations of human rights and international covenants, official disdain for human dignity, official contempt for Afghan cultural norms, and more. US troops and their local allies did not necessarily treat detainees or civilians worse than in earlier wars (the infamous tiger cages where the US-backed South Vietnamese government held prisoners offer one comparison), but the global war on terror certainly went further in justifying such treatment, in many cases virtually bragging about it.

In the summary of a 2008 report revealed in the Afghan War Diary, the analysis of congressional engagement with the issues of interrogation and torture, including the so-called “McCain Amendment,” takes as a matter of course the category of “enemy combatants” and “terrorist suspects” detained by US troops, without any indication that the very terms were designed as part of a conscious strategy to disregard the obligations imposed by the Geneva Conventions regarding the treatment of prisoners:

Controversy has arisen regarding US treatment of enemy combatants and terrorist suspects detained in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other locations, and whether such treatment complies with US statutes and treaties such as the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT) and the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Congress approved additional guidelines concerning the treatment of detainees via the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA), which was enacted pursuant to both the Department of Defense, Emergency Supplemental Appropriations to Address Hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, and Pandemic Influenza Act, 2006 (PL 109-148, Title X), and the National Defense Authorization Act for FY2006 (PL 109-163, Title XIV). Among other things, the DTA contains provisions that (1) require Department of Defense (DOD) personnel to employ United States Army Field Manual guidelines while interrogating detainees, and (2) prohibit the “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment of persons under the detention, custody, or control of the United States Government.” These provisions of the DTA, which were first introduced by Senator John McCain, have popularly been referred to as the “McCain Amendment.” This report discusses the McCain Amendment, as modified and subsequently enacted into law. [CRS-RL33655]

In another section, the report provides a reminder of Bush’s plan to veto any congressional effort to hold the CIA accountable to the same public standards that the Pentagon was supposed to follow in the Army Field Manual. Those standards, however consistently they were violated, were at least officially designed to meet the requirements of the Geneva Conventions. They were far more restrictive than the official standards of the CIA’s interrogation techniques, which blatantly included torture but insisted on its denial:

Finally, this report briefly describes legislation introduced in the 110th Congress that references interrogation standards or requirements initially established by the McCain Amendment. Discussed legislation includes HR 2082, the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008, which was vetoed by President Bush on March 8, 2008, and HR 4156, the Orderly and Responsible Iraq Redeployment Appropriations Act, 2008, which was passed by the House on November 14, 2007, but has not been considered by the Senate due to the failure to invoke cloture on the bill. Both bills proposed to bar the CIA and other intelligence agencies from employing any interrogation tactic that is not authorized by the Army Field Manual, effectively prohibiting these agencies from employing certain harsh interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, regardless of whether those techniques had otherwise been deemed legally permissible. The White House has indicated that the President shall veto any legislation requiring the CIA to use only those interrogation techniques authorized under the Army Field Manual.

THE COST OF WAR

Opposition to the war in Afghanistan grew—gradually at first, then faster—from the first months of the US invasion and occupation. While casualties (US casualties, at least—unfortunately Afghan casualties too rarely led to widespread opposition) played a role in the rising public outrage about the war, but another important reason was its cost. Since October 2001, US taxpayers have paid about $715 billion for the war in Afghanistan alone. That translates into more than $10 million every hour—every day, every year since 2001.

And beyond the broad problem of paying for a war widely understood to be failing at its expressed goals, there were occasional bursts of indignation when it became clear that US taxpayer money—straight from the Pentagon’s coffers—was helping to fund the Taliban insurgency. While that stark reality had been known in small circles before, WikiLeaks again provided detailed examples of how it worked.

In physical terms, Afghanistan is an extraordinarily isolated country. Landlocked and surrounded by mountains, half a world away from the United States, building up and supplying an occupying army of up to 150,000 US and NATO troops at any given moment was a logistical nightmare. With goods either trucked in over the Pakistani border to face long and dangerous drives to Kabul and beyond, or flown in at huge expense to Bagram Airbase outside of Kabul, provisioning and arming the hundreds of “Forward Operating Bases” scattered throughout the country required lots of local help. That meant hiring local transport companies, and it also meant paying for security. One 2007 cable describes just such a military contractor, a local Afghan trucking company with a striking name:

Four Horsemen International reported that they were approached by Taliban personnel to talk about payment for the safe passage of convoys through their area. The current price for passage is $500 US per truck from Kandahar to Herat, $50US per truck from Kabul to Ghazni, $100US per truck from Ghazni to Orgun-E, and $200-300US per truck from Orgun-E to Wazi Kwah. All negotiations are conducted outside of Afghanistan with the Taliban POC located in Quetta, Pakistan. This information has been verified by other HNT companies and the other companies state they are paying money for safe passage. [CRS-RL33655]

The financial totals of up to $500 per truck paid to the Taliban (as well as other militias, some of them nominally supporters of the government) add up to hundreds of millions of dollars. Knowledge that these enormous sums were being paid to the Taliban, even as the ostensible justification for the US troops being in Afghanistan was the claimed need to wipe out the Taliban, played a significant role in reducing public support for the war.

Counter-insurgency wars waged far from the home country of the occupying soldiers are never easy. When the United States prepared to attack Afghanistan in 2001, the country’s language and culture remained unknown to the vast majority of troops and commanders being sent. When the war in Afghanistan began, it was clear that the Bush administration had no concern for or interest in the people, religion, traditions, culture, or anything else there. The original claim from Bush’s secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and others, was that the war would be quick and tidy: the Taliban government would be overthrown, the new government created at the Bonn Conference in November 2001 would be helicoptered into Kabul to take over, the population would be grateful, and the work would be over.

It did not turn out quite like that. The quick war rather swiftly morphed into a long-term counter-insurgency war, with US and other NATO troops facing conditions in which ignorance of the local people and culture put the troops themselves, as well as the evanescent goals of the war, at serious risk. Realizing that, several years into the war, the military began a project designed to embed academics—anthropologists, sociologists, and others—into military units in Afghanistan, to strengthen the capacity of the troops by providing cultural and social insight into Afghan society.

In August 2009, the Washington Post magazine documented the work of psychologists and anthropologists who joined the Pentagon’s Human Terrain project. In the photos, the academics were dressed in camouflage and armed with standard weapons, indistinguishable from the regular soldiers. Their role in one “model” village, Pir Zadeh in southern Afghanistan, was described thus: “They would drive in MRAPs, heavy, armored vehicles designed to minimize the effects of makeshift bombs, then would get out and move west through the village. The soldiers would create a secure perimeter as they walked … Any villager who wanted to pass the patrol would have to enter the perimeter and be frisked for weapons.” The Post acknowledged that few social scientists were willing to participate, but never asked the critical question of why that might be. It never questioned just whose village the perimeter-establishing soldiers thought it was. Though tragic, it certainly should not have surprised anyone that an earlier Human Terrain recruit, described as a “soldier and aid worker,” had been fatally attacked while she was on patrol in a neighboring village. The attacker was captured, and the Human Terrain social scientist’s Army Ranger partner “pulled out his pistol and shot the man in the head.” He pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to probation and a fine.

It was left to WikiLeaks to bring to light the “Human Terrain Team Handbook”—unclassified but kept from the public—with its description of who makes up those teams and what they are tasked with in carrying out counter-insurgency war. Official members of the military or not, their task is clear: to strengthen the US army’s military operations:

Human Terrain Teams (HTTs) are five- to nine-person teams deployed by the Human Terrain System (HTS) to support field commanders by filling their cultural knowledge gap in the current operating environment and providing cultural interpretations of events occurring within their area of operations. The team is composed of individuals with social science and operational backgrounds that are deployed with tactical and operational military units to assist in bringing knowledge about the local population into a coherent analytic framework and build relationships with the local power-brokers in order to provide advice and opportunities to Commanders and staffs in the field.

…

Each team is recruited and trained for a specific region, then deployed and embedded with their supported unit. The HTTs are comprised of a mix of Soldiers and Department of the Army Contractors that provide a mix of senior military specialists and academicians with strong social sciences credentials. An HTT integrates into the unit staff, conducts unclassified open-source and field research, and provides operationally-relevant human terrain information in support of the planning, preparation, execution and assessment of operations.

A fundamental condition of irregular warfare and counter-insurgency operations is that the Commander and staff can no longer limit their focus to the traditional Mission, Enemy, Terrain and weather, friendly Troops and support available, and Time.

…

In an irregular warfare environment “Commanders and planners require insight into cultures, perceptions, values, beliefs, interests, and decision-making processes of individuals and groups” and should be evaluated according to their “society, social structure, culture, language, power and authority, and interests.” The human dimension is the very essence of irregular warfare environments. Understanding local cultural, political, social, economic, and religious factors is crucial to successful counterinsurgency and stability operations, and ultimately, to success in the war on terror. In stability operations and irregular warfare, the human aspect of the environment becomes central to mission success.

Information on social groups and their interests, beliefs, leaders, and the drivers of individual and group behavior is needed to conduct effective counterinsurgency operations. The expertise for conducting research and analysis to provide valid and objective information on these topics are highly specialized in the social sciences. Social science research of a host nation’s population produces a knowledge base that is referred to as the Human Terrain, or “The element of the operational environment encompassing the cultural, sociological, political and economic factors of the local population.”⁵

The people of Afghanistan, then, had become an “element of the operational environment” of Washington’s war.

THE MASSACRE OF DASHT-E-LEILI

The philosophy articulated in the Handbook saw massacres as an inevitable component of the US war. Of course, one of the most significant consequences of the release of the WikiLeaks papers was the detailed accounting of mass killing and other barbarities—actions that provide a shocking, though not surprising, prism for understanding the war. One such action, documented in excruciating detail, was the massacre, in just the first weeks after the US invasion of Afghanistan, of between 2,000 and 3,000 Taliban prisoners by US-backed Afghan soldiers. In many ways, the Dasht-e-Leili massacre would portend the continuing war crimes involving prisoners, torture, and attacks on civilians that would come to characterize the US “global war on terror” for at least the next twelve years.

While the cables are heavily redacted, they describe how “hundreds or perhaps thousands” of Taliban fighters had surrendered after brief fighting in Mazar-e Sharif and Konduz in November 2001, and were incarcerated in shipping containers to be transferred to US custody at Sheberghan Prison—a two-day journey from Dasht-e-Leili, where they had surrendered. But the metal shipping containers were sealed, and most of the prisoners suffocated before they arrived. Many were also shot through the walls of the sealed containers.

The killing of these prisoners represented a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions regarding protection of fighters who have surrendered. The kind of wanton disregard for human life shown in the killings should have led to immediate efforts to achieve accountability—including on the part of US forces. Instead, the atrocity is described coolly, with significant attention to the efforts (it remains unclear whether it refers to efforts by Afghans or US or other NATO forces) to keep the focus on Taliban atrocities, as if these somehow excused the horror of the atrocities committed by US-backed Afghan forces.

The documents regarding the massacre refer, without detail, to “Dostum,” or occasionally “General Dostum.” The reference is to General Ahmad Rashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek warlord who had fought in Afghanistan first with the pro-Soviet Afghan government in the 1980s against the anti-Soviet mujahideen, and then joined the mujahideen fighters of the US-backed Northern Alliance, until they were beaten by the Taliban in the mid 1990s, at which point Dostum fled to comfortable exile. Dostum returned to Afghanistan with the US invasion forces in 2001, and with US backing reclaimed leadership as chief of staff of the Afghan military installed by the US, as well as simultaneously reconstituting his Uzbek-based private militia.

Dostum had long been known for his brutality, alleged mass rapes of young girls by his militia, the brutal killing of individual soldiers and others who crossed him, and more. Dostum’s Junbish militia allegedly dropped cluster bombs on residential areas of Kabul in January 1997 as the civil war wound down. According to another February 2008 WikiLeaks cable sent from the US ambassador in Kabul to the CIA, DIA, State Department, and beyond, “Dostum remains the quintessential warlord, an enduring symbol of Afghanistan’s war-ravaged past whose bravado and violence earned for him the status of a respected, but deeply flawed national hero” [08KABUL491_a].

The WikiLeaks reports make clear the knowledge of US officials—military, intelligence, CIA, political, diplomatic, and beyond—about the Dasht-e-Leili massacre, and other examples of Dostum’s culpability. The documents cite a reminder to recipients that they should “take every opportunity to remind observers that the Taliban were the primary abusers in the country and that any investigations into alleged Afghan military atrocities must be balanced with investigations into Taliban atrocities.”

The Dasht-e-Leili massacre might have remained a horrific moment in the past, even with the details made available through WikiLeaks, were it not for the contemporary role of certain key players. In Afghanistan’s presidential campaign in spring 2014, one of the leading candidates was Ashraf Ghani, a Western-oriented former World Bank official, who had in the past identified Dostum as a killer. But with ethnically based campaigning being central to Afghanistan’s wartime election, Ghani suddenly welcomed General Dostum as his running mate, hoping to consolidate the Uzbek vote in Mazar-e Sharif and elsewhere in northern Afghanistan. After Ghani’s hotly contested victory, the perpetrator of the Dasht-e-Leili massacre was sworn in as the new vice president of Afghanistan—with proud US and NATO backing for Afghanistan’s new democracy.

Afghanistan’s war continues.