All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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Hey, you guys, this one is dedicated to the memory of the great Butler Schaefer.
Okay, guys, on the line, I've got Brett Murphy from USA Today, and he has got this incredible story here inside the U.S. military raid against its own security guards that left dozens of Afghan children dead.
Welcome to the show, Brett.
How are you doing?
Hey, I'm great.
Thanks for having me.
Man, this story is really something else here, republished at msn.com, again, USA Today story, and this is about a strike that took place, I'm sorry, was it 2013?
2008.
Oh, 2008.
I'm sorry.
2006, 2008.
Yep.
So go ahead and take us through the basics here.
So this was something that was sort of months in the making, and what happened was the special operation forces at this foreign operating base sort of on the western edge of Afghanistan inside of the Shindand airfield, they had been tracking this Taliban commander, Mullah Sadiq, for months that summer.
This is the summer of 2008, and they had received intelligence that he was going to be at a nearby village.
This is the guy they've been after, a nearby village, 20 minutes away from where they were stationed, and they launched this raid with the intention of capturing or killing this commander, but what they kind of failed to factor in were all these different things going on, especially when they were gathering intelligence.
Some of the intelligence had actually come from some associates of a previous warlord that had been on the payroll, on their intelligence payroll, and working for the private company on the airfield.
Armor Group was the name of the company, and when they launched the mission, some people knew, but other people in the intelligence office didn't know that there was also a civilian gathering the following morning.
There was a funeral gathering, and that night when they went into the village, they immediately came under fire, and the mission had included an AC-130 gunship overhead for close air support, so when they came under fire for a couple hours that night, the troops, the special operation forces were using that pretty much all night, and they were leveling these buildings, and in those buildings the next morning were several dozen civilians that were mostly children that were there.
They had gathered for this funeral ceremony the next morning, and what we had found from the record is right after the mission, the Pentagon had touted this as a success.
They said that they got that Sadiq Taliban commander, that the collateral damage was minimal.
There weren't a lot of civilian casualties at all.
They said five to seven, but through all the records and interviews we got, we found pretty much none of that to be true, and there was a much more grim picture, and there was a lot of mistakes building up to it from the planning, the execution, the intelligence was gathering, the private contractor at the airfield, it was kind of like a perfect storm of strategic errors leading up to this thing.
Yeah, it really is an incredible story that you tell here, you know, I guess befitting the casualty numbers in a way, 60 children dead, and I'm not sure fewer, but also quite a few adults as well.
And I guess, was it all innocent civilians?
Were there any so-called Taliban armed militants among the dead at all?
So what we found was that there were a handful of fighting age men there, and there were weapons around them.
There's no doubt, in my mind anyway, after going through all this over the past year, there's no doubt that there was a firefight that night, that they came under fire, the special operation forces in the village, but who they were fighting is a little less clear.
From as far as I can tell, is that there was a meeting that night.
I think that there was, you know, they call them a shura, Taliban shura that night.
It's always a little gray where allegiances, and you know, who's a sympathizer with what different militia or insurgents groups, how much of it's just tribal infighting.
But the sort of ironic twist to this thing is that the guys they were fighting that night, a large portion of them were their own security contractors.
They were guards working at the airfield I was mentioning earlier.
They were on the Pentagon payroll, and they were using the guns from the security company.
So they were really fighting the guys that are stationed outside the very base where they sleep at night, just in a village, you know, 20 miles away.
So that's sort of what made this whole thing a little more tragic was that, you know, it had been presented as this sort of like surefire mission against the, you know, these dozens of bad guys.
But what they really found were, you know, their own security guards who did, you know, executed them.
But it just got a lot more complicated the more you looked at it, as things do over there, I think.
Well, yeah, there's a couple of options there, right?
I mean, after all, a fighting age male with a rifle could still just be an innocent civilian and not necessarily part of any insurgency, just because he gets attacked, doesn't make him necessarily a bad guy.
Or on the other case, if these guys really were the insurgency enemy, then what were they doing palling around with our contractors?
Or what were we doing palling around with contractors who were palling around with the Taliban?
Yeah, it's this tangled web.
It's this absolute tangled web of, you know, uncertainty of people just not knowing who we're working with, who we're fighting, who we're supposed to be protecting.
It became very clear to me from the records that every person who was in charge of knowing this sort of thing had a very different opinion or appraisal of the situation of who was who.
They had a hard enough time keeping track of these guys' names, these different warlords that they were subcontracting the staffing for on the base, that they used monikers from reservoir dogs.
They called them Mr. White and Mr. Pink because they had, you know, in part, a hard enough time just keeping track of who they were.
But I mean, you're right.
It's Afghanistan, and people are constantly in a position of defending themselves.
And it's my understanding from all the reporting that these guys were moonlighting.
They were guards at the base who were taking their guns off the base and then working as the personal bodyguards of the warlord, Mr. White No.
2, who was hosting that meeting that night.
And I think that's what happened.
There's still a ton of debate around all the facts here, but based on the Pentagon documents we got, on what we got from the United Nations, then all my interviews in Afghanistan, as far as I can tell, that's how it went down.
And the, you know, the really tragic thing is, you know, it seemed to be that there were just too many civilians there.
There's just too many women and children in the area.
And this mission, you know, it didn't seem like it had a lot of chances for success at the jump, you know.
Well, now you mentioned at the beginning there, it's in the article too, that some of the American military people involved did know that there were civilians in the area.
In fact, I think he said many even, that there was some event going on, but that some didn't.
Can you differentiate who knew what?
And was it, did the commanders of the actual team know that there were women and children there?
Yeah.
So, I mean, so based on the testimony of the records we got, so just to, if it's helpful, give you a little context of what that means, the, the, the Pentagon did a full, what's called a 15-6 investigation, you know, looking into what happened here to see if there were violations of the rules of engagement, if there were war crimes.
And most of that investigation was interviews with everybody involved, sworn testimony.
And then what we got after we sued the Pentagon in the FOIA lawsuit were transcriptions, heavily redacted transcriptions of those interviews.
And when I was going through them, I was looking for, you know, markers.
It was like, okay, who knew what, when kind of thing.
And as far as I can tell, everybody in the intelligence office and most people on the mission itself did not know about this funeral ceremony the following morning.
Everybody said, no, I didn't know about it.
There was just supposed to be a Taliban meeting.
There weren't supposed to be any women and children.
With two like super notable exceptions to that.
There was the, who became the on-scene commander.
So he was the one coordinating with the gunship and he was one of the people who's, who's certainly in charge on the ground.
And then the other person who knew was a lead intelligence official.
They're called the J-2.
The J-2 was, was responsible for a large part of the, of the planning of this mission.
So what seems to me is a pretty clear intelligence communication breakdown is, you know, why wasn't that information more widely known?
And the other question that I don't have the answer to is, was that information passed up the chain of command when the mission and when the gunship were approved?
Those are the two large outstanding questions because it seems to be a pretty significant planning and intelligence failure right there.
Yeah, you had the quote in here about kind of a pull quote from some of the after action debriefings or what have you, where the guy says, so you decided to level the building because one guy ran in there, right?
And the guy says, yeah, that was it.
One guy ran in there.
So we leveled the building.
And I guess that was possibly the actual instant among the entire incident here where the civilians, the most of them were killed.
Is that right?
Yeah, as far as I can tell, what happened was, and you know, I am not in the position to, you know, I wasn't there.
So it's very hard to reconstruct these things, as you can imagine when you're not there.
But from the testimony and as much as I could glean from what everyone was saying was, they came under fire kind of immediately upon entering the village, the Marines did.
And they were pinned down.
And that's when they, and a Marine was shot, he was wounded.
And that's when they called in the close air support as sort of a defensive measure, because the commander who I was mentioning earlier was, you know, trying to protect his guys.
But then what's unclear is when that defensive posture sort of changed to an offensive strategy.
It's, or tactic, it's, it's a little unclear.
But what we do know is that for multiple hours after that initial like volley of engagement for multiple hours, about two hours, they were using the close air support to, to shoot at the people who were shooting at them.
So they were, they were stationed in the building.
And like that, like that testimony just referenced, was talking about whenever there would be, you know, somebody who they identified as, as an insurgent, or somebody who was definitely like shooting at them, or somebody who was fleeing into a building, or somebody who looked like he was regrouping with other people, they would use that as, you know, as reason to, to shoot at them from the gunship.
And this gunship is, you know, it's firing howitzers and 40 millimeters, which are, which are really heavy rounds, and it fired a lot of them.
I think it's something like 240, 40, from the 40 millimeter, and then somewhere around half of that, or maybe a third of that from the howitzer.
They were firing into the buildings and onto the rooftops where they identified people shooting at them, or where, like you just said, where at least one guy was, was ducking for cover.
And when they were doing that, they were, they were collapsing a lot of these buildings.
And it's the, it's that really thick, dense mud brick, it's, it's like concrete.
And when those roofs collapsed on the people underneath, they didn't really have a chance, you know.
Hold on just one second, be right back.
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Now, why did it take until 2019, almost 2020, to get this story published?
Well, I think my, so there was some great reporting at the time, especially from The New York Times, Carlotta Gall, you know, on the incident itself, on these large discrepancies of numbers from the US and from Kabul.
I think you even say in here, Carlotta Gall found a dead baby's body herself when she went there.
Is that right?
She did, yeah.
She was on the ground there and she was reporting and she was bringing all this new evidence to light at the time, including this video of the mosque, of bodies inside the mosque where the villagers had been collecting them.
So as the ground reports were coming up and as all this pressure was coming out of Kabul, you know, pretty much telling, pretty much telling Washington, hey, you have this wrong.
You know, this was not what you're saying it was.
Things went sideways here.
The US kept denying, they kept denying and denying, and eventually that video surfaced and they were forced to launch this kind of full, full investigation.
But after they finished that, they did not release all of the evidence they had collected.
All they released was this, this executive summary, which was very exonerative.
It's pretty much said, you know, everything was kind of by the books here.
And you know, the only people who did anything wrong were the Taliban who were using these civilians as human shields and our guys had no way of knowing.
And that was more or less it.
And we had filed a FOIA, a Freedom of Information Act request for the public records for all those evidence that the investigators had collected.
But they denied it and they had denied journalists and activists in the past, claiming that there was confidential national security information in those things, so they couldn't give them out.
And it wasn't until we filed a lawsuit against the DOD and until we traveled to Afghanistan, we were able to get all these other records, you know, the confidential United Nations investigation, the Red Cross's inquiry, all this other stuff that, you know, everyone had previously denied or not given out.
Once, once we were able to get those things, it really put together the whole picture in a way that I don't think was available to a lot of other reporters, you know, in years past.
Yeah.
And certainly wasn't available to the survivors of the victims here.
Yeah.
And they didn't, I mean, they still didn't know, like when I was over there, I was talking to them about this and, you know, they're not going to forget any time soon what happened in May.
You know, they had a pretty, I want to call it like one dimensional or anything, but there was a narrative that was set in, they had, they had their understanding of what happened based on the limited information that they had.
So when I was over there and I was telling them all this new stuff, it was all, it was all very much news to them.
So what was their story that they believed?
Well, they, they believe that it was this entire thing was caused by this one warlord and he was Mr. Pink.
He was the other warlord on the security company contract.
And the narrative that had been set over there was that he provided false information to the Americans, to the special operation forces.
He made up this entire thing about a Taliban meeting.
There was no Taliban meeting and he was just using the American forces to edge out his competition.
He was trying to get Mr. White and Mr. White's family killed.
And this was the way he was going to do it, by planting this, this false information.
A part of that is true.
The information for this air raid, according to the records I was looking at, did in fact come from associates of Mr. Pink.
And I do believe that there were Klan motivations behind it, you know, tribal infighting.
That's what the intelligence officers had told the Pentagon investigators anyway.
But they also believe that the information was sound.
They believe that that commander was there.
They believe that this, these Taliban militia were there.
They found explosives and IED material on the objective afterwards.
And a lot of the people in the village didn't have firsthand knowledge of a lot of that or didn't, didn't know a lot about that.
All they knew is that, you know, a lot of these victims, a lot of these villagers were gathering for this funeral ceremony the next morning.
And the next thing they knew, you know, the courtyard where they had been sleeping or the houses under which they had been sleeping were, were leveled.
So it was, you know, it's pretty easy to see how that one narrative had set in because, you know, the vast majority of these people weren't doing anything wrong.
They were just, they were just sleeping.
So you know, once we got into it more, it just turned out to be a lot more complicated nuance.
Yeah.
Although, you know, the kernel of truth there in that narrative has replayed over and over again this entire war long as Anand Gopal and other journalists have shown that you have the new police chief, just six, the Americans on the last police chief who wonders why he's being raided in the middle of the night when he's been cooperating for the last decade or however long, you know, but these things do happen.
Yeah.
And I mean, that was, that was sort of part of it here too.
Everyone, we found out, you know, during the course of the investigation, everybody here had some kind of relationship with the special operation forces at that base.
Everybody was, was either an informant themselves or they had some informants on their payroll.
So everybody thought they were more or less protected or had some relationship with, with the Americans.
So it was just this kind of like a really messy tangle that I don't think a lot of the people, uh, either at the security company or, or in the intelligence office with special operation forces, um, truly appreciated until, until it was too late.
Well, and I want to go back to what you said about the people, you know, regardless of, uh, how all encompassingly correct their local narrative is this village where they lost 60 children.
I mean, that's the entire second grade, man.
That's a huge, that's every kid in the neighborhood that I grew up in.
60 that's all of us.
So imagine for a moment that some foreign state had committed an atrocity like that, however mistakenly possibly or carelessly, how hard it would be to win over our hearts and minds under the new counterinsurgency doctrine as even more soldiers like those who killed 60 of our kids come to reinforce the violence that they've already delivered to us.
And it's the craziest thing.
This was the year before Obama announced the launch of the surge.
Yeah, this is just before the surgeon in that sentiment you were just describing was compounded by the fact that, uh, the immediate response from Washington was to deny this larger number.
They were, they were very reluctant to agree that there were more civilians in that rubble.
Um, and they thought that anybody claiming to have a dead relative or a dead child was, you know, financially motivated by, uh, uh, the blood money payouts that the government might do.
Uh, so that, you know, hearing that from the Americans and then, you know, of course the, uh, the Taliban use these things as, as recruitment tools.
They say, look, they killed your family and now they're denying you even had a family.
Um, all it, all it does is, is drive these people further away.
And when I was over there talking with them, that was largely the sentiment that I heard from the villagers, from the local officials and that entire area now is, is controlled by the Taliban.
It's, it's their, it's their district now, the Shindand district and, uh, the village itself is hollowed out.
There's hardly anyone living there.
The, those houses are still, are still rubble.
They were never rebuilt.
Um, and, and the people who did survive, um, like you were saying before, you know, they won't soon forget.
Yeah.
And this is, um, in the far West of the country.
Can you help me out?
Uh, this is the far Southwest or this is by Herat province somewhere.
Yeah.
So it's, it's, it's almost in Iran.
It's that far West.
It's, um, there's the, there's the ring road that circles the entire country.
And then on the kind of periphery between the ring road and the Iranian border is, uh, this, this airfield, um, the Shindand airfield, and it was an old Soviet air base that, uh, the Taliban took when they had the country.
And then the Afghan national army and the Americans retook it, I think in 2004, uh, and then, you know, it was one of the, uh, Pentagon's rebuilding projects where they were trying to help the Afghan national army sort of have this military infrastructure that could stand on its own.
After we left, um, back in, this was in 2007, they started construction and they want to rebuild this airfield right next to this village in Azizabad way over on the Western border.
And this is just North of Farah province, um, and on the very Southern border of, of Herat, um, in the Shindand district, uh, way on the West.
So that's where we are.
I see.
So I, I know every time I bring this up, I feel like I'm dangerously oversimplifying the question cause I know it's a complicated one, but it does still, I think matter that, am I right that this is not predominantly Pashtun territory and yet it's ruled by the Taliban anyway?
Um, the, you're right, it's, it's way more complicated and I, I, I'm reluctant to even hazard an answer.
Um, that's fair.
The, the, there was a lot of Pashto speakers, um, uh, in the village.
Uh, there are 450 villages in Shindand and I would say something wrong if I try to tell you what the predominant, um, ethnic makeup is in the area.
Well, and certainly they've made plenty of advances beyond the, uh, very strongly predominantly Pashtun areas in the South and the East over the past few years.
No question.
So they, you know, they wouldn't have to necessarily, uh, be in a Pashtun area to be permanently.
It seems like they rule even in the South, they don't rule the provincial capitals, right?
So Ashkar Gah and Kandahar city are still in the hands of government forces, but the rest of the provinces are in the control of the Taliban, that kind of situation, right?
That's usually how I understand this.
I mean, certainly in, uh, Herat province where, where I was, um, you know, Herat is still a government controlled city, but the further you get, I think away from the urban areas, uh, more into the rural areas and, and certainly, you know, along the ring road, uh, it becomes much less government controlled and much more contested the further you are from those urban centers.
So Peter Van Buren, the former state department official came on the show the other day to talk about this young woman who was killed on her way to a PR stunt essentially in 2013 by an IED, a state department official.
She was just 25 years old.
And he was just kind of highlighting how this, her death took place long after the admissions in the Afghan papers that they knew this wasn't working and that kind of thing.
And, uh, so it seems like it's really worth highlighting the different things that are going on, you know, on the timeline at the same time, you know, when you have, uh, the kind of decisions that are being made without the context and the knowledge of atrocities like this, because of the way that they're covered up.
Right.
So, you know, maybe in other words, maybe if we had had a little bit more coverage of events like this leading up to the, uh, escalation of the surge in 2010, maybe there would have been, it would have just seemed less plausible that something like that would be a good idea when after all, look at how bloody the occupation has been up till now.
But since it had been portrayed really antiseptically, just by omission though, by the lack of coverage, um, it seemed like a reasonable enough thing to do to enough people, I guess, that let's try to double down on the war and see if we can get this done after all, you know?
Yeah, man.
And, uh, you know, the, the stories over there, they're there, it's, it's very hard, um, even when you have superb journalists like Carlotta Gall on the ground, um, it's very hard to get the truth out, uh, quick enough, especially when you have all of these, um, these motivations that are in Congress with one another.
And when you have, uh, the Pentagon speaking so highly of a lot of these, a lot of, a lot of these operations, um, I think it's hard for a lot of people back home to, to parse through and, and to really know what's going on with these things.
And only when you have, you know, the benefit of time and records, uh, are you able to actually kind of like needle, needle, needle into the truth.
Um, and that's why we found it, you know, it was such an important job, you know, to do.
And now this particular event was a bit of a public relations stun itself, right?
They had Oliver North along, of all people, he was a Fox news host and, and now what exactly was his role?
Or I guess more importantly, if I can figure out how to phrase it right, what role did his presence play in the timing of the assault?
Was it the kind of thing where, you know, like we're on the first 48, we got to raid the house now kind of deal like that?
There were certainly people who were there at the company at armor group who made that observation, who connected those dots.
Um, that's not something I heard directly from anybody involved with planning the operation, but uh, the timing was, uh, was that North, uh, had arrived to the base and he was filming these dispatches for Fox news as a contributor, these war stories.
And they were, you know, they were promotional, um, there were promotional videos showing, uh, you know, profiles of, of the guys were in, in successful operations, uh, in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
And he was, uh, North and, uh, and a cameraman were embedded on, uh, on the operation and their, their video, um, of it's largely paints this operation as a, as a success.
They say that they, you know, the, that Taliban commander was killed.
Um, everything went, went well.
He has a whole chapter about it in his book, um, he calls it a spectacular success.
Uh, so what, you know, what factor that played in beforehand to the people planning and executing the mission is, I don't know.
You know, I wasn't, I'm not in their heads on that.
And they did not testify to that.
Um, but he was there and, um, and he was filming and he was wearing, um, you know, fatigues and the night vision goggles.
So, well, you know, all the news coverage today reminds me a lot of the height of the surge, not that the Afghan war is over any of this, but that era of the war, um, just the way that, Hey, the government is doing something.
It must be important and necessary, and they must be being honest about what's going on.
And none of that is ever to be questioned.
The only question is just how awesome was that raid against those bad guys?
And that's it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think, uh, I think there's certainly elements of that, of that here in, in what, in what we saw in the immediate aftermath and, and in his segment, I gave Oliver North a little bit of a guest spot in my book on the war, where, uh, I talked about one of his specials about the drug war and just how effective the DEA was at eradicating poppies from the face of the earth in Afghanistan.
And this is how we're going to win the war against the Taliban by eradicating the opium trade.
And I guess it makes for a good piece of TV, you know, in an instant, as long as nobody remembers it later, you know?
Uh, yeah, the, uh, I'll, I'll let you have the last word on that one.
Yeah.
I'm sorry, man.
You're more of a reporter than a pundit.
I get it.
I'm just reporting to you that that happened.
That's all.
Um, no, listen, I got to tell you, this is such an important story.
I shouldn't be making too much light here at the end.
It's an absolute catastrophe.
Um, you know, I sent the link to Danny Davis, um, the, uh, army Lieutenant Colonel whistleblower of the Afghan war.
And he responded, Oh my God, you know, this is, he was there and he saw stuff like this happen himself.
He knew all about it, but this was ranks right up there.
60 kids killed in this thing.
And plus how many adults was it?
20 something or in the teens or something?
Uh, yeah, something around, around, uh, in the twenties.
So I mean, this is just, you know, bringing it back to the, put the shoe on the other foot kind of a thing.
This is the biggest deal in the world to these people.
As you said, their community doesn't even exist anymore, but wherever they are, the scattered survivors of this thing, you know, they'll never get over it.
And, uh, we owe it to them to at least know the truth.
And so we owe you a lot for doing the work and bringing this story to us.
It really is an incredible one.
And so really appreciate it.
Well, thanks man.
I really appreciate that.
All right.
You can find this piece at the USA Today inside the U S military raid against its own security guards that left dozens of Afghan children dead by Brett Murphy.
Thanks again.
Thank you.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com and reddit.com slash scott Horton show.
Oh yeah.
Fool's errand timed and the war in Afghanistan at fool's errand.us.
