All right y'all, welcome back.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest on the show today is Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist for Interpress Service, that's IPSnews.net and of course we keep all of it at antiwar.com/porter, really original.antiwar.com It'll forward you on there, I think ISAF data, I-S-A-F data, night raids killed over 1,500 Afghan civilians is the headline today at antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth, how are you doing?
I'm fine, thanks again for having me, Scott.
All right, so what's ISAF, what data, and what's a night raid?
ISAF is the International Security Assistance Force, which is the U.S. NATO command, and the forces that are under their command fighting in Afghanistan have been since 2003.
And the, what was the second question, let's see, the second question was what?
Oh, which data are you referring to?
Which data, which data?
We're talking about the data that the, that the ISAF has leaked to major news media, mainly Associated Press, New York Times, and the Washington Post during 2010 and 2011 on the accomplishments of their night raids in Afghanistan, that is special operations forces targeted raids.
There are three different campaigns, it's now clear, that were carried out, each one 90 days in duration.
The first one from May through July 2010, the second one August 11th through November 11th, 2010, and the third one from November 18th to February 18th, 2011.
That is obviously November 18th, 2010 to February 18th, 2011.
And the figures that were put out for each of those three 90-day campaigns add up to, the figures for the number of rank-and-file insurgents supposedly killed add up to nearly 6,000, 2,599 rank-and-file insurgents.
In addition to that, they claimed in the first two of those that there were 723, a combined total of 723 so-called leaders who were killed or captured.
So in order to figure out, to use that number in the overall total, I used a conservative estimate that only one-third of those so-called leaders were actually killed and two-thirds were captured.
That's the same ratio of killed to captured that was shown in the figures on the rank-and-file alleged insurgents.
So the total of those two categories then for the three 90-day campaigns came to over 1,800 insurgents or alleged insurgents who were killed according to the ISAF figures.
So what I did in this story was to use one of the key claims that has been made repeatedly by ISAF and U.S. military officials, which is that shots are fired in these targeted raids only once in five raids, that is 20% of all the raids have shots fired in them.
Well, if you use that percentage and then you find out the total number of raids that are given in these leaks to the media, which is, let me find it because it's hard for me to remember the exact number, it's 6,282 total for the ten months, for the three periods over ten months, raids, nighttime raids.
And if you take one-fifth of that, it's roughly 1,300, as I recall, raids in which shots were fired.
And then if you realize that night raids are called night raids because they're targeting homes in the middle of the night so that they can catch somebody unaware, totally off guard, and that means that they're targeting an individual, not groups of insurgents as they would if they were targeting, you know, their operations centers, their safe houses, and so forth, at a time when they catch people working together, then you realize that really only one person is targeted per raid.
And so all of the figures above the 1,300, roughly a figure of the number of raids where shots were fired, the additional more than 1,500 people, are people who were not targeted, who were killed in night raids.
And so that's the heart of my story.
What I've concluded here is that the more than 1,500 people who were killed in night raids were not women and children, obviously, they were adult males who were killed when they came out with weapons, which every adult male in the Pashtun zones of Afghanistan and Pakistan has a weapon.
And if the home or family is threatened by an outsider, they immediately grab their weapon and go to see what they can do.
And so it's clear that more than 1,500 of these adult male Pashtuns were killed by the night raiders in the process of carrying out the raids.
Well, how can you be so sure that they're even telling the truth about how many of those dead are adult males with or without a rifle?
I mean, it seems like if they're breaking into houses, Nelson Rockefeller, no-knock style in the middle of the night, and it's not just, you know, drug cops, but actual, you know, Delta Force, Waco killer types going in there, then certainly women and children are dying in these things.
Yeah, I mean, there's no doubt that some women and children have died.
I certainly make that clear in my story, that a minority, a relatively small minority, the total are certainly women and children who are killed.
But the vast majority of these are people who are killed, and this is borne out by, you know, a number of accounts of night raids, where people are getting killed for the most part are when they come to the aid of neighbors or they come out of their homes.
And bear in mind that we're talking here about homes that are organized in extended families, behind mud-walled compounds, where there are normally not just, you know, the main owner of the compound, but that owner's brothers and his family, families of the cousins and their families.
So they're quite large households.
Each adult male home is going to have a weapon.
And so that's why, you know, it's clear that multiple, every time there's a raid, you know, you have more than one person killed on average.
It's more like 2.5, as I recall, on average.
And that means that in many cases, it's even more than that.
And that's why I think it's clear that the overwhelming cause of civilian casualties is that it's the honor code of the Pashtun population.
Sure.
And, you know, you actually have quotes in here from Stanley McChrystal saying...
That's right.
And I mean, this is really an important piece of evidence here.
The fact that Stanley McChrystal, in his...
He's the general that was in charge of this war until about a year and a half ago.
Right, right.
He was there for over a year.
And in February or March, I guess it was March of 2010, the ISAF put out a press release which included a partial text of the directive that McChrystal had issued.
I believe it was in January that he issued the directive, but they only for some reason publicized it in March.
And in that text, the partial text that was issued, he makes the remarkable admission that the code of conduct of the Pashtun male population is such, their values are such, that they are inculcated with the idea that they must respond to any threat or perceived threat to their home and family by coming out with their weapon and trying to defend their home and family.
Which I think is hilarious that this is, you know, Afghans are conditioned this way or whatever.
That's what it means to be a man.
Some armed people come to your house, you grab your rifle, and you stand up for your people.
That's it.
He said we would do the same thing under the circumstances.
All right.
We'll be right back with Gareth Porter after this, everybody.
IPSnews.net, antiwar.com/Porter.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
It's Antiwar Radio.
Scott Horton.
Sometimes I can't believe how long those breaks are.
Sorry for keeping you on hold so long, Gareth.
It's Gareth Porter.
We're used to it by now.
Yeah, there you go.
Independent historian and journalist writes for IPS News.
That's IPSnews.net.
And of course, we reprint all of it at antiwar.com/Porter.
And what we're talking about here basically is the Delta Force and other associated parts of the Joint Special Operations Command and the Special Operations Command doing these night raids at the, you know, so-called terrorist leaders' houses in Afghanistan.
And then, as Gareth has discovered, I think he had a pretty good working hypothesis on the way in, but as he discovered from crunching the numbers, it's clear that what happens all the time, you know, virtually every time, is they do a night raid and all the neighbors come out to see what the hell is going on, and then they all get shot to death too.
Yeah, I mean, I'm suggesting, not just suggesting, and the evidence strongly points to the conclusion that once out of five times, this is what's going to happen.
And that adds up to many hundreds of adult males who are going to get killed, who have been killed.
And we were just talking about McChrystal's remarkable acknowledgment of this problem, that it was so serious that he actually included a discussion of this in his directive.
The only problem, I mean, and he says in the directive, McChrystal expresses regret about, quote, instinctive responses by an Afghan man to defend his home and family that are sometimes interpreted as insurgent acts with tragic results, unquote.
Now, of course, you know, when he says sometimes, he means frequently, and the tragic results means that they're shot immediately and killed.
It's like sitting ducks.
I mean, we're talking about men with very high-powered rifles shooting at close range, men who are expert riflemen, shots, and who don't miss.
And so the possibility that they don't kill these people is extremely small.
Yeah, so, and all this, the original raid, forget all the collateral damage for a minute, the original raid, as you've reported in the past, is usually based on, oh, well, this guy's cell phone called that guy's cell phone to call that guy's cell phone, and so we're pretty sure who we should kill in the first place here.
Well, that's right, and I wanted to make sure that people understand that in my story, it's not just the people who are not targeted who are killed, although they make up the vast majority, but there are also people who were targeted in the raids who are not actually insurgent.
One reason being that malicious tips are given by people in the Afghan government, in tribal rivals to the U.S. military and the U.S. intelligence.
Sometimes it's because the U.S. has decided to target somebody who they don't really have any evidence that he's an insurgent, but they have suspicions and they decide to just put him on just to find out so they can pick him up and interrogate him for a few days, and a large proportion of the significant proportion of the targets are people who they just decided they might have intelligence information.
We've talked about this before as well.
They've targeted people specifically just to get intelligence because they think they know something about local rank and file or particular leaders of the Taliban.
So hundreds, clearly hundreds of people are being targeted who they do not know and have, in fact, have reason to believe are not insurgents, but they decide to pick them up anyway.
And in some cases, those people follow the Pashtun Wali code and bring out their Kalashnikov and they're killed.
Yeah, meanwhile, the people that we're fighting for are a bunch of torturers, a bunch of, you know, the Northern Alliance.
These are guys who like to, you know, commit mass rapes and skin people alive.
And they're, you know, this guy, General Dostum, who's their, you know, secretary of defense or whatever they call him over there, is one of the worst butchers on the planet Earth right now.
And this is who we're fighting for.
We're providing 95 percent of the gross domestic product, 100 percent of the budget of the so-called Afghan government fighting a war in a country shaped like, you know, on the from the ground I view, shaped like Colorado, full of mountains and whatever.
These men who have a proud tradition of using their rifles against foreign invaders in a war that cannot be won in a million years of this.
So I think the one point that I haven't made that I want to make sure gets into this discussion is that it's very, very clear.
It's on the record that the ISAF, the Special Operations Forces, and their bosses at ISAF have a firm practice that anyone who is killed in a night raid who is not a woman or a child is going to be reported as an insurgent.
And they feel perfectly justified in doing that, because after all, these people picked up a weapon and therefore they're insurgent.
So, I mean, this is how they cover themselves.
And this is why they can come up with the kind of figures that they do for the number of insurgents that they've killed and sort of impress the mainstream media as to how successful their night raids strategy has been.
Yeah, of course, got to keep those body counts up.
That's how we know we're winning this war that cannot possibly be won.
And I think, you know, like sort of good war planners and war operators, they keep good tabs on how many people they kill.
And I think that they're probably pretty accurate in reporting those figures.
The only difference is, the only problem is that they're reporting overwhelmingly as insurgent people who are civilians.
They weren't part of the Taliban insurgency.
They weren't combatants at all.
And this is, of course, one reason, a major reason, why there's such outrage in the Afghan society about these night raids, why they are the primary reason why Americans are hated and why that hatred will burn for decades in the future.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's just like during the days of Condoleezza Rice and Karen Hughes, the Obama administration, the State Department in particular, Hillary Clinton's faction over there, they continue to complain that the people of the Middle East and the Muslim world, they just don't get it.
We have got to, you know, improve our public relations so that they understand that we mean well as we burn their families to death.
Absolutely.
Yes.
It's all a matter of honing our message, our communication strategy.
That's the way to approach this problem.
Absolutely.
I mean, you could read that in The New York Times on a regular basis.
I wish I was joking or something, but come on.
And also in the new book, Counter-Strike, The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al-Qaeda.
That's one of the central messages that, you know, the problem here is just that we haven't quite perfected our strategy for communication with the Islamic world.
Yeah.
Well, and the thing is, I mean, well, there's a lot of the things, but here's one.
That's the book by the two New York Times men, by the way.
Sorry, I sort of inserted that.
Yeah, it sounded like it was written by the State Department.
Same thing.
Now, Andrew Coburn has a piece on that we're featuring on antiwar.com today, and it's in a way it's sort of a rewrite of some reporting that he did for Harper's about the war against the IEDs.
But the subset of it is that assassinations don't work and that they learn, for example, in Iraq, they had this campaign of targeting the leaders of the groups that were planting the IEDs, and they actually had some capable people on the task and they were doing a pretty good job of killing these guys.
And as a result, younger, angrier, you know, more energetic bomb makers replaced them.
And the IED war against the American occupation just got worse because people who were kind of used to cranking out one or two bombs a day were replaced by people who were making 10.
And they do.
They continue to make more and more and to plant more and more.
This is an astonishing fact about the war in Afghanistan.
And by the way, it's not astonishing because it's exactly what would happen if someone tried to occupy Texas or Virginia or anywhere else in this country.
That's right.
Those hippies with tie-dyed shirts and military-style weapons.
Yeah, that's right.
I was telling Gareth before the show about how Austin hippies, if you go to a gun show, you'll see people with long hair and tie-dyed shirts and sandals walking around, walking out of there with rifles that look like out of a movie or something, you know, insane kind of weaponry.
So yeah, nobody better mess with Austin, Texas.
You know, we'll put down our joints and grab our rifles.
Yeah, yeah, no doubt about it.
All right.
Well, yeah, I mean, that's the whole thing about this is we really do have to, as a population, just lie to ourselves and pretend that human nature is not active in Afghanistan.
We can win these people over by killing them.
Well, there's another story to be done, which someday I will do, about a strategy that was dreamed up by some people in the CIA and the military that they would precisely create this situation of younger, angrier Taliban insurgents so that they would be doing things that would alienate them from the population.
I can document that, and I'll write about that soon.
Oh, you've got to be kidding me.
Boy, these people are just too clever by half, I'll tell you what.
Yeah, yeah.
Amazing.
All right.
Well, we're over time.
Thanks very much for your time, as always, Gareth.
Thanks again, Scott.
Everybody, that's the great Gareth Porter, Enterprise Service, IPSnews.net, antiwar.com/Porter, ISAF data, night raids killed over 1,500 Afghan civilians just in the last year.
