Jean MacKenzie, senior correspondent for GlobalPost, discusses her article on why the March 11 Kandahar massacre is much more surprising to Americans than Afghans; the success of US night raids in killing mid-level Taliban commanders – who are quickly replaced by younger, more hardcore fighters; the lack of a US endgame strategy, other than spinning withdrawal as a “victory;” and Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s odds of survival without US backing.
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All right, so welcome back to the show.
Since I wore radio, I'm Scott Horton and our next guest on the show today is Jean McKenzie from the global post.
Used to write from Afghanistan.
Uh, now back here in the state serial expat.
She calls herself.
Uh, been a while since we've spoken.
Welcome back.
How are you doing, Jean?
I'm fine.
Thank you, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Pleasure to talk with you again.
Pleasure's all mine.
All right.
So I saw this piece you wrote about the Kandahar massacre and how, um, well, to you, this is obviously it's as, uh, horrible to you as it is to everybody else, but, uh, it's not all that shocking to you.
Apparently this you say is the kind of thing that happens in Afghanistan all the time, maybe usually as an official raid, rather than sort of a middle of the night, a rogue mission as this apparently was, which maybe we can, uh, talk about that here too, but, um, civilians die in the Afghan war all the time you say, huh?
Well, that's true.
Uh, I was making the point, not that it was not shocking to me, but that it was not shocking to the Afghans that the Afghans see very little difference between what happened, uh, allegedly with, uh, staff Sergeant Bales and what happens, uh, almost every night in some part of Afghanistan.
Well, now we don't really get to read too much about the night raids around here, other than that they're happening.
Um, but, um, let's see from time to time, I guess.
Anyway, we see reports that, well, you know, it's working really well.
We'd go in there and we arrest a lot of, we've arrested a lot of guys in these night raids, but, um, do they mostly just go in there and wax people or do they really just arrest them?
Uh, there's, uh, there's quite a bit of both actually.
Uh, there are, uh, there is an attempt to detain people, but very often what happens, uh, if someone breaks into your home in the middle of the night and Afghanistan is a very heavily armed country, uh, someone may reach for a gun.
And the minute you reach for a weapon, of course, you become an enemy combatant and then are subject to, uh, termination with prejudice.
Uh, so it very often happens that what might start out as an attempt to, uh, to detain or capture a suspected terrorist will end with, with, uh, one or more people being killed.
Well, I guess oftentimes too, we've read about, uh, the neighbors come out to see what's going on and they all end up getting shot as well.
Uh, that, that does happen.
Uh, if, uh, you just have to picture, uh, being asleep in the middle of the night and having your door kicked in, uh, if you happen to have one or more AK 47s hanging around, uh, you reach for it, certainly you reach for it.
And then of course you end up in a gunfight and, uh, there are very likely going to be more soldiers, uh, than civilians.
Uh, so it does not usually end well for civilians.
Uh, I know that the, um, that NATO and, uh, the U S military has made the point that this is one of their most effective tools, uh, against the enemy.
Uh, but we have to look at a, whether that is an accurate statement and be, uh, whether the, um, the downside is, is, uh, more powerful than the upside, if you will.
Right.
And by the way, I'm sorry about saying, you know, you weren't shocked or whatever.
I didn't mean to make you sound, uh, cold and callous, just that it's not that surprising to hear about this.
The only real aberration about this, um, this massacre in Kandahar that I don't know if you agree, maybe we could talk about this, but, uh, they're saying that this guy Bales committed is that he wasn't on an official mission here.
He just decided to go and kill a lot of people.
And I guess he, you know, more than half of the targets here or the half of the victims were children.
And so, uh, maybe that makes it a little bit, uh, you know, worse than the average one, but really what's different about it is that it wasn't a sanction rate.
It still was just a raid though, in a way.
Well, I, from the Afghan perspective, it is just a raid.
It's an American military person.
If, if the facts are borne out, uh, coming into their home and killing people, this is what they see every day from our perspective, of course, it is quite shocking that an office, uh, that a soldier would just go rogue and, uh, for no particular reason that we can fathom, um, just start murdering people with, with very little rhyme or reason.
Uh, but there has been a lot made of the fact that there were violent protests in Afghanistan, uh, in the wake of the desecration of the Quran or the, um, the burning of the Quran, uh, by American military personnel, uh, but that there were not violent protests in the wake of these killings.
Uh, my point being that the reason for that is, uh, Afghans have become, um, a bit inured to this type of treatment because it is, uh, uh, from their point of view, so very common.
Yeah.
Um, well, and I guess I do want to ask you about what you think about the, uh, the story that, uh, this, uh, Sergeant Bales did all this himself, but I guess I, uh, first I'd like to ask you if I could about whether you think that these night raids are actually worth anything at all, of course, the military will say, I don't know if they quote an exact body count or anything anymore, but they will say that, listen, we're catching and probably killing to a lot of really bad guys here, and so that's progress in our war.
Uh, that is what the military will say.
And, uh, something that we don't often hear is that many Afghans support them.
Uh, there is an awful lot of internal strife, uh, and in Afghanistan.
And there is some evidence that, uh, Afghans are using these night raids as a way of, of getting at their own, um, political, economic, and other rivals.
Uh, the U S military, uh, who is conducting these raids, uh, are reliant on intelligence and often that intelligence is supplied by, uh, by Afghans, by the Afghan community.
Uh, it is not uncommon for someone to inform, uh, on a person that he might have some sort of, uh, personal or business or political beef with, um, that this person is, uh, in fact, a Taliban supporter or sympathizer or facilitator, uh, and then what follows, uh, will quite often be a night raid.
So we really don't know what role these night raids are performing for, uh, for the Afghans themselves.
Uh, but I have heard from a number of sources that there is widespread support for these night raids among certain sectors of the Afghan population.
Yeah.
The ones that we're fighting for against their enemies on any given day, I guess.
Exactly, exactly.
Of course, that is also a moving target since these alliances, uh, form and break up, uh, so it is very difficult to pinpoint.
There have been studies, uh, that have shown that many of the people who are detained, uh, an overwhelming majority of the people who are detained are later shown to be the wrong people or the intelligence was faulty, uh, and up to 80% of them are released within, uh, four or five days.
Uh, so that would indicate to me that our, um, our intelligence is not exactly as, uh, as accurate as we would like to think, uh, if 80% of the people we detain are later shown to be, uh, innocent, how many of the people that are killed in these rates, um, are also innocent, but of course we cannot, we don't have the luxury of hindsight in that sense.
Right.
Um, wow.
That was a pretty amazing statistics.
I guess it's something that's been remarked upon the show before.
I'm not sure by who, but, uh, I guess it's a pretty obvious comparison.
You look at how many times local cops get the wrong house on a drug in the neighborhood, you know, in town where they live, where there are police stations right down the street and they still get the wrong house.
So when you're talking about not the local sheriff's department, but the Delta force or the Navy seals coming into somebody's house on the other side of the planet, I mean, what chance could they possibly have of really knowing who they're dealing with and, and deliberately going after a target that they need to go after quote unquote under their, even their priorities.
Well, I think that that is, is a very, uh, accurate observation.
And as we've seen from numerous night raids where women, children, uh, et cetera are killed, uh, or where we later find out that the house was the wrong house or the target was based on incorrect information, these rates, uh, really need to be, uh, firmed up before we can call them the, uh, unalloyed success that we are billing them to be.
All right.
Well, uh, everybody, we're talking with Jean McKenzie.
She's a journalist for the global post recently.
She's been writing about the American election, but who cares about that?
I want to ask her all about her time in Afghanistan.
More like this when we get back.
Oh, your writing's great.
I'm not saying that.
I'm just saying the election who cares about the election?
Um, all right.
We'll be right back with Jean McKenzie from the global post right after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Um, I guess this would be my last chance to remind you.
I'll be giving a anti-war speech tomorrow down at the South side of the Texas state Capitol sometime between noon and two or three or something.
It's supposed to be a pretty big thing.
I don't know.
It's supposed to be a pretty good speech.
I'll try to come up with one.
All right, good.
Okay.
Uh, so we're talking with Jean McKenzie from the global post about the, uh, massacre in Afghanistan and the night raid, uh, strategy in general.
Um, now Jean, the, the night raid strategy really, um, I guess this must be an oversimplification, but it pretty much, it seems like this was the, it at least got a big boost with the advent of the, um, implementation of the Afghan surge and the counter insurgency strategy from the CNAS group.
And they sent, uh, general Petraeus has made him the head of CENTCOM and they put his, uh, right-hand man, I guess, uh, McChrystal, the former head of the, uh, torture prison at, uh, Nama, right in, uh, Iraq.
And they put him in charge as Delta force officer in charge of running the Afghan war.
And that's when they tried to do this thing, right.
Where they turned the regular soldiers into traffic cops standing around or, or, you know, try to a lot of training, I guess, and a lot of standing around while the special forces do all the fighting and they do it in the middle of the night and they do these night raids, but then it was McChrystal himself, and I don't think Petraeus really changed that strategy when he took over the war for McChrystal.
And then now that they've passed it on to Alan and it's Alan, right.
And whoever else, I don't know exactly how it goes, but according to McChrystal, which I guess he was speaking for Petraeus too, or might as well have been, he said, for every one bad guy we kill, we create 10 more.
And so this whole thing is just making matters worse with every night raid that's acknowledged by the people leading the implementation of the strategy that puts night raids at the center of it.
Now, I'm sorry that that was the longest question that was ever asked of you.
And it wasn't even really a question, just a bunch of babbling, but I wonder whether you can make any sense out of that.
Is this really the plan to somehow defeat the Taliban and win Afghanistan?
If the people implementing the plan say that it's a recipe for disaster themselves?
Well, there is some there is some evidence that the night raids and other attacks have had a negative effect, if you will, on the the mid-level Taliban command.
There is some truth to the fact that the surge of the attacks in the south and in some cases, the night raids have knocked a big hole in the Taliban commanders, the mid-level commanders.
Another question is whether or not this is good news, because they tend to be replaced by by people who are are even more hard line and more difficult to negotiate with.
It is true that when night raids go wrong, as we have said, they often do, that we will alienate a village or even a much larger community, people who are angry, as we just saw in the north, in Faryab, people were angry at the killing of a mullah there who they said had nothing to do with any kind of terrorist activity.
So we might have killed one person, but we've created a community who no longer supports us and who is is angry and convinced that we are their enemy.
So, yes, they are.
They can be counterproductive.
And McChrystal was not the first one to say that.
Other military analysts have pointed this out in the past.
The decision apparently has been made that that it was worth it.
Now that we have a deal with the Afghans on night raids, we'll have to see if this tempers the either the implementation of the night raids or the anger felt by the Afghan community if these night raids do end up being led by Afghan soldiers themselves.
Yeah, and there's this piece right here in Stars and Stripes, night raid deal in Afghanistan is largely symbolic.
Turns out we didn't really mean it.
Well, I suspect that that that there is quite a bit of truth to that in that when we say we're going to ask permission from the Afghans, when you've got a country and a president that are largely under the thumb of the military, asking permission does tend to be more symbolic than real.
But I think there is going to be an attempt to have these raids at least symbolically led by Afghan forces to give them an Afghan face, whether the Afghans will actually be doing much of the fighting or whether they'll just be the first people through the door.
I don't know.
I think we can probably make some guesses about that, but I don't have any firm information.
All right.
Now, when they say that they want the beginning of the end of this thing to really be 2014, does that sound plausible to you?
I mean, I guess, first of all, we'd have to define what exactly is the mission is.
If success is we can leave and this government will still be the government of Afghanistan after we go.
Do you think they can accomplish that in a couple of years or this whole thing is just a fool's errand?
God, if we define the mission here, I think we might be the first people to actually do so.
Well, let's try to define it down.
How about Karzai doesn't have his head on a pike in a week after we pull out?
I think that no one can really make any predictions about what is going to happen.
I myself am very firmly of the persuasion that there will be a civil war once we leave.
How long that's going to take, whether Karzai's head is going to be on a pike or whether he himself will will be out of the country before we are is something we're just going to have to see.
But I do not think that the government or the country is going to be able to hold together for very long if the American forces really do pull out by 2014.
Despite all of the rosy comments we're seeing lately about the preparedness of the Afghan forces, we've seen very little indication in any of the major attacks that they are ready and willing to take the lead in major combat operations.
And that is a worrying sign if the insurgency continues to mount attacks, as they show every sign of being able to do.
Well, it's funny, you know, I have no idea how complex it all is with all the different ethnicities and different tribes and Uzbeks and Hazaras and Tajiks and personal relationships between people who fought before or friends now or whatever.
It seems like what the government of America is trying to do is create this Afghan army where, because they all wear the same American-bought camouflage, that that papers over all these differences, all these real factional splits that exist in Afghanistan that the Americans probably don't even want to take the time to learn about.
And they're hoping, just crossing their fingers, that somehow they're going to actually create a centralized Westphalia-style nation-state in Afghanistan, you know, a multi-ethnic project kind of thing they can't seem to pull off here or anywhere else.
Well, I think that that is one of the stated aims, or has been, is to create a stable nation-state in the region, that nation-state being Afghanistan.
I think that that is clearly not attainable at this point, probably never was attainable, and is not up to us to do in any case.
It's something that the Afghans are going to have to do themselves once they decide that that is what they want.
Well, but can you predict that we'll ever leave then?
Or does that mean that, well, I guess we just have to keep pushing that boulder up the mountain forever?
No, I don't.
I think we will leave.
I think we have to leave.
I think the American public is heartily sick of this war and has no idea why we are fighting it, why we continue to fight it.
I think political support for the war is waning very quickly.
So the question is not, how do we withdraw?
The question is, how do we spin the withdrawal so that it does not appear to be a defeat?
And that, I think, is what we are seeing now, is an attempt to paint what is going to happen, not as a defeat, but as some sort of, as something on the spectrum of victory, if you will.
Well, I say, give me a bell, I'll ring it and let's all, you know, have a ticker tape raid and everyone will feel really good about their self-esteem and we'll get our troops the hell out of there.
Finally, call it quits.
I think that that is what is going to happen.
And I don't think that there's going to be much of a backlash to that in the United States.
We want our troops home.
We want out of that war.
We want an end to what has been 11 years of misery and very little measurable success.
So I think that's where we're headed.
And I don't really see much of a downside to that for the Americans.
What's going to happen to the Afghans is a different question altogether.
All right.
Thanks so much for your time.
Great to talk to you again.
You're quite welcome.
Thank you.
Gene McKenzie, everybody from the Global Post, globalpost.com.
