UNAMA team leader Denise Lifton conceded that the report had
made no effort to ascertain what positions had been occupied
by those who had been killed in U.S. raids. "We have not
looked at the functions, per se, of those [who are] accused
of being Taliban and are killed," she said in an e-mail to
IPS.
Night raids generally kill Taliban personnel in their own
homes, and thus outside the context of a military operation.
If the same humanitarian law criterion used in counting
victims of Taliban assassinations were applied to the
alleged Taliban targeted in SOF night raids, the victims of
killings during those raids would have to be considered
civilian casualties.
U.S. Special Operations Forces acknowledge only 38 civilian
casualties, including killed and wounded, as a result of
night raids, as reported by Reuters Feb. 24.
Sunset Belinsky, a spokesperson for the International
Security Assistance Force (ISAF), insisted in an e-mail to
IPS that such raids are "intelligence driven", and that
"there is a rigorous process involved in identifying
targets".
But although Belinsky acknowledged to IPS last September
that the total of 1,355 insurgents "captured" in the raids
from May through July 2010 included "suspected insurgents,"
she was unable to provide any figures on how many of those
1,355 had later been released.
Belinsky did not respond directly to a request from IPS this
week for the information on what proportion of insurgents
captured in 2010 had turned out not to be insurgents.
The
continued refusal of ISAF, under the command of Gen. David
Petraeus, to release that information suggests that it would
reveal a very high proportion of the several thousand
Afghans killed last year as "Taliban" were simply civilian
supporters or victims of misidentification or a malicious
intelligence tip.
The remarkably sharp rise in the number of night raids carried
out by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, ISAF commander until June
2010 - and the even more spectacular increase in the raids
under Petraeus - in 2010 raises serious questions about how
the U.S. military could avoid a massive increase in the
killing of individuals with non-military functions in the
Taliban as well as people with only tangential or no
connection to the insurgency.
According to a document from the Afghanistan war logs
released by Wikileaks last July, in October 2009, the target
list for SOF night raids, called the Joint Prioritized
Effects List (JPEL), included 2,058 names. That list
provided the intelligence basis for a pace of some 90 raids
per month in late 2009 -- a huge increase from the 20 per
month just six months earlier.
Significantly, at that moment, Gen. Petraeus was warning the
White House against a strategy of relying on more SOF raids
and a smaller conventional force footprint. "There's just a
limit to how many precise targets you have at any one
time"," Petraeus said, according to the account in Bob
Woodward's book "Obama's Wars".
But from May through July 2010, according to ISAF figures,
SOF units launched 3,000 night raids -- a 50-fold increase
over the rate of only a year earlier -- in which they
reported killing nearly 1,100 Taliban "leaders" and "rank
and file".
A 10-fold increase in raids, which implied a similar
increase in the size of the target list, could not have been
carried out without a dramatic relaxation of the already
very loose criteria for including someone on the JPEL,
according to Matthew Hoh.
"Commanders are under pressure to find targets for these
raids, because it has become a metric of success," Hoh told
IPS. He likened that broadening of the targeting criteria to
the CIA's getting much greater latitude on targeting of
drone strikes in Northwest Pakistan in early 2008, expanding
the target list from a handful of al Qaeda leaders to
virtually anyone tangentially associated with either al
Qaeda or the Taliban.
Hoh said one result of the frantic effort to expand the
target list is bound to be an increased use of intelligence
tips from individuals or tribal enemies.
That appears to have been a factor in the killing of
President Hamid Karzai's cousin, Yar Mohammad Karzai, in a
night raid in the Karzai ancestral home in Kandahar
province, Mar. 9. The raiders also took his son away with a
black bag over his head.
made no effort to ascertain what positions had been occupied
by those who had been killed in U.S. raids. "We have not
looked at the functions, per se, of those [who are] accused
of being Taliban and are killed," she said in an e-mail to
IPS.
Night raids generally kill Taliban personnel in their own
homes, and thus outside the context of a military operation.
If the same humanitarian law criterion used in counting
victims of Taliban assassinations were applied to the
alleged Taliban targeted in SOF night raids, the victims of
killings during those raids would have to be considered
civilian casualties.
U.S. Special Operations Forces acknowledge only 38 civilian
casualties, including killed and wounded, as a result of
night raids, as reported by Reuters Feb. 24.
Sunset Belinsky, a spokesperson for the International
Security Assistance Force (ISAF), insisted in an e-mail to
IPS that such raids are "intelligence driven", and that
"there is a rigorous process involved in identifying
targets".
But although Belinsky acknowledged to IPS last September
that the total of 1,355 insurgents "captured" in the raids
from May through July 2010 included "suspected insurgents,"
she was unable to provide any figures on how many of those
1,355 had later been released.
Belinsky did not respond directly to a request from IPS this
week for the information on what proportion of insurgents
captured in 2010 had turned out not to be insurgents.
The
continued refusal of ISAF, under the command of Gen. David
Petraeus, to release that information suggests that it would
reveal a very high proportion of the several thousand
Afghans killed last year as "Taliban" were simply civilian
supporters or victims of misidentification or a malicious
intelligence tip.
The remarkably sharp rise in the number of night raids carried
out by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, ISAF commander until June
2010 - and the even more spectacular increase in the raids
under Petraeus - in 2010 raises serious questions about how
the U.S. military could avoid a massive increase in the
killing of individuals with non-military functions in the
Taliban as well as people with only tangential or no
connection to the insurgency.
According to a document from the Afghanistan war logs
released by Wikileaks last July, in October 2009, the target
list for SOF night raids, called the Joint Prioritized
Effects List (JPEL), included 2,058 names. That list
provided the intelligence basis for a pace of some 90 raids
per month in late 2009 -- a huge increase from the 20 per
month just six months earlier.
Significantly, at that moment, Gen. Petraeus was warning the
White House against a strategy of relying on more SOF raids
and a smaller conventional force footprint. "There's just a
limit to how many precise targets you have at any one
time"," Petraeus said, according to the account in Bob
Woodward's book "Obama's Wars".
But from May through July 2010, according to ISAF figures,
SOF units launched 3,000 night raids -- a 50-fold increase
over the rate of only a year earlier -- in which they
reported killing nearly 1,100 Taliban "leaders" and "rank
and file".
A 10-fold increase in raids, which implied a similar
increase in the size of the target list, could not have been
carried out without a dramatic relaxation of the already
very loose criteria for including someone on the JPEL,
according to Matthew Hoh.
"Commanders are under pressure to find targets for these
raids, because it has become a metric of success," Hoh told
IPS. He likened that broadening of the targeting criteria to
the CIA's getting much greater latitude on targeting of
drone strikes in Northwest Pakistan in early 2008, expanding
the target list from a handful of al Qaeda leaders to
virtually anyone tangentially associated with either al
Qaeda or the Taliban.
Hoh said one result of the frantic effort to expand the
target list is bound to be an increased use of intelligence
tips from individuals or tribal enemies.
That appears to have been a factor in the killing of
President Hamid Karzai's cousin, Yar Mohammad Karzai, in a
night raid in the Karzai ancestral home in Kandahar
province, Mar. 9. The raiders also took his son away with a
black bag over his head.
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