Afghanistan: Misunderstanding the Society, Killing the Civilians (Porter)

Gareth Porter writes for Inter Press Service:

A Special Operations Forces raid on Feb. 12 on what was supposed to be the compound of a Taliban leader but that killed three women and two Afghan government officials demonstrated a fatal weakness of the U.S. military engagement in Afghanistan: after eight years of operating there, the U.S. military still has no understanding of the personal, tribal and other local socio-political conflicts.

In targeting the suspected Taliban in such raids, therefore, the U.S. military command has been forced to rely on informants of unknown reliability --- and motives.

Afghanistan: Death And The Prices We Pay for Intervention

As a provincial council member from Gardez, near the scene of the botched raid, declared bitterly last week, U.S. Special Forces "don't know who is the enemy and who isn't".


When the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, Adm. William McRaven, went to the site of the raid to apologise, the head of the extended family which lost five people to the SOF unit, Hajji Sharibuddin, demanded that the U.S. military turn over "the spy who gave the false information to the Americans".

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and his chief of intelligence, Gen. Michael Flynn, have admitted the profound ignorance of the U.S. military about Afghan society, while avoiding the implications of that ignorance for the issue of false intelligence on the Taliban.

McChrystal acknowledged in his "initial assessment" last August that his command had to "acquire a far better understanding of Afghanistan and its people".

In an interview with National Public Radio Aug. 13, Flynn admitted, "What we really have not done to the degree that we need to is really truly understand the population: the tribal dynamics, the tribal networks, the ethnicity…."

Such dynamics are different "from valley to valley", Flynn observed.

And in an unusual paper published by the Centre for a New American Security last October, Flynn was even more frank, saying, "I don't want to say we're clueless, but we are. We're no more than fingernail deep in our understanding the environment."

Flynn avoided any suggestion that this profound ignorance of the society in which U.S. troops are operating could affect targeting of suspected Taliban. He asserted that the intelligence problem is not about the Taliban but about the lack of knowledge about governance and development issues.

But a foreign military force that is so fundamentally ignorant of the socio-political forces at play inevitably allows local sources which have access to it to act in their own self-interest.

More often than not, the U.S. and NATO have depended heavily on ties with Afghan tribal leaders and warlords. That has proven disastrous over and over again.

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