TIME: When Bad Information
Kills People
Monday, March 11, 2002
By TIM McGIRK with reporting by MARK THOMPSON /
WASHINGTON and MICHAEL WARE / KANDAHAR
This is what bad intelligence produces: a girl's
dress, its embroidery stained dark red with blood,
lying amid the rubble of a bombed-out building. Men
wandering through the debris, gesturing to show where
people were dancing when the bombs began to fall. And
a U.S. special-forces soldier, who is said to have
surveyed the scene and asked, "Why did we do this?"
It was a wedding party on a late December night. But
from the air, it looked to the pilots like what their
intelligence source had claimed: a gathering of
al-Qaeda terrorists. Dozens of cars had converged on
Qila-Niazi, a hamlet of 12 mud-walled homes in the
shadow of a snowy ridge 80 miles southeast of Kabul.
The women were gossiping and painting their hands red
with henna. The men were in another room playing
cards and dancing. Music drowned out the sounds of
the U.S. warplanes overhead.
At 10:30 p.m., the first bombs struck the party; the
assault lasted six hours. The next day, a team of
special forces arrived in Qila-Niazi to inspect what
was thought to have been a triumphant blow against
Osama bin Laden's network. Instead it found the
remains of the party. Out of 112 people, two women
had survived. "When the U.S. soldiers saw the
destruction, they were very sad," says Assaullah
Falah, a tribal elder, as he leads a reporter through
the wreckage.
Why did we do this? The question has echoed over the
past two months as TIME and other publications have
reported grim stories from Afghanistan that are at
odds with Pentagon accounts of victorious strikes
against the enemy. On Dec. 20, U.S. planes rocketed a
convoy of tribal elders going to Kabul for the
swearing-in ceremony of Afghan leader Hamid Karza and
then chased the fleeing tribesmen into a village,
killing 60, say locals. On Feb. 4, a Predator drone
fired a Hellfire missile at a man who U.S. Central
Command thought might be bin Laden. Villagers say the
dead man was a scrap collector; the Pentagon says he
was al-Qaeda. And on Jan. 24, special forces raided a
compound in Uruzgan province, killing 16. Locals say
the victims were not Taliban or al-Qaeda but
supporters of Karzai.
Pentagon officials have conceded error only in the
Jan. 24 case, grumbling that after 18,000 bombs and
missiles have been dropped on Afghanistan--with a
declared success rate of about 85%--no one should be
surprised when innocents are hurt or killed. Army
general Tommy Franks, who is running the war in
Afghanistan, told TIME that civilian casualties "are
probably on the low end of any we have ever seen in
combat. We obviously could just bomb the heck out of
the thing. But that's not the American way."
Precision munitions are worse than worthless if their
targets are selected by dishonest men. Western
diplomats and Afghan intelligence sources in Kabul
say that until recently the special forces in eastern
and southern Afghanistan have relied on untrustworthy
informants who tricked the U.S. into sending in
lethal air strikes on their tribal enemies. Both the
Kabul-bound convoy and the Qila-Niazi wedding party,
for example, were targeted by Pacha Khan, a former
provincial governor, derided by one official as a
"Pentagon-created warlord," who was using American
munitions to take care of his own business, according
to Afghan government sources and tribal elders in
Gardez. Says tribal chieftain Saifullah Khan: "Pacha
Khan would phone up the Americans, point out a
village and say they are all al-Qaeda." Pacha Khan
denies the charges. After the attack on the wedding
party, Saifullah visited the local base of the
special forces. "We told the soldiers that these are
good people--don't bomb them." As proof of loyalty,
Saifullah pledged hundreds of his men to help the
special forces hunt down al-Qaeda and Taliban bands
spotted in a mountain region known as Armat Zadran,
near the Pakistan border. The message got across:
Gardez townsfolk rebelled against Pacha Khan last
month, ousting him as governor. American warplanes
circled but did not intervene.
As the rate of U.S. bombing has declined, errors have
dropped. With the remnants of al-Qaeda and Taliban on
the run in eastern Afghanistan, the special forces
have had a crash course in the complexities of local
tribal feuds. U.S. soldiers are far more circumspect
about calling in air strikes. "When we get
information about Taliban or al-Qaeda, we check it
three, maybe four times before we act," says Gardez
governor Taj Mohammed Wardak. Americans are also
training local militias to hunt al-Qaeda. In Gardez
alone, the special forces have recruited more than
200 men, giving them better guns, warm clothes, food
and $200 a month. (In all, Western diplomats in Kabul
tell TIME, the Americans have more than 15,000 Afghan
fighters on the payroll, mainly in the Jalalabad and
Kandahar regions.)
U.S. special forces in Afghanistan are frustrated by
the perception that they are killing civilians
heedlessly; they insist many strikes have been called
off because of concern over such deaths. And they
refuse to talk to the press. Last week a TIME
reporter spotted two of them at the gates of a Gardez
hospital; others were out back, tinkering with a
rusty generator. But the two soldiers bolted. By the
weekend, U.S. forces were fighting al-Qaeda suspects
near Gardez in the fiercest battle in months. One
American was reported dead. Civilian casualties were
unknown.
--By Tim
McGirk. With reporting by Mark Thompson/Washington
and Michael Ware/Kandahar