Deadly wordplay: picking Afghan targets
Dana Priest The Washington Post Thursday, February 21, 2002
WASHINGTON When the soldiers of U.S. Army Special Forces Team 555 went to work in Afghanistan, they found no shortage of targets for U.S. warplanes to strike: mud huts where Taliban soldiers slept, rusted jeeps that they drove, shacks with suspicious antennas pointing toward the sky.
But to navy and air force pilots flying at thousands of feet, those things did not look like military targets, and in the initial days of the war, the fliers were reluctant to attack. So “we started to play this terminology game,” said Chief Warrant Officer Dave Diaz, who led Team 555.
He told his nine soldiers and one air force combat controller: “Yes, it is a civilian village, mud hut, like everything else in this country. But don’t say that. Say it’s a military compound. It’s a built-up area, barracks, command and control. Just like with the convoys – if it really was a convoy with civilian vehicles they were using for transport, we would just say, ‘Hey, military convoy, troop transport.'”
The pilots quickly came to trust Team 555’s judgment – in their 25 days of round-the-clock target-spotting, the team directed 175 aircraft sorties – but the early episode recounted by Diaz highlights the complexity of identifying targets in the Afghan war.
The U.S. targeting practices have come under question as Afghan villagers have reported civilian casualties from U.S. strikes. Pentagon officials have disputed the reports and insisted that the majority of air strikes hit Taliban and Al Qaeda targets while others have noted that in such a war, enemies and noncombatants may mingle freely.
Team 555 entered Afghanistan on Oct. 19 and remained until Jan. 4. The team’s experience, recounted in extensive interviews with several members, illuminates how they chose and checked targets, and how, in certain circumstances, civilians could find themselves in harm’s way.
Team 555 members worked with the CIA and with Northern Alliance commanders to select strike targets. First, they were to destroy the Taliban front line around the Bagram airfield, where the alliance and the Taliban had faced off for three years. After that, the team was to direct planes to destroy Taliban and Al Qaeda strongholds in the 48-kilometer (30-mile) swath of barren land stretching south to the capital, Kabul. Finally, they were to help the alliance seize Kabul.
For nearly a week in October, Team 555 was one of only two special forces teams inside Afghanistan, so it had the entire range of air force and navy planes on call: F-18, F-14 and F-15 fighters, B-52 and B-1 bombers, AC-130 gunships. To cover targets, the team split into two groups and used one of three observation posts within a three kilometer area.
From those and other positions, team members used high-powered binoculars to see small columns of men walking ridge lines, cooking fires burning near trench lines, artillery and mortar pieces and tanks glistening in the sun, mortars embedded in courtyards. Sometimes they saw black-shrouded figures, which they took to be Al Qaeda members.
To verify targets, pilots and targeters working in a command center in Saudi Arabia had an unprecedented array of information: CIA ground intelligence, pictures from satellites, P-3 spy planes and, in some cases, live video from a Predator surveillance drone hovering over the battlefield.
In the early going, when a pilot expressed reluctance to hit a certain target, members of Team 555 sometimes stopped their terminology game to plead their case explicitly.
“Yes, it’s a mud hut,” went the argument of one sergeant, who asked to be identified only as J.T. “We live in mud huts. They live in mud huts. We fight out of mud huts. They fight out of mud huts. There are no good guys there anymore.”
A number of Taliban soldiers would spend their days in Kabul but return to Bagram for the night, believing it was safer at the airfield. Northern Alliance intelligence in Kabul kept track of nearly everyone who left on these evening treks and noted that the convoys sometimes included civilians.
“We knew the only people who were going to travel from here to Kabul were combatants, and in some cases, their family members,” said Diaz. Although Team 555 members said that they worked hard for the air force to avoid civilians, there were occasions when they saw a few women and children mixed in with the Taliban forces that they needed to strike at that moment. Then, Diaz said, “the guidance I gave my team, and the guidance from higher headquarters, is that they are combatants.”
Rear Admiral Craig Quigley, a Pentagon spokesman, said that war planners developed rules of engagement for special forces soldiers and pilots that took into account “the very unsettled and unconventional conditions that our forces would find themselves in Afghanistan,” including times when the Taliban and Al Qaeda had families near them. As is standard, he would not describe the rules of engagement but said they “allowed clarity for forces on the ground.” To date, Quigley added, “we have not taken any action against any of our forces for noncompliance with the rules of engagement.”
International law requires that military forces take “all feasible precautions” to avoid civilian casualties, attack only military objects and weigh the value of military targets when some civilian casualties could occur.
By law, unarmed civilians can never be considered combatants, said Kenneth Roth, director of Human Rights Watch, which is sending investigators to Afghanistan to assess civilian casualties. “But we don’t criticize things that are close calls,” he added.
In unconventional warfare, Roth said, military commanders have an obligation to weigh the value of hitting targets that are likely to result in civilian deaths and to determine whether those deaths would be a trade-off that they can justify.
If this is true, action must be taken. There is no way that they can say that all feasable precautions were taken to protect citizens. If the fighter pilots were instructed that just about everywhere was military compund, etc, then this is NOT a close call. Or is it because the people involved are American?
Will
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