The Secret Killers: Covert Assassins Charged With Hunting Down and Killing Afghans

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A US soldier belonging to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) patrols Bagram airbase in Afghanistan. Thirteen NATO soldiers have been killed in two days in Afghanistan, one of the deadliest bouts for the alliance this year that underlines a growing Taliban momentum in defiance of calls for peace talks.


The Secret Killers: Covert Assassins Charged With Hunting Down and Killing Afghans
Tomdispatch.com / By Pratap Chatterjee

August 29, 2010 | A US soldier belonging to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) patrols Bagram airbase in Afghanistan. Thirteen NATO soldiers have been killed in two days in Afghanistan, one of the deadliest bouts for the alliance this year that underlines a growing Taliban momentum in defiance of calls for peace talks.

Whatever terminology you choose, the details of dozens of their specific operations -- and how they regularly went badly wrong -- have been revealed for the first time in the mass of secret U.S. military and intelligence documents published by the website Wikileaks in July to a storm of news coverage and official protest. Representing a form of U.S. covert warfare now on the rise, these teams regularly make more enemies than friends and undermine any goodwill created by U.S. reconstruction projects.

When Danny Hall and Gordon Phillips, the civilian and military directors of the U.S. provincial reconstruction team in Nangarhar province, Afghanistan, arrived for a meeting with Gul Agha Sherzai, the local governor, in mid-June 2007, they knew that they had a lot of apologizing to do. Philips had to explain why a covert U.S. military “capture/kill” team named Task Force 373, hunting for Qari Ur-Rahman, an alleged Taliban commander given the code-name “Carbon,” had called in an AC-130 Spectre gunship and inadvertently killed seven Afghan police officers in the middle of the night.

The incident vividly demonstrated the inherent clash between two doctrines in the U.S. war in Afghanistan -- counterinsurgency (“protecting the people”) and counterterrorism (killing terrorists). Although the Obama administration has given lip service to the former, the latter has been, and continues to be, the driving force in its war in Afghanistan.

For Hall, a Foreign Service officer who was less than two months away from a plush assignment in London, working with the military had already proven more difficult than he expected. In an article for Foreign Service Journal published a couple of months before the meeting, he wrote, “I felt like I never really knew what was going on, where I was supposed to be, what my role was, or if I even had one. In particular, I didn't speak either language that I needed: Pashtu or military.”