rssOne Vivid, Horrible Reason McChrystal Wants Control of Special Forces in Afghanistan
Monday, April 05, 2010 at 9:07 am
- 8 Comments
In February, U.S. Special Operations Forces raided a house in Gardez, in the eastern district of Paktia, searching for Taliban militants. They killed two men they believed to be insurgents. A NATO statement at the time said that soldiers also “found the bodies of three women who had been tied up, gagged and killed.”
But last night, Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s command announced the results of an investigation into the raid that calls the initial account into question. From an official statement:
A thorough joint investigation into the events that occurred in the Gardez district of Paktiya province Feb. 12, has determined that international forces were responsible for the deaths of three women who were in the same compound where two men were killed by the joint Afghan-international patrol searching for a Taliban insurgent.
The two men, who were later determined not to be insurgents, were shot and killed by the joint patrol after they showed what appeared to be hostile intent by being armed. While investigators could not conclusively determine how or when the women died, due to lack of forensic evidence, they concluded that the women were accidentally killed as a result of the joint force firing at the men.
The statement has a vague explanation for the February report about the women being bound and gagged: “this information was taken from an initial report by the international members of the joint force who were not familiar with Islamic burial customs.” Presumably that means the women were shrouded, but that’s hard to square with U.S. forces being responsible for the actual killing. Additionally, The New York Times further reports that the “lack of forensic evidence” about those dead women civilians may be attributable to Special Operations Forces digging “bullets out of the bodies of the women to hide the nature of their deaths.”
Last month, McChrystal, himself a former Special Operations commander, took greater control over the Special Operations chain of command in Afghanistan. McChrystal’s move was an attempt to end a semi-autonomous war effort that can too often place a giant asterisk on his strategy of prosecuting the war through protecting the civilian population. One area he apparently left untouched is detention operations. Will there be further clarifications in the future about ultimately-untrue statements about the treatment of detainees in Afghanistan?
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8 Comments
Pingback posted April 5, 2010 @ 12:14 pm
[...] One Vivid, Horrible Reason McChrystal Wants Control of Special … [...]
Pingback posted April 5, 2010 @ 12:48 pm
[...] in Afghanistan War, Daily life, Military, Obama administration at 9:48 am by LeisureGuy Spencer Ackerman in the Washington Independent: In February, U.S. Special Operations Forces raided a house in Gardez, in the eastern district of [...]
Comment posted April 5, 2010 @ 3:31 pm
My comment is on two men and three women being murdered by UN forces. This is another reason for American soldiers to get out of Afghanistan now. I mean within 30 days, men and equipment with an apology to Afghanistan civilians for being sent to their country to ruin it culturally, morally and economically. Send the troops home now, now, now!
Comment posted April 5, 2010 @ 4:05 pm
The militants weren’t militants, they were loyal government officials. The women, according to dozens of interviews with witnesses at the scene, were killed by the raiders. Two of them were pregnant, one was engaged to be married.
That “hearts and minds” thing sounds like another casualty.
Pingback posted April 5, 2010 @ 5:11 pm
[...] overall effort. Or perhaps they can be prevented through technical measures; as Spencer Ackerman points out, General Stanley McChrystal has curtailed night-time raids and taken closer personal control over [...]
Comment posted April 5, 2010 @ 5:10 pm
Re: being bound and gagged…
If you don't have an undertaker, one ties a piece of cloth or some other binding under the jaw of the dead and around the head to prevent the decay process from popping the jaw open in a scary way. Similar bindings might be used to keep the decay process from doing scary things like causing the corpse to sit up when the muscles go rigid in strange ways.
See here for a photo of a jaw binding on the corpses of one of the Gardez victims:
http://www.facebook.com/rethinkafghanistan#!/ph…
I think you are entirely too easy on McChrystal here, Spencer. First, SOF are were often, but not always, in a goofy command chain relationship with ISAF. No one at ISAF has pointed the finger at JSOC, for example, and ISAF themselves took responsibility for the raid in the latest press release. Further, even if it was undertaken independent of McChrystal's chain of command, the P.R. office that first lied about the women being dead when they got there and being bound/gagged, who attacked journalists for questioning the official story, and who only admitted what happened after getting the crap kicked out of them in the press, were in all cases under McChrystal's command.
This is not a “special forces bad, Team McChrystal good” story.
Pingback posted April 5, 2010 @ 9:52 pm
[...] One Vivid, Horrible Reason McChrystal Wants Control of Special … [...]
Comment posted April 6, 2010 @ 12:12 am
I could not agree more.
We should also offer free immigration to any Afghanis who cast their lot with us. And hopefully a number of military careers will be terminated by jail time, although since we are in a country where the powerful and well connected almost never pay for their crimes, I can only hope.
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