Afghan Victims of CIA Missile Strike Described as Peasants, Not Al Qaeda
By Doug Struck, Washington Post Foreign Service
A SECTION; Pg. A01
1392 words
ZHAWAR, Afghanistan – Mir Ahmad was a little tall. But he was not Osama bin Laden.
Villagers here in the remote mountains of eastern Afghanistan said Ahmad and two other local men, Daraz and Jahan Gir, were peasants gathering scrap metal from the war in a region of suspected al Qaeda hide-outs. They were killed last Monday when a U.S. Hellfire missile, fired from a CIA-run Predator drone, shrieked down in what was sup-posed to be an attack on
terrorists.
The Pentagon has said the missile was fired on the strength of intelligence suggesting the men were al Qaeda leaders, feeding speculation that a tall man among them might have been bin Laden, the elusive al Qaeda founder who was the main target of the war launched by the Bush administration in Afghanistan on Oct. 7. Since then, however, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other U.S. officials have said they are unsure who was hit.
A Washington Post reporter who reached the remote scene of the attack was held at gunpoint by U.S. soldiers and prevented from entering the site. The soldiers also barred access to the nearby village where Ahmad and the two other men had lived.
“This is an ongoing military operation,” said the soldiers’ commander, who would not identify
himself, after con-sulting by radio with his superiors. “If you go further, you would be shot.”
“We’re trying to find out what happened here, too,” he added.
The uncertainty over who was killed in the missile attack illustrates the problems facing the United States as it tries to identify and destroy the remnants of an enemy that has slipped into the rugged hills of Afghanistan. More than four months after the start of U.S. airstrikes, U.S. planes are still crossing the skies and unleashing bombs and rockets. But increasingly, Afghans in this area said, the Americans do not really know who they are aiming at, and sometimes hit the wrong targets.
“Who are they talking to?” said Mohammed Ibrahim, governor of Khost province, about 130 miles southeast of Kabul near the border with Pakistan. “They aren’t talking to me. They aren’t talking to local people. Their intelligence in this area is very weak.”
The Hellfire missile attack was the latest incident in which U.S. forces, acting on intelligence often provided by Afghan allies, have delivered deadly strikes only to hear protests later that their targets were innocent.
The CIA has begun paying reparations to victims of a Jan. 24 raid in Uruzgan province that killed 21 people, and 27 Afghans captured in the raid have been released. The head of Afghanistan’s interim administration in Kabul, Hamid Karzai, has said U.S. forces similarly misfired in December when they attacked a convoy headed from Khost to Kabul for his inauguration, killing 12. And local villagers have complained that dozens of people from a wedding party, including women and children, were killed when U.S. bombers hit an arms cache Dec. 29 in the hamlet of Qalai Niazi near Gardez.
U.S. forces in Khost are recruiting 400 local fighters — at $ 50 apiece to begin — to help sort out the problems in this region. According to local officials, the fighters will be trained at a small camp of U.S. Special Forces and CIA operatives to comb through the mountains in search of al Qaeda members.
It will be a treacherous task. These mountains are a tableau of craggy peaks and sharp ravines. The terrain disappears in folds and creases, creating innumerable places to hide.
Along a low riverbed trail, for example, an al Qaeda cave once used as a hospital suddenly
appears. It would be invisible from the air. But on the ground, the entrance is carefully framed in brick. Inside, the floor is concrete and tunnels connect the cave to three separate entrances.
Some American officials say they believe these hills may hold answers to why more al Qaeda and Taliban fighters were not found after they surrendered the cities of Afghanistan. The officials suspect the fighters melted into the hills and now may be living in caves or hiding in villages in Khost and other remote provinces.
The villages around Khost are nearly inaccessible. To travel from Khost to Zhawar — sometimes referred to as Zhawar Kili, kili meaning village — requires a jolting three-hour trek in a rugged vehicle, fording streams, climbing unmarked mountain trails and inching along snowy precipices.
The U.S. soldiers at Zhawar, who were helicoptered in, acknowledged surprise at seeing a visitor: “You must have known some way to get here we didn’t know,” said one.
Zhawar was used as a training base and a transit point for Taliban supporters on their way to and from Pakistan, just on the other side of the nearest mountains. The Americans believe many of those who were at the camp are still in the area. As a result, U.S. forces have continued to bomb the area regularly.
The bombardment has clearly taken a toll. On a mountaintop near here, all that remains of a
Taliban post is a 10-foot hole, where a U.S. missile struck, a few bits of clothing and the straw that was used by the Taliban fighters for shelter.
A woodcutter in the area said Pakistani volunteers manned the post and inhabited houses in the area. In the near distance is a line of mud houses, each neatly collapsed by precise U.S. strikes.
Those who live here agree that it remains a dangerous area. To help a reporter travel to Zhawar, the governor sent along 10 armed escorts. But Mohammad Hakeem, a security chief of the Gorboz district that includes Zhawar and much of these mountains, said he believes the hard-core fighters, including Arabs and Pakistanis, have fled.
The border with Pakistan is porous, he noted, and the Gorboz district abuts a semi-autonomous tribal area of Pakistan, little patrolled by Pakistani soldiers.
“I can be in Pakistan in a half-hour. It’s right over that mountain,” Hakeem said, gesturing to a nearby peak. “Why would I stay here to get bombed?”
So most of those still in the area are peasants, as was missile victim Mir Ahmad, local officials
said. Ahmad and the two others from the nearby village of Gorboz had gone to Zhawar, which had been heavily bombed, to collect scattered munitions and scrap metal to sell in Pakistan, said Zawar Khan, who is from Gorboz.
“I was going past there toward Khost, and I heard the sound of an explosion,” he said. “The three were cut in half. They were just poor people trying to get money to feed their families.”
Khan said Ahmad had two wives and five children.
The Pentagon has said that an unmanned Predator drone spotted a group of men at Zhawar,
and that others seemed to be acting in a deferential manner toward one tall man. U.S. officials have said they received other, unspecified information that the men were al Qaeda leaders before giving approval to fire the missile.
The Pentagon sent soldiers to the area this weekend to investigate the missile strike, but has not disclosed their findings.
Khan said that Ahmad, about 35, was taller than most men here, but estimated his height at about 5 feet 10. Bin Laden is said to be 6 feet 4 to 6 feet 6.
Local security forces said the Americans are depending on unreliable sources. The U.S. base at
Khost is guarded by forces of Bacha Khan, a local commander. And while all those in control at Khost are nominally Bacha Khan sup-porters, they said the Americans are getting information from outsiders or from Bacha Khan’s 17-year-old brother, Wazer Khan, who is said to be at the U.S. camp often.
“They don’t consult the real locals, who know what the situation is,” said the deputy security chief at Khost, Sakhi Jan Wafadar.
As an example, local officials said, two weeks ago they sent a force to Zhawar to check on the
results of U.S. bombing there. A U.S. helicopter landed and Special Forces soldiers captured the men, made them lie on the ground and then flew them to Kandahar before acknowledging that they were friendly forces and releasing them.
Attempts to speak to U.S. military officials at the base in Khost were rebuffed. A soldier at the gate of razor wire and sandbags said no officer would speak to a reporter.
The governor, Ibrahim, said he also is turned away at the gate. “It’s not possible for me to go there. There’s no communication with the Americans,” he said. “We are happy that they came, and we are ready to help them. But the people are starting to get angry at them.”
The following reaction articles to Struck’s experience appeared in The Washington Post.
February 17, 2002 Sunday
Final EditionWar Coverage Takes a Negative Turn;
Civilian Deaths, Military Errors Become Focus as Reporters Revisit Bombing
SitesBy Howard Kurtz, Washington Post Staff Writer
A SECTION; Pg. A14
1449 wordsWhen U.S. soldiers conducted a raid north of Kandahar, Afghanistan, on Jan. 24, it was initially
reported as an American victory.“U.S. Special Forces got into a fight with the Taliban. . . . Fifteen Afghan fighters were killed and
27 taken into custody,” said ABC’s Peter Jennings.“Army Special Forces stormed two Taliban compounds,” said NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski. Newspapers
carried sim-ilar stories, adding such caveats as “Defense Department officials said.”Days later, however, a few reporters in Afghanistan began challenging the official accounts,
eventually prompting the Pentagon to acknowledge that those captured were not Taliban
members after all. On balance, though, some jour-nalists say the news business has been too
passive during a war in which the first, often lasting impressions are left by military briefers at the
lectern.“We are the auditors of this operation,” said Mark Thompson, Time magazine’s defense
correspondent. “Some-times you get the feeling there’s a little too much Arthur Andersen going
on.”After five months in which the Bush administration drew consistently upbeat coverage for a
successful military campaign, the media climate has turned sharply negative. Suddenly, the issues
of civilian casualties, military mistakes and the Pentagon’s own credibility have been dragged into
the national spotlight.Perhaps there was lingering resentment among journalists over their limited access during the war
while Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was hailed on magazine covers like a rock star.
Perhaps the tales of innocents slain in remote Afghan villages became too heart-rending to
ignore. Perhaps there was a news void as the fighting largely sub-sided and the Osama bin Laden
trail went cold.Or perhaps it is easier for reporters to raise uncomfortable questions about military blunders now
that the Taliban regime has been toppled and the threat to American troops greatly eased.
Whatever the cause, war coverage now resembles a kind of time-lapse photography, with
journalists revisiting the scene of past bombing raids for the kind of up-close-and-personal
reporting that was all but impossible while the ground war was raging.On Monday, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and the New York Times reported
allegations by some of the 27 Afghans captured in last month’s raid that American forces had
beaten and kicked them — prompting Rums-feld to order an investigation. A day earlier, the New
York Times ran a lengthy piece on civilian deaths in several raids in Afghanistan. On Wednesday,
The Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times examined civilian casualties in a raid in
October.But the Pentagon still controls access in some areas where journalists want to dig for information.
One dramatic clash took place last weekend when Washington Post reporter Doug Struck tried to
visit the site of the Jan. 24 raid. He was turned away at gunpoint by U.S. soldiers who threatened
to shoot him if he went farther.Struck said from Afghanistan that “the important thing isn’t whether Doug Struck was threatened. It
shows the extremes the military is going to to keep this war secret, to keep reporters from finding
out what’s going on.”Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke defended the department’s dealings with the media. “I
think it’s a reflec-tion of the often confusing and shifting nature of a very unconventional war,” she
said. “It’s always a balance. We want to put out as much information as we can, and we want that
information to be as accurate as it can be. We can’t always do that as quickly as some reporters
would like.”Since the Persian Gulf War, the military and the media have been arguing over the degree to
which journalists can accompany battlefield troops without jeopardizing their safety. These
complaints grew louder after the United States began bombing Afghanistan Oct. 7 without
activating previously designated pools of reporters. At the same time, Rumsfeld threatened to
prosecute anyone caught leaking classified information.Now that journalists are relatively free to invade Afghanistan on their own, the war’s latest phase
has produced a spate of murky, conflicting accounts of whether U.S. troops sometimes targeted
the wrong people.CBS correspondent David Martin said Rumsfeld’s crackdown has meant that “the real story does
not seem to bubble up from below in the reporting chain the way it used to. People who care
about their credibility with you no longer trust all the information they’re getting. They’ve become
more cautious because they don’t want to be made to look the liar when some other report comes
up two days later.”Thompson said the military itself frequently has incomplete information about the impact of its
bombing. “The Pentagon was pretty much as blind as we were,” he said. “As painful as it was to
watch, the Pentagon has provided us with their changing assessment as it occurred. Frankly, I
don’t know how they screwed up so bad.”Not all journalists are critical of defense officials. “I know there are a lot of complaints from
reporters that this war has been harder to cover, but personally I don’t find it so,” NBC’s
Miklaszewski said. “You get the first blush from military sources, and in many cases a more
thorough examination finds it didn’t exactly happen that way.”CNN’s Bob Franken, who recently visited Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, said officials at the U.S. naval
base there con-sidered lifting the ban on filming the transfer of detainees. But, he said, “people
on the ground got a tremendous amount of grief from higher-ups for suggesting the idea. I was
told there was a concern about what if something goes wrong. Well, in a free society you report
the good and the bad.”The day after the Jan. 24 raid, National Public Radio introduced a report from Mike Shuster by
noting that “there have been many accusations of errant bombs that killed civilians and civilians
who died because they were too near military targets.”“It’s been a hard story to get,” said Barbara Rehm, NPR’s managing editor. “We’ve tried very hard
to chip away at it. The best information for us has been on the scene. I wish we had infinitely more
access. It’s hard moving around the country.”On Jan. 28, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Knight Ridder and London’s Guardian
reported claims by Afghan villagers that those killed in the raid four days earlier were, as the Los
Angeles paper put it, “pro-government local residents, not hard-line Taliban holdouts as
described by the U.S. military.”The Pentagon opened an investigation Jan. 30, even as Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, said there was no evidence that U.S. forces had struck the wrong target. The
military later released the 27 captives.In the incident involving Struck, Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, a Pentagon spokesman, said the
reporter was turned back “both for his safety and that of the soldiers who were there doing that
work.”Although Struck presented his credentials, Quigley said, he was accompanied by armed Afghan
guards and “we had no idea who these guys were.”Struck called that explanation “an incredibly specious excuse on the part of the Pentagon.” He
said his guards, who remained at the bottom of a hill where the soldiers were stationed, “were
clearly no threat to the Americans and clearly going nowhere.”Struck said the soldiers’ commander, after consulting by radio with his superiors, told him: “If you
go further, you would be shot.”Quigley challenged the reporter’s version, saying the commander had told Struck: “For your own
safety, we cannot let you go forward. You could be shot in a firefight.”Struck said: “That’s an amazing lie. Those words were not spoken. With all due respect, Admiral
Quigley was not there; I was.”The question of access has come up in other settings. At Camp Rhino, the U.S. Marine base in
Afghanistan, military spokesmen repeatedly told reporters last month that they could not see,
interview or photograph the detainees be-cause of Geneva Convention rules — even though the
administration was then arguing that the detainees were not formally covered by the international
agreement.Clarke, maintaining that the captives always enjoyed Geneva-type protections, said the military
has accommodated “scores and scores of reporters” on airplanes, aircraft carriers and even with
Special Forces units. “We go to extreme lengths to the extent possible to facilitate media coverage
of this war,” she said.Miklaszewski said the media is still getting a good picture of the war: “A complete picture? We’ll
never get that. There’s still information being released about secrets kept during World War II.”
February 13, 2002 Wednesday
Final EditionAccountability in Afghanistan
EDITORIAL; Pg. A26
580 wordsFRIENDLY FIRE and other tragic mistakes that kill the wrong people are inescapable in war, and
the U.S. cam-paign in Afghanistan has been no exception. For the first several months of the
conflict, unintended deaths caused by American forces appeared to be relatively low, thanks to
the use of precision weapons; according to a careful, if pre-liminary, study by the Associated
Press, they numbered in the mid-hundreds, not the thousands claimed by the Taliban. The
evidence available so far suggests that U.S. commanders did their best to avoid innocent deaths.
Nevertheless, both senior officers and their civilian leadership in the Bush administration have
failed to carry out what should be an essential duty: mounting serious investigations of wrongful
deaths, providing a full public explanation and holding U.S. officers and soldiers accountable for
any improper or reckless behavior.The obligation to do so is all the greater now because of the mounting evidence that U.S. planes
or commandos attacked and killed innocent people several times in the past two months. The
new, ardently pro-American Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, recently confirmed reports that U.S.
planes mistakenly attacked a delegation of leaders traveling to his inauguration in December; he
also supported extensive reports from villagers that a raid in the Oruzgan area in January wrongly
targeted pro-government forces. This week some of the 27 persons arrested and later released in
Oruzgan told reporters that they had been brutally beaten by U.S. soldiers. Villagers near the
town of Khost told The Post’s Doug Struck that a missile fired last week at a group of men
suspected to be al Qaeda leaders instead killed sev-eral impoverished scavengers.It may be that some or even all of these disturbing reports are inaccurate, in part or in whole. But
what is most troubling at the moment is the manifest reluctance of the Pentagon to respond
seriously to them. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld set the tone early on; in his televised
press conferences, he has regularly dismissed reports of civilian casualties as terrorist
propaganda. Against all the testimony, and without providing any contrary proofs, U.S. spokes-
men continue to insist that the delegation traveling to Mr. Karzai’s inauguration was a legitimate
target; on Monday, the Pentagon essentially stuck to its story that the men killed by the missile
strike were from al Qaeda, even though officials acknowledged that they hadn’t yet determined
the identities of those killed. An investigation is said to be underway in the Oruzgan case, but U.S.
Central Command may have damaged its credibility by refusing to acknowledge that the raid had
gone wrong even after those captured had been released.If there has been a rash of misdirected raids, U.S. commanders need to consider how to improve
intelligence and operational safeguards so as to operate more effectively in the highly confusing
and volatile Afghan landscape. But even more important to preserving support for the war in and
outside Afghanistan is a clear commitment to accountability for such damaging errors. When
innocent people are reported killed by its forces, the United States must investigate vigorously, be
clear and open in its explanations, and be prepared to take action in cases of improper behavior.
Meeting such a standard would minimize the injury caused by war’s unintended tragedies; for now,
the Bush administration instead risks compounding the damage.
February 17, 2002 Sunday
Final EditionCatching Up With a Hidden War
By Michael Getler
EDITORIAL; Pg. B06
705 wordsWhether Osama bin Laden is “dead or alive” we still don’t know. But the Bush administration,
which focused on bin Laden and the Taliban’s Mohammad Omar as the personification of the
terror unleashed Sept. 11, hasn’t been saying much about them recently. Officials have been
saying a lot about Iraq, which, as far as we know, had little or nothing to do with Sept. 11.Any administration has a strong hand when it comes to changing the news agenda. The White
House is a powerful pulpit. So the president’s threats to turn America’s might toward Baghdad and
the ouster of Saddam Hussein seems to be gathering more TV time and print headlines these
days than the lingering activity in Afghanistan.But American reporters in Afghanistan, fortunately, are out of sync with the shifting emphasis in
Washington. They still are trying to report on what went on in a war they were largely not allowed
to see or get close to, at least as far as the American participation is concerned. Last week this
produced a string of front-page stories that significantly expanded the picture of what had been
happening beyond official Pentagon briefings.Last Sunday The Post’s Susan Glasser provided a lengthy, revealing account of the battles and
searches around the suspected bin Laden stronghold of Tora Bora in December and the role
played by U.S. Special Forces, as described by various Afghans who took part in the mission. The
next day Post staff writer Doug Struck made his way to the remote village of Zhawar to report what
he could find out about a Feb. 4 attack by a U.S. Hellfire missile fired from a CIA-operated
Predator drone. Alongside Struck’s report was a detailed report by Molly Moore from the village of
Uruzgan, where a U.S. attack Jan. 24 on what were thought to be al Qaeda and Taliban outposts
killed 21 people and where 27 others were taken prisoner. This reconstruction also was reported
by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and the Pentagon is investigating. On
Wednesday another story by Moore reported on the death of 21 people in two families killed
during a missile attack Oct. 21.These accounts, not surprisingly, have started to produce some angry calls and e-mails — only a
handful thus far — that The Post is bashing the military and being unpatriotic, trying to knock a few
points off the president’s high standing in the poll and doesn’t seem to understand that this is war
and that civilians sometimes die in wars. I disagree with these sentiments. The Post is doing what
it should be doing: trying to provide as detailed and independent a record of Americans at war as
it can. There’s no indication that military security has been compromised, or that most people
don’t understand that this is an unusual fight and that there are bound to be some
miscalculations, mistakes and civilian casualties, which still seem remarkably low.These were well-reported stories by experienced correspondents who take substantial risks in
bringing them to readers. They have no protection by U.S. forces, and in one instance, U.S.
troops, well after the battle, held Struck at gunpoint to prevent him from passing. In another,
reporters related that troops stood by while armed Afghan fighters took camera equipment and
film.One theme that comes through in all these reports is that things appear to have gone wrong
because of faulty intelligence. That is worth knowing. If some Special Forces soldiers are alleged
to have mistreated civilians, that may be understandable, but it is also worth knowing, especially
for the military.Can The Post do better in the way it presents these stories at a time when American emotions are
still raw? I think so. All of these stories are based on accounts by Afghans. They are numerous,
powerful and on the record. But in some cases it would help to state the obvious: These accounts
cannot be independently confirmed at this time. It would help to say whether the interviews were
conducted through a translator, to make sure that neutral language is used in describing
allegations or denials, and to report if signs of physical abuse were noticeable.Military success demonstrates one aspect of American power. No-punches-pulled reporting
demonstrates another.
February 12, 2002 Tuesday
Final EditionUnder the Fog of War
By Richard Cohen
EDITORIAL; Pg. A25
747 wordsCarl Sandburg’s fog comes on little cat feet. The fog of war comes differently — on the heavy
boots of soldiers. It is these boots that allegedly walked across the backs of Afghan prisoners, in
some cases cracking ribs of men who, it later turned out, were American allies. The imprisonment
was a mistake. The torture, if true, was a crime.Both The Washington Post and the New York Times report the same set of facts: Afghans friendly
to the central government were mistakenly attacked in the village of Uruzgan by U.S. forces.
Twenty-one of the villagers were killed. Twenty-seven others were taken prisoner. They say they
were beaten, kicked and imprisoned in a “cage.”Yes, I know, the aforementioned fog of war and all of that. Yet as the fog lifts a bit, we are
beginning to see some incidents that threaten to take the luster off what has been a marvelous
achievement by the U.S. military in Afghanistan. It is one thing to bomb or attack on the basis of
misinformation. It is quite another thing to abuse prisoners captured as a result.It is also quite another thing to threaten the life of an American journalist. This, though, is what
happened outside the village of Zhawar, where, it seems, yet another mistake was made. This
time a U.S. Hellfire missile, fired from one of the CIA’s Predator drones, hit a group of suspected al
Qaeda leaders. One of the victims was tall, as is Osama bin Laden. It turned out, however, to be
local villagers.Once again, mistakes happen. But this time the mistake was compounded by a coercive attempt
to keep journalists from learning the truth. My Post colleague Doug Struck was restrained at
gunpoint by American soldiers. “This is an ongoing military operation,” said the commanding
officer, who would not give his name. “If you go further, you would be shot.”Now, who is this commander who would shoot an American journalist merely for doing his job?
What is his name, and was he authorized to threaten Struck’s life? Is it the Pentagon’s policy to
use force to stop a reporter from gathering the facts? What country is this, anyhow?Please, spare me your letters and e-mails about the realities of war. We are not talking here about
the understandable overreaction that occurs when people are scared, adrenaline is flowing or
lives are on the line. To save a colleague — to save any innocent person — I would not hesitate to
encourage cooperation with a good kick.But the Afghans are alleging gratuitous beatings administered after the non-battle — these were
friendlies, remem-ber — was over. They are saying they were mistreated after they were removed
to the American prison. “They were beating us on the head and back and ribs,” one of the former
prisoners told The Post. “They were punching us with fists, kicking me with their feet,” he added.
This is when some of the men had their ribs broken.This is similar to the allegations made by lawyers for John Walker Lindh, the American who
enlisted to fight with the Taliban. His attorneys said he was abused after being captured, at one
time stripped naked, bound hand and foot and imprisoned in a metal container. I know it’s hard to
work up a lot of sympathy for Lindh, but his values are not the issue here. Ours are.And this is what the world is questioning. We are conducting both our foreign policy and the war
with a kind of swagger and, sometimes, with not much thought. Policies are announced and then
more or less rescinded. After all the controversy over military tribunals, Lindh is being prosecuted
in a civilian court. After effectively giving the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war the brushoff,
the Bush administration said it would, after all, comply.As far as I’m concerned, the war against al Qaeda is still about revenge. I want to kill those guys,
both to even the score and to ensure that no one again attacks Americans. But it is also a war
about American values, and these do not include torture or arrogance or the use of the military to
threaten the life of a journalist. A reporter shouldn’t have to watch his back as well as his front.
Some of what has been reported so far are allegations. But the accounts are credible, certainly
worth investigating, and raise the specter of something much worse happening — My Lai comes to
mind — if American soldiers are led to believe they can do pretty much what they want. Even in
war there are distinctions. It is one thing to fight the enemy. It is quite another to fight like him.