Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

35. One Night in Gardez

WASHINGTON, DC 2008-2010; AFGHANISTAN, 2009–2010—Stanley McChrystal had been off the battlefield since early 2008. After McRaven took the helm at JSOC, McChrystal returned to Washington to serve as the director of the Joint Staff, a powerful position within the Pentagon bureaucracy. His nomination had been held up by a handful of senators who wanted his possible role in the abuse and torture of prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere investigated, but he was ultimately confirmed. The move was not a demotion for McChrystal. If anything, it put him at the center of future decisions on troop deployments and the makeup of the forces that would be used in military operations. At the Joint Staff, McChrystal was instrumental in persuading Obama to spread out control of Special Operations Forces and shift some command authority over unconventional warfare to the combatant commanders. These moves, in turn, expanded the covert battlefield and facilitated the lethal operations Obama was increasingly authorizing in Yemen and other countries.

For the first several months of the Obama administration, his national security team engaged in a heated debate over how to proceed in Afghanistan. Some military commanders had pressed for a sizable increase to the US force and a replay of the counterinsurgency tactics mythologized in the narrative about the “success” of the troop surge in Iraq, but Vice President Joe Biden and National Security Adviser James Jones advocated for a shift in the focus of the campaign to Pakistan, using a combination of Special Ops Forces and drones. “I don’t foresee the return of the Taliban and I want to be very clear that Afghanistan is not in imminent danger of falling,” General Jones said in October 2009. “The al Qaeda presence is very diminished. The maximum estimate is less than 100 operating in the country, no bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies.”

McChrystal and McRaven had pressed Obama to surge US forces in Afghanistan and, along with other powerful US military figures, including Petraeus, convinced the new commander in chief that it was the right course. Obama and McRaven “actually have a fairly good relationship, and McRaven, when McChrystal was in Afghanistan, worked hand in glove with McChrystal, designing the counter al Qaeda strategies,” a source close to the administration told me at the time. McRaven “played a significant, hidden role in developing the McChrystal plan that Obama eventually signed off on.”

In December 2009, Obama announced a surge in Afghanistan. By the summer of 2010, Obama wanted to increase the number of US troops in the country from 68,000 to 100,000 US forces. Their goal, as President Obama explained in late 2009, was “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to prevent its capacity to threaten America and our allies in the future” and to “reverse the Taliban’s momentum.” Obama asserted that he was “convinced that our security is at stake” and “that new attacks are being plotted as I speak. This is no idle danger; no hypothetical threat.” To confront that “threat,” Obama chose General McChrystal as his man in Afghanistan.

In appointing McChrystal as the commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and commander of US forces in Afghanistan, Obama revealed the extent to which his counterterrorism policies centered on JSOC. Obama selected a man who was more closely aligned than almost any other figure with the most aggressive military policies of the Bush administration, except, perhaps, General Petraeus, to run the war Obama would soon claim as his own. “I was somewhat stunned when McChrystal was selected to be the commander in Afghanistan,” recalled Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who had struggled with JSOC’s secrecy during the Bush administration. “This guy has been kept away from the public. He’s been a clandestine operator. He’s a guy who’s used to direct action. He’s a guy who’s used to getting his own way. He’s a guy who’s used to having it all happen without any transparency.”

Other sources with whom I spoke put a different spin on McChrystal’s appointment. They pointed to the problems the conventional command had long had with JSOC’s forces conducting operations without informing them and observed that such actions were undermining the COIN, or counterinsurgency, strategy. “The Kabul Command just felt as if they were outside of the picture, JSOC was out doing its own show, JSOC wasn’t toeing the line with respect to counterinsurgency doctrine” and “most of the tactics that were being used by JSOC in fact did undermine the legitimacy of the [Afghan] government,” said Scott Horton, the human rights lawyer who has studied JSOC extensively. “So I think one way of reconciling these things, was in fact to put Stanley McChrystal in charge of the command in Kabul. And make him implement the counterinsurgency doctrine. Put in someone that JSOC would have to listen to.”

Although many of these Special Ops Forces operated outside of the coalition chain of command, in his review of the war effort in Afghanistan, McChrystal made it clear that closer coordination with JSOC was among his key goals and that he sought to bring SOFs into the overall strategy of defeating the insurgency. Vice Admirals McRaven and Robert Harward (a JSOC veteran and the head of a new detention task force), were brought into the White House Afghanistan strategy meetings in the fall of 2009. Like McChrystal, McRaven and Harward pressed for a “heavy, heavy, heavy COIN presence” in major population centers, while using CT teams to stalk targets throughout the country. The region near the border with Pakistan was to receive renewed attention, and McRaven also wanted to be sure that operations inside of Pakistan would not be off the table. “They’re focusing on the main population centers that they think they can save with manpower on the ground, and everything else will be cross border,” a staffer on the NSC told journalist Spencer Ackerman in November 2009. “JSOC is already ramping up for that.”

As the man credited with systematizing the mass killing and detention of suspected insurgents in Iraq, McChrystal may have seemed an unlikely champion of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. But he made a show of embracing its core tenets, such as a significant troop surge and a renewed focus on securing population centers and promoting good governance. During his confirmation hearing in June, McChrystal had stressed that bringing down coalition-caused deaths and injuries was “essential to [the] credibility” of the mission, and that a tactical victory there would be “hollow and unsustainable” if it resulted in popular outrage. The “complete elimination of al-Qaeda” from Pakistan and Afghanistan was still a primary goal. However, he said, the metric of success in Afghanistan would “not be [the number of] enemy killed” but “the number of Afghans shielded from violence.” McChrystal issued directives that significantly reduced air strikes in Afghanistan, which had been associated with a staggering number of civilian deaths. In May 2009—a month before McChrystal’s confirmation—a US air strike killed more than ninety-seven Afghan civilians in Farah Province, many of them women and children. McChrystal also developed new rules for house raids that required that “any entry into an Afghan house should always be accomplished by Afghan National Security Forces, with the support of local authorities.”

While McChrystal and the “COIN Doctrine” received much hype in the media, the reality on the ground was that the United States was simultaneously escalating two wars in Afghanistan: the public COIN-centric campaign of the conventional military forces and the covert war being waged by Special Ops Forces. The week that McChrystal was confirmed as the Afghan war commander, 1,000 Special Operations Forces and supporting personnel deployed to the country, bringing the total number of SOFs in Afghanistan to about 5,000. JSOC’s High Value Target list was no longer limited to al Qaeda; McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy needed teeth, and as conventional forces worked to secure the cities and towns, the SOF teams set to mowing down the midrank Taliban leadership as well as other militant groups such as the Haqqani network. “By any objective reckoning [McChrystal] was absolutely unqualified to do anything except carry out targeted killing. That’s all he had done for five years, from 2003 to 2008,” historian Gareth Porter told me. Porter, who spent extensive time in Afghanistan during McChrystal’s tenure, said that putting McChrystal in charge of the war “really sent the signal that the United States was going to in fact be putting more and more emphasis on targeted killing in Afghanistan. It’s as simple as that—and that’s exactly, of course, what happened.”

Upon assuming command in Afghanistan, McChrystal escalated JSOC-style night raids and expanded the list of names on the kill list in the country. By October 2009, there were more than 2,000 people on the Joint Prioritized Effects List. In May 2009, Special Ops Forces were conducting about twenty raids a month in Afghanistan. By November, under McChrystal, that had increased to ninety and was climbing steadily. Afghan forces would be used to gain entry, but according to the new rules, these raids were conducted by US Special Forces. By December 2009, the number of raids carried out by JSOC each month had increased fourfold. “This is Gen. McChrystal’s play,” a senior US official told the Los Angeles Times, “They have to show they can reverse momentum. He has to show he is making headway.” The uptick in raids also resulted in a swelling of the ranks of prisoners taken into custody.

As in Iraq years earlier, JSOC ran its own detainee operations in Afghanistan. Prisoners they believed had intelligence that could lead to HVTs were taken to secretive US-run detention centers, known as Field Detention Sites, situated on US bases throughout Afghanistan. Although NATO had guidelines limiting the detention of militants by coalition forces to ninety-six hours, Special Ops Forces could find ways to hold detainees at interim detention facilities for up to nine weeks. There was also a secret prison within the larger Bagram prison, known as the Black Jail, for holding HVTs. As with Camp NAMA in Iraq, the Black Jail was off-limits to the Red Cross. Human rights workers who investigated the facility reported forced nudity, environmental manipulation and solitary confinement, and former prisoners described being beaten while in custody.

Although Obama had pledged to defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan, McChrystal’s time at the helm during the war would see a notable rise in support for the Taliban and a record number of US soldiers killed.

OBAMA’S EMERGING TWILIGHT WARS in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia received very little media attention in the early stages of his presidency. The overwhelming focus was on Afghanistan and the debate over the troop surge, but there was a far more significant development in the works. The White House, working closely with General McChrystal, began to apply its emerging global kill list doctrine inside Afghanistan, buried within the larger, public war involving conventional US forces. When I visited Afghanistan in 2010, Afghan police commanders told me that US Special Ops teams would enter their areas of responsibility without coordinating with local authorities or informing the main US military bases in the area. They would conduct operations, sometimes killing people in night raids or snatching people and flying them to other provinces. The raids, the commanders explained, were causing a major backlash against the conventional US forces and the US-supported Afghan police units. They told me that the night raids were actually helping the Taliban.

The White House was well aware by that point of how serious the damage was in Afghanistan. In September 2009, a senior US diplomat in Afghanistan submitted a letter of resignation, in which he delivered a stinging indictment of the US war. Matthew Hoh, a decorated combat marine who had done multiple tours in Iraq and went on to serve as the top US civilian official in Zabul Province in Afghanistan, asserted that the “U.S. and NATO presence and operations in Pashtun valleys and villages” amounted to “an occupation force against which the insurgency is justified.” In a letter to the State Department, Hoh stated bluntly, “The United States military presence in Afghanistan greatly contributes to the legitimacy and strategic message of the Pashtun insurgency.” He wrote:

The Washington Post reported that Hoh’s letter “sent ripples all the way to the White House.” Senior US officials, including the US ambassador and Obama’s Af/Pak envoy, Richard Holbrooke, tried to offer Hoh other jobs to keep him from resigning. Holbrooke told the Post that he asked Hoh, “If he really wanted to affect policy and help reduce the cost of the war on lives and treasure,” shouldn’t he be “inside the building, rather than outside, where you can get a lot of attention but you won’t have the same political impact?” Hoh ultimately declined the job offers and went public with his opposition to the war.

When I met Hoh soon after his resignation, we discussed the night raids and the role JSOC was playing in Afghanistan. Hoh made clear that he had tremendous respect for Special Ops teams and that he believed there are dangerous people who “need to be killed.” But Hoh questioned the use of such an elite force to fight against what had effectively become a popular insurgency against a foreign occupation. JSOC, he said, is “the best strike force the world’s ever known,” yet “we’ve got them in Afghanistan chasing after mid-level Taliban leaders who are not threatening the United States, who are only fighting us really because we’re in their valley.” Hoh told me, “We found ourselves in this Special Operations form of attrition warfare.” He estimated that there were “fifty to a hundred” al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan at the time.

Under McChrystal, the pace of night raids accelerated as JSOC mowed its way down a kill list that seemed bottomless. McChrystal knew how to promote his agenda with the White House, and when he fought for his vision to be embraced, he did so “with the same fearlessness he used to track down terrorists in Iraq: Figure out how your enemy operates, be faster and more ruthless than everybody else, then take the fuckers out,” noted journalist Michael Hastings, who traveled with McChrystal and spent time in Afghanistan. McChrystal and McRaven’s Special Ops task forces began expanding the target list, going after Taliban “facilitators” and “suspected militants.” The intelligence feeding the operations relied heavily on Afghan sources. Hoh told me it was common for Afghans to accuse their enemies of being Taliban operatives to settle grudges over land disputes or tribal conflicts. The feeding of such false intel to the American forces, in turn, created an environment in which a tremendous number of innocent Afghans found themselves facing US commandos bursting into their homes in the middle of the night, snatching or killing people. “A lot of times, yeah, the right guys would get targeted and the right guys would get killed,” Hoh recalled. “And then, plenty of other times, the wrong people would get killed. Sometimes it’d be innocent families. Other times it would be people and their families who had been turned in because of grudges or because of rivalries that existed well before we showed up. It was very much, whoever got to the Americans first was the person who turned his rival, or his enemy, or his antagonist in.”

Hoh said there were also times when a JSOC task force “would kill someone who was important to us. They would kill a tribal leader or some type of government administrator who was working with us or we were making inroads with. In the middle of the night, you end up shooting the guy.” He added: “There’s nothing like going into a village in the middle of the night, knocking a door down and killing a woman or child to just undo” any progress civilian or conventional military officials had made in areas around Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, I investigated several botched night raids, in which it was clear that innocent people had been targeted. None of them was more gruesome than what happened just outside of Gardez in Paktia Province, in February 2010.

ON FEBRUARY 12, 2010, Mohammed Daoud Sharabuddin had much to celebrate. He was a respected police officer who had recently received an important promotion, becoming head of intelligence in one of the districts of Paktia Province, in southeast Afghanistan. He was also the father of a newborn son. That night, Daoud and his family were celebrating the naming of the boy, a ritual that takes place on the sixth day of a child’s life. The party was taking place at their compound, in the village of Khataba, a short distance from Gardez, the capital of Paktia. There were two dozen people at their home for the celebration, along with three musicians. “We invited many guests and had music,” Daoud’s brother-in-law Mohammed Tahir told me when I visited the family. “During the party, people were dancing our traditional dance, the Attan.”

The Sharabuddin family was not ethnic Pashtun, the dominant—almost exclusive—ethnicity of the Taliban. Their main language was Dari. Many of the men in the family were clean-shaven, or wore only mustaches. They had long opposed the Taliban. Daoud, the police commander, had gone through dozens of US training programs, and his home was filled with photos of himself with American soldiers. Another family member was a prosecutor for the US-backed local government, and a third was the vice chancellor at the local university. The area where they lived was near a Taliban stronghold, and the Haqqani network—an insurgent group that the United States alleged had close ties to al Qaeda and Pakistan’s ISI spy organization—had been staging attacks against government and NATO forces. So when they began to notice something was amiss outside their compound, the family feared it might be a Taliban attack on their home.

It was around 3:30 a.m., as the celebration was winding down, that the family and their guests noticed the main light to the compound had been shut off by someone outside the party. Around that time, one of the musicians went into the courtyard to use the outhouse and saw lasers scoping the grounds from the perimeter. The man ran back inside and told the others. “Daoud went to see what was happening,” Tahir told me. “He thought the Taliban had come. They were already on the roof.” As soon as Daoud and his fifteen-year-old son, Sediqullah, stepped out into the courtyard, they were both hit by sniper rounds and fell to the ground. The family began hearing the voices of their attackers. Some were shouting commands in English, others in Pashtun. The family suspected the attackers were Americans.

Panic broke out inside the house.

“All the children were shouting, ‘Daoud is shot! Daoud is shot!’” Tahir recalled. Daoud’s eldest son was behind his father and younger brother when they were hit. “When my father went down, I screamed,” he told me. “Everybody—my uncles, the women, everybody came out of the home and ran to the corridors of the house. I sprinted to them and warned them not to come out as there were Americans attacking and they would kill them.” Meanwhile, Daoud’s brothers, Mohammed Saranwal Zahir and Mohammed Sabir, tried to come to his aid. “When I ran outside, Daoud was lying here,” Mohammed Sabir told me as we stood in the dusty courtyard at the very spot where Daoud was shot. “We carried Daoud inside.”

As Daoud lay bleeding out on the floor in a hallway inside the compound, his brother Zahir said he was going to try to stop the attack by speaking to the Americans. He was a local district attorney and knew some English. “We work for the government!” he shouted outside. “Look at our police vehicles. You have wounded a police commander!” Three women from the family, Bibi Saleha, aged thirty-seven, and Bibi Shirin, aged twenty-two, and Gulalai, aged eighteen, clutched at Zahir’s clothes, pleading with him not to step outside. It didn’t make a difference. Zahir was gunned down where he stood, with sniper rounds hitting him and the three women. Zahir, Bibi Saleha and Bibi Shirin died quickly. Gulalai and Daoud held on for hours, but their besieged family members could do nothing for them and they eventually died from their injuries.

Somehow, in a matter of minutes, a jubilant family event had become a massacre. Seven people had died in all, according to family members. Two of the women had been pregnant. The women had sixteen children among them.

IT WAS 7:00 A.M. A few hours earlier, Mohammed Sabir had just seen his brother, his wife, his niece and his sister-in-law gunned down. Now he stood, shell-shocked, above their corpses in a room filled with American soldiers. The masked commandos had burst into the home and proceeded to raid it, searching every room. Sabir told me that Daoud and Gulalai were still alive at that point. US soldiers kept saying they would get them medical attention. “They didn’t let us take them to the hospital and kept saying that they have doctors and they would take care of the injured folks,” he said. “I kept asking them to let me take my daughter to the hospital because she had lost a lot of blood and we had a car right there,” Mohammed Tahir, Gulalai’s father, recalled. “But they didn’t let me take her to hospital. My daughter and Daoud were still alive. We kept asking, but we were told that a helicopter is coming and our injured will be taken to the hospital.” Both of them died before any helicopter came to retrieve them.

Even as the American raid was under way, Mohammed Sabir and his nephew Izzat, along with the wives of Daoud and Sabir, prepared burial shrouds for those who had died. The Afghan custom involves binding the feet and head. A scarf secured around the bottom of the chin is meant to keep the mouth of the deceased from hanging open. They had managed to do this before the Americans began handcuffing them and dividing the surviving men and women into separate areas. Several of the male family members told me that it was around this time that they witnessed a horrifying scene: US soldiers digging the bullets out of the women’s bodies. “They were putting knives into their injuries to take out the bullets,” Sabir told me. I asked him bluntly, “You saw the Americans digging the bullets out of the women’s bodies?” Without hesitation, he said, “Yes.” Tahir told me he saw the Americans with knives standing over the bodies. “They were taking out the bullets from their bodies to remove the proof of their crime,” he said.

Mohammed Sabir would not be able to attend his own wife’s burial, nor those of any of his dead family members. Following the raid, the American forces made everyone kneel or stand in the courtyard, barefoot, on a brutal winter morning, with their hands tied behind their backs. Witnesses told me that those who tried to speak or plead with the soldiers were beaten. “They told me to raise my hands, but I thought it was my own house, why should I?” Daoud’s eldest son, Abdul Ghafar, told me. “They hit me several times. They fired on me and around me. I put myself on the ground. I told the [American’s Afghan] translator to tell them not to kill women, just do their search. We are pro-government people. We work with the government. They kicked me several times. I tried to stand, but they kicked me.” A witness later told a UN investigator that at least ten people were assaulted by the US and Afghan team, including Hajji Sharabuddin, the sixty-five-year-old head of the household. “They told us that they were informed that forty to fifty Taliban are here,” Sharabuddin told me. “But, in fact, all of them were from my family and work for the government.” Sharabuddin demanded to know why they burst into his home in the middle of the night. “You could have searched my house in the morning,” he recalled telling them. “And if you could find any Talib in my house, then you could do anything to me or destroy and spoil my house and I would not blame you.”

A subsequent UN investigation conducted two days after the raid, which was never publicly released, determined that the survivors of the raid “suffered from cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by being physically assaulted by US and Afghan forces, restrained and forced to stand bare feet for several hours outside in the cold,” adding that witnesses alleged “that US and Afghan forces refused to provide adequate and timely medical support to two people who sustained serious bullet injuries, resulting in their death hours later.”

Mohammed Sabir was one of the men singled out for further interrogation after the raid. With his clothes still caked with the blood of his loved ones, Sabir and seven other men were hooded and shackled. “They tied our hands and blindfolded us,” he recalled. “Two people grabbed us and pushed us, one by one, into the helicopter.” They were flown to a different Afghan province, Paktika, where the Americans held them for days. “My senses weren’t working at all,” he recalled. “I couldn’t cry, I was numb. I didn’t eat for three days and nights. They didn’t give us water to wash the blood away.” The Americans ran biometric tests on the men, photographed their irises and took their fingerprints. Sabir described to me how teams of interrogators, including both Americans and Afghans, questioned him about his family’s connections to the Taliban. Sabir told them that his family was against the Taliban, had fought the Taliban and that some of them had been kidnapped by the Taliban.

“The interrogators had short beards and didn’t wear uniforms. They had big muscles and would fly into sudden rages,” Sabir recalled, adding that, at times, they would shake him violently. “We told them truthfully that there were not Taliban in our home.” One of the Americans, he said, told him they “had intelligence that a suicide bomber had hidden in your house and that he was planning an operation.” Sabir told them, “If we would have had a suicide bomber at home, then would we be playing music in our house? Almost all guests were government employees.” After three days in captivity, he told me, the Americans released him and the others. “They told us that we were innocent, that they are very sorry, and it was a very bad thing that they did in our house.” In public, however, the United States and its allies put forward a very different story about what happened that night in the compound in Gardez.

WHILE MOHAMMED SABIR and the others were in US custody, the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force wasted little time in issuing a statement on the incident. Just hours after the raid, ISAF and the Afghan Ministry of Interior put out a joint press release. They asserted that a combined Afghan-international “security force” had made a “gruesome discovery” the night before. The force had been on a fairly routine operation near the village of Khataba. Intelligence had “confirmed” the compound to be the site of “militant activity.” As the team approached, they were “engaged” in a “fire fight” by “several insurgents,” the statement read. The force killed the insurgents and was securing the compound when they made their discovery: three women who had been “bound,” “gagged” and then executed inside the compound. The force, the press release alleged, found them “hidden in an adjacent room.”

“ISAF continually works with our Afghan partners to fight criminals and terrorists who do not care about the life of civilians,” Canadian army brigadier general Eric Tremblay, ISAF’s spokesman, told the press, referring to the raid. He portrayed the commandos who had raided the home as heroes. A number of men, women and children were detained by the force as they tried to leave the compound, the release stated, and eight men had been taken into custody for further questioning. During the incident, medical support had been called in, the statement said.

A few news agencies picked up the story that day and published more assertions from US, Afghan and ISAF officials. A “senior U.S. military official” told CNN that four victims had been found at the compound, two men and two women. The official confirmed the original statement’s lurid details of the women’s executions, adding that the killings seemed to have extreme cultural motives. “It has the earmarks of a traditional honor killing,” the official said, the implication being that the four people could have been murdered by their own family members. The official speculated that adultery or collusion with NATO forces could have been the motivation.

The New York Times put out a brief the following day, largely summarizing NATO’s account. The Times reporter, Rob Norland, spoke to the Paktia Province police chief, Aziz Ahmad Wardak, who, he wrote, confirmed many details of the incident but said that three women and two men had been killed. He claimed the group had been killed by Taliban militants who attacked during a party celebrating a birth. US officials would later tell the press that the victims appeared to have deep cuts and puncture wounds, suggesting they had been stabbed.

While international news agencies largely put forward the US version of events, local reporters began speaking with Afghan officials and family members. The Pajhwok Afghan News Agency spoke with the deputy police chief in the province, Brigadier General Ghulam Dastagir Rustamyar, who said that “US Special Forces” had killed the five people during an operation, evidently in response to an inaccurate or falsified tip-off. “Last night, the Americans conducted an operation in a house and killed five innocent people, including three women,” Shahyesta Jan Ahadi, a deputy provincial council member in Gardez, told a local reporter for the Associated Press. “The people are so angry.” Ahadi denied the NATO claim that it was a joint Afghan–US force. “The [Afghan] government didn’t know about this,” he said. “We strongly condemn this.”

Within days of the raid, UN human rights investigators in Gardez spoke to “local authorities,” who said that US Special Forces had come from Bagram to Gardez days before the operation. They were also told that Afghan security officials had been notified about an impending operation but had not been given any details about the time or place. The United Nations concluded that neither the local Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) nor ISAF troops were involved in the raid.

NATO had promised a “joint investigation,” but it never happened. After the incident, Afghan officials from the provincial capital were barred from entering the compound. “By the time we got there, there was a foreign guy guarding the bodies, and they wouldn’t let us come near,” said Wardak, of the Paktia police. Ultimately, the Interior Ministry in Kabul dispatched a delegation, headed by Kabul’s top criminal investigator, to investigate the raid. The group appeared to have worked largely independent of NATO.

By the time Mohammed Sabir returned home after being held in American custody, he had missed the burial of his wife and other family members. Racked with grief, he imagined avenging his loved ones. “I didn’t want to live anymore,” he told me. “I wanted to wear a suicide jacket and blow myself up among the Americans. But my brother and father wouldn’t let me. I wanted jihad against the Americans.”

THERE WAS CLEARLY A COVER-UP. The family knew it. The United Nations knew it. And the Afghan investigators knew it. The force that raided the home was US-led, but who were the Americans who had stormed into that home in the middle of the night?

It wasn’t until a British reporter, Jerome Starkey, began a serious investigation of the Gardez killings a month after they took place that the full story would begin to unfold. When Starkey first read the ISAF press release, he said he “had no reason to believe it wasn’t true.” When I visited him at his home in Kabul, Starkey told me, “I thought it was worth investigating because if that press release was true—a mass honor killing, three women killed by Taliban who were then killed by Special Forces—that in itself would have made an extraordinary and intriguing story.” But when he visited Gardez and began assembling witnesses to meet him in the area, he immediately realized ISAF’s story was likely false.

The family had significant evidence that undercut the story circulated by ISAF and picked up by many news organizations. The family in Gardez showed Starkey and me a video from the night of the raid in which the musicians are seen playing and Daoud and his relatives are dancing in celebration of the naming ceremony for Daoud’s son. “I suppose the closest approximation we’d have is like a christening party,” Starkey recalled. “It’s the sixth night after a child is born. It’s named, usually by its grandparents, and you celebrate that by inviting all your friends and neighbors and cousins over to your house, effectively for a sort of feast or banquet and the dancing and music.” Starkey realized that the nature of the celebration “didn’t chime with the suggestion that they were Taliban. The Taliban are notorious for their very strict rules, and musical instruments were banned when they were in power. So here we’ve got video of guys, of a three-piece band, and we interviewed the musicians, who corroborated the story. It just, it really didn’t stack up. They clearly weren’t Talibs.”

Starkey visited Gardez about a month after the raid and spoke to more than a dozen survivors, as well as local government and law enforcement officials and a religious leader. He also spoke to UN human rights investigators in the area who had conducted an investigation of their own. All of the people Starkey spoke to insisted that the mysterious US and Afghan shooters had killed the five people. In addition to learning new details about the killings on February 12, Starkey found that conventional coalition forces had likely not been behind the strike, suggesting that US “Special Forces” had been involved. US soldiers based in the area denied having been a part of any night raid in Khataba that day. And Afghan officials who, according to NATO protocol, should have been notified of an operation within their jurisdiction said they’d received no notice of a planned raid. “Nobody informed us,” said the deputy governor of Gardez, Abdul Rahman Mangal. “This operation was a mistake.”

Under NATO rules, the team conducting the operation should have left information about its unit with the local people, but the family said they had received nothing. The family further accused the soldiers of trying to cover up the raid, abetted by NATO’s misinformation.

Starkey contacted Rear Admiral Greg Smith, General McChrystal’s deputy chief of staff for communications, and confronted him with the discrepancies. NATO was guilty, Smith said—of poor word choice. The women, he conceded, had probably been prepped for a funeral, rather than “bound and gagged.” But Smith denied that a “cover-up” had taken place and insisted that the women had been dead for hours. He confirmed that the men had been killed by the US and Afghan forces. “They were not the targets of this particular raid,” Smith admitted. But they had been armed and showing “hostile intent,” he claimed, justifying the escalation of force. “I don’t know if they fired any rounds,” he said. “If you have got an individual stepping out of a compound, and if your assault force is there, that is often the trigger to neutralize the individual. You don’t have to be fired upon to fire back.”

Despite the UN investigation and a smattering of mostly local news reports questioning ISAF’s version of events, the US-led NATO command wasn’t forced to publicly account for the wild discrepancies between what the family said happened and ISAF’s assertions. That is, until Starkey published a story in the Times of London, headlined: “Nato ‘Covered Up’ Botched Night Raid in Afghanistan That Killed Five.” Within hours of his story coming out, Starkey was receiving phone calls from his colleagues, warning him. “I was getting information from other journalists in Kabul, who were my friends, that NATO was briefing against me,” Starkey told me. “NATO was trying to discredit me, trying to say that the story was inaccurate, and effectively trying to kill it dead.”

Rear Admiral Smith had put out a statement that dispensed with the diplomacy and allusion typical of official press releases. McChrystal’s press team was naming names. “The allegation made by Times UK reporter Jerome Starkey that NATO ‘covered up’ an incident that was conducted outside Gardez in Paktia province is categorically false,” the statement read. It went on to accuse Starkey of misquoting Admiral Smith in the article and claimed that the ISAF Joint Command had sent an investigative team to the compound within twelve hours of the incident. Smith and Duncan Boothby, McChrystal’s civilian press aide at the time, also “called up rival outlets and reporters to ‘brief’ against Starkey, saying he wasn’t a credible journalist” because of a stint at a British tabloid. “I’ve been living in Afghanistan for four years,” Starkey said. “I can’t remember another case where that has happened. To my knowledge, that was the only time that they’ve named a journalist, and singled out a journalist so specifically in a denial.”

NATO “claimed to have a recording of my conversation which contradicted my shorthand record,” Starkey wrote in a Nieman Watchdog blog post the following week, referring to the alleged misquote. “When I asked to hear it, they ignored me. When I pressed them, they said there had been a misunderstanding. When they said recording, they meant someone had taken notes. The tapes, they said, do not exist.”

Starkey pressed on, publishing another story describing the community’s anger over the raid and subsequent responses of NATO and the Afghan authorities. “I don’t want money. I want justice,” the family’s patriarch, Hajji Sharabuddin, told Starkey. He said that the government had offered them compensation for each slain family member after protests paralyzed the provincial capital. “All our family, we now don’t care about our lives. We will all do suicide attacks and [the whole province] will support us.”

“Nato officials continued to brief journalists in Kabul yesterday that the women were victims of an ‘honour’ killing,” Starkey wrote. “However, they did not explain why the bodies would have been kept in the house overnight, against Islamic custom, nor why the family had invited 25 guests to celebrate the naming of a newborn child the same evening.”

“My father was friends with the Americans and they killed him,” Daoud’s son, Abdul Ghafar, told Starkey, showing him a photograph of his father with three smiling American soldiers. “They killed my father. I want to kill them. I want the killers brought to justice.”

ON MARCH 15, 2010, the New York Times reported that General McChrystal had decided to bring most of the US Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan under his command. The decision was motivated in part by concerns about civilian casualties, the article noted, which were often caused by elite forces operating outside of the NATO command structure. The Times report largely seconded Starkey’s account of the Gardez raid, confirming that “Afghan police special forces paired with American Special Operations forces” had been behind the operation. Again, Admiral Smith avoided taking responsibility for the deaths of the women. “The regret is that two innocent males died,” Admiral Smith said. “The women, I’m not sure anyone will ever know how they died.” He added, however, “I don’t know that there are any forensics that show bullet penetrations of the women or blood from the women.” Smith added that the women appeared to have been stabbed and slashed by knives, rather than shot. The Times spoke to Sayid Mohammed Mal, the father of Gulalai’s fiancé and the vice chancellor of Gardez University. “They were killed by the Americans,” he said. “If the government doesn’t listen to us, I have 50 family members, I’ll bring them all to Gardez roundabout and we’ll pour petrol on ourselves and burn ourselves to death.”

Weeks later, in early April, Starkey received an unexpected phone call. “NATO phoned me up,” Starkey told me, “and they said, ‘Jerome, we just wanted to let you know that we’re preparing to put out a press release. We’re changing our version of events.’” A so-called joint investigation had “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 report added, “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 maintained that the men had shown “hostile intent” but were “later determined not to be insurgents.” “The [original] statement noted the women had been bound and gagged, but this information was taken from an initial report by the international members of the joint force who were not familiar with Islamic burial customs,” the statement said. When Starkey received the phone call, he had just filed another story for the Times of London. This was his most explosive story to date, based on a conversation with a senior Afghan official involved in the government investigation, as well as members of the family.

The delegation had finished its report, and McChrystal was briefed on the findings as well. The press release, followed by news that McChrystal was ordering a second review of the incident, was meant to preempt a gruesome revelation. “US special forces soldiers dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath of the botched night raid, then washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened,” Starkey asserted in his story, which came out the following day. Afghan investigators told Starkey that the US soldiers had also removed bullets from the scene. Their investigation had determined that eleven bullets were fired, but only seven had been found. The missing bullets, combined with photographic evidence and witness testimony, had brought them to their conclusion about what the US Special Forces had done. “In what culture in the world do you invite…people for a party and meanwhile kill three women?” the senior Afghan official told Starkey. “The dead bodies were just eight meters from where they were preparing the food. The Americans, they told us the women were dead for 14 hours.” The Afghan government investigators had confirmed what the family had told Starkey—and later me—about the US forces digging bullets out of the women’s bodies. “Because we were aware that what we were looking into was potentially so controversial, we wanted to make sure that we were on solid ground,” Starkey told me, referring to the digging out of the bullets. “That allegation I left out of my original story. But when I heard it again, from this very senior, very credible Afghan source, we published that.”

THAT SAME DAY, the New York Times reported some of the conclusions of the Afghan investigation. “We came to the conclusion that the NATO patrol was responsible for the killing of the two men and the three women, and that there was evidence of tampering in the corridor inside the compound by the members” of the assault team, said the lead investigator, Merza Mohammed Yarmad. “There was a mess at the scene.” NATO said the allegations had prompted another investigation but nonetheless rejected them outright. “We strongly deny having dug any bullets out of bodies. There simply is no evidence,” said a NATO military official. The officer appointed to conduct the second review was put under McChrystal’s direct “operational control” while still conducting the investigation. The results remained classified, but NATO continued to insist that there was “no evidence of a cover-up.”

AS RAGE IN AFGHANISTAN MOUNTED over civilian deaths in raids like that in Gardez, there was a fierce debate within NATO about how to respond. At one point there was a plan for General McChrystal to travel to the village to personally apologize to the family. Instead, the actual commander of the force responsible for the raid would travel to Gardez and in the process reveal exactly which unit was behind the gruesome killings and cover-up of the massacre. It would also publicly reveal the face of JSOC. On the morning of April 8, shortly after 11:00, Admiral William McRaven, JSOC’s secretive commander, pulled up to the gates of the Sharabuddin compound.

The family had been told the night before that they would be receiving an important visitor. They thought it would be McChrystal himself. Mohammed Sabir and other family members told me that they had actually discussed killing McChrystal when he came the next day, but their local imam counseled them to instead show him hospitality and listen to him. Faced with this imminent meeting, the family decided to call an international witness: Jerome Starkey. NATO had tried to conceal the details and timing of the visit, but once Starkey got the call, he began the half-day drive to Gardez from Kabul. “We were obviously very keen to make sure that we were there when it happened and that was very, very difficult because nobody wanted to tell us. And I think, from the sort of PR spin side of things, that the image management within NATO probably didn’t really want to draw attention,” he told me. “They admitted they’d got it wrong. Again they were hoping it was going to go away but it wasn’t.”

Starkey arrived at the family compound early in the morning and was sitting with the family drinking tea and talking. “At about eleven o’clock, up rolls a huge convoy of massive American armored cars, armored land cruisers, countless, I mean literally countless Afghan officers and soldiers,” Starkey recalled. “And among them is a man wearing a uniform that I recognized as sort of U.S. Marines, but it says U.S. Navy on his lapel.” His name tag simply read “McRaven.” “I didn’t know who he was at that stage,” said Starkey, one of the most experienced Western reporters in Afghanistan at the time. “And so, there unfolded perhaps one of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever seen in Afghanistan as they off-loaded a sheep from the back of an Afghan Army pickup truck. And three Afghan soldiers knelt on this sheep on the street outside the home where this operation had taken place, in the exact same place where these soldiers had been when they started the raid. And there with a knife, they sharpened the knife and there was an Afghan Army mullah who started praying and they were offering to sacrifice this sheep.”

Hajji Sharabuddin, the family elder, intervened. “Don’t do it,” he told the soldiers. Starkey said that the Afghan forces and McRaven’s men had put the family in a difficult position. “When people come to your gate and ask forgiveness, according to Afghan law, it’s difficult to reject them,” Sharabuddin told Starkey, who added that the practice was “an ancient Afghan ritual known as nanawate where you offer to sacrifice a sheep at somebody’s door in order to ask for forgiveness.” The family, Starkey said, “was left with no option, no honorable dignified option other than to let these men into [their] house.”

The Afghan soldiers tried to prevent Starkey’s photographer, Jeremy Kelly, from taking photos and to expel Starkey from the room once McRaven had entered. But the family insisted he remain. Otherwise, there would have been no evidence that this extraordinary event occurred, no proof of who the killers were. Inside the house, the commander of JSOC stood face-to-face with the survivors of the raid, including the fathers and husbands of the women his men had killed. “Admiral McRaven stood up and he gave an extraordinary speech. He drew similarities between himself and Hajji Sharabuddin, and he described them both as spiritual men, as men of God. He drew comparisons and found similarities between Christianity and Islam,” Starkey recalled. “Sir, you and I are very different,” McRaven told Sharabuddin. “You are a family man with many children and many friends. I am a soldier. I have spent most of my career overseas away from my family, but I have children as well and my heart grieves for you. But we have one thing in common. We have the same god. He is a god who shows great love and compassion. I pray for you today, sir, that in your grief he will show you love and compassion and ease your pain. I also pray today that he will show mercy on me and my men for this awful tragedy.” Starkey said McRaven then told the family, “My soldiers were responsible for deaths of these members of your family,” and then apologized. The Afghan generals handed the family a pile of money—almost $30,000, according to relatives. Major international news outlets reported that Hajji Sharabuddin had accepted McRaven’s apology.

Months later, when I sat with Sharabuddin at his home, his anger seemed only to have hardened. “I don’t accept their apology. I would not trade my sons for the whole kingdom of the United States,” he told me, holding up a picture of his sons. “Initially, we were thinking that Americans were the friends of Afghans, but now we think that Americans themselves are terrorists. Americans are our enemy. They bring terror and destruction. Americans not only destroyed my house, they destroyed my family. The Americans unleashed the Special Forces on us. These Special Forces, with the long beards, did cruel, criminal things.”

“We call them the American Taliban,” added Mohammed Tahir, the father of Gulalai, one of the slain women. As I spoke to other family members, Mohammed Sabir, whose brothers and wife were killed, approached me with his six-year-old daughter, Tamana. He told me that we should leave soon and head back to Kabul because the Taliban control the roads at night. As we stood there, he asked his daughter, “Tamana, who did the Americans kill?” She bounced against her father’s legs as she recited the list of dead. She then stared into the distance, blankly. “She remembers everything from that night,” Sabir told me. “The Americans’ arrival, their shootings, the destruction, everything.” As we loaded up the car, he told me, “I have this message to people of America to help us: take these special forces of theirs back, and have them sentenced because they are killing innocent people.”

FOR MORE THAN A YEAR, I tried to get access to any documents the US military had about the incident at Gardez. I asked for the “after action” reports and for any information on any disciplinary actions taken against the soldiers who killed the three women and two men and then dug the bullets from the women’s bodies. I filed Freedom of Information Act requests that were bounced around the military before ending up in an unnamed “agency” awaiting review. As of this writing, in early 2013, I have received no documents. Starkey told me his attempts to get documents had met the same fate.

Not long after I returned from Afghanistan in late 2010, I met with General Hugh Shelton, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and asked him about the Gardez incident. He told me he was not familiar with all of the details. And though he said that an internal review should be done on behalf of the commander to determine what happened and if any soldiers should face a court martial, he said he believed that it should not be investigated further. “If that police chief [Daoud], and those two pregnant women were killed, as a result of JSOC, based on all the intelligence that they had pointing to this is going to be a terrorist operation that’s taking place here, and if they go flying in, and try to get to this place, and meet any kind of resistance at all—I mean, shots are fired—then I’m sorry that they got killed,” he told me. “But in the wrong place, at the wrong time, our guys were doing what they thought they should do, and protecting themselves and their buddies in the process. I’m OK with that. I don’t think it ought to be investigated; I think you write it off as one of those damn acts of war.”

The fact that Daoud was a US-trained police commander meant little to Shelton. “Now, just because he’s a police chief, he could have been a terrorist as well. He could have been working both sides,” he told me. “The two pregnant women? The fact that they were pregnant is very, very unfortunate. But it’s also unfortunate that they were women. But on the other hand, I’ve been shot at by women myself. So, that doesn’t—and I mean shot at. So that doesn’t excuse them. They die just like men do if they shoot at us.”

As the pace of night raids increased in Afghanistan under McChrystal, the Special Ops Forces continued to enjoy the freedom to operate with no accountability for their actions, a fact that did not seem lost on McChrystal. “You better be out there hitting four or five targets tonight,” McChrystal would tell a Navy SEAL in Afghanistan, before adding, “I’m going to have to scold you in the morning for it, though.” But with each new raid, more protests began spreading across Afghanistan.

The conditions that drove Matt Hoh to resign his State Department post in protest in late 2009 persisted in 2010. If anything, things had gotten worse. Civilian deaths from NATO operations had killed upward of ninety civilians in the first few months of 2010, a 75 percent increase from the previous year. And it wasn’t just in night raids. More than thirty Afghans were killed at checkpoint shootings from the time McChrystal took charge in Afghanistan to the spring of 2010. “In the nine-plus months I’ve been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it,” McChrystal conceded in March 2010, during a teleconference with US troops. “We’ve shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat.”

While McChrystal ostensibly put in place greater restrictions on night raids and almost entirely stopped air strikes, the ground truth was still the same: innocent people were dying and Afghans were growing ever more enraged. By May 2010, the United States was conducting as many as 1,000 night raids a month. US Special Ops Forces “were authorized to shoot any armed man on sight,” reported Gareth Porter, “so the raids were resulting in many Afghan civilians being killed during the raids, all of whom were automatically categorized by SOF as insurgents.”

When I met with Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the former Taliban spokesperson, in late 2010, he told me bluntly that the US raids were aiding the Taliban, just as Hoh alleged. “They are encouraging the people to become extremist,” he said as we sat in his home in Kabul, where he was under de facto house arrest, being watched day and night by Afghan police officers positioned outside his building. US political and military leaders, he said, “are thinking, ‘When we scare the people, they should be quiet.’ But this is a different nation. When you are killing one person, four or five others rise against you. If you are killing five people, twenty, at least, are rising against you. When you are disrespecting the people or the honor of the people in one village, the whole village becomes against you. This is creating hatred against Americans.”

The US killing of civilians, combined with a widely held perception that the Afghan government existed only for facilitating the corruption of powerful warlords, drug dealers and war criminals, had produced a situation in which the Taliban and the Haqqani network gained support from communities in the Pashtun heartland that would not otherwise be backing them. Zaeef told me that since 2005, when he was released from the US prison at Guantánamo, “the Taliban have become stronger.” “Are the Taliban coming from the sky?” Zaeef asked. “No, it’s new people.”

When I asked Hoh what he thought of Zaeef’s comments, he said they were accurate. “I think we’re engendering more hostility. We’re wasting a lot of very good assets going after midlevel guys who don’t threaten the United States or have no capacity to threaten the United States,” he told me. “If we say that al Qaeda recruits based on an ideology that they are defending the Muslim world against Western attack, this only feeds into that ideology.”

By June 2010, Afghanistan had become the longest-running war in American history. That summer, the number of US dead passed the 1,000 mark. From June 2009 to May 2010, the number of improvised explosive device attacks had swelled from 250 per month to more than 900. As the situation in Afghanistan deteriorated and the Taliban and other insurgent groups gained ground, a stunning scandal rocked the US military and the Special Ops community that would ultimately lead to the resignation and retirement of General McChrystal, one of the architects of the post-9/11 US killing machine. But his demise had nothing to do with any of his actions with JSOC in Iraq or his involvement in covering up the friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman, the former NFL player turned Army Ranger in Afghanistan in 2004 or his role in transforming JSOC into a global hit squad. Instead, McChrystal was brought down by an article in Rolling Stone magazine written by Michael Hastings that captured McChrystal and his inner circle making disparaging remarks about President Obama, Vice President Biden and other top US civilian officials. Before the issue of Rolling Stone even hit newsstands, excerpts of it boomeranged throughout the chambers of power and the media in Washington. McChrystal was finished, his run as the commander of the most elite units in the US military brought down by a story published in an issue of a magazine that featured on its cover an almost naked Lady Gaga sporting a brassiere with two rifles protruding from it.

On June 23, President Obama, flanked by Biden, Admiral Mullen, Defense Secretary Gates and General Petraeus, announced that “with considerable regret,” he had accepted McChrystal’s resignation. “It is the right thing for our mission in Afghanistan, for our military and for our country,” Obama said outside the White House. “I believe that it is the right decision for our national security,” he added. “The conduct represented in the recently published article does not meet the standard that should be set by a commanding general.” Obama thanked McChrystal “for his remarkable career in uniform.”

“This is a change in personnel,” Obama declared. “But it is not a change in policy.”

That point was driven home as the president announced that General Petraeus, one of the key architects of the expansion of the global US battlefield, would be taking over for McChrystal. Almost as soon as Petraeus took command of the war, the pace of night raids increased and air strikes resumed. As the civilian death toll mounted, the Afghan insurgency intensified. The US “targeted” killing program was fueling the very threat it claimed to be fighting.