This is a summary of the original article by Dr. Tumadir that may be found here
The more that emerges regarding America’s twenty-year misadventure in Afghanistan, the more tragic it gets.
Lynzy Billing, whose mother and sister were killed in Afghanistan thirty years ago, went back to the country to investigate what exactly had happened, only to be overcome by the stories and eye-witness accounts she heard about CIA-backed special operations units that went on night raids.
Here is one of the stories that compelled her to investigate these crimes:
“Mahzala watched as the gunmen questioned Safiullah, 28, and 20-year-old Sabir, before roughly pinning them against a courtyard wall. Then, ignoring their frantic protests of innocence, the masked men put guns to the back of her sons’ heads. One shot. Two. Then a third. Her youngest, ‘the quiet, gentle one,’ was still alive after the first bullet, Mahzala told me, so they shot him again.
Her story finished, Mahzala stared at me intently as if I could somehow explain the loss of her only family. We were in the dim confines of her home, a sliver of light leaking in from the lone window above her. She rubbed at the corner of her eyes; her forehead creased by a pulsing vein. The voices of her sons used to fill their home, she told me. She had no photos of them. No money. And there was no one who would tell her, a widow in her 50s, why these men dropped out of the sky and killed her family or acknowledge what she insisted was a terrible mistake.”
Haunted by Mahzala’s story, Billing embarked on an investigation into these crimes, taking years and culminating in a new report, documenting her findings.
Below are some highlights from the report.
“These special CIA-backed units were called “Zero Units.” There were four of these units in total, and the report focuses on the operations of just one of them, known as “02,” spanning a four-year period. The units comprised Afghan soldiers accompanied by “US special operations soldiers working with the CIA.”
One Afghan soldier from the unit described his experience in these raids:
“‘These deaths happened at our hands. I have participated in many raids…and there have been hundreds of raids where someone is killed and they are not Taliban or ISIS, and where no militants are present at all.’”
During the four years investigated, “at least 452 civilians were killed in 107 raids. This number is almost certainly an undercount.” This is in part because of the way in which militaries count and categorize kills. In places like Afghanistan, where villagers and actual combatants live side-by-side, the military can be quite sloppy in its categorization of civilians versus combatants killed. Others killed, Billing notes, are often just “written off as collateral.”
Another reason for the unrealistically low civilian count is this:
“One coroner in Jalalabad described how, at times, 02 soldiers had brought bodies to the morgue themselves, dismissing the staff and using the facilities before leaving with the dead. These deaths were not allowed to be recorded by him or other staff.”
A significant number of raids were carried out based on “faulty intelligence by the CIA and other US intelligence-gathering services.”
One would think that with all of the money and resources the US has at its disposal, they would be able to get the story straight. But far too often, they seem to stumble through their “freedom wars,”
As Billing reports:
“Lisa Ling spent 20 years in the military and built technology that was ultimately used to process intelligence that targeted Afghans. ‘I understand very viscerally how this tech works and how people are using it,’ she said. The counterterrorism mission is essentially: “Who am I fighting, and where will I find them,” she said. “But the U.S. struggled to differentiate combatants from civilians”, she said, “because it never understood Afghanistan.”
The reason why the US almost always fails to ‘get it right’ is rank arrogance. Why even bother trying to understand those that are beneath you?
Billing supports her findings by reporting that “[former US Air Force intelligence analyst Daniel] Hale was convicted for disclosing classified information that nearly 90% of the people killed by US airstrikes in Afghanistan were not the intended targets.”
The US’s twenty-year foray into Afghanistan created a vicious cycle of violence, which necessitated installing corrupt, puppet leaders and branding the war to legitimize it (a war for women, a war against opium, a war to protect America). Billing’s report reaffirms that seemingly every action taken by the US in Afghanistan led to more harm for civilians.
The Zero Units have been kept under wraps thanks to a legal loophole — the Leahy Law. With this law, the US military is prohibited from “providing training and equipment to foreign security forces that commit human rights abuses, but it does not apply to US intelligence agencies.”
This dubious law plus on-ground callousness makes for a terrible combination which allows for selective ‘human rights.’
Despite all of this, what do we typically hear from the US? “The Taliban are harming women!”
Go tell that to all those women whose children and husbands the US killed, to whom no apology or support was ever offered.
Let us never forget the thousands of innocent Muslims who perished from these heinous actions, so many lives and families destroyed.
May Allah reward the people of Afghanistan for their steadfastness through all that they have suffered. Aameen!
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