On what would be the last day of his life, Zemari Ahmadi, an employee of a U.S.-based NGO, was being watched by a remote crew piloting a Predator drone above the skies of Kabul, Afghanistan. As Ahmadi went about his work, running a series of errands across the city, the drone operators, though they did not know his identity, were making plans to kill him.

A series of innocuous actions, like Ahmadi loading water containers into his car, were interpreted in the minds of the operators watching as sinister preparations for a suicide bomb attack. After surveilling Ahmadi for several hours, the drone operators issued a death sentence, firing a Hellfire missile at his car as he drove up to his home, just as three children were rushing out to greet him. A total of 10 people, all civilians, were killed in the attack that the U.S. military had initially insisted had targeted a terrorist working with the Islamic State.

The deaths of Ahmadi and his family members were unique in the level of public attention they received. It was sadly unremarkable, though, in the context of the larger U.S. drone war that has been waged over the past 20 years.

Armed drones have become a staple of modern American warfare, placing operators at a historically unprecedented remove from danger.

Armed drones have become a staple of modern American warfare, placing operators at a historically unprecedented remove from danger. At the same time, they have exposed those targeted, whether combatants or civilians, to a form of violence that they can neither defend themselves against nor surrender to. Freed from the traditional reciprocity of war, in which both sides put their lives on the line, drone operators have become more like judicial executioners: putting people on trial on the other side of the planet without due process and meting out death sentences by remote control.

The U.S. pioneered this style of warfare but is no longer alone in using what are technically called unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. Other countries, including U.S. rivals, are ramping up their own drone programs, signaling that this style of killing at great distance is likely to become a defining feature of war in the 21st century.

Understanding what this means is the task of two recent books, “Asymmetric Killing: Risk Avoidance, Just War, and the Warrior Ethos” by Neil Renic, an international relations scholar at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg in Germany, and “On Killing Remotely: The Psychology of Killing With Drones,” by Wayne Phelps, a retired U.S. Marine Corps lieutenant colonel who participated in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Phelps’s book is based on hundreds of interviews with drone operators who have carried out strikes. Examining how drone warfare fits into the broader culture of the U.S. military, the volume also gives a remarkable insight into the psyche of drone operators tasked with carrying out targeted killings. Unlike traditional forms of combat where events often move with brutal speed, drone operators, through a high-definition camera in the sky, often intimately follow their targets over long periods of time, sometimes several months, getting to know their habits, personalities, and even families, before one day pulling the trigger and killing them.

While drone strikes are often viewed as an antiseptic, dehumanized form of killing — comparable to blowing up targets in a video game — many operators interviewed by Phelps describe it as a psychologically difficult. Some even develop parasocial relationships with those they are tasked to stalk and kill.

In one case discussed in the book, an intelligence analyst working on the CIA’s drone program was part of a team tasked with six months of 24-hours-a-day surveillance of a man said to be a “high-value target.” In addition to the behavior that was alleged to justify his killing, the analyst observed his target walking his children to school on a daily basis and taking care of his family, as part of a long-term surveillance routine known as pattern-of-life analysis. In a strange way, the analyst got to know his target, even developing a level of sympathy born out of spending so much time seeing how he interacted with others, especially his wife and children.

The level of closeness and knowledge about his target, gleaned by watching him for months through a drone’s lens, was far greater than that in traditional combat situations.

Eventually, the day that the intelligence analyst would have to kill him came. After such a long period of voyeuristic intimacy with the man — about whom the analyst himself said, “there was no doubt that he was a good father” — it was nothing like a video game. A father himself, the analyst related on a human level with the man he had been following. In many ways, the level of closeness and knowledge about his target, gleaned by watching him for months through a drone’s lens, was far greater than that in traditional combat situations, where combatants have little personal knowledge about those that they kill. As Phelps notes, “the analyst said that when the time came to strike this guy, whom he had observed being a normal dad every day for six months, it was emotionally difficult.”

Other drone operators describe experiencing physiological stress during their missions, as well as brief bursts of adrenaline following successful shots that supported friendly ground forces engaged in active combat. When they were asked to describe their worst day on the job, many of their responses dealt with what drone crews saw in the aftermath of certain strikes. One sensor operator on a drone described their worst day to Phelps this way: “Watching the son of the person I just obliterated with a Hellfire missile pick up the pieces of his father. It wasn’t the act of killing I focused on, it was watching the boy’s face and interactions with the rest of his family that continue to haunt me.”

A contractor working as a tactical controller on a Reaper drone crew also provided their view on the long-term consequences of a killing that he had helped carry out:

Although I would not do it differently, conducting surveillance on a confirmed HVT [high-value target] and seeing him positively interact with his spouse and children, like a caring father and husband, playing soccer with his son, and ultimately taking a kinetic strike opportunity far from his home. No collateral damage occurred, however, had full viewing in HD of the family mourning and could not help but think that the son would be the next generation of terrorist due to this event.

Phelps approaches drone warfare as a military insider. He is mainly concerned with reducing the stigma against drone operators within the military hierarchy and finding ways of making the process of remote killing psychologically easier. He suggests creating greater social distance between operator and target, using technical language to describe the people involved, and breaking up tasks so that the person doing intimate, pattern-of-life surveillance on an individual is not the same person pulling the trigger or observing the target’s family in grief in the aftermath.

“I wish it was just a guy in a car that we didn’t know. Those shots are easy.”

Not everyone who takes part in drone warfare is troubled by their experience. Some take the righteousness of their operations for granted. Nonetheless, in his descriptions of the psychological impact of targeted killing on drone operators, Phelps dispels the notion that taking a life with a drone is always as easy as playing a video game for the people doing it.

“It’s ridiculous the idea that we don’t see the humanity. I’m watching a target for eight hours. I’m going to watch him go to the store and go to his wife. I’ve had targets that I followed for four or five days. I know where they live, I know what they do,” one drone operator told Phelps. “Then eventually you kill this guy. Absolutely I know that his wife is out there and that we just made her a widow and that we just took a father away from his three kids. It sucks. I wish it was just a guy in a car that we didn’t know. Those shots are easy.”

Courtesy of Oxford University Press

Embedded in Phelps’s analysis in “On Killing Remotely” is the assumption that targeted killing with drones is just another evolution in how human beings have created advantages for themselves in combat, comparable to the bow and arrow, cannon, sniper rifle, bomber plane, and ballistic missile.

That assumption is put to the test in Neil Renic’s “Asymmetric Killing.” Renic argues that drones establish a “radical asymmetry” of violence unlike anything created by prior weapons. The utter lopsidedness of the violence, where one side is completely free from danger and the other at their total mercy, calls into question whether what is happening is a war at all — or something more sinister.

In countries like Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, the U.S. has carried out thousands of strikes in the absence of a meaningful U.S. ground presence. The people being killed on the ground in these strikes usually do not, and indeed cannot, pose any conceivable threat to Americans. Renic argues, with reference to philosophical traditions like “just war” theory, that this makes even many purportedly legitimate drone targets, particularly the low-level, rural, foreign fighters who bear the brunt of the drone program, little different from civilians.

The concept of war as a legal and morally regulated activity was historically built on an assumption of mutual risk and danger among those taking part. That dynamic simply no longer exists when one side is fighting only with robots from the other side of the planet. While prior technological advances may have reduced the structural threat between combatants, drone warfare is the first time that one side has made themselves absolutely immune to violence.

“UAV-exclusive violence marks a fundamental shift in the nature of hostilities, from an adversarial contestation to something more closely approximating judicial sanction,” Renic writes. “One outcome of this shift has been the dehumanization of those targeted by the United States.”

Renic argues that killing through drone strikes outside of active combat situations is less like war and more like “a creative process of disinfection.”

What emerges in place of war as a situation of mutual risk is simply an unending series of executions carried out from the skies. The task of the people carrying out many strikes is less about overcoming an enemy in battle than issuing moral judgments and death sentences against individuals who pose no conceivable threat to the U.S. and whose customs, circumstances, and even identities are often unknown to them. To use a chilling metaphor, Renic argues that killing through drone strikes outside of active combat situations is less like war, as traditionally defined, and more like “a creative process of disinfection.”

In cases where drones are targeting high-level terrorists who are directly planning attacks against the U.S. or where they are supporting friendly ground forces in combat, the strikes are more justifiable, according to traditional moral schema. These are not often the circumstances of drone strikes. Thousands of strikes have taken place outside of active combat zones over the years or have targeted low-level fighters or even unarmed individuals who posed no direct threat to U.S. forces or civilians. An investigative report recently published by the military-focused news site Connecting Vets, including leaked footage of many strikes, outlined the extent to which U.S. military commanders became obsessed with killing low-level suspected Taliban members in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, during a 2019 drone campaign.

Fixated on increasing their “kill counts” as a metric of operational success, military commanders authorized drone strikes even against unarmed individuals in the province suspected of having walkie-talkies or wearing tactical vests. The attacks were in stark contrast to Phelps’s characterization of U.S. drone warfare as intelligence-driven, targeted strikes against bad actors: Participants in the Helmand campaign described it as “nihilistic,” stating that “the drone strikes were punitive. Killing for the sake of killing.”

As much as drone warfare has eliminated mortal risk on one side of war almost entirely, it has simultaneously displaced that risk onto civilians whose safety the military is ostensibly tasked to defend. By making themselves wholly immune to retributive violence from an enemy that they kill from afar, the U.S. military makes it more likely that those enemies will respond by attacking whatever target is available, usually civilian ones, rather than accept surrender or annihilation in the face of relentless one-way violence.

That does not make the killing of civilians, whether Americans or locals in foreign countries, by militant groups any less morally objectionable. Yet by military officials’ own accounts, the displacement of the violence onto the defenseless is a foreseeable outcome of policies that primarily seek to protect soldiers from physical danger at all costs.

“Attempts to armorize our force against all potential enemy threats … shifts the ‘burden of risk’ from a casualty-averse military force onto the populace,” wrote American Marine Maj. Trent Gibson in a 2009 paper titled “Hell Bent on Force Protection: Confusing Troop Welfare with Mission Accomplishment in Counterinsurgency,” which drew on experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. “In doing so, we have lifted the burden from our own shoulders and placed it squarely upon those who do not possess the material resources to bear it — the civilian populace.”

Courtesy of Little, Brown and Company

“On Remote Killing” ends with a word of warning about the prospect of autonomous weapons platforms, which may have the capacity of distancing human beings from war even further by automating the entire killing process using artificial intelligence. Phelps compellingly argues that “war is a human endeavor and there must be a human cost to undertaking it.” Though his book establishes that taking lives is not as easy for drone operators as stereotypes may suggest, for those who have been on the receiving end of violence over the past 20 years, simply knowing that there is a human being who pulled the trigger that killed their family members is not much comfort.

After initially trying to cover up the killings of Zemari Ahmadi and his family in Kabul, the Pentagon subsequently backtracked following a stream of news reports disproving their narrative about killing an ISIS-K terrorist, the Islamic State group’s affiliate in Afghanistan. Though it was forced to admit responsibility, the military has said that no disciplinary action would be taken against anyone involved in the attack that took the lives of 10 members of an innocent family.

If drone warfare, whether autonomous or not, is to have any moral component at all, it must include some accountability for the innocent people regularly killed in strikes like the one that ended the life of Zemari Ahmadi. Periodic apologies aside, moral responsibility toward the tens of thousands killed, maimed, or deprived of their loved ones over the past 20 years has been in short evidence.

“That is not enough for us to say sorry,” Emal Ahmadi, Zemari’s brother, told reporters in the aftermath of the drone strike. “The U.S.A. can see from everywhere. They can see that there were innocent children near the car and in the car. Whoever did this should be punished. It isn’t right.”

The post The Psychological Tolls and Moral Hazards of Drone Warfare appeared first on The Intercept.

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Before the Taliban took control of Kabul in August, the U.S.-backed Afghan commandos known as Zero units were the ghosts of the Afghan battlefield. Along with their CIA advisers, they were feared and, in recent years, virtually invisible.

But in the hectic, violent weeks between the Taliban victory and the U.S. military withdrawal, fighters belonging to a Zero unit known as 01 — and other linked militias known collectively as National Strike Units, or NSUs — helped the Americans secure Hamid Karzai International Airport. Firing warning shots day and night, 01 fighters sought to corral and search crowds of Afghans and foreigners trying to enter the airport to board evacuation flights, much as Taliban fighters struggled to maintain control at other airport entrances around the same time.

One evening in late August, an Afghan 01 commander whose fighters were guarding the airport’s northwestern gate asked an Intercept journalist taking photographs to identify himself to the fighter’s American handler. The handler, who was wearing a baseball cap and had a pistol strapped to his waist, suggested that if the journalist wanted to leave on an evacuation flight, he should do so immediately. Soon, the man said, he’d be evacuating “my guys,” referring to the 01 fighters. After that, the gate would be closed for good. The American then turned to the 01 commander and explained the value placed on a free press by citizens of the country to which he and his fighters would soon be flown.

The CIA prioritized the evacuation of Zero unit members from Afghanistan, flying out as many as 7,000 of the former commandos and their relatives even as thousands of vulnerable former U.S. government and military employees, human rights activists, and aid workers were left behind. NSU commandos refused to allow a former U.S. government interpreter through the airport gates unless she gave them $5,000 each for herself, her husband, and their three children, Al Jazeera reported. The woman, who said she and her relatives were beaten by NSU members at the airport, could not afford the bribe. Two former members of a different U.S.-trained military unit, the Afghan National Army’s KKA, or Afghan Special Unit, told The Intercept from a safe house in Kabul that no formal effort was made to evacuate them and that unit members who were able to board flights did so through personal connections. The two former members themselves had been turned away by 01 militiamen after approaching the airport’s northwestern gate. Since then, they said, at least four KKA members have been tracked down by Taliban fighters and killed.

The CIA’s ability to evacuate its allies appears to have far outstripped that of other U.S. government entities and signals its pivotal role in the war. The agency evacuated as many as 20,000 Afghan “partners” and their relatives, the Washington Post reported, nearly one-third of the 60,000 Afghans the U.S. has taken in overall. The CIA did not respond to a request for comment.

Most coverage of the CIA’s efforts has been laudatory. But the Zero units were known for deadly night raids that killed an untold number of civilians across Afghanistan. The Intercept documented 10 raids conducted by 01 in Wardak Province, southwest of Kabul, in which at least 51 civilians, including children, were killed — many at close range, in execution-style assaults. Most 01 missions were led by a small number of CIA “advisers,” as their Afghan fighters knew them, or U.S. special forces borrowed from the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command.

“The U.S. should not be offering safe haven to those who committed war crimes or serious human rights abuses,” said Patricia Gossman, associate director for the Asia division at Human Rights Watch, who wrote a report on the units’ abuses. “In Afghanistan, these forces were never held accountable for their actions, which included summary executions and other abuses. The U.S. and any other countries resettling members of these units should screen arrivals and investigate any for their possible involvement in human rights violations.”

Most of the Zero unit members were flown to Qatar, where CIA paramilitary officers worked to get their former Afghan colleagues sent to the U.S., according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official with direct knowledge of the operation. The former Afghan commandos are being housed on U.S. military bases, including two in Virginia and New Jersey, and at Ramstein Air Base in Germany while they await resettlement, according to the former senior U.S. official, two former senior Afghan intelligence officials, and a former commando from a different Afghan unit who was evacuated to the same U.S. base as some Zero unit members. Another small group of Zero unit members is in the United Arab Emirates, but they are expected to come to the U.S. within weeks, one of the former Afghan officials told The Intercept. Both former Afghan officials said they have spoken with relatives who previously belonged to the Zero units and are now in the United States.

Once known within the U.S. government as the Mohawks, Zero units started as an irregular commando force controlled by the CIA. The intelligence agency trained the teams to serve as guerrilla fighters out of small U.S. outposts, mainly in the north and east of the country, near the Pakistan border. Much of the original purpose of the program was to enable the CIA to conduct cross-border raids into Pakistan, a politically fraught and rarely approved activity for U.S. personnel.

The Zero units allowed the U.S. to conduct deniable operations and avoid accountability and were similar in some respects to the CIA’s Phoenix program during the Vietnam War. For that program, the agency created Provincial Reconnaissance Units comprised mostly of South Vietnamese guerrillas led by American commanders. Like the Afghan Zero units, the PRUs gathered intelligence and assassinated suspected Viet Cong.

In 2010, the Afghan government signed an agreement with the CIA to turn the NSUs into a joint program with Afghanistan’s former intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, or NDS, according to the two former senior Afghan officials, who were involved in the arrangement. While the missions would be jointly run, the units continued to be funded exclusively by the U.S. government, the two former Afghan officials told The Intercept. The change allowed the CIA to claim plausible deniability against accusations of human rights abuses or war crimes.

But in 2019, Afghanistan’s most senior defense official, then-Afghan national security adviser Hamdullah Mohib, told The Intercept that 01 was controlled by the CIA. “Quite frankly, I’m not fully aware … of how they work,” he said at the time. “We’ve asked for clarification on how these operations happen, who are involved, what are the structures of this. When they were set up, why are they not in Afghan control?”

Just after President Joe Biden took office in January, the CIA gave the NDS one year’s budget and said the agency would no longer support Zero units or continue funding them, one of the former Afghan intelligence officials told The Intercept.

A spray painted reference to the American-backed 01 unit is seen on Sept. 6, 2021 inside Eagle Base, a few miles northeast of downtown Kabul, where the Central Intelligence Agency and 01 were based before the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Photo: Andrew Quilty

Eagle Base, the sprawling CIA and 01 compound on a hillside northeast of Kabul, used to be off-limits to all but America’s closest allies.

From the highway, passersby could see a shooting range cut into the side of the hill and a narrow road snaking up to a cluster of beige structures. Less visible was the complex of helicopter hangars, ammunition depots, and barracks as well as the former CIA black site known as the Salt Pit, where interrogations and torture were carried out in the earliest years of the war.

Perimeter security was extreme, even by Afghanistan’s standards. A ditch ringed an earthen wall 6 feet high. Next came concertina wire, faded red bollards linked by steel cables, and a 10-foot mud and concrete wall topped with more concertina wire, with elevated guard posts every 300 feet. Floodlights illuminated the entire circumference at night.

Before 2019, 01 fighters left Eagle Base in vehicle convoys for nighttime missions. That changed when convoys on two Wardak missions were ambushed, according to a former NDS counterterrorism officer who used to accompany 01 on raids in the province. Thereafter, almost all 01 missions were flown into Wardak aboard American Chinook helicopters. Residents living near Eagle Base told The Intercept in 2019 that they heard the distinct thwap of the dual-rotor helicopters several times a week, departing early in the evening and returning before dawn. Otherwise, 01 fighters were rarely seen.

But the Taliban knew who occupied Eagle Base. On July 25, 2019, a suicide car bomb targeted CIA officers traveling in unmarked Toyota Land Cruisers arriving at the gate, Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid said in an interview that year. Local residents confirmed that a bombing took place against white Land Cruisers at the compound gate that day. The incident attracted little media attention. A spokesperson from Resolute Support, the now-defunct U.S. military mission in Afghanistan, told The Intercept that he was unaware of any foreign military casualties in Kabul that day. The CIA declined to comment.

Scores of burned-out civilian and military vehicles are seen within the CIA’s Eagle Base on Sept. 6, 2021. An ammunition depot, an armory, and several other structures were also destroyed by explosives and fire before the U.S. departure.

Photo: Andrew Quilty

Taliban fighters have occupied the expansive facility since parts of it were destroyed by fire and explosives in the final days of the American military withdrawal from Afghanistan at the end of August. In early September, a week after the last U.S. military aircraft had departed Kabul, Taliban fighters clad in a darker version of fatigues with the same tiger-stripe pattern worn by 01 escorted journalists through the ruins of Eagle Base, leading them through areas they said had been cleared of land mines and booby traps left by the Americans and their Afghan partners.

The fighters were from the Taliban’s “Badr” 313 Brigade, an elite commando unit named for the Battle of Badr 1,400 years ago, when the Prophet Mohammad is said to have overcome enemy forces with just 313 men. They were led by an English-speaking Taliban member in his 40s wearing traditional clothes, sunglasses, and a surgical mask.

Nearly two weeks earlier, at dusk on August 26, a suicide attack at the airport and subsequent gunfire had killed about 170, including 13 U.S. service members. Kabul residents were on edge. When another huge explosion was heard across the city before midnight, many feared that there had been a second deadly attack. But that explosion was a controlled detonation, one of several that destroyed ammunition depots, armories, and vehicles as well as various facilities inside Eagle Base that the CIA didn’t want to leave for the Taliban once the agency finally abandoned it. Brian Castner, Amnesty International’s senior crisis adviser for arms and military operations and a former U.S. Air Force explosive ordnance disposal officer, said The Intercept’s photos from the site suggested “a very hasty and messy withdrawal.”

Constellations of bullets, mortars, and grenades littered the charred foundations of ammunition depots destroyed by fire. In the burned-out shell of what appeared to be an armory, the barrels of Kalashnikovs, belt-fed PKM and DShK machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and mortar tubes lay in piles like pick-up sticks.

Inside a dormitory building, the Zero units’ trademark tiger-stripe uniforms hung from hooks and littered the floor. In a steel locker, amid the discarded packaging of tactical gadgets and passport photos of a young family, a military patch in the shape of a pentagon read “The Shield & Swords of Afg, NSU (01).”

The post The CIA’s Afghan Proxies, Accused of War Crimes, Will Get a Fresh Start in the U.S. appeared first on The Intercept.

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The son of Afghanistan’s most celebrated anti-Taliban resistance leader has escaped into neighboring Tajikistan, less than a month after vowing to defend his homeland “no matter what happens.”

Ahmad Massoud, son of the late Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, fled to Tajikistan shortly after the Taliban seized control of the Panjshir Valley on September 6, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official, a Pentagon consultant, and two former senior Afghan government officials. Massoud was joined a few days later by Amrullah Saleh, the former Afghan vice president and longtime intelligence chief, who left Afghanistan by helicopter, the senior U.S. official and two former Afghan officials said.

The retreat of the two key Afghan resistance figures contradicts public claims that they are still in Afghanistan and holding out against the Taliban and signals a remarkable shift in their fortunes: For the first time in decades, the United States government and the CIA do not appear to be backing them. Massoud and Saleh are both seeking military aid and equipment from the West, but the Biden administration is not supporting them and has given no indication of whether it will provide future assistance, according to the two former Afghan officials and a retired U.S. intelligence official.

On Wednesday, Massoud hired Washington lobbyist Robert Stryk. Massoud and Saleh have been embraced by prominent Republicans like Sen. Lindsey Graham, who is keen on the U.S. returning to Afghanistan.

Neither Massoud nor Saleh has been seen in public since the Taliban took Panjshir. Both come from the mountainous northeastern province, a perennial base of Afghan resistance, first against the Soviet Union and later the Taliban. Massoud is currently in a “safe house” in the Tajik capital of Dushanbe, according to a former senior Afghan government official who spoke with him last week, while Saleh is in a nearby location.

Former Vice President of Afghanistan Amrullah Saleh speaks during a function at the Afghan presidential palace in Kabul on August 4, 2021.

Photo: Sajjad Hussain/AFP via Getty Images

Saleh last tweeted on September 3, as the Taliban began encircling Panjshir. In an accompanying video, he dismissed reports that he had already fled Afghanistan as “totally baseless.” “The RESISTANCE is continuing and will continue,” Saleh tweeted. “I am here with my soil, for my soil & defending its dignity.”

On Monday, Ali Maisam Nazary, a spokesperson for Massoud, told The Intercept that Massoud “is inside Afghanistan … in an undisclosed location.” Saleh could not be reached for comment.

Saleh, who once worked as an aide to Ahmad Shah Massoud and served many years in senior positions in Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed government, tweeted last month that he was the legal successor to former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, citing Ghani’s decision to flee to the United Arab Emirates. “As per d constitution of Afg, in absence, escape, resignation or death of the President the FVP [First Vice President] becomes the caretaker President,” Saleh tweeted on August 16, the day after the Taliban seized control of Kabul. “I am currently inside my country & am the legitimate care taker President.”

In August, prominent Republicans like Graham and Rep. Mike Waltz called on the Biden administration to recognize Saleh and Massoud as the “legitimate government representatives” of Afghanistan. “We will be going back into Afghanistan,” Graham told the BBC earlier this month. “We’ll have to because the [terror] threat will be so large.”

“I want his voice out,” Graham said of Saleh in an interview with Politico last week. “I’m gonna go all in. [The Taliban are] holding our people hostage. They’re a terrorist group. They’re a radical Islamic jihadist group.” Graham also reportedly secured Saleh a slot on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show in August; Waltz managed to get Massoud booked on Fox News as well. On Tuesday, James Hewitt, a spokesperson for Waltz, reiterated the congressman’s call to recognize Saleh and Massoud as the legitimate representatives of Afghanistan, saying, “Yes, this is still his position,” and linking to a press release titled “Waltz, Graham Call on Biden to Recognize Opposition Forces in the Panjshir Valley.” Graham did not respond to requests for comment.

A growing number of Republican senators have also been urging Biden to designate the Taliban as a terrorist organization, with Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chair Marco Rubio introducing legislation that would do just that — a move that would likely doom diplomatic engagement with the new government.

The U.S. has long supported opposition groups in Afghanistan, going back to the CIA’s role in arming Afghan mujahideen to fight the Soviets under President Ronald Reagan. Ahmad Shah Massoud, a legendary resistance commander, received CIA funding under Reagan and subsequent U.S. administrations, as his militia ousted the Soviets from Kabul and later led the opposition to the Taliban. Massoud was assassinated by Al Qaeda operatives two days before the 9/11 attacks.

It is not clear whether Ahmad Massoud and his National Resistance Front will win the support of U.S. or other Western governments this time around. Prospects for the resistance appear grim, with the New York Times reporting last week that “combat had largely ceased” in Panjshir province and that “what resistance remained seemed confined to mountainous areas.”

Though Western intelligence agencies have not formally cooperated with Massoud, they reportedly have held informal meetings. There is also ample historical precedent for opposition groups fleeing to neighboring countries to plot their eventual return. This happened most recently in 2001, when the Taliban disappeared into Pakistan and Iran to regroup.

The post With No U.S. Support, Leaders of Afghan Resistance Flee the Country appeared first on The Intercept.

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None of the issues still lingering 20 years after the 9/11 attacks have been as persistent — or as emotionally wrenching for the families of the victims — as the question of whether Saudi Arabia provided funding and other assistance for the worst terrorist attack in American history.

Of the 19 Al Qaeda terrorists who hijacked four U.S. commercial airliners on the morning of September 11, 2001, 15 were citizens of Saudi Arabia — and of course, Osama bin Laden was a member of one of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest families.

Immediately after the attacks, the Bush administration downplayed the Saudi connection and suppressed evidence that might link powerful Saudis to the funding of Islamic extremism and terrorism. The Bush White House didn’t want to upset its relationship with one of the world’s largest oil-producing nations, which was also an American ally with enormous political influence in Washington, and much of what the FBI discovered about possible Saudi links to the attacks remains secret even today.

“What are they hiding? What is the big secret?” Terry Strada, whose husband was killed in the attack on the World Trade Center, asked in an interview. “We’ve been operating on lies for 20 years. I’ve always just wanted to know the truth: Who was behind this, and how did it happen?”

Many U.S. officials have insisted over the last two decades that the American government is not really hiding any conclusive evidence of Saudi involvement, and it is quite possible that successive presidents, along with the intelligence community, have closed ranks simply to avoid revealing classified information. And it’s plausible that officials want to avoid exposing details that might be politically embarrassing for both Washington and the Saudis yet don’t prove that the Saudi royal family, the Saudi government, or other powerful Saudi individuals played any role in providing funding or assistance for the September 11 attacks. But the refusal to be open and transparent about such a fundamental issue has fed suspicions.

Two decades later, however, glimpses of material that have become public provide mounting evidence that senior Saudi officials, including one diplomat in the Saudi Embassy in Washington, may in fact have indirectly provided assistance for two of the Al Qaeda hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who were the first of the hijackers to arrive in the United States in 2000 and lived for about a year and a half in San Diego beforehand.

The CIA had identified both Mihdhar and Hazmi as Al Qaeda operatives by early 2000, based partly on Mihdhar’s participation in an Al Qaeda meeting in Malaysia, and the agency was tracking the pair’s international movements. But the CIA did not pass on that information to officials at the FBI or other domestic agencies at the time, and the two plotters were not placed on any watch lists that might have prevented them from entering the United States weeks later. It was not until weeks before the September 11 attacks that the FBI learned that Mihdhar and Hazmi had entered the country and began a belated and unsuccessful search for them, even as both men were living openly in San Diego, according to multiple government reviews.

While no smoking gun has emerged, the evidence indicates that the two hijackers had received logistical and financial support from a handful of people inside the United States with connections to Saudi Arabia, including a man in California whose family received tens of thousands of dollars from the wife of the Saudi ambassador to the United States.

The ongoing scrutiny of the Saudis’ role has been driven by a massive lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan brought by families of the victims, who maintain that senior Saudi officials were complicit in the attacks. The families were blocked for 15 years from even bringing their claims because of the “sovereign immunity” protection for foreign governments in court. In 2016, Congress overrode a veto by President Barak Obama to clear the way for the lawsuit by approving the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act.

Bill Doyle, left, and Joan Molinaro, center, both parents of 9/11 victims, present a poster of the World Trade Center bearing photographs of all the victims during a news conference on Capitol Hill on March 19, 2003.

Photo: Charles Dharapak/AP

Lawyers for the families have now collected some 11,000 still-secret pages of internal documents from the U.S. government and have deposed numerous Saudi witnesses to determine what they knew of the hijackers’ plot, bolstering what they say is a trail of connections leading back to Riyadh.

“Our view has always been that there were agents of the Saudi government acting in coordination with one another … to provide a critical support network for the first hijackers,” Sean P. Carter, one of the lawyers representing the victims’ families, said in an interview. “There are a lot of contact points between the bad actors here.”

“Our view has always been that there were agents of the Saudi government acting in coordination with one another … to provide a critical support network for the first hijackers.”

Carter said that a verdict against the Saudis, finding them financially liable in the attacks, could result in “many billions of dollars” in damages. But he added that bringing out the truth would be just as important. “This is the only vehicle the families have to correct the historical record and achieve some sort of accountability on behalf of their loved ones,” he said. “That’s a huge piece of it.”

One of the most explosive pieces of evidence against the Saudis emerged only by accident. It came in a court filing by the Trump administration last year that was intended, ironically, to support the government’s arguments for keeping the FBI’s Saudi records sealed as state secrets. The Justice Department’s public filing, first reported by Yahoo News, redacted numerous sections on national security grounds but inadvertently disclosed the name of a former official in the Saudi Embassy in Washington — “Jarrah” — or Mussaed Ahmed al-Jarrah, who worked as a senior diplomat until about 2000 under Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who was then the long-serving Saudi ambassador to the United States. The document, citing a 2012 internal FBI summary, indicated that Jarrah was believed to have “tasked” two other Saudi men living in southern California “with assisting the hijackers” in San Diego, Mihdhar and Hazmi, who spoke little English.

The accidental disclosure, reaching inside the Saudi Embassy in Washington, could prove critical for the victims’ families in establishing that Saudi Arabia bears some responsibility for the attacks.

There has long been scrutiny on the two Saudi men who helped the hijackers in southern California — Omar al-Bayoumi and Fahad al-Thumairy, both of whom have left the United States. Bayoumi, a Saudi expatriate who was on the payroll of a Saudi defense contractor, befriended the two hijackers in San Diego soon after their arrival in 2000 and worked with them step by step to settle into their new lives. He helped them open bank accounts, apply for Social Security cards and driver’s licenses, find a place to live in San Diego, and even receive flying lessons.

Bayoumi later told the FBI that he had met the two men by chance at a restaurant in Los Angeles and agreed to help them as simple hospitality toward fellow Saudis. But the FBI was skeptical of his account, according to documents that have since become public.

The second man, Thumairy, was a diplomat in the Saudi consulate’s office in Los Angeles at the time. The FBI found extensive phone contacts between Thumairy and Bayoumi, and agents suspected that Thumairy also worked to help Mihdhar and Hazmi after their arrival.

Osama Basnan, a Saudi living in San Diego, may have also played a role with Bayoumi. Basnan’s wife received tens of thousands of dollars in checks from the wife of Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the United States. The Saudis insisted that Bandar’s wife, Princess Haifa al-Faisal, sent the money as part of a charitable effort to help with medical bills for Basnan’s wife, who was ill at the time. But FBI investigators believed that a chunk of the money ended up with Bayoumi.

Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the U.S., Prince Bandar bin Sultan, answers questions from graduate students at Tufts University’s Fletcher School on Oct. 23, 2003.

Photo: Neal Hamberg/AP

Other possible connections also led back to Prince Bandar, according to a 28-page section of a joint congressional inquiry in 2002, which was kept secret until its partial release in 2016. One intriguing piece of evidence came when an Al Qaeda operative was captured with the unlisted number for a Colorado company that managed Prince Bandar’s estate in Aspen.

The 28 pages, kept secret through the Bush administration and most of Obama’s, laid out a panoply of other connections between the hijackers and people inside or connected to the Saudi government, raising as many questions as they answered. Former Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, who was co-chair of the joint congressional review that produced the report, had pushed for years for it to be declassified. He said at the time that the release of the partially redacted document “suggests a strong linkage between those terrorists and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Saudi charities, and other Saudi stakeholders” and represented “the removal of the cork at the end of the bottle.”

But many thousands of pages of government files on the possible Saudi connections remain bottled up, even as families of the victims have pushed in court for greater access to them as part of their lawsuit against the Saudis. And Prince Bandar himself reportedly refused to answer questions from lawyers for the victims’ families as part of the recent depositions of Saudi officials in their lawsuit. For years, Saudi Arabia has strenuously rejected charges that its officials had any knowledge of or involvement with the 9/11 terror plot.

The Saudi Embassy in Washington did not return messages seeking comment on the lawsuit or the ongoing questions about the royal kingdom’s possible involvement in the attacks.

Because of Saudi Arabia’s status as a critical Middle East ally, successive presidents have walked a diplomatic tightrope with Riyadh for two decades, selling billions in arms to the kingdom even in the face of human rights abuses and the ongoing questions about connections to the September 11 attacks. The alliance was tested again three years ago by another brutal act of violence — the killing and dismembering of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist. While the Trump administration drew wide criticism for failing to take any action over the assassination, the Biden administration publicly released an intelligence report earlier this year laying responsibility for the murder directly at the feet of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and issued financial sanctions against some of those Saudi operatives thought to have been involved. But Biden stopped short of taking action against the royal prince himself because of concerns about the damage it might cause to the partnership.

The final report of the 9/11 Commission in 2004, after a 20-month investigation, acknowledged that “Saudi Arabia has long been considered the primary source of Al Qaeda funding, but we have found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded the organization.” Some of the more intriguing financial connections between Saudis and the hijackers were consigned to unexplained footnotes.

But some commissioners now doubt the report’s conclusions about the lack of Saudi involvement. “I don’t think we know all the answers. We got what the FBI had,” Jamie Gorelick said in an interview. “There were a number of trails that went dead on us, and it has been my assumption that funds from people in Saudi Arabia — not necessarily the government — flowed into the United States to help the hijackers,” she added. “They must have had some help, a network of support.”

Indeed, the possible Saudi connections had generated intense scrutiny from investigators at the 9/11 Commission and debate over the final conclusions. Staffers believed that they had found a close Saudi connection to the hijackers in San Diego, but Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the commission, and Dieter Snell, a top aide, had doubts and rewrote that section of the final report before it went to the printers, removing the most damning material against the Saudis, according to “The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Commission,” a 2008 book by Philip Shenon, who covered the commission for the New York Times.

For years after the commission report, a team of FBI agents continued pursuing possible connections between the Saudis and the hijackers and built more evidence, but the Justice Department closed down the investigation without charges. In 2015, a federal commission revisited the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations and findings, but on the question of complicity by the Saudis or anyone else, it arrived at the same place — even in light of potentially significant new material gathered by the FBI in its investigation. “This new information is not sufficient to change the 9/11 Commission’s original findings regarding the presence of witting assistance to al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar,” the review concluded.

Most of the FBI files on the possible links still remain secret, even though the investigation has been closed. The Justice Department told the judges hearing the families’ lawsuit in August that the FBI would review the classified documents to determine what additional files could be disclosed publicly, and Biden signed an executive order last week formally authorizing that review process. But some victims’ family members say they are not optimistic that the review will produce much of value after fighting for 20 years — through four different presidential administrations — to find out what role Saudi officials might have played in the 9/11 plot. Some 1,700 survivors have been so upset by the ongoing blockage of the internal information in the case that they signed a letter to Biden last month asking him not to attend memorial events this week commemorating the anniversary.

“I want to know why the Department of Justice is protecting the Saudi kingdom.”

The possible Saudi connection overlaps with another lingering mystery from 9/11: How was it that even with the system “blinking red” at the CIA over intelligence indicating a possible attack, the CIA failed to communicate with the FBI about what it had learned about the Malaysia meeting and the fact that two of the would-be hijackers were in the United States?

The explanation that communication failures and turf issues between the CIA and the FBI were to blame has never satisfied former intelligence officials like Daniel J. Jones, who led the six-year Senate intelligence staff investigation in the aftermath of 9/11 into the CIA’s use of torture against Al Qaeda detainees.

“It has never made sense to me how the CIA requested surveillance of the meeting in Malaysia — this is after the embassy bombings and when there was a belief another attack was coming — yet nobody at the CIA officially relayed this information to the FBI, even after the CIA tracked two of the operatives to Los Angeles,” he told The Intercept.

Richard A. Clarke, counterterrorism director at the National Security Council in both the Clinton and Bush White Houses, has theorized that one explanation may come from Saudi Arabia: With the CIA prevented from conducting intelligence operations on U.S. soil, it might have turned to a friendly foreign intelligence service — the Saudis — to track the movements of the two San Diego hijackers using Bayoumi, a suspected Saudi spy.

“Nothing in the joint congressional investigation, the 9/11 Commission’s work or the CIA Inspector General’s investigation explains why the CIA hid its knowledge about these two al-Qaeda operatives,” Clarke wrote after the partial release of the 28 pages on the Saudis’ possible involvement in 2016.

But a “false flag operation that went wrong” just might explain it, Clarke said. By this theory, the CIA — rather than going to the FBI for help — might have gotten the Saudi intelligence to have Bayoumi ingratiate himself with the two would-be hijackers in Southern California in 2000 and track their movements to determine why they had come to America. And in the aftermath of 9/11, the CIA and the Saudis “would have good reason to hide it,” he said.

The lingering questions beg for answers, families of 9/11 victims say.

Kristen Breitweiser, whose husband was killed in the attacks, said in an interview that the families are fighting not just the Saudis, but their own government, which she said appears more intent on protecting an important foreign ally than aiding the victims’ families.

“We’re fed up. We want accountability and transparency,” Breitweiser said. “I want to know why the Department of Justice is protecting the Saudi kingdom. I’m being robbed of justice for the murder of my husband. It’s just a cover-up, I’m sorry to say.”

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The U.S.-led global war on terror has killed nearly 1 million people globally and cost more than $8 trillion since it began two decades ago. These staggering figures come from a landmark report issued Wednesday by Brown University’s Costs of War Project, an ongoing research effort to document the economic and human impact of post-9/11 military operations.

The report — which looks at the tolls of wars waged in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and other regions where the U.S. is militarily engaged — is the latest in a series published by the Costs of War Project and provides the most extensive public accounting to date of the consequences of open-ended U.S. conflicts in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa, referred to today as the “forever wars.”

“It’s critical we properly account for the vast and varied consequences of the many U.S. wars and counterterror operations since 9/11, as we pause and reflect on all of the lives lost,” said the project’s co-director, Neta Crawford, in a press release accompanying the report. “Our accounting goes beyond the Pentagon’s numbers because the costs of the reaction to 9/11 have rippled through the entire budget.”

The Costs of War Project’s latest estimates hold that 897,000 to 929,000 people have been killed during the wars.

The staggering economic costs of the war on terror pale in comparison to the direct human impact, measured in people killed, wounded, and driven from their homes. The Costs of War Project’s latest estimates hold that 897,000 to 929,000 people have been killed during the wars. Of those killed, 387,000 are categorized as civilians, 207,000 as members of national military and police forces, and a further 301,000 as opposition fighters killed by U.S.-led coalition troops and their allies. The report also found that around 15,000 U.S. military service members and contractors have been killed in the wars, along with a similar number of allied Western troops deployed to the conflicts and several hundred journalists and humanitarian aid workers.

The question of how many people have lost their lives in the post-9/11 conflicts has been the subject of ongoing debate, though the numbers in all cases have been extraordinarily high. Previous Costs of War studies have put death toll figures in the hundreds of thousands, an estimate tallying those directly killed by violence. According to a 2015 estimate from the Nobel Prize-winning Physicians for Social Responsibility, well over 1 million have been killed both indirectly and directly in wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan alone. The difficulty of calculating death tolls is made harder by the U.S. military’s own refusal to keep track of the number of people killed in its operations, as well as the remoteness of the regions where many of the conflicts take place.

Like its previous studies, the death toll calculated by the Costs of War Project focuses only on deaths directly caused by violence during the global war on terror and does not include “indirect deaths, namely those caused by loss of access to food, water, and/or infrastructure, war-related disease” that have resulted from the conflicts. The report’s footnotes also state that “some of the people classified as opposition fighters may actually have been civilians as well, since there are political incentives to classify the dead as militants rather than civilians” — a caveat that dovetails with the U.S. government’s own confessed practice of labeling any “military-age males” killed in its operations as combatants unless proved otherwise.

Such practices have continued across multiple administrations. A recent investigation from the military-focused news site Connecting Vets included leaked video and accounts from the 2019 drone campaign in Helmand province in Afghanistan. The story included testimony from former drone operators who said that they had been given the green light to kill anyone seen holding a walkie-talkie or wearing a tactical vest in the province, which had poor security and lacked reliable cell phone service. For some U.S. officials licensed to authorize drone strikes, frustrated by their inability to achieve strategic victory or even favorable negotiating terms with the Taliban, the “metric for success was racking up a body count.”

The Costs of War Project report states that its findings about deaths in the wars are conservative, leaving many still uncounted. Although nearly 1 million people can be said with confidence to have been killed since the global war on terror began, even that staggering figure is, in the words of Crawford, the project co-director, “likely a vast undercount of the true toll these wars have taken on human life.”

Economic Costs

The economic costs tallied by the Costs of War report include $2.3 trillion spent by the U.S. government on military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, $2.1 trillion in Iraq and Syria, and $355 billion in Somalia and other regions of Africa. An additional $1.1 trillion has been spent on domestic security measures in the United States since 2001, bringing direct expenditures from the war on terror at home and abroad to an astronomical $5.8 trillion.

Even that, however, does not represent the full expenses imposed by the wars. Tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers have returned from foreign war zones maimed and traumatized, turning many into long-term dependents of the federal government. The cost of providing disability and medical care for these veterans is likely to exceed $2.2 trillion by 2050 from its current post-9/11 total of $465 billion, bringing the total economic bill of the wars to $8 trillion.

The report compiles several different sources to give a total for how much the post-9/11 wars have cost, including appropriations for war-related expenses by the departments of Defense and State; increases to the Defense Department’s baseline operating budget; interest payments spent on borrowing; money obligated for future Veterans Affairs services; and Department of Homeland Security spending for preventing and responding to terrorist attacks. Even this thorough accounting does not give the full picture of U.S. expenditures: The report’s total figure of $8 trillion does not include money spent on war zone humanitarian assistance and economic development, nor does it factor in future interest payments that will be incurred on the massive deficit spending used to pay for the wars.

Many will find the astronomical financial cost of the global war on terror galling, not just because of how relatively little it has produced in return, but also because of the discrepancy between what the current price tag of the wars has run and what U.S. officials initially claimed would be required. The war in Iraq provides one sobering example. In September 2002, Lawrence Lindsey, then-chief economic adviser under President George W. Bush, estimated that the “upper-bound” expenses for the looming invasion and occupation would run between $100 and $200 billion. Later that year, Mitch Daniels, then-director of the Office of Management and Budget, provided an even more humble estimate of the costs, saying that war in Iraq would likely run U.S. taxpayers between $50 and $60 billion.

“Millions of lives and trillions of dollars later, who has won?”

In reality, the invasion and occupation of Iraq — just one of a number of conflicts fought by the U.S. across the world since 9/11 — has wound up costing trillions of dollars while destabilizing the Middle East and breeding secondary conflicts that have continued to draw the U.S. in at further expense and loss of life. Current events have grimly underlined how the situation has grown out of control. The recent airport terrorist attack in Afghanistan, which killed over a dozen U.S. service members and around 170 Afghans, was claimed by a local branch of the Islamic State, a terrorist group that did not exist at the start of the global war on terror and was birthed amid the chaos created by the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

The conflicts appear to have no end in sight, even as the U.S. makes plans to extricate itself from its 20-year occupation of Afghanistan.

“What have we truly accomplished in 20 years of post 9/11 wars? Millions of lives and trillions of dollars later, who has won? Who has lost, and at what price?” said Stephanie Savell, co-director of the Costs of War Project. “Twenty years from now, we’ll still be reckoning with the high societal costs of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars – long after U.S. forces are gone.”

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When Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, descended into panic as the city fell to the Taliban, Prince Wafa placed a desperate call to a State Department number set up to help people trying to flee. Wafa, an American citizen who lives in San Diego, had arrived in Afghanistan just a month before to visit his wife in Kabul. After the sudden collapse of the U.S.-backed Afghan government, he is now attempting to get her and himself out of the country to safety.

A former U.S. Army translator, Wafa, who became a U.S. citizen in 2019, is among those most endangered by the fall of the Afghan government: people who cooperated with U.S. forces and are now likely to be treated as traitors by the Taliban, Afghanistan’s new rulers. The home of Wafa’s family in the city of Herat had already been visited by longtime neighbors who turned out to be covertly working for the Taliban; the neighbors were said to be searching for him.

The abrupt departure of American troops and closure of the Kabul airport left Wafa, who fears violent retribution for his work with the U.S., stuck hiding with his wife in Kabul and looking for a way out.

When Wafa called the State Department on August 29, the deadline for the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was still expected to be two days away. An official picked up Wafa’s call and gave him instructions on what to do.

Wafa was reassured by the confident tone of the U.S. official. “They told me that they would not leave any citizen in the country, they would get everyone out,” Wafa said. “They told me to take shelter and not go to the airport and to wait for further directions on what to do.” The official took down his information and told Wafa to wait for another call that would provide directions on how to safely exit the country with his wife.

Wafa waited for a nerve-wracking 24 hours, but no call came.

“I have my passport in my hand right now, and no one has given me any way to get out.”

The next morning, he turned on the news to see that the U.S. had executed its withdrawal from the country. Wafa watched in disbelief as President Joe Biden announced that the withdrawal from Afghanistan had been successful and that American citizens who had been there were now free from danger.

In a panic, Wafa called the same State Department number he had called earlier and told the official on the line that he was, like many other U.S. citizens and green card holders he knew, still stranded in Afghanistan. “I told them President Biden is saying on the news that everyone is out, but I’m still here,” Wafa said. “I have my passport in my hand right now, and no one has given me any way to get out.”

The State Department official listened and told Wafa to wait briefly while he checked what could be done. After a few moments, the official returned with a brief, terse message. “At this time, we have no other information to share with you on steps to take,” Wafa recalled the official saying. “We can only advise you to shelter in place for the time being.”

“Thank you for calling the U.S. Department of State,” the official added, hanging up before a stunned Wafa could even reply.

Prince Wafa, far left, stands with a group of U.S. military service members in Afghanistan, with whom he served as an interpreter, in an undated photo. Wafa, whose face is obscured at his request, fears his work with the U.S. military could make him a target of the Taliban.

Courtesy: Prince Wafa

It is unclear how many U.S. citizens, green card holders, or partners of U.S. persons eligible for withdrawal are still stranded in Afghanistan. Some monitoring groups have put the total numbers into the thousands.

As for U.S. citizens, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a press conference that fewer than 200 Americans remained in Afghanistan after the end of the U.S. airlift. “We believe there are still a small number of Americans — under 200 and likely closer to 100 — who remain in Afghanistan and want to leave,” Blinken said. “We’re trying to determine exactly how many.” (The State Department did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.)

Blinken went on to suggest that some of the remaining Americans were still deciding whether to leave: “Part of the challenge with fixing a precise number is that there are longtime residents of Afghanistan who have American passports and who were trying to determine whether or not they wanted to leave.” For Wafa, there was no indecision.

On Monday, Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, said no U.S. citizens left on the last five military jets out of Afghanistan. “We maintained the ability to bring them in up until immediately before departure, but we were not able to bring any Americans out,” he said. “That activity ended probably about 12 hours before our exit, although we continued the outreach and would have been prepared to bring them on until the very last minute. But none of them made it to the airport and were able to be accommodated.”

McKenzie said that with the military engagement over, the State Department would be handling requests by Americans to leave Afghanistan. “The military phase of this operation has ended,” he said. “The diplomatic sequel to that will now begin.” McKenzie said the U.S. would negotiate with the Taliban on getting the remaining Americans out of Afghanistan.

Wafa said he would have little faith in such processes but in his desperation would take his chances with any avenue available. “I can’t trust the Taliban, they are my enemy and the enemy of all Americans,” he said. “They proved that over the last 20 years. I don’t know how the U.S. government can trust them to negotiate anything. But if I have to take the risk of them negotiating, I will do it if that is the only thing that can allow my wife and me to leave the country.”

Since his last call with the State Department, Wafa has been desperately trying to contact U.S. embassies in Qatar and Pakistan through email in an attempt to find someone who can help him and his wife escape the country. Text messages between a State Department WhatsApp number and Wafa reviewed by The Intercept also show a department official apologizing that no one had called him back with further information after his initial call. The official on WhatsApp also advised Wafa that they had no further information to give.

Wafa’s wife is an Afghan citizen who had already completed her documentation requirements to receive a U.S. spousal visa and had been waiting for a visa interview at the U.S. embassy in Kabul when the city fell to the Taliban. Foreign-born spouses of U.S. citizens in the country have previously been deemed eligible for withdrawal, though it is unclear how many are still left behind. Wafa had come to the city to visit her not long before the security situation in the country suddenly unraveled, forcing them both to go into hiding.

With the U.S. government apparently unable or unwilling to help, former U.S. military colleagues have been reaching out on his behalf to United Nations staff and others in Afghanistan to try and find a way for Wafa and his wife to leave. With Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport still closed, Wafa is now desperately looking for help to get out of the country by land, whether by crossing into Pakistan or by other means.

With the Taliban cementing their hold on power, Wafa is frightened about what will happen to him and to others, both American and Afghan, who worked with the Afghan government and its U.S. allies over the past two decades.

Above all, he is worried for his wife. “I cannot leave her here,” Wafa said. “We are afraid that when everyone else leaves the country, the Taliban will show their real face.”

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A Sunday drone strike in Kabul initially claimed by U.S. officials to have destroyed a car packed with “multiple suicide bombers” reportedly killed 10 civilians from one family, including several children.

The drone strike that hit Khwaja Burgha, a working-class residential neighborhood in Kabul, was said to have killed numerous members of the Ahmadi family, with the youngest alleged victim being a 2-year-old girl. Morgue footage shared on social media showed the burned bodies of several children, as well as photos of the victims before their deaths. One of the dead, according to members of the Ahmadi family who spoke to reporters, was a former Afghan military officer who had served as a contractor for U.S. forces, as well as a worker at a charity organization.

“The Americans said the airstrike killed Daesh members,” a neighbor of the family angrily told reporters after the strike, referring to the Islamic State. “Where is Daesh here? Were these children Daesh?”

The Defense Department and other arms of the Biden administration continued to describe the drone attack as a “successful” strike against the militant group Islamic State-Khorasan, or ISIS-K, which had taken responsibility for a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport. As reports confirmed that an innocent family had been killed, Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said that the Department of Defense is “not in a position to dispute” reports that civilians were killed, stating that the incident would be investigated.

The Kabul drone strike is just one in a long string of attacks in Afghanistan by U.S. forces and their proxies reported to have killed large numbers of civilians. Past attacks have hit families traveling in cars and buses, wedding parties, hospitals filled with patients, and groups of farmers working in fields. While the withdrawal of American troops can be described as the end to the war in Afghanistan, the Kabul strike shows how the war may simply enter a new chapter, with the U.S. striking targets with aircraft launched from faraway drone bases.

Critics of civilian casualties in the U.S. war have pointed to the lack of serious investigations on the ground into the deaths — accountability that will be even harder to come by in a remote war.

“The drone program is opaque, with extremely limited accountability for anyone involved.”

“In my experience, the bar for thorough military investigation has been so high as to discount a majority of credible incidents. What investigations do take place are neither consistent nor rigorous,” said Nick McDonell, author of “The Bodies in Person: An Account of Civilian Casualties in American Wars,” an analysis of the impact of the U.S. air wars in the Middle East. “At the same time, the military has repeatedly suppressed information on civilian casualties. The drone program is opaque, with extremely limited accountability for anyone involved.”

What separated the recent Kabul drone strike from the long pattern of reported civilian deaths was the level of immediate attention and outrage it has generated. The U.S. war in Afghanistan has mostly been waged in rural areas, away from the attention of international media. Kabul, on the other hand, is the highly populated capital and the country’s center for expatriates, nongovernmental organizations, and both Afghan as well as international journalists.

When the strike was reported, immediate video footage of the civilians who were killed in the attack began to circulate, and even international journalists were able to quickly access the attack site.

In contrast, many past strikes have gone under the radar — and continue to do so. A retaliatory strike that came immediately after the recent terrorist attack at Hamid Karzai International Airport hit rural eastern Afghanistan, allegedly killing two people: an ISIS “planner” and a “facilitator,” according to the Defense Department.

At the press briefing Monday, Kirby declined to share further information about the identities of the two people allegedly killed in that prior attack. Other than dedicated Afghanistan observers, few took notice. Journalists and rights advocates have so far not reported any details of on-the-ground investigations or if such investigations are even possible.

The opaque nature of the war in Afghanistan has made calculating accurate death tolls from U.S. operations difficult — a challenge that has been compounded by the military’s own long-standing refusal to compile statistics and verify information about who is killed in its strikes. The secretive nature of the war on terror in general, across all its various theaters of operation, coupled with military practices that devote little attention to strike investigations, makes assessing civilian impact nearly impossible.

The Pentagon initially released a statement celebrating Sunday’s strike in Kabul’s Khwaja Burgha neighborhood for having stopped what it claimed was another imminent terrorist threat against the airport. After local journalists and activists began surfacing harrowing footage of civilians killed, however, the Pentagon put out a press release stating that “it is unclear what may have happened” in the strike, claiming that there were secondary explosions from the bombing that suggested the presence of explosives on the ground. (The White House cited this explanation in its own statements on the allegations of civilian casualties.)

The Pentagon often releases footage of its airstrikes, with the intention of advertising successful attacks against alleged terrorists. In the past, some videos have been released describing successful strikes that were later revealed to have hit civilian targets. The Pentagon declined to comment to The Intercept as to whether it would release footage of the Khwaja Burgha strike in order to verify the claimed presence of secondary explosions.

The military’s own promises to investigate civilian casualty incidents have resulted in little meaningful accountability in the past.

According to its standard practices, the military does not conduct site visits to learn who was killed in its airstrikes, leaving the grueling work of finding out who died and why to independent monitoring organizations and investigative journalists who operate with far fewer resources than the Pentagon. The Washington Post reported last year that as airstrikes ramped up in the final years of the Afghanistan War, the number of strikes investigated by the military for civilian casualties plummeted. Few outside the areas impacted would have taken notice of many of the strikes at all, let alone the absence of investigations.

“The failure to properly acknowledge, investigate, or compensate civilian deaths and injuries is one constant of U.S. airstrikes.”

In those cases in which the military did launch its own inquiries, the findings were viewed with skepticism. “These investigations are nothing but advertisements to the media,” a local council official from Helmand Province in Afghanistan told the Post. “They have no mercy. They only see targets to kill.”

The Kabul airstrike, though, generated an outpouring of grief and anger among many Afghans, already reeling from the Taliban takeover of their country following the collapse of the U.S.-backed central government. Though the Pentagon has promised to hold itself accountable for such incidents, experts on the drone war say that there is little reason based on past practice to expect meaningful justice for the victims.

“The failure to properly acknowledge, investigate, or compensate civilian deaths and injuries is one constant of U.S. airstrikes, whether in recognized wars like Afghanistan, or outside of them, like in Somalia,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. “The specific reasons and the agencies involved in those failures may differ in each context — and over 20 years we’ve repeatedly seen legal and policy debates and promises by the U.S. government to do better. But that’s of little comfort to the civilians on the receiving end of American lethal force who suffer terrible harm with little or no transparency and accountability.”

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This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Amid terror concerns, the Defense Department has asked congressional staff to stop sending evacuation requests on behalf of some Afghans whose work for the U.S. during the war may now put them at risk of Taliban reprisals, according to two people familiar with the order.

The directive, issued Wednesday night by the Defense Department’s Afghanistan Non-Combatant Evacuation Operation, applies to applicants for Special Immigrant Visas, a congressional official and a U.S. military contractor told The Intercept. Among the Afghans applying for such visas are military interpreters and others who helped the U.S. government. The Intercept recently reported that the Taliban has seized biometrics devices that contain identifying information about Afghans who may have assisted coalition forces.

The Defense Department, which controls the Kabul airport, issued the guidance to congressional officials working under the House Armed Services Committee and the House Judiciary Committee, which oversees certain immigration matters.

A Judiciary Committee spokesperson said they are unaware of members receiving the notice. The Defense Department and House Armed Services Committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Biden administration has vowed to promptly evacuate Afghan allies, but the State Department reportedly faces a significant backlog of such applications. While only about 16,000 Afghan have received the special visas since 2014, the administration has identified some 50,000 applicants and their families in need of evacuation, and a congressional aide told the New York Times that far more are eligible.

The Defense Department guidance was issued amid intelligence reports warning of an imminent terror attack at the Kabul airport and just hours before a suicide bombing on Thursday morning killed dozens of Afghan civilians and 13 U.S. service members there. The Islamic State claimed responsibility.

Before Wednesday’s guidance, Afghans were already struggling with a chaotic U.S. evacuation process and a Kafkaesque immigration system. The new restrictions effectively formalize the cessation of departure opportunities for Afghans eligible to receive the special visas. It is unclear whether the guidelines are temporary or permanent.

“A decision like that doesn’t functionally change the reality for my families,” said an Army veteran helping evacuate contacts in Afghanistan. “They all have [special immigrant visa] applications in process, their names on a flight manifest, and passes that are supposed to allow them through the gates. They’re all being turned back by U.S. military security.”

“They’ve been getting turned away for days,” he added. “I don’t think the blast will change much for them, other than [to] seal the deal that they probably aren’t getting out.”

The congressional source echoed the veteran’s grim assessment. “Congressional offices and a bunch of other entities have been referring hundreds, if not thousands, of vulnerable Afghans to the State Department for refugee designation and emergency evacuation assistance, but nobody can tell us what happens after they’ve been referred or why we’re doing it. State never bothered to even acknowledge the evacuation requests.”

The military contractor shared a copy of a State Department document responding to a Special Immigration Visa application to illustrate the dysfunction. The application, acknowledged on August 16, would only result in an embassy interview over a month later — on September 28. But by that point, there may be no Americans left in Kabul to conduct one.

Congress first authorized a special immigrant status for Afghans and Iraqis who assisted U.S. armed forces as translators during the George W. Bush administration. While the program for Afghan allies was expanded in the years that followed, it was plagued by delays and challenges that have long gone unaddressed. The Intercept reported in April 2018 that one of the visa pipelines had a backlog of 58,000 applications.

The Trump White House’s notorious anti-Muslim immigration policy appears to have impeded efforts to bring attention to the issue as the administration sought to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Olivia Troye, a former homeland security adviser to Vice President Mike Pence, tweeted on August 20 that Trump adviser Stephen Miller “would peddle his racist hysteria about Iraq and Afghanistan. He & his enablers across gov’t would undermine anyone who worked on solving the [special immigrant visa] issue by devastating the system at [the Department of Homeland Security] & State.”

The post Defense Department Halts Evacuation of Afghan Visa Applicants Amid Terror Threat appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

In statements, interviews, and press conferences given since they dramatically swept into power in Kabul this week, high-ranking Taliban officials, not previously known for moderation or pragmatism, have struck a surprisingly conciliatory tone on issues of minority and women’s rights. Taliban officials have posted pictures of themselves visiting religious minorities, including Sikh and Shia Muslim communities, and issued statements claiming that Afghan women will be welcome in both the workforce and higher education under their rule. As part of a broader media blitz, a Taliban spokesman even gave an interview to an Israeli news outlet in which he gave assurances about the safety of the last Afghan Jew in Kabul, though the spokesman, Suhail Shaheen, later indicated that he had been unaware of which news outlet he had been speaking with.

These reassuring statements, born of the Taliban’s desire for international recognition, have been little comfort to those who remember the history of their last emirate. During their previous time in power in Afghanistan, from 1996 to 2001, the Taliban became international pariahs due to their brutal treatment of women and minorities, destruction of historical landmarks, and harboring of international terrorist groups. Despite recent suggestions that they have changed character, the Taliban’s insistence that they will govern according to their interpretation of Islamic law has renewed fears about what type of social order they plan to impose on the country and how women and minorities will fare under their rule.

But foreign interlocutors who have spoken with Taliban leaders say that there is an opportunity to use the group’s sincere desire for international legitimacy, as well as their need for economic support, as a means to continue to exert influence on Afghanistan’s future.

“There is a contradiction between the Taliban’s goal, a very serious goal of being recognized and accepted in international community, and their goal of implementing their idea of Islam,” an analyst who has been in contact with Taliban leadership and requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the situation told The Intercept. “They cannot do both of these things, and they know that they cannot govern Afghanistan without the support of the international community.”

“They know that they cannot govern Afghanistan without the support of the international community.”

In an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos this week, President Joe Biden indicated that the U.S. might extend its presence in Afghanistan beyond a scheduled August 31 withdrawal. Biden also said he believed that the Taliban had not changed their ideological character, despite their claims to the contrary, but suggested that the group might be willing to bend to international opinion out of necessity.

“I think they’re going through sort of an existential crisis about do they want to be recognized by the international community as being a legitimate government. I’m not sure they do,” Biden said. “But they also care about whether they have food to eat, whether they have an income [that] they can make any money and run an economy. They care about whether or not they can hold together the society that they in fact say they care so much about.”

Still, some sectors of the U.S. establishment, enraged by the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and the damning message it sends about the past two decades of nation-building, appear to be in no mood for taking a nuanced approach now. So far this week, the U.S. government has moved to freeze billions of dollars held by the Afghan government in foreign accounts, while the United Kingdom has indicated that economic sanctions against Afghanistan are on the table. During the tenure of former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who fled to the United Arab Emirates this week, the U.S. sent weekly dispatches of hard currency to Afghanistan to keep the wheels of government turning. Last week, due to instability, that shipment did not arrive.

It’s unclear whether American officials have an appetite to continue these payments now that the Taliban are in charge. In a recent discussion on Afghanistan’s financial future, Brookings Institute scholar Vanda Felbab-Brown warned that “if that money is not delivered, if it stops coming, one of the quite rapid economic effects will be that poor people will find it hard to buy food, even just basic survival on a day-to-day basis.”

Ordinary Afghans once again seem to be at dire risk of being sacrificed to foreign political priorities. But experts on the country who have dealt with the Taliban say that an approach that consists of simply cutting ties or using coercion will only generate more chaos.

“If you want to use aid conditionality as leverage over the Taliban you need a clear diplomatic strategy — threatening to cut aid before they’ve even formed a government is not how to do it. Promises of aid and recognition should be used get more concessions regarding how they govern,” said Ashley Jackson, co-director of the Centre for the Study of Armed Groups at the Overseas Development Institute and the author of “Negotiating Survival: Civilian-Insurgent Relations in Afghanistan.” “We are hearing a lot of rhetoric now about ‘holding on to gains’ regarding development in Afghanistan, but the reality is that no one will hold on to any gains if aid is cut off. They will disappear, and it won’t have been the Taliban that took them away.”

People stroll through a marketplace in Kabul, Afghanistan, now under Taliban control, on August 19, 2021.

Photo: Sayed Khodaiberdi Sadat/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Afghanistan today is economically dependent on the international community in very basic ways. A 2019 study by the World Health Organization determined that a staggering 80 percent of the country’s health care system was funded by foreign donors, with a comparable portion of the national budget as a whole also coming from abroad. Former Afghan government officials who spoke with The Intercept confirmed the extent to which the Taliban would need foreign help to continue providing basic services now that they are in power.

“If the Taliban wants to continue with the current government civil staff structure and existing services such as health, education, and other basics, let alone expand and deliver more services, they will need international aid. The government budget at the start of this year was approximately 6 billion U.S. dollars, and that was still not sufficient to generate economic growth and development,” said Shah Zaman Farahi, who served as an economist in the Afghan Ministry of Finance until last year. “The Taliban will not only need money to cover deficits but also the technical expertise of international organizations and individuals to run the government and manage economic development. In the absence of both, the population will be worse off, and their strategy to win hearts and minds of the people will fail.”

While noting that over 10 million Afghans are food insecure and several million more are internally displaced, Farahi still recommends a strategy of threatening aid withdrawals and sanctions on Afghanistan as a means of pressuring the Taliban government to modify its behavior on human rights, even if it results in a worsening of conditions in the country.

“Seizing aid will hurt common Afghans and breaks my heart. It is evil, but a necessary one,” Farahi said. “We must secure fundamental women’s rights and human rights before giving to the Taliban.”

The Taliban can also draw funds from Afghanistan’s informal economy, the size of which is not known with confidence but which some experts say could provide billions of dollars in annual revenue. Nonetheless, international organizations have warned that an abrupt cessation of foreign aid, let alone imposing international sanctions, would lead to a humanitarian catastrophe in Afghanistan, potentially breeding more radicalism and a massive refugee exodus. Organizations like UNICEF that have had a long-standing presence in Afghanistan have indicated their desire to continue programs in the country, including girls’ education, while welcoming statements from Taliban officials indicating that their operations would not be disrupted.

“When it comes to things like health care, if that is lost, Afghan women will be the ones hurt most.”

“The question of humanitarian assistance is a very important one since there are huge problems with health care access and malnutrition in Afghanistan at the moment and the Afghan people are dependent on foreign assistance. We’re currently advising donors not to cut off aid, especially since more than 75 percent of the previous government’s budget was funded by aid money,” said Heather Barr, interim co-director of the Women’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch. “If you cut off that aid, the people you punish most are not the Taliban. When it comes to things like health care, if that is lost, Afghan women will be the ones hurt most.”

Throughout its 20-year long occupation of Afghanistan, the U.S. has cited promoting women’s rights as a major justification for its presence in the country — and the issue is already emerging as a political flashpoint as the U.S. withdraws. Though the status of women in most of Afghanistan did not improve much as a result of the U.S. presence, in parts of some cities Afghan women did make significant gains that allowed them to take part in civic life. The return of the Taliban marks a potentially dire turning point for educated urban women. In an attempt to repair their reputation for misogyny, Taliban leaders today are trying to project an image of reform to both Afghans and the international community. In addition to statements that women’s rights would be respected, Taliban officials have released images of themselves meeting with female government employees and asking them to remain in their posts. In a first, a Taliban official this week even gave an on-air interview to a female Afghan television presenter.

There is reason to be skeptical about how durable these assurances will be in the long run. But given their need for international support, a trust-but-verify approach could be used to work with the Taliban in a manner that preserves the limited but important gains of the past two decades.

“The jury is out on what these statements from the Taliban that are intended to reassure everyone are supposed to mean. If what they are saying is true and they’re taking a moderate approach to things, that’s good news. But their past behavior gives reason not to be trusted,” said Barr. “The best way to figure out how sincere they are is for them to provide access that allows human rights organizations and the United Nations to monitor what is going on in the country.”

Added Barr, “It’s important for donors to think about ways they can deliver aid ethically with a Taliban government in place while avoiding funding programs that are abusive or discriminatory. It’s difficult, but I don’t think it’s impossible. Prior to 2001, lots of [nongovernmental organizations] operating in Afghanistan found ways to do it, working with local Taliban leaders and convincing them that the work they were doing was not political and was simply aimed at meeting people’s basic needs.”

A Marine checks two civilians during processing through an Evacuee Control Checkpoint (ECC) during an evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 18, 2021.

Photo: Staff Sgt. Victor Mancilla/U.S. Marine Corps

The abruptness of the Taliban’s rise to power in Afghanistan this week was shocking not just to the international community and U.S. intelligence officials but also, according to analysts who have been in touch with the group, to the Taliban themselves. The Taliban now find themselves suddenly thrust into a position of grave responsibility, left with the serious question of how to manage the affairs of an impoverished, war-stricken country, as well as their own poor relations with the outside world. Scenes of desperate Afghans attempting to flee the country on U.S. military aircraft underline how deep the challenges go. Avoiding global isolation, repairing their abysmal reputation, and stemming brain drain from the country — a concern that Taliban spokesmen have already raised in public interviews with the press — is no easy task.

A timely paper published this March by the United States Institute of Peace laid out options for dealing with a future Taliban government, leveraging precisely the group’s desire for outside legitimacy as a means of maintaining stability and basic human rights standards in the country.

“The Taliban’s quest for recognition and eventual eligibility for aid provides some of the most important leverage that other actors have over them. They reject being labeled as terrorists and seek to be recognized as a legitimate movement and, ultimately, a government or part thereof,” wrote the paper’s author, former State Department official and Afghanistan expert Barnett Rubin. “Entering a genuine political settlement would enable the Taliban to realize their goal of being internationally accepted as partners in ruling Afghanistan, but to do so they would have to make difficult decisions that they have thus far avoided.”

Among those tough decisions will be how to ensure that their vision of governing Afghanistan can be undertaken without infuriating the rest of the world, ensuring satisfactory power-sharing with other sectors of Afghan society and preventing the country from once again being used as a base for international terrorist groups.

“The major question is how to best help, or at least do the least harm, to these people that we have abandoned.”

Jackson, of the Center for the Study of Armed Groups at the Overseas Development Institute, argues that Western powers should adopt a policy of measured engagement with the new government, noting that before the Taliban took power this week, foreign powers had already been willing to pragmatically deal with the group on the ground. Above all, a policy of using incentives instead of pure coercion might lead to a situation that mitigates harm to Afghans while giving the Taliban enough of a stake in the international system to prevent them from once again becoming a destabilizing force.

“I’m not saying this approach is ideal, but everything has to be guided by what’s the least bad for Afghans at the moment. The major question is how to best help, or at least do the least harm, to these people that we have abandoned,” said Jackson. “If you want to grandstand instead, that’s great. But it’s only going to harm Afghans and lead to a replay of what we saw during the 1990s.”

The post The International Response to the Taliban’s Ascent Will Shape Afghans’ Fate appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.