'KILL/CAPTURE' PROGRAM IN AFGHANISTAN GOES INEXPLICABLY ON
WASHINGTON -- While the United States keeps trying to forget about Afghanistan -- and President Obama has quietly slipped the date for withdrawal three years ahead, from July 2011 to July 2014 -- a new secret program in Afghanistan is quietly boasting of bringing about an end to the decade-long war.
The program is "kill/capture," and it has been waged by the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, for the last year, with, according to PBS's excellent "Frontline," 3,000 operations in only the last 90 days. Essentially, it sends special forces out in the dark of night into slumbering Afghan villages to force Taliban leaders out of their hiding places and then shoot them or capture them. There is only one major problem: It appears rather too often that the American intelligence planners are not certain that the men they are killing or capturing are really Taliban. There is, of course, a larger question: Why are we killing and capturing Taliban when this war was supposed to be about al-Qaida? But we'll set that aside for the moment. Under Gen. David Petraeus, now named to be head of the CIA, the American forces have killed or captured more than 12,000 militants in the last year, according to "Frontline." Lt. Col. John Nagl, one of the officers involved in the campaign, is quoted as saying that these American troops are "getting very good at this ... almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine." The pictures of the Americans on patrol that accompany the TV show are terrifying, as they break into mud houses in the middle of the night, dragging out men who may match the pictures they carry with them to identify the Taliban -- or may not. I surely couldn't tell.