Details of Task Force 373’s missions became public after incident reports were published on Wikileaks.

The actions of a US military “capture/kill” team named Task Force 373 have caused civilian deaths and have been heavily criticised.

WHEN Danny Hall and Gordon Phillips, the civilian and military directors of the US provincial reconstruction team in Nangahar Province, Afghanistan arrived for a meeting with Gul Agha Sherzai, the local governor, in mid-June 2007, they knew that they had a lot of apologising to do.

Philips had to explain why a covert US military “capture/kill” team named Task Force 373, hunting for Qari Ur-Rahman, an alleged Taliban commander given the code-name “Carbon”, had called in an AC-130 Spectre gunship and inadvertently killed seven Afghan police officers in the middle of the night.

The incident vividly demonstrated the inherent clash between two doctrines in the US war in Afghanistan: counterinsurgency (“protecting the people”) and counterterrorism (killing terrorists). Although the Barack Obama administration has given lip service to the former, the latter has been, and continues to be, the driving force in its war in Afghanistan. For Hall, a Foreign Service officer who was less than two months away from a plum assignment in London, working with the military had already proven more difficult than he expected.

It had been no less awkward for Phillips. Just a month earlier, he had personally handed over “solatia” payments – condolence payments for civilian deaths wrongfully caused by US forces – in Governor Sherzai’s presence, while condemning the act of a Taliban suicide bomber who had killed 19 civilians, setting off the incident in question. “We come here as your guests,” he told the relatives of those killed, “invited to aid in the reconstruction and improved security and governance of Nangarhar, to bring you a better life and a brighter future for you and your children. Today, as I look upon the victims and their families, I join you in mourning for your loved ones.”

Hall and Phillips were in charge of a portfolio of 33 active US reconstruction projects worth 11 million dollars in Nangahar, focused on road-building, school supplies, and an agricultural programme aimed at exporting fruits and vegetables from the province. Yet the mission of their military-led “provincial reconstruction team”, made up of civilian experts, US State Department officials and soldiers, appeared to be in direct conflict with those of the “capture/kill” team of special operations forces whose mandate was to pursue Afghans alleged to be terrorists as well as insurgent leaders.

Capture/Kill Operations

Details of some of the missions of Task Force 373 first became public as a result of more than 76,000 incident reports leaked to the public by Wikileaks, a whistleblower website. The Wikileaks data suggests that as many as 2,058 people on a secret hit list called the “Joint Prioritised Effects List” (JPEL) were considered “capture/kill” targets in Afghanistan. Task Force 373 is supposedly run out of three military bases – in Kabul, the Afghan capital, Kandahar, the country’s second largest city, and Khost Province which borders the Pakistani tribal lands. It’s possible that some of its operations also come out of Camp Marmal, the German base in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif.

Sources familiar with the programme say that the task force has its own helicopters and aircraft, notably AC-130 Spectre gunships, dedicated only to its use. Its commander appears to have been Brigadier General Raymond Palumbo, based out of the Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Palumbo, however, left Fort Bragg in mid-July 2010, shortly after General Stanley McChrystal was relieved as Afghan war commander by President Obama. The name of the new commander of the task force is not known.

In April 2007, David Adams, commander of the Khost provincial reconstruction team, was called to meet with elders from the village of Gurbuz in Khost province, who were angry about Task Force 373’s operations in their community. The incident report on Wikileaks does not indicate just what Task Force 373 did to upset Gurbuz’s elders, but the governor of Khost, Arsala Jamal, had publicly complained about Special Forces operations and civilian deaths in his province since December 2006, when five civilians were killed in a raid on Darnami village.“Let us sit together, we know our Afghan brothers, we know our culture better. With these operations we should not create more enemies. We are in a position to reduce mistakes.”

Less than a week later, a Task Force 373 team fired five rockets at a compound in Nangar Khel in Paktika Province to the south of Khost, in an attempt to kill Abu Laith al-Libi, an alleged al Qaeda member from Libya. When the US forces made it to the village, they found that Task Force 373 had destroyed an Islamic school, killing six children and grievously wounding a seventh. met with the US military the day after the raid. According to the Wikileaks incident report, Paktika Governor Akram Khapalwak “echoed the tragedy of children being killed, but stressed this could’ve been prevented had the people exposed the presence of insurgents in the area.”

PRATAP CHATTERJEE
IPS
LEHTIKUVA - AFP PHOTO - ROMEO GACAD