Petraeus' captured 'Taliban' were
civilians By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - During his intensive initial
round of media interviews as commander in
Afghanistan in August 2010, General David Petraeus
released figures to the news media that claimed
spectacular success for raids by Special
Operations Forces (SOF): in a 90-day period from
May through July, SOF units had captured 1,355
rank-and-file Taliban, killed another 1,031, and
killed or captured 365 middle or high-ranking
Taliban.
The claims of huge numbers of
Taliban captured and killed continued through the
rest of 2010. In December, Petraeus' command said
a total of 4,100 Taliban rank and file had been
captured in the previous six months and 2,000 had
been killed.
Those figures were critical
to creating a new media narrative
hailing the success of SOF
operations as reversing what had been a losing US
strategy in Afghanistan.
But it turns out
that more than 80% of those called captured
Taliban fighters were released within days of
having been picked up, because they were found to
have been innocent civilians, according to
official US military data.
Even more were
later released from the main US detention facility
at Bagram air base called the Detention Facility
in Parwan after having their files reviewed by a
panel of military officers.
The timing of
Petraeus' claim of Taliban fighters captured or
killed, moreover, indicates that he knew that four
out of five of those he was claiming as "captured
Taliban rank and file" were not Taliban fighters
at all.
Checking on the claims of the
number of Taliban commanders and rank-and-file
killed is impossible, but the claims of Taliban
captured could be checked against official data on
admission of detainees added to Parwan.
An
Afghan detained by US or North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) forces can only be held in a
Forward Operating Base for a maximum of 14 days
before a decision must be made about whether to
release the individual or send him to Parwan for
longer-term detention.
Inter Press Service
(IPS) has now obtained an unclassified graph by
Task Force 435, the military command responsible
for detainee affairs, on Parwan's monthly intake
and release totals for 2010, which shows that only
270 detainees were admitted to that facility
during the 90-day period from May through July
2010.
That figure also includes alleged
Taliban commanders who were sent to Parwan and
whom Petraeus counted separately from the
rank-and-file figure. Thus more than four out of
every five Afghans said to have been Taliban
fighters captured during that period had been
released within two weeks as innocent civilians.
When Petraeus decided in mid-August to
release the figure of 1,355 Taliban rank-and-file
allegedly captured during the 90-day period, he
already knew that 80% or more of that total had
already been released.
Major Sunset R
Belinsky, the International Security Assistance
Force (ISAF) press officer for SOF operations,
conceded to IPS last September that the 1,355
figure applied only to "initial detentions".
Task Force 435 commander Admiral Robert
Harward confirmed in a press briefing for
Journalists November 30, 2010, that 80% of the
Afghans detained by the US military during the
entire year to that point had been released within
two weeks.
"This year, in this battle
space, approximately 5,500 individuals have been
detained," Harward said, adding the crucial fact
that "about 1,100 have come to the detention
facility in Parwan".
Harward did not
explain the discrepancy between the two figures,
however, and no journalist attending the Pentagon
briefing asked for such an explanation.
Petraeus continued to exploit media
ignorance of the discrepancy between the number of
Taliban rank and file said to have been "captured"
and the number actually sent to the detention
facility in Parwan.
In early December, the
ISAF gave Bill Roggio, a blogger for The Long War
Journal website, the figure of more than 4,100
"enemy fighters" captured from June 1 through
November 30, along with 2,000 rank-and-file
Taliban killed.
But during those six
months, only 690 individuals were sent to Parwan,
according to the Task Force 435 data - 17% of the
4,100 Taliban rank and file claimed captured as
"Taliban".
The total of 690 detainees also
includes an unknown number of commanders counted
separately by Petraeus and a large number of
detainees who were later released from Parwan.
Considering those two factors, the actual
proportion of those claimed as captured Taliban
who were found not to be part of the Taliban
organization rises to 90% or even higher.
Three hundred forty-five detainees, or 20%
of the 1,686 total number of those who were
detained in Parwan from June through November,
were released upon review of their cases,
according to the same February 5, 2011 Task Force
document obtained by IPS. The vast majority of
those released from the facility had been sent to
Parwan in June or later.
Detainees are
released from Parwan only when the evidence
against them is so obviously weak or non-existent
that US officers cannot justify continuing to hold
them, despite the fact that the detainees lack
normal procedural rights in the "non-adversarial"
hearing by the Task Force's Detainee Review.
The deliberate confusion sowed by Petraeus
by referring to anyone picked up for interrogation
as a captured rank and file Taliban was a key
element of a carefully considered strategy for
creating a more favorable image of the war.
As Associated Press reporter Kimberly
Dozier wrote in a September 3, 2010, news analysis
after an interview with Petraeus, he was very
conscious that "demonstrating progress is
difficult in a war fought in hundreds of small,
scattered engagements, where frontlines do not
move and where cities do not fall".
SOF
raids, however, could be turned into a dramatic
story line. "The mystique of elite, highly trained
commandos swooping down on an unsuspecting Taliban
leader in the dead of night plays well back home,"
wrote Dozier, "especially at a time when much of
the news from Afghanistan focuses on rising
American deaths and frustration with the Afghan
government."
Petraeus made sure the impact
of the new SOF narrative would be maximized by
presenting the total of Afghans swept up in SOF
raids as actual Taliban fighters.
The
deceptive nature of those statistics, as now
revealed by US military data, raises anew the
question of whether the statistics released by
Petraeus on killing of alleged Taliban were
similarly skewed.
Gareth Porter
is an investigative historian and journalist
specializing in US national security policy. The
paperback edition of his latest book, Perils
of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to
War in Vietnam, was published in 2006.
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