Once the revellers started to flee, however, the AC-130 appears to have opened fire on them with lighter-gauge weapons: presumably the 25 mm and 40 mm machine guns.
Ahmed Jan Agha, who had been playing drums in the men’s section of the party, thought the house was under rocket attack. ‘The aeroplanes were shooting rockets at the people running away. They were chasing us.’ His account was later corroborated by children who survived, who all told of running into the wheat fields around town to hide, hotly pursued by machine-gun or rocket fire.
Fifteen-year-old Sadiqua made it to a dried-up riverbed outside the house, but the AC-130’s gunners caught up with her. She was shot in both legs.
The first on the scene was Uncle Anwar’s brother Abdul Bari. By the time he reached the house at around 2 a.m., the actual shooting was over, but women and children were still running around screaming, and the compound remained shrouded in a dust cloud.
He ran into the house, saw the extent of the damage and started carrying bodies – the wounded and the dead – into the garden. Shortly afterwards, however, US Special Forces arrived alongside the building and instructed him to stop. When he refused, they arrested him.
‘They blindfolded us. Handcuffed us,’ he says. ‘People who had been arrested by the Americans were begging for them to help the wounded. We weren’t begging for our own release, but begging to help the wounded people.’
According to Bari, they were lined up and told not to move. Ignoring requests to treat the wounded first, the troops instead started interrogating the surviving wedding guests.
‘They asked us if we knew Mullah Omar or Mullah Barader.’ Bari thought the question was senseless. ‘Of course, everybody knew Mullah Barader: he was from this district.’ Deciding that discretion was the better part of valour, Bari denied knowing the mullah. ‘I said, “No, I don’t know him.”’
Abdul Malik, spending the night at his uncle’s house twenty minutes away, was woken by the sound of guns. He realized the attack was somewhere in the direction of his family home, but it never occurred to him that his own engagement party had been the target.
He tried listening to his police radio for news, but all he got was white noise; apparently the signal was being jammed by the US Special Forces. As day broke, however, the radio crackled back to life and he learned that his house had been damaged. At that moment, a friend hammered on the door.
‘Your house,’ he told the groom. ‘It’s been bombed.’
Malik and his friend started to run.
Uncle Anwar also had no idea the family home had been hit. Around 7 a.m., he received an emergency visit from a couple of neighbours who told him he needed to come right away. There had been an attack, they said. A rocket had landed on his house. Two children had been hurt.
‘I didn’t believe it,’ he says. ‘There were lots of people there. If a rocket had hit the house, more would have been hurt.’
As his car approached Deh Rawood, it was obvious the devastation was far greater than his friends had admitted.
‘Before reaching the village I could see that injured bodies were being moved.’
Anwar got out of the car and started to run, but was stopped by another friend carrying the body of a young woman. It was his niece.
Cars crammed full of injured partygoers sped past – and the scale of the destruction became clear.
By the time Abdul Malik arrived at the scene, the entire compound had been cordoned off by the Americans and helicopters were ferrying the wounded to field hospitals. At nine or ten o’clock, when all of the wounded were on their way to hospital – by car or helicopter – the clearing-up process began.
To those unfamiliar with the notion of ‘target saturation’, as practised by a US Air Force SPECTRE gunship, the extent of the damage was flabbergasting.
‘We had four cows, one dog, one donkey and many chickens,’ says Malik. ‘They were all killed.’
Abdul Bari was dumbstruck: ‘Everything was dead. Human beings, animals, sheep, cows – everything.’
Even the family cat was killed.
Many of the corpses were unrecognizable.
‘A few of the dead children, we never found their bodies. We just collected the bits of meat and put them all into one grave.’
Uncle Anwar helped. ‘We collected parts of human bodies that were just scattered everywhere. There was blood everywhere. So we cleaned up the blood, and collected all the human meat.’
Jan Agha brought an old blanket from his home and used it to carry the corpses. ‘The wounded and the dead were lying everywhere,’ he says. ‘Pieces of human bodies were in the trees, on the ground, in all the corners.’ Agha set about lifting the bodies from the house. ‘I carried one little kid who I thought was asleep. But she was dead.’
When news broke in the United States that its military appeared inadvertently to have killed a large number of civilians in Afghanistan, the Pentagon struggled to keep pace. Initially, spokesmen said the incident might have been the result of a 2,000 lb bomb that had gone astray.
‘At least one bomb was errant,’ a spokesman admitted of Operation Full Throttle on 1 July. ‘We don’t know where it fell.’
The next day more detail was added. A B-52 had dropped seven precision-guided munitions in Oruzgan on the night of 30 June. One had missed its target by 3,000 yards.
‘It does seem as though something went wrong,’ Paul Wolfowitz told National Public Radio. ‘But we’re still trying to get to the bottom of it.’
One Pentagon spokesman suggested that the civilian casualties might have been ‘the result of anti-aircraft artillery’, implying the villagers had shot themselves.
The image was one of confusion. ‘I read in the paper that there was a wedding,’ Rumsfeld told the Press. ‘But I just don’t have the facts.’
Asked about the incident, Pentagon spokesperson Torie Clarke replied that ‘there isn’t any reason to believe or disbelieve anything’.
Rumsfeld, however, appears to have had a reason to believe something: ‘Taliban and al-Qaeda training manuals have explained to people how to do disinformation and how to handle those types of things to discredit the United States.’
Certainly, the Pentagon believed the casualty figures coming out of Afghanistan were inflated. They were right. Initial reports indicated that 250 civilians were dead and 600 wounded. The actual figure was 48 dead, 117 wounded.
Special Forces returning from Operation Full Throttle were appalled. They had been on a difficult, dangerous, night-time operation. A clandestine raid had been compromised. It was entirely possible they had walked into a trap. They were lucky to have made it back alive. Now they were hijacked by the liberal press – no doubt the same liberal press that had predicted the failure of the invasion in the first place – and accused of massacring innocent civilians.
‘Something,’ one wrote later, ‘was fishy’
General Dan McNeill, Commander of US forces in Afghanistan, was also confused as to what had happened. He summoned one of the Special Force officers who had taken part. ‘Describe for me directly what happened,’ he said, ‘what the situation was.’ The case was complicated. ‘It was awfully difficult,’ General McNeill recalls today, ‘but after about a day I began to realize that I could put it all together and understand what had occurred.’
Aircraft providing cover for the ground troops over Deh Rawood had been engaged from the ground, apparently with anti-aircraft artillery. Assuming they were under attack, they had returned fire. One of the AC-130s had targeted the wedding party, where, apparently, men were firing rifles into the sky to celebrate.
General McNeill flew straight to Oruzgan to meet the groom’s relatives, including Uncle Anwar. He listened to their account of what happened and apologized on behalf of the US military.
Not everyone was in an apologetic mood. Visiting Afghanistan in mid-July Paul Wolfowitz, the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, was told that President Karzai was livid and that the US embassy had dispatched a
Pashtun-speaking officer to attend the consequent funerals and to apologize for the targeting error.
‘Why do you assume there was a wedding party?’ the undersecretary asked his briefer. ‘How do you know?’ Wolfowitz suggested that the US response was misguided. ‘We shouldn’t be so passive in apologizing. We should be more confident.’
A similar response had come the previous February when Donald Rumsfeld had suggested that another friendly-fire incident was not all it seemed. ‘Let’s not call them innocents,’ he told the Press of a group of Afghans shot by US forces. ‘We don’t know quite what they were.’
Like Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld also appears to have questioned whether the wedding-party story was true, referring to the incident at one point as ‘the so-called wedding’. Why assume civilian casualties were innocent? Wasn’t there a possibility they might have been guilty?
Publicly, however, Paul Wolfowitz was contrite. ‘All the evidence suggests that innocent people were killed there . . . we deeply regret that. Unfortunately, sometimes mistakes are made.’ Investigations were underway.
Two weeks later, while the US military was conducting an internal investigation, the United Nations came up with a document of its own: a ‘quick, preliminary report’ compiled by staff who had visited Deh Rawood on 1 July. To the horror of the US military, it was leaked to the Press. Not only had the United States underestimated the number of dead and wounded in the town, the report suggested, there was no evidence to indicate the AC-130 had been targeted at all, while there was an indication that the US military had ‘cleaned the area’, removing evidence of the incident, including shrapnel, bullets and blood. The UN report also highlighted discrepancies in the American account of the attack. A further, fuller, report would be released within forty-eight hours.
It never was. The following day the United Nations changed its tune: the report would remain classified, to be shared only with the US and Afghan governments. According to a UN spokesman, the organization had never been involved in an inquiry at all, but was simply ‘responding to humanitarian needs’. Commentators assumed the decision to withold the document was the result of pressure from the US administration – not keen, apparently, to have its account of events challenged. More of the same could be expected.
‘The more it drags on, the harder it is to prove,’ one UN official told the Times. ‘Probably the people investigating want it to go slowly and die away’
Perhaps there was some truth in this. James Dobbins, the US Special Envoy at the time, writes of the Pentagon’s ‘deny first, investigate later’ attitude. Dobbins had witnessed an example of it first-hand, following the misguided US air strike on the Gardez convoy attending the presidential inauguration in December 2001. Sharing a car with General Tommy Franks on the way to the ceremony, Dobbins had mentioned there had been an incident. Franks had not heard about it, but the moment he was confronted by the Press he denied categorically it had taken place.
Dobbins was taken aback: ‘I don’t think this was necessarily a policy. I think it was a tropism,’ he says today ‘but I do think that it wasn’t until the fourth or fifth time that this happened that they began to recognize that that particular tropism was impinging badly on their credibility’
It would be easy at this point to blame the Green Berets, the Navy SEALs and the crew of the AC-130 aircraft for what happened at Deh Rawood. The evidence seems clear-cut. They shot people. The wrong people. Lots of them. No Taliban leaders were killed or caught. Worse, no evidence was ever found of the artillery piece that the AC-130 crew claimed had engaged it. Those who have seen the gun-tape footage from the aircraft swear that it shows enemy fire, but these tapes have never been released. US officials are insistent that, while there was background noise about various Taliban officials in the region, there was no concrete intelligence regarding Mullah Barader. Certainly, they didn’t know there was a wedding party.
Over the next few years, this pattern would repeat itself: contaminated intelligence, Special Forces on the ground, aerial strikes, civilian casualties. Often the targets were wedding ceremonies. Apparently, coalition troops, unfamiliar with the Afghan custom of shooting during celebrations, mistook it for hostile fire and responded.
‘I’d say it’s about time we gave up on the wedding-party bombing strategy,’ wrote one satirical blogger in 2008. ‘We’ve been following it in Afghanistan for over six years now, and things are worse in that country than when we first started bombing its weddings.’
To blame the military for these incidents, however, is to miss the point. The wedding-party attack is not simply the story of a bunch of trigger-happy cowboys; it represents the end result of a long chain of decisions. At the head of these was the adoption of a ‘light footprint’ by the White House. The decision not to commit large numbers of troops meant less accurate intelligence. Operations had to be conducted by small groups of Special Forces, often in unfamiliar regions. They needed to defend themselves. If they got into trouble on the ground, aerial bombardment followed. Mistakes were inevitable. When these mistakes were made on board weapons platforms as lethal as AC-130 gunships, results were always going to be tragic.
Throughout the initial period in Afghanistan, the US administration downplayed any suggestion things were going wrong. The Pentagon vetoed the idea of expanding peacekeeping operations beyond the country’s main cities, even when they were to be staffed by other NATO countries. European diplomats fiercely disagreed. The Afghans, they argued, needed to see that things had changed for the better; they needed hard evidence. Above all, if the Karzai administration was to govern with any real authority, it needed security. The best way to arrange this was to expand peacekeeping operations – and fast.
‘There was a moment in Afghanistan which lasted – I don’t know how long – three months maybe, possibly a bit longer,’ says a British diplomat, ‘in which people knew that the old order had disappeared, but they didn’t know what the new order was. And at that moment you could impose something.’
The suggestion was forwarded to the United States both from inside the administration (Special Envoy Dobbins was all for it) and outside. The answer was unequivocal: ‘They were not remotely interested.’ According to Rumsfeld, those who thought more troops were necessary in Afghanistan were ‘mostly on editorial boards, columnists and at the UN’.
In terms of manpower, the Afghan campaign would prove to be one of the worst-resourced stabilization operations in modern history. In Kosovo the international community had committed 19 troops per 1,000 people; in Afghanistan the figure was 1.6 troops per 1,000. Despite George W. Bush’s repeated invocation of the Marshall Plan, when it came to troop levels the Afghanistan mission ranked lower than some of the international community’s most notable failures: Somalia (5.7 troops per 1,000) and Haiti (2.9 per 1,000).
At the time of the wedding-party incident, the United States had 8,000 troops in Afghanistan: a quarter of the number of uniformed police officers in New York City. Bosnia had received 2,000 civilian police officers to assist with law enforcement; Kosovo 5,000. Afghanistan received none. Attempts to rebuild the country’s police, military and judicial systems floundered: the countries assigned responsibility for them made little effort.
‘None of the countries, including the United States, did what they were supposed to do in the way they were supposed to do it,’ says Robert Finn, America’s first ambassador to Afghanistan for more than twenty years. ‘They were all individuals with their own failings, and there was no one in charge who could go around and kick them in the butt and say, “You’re not doing it right.”’ NATO members sent troops from time to time, but often restricted the roles they were allowed to play. No one was keen on putting their soldiers in harm’s way.
The result was an inability to provide security of any sort in the countryside. Special Forces could clear and sweep villages, arrest and shoot Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters, but they were unable to stay for long. All the Taliban had to do was slip away when coalition forc
es arrived, then return once they left. As Mullah Omar famously stated: ‘The Americans may have the clocks. But we have the time.’
Instability in the countryside made civilian operations to rebuild the country dangerous. Progress slowed down. Afghans, waiting for roads and civilian infrastructure to be rebuilt, became disaffected – and open to recruitment from Taliban members, who started flowing back over the border from Pakistan and bombing coalition troops. More attacks meant less reconstruction, which fed popular disaffection and led to further attacks. The military blamed the civilians for not repairing the country’s infrastructure. The civilians blamed the military: if the countryside wasn’t safe, how were they supposed to get the place up and running again?
Money was another issue. The initial sum allocated to Afghanistan by the United States in the winter of 2001 was no higher that it would have been had the country still been under Taliban control – a source of surprise to James Dobbins.
‘The idea that we’d liberated a country,’ he recalls, ‘and the aid budget was the same as it was before we’d liberated it struck me as bizarre.’
The international community did little better. Generally, about half the money requested for Afghan reconstruction was actually pledged. Of that half, half never arrived. The money that did often came in the form of credits with donor countries and was administered through middlemen, who took commissions along the way. Financially, the operation was a disaster. Funding for reconstruction in Kosovo in the first year had been $577 per civilian; Afghanistan received just $60. And yet reconstruction in Afghanistan was clearly going to be harder than it had been in the former Yugoslavia.
‘In Bosnia they had these nice, tidy Bosnian brick houses, so you just had to go in and paint them and reconnect the plumbing and the electricity and put a roof on and you were back in business,’ says Finn. ‘In Afghanistan we were starting from scratch.’
Lack of troops, and visible progress, meant that all most Afghans saw of foreign forces in their country was when a bunch of Special Forces kicked down the door and arrested someone – or, worse, started shooting and killed civilians. No Special Forces, no matter how well trained, were going to fix Afghanistan without proper support. This was a problem that SPECTRE gunships were not going to solve.
A History of the World Since 9/11 Page 12