His sons were sacrificed at point-blank range on the first night of Eid al-Adha, the elderly Abdullah watching as an American special forces officer ticked the names of the victims off his digital device. Furushgah-e Zurmat, the little store where Abdullah’s sons sold irrigation equipment in Ghazni’s bazaar, had shut down for Eid on 12 August 2019. The brothers had returned to their homes in the village of Kulalgo, and its cluster of qalas, or earth-walled compounds. A high school teacher, a college student, a farmer—11 lives ended that night, barely noticed by the world. Furushgah-e Zurmat never reopened.
This week, President Donald Trump vowed to “permanently pause migration from all Third World countries” after a former Afghan special forces operative shot dead two National Guard troops in Washington, DC. The killer’s story, though, is about American barbarism, not Afghan backwardness.
For years, Rahmanullah Lakanwal served as a soldier in a so-called “zero unit” in Kandahar—a special force trained and funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), operating outside the control of the military and civilian hierarchy. Zero units like Lakanwal’s No 03 are alleged to have been responsible for hundreds of killings—the consequences of poor intelligence, mistakes of judgement, and plain sadism.
Like almost a hundred thousand other Afghans, members of Lakanwal’s unit were evacuated to the United States before the fall of Kabul in 2021. He received asylum in April. Even his long journey across Neptune’s oceans, though, proved too little to wash the blood from Lakanwal’s mind; to bathe the reeking wounds of the soul his war left behind.
Killing on the cheap
From the outset, the US relied heavily on local militia and warlords to wage the war after 9/11, reveals the partially-declassified account of CIA’s then-chief of counter-terrorism special operations, Henry Crumpton. The use of the ethnic-Uzbek and Tajik militia of the Northern Alliance threw off the balance for the al-Qaeda leadership, which had expected a ponderous, massive American military build-up. Al-Qaeda also expected that American forces would withdraw in the face of casualties, as they had done in Somalia after the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993.
The Americans’ rapid victory, though, glossed over several problems. First, the thin presence of conventional forces—which were depleted even further when the Iraq War began in 2003—gave the Taliban and al-Qaeda room to retreat into Afghanistan. Worse, General Pervez Musharraf’s regime in Pakistan persuaded the US to let him shelter the Taliban, holding out the promise of a political settlement.
From 2006, as signs of a Taliban resurgence became evident in southern and southeastern Afghanistan, high-ranking officials such as Defence Secretary Robert Gates and army chief General David Petraeus held out offers of dialogue to the Taliban insurgents. The US also began building up troop numbers in Afghanistan and started establishing a proper Afghan army.
The lack of careful planning and a colossal willingness to waste resources meant the $90 billion effort to build military capacity never took off, an investigation by the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction later concluded. The Afghan army and police were riddled with corruption and lacked the resources needed to be an effective, independent force. And even at their high point, there were just 11,000 American troops in Afghanistan—nowhere near enough to secure a gigantic mountain nation.
From 2014, as political pressure led to cuts in American troop numbers, CIA-led forces became even more central to the holding operation in Afghanistan. Led by soldiers loaned from American special forces to the CIA, the members of the zero units were like the armies of the old warlords—except they were loyal to America, not ethnic or clan networks. Afghan recruits to the zero units were paid $700 a month—three times the salary of a soldier—directly by the CIA.
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Flaws in the wall
The most important consequence of these efforts was that state-building was passed over, as military commanders concluded they could, at relatively low cost, lock the Taliban into a losing battle of attrition. Four zero units, notionally instruments of Afghanistan’s intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), were the key building blocks of the anti-terrorism wall. Zero unit 01 operated in central Afghanistan, 02 in the east, 03 in the south, and 04 in the north. There was, in addition, the Khost Protection Force (KPF), a militia with no formal Afghan control at all.
Frequently brutal in their tactics, the zero units drew former Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s ire from the start. Large-scale civilian casualties, which often took place in nighttime raids based on inadequate or flawed intelligence, undermined his political authority. The NDS’s control over the zero units, moreover, was sometimes notional, with Afghan officers clearly understanding their dependence on the continued flow of dollars.
Estimates of the size of these forces, scholars Astri Suhrke and Antonio De Lauri have written, ranged from 3,000 to 10,000, with the KPF making up another 4,000 men. The CIA-sponsored forces were exceptionally well-equipped, generally English-speaking, and authorised to call in air support when needed.
The lack of accountability had predictable consequences. Former NDS chief Rahmatullah Nabil, the Afghan point-of-contact for the zero units, was sometimes reduced to offering blood money to the families of villagers killed in outrages. Women and children, documentation by author Kate Clark shows, were often caught up in the fighting. Following one unsuccessful raid on a Taliban commander’s home in Kunar, Clark records, zero unit personnel came under fire and called in an air strike. Twelve women and children were killed, as well as a mentally ill man.
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The stain of blood
For all the sanctimonious lectures Western powers handed out to India on its human rights record in Kashmir and Punjab, their troops killed with exceptional enthusiasm. A unit of the élite Special Air Services killed 54 unarmed people in a single, six-month tour of Afghanistan, an investigation by the BBC established.
A witness code-named N1766 has told an ongoing official investigation that he believed the official SAS policy was to “kill all males on target, whether they posed a threat or not”—a practice the soldiers called “flat-packing”.
Asked by a lawyer if the victims included individuals as young as 16, another witness replied: “Or younger, 100%.” The officer wrote in an email to his colleagues that SAS and murder were “regular bedfellows”, and that the regiment’s official combat despatches on its operations were “quite incredible”.
For their part, Australian special forces were found guilty of the extrajudicial execution of at least 39 individuals. A soldier was later held on charges of murder, but has yet to be prosecuted, while some senior commanders were relieved of their battle decorations. A compensation scheme has been announced, though it has been criticised for its opaque criteria and the lack of a mechanism to consult with victims.
There has been no similar investigation in the US, but investigative journalists have been able to identify 781 cases in which the military justice system investigated complaints of potential war crimes. These included the rape of a 14-year-old girl, who was subsequently murdered along with her family. The soldier, Steven Dale Green, committed suicide in 2014 after receiving a life sentence from a jury in Kentucky.
Law officers for the military prosecuted 151 of these cases, involving 572 alleged perpetrators. A hundred and twenty-seven personnel were convicted, but almost all with minor punishments such as extra duty, demotions, or reprimands. The single median criminal sentence awarded was just eight months.
The large-scale killing—combined with the failure to deliver either security or development—ended up hollowing out the Afghan state. Long before its forces finally collapsed in 2021, the Afghan republic had been reduced to a shell, discredited in the eyes of a people who once hoped it would bring democracy.
For America, this ought to be a moment of deep introspection, not anger.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)