Gen. David Petraeus releases figures; Ninety Percent Of Captured 'Taliban' Were Civilians
54 replies, posted
[IMG]http://i.huffpost.com/gen/290114/thumbs/r-AFGHANISTAN-PRISONERS-TALIBAN-large570.jpg[/IMG]
[URL]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/12/ninety-percent-of-capture_n_875660.html[/URL]
[release][B]During his intensive initial round of media interviews as commander in Afghanistan in August 2010, Gen. David Petraeus released figures to the news media that claimed spectacular success for raids by Special Operations Forces: 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.[/B]
The claims of huge numbers of Taliban captured and killed continued through the rest of 2010. In December, Petraeus’s 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 U.S. strategy in Afghanistan.
But it turns out that more than 80 percent 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 U.S. military data.
Even more were later released from the main U.S. detention facility at Bagram airbase called the Detention Facility in Parwan after having their files reviewed by a panel of military officers.
The timing of Petraeus’s 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 U.S. or 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.
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 percent or more of that total had already been released.
Major Sunset R. Belinsky, the 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 Adm. Robert Harward confirmed in a press briefing for Journalists Nov. 30, 2010 that 80 percent of the Afghans detained by the U.S. military during the entire year to that point had been released within two weeks.
“This year, in this battlespace, 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 FDIP.
In early December, ISAF gave Bill Roggio, a blogger for “The Long War Journal” website, the figure of more than 4,100 “enemy fighters” captured from Jun. 1 through Nov. 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 percent 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 organisation rises to 90 percent or even higher.
Three hundred forty-five detainees, or 20 percent 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 Feb. 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 nonexistent that U.S 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 favourable image of the war.
As Associated Press reporter Kimberly Dozier wrote in a Sep. 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 maximised 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 U.S. military data, raises anew the question of whether the statistics released by Petraeus on killing of alleged Taliban were similarly skewed.[/release]
pff starpluck you're making too much of it
it's not like they're people like you and me, they are afghans
This thread cannot end well
[QUOTE=thisispain;30444401]pff starpluck you're making too much of it
it's not like they're people like you and me, they are afghans[/QUOTE]
They ain't white like you and I!
[QUOTE=Zillamaster55;30444424]This thread cannot end well[/QUOTE]
Tempted to post that Joker gif...
I am less than surprised
[QUOTE=staticman;30444430]They ain't white like you and I!
Tempted to post that Joker gif...[/QUOTE]
Woah man, that's racist. We're talking about nationalities here, not races, jesus, you evil man.
I am [B]NOT[/B] condoning this, but it may be hard to tell Friend from Foe when the enemy has no initial uniform.
[QUOTE=Roof;30444463]Woah man, that's racist. We're talking about nationalities here, not races, jesus, you evil man.[/QUOTE]
Forgot my sarcasm tag.
Blah
This was just a PR thing, including people they ordinarily brought in for questioning along with actual Taliban fighters, right?
[QUOTE=Zillamaster55;30444487]I am [B]NOT[/B] condoning this, but it may be hard to tell Friend from Foe when the enemy has no initial uniform.[/QUOTE]
Shoot 'em all and let God sort em out
[QUOTE=JLea;30446219]Shoot 'em all and let God sort em out[/QUOTE]
Or arrest anyone suspicious and figure out if they are Taliban then, that works too.
Well a lot of the times they are consider "civilians" is when they can't find enough evidence to prove that they are Taliban, times when they find the shit for making bombs but can't make any convictions because of lack of evidence. I think we should fight the war like the Russians did and kill anyone suspected of being taliban.
I don't blame them, especially since the Taliban have no uniform and look just like civilians.
and they capture and interrogate the civilians then bring them back to where they got them
I have heard tons of people get on the military about this as if its such a horrible crime so I am going to rant about it a bit.
If anybody is trying to say they need to stop what they are doing to capture Taliban because of this high rate of captured Civilians they should go die. If you watch Hurt Locker that is actually a pretty accurate representation of how nobody knows who works for the Taliban so you have to be careful about everybody.(according to my dad who spent 6 months in Saudi and 6 months in Afghanistan.) In wars like these everybody is guilty until proven innocent and I'd rather my men be alive than some human rights activists getting on the military for arresting civilians under suspicion.
Maybe I'm over-analysing this too much.
[QUOTE=W0w00t;30450902]and they capture and interrogate the civilians then bring them back to where they got them[/QUOTE]
you say this like its alright
This was actually known about quite a while ago. When going into Afghanistan we didn't actually find any Al Qaeda members. We teamed up with a local group there and they just turned in civilians. It was of course reported that we were finding terrorists, but that wasn't true at all because the local group we teamed up with were just turning in random people to get power and money. Eventually we started backing off from this. Then we searched for terrorists in the US and it turns out that we caught over 200. And then it turns out everyone we caught was absolutely innocent and the judges threw out the cases. The best actual case they had was of two guys who had received training, but the judge still threw out the case because there was absolutely no evidence to show that they had any intentions to commit terrorism, and they had a lot of evidence. The prosecution argued that the should be kept in jail just in case they had intentions, to which the judge had quite the bad reaction to. Same thing happened in Britain and all the cases got thrown out.
Now there have been Al Qaeda members caught and they usually confess. You can read the leaks about all the Guantanamo bay prisoners. The fact of the matter is that this is similar to the red scare, the majority of people caught are innocent.
How were they supposed to know they were civilians if they didn't speak 'mercan?
[editline]14th June 2011[/editline]
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vOBL5qPxHs[/media]
Totally relevant
I only read the first part of the title, expected Petraeus action figures.
you're telling me that our war on terror is doing more damage than good?
IMPOSSIBLE
remind me again WHY we are still in there?
[QUOTE=yaik9a;30450820]Well a lot of the times they are consider "civilians" is when they can't find enough evidence to prove that they are Taliban, times when they find the shit for making bombs but can't make any convictions because of lack of evidence. I think we should fight the war like the Russians did and kill anyone suspected of being taliban.[/QUOTE]
I think we should do like they do in africa and kill the mentally disabled, starting with you.
[QUOTE=yaik9a;30450820]Well a lot of the times they are consider "civilians" is when they can't find enough evidence to prove that they are Taliban, times when they find the shit for making bombs but can't make any convictions because of lack of evidence. I think we should fight the war like the Russians did and kill anyone suspected of being taliban.[/QUOTE]
i hate you to the core of your being
Isn't he the pro-Gaddafi guy?
[QUOTE=yaik9a;30450820]Well a lot of the times they are consider "civilians" is when they can't find enough evidence to prove that they are Taliban, times when they find the shit for making bombs but can't make any convictions because of lack of evidence. I think we should fight the war like the Russians did and kill anyone suspected of being taliban.[/QUOTE]
The Einsatzgruppen called. They want their psycho back.
[img]http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/ww2-pix/einsatz2.jpg[/img]
[QUOTE=Zillamaster55;30444487]I am [B]NOT[/B] condoning this, but it may be hard to tell Friend from Foe when the enemy has no initial uniform.[/QUOTE]
Especially when the "enemy" are generally just confused tribesmen attempting to defend themselves against a completely unexplained foreign presence in their country.
This is no surprise. They brand everyone as Taliban who doesn't accept them with a warm welcome or fights because of the sudden and unapologetic appearance of armed men in their territory, and blame them for every problem in the Afghan government.
Congratulations, Mr. Petraeus. You just admitted to murdering hundreds of civilians while chasing ghosts around the mountains of a dirt hole of a country.
If there's one nation that needs to be completely stripped of its military it's the USA
Not to imply any of this is okay, but it's not like any of us on FP could do a better job managing a war against a practically unseen enemy, so lets try to keep our horses' heads out of the clouds.
[editline]herpderp[/editline]
Looking at you Cuntsman
[QUOTE]80 percent of those called captured Taliban fighters were released [B]within days of having been picked up[/B][/QUOTE]
Personally i'm just glad to see that. People will have you believe that everyone they pick up is condemned to life in Guantanamo.
[QUOTE=CommieTurtle;30460086]Not to imply any of this is okay, but it's not like any of us on FP could do a better job managing a war against a practically unseen enemy, so lets try to keep our horses' heads out of the clouds.[/QUOTE]
It's an unseen enemy because it's a nonexistent enemy.
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