America’s Longest War Takes a Deadly New Turn

The rush of incoming aircraft roused Waheeda and her sleeping family. It was long after dark on a cool spring night in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province, a Taliban stronghold of fertile valleys and stark mountains that borders Pakistan. The sound of warplanes is a familiar echo across the skies here, but it had never come so close to Waheeda’s mud-brick home. Her father, a village doctor named Nazar Gul, got up to see what was going on when the first bomb struck the family compound, killing five of her cousins. Her father was moving toward the blast site when a second bomb exploded, she says. In an instant, both of her parents and five of her sisters vanished. “It was dark and dusty, and nothing was visible,” the 14-year-old remembers. “I just knew they were all martyred.”
Two of Waheeda’s little sisters, one of them just five days old, lay crying on the ground as helicopter gunships began strafing what remained of the compound. Waheeda was hit in the leg. She wanted to flee, but it was impossible to discern a clear path out in the darkness, so she swept up her sisters and took cover under an eave of the blown-out kitchen. When the attack finally ended, Waheeda picked her way over mounds of dirt and rubble and made it to the village center to find help. Under the light of cellphones, relatives and neighbors worked past dawn to retrieve the bodies. Twelve people in all.
“When I saw my nieces and sister-in-law, I could not control myself,” Waheeda’s uncle and now guardian, Sherif Khan, recalls, breaking into sobs at the memory. “I thought that my heart would explode, but human beings have tough hearts.” The March 9th, 2019, attack was carried out by U.S. air support, the American-led NATO mission would later confirm, and had been called in by Afghan forces in an operation against the Taliban. But more than a year later, Khan has not received answers from the U.S. military as to why the home of his brother, the only doctor in the village, was targeted. He says the U.S.-led mission, Resolute Support, has made no recognition of his loss. “We Afghans are very kind and compassionate people. Our hearts are full of mercy,” he says. “But no one has come.”
We heard the same story from several families in Afghanistan while making an Al Jazeera English documentary in March, in partnership with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, an independent news organization based in London that has been tracking civilian casualties from U.S. airstrikes since 2015. Civilians are being wiped out by U.S. bombs, with zero acknowledgment made, much less an apology or compensation. It is a stark departure from the first half of the decade, when civilian deaths were declining and allegations of harm were more thoroughly examined on the ground. “Survivors are often left completely in the dark over the results of U.S. investigations into their case,” says Jessica Purkiss, a reporter with the BIJ. “This is about owning your mistakes and saying sorry. And this is about accountability, in a largely unaccountable war.”
Last year, the U.S. dropped more bombs on Afghanistan than in any year in the past decade. There were more than 1,000 civilian casualties, 700 dead and 345 wounded, from U.S. and Afghan airstrikes, the fifth year in a row airstrike casualties have risen, according to the U.N. But by the Pentagon’s tally, U.S. military operations killed only 108 civilians, a vast disparity that watchdogs who conduct on-the-ground investigations contend is part of a consistent pattern of grossly undercounting casualties. Confronted by journalists and human rights monitors with witness testimonies, visual and material evidence, and timelines of attacks that confirm U.S. military involvement, the U.S. frequently provides no response or denies responsibility. (Resolute Support officials declined our requests for an interview.)
According to the U.N., more than 35,000 Afghans have perished since it began tracking civilian casualties, in 2009. And while insurgents continue to be responsible for the vast majority of these deaths, the first half of 2019 marked a grim milestone: For the first time, the U.S. and Afghan militaries were responsible for more civilian deaths than the Taliban.
Since Donald Trump was elected in 2016 on a pledge to end endless wars, he has compensated for the drawdown of U.S. ground forces — there are around 10,000 in Afghanistan, down from a peak of more than 100,000 in 2010-11 — by loosening restrictions on airstrikes. The ramped-up air war was intended to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table with the U.S., which finally happened in February, when the two sides set conditions for the U.S. withdrawal. But experts say the airstrikes and resultant spike in civilian deaths only help the Taliban’s cause and undermine a central government the U.S. has spent billions of dollars propping up over almost two decades. In areas where “people are not politically connected, they will support whoever can keep them safest,” says Andrea Prasow, the Washington, D.C., director of Human Rights Watch. “And when the U.S. is killing civilians, it’s not the U.S. and it’s not the Afghan government that can keep them safe.”
A 2017 change in U.S. policy dictated that instead of having to be in contact with enemy combatants to call in a strike, U.S. forces can now remotely order them on areas where the Taliban is known to mix with the civilian population. The drastic spike in civilian deaths has been the predictable result. “Almost no civilian in Afghanistan has escaped being personally affected in some way by the ongoing violence,” Tadamichi Yamamoto, the U.N. special representative for Afghanistan, said in February. Trump’s gloves-off attitude was perhaps epitomized by the April 2017 dropping of the Mother of All Bombs, a $16 million, 21,600-pound explosive deployed against Islamic State fighters in Nangarhar. The U.S. military insisted it “took every precaution to avoid civilian casualties,” but within days local politicians were reporting several people killed.