U.S. seems to be getting good at killing Taliban, but why?
Friday, May 20, 2011 03:07 AM
BY GEORGIE ANNE GEYER
Columbus Dispatch
While the United States keeps trying to forget about Afghanistan, a new secret program in Afghanistan is quietly boasting of bringing about an end to the decade-long war.
The program is “kill/capture,” and it has been waged by the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, for the past year, with, according to PBS’s excellent Frontline, 3,000 operations in only the past 90 days.
Essentially, it sends special forces out in the dark of night into slumbering Afghan villages to force Taliban leaders out of their hiding places and then shoot them or capture them.
There is only one major problem: It appears rather too often that the American intelligence planners are not certain that the men they are killing or capturing are really Taliban. There is, of course, a larger question: Why are we killing and capturing Taliban when this war was supposed to be about al-Qaida?
