Fears of Blowback Nixed Afghan Air Strikes in 2004

The present U.S. policy in Afghanistan of using air strikes to target local Taliban leaders was rejected by the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan in early 2004 as certain to turn the broader population against the U.S. presence.

Lt. Gen. David Barno, the three-star general who commanded the Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan, the overall U.S. and coalition command for Afghanistan from October 2003 to mid-2005, recalled in an interview that he had ordered that such air strikes be halted in Afghanistan in early 2004. He said the decision did not prohibit air strikes for close support of U.S. troops in contact with the Taliban.

Gen. Barno, now retired from the Army and director of the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies at the National Defense University, said he decided to stop the use of pre-targeted air strikes in early 2004 because the civilian casualties they caused were eroding the tolerance of the Afghan population for the U.S. military presence in the country.

"I felt that civilian casualties were strategically decoupling us from our objective," said Barno. "It caused blowback that undermined our cause."

But Barno said he had viewed the Afghan population's willingness to accept U.S. troops in the country as a "bag of capital," which U.S. forces were "spending too rapidly every time we caused civilian casualties with airpower or knocked down doors or detained someone in front of their family."

After Barno left Afghanistan in 2005, air strikes aimed at killing local Taliban or al-Qaeda leaders resumed, and air strikes have come to be used routinely in military encounters with Taliban troops. The same tactic has also been used to target local al-Qaeda leaders in northwest Pakistan.

U.S. planes flew just 86 bombing missions in Afghanistan in all of 2004, but in 2007, the number of such air strikes had risen to nearly 3,000, according to U.S. Air Forces Central Command figures.

The exponential rise in bombing continued in 2008. In the two months of June and July 2008 alone, the United States dropped nearly 600,000 pounds of bombs in Afghanistan – roughly equivalent to the total tonnage dropped in all of 2006 – according to statistics collected by Marc Gerlasco of Human Rights Watch.

U.S. air strikes have generated a rapidly rising rate of civilian casualties, creating a political climate marked by increased anger toward the U.S. and NATO military presence, according to many Afghan and foreign observers.

The worst case of civilian casualties was the killing by a C-130 gunship of as many as 95 civilians, including 50 children and 19 women, according to local tribal elders and Afghan government officials, in the village of Azizabad in Herat province Aug. 22. The air attack came after U.S. Special Forces had gotten intelligence that a Taliban commander was in Azizabad and had been unable to suppress it.

That incident followed two different air strikes in eastern Afghanistan in early July, in which 69 civilians were killed, including 47 people walking to a wedding party, according to Afghan officials.

Barno's successors have justified the vastly increased use of air strikes as necessary because of the small number of ground combat troops available in Afghanistan. In May 2007, a U.S. military official told Carlotta Gall of the New York Times, "[W]ithout air, we'd need hundreds of thousands of troops."

One of the key considerations in convincing him to stop the use of pre-targeted air strikes, Barno recalled, was the tribal nature of Afghan society. "Whenever you cause civilian casualties, you are killing members of a tribe and spreading a widening circle of revenge-seeking."
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