Saving Afghanistan One Village At a Time (with 25 Tons of Bombs)

[Ed Jewett]

American Warrior Elite Saving Afghanistan One Village At a Time

20 01 2011 25 Tons of Bombs Wipe Afghan Town Off Map

• By Spencer Ackerman
  

An American-led military unit pulverized an Afghan village in Kandahar's Arghandab River Valley in October, after it became overrun with Taliban insurgents. It's hard to understand how turning an entire village into dust fits into America's counterinsurgency strategy which supposedly prizes the local people's loyalty above all else.
But it's the latest indication that Gen. David Petraeus, the counterinsurgency icon, is prosecuting a frustrating war with surprising levels of violence. Some observers already fear a backlash brewing in the area.
Paula Broadwell, a West Point graduate and Petraeus biographer, described the destruction of Tarok Kolache in a guest post for Tom Ricks' Foreign Policy blog. Or, at least, she described its aftermath: Nothing remains of Tarok Kolache after Lt. Col. David Flynn, commander of Combined Joint Task Force 1-320th, made a fateful decision in October.
His men had come under relentless assault from homemade bombs emanating from the village, where a Taliban "intimidation campaign [chased] the villagers out" to create a staging ground for attacking the task force. With multiple U.S. amputations the result of the Taliban hold over Tarok Kolache, Flynn's men were "terrified to go back into the pomegranate orchards to continue clearing [the area]; it seemed like certain death."
After two failed attempts at clearing the village resulted in U.S and Afghan casualties, Flynn's response was to take the village out. He ordered a mine-clearing line charge, using rocket-propelled explosives to create a path into the center of Tarok Kolache.
And that was for starters, Broadwell writes. Airstrikes from A-10s and B-1s combined with powerful ground-launched rockets on Oct. 6 to batter the village with "49,200 lbs. of ordnance" which she writes, resulted in "NO CIVCAS," meaning no civilians dead.
It seems difficult to understand how Broadwell or the 1-320th can be so confident they didn't accidentally kill civilians after subjecting Tarok Kolache to nearly 25 tons worth of bombs and rockets. The rockets alone have a blast radius of about 50 meters [164 feet], so the potential for hitting bystanders is high with every strike.
As she clarified in a debate on her Facebook wall, "In the commander's assessment, the deserted village was not worth clearing. If you lost several KIA and you might feel the same." But without entering Tarok Kolache to clear it, how could U.S. or Afghan forces know it was completely devoid of civilians?
As Broadwell tells it, the villagers understood that the United States needed to destroy their homes except when they don't. One villager "in a fit of theatrics had accused Flynn of ruining his life after the demolition."
An adviser to Hamid Karzai said that the 1-320th "caused unreasonable damage to homes and orchards and displaced a number of people." Flynn has held "reconstruction shuras" with the villagers and begun compensating villagers for their property losses, but so far the reconstruction has barely begun, three months after the destruction.
"Sure they are pissed about the loss of their mud huts," Broadwell wrote on Facebook, "but that is why the BUILD story is important here."

Broadwell writes that the operation is ultimately a success, quoting Flynn as saying "As of today, more of the local population talks to us and the government than talk to the Taliban." That appears to be good enough for higher command. Petraeus, having visited the village and allowing Flynn to personally approve reconstruction projects worth up to $1 million, told his commanders in the south to "take a similar approach to what 1-320th was doing on a grander scale as it applies to the districts north of Arghandab."
We've reached out to Petraeus' staff to get a fuller sense of what the commander of the war actually thinks about the destruction of Tarok Kolache, and will have a forthcoming post on precisely that. But Petraeus has waged a far more violent, intense fight than many expected.
Air strikes, curtailed under Gen. Stanley McChrystal, are at their highest levels since the invasion. Tankshave moved into Helmand Province, rockets batter Taliban positions in Kandahar, and throughout the east and the south Special Operations Forces conduct intense raiding operations. Petraeus rebuked Karzai when the Afghan leader urged an end to the raids.
According to Erica Gaston, an Afghanistan-based researcher with the Open Society Institute, the level of property destruction at Tarok Kolache is "extreme" compared to other operations, so it doesn't appear as if wiping out villages is standard procedure. The area is a "virtual no-go by civilian means because of the security concerns," limiting the ability of analysts, including Gaston, to independently assess what happened.
But from what she hears, destroying Tarok Kolache in order, apparently, to rebuild it has meant jeopardizing whatever buy-in local Afghans gave U.S. troops for fighting the Taliban in the Arghandab, which has been the scene of fierce fighting for months.
And that's precisely because it's not standard procedure for U.S.-led troops to destroy whole villages. "But for this, I think [NATO] would have started to get some credit for improved conduct," Gaston e-mails. "Some Kandahar elders (and I stress 'some,' not all' or even most') who had initially opposed the Kandahar operations due largely to fears that it would become another Marjah were in the last few months expressing more appreciation for ISAF conduct during these operations, saying they had driven out the Taliban and shown restraint in not harming civilians."
Perhaps that popular goodwill would have dried up anyway, Gaston continues, but "I think this property destruction has likely reset the clock on any nascent positive impressions."
It's also not like the coalition has an overflow of goodwill in the Arghandab. Last year, Army researchers warned that the locals there trust the Taliban more than Karzai.
And it's where the infamous rogue "Kill Team" from the 5th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Divisionallegedly murdered at least three Afghans in late 2009 and early 2010. The commander of the 5th Strykers, unaware of what the "Kill Team" was doing, was none too keen on the restraint urged on him by McChrystal.
For reasons like that, Josh Foust writes, not every Afghan automatically believes the U.S. military has benign intentions.
And it's worth remembering why counterinsurgency even took hold in Afghanistan among military theorists in the first place. Although counterinsurgency has always been a violent affair, the theory holds that popular sentiment will ultimately determine who wins in a guerrilla war, something that many in uniform thought was vindicated by the Iraq surge which imposes restrictions on how to use force.
Popular Afghan dissatisfaction was the reason that McChrystal and his predecessor, Gen. David McKiernan, rolled back the air strikes. McChrystal's men ultimately thought his restraint went too far. But if Tarok Kolache is to become a new model for the military in Afghanistan, then it's quite an irony for Petraeus, the military's chief counterinsurgency theorist-practitioner, to swing the pendulum in the direction of decimating whole villages.
Photo: Paula Broadwell, via Tom Ricks' blog

[Peter Lemkin]

Just as in Vietnam where famously it was said 'we had to destroy the village to save it!'......sickening photo and info....no surprise, however. They are not American and they are not lily-white nor Christian, so their lives to the troops and the USG are collectively worth only as much as any pawn in a chess game. [and the USG even has extra pawns up their sleeves] How would Americans react if someone did that to our towns or cities, one at a time?......we'd fight like the Vietnamese did and the Afghanis do. We simply can not put our heads and hearts in other's realities. We are lost in our own mythology and Imperial delusions. The military has been made into crusaders against an invented enemy. Sick stuff....which in the end will destroy America, as it has much of the rest of the World. Sad.

[David Guyatt]

I actually think this is not all that dissimilar to Nazi responses to Partisans and French Resistance during WWII, where individuals were identified as coming from a given village and that village, and its inhabitants were destroyed.

Oradour-sur-Glane comes to mind.

[Jan Klimkowski]

See the thread here for more context, and more atrocities committed for the same insane reasons.

[Peter Lemkin]

I actually think this is not all that dissimilar to Nazi responses to Partisans and French Resistance during WWII, where individuals were identified as coming from a given village and that village, and its inhabitants were destroyed.

Oradour-sur-Glane comes to mind.

Or Lidice, Czechoslovakia [in retaliation for the assassination of mass-murderer and Holocaust Head Honcho Reinhard Heydrich.
----------------------------------------------------------
The Massacre at Lidice

On June 10, 1942, the German government announced that it had destroyed the small village of Lidice, Czechoslovakia, killing every adult male and some fifty-two women. All surviving women and children were then deported to concentration camps, or if found suitable to be "Germanized", sent to the greater Reich. The Nazi's then proudly proclaimed that the village of Lidice, it's residents, and its very name, were now forever blotted from memory.

Pre-destruction view of Lidice, the barnyard in the foreground is the Horak farm where the men of the Lidice were shot down.

For centuries Lidice was an ordinary agricultural village, which belonged to the Buštehrad manor, located in a shallow valley of the Lidice Creek in the Kladno district sone 20 km west of Prague. The village is today a quiet town that lies adjacent to valleys and of meadows, with a few stone ruins of a farmhouse and church, and a striking bronze sculpture of children. This is the site of the original village, and what happened here on June 10th, 1942, shocked the entire world.

After the Munich Agreement of September 1938, Hitler's troops occupied the ethnic-German border regions of Bohemia and Moravia (the Sudetenland). Soon afterwards Hungary received territory in southern Slovakia and Ruthenia. Czechoslovakia ceased to exist in March 1939, when Hitler occupied the rest of the Czech lands, and the remaining part of Slovakia became a Nazi puppet state.

Reinhard Heydrich & Karl Hermann Frank


The Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia had tragic consequences for Lidice. In order to suppress the growing anti-Fascist resistance movement, security police chief SS Obergruppenfuhrer - Reinherd Heydrich was appointed deputy Reichs-protektor in September 1941. During his short reign of terror, 5000 anti-Fascist fighters and their helpers were imprisoned.



The courts working under martial law were kept busy and the Nazis even had people summarily executed without a trial in order to spread fear throughout the country. So many people throughout the Sudetenland died on the scaffold from Heydrich' s persecution, that he earned himself the nickname the "Hangman".



Edvard Beneš, the leader of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, together with František Moravec, head of Czechoslovak military intelligence, organized and coordinated a resistance network. Hácha, Prime Minister Eliáš, and the Czech resistance acknowledged Beneš's leadership. Active collaboration between London and the Czechoslovak home front was maintained throughout the war years.




Jan Kubis and Joseph Gabcik


The most significant act of resistance was the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich during a mission codenamed: Operation Anthropoid. Two Czech patriots, Jan Kubis and Joseph Gabcik, serving with the Polish forces in Britain, volunteered to be dropped by parachute near Prague.



Their mission, to assassinate SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. The ambush took place on May 27, 1942, as Heydrich drove to his office. Severely wounded, he was rushed to Bulovka Hospital where he died eight days later.



Soon after his death, the Nazi reprisals began when an enraged Hitler ordered Heydrich's underling SS Gruppenführer Karl Hermann Frank to initiate mass executions of the Czech populace, but Frank persuaded him first to search for the assassins.



The Germans raided 5,000 towns and villages arresting some 3,180 people, 1,344 were sentenced to be executed. This number however was far to small for Adolf Hitler who ordered severe reprisals threatening to kill 30,000 Czechs.




Members of the Schutzpolizei pose in front of the Horak family farm after its destruction


Thankfully for many Czech civilians Hitler's threat never materialized, however Karl Hermann Frank, now Secretary of State for the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, reported from Berlin that the Führer had commanded the following concerning any village implicated in the Heydrich assassination:

All adult males were to be executed.

All woman to be immediately transported to concentration camps.

All children suitable for "Germanizing" were to be placed with SS families in the Reich and raised as Germans.

The village was to be destroyed and the areal leveled.

On the morning of June 9,1942 10 trucks filled with Security Police rolled into the small town of Lidice in the Kladno district. The sleepy town had been targeted because the Gestapo in Kladno had intercepted a letter belonging to a local family by the name of Horak, who had a son in the Czech army in Britain. This letter was labeled as "suspicious" and the ensuing action resulted.




Bodies of men massacred at Lidice


All men of the village were rounded up and taken to the farmstead of the Horák family on the edge of the village. Mattresses were taken from neighboring houses where they were stood up against the wall of the Horáks' barn. Shooting of the men commenced at about 7 a.m. At first the men shot in groups of five, but the SS commanders thought the executions were proceeding too slowly and ordered that ten men be shot at a time.



By 22.00 on the 9 June 1942 Gestapo agents from Prague were joined in Kladno by two companies of police in battle-dress, and a squad of Security Police. The Security Police were under the command of SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Max Rostock, who would carry out the executions.



While the extermination squad dealt with the men, other gangs went round with cans of petrol firing the buildings. Later that evening the Germans sealed off the village.



By noon the next day, in an orchard, as John Bradley put it, 'seventeen rows of corpses in bloody clothes, with shattered skulls, brains and guts spilling out, lay on the ground in batches of ten'. These were the 173 men of the village gunned down by a German death squad tanked up on alcohol.




Post war photo of Max Rostock


After them came engineers with charges to blow up the still-standing walls, then pioneers with bulldozers who flattened the ruins, uprooted the fruit-trees, and filled in the lake, they even diverted the stream.

On the 11 June 1942 trucks carrying 30 Jews from Theresienstadt transit ghetto arrived in Lidice and began the digging of a common grave for the men executed the day before.

Ploughs were driven back and forth across the acres of rubble, so that no recognisable outline should remain, and when all was done, they put up a high barbed wire fence around the site with notices in Czech and German which read:

"Anyone approaching this fence who does not halt when challenged will be shot."

The women of Lidice were no more spared than the children of the village. A few were executed with the remaining men of Lidice in Prague on the night of the 16th of June. When the other women and the children were separated, nearly 200 women were transported to Ravensbruck; four of them, heavily pregnant, were allowed to give birth to children they would never see. After three brutal years of treatment only a handful of the Lidice women returned home.


School children from Lidice


In the village the dead were left lying where they fell and the newly brought out soon-to-be victims had to first walk past them and stand in front of them. The firing squad always took two steps back and the scene of horror repeated itself. The men were not blindfolded and were taken to the place of execution without bonds.



This spectacle continued until the afternoon hours when there were 173 dead bodies lying in the Horák farm orchard. The next day, another nineteen men who were working in a mine, along with seven women, were sent to Prague, where they were also shot.



Eighty-eight Lidice children were transported by bus to Lovosice located in the area of the former textile factory in Gneisenaustreet of Lodz on June 13, 1942.



Their arrival was announced by a telegram from Horst Boehme's Prague office which ended as follows: "these children are only bringing what they wear. No special care is desirable"




Krumey letter ordering the remaining Lidice children be sent to Lodz


The children were not sufficiently fed and were forced to sleep on cold dirt floors without blankets, they covered themselves with their coats if they had any brought one with them. Under specific orders of the camp management, no medical care was given to the children.



Shortly after their arrival in Lodz, officials from the Central Race and Settlement branch chose seven children at random to be "Germanized". Adolf Eichmann then gave the order for the murder of the remaining children on July 1, 1942.




Heinrich Himmler letter outlining discussing options for dealing with the children of Lidice


On July 2, 1942 all of the remaining 81 Lidice children were handed over to the Lodz Gestapo office, who in turn had them transported to the extermination camp at Chelmo some 70 kilometers away where they were gassed to death in Magirus gas trucks.



It is generally believed that they were killed on the day of their arrival. Out of the 105 Lidice children, 82 died in Chelmno, six died in the German Lebensborn orphanages and 17 returned back home.



After the villagers had been either shot or deported, military police ransacked the homes once again and took anything of value. All farming tools were taken and cattle were herded up. Anything of the remotest value was taken.


Description of the Massacre of Lidice as told in the Nuremberg Trials Friday, 22 February 1946:



The Village of Lidice is burned


Lidice's children were sent to families in Germany and elsewhere to be 'Germanized'. Of 104, only sixteen were ever traced. In the days that followed, Lidice was erased from the face of the earth. Even its cemetery was desecrated, its 400 graves dug up. Jewish prisoners from the camp at Terezin were brought in to shift the rubble. New roads were built and sheep set down to graze. No trace of the village remained.



A small Czech village called Ležáky was also destroyed two weeks after Lidice. Here both men and women were shot, and children were sent to concentration camps or sent to the Reich to be "Germanized".



The ruins of Lidice


The death toll resulting from the effort to avenge the death of Heydrich is estimated at 1,300. This count includes relatives of the partisans, their supporters, Czech elites suspected of disloyalty and random victims like those from Lidice. All that was left of Lidice was a great brown blotch of broken rubble, obscene and sterile amid the growing crops.



The re-establishment of the village began soon after the liberation of Czechoslovakia in May 1945. On June 3, 1945 Red Army soldiers erected a monument at the grave of the men of Lidice. The place was later declared a national cultural memorial.




Memorial to the Children of Lidice


The area also includes a statue of a woman mourning at the grave site and a statue of a mother with children located on the foundations of the original school.



By the beginning of the 1950s, more than 100 homes were built not far from the original site. Its Rose Garden became symbolic of the continuity of life and was created with a donation of 29,000 rose bushes from 32 countries.







Children from Lidice never seen again:
Josef Brehjca

Josef Bulina

Anna Bulinova
Jaroslava Bulinova
Jiri Cermak

Miloslava Cermakova

Bozena Crmakovya

Jiri Fruhaug
Karel Hejma
Frantiasek Hejma
Jaroslava Hermanova
Marie Hockova
Vara Honzikova
Marie Hockova
Bozena Honzikova
Zdenek Hronik
Bozena Hronikova
Marta Hronikova
Zdenka Hronikova
Vaclav Jadlicka
Karel Kacl
Vara Kafkova
Anna Kaimlova
Jaroslav Kobera
Vaclav Kobera
Milada Koberova
Zdenka Koberova
Hana Kovarovska
Ludmila Kovarovska
Antonin Kozel
Venceslava Krasova
Rudolf Kubela
Frantisek Kulhavy
Jaroslav Kulhavy

Miloslav Liscka
Milada Mikova
Jitka Moravcova
Vaclav Moravec
Karel Mulak
Marie Mulakova
Zdenek Muller
Antonin Nerad
Alena Nova
Milada Novotna
Antonin Pek
Emilie Pelichovska
Vaclav Pelichovska
Josef Pesek
Anna Peskova
Jirina Peskova
Miloslav Petrak
Zdenek Petrak
Jirina Petrakova
Zdenek Petrik
Marie Pitinova
Stepan Podzemaky
Vera Pruchova
Josef Prihodova
Anna Prihodova
Jaroslava Prihodovha

Venceslava Puchmeltrova
Miloslav Radosta
Vaclav Rames
Jaroslava Ramesova
Bozena Rohlova
Jirina Ruzenecka
Jiri Seje
Jirina Souckova
Marie Souckova
Miloslav Souckova
Jarmila Strakova
Ludmila Strakova
Josef Suchy
Wiroslava Syslova
Josef Sroubek
Marie Sroubkova
Jaroslava Storkova
Antonin Urban
Vera Urbanova
Josef Vandrdle
Dagmar Vesela
Karel Vlcek
Jaromir Zelenka
Ivan Zid






Sources:



The Narodni Filmovy Archiv

Lidice: The Story of a Czech Village Eduard Stehlik 2004

Nuremberg Trial Proceedings Vol. 8

The Secret History of the Czech Connection: The Czechoslovak Government in Exile in London and Buckinghamshire During the Second World War. Buckinghamshire: Neil Rees

A little village called Lidice: Story of the return of the women and children of Lidice. by Zena Irma Trinka International Book Publishers 1947

The Final Solution by G. Reitlinger Vallentine Mitchell &Co Ltd 1953.

Reinhard Heydrich by Cowdery & Vodenka published by USM Inc 1994

The Jews of Czechoslovakia. Avigdor Dagan, Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia, 1984
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