AP EXCLUSIVE: US not reporting all Afghan attacks

An Army carry team marches away from a trans­fer case con­tain­ing the remains of Staff Sgt. Dick A. Lee Jr. Sun­day at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Accord­ing to the Depart­ment of Defense, Lee, 31, of Orange Park, Fla., died April 26, 2012 in Ghazni province, Afghanistan from injuries sus­tained when his vehi­cle encoun­tered an impro­vised explo­sive device. (Asso­ci­ated Press | Steve Ruark)

ROBERT BURNS

AP National Secu­rity Writer

WASHINGTON — The mil­i­tary is under-reporting the num­ber of times that Afghan sol­diers and police open fire on Amer­i­can and other for­eign troops.

The U.S.-led coali­tion rou­tinely reports each time an Amer­i­can or other for­eign sol­dier is killed by an Afghan in uni­form. But The Asso­ci­ated Press has learned it does not report insider attacks in which the Afghan wounds — or misses — his U.S. or allied tar­get. It also doesn’t report the wound­ing of troops who were attacked along­side those who were killed.

Such attacks reveal a level of mis­trust and ill will between the U.S.-led coali­tion and its Afghan coun­ter­parts in an increas­ingly unpop­u­lar war. The U.S. and its mil­i­tary part­ners are work­ing more closely with Afghan troops in prepa­ra­tion for hand­ing off secu­rity respon­si­bil­ity to them by the end of 2014.

In recent weeks an Afghan sol­dier opened fire on a group of Amer­i­can sol­diers but missed the group entirely. The Amer­i­cans quickly shot him to death. Not a word about this was reported by the Inter­na­tional Secu­rity Assis­tance Force, or ISAF, as the coali­tion is for­mally known. It was dis­closed to the AP by a U.S. offi­cial who was granted anonymity in order to give a fuller pic­ture of the “insider” problem.

ISAF also said noth­ing about last week’s attack in which two Afghan police­men in Kan­da­har province fired on U.S. sol­diers, wound­ing two. Reporters learned of it from Afghan offi­cials and from U.S. offi­cials in Wash­ing­ton. The two Afghan police­men were shot to death by the Amer­i­cans present.

Just last Wednes­day, an attack that killed a U.S. Army spe­cial forces sol­dier, Staff Sgt. Andrew T. Brit­ton­mi­halo, 25, of Simi Val­ley, Calif., also wounded three other Amer­i­can sol­diers. The death was reported by ISAF as an insider attack, but it made no men­tion of the wounded — or that an Afghan civil­ian also was killed.

The attacker was an Afghan spe­cial forces sol­dier who opened fire with a machine gun at a base in Kan­da­har province. He was killed by return fire.

That attack appar­ently was the first by a mem­ber of the Afghan spe­cial forces, who are more closely vet­ted than con­ven­tional Afghan forces and are often described by Amer­i­can offi­cials as the most effec­tive and reli­able in the Afghan military.

Coali­tion offi­cials do not dis­pute that such non-fatal attacks hap­pen, but they have not pro­vided a full accounting.

The insider threat has existed for years but has grown more deadly. Last year there were 21 fatal attacks that killed 35 coali­tion ser­vice mem­bers, accord­ing to ISAF fig­ures. That com­pares with 11 fatal attacks and 20 deaths the pre­vi­ous year. In 2007 and 2008 there were a com­bined total of four attacks and four deaths.

ISAF has released brief descrip­tions of each of the fatal attacks for 2012 but says sim­i­lar infor­ma­tion for fatal attacks in 2011 is con­sid­ered clas­si­fied and there­fore can­not be released.

Jamie Gray­beal, an ISAF spokesman in Kabul, dis­closed Mon­day in response to repeated AP requests that in addi­tion to 10 fatal insider attacks so far this year, there have been two oth­ers that resulted in no deaths or injuries, plus one attack that resulted in wounded, for a total of 13 attacks. The three non-fatal attacks had not pre­vi­ously been reported.

Gray­beal also dis­closed that in most of the 10 fatal attacks a num­ber of other ISAF troops were wounded. By pol­icy, the fact that the attacks resulted in wounded as well as a fatal­ity is not reported, he said.

Asked to explain why non-fatal insider attacks are not reported, Gray­beal said the coali­tion does not dis­close them because it does not have con­sent from all coali­tion gov­ern­ments to do so.

“All releases must be con­sis­tent with the national poli­cies of troop con­tribut­ing nations,” Gray­beal said.

Gray­beal said a new review of this year’s data showed that the 10 fatal attacks resulted in the deaths of 19 ISAF ser­vice mem­bers. His office had pre­vi­ously said the death total was 18. Most of those killed this year have been Amer­i­cans but France, Britain and other coali­tion mem­ber coun­tries also have suf­fered fatalities.

Gray­beal said each attack in 2012 and 2011 was “an iso­lated inci­dent and has its own under­ly­ing cir­cum­stances and motives.” Just last May, how­ever, an unclas­si­fied inter­nal ISAF study, called “A Cri­sis of Trust and Cul­tural Incom­pat­i­bil­ity,” con­cluded, “Such fratricide-murder inci­dents are no longer iso­lated; they reflect a grow­ing sys­temic threat.” It said many attacks stemmed from Afghan griev­ances related to cul­tural and other con­flicts with U.S. troops.

Mark Jacob­son, an inter­na­tional affairs expert at the Ger­man Mar­shall Fund in Wash­ing­ton and a for­mer deputy NATO senior civil­ian rep­re­sen­ta­tive in Afghanistan, said attacks of all types are cause for worry.

“You have to build up trust when work­ing with part­ners, and years of trust can be destroyed in just a minute,” Jacob­son said. No mat­ter what the moti­va­tion of the Afghan attacker, “it threat­ens the partnership.”

Until now there has been lit­tle pub­lic notice of non-fatal insider attacks, even though they would appear to reflect the same deadly intent as that of Afghans who man­age to suc­ceed in killing their for­eign partners.

Gen. Moham­mad Zahir Azimi, spokesman for the Afghan Defense Min­istry, said the army has tight­ened its mon­i­tor­ing of sol­diers’ activ­i­ties recently and, in some cases, taken action to stop insider attacks.

For exam­ple, “a num­ber of sol­diers” have been arrested for activ­ity that might sug­gest a plot, such as pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion on army activ­i­ties to peo­ple out­side the mil­i­tary, he said. Some have been dis­missed from the Army, but he did not pro­vide figures.

U.S. offi­cials say that in most cases the Afghans who turn their guns on their sup­posed allies are moti­vated not by sym­pa­thy for the Tal­iban or on orders from insur­gents but rather act as a result of per­sonal griev­ances against the coalition.

Posted by AP News on Apr 30 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.