We weren't sure at first if this was a Team America-inspired parody, but no, it's just Fox News. On an embed with U.S. Special Forces, Fox's Greg Palkot channels Kent Brockman as he describes "a new aerial approach to nab the Taliban." Too bad all the commandos appear to be doing in the clip is nabbing Afghans for the crime of wearing the wrong-colored turbans.
This segment shows Green Berets swooping in with helicopters to stop a "suspicious vehicle" in Zabul Province. Palkot gives us the play-by-play: "When a suspicious vehicle is spotted, a Blackhawk helicopter hovers in front and blocks it! The second lands behind and out comes a team of heavily armed Green Berets and Afghans!"
I mean, it's possible these guys do great work, and Fox caught 'em on a bad day. And it's possible that there was more to the targeting, but the SF guys wanted to keep it quiet. But if a Toyota Hiace is considered suspicious merely because it's full of Afghans, then we are in big trouble. This helicopter assault – which involves a total of five aircraft – finds "no fewer than two dozen folks filling this van, plus an assortment of items, but no bad guys or bad stuff."
No problem, on to the next "takedown": Another "suspicious vehicle, with those inside sporting black turbans, similar to what the Taliban wear." And then they stop and frisk some guys on motorcycles, because militants are sometimes known to use them to get away from the roadside bombs they just planted.
Here's the kicker: "On this day, in fact, no one is taken in," Palkot says. "Commanders say the method has been effective."
Um, effective at what? Winning the support of the residents of Zabul?
While it's fun to rip on Fox for this kind of reporting, there's a more serious question here. Gen. Stanley McChrystal's strategy in Afghanistan is being sold as "population centric": It's supposed to shift emphasis away from pointless raids and refocus on protecting population centers and promoting development.
But if the latest report from Julian Barnes of the Los Angeles Times is correct, there's also a parallel push underway to step up the number of special operations raids to kill or capture Taliban leadership and dismantle their infrastructure.
"The number of raids carried out by such units as the Army's Delta Force and Navy's SEAL Team Six in Afghanistan has more than quadrupled in recent months," Barnes writes. "The teams carried out 90 raids in November, U.S. officials said, compared with 20 in May. U.S. special operations forces primarily conduct missions in eastern and southern Afghanistan."
In theory, this shift could complement higher-profile conventional efforts to protect population centers to draw away support for the Taliban. But if done inappropriately, or clumsily, that effort has as much potential to backfire as large-scale conventional sweeps.
– Nathan Hodge and Noah Shachtman
