Qala-e-Gangi

This post is one in a series on the lessons of the Afghan War.  The posts are indexed in this post of 02/20/06.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the prison uprising at Qala-e-Gangi near the city of Mazar-e-Sharif in northern Afghanistan was the first incident in the Afghan War that made me wonder whether the US approach being taken there might have some serious problems. (Thre are a number of alternative English spellings: Qala Janghi, Qala Jangi, Qala-e Janghi, Qala-e-Jangi, Qalai Jhanqi; it means "House of War".)

One aspect of that incident on which I want to focus in particular is the death of Mike Spann, the CIA agent who became the first American death in the Afghan War.  I have mentioned the prison uprising before here at Old Hickory's Weblog, as in posts of 06/13/04 and 12/08/04.  It has come to my attention that one aspect of the incident has been widely reported in a misleading way.  And my previous posts reflected that erroneous reporting.

That aspect is reflecting in this article and its title, which I'll be discussing more specifically in later posts: Afghan prisoners told FBI about death of CIA officer: Captives said Spann may have sparked riot that killed him by San Francisco Chronicle 12/08/04 (original in the Los Angeles Times is behing the paid archive wall now).

The incident at Qala-e Gangi bagan in late November 2001.  Uzbek Gen. Dostum's forces, part of the US-backed Northern Alliance, had surrounded a group of around 5,000 pro-Taliban fighters in the city of Konduz.  The group included both Afghans and foreigners, including Pakistanis and, as we now know, the "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh.

The exact nature of Lindh's affiliations are hard to describe.  He was fighting on behalf of the Taliban, but he was not part of the the Taliban army per se. Lindh first received military training for jihad at a camp run by the Pakistan-backed Harkat ul Mujaheddin group, described  by Mark Kukis in "My Heart Became Attached" (2003) as "one of the most violent jihadi groups". Harkat ul Mujaheddin had become notorious for the kidnapping and beheading of a Norwegian hiker in Kashmir in themid-1990s.

When he travelled from Pakistan to Afghanistan, Lindh was sent to an Afghan training camp in June 2001. It was here that his training group was addressed several times by Osama bin Laden. When he was finally deployed to fight as a jihadist in late summer 2001, just prior to the 9/11 attacks, he was part of a group of foreign fighters known as al-Ansar, i.e., "the helpers", who fought under Taliban command.

Dostum's forces were openly threatening to kill all the foreign fighters even after they surrendered.  But surrender negotiations extracted a promise from Dostum that even the al-Ansar prisoners' lives would be spared.

When they surrendered, the Taliban and foreign fighters were taken to the Qala-e-Gangi fort, where they were to be held.  The fort was not set up to hold prisoners, and there were stores of weapons and ammunition in the fort.

Destum's reputation for brutality was well known to the US military.  According to an anonymous Green Beret sargeant quoted by Richard Mahoney in Getting Away with Murder (2004), the Green Beret (Special Forces) TIGER 01 A-team with which Mike Spann had linked up in late October were given the following guidance, which explicitly addressed the need to avoid collaboration with any war crimes committed by Dostum's forces.  Presumably, Mahoney is quoting the sargeant's own interpretation of the order rather than the exact text of the order (which I'm going to assume won't violate AOL's terms of services to quote):

Find and support Dostum, stay with him and help. Go with him wherever he goes - if he wants to take over Kabul, go. If he wants to take over the whole f***ing country, that's fine too. If he starts mass executions on the way, call HQ and advise, maybe exfil [leave the country] if you can't rein him in. (my emphasis)

In the middle of November, Spann was assigned with fellow CIA officer Dave Tyson to interrogate prisoners in the Mazar-e-Sharif area.

On Saturday, November 25, 2001,Spann and Tyson were in the Qala-e-Gangi fortress interrogating prisoners.  One of them was Lindh, although they did not persuade him to reveal his identity at that point during their brief interview.

While the two CIA men were interrogating prisoners in an open courtyard, a prisoner revolt broke out. Spann was killed within the first few minutes.  Tyson, along with two doctors and a Northern Alliance officer who were with them, escaped to safety.

It took Dostum's forces, amply assisted by US and British support and firepower, a week to put down the uprising and for the final holdouts to surrenders, which occurred on the following Saturday, December 1.  The incident received extensive coverage, because a number of Western journalists were present at Qala-e-Gangi, and because a videotape had been made of Spann's and Tyson's interrogations, a tape that included the opening moments of the uprising.  And also because one of the surviving prisoners was the American John Walker Lindh.

What I found striking at the time was that prior to the surrender at Konduz, Dostun's forces had threatened to murder all the foreign fighters.  And, in fact, most of the foreign fighters were killed within days of their surrender, killed off in the suppression of the revolt with the active help of British and American forces.  Had the mannerof making war that Rumsfeld's Pentagon adopted in Afghanistan allowed the US to be jacked around by Afghan warlords?

The question is by no means purely historical or "academic".  The recently-published 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) indicates that the changes being planned to increase the military's counterinsurgency capabilities assume that something like the Afghan approach is anticipated for the future.  That approach was central to Rumsfeld's version of "defense transformation", and also to the unbounded faith of the "neoconservatives" in the ability of US military force to be the decisive element of diplomacy all over the world.

So its strengths and weaknesses are important to understand realistically.