Way Off The Mark

By Massimo Calabresi/Washington and Tim Mcgirk/Kabul

The day started out like so many others for U.S. counterinsurgency forces in Afghanistan: monitoring the airwaves for enemy communications. From the southeastern part of the country, the U.S. picked up a signal from the phone of a small-time Taliban commander, Mullah Wazir, whose band was suspected of ambushing road crews in an effort to halt reconstruction of the pitted Kabul-to-Kandahar highway. When Wazir's phone flickered to life, the U.S. traced it to a mud-walled fortress near the town of Ghazni. The U.S. command at Bagram air base outside Kabul quickly dispatched an A-10 Warthog fighter plane, able to lay down enough fire to decimate a small army.

What the eavesdroppers had no way of knowing on Dec. 6 was that Wazir was long gone. He had left his sat-phone behind, and according to Afghan security officials, a local laborer had apparently switched it on. Outside Wazir's house, nine children were shooting marbles in the dirt. Around 10:30 a.m., villagers saw the Warthog circle once over the house, vanish behind a mountain and come roaring back, firing what villagers said were 35 explosive rounds. Each was powerful enough to destroy a tank. The children were in the pilot's field of attack. There was little left of them except the marbles, a few shredded prayer caps and small pools of blood.

Just hours earlier, U.S. forces made a similar blunder, killing six other children along with two adults, members of a village family in neighboring Paktia province. That raid was supposed to take out a powerful clergyman named Mullah Jalani, who was accused by the Pentagon of operating training camps for mujahedin, hiding a sizable arsenal inside his stockade and firing at U.S. troops with what officials call a "crew-served machine gun." But many question why Jalani had been targeted. Just two days before, he had been drinking tea and cracking jokes with the pro-U.S. governor of the provincial capital, Gardez. Special-forces teams that operate out of a fortress near Gardez maintained a hands-off policy toward Jalani. They say he might have set up illegal roadblocks to extort money from travelers, as many local commanders do, but they don't regard him as a terrorist. Later, local security officials said, U.S. forces were surprised when orders came to target Jalani. During the three-hour air and ground assault, the wall of a house collapsed on the eight victims. U.S. spokesmen said the damage was caused by secondary explosions from the hidden arsenal. But villagers told TIME that a U.S. bomb hit the wrong house, 50 yards from the militant's. And one villager said Jalani escaped in a burqa when the U.S. troops allowed women to leave his compound before bombing it.

Among the number of Afghan casualties inflicted by the U.S., the mistaken killing of 15 children stands out. "We are very angry," says Ghulab Khan, a local farmer observing the row of eight rocky graves in Paktia. The incidents are bound to inflame anger at American soldiers and the pro-U.S. President, Hamid Karzai. The deaths embarrassed U.S. military commanders struggling to bring security and normality to the country, and deepened worries among Afghan authorities and civilians about the accuracy and skill of U.S. counterinsurgency methods. "It shows the need for better coordination," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Omar Samad, "and that we need to look at the intelligence-gathering process."

Faulty intelligence has long dogged U.S. efforts to restore peace in Afghanistan. While U.S. forces are still trying to track down Osama bin Laden and the remnants of al-Qaeda, the quarry is increasingly a resurgent Taliban. Two years after the government in Kabul was routed, black-turbaned militants are again stalking the dusty villages and towns of the Pashtun heartland. High-ranking Afghan sources tell TIME that the Taliban is trying to unite with the Pashtuns under one leadership. A core of 250 Taliban veterans is recruiting a fresh generation of young zealots from the refugee camps and madrasahs in the Pakistan border tribal areas. Tragic U.S. blunders like these help recruit them. Many Afghans who are not sympathetic to the Taliban are reluctant to help U.S. forces patrol their villages, fearing the Taliban will take revenge once the humvees roll away. "Afghans are sitting on the fence," says Nick Downie, a security coordinator for aid agencies in Kabul. "They face intimidation, and they're not sure who the winner is going to be."

From the beginning of its Afghan campaign, the U.S. has relied heavily on electronic surveillance in a country where men on the ground can frequently outwit spies in the sky. The U.S. has apparently been close several times to killing the notorious warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, wanted for sponsoring attacks on foreign troops and their Afghan allies. But last week he sent a gloating videotape to a news station in the Pakistani border city of Peshawar, jauntily recounting the near misses by U.S. troops tracking him. On one occasion, he says, he survived by climbing up a mountain barely 200 yards from where U.S. soldiers were searching a house. "We were in a neighboring house and could hear the voices of the Americans," he said, "but they couldn't find us."

When U.S. forces do hook up with human informers, they are sometimes led astray. "The Americans made alliances with unsavory characters," says a top Afghan security official. He says some locals use U.S. firepower to settle old tribal scores. Special-forces teams have sometimes relied for information on warlords who had terrorized territories before the Taliban; the villagers refuse to cooperate with old enemies. At other times, intelligence relayed to U.S. agents has been deliberately tainted. An official in Karzai's office says the Afghan President told Bagram commanders that translators hired by the U.S. had been infiltrated by Taliban sympathizers. His complaint came after one of them misled U.S. forces into raiding the house of an allied tribal elder. Now U.S. garrisons try to use Afghan Americans who can speak Pashtu fluently, but they don't necessarily understand tribal feuds.

Even if Afghan officials want to help hunt down terrorists, they are woefully underequipped. An Afghan official told TIME that the U.S. experimented with giving satellite phones to provincial security chiefs earlier this year. But the officials, who hadn't been paid in months, used them to run international-call services on Uncle Sam's tab. The Americans took back the phones.

U.S. officials have apologized for the deaths of the children and promise full investigations of the circumstances. But that doesn't address the larger problem of how to gather intelligence accurate enough to target wanted terrorists and minimize innocent deaths. A senior U.S. intelligence official concedes that the problem is unsolved: Hekmatyar, bin Laden and former Taliban leader Mullah Omar are all still at large. "The results speak for themselves," the official says. And the job may only get harder. In his videotape, Hekmatyar warns his followers not to use sat phones, seeking to deny the Americans even their advantage from overhead. --With reporting by Timothy J. Burger/Washington, Ghulam Hasnain/Chaman and Rahimullah Yusufzai/Peshawar

With reporting by Timothy J. Burger/Washington, Ghulam Hasnain/Chaman and Rahimullah Yusufzai/Peshawar