“The Night Doctrine”: The Lives Lost to a U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan
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[light music]
[crickets chirping]
[owls hooting]
[Lynzy] A raid is one of the most offensive
and intrusive ways to place yourself in someone’s life.
To come to people’s homes at night
when they are most vulnerable, in such a scary way.
[helicopter engine roaring]
[gun firing] [person screaming]
And when that happens to someone who isn’t the right target,
they’re left with that trauma,
night after night, and years after.
[soft somber music]
It is a psychological strategy.
The US knew that when they used it here in Afghanistan.
For years, I’ve gone on a quest
to count the deaths from these night raids.
[light somber music]
This story is personal to me.
My name is Lynzy.
[baby laughing]
When I was two years old,
a night raid in Nangarhar Province
killed my sister and mother during the Civil War.
[guns firing] [baby crying]
My father was killed later in fighting.
[footsteps clicking]
[creature growling]
I was adopted by a British family living in Pakistan.
When I was 12 years old, I moved with them to Israel.
When I was in my early 20s,
I started looking into my biological family.
I didn’t know anything about them.
I actually tried to hire investigators
to help me look into it.
They were totally uninterested to help.
By that time, I had become a reporter in the UK,
[plane engine roaring]
so I decided to go back to my homeland
and investigate my past myself.
But what I found in Afghanistan
was bigger than anything I had imagined.
A bridge that would tie past, present, and future.
[crowd yelling]
[Reporter] Hours ago, the last American troops
left Afghanistan.
[Reporter 2] The US’s longest war is over.
[Reporter 3] 20 years since it began on October, 2001.
[light music]
[plane crashing]
[Lynzy] In 2001, everything changed.
Days after September 11th,
the first CIA officers touched down in Afghanistan,
targeting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.
[drone whirring]
Over the past two decades,
that strategy largely consisted of drone strikes,
air strikes, and night raids.
I was in Nangarhar, looking into my personal story,
when I met a widow named Mahzala.
She told me the story of how masked soldiers
came to her home in the middle of the night
and shot and killed her only two sons.
I knew what it felt to live without knowing
why your family had been killed.
[gun firing]
That it is not possible to move on
from the grief without answers.
I felt this huge responsibility
to look into what had happened to Mahzala and others.
I learned that the raid on her home
was conducted by elite squadrons of Afghan Special Forces
backed by the United States.
They were known as the Zero units.
[gun firing]
[person screaming]
Over the last four years of the war,
these units killed hundreds of civilians.
They were overseen by the CIA,
and their targets were selected using American intelligence.
I spent more than three years
investigating hundreds of night raid operations.
[light music]
I also spent six months trying to find soldiers
from inside the unit to talk to.
I really wanted to find out how they felt
when civilians were killed in these operations.
[people speaking indistinctly]
I met two Afghan soldiers
who I’ll call Baseer and Hadi for their safety.
They fought in this unit for years.
[propellers whirring] [light dramatic music]
[Baseer speaking foreign language]
[phone ringing]
[Baseer speaking foreign language]
[Hadi speaking foreign language]
[Baseer speaking foreign language]
[dramatic music]
[wind blowing]
[Lynzy] In 2019, Baseer and Hadi told me
about a night raid in Logar Province
when they killed four members of a family.
I’d later speak to the surviving grandfather and uncle.
This was not the first time they had killed civilians,
but it was this raid that felt
like a turning point in their lives.
[guns firing]
[person screaming]
[Ghulam speaking foreign language]
[gun firing]
[Ghulam speaking foreign language]
[Matiullah speaking foreign language]
[propellers whirring]
[light dramatic music]
[Baseer speaking foreign language]
[Matiullah speaking foreign language]
[light music]
[Baseer speaking foreign language]
[plane engine roaring]
[bombs exploding]
[Baseer speaking foreign language]
[somber music]
[Reporter 4] What you are looking at is Taliban fighters
inside the Presidential palace.
[Lynzy] I felt so helpless
when the Taliban took control of the country again.
After everything I’ve seen in the last four years,
I wonder why the US has never been held accountable
for the damage they leave behind.
[somber music]
Everyone in Afghanistan has a shared pain
about what these raids have left behind,
whether that’s the families or the soldiers conducting them.
[water splashing]
Night raids failed in Vietnam, Iraq, and now Afghanistan.
Who will suffer when America uses the same failed tactic
in their next war?
[somber music]
I didn’t finish finding all my answers, that’s true.
But I did get some closure through Baseer, strangely enough.
His remorse helped loosen something in me.
Although he didn’t kill my family, he is a perpetrator.
If Baseer was brave enough to speak
about the pain he had caused,
I could also share my own story
and talk about the pain I had buried.
I could also start healing.
[somber music] [people yelling]
[light somber music]
[light somber music continues]
[light somber music continues]
[light somber music continues]
[somber music]
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