Way Off The Mark

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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.