Nato’s Commander in Kabul

Heidi Kingstone

23 May 2007

Dan McNeill, Nato’s commander in Kabul, tells Heidi Kingstone that even a ‘hard-bitten dude’ faces a struggle to make the liberated country function as an orderly society

On the coffee table is a bowl of silverfoil-wrapped Hershey’s Kisses, in the corner of his office a small pile of DVDs. They show the beheadings of four victims, illustrating the brutality of Mullah Dadullah, the iconic Taleban strategist who was recently killed in a military action, brought down, concludes the general, by his own ego.

Dadullah’s demise may well be helpful to the effort, McNeill thinks, ‘but only time will tell as to how long those effects will last. I’m a hard-bitten dude,’ he continues, ‘but these [the beheadings] are grotesque in the extreme. It’s not a Hollywood movie where some guy with biceps takes one swing with a blade. Instead the folding knife opens, and the sawing action goes on for about two minutes, blood spurting out from the neck about three, three and a half meters across the floor and the body convulsing.’

‘Many of those leaders are egotistical and will give us other opportunities,’ McNeill says. Dadullah was caught by good intelligence, hard work, analysis and a ‘bit of help from a friendly source’. There have been other opportunities that McNeill has said he has not been able to take. Last month he was given an image of a significant insurgent leader sitting in a courtyard with six other insurgents, no question of their identities. On the other side of the huge mud wall, characteristic of Afghanistan, were a group of civilians, including children.

‘We had the capacity to engage, we had the right concept, we knew exactly the outcome because of the ammunition we were going to use. There would likely be little harm to the children, but they would be traumatised, and because of that we decided not to act. This is a stupid fellow. He’ll make a mistake again, and we’ll wait him out.’

Civilian casualties loom large on the horizon; even President Karzai mentioned them recently. Every time there is ‘untoward death of a civilian’ McNeill personally gets involved. ‘I go down the line and look at what ammunition was used, what the circumstances were, if we knew there was a likelihood of damage. If we find we were doing anything wrong, we will make the adjustments, make the changes.’