Was the Las Vegas Bombing a Case of the Afghan War Coming Home?

Master Sgt. Matthew Alan Livelsberger was clearly shaken by what he saw in Afghanistan. In the last few days of his life, the Special Forces soldier wrote in a note released by authorities, “Why did I personally do it now? I needed to cleanse my mind of the brothers I’ve lost and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took.” Livelsberger was found dead after his rental car, filled with fireworks and gas canisters, exploded in Las Vegas on New Year’s Day.

Livelsberger had also allegedly emailed a “manifesto” to military podcaster Shawn Ryan explaining his motives. (FBI Special Agent in Charge Spencer Evans told reporters that the bureau hadn’t “conclusively proven” who the email was from, though it had “strong evidence” that “lead us to believe that it was in fact him who wrote it.”) The message was rambling and fantastical, claiming that China was poised to attack the White House with antigravity drones and that Livelsberger had nearly been kidnapped by the government.

But it mentions a real incident from the war in Afghanistan. The email’s author claims to have been involved in “war crimes that were covered up during airstrikes in Nimruz province Afghanistan in 2019 by the [administration, Department of Defense, Drug Enforcement Administration] and CIA….The [United Nations] basically called these war crimes, but the administration made them disappear.”

The Nimruz airstrikes were an infamous crossover between the war on terror and the war on drugs. Working under the theory that the Taliban’s war effort was funded by “profits from narcotics,” the U.S. military announced an air campaign in November 2017 to destroy alleged “drug enterprises” under Taliban control. On May 9, 2019, warplanes bombed 30 alleged drug labs in Nimruz Province and neighboring Farah Province, killing dozens of people.

Soon afterward, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said it received “specific and detailed information” that 89 civilians were killed in the airstrikes. In a report released in October 2019, the agency was able to confirm 30 of those deaths, including several children, and found “reliable and credible information to substantiate” another 30 deaths.

The military, of course, investigated itself and found no wrongdoing.

One point of dispute between UNAMA and the U.S. military was whether workers in the drug trade should be counted as civilians. While the U.S. Department of Defense argued that the drug labs were controlled by the Taliban and therefore people inside were “lawful military targets,” UNAMA countered that many of the drug labs were “owned and operated by criminal groups” rather than the Taliban, and in any case, “involvement in illicit drug activity would not qualify as direct participation in hostilities.”

Even if the drug trade counted as Taliban military infrastructure, though, many of the victims had nothing to do with it. Out of the 30 verified dead, only 17 of them were confirmed by UNAMA to be drug workers. The UNAMA report states that “some of the targeted structures did not appear to have any connections to drug-processing activities, including residential homes.”

It’s not clear whether Livelsberger had personally “conducted targeting for these strikes,” as the email claims. At the very least, he was in Afghanistan at the time with the 10th Special Forces Group, which lost two soldiers in June 2019. The anti-drug air campaign must have stuck out as a particularly wasteful chapter in a particularly violent year.

The U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction found that the U.S. government was giving “totally exaggerated” statistics on the success of the campaign. The International Drug Policy Unit at the London School of Economics concluded in April 2019 that the U.S. military had spent millions of dollars to inflict only hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage on the drug trade.

There was a more fundamental problem to the theory of choking the Taliban by choking the drug trade. Everyone, including the Taliban and the U.S.-backed Afghan republic, sustained themselves from the opium economy, because that was the local economy in large parts of the country. Earlier in the war, U.S. troops had realized that they had to leave opium farms alone in order to gain Afghan farmers’ trust.

The sudden shift to bombing drug production was inspired by the campaign against the Islamic State group in Syria, where the U.S. military choked Islamic State funding by attacking oil smugglers. The theory was that the Taliban had a similarly vulnerable stream of revenue, Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian told The Wall Street Journal. Yet Harrigian himself admitted that the Afghan air campaign was “not working as well as in Syria.”

The oil trade in Syria was a small, lucrative, and conspicuous part of the economy that could easily be isolated and targeted. On the other hand, Afghans took the anti-drug airstrikes as an all-out attack on “the local population and their property,” according to interviews conducted by the London School of Economics.

In fact, the new Taliban government is running into similar problems today trying to stamp out the drug trade.

The U.S. military officially announced the end of “Operation Iron Tempest,” the first stage of the air campaign against drug labs, in February 2019. But the air raids continued.

The attack on Nimruz was, in fact, worse than what came before. Rather than the usual strikes on empty buildings at night, the U.S. military bombed buildings full of people during the day, and it was “the first time that UNAMA had received allegations of civilian casualties of such a scale,” according to the UNAMA report.

Two years after the Nimruz airstrikes, U.S. troops withdrew entirely and the Taliban overthrew the Afghan republic. The war on terror in Afghanistan turned out to be a massive waste of lives and resources; combining it with the war on drugs only compounded that waste. And as the tragedy in Las Vegas demonstrates, Afghans and Americans alike are still suffering.

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