Way Off the Mark

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...