Conventional wisdom dictates that night raids in Afghanistan are a bad idea. They’re probably a bad idea anywhere that people would object to being woken from a dead sleep by men with guns who seem to be pissed about people you know. So unless you’re kicking doors down in Insomniastan, you’re going to get a less than warm welcome.
In Afghanistan, American night raids were one of the reasons His Hamidness got a case of presidential ass when it came to dealing with foreign troops wandering around the countryside in the graveyard of cultural awareness. The other one was airstrikes, which did a grand job of making Extreme Makeover: Air Force Edition the least liked showed in Afghanistan. And now that it’s 2016, and US troops are totes not doing night raids anymore, the acting Minister of Defense, one Masoom Stanikzai, wants to increase them.
And they’re a bad idea, if you care about not hurting anyone’s feelings. Or you’re worried that the people detained in a night raid are going to disappear into some deep abyss of Afghan justice and never be seen again. Which, well, fair point. Except that they do a fantastic job of taking people off the battlefield.
And making sure the bad guys know that Afghan forces are just as good at owning the night as the Americans that trained them? That’s a bit of a PR win for the Afghan government. And because intelligence is never wrong, there’s a less than average chance that anyone who gets caught up in one of these things is a bad guy in the first place.
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