"Kill Capture": A live chat with PBS' Frontline

Tonight (May 10), PBS' Frontline is airing "Kill/Capture," a six-month investigation into the U.S. military's program of targeted killings in Afghanistan. The military says these raids have taken some 12,000 insurgents off the battlefields of Afghanistan over the last year, and represent a crucial part of the U.S.'s strategy in the country. Afghan government officials, Afghan communities, and human rights groups, on the other hand, have objected to the raids on the grounds that they alienate the local population and are unduly harsh. The question is: will the kill/capture missions help end the war in Afghanistan?

"Kill/Capture" features research by Kate Clark, whose work we have regularly featured on the AfPak Channel, at the Afghanistan Analysts Network, which has just released a devastating new report investigating a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan's Takhar province in the fall of last year, claiming that civilians were killed in a case of mistaken identity. The report is based on interviews with survivors of the airstrike, witnesses, Afghan officials, and U.S. Special Forces officers. The U.S. military insists the strike killed a senior member of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Who was killed in the Takhar strike, and why?

Given that a targeted American raid recently killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, we have lots of questions about how these operations are authorized and carried out, and what their impact has been on both the insurgency in Afghanistan and the Afghan communities in which they occur.

Join us tomorrow (May 11) at 1:00pm EST here for a live chat with Frontline's Stephen Grey and Shoaib Sharifi. Grey is a London-based journalist who has been reporting on the Afghan war since 2007, and Sharifi is an award-winning journalist with extensive experience in Afghanistan. Watch a preview of the film here, and be sure to tune in this evening for the full show.