"}In a cold February dawn in 2010, two small SUVs and a\n four-door pickup truck headed down a dirt road in the mountains of \nsouthern Afghanistan. They had set out soon after midnight, traveling \ncross-country to reach Highway 1, the country\u2019s principal paved road, \nwhich would lead them to Kandahar and north to Kabul. Crammed inside \nwere more than thirty men, women, and children, four of them younger \nthan six. Everyone knew one another, for they all came from the same \ncluster of mountain villages roughly two hundred miles southwest of \nKabul. Many of the men, unemployed and destitute, were on their way to \nIran in hopes of work. Others were shopkeepers heading to the capital to\n buy supplies, or students returning to school. The women carried \nturkeys, gifts for the relatives they would stay with in Kabul. A number\n were Hazaras, an ethnic minority of Shia Muslims whom the Taliban \ntreated with unremitting cruelty whenever they had the opportunity. Now \nthey were in western Uruzgan Province, Taliban country and therefore \nvery dangerous for them, but they risked the shortcut because they were \nshort on gas.
\nThey met no other cars and little foot traffic; the world around them\n must have seemed empty. But it was not. Unbeknownst to them, they were \nbeing watched and their every movement\u2014even the warmth from their \nbodies\u2014transmitted across the globe. As the ramshackle vehicles\u2014one of \nthem kept breaking down and another blew a tire\u2014clattered along, people \nthey would never meet conferred across oceans and continents as to who \nthey were, where they were going, what they were carrying, and whether \nthey should live or die.\nUnwittingly, the little group was driving toward an Operational \nDetachment Alpha, a U.S. Special Forces patrol dropped in with a \nsupporting force of Afghan soldiers soon after midnight to attack the \nnearby village of Khod. Such raids were routine in Afghanistan, planned \nand executed by the semimythic Special Operations Command that \nspecializes in the pursuit and elimination of \u201chigh-value targets.\u201d \nSomeone thought this operation important enough to give it the code name\n Operation Noble Justice.Definitely the best writing I\u2019ve read all week. A visceral tale of how a kill order is determined, made, carried out, and goes wrong along the technological chain of command.