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, thou
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