More than six months after the war began in Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asked why the military didn’t use napalm in the country’s caves.
The question was directed to then-Vice Adm. Edmund Giambastiani, the secretary’s senior military assistant at the time, in the form of a memo. It is one of hundreds of documents published in the Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers database on Monday.
“One of the wounded I visited at Walter Reed asked why we didn’t use napalm in the caves,” Rumsfeld said. “Please get me an answer.”
In a hand-written response on the document, Giambastiani explained that the United States used precision-guided bombs on cave entrances from elevations over 10,000 feet.
“Napalm (Mk 77s) is NOT a precision guided weapon — it is a free fall tumbling, lower altitude area tactic weapon; not suitable for a precise target,” Giambastiani wrote, using the military designation for napalm bombs.
The admiral explained that there had not been any mission plans to use napalm since 1991 when the U.S. dropped 500 napalm bombs on Iraqi forces during Operation Desert Storm. He also noted there were 2,000 napalm bombs left in reserve in Nevada, and half were “deemed unusable.”
Taliban and al Qaeda forces often use vast networks of underground caves buried deep into Afghanistan’s mountain ranges to hide from U.S. forces. In recent years, Islamic State fighters also have hidden in caves. The U.S. dropped the “mother of all bombs” — the military’s most powerful non-nuclear weapon — on an ISIS cave complex in Afghanistan in 2017.
U.S. forces reportedly used napalm during the battle of Tora Bora, a conflict in Afghanistan’s mountainous eastern border region where Osama bin Laden narrowly escaped capture. Gen. Tommy Franks, who commanded U.S. forces in Afghanistan at the time, denied the use of the weapon.
In 2003, the Marine Corps reportedly used napalm-like bombs against Iraqi forces during Operation Iraqi Freedom, though the Pentagon denied the claim. It later was revealed that the weapons used were not technically napalm, though they functioned in a similar fashion.
International law bans the use of napalm against civilian targets, but use against military targets is allowed.
