By Conn Hallinan – July 26, 2009
Sudan: the two F-16s caught the trucks deep in the northen
desert. Within minutes the column was a string of shattered wrecks burning
fiercely in the January sun. Surveillance drones spotted a few vehicles that
had survived the storm of bombs and cannon shells, and the fighter-bombers
returned to finish the job.
Syria: four Blackhawk helicopters skimmed across the Iraqi
border, landing at a small farmhouse near the town of al-Sukkariyeh. Black-clad
soldiers poured from the choppers, laying down a withering hail of automatic
weapons fire. When the shooting stopped, eight Syrians lay dead on the ground.
Four others, cuffed and blindfolded, were dragged to the helicopters, which
vanished back into Iraq.
Pakistan: a group of villagers were sipping tea in a
courtyard when the world exploded. The Hellfire missiles seemed to come out of
nowhere, scattering pieces of their victims across the village and demolishing
several houses. Between Jan. 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009, 60 such attacks took
place, killing 14 wanted al-Qaeda members along with 687 civilians.
In each of the above incidents, no country took
responsibility or claimed credit. There were no sharp exchanges of diplomatic
notes before the attacks, just sudden death and mayhem.
War without a
declaration
The F-16s were Israeli, their target an alleged shipment of
arms headed for the Gaza Strip. The Blackhawk soldiers were likely from Task
Force 88, a ultra-secret U.S. Special Forces group. The Pakistanis were victims
of a Predator drone directed from an airbase in southern Nevada. Each attack
was an act of war and a violation of the United Nations Charter. Each attack
drew angry responses from the country whose sovereignty was violated, but since
neither the Israelis nor the U.S. admitted carrying them out the diplomatic
protests had no place to go.
The “privatization” of war, with its use of armed
mercenaries, has come under heavy scrutiny, especially since a 2007 incident in
Baghdad in which guards from Blackwater USA (now “Xe”) went on a shooting
spree, killing 17 Iraqis and wounding scores of others.
But the “covertization” of war has remained largely in the
shadows. The attackers in the Sudan, Syria and Pakistan were not private
contractors, but U.S. and Israeli soldiers presumably acting under orders from
their respective military command.
In his book “The War Within: Secret White House History
2006-2008,” the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward disclosed that the U.S. military
has developed “secret operational capabilities” to “locate, target, and kill
key individuals in extremist groups.”
In a recent interview during a “Great Conversations” event
at the University of Minnesota, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative
journalist Seymour Hersh revealed a U.S. military “executive assassination ring,” part of the Joint Special
Operations Command (JSOC).
“It’s a special wing of our special operations community
that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the
Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to Cheney’s office,” he said,
bypassing the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
Hersh says
“Congress has no oversight” over the program, and that under the Bush
Administration, “they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the
ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on the list and
executing them and leaving.”
According to a 2004 classified document uncovered by the New
York Times, the U.S. has the right to attack “terrorists” in some 15 to 20
nations, including Pakistan, Syria, Yemen and Iran.
The Israeli military has long used “targeted assassinations”
to eliminate Tel Aviv’s enemies. Hizbollah military commander Imad Mughniyeh
was killed last year by an Israeli car bomb in Damascus, and a number of Hamas
leaders have been assassinated in Gaza.
U.S. and NATO “assassination teams” have emerged in Iraq and
Afghanistan, where, according to the United Nations, they have killed scores of
people. Philip Alston of the UN Human Rights Council charges that secret
“international intelligence services” allied with local militias are killing
Afghan civilians and then hiding behind an “impenetrable” wall of bureaucracy.
When Alston protested the killing of two brothers in
Kandahar, “not only was I unable to get any international military commander to
provide their version of what took place, but I was unable to get any military
commander to even admit that their soldiers were involved,” he told the
Financial Times.
Alston says these “shadow” units work out of two U.S. bases
in Afghanistan, one in Kandahar and other in Nangarhar.
In Iraq, such special operations forces have carried out a
number of killings, including a raid that killed the son and a nephew of the
governor of Salahuddin Province north of Baghdad. The Special Operations Forces
(SOF) stormed the house at 3 AM and shot the governor’s 17-year old son dead in
his bed. When a cousin tried to enter the room, he was also gunned down. SOFs
recently killed two men during an early morning raid in Kut, a city southeast
of Baghdad.
Such “night raids” by SOFs have drawn widespread protests in
Afghanistan. According to the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission,
night raids involve “abusive behavior and violent breaking and entry,” and only
serve to turn Afghans against the occupation. Iraqi Prime Minster Nuri Kamal
al-Maliki charged that the Mar. 26 Kut raid violated the new security agreement
between the U.S. and Iraq.
The Predator strikes have deeply angered most Pakistanis.
Owais Ahmed Ghani, governor of the Northwest Frontier Province, calls the drone
strikes “counterproductive,” and says they do little more than “attract more
jihadis.” While everyone knows Americans direct the drones from bases in
Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nevada, the U.S. government does not officially take
credit for the attacks.
The U.S. also sent SOFs across the Pakistani border to
attack a village on Sept. 3, 2008, killing up to 20 people.
If Congress agrees to Gates’ proposed Defense Department
budget, it is likely that attacks by SOF and armed robots will increase. While
most the media focused on the parts of the budget that step back from the big
ticket weapons systems of the Cold War, the proposal actually resurrects a key
Cold War priority of the 1960s.
“The similarities between Gates’ proposals and the strategy
adopted by the Kennedy administration are too great to ignore,” notes Nation
defense correspondent Michael Klare, including “a shift in focus toward
unconventional conflict in the Third World.”
Gate’s budget would increase the number of SOFs by 2,800,
build more drones like the Predator and its bigger, more lethal cousin, the
Reaper, and enhance the rapid movement of troops and equipment. All of this is
part of General David Petraeus’s “counter insurgency” doctrine.
The concept is hardly new. The units are different than they
were 50 years ago—Navy SEALS and Delta Force have replaced Green
Berets—but the philosophy is the same. And while the public face of
counter insurgency is winning “hearts and minds” by building schools and digging
wells, its core is 3 AM raids and Hellfire missiles.
The “decapitations” of insurgent leaders in Iraq,
Afghanistan and Pakistan is little different—albeit at a lower
level—than Operation Phoenix, which killed upwards of 40,000 “insurgent”
leaders in South Vietnam during the war in Southeast Asia. The massacre of
helpless Vietnamese peasants at My Lai was part of the Phoenix program.
In the past, war was an extension of a nation’s politics,
“too important,” as World War I French Premier Georges Clemenceau commented,
“to be left to the generals.”
But increasingly, the control of war is slipping away from
the civilians in whose name and interests it is supposedly waged. While the
“privatization” of war has frustrated the process of congressional oversight,
its “covertization” has hidden war behind a wall of silence or denial.
“Congress has been very passive in relation to its own
authority with regard to warmaking,” says Princeton international law scholar
Richard Falk. “Congress hasn’t been willing to insist that the government
adhere to international law and the U.S. Constitution.”
The SFOs may be hidden, but there are eight dead people in
Syria, four of them reportedly children. There are at least 39 dead in northern
Sudan, and dead men in northern and eastern Iraq, and southern Afghanistan. The
number of dead in Pakistan runs into the hundreds.
The new defense budget goes a long ways toward retooling the
U.S. military into a quick reaction/intervention force with an emphasis on
counterinsurgency and covert war. The question is: where will the shadow
warriors strike next? 