Category Archives: war in Pakistan

Predator warfare blowback

“Looks like you just lost that bet, Mr. Woodward. I’ll be waiting for your apology,” a reader said after I wrote on Sunday, “if I was to place a bet on who did this, I’d go with someone whose sympathies are probably more Tea Party than Taliban.”

Indeed I was wrong, though I’m not sure what I’m being asked to apologize for. Having engaged in premature speculation or having entertained the suspicion that there could be among the ranks of the Tea Party crowd anyone crazy enough to try and set off a bomb in Times Square?

Even if I and others were mistaken in suggesting that the Times Square incident might be connected to the Tea Party movement, the movement itself needs to engage in a bit of self-examination if it wants to understand its image problem — not pretend it’s simply the victim of unfair criticism.

Moving on, Noah Shachtman reports:

Federal agents have made an arrest in the Times Square bombing attempt. And YouTube may have provided some clues to the investigators.

Faisal Shahzad was attempting to board a plane for Dubai when he was apprehended at New York’s JFK airport. Law enforcement officials believe the Connecticut resident recently bought the 1993 Nissan Pathfinder that was rigged with explosives and fertilizer and left smoldering in Times Square.

One “clue in the investigation is a video posted online early Sunday morning by persons in Connecticut, who may have been involved in the bomb attempt and are being sought by law enforcement,” ABC News reports.

The video (below), features the voice of Qari Hussain Mehsud, the “Pakistani Taliban master trainer of suicide bombers,” according to the Long War Journal. The clip congratulates fellow Muslims for the “jaw-breaking blow to Satan’s USA.” “The attack a revenge” for the slaying of extremist leaders in Iraq and Pakistan, the video continues, and is a response to “the recent rain of drone attacks.”

If Faisal Shahzad was the best recruit the Pakistani Taliban could find, the threat they pose to the United States is probably limited, but DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano’s initial assessment that this was a “one-off” operation is clearly premature. Indeed, if the intense campaign of drone warfare in Pakistan has triggered enough outrage among a few Pakistani Americans to seek revenge in Times Square, then there is one word that this administration should now be thinking about seriously: blowback.

President Obama seems to pride himself in having been less hesitant to take the war to Pakistan than was his predecessor, yet as the reappearance of Hakimullah Mehsud should make clear, the successes of the drone campaign have not been as great as the CIA has often claimed, while the costs have just as frequently been understated.

Killing innocent people “over there,” inevitably elevates the risk that innocent people will again end up dying here.

The bomb-making abilities on display in Times Square may have made some observers respond dismissively — and I am guilty of having done so — but the Taliban’s threat to bring the war to the United States can no longer be regarded as empty rhetoric.

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All Kayani’s men

Anatol Lieven, in an article where he notes that Pakistan’s military is among the most democratic of institutions in what otherwise remains a largely feudal society, writes:

American operations in South Asia… are threatening to upset [a] fragile balance between Islam and nationalism in the Pakistani military. The army’s members can hardly avoid sharing the broader population’s bitter hostility to U.S. policy. To judge by retired and serving officers, this includes the genuine conviction that either the Bush administration or Israel was responsible for 9/11. Inevitably therefore, there was deep opposition throughout the army after 2001 to American pressure to crack down on the Afghan Taliban and their Pakistani sympathizers. “We are being ordered to launch a Pakistani civil war for the sake of America,” an officer told me in 2002. “Why on earth should we? Why should we commit suicide for you?”

Between 2004 and 2007, there were a number of instances of mass desertion and refusal to serve in units deployed to fight militants, though mostly in the Pashtun-recruited Frontier Corps rather than in the regular army. These failures were caused above all by the feeling that these forces were compelled to turn against their own. We must realize in these morally and psychologically testing circumstances, anything that helps maintain Pakistani military discipline cannot be altogether bad—given the immense scale of the stakes concerned, and the consequences if that discipline were to fail.

For in 2007–2008, the battle was beginning to cause serious problems of morale. The most dangerous single thing I heard during my visits to Pakistan in those years was that soldiers’ families in villages in the NWFP and the Potwar region of the Punjab were finding it increasingly difficult to find high-status brides for their sons serving in the military because of the growing popular feeling that “the army is the slave of the Americans” and “the soldiers are killing fellow Muslims on America’s orders.”

By late 2009, the sheer number of soldiers killed by the Pakistani Taliban and their allies, and still more importantly, the increasingly murderous and indiscriminate Pakistani Taliban attacks on civilians, seem to have produced a change of mood in the areas of military recruitment. Nonetheless, if the Pakistani Taliban are increasingly unpopular, that does not make the United States any more well liked; and if Washington ever put Pakistani soldiers in a position where they felt that honor and patriotism required them to fight America, many would be willing to do so.

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Pakistani intelligence officials say Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud is alive

The Washington Post reports:

Even by the standards of a bullet- and bomb-dodging Taliban commander, Hakimullah Mehsud has displayed notable survival skills.

The Pakistani Taliban chief was thought to have died in a leadership duel last summer, only to stage a news conference a few days later. A U.S. drone strike in January was followed by intense speculation about his fate, then statements by Pakistani intelligence officials that he was “100 percent” dead.

On Thursday, those intelligence officials circulated another message: Mehsud is alive.

Earlier reports that Mehsud was dead — repeated by U.S. officials — were hailed as a potentially fatal blow to the Pakistani Taliban, a loose network of border-based militants that has carried out a cascade of suicide attacks in recent years. News of his survival again underscored the staying power of a group that Pakistan’s military has targeted with unprecedented force in the past year. It also has exposed blind spots within the Pakistani and U.S. intelligence services, which struggle to develop reliable information in Taliban strongholds.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reports:

A Pentagon report presented a sobering new assessment Wednesday of the Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan, saying that its abilities are expanding and its operations are increasing in sophistication, despite recent major offensives by U.S. forces in the militants’ heartland.

The report, requested by Congress, portrays an insurgency with deep roots and broad reach, able to withstand repeated U.S. onslaughts and to reestablish its influence, while discrediting and undermining the country’s Western-backed government.

But the Pentagon said it remained optimistic that its counter-insurgency strategy, formed after an Obama administration review last year, and its effort to peel foot soldiers away from the Taliban will show success in months to come.

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Is Pakistan on a path back to military control?

From the New York Times:

In a sign of the mounting power of the army over the civilian government in Pakistan, the head of the military, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, will be the dominant Pakistani participant in important meetings in Washington this week.

At home, much has been made of how General Kayani has driven the agenda for the talks. They have been billed as cabinet-level meetings, with the foreign minister as the nominal head of the Pakistani delegation. But it has been the general who has been calling the civilian heads of major government departments, including finance and foreign affairs, to his army headquarters to discuss final details, an unusual move in a democratic system.

Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi has been taking a public role in trying to set the tone, insisting that the United States needs to do more for Pakistan, as “we have already done too much.” And it was at his request that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton agreed this fall to reopen talks between the countries at the ministerial level.

The talks are expected to help define the relationship between the United States and Pakistan as the war against the Taliban reaches its endgame phase in Afghanistan. It is in that context that General Kayani’s role in organizing the agenda has raised alarm here in Pakistan, a country with a long history of military juntas.

The leading financial newspaper, The Business Recorder, suggested in an editorial that the civilian government of Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani should act more forcefully and “shun creating an environment conducive to military intervention.”

The editorial added, “The government needs to consolidate civilian rule instead of handing over its responsibilities, like coordination between different departments, to the military.”

“General Kayani is in the driver’s seat,” said Rifaat Hussain, a professor of international relations at Islamabad University. “It is unprecedented that an army chief of staff preside over a meeting of federal secretaries.”

As Gen Kayani rises in power, it’s hard not to wonder whether the United States is falling back into its habitual pattern of preferring to deal with powerful military leaders rather than elected governments. For Washington, international relations always seem so much easier to manage on the basis of personal relations with generals who won’t be held accountable by a troublesome electorate.

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Afghan tribal rivalries bedevil a U.S. plan

The New York Times reports:

Six weeks ago, elders of the Shinwari tribe, which dominates a large area in southeastern Afghanistan, pledged that they would set aside internal differences to focus on fighting the Taliban.

This week, that commitment seemed less important as two Shinwari subtribes took up arms to fight each other over an ancient land dispute, leaving at least 13 people dead, according to local officials.

The fighting was a setback for American military officials, some of whom had hoped it would be possible to replicate the pledge elsewhere. It raised questions about how effectively the American military could use tribes as part of its counterinsurgency strategy, given the patchwork of rivalries that make up Afghanistan.

Government officials and elders from other tribes were trying to get the two sides to reconcile, but given the intensity of the fighting, some said they doubted that the effort would work. At the very least, the dispute is proving a distraction from the tribe’s commitment to fight the Taliban, not each other.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reports:

A growing number of Taliban militants in the Pakistani border region are refusing to collaborate with Al Qaeda fighters, declining to provide shelter or assist in attacks in Afghanistan even in return for payment, according to U.S. military and counter-terrorism officials.

The officials, citing evidence from interrogation of detainees, communications intercepts and public statements on extremist websites, say that threats to the militants’ long-term survival from Pakistani, Afghan and foreign military action are driving some Afghan Taliban away from Al Qaeda.

As a result, Al Qaeda fighters are in some cases being excluded from villages and other areas near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border where they once received sanctuary.

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Marjah: Success for the military, hell for the residents

At GlobalPost, Jean MacKenzie and Mohammad Ilyas Dayee write:

The dusty squares of Marjah are empty; there is no life, the soul of the place seems to have disappeared. Those residents who are left cower in their homes, afraid of bullets or mines if they venture out, even for food.

“It is a small picture of Doomsday,” said Alishah Mazlumyar, the head of Helmand’s Department of Information and Culture, and a member of the Marjah shura, or council. “Dozens of civilians have been killed. Their families cannot bury the bodies, and for days they have been lying in their houses, beginning to decompose. There is a smell of death here.”

Twelve days into Operation Moshtarak — pitting 15,000 U.S., British and Afghan troops against a few hundred Taliban — the message from the military and diplomatic communities is resolutely upbeat.

Western diplomats term the operation a success, and the media office of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) points to a bright future.

“Signs of steady progress in development and governance are being seen in central Helmand province. Bridges, roads and culverts are being repaired, bazaars are re-opening and attracting customers, and a variety of initiatives are being planned or implemented,” read the IJC press release of Feb. 22.

But those in Marjah are telling a very different story.

Reporting for Christian Science Monitor, Anand Gopal says:

Pakistan has arrested nearly half of the Afghanistan Taliban’s leadership in recent days, Pakistani officials told the Monitor Wednesday, dealing what could be a crucial blow to the insurgent movement.

In total, seven of the insurgent group’s 15-member leadership council, thought to be based in Quetta, Pakistan, including the head of military operations, have been apprehended in the past week, according to Pakistani intelligence officials.

Western and Pakistani media had previously reported the arrest of three of the 15, but this is the first confirmation of the wider scale of the Pakistan crackdown on the Taliban leadership, something the US has sought.

“This really hurts the Taliban in the short run,” says Wahid Muzjda, a former Taliban official turned political analyst, based in Kabul. Whether it will have an effect in the long run will depend on what kind of new leaders take the reins, he says.

The New York Times reports:

Inside a secret detention center in an industrial pocket of the Pakistani capital called I/9, teams of Pakistani and American spies have kept a watchful eye on a senior Taliban leader captured last month. With the other eye, they watch each other.

The C.I.A. and its Pakistani counterpart, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, have a long and often tormented relationship. And even now, they are moving warily toward conflicting goals, with each maneuvering to protect its influence after the shooting stops in Afghanistan.

Yet interviews in recent days show how they are working together on tactical operations, and how far the C.I.A. has extended its extraordinary secret war beyond the mountainous tribal belt and deep into Pakistan’s sprawling cities.

Beyond the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, C.I.A. operatives working with the ISI have carried out dozens of raids throughout Pakistan over the past year, working from bases in the cities of Quetta, Peshawar and elsewhere, according to Pakistani security officials.

The Washington Post says:

A blizzard of bank notes is flying out of Afghanistan — often in full view of customs officers at the Kabul airport — as part of a cash exodus that is confounding U.S. officials and raising concerns about the money’s origin.

The cash, estimated to total well over $1 billion a year, flows mostly to the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai, where many wealthy Afghans now park their families and funds, according to U.S. and Afghan officials. So long as departing cash is declared at the airport here, its transfer is legal.

But at a time when the United States and its allies are spending billions of dollars to prop up the fragile government of President Hamid Karzai, the volume of the outflow has stirred concerns that funds have been diverted from aid. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, for its part, is trying to figure out whether some of the money comes from Afghanistan’s thriving opium trade. And officials in neighboring Pakistan think that at least some of the cash leaving Kabul has been smuggled overland from Pakistan.

Finally, in Mother Jones, Daniel Schulman reports:

Blackwater improperly obtained hundreds of weapons intended for use by Afghanistan’s already underequipped police force—and then falsely claimed to a Senate committee that the firearms had been returned when many remained unaccounted for.

According to a months-long investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee that unearthed a range of misconduct by the company’s personnel, contractors working for a Blackwater subsidiary named Paravant operated recklessly and routinely violated military regulations. The inquiry also identified a series of major vetting lapses by the company, which employed at least one contractor it had previously fired for improper behavior in Iraq and others who abused alcohol and drugs, including steroids. The investigation paints a grim picture of the state of contracting oversight in Afghanistan, where, according to committee staffers, military officials missed multiple red flags calling Paravant’s conduct into question—and were even confused about who was ultimately responsible for overseeing the company’s work in the first place.

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Pakistani reports capture of a Taliban leader

The New York Times reports:

In another blow to the Taliban senior leadership, Pakistani authorities have captured Mullah Abdul Kabir, a member of the group’s inner circle and a leading military commander against American forces in eastern Afghanistan, according to a Pakistani intelligence official.

American officials in the region and in Washington said they had received some indications of Mullah Kabir’s detention but that they could not confirm it.

Mullah Kabir was detained several days ago in Nawshera, in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, the Pakistani official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Mullah Kabir is a member of the Quetta Shura, the small group of leaders who direct the Taliban’s operations and who report to Mullah Muhammad Omar, the group’s founder. The group is named for the Pakistani city where many of the Taliban’s leaders are thought to be hiding.

Mullah Kabir is the second member of the Quetta Shura to be captured in Pakistan in recent weeks. Last month, American and Pakistani intelligence agents captured Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s top military commander and the head of the Quetta Shura.

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Fixing what’s wrong in Washington… in Afghanistan

Tom Engelhardt, noting that the US government is broke and that there is a bipartisan consensus that Washington is paralyzed, asks:

Why does the military of a country convinced it’s becoming ungovernable think itself so capable of making another ungovernable country governable? What’s the military’s skill set here? What lore, what body of political knowledge, are they drawing on? Who do they think they represent, the Philadelphia of 1776 or the Washington of 2010, and if the latter, why should Americans be considered the globe’s leading experts in good government anymore? And while we’re at it, fill me in on one other thing: Just what has convinced American officials in Afghanistan and the nation’s capital that they have the special ability to teach, prod, wheedle, bribe, or force Afghans to embark on good governance in their country if we can’t do it in Washington or Sacramento?

Meanwhile, The Times reports:

Nato forces in southern Afghanistan bombed a civilian convoy, killing 27 people including women and children and injuring many more, Afghan officials said.

The airstrike in a remote part of Oruzgan province yesterday capped a bloody week for Afghan civilians that has seen some 60 innocent people killed by Nato weapons.

Afghanistan’s cabinet called the attack “unjustifiable” and condemned the raid “in the strongest terms possible”.

The New York Times reports on the latest fracture in the NATO coalition:

A day after his government collapsed, Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said Sunday that he expected Dutch troops to come home from Afghanistan before the end of the year.

A last-ditch effort by Mr. Balkenende to keep Dutch soldiers in the dangerous southern Afghan province of Oruzgan instead saw the Labor Party quit the government in the Netherlands early Saturday, immediately raising fears that the Western military coalition fighting the war was increasingly at risk.

Even as the allied offensive in the Taliban stronghold of Marja continued, it appeared almost certain that most of the 2,000 Dutch troops would be gone from Afghanistan by the end of the year. The question plaguing military planners was whether a Dutch departure would embolden the war’s critics in other allied countries, where debate over deployment is continuing, and hasten the withdrawal of their troops as well.

The Times says:

… Afghans involved in western-backed attempts to start talks with the Taliban to end the war were furious, warning that the arrest [of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar] might have ruined chances of negotiations.

“It’s a spectacular own goal [for the US],” said one official. “They want to wreck talks,” said a close aide to Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai.

“Mullah Baradar was independently in contact with the Afghan government to find a way for reconciliation and the Pakistanis knew that from their secret agents.”

Finally, the Associated Press reports:

Pakistan will not turn over the Afghan Taliban’s No. 2 leader and two other high-value militants captured this month to the United States, but may deport them to Afghanistan, a senior minister said Friday.

Interior Minister Rahman Malik said Pakistani authorities were still questioning Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the most senior Taliban figure arrested since the start of the Afghan war in 2001, and two other senior militants arrested with U.S. assistance in separate operations this month.

If it is determined that the militants have not committed any crimes in Pakistan, they will not remain in the country, he said.

“First we will see whether they have violated any law,” Malik told reporters in Islamabad. “If they have done it, then the law will take its own course against them.

“But at the most if they have not done anything, then they will go back to the country of origin, not to USA,” Malik said.

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Pakistan is said to pursue role in U.S.-Afghan talks

The New York Times reported:

Pakistan has told the United States it wants a central role in resolving the Afghan war and has offered to mediate with Taliban factions who use its territory and have long served as its allies, American and Pakistani officials said.

The offer, aimed at preserving Pakistan’s influence in Afghanistan once the Americans leave, could both help and hurt American interests as Washington debates reconciling with the Taliban.

Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, made clear Pakistan’s willingness to mediate at a meeting late last month at NATO headquarters with top American military officials, a senior American military official familiar with the meeting said.

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School bombing exposes Obama’s secret war inside Pakistan

The Times:

The discovery of three American soldiers among the dead in a suicide bombing at the opening of a girls’ school in the northwestern Pakistan town of Dir last week reignited the fears of many Pakistanis that Washington was set on invading their country.

Barack Obama has banned the Bush-era term “war on terror” and dithered about sending extra troops to Afghanistan, but across the border in Pakistan, the US president has dramatically stepped up the covert war against Islamic extremists.

US airstrikes in Pakistan, launched from unmanned drones, are now averaging three a week, triple the number last year. “We’re quietly seeing a geographical shift,” an intelligence officer said.

For the past month drones have pounded the tribal region of North Waziristan in apparent retaliation for the murder of seven CIA officers in Afghanistan by a Jordanian suicide bomber working with the Pakistani Taliban.

At TomDispatch, Pratap Chatterjee wrote:

In recent years, many commentators and pundits have resorted to “the Vietnam analogy,” comparing first the American war in Iraq and now in Afghanistan to the Vietnam War. Despite a number of similarities, the analogy disintegrates quickly enough if you consider that U.S. military campaigns in post-invasion Afghanistan and Iraq against small forces of lightly-armed insurgents bear little resemblance to the large-scale war that Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon waged against both southern revolutionary guerrillas and the military of North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, who commanded a real army, with the backing of, and supplies from, the Soviet Union and China.

A more provocative — and perhaps more ominous — analogy today might be between the CIA’s escalating drone war in the contemporary Pakistani tribal borderlands and Richard Nixon’s secret bombing campaign against the Cambodian equivalent.

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U.S. deaths in Pakistan fuel suspicion

Time magazine reports:

By killing three U.S. soldiers in a bomb attack in a remote corner of northwest Pakistan on Wednesday, Feb. 3, the Taliban scored a political jackpot. With anti-American sentiment cresting in Pakistani public opinion, the presence of the three American trainers in a convoy passing through Koto village when it was struck by a roadside bomb has set off a flurry of questions and even wild conspiracy theories about the U.S. presence in the country. The news left Islamabad in a difficult position, deepened suspicion of the U.S. and further strained an already troubled relationship.

The trainers’ presence had been Pakistan’s worst-kept secret. They’re here at the invitation of the paramilitary Frontier Corps, the front-line force in the battle against the Pakistan Taliban, to help improve its poor counterinsurgency capability. In 2008, Washington dispatched 100 military personnel to train Pakistani officers, who would in turn pass on their skills to rank-and-file soldiers; but local sensitivities precluded the Americans from being given direct access to the troops. As U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke told reporters in Washington, “There is nothing secret about their presence there.”

Noah Shachtman adds:

The U.S. military has 200 troops on the ground in Pakistan. That’s about the double the previously-disclosed number of forces there. It’s a whole lot more than the “no American troops in Pakistan” promised by special envoy Richard Holbrooke. And let’s not even get into the number of U.S. intelligence operatives and security contractors on Pakistani soil.

The troop levels are one of a number of details that have emerged about the once-secret U.S. war in Pakistan since three American troops were killed yesterday by an improvised bomb. The New York Times reports that the soldiers were disguised in Pakistani clothing, and their vehicle was outfitted with radio-frequency jammers, meant to stop remotely-detonated bombs. “Still, the Taliban bomber was able to penetrate their cordon. In all 131 people were wounded, most of them girls who were students at a high school adjacent to the site of the suicide attack,” the paper reports.

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Covering up homicide

In his State of the Union speech, President Obama said: “… in the last year, hundreds of al Qaeda’s fighters and affiliates, including many senior leaders, have been captured or killed — far more than in 2008.”

He could have said “we have killed…” just to make it clear that he includes himself as an actor, not an observer, in the killing process. And he could also have said “and we killed a bunch of innocent bystanders as well.” But maybe when it comes to al Qaeda, there is in Obama’s mind no such person as an innocent bystander. Maybe the children, wives and grandparents are “affiliates”.

In Pakistan the concept of an innocent bystander has not been abandoned and what Obama touts as great success is perceived as an ongoing unrelenting massacre.

Here are some of the latest damning numbers – numbers that no doubt many an American journalist will hesitate to report because they haven’t been confirmed by the holiest of sources, the Pentagon:

Afghanistan-based US predators carried out a record number of 12 deadly missile strikes in the tribal areas of Pakistan in January 2010, of which 10 went wrong and failed to hit their targets, killing 123 innocent Pakistanis. The remaining two successful drone strikes killed three al-Qaeda leaders, wanted by the Americans.

The rapid increase in the US drone attacks in the Pakistani tribal areas bordering Afghanistan can be gauged from the fact that only two such strikes were carried out in January 2009, which killed 36 people. The highest number of drone attacks carried out in a single month in 2009 was six, which were conducted in December last year. But the dawn of the New Year has already seen a dozen such attacks.

Note that all of these Predator attacks came after the CIA team widely reported as having been responsible for Predator targeting had been killed in the Khost bombing.

Now if it became known that the US government was responsible for sending gunmen into restaurants where mafia-style they left their targets riddled with bullets in front of horrified onlookers, even if there were no innocent bystanders killed, there would be public outrage. The government would be accused of having stooped to using the methods of gangsters.

Instead, we fire missiles, destroy the restaurant and kill everyone in it and even if it turns out the target had already left, somehow it’s OK. It was an innocent mistake. It happened in a distant country. We’ll never hear the names of the dead.

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U.S. mulls legality of killing American al Qaeda “turncoat”

U.S. mulls legality of killing American al Qaeda “turncoat”
By Matthew Cole, Richard Esposito and Brian Ross, ABC News, January 25, 2010

White House lawyers are mulling the legality of proposed attempts to kill an American citizen, Anwar al Awlaki, who is believed to be part of the leadership of the al Qaeda group in Yemen behind a series of terror strikes, according to two people briefed by U.S. intelligence officials.

One of the people briefed said opportunities to “take out” Awlaki “may have been missed” because of the legal questions surrounding a lethal attack which would specifically target an American citizen. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — I’m not a lawyer, but isn’t this the way it works? If someone has an Arabic name, then citizenship is secondary. So long as they are “taken out” overseas, preferably in a state or area with a reputation for lawlessness, then legal process fits comfortably into the tip of a Hellfire missile. Extra latitude is of course provided when the “target” is not white.

But maybe the Justice Department could provide a little extra clarity — some new designations in citizenship status just so everyone understands which American citizens can be executed on the basis of a presidential order and which can’t. As for non-Americans, well, America has always reserved the right to kill them as and when it sees fit.

The drone surge
By Nick Turse, TomDispatch, January 24, 2010

One moment there was the hum of a motor in the sky above. The next, on a recent morning in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, a missile blasted a home, killing 13 people. Days later, the same increasingly familiar mechanical whine preceded a two-missile salvo that slammed into a compound in Degan village in the tribal North Waziristan district of Pakistan, killing three.

What were once unacknowledged, relatively infrequent targeted killings of suspected militants or terrorists in the Bush years have become commonplace under the Obama administration. And since a devastating December 30th suicide attack by a Jordanian double agent on a CIA forward operating base in Afghanistan, unmanned aerial drones have been hunting humans in the Af-Pak war zone at a record pace. In Pakistan, an “unprecedented number” of strikes — which have killed armed guerrillas and civilians alike — have led to more fear, anger, and outrage in the tribal areas, as the CIA, with help from the U.S. Air Force, wages the most public “secret” war of modern times.

In neighboring Afghanistan, unmanned aircraft, for years in short supply and tasked primarily with surveillance missions, have increasingly been used to assassinate suspected militants as part of an aerial surge that has significantly outpaced the highly publicized “surge” of ground forces now underway. And yet, unprecedented as it may be in size and scope, the present ramping up of the drone war is only the opening salvo in a planned 40-year Pentagon surge to create fleets of ultra-advanced, heavily-armed, increasingly autonomous, all-seeing, hypersonic unmanned aerial systems (UAS). [continued…]

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The return of the neocons

The return of the neocons
By David Margolick, Newsweek, January 22, 2010

Technically, there is nothing “neo” about conservatives like Robert Kagan, the historian and another Washington Post columnist, or John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary; each is a son of one of neoconservatism’s founding fathers. Indeed, no strain in American politics is so dynastic. It is akin to the right-wing Likud Party in Israel, whose religion and politics, world view, and succession rituals the neocons often share. The definitions, and analogy, are inexact, but both groups have recent ties to Europe and are haunted by the Holocaust, which has left them feeling wounded, suspicious, and sometimes bellicose, determined never again to be naive or to trust the world’s good intentions. Both spent decades in the po-litical wilderness before miraculously acquiring power; both begat “princes” who defied the normal generational tensions and allied themselves with their kingly fathers. When Bill Kristol rose to praise Irving that morning, he was really picking up his scepter.

Had you Googled “neoconservative” and “death” that day, four days after the 89-year-old Kristol expired, you’d have found lots on their long-rumored—and for some, much-anticipated and -savored—demise. On both the left and right, neoconservatism was deemed a spent force. Its ideas, Foreign Policy magazine had pronounced, “lie buried in the sands of Iraq.”

But obituaries can be premature. At the moment, in fact, the neocons seem resurrected. One of their own, Frederick Kagan of AEI (Robert’s younger brother), helped turn around the war in Iraq by devising and pushing for the surge there. More recent-ly, President Obama—whose foreign–policy pronouncements (nuanced, multi-lateral, interdependent) and style (low-key, self-critical, conciliatory, collegial) were a repudiation of neoconservative assertiveness—has swung their way, or so they believe. First, he’s sending an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, nearly as many as leading neocons had sought. Then came his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which, with its acknowledgment of the need for force, its nod to dissidents in Iran and elsewhere, and its talk about good and evil, was surprisingly congenial.

As if on cue, a Nigerian man with explosives in his crotch nearly brought down an American airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day, leaving the neocons feeling further vindicated and energized. Obama, who’d ratcheted up his rhetoric after an initial response that Bill Kristol and other neocons considered too tepid, had been “mugged by reality,” Kristol declared. It was an obvious homage to his father, who’d long ago defined “neocon” as a liberal to whom just that had happened. “Whether they praise or denounce Obama, the neocons are winning,” says Jacob Heilbrunn, a senior editor at The National Interest and author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons (2008). “They’ve got him embracing the surge in Afghanistan and on the run for being ‘soft on terrorists.’ Either way, he ends up catering to them.” With Obama further weakened by an electoral repudiation in Massachusetts, that process might only intensify. [continued…]

Obama quietly continues to defend Bush’s terror policies
By Marisa Taylor, McClatchy, January 22, 2010

Although the FBI has acknowledged it improperly obtained thousands of Americans’ phone records for years, the Obama administration continues to assert that the bureau can obtain them without any formal legal process or court oversight.

The FBI revealed this stance in a newly released report, troubling critics who’d hoped the bureau had been chastened enough by its own abuses to drop such a position.

In further support of the legal authority, however, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel backed the FBI in a written opinion issued this month.

The opinion by the OLC — the section that wrote the memos that justified enhanced interrogation techniques during the last administration — appears to be yet another sign that the Obama administration can be just as assertive as Bush’s in claiming sweeping and controversial anti-terrorism powers. [continued…]

CIA deaths prompt surge in U.S. drone strikes
By Scott Shane and Eric Schmitt, New York Times, January 22, 2010

… officials deny that vengeance is driving the increased attacks, though one called the drone strikes “the purest form of self-defense.”

Officials point to other factors. For one, Pakistan recently dropped restrictions on the drone program it had requested last fall to accompany a ground offensive against militants in South Waziristan. And tips on the whereabouts of extremists ebb and flow unpredictably.

A C.I.A. spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, declined to comment on the drone strikes. But he said, “The agency’s counterterrorism operations — lawful, aggressive, precise and effective — continue without pause.”

The strikes, carried out from a secret base in Pakistan and controlled by satellite link from C.I.A. headquarters in Virginia, have been expanded by President Obama and praised by both parties in Congress as a potent weapon against terrorism that puts no American lives at risk. That calculation must be revised in light of the Khost bombing, which revealed the critical presence of C.I.A. officers in dangerous territory to direct the strikes. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — The question that the New York Times‘ Washington-based reporters (true to form) fail to address is this: If the Khost bombing killed CIA officers who were critical in choosing the targets for drone attacks, how have subsequent targets been chosen? Are we supposed to believe that right in the aftermath of this huge blow to the CIA’s drone operation, a flood of valuable intelligence swept in?

How convenient… and improbable.

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Elite US troops ready to combat Pakistani nuclear hijacks

Elite US troops ready to combat Pakistani nuclear hijacks
By Christina Lamb, The Sunday Times, January 17, 2010

The US army is training a crack unit to seal off and snatch back Pakistani nuclear weapons in the event that militants, possibly from inside the country’s security apparatus, get their hands on a nuclear device or materials that could make one.

The specialised unit would be charged with recovering the nuclear materials and securing them.

The move follows growing anti-Americanism in Pakistan’s military, a series of attacks on sensitive installations over the past two years, several of which housed nuclear facilities, and rising tension that has seen a series of official complaints by US authorities to Islamabad in the past fortnight.

“What you have in Pakistan is nuclear weapons mixed with the highest density of extremists in the world, so we have a right to be concerned,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA officer who used to run the US energy department’s intelligence unit. “There have been attacks on army bases which stored nuclear weapons and there have been breaches and infiltrations by terrorists into military facilities.” [continued…]

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Suicide attack reveals threat to Obama’s Afghanistan plan

Suicide attack reveals threat to Obama’s Afghanistan plan
By Saeed Shah, McClatchy, January 14, 2010

The bombing has focused new attention on the Haqqani network, an Afghan insurgent group that U.S. intelligence officials said is based in North Waziristan, has ties to members of the Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency and probably played a key role in the suicide bombing.

The relative sophistication of the attack, especially in contrast to the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Northwest Airlines jet, suggests that the militants who been planned and ran it may have received some training or advice from rogue ISI officers, the officials said.

For example, they said, the bomber, 32-year-old Jordanian Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al Balawi, spent most of 2009 in Pakistan and traveled to Khost from Pakistan, and he managed to evade the counter-intelligence tools that customarily are used to assess whether a potential agent is reliable, they said.

“Pakistan has to decide whether Haqqani is an asset or a liability. At the moment, I think they’re veering towards liability, but it’s not clear,” said a Western official in Afghanistan, who couldn’t be named because he isn’t authorized to discuss the subject publicly. [continued…]

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War’s fury no longer pauses for Afghan winter

War’s fury no longer pauses for Afghan winter
By Rod Nordland, New York Times, January 12, 2010

Afghanistan’s high mountains and harsh weather once meant that winter was a respite from much of the war’s violence, but as the deaths of six Western soldiers in three separate attacks on Monday show, this winter is proving to be different.

American military leaders and Taliban commanders are vowing to carry the fight to each other and skip the traditional winter vacation, and there is every sign that they are doing just that.

Though the trend has been building, in past years, the Taliban generally slipped off to sanctuaries in Pakistan, or just stayed home, while NATO forces enjoyed a drop in attacks and a steep decline in the body count from December through March.

A combination of factors has changed that. American troop levels nearly doubled in 2009, meaning more missions against the Taliban — and more potential targets for them. Military crackdowns by Pakistan along the border have in some places made it harder for insurgents to flee there. [continued…]

An insurgent’s paradise
By Adnan R. Khan, Macleans, January 11, 2010

It’s an odd object to come across in this part of Pakistan, on the edge of Peshawar, the capital of the North-West Frontier Province bordering the Tribal Areas. In the madness of Karkhano, one of Pakistan’s best-known smuggler bazaars, among a jumble of domestic products for sale outside a nondescript storefront, is a black plastic trunk emblazoned with the name Lt. Stoddard, 2611, 62nd ECB(H). Inside are personal items belonging to the U.S. soldier: T-shirts and sweatshirts, socks and gloves, even a few pairs of underwear. An identical trunk next to it, its lid similarly flung open, is teeming with books and DVDs, all in English, all well-worn, all incongruous here.

That’s only the beginning; digging deeper, things start to take a turn for the surreal. Hidden behind a torn and faded copy of All Quiet on the Western Front is a stack of letters from a woman in the U.S. to her lesbian lover deployed with the U.S. Corps of Engineers in Afghanistan. “We’ll make greatness out of what shall be once we overcome the obstacles standing in our way,” one letter says. Beneath pirated copies of Rambo: First Blood and Full Metal Jacket is a notebook belonging to a budding U.S. military rap artist: “To carry out the mission, complete the objective,” he writes in acrid verse. “u move I shoot, f–k being selective.” And then another letter, this time from a woman to her soldier son, dated July 3, 2008, revealing in intimate detail the regrets of a mother about the soldier’s sister: “I feel like I have missed out raising B—- in some way I can’t explain,” she confesses. “Maybe because E—- was drinkin’ and I was the shield to save my kids from abuse by his actions and I’m sure that hurt her growing up.”

How did such things, windows into American lives, get here?

The answer lies on the Grand Trunk Road, which runs by Karkhano. It once carried hippies from Afghanistan through Pakistan to the land of enlightenment in India during the 1960s. It now ferries Afghan refugees brave enough to go back to Kabul across the historic Khyber Pass. Vans and gaudily painted buses stuffed to overflowing ooze black exhaust fumes as they inch over the remaining hundred metres to the last police checkpoint in the “settled areas” of Peshawar. Beyond that, past the sign reading “Entry of Foreigners Prohibited,” is tribal country, with its gun shops, its hashish dispensaries, and its anarchy. Past that is Afghanistan. [continued…]

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How this suicide bomber opened a new front in Al-Qaeda’s war

How this suicide bomber opened a new front in Al-Qaeda’s war
By Christina Lamb and Miles Amoore, The Sunday Times, January 10, 2010

According to the guard, Balawi had been to the base before. He claimed that before the doctor reached the first gate, the Afghan security guards in charge of the perimeter security were instructed by US soldiers to go into their rooms.

“They did not want any Afghans to see Balawi,” he said. A US army vehicle then led the car through the next two gates, reaching the inside of the base before stopping outside a block of buildings used by the CIA and military intelligence to debrief their sources.

As Balawi stepped out of the car, seven CIA officers and a handful of soldiers gathered around. According to the guard, it was then that Balawi detonated his bomb, killing eight and injuring six.

Arghawan, still sitting in the driver’s seat, survived the initial blast but a US soldier shot him in the head with his pistol, assuming that he was part of the bomb plot.

“There were lots of body parts,” said the guard. “The suicide bomber’s legs were all that was left of him. He had hidden the bomb beneath his pattu.”

According to one US intelligence official, the explosive was so powerful that it killed agency operatives who were as far as 50ft away. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Arghawan, the Afghan army commander who drove Balawi into the base, “clearly knew” Balawi, Arghawan’s driver told The Sunday Times. So, given that as the Washington Post says, “Virtually everyone within sight of the suicide blast died,” Arghawan would have been the crucial witness who could describe what happened — were it not for the fact that he got executed by an American soldier.

Pakistan’s volatile tribal areas draw foreign militants
By Nasir Khan, The National, January 8, 2010

As Pakistan’s army pushes ever deeper into the country’s mountainous tribal regions in a bid to flush out extremists, they are making a startling discovery – the majority of fighters are foreigners, and not just from Afghanistan.

Uzbeks, Europeans, Afghans, Russians and even a few Caucasian Americans all have been arrested along the rugged border with Afghanistan as the military presses its operation in North and South Waziristan.

Col Nadeem Mirza, the military commander, told The National on an exclusive trip to the region: “Our intelligence had informed us that al Qa’eda followers were hiding in the tribal agencies but no one was expecting to find so many foreigners and al Qa’eda members here. It seemed like these areas had become a fortress for al Qa’eda.” [continued…]

The terrorist mind: an update
By Sarah Kershaw, New York Times, January 10, 2010

Despite the lack of a single terrorist profile, researchers have largely agreed on the risk factors for involvement. They include what Jerrold M. Post, a professor of psychiatry, political psychology and international affairs at George Washington University, calls “generational transmission” of extremist beliefs, which begins early in life; a strong sense of victimization and alienation; the belief that moral violations by the enemy justify violence in pursuit of a “higher moral condition;” the belief that the terrorists’ ethnic, religious or nationalist group is special and in danger of extinction, and that they lack the political power to effect change without violence. [continued…]

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