So let me get this right. The US spends billions annually to fight countless wars, defend the homeland, launch drone attacks against “enemies” in at least six countries and the threat is only this?
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta declared Saturday that the United States is “within reach” of “strategically defeating” Al Qaeda as a terrorist threat, but that doing so would require killing or capturing the group’s 10 to 20 remaining leaders.
Heading to Afghanistan for the first time since taking office earlier this month, Panetta said that intelligence uncovered in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May showed that 10 years of U.S. operations against Al Qaeda had left it with fewer than two dozen key operatives, most of whom are in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and North Africa.
As Osama bin Laden watched his terrorist organization get picked apart, he lamented in his final writings that al-Qaida was suffering from a marketing problem. His group was killing too many Muslims and that was bad for business. The West was winning the public relations fight. All his old comrades were dead and he barely knew their replacements.
Faced with these challenges, bin Laden, who hated the United States and decried capitalism, considered a most American of business strategies. Like Blackwater, ValuJet and Philip Morris, perhaps what al-Qaida really needed was a fresh start under a new name.
The problem with the name al-Qaida, bin Laden wrote in a letter recovered from his compound in Pakistan, was that it lacked a religious element, something to convince Muslims worldwide that they are in a holy war with America.
Maybe something like Taifat al-Tawhed Wal-Jihad, meaning Monotheism and Jihad Group, would do the trick, he wrote. Or Jama’at I’Adat al-Khilafat al-Rashida, meaning Restoration of the Caliphate Group.
As bin Laden saw it, the problem was that the group’s full name, al-Qaida al-Jihad, for The Base of Holy War, had become short-handed as simply al-Qaida. Lopping off the word “jihad,” bin Laden wrote, allowed the West to “claim deceptively that they are not at war with Islam.” Maybe it was time for al-Qaida to bring back its original name.
The letter, which was undated, was discovered among bin Laden’s recent writings. Navy SEALs stormed his compound and killed him before any name change could be made. The letter was described by senior administration, national security and other U.S. officials only on condition of anonymity because the materials are sensitive. The documents portray bin Laden as a terrorist chief executive, struggling to sell holy war for a company in crisis.
A rather startling Newsweek feature that shows just how shallow the US understanding of the Middle East has been for decades. Working with tyrants and torturers and murderers, in the name of fighting “terrorism”, has meant that the overthrow of such figures in the last six months has resulted in US eyes and ears becoming close to blind and deaf. Expect Washington to support any kind of reliable brutes in the months and years ahead:
Among American spies there’s more than a little nostalgia for the bad old days. You know, back before dictators started toppling in the Middle East; back when suspected bad guys could be snatched off a street somewhere and delivered to the not-so-tender mercies of interrogators in their home countries; back when thuggish tyrants, however ugly, were at least predictable.
It’s not a philosophical thing, just a practical one. Confronted by the cold realities of this year’s Arab Spring, many intelligence and counterterrorism professionals now see major dangers looming near at hand, while the good news—a freer, fairer, more equitable and stable Arab world—remains somewhere over the horizon. “All this celebration of democracy is just bullshit,” says one senior intelligence officer who’s spent decades fighting terrorism and finds his job getting harder, not easier, because of recent developments. “You take the lid off and you don’t know what’s going to happen. I think disaster is lurking.”
…
Which is why the Americans have once again turned to Riyadh as their discreet and indispensable ally. In Yemen particularly, the Saudis have their own operatives on the ground and many tribal leaders on their payroll. The kingdom’s main objective—to stabilize Yemen while eliminating Al Qaeda—is much the same as Washington’s. But can Saudi Arabia really resist the region’s seismic change? If the country is about to erupt as Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria have done, would local intelligence services know? Would the Americans? The record is far from encouraging.
White House spokesman Jay Carney expressed satisfaction with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Congress address and his commitment to peace. The White House is satisfied with the commitment Netanyahu expressed for the two-state vision, Carney said.
Ben Rhodes, a senior official in the US National Security Council who is currently touring Europe with President Barack Obama, also praised Netanyahu’s speech. He noted that he himself would not equate Hamas with al-Qaeda but could not help agree with the comparison.
Senator John McCain tweeted “Just left strong speech by Israeli PM Netanyahu. America stands with Israel and always will.”
Netanyahu declared “Israel will be generous about the size of the Palestinian state” but stressed he will not accept the right of return, will not divide Jerusalem and will insist on military presence along the Jordan River.
This is an interesting piece about Barack Obama and his evolving views towards the Muslim world. The idea that people there will suddenly likes America after a pretty speech is delusional. For example, anti-US sentiment is strong in Egypt, as it should be, considering the Mubarak regime was backed for three decades, including by Obama until the last minute.
And note the conversations with supposedly leading foreign affairs “experts”, both of whom largely support the imperial role of the US in the world and backed the Iraq war. Fareed Zakaria assisted President Bush post 9/11 with “advice” how to manage the Middle East.
And, er, would the US President want to speak to some real experts in the Middle East itself?
For President Obama, the killing of Osama bin Laden is more than a milestone in America’s decade-long battle against terrorism. It is a chance to recast his response to the upheaval in the Arab world after a frustrating stretch in which the stalemate in Libya, the murky power struggle in Yemen and the brutal crackdown in Syria have dimmed the glow of the Egyptian revolution.
Administration officials said the president was eager to use Bin Laden’s death as a way to articulate a unified theory about the popular uprisings from Tunisia to Bahrain — movements that have common threads but also disparate features, and have often drawn sharply different responses from the United States.
The first sign of this “reset” could come as early as next week, when Mr. Obama plans to give a speech on the Middle East in which he will seek to put Bin Laden’s death in the context of the region’s broader political transformation. The message, said one of his deputy national security advisers, Benjamin J. Rhodes, will be that “Bin Laden is the past; what’s happening in the region is the future.”
“The spotlight is understandably always on whatever country things are going worst in,” Mr. Rhodes said. “What’s important is to step back and say, ‘The trajectory of change is in the right direction.’ ”
Still, although Bin Laden’s killing may provide a rare moment of clarity, it has less obvious implications for American strategic calculations in the region. Some administration officials argue that the heavy blow to Al Qaeda gives the United States the chance to be more forward-leaning on political change because it makes Egypt, Syria and other countries less likely to tip toward Islamic extremism.
But other senior officials note that the Middle East remains a complicated place: the death of Al Qaeda’s leader does not erase the terrorist threat in Yemen, while countries like Bahrain are convulsed by sectarian rivalries that never had much to do with Bin Laden’s radical message. The White House said it was still working through the policy implications country by country.
…
Thomas E. Donilon, the national security adviser, said Mr. Obama was as deeply immersed in all the Arab countries undergoing political upheaval. “The president, in each of these cases, has really been the central intellectual force in these decisions, in many cases, designing the approaches,” he said.
At night in the family residence, an adviser said, Mr. Obama often surfs the blogs of experts on Arab affairs or regional news sites to get a local flavor for events. He has sounded out prominent journalists like Fareed Zakaria of Time magazine and CNN and Thomas L. Friedman, a columnist at The New York Times, regarding their visits to the region. “He is searching for a way to pull back and weave a larger picture,” Mr. Zakaria said.
Mr. Obama has ordered staff members to study transitions in 50 to 60 countries to find precedents for those under way in Tunisia and Egypt. They have found that Egypt is analogous to South Korea, the Philippines and Chile, while a revolution in Syria might end up looking like Romania’s.
This deliberate, almost scholarly, approach is in keeping with Mr. Obama’s style, one that has frustrated people who believe he is too slow and dispassionate. But officials said it also reflected his own impatience, two years after he gave a speech in Cairo intended to mend America’s relations with the Muslim world, that many of these countries remained mired in corruption.
“The way he personally talks about corruption, he understands the frustration,” Mr. Rhodes said.
The most expensive public enemy in American history died Sunday from two bullets.
As we mark Osama bin Laden’s death, what’s striking is how much he cost our nation—and how little we’ve gained from our fight against him. By conservative estimates, bin Laden cost the United States at least $3 trillion over the past 15 years, counting the disruptions he wrought on the domestic economy, the wars and heightened security triggered by the terrorist attacks he engineered, and the direct efforts to hunt him down.
So I wrote an article for the ABC last week on the murder of Osama Bin Laden. I asked questions about his death, the significance of his assassination, the role of Al-Qaeda in making the US an insanely paranoid security state post 9/11 and the terror leader’s relevance (or otherwise) during the Arab Spring.
But the cultural police are out in force. Rupert Murdoch’s duly appointed “leftists” won’t have a bar of questioning “war on terror” doctrine. Not allowed, you see. May cause anti-Semitism. Or love of Iran. Or something.
No self-respecting social democrat mourned his death. And yet, had one’s daily reading habits been confined to sections of so-called “progressive” opinion, bin Laden’s death was a matter of profound regret. The extra-judicial killing was a denial of due process, celebrity lawyer Geoffrey Robertson protested, oblivious to the impossibility of capturing or trying bin Laden. “[It's] hard to celebrate one more corpse,” opined Jeff Sparrow, a devotee of the violent Bolshevik thug, Leon Trotsky, on ABC’s The Drum. Not to be outdone, Crikey’s Hunter S Thompson-wannabe, Guy Rundle, downplayed bin Laden’s crimes claiming that: “Morally speaking, 9/11 was no worse than a B-52 run over Vietnam.”
You don’t have to believe that American engagement in Indochina during the 1960s and 70s was foolhardy or that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was likewise ill-judged, as the present writer does, to find Rundle’s commentary nonsensical. Then again this is a man who has penned such thoughtful treatises as “Zionists and Nazis Connected. Discuss.”
Perhaps the most disturbing local contribution came from another Drum regular, anti-Israel activist Antony Loewenstein, who announced that “the West has much to learn”. Bin Laden’s “[terrorist] tactics were abhorrent and failed to attract huge numbers of followers” Loewenstein surmised, nonetheless the West’s subjugation of Muslims meant that the “arguments for his organisation’s force have only strengthened since 9/11″.
In other words, Osama was a nasty piece of work but fighting the good fight against imperialist crusaders. (Never mind that the majority of al-Qa’ida’s victims have been Muslim.) Loewenstein concluded by offering a paean of praise: “Bin Laden died a man who profoundly changed the landscape of the world.”
Well, yes, he certainly changed Lower Manhattan’s landscape.
If any further evidence were required to show that a segment of the 21st century Western Left has completely lost the plot and plumbed the deepest, darkest depths of moral nihilism and cultural relativism, the contributions of these so-called “progressive” thinkers is conclusive proof.
…
Today, however, noisy elements on the far Left – think Noam Chomsky, John Pilger and our local scribblers – seem to believe that Western-style democracy is in fact the real enemy.
With monotonous regularity they excuse bin Laden and his fellow Jihadis’ death-cult or rationalise Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s vile anti-Semitism, instead preferring to blame the US and Israel for all the woes of the world, including partial responsibility for the September 11 atrocities.
…
It is high time these values-free misfits received a new appellation.
Practically speaking, they oppose mainstream Left thinking on virtually every subject. Amazingly they can see no tangible difference between a theocracy and a democracy nor denounce Islamic fundamentalism in unequivocal terms. To my mind, they should be known for what they are: nihilists.
So let them rail against liberal democracy and chant: “We are all Hezbollah” from the rooftops but do not besmirch the good name of others by deeming themselves Left. No, let them stand with like-minded nihilists, Jew-haters and other enemies of social democracy, including a recently deceased jihadist unlikely to be enjoying a judenrein paradise of virgins. On behalf of the sane Left, good riddance to the lot of them.
I have been duly chastised and will no longer ask any questions about anything.
After the recent US murder of Osama Bin Laden – was Pakistan warned about the attack? Some almost certainly were but denied it to give the impression that Pakistan wasn’t colluding with the super-power (which they are, in a massive way) – where’s the relationship likely to go now?
Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker gives a good overview of the situation and reveals the typically inept application of US foreign policy:
It’s the end of the Second World War, and the United States is deciding what to do about two immense, poor, densely populated countries in Asia. America chooses one of the countries, becoming its benefactor. Over the decades, it pours billions of dollars into that country’s economy, training and equipping its military and its intelligence services. The stated goal is to create a reliable ally with strong institutions and a modern, vigorous democracy. The other country, meanwhile, is spurned because it forges alliances with America’s enemies.
The country not chosen was India, which “tilted” toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Pakistan became America’s protégé, firmly supporting its fight to contain Communism. The benefits that Pakistan accrued from this relationship were quickly apparent: in the nineteen-sixties, its economy was an exemplar. India, by contrast, was a byword for basket case. Fifty years then went by. What was the result of this social experiment?
India has become the state that we tried to create in Pakistan. It is a rising economic star, militarily powerful and democratic, and it shares American interests. Pakistan, however, is one of the most anti-American countries in the world, and a covert sponsor of terrorism. Politically and economically, it verges on being a failed state. And, despite Pakistani avowals to the contrary, America’s worst enemy, Osama bin Laden, had been hiding there for years—in strikingly comfortable circumstances—before U.S. commandos finally tracked him down and killed him, on May 2nd.
American aid is hardly the only factor that led these two countries to such disparate outcomes. But, at this pivotal moment, it would be a mistake not to examine the degree to which U.S. dollars have undermined our strategic relationship with Pakistan—and created monstrous contradictions within Pakistan itself.
…
In 2009, Senators Richard Lugar and John Kerry, recognizing that American military aid had given the Army and the I.S.I. disproportionate power in Pakistan, helped pass legislation in Congress sanctioning seven and a half billion dollars in civilian assistance, to be disbursed over a period of five years. Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, apparently at the direction of the military, flew to Washington, and insisted that his country would not be micromanaged. So far, less than a hundred and eighty million dollars of that money has been spent, because the civilian projects require oversight and checks on corruption. The Pakistani military, meanwhile, submits expense claims every month to the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad; according to a report in the Guardian, receipts are not provided—or requested.
This is a moving piece. Written by US journalist Michael Hastings (a friend and colleague) about the real opportunity that should be taken with the death of Osama Bin Laden.
An imperial nation that continues to believe it can rule by brute force and invade Muslim nations is delusional:
Osama bin Laden’s actions, and our reactions to them, have defined my adult life. I was in New York City on September 11th, 2001, a senior in college. After the towers collapsed, I walked 95 blocks to get as close to Ground Zero as possible, so I could see first-hand the destruction that would define our future. By the time I got to Baghdad four years later, very few Americans believed that the people we were fighting in Iraq posed a threat to the United States. Even the military press didn’t bother lying about it anymore, referring to our enemies as “insurgents” rather than “terrorists.” A woman I loved was killed in Baghdad in January 2007 — Al Qaeda in Iraq took credit for it — and my younger brother fought for 15 months as an infantry platoon leader, earning a Bronze Star. Other friends, both American and Iraqi, suffered their own losses: homes, limbs, loved ones.
By the fall of 2008, when I had moved on to Afghanistan, bin Laden and Al Qaeda were barely footnotes to what we were doing there. “It’s not about bin Laden,” a military intelligence official told me. “It’s about fixing the mess.” This added to the growing despair Americans felt about the war: If it wasn’t about bin Laden, then what the fuck was it about? Why were we fighting wars that took us no closer to the man responsible for unleashing the horror of September 11th? A top-ranking military official told me last year that he didn’t think we’d ever get bin Laden. Yet each time our presidents and generals told us why we were still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, they always used bin Laden and September 11th as an excuse. As long as they insisted on fighting these wars we didn’t need to fight, the wound to the American psyche wasn’t allowed to heal.
Right from the start, the idea of the War on Terror was a fuzzy one at best. We were promised there would be no “battlefields and beachheads,” as President George W. Bush put it. It would be a secret war, conducted mostly in the dark, no holds barred. And that’s how it might have played had we got bin Laden early on, dead or alive. But that’s not what happened. Instead, we went on a rampage in the full light of day. We got our battlefields and beachheads after all. Kabul, Kandahar, Baghdad, Fallujah, Ramadi, Najaf, Mosul, Kirkuk, Basra, Kabul and Kandahar again — the list went on and on. We couldn’t find bin Laden, so we went after anyone who looked like him, searching for other monsters to put down: the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
In the end, bin Laden got the carnage he had hoped to unleash. Nearly 3,000 Americans were killed on September 11th. Since then, 6,022 American servicemen and women have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more than 42,000 have been wounded. More than 3,000 allied soldiers have died, along with some 1,200 private contractors, aid workers and journalists. Most of the killing didn’t take place in battles — it was in the dirty metrics of suicide bombs, death squads, checkpoint killings, torture chambers and improvised explosive devices. Civilians on their way to work or soldiers driving around in circles, looking for an enemy they could seldom find. We may never know how many innocent civilians were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan, but estimates suggest that more than 160,000 have died so far. Al Qaeda, by contrast, has lost very few operatives in the worldwide conflagration — perhaps only “scores,” as President Obama said this month. In truth, Al Qaeda never had many members to begin with. Not since Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Archduke Ferdinand, setting off World War I, has a conspiracy undertaken by so few been felt by so many.
After learning of bin Laden’s death, I congratulated my friends in the military and the intelligence community, tweeted my appreciation to President Obama and his team, then sat back and listened to the horns honking outside my apartment in Washington. I thought of all the dead, and what adding this fucker’s name to the list actually means. My hope — and it is not one I have much hope in — is that our political leaders will use bin Laden’s death to put an end to the madness he provoked. Withdraw our remaining troops from Iraq, a country that never posed a threat to us. End the war in Afghanistan, where we will spend $120 billion this year to prevent the country from becoming a hideout for Al Qaeda. As bin Laden’s death makes clear, our true enemies will always find a hideout, no matter how many people we torture and bribe and kill. For the past 10 years, we have used the name Osama bin Laden to justify our wars. Perhaps, now that he is dead, we can use it in the cause of peace.
When the rhetoric is stripped away, the reasons return to the fateful decision to treat the September 11 attacks as an act of war, rather than a monstrous crime. That choice, though it will probably forever be portrayed as an unavoidable bow to the righteous fury of American citizens, emanated at least equally from raison d’état. Not only had 19 men with box cutters destroyed iconic buildings and sown panic in the two most strategic US cities, they had breached the walls of the mightiest military power the world has ever known, catching its watchmen unawares. The hijackers hailed, moreover, from the region of the globe where US interests most require the projection of invincibility. To secure its guardianship of Persian Gulf oil reserves, such a crucial component of its superpower status, the US felt compelled to stage as dramatic a show of force as it could muster. It so happened that the Bush administration was staffed with men and women who had been waiting for the occasion to make sure the world knew who was boss. The Obama administration, having inherited the aggressive forward deployments, is loath to rein them in without first demonstrating US dominion conclusively. Osama bin Laden surely knew what was he was doing in picking his targets, but the US national security state has chosen to fulfill his foul prophecy.
The media coverage of the murder of Osama Bin Laden continues apace (including my favourite kind of “journalism”, “US officials say…”. Because US officials have a glorious history of telling the truth.)
Pierre Bourdieu is (or was) a Frenchman. Thus in that category of people who the English-speaking world generally ignore or treat with derision. Much of what is written by French social theorists does not cross the Channel in good shape. But here is a bon mot that appears to capture succinctly the state of play in the English-speaking world post Abbottabad. And even more remarkable given that it is a spontaneous intervention in a public exchange.
The occasion? The Frankfurt Book Fair, 15 October 1995.
Included in Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of our Time, Polity Press, 1998; translated by Richard Nice.
“From deep inside the Islamic countries there comes a very profound question with regard to the false universalism of the West, or what I call the imperialism of the universal. France has been the supreme incarnation of this imperialism … If it is true that one form of universalism is no more than a nationalism which invokes the universal (human rights, etc.) in order to impose itself, then it becomes less easy to write off all fundamentalist reaction against it as reactionary.
“Scientific rationalism – the rationalism of the mathematical models which inspire the policy of the IMF or the World Bank, that of the law firms, great juridical multinationals which impose the traditions of American law on the whole planet, that of rational-action theories, etc. – is both the expression and the justification of a Western arrogance, which leads people to act as if they had the monopoly of reason and could set themselves up as world policemen, in other words as self-appointed holders of the monopoly of legitimate violence, capable of applying the force of arms in the service of universal justice.
“Terrorist violence, through the irrationalism of the despair which is almost always at its root, refers back to the inert violence of the powers which invoke reason. Economic coercion is often dressed up in juridical [rationales]. Imperialism drapes itself in the legitimacy of international bodies. And, through the very hypocrisy of the rationalizations intended to mask its double standards, it tends to provoke or justify, among the Arab, South American or African peoples, a very profound revolt against the reason which cannot be separated from the abuses of power which are armed or justified by reason (economic, scientific or any other). These ‘irrationalisms’ are partly the product of our rationalism, imperialist, invasive and conquering or mediocre, narrow, defensive, regressive and repressive, depending on the place and time.
“One is still defending reason when one fights those who mask their abuses of power under the appearances of reason or who use the weapons of reason to consolidate or justify an arbitrary empire.”
Bourdieu’s acculturising ‘symbolic violence’, draping the real violence, is resplendent in Obama’s speech and the triumphalist crowds.
Osama bin Laden exists because of the divergence between the West’s sustaining myths (freedom) and the reality (subjugation), a divergence most transparent at the hard edge of empire. OBL, a symptom, disappears from the scene; the divergence between myth and reality remains.
This divergence fuels the ‘war on terror’ from within, now a perpetual motion machine.
Meanwhile, the mutual embrace of the West and the Saudi regime, that paradigmatic myth-reality divergence, that prime propellant of OBL from spoiled brat to global bogeyman, stays firmly cemented in the bond of uncompromising self-interest.
Back in November I broke a story that detailed covert Australian missions across the Middle East, mostly off the books and often skirting legality.
Today’s piece in the Sydney Morning Herald by Rafael Epstein appears to add important points to the role Australia is playing alongside the US and Britain in these war zones but so many questions remain, not least the actual tasks of counter-insurgency that often merely inflame anti-Western hatred. There’s much more on this story to come:
Australian special forces soldiers have been serving in highly secretive US and British hit squads in Afghanistan, and some have served with the US unit whose men killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan this week.
The Herald has confirmed that, since 2001, Australians from the SAS and Commando regiments have successfully served on “third country deployments” alongside some of the most highly classified, best-trained and well-resourced combat groups in Afghanistan. Crucially, the Australians have been refused permission to participate in cross-border raids into Pakistan.
The so-called ”capture-or-kill” squads ramped up their pursuit of senior insurgent leaders under the Obama administration, especially after US General David Petraeus took command in Afghanistan last year. They do not operate under NATO’s protocols and rules of engagement, but fight under the banner of the US-led Operation Enduring Freedom, which gives them ”greater freedom of action”, an Australian source said.
Dozens of Australian soldiers have served in Afghanistan with America’s Taskforce 373, and the British-led Taskforce 42, designations detailed last year in cables released by WikiLeaks.
These units have been rebadged, but sources have requested their new number designations not be disclosed, due to the secret nature of their work.
The Herald has confirmed that repeated requests from senior special forces officers were refused when they asked for small numbers of Australian personnel to serve in operations crossing into Pakistan.
One source said the requests were ”beyond the risk profile considered acceptable”, following internal legal advice.
Military sources insist the US- and British-led squads aim to capture, rather than kill, their targets, but with many insurgent leaders regarded as experienced fighters, efforts to arrest are often regarded as a more dangerous option. Another Australian source said the squads “don’t take many prisoners”.
Australian soldiers deployed with these teams go through a legal process allowing them to operate under another country’s flag while ensuring their status as members of the Australian Defence Force. However they are not allowed to participate in many anti-narcotics missions and are barred from deploying inside Pakistan because “if the Aussies breach the rules and they’re found out, it’s over”, one source said.
As many as six Australians at any one time are stationed with elite units such as the British Special Air Service and Special Boat Service, the US 75th Ranger Regiment, and ”Tier One” units, the Combat Application Group or Delta Force and the Navy SEALs Special Warfare Development Group. It was this last group that raided bin Laden’s compound.
The Australians and their counterparts are specially trained and equipped, have priority over almost all other military activity in Afghanistan and have access to many more remote-control drones, helicopters and observation satellites than the special forces that serve under the NATO banner.
Most Australian special forces are deployed with the ADF’s Special Operations Task Group in Oruzgan, and operate under rules and regulations set by NATO, after agreement with the President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai.
They operate with significant numbers of Afghan soldiers and abide by rules of engagement governing the International Security Assistance Force.
The British and American-led teams – often including an Australian member – follow a different set of rules and regulations, and have been criticised by human rights groups and some of the newspapers that first detailed their existence.
However Australian sources have told the Herald that the secret squads are subject to even greater scrutiny than NATO combat groups and have to explain and justify the precise detail of almost every operation, often personally reporting to the staff of General Petraeus.
The US Taskforce 373 is split into four groups, allowing it to operate all over Afghanistan, with some of its soldiers based at Bagram airbase outside Kabul and others at the Kandahar airbase, near the country’s second biggest city.
The taskforce consists of soldiers trained to target insurgent leaders. There is also other specialised training including targeting moving vehicles.
Overall in Afghanistan allied special operations forces have mounted more than 1600 missions in the first three months of this year, an average of 18 a night. They have captured or killed close to 3000 insurgents, General Petraeus has told US newspapers.
Bin Laden got his just deserts – those who live by the sword tend to die by the sword – but did he get the “justice” that President Obama talked about? Many Arabs – and this theme was taken up by the Arab press, which spoke of his “execution” – thought he should have been captured, taken to the international court in The Hague and tried.
Of course there will always be those who do and will believe he was a brave martyr ignominiously murdered by the proxy arm of “Zionism”. Islamist groups in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and many ulema in south-west Asia have said as much already. In reality, needless to say, he was a has-been. His promises of overthrowing the pro-American or non-Islamic Arab dictators were fulfilled by the people of Egypt and Tunisia – and perhaps soon by Libyans and Syrians – not by al-Qa’ida and its violence.
The real problem, however, is that the West, which has constantly preached to the Arab world that legality and non-violence was the way forward in the Middle East, has taught a different lesson to the people of the region: that executing your opponents is perfectly acceptable.
Both President Bush and President Obama have reserved the right for US forces to operate lethally and unilaterally in any country across the globe in pursuit of alleged high value terrorists. The Obama administration’s expansion of US Special Operations activities globally has been authorized under a classified order dating back to the Bush administration. Originally signed in early 2004 by then–Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, it is known as the “AQN ExOrd,” or Al Qaeda Network Execute Order. The AQN ExOrd was intended to cut through bureaucratic and legal processes, allowing US special forces to move into denied areas or countries beyond the official battle zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. Gen. David Petraeus, who is poised to become director of the CIA, expanded and updated that order in late 2009. “JSOC has been more empowered more under this administration than any other in recent history,” a Special Ops source told The Nation. “No question.”
The White House Tuesday blamed “the fog of war” for conflicting statements in its recounting of the events surrounding the Abbottabad raid that killed Osama bin Laden, but the history of misstatements from U.S. government officials about various combat operations raises questions about whether briefers also were subjecting us to a counterterrorism strategy and not just completely confused in their initial statements.
This is a Flickr badge showing public photos from AntonyLoewenstein. Make your own badge here.
This is a non-profit site dedicated to providing timely and challenging material. Any financial contributions would be greatly appreciated, however, to sustain hosting costs and the life of a freelance journalist.
