Shadow Wars

Shadow Wars

 

By Conn Hallinan

Foreign Policy In Focus

May 26, 2009

 

http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6141

 

Sudan: The two F-16s caught the trucks deep in the

northern desert. Within minutes, the column of vehicles

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 January 14, 2006

and April 8, 2009, 60 such attacks took place. They

killed 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 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, an

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 drew angry responses

from the country whose sovereignty was violated. But

since no one 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. Assassination Teams

 

In his book The War Within, 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). Hersh says that "Congress has no oversight"

over the program.

 

According to a 2004 classified document, the United

States has the right to attack "terrorists" in some 15

to 20 nations, including Pakistan, Syria, and Iran. The

Israeli military has long used "targeted

assassinations" to eliminate Tel Aviv's enemies. U.S.

and NATO "assassination teams" have emerged in Iraq and

Afghanistan, where, according to the UN, 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.

 

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 3AM 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.

 

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 a

March 26 raid in Kut that killed two men 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," a sentiment that David Kilcullen,

the top advisor to the U.S. military in Afghanistan,

agreed with in recent congressional testimony. The U.S.

government doesn't officially take credit for the

attacks.

 

Budgets and Strategy

 

If Congress agrees to the Defense Department budget

proposed by Pentagon chief Robert Gates, attacks by SOF

and armed robots will likely 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. These similarities include "a shift in

focus toward unconventional conflict in the Third World."

 

Gates' 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 counterinsurgency 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 counterinsurgency is

winning "hearts and minds" by building schools and

digging wells, its core is 3AM 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. Hidden Wars

 

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 more dead in

Iraq and Afghanistan. The number of civilian dead in

Pakistan runs into the hundreds.

 

The new defense budget goes a long ways toward

retooling the U.S. military to become a quick

reaction/intervention force with an emphasis on

counterinsurgency and covert war. The question is:

Where will the shadow warriors strike next?

 

c 2009 Foreign Policy In Focus

 

Conn Hallinan is a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist.