Wednesday, July 15, 2009

A Disturbing (To Some) Fable

The first red of the dawn sun was breaking over the low hill at the east end of the valley. To each side the higher cliffs were already brilliant in the new day. A group of men are assembling in the courtyard surrounded by a low stone wall. To one side a stone and adobe building spreads. From a door a tall, thin man emerges.

He walks to the front of the group, now formed in three rough lines. The man spreads a rug before him. The others do likewise. Facing the sun which has now fully risen, the wraith like man keels. The men behind him do the same. The man slowly bows his forehead to the ground.

A convulsion runs though his bent body. His legs kick straight out behind. He falls, rolls to one side. The men behind him do not notice immediately.

A second later the man's body shudders again. His head blows apart, a melon under an invisible sledge hammer. Behind him a scream echoes to the mountains.

A kilometer or more away five men pack up their specialist equipment. The trigger puller, his spotter, the three man security detail, prepare to pull out of the hide they have occupied since the CIA officer and his two local "assets" piloted them in two nights earlier with assurances the target would be arriving.

"I've got an "abu" in the local force." The CIA man had said. "He hasn't been wrong yet. You can bet on it."

The trigger puller remembered thinking, "Yeah. I am. My life. And the lives of the other guys too."

It was high step it time now. High pucker factor. It won't take the turbans long to be out for blood. Two or three klicks down the mountain. A race between the team getting to the extraction point and the bad guys finding them.

A voice from hundreds, thousands? of miles away whispered in the team leader's ear. "The imagery is good. Looks like a clean cancel. An attaboy all the way around. Haul ass!"

"Roger that," the team leader whispered in reply. The team was already fast walking down the scree covered, bush laden slope.

And, so it might have been. This would have been one of the most desired outcomes had CIA gone beyond the initial planning stages and, after gaining all the requisite approvals from the Executive and Legislative branches, put the planning to work in the real world. This would have been the endgame of the program Congress never knew about.

Where's the problem? Who would not have approved of a well-thought out program to kill the leadership cadre of al-Qaeda or Taliban?

There was--and is--no need for the statutorily responsible committees of Congress to have been briefed on any tentative, never developed, never proposed for execution program to kill (or capture--have to put that option in for the squeamish) the command echelon of a group which has attacked the United States, killed its citizens, sent seismic waves of shock though its social, political and economic institutions. If the plan, the program had been fully developed on paper then there might have been a need to brief the Gang of Eight on its existence, its potential benefits--and risks.

There would have been a need to debate any ethical considerations, to discuss the legality of assassination. To consider the possible impact of the US effort and involvement, either direct or indirect, becoming public knowledge.

But, the idea of pushing the cancel button on al-Qaeda heavies up close and personal on the ground rather than through the distant, sanitary method of Predator delivered Hellfire missiles needed to be presented and approved if and only if its development had gone beyond, far beyond the very preliminary stages. Such was apparently not the case. The idea went nowhere.

CIA is no stranger when it comes to assassination. It took very heavy hits in public from the Church Committee for the planned attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba. Lost in the chest-pounding over the morality of such efforts was a basic reality: The CIA did not initiate the plans for these killings and many in the Agency did not approve of killing high level political leaders fearing the destabilising consequences of doing so.

No such qualms existed with respect to the targeted killing of lower level political and military personnel. The Quang Ngai Special Platoon program and its very controversial follow-on, the Phoenix program did assassinations as part of the total effort to disrupt the organisation of the Viet Cong and National Liberation Front. On some occasions these assassinations were very effective. On others they were counterproductive.

If anyone at CIA reviewed the history of these activities during the Vietnam War they would have seen the plethora of problems concerning mounting operations intended to kill (or capture) designated hostile personnel. A review of the Israeli experience would have demonstrated the same mix of success and disaster, problems overcome and difficulties which killed the operation deader than the intended target ever could be.

Hard target kills are no easier from the ground than they are from the air. The same difficulties of information acquisition and rapidity of operation exist. The same problems of killing only the desired target exist as to the complications if the wrong person is aced or there is too much collateral death.

Ground operations carry a very real problem of deniability. No matter how carefully personnel are selected, trained, equipped, sanitised and inserted the chance of a team member being captured or a dead body being recovered and identified at least as to nationality exists. Nor does the use of foreign personnel obviate the difficulties. Further, foreign personnel often lack the reliability and motivation of US forces.

On balance there are any number of very sound reasons to consider and reconsider ground based hits. If the clandestine service people reviewed the mixed record of US activities in Vietnam they would have seen the pitfalls far outnumbered (and certainly outweighed in effectiveness) the successes. An unbiased appraisal of the overly celebrated Israeli "hit teams" would have reinforced this impression.

Quite simply, air delivered death is preferable to the ground borne sort. Predators with Hellfires may have the risk of killing the wrong person or too many people, but they are inherently non-provable. Absent a shot down pile of wreckage there is no way of verifying the sneaky Americans were out and about snuffing the odd hostile here and there.

Leon Pinetta's partisan effort to protect Nancy Pelosi from the consequences of shooting off her mouth in finest Joe Biden style along with the concomitant Progressive Caucus driven hue and cry for hearings on how that horrible CIA did this without telling us has two destructive results. The first is to assure that we will never use a ground team to target Osama or any of his senior level ilk. The second is worse.

Should anyone at any time in any place dust Osama or Omar or any of the assorted Abduls, Mohammads, and Abu Ya Fools who constitute the command echelon of any Islamist jihadist group, the soft-hearted and feeble minded as well as Islamist apologists everywhere will blame the US for the death. Uncle Sam will be excoriated not only in Islamist polluted countries but elsewhere for having stooped to assassination.

Suicide bombers are OK. Snipers are evil. An interesting way to parse violence and death.

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