If you have a chance head over to Obsidian Wings and check out the latest post by my favorite writer there, Eric Martin. He raises some good points concerning this article in today's New York Times, to wit: U.S. Is Said to Expand Secret Actions in MidEast.
Then I had to go a ruin it by trying to make a point that I poorly expressed in his comments section... But, that said, the Times article and the disquieting issues raised by Eric deserve a further hearing.
This seems to be nothing more than a continuation of the Bush policy (and I use that word loosely) of committing our SOCOM guys and the Sekrit Squirrels to further Spy vs. Spy antics in South Asia. Here's the gist from the Times:
While the Bush administration had approved some clandestine military activities far from designated war zones, the new order is intended to make such efforts more systematic and long term, officials said. Its goals are to build networks that could “penetrate, disrupt, defeat or destroy” Al Qaeda and other militant groups, as well as to “prepare the environment” for future attacks by American or local military forces, the document said. The order, however, does not appear to authorize offensive strikes in any specific countries.
...
Some of Mr. Rumsfeld’s initiatives were controversial, and met with resistance by some at the State Department and C.I.A. who saw the troops as a backdoor attempt by the Pentagon to assert influence outside of war zones. In 2004, one of the first groups sent overseas was pulled out of Paraguay after killing a pistol-waving robber who had attacked them as they stepped out of a taxi.
A Pentagon order that year gave the military authority for offensive strikes in more than a dozen countries, and Special Operations troops carried them out in Syria, Pakistan and Somalia.
Recent reports from Afghanistan have documented alleged attrocities by Green Beenies getting loose on villagers in so-called "night raids." This raises questions I had in the wake of both in the Haditha Massacre and the odd case of Sgt. Ray Giroux, the Army sergeant courts martialed for murder in Western Iraq and who's trial revealed that he had been ordered to "kill all men of military age."
To me, the real question is not
whether toadcranking peasants is now officially part of the CentCom theater
ROE, but what is the level of supervision and mission cohesion in the field,
right now.
More to the point, I keep flashing on this exchange from Charlie Wilson's War:
Charlie: So, what, exactly, is our policy in Afghanistan?
Gust: Well, technically speaking, we don't have one, but we're working on that...
Charlie: Who's "we?"
Gust: Me and three other guys...
It points to what I believe is the underlying problem. Our South Asia policy has been all over the map and we have not been able to come to a consensus on what it is we really want to be accomplishing in South Asia, much less how to go about it. Because to admit a breakdown of troop discipline in the field, or that command level organization no longer has effective unit control or that those units don't understand the overall mission beyond the vague political platitudes of "securing freedom" or "defeating the enemy," is really the final admission that our South Asia policy is a complete train wreck, turning military horror-show.
Granted, the Obama Administration has inheirited this screwed up mess, but it's his now and we need to get everyone on the same page, conceptually at least, on what is our overall plan for our dealings with the region, because right now, as I commented earlier, I believe we don't have a real policy consensus -- either in
government or amongst the population -- on what to do there, beyond the buck-passing "you go come up with something; let me know how
it works out..." and then we have the nerve to be all shocked and
surprised when tragedies like the Haditha or these night raids happen.
Eric points out that a lot of the SOCOM guys have been operating, it seems, as though they have carte blanche to do what they think needs done. Wonder how they got that idea? Sarcasm aside, it's because we don't have a unified, cohesive picture in our own minds of what our relationship to that region is supposed to be.
This is more than a political question careening through the halls of power, this is a moral and cultural question that we as a nation need to come to grips with. But given our own inability to even culturally cope with Latino migrants, I don't even pretend to know how we're going to wrap our collective heads around this one.
But if there is transparency and accountability to be had, it needs to start with what our actual policy is and then it should flow down hill from there.
mojo sends
