PETER BERGEN, WASHINGTON POST
On May 1, 2011, CIA Director Leon Panetta was in command of the single most important U.S. military operation since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001: the Navy SEAL Team 6 assault on a mysterious compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden was suspected to be hiding. The SEALs were sneaking into Pakistan without the permission of its government on a covert “deniable” mission in a country that was supposedly allied to the United States. Because U.S. law forbids the military to do this kind of work, the SEALs were turned over to the control of the CIA and were “sheep-dipped” to become, in effect, spies under Panetta’s nominal control.
....A few years before the bin Laden operation, Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, then the head of Joint Special Operations Command, had turned the Army’s Delta Force and Navy SEAL Team 6 into a fighting machine in Iraq and Afghanistan that increasingly mounted operations to gather intelligence — what McChrystal termed “a fight for knowledge.”
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| Stanley A. McChrystal |
....Since the 9/11 attacks, a dramatic shift has occurred in the way the United States deploys its military and intelligence forces. In his new book, “The Way of the Knife,” Mark Mazzetti documents the militarization of the CIA and the stepped-up intelligence focus of Special Operations forces. As Mazzetti observes in his deeply reported and crisply written account, over the past decade “the CIA’s top priority was no longer gathering intelligence on foreign governments and their countries, but man hunting.” The bin Laden operation was far from the only deadly mission that Panetta presided over.
Panetta’s tenure at CIA, Mazzetti writes, was known for its “aggressive — some would come to believe reckless — campaign of targeted killings.” He authorized 216 CIA drone strikes in Pakistan that killed at least 1,196 people, mostly militants, but also a smaller number of civilians, according to a count by the New America Foundation. Panetta, a devout Catholic, observed that he had “said more Hail Marys in the last two years than I have in my whole life. ”Conversely, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was deeply irritated when the CIA rather than the military led the ground operation in late 2001 that ejected the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. He came to the conclusion that “the only answer was to make the Pentagon more like the CIA.”
The emergence of a “military-intelligence complex” has proved devastating to al-Qaeda and its affiliates. The CIA drone campaign in Pakistan has killed much of the terror network’s leaders and largely eliminated Pakistan’s tribal regions as the key training ground for the group; as a result, al-Qaeda hasn’t been able to mount a successful assault on the West since the suicide attacks on the London transportation system in 2005.
Meanwhile, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) not only killed bin Laden, but also largely destroyed the vicious leadership of al-Qaeda’s Iraqi affiliate, which had precipitated the civil war in Iraq by its numerous attacks on the Shia community. JSOC’s campaign against al-Qaeda played a key role in tamping down the Iraqi civil war and helped enable a steady decline in violence in Iraq since 2007.
Until recently this history had not been well understood because units like SEAL Team 6 that make up Joint Special Operations Command aren’t even officially acknowledged. McChrystal’s recent authoritative memoir, “My Share of the Task,” has done much to illuminate this important chapter in the evolution of American military operations.
If there is an “Obama doctrine,” it is to fight the war against al-Qaeda and its allies with drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen and with small numbers of clandestine Special Operations forces on the ground in countries such as Somalia. This new kind of fighting gives Mazzetti the title of his book, “The Way of the Knife.” It’s a form of warfare that avoids “messy, costly wars that topple governments and require years of American occupation.”
The benefits of the way of the knife are obvious: Few Americans are put at risk, and the costs are relatively low in a time of budgetary constraints. But as Mazzetti points out, this type of knife fighting is not as surgical as some of its proponents think, for it “creates enemies just as it has obliterated them.” It also has “lowered the bar for waging war, and it is now easier for the United States to carry out killing operations at the ends of the earth than at any other time in its history.”
CIA drone strikes are emblematic of this point. In Pakistan, a country with nuclear weapons, drone attacks are deeply unpopular, angering many of the 180 million Pakistanis. This is a high cost to pay. In 2010, a record 122 strikes occurred in Pakistan, yet few of the victims were leaders of al-Qaeda, suggesting that this tactic was being used without much thought for the larger strategic picture. The CIA drone program, which was conceived of as a way to kill the leaders of militant groups, had evolved into a counterinsurgency air force that killed mostly lower-level members of the Taliban in Pakistan.
But some big payoffs emerge from the blending of the roles of the military and the CIA that are well illustrated by the execution of the bin Laden raid. The first 15 minutes of the raid were consumed in killing bin Laden’s two bodyguards, his son and the al-Qaeda leader himself. But during the next 23 minutes, the SEALs picked up every computer, thumb drive and file they could lay their hands on in bin Laden’s compound. More than half of the time that the SEALs were on the ground in Pakistan they were performing what is known among intelligence professionals as SSE, or sensitive site exploitation.
As a result, the CIA was able to launch drone strikes — presided over by Panetta, not the military — that killed a number of al-Qaeda leaders, such as Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, who had appeared prominently in the documents the SEALs had recovered at the Abbottabad compound. The documents revealed that Rahman was not the middle-tier al-Qaeda official he had originally been pegged, but bin Laden’s chief of staff.
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| Atiyah Abd al-Rahman |
The increasingly intelligence-driven mission of Special Operations forces is surely a net gain for U.S. national security interests, but balanced against this is the fact that these forces operate behind a screen of secrecy that makes them far less accountable than the conventional military is to Congress and the American public. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis warned a century ago, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
N.Y. REVIEW OF BOOKS
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Given the extent to which Pakistan and the US have gotten on each other’s nerves in recent years, putting a greater distance between them might seem a very good idea. The notion of moving to a hostile “containment” of Pakistan, however, suffers from several flaws. It ignores the presence of large Pakistani diasporas in the West, which make the very idea of “containing” Pakistan ridiculous. It implies that the US will lose all interest in the fate of Afghanistan once US ground forces are withdrawn. It misses the great importance of Pakistan to the increasingly fraught triangular relationship between the US, India, and China. And it implies handing an even greater share of the responsibility for dealing with Pakistan to the CIA and the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).
As Mark Mazzetti makes clear in The Way of the Knife, his powerful exposé of the strategy of these forces since September 11, that would be a really bad idea. The militarization of US intelligence has both reflected and encouraged a tendency to forget certain crucial points about Pakistan.
The first is that groups based in Pakistan are only part of the Pakistani terrorist threat to the West. Launching attacks in the West requires terrorists from the Pakistani diaspora in the West. It is therefore not helpful to US security to kill terrorists in Pakistan if the result is to radicalize Pakistanis in the US and other Western countries—which is why the British authorities, acutely aware of their large, growing, and deeply troubled Pakistani communities, have a significantly different attitude toward these issues than their US counterparts.The second point...is that in the end, only Pakistanis can control Pakistan. The Pakistani intelligence services may be unreliable and infuriating, but they are also indispensable. Even if US intelligence could conceivably develop a presence in Pakistan that would enable it to monitor a country of more than 180 million people, what would it do with the intelligence gathered? In future, terrorist plots against the US may well be hatched in parts of Karachi or in Punjabi cities that are under militant influence, as much as in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) on the Afghan border that have been the target of the US drone campaign so far....
The CIA does have some great tactical successes to its credit in Pakistan, most notably finding Osama bin Laden; but if an intelligence service is to be given the power to conduct military operations of targeted killing in other countries, then—questions of morality and legality aside—it is essential that these be subject to political oversight and guided by political considerations.
In the case of CIA actions within Pakistan, it is not just that, as Mazzetti recounts, CIA policy has often operated on autopilot, with ostentatious disdain for political considerations and diplomatic advice; it is that on occasion it has also been extremely incompetent, most notably in the Raymond Davis affair in 2011, in which the CIA persuaded the Obama administration to undertake a strategy that ended in crisis.
Raymond Davis was a former US soldier and private security employee who was hired by the CIA to work out of the US consulate in Lahore—allegedly to spy on the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, responsible for the Mumbai terrorist attacks of 2008. On January 27, 2011, Davis shot and killed two men who were supposedly trying to rob him. Amid public fury in Pakistan, he was arrested and held for several weeks, before being released as part of a deal under sharia law whereby the families of the deceased were compensated by the US.
It should have been absolutely clear that the background, training, and character of Davis made him unsuited for a sensitive intelligence role in an important and volatile country (after returning to the US he attacked a man in a dispute over a parking space and later pleaded guilty to assault). And Davis was not alone. He was one of hundreds of new CIA operatives sent into Pakistan in 2010 in a disastrous effort to bypass Pakistani intelligence and gain information on terrorist groups.
The CIA then compounded its error by denying to the Pakistanis that Davis was indeed its man, and overruling for several weeks attempts by the US ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter, to arrange what was from the start the only way out of the crisis: the compensation of the victims’ families. As recounted by Mazzetti, the ability of the CIA to override the State Department is becoming a truly sinister aspect of US government.