[Peace-discuss] Obama's secret war vs. Pakistan

[C. G. Estabrook]

	3 G.I.s Killed in Pakistan. Now Can We Start
	Treating This Like a Real War?
	By Noah Shachtman
	February 3, 2010

Last year, President Obama and his administration ruled out sending U.S. ground 
forces into Pakistan. Instead, the White House said, America’s clandestine 
operations there would be waged solely by remote-control — with Predator and 
Reaper drones. “There is a red line,” said special envoy Richard Holbrooke. “And 
the red line is unambiguous and stated publicly by the Pakistani government over 
and over again: No foreign troops on our soil.”

Yet today, three U.S. soldiers were killed and two more were wounded by an 
improvised bomb in Pakistan. The area was known “as a Taliban stronghold,” the 
New York Times notes. But the “Pakistani military had declared cleared of the 
militants.”

It’s another sign that America’s once-small, once-secret war in Pakistan is 
growing bigger, more conventional, and busting out into the open. The U.S. Air 
Force now conducts flights over Pakistani soil. U.S. security contractors 
operate in the country. U.S. strikes are growing larger, more frequent, and more 
deadly; the latest attack reportedly involved 17 missiles and killed as many as 
29 people. Billions of dollars in U.S. aid goes to Islamabad. And now, U.S. 
forces are dying in Pakistan.

Which begs the question: When are we going to start treating this conflict in 
Pakistan as a real war — with real oversight and real disclosure about what the 
hell our people are really doing there? Maybe at one point, this conflict 
could’ve been swept under the rug as some classified CIA op. But that was 
billions of dollars and hundreds of Pakistani and American lives ago.

According to the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, the American forces were there 
merely “to attend the inauguration ceremony of a school for girls that had 
recently been renovated with U.S. humanitarian assistance.” These guys were 
merely trainers part of the small cadre — maybe a hundred or so — of U.S. 
special forces in Pakistan, beefing up the local Frontier Corps’ 
counterinsurgency skills.

As the Long War Journal notes, “The soldiers are not supposed to conduct 
military operations alongside the Frontier Corps units.”

But according to Washington Post columnist and de facto government spokesperson 
David Ignatius, “the improved U.S.-Pakistani cooperation extends to other 
activities [beyond training] as well. A senior Pentagon official said Tuesday 
that in Bajaur, a tribal area bordering Afghanistan, the two countries’ military 
operations were ‘much more coordinated.’”

American forces have found themselves in combat within Pakistan’s borders 
before. Back in 2001, a pair of Rangers were killed in a Blackhawk crash in 
Pakistan. In 2008, a raid by U.S. special operations troops killed as many as 20 
Pakistanis.

There are also a host of American private security contractors in Pakistan. 
Their exact roles are murky. But their presence is well-known, and deeply 
controversial. Which is why the Pakistani Taliban not only took credit for 
today’s bombing — but also claimed that the slain U.S. troops were, in fact, 
guns-for-hire. “The Americans killed were members of the Blackwater group,” a 
Taliban spokesman tells Dawn.

One operation the U.S. contractors are most certainly involved in: the drone 
strikes on suspected militant camps. There have been 12 reported attacks just in 
2010 — a huge increase over last year’s rate of about one strike per week. And 
the drone show no signs of letting up. Five aircraft supposedly participated in 
the most recent attack. If press accounts are accurate, the drone unleashed 
almost their full load of missiles. Each Repear unmanned aircraft carried four 
Hellfire missiles. This attack reportedly included 17 or more Hellfire hits.

UPDATE: My pal Uncle Jimbo from Blackfive.net accuses me of “a bit of heavy 
breathing on this.” He writes:

It is fair to point out that the ops in Pakistan are more tightly tied to a 
shooting war than many others, but does that mean we should take them and shine 
a bunch of bright lights on them? … There is plenty of oversight operating where 
it belongs in classified briefings… The political environment in Pakistan is 
delicate as Hell so we properly tread lightly. A bunch of breathless stories 
about the mere possibility that we are cooperating more w/ Pakistan or that 
heaven forbid the evil Blackwater mercenaries are helping load drones doesn’t 
make doing any good there easier… It is smart and a proper use of Special 
Forces. Now let’s stop making their jobs harder by acting like something 
nefarious is going on.

I hear that. And if this were some other, relatively small-scale SF operation 
(cough Yemen cough), I’d agree 100%. But there has been too much cash spent and 
too many lives lost in this mission to keep on operating as if it can all be 
kept behind the black door. The Pakistanis know what we’re up to, and our 
secrecy is only fueling the paranoia and conspiracy theories — not to mention 
depriving Americans of their right to know how their blood and treasure is being 
spent.

UPDATE 2: U.S. Central Command says the three troops killed today weren’t 
trigger-pullers. They were part of the military’s cadre of nation-builders, 
known as “civil affairs.” A CENTCOM statement notes that “the service members 
were assigned to the Office of the Defense Representative, Pakistan to conduct 
civil affairs-related training at the invitation of the Government of Pakistan.”

In other words, these soldiers weren’t involved in some high-speed, secret 
squirrel operation that needed to be kept quiet. They were part of a growing 
U.S. counterinsurgency in Pakistan. A widening war.

UPDATE 3: Rusty Shackleford over at the Jawa Report also thinks I’m off-base. 
“Admitting that we have troops on the ground engaged in combat roles would — 
literally — lead to a civil war in Pakistan. As it is, the Pakistani people 
tolerate – barely — the notion that foreign troops are there in a support 
mission,” he writes. “It is a catch-22, ironic, and duplicitous: but calling 
this a war is the same thing as losing it. Me, I’m willing to be called 
two-faced for sake of winning a war. Those that prefer consistency over victory 
are misguided.”

Captain Liz Mathias, on the other hand, thinks I’m on the right track. She 
writes in the comments:

Noah, I think you’re point about disclosure is more than valid, especially given 
the propaganda edge covert US operations in Pakistan give the TTP.* As TTP 
routinely links Blackwater with large-scale attacks, they’ve built a strong 
perception that any foreign invovlement, official, covert or contract, occurs 
without accountability. Just as “Blackwater” didn’t go away when they changed 
their name, the real participation of US forces in Pakistan doesn’t go away if 
we don’t talk about it.

Obviously, she’s writing in a personal capacity here. But it’s worth noting 
that, until recently, Captain Mathias was a spokesperson for the U.S.-led 
coalition in Kabul.

Read More 
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/02/3-gis-killed-in-pakistan-when-do-we-start-treating-this-like-a-real-war/#ixzz0eX5wnbdu

*[The following is from Jane's.  --CGE
"The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) was formed as an umbrella group that would 
enable the numerous pro-Taliban groups operating in the Federally Administered 
Tribal Areas (FATA) and North West Frontier Province (NWFP) of Pakistan to 
co-ordinate their activities and consolidate their growing influence in the 
region. The formation of the TTP was announced in a statement on 14 December 
2007. However, the individual groups that constitute the TTP - most notably the 
Tehrik-e-Nefaz-e-Shariat-Mohammadi (TNSM) in Swat - had existed for varying 
amounts of time prior to this date. The TTP was founded by Baitullah Mehsud, who 
served as the overall emir of the TTP, and the commander of TTP forces in South 
Waziristan, until his death on 23 August 2009 from injuries sustained in a 
United States drone missile strike on 5 August. The group's shura (council) on 
22 August selected the TTP's commander in Orakzai, Kurram and Khyber agencies, 
Hakimullah Mehsud, as Baitullah's replacement."]

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