Always Another War America and Israel together against Iran

PHILIP GIRALDI • AUGUST 31, 2021

  

Afghanistan is not exactly history quite yet as there still will be a lot final adjustments on the ground as well as the usual Vietnam-syndrome war of words that inevitably follows on yet another American-engineered foreign catastrophe. But the recriminations will go nowhere as there is certainly enough mud to stick on both major political parties that make Washington their home, and neither wants to be embarrassed to such an extent that anyone will actually demand change.

Regarding Afghanistan itself, I often recall hearing from a CIA friend of mine who served as the last Chief of Station in Kabul in the 1970s before the start of the Mujaheddin insurgency against the Marxist-Leninist government that was then in place eventually forced the US Embassy to close. He remarked how liberated the city was, full of smartly dressed attractive women and well-turned-out men going about their business. Though there was considerable repression in rural areas, education was highly prized by the people in the cities while many aspects of fundamental Islam were made illegal.

All of that came to a crashing halt when the United States and Saudi Arabia supported the Mujaheddin and eventually created al-Qaeda in a bid to damage the Soviets, who had intervened in the country and were backers of the Kabul regime headed by Babrak Karmal. Zbigniew Brzezinski was the “brain” behind the plan, in part to do payback for the Soviet role in Vietnam and in part because Zbig apparently had difficultly in separating his attachment for Poland, at the time part of the Soviet empire, from his role as national security adviser for Jimmy Carter, President of the United States of America.

To be sure, wars that are unsuccessful, like Vietnam and Afghanistan, do generate a certain blowback. It was regularly observed that the 1990-1 US-led Desert Storm operation followed by a victory parade down Fifth Avenue in New York City helped the United States recover from Vietnam fatigue. That meant that it would not hesitate to again use armed force to enforce its often touted “rules based international order,” best translated as US global hegemony.

Some might suggest that the best thing to do about Afghanistan is to learn from it. Hold senior officials and officers responsible for the egregious errors in judgement that led to disaster. But that will never happen as the top levels of the US government operate like a large social club where everyone protects everyone else. A Marine Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller who has called for accountability at senior levels has already been relieved of his command and is leaving the service, a warning from above to others who might be similarly inclined to be outspoken.

So, with all that in mind, the best was to make Afghanistan go away is to begin preparations for the next war. Since that is so, how lucky is President Joe Biden to have a visit at this very critical moment from Israel’s new Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who presented the president with a “new strategic vision” for the Middle East. In preparation for the visit, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that the prime minister’s visit “will strengthen the enduring partnership between the United States and Israel, reflect the deep ties between our governments and our people, and underscore the United States’ unwavering commitment to Israel’s security.” Psaki, who conflates the deep ties between the Democratic Party and its Jewish donors with a “partnership,” predictably said everything demanded of her, only stopping short of turning in her application to join the Israel Defense Force (IDF).

Bennett met on the day before the White House meeting with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley and also separately with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. It is not known how many standing ovations were given to Bennett by the simpering US officials, but it is presumed that they were necessary as filler for the event because Austin and Milley in particular are notably inarticulate and poorly informed. The lumpish Austin did, however, echo Psaki in coming out with the usual message, telling Bennett that the Pentagon is absolutely “committed” to ensuring Israel can “defend itself” against the Iranians, that “The administration remains committed to Israel’s security and right to self-defense. That is unwavering, it is steadfast and it is ironclad.”

Bennett was engaged in delivering his timely message that the fall of Afghanistan has actually made everything in that part of Asia more dangerous, meaning that the US and Israel should prepare to fight Iran when it seeks to take advantage of the situation. More to the point, Bennett also made time to meet with the omnipotent Israel Lobby as represented by the head of its most powerful component, Executive Director Howard Kohr of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

The actual discussion with Biden and who-knows-who else in the room was also predictable, minus only that Biden did not feel compelled to go down on his knees as he did with visiting outgoing Israeli President Reuven Rivlin and his chief of staff Rivka Ravitz in early July. Perpetual victim Israel was presented by Bennett as facing hostilities coming from its southern border where Hamas controls the Gaza Strip. Neither Bennett nor Biden mentioned the enormous advantage in military power that Israel already possesses, as was evident in the conflict that took place three months ago, an 11-day war that left 265 dead in Gaza, including many targeted children in apartment blocks, while only 13 died in Israel.

Bennett had two principal objectives. First, he was looking for a commitment from Biden not to re-engage with Iran in the nuclear proliferation treaty Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) unless it is greatly “improved” to include peripheral regional issues as well as eliminating any uranium enrichment. As Iran is prepared to accepted the status quo ante and nothing more, Bennett knew perfectly well that his insistence on a broader agreement would be a game-breaker. And second, as a consequence of that expected commitment, he wanted assurances that the US will not withdraw its remaining forces from Iraq and Syria and would support Israel fully if it should choose to attack Iran.

Israel’s Ambassador to the US Gilad Erdan has also been pushing the White House to admit Israel to the so-called Visa Waiver Program, which would allow Israelis to travel freely to the United States without having to obtain a visa. The program usually requires reciprocity which would mean that Israel would in turn have to admit all American travelers, but the Jewish state insists on reserving the right to block Arab and Muslim Americans for no reason whatsoever. It is presumed that Bennett discussed the issue with Blinken.

On the other more important issues, Biden appears to have bought into at least some of what Bennett was selling. In comments made after their meeting, with the Israeli standing beside him, the US President said that “We’re putting diplomacy first and see where that takes us. But if diplomacy fails, we’re ready to turn to other options.” Bennett was pleased by what he was hearing, elaborating on it, “I was happy to hear your clear words that Iran will never be able to acquire a nuclear weapon and that you emphasize that you will try the diplomatic route, but there’s other options if that doesn’t work out.” The other “options” include, of course, intensified covert action intelligence operations, assassinations and a hoped-for bombing attack on Iranian nuclear facilities and weapons sites. Attacking Iran will also have the benefit of demonstrating that Biden is a “tough” leader, surely a consideration at this point when his approval ratings are sinking.

The prime minister also surfaced another proposal for all his interlocutors, including Biden. He wants to upgrade his fleet of F-15 fighter bombers to give his military planners more options if there should be a war with Iran. The US produced F-35 is the primary fighter for IDF, but the older F-15 can carry significantly more weaponry and bomb load. Bennett has asked Washington to provide an advance on its annual $3.8 billion military assistance package to pay for the improvements. In other words, Israel wants to start a war and have the United States pay for it, possibly in addition to actually doing much of the fighting.

Israel has, in fact, been warning that a war is coming for quite some time, a message that was delivered yet again in a timely fashion as Bennett winged his way to Washington for his meetings. As the prime minister was landing in the US, IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kohavi held a press conference in which he advised that the Israeli military advancing its “operational plans” against Iran. He observed that the country’s new military budget had funds earmarked specifically to improve IDF capabilities against Iran. Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz also warned on the same day that “The State of Israel has the means to act and will not hesitate to do so. I do not rule out the possibility that Israel will have to take action in the future in order to prevent a nuclear Iran.”

So, the new Israeli premier has laid down the gauntlet and, for the moment, Joe Biden has only tentatively moved to pick it up even if he has in a sense pledged total support for Israel no matter what the Jewish state decides to do. The Israel Lobby meanwhile will be working hard to bring Joe totally into line. And to be sure Biden will have to reckon with the fact that there is a new player in town in the form of a bunch of progressive Democrats who are not in love with Israel, backed up by shrinking public support for Israeli actions resulting from the recent slaughter in Gaza. Nevertheless, a weakened and disoriented Biden will have only limited ability to stand up to an increasingly assertive Israel and its powerful lobby.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org 

  https://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/always-another-war/

What is left of America (and its experts) in the Taliban era?

 Why is it that a superpower so rich in experts, scholars, pundits and policymakers keeps messing up in the Greater Middle East?

• 
  Abdelwahab El-Affendi

  Profesor of Politics at Doha Institute for Graduate Studies

31 Aug 2021

An American soldier stands near a burning M-ATV armoured vehicle after it struck an improvised explosive device in the Arghandab Valley north of Kandahar on July 23, 2010 [File: Reuters/Bob Strong]

Even by the usual American standards, the collapse of the US-built and generously sponsored Afghan army in the face of the Taliban’s walkover victory into Kabul is a fiasco of mega proportions. The habitual post-mortem (who “lost” Afghanistan, how, and why?) hardly scratches the surface of what actually happened.

When a ragtag movement, supposedly crushed into oblivion by the most powerful military alliance on the planet, and bombed and re-bombed to smithereens for over two decades, rises from the ashes, walks into the very presidential palace built by the “terminators” – who were incidentally still around, watching as if in a trance – to manage its terminal absence, it is not Afghanistan we should be discussing here. It should be America itself and what is left of it as a world power.

Hitherto, the standard answers being offered included: how the “good war in Afghanistan” (unlike, God forbid, the bad one in Iraq!), turned bad as well; how better logistics and timing could have helped, how strategies could have been different, etc.

This focus on largely technical issues, such as the internal command problems within NATO, weak planning, corruption and incompetence in the Afghan leadership, the failure of President Barack Obama’s 2009 “surge”, missed opportunities for peace-making, etc, is more of a distraction than a insightful analysis.

Even the persistent accusations against Pakistan of supporting the Taliban are irrelevant; even if those are true, its involvement would be no match for the over 40 other advanced countries backing America, and the strong support from tribal-ethnic forces that did most of the ground fighting initially.

Here, we have the world’s mightiest, ultra-modern war machine, failing dismally in a war against a marginal, almost alien, military-political force, in one of the poorest countries in the world. This dream alliance, generously funded (to the level of over a trillion dollars) and backed by United Nations leadership and guidance in civil affairs, spent two decades amassing “victories” and “achievements”. Then it watched in stunned impotence as bare-foot villagers walked in, or rode in on motorbikes, to wipe out all those “achievements” within a couple of weeks.

That was no technical or logistical mishap. It was a thrashing, a defeat in all the senses of the word, an abject failure. Even in the wake of the most violent colonial wars of liberation, never have we seen an occupation that had to rush to take all its “human achievements”, including the translators, home with it. As routings go, this was epic!

A few critics raised the fundamental issue of whether the idea of the war itself was sound, reminding us of the questionable justifications, given that none of the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks came from Afghanistan, and America has harboured more of them than Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda chose Afghanistan because of its statelessness, not because it had a “terror-sponsoring” state. So, the war did not address the root cause of the conflict.

Afghanistan had remained exceptionally resistant to foreign invaders – and very effective in keeping them out, unlike Iraq, which had a formative colonial experience. The invasion was thus both unhelpful and unwise. Many deemed it unjust and illegal.

However, Western support for this “good” and just war remained strong overall, apart from a small section of sceptics. In October 2019, Foreign Affairs asked a group of “authorities with deep specialised expertise” on the Afghan case whether the war was a mistake. Only a handful questioned its legitimacy, even after all that had happened or become known.

In the post-9/11 trauma, US leaders felt they had to do something violent, and soon. It was more an act of seeking catharsis than a rational response. Like Osama bin Laden, George W Bush also chose Afghanistan, the apparent weakest link, as the site of his retaliation spectacle.

Nonetheless, the consequences of such a rash indulgence were not that hard to predict. The question is: Why was foreseeing the disaster so difficult in this “advanced” country, with a limitless supply of pundits, scholars, experts and veteran policymakers?

The Afghan debacle was not the only major occurrence that had caught “experts” by surprise. So did the Arab Spring, the Berlin Wall, the Iranian revolution, the rise of Islamism – you name it. There is something problematic about “experts” who always appear the last to know.

Some scholars had contended that historical developments are inherently unpredictable, even to the actors involved in them; many of the latter engage in “preference falsification” (the deliberate hiding of intentions). However, this is not the whole story. There is often a reluctance by “experts” to see the obvious.

I have spent the past few decades responding to wishful thinking about the “end of Islamism”. In the late 1990s an American friend sent me for comment chapters of her book, which predicted the end of Islamism. I sent her an article I had published a decade earlier, criticising the methodology for similar conclusions reached by State Department analysts.

They had based their conclusions on “election” results from five countries, all autocracies! I warned in that piece that continued oppression by US-backed regimes will radicalise Islamists, not eliminate them, as some seem to aspire. I think we all now know how things have evolved since then.

Edward Said’s deep critique of “Orientalism” has shown us these errors were part of a broader pattern of distortions. Ironically, Said’s work faced a backlash that triggered a “sectarian” polarisation in Middle Eastern studies in the US. Opponents of his views, including an alliance of neoconservatives and pro-Israel lobbies, launched multiple crusades against fair-minded academics, including campaigns of defamation, lobbying to cut official funds to universities deemed anti-Israel, or even anti-America.

These ventures included the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, set up in 1995 by Lynne Cheney and Senator Joe Lieberman, and described by critics as a form of New McCarthyism for its systematic targeting of progressive academics as “enemies of the American civilisation”.

In 2002, the pro-Israel lobbyists launched Campus Watch, dedicated to targeting academics deemed hostile to Israel’s agenda. The group published a “black list” of “offending” academics, and urged students to snitch on their professors!

Given the already mentioned problems of “expertise” in foreign policy analysis, the advice of these campaigners looks like a prescription for the poor-sighted to wear blindfolds. Enhanced since then by Trumpism and its hostility to anything rational, this approach threatens American society as a whole, and not just academia and rationality.

The Afghan question needs to be seen in this broader framework. Faulty analyses (or plain prejudice/bias) often produce disastrous policies, which in turn generate more misguided analyses. There is the background issue of Israel, and the irrational decision in Washington to indulge whatever absurd and dangerous policies Israelis propose, oblivious of the consequences, even to Israel itself. As a result, it is not Israel, but America that is the gravest threat to stability in the region.

But the immediate roots of the current crisis go back to 1990, when President George Bush Sr decided to exploit Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait to assert US hegemony in the post-Cold War era. Instead of using diplomacy to resolve the crisis, he took the opportunity to show off American firepower, shore up friendly despots, secure oil supplies, and show everybody who the boss was.

Senior British and US officials dismissed warnings of serious consequences, boasting after the war about how right they were: nothing happened. Then, of course, 9/11 happened, and the same people were asking: where did this come from?

What happened in 1990 in the Middle East was similar to what happened in Afghanistan in 2001. In both cases, a conservative society was traumatised by a disruptive foreign presence (more violently in the case of Afghanistan) that tore it apart and provoked violent defensive reactions that spilled over into America.

The intrusion into Saudi Arabia in 1990 was the original sin, producing al-Qaeda; the 2003 invasion of Iraq produced ISIS; then the invasion of Afghanistan created a more viable Islamic emirate.

Simultaneously, the regional balance came unhinged. Ironically Iran, the supposed enemy, was handed multiple victories; the US neutralised its Iraqi (and later Afghan) enemies, and practically handed over Iraq to it. Simultaneously, Saudi Arabia, Iran’s nemesis, was destabilised by the disruptive presence of US troops on its territory.

As I have pointed out elsewhere, followers of Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini would be forgiven to regard this as a divine intervention: Heaven sent Iran’s archenemy to subdue its local adversaries and hand Iranians the spoils. The US acted practically just like one of the pro-Iranian militias in the region, doing its bidding from a distance, only for free.

In the same vein, instead of taking serious action to stop Bashar al Assad’s genocide of the Syrian people, the selective intervention against ISIS made the US and NATO the complimentary air force of the Syrian regime and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard’s Qassem Soleimani, this time handing over Syria to Putin and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

America’s most dependable ally, Turkey, was left carrying the can, hostage to the Russia-Iran alliance. Even good old Machiavellianism appeared elusive. Ethics is not the only casualty here, but pragmatism as well. By continuing to let down its allies through its fickleness and faithlessness, and helping its enemies prosper through its incompetence, America will be without allies next time it decides to face up to China or Russia.

Only a decade ago, the question asked would have been: How long could extremists survive in the era of American unipolarity? I think now the question would be: how long can America last in the era of the Taliban?

In this, so-called “experts” are as guilty as the blundering politicians.

A few years ago, a taxi driver who drove me to Sky News studios in London for an interview, asked about the topic I was going to speak about. When he learned it was the war in Iraq, he remarked wryly, “I think the intelligence agencies should be sued under the Trade Descriptions Act.”

Maybe they are not the only ones.

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/8/31/the-mystery-of-us-policy-failures-in-the-greater-middle-east

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• 
  Abdelwahab El-Affendi

  Profesor of Politics at Doha Institute for Graduate Studies

  Abdelwahab El-Affendi is Professor of Politics at Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.
• 
  

Blowback: Taliban Target US Intel's Shadow Army

 PEPE ESCOBAR • AUGUST 29, 2021 

The Kabul Airport bombing shows there are shadowy forces in Afghanistan, willing to disrupt a peaceful transition after US troops leave. But what about US intel’s own ‘shadow army,’ amassed over two decades of occupation? Who are they, and what is their agenda?

So we have the CIA Director William Burns deploying in haste to Kabul to solicit an audience with Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar, the new potential ruler of a former satrapy. And he literally begs him to extend a deadline on the evacuation of US assets.

The answer is a resounding “no.” After all, the 31 August deadline was established by Washington itself. Extending it would only mean the extension of an already defeated occupation.

The ‘Mr. Burns goes to Kabul’ caper is by now part of cemetery of empires folklore. The CIA does not confirm or deny Burns met Mullah Baradar; a Taliban spokesman, delightfully diversionist, said he was “not aware” of such a meeting.

We’ll probably never know the exact terms discussed by the two unlikely participants – assuming the meeting ever took place and is not crass intel disinformation.

Meanwhile, Western public hysteria is, of all things, focused on the imperative necessity of extracting all ‘translators’ and other functionaries (who were de facto NATO collaborators) out of Kabul airport. Yet thundering silence envelops what is in fact the real deal: the CIA shadow army left behind.

The shadow army are Afghan militias set up back in the early 2000s to engage in ‘counter-insurgency’ – that lovely euphemism for search and destroy ops against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Along the way, these militias practiced, in droves, that proverbial semantic combo normalizing murder: ‘extrajudicial killings,’ usually a sequel to ‘enhanced interrogations.’ These ops were always secret as per the classic CIA playbook, thus ensuring there was never any accountability.

Now Langley has a problem. The Taliban have kept sleeper cells in Kabul since May, and much earlier than that in selected Afghan government bodies. A source close to the Ministry of Interior has confirmed the Taliban actually managed to get their hands on the full list of operatives of the two top CIA schemes: the Khost Protection Force (KPF) and the National Directorate of Security (NDS). These operatives are the prime Taliban targets in checkpoints leading to Kabul airport, not random, helpless ‘Afghan civilians’ trying to escape.

The Taliban have set up quite a complex, targeted operation in Kabul, with plenty of nuance – allowing, for instance, free passage for selected NATO members’ Special Forces, who went into town in search of their nationals.

But access to the airport is now blocked for all Afghan nationals. Yesterday’s double tap suicide-car bombing has introduced an even more complex variable: the Taliban will need to pool all their intel resources, fast, to fight whatever elements are seeking to introduce domestic terror attacks into the country.

The RHIPTO Norwegian Centre for Global Analyses has shown how the Taliban have a “more advanced intelligence system” applied to urban Afghanistan, especially Kabul. The “knocking on people’s doors” fueling Western hysteria means they know exactly where to knock when it comes to finding collaborationist intel networks.

It is no wonder Western think tanks are in tears about how undermined their intel services will be in the intersection of Central and South Asia. Yet the muted official reaction boiled down to G7 Foreign Ministers issuing a mere statement announcing they were “deeply concerned by reports of violent reprisals in parts of Afghanistan.”

Blowback is indeed a bitch. Especially when you cannot fully acknowledge it.

From Phoenix to Omega

The latest chapter of CIA ops in Afghanistan started when the 2001 bombing campaign was not even finished. I saw it for myself in Tora Bora, in December 2001, when Special Forces came out of nowhere equipped with Thuraya satellite phones and suitcases full of cash. Later, the role of ‘irregular’ militias in defeating the Taliban and dismembering al-Qaeda was feted in the US as a huge success.

Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai was, to his credit, initially against US Special Forces setting up local militias, an essential plank of the counter-insurgency strategy. But in the end that cash cow was irresistible.

A central profiteer was the Afghan Ministry of Interior, with the initial scheme coalescing under the auspices of the Afghan Local Police. Yet some key militias were not under the Ministry, but answered directly to the CIA and the US Special Forces Command, later renamed as the infamous Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).

Inevitably, CIA and JSOC got into a catfight over controlling the top militias. That was solved by the Pentagon lending Special Forces to the CIA under the Omega Program. Under Omega, the CIA was tasked with targeting intel, and Special Ops took control of the muscle on the ground. Omega made steady progress under the reign of former US President Barack Obama: it was eerily similar to the Vietnam-era Operation Phoenix.

Ten years ago, the CIA army, dubbed Counter-terrorist Pursuit Teams (CTPT), was already 3,000 strong, paid and weaponized by the CIA-JSOC combo. There was nothing ‘counter-insurgency’ about it: These were death squads, much like their earlier counterparts in Latin America in the 1970s.

In 2015, the CIA got its Afghan sister unit, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), to establish new paramilitary outfits to, in theory, fight ISIS, which later became locally identified as ISIS-Khorasan. In 2017, then-CIA Chief Mike Pompeo set Langley on an Afghan overdrive, targeting the Taliban but also al-Qaeda, which at the time had dwindled to a few dozen operatives. Pompeo promised the new gig would be “aggressive,” “unforgiving,” and “relentless.”

Those shadowy ‘military actors’

Arguably, the most precise and concise report on the American paramilitaries in Afghanistan is by Antonio de Lauri, Senior Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute, and Astrid Suhrke, Senior Researcher Emerita also at the Institute.

The report shows how the CIA army was a two-headed hydra. The older units harked back to 2001 and were very close to the CIA. The most powerful was the Khost Protection Force (KPF), based at the CIA’s Camp Chapman in Khost. KPF operated totally outside Afghan law, not to mention budget. Following an investigation by Seymour Hersh, I have also shown how the CIA financed its black ops via a heroin rat line, which the Taliban have now promised to destroy.

The other head of the hydra were the NDS’s own Afghan Special Forces: four main units, each operating in its own regional area. And that’s about all that was known about them. The NDS was funded by none other than the CIA. For all practical purposes, operatives were trained and weaponized by the CIA.

So, it’s no wonder that no one in Afghanistan or in the region knew anything definitive about their operations and command structure. The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), in trademark infuriating bureaucratese, defined the operations of the KPF and the NDS as appearing “to be coordinated with international military actors (emphasis mine); that is, outside the normal government chain of command.”

By 2018, the KPF was estimated to harbor between 3,000 to over 10,000 operatives. What few Afghans really knew is that they were properly weaponized; well paid; worked with people speaking American English, using American vocabulary; engaged in night operations in residential areas; and crucially, were capable of calling air strikes, executed by the US military.

A 2019 UNAMA report stressed that there were “continuing reports of the KPF carrying out human rights abuses, intentionally killing civilians, illegally detaining individuals, and intentionally damaging and burning civilian property during search operations and night raids.”

Call it the Pompeo effect: “aggressive, unforgiving, and relentless” – whether by kill-or-capture raids, or drones with Hellfire missiles.

Woke Westerners, now losing sleep over the ‘loss of civil liberties’ in Afghanistan, may not even be vaguely aware that their NATO-commanded ‘coalition forces’ excelled in preparing their own kill-or-capture lists, known by the semantically-demented denomination: Joint Prioritized Effects List.

The CIA, for its part, couldn’t care less. After all, the agency was always totally outside the jurisdiction of Afghan laws regulating the operations of ‘coalition forces.’

The dronification of violence

In these past few years, the CIA shadow army coalesced into what Ian Shaw and Majed Akhter memorably described as The Dronification of State Violence, a seminal paper published in the Critical Asian Studies journal in 2014 (downloadable here).

Shaw and Akhter define the alarming, ongoing process of dronification as: “the relocation of sovereign power from the uniformed military to the CIA and Special Forces; techno-political transformations performed by the Predator drone; the bureaucratization of the kill chain; and the individualization of the target.”

This amounts to, the authors argue, what Hannah Arendt defined as “rule by nobody.” Or, actually by somebody acting beyond any rules.

The toxic end result in Afghanistan was the marriage between the CIA shadow army and dronification. The Taliban may be willing to extend a general amnesty and not exact revenge. But to forgive those who went on a killing rampage as part of the marriage arrangement may be a step too far for the Pashtunwali code.

The February 2020 Doha agreement between Washington and the Taliban says absolutely nothing about the CIA shadow army.

So, the question now is how the defeated Americans will be able to keep intel assets in Afghanistan for its proverbial ‘counter-terrorism’ ops. A Taliban-led government will inevitably take over the NDS. What happens to the militias is an open question. They could be completely taken over by the Taliban. They could break away and eventually find new sponsors (Saudis, Turks). They could become autonomous and serve the best-positioned warlord paymaster.

The Taliban may be essentially a collection of warlords (jang salar, in Dari). But what’s certain is that a new government will simply not allow a militia wasteland scenario similar to Libya. Thousands of mercenaries of sorts with the potential of becoming an ersatz ISIS-Khorasan, threatening Afghanistan’s entry into the Eurasian integration process, need to be tamed. Burns knows it, Baradar knows it – while Western public opinion knows nothing.

(Republished from The Cradle by permission of author or representative)

https://www.unz.com/pescobar/blowback-taliban-target-us-intels-shadow-army/