Tag Archives: drones

May 1, 2012 · 23:52

Remembering the Killing of Osama Bin Laden While Realistically Looking at Afghanistan and Pakistan

A year ago US Navy SEALs from SEAL Team Six and other Special Operations Forces made a daring night raid into Pakistan to kill Osama Bin Laden.  Bin Laden had orchestrated the Al Qaeda attacks on September 11th 2001 which killed over 3000 Americans, the near sinking of the US Navy Destroyer USS Cole, the Luxor Massacre of 1997 and the bombings of the US Embassies in Dar es Salaam Tanzania and Nairobi Kenya in 1998 and numerous other terror attacks throughout the Middle East. Bin Laden was the sworn enemy of the United States. The killing of Bin Laden was a victory, perhaps the biggest victory that we have achieved in over 10 years of war. In fact Bin Laden was the reason we went to war, the reason that we became embroiled in Afghanistan.

Bin Laden had been the “guest” of the Afghan Taliban government and used Afghanistan as his base of operations to train his fighters and plan his operations. After September 11th the United States attacked Afghanistan, toppled the Taliban and put Bin Laden on the run. Pakistan which had supported the Taliban government following the fall of the former Soviet supported Republic of Afghanistan and subsequent civil war which brought the Taliban to power. Pakistan’s President Musharraf quickly allied his country with the United States.  However over the course of the 10 year war in Afghanistan the government and certain elements of its security and intelligence services gave tacit support to the Taliban as well as Al Qaeda. The most damning was the fact that Bin Laden had resided in the Pakistani military town of Abbottabad with a significant amount of his family for five years.

President Obama gave the order for the SEAL team to kill Bin Laden over the objections of his Vice President and Secretary of Defense. It was a ballsy move. If it had gone wrong which it easily could have many US troops could have been killed, captured and placed on display by the Pakistani government.  The credit to the planning and execution of the operation has to go to the SEALs and Special Operations Command, but credit for the order to do it needs to be given to the President.  If President Bush had succeeded in killing Bin Laden I would feel the same way.

The fact is that President Obama has been successfully waging war against Al Qaeda, not only killing Bin Laden but other top leaders. Even Bin Laden before his death was concerned about the toll being taken on his organization by the reinvigorated US campaign.  The Pakistanis enraged by the United States taking the war against Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies inside Afghanistan, something that it should have been doing but had not despite Jihadist terrorist attacks on it cut the supply lines to US and NATO forces running through it months ago and have not reopened them. Some ally.

But that is not surprising. As far back as November 1979, before the Soviets intervened in Afghanistan the US Embassy was ransacked and burned by Pakistani mobs, an attack which killed a US Marine. The Pakistanis only began to reluctantly cooperate with the United States in supporting some of the Afghan Pashtun Mujahideen fighters.  After the Soviets left Afghanistan it continued to support its Pashtuns against Uzbek and Tajik Afghans, support which eventually allowed the Taliban to take over the country. Despite US protests in the 1990s the Pakistanis did little to nothing to hinder Bin Laden, Al Qaeda or the Taliban regime. While it quickly and officially “supported” the US under former President Musharraf factions within its ISI intelligence service are believed to have continued to support Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters and encouraged attacks on US, Afghan and  NATO troops.

Pakistan itself teeters on the edge of collapse. Its economy is in shambles, it cannot control its borders, its intelligence service is often at odds with the government while extremist groups gain more power every day. It is a rapidly failing state with nuclear weapons. Every day it grows more antagonistic towards the United States which under the Obama Administration had been persistent in using arial drones to attack suspected terrorists in Pakistan. The relationship between the United States and Pakistan is as bad or worse as it was in 1979.

In the mean time our former nemesis the Russian Federation, the former Soviet Union has been stalwart in allowing our troops and supplies to flow through their country and the neighboring Central Asian Republics into Afghanistan. The Russians having experienced the agony of Afghanistan and the reality of Jihadist terrorism emanating from it as well as Chechnya do not want the US and NATO mission to stabilize Afghanistan to fail.  Currently without the support of the Russians we would be unable to supply our troops in Afghanistan.

Today President Obama travelled to Afghanistan and announced the signing of a long term security and cooperation agreement with the Afghan government. The agreement will take effect after the current plan to withdraw most US and NATO troops by 2014. We have no idea how well this will turn out and despite all the good intentions on our part I doubt that the agreement stands the test of time because of the nature of Afghanistan and its competing ethnic, religious, political and tribal divisions. It is my belief that we will be lucky to get out as well as the Soviets did in 1989 because I do not see a truly united Afghanistan coming out of this and it is more than likely that Pakistan will descend into chaos making our presence in Afghanistan even more problematic.

The mission started to get Bin Laden after 9-11. In the process it became something different as we attempted to transform Afghanistan. A year ago we finally succeeded in killing Bin Laden and have significantly degraded Al Qaeda.  That is why we went to war.  That is probably the best it will get.

At some point President Obama or his successor will likely have to decide to withdraw completely from Afghanistan and like former Soviet Premier Gorbachev admit that “We are not going to save the regime. We’ve already transformed it.”

Peace

Padre Steve+

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November 27, 2011 · 23:53

The War that No One wants to Fight: Pakistan 2011

Supply Lines in Peril

This weekend there was an altercation on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in which somewhere between 24 and 28 Pakistani soldiers were killed during a NATO airstrike.  Afghan military and regional government officials are saying that Afghan soldiers called in for air support after they were attacked from the Pakistani side of the border.  The Pakistanis are calling the the strike an “unproved attack.” NATO and Afghan officials note that the border is not very distinguishable and that Taliban forces often will shoot from positions near Pakistani outposts.  Unfortunately in Pakistan the only truth that matters is that NATO killed its soldiers and the fact that their country and some agencies specifically the intelligence service actively support the Taliban is irrelevant.  The truth is that the only reason that the Pakistani government and military has halfway cooperated with NATO is because of the vast amount of military and economic aid it receives from the United States.  The thin veneer of cooperation was broken this weekend and there may be little that anyone can do to reestablish any kind of real trust or cooperation despite the fact that the cooperation of the Pakistanis is a “necessary evil” as long as the US an NATO have over 100.000 troops deployed in “penny packets” around the vast  rugged expanse of Afghanistan.

The fact is that depending on whose statistics you look at some 40-50% of NATO’s supplies are transported overland from the Pakistani port of Karachi to Afghanistan. The bulk of these goods are things like fuel and heavy equipment without which the ability of NATO forces in Afghanistan cannot conduct effective operations.  The Pakistanis have already demanded that the US pull its CIA drone units from a key Pakistani air base and the Pakistanis are still smarting over the killing of Osama Bin Laden on their soil. The simple truth is that unless the Pakistani military can calm their country our supply lines will be cut off. Unfortunately this same military and government has used any excuse or provocation to stir up their population against the United States and NATO in order to preserve their hold on power.  Now it appears that the situation has reached a point that they will not be able to control the passions that they have stirred whenever the need suits them.

If the Pakistani military and government have put themselves and us in a bind. If they  appear to be “soft” on NATO in the eyes of their people they risk a popular revolt and more terrorism at home. If they harden their opposition to NATO and the US or use the latest incident to whip up more anti-NATO support they could find themselves in a war with the United States and NATO.  Any misstep could be disastrous to all concerned.

Unlike the Iranians the Pakistanis actually have deployable nuclear weapons in addition to a large conventional military force.  If they were to decide to stop US and NATO resupply convoys for more than a few days our operations in Afghanistan would be affected and if the impasse were to become long term it could cripple US and NATO operations in that country.

The sad truth is that the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan are terribly exposed to dangers that neither they or their commanders control. It is what happens along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border that matters what happens between the United States-Israel and Iran can have a dramatic and even calamitous effect on our deployed forces.

The fact is that it is hard to replace 40-50% of your bulk supplies when they have to come by sea and the only port is in a hostile or at best semi-hostile country.  If the Pakistanis were to force the issue the mission in Afghanistan would be untenable.  A smaller force tailored to anti-terrorism operations could be sustained by air and via overland routes which pass through former Soviet republics but a heavy force of over 100,000 troops scattered across thousands of square miles of mountainous terrain cannot be sustained unless the supply lines for bulk fuel, water, food and heavy equipment are secure.

Logistics is not sexy but no modern military can do without it. You do not operate heavy mechanized forces in hostile territory without reliable supply lines. Simply ask the Germans in Stalingrad or the French at Dien Bien Phu how well they did when supplies were cut off.

It just doesn’t seem to me that most people especially politicians see the danger that US and NATO troops face in Afghanistan from forces that they cannot control in surrounding countries.  This is a dangerous situation and even if the current impasse is resolved the long-term outlook is bleak as long as the Pakistani regime plays both sides of the fence.

If the supply lines were severed for any length of time the mission in Afghanistan would have to be reevaluated and the possibility of military action to reopen them considered. At that point all bets are off and God help us.  It would not be good.

Peace

Padre Steve+

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January 3, 2011 · 23:59

The Coming of Orwell’s 1984 27 Years Late….So Much for Timing

Yes my friends is finally 1984, well the Orwellian kind. I remember the first 1984, back in the good old days of the Cold War and all that.  But that 1984 was more of a number and not very Orwellian. It is funny I read the novel 1984 on my way to my first assignment in Germany in January 1984 and found it rather chilling.  However back then it was still rather futuristic despite being written back in 1948.  Orwell’s vision of surveillance and the manipulation of language didn’t seem as threatening back in 1984 because the technology wasn’t there yet but now it is.

There has been a proliferation of low cost high resolution video surveillance technology which continues to evolve at an exponential rate with corresponding advances in facial, voice and even emotional sensing technology that can have positive outcomes but in the wrong hands, particularly in the hands of terrorists but even worse governments, especially those that sacrifice freedom in the name of security. Since no government or political system is immune to corruption or without actors who are only there for their personal power or advancement of their political, social or even religious ideology these technologies are fraught with danger.  They are a double edged sword with great promise for individuals and societies which can be quickly turned to the service of evil.  An example is high resolution cameras linked to artificial-intelligence software analyzed the images to recognize faces, gestures and patterns of group behavior. There is the Mind’s Eye program being developed for the military which seeks to develop in machines a capability that exists only in animals: visual intelligence. Emotional sensing software is being experimented by some movie studios to judge the emotional reaction of audiences to films and face recognition software is used by Google’s Picasa, Yahoo’s FLICKR and others for file sharing and organizing. Google has also developed Googles which lets a person snap a photograph with a smartphone which then sets off an Internet search of whatever was taken.  Google has refused to put facial recognition software on the phone despite user’s requests. Google realized that since smartphones can be used to take pictures of people’s faces and retrieve all kinds of personal information such as their name, occupation, address and workplace without their knowledge.

September 11th 2001 brought the nation to the realization that terrorism could occur in the United States.  Now people in many other countries have dealt with terrorism of various kinds for years but for Americans it was something that happened to other people far away, or Americans serving, working or living overseas.  When I was a young Army Officer we lived under the daily threat of the Red Army Faction and Baader-Meinhoff terrorists groups in Germany very narrowly avoiding being in the blast zone at the Frankfurt Army Post Exchange on November 25th 1985 when a bomb was detonated injuring 34 Americans. We turned around about 15 minutes before the blast because Judy felt ill; otherwise we would have been right in the zone. I remember getting the call from my Colonel that my Ambulance Company was on alert after this.  We know what it is like to have your vehicle inspected every day going into the base and being questioned by German Police when reporting a terrorist sighting.  So for us this was old hand, but September 11th tore at the soul of the American nation and I dare say that we haven’t been the same since.

We passed the Patriot Act and created new security agencies such the TSA and we greatly expanded the surveillance capabilities at home and abroad of American Intelligence and Police agencies as well as that of the military.  Now I am not knocking all the things that the U.S. Government has done to try to prevent another 9-11 or worse. At the same time every new expansion of security and surveillance there is a corresponding loss of liberty and with each new law or Presidential Executive order or Directive regarding security and intelligence gathering a little more freedom is given up and a greater possibility that the very laws and measures being implemented to “protect” the populace will be used against it in the future.

Those that design the technologies which make the implementation of these laws possible are increasing in the capabilities of their innovations on an exponential basis often with the explicit help and support of the government in particular Federal and State Police agencies, intelligence agencies and the military.  Data mining, aerial surveillance drones both armed and unarmed, the ever present surveillance cameras which seem to populate every public place. Add to the power of individuals using the latest smartphones to do their own spying on people and the technology which has so much promise to do good can and at some point probably will be turned against the people.

This will happen for sure after the next major terrorist attack and it matters not if there is a Democratic or Republican administration in charge.  Security would be the rational and those that dissent will be dealt with in one way or another.  One only has to look back at the Nazi and Soviet regimes to see how governments with far less technology were able to subjugate their people and oppress dissenters to see how easy this can happen. In the name of security and economic stability the Germans, a sizable percentage of that had little regard for the Nazis or Hitler let Hitler enact laws that gave him absolute power.

That is my concern. I like technology and love the benefits that the advances in it provide, but I am certainly aware that the technology that I so enjoy is a two edged sword which in the wrong hand can, is and will be used against the citizens of the countries that come to rely on it and draconian security laws and police procedures.

I am very security conscious. Having lived under the threat of terrorism on a daily basis in the 1980s and having served under constant threat in the far reaches of Al Anbar Province never knowing if Al Qaeda had infiltrated the Iraqi Police or Army units that I was among I fully understand the threat. At the same time I am fully cognizant of the proclivity of men in power to promote a culture of fear in which citizens willingly surrender freedom for security and in the process descend into the abyss.

Peace

Padre Steve+

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