Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad (22 page)

The ISA also uses lethal force on its own account, when necessary, but as observers including Douglas Waller have pointed out, “the Defense Department has had a checkered history with cloak-and-dagger work. The Pentagon set up intelligence units in the early 1980s that were kept secret from Congress. They became rogue outfits, using tax dollars for questionable operations, to pay for expensive hotel rooms, first-class airline tickets and, in one instance, a hot-air balloon and a Rolls-Royce….” For Rumsfeld and his successors, the test would be whether the soldier spies “can do better than the CIA overseas and keep out of trouble at home.”

As hundreds of Special Forces operators, Agency Special Activities artists and freelance guns hired from the private sector penetrated the undefined battlefields of Af-Pak, the sort of fine-tuning expected by Congress was usually overtaken by events, many of them lethal. The first strategic error was to switch Special Operations resources from Afghanistan to Iraq. As Gary Schroen has pointed out: “In early 2002, in the immediate aftermath of the battle at Tora Bora…CIA and specially trained U.S. military Special Operations units began to organize teams in the provincial areas east and southeast of Kabul along Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. These teams, relatively small and mobile, operated out of temporary compounds protected by local commanders, who provided manpower, intelligence and firepower as the teams tracked down terrorist elements…. Initial results were promising.

“However, as early as March 2002, the U.S. military began to withdraw many of the key units involved in this effort, in order to allow them to regroup and train in preparation for the coming war with Iraq. These special units were replaced, for the most part, with members of conventional U.S. military forces, such as the 10th Mountain Division. While staffed with excellent, brave soldiers, these forces lacked the training and the agility in guerrilla warfare of the Special Operations units.”
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Later, though the CIA’s increasing use of Hellfire anti-tank missiles fired from Predator drones caused dismay to Islamist foes, critics claimed this strategy also brought about so many innocent civilian deaths that its employment, like strategic B-52 bombing in Cambodia and elsewhere, became politically counterproductive. Irregular warfare, after all, is about winning hearts and minds rather than occupation of territory or, as in Vietnam, computing success by reference to the body count. As the CIA prepared to increase Predator strikes on “high value human targets,” officials claimed that in eighty such attacks between the summer of 2008 and mid-December 2009, more than 400 militants had been killed, as well as twenty civilians. Human rights groups believed the civilian death toll was 260.

Targeted assassination from the air, combined with ritualized regret about “collateral damage,” was perfected by Israel. But then, Israel seeks not to persuade its enemies but—witness Operation Wrath of God, the international manhunt for the Munich Massacre terrorists—to suppress them.

Within a Pentagon think tank called the Defense Science Board, the philosophy was taken a stage further in 2002 with a proposal for a Proactive Pre-emptive Operations Group (P2OG) to “proactively, pre-emptively evoke responses from adversary/terrorist groups.”
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This could be interpreted to mean that a clandestine unit, similar to the pseudo-gangs employed by the British in Kenya in the 1950s, would launch false-flag operations aimed at stimulating reactions among terrorists. The defense analyst David Isenberg believed it would “prod terrorist cells into action, thus exposing them to ‘quick response’ attacks by U.S. forces. The means by which it would do this is the far greater use of special forces.”

Such blue-sky thinking probably appealed to the Bush administration, contributing to the creation of the National Clandestine Service in 2005. But in this conflict, the underlying assumption—that by flushing out the enemy so as to kill him in large numbers, a political victory could be achieved—failed to recognize the potency of the cult of death and martyrdom that underpins Islamist terror. The immediate impact was to make the Pentagon, not the CIA, the lead agency in operations that could be characterized as “black.” The new doctrine evolved into a belief in decapitation. This did not mean the physical removal of victim heads (though the British did chop them in Malaya, to identify dead terrorists more easily than removing an entire body from the jungle by helicopter). In Iraq and Afghanistan, “decapitation” was used figuratively and politically to describe a policy of removing key players on the opposition team. The Pentagon’s decision to issue packs of playing cards to soldiers in Iraq, bearing portraits of the most-wanted fugitives, gave physical expression to the process. The jury must still be out on the result of this strategy in the Af-Pak War. The strategy worked for Michael Collins in Ireland back in 1919/20, but then he led an indigenous resistance guerrilla army, not an alien counterinsurgency force.

In terms of attrition, decapitation seemed to have something going for it by 2007. In that year, according to a source within the rebel movement, the insurgency lost half its deputy commanders. U.S. field commanders claimed to have killed or captured 100 middle ranking enemy and a number of top people in addition. This was achieved by a variety of means developed by the Israelis as well as British and American signals intelligence specialists at the National Security Agency and its English counterpart, GCHQ. Cell phones and satellite phones were like a tin can tied to a dog’s tail, and more easily pursued. British Special Forces in the wilderness of Afghanistan received real-time guidance about the locations of their adversaries from a base in England. In the field, infantry units were able to employ their own Unmanned Aerial Vehicles such as Hermes to watch the enemy prepare hides for roadside mines known in the jargon as IEDs (for Improvised Explosive Devices). The British problem was that they were under-resourced. There were more IEDs than UAVs.

The Taliban response to Anaconda was to cut the number of sacrificial frontal assaults. It also ordered commanders to use couriers in preference to cell phones and to limit the number of men in most operations to between five and eight. a policy that worked for the IRA in Northern Ireland between 1970 and 1998. After 2002, the indirect warfare strategy represented by IEDs, perfected by Islamists in Iraq and reliant on technical know-how from Iran and Pakistan, was one of the most effective weapons employed by the Taliban in this second phase of the Afghanistan war. Out of 21 Green Berets killed in action between 2001 and 2009, twelve fell victims to roadside bombs. In 2009, at least 175 American and allied troops were killed this way, double the number the year before. In Iraq and Afghanistan, many British Special Forces were killed by roadside bombs, largely due to their country’s failure to invest in hardened vehicles and helicopters. There were also numerous coalition victims among conventional military units not engaged in the higher-risk operations that SF teams accepted as part of the job.

The price of stalemate in Afghanistan as the Bush era came to an end was being paid in civilian lives as well as those of combatants on both sides. Most civilian casualties, as Human Rights Watch acknowledges, were caused by Taliban fighters including suicide bombers. This conclusion was confirmed by a UN report that found that militants were responsible for 55 per cent of the deaths. The greater political damage was suffered by U.S. and NATO forces as wedding parties in obscure villages came under deadly aerial bombing.

The New York-based advocacy group Human Rights Watch (HRW) concluded after dogged research: “The combination of light ground forces and overwhelming air power has become the dominant doctrine of war for the U.S. in Afghanistan.”
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The same analysis distinguished between pre-planned strikes on suspected Taliban hideouts (“Interdiction” in soldier-speak) and the forces’ response to unexpected contacts with the enemy (“Close Air Support”) whether by accident or as a result of ambush. In cases that HRW categorized as “unplanned” air strikes, U.S. Special Forces were prominent, if only because they often acted as the forward reconnaissance team for a sweep by regular soldiers. Sometimes outnumbered and surrounded, their only recourse was to call on air power, a legitimate reaction in a free-fire zone but inappropriate in densely populated civilian areas. In another scenario, as HRW noted, Taliban fighters occupied villages so as to use them as bases for attacks on U.S. forces, effectively using local people as human shields.

The concern increased after a suicide bomb attack on a U.S. Marine Corps Special Operations team near Jalalabad on 4 March 2007. Human rights groups alleged that the Marines’ response was to kill nineteen unarmed civilians and to wound another fifty as the convoy drove away from the scene, shooting at everything that moved over a six-mile route. The unit was ordered out of Afghanistan by Army General Frank Kearney, commander of Special Operations in the region. A court of inquiry followed in the U.S. The Marine Lieutenant-General commanding U.S. Marine Forces at Central Command ruled that the convoy “acted appropriately and in accordance with the rules of engagement and tactics, techniques and procedures in place at the time in response to a complex attack.”

Germany’s response to a similar nightmare was less robust. In September 2009, two petrol tankers were hijacked by the Taliban and taken to the banks of the Kunduz River, where they were bogged down. A German officer in charge of the area called an air strike by two USAF F-15s, whose bombs wiped out the tankers and killed around 142 people, including a number of civilians. Was it a legitimate call? Some civilians were looting the petrol, either for their own benefit or on instructions from the Taliban. Was it clear enough that to hit the target would cause unacceptable civilian casualties, contravening McChrystal’s new policy of avoiding such incidents? A leaked report on the affair back in Germany coincided with America’s appeal to allies to send more soldiers into this war. A political rumpus provoked the resignation of Germany’s Defense Minister, Franz Josef Jung.

The ramifications of the affair did not end there. Though the German Army was slow to follow up the air attack on the ground, to confirm the facts and head off a Taliban propaganda coup, an Anglo-Irish journalist named Stephen Farrell, working for
The New York Times,
and his interpreter, Sultan Munadi, did reach the scene the following day. They were promptly taken hostage by the Taliban. An urgent, joint Anglo-American Special Forces rescue operation was mounted. Aided by radio and telephone intercepts provided—almost certainly—by The Activity, British SAS soldiers launched an attack on the compound where Farrell and Munadi were held. An intense gun battle followed. Farrell dived into a ditch and shouted to his rescuers he was a British hostage. Munadi was killed, as was an SAS soldier. The incident revived a debate among British Special Forces about the role of reporters, and whose responsibility it was if, on high-risk assignments of their choosing, they became prisoners.

In 2008, the UN concluded, a total of 2,118 civilians had been killed in Afghanistan, the worst year since the 2001 invasion. While insurgents were responsible for the majority of these, 828 of the casualties were caused by pro-government forces. Two thirds of that group died as a result of air strikes. The impact of these deaths sent ripples of indignation through the coalition. In an unsourced statement, HRW claimed: “Beyond violations of international humanitarian law, the political cost of each bombing that goes awry is high. In one district, a senior British commander asked U.S. Special Operations Forces to leave his district due to the mounting civilian casualties caused when the U.S. repeatedly called in airstrikes to rescue small numbers of special forces during firefights with insurgent forces. Each civilian death for which U.S. or NATO forces are perceived to be responsible increases hostility to the U.S. and NATO forces and may increase support for anti-government forces.” In December 2008, Kai Eide, the UN’s special representative in Kabul, suggested that harsh criticism of allied strategy by Hamid Karzai (by then into his first tour as the country’s president) was “authentic.”

For a time, the bombing and attacks on civilian houses continued after President Obama’s inauguration. U.S.-led air strikes in Farah province early in May 2009 destroyed houses “packed with terrified civilians,” killing more than a hundred people. Yet with the Obama factor came the first signs of a dramatic change of strategy. Covert Special Forces operations, including nocturnal raids on the homes of Taliban suspects, were halted on the orders of Special Operations Command. The only exceptions permitted were “the highest ranking leaders of the Taliban and Al Qaida.”

Soon after this decision, the senior American soldier in Afghanistan, General David D. McKiernan, was forced to resign to clear the way for a new approach to the conduct of the war. He had been in command for only eleven months. He was replaced by Lieutenant General Stanley A. McChrystal, commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, a Green Beret soldier and qualified Ranger who liked to lead from the front. In Iraq, Delta Force, under his command, was credited with capturing Saddam Hussein and with the hunt that ended with the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an al Qaeda chieftain. Both operations were remarkable for their precision.

It would be some time before the new strategy could be expected to achieve a military victory while retrieving the catastrophic loss of popular support for the anti-Taliban campaign that had occurred in both Afghanistan and Pakistan over the preceding eight years. Some commentators believed that McChrystal represented “a more aggressive and innovative” approach, though what the Afghanistan strategy needed, after decades of conflict, was a rapier rather than a cosh. This implied even greater reliance on Special Forces of every sort, but limiting their use of air power as a form of instant and often self-defeating artillery.