Blowback and news from the 6th War

(4 pm. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

   Ever since WWII it has been more and more difficult to define our “wars”. The line tends to get blurry when the President doesn’t have to consult Congress before sending in troops.

  However, when you are bombing a nation, and occasionally using ground troops, then I think it is defined as a war. Just because we aren’t trying to overthrow a government (i.e. Iraq and Libya) doesn’t mean we aren’t at war (i.e. Iraq and Afghanistan). Of course this means that we are at war in Pakistan, just at a lower intensity.

  Oh sure, there will be people who deny it. But consider the lessons of history on how easily bombing a nation can turn into a broadening war (i.e. Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia).

 There are many reasons why it is important to acknowledge how many wars we are engaged in. Not the least of which is so that it focuses the public on what our government is up to, rather than ignoring our foreign policy disasters until there is blowback.

 This means that we must pay attention to what our government is doing in Yemen, and most of all, Somalia.  

  Osama bin Laden is dead and Leon Panetta has acknowledged that Al Qaeda has a grand total of “fewer than two dozen key operatives” in the entire world. But instead of the War on Some Terror winding down, it is expanding.

  The Obama Administration has provided guns to the Saudi Arabian army to invade northern Yemen, all the while expanding a bombing campaign inside Yemen. “The Central Intelligence Agency is building a secret air base in the Middle East to serve as a launching pad for strikes in Yemen using armed drones” (The New York Times, June 15, p.A12).

  Remember that in December of 2009, we dropped cluster bombs in Yemen that killed 41 people, including 14 women and 21 children. In 2010 we killed a deputy governor that was trying to talk Yemen rebels into stop fighting.

  It’s these kinds of attacks that is so self-defeating.

    Just as high civilian casualties in US attacks on militants have fed extremism in Iraq and Afghanistan, the same phenomenon is now playing out in Yemen, says Yemen specialist Gregory Johnsen.

   “It is incredibly dangerous what the US is trying to do in Yemen at the moment because it really fits into AQAP’s broader strategy, in which it says Yemen is not different from Iraq and Afghanistan,” says Mr. Johnsen of Princeton University in New Jersey, who adds that AQAP can recruit militants from outside Yemen as well. “They are able to make the argument that Yemen is a legitimate front for jihad… They’ve been making that argument since 2007, but incidents like this are all sort of fodder for their argument.”

 If you haven’t figured it out by now, our so-called “surgical strikes” never have been and never will be. A headline in June: “Afghan Civilian Deaths Set a Monthly Record, U.N. Says” (The New York Times, June 12, p.A20). We slaughter innocents much more often than the guilty.

 Noor Behram says his painstaking work has uncovered an important — and unreported — truth about the US drone campaign in Pakistan’s tribal region: that far more civilians are being injured or dying than the Americans and Pakistanis admit. . . .

  “For every 10 to 15 people killed, maybe they get one militant,” he said. “I don’t go to count how many Taliban are killed. I go to count how many children, women, innocent people, are killed” . . .

  According to Noor Behram, the strikes not only kill the innocent but injure untold numbers and radicalise the population. “There are just pieces of flesh lying around after a strike. You can’t find bodies. So the locals pick up the flesh and curse America. They say that America is killing us inside our own country, inside our own homes, and only because we are Muslims.

  “The youth in the area surrounding a strike gets crazed. Hatred builds up inside those who have seen a drone attack. The Americans think it is working, but the damage they’re doing is far greater.”

 A few months ago Harper’s did a calculation of the effectiveness of our bombings:

   Minimum number of people killed by CIA drone attacks in Pakistan last year : 607

   Number of those who appeared on a U.S. list of most-wanted terrorists : 2

 A gathering of Pakistani colonels was asked “whom they regarded as the greatest enemy. A third of them named America” (The Economist, June 18, p.46).

  Which brings us back to our 6th War in Somalia.

You might have read something about Somalia as the U.N. prepares to declare the nation in a “full phase-five famine” situation. Translated, that means when a ‘humanitarian emergency’ tips into ‘famine/humanitarian catastrophe’.

  Malnutrition wards are filling up. The crisis is already worse than the situation that led to U.N. intervention in 1991. We are staring into the face of a regional famine the world has not seen since Ethiopia in 1984. There are millions of people currently at risk.

 This is generally a situation that calls for people and nations to come together to prevent a catastrophe of epic proportions. Human decency and civilisation requires it. So what is our government doing in Somalia in the name of America and humanity in general?

  For starers, we are increasing our bombing campaign of Somalia. After all, if they are dying anyway we might as well help them along.

  However, let us not be said that we don’t have something special for the ones that are living – torture cells.

 Nestled in a back corner of Mogadishu’s Aden Adde International Airport is a sprawling walled compound run by the Central Intelligence Agency…

  As part of its expanding counterterrorism program in Somalia, the CIA also uses a secret prison buried in the basement of Somalia’s National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters, where prisoners suspected of being Shabab members or of having links to the group are held. Some of the prisoners have been snatched off the streets of Kenya and rendered by plane to Mogadishu. While the underground prison is officially run by the Somali NSA, US intelligence personnel pay the salaries of intelligence agents and also directly interrogate prisoners. The existence of both facilities and the CIA role was uncovered by The Nation during an extensive on-the-ground investigation in Mogadishu. Among the sources who provided information for this story are senior Somali intelligence officials; senior members of Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG); former prisoners held at the underground prison; and several well-connected Somali analysts and militia leaders, some of whom have worked with US agents, including those from the CIA. A US official, who confirmed the existence of both sites, told The Nation, “It makes complete sense to have a strong counterterrorism partnership” with the Somali government.

  ‘Essentially, the CIA seems to be operating, doing the foreign policy of the United States,’ said a well-connected Somali analyst.

  …the United States has Somali intelligence agents on its payroll. Somali sources with knowledge of the program described the agents as lining up to receive $200 monthly cash payments from Americans. “They support us in a big way financially,” says the senior Somali intelligence official. “They are the largest [funder] by far.”

 You might remember the CIA foreign policy record from such places as Afghanistan, Panama, Iraq, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Iran.

“The US has stopped running its global network of secret prisons, CIA director Leon Panetta has announced. ‘CIA no longer operates detention facilities or black sites,’ Mr Panetta said in a letter to staff”

   – BBC, April 9, 2009

 Some in the media have rushed to defend the secret CIA prisons. After all, al-Shabab are not nice people, and they are working with the islamist rebels in Yemen.

  But let’s compare that too the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia (the one created by the U.N., not by the Somalian people) that we are propping up. For instance, taking examples only from today’s news stories, we find this:

 However, Amnesty also noted that Somalia’s transitional government is on a UN “list of shame” for recruiting, using, killing and maiming children in armed conflict.

  And this one:

At least two soldiers have been killed and two others hurt after Somali government forces clashed at Somalia’s presidential palace in Mogadishu, witnesses said Tuesday morning.

  Independent sources said the fighting erupted as a wrangle between the president and the speaker over the appointment of a new cabinet lineup has continued over the last few days.

  The TGF government has one of the worst human rights records in the world. Some of their actions amount to “war crimes”. AMISOM, the African “peacekeeping” force which recently launched a military offensive, is as much responsible as anyone. Much like our record in Vietnam in the 1960’s, and Iraq in the 1980’s, this is what we are defending.

 With one of the greatest humanitarian disasters in our lifetimes now upon us, the government’s response has been to up the level of carnage. I question the values of anyone who defends this policy.