Crusader Corner: Killing Terrorist Leaders Is Not the “Magical Solution” to Stopping Terrorism

Another day, another dead terrorist leader. This time, the dead terrorist guy was Taliban chief Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, killed by a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan, and everyone is cheering, because everyone knows that each dead terrorist leader is, well, another dead terrorist leader.

Mullah Mansour’s death is “an important milestone,” President Barack Obama declared on Monday morning. But it’s a milestone on the road to nowhere.

After all, we’ve passed this milestone several dozen times before. Let’s briefly recap:

• In April, U.S. and Kurdish forces killed Salman Abu Shabib al-Jebouri, a “senior” Islamic State leader in Iraq. In March, S. forces killed “top Islamic State commander” Abd al-Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli in Syria. The United States also killed Islamic State “deputy”Haji Imam and “senior operative” Abu Omar al-Shishani in Syria that same month. In February, U.S. strikes killed Noureddine Chouchane, another “senior” Islamic State operative in Libya.

• In 2015, the United States managed to kill “senior al-Shabab leader” Abdirahman Sandhere in Somalia; militant chiefs Mokhtar Belmokhtar and Khawray Mehsud in Pakistan; Islamic State “No. 2” Fadhil Ahmad al-Hayali in Iraq; al Qaeda leader Nasir al-Wuhayshi in Yemen; and Ustad Ahmad Farooq, the deputy emir of al Qaeda in the Indian subcontinent.

• In 2014, U.S. strikes killed terrorist leader Ahmed Abdi Godane in Somalia, followed by al-Shabab intelligence and security chief Tahlil Abdishakur, as well as Nusra Front leader Abu Yousef al-Turki, who was killed by U.S. strikes in Syria, and Omar Farooq, a senior al Qaeda coordinator. The United States also successfully targeted Mufti Sofian and Abu Bakar, both senior commanders in the Afghan Taliban.

• In 2013, the United States killed Said al-Shehri, the second in command of al Qaeda in the Arabia Peninsula (AQAP). The Taliban’s original leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, also bit the dust in 2013, though he reportedly died of a non-drone-related illness, and his death apparently made so little difference to the Taliban that no one even noticed he was dead until 2015.

• In 2012, U.S. strikes killed another “al Qaeda No. 2,” Abu Yahya al-Libi, in Pakistan; senior al Qaeda leader Sakhr al-Taifi in Afghanistan; AQAP leader Fahd Mohammed Ahmed al-Quso in Yemen; Taliban ally Badruddin Haqqani in Pakistan; and Jemaah Islamiyah leaderZulkifli bin Hir in the Philippines.

• In 2011, U.S. drones killed Fazul Abdullah Mohammed in Somalia; the American cleric and al Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen; al Qaeda’s chief of operations in Pakistan, Abu Hafs al-Shahri; and Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, reportedly al Qaeda’s second in command after Osama bin Laden’s death; along with Ilyas Kashmiri, said to be a senior Pakistani al Qaeda operative. And, of course, we killed Osama bin Laden himself, al Qaeda’s original No. 1.

I left out a few dozen other senior terrorist leaders, most of whom were also killed by U.S. strikes, but you get the idea.

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Modern War: The Decade of the Mercenary

Contrary to popular belief, Mercenaries are the “Silent Majority” in Obama’s Military, and the president’s “light footprint” approach to war has relied on thousands of Americans paid to fight — and die — in the shadows.

Last weekend, the New York Times published one of what will be many takes on President Barack Obama’s legacy as commander in chief. Retroactively shoehorning seven-plus years of varied military operations into one coherent “doctrine” is impossible, but dozens of articles will soon attempt to do so.

There is one significant aspect of this doctrine, however, that is rarely mentioned by the media and never by Obama: the unprecedented use of private contractors to support foreign military operations.

Obama has authorized the continuation or re-emergence of two of the most contractor-dependent wars (or “overseas contingency operations” in Pentagon-speak) in U.S. history. As noted previously, there are roughly three contractors (28,626) for every U.S. troop (9,800) in Afghanistan, far above the contractor per uniformed military personnel average of America’s previous wars. In Iraq today, 7,773 contractors support U.S. government operations — and 4,087 U.S. troops. These numbers do not include contractors supporting CIA or other intelligence community activities, either abroad or in the United States. On April 5, Adm. Michael Rogers, commander of the U.S. Cyber Command, declared during a Senate hearing that contractors made up 25 percent of his workforce.

Under Obama, more private military contractors have died in Iraq and Afghanistan than all the U.S. troops deployed to those countries. Between Jan. 1, 2009, and March 31, 2016, 1,540 contractors were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan (176 in Iraq and 1,364 in Afghanistan). During that period, 1,301 U.S. troops were killed in Afghanistan and Iraq (289 in Iraq and 1,012 in Afghanistan). Last year was even more skewed toward contractors than the preceding six years; 58 contractorsdied in Afghanistan or Iraq, while less than half as many U.S. troops did (27) fighting in either country, includingSyria.

The first thing you learn when studying the role contractors play in U.S. military operations is there’s no easy way to do so. The U.S. government offers no practical overview, especially for the decade after 9/11. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) began to release data on contractors only in the second half of 2007 — no other geographic combatant command provides such data for their area of operations. In 2011, the Government Accountability Office found, “Although all [State Department, USAID, and DOD] are required to track the number of personnel killed or wounded while working on contracts and assistance instruments in Iraq or Afghanistan, DOD still does not have a system that reliably tracks killed and wounded contractor personnel.” Just last month, an especially exasperated John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told acting Secretary of the Army Patrick Murphy, “We look forward to the day you can tell us how many contractors are employed by [the Department of Defense].”

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World War II History: What Patton’s Poems Tell Us About Today

By Randy Brown
Best Defense poet laureate

“Patton, you magnificent bastard! I read your verse!” —Charlie Sherpa

Even casual consumers of military history — at least, those familiar with actor George C. Scott‘s portrayal of Patton in the 1971 movie — suspect the historical general may have more than occasionally written poetry. In an early scene set in World War II North Africa — the original script was written by a young Francis Ford Coppola — Lt. Gen. George S. Patton briefly diverts his command car to an ancient battlefield he senses from a past incarnation. Patton then delivers this memorable roadside monologue to Maj. Gen. Omar Bradley, played by Karl Malden:

 “It was here. The battlefield was here. The Carthaginians defending the city were attacked by three Roman legions. The Carthaginians were proud and brave but they couldn’t hold. They were massacred. The Arab women stripped them of the tunics and swords, and lances. And the soldiers lay naked in the sun. Two-thousand years ago. I was here.

You don’t believe me, do you, Brad? You know what the poet said:

Through the travail of ages,
Midst the pomp and toils of war,
Have I fought and strove and perished
Countless times upon a star.

As if through a glass, and darkly
The age-old strife I see—
Where I fought in many guises, many names—
but always me.

Do you know who the poet was?
Me.

The movie dialogue takes two separate stanzas — the first and twenty-second — from Patton’s longest poem, “Through the Glass Darkly” (1922). The excerpted poem also evokes 1 Corinthians 13:11 (“For now we see through a glass, darkly…”). In the unabridged work, Patton describes himself as being present at various points in history, from the crucifixion of Christ and ancient Rome, to the Battle of Crécy (1346), to the Battle of Waterloo (1815).

Scholar Carmine A. Prioli (Lines of Fire, 1991) documents more than 80 poems written by Patton between the years 1903 and 1945. According to biographer Carlo D’Este (Patton: A Genius for War, 1996), Patton was a dedicated practitioner of poetry, starting in his first years at Virginia Military Institute and West Point. Patton was not a strong student overall — in retrospect, he likely suffered undiagnosed dyslexia, which contributed to his academic difficulties — but he excelled in history. He also regarded the memorization of verse to be a worthy mental exercise, and its recitation a welcome distraction for himself and others.

Particularly during times of separation from his beloved girlfriend Beatrice — later his wife — or convalescing in hospital from sports or war injuries, Patton found writing poetry a source of inspiration, entertainment, and solace. Patton also notably used poetry to shape his public persona, tasking Beatrice with submitting works to magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Women’s Home Companion. At one time, Patton reportedly planned to publish some of his poetry during the years between the world wars. In 1943, one of his poems was even set to music and broadcast to soldiers in Europe by the American Expeditionary Radio Station.

For Patton, then, the practice of poetry was both tactical and strategic.

The poems collected by Prioli often adhere to some form of iambic form, in stanzas of four lines each. The poems are sometimes amateurish, but are not without merit or appeal. Not surprisingly, Patton’s favorite themes involve soldierly life, battlefield death, and reincarnation. Patton’s words could also deliver profane humor, scathing satire, and insights into his geopolitical worldview.

For the profane, one need look no further than Patton’s “The Turds of the Scouts,” the title of which alone is certain to amuse horse soldiers and latrine humorists of all eras. (Oft given to quoting Canadian Lt. Col. John McCrae’s World War I poem “In Flanders Fields,” 21st century cavalry troopers are some of the soldiers most likely to maintain an appreciation of military poetry.) Patton achieves something akin to cowboy poetry with lines such as:

For days and weeks he’d ridden hard
He’d eaten many a meal
Yet every morn he waits in vain
Some bowel movement to feel.

The rest of the poem is, perhaps, best left to off-hours Internet searches. Patton’s father, a California attorney, thought it downright vulgar, and refused to share it with family. Still, anyone who has partaken of too many MRE crackers, or ridden too long on convoy, can empathize with Patton’s scatological sentiments. No doubt, a poet of the M-RAP generation will someday deliver an “Ode to a Gatorade Bottle.”

On a higher note and satirical purpose, Patton makes an effective assault on bureaucracy with his poem “REFERENCE: B AND B3c-24614 FILE: INV. FORM A62B-M. Q.” Consider these excerpts:

[…] They had written—”Your directive when effective was defective
In its ultimate objective—and what’s more
Neolithic hieroglyphic is, to us, much more specific
Than the drivel you keep dumping at our door.” […]

and

[…] But first he sent a checker, then he sent a checker’s checker
Still nothing was disclosed as being wrong.
So a checker’s checker’s checker came to check the checker’s checker
And the process was laborious and long.

Obviously, Patton had a sense of humor. And could use that humor to direct fire at a satirical target, in order to achieve an objective.

In “Absolute War” (1944), Patton offers a critique of the American way of war, as applicable to the 21st century as it was his own:

Now in war we are confronted with conditions which are strange.
If we accept them we will never win.
Since by being realistic, as in mundane combats fistic,
We will get a bloody nose and that’s a sin.

To avoid such fell disaster, the result of fighting faster,
We resort to fighting carefully and slow.
We fill up terrestrial spaces with secure expensive bases
To keep our tax rate high and death rate low.

But with sadness and with sorrow we discover to our horror
That while we build, the enemy gets set. […]

Bringing his philosophy more down to earth, Patton underscores his thoughts later in the same poem, observing that “[…] in war just as in loving, you must always keep on shoving. / Or you’ll never get your just reward.” Like film and history and other human endeavors, poetry is an imperfect mirror. Patton wasn’t perfect. Neither was his verse.

Patton’s poetry humanizes and complicates our understanding of his persona and of our history, however, enriching it beyond his cinematic ghost. And, in reading it, even if we hear in our heads the graveled growls of actor George C. Scott, we are reminded of universal truths, encountered on battlefields both ancient and modern:

War is repetitious. War is shit. War is bureaucratic.

Randy Brown embedded with his former Iowa Army National Guard unit as a civilian journalist in Afghanistan, May-June 2011. He authored the poetry collection Welcome to FOB Haiku: War Poems from Inside the Wire (Middle West Press, 2015). As “Charlie Sherpa,” he blogs about military culture at www.redbullrising.com.

Read the Original Article at Foreign Policy

Espionage Files: Pakistani Intelligence Possibly Financed 2009 CIA Outpost Bombing

Pakistan’s powerful spy agency may have provided the funding for a deadly 2009 suicide attack on a CIA base in Afghanistan that ranks as one of the deadliest days in the agency’s history, according to a newly declassified State Department cable.

The heavily redacted cable, sent about two weeks after the attack on Dec. 30, 2009, reports on a meeting between operatives belonging to the Haqqani network, a highly capable al Qaeda-linked terror group, and unidentified officers with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence. According to the cable, which was released Wednesday, the ISI was suspected of giving the Haqqani network $200,000 to “enable” the attack on Forward Operating Base Chapman in Afghanistan’s Khost province.

The Chapman attack killed seven CIA officers and a Jordanian intelligence operative. It was carried out by a double agent, a Jordanian named Hammam Khalil Mohammed, who was invited onto the base to help the agency track down senior al Qaeda operatives. When he blew himself up during a meeting with senior CIA officials responsible for hunting al Qaeda, he greatly hindered Langley’s effort to dismantle the terror network.

While Pakistan’s ISI has a well-known record of supporting Islamist militant groups, its funding of the Chapman attack remains unconfirmed. The cable notes that it is an “information report” and “not finally evaluated intelligence.” The CIA did not answer questions Wednesday about the report’s veracity, or whether stronger intelligence proves that the ISI funded the Chapman bombing.

The National Security Archive at George Washington University published the cable, which was part of a trove of documents received under a Freedom of Information Act request.

Another State Department cable, also published Wednesday, reported that leaders of the Haqqani network were suspected of meeting monthly with the ISI in Islamabad as of late December 2009 — around the time of the Chapman bombing. The ISI provided the Haqqani network during these meetings with an “unknown amount of funding” for “unspecified operations,” the cable reported.

In December 2009, the ISI and Haqqani network met twice, according to thatcable. During the first meeting, they “discussed funding for operations” in Khost province. During the second, ISI provided “direction to the Haqqanis to expedite attack preparations and lethality in Afghanistan.”

Other documents published by the National Security Archive give new insights into the Haqqani funding sources.

The ISI has a long history of playing both sides in America’s long war against radical Islamist groups in the tribal areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Anticipating an eventual American withdrawal from Afghanistan, Islamabad has cultivated close ties with Afghan militants, providing them with funds and arms.

Pakistani intelligence officials believe their relationship with Afghan militants, such as the Haqqani network and the Afghan Taliban, provides Islamabad with a decisive advantage in its contest with India, Pakistan’s historic enemy, for influence in Afghanistan.

At the same time, Pakistan has accepted billions of dollars in military and humanitarian aid from the United States after helping Washington combat Islamist terror groups following the 9/11 terror attacks.

Pakistani armed forces are carrying out an offensive in the country’s tribal areas against the Pakistani Taliban, which has been responsible for a spate of recent deadly bombings. Just last month, a splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban killed more than 70 people in an Easter bombing targeting Christians celebrating in Lahore.

Read the Original Article at Foreign Policy

Putin’s Attack Choppers and Merc’s are Winning the War for Assad

The George W. Bush parallel was lost on very few analysts when Vladimir Putin proudly announced that he was withdrawing a significant amount of Russia’s forces from Syria because their “mission is accomplished.” The announcement came just four days after the Atlantic published an overview of “The Obama Doctrine,” wherein U.S. President Barack Obama told journalist Jeffrey Goldberg that Russia was “bleeding,” “overextended,” and that Putin had made a terrible mistake. In both Syria and Ukraine, Obama argued, the Russian ruler had pursued policies that made his country weaker.

“The notion that somehow Russia is in a stronger position now, in Syria or in Ukraine, than they were before they invaded Ukraine or before he had to deploy military forces to Syria is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of power in foreign affairs or in the world generally. Real power means you can get what you want without having to exert violence,” the U.S. president said.

Yet there was Putin, proudly proclaiming the opposite. According to him, Russia could draw down its mission in Syria because it had achieved its goals. The White House, and the U.S. intelligence community, appeared completely surprised at the announcement of Russia’s drawdown. Once again, Vladimir Putin had defied American expectations and seemingly came out on top.

Putin’s announcement was filled with lies and distortions, but one glaring truth underscored his words — unlike Bush’s now-infamous declaration from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, the Russian president indeed may have accomplished his mission.

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