by Scott Creighton
As the occupation of Afghanistan was grinding along in late 2008 and early 2009, resistance to our presence and the brutal puppet regime we installed was growing. President Peace Prize decided to step-up attacks on mid to low level Taliban members and so our occupational forces turned into what amounts to a state-backed death-squad on an industrial scale.
Obama immediately brought in Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Mr. Salvador Option himself and the list making began.
General Stanley McChrystal’s plan for Afghanistan says the focus should be on troops on the ground fighting a “counter-insurgency” war to “protect Afghans” and reduce civilian casualties by avoiding airstrikes. It also makes intelligent suggestions such as having troops actually leave vehicles to protect villagers ;and providing jobs to potential defectors from the insurgents. However unless it’s very different to past US and US-trained counter-insurgency operations in Vietnam and El Salvador and Afghanistan (and General McChrystals previous command in Iraq) and current ones in Iraq, Colombia and Pakistan – it’s likely to involve death squads murdering, torturing and disappearing civilians and insurgents alike on suspicion if it goes ahead. In Place of Fear, 2009
That quote comes from an article written in 2009 which provides a great history of our death squads of the past as well as a nice little expose on Mr. James Steele who never gets enough attention in my opinion.
As it turns out, that article was extremely prescient. Chillingly so.
A new article from Der Spiegel exposes at least part of the truth behind the Obama administration’s actions in Afghanistan over the past 6 years by revealing some leaked documents from Wikileaks (yes I know) which purport to show a few of the administration’s kill lists and other various documents relating to how folks might end up on one or more of those.
Turns out, what we were told about drone strikes and the like only being used when there was an imminent threat to U.S. forces or “interests” is complete bullshit.
I have been writing that for years.
What they were really doing was targeting people because of their ideological beliefs: killing off folks because in essence, they were opposed to the kind of nation we were building. Either that or they were killing them because they were somehow suspected of being involved in the illicit drug trade and by “illicit” I mean the part of the trade the U.S. and her allies aren’t in control of.
…The documents show that the deadly missions were not just viewed as a last resort to prevent attacks, but were in fact part of everyday life in the guerilla war in Afghanistan.
The list, which included up to 750 people at times, proves for the first time that NATO didn’t just target the Taliban leadership, but also eliminated mid- and lower-level members of the group on a large scale. Some Afghans were only on the list because, as drug dealers, they were allegedly supporting the insurgents.
The 13-year combat mission in Afghanistan comes to an official end this week, but the kill lists raise legal and moral questions that extend far beyond Afghanistan. Can a democracy be allowed to kill its enemies in a targeted manner when the objective is not to prevent an imminent attack? And does the goal of eliminating as many Taliban as possible justify killing innocent bystanders? Der Spiegel
You have to remember, the Taliban was nothing more than a political party that came to power in late 1999 and early 2000 in Afghanistan by overthrowing the corrupt and brutal regime that was in place already.
In July of 2001, they had a meeting in Paris with members of the various elites of this country and others and were being offered “a carpet of gold” if they allowed the U.S. to install the Trans Afghan Pipeline through their country with no resistance. If they declined however, they were promised a “carpet of bombs”.
They declined basically because the U.S. needed to install military installations near the pipeline in order to secure it’s protection. That was demand from the companies who were financing the operation.
That was the deal breaker for the Taliban.
Taliban officials had been negotiating with these companies in Texas just a few months prior to that meeting.
Anyway, the Taliban was the reason 9/11 took place, or at least I should say, they were the reason the Bush administration blamed Afghanistan for 9/11 before they later tried to blame Saddam for it.
Just after 9/11, Taliban officials held two press conferences in which they announced that they had sent word to the Bush White House offering to hand over Osama bin Laden if they were to provide proof he was involved in the attacks.
The Bush administration never got back to them.
The carpet of bombs agenda was already in the works.
It should also be noted that the finished plans for the invasion of Afghanistan were placed on the president’s desk just days before 9/11.
With all that in mind, the Taliban represents the same kind of threat to our existing structure of power in Afghanistan as the Muslim Brotherhood does in Egypt and the new revolution from the north does in Iraq.
That is why we have been targeting mid and low level Taliban members for these death from above death-squad attacks. We don’t want to see the movement build strength again, so this kind of Salvador Option action is what was called for.
The strikes rarely had anything to do with pending attacks on U.S. forces. They were the calculated demolition of the idea of resistance as much as they were for the protection of our troops.
They were “cleansing” the nation of people who thought the wrong way about our occupation and the way our neoliberal puppet ran the country. Kinda like the people in Iraq who feel the same way about us. Kinda like the people in Egypt who feel the same.
Under Petraeus, a merciless campaign began to hunt down the so-called shadow governors and local supporters aligned with the Islamists. For the Americans, the fact that the operations often ended in killings was seen as a success. In August 2010, Petraeus proudly told diplomats in Kabul that he had noticed a shifting trend. The figures he presented as evidence made some of the ambassadors feel uneasy. At least 365 insurgent commanders, Petraeus explained, had been neutralized in the last three months, for an average of about four killings a day. Der Spiegel
The Der Spiegel article describes how NATO and U.S. forces, usually at the behest of the CIA, would track suspect’s cell phone number when they turned them on and use that locator to target them with a drone strike. It was extremely imprecise and resulted in a great deal of collateral damage (civilian deaths)
They didn’t care about the civilian casualties. In fact, the more the better.
You see, if you are trying to demonize a political movement or ideology, it’s better to kill a few innocent’s standing near a targeted individual when you take them out. That way, the people of the targeted population will start to avoid Taliban or Muslim Brotherhood members like the plague for fear of becoming the next statistic.
The shift to killing drug dealers, or more specifically folks accused of being drug dealers, was one of momentous proportions. In that it was illegal.
According to the NSA document, in October 2008 the NATO defense ministers made the momentous decision that drug networks would now be “legitimate targets” for ISAF troops. “Narcotics traffickers were added to the Joint Prioritized Effects List (JPEL) list for the first time,” the report reads.
In the opinion of American commanders like Bantz John Craddock, there was no need to prove that drug money was being funneled to the Taliban to declare farmers, couriers and dealers as legitimate targets of NATO strikes.
In early 2009, Craddock, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander for Europe at the time, issued an order to expand the targeted killings of Taliban officials to drug producers. This led to heated discussions within NATO. German NATO General Egon Ramms declared the order “illegal” and a violation of international law. Der Spiegel
Whacking people merely suspected of aiding drug trafficking with a drone strike and a couple hell-fire missiles? Is that really the “CHANGE” everyone voted for in 2008?
Well, that was the change you got.
People reading this blog are probably well aware of how the CIA has used death-squads and kill lists over the decades in order to protect democracy and our “national interests” over seas.
Many readers here probably remember me writing about how Obama’s own mother was working in Indonesia for USAID when the CIA was using that agency to prepare similar lists for a little dictator we installed named Suharto.
Now Barack has come of age and the memories of his father (worked directly for Suharto) have compelled him to make his own little lists in Afghanistan , Sudan, Egypt, Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq and right here at home.
Over the years I have been writing that these drone strikes and black bag ops weren’t targeting guys in caves wearing suicide vests but rather people opposed to our puppet regimes and the neoliberal fleecing of their nations.
Today, this list and the reporting from Der Spiegel confirms what I have been saying all along. Though it certainly doesn’t go far enough and is probably being released by Wikileaks in a way to normalize this kind of illegal, immoral, fascist behavior, it’s at least a start.
Going back to that article from In Place of Fear, 2009 , it’s too bad the “conspiracy theorists” like them weren’t listened to back then. How many lives would have been saved had those prescient words been heeded?
What’s it going to take for us to understand that lists like these never lead to anything good? While drone air travel corridors are being crafted over our heads as we speak, one has to ask what their purpose is as the terror watch list slowly grows on the “home-front”.
Though it isn’t a new story, it’s certainly worth reading over at Der Spiegel. We’ve known about “Terror Tuesdays” for a while now. But in the past there has been the pleasant fiction that all these strikes were based on intelligence pointing to an imminent threat.
But now we know the real threat: the threat of an opposing ideology which in some cases would be defined as “democracy”
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