CIA Caught In Dirty & Secretive War

ANALYSIS

By Tom Coghlan
January 1, 2010
Courtesy Of The Times Online

The deaths of seven CIA agents in Khost province have brought into the limelight the secretive and dirty war being fought by America’s intelligence agencies — and the Taleban and al-Qaeda — in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Forward Operating Base Chapman, and others like it along the border, are the forward edge of American military and intelligence counter-terrorism operations, aimed principally at hunting down senior figures in al-Qaeda and their allies in the Taleban hiding in the lawless tribal belt.

The CIA’s main strike weapons are the drones that loiter over the border areas 24 hours a day, watching and listening to telephone networks. While the drones provide surveillance and electronic intelligence and carry out strikes, human intelligence is far harder to acquire among remote communities suspicious of any outsider.

Then there are the night raids against suspected insurgent and al-Qaeda linked leaders. It was an operation by what are euphemistically called “other government agencies” that was alleged to have killed a number of students in Kunar province on Saturday, causing widespread anger in Afghanistan.

CIA-led night raids such as this have proved controversial before. A UN-commissioned report last year from Philip Alston, director of the New York Centre for Human Rights, claimed that such raids raised issues under humanitarian and international law.

The report criticised the “opaque” use of ultra-secretive CIA units operating alongside irregular Afghan militias such as the Pashai.

Professor Alston complained that many raids were “composed of Afghans but with a handful, at most, of international people directing it” and were “not accountable to any international military authority”.

Such units answer directly to the Pentagon rather than to the Nato command structure, and their operations are often so secretive that even other US forces operating nearby are sometimesmay be unaware of them.

Such has been the effectiveness of strikes on the terrorist command structure that there are persistent reports of al-Qaeda leadership figures relocating to urban areas in Pakistan and shifting the focus of their operations towards Yemen, Somalia and other areas of the Horn of Africa.

The Taleban have infinitely smaller resources. But their successful strike within a CIA base indicates that their own intelligence operation can also hit its mark.