Obama’s new blueprint of covert warfare

[Lahore_Real_Estate]

Islamabad—Following the US defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Obama administration continues with its agenda of secret wars. The US administration is scheming against Pakistan. The next six months would be very crucial. The administration plans to repeat secret operation in Pakistan. It would time the next operation before the presidential election to boost the image of Barak Obama.

The next target is Balochistan. In this connection, the CIA and MI6 assembled rouge elements from Balochistan and Sindh in London. They issued a highly objectionable statement against the Pakistan military and invited US and British troops to deploy in Balochistan and Sindh. Evidently, this provocative meeting and statement are part of the psychological warfare against the defiant military establishment.

Obama, who has landed the United States in one of the most serious economic crisis, is now reshaping his war into one mostly out of public view to push for military domination. He is insisting on the war doctrine even as the United States was close to default. Its debts have risen to $14.3 trillion.

Pakistan remains in grave danger. The Obama administration is planning secret wars deep inside Pakistan by covert operations uniting Pentagon Special Forces, CIA paramilitary troops and sophisticated drone. The new generation of drones is very advanced. They can launch powerful missiles. Others are so small that they can eavesdrop unnoticed in the shadows. The hallmark of the new US strategy in Pakistan is the collaboration between the military and intelligence community.

The covert operations in Pakistan would include Delta Force, Seal Team Six and radar-evading helicopters. Operatives from CIA’s paramilitary special Activities Division are in-country running agents. The Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSCO), which run the “ black” special forces, is flying overhead an armada of drones many of designs and sizes that are still classified.

The CIA, already flying a covert air force of Predator and Reaper drones over Pakistan, has now acquired enough that it’s begun patrols over Yemen to provide more consistent surveillance and heavier firepower than most of JSOC’s fleet can supply.

Meanwhile, a mini-carrier—currently the Marines’ amphibious assault vessel USS Boxer—is on permanent station in the Gulf of Aden off Yemen’s coast with a squadron of Harrier aircraft to fly strike-missions against targets in-country identified either by the CIA, special forces on the ground or the drones.

When the target warrants, the submarine escorting the amphib is called into action, to launch one of its battery of land-attack cruise missiles. In the command center of this covert campaign, video feeds from a drone over the target have allowed commanders to witness real-time the cruise missiles’ impact. The campaign against al Qaeda in Yemen is thus far more ambitious than has been disclosed. No element in the campaign is new. What is new is their integration—CIA, “white” and “black” special operations forces, and conventional forces—into a unified effort under a single command.

The concept behind the operation took shape during Petraeus’ spell running Central Command from fall 2008 to mid-2010. After Petraeus shifted last summer to take over the effort in Afghanistan, the campaign was amped up by JSOC commander Vice Admiral William McRaven and Michael Vickers, the Pentagon’s Undersecretary for Intelligence (and a veteran of both U.S. Special Forces and the CIA’s Special Activities Division). At the CIA, Director Leon Panetta vigorously backed their efforts—which is one reason why Obama picked Panetta to succeed Gates.

Petraeus was likely referring very obliquely to the Yemen campaign when, at his confirmation hearing, he talked of the need to combat the network of al Qaeda “franchises”—the Yemen-based spinoff from Osama bin Laden by far the most threatening—with “networks of our own.”

“One of the major developments since 9/11 has been the establishment of this network, in many cases led by the Joint Special Operations Command of the military, but with very, very good partnering with elements of the Central Intelligence Agency, other elements of the intelligence community, and in fact with conventional military forces, the white SOF as well as the special mission units,” Petraeus told senators.

The focus of the Yemen campaign is counterterrorism. That’s the mission of the Joint Special Operations Command. But the integrating principle behind it has been applied in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The conflict in Yemen is far from over—its future complicated now by the near civil war against the rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who gave the go-ahead for the U.S. campaign against the al-Qaeda branch in his country. But within the Pentagon, there is growing interest in the campaign as a possible harbinger of a new sort of warfare.

Admiral Eric Olson, the former SEAL who is soon to retire as commander of Special Operations Command (SOCOM)—the umbrella command for both “white” and “black” special forces—has noted that special forces have nearly doubled in number in the decade since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack, their budget has nearly tripled, and their overseas deployments have quadrupled.

The Special Operations Command’s overall strength now stands at roughly 60,000, according to spokesman Kenneth McGraw. Of these, some 13,000 were deployed last week, he said, in 79 countries.

That’s a lot of activity that most Americans can’t see. And it gives Petraeus and Panetta—as they swap agencies—the foundation for designing a new blueprint for covert warfare.