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Just today we have three examples of revelations about Bush-era policies abroad, some confirmations of what we already knew, and some fresh horrors.
For example, longtime secret war in Pakistan!
American special forces have conducted multiple clandestine raids into Pakistan’s tribal areas as part of a secret war in the border region where Washington is pressing to expand its drone assassination programme.
A former Nato officer said the incursions, only one of which has been previously reported, occurred between 2003 and 2008, involved helicopter-borne elite soldiers stealing across the border at night, and were never declared to the Pakistani government.
“The Pakistanis were kept entirely in the dark about it. It was one of those things we wouldn’t confirm officially with them,” said the source, who had detailed knowledge of the operations.
Such operations are a matter of sensitivity in Pakistan. While public opinion has grudgingly tolerated CIA-led drone strikes in the tribal areas, any hint of American “boots on the ground” is greeted with virulent condemnation.
After the only publicly acknowledged special forces raid in September 2008, Pakistan’s foreign office condemned it as “a grave provocation” while the military threatened retaliatory action.
These weren’t even successful raids, judging from the continued presence of Al Qaeda in Pakistan. And they strained the relationship with the Pakistani government, a distrust that continues to this today.
Among the more mundane disclosures today – Lithuania confirmed CIA prisons within their borders:
The CIA used at least two secret detention centres in Lithuania after the 11 September 2001 terror attacks on the US, a Lithuanian inquiry has found.
The report by a Lithuanian parliamentary committee says that in 2005 and 2006 CIA chartered planes were allowed to land in Lithuania.
It says that no Lithuanian officials were allowed near the aircraft, nor were they told who was on board.
Other sites have been reported to be in Poland and Romania, but this is among the first to be confirmed.
And Peter Bergen has the definitive account of how an understaffed military let Osama bin Laden escape at Tora Bora in late 2001.
What really happened at Tora Bora? Not long after the battle ended, the answer to that question would become extremely clouded. Americans perceived the Afghan war as a stunning victory, and the failure at Tora Bora seemed like an unfortunate footnote to an otherwise upbeat story. By 2004, with George W. Bush locked in a tough reelection battle, some U.S. officials were even asserting, inaccurately, that bin Laden himself may not have been present at the battle.
The real history of Tora Bora is far more disturbing. Having reconstructed the battle–based on interviews with the top American ground commander, three Afghan commanders, and three CIA officials; accounts by Al Qaeda eyewitnesses that were subsequently published on jihadist websites; recollections of captured survivors who were later questioned by interrogators or reporters; an official history of the Afghan war by the U.S. Special Operations Command; an investigation by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and visits to the battle sites themselves–I am convinced that Tora Bora constitutes one of the greatest military blunders in recent U.S. history. It is worth revisiting now not just in the interest of historical accuracy, but also because the story contains valuable lessons as we renew our push against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The failures of the Bush Administration is in no way a reason to become satisfied at the actions of the Obama Administration. It is occasionally worth looking back, however, just to understand what a disaster this last decade has been.
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add Ugly Fact # 4 to this post
Somalia is greatest victim of cheney’s / bush’s War on Terror
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article6963512.ece
Afghanistan and Iraq have monopolised the headlines but Somalia is arguably an even greater victim of George W. Bush’s ill-conceived and lamentably executed War on Terror. America’s interventions have proved so catastrophic that its best hope of salvaging something from the wreckage is a president it chased from power three years ago, who controls a few square miles of a country three times the size of Britain.
It has delivered a people that practised a moderate form of Islam into the hands of religious extremists. Its efforts to combat terrorism have turned Somalia into a launchpad for global jihad. Somalia is now the ultimate failed state whose mayhem threatens to destabilise the region and whose pirates maraud the vital shipping lanes off its shores. Its people endure Africa’s worst humanitarian crisis.
During the Cold War, the US pumped arms into Somalia to counter Soviet support for neighbouring Ethiopia. In 1991 clan warlords ousted the dictator Siad Barre and turned that arsenal on each other. In 1992 President Bush Snr sent in the Marines to help its suffering people — a venture that ended in the Black Hawk Down debacle, a humiliating US withdrawal and a dozen more years of anarchy as the feuding warlords ran amok.
In 2006 a grassroots movement called the Islamic Courts Union emerged. Fearing that the Courts would become a new Taleban and Somalia another Afghanistan, Washington sought to stop the Islamists by giving the warlords millions of dollars for arms — the same warlords who had humiliated America in 1993 and subsequently caused such carnage. The plan failed. The Courts drove the warlords from Mogadishu and imposed order for the first time in a generation. The city’s roadblocks and machineguns vanished. Exiles returned, businesses reopened and people ventured out at night.
The Courts’ titular leader was Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, a relative moderate, but the movement included a militant wing called al-Shabaab, as well as extremists who imposed strict Islamic law, backed Somali rebels in neighbouring Ethiopia and sheltered terrorists.
Europe broadly favoured engagement with the Courts’ moderate leaders. The Bush Administration backed an invasion by Christian-ruled Ethiopia, Somalia’s bitter enemy, which replaced the Courts with a deeply unpopular transitional government of former warlords. After six months of relative peace Somalia was plunged back into war, with al-Shabaab portraying themselves as nationalists fighting a puppet government. Revisiting Mogadishu in April 2007, I saw how the hopes of peace had evaporated.
Today al-Shabaab controls much of Somalia and most of Mogadishu. It has morphed into a jihadist movement with ties to al-Qaeda.
We need to defund the “defense” dept. Good diary, and comment by reality matters.
No mention in the TNR article about the possibly that OBL is no longer alive. At the end he mentions we haven’t seen OBL on video since 2007 and mentions the black beard and him looking healthy. Yet he also mentions the video of OBL from just after ToraBora (2001?) where he looks aged and doesn’t move his whole left side. No mention of Bhutto’s claim, before her assassination, that OBL was dead…
Any news on the Bhutto assassination? Has there ever been a trial?