By Micah Zenko
November 3 marks the tenth anniversary of America’s Third War — the campaign of targeted killings in non-battlefield settings that has been a defining feature of post-9/11 American military policy as much as the conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Unlike other wars, there won't be any ceremonies at the White House or Pentagon, parades down Main Streets, or town square rallies to acknowledge the sacrifices made by the countless civilian and military personnel involved. There won’t even be a presidential statement since targeted killings cannot and will not be recognised by the US government. The war is conducted by both the CIA — covert and totally unacknowledged — and by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) — described without any specificity as “direct action” by the White House. Whether the CIA or JSOC is the lead executive agency, the Third War is marked by the limited transparency and accountability of US officials.
The Third War, which began with a drone strike in Yemen, had two simple goals: preventing another attack on the US homeland and capturing or killing those al Qaida operatives responsible. Bush administration officials warned ominously that its forward-leaning counterterrorism approach mandated preventive attacks against terrorist safe havens. Five days after 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney stated that the United States would have to work “the dark side,” and an anonymous senior official declared: “The gloves are off. The president has given the [CIA] the green light to do whatever is necessary. Lethal operations that were unthinkable pre-September 11 are now underway.”
On September 17, 2001, President Bush signed a memorandum of notification that authorised the CIA to kill, without further presidential approval, “two or three dozen” high-value targets. A former CIA official estimated: “There are five hundred guys out there you have to kill. There’s no way to sugarcoat it — you just have to kill them.” (In a quaint historical footnote, on October 15, 2001, the Bush administration rebuked Israel for killing the suspected plotter of a Tel Aviv terror attack: “It’s the same position that we’ve said over and over again, and that is that we oppose the policy of targeted killings.”)
The United States certainly killed many suspected members of al Qaida during the operation in Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban. However, surviving al Qaida operatives simply went elsewhere, including just across the Durand Line into the tribal areas of Pakistan. In May 2002, Gen John Keane, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, vowed: “We have broken their will and they are trying to establish another safe haven now in Pakistan . . . when the time is right, we will deal with that one as well.” Indeed, two years later, his prediction came to pass on June 17, 2004, when a Hellfire missile killed Taliban commander Nek Mohammed, beginning the CIA campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan that continue to this day.
Al Qaida operatives also relocated to Yemen. It was on November 3, 2002, after a year-long manhunt and several missed opportunities, that a fusion of human intelligence assets and signals intercepts pinpointed Abu Ali al-Harithi — an operational planner in the al Qaida cell that bombed the USS Cole in 2002 — and his bodyguards near the Saudi Arabian border. After determining that Harithi and a group of unknown men were travelling in an SUV, a CIA Predator drone fired a single Hellfire missile, killing al-Harithi, four unknown Yemenis, and Ahmed Hijazi (otherwise known as Kemal Derwish) — a naturalised US citizen who recruited six men from Lackawanna, NY, to briefly attend an al Qaida camp in Afghanistan. An official later claimed Hijazi’s death was justifiable “collateral damage” since “he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.” When reporter Dana Priest asked a CIA spokesperson, “Wasn’t that assassination?” he yelled: “They attacked us, remember. Don't you get it?”
Since November 2002, there have been 400 more documented US targeted killings in the non-battlefield settings of Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and the Philippines (where there was reportedly one). Although over 95 percent of all targeted killings have been conducted by CIA and JSOC drones, a small number have also been carried out by Air Force Special Operations Command AC-130 gunships, cruise missiles fired by Navy ships or planes, and raids by special operations forces, including the one that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011.
Targeted killings have exacted a considerable toll, far beyond what anyone imagined in the immediate post-9/11 era. Although the publicly available numbers vary among research organisations, an estimated 3,400 people have been killed — 13 percent of whom were civilians.
Wp-bloomberg
