Doug Valentine: CIA Killings Spell Defeat In Afghanistan

January 5, 2010

Posted in: Economy, Police State, War

Douglas Valentine, author of the recently released account of the DEA, “The Strength of the Pack,” contributes this piece to The Mind Body Politic:

Disrupting the Accommodation:

Why?

“Why?” The grieving family members ask. “Why did the terrorists kill our loved ones?”
The hardnosed colleagues of the four fallen CIA officers comfort the
wives and children (and one husband). They shake off their sorrow,
huddle together by the graves, and vow vengeance. They bathe themselves
in their seething anger like it was the blood of the lamb.

“Why? The American public and its officials ask. Why? The media
repeats, adding in shock and awe, “Don’t the terrorists know that you
can’t kill CIA officers?”

Why, everyone wonders, did a Jordanian suicide bomber target the
CIA, knowing that the wrath of the biggest, baddest, bloodthirstiest
Gang on Planet Earth is going to start dropping bombs and slitting
throats until its lust for death and suffering is satisfied?

Over the course of its sixty year reign of terror, in which it has
overthrown countless governments, started countless wars costing
countless lives, and otherwise subverted and sabotaged friends and foes
alike, the CIA has lost less than 100 officers.

On a good day, one CIA drone, and one CIA hit team, kills 100 innocent women and children, and nobody bats an eye.

Why would the terrorists suddenly deviate from the norm – the sacred accommodation – and throw the whole game into chaos?
Why?

OK, I’ll Tell You Why

There is a phenomenon called “The Universal Brotherhood of Officers.”
It exists in the twilight zone between imagination and in reality, in
the fog of war. It is why officers are separated from enlisted men in
POW camps and given better treatment. It is why officers of opposing
armies have more in common with one another than they have with their
own enlisted men.

Officers are trained to think of their subordinate ranks as canon
fodder. Their troops are expendable. They know when they send a unit up
a hill, some will be killed. That is why they do not fraternize with
thee lower ranks. This class distinction exists across the world, and
is the basis of the sacred accommodation. No slobs need apply.

It is why the Bush Family flew the Bin Laden Family, and other Saudi
Royals, out of the United States in the days after 9-11. If anyone was
a case officer to the 9-11 bombers, or had knowledge about the bombers
or any follow-up plots, it was these “protected” people.

CIA officers are at the pinnacle of the Universal Brotherhood. They
are the Protected Few, blessed with false identities and bodyguards,
flying in jet planes, living in villas, eating fancy food and enjoying
state of the art technology. CIA officers tell army generals what to
do.They direct Congressional committees. They assassinate heads of
state and innocent children equally, with impunity, with indifference.

In Afghanistan they manage the drug trade from their hammocks in the
shade.They know the Taliban tax the farmers growing the opium, and they
know that Karzai’s warlords convert the opium into heroin and fly it to
the Russian mob. They are amused by the antics of earnest DEA agents,
who, in their ignorant patriotic bliss, cannot believe such an
accommodation exists.

CIA officers are trained to exist in this moral netherworld of
protected drug dealers, for the simple reasons that the CIA in every
conflict has a paramount need to keep secure communication channels
open to the enemy. This is CIA 101. The CIA, as part of its mandate, is
authorized to negotiate with the enemy, but it can only do so as long
as the channel is secure and deniable.

No proof will ever exist, so the American public can be deceived.

Take Iran Contra, when Reagan vowed never to negotiate with
terrorists, then a team to Tehran to sell missiles to thee Iranians and
use the money to buy guns for the drug dealing Contras.
There’s stated and unstated policy – and the CIA is always pursuing the
unstated, which is why it relies so heavily on its patriotic and
witless assets in the mainstream media.

In Afghanistan the accommodation is the environment that allows the
CIA to have a secure channel to the Taliban to negotiate on simple
matters like prisoner exchanges.

The exchange of British journalist Peter Moore for an Iraqi
“insurgent” in CIA custody was an example of how the accommodation
works in Iraq. Moore was held by a Shia group allegedly allied to Iran,
and his freedom depended entirely on the CIA reaching an accommodation
with America’s enemies in the Iraq resistance. The details of such
prisoner exchanges are never revealed, but involve secret negotiations
by the CIA and the resistance over issues of strategic importance to
both sides.

The accommodation is the intellectual environment which provides a
space for any eventual reconciliation. There are always preliminary
negotiations for a reconciliation or ceasefire, and in every modern
conflict that’s the CIA’s job.

And the Afghanis want reconciliation. Apart from the US and CIA,
Karzai and his clique at every level have filial relations with the
Taliban.

No matter how powerful the CIA is, it can’t overcome that.
Ed Brady, an Army officer detailed to the CIA and assigned to the
Phoenix Directorate in Saigon in 1967 and 1968, explains how the
accommodation worked in Vietnam.

While Brady and his Vietnamese counterpart Colonel Tan were lunching
at a restaurant in Dalat, Tan pointed at a woman eating noodle soup and
drinking Vietnamese coffee at the table next to them. He told Brady
that she was the Viet Cong province chief’s wife. Brady, of course,
wanted to grab her and use her for bait.

Coolly, Colonel Tan said to him: “You don’t understand. You don’t
live the way we live. You don’t have any family here. You’re going to
go home when this operation is over. You don’t think like you’re going
to live here forever. But I have a home and a family and kids that go
to school. I have a wife that has to go to market…. And you want me to
go kill his wife? You want me to set a trap for him and kill him when
he comes in to see his wife? If we do that, what are they going to do
to our wives?”

“The VC didn’t run targeted operations against them either,” Brady
explains. “There were set rules that you played by. If you went out and
conducted a military operation and you chased them down fair and square
in the jungle and you had a fight, that was okay. If they ambushed you
on the way back from a military operation, that was fair. But to
conduct these clandestine police operations and really get at the heart
of things, that was kind of immoral to them. That was not cricket. And
the Vietnamese were very, very leery of upsetting that.”

Obama’s Dirty War in Afghanistan relies largely on such clandestine
CIA operations, in which wives and children are used as bait to trap
husbands – or are killed as a way of punishing men in the resistance.
The CIA plays the same role in Afghanistan that the Gestapo played in
the cities and the Einsatzgruppen performed in the countryside for the
Nazis in World War Two – killing and terrorizing the urban resistance
and partisan bands.

Its unstated object is to rip apart working and middle class
families and thus the whole fabric of Afghan society, until the Afghan
people accept American domination, through its suppletif ruling
class.(1)

And this is why the CIA was targeted.

The CIA is utterly predictable. It will invoke the “100-1 Rule” used
by the Gestapo and Einsatzgruppen and go on a killing spree until its
vengeance is satisfied. At the end of the day, the Afghan people will
only hate the Americans more. This makes the CIA happy, on the premise
that terror will make the people submit. But in Afghanistan it spells
protracted war, and as in Vietnam, eventual defeat.

1) It also has a ‘foreign intelligence” mission of pursuing the
Taliban’s supporters in Pakistan, Iran and other neighboring countries.

My Comment:

This is shocking stuff to people accustomed to thinking of the CIA
as essentially good, with corrupt elements in it. I confess that I’ve
thought so until very recently. But in the last two years I’ve come to
see that enough of the outfit operates so far outside any ethical or
legal boundary that one begins to question the need for any of it to
exist.

Some people, no doubt, will find this an extreme position. How, they
might ask, can we abandon espionage and covert ops when other countries
also spy, albeit on a much smaller scale and with far less danger to
the world (eg. RAW in India).

It’s a good question.

And it’s the same question posed by the issue of disarmament, nuclear and other wise.
Who goes first? And how do we trust others to follow?

I have no easy answers.

But my sense is that the greatest of the world powers today is still
the US, or, if you prefer, the Anglosphere - since whatever its
economic state, the US is still the most powerful state, militarily. 
Without the US and the Anglosphere cutting back on weaponry and
espionage , no other state will ever be prevailed upon to follow. They
will, correctly, see any demand that they do so as imperial hypocrisy.
They will argue that their own espionage is essentially defense against
empire.

And there is no good rebuttal to that.