generalspeaking

In The Shadows

"It's all in the shadows now."
"The official war for the Americans -- the part of the war that you could go see -- that's over. It's only the secret war that's still going. But it's going hard."
Former Afghan security official

 
U.S. President Barack Obama shakes hands with troops after delivering remarks at Bagram Air Base in Kabul. (Jonathan Earnst/ Courtesy Reuters)


When a small crack team of Afghan intelligence commandos and U.S. Special Operations forces descended on Nazyan district, to a village on a mountain pass of the Khyber tribal agency in Pakistan, they were searching for a leader of al-Qaeda. Nabbing Abu Bara al-Kuwaiti was the goal, and the search ended in success. Not only did the team come away with the senior al-Qaeda operative but they also brought away with them a treasure-trove of files detailing al-Qaeda operations in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, contained on his laptop hard drive.

The intelligence gathered there after assessment and full appreciation of its content represented data as highly significant, according to U.S. military officials, as the computer contents and documents taken by the Navy SEALs raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in his haven in Abbottabad, Pakistan in 2011 on that auspicious occasion when the mastermind and head of al-Qaeda moved from living legend to dead celebrity-hero of Islamist terrorism.
Since that serendipitous find, night raids conducted by U.S. Special Operations forces and Afghan intelligence commandos have spiked, rife with success, thanks to that intelligence trove. Even as the Obama administration has stated that the American role in Afghanistan is done and over with, the U.S. remains integrally involved in Afghanistan. As in, you know, boots on the ground. Responding in part to the large numbers of Afghan soldiers and police killed by the Taliban in the last year.

And American forces are playing direct combat roles in those raids; not merely acting as advisers. Shush! not a word to the American public... A broad cross-section of Islamist militants have been targeted, spanning the counterterrorism mission that was set to continue, but going well beyond, to hit al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives. Traditionally, at this time of year there has been a lull in fighting until spring, but not this time.

Afghanistan's new president Ashraf Ghani, signed a security agreement with the United States, that very same agreement that his predecessor the unpredictable and volatile Hamid Karzai steadfastly refused to sign. And the intelligence that dropped into the laps of the U.S. 'coalition' has been of inestimable value and practical use since its attainment last October. There have been 'precision strikes' after 'precision strikes', all based on the data gleaned from that source.

Among those whom the coalition succeeded in putting out of commission was Mullah Abdul Rauf Khadim, formerly a Guantanamo Bay detainee, a Taliban commander who had more recently pledged his allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq & Al-Sham. He will be greatly missed.

The raids were carried out by a combination of the elite commandos of the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan's main spy agency, and those of U.S. military Special Operations units; Navy SEALs and Army Rangers, and paramilitary officers from the Central Intelligence Agency. Now that's elite military...

Generously enough, U.S. officials have been happy enough to give credit to Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security, and the NDS was more than pleased to take full credit for killing Kuwaiti in an area of Pakistan hosting militants from Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Middle East and elsewhere in the world where they tend to migrate from as a pestilence geared to spread.

As for the targeted figure, Kuwaiti, he was believed to have taken on the duties of top al-Qaeda operative Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, who died in a U.S. drone strike. "He would have had a lot of the nuts and bolts about what they were up to in that computer", the Afghan security official concluded.

Amply giving that formidable coalition -- surely a match for the combined Taliban/al-Qaeda/ISIS triumvirate -- more than enough resolution to carry the battle against Islamist terrorism forward to another level, degrading their strengths and positioning -- in that part of their deflated territory at the very least. But then there are other vulnerable geographies ripe for their picking...

Labels: Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda, Conflict, Defence, Islamic State, Pakistan, Security, Taliban

posted by Pieface @ Saturday, February 14, 2015