Abstract
“Find the enemy, then kill or capture’em”, as General Tommy Frank, commander in chief of the U.S. forces in Afghanistan, had already ordered Lieutenant Colonel Pete Blaber, commander of the Delta Forces (Special Forces Operations Detachment-Delta) in December 2001, when he received him at Bagram air base, north of Kabul. It was through this Way of War that the United States continued to employ high-tech killing machines as the death squadrons of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), including the Delta Forces and Navy SEALs, to summarily assassinate and/or capture the heads of al-Qa’ida and the Taliban in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan and throughout the Arab Peninsula. The targets were part of a Joint Prioritized Effects List (JPEL), which even included American citizens, based on legal or extralegal premises according to classified guidelines from President Obama.
This campaign constituted an “almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine”, declared Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, one of the advisors of General David Petraeus, when interviewed in the PBS show Frontline. Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl revealed that, in only 90 days of 2010, the soldiers of Special Operations Command carried out 3000 operations, penetrating villages in Afghanistan during the dead of night, and killing or capturing more than 12,000 Taliban and/or al-Qa’ida militants that year.
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Notes
- 1.
Jeremy Suri, “Obama’s strategic retreat in Afghanistan”, CNN, May 2, 2012.
- 2.
Christoph Reuter, Gregor Peter Schmitz and Holger Stark, “Talking to the Enemy. How German Diplomats Opened Channel to Taliban”, Der Spiegel, 10/1/2012. “Negotiations in Afghanistan — Karzai Asks Berlin for Help with Taliban Talks”, Der Spiegel, 23/7/2012.
- 3.
Jochen Buchsteiner, “Bernd Mützelburg Unser Mann für Afghanistan”, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 16/2/2009.
- 4.
“Taliban müssen Al Qaida abschwören”, Ambassador Michael Steiner in an interview with Tagesspiegel, 19/11/2010. Rashid, 2002b, p. 113–115.
- 5.
Carlotta Gall and Ruhullah Khapalwak, “U.S. Has Held Meetings with Aide to Taliban Leader, Officials Say”, The New York Times, May 26, 2011.
- 6.
Dean Nelson and Ben Farmer, “Secret peace talks between US and Taliban collapse over leaks”, The Telegraph, August 10, 2011.
- 7.
Matthias Gebauer, “Negotiations in Afghanistan — Karzai Asks Berlin for Help with Taliban Talks”, Der Spiegel, 23/7/2012.
- 8.
Rashid (2002b), p. 118–119.
- 9.
Ibid., p. 56.
- 10.
Stephen M. Walt, “Why isn’t anyone talking about Afghanistan?”, Foreign Policy, August 14, 2012.
- 11.
Sanger (2012a), p. 49.
- 12.
2012 UNHCR country operations profile — Afghanistan, http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/page?page=49e486eb6.
- 13.
Poonam Taneja, “Reaching Afghanistan’s hidden war widows in Helmand”, BBC News — South Asia, February 27, 2011.
- 14.
Rod Nordland, “Afghan Army’s Turnover Threatens U.S. Strategy”, The New York Times, October 15, 2012.
- 15.
John Ryan, “Units aim to root out corruption in Afghanistan”, Army Times, February 16, 2012.
- 16.
GHANIZADA, “Above 30% of Afghan population facing poverty: Officials”, Khaama Press, Afghan Online Newspaper, October 16, 2011.
- 17.
“Afghanistan’s Most Vulnerable — The Poverty of War”, Afghanistan 101, February 24, 2012.
- 18.
“Earthly Empires. How evangelical churches are borrowing from the business playbook”, BusinessWeek Online, May 23, 2005.
- 19.
Chip Berlet, “Religion and Politics in the United States: Nuances You Should Know”, The Public Eye Magazine, Summer 2003, Political Research Associates.
- 20.
Bacevich (2005), p. 123–135.
- 21.
“I will give all this land from the river of Egypt to the Euphrates.” Voltaire (1964), p. 248.
- 22.
By adopting the name of Tea Party, the right sought to evoke the protest movement of the tea growers, known as the Boston Tea Party, against England’s Tea Act, which increased the taxes on the sales of tea on December 16, 1773, turning into one of the precedents of the war of independence of the 13 English colonies in North America. Crates of tea belonging to the British East India Company were taken from the ships and thrown into the waters of Boston Harbor.
- 23.
Randi Kaye, “Sarah Palin — Pastor: GOP may be downplaying Palin’s religious beliefs”, BBC Politics, September 8, 2008. Julia Duin, “Sarah Palin — Pentecostal”, The Washington Times, August 29, 2008. Amy Sullivan, “Does Sarah Palin Have a Pentecostal Problem?”, Time, October 9, 2008.
- 24.
Mccarty et al. (2006), p. 141–146.
- 25.
Ibid., p. 1–3, 116.
- 26.
Denavas-Walt et al. (2011).
- 27.
Just as the Islamic fundamentalists, who must submit to the will of Allah, fundamentalist Christians in the United States believe that the only acceptable reason for living is to submit to the will of God and of his Son, Jesus Christ.
- 28.
Hedges (2006), p. 113–120.
- 29.
Priest and Arkin (2011), p. 275.
- 30.
“Política externa dos Estados Unidos e o perigo que ela representa para o Brasil”, Ofícios, Sérgio Teixeira de Macedo ao Visconde de Olinda, Washington, 6/8/1849, Historical Archive of the Itamaraty — 233/3/5.
- 31.
Remarks by the President at the Acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize Oslo City Hall, Oslo, Norway. Immediate Release, Office of the Press Secretary The White House December 10, 2009.
- 32.
Ibid.
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
Hastings (2012), p. 15–16.
- 35.
Blaber (2008), p. 204.
- 36.
The Navy SEALs are a special unit of the United States Naval Special Warfare Command (NAVSPECWARCOM), headquartered in Coronado, California. They’re part of the US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). It was a Navy SEALs commando who executed bin Ladin in Pakistan. SEAL is an acronym for Sea, Air and Land.
- 37.
Priest and Arkin (2011), p. 251.
- 38.
Georgie Anne Geyer, “Killing Our Way to Defeat — Obama’s Private Killing Machine. U.S. seems to be getting good at killing ‘Taliban’, but why? John Nagl, a former counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. Petraeus, described JSOC’s kill/capture campaign to Frontline as ‘an almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine’”, May 23, 2011. Gretchen Gavett, “What is the Secretive U.S. ‘Kill/Capture’ Campaign?”, Frontline, Afghanistan/Pakistan > Kill/Capture, June 17, 2011.
- 39.
Frontline is a TV show in the United States from PBS (Corporation for Public Broadcasting), funded by the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and by the Reva & David Logan and Park Foundation.
- 40.
Van Linschoten and Kuehn (2012), p. 313.
- 41.
Ibid., p. 313. Katherine Tiedemann, “Daily brief: U.S. prepared for fights with Pakistanis during bin Laden raid: report”, Foreign Policy, The Afpak Chanel, May 10, 2011.
- 42.
Gretchen Gavett, “What is the Secretive U.S. ‘Kill/Capture’ Campaign?”, Frontline, Afghanistan/Pakistan > Kill/Capture, June 17, 2011.
- 43.
Tom Engelhardt, “Offshore Everywhere — How Drones, Special Operations Forces, and the U.S. Navy Plan to End National Sovereignty As We Know It”, TomDispatch.com , February 5, 2012.
- 44.
Craig Whitlock and Greg Miller, “U.S. assembling secret drone bases in Africa, Arabian Peninsula”, The Washington Post, September 21, 2011.
- 45.
“U.S. special forces close in on jungle hideout of Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony”, Daily Mail, April 30, 2012.
- 46.
An authorization given by the president of the United States, almost always in writing, in which he states (finds) that a covert action is important for national security. The finding is the most secret among the documents of the American government.
- 47.
Barry D. Watts, “Strategy for the Long Haul: The US Defense Industrial Base. Past, Present and Future”, The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), 2008, p. 23–24.
- 48.
Ibid., p. 39.
- 49.
Priest and Arkin (2011), p. 210–2011.
- 50.
Nick Wingfield e Somini Sengupta, “Drones Set Sights on U.S. Skies”, The New York Times, February 17, 2012.
- 51.
“Predator Drones and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)”, The New York Times, May 11, 2012. Peter W. Singer, “Do Drones Undermine Democracy?”, The New York Times, January 21, 2012.
- 52.
Karen DeYoung, “A CIA veteran transforms U.S. counterterrorism policy”, The Washington Post, October 25, 2012.
- 53.
Craig Whitlock, “Remote U.S. base at core of secret operations”, The Washington Post, October 26, 2012.
- 54.
Ibid. See also: New America Foundation: America’s Counterterrorism Wars. Tracking the United States’ drone strikes and other operations in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. In: https://www.newamerica.org/in-depth/americas-counterterrorism-wars/ See also: Drone theater expands beyond Pakistan. Sources: New America Foundation; Longwarjournal.org; staff reports | Julie Tate and Bill Webster/The Washington Post October 24, 2012. In: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/drone-theater-expands-beyondpakistan/2012/10/24/1fd3a666-1d27-11e2-ba31-3083ca97c314_graphic.html. Accessed: May 05, 2015.
- 55.
Ibid.
- 56.
Greg Miller, “Plan for hunting terrorists signals U.S. intends to keep adding names to kill lists”, The Washington Post, October 24, 2012.
- 57.
Ibid.
- 58.
Bobbio (1999), p. 102.
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Moniz Bandeira, L.A. (2017). The Technological War on Terror. In: The Second Cold War. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54888-3_10
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