Targeted Killing Conundrum

Targeted Killing Conundrum

By Ken Meyercord (8/1/16)

 

Terrorist attacks from Munich to Orlando are scaring the bejeezus out of the Western World, but there’s a more appropriate and effective way than slashing train passengers or gunning down gays by which the terrorists could make their point. Yet they don’t seem to have tried it, and I find that a conundrum. I don’t have the answer to the riddle, but I think it’s worth speculating on.

We have been engaged in target killings for years now and have been quite successful at it. In any fight – whether a schoolyard fistfight or a Great Powers confrontation – when someone hits you, it’s important to hit back. Otherwise you open yourself to further pummeling. So, if you were the leader of a targeted group who saw his seconds-in-command being assassinated by drones, how would you respond?

The obvious answer is to respond in kind; i.e., with a little targeted killing of your own. Al Qa’ida, the Taliban, et al. may not have drones to use as an assassination tool, but how hard would it be for them to send a lone assassin to this country by commercial jet? He wouldn’t even need to bring his own gun; they’re not that hard to come by in this country. Wouldn’t the assassination of one of our top leaders give those who come up with our kill-list pause? And yet the terrorists have not, so far as I know, responded in this tit-for-tat manner, and there’s the conundrum. Why not?

It’s not because an assassin could not breach the security surrounding those in our upper echelons who give the kiss of death, figuratively, to faraway terrorists. I personally have sat less than ten feet from Jeh Johnson, head of the Department of Homeland Security, and Michael Hayden, ex-CIA and NSA head, at events here in Washington where I didn’t have to go through a metal detector or any kind of security check at all. At General Hayden’s talk he mentioned how he chats with passersby while jogging along the bike trail near his home in the DC suburbs.

One bright Sunday morning a while back, Medea Benjamin of Code Pink fame and a fellow Pinkster decided to pay John Brennan, then National Security Advisor to the President, a visit at home to tell him what they thought of his drone warfare policy. They got his address off his son’s Facebook page. When Medea rang the doorbell, guess who answered the door – in person. Bang!

So, it would not be difficult for an assassin to get close to those who fingered their comrades for assassination. (Strange, while we are all being strip-searched at the airports, our leaders act as if there’s nothing to be concerned about! Hmmm…) So why haven’t the terrorists retaliated in this direct and relatively easy manner?

One explanation would be that they haven’t got the means or the brains, but that explanation doesn’t really hold up on reflection. These are groups which have hundreds of foreign fighters in their ranks, including Americans. It would be a suicide mission, but they don’t seem to suffer a shortage of those willing to martyr themselves. They are smart enough that we haven’t been able to defeat them despite more than a decade of trying. In fact, their reach is expanding.

A spooky, conspiratorial explanation is that these groups, or at least some of them, are not really our enemies. The prevailing opinion amongst Syrians and Iraqis when the Islamic State first appeared on the scene in a big way was – and maybe still is – that we are behind the Islamic State. Before scoffing at this mindboggling possibility, consider that those folks are a lot closer to the action than we are and their lives depend much more on getting things right than ours do.

Bolstering their belief is the fact that some of our closest allies in the area have supported the Islamic State in one way or another. Qatar is known to have been – and, according to some, still is – a major financier of the budding Caliphate. Qatar! A country with 300,000 citizens, occupied by foreign troops (ours), and totally dependent on the country from which those troops come for their well-being. Are the Qataris likely to act against our wishes? We have effected regime change in countries which had committed far less mortal sins (e.g., Libya); and, in Qatar’s case, it would probably only take a platoon of Marines to replace the leadership overnight (versus seven months of bombing in Libya’s case). Are the Qataris acting as our proxies?

Why would we sponsor “radical Islamic extremists” while raving about what a threat they represent? Consider the comment of Harry Truman back when he was a Senator. Shortly after Germany had invaded the Soviet Union but before we had entered the war, he opined “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible…” (as quoted in The New York Times, July 24, 1941). Is our goal to see as many Muslims killed as possible by juggling our support for one or another band of violent, fanatical Muslims (amazingly, with the aid of the “Guardian of the Muslim Holy Places”, Saudi Arabia). If that is our aim, you have to admit our policy has been remarkably successful.

It’s hard to believe we are colluding with extremist elements in such a Byzantine subterfuge. A slightly more believable explanation for the terrorists not hitting back in kind is that we have a tacit – perhaps explicit – understanding with the heads of these groups that while we will knock off their underlings they themselves are immune so long as they don’t target our leaders. Perhaps this explains why Mr. al-Zawahiri, the al-Qa’ida Don, is still around – issuing fatwas and disseminating videos – five years after we supposedly located and killed his predecessor, Osama bin Laden.

Something else the terrorist leaders may understand implicitly which deters them from retaliating is that, were they to assassinate a Jeh Johnson or a Michael Hayden, not just whole villages but whole towns in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, or wherever the instigators found sanctuary would be obliterated. An instructive lesson of this sort was taught to the Hezbollah leadership in 2006, when the killing of a couple of Israeli soldiers led, despite the Shiite fighters’ successful repulse of an Israeli land invasion, to the flattening of a large part of Shia-dominated southern Beirut from the air.

But maybe my whole premise is wrong. Maybe an assassin or two has been dispatched to this country, but our infiltration of the terrorist network is so thorough and our monitoring of their communications so complete that the would-be assassins were “neutralized” long before they reached our shores. Proud of such an achievement as our intelligence apparatchiks might justifiably be, they might not make it known publicly for their own reasons.

As I said, I don’t know what the answer to the conundrum is. I suspect I never will. But I think the answer, were it known, would explain a lot about what’s happening in the Middle East, which, after all, looks as bizarre as any of my speculations.