Black Site: A Delta Force novel

I had been looking forward to reading Dalton Fury’s first novel, Black Site, since it was first announced because I knew as a former Army Special Operations guy, and a writer of military fiction myself, that someone with Fury’s background was set up for a grand slam. There are a lot of writers in this genre and some of them are very good, but I find that most of them just don’t understand SOF. I’m not just talking about the technical details, but they don’t get the mentality or the attitude. This was where Fury’s book really comes through for readers.

Source: http://ca.news.yahoo.com

He sprung from the cabin window, as he said this, upon the ice-raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance. ‘

Wack MCs, Your Time is Up

There’s little doubt that Osama bin Laden was a monster, murderously cruel, a delusional megalomaniac whose methods leave it impossible for anyone in their right mind to mourn him after he was killed by US Special Forces in a compound in Abbottabad (the only reason I wish George W. Bush was still President would be to hear his pronunciation of Abbottabad) yesterday.

Yet I can’t help but watch the reactions of jubilation, the partying in the streets of Washington, without some pause. My pause mainly stems from two reasons. The first comes from spending perhaps too much time reflecting on who Osama Bin Laden really was, what he really represented, and what it says about the world that a man like him could command such influence. Unlike Shelley’s Frankenstein monster, we feel no compassion for Osama. But Osama was partly a monster of our own making, and that cannot be forgotten amidst the relief.

The second reason I am given pause is these displays of celebration and joy are stemming from an act of death and violence. We feel his death is justified, so we are therefore exultant? It doesn’t look all that different from the way a jihadist might celebrate the death of an enemy, and that’s worrying.

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The death of bin Laden is hardly the end of what has been a long, complicated, and messy chapter in American foreign policy, simply the end of Osama’s part in it. Most Americans only began to get acquainted with Osama in August 1998, when Al Qaeda bombed the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and in October 2000 when the USS Cole was bombed just off the coast of Yemen. Keener observers know, however, that the US and Al Qaeda have been entangled, even if somewhat indirectly, for years.

As Steve Coll lays out in his compelling Ghost Wars (which is to this day one of my favorite books of all time–I’m reminded of an interview from three years ago where Coll asserts that bin Laden was in hiding in Pakistan at the time) how the CIA funded jihadist fighters throughout the 1980′s to fight the Soviets. Millions upon millions of dollars, over the following years, would be poured out of CIA coffers through Pakistan’s ISI, and likely into the hands of folks like bin Laden (who of course had a vast fund-raising network of his own).

US funding, with the single-minded goal of draining the Soviet Union’s military, invariably found its way into the wrong hands, but the United States didn’t much mind if brutal, violent fighters with little propinquity with US interests got cash and Stinger missiles in their hands, as long as they were killing Russians (it’s worth remembering this as NATO drops bombs all over Libya). As Coll so compellingly tells, the US poured money into creating a potent guerilla force, but never paid much attention to infrastructure or the emergence of a stable Afghan state. And a stable state was never much in the interests of Pakistan, especially one that might tilt towards India.

And boy, did we pay dearly. The US, for a variety of reasons that never totally added up, banked on Pakistan’s ISI to insure stability in the region–an intelligence service with fissures and fractures at every turn. Yet the US continued to rely on Pakistan’s military intelligence after 9/11; and they continually failed (that is, assuming the ISI’s interests were aligned with US interests, otherwise it’s not really failure). In December 2001, in the Battle of Tora Bora, US Delta Force commander Dalton Fury (a pen name), asserts that Pakistan failed to guard the border, allowing bin Laden to escape into Pakistan.

The ISI continued to fail the US, and the US happily obliged and engaged in its own failures. In another operation, later dubbed “Operation Evil Airlift”, aptly described by Ahmed Rashid in his Descent into Chaos and by Seymour Hersh in an article for The New Yorker, VP Cheney secretly helped set up an air corridor for rogue ISI officers, planted with Taliban and Al Qaeda forces, to escape Kunduz as US Forces closed in. What is clear from the operation is that numerous Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters and commanders escaped along with the radical elements in the ISI. Pervez Musharraf could never really explain why so many ISI officers were there in the first place.

These blunders were small potatoes compared to the one the US made in 2003, which was, of course, diverting the bulk of our resources away from Afghanistan to Iraq. Not only did Iraq prove a quagmire (one that we didn’t need to fight, and only did because of Executive Branch fibs and our sheepishness in questioning those fibs), but it severely hampered us in Afghanistan, taking away our most able military, marines, and, perhaps most importantly, nation-building troops.

All the while, the ISI claimed Osama wasn’t in Pakistan. Even when most signs pointed to his being there, the ISI provided misdirection, duplicitous in assuring the US it was doing all it could. We’re not talking about the false remonstrations of a trusted ally or an insignificant military when we talk about Pakistan. We’re talking about a country that has been one of the largest recipients of US foreign aid, both military and humanitarian, over the past decade. We’re talking about a country with nuclear weapons that has been linked to North Korea’s nuclear program, and was caught red-handed selling nuclear material to Qaddafi.

This is all, of course, not to mention how diffuse power has become in Al Qaeda. How many times has one heard that “the number 3 man in Al Qaeda was killed”. Bin Laden is huge figure, of course, unquantifiable in importance. But Al Qaeda will survive, all the more so, as Nicholas Kristof pointed out last night, if Americans continue to dance in the streets.

So yes, we got bin Laden. But alas, there is no joy in Mudville now that we’ve slain our Frankenstein.