The nomer Special Operations Forces is a broad umbrella often confused with US Special Forces, which are the Army's Green Berets. SOF can mean these, Delta Forces, and an alphabet soup of other units but lately, most dangerously, private contractors.
This week's Nation:
On March 26, 2009, Mullah Sahib Jan, a militant Taliban imam from the Mohammed Agha district in Afghanistan's Logar province, walked into the office of the Independent National Reconciliation Commission, the main body encouraging the Taliban to lay down their weapons and work with the government. He was escorting fifty Taliban fighters who, he said, had committed to ending their fight against the Afghan government and entering the process of integration. To the government, Sahib Jan was a shining example of how reconciliation with the Taliban is supposed to work. But less than a year later, the former militant's story would stand as a devastating symbol of how the actions of US Special Operations Forces are sabotaging the very strategy for reaching a political settlement that US officials claim to support.
I suspect it was Blackwater or one of the private outfits because of the thuggish pattern of what happened next.
on the morning of January 14, Sahib Jan's bullet-riddled body lay on the ground outside his family's mud-brick compound in Logar's Safed Sang village. According to local officials and his family, he was killed in a night raid by US Special Operations Forces. "At 1 or 1:30 in the morning, US soldiers pulled up to the gas station in front of our house. We were sleeping in our rooms at that time," recalls Sahib Jan's 18-year-old son, Haider. "They broke down the doors of our house. My father was in one room, and we were in another. We don't know exactly when the US soldiers entered our house, we just know that they took our father and killed him. They killed our father outside our house, a short ways away... As Sahib Jan's sons were tied up, they had no idea of their father's fate until the Afghan translator appeared with US soldiers. They showed them a picture and said, "This is the man we killed."
"It was my father," Haider recalls. The soldiers then escorted the surviving men of the family to their father's body, where they saw about six bullets in it. With that, the Americans left.
ISAF has already confirmed that mercenaries are given free reign in Afghanistan, as when what it described as "non-military Americans" shot a number of handcuffed children in 2009. As a matter of policy Obama has greatly increased the use of mercenaries.
It's an extremely profitable business, with your tax dollars which could be going toward repairing collapsing bridges (at good labor union wages) and green jobs programs going toward creating instability and hatred instead. The money flow to congress from people like Blackwater founder Erik Prince is a gusher, with contributions totaling a quarter million from Prince alone to candidates like Keith Fimian, Republican running for the VA-11th.
Blackwater has its own helicopters and even cargo planes, and it is not known if it is an extension of Petreaus' now bloody hand, or has its own chain of command.
In the Nation report "Mohammed" says:
"The way the Americans rely on bad intelligence to target people like me, the night raids we keep witnessing, the arrests and the torture and the killing is all making me want to pick up a weapon again. We are not by our nature against the government, but what they are doing is encouraging people to rise up against them."
The report says the continuing US targeted-killing campaign and renewed airstrikes ordered by General Petraeus seem only to be further weakening the already fragile Karzai government, and that the United States' own actions in Afghanistan seem to be delivering the most fatal blows to its counterinsurgency strategy. "I think that the Americans are already defeated in Afghanistan, they are just not accepting it," says a former Taliban commander. The Taliban like to say "You've got the clocks, we've got the time."
There is another reason for disbanding, outlawing, and prosecuting these punks. They make a habit of employing the singularly most undisciplined, brutish, thoughtless, and obedient dregs of society, and as such are a danger to democracy. When you are on the streets joining the mass protests against Medicare slash-backs and raising of retirement age to 80 in order to finance the endless wars, it's not the soldiers of the sworn U.S. armed forces you'll be facing, whom the powers have found cannot be relied upon to fire upon you. It will be Blackwater. And they will.
Blackwater in New Orleans after Katrina