Saturday, February 06, 2010
Do you know what JSOC is doing in your name?
Not too many people do know, certainly not the Congress who have been spared oversight responsibility for this covert action group. To put it simply, they are part of the "black operations" elements in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Jeremy Scahill, writing in The Nation, gives us more detail on what they do and how they differ from the "white operations" that do qualify for oversight.
In military parlance, these above-board US "training" forces operating under an unclassified mandate are "white" forces, while operatives working for the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) would be classified as working on "black" operations, sometimes referred to as Special Mission Units. Since 2006, JSOC teams have operated in Pakistan in pursuit of "high-value" targets.And this expansion of what we thought we were in is making us safer, how? As with past efforts, we will have to wait and see how it ends to find out.
"What we're seeing is the expansion of 'white' Special Operations Forces into Pakistan," says a former member of CENTCOM and US Special Forces with extensive experience in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater. "As Vietnam, Somalia and the Balkans taught us, that is almost always a precursor to expanded military operations." The former CENTCOM employee spoke to The Nation on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the Pakistan operations. He characterized the US military's role with the Pakistani Frontier Corps as "training in offensive operations," but rejected the idea that at this stage these US trainers would cross the line to engage in direct combat against Taliban forces. That does not mean, he says, that US military forces are not fighting in Pakistan. "Any firefights in Pakistan would be between JSOC forces versus whoever they were chasing," he said. "I would bet my life on that."
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