The
U.S. government may pretend to respect a “rules-based” global
order, but the only rule Washington seems to follow is “might makes
right” — and the CIA has long served as a chief instigator and
enforcer.
by
Nicolas J.S. Davies
Part
3 - CIA in Syria and Africa
But
Fletcher Prouty was even more disturbed by the way that the CIA uses
clandestine operations to trigger coups, wars and chaos. The civil
and proxy war in Syria is a perfect example of what Prouty meant. In
late 2011, after destroying Libya and aiding in the torture-murder of
Muammar Gaddafi, the CIA and its allies began flying fighters and
weapons from Libya to Turkey and infiltrating them into Syria. Then,
working with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Croatia and other allies,
this operation poured thousands of tons of weapons across Syria’s
borders to ignite and fuel a full-scale civil war.
Once
these covert operations were under way, they ran wild until they had
unleashed a savage Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria (Jabhat al-Nusra, now
rebranded as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham), spawned the even more savage
“Islamic State,” triggered the heaviest and probably the
deadliest U.S. bombing campaign since Vietnam and drawn Russia, Iran,
Turkey, Israel, Jordan, Hezbollah, Kurdish militias and almost every
state or armed group in the Middle East into the chaos of Syria’s
civil war.
Meanwhile,
as Al Qaeda and Islamic State have expanded their operations across
Africa, the U.N. has published a report titled Journey to Extremism
in Africa: Drivers, Incentives and the Tipping Point for Recruitment,
based on 500 interviews with African militants. This study has
found that the kind of special operations and training missions the
CIA and AFRICOM are conducting and supporting in Africa are in fact
the critical “tipping point” that drives Africans to join
militant groups like Al Qaeda, Al-Shabab and Boko Haram.
The
report found that government action, such as the killing or detention
of friends or family, was the “tipping point” that drove 71
percent of African militants interviewed to join armed groups, and
that this was a more important factor than religious ideology.
The
conclusions of Journey to Extremism in Africa confirm the findings of
other similar studies. The Center for Civilians in Conflict
interviewed 250 civilians who joined armed groups in Bosnia, Somalia,
Gaza and Libya for its 2015 study, The People’s Perspectives:
Civilian Involvement in Armed Conflict. The study found that the most
common motivation for civilians to join armed groups was simply to
protect themselves or their families.
The
role of U.S. “counterterrorism” operations in fueling armed
resistance and terrorism, and the absence of any plan to reduce the
asymmetric violence unleashed by the “global war on terror,”
would be no surprise to Fletcher Prouty. As he explained, such
clandestine operations always take on a life of their own that is
unrelated, and often counter-productive, to any rational U.S. policy
objective.
“The
more intimate one becomes with this activity,” Prouty wrote,
“The more one begins to realize that such operations are rarely,
if ever, initiated from an intent to become involved in pursuit of
some national objective in the first place.”
The
U.S. justifies the deployment of 6,000 U.S. special forces and
military trainers to 53 of the 54 countries in Africa as a response
to terrorism. But the U.N.’s Journey to Extremism in Africa
study makes it clear that the U.S. militarization of Africa is in
fact the “tipping point” that is driving Africans across the
continent to join armed resistance groups in the first place.
This
is a textbook CIA operation on the same model as Vietnam in the late
1950s and early 60s. The CIA uses U.S. special forces and training
missions to launch covert and proxy military operations that drive
local populations into armed resistance groups, and then uses the
presence of those armed resistance groups to justify ever-escalating
U.S. military involvement. This is Vietnam redux on a continental
scale.
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