The Fourth World War (A readable article about the War on terror being fought in the shadows)

If you happen to find yourself in Nouakchott, a dusty and rarely visited city of three million on the far western edge of the Sahara, you may be surprised to find an unlikely sort of character hanging around government buildings and better hotels. These new strangers, whose ranks have been growing steadily in recent months, are a species of serious-looking American men who bear little resemblance to the oil explorers and motorcycle adventurers who until recently were this city's only foreign visitors.

These men, the first Americans in decades to pay any attention to this poor region, began to appear only in the past two years. With their grim and purposeful presence, they bring a Graham Greene sort of mood to this very remote outpost, but instead of seersucker suits and Panama hats, they tend to wear floppy safari hats and sunglasses, the unofficial uniform of the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. Special Forces.

What are these quiet Americans doing in the capital of Mauritania, a nation that has never made the front pages and sits a continent and a half removed from the immediate interests of the United States? And what are their colleagues in a dozen other far-flung regions doing, handing out money and guns and hard-won secrets to governments and warlords and military men in the southern islands of the Philippines, on the steppes of Uzbekistan, in the dense jungle between Venezuela and Brazil?

The guys in the sunglasses have a name for this not-so-secret campaign. They call it World War Four, an unofficial title that is now used routinely by top officials and ground-level operatives in the U.S. military and the CIA. It is a global war, one of the most expensive and complex in world history. And it will mark its second anniversary this week, on Sept. 11.

The White House would rather it be known as the war on terrorism. But in its strategies, political risk and secrecy, it is more like the Cold War, which the CIA types like to consider World War Three. Its central battles, in Afghanistan and Iraq, have been traditional conflicts. But while the public's attention was focused on those big, controversial and expensive campaigns, the United States was busy launching a broader war whose battlefields have spread quietly to two dozen countries.

Iraq also was a distraction in another way: It was a shocking and awesome display of conventional military might that is not at all typical of the stealth, spy craft, diplomacy and dirty tricks being employed in the wider war on terrorism. Likewise, "although Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan understandably captured the imagination and attention of the press and public," said William Rosenau, a former senior policy adviser in the State Department, "large-scale military operations are arguably the smallest aspect of the counterterrorism campaign. That campaign resembles an iceberg, with the military component at the top, visible above the water."

Below the surface are dozens of operations, some secret and some simply unnoticed, conducted by the CIA, the FBI, the diplomatic corps and small, elite military squads. They have been aided by changes to U.S. laws after Sept. 11 that allow Americans to do things once forbidden — such as assassinating foreign figures.

And much of the war is being fought by foreign governments that are willing and able to do things Americans wouldn't or couldn't. "We simply don't have the resources, or the inclination, to be everywhere the terrorists and their supporters are, so we have no choice but to co-operate with other countries and their security services," Mr. Rosenau said during a panel discussion in Washington last week.

In some cases, that co-operation has led the United States to endorse and enable activities that are deeply unsavoury, all in the name of stomping out terrorism. "Counterterrorism is now 90 per cent law enforcement and intelligence," said Jonathan Stevenson, a senior strategist with the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. "Since Sept. 11, the only overt military actions have been the Predator [missile] strike in Yemen, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — and I don't think there will be many more. I think there's a much higher priority placed on law enforcement and intelligence now. It's not a traditional war."

Whether this is actually a world war, or a large-scale police action, or (as both critics and some supporters say) the gestation of a new American imperialism, there is no question that it has come to span the globe. It has caused mammoth shifts in global allegiances, in the positioning of U.S. military bases and CIA stations, in the flow of aid dollars, soldiers and arms across distant borders, on a scale not seen since the Cold War began.

Over the summer, while the world's attention was focused on Iraq, the Pentagon was busily preparing to shift hundreds of thousands of soldiers to new real estate, in places most Westerners known little about, in preparation for a world war that could last decades. "Everything is going to move everywhere," Pentagon undersecretary Douglas Feith said. "There is not going to be a place in the world where it's going to be the same as it used to be."

Southeast Asia: Setting up bases in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, shifting troops away from their old base in Japanese islands. Mission: To combat Islamist groups linked to al-Qaeda, such as Jemaah Islamiyah.

The Philippines: Heavy Special Forces and CIA presence in the south, preparing to send in thousands of additional troops to help Manila combat Islamic opposition and terror groups.

Central Asia: Remote steppe nations ruled by dubious governments, such as Uzbekistan, have provided airstrips and intelligence in exchange for aid and arms, and are home to Islamic groups tied to the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Horn of Africa: A major installation in tiny Djibouti allows the United States to operate on a permanent basis in Sudan, Ethiopia, Yemen, Kenya, Tanzania, Somalia.

Chechnya and Georgia: Military assistance and weapons are being provided to Russia, which claims the former Soviet republics have rebel movements tied to al-Qaeda.

Sahara: Suspicion that al-Qaeda may have sought refuge along ancient desert trade routes when driven out of north Africa has prompted military aid and support to Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Chad, perhaps sites of future bases.

South America: Thousands of Saudi expats live in the remote jungle "tri-border region" between Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina, where al-Qaeda is rumoured to have training camps and to be receiving financial support from locals. U.S. covert forces now in the area, and eyeing Arabs living on Margarita Island, the tourist hot spot in Venezuela.

Pakistan and Afghanistan: Still a major military focus, with al-Qaeda and Taliban forces active in mountainous regions between the two countries. Considerable financial and military aid goes to Pakistan, even though elements in its military appear to back Islamists.

Iraq: Intelligence officials never believed there were any substantial links between Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime and al-Qaeda (which once declared it an enemy). But now a terrorist presence seems to have emerged, fuelled by foreign mujahedeen who have entered the country just to fight Americans.

Boomers Readied for Littoral, Special Warfare

The US Navy has twelve aircraft carriers in various states of readiness and repair. Unfortunately, as highly publicized recent problems with ships (USS John F. Kennedy and USS Detroit, to name two) and aircraft (EA-6B, F-14, and S-3B) have shown, the US Navy is currently stretched beyond its ability to meet the commitments set for it after September 11, 2001.

The Navy is addressing the problem in part by changing its ship mix. The Navy’s four oldest Ohio-class Trident ballistic missile submarines are about to be converted to carry 166 Tomahawk cruise missiles in place of each’s 24 nuclear ballistic missiles. This transformation is part of a $4 billion Congressional authorization to reshape the US’ four oldest Trident-class subs to, in the words of one Navy official, “modern street fighters.” Or, to think of them another way, firepower extenders — getting a lot of whistling death to a hot spot quickly. Conversion of the four older Tridents will leave fourteen others still on nuclear attack deterrence duty.

The converted Ohio-class boats are to be equipped with the Tactical Tomahawk Weapons Control System (Lockheed Martin Management and Data Systems, Valley Forge, PA), developed for Burke-class destroyers and Ticonderoga-class cruisers, as well as the Multiple All-up-round Canisters (MAC), from Northrop Grumman (Annapolis, MD). Originally designed to manage up to 128 missiles, the TTWCS will require only a software modification to adapt it for SSGN use, according to CAPT Brian Wegner, SSGN Program Manager.

The change will also involve adapting 22 of the 24 missile tubes so that each tube can carry and launch up to seven Tomahawks within seconds. Because there are significant differences in the hydrodynamics and hullform associated with the Ohio-class boats as opposed to the Los Angeles-class boats that already can fire cruise missiles, the Tridents will also have to undergo extensive modifications since the cruise missiles will be launched seven from each tube, rather than one big ballistic missile per tube. According to a report in TheDay.com,, the redesign will also anticipate deploying other types of missiles in the tubes, such as the Army Tactical Missile or a planned hypersonic missile that could reach mach 6. According to Wegner, the remaining two tubes will be widened and used to store gear for Navy SEALs; the revamp will include adding the capability of covertly ferrying special forces personnel to and from foreign soil. Such missions will, in turn, mean the addition of unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVs), as well as mini-submersibles to haul special forces to and from shore.

-snip-

(K.B. Sherman in NavLog.org, December, 2002)
To Read This Article Click Here

Horn of Africa Now a Key Target for US ‘War on Terror’
Some see haven for drug running, terrorist training camps and al Qaeda. Traditional violence and instability in region could prove sticky, entangling US in mesh of bloody rivalries

Not too long ago a man named Issa al-Hayatt carrying a South African passport was lying in the Kaysaney Hospital in downtown Mogadishu, the lawless capital of Somalia, a constant battleground between clan-based warlords. Around about March 11 or 12, he’d been shot in what appeared to be an attempt by militiamen to kidnap him. On March 18, six armed men, identified as Americans by witnesses, swept into the ward with several local militiamen, including a translator, and dragged away the man known as Issa.

They drove him out to Aisaley Airport near Mogadishu, put him aboard an aircraft which had flown in the Americans the day before, and took off for Nairobi, capital of neighboring Kenya, where he was placed under arrest by the country’s anti-terrorist police unit.

A few days ago, the man known as Issa was formally handed over to US authorities as a suspected member of al-Qaeda. Kenya’s National Security Minister, Chris Murungaru, named the man as Suleiman Abdalla Salim Hemed, believed to be a Yemeni but who also held Somali and Tanzanian passports. The minister said he was believed to be a high-ranking Al-Qaeda operative who was linked to the Nov. 28 suicide bombing of the Paradise Hotel in the Indian Ocean resort of Mombasa, in which 11 Kenyans and three Israelis perished, and the August 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es Salaam which killed 231 people, 12 of them American. The Kenyans maintained the fiction that the suspect had been seized by Mogadishu militiamen paid by the Americans, hence his well-publicized handover to US officials in Nairobi. But, in fact, he was grabbed by an American team, probably Federal Bureau of Investigation agents or US special forces, after the militiamen had apparently failed to kidnap him themselves.

Whoever the suspect is, Murungaru said: “He’s a leading organizer of terrorism in the East African region and beyond, and he’s provided us with very useful information.”

Word of the hospital raid did not get out until March 20, the day the Iraq war began. That grabbed all the headlines and the raid passed almost unnoticed. Yet it was the first known covert operation in volatile Somalia since a ragtag army of militiamen chopped up a unit of elite US Army Rangers in 1993 when the troops tried to captured the late warlord Mohammed Farah Aideed. Osama bin Laden has hailed that battle, in which 18 American soldiers were killed, as Al-Qaeda’s first victory in its jihad against the United States.

However, the March raid is unlikely to be the last, given that last September the Bush administration gave US intelligence agencies the green light to conduct covert operations, including assassinations, against Al-Qaeda leaders and those who support them. So the stakes are getting higher as the Americans increasingly turn their attention to the Horn of Africa and East Africa, where Al-Qaeda supposedly has taken root among the Muslim communities along the Indian Ocean coastline.

Islam was carried to the region centuries ago by seafarers from Oman. In the 17th century, Oman was a major maritime power at the confluence of the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea and its religious domain ran as far south as Zanzibar.

The US military presence in the Horn of Africa, one of several such deployments around the globe since Sept. 11, 2001, is involving the Americans ever deeper in a region that is inherently unstable, where Islam is widely practiced and political rivalries are rife and often violent. The US runs the risk of becoming entangled in these rifts, using one “partner” in the counter-terrorism war against another, or providing fresh targets for Muslim extremists.

Somalia, a Muslim country, has been without an effective government since the 1991 fall of dictator Mohammed Siad Barre. The state collapsed into a patchwork of feuding factions, ideal as a sanctuary for groups like Al-Qaeda.

The Mombasa attack, along with an attempt to shoot down an Israeli airliner with shoulder-fired missiles that narrowly missed, showed that Al-Qaeda was operating in the region again despite a CIA-military hunt for its personnel following the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Al-Qaeda is alleged to have strong links with a Somali group, Al-Ittihad al-Islamiya (Islamic Unity) that was formed in the early 1990s with the aim of establishing an Islamic state.

To counter the Al-Qaeda threat, the US has deployed some 2,000 troops, mainly Marines but with some army special forces units, in the former French colony of Djibouti, across the Arabian Sea from Yemen, bin Laden’s ancestral home and a hotbed of Al-Qaeda support. There is also a CIA team there tracking known or suspected operatives in Yemen, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. It was this team that was responsible for the assassination of a leading Al-Qaeda figure, Sunian al-Harithi, and five of his people on Nov. 4.

They were killed when a laser-guided Hellfire missile fired by remote control from a Predator unmanned aerial vehicle launched by the CIA in Djibouti hours before to track Harithi’s car on a dirt road in the province of Marib, 200 kilometers east of Sanaa, the capital. The operator in Djibouti was given the coordinates by a source in Yemen who reported in by cell phone. The operation was also intended “to light a fire under Ali Abdullah Saleh,” Yemen’s president, who was dragging his feet in cracking down on Al-Qaeda operatives and their Islamic tribal allies who have been responsible for several attacks on US targets, including the October 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole in Aden Harbor which killed 17 sailors.

“It had the desired result,” said one source. “Saleh became much more cooperative.”

Still, Yemen has long distrusted the US and tolerated religious extremism. Bin Laden recruited thousands of fighters from Yemen to fight with Afghanistan’s mujahideen against the Soviets in 1979-89. So Saleh knows that domestically there are limits to how far he can go. One of his predecessors was assassinated in 1978 in what many believe was a plot by tribal leaders angered by Sanaa’s meddling in their affairs. Yemen’s central government remains weak, so Saleh may not feel he is strong enough to challenge two overlapping constituencies: fiercely independent tribes and the country’s religious leaders.

The aerial ambush in Marib was the first such attack against Al-Qaeda outside Afghanistan. That operation underlined the impact of the increasing level and quality of intelligence the Americans are now gathering about Al-Qaeda operatives, their hideouts, travel networks, much of it obtained by agents on the ground, in this case probably Yemeni mercenaries.

The activities of the US forces are largely classified and little is known about them. But they appear to be wide-ranging. There have been reports that US special forces teams have probed deep into Somalia from covert bases in Ethiopia. Jane’s Terrorism and Security Monitor, a weekly newsletter published in London, reported that raids planned and coordinated with the joint task forces had been carried out by Ethiopian troops against al-Ittihad in Somalia, with US aircraft used to infiltrate the soldiers and extract them.

Lieutenant General Michael DeLong, the US Marine general in overall command of the Horn of Africa operations, disclosed last Friday that his forces had recently captured several mid-level Al-Qaeda operatives in various places within his operational area. He gave few specifics, saying that these successes had been kept “low key” at the request of the governments concerned.

The US forces in Djibouti are mainly based at a former French Foreign Legion headquarters, Camp Lemonier, near the capital’s international airport. This is where the Marines, including men from the Small Craft Company of the 2nd Marine Division at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, are deployed. Earlier this year, the USS Mount Whitney, a hi-tech command and intelligence vessel arrived in Djibouti to coordinate operations by the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, or CJTF-HOA in Pentagonspeak.

It is backed by the US Army’s High Speed Theater Support Vessel-1X, a strike craft that has been spotted entering Djibouti harbor several times in recent months, presumably to refuel.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld noted during a December visit to Djibouti that US forces would be deployed in the region for several years because “this is where the action is. There are a number of terrorists just across the water in Yemen and the southern part of Saudi Arabia, for example.”

General Jim Jones, NATO’s supreme commander, said last week that the US plans to bolster its military presence in Africa to respond to new threats.

There are, he said, “a certain number of countries that can be destabilized in the near future, large ungoverned areas across Africa that are clearly the new routes for narco-trafficking, terrorist training and hotbeds of instability.

He foresaw “carrier groups and expeditionary strike groups may “spend half their time going down the west coast of Africa.”

The Americans have moved into a hornet’s nest of tribal feuding and inter-state rivalries among some of the world’s most impoverished states, and the US is again playing footsy with some nasty regimes in the name of fighting terrorism. This is a pattern, established during the Cold War, that is being repeated and which militates against the Bush administration’s insistence that it spread democracy to all and sundry. Indeed, the regional rivalries in some cases are so sharp that they could cripple the US “war on terrorism” in the Horn of Africa and the Middle East.

For example, tension between Ethiopia and Eritrea, who fought a bloody two-and-a-half-year war along their 1,000-kilometer border that ended in December 2000, is simmering again, with both rivals playing off each other in a bid to get more benefits from the US. Though neither seems prepared at this stage to abrogate the peace agreement, both are striving to exploit the US military’s need for calm in the region.

Eritrea has offered its main seaport of Asmara, of the Red Sea’s western shore north of Djibouti, as a US base. So far the Americans have not taken it up on that offer, although during the Cold War the US maintained an electronic listening post there known as Kagnew Station that kept an eye on the Soviet Navy operating in what was then Marxist South Yemen.

Djibouti’s president, Ismael Omar Guelleh, a staunch Islamist, has parlayed his new relationship with the Americans to his country’s advantage even though much of the Muslim world disapproved of his alliance with Washington. US aid has risen from $3 million a year pre-Sept. 11 to $10 million now and is expected to rise further. But Guelleh must also worry about his neighbors who have long cast coveteous eyes on his strategically placed country that sits on the Bab al-Mandeb, the southern gateway to the Red Sea across the waterway from Yemen. Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia all would like to get their hands on Djibouti’s deep-water port.

Djibouti is Ethiopia’s only outlet to the sea and allied itself with Addis Ababa during Ethiopia’s war with Eritrea. That angered the Eritreans, who have conducted incursions into Djibouti. Ethiopian premier Meles Zenawi was sufficiently concerned to warn Eritrea he would not tolerate any Eritrean presence in Djibouti. For its part, Somalia maintains that historically — or at least until the French moved out — it was part of “Greater Somalia” and has long campaigned to incorporate the tiny enclave within its border.

(Ed Blanche in The Daily Star [Beirut, Lebanon], May 5, 2003)
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/06_05_03/art19.asp

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.