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The New Yorker. This magazine excels at going behind the story and finding nuggets of fact that put a different spin on the stories in the news. Seymor Hersh reports on special ops in Afghanistan and the potential of a nuclear war in central asia. Here is some of the article with my spin attached:
""Nonetheless, in recent weeks an élite Pentagon undercover unit—trained to slip into foreign countries and find suspected nuclear weapons, and disarm them if necessary—has explored plans for an operation inside Pakistan."" While this is true -- I have run into strange units like this in the past -- a more accurate description may be, "a frustrated supersecret unit, unable to get authorization to be used, has decided to conduct training on a raid of Pakistan's nuclear facilities. ""
According to press reports, Abdul Haq, an Afghan guerrilla leader who was a hero in the war against the Soviets, had been ambushed and executed after a two-day standoff in eastern Afghanistan. Haq was said by the Taliban to have been on a mission for the United States, and to have been carrying large amounts of money—presumably to be used to induce Taliban commanders to defect. An Afghan press report subsequently quoted a Taliban spokesman who said that fifty of Haq's supporters, possibly including "foreigners," had also been surrounded. Haq's death was a major setback to the American anti-Taliban effort and to Pakistan's hopes of forming a broad-based new government in Afghanistan. True. American's probably died in that attack. However, our inability to bring overwhelming force to the location to save Abdule Haq is gross stupidity. A failure to communicate. A failure of resolve. We need Microsoft efficiency here not post office efficiency.
The former State Department official acknowledged that the air attacks thus far had not been a success and added, "What worries me is if, a month from now, bin Laden gets on Al-Jazeera and thumbs his nose at us. It'd be a huge loss of prestige for the United States." Are we following Al-Jazeera's reporters? We should be like white on rice with these guys. If bin Laden goes live, with a satellite hook-up, bombs should rain down on his head within 5 minutes of broadcast.
The American team is apparently getting help from Israel's most successful special-operations unit, the storied Sayeret Matkal, also known as Unit 262, a deep-penetration unit that has been involved in assassinations, the theft of foreign signals-intelligence materials, and the theft and destruction of foreign nuclear weaponry. Excellent. The Israeli's always had a better military system than we did. IF you were excellent you could become a colonel by 30 and a general by 35. We have a much more structured system that discourages excellence. They also actively help their best people enter the civilian world when their time is up. We don't. In fact, there is a bias against military people in the US. I have yet to see an American company run as well as most military units, but the bias exists.
Referring to the air and ground war against bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan, the former high-ranking government official, who has direct knowledge of the situation, said, "The Bush Administration is so focussed on the target and the objective that it's lost its peripheral vision. If Musharraf is toppled in a coup, or fears he'll be toppled, or, as a price for not being toppled, gives the I.S.I. permission to ratchet it up in Kashmir, that's very dangerous." Pakistan television is replete with propoganda against India to deflect internal attention from the horrible conditions at home.
Pakistani military officials have approached Pentagon officials several times in the past decade in an unsuccessful attempt to get support for an upgrading of Pakistan's nuclear command-and-control mechanisms. Senior military and proliferation officials in the Clinton Administration told me, however, that they had determined that such assistance was barred by the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, ratified in 1968, which prohibits declared nuclear states from providing any support or guidance to any emerging nuclear power. One former Pentagon official caustically depicted the Clinton Administration's Pakistani command-and-control debate as being similar to the debate over condoms in high schools and needle exchanges: "If you give out condoms, are you condoning teen-age sex? If you give out needles, are you condoning drugs? By helping with command-and-control, are you condoning nuclear weapons?" I agree. We should have helped them.
5:34:38 PM 
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