In a talk before the U.S. Institute of Peace, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke about the Kandahar offensive:
It was [not] going to be a massive military action, sort of sieging the city, tanks rolling into the city. That is not the kind of operation that our military leaders believe is warranted.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
That we are not going to lay siege to Kandahar, not going to roll the tanks in, puts a nice positive spin on the fact that we will be running death squads.
About the Death Squads
Death squads are a central part of our strategy for the Kandahar offensive.
We will be rounding up suspected resistance members, and killing or disappearing them.
The death squads are a joint operation of U.S. Special Forces and Afghan militias. The militias are under the control of Ahmed Wali Karzai. They are currently running out of a base we have at Mullah Omar's old place.
Since our prisons in Afghanistan are already packed beyond capacity, expect more assassination than disappearance.
Since packing 50 men instead of 40 into a cell meant for 10 is approximately assassination anyways, it doesn't matter. Humans packed standing in a cage, unable to sleep, unable to eat, pissing and shitting on each other in an unsanitary way, have a tendency to drop like flies. Tuberculosis, as one cause of death.
Up until recently, the military has been running what it calls "shaping" operations in Kandahar. Targeting the highest-level resistance leaders for assassination. Shaping disrupts an enemy, in preparation for the real battle.
They are now ramping up to what they call "decisive force" in Kandahar. Enough force to win the battle. The assassination campaign will be extended to lower-level resistance members.
General infantry will be used for large-scale scouting operations. General infantry will scout for resistance members where they may be most easily found: in their house, sleeping, at night. Infantry will knock down the doors of the houses and rush in, and then scout for enemies inside the house.
Afghan Resistance to the Death Squads
The resistance has been conducting shaping operations of its own. These shaping operations have specifically targeted high level components of our death squad and torture operations: the attack on the death squad school in Kandahar; the attack on Bagram; the attack on Kandahar airbase; targeted killings of prison officials and prisons. Our military has been attempting to obscure the focus of attacks by referring to the Kandahar area as "southern Afghanistan" more vaguely.
What Peoples of a Nation Know About Their Death Squads
Secretaries of State, government officials generally, never openly admit to running death squads. There is too much legal exposure to it. Even in dictatorships and authoritarian states, there is always the possibility of a coup. Even in liberal Western democracies, there is always the slight possibility of prosecution.
Newspapers rarely talk about death squads. The existence of death squads in a nation is a combination of known but hidden. Death squads depend on implausible deniability. Newspapers, preferring verifiable fact and batshit opinion, are just systematically poorly equipped to deal with the issue.
Opponents of death squads and torture are systematically hampered by the implausible deniability dynamic.
The Relation of Death Squads and Torture
Wherever you have death squads, you have torture, always. Wherever you have torture, you have death squads, almost always. We should be surprised at ours?
Torture and death squads come from the same set of beliefs about national security.
The state, being good, and having enemies, who are bad, because the enemies would torture and kill, must prevent the enemies from taking over the state, by torturing or killing them.
You can get very strange conflations of the interests of nation, state, party, state leader, and party leader out of this. Nouri al-Maliki, Prime Minister of Iraq, is a skilled conflator in this way of national security and his own personal rule. I haven't noticed Hamid Karzai talk in this way, nor Democratic leaders in the United States. Republican leaders in the U.S. will dog whistle about it.
But you still find an interesting version of this way of thinking in the United States now. Democrats are good; Republicans are bad, because Republicans torture. Torture and death squads cannot be talked about, because this would give benefit to Republicans. Democrats must run death squads and torture, and look the other way about it, because otherwise government would fall into the hands of Republicans, who run death squads and torture.
About the Weapons of Mass Distraction
On Sunday, the administration issued a press release, announcing the discovery of weapons of mass distraction in Afghanistan. The weapons of mass distraction were discovered by rooting through old Russian documents in the library of the Afghan Geological Survey in Kabul.
Hillary Clinton's not-tanks not-rolling into is-Kandahar are another weapon of mass distraction.
The not-tanks distract you from the is-death-squads.