This should be expected from the New Yorker as the MH17 shoot down provides the author the opportunity to resurrect past history to discredit the US.
But despite that the author does highlight the risks of using indigenous forces (or proxies) that cannot be controlled by the sponsor (and not just the US as a sponsor). This history has to be studied and not overlooked whenever anyone decides that working through and with indigenous forces might be an option. We should never discount that potential option solely because of the history as it may be the right method for a given strategic situation but we also must figure out how to mitigate the potential blowback from doing so. But his conclusion regarding Putin is very important:
Characteristically, Putin was quick to lament the loss of life; he released a photograph showing him and Russian Cabinet members standing for a moment’s silence to honor the dead. Later in the day, he said that the incident was Ukraine’s fault. But by then evidence was emerging from multiple sources, including cell-phone intercepts, strongly suggesting that Putin’s rebels had done it. They still deny it. It may have been a hideous mistake made by fighters accustomed to firing on anything that appears in the skies above—and equipped with the means to do it. But, however it played out, this sort of tragedy is a natural consequence of giving weapons to violent men who feel that their powerful sponsor allows them to commit crimes with impunity.Putin has been using the Ukrainian conflict to revive the notion of Russia as a superpower. Until now, his proxies—first his “little green men” in Crimea, and then the separatists of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic—have provided him a thin veil of deniability. Now, though, he may have provided for his own blowback, and sooner than he might have guessed.
JULY 19, 2014
OF PLANES AND PROXIES
POSTED BY JON LEE ANDERSON
A day after a Malaysia Airlines jet was brought down over eastern Ukraine, President Obama placed the blame squarely on the area’s Russian-backed separatists. “We don’t have time for propaganda,” he said. “We don’t have time for games.”
One of the games being played in the region is an old and dangerous one: the proxy war. For a power that wants to meddle in another country, the great thing about fielding surrogates is that they give you deniability. The bad thing is that you can’t ever fully control them. Things were problematic enough in the nineteen-sixties, when the C.I.A. hired mercenaries to fight Soviet proxies in Africa and Latin America. The formula was simple: here’s a down payment, in money or arms. Go in and do your worst, and you’ll get more if you get something done. If you screw up, get caught, or get killed, we’re not involved. But, even with that protective distance, these kinds of agents could create terrible mischief, which often found its way home. When I was in Bolivia in the mid-eighties, Argentine pilots told me that the C.I.A. was hiring fliers to drop arms to the Nicaraguan contras. The pilots had a friend, recently employed by an infamous drug lord, who had just signed on. Later, it emerged that some of the contras had made a side deal with Pablo Escobar, the drug trafficker, allowing him to ship cocaine through their network of clandestine airstrips.
During the early Cold War, the West’s more infamous mercenaries—such as the Briton (Mad) Mike Hoare and the Frenchman Bob Denard—generally operated in backwaters, like the Congo or the Comoro Islands. Because there was little oversight, the powers that hired such characters rarely suffered much for their transgressions. In 1961, the U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold died in a plane crash, on the border between Northern Rhodesia (now called Zambia) and the Congo, where he was attempting to resolve a bid for secession in the copper-rich Katanga Province. Many people believe that, rather than suffering a mechanical failure, the plane was shot down by Belgian mercenaries who supported the secessionists. But the official inquiries were inconclusive.
In the nineteen-eighties, the C.I.A. handed out Stinger surface-to-air missiles to the mujahideen fighting the Soviet Army in Afghanistan, and, again, the thinking seemed simple enough. By giving these rustic fighters—who had begun their resistance with century-old Lee-Enfield rifles—the means to blast airplanes out of the sky, the West could covertly shift the war in their favor. The Stingers were effective, and soon the Soviet Army—which had enjoyed unhindered aerial dominance, thanks to its Hind helicopters and MIG jets—began to suffer. Scores of aircraft were shot down and, in 1988, nine years after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, they began to withdraw in defeat. By then, however, the C.I.A. had become nervous about the Stingers, fearing that the sophisticated mobile weapons it had handed out could be used against American interests. The Soviets and the Americans had both recently shot down civilian airliners by accident (KAL Flight 007, in 1983, and Iran Air Flight 655, in 1988, respectively), and so the risks to aviation posed by irresponsible proxies seemed very real. The Agency initiated a covert program to buy the Stingers back— with less than total success. In early 1989, in rural Kandahar, a mujahideen commander who owned two Stingers mistook me for a C.I.A. field agent, and said, “Tell your people I am not giving them back, ever.” But the jihadis whom the West supported eventually provided a different kind of blowback, thanks to Al Qaeda’s use of passenger jets themselves as weapons.
For decades, the Libyan despot Muammar Qaddafi fielded his own proxies in fights across Africa and beyond. The Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (a.k.a. Carlos the Jackal) was on his payroll at one point. Qaddafi’s agents planted explosives aboard a Pan Am jetliner that blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988; a year later, in similar fashion, they blew up a French civilian passenger plane as it flew over Niger. When Qaddafi was deposed, in 2011, a motley group of “revolutionaries,” including some whom he had supported, swarmed into Libya and looted his vast armories. Among the weapons were large numbers of Russian-made heat-seeking anti-aircraft missiles. Peter Bouckaert, of Human Rights Watch, documented hundreds of them in unguarded caches, but, by the time weapons inspectors arrived, the missiles were gone. Where they are today, nobody knows. But Libya has become a hotbed of warring militia groups and jihadi extremists, and it seems likely that, sooner or later, the missiles will find a use.
(Continued at the link below)
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