CIA agents’ assassination in Afghanistan exposes ‘dirty and lawless’ US tactics - India News and Travel Times Provides India-centric and other News and Features

The assassination of seven CIA operatives in Afghanistan this week has exposed the “dirty secret war” being fought between American intelligence agencies, the Taliban and al-Qaeda on the Pak-Afghan border. It has emerged that various American military and intelligence operations are aimed principally at hunting down senior figures in al-Qaeda and their allies in the lawless tribal belt. The CIA ’s main strike weapons are the drones that loiter over the border areas 24 hours a day, watching and listening to telephone networks, The Times reports. On Saturday, night raids against suspected insurgents and al-Qaeda linked leaders allegedly killed a number of students in Kunar province, causing widespread anger in Afghanistan . CIA -led night raids such as this have raised human rights concerns in the past. A UN-commissioned report last year criticised the “opaque” use of ultra-secretive CIA units operating alongside irregular Afghan militias such as the Pashai. Philip Alston , director of the New York Centre for Human Rights, complained that many raids were “composed of Afghans but with a handful, at most, of international people directing it” and were “not accountable to any international military authority”. He added that such units answer directly to the Pentagon rather than to the NATO command structure, and their operations are often so secretive that even other US forces operating nearby are sometimes may be unaware of them. The dirty war and drone strikes in Afghanistan has forced several al-Qaeda leaders to relocate to urban areas in Pakistan and shift the focus of their operations towards Yemen, Somalia and other areas of the Horn of Africa.