US is forced to come clean over dirty war in Pakistan

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US is forced to come clean over dirty war in Pakistan


Published on 4 Feb 2010

Last year I met an American who specialised in biometrics.

At least that’s what he told me. To my mind, he didn’t look like a biometrician, not that I knew, of course, what a biometrician was or did. Somehow, though, the word failed to tally with the image of the young, long-haired bearded man standing before me, dressed in a hybrid mix of military clothing and with an M4 carbine rifle and telescopic sight slung over his shoulder.

Frankly, he looked more like one of his Taliban adversaries than the US special forces soldier that, in fact, he was. Later, I looked up biometrics and found its catch-all dictionary definition as having to do with “identifying individuals and groups based upon behavioural traits, often under surveillance, and calculating the probable duration of human lifespans”.

Looking back now, that pretty much summed up this guy’s role. These days, in the remote mountainous border region that straddles Afghanistan and Pakistan, “biometricians” of his kind are in big demand. So, too, are others like him who go by equally duplicitous job descriptions such as “aid worker”, “civil affairs” specialist, “security consultant” and “contract worker”.

The simple fact is that one should never underestimate the importance of language as a convenient cover when it comes to describing the activities of those special operations soldiers, spies and mercenaries who do the shadowy bidding of our governments in places such as Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Sometimes, though, this subterfuge breaks down. Earlier this week, rather spectacularly and embarrassingly, it did just that, even if the story rapidly dropped from the headlines. It began with the news that three soldiers had become the first known American military fatalities in Pakistan, after being blown up by a Taliban bomber.

According to the official version of events, they were en route to a newly built girls’ school in Maidan, in the volatile North West Frontier Province (NWFP), for which the US government is said to have provided the funding. While this might very well be true, the Pentagon was quickly forced to backtrack from its initial description of them as “aid workers”, then “civil affairs” specialists and admit they were, in fact, “special operations soldiers”.

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