Line blurred between military and CIA roles in Afghanistan

By Tabassum Zakaria

Tuesday February 12, 8:30 AM

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The line between CIA and military operations blurred during the U.S. war in Afghanistan, where the spy agency played an unusually visible role by firing missiles from pilotless planes at suspected al Qaeda targets, U.S. experts said on Monday.

"In this highly refined special ops kind of warfare, in fact the line has blurred between traditional military operations and the CIA," said Kurt Campbell, director of the international security programme at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Michael Vickers, director of strategic studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said, "They've been featured far more prominently in this war than they have in other recent conflicts."

The CIA has operated the armed Predator drones to attack targets, linked up with local Afghan groups, and searched for al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.

"What's interesting about this case, however, is the level to which CIA paramilitary operatives are coordinated into an overall conventional military capability," Campbell said.

The U.S. war on terrorism, launched after the September 11 attacks on America in which about 3,000 people died, has relied primarily on air strikes and small groups of special operations forces on the ground, and avoided flooding Afghanistan with massive numbers of American troops as the Soviet Union did in the 1980s before it was pushed out by Afghan forces.

CIA officers were sent to Afghanistan before the U.S. began bombing on October 7 to liaise with anti-Taliban groups. The bombing was aimed at destroying Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network, blamed for the September 11 attacks, and to oust their Taliban protectors.

"During various critical junctures in the war on Afghanistan in the fall I think we're struck by the really unusually high profile that these CIA groups have played in various battlefield situations," Campbell said.

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The war in Afghanistan marks the first time the United States deployed the unmanned surveillance planes armed with missiles fired by a remote operator watching a live video feed.

The CIA operates those Predator drones and launched a Hellfire missile at a handful of men gathered near the Zawar Khili cave complex in southeastern Afghanistan last week. Speculation about who was hit ranged from a senior al Qaeda leader to villagers collecting scrap metal.

"They were under observation for several hours before the strike occurred and no one was observed picking up scrap metal," a U.S. official said. They appeared to be in Arab dress, armed with rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and in an area known to be an al Qaeda haven, he said.

The CIA conferred with the U.S. military's Central Command, which is running the war in Afghanistan, before launching the missiles. Marine Major Ralph Mills, a spokesman for Central Command, said: "There was no reason for us to object and we thought that target was a valid one."

Military personnel from Central Command serve at CIA headquarters outside Washington and CIA personnel serve at Central Command headquarters in Florida -- with live hook-ups between the headquarters for consultation, officials said. The video from the drone can be seen live at both sites.

"The agency and the Central Command work very closely together on and just about everything that's going on in Afghanistan," said Rear Admiral John Stufflebeem, a senior official on the military Joint Staff. But, he told a Pentagon briefing, the CIA also had objectives that the military might not be involved in or even know.

The CIA and special forces have different capabilities, an intelligence official said. "We complement the special forces. We have unique capabilities, some that they have, some that they don't. We can fuse information from various disciplines," he said."

The CIA for decades has used its own weapons, boats and planes for guerrilla warfare, working with opposition forces, smuggling people into areas, or extracting them out, but using the armed unmanned aerial vehicle was new, Vickers said.

The armed Predator was the CIA's answer to the problem of finding a target but being unable to attack and watching the target flee before a strike could be conducted, he said.

A key issue is whether the rules of engagement should be changed at this stage when the Taliban and al Qaeda have dispersed or tried to blend in with civilians, and civilians are starting to go out about their usual business, he said.

"That may not be adequate target identification for this phase of the war," Vickers, a former CIA officer and member of the military's special forces, said of aerial surveillance.