Scahill tracks the dramatic rise of US covert operations without legislative oversight, kill lists that keep being added to, American support for the full gamut of mercenaries — Somali warlords, Yemeni tribal leaders, security contractors — and the escalation of wanton aerial strikes. These covert operations result in a de facto trashing of international law and the American Constitution by the very people tasked with upholding them; in Dirty Wars, the ‘war on terror’ appears less a mediated, measured multilateral effort to make the world a safer place, and more a reckless campaign by an international criminal syndicate whose grossly excessive use of violence creates a blowback against the United States and the people, institutions and states around the world seen to be allied with the US. Assassinations, civilian casualties, renditions, torture — all are reported in Dirty Wars by the spadefull. And it’s not a pretty picture.

But first, a disclaimer: For most, Dirty Wars shall not lead to entirely new insights (especially in Pakistan where drone attacks are rooted at the heart of the right-of-centre political discourse). Most readers shall already be familiar with many of the events in the book. Still, Scahill makes two contributions to reporting on the global wars since 9/11: (1) he shifts the emphasis from conventional military campaigns to covert operations run by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and more ominously, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) that is directly under the American presidency and not subject to political oversight like the CIA is in principle; and, (2) Scahill weaves together different stories that take the reader from the corridors of power in Washington to the mosques of suburban Virginia, to Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, and to a lesser extent, Pakistan. Indeed, besides personal interviews — wide-ranging as they are — Scahill’s sources are all in the public domain (there are 80 pages of endnotes for the skeptics). Dirty Wars is not without its share of shortcomings, both conceptual and stylistic — more on that later — but overall, it remains focused on extra-judicial killings and the exercise of power sans political oversight.

Amidst the carefully reconstructed processes detailing the empowerment of US special forces (including security contractors), and elaborate descriptions of US clientalism in Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan, Dirty Wars keeps returning to the thorny questions of whether the US president can order the assassination of an American citizen without trial. Scahill tracks three American-born citizens who were killed by drone strikes in Yemen in 2011: Anwar Awlaki, his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman Awlaki (killed in a separate drone strike some days later), and Samir Khan, who was killed with the elder Awlaki. Anwar Awlaki is, in fact, the central figure around which Dirty Wars moves (chapters on Awlaki are interspersed throughout the book). Scahill doesn’t so much take a categorical position on whether the strikes were or were not illegal; rather, his answer lies in the exposition of how assassination became standard operating procedure in the ‘war on terror’ after 9/11.

Broadly, the story goes like this: The 9/11 attacks gave neoconservatives in the Bush administration — Dick Cheney, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz — the opportunity to finally pursue an assertive foreign policy that they had been wistfully dreaming of; indeed, all through the Clinton administration, right-wing think tanks had been bemoaning the lack of assertiveness in US foreign policy since the Cold War. Following the attacks on New York and Washington, the US Congress and Senate, reeling from the recent events, didn’t think twice about giving the US president unprecedented latitude to wage a global war. In a vote on September 14, 2001, the House and Senate passed the Authorisation for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that allowed the president to “use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, persons, organisations he determines planned, authorised, committed or aided the terrorist attacks.” The one dissenting vote was of California Democrat Barbara Lee, whose concerns with granting the president unprecedented authority today appears prophetic. Calling for a need to “step back for a moment and think through the implications of our actions,” Lee cautioned that “we must be careful not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target.” Lee’s caution was diametrically opposite to the view of Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld who in their public statements after 9/11 relished the prospect of a shadowy war without exit strategies. The signing of the AUMF into law on September 17 undid the National Security Act of 1947, which had required the US president to issue a finding before undertaking covert action, and which had also demanded that such covert action be in compliance with the US law and Constitution. Such procedural matters could now be bypassed, especially in the “unleashing” of the deadly JSOC by Rumsfeld — described by Scahill as “America’s best killers” — and the “assumption of presidential power” by vice-president Dick Cheney, both of whom were against congressional oversight of covert operations.

The first clear indication of new directions in the global war was the assassination, in 2002, of Abu Ali al Harithi, identified as the mastermind behind the year-2000 USS Cole bombing. Killed in Yemen by a US Predator drone flown out of Djibouti, Harithi was the first confirmed citizen killed outside of a battlefield since Gerald Ford’s ban on political assassinations in 1976. This was also the first time that a Predator drone had been used to strike targets outside of Afghanistan and would pave the way for a sharp escalation in drone strikes under the presidency of Barack Obama.

Although Scahill provides extensive evidence of gross excesses committed by American special forces acting without any political oversight — the body count rises dramatically through the book — his most damning criticism is demonstrating a continuity between President George W. Bush and successor President Barack Obama. The only difference between the two was that the latter was more ruthless in his use of extrajudicial measures, and he went about it more cleverly. By linking Republican presidential candidate John McCain to the unpopular war in Iraq, Obama remained categorical that he would support covert operations in the so-called “just war,” noting at one time on the campaign trail that “if we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf will not act, we will.” Following his election, Obama’s team consisted of hawkish Democrats (Joe Bidden, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice), George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defence, Robert Gates, CIA veteran John Brennan as senior advisor on counterterrorism, and General James Jones as national security advisor. In the words of Jeremy Scahill: “Conservative Republicans heaped praise on Obama’s picks.” President Bush’s senior advisor Karl Rove described Obama’s team as “reassuring” and McCain’s former campaign staffer described himself as “gobsmacked by the appointments, most of which could have just as easily come from a President McCain.” An article in the Weekly Standard, the leading neoconservative publication, noted that Obama was set to follow the course of outgoing President Bush. Obama’s December 2009 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech — described by journalist Glenn Greenwald as “the most explicitly pro-war speech ever delivered by anyone while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize” — was likewise praised by conservative Republicans from Karl Rove to Newt Gingrich. Dirty Wars contributes to our understanding of American power and how and why it operates the way it does; it is a welcome addition to the literature on the global ‘war on terror’. Given the current interest on killings by drones in relation to Pakistan’s sovereignty, this is a book that should be flying off the bookshelves in this country.

But my appreciation of Scahill’s efforts aside, I have three criticisms. First, Dirty Wars is narrowly focused on US covert operations, and frequently devoid of context. Here I am not criticising the author for the book he has not written; it is not Scahill’s intention to write a comprehensive account of Al Qaeda. Still, I find it peculiar that there is no discussion of Al Qaeda as an organisation (or the Taliban) or their many terrorist franchises across the world. There is no discussion of the ideology of those whom the US is at war with (or for that matter, a discussion of the United States’ ideological principles). There is no reference to a Saudi-backed puritanical Sunni Islam and only one passing reference to Iran in the entire book. While Scahill describes Anwar Awlaki’s increasing radicalisation, he is strictly non-judgmental about taking a position on Awlaki. I can only surmise that Scahill believed that if he took a critical position on Awlaki, he would (1) take away from the focus on covert operations, or (2) condone Awlaki’s killing. Neither would have been the case. In Dirty Wars, the ideological, sectarian and geopolitical schisms that are tearing the Muslim world — and end up contributing to the radicalisation of the people and organisations that the United States finds itself at war with — do not exist, or do not matter.

Second, there are key historical similarities between US covert operations described in Dirty Wars and the proxy wars of the Cold War. For example, Scahill describes how non-combatants are frequently killed by US drones, and how military-age men in zones where drones operate are considered potential targets. There is a strong parallel here with the Vietnam war, its “free-fire zones” where anything that moved was a target, where tens of thousands of children (to say nothing of civilians in general) were killed as standard operating practice and chalked up as enemy kills, and where in Cambodia and Laos history’s largest aerial wars unfolded against countries that the United States was not officially at war with. Comparisons with the dirty wars in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, where in the 1980s US-backed military juntas engaged in horrific acts of violence against some of the poorest people in the world, can also prove revealing. A comparative perspective allows us to begin thinking about the post-9/11 dirty wars in conjunction with similar processes in other parts of the world at different points in time and shall contribute to our understanding of the present. Consider that I made about a hundred annotations and highlights on my now very-well thumbed copy of Dirty Wars; yet, as I flipped back through the book for this review, I discovered that what I had highlighted were actually vignettes — characters, individual events, and some stories that are spread out over one or two decades — but little that would allow us to see the current dirty wars as part of broader macro-historical processes unfolding over time.

My last gripe with the book is admittedly personal. At nearly 650 pages, Dirty Wars has the look and feel of a telephone directory. Towards the end, I couldn’t help but ask whether it needed to be this long: Do we need a dozen chapters on Anwar Awlaki? No. Is there any information in the two chapters on Raymond Davis that most news-savvy readers in Pakistan did not know? None. Do the chapters on the killing of Osama bin Laden tell us anything new? Nothing. Still, this is a passionately written book, and one that I can recommend, along with Scahill’s earlier Blackwater. What Dirty Wars is missing is a step back by the author to critically assess what he has set out to do, although I believe that this is not going to be a criticism many non-academics would levy against this book.

The reviewer is an assistant professor of History at the Lahore University of Management Sciences

Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield

(War)

By Jeremy Scahill

Nation Books, US

ISBN 156858671X

680pp.