Posting these excerpts from Missionaries, a novel by Philip Klay that examines the globalization of violence and the ways that America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq intersect with its operations in Colombia. Klay won the National Book Award for his first book, Redeployment (a short story collection on American war vets returned from the Middle East). This book is every bit as good, and very much worth reading.
From Abel, who becomes paraco after his village is slaughtered by guerrilla (page 49):
As a child, I thought there were guerrilla, and there were paracos, and they were at war with each other, but with Jefferson I learned that it was so much more complicated. There were cocaleros, like I had been, working the fields and sometimes organizing into little self-defense unions. And there were narcos, who bought and transported coca. And there were police and army. But within each group were different factions. Narcos who worked with us, but not the guerilla. Narcos who worked with the guerrilla, but not us. Narcos who worked with both. Guerrilla who would work with us against other guerrilla. Paracos who would work with narcos against us. Cocaleros who protected the guerrilla. Army officers who asked us to do the work they could not. Police who worked for everyone and no one. Sometimes it seemed like it was all a great game. Sometimes it seemed like hell. And always, it seemed so much bigger than I had imagined. Those days, I would sometimes think with wonder at how little worth I had possessed in the world, and how easily I could have been erased from the earth, and how even a whole town, like the one I had come from, could be destroyed without changing the calculations of the powerful.
From Juan Pablo, an Army Captain trying to steer American support (page 119):
What we want is not simply a new front in the war, but access to that thing the Americans, and only the Americans, can provide. The same thing that killed Raul and Reyes, and which the Americans have been using to hunt people in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Philippines and Somalia and Niger and Colombia and Ecuador and who knows where else. And it is something we deserve access to. After all, it started here, in Colombia, thirty years ago.
This was during the war against Pablo Escobar, who had been the herald of a new type of criminal. A drug lord of such scale and wealth that he was able to wage an asymmetric war against the foundations of the state itself, focusing as much on murdering police officers, judges, and politicians as on holding territory. When ISIS started murdering every state worker in Iraq they could find, including garbage men, as part of their war, they were acting as Escobar’s children. Break down all order, all civilization, so the cockroaches can breed in the ruins.
In response, we formed a special unit, the Search Bloc, about whom much has been written. Behind the scenes, men like my father worked with the Americans to create an integrated network of differing agencies designed to tighten the loop of finding targets, fixing them in place, finishing them, exploiting and analyzing the intelligence collected, and then disseminating that intelligence to the agencies and the commands able to act on it most rapidly. It created a model in which the operations of special forces, military intelligence, police intelligence, signals and human and image intelligence services were reorganized and integrated to reduce stovepiping, maximize information sharing, and tighten the circle of analysis and execution into a seamless, never-ending cycle.
That system is something often ignored in discussions of military capabilities, because it is not a particular unit, or weapons system, or technology, or style of training, but something more amorphous, a system that ties all of those elements together and multiplies their lethality and speed. This is no exaggeration. The Americans would use the same system in the Balkans, and then would pump steroids into it in Iraq. The outcome: a special operations command that was executing 12 raids a month in 2004 turned into an industrial-scale killing machine that was conducting 250 raids a month only two years later.
An American officer once described it to me this way: “When civilians think about war, they tend to think about the mechanisms of death. The heroic Navy SEAL firing a tight cluster of bullets into a bad guy’s head. The creepy, mechanical drone delivering a bomb. But those are just the flathead and Philips-head screwdriver at the end of a targeting system. And it’s the system that’s the real killer.”
The Americans took the system back to Colombia ten years ago, and after a lucky NSA intercept of a phone call with Hugo Chavez, used it to help us kill Raul Reyes. And Negro Acacio. And Martin Caballero. And many others. Of course, we can run the system, in a limited sense, on our own. In fact, we teach the system to other military allies around Latin America. But access to U.S. assets turns it into a monster.