The Perfect Kill by Robert B. Baer

Author:Robert B. Baer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2014-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

THE BARBARIANS AREN’T LIKE US

In his Spanish Civil War memoir, Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell describes how one day a fascist soldier jumped out of a trench in front of him. The man was holding his pants up so they wouldn’t fall off, which is what saved his life. “I did not shoot, partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come to shoot at ‘Fascists,’ but a man that was holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist,’ he’s visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.”

Orwell was thrown by the realization he didn’t really know the enemy. Which brings me to the question, Shouldn’t we be killing people we know and all of the really evil shit that comes along with them? Isn’t it the enemy you know, with a face and a past, you want to destroy, instead of the one you don’t know? You’re certain he’s either done you harm or is about to. What I’m trying to say is that killing total strangers, especially at great distances, is something other than proper assassination. It’s more like—I don’t know—spraying insects from a crop duster.

Let me go back to the Lao assassins. There was no misidentifying the victim or mistaking the crime. The locals knew everything there was to know about the victim, in particular how exactly his murder would better everyone’s chances of survival. They were able to put both a face and a price on blood.

At the other end of the scale, the CIA can murder as many Pashtuns as it likes, but with the Pashtuns’ horizontal power structure and their opaque politics, it could never know what it was getting out of it. With a faulty understanding of an enemy, murder is a blind shot. Which in turn means we’re making more enemies than we’re eliminating.

Our military faces the same problem. While the Pentagon has permitted targeted killings in Afghanistan and can do things like number each and every house in every suspect Taliban village—they call them “battlefield maps”—it hasn’t been able to identify the Taliban command well enough to eliminate it. Indeed, when U.S. troops do finally withdraw from Afghanistan, they’ll be leaving the country in the same state as they found it—with the Taliban in charge.

It would be a mistake to lay the entire blame at the feet of the American military or the CIA. Washington is a capital so far from an age when assassination was the common fate of leaders that it’s unable to understand its rules or workings. Couple that with Washington’s devouring lack of interest in anything foreign and its near-sighted, one-dimensional view of the world, and it is all but inevitable that complicated, nuanced political murder is beyond its grasp.

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