Elite US military unit handed anti-terror role
New task force could also offer intelligence, strike recommendations and advice to forces of traditional allies
President Barack Obama’s administration is giving the elite Joint Special Operations Command — the organisation that helped kill Osama Bin Laden in a 2011 raid by Navy Seals — expanded power to track, plan and potentially launch attacks on terrorist cells around the globe, a move driven by concerns of a dispersed terrorist threat as Daesh militants are driven from strongholds in Iraq and Syria, US officials said.
The missions could occur well beyond the battlefields of places such as Iraq, Syria and Libya where the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) has carried out clandestine operations in the past.
When finalised, the decision will elevate JSOC from a highly valued strike tool used by regional military commands to the lead of a new multi-agency intelligence and action force. To be known as the ‘Counter-External Operations Task Force,’ the group will be designed to take JSOC’s targeting model — honed over the past 15 years of conflict — and export it globally to go after terrorist networks plotting attacks against the West.
Best practice ‘codification’
The creation of a new JSOC entity this late in Obama’s tenure is the “codification” of best practices in targeting terrorists outside of conventional conflict zones, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss administration deliberations.
It is unclear, however, whether the administration of Presidentelect Donald Trump will keep this and other structures set up by Obama. They include guidelines for counterterrorism operations such as approval by several agencies before a drone strike and “near certainty” that no civilians will be killed. This series of presidential orders as the “playbook.”
The new JSOC task force could also offer intelligence, strike recommendations and advice to the militaries and security forces of traditional western allies, or conduct joint operations with them, officials said. In other parts of the world with weak or no governments, JSOC could act unilaterally.
The global focus is reminiscent of when US forces first went after Al Qaida in the months after the September 11, 2001, attacks. As the approaching US troops forced militants to flee their safe havens in Afghanistan and scatter across the globe, the US followed in pursuit, using CIA assets to grab suspected Al Qaida operatives in dozens of countries, sometimes capturing and imprisoning them under murky legal authorities and using interrogation techniques widely seen as torture.
Some in the Pentagon hope to see the new task force working in tandem with the CIA, elevating a sometimes distant relationship to one of constant coordination to track and go after suspected terrorists outside traditional war zones. is known