The War After the War — #GWOT

At National Journal, "Inside America's Shadow War on Terror—and Why It Will Never End":

The muezzin's call to predawn prayers had not yet woken the seaside Somali town of Barawe when a lone figure stepped out of a two-story villa near the water's edge. In the darkness of a walled compound, he smoked a cigarette, the glow of ash rhythmically illuminating his face. It was an effect that was heightened by the night-vision goggles focused on him. When the man stepped back inside, the commander of Navy SEAL Team Six, his own face hidden under black grease, directed his commandos to take up their positions and storm the villa. The date was Oct. 5, 2013, and inside was a Kenyan named Abdikadir Mohamed Abdikadir, or Ikrimah—the leader of al-Shabaab suspected of masterminding the gruesome killing of non-Muslims at Nairobi's Westgate Mall.

Two hours later and nearly 3,000 miles away, a Libyan named Nazih Abdul-Hamad al-Ruqai, or Anas al-Libi, was returning from dawn prayers as the sun began to rise over Tripoli. His sedan pulled up to a comfortable house in an upscale suburb of the capital and was suddenly boxed in from the side and the front by two white vans with darkened windows. Commandos from the Army's elite Delta Force counterterrorism unit leaped out, one training his gun on al-Libi from the front as another broke the window, pulling the terrorism suspect out of the car and bundling him into one of the vans before both vehicles and a third that had been hidden sped off. The entire operation, caught on a surveillance camera and posted on YouTube, took 60 seconds.

President Obama wants deeply to convince Americans that the time of perpetual war is over. "America is at a crossroads," he said last year in a speech that was meant to reassure a weary public that the post-Sept. 11 era of invasion, regime change, and nation-building was nearly done. "Beyond Afghanistan, we must define our effort not as a boundless 'global war on terror,' but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America."

Indeed, even after the last U.S. combat troops leave Afghanistan this year, the shadow war against jihadi terrorists that began on Sept. 11, 2001, will rage on, executed by comingled military, intelligence, and law-enforcement capabilities using legal authorities that blur distinctions between uncommon criminals and enemy combatants. Terrorism suspects caught in the hard stare of the U.S. counterterrorism network will still be arrested by U.S. law-enforcement agents overseas; snatched off the streets of lawless cities by U.S. special operations forces; eviscerated by CIA drone strikes in remote areas far from any declared war zone; and interrogated under the rules of warfare before being read their Miranda rights and prosecuted in federal courts. And that life-and-death struggle will continue to play out largely in secret.

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