I had known el Mammun when he was our vassal. Loaded with official honors for services rendered, enriched by the French Government and respected by the tribes, he seemed to lack for nothing that belonged to the state of an Arab prince. And yet one night, without a sign of warning, he had massacred all the French officers in his train, had seized camels and rifles, and had fled to rejoin the refractory tribes in the interior.Treason is the name given to these sudden uprisings, these flights at once heroic and despairing of a chieftain henceforth proscribed in the desert, this brief glory that will go out like a rocket against the low wall of European carbines. This sudden madness is properly a subject for amazement. And yet the story of el Mammun was that of many other Arab chiefs. He grew old. Growing old, one begins to ponder. Pondering thus, el Mammun discovered one night that he had betrayed the God of Islam and had sullied his hand by sealing in the hand of the Christians a pact in which he had been stripped of everything.Indeed what were barley and peace to him? A warrior disgraced and become a shepherd, he remembered a time when he had inhabited a Sahara where each fold in the sands was rich with hidden mysteries; where forward in the night the tip of the encampment was studded with sentries; where the news that spread concerning the movements of the enemy made all hearts beat faster round the night fires. He remembered a taste of the high seas which, once savored by man, is never forgotten.
On that model, Lakanwal despaired of his betrayal of God and God's promises of a martial glory for his people; and this was an attempt, as it were, at reconciliation with the divine model. I can see how that might sometimes be the case in these green-on-blue killings. It is true that witnesses report that he shouted "Allahu Akbar" at the time of the shootings.
My experience in Iraq suggests that it is usually more personal, that it is some direct connection within the tribe that either draws someone out of the insurgency and to us, or out of fellowship with us and into the insurgency. Those speculating that the Taliban might have gotten physical control of his family in Afghanistan are on this thread, but they might not be right either.
It's a weird story. He was right there through the evacuation of Kabul, taking only one of the last planes out. He seemed like a true believer, which is how you get picked for what Blade Runner called "a kick-murder squad" in this case what has been identified in the press as a "Zero Unit" or a "Scorpion Unit" run by a combination of Western intelligence agencies, originally including the CIA but also Scandinavian intelligence agencies.
An aside: this Scorpion Unit is not to be confused with the Serbian war-crimes 'police' unit; nor also the various police units worldwide that have adopted the name 'Scorpion units' for various dodgy "police" purposes that somehow always seem to lead to people dying at police hands. It may be that one should just not set up armed units with names like "Scorpion Unit," whether paramilitary or police -- this seems to be triggering a negative mythic pathway in the minds of those so organized.
To return to the curious case: for some reason he drove across the country to kill American soldiers for no apparent reason. This he did with just a .357 Magnum revolver, not a rifle with a detachable magazine and multiple additional filled ones: thus, he wasn't planning for even a short battle with authorities, just a murder and then probably to be killed by responding police. Instead he was captured by a National Guard Major responding with only a pocket knife(!).*
Somehow and for some reason yet to be explained, Lakanwal had stripped almost naked by the time he was injured and captured. I've seen speculation that there was some sort of Islamic purpose for that, but also that he was destabilizing mentally for months here in America. It might be as simple as the last: being removed from his own culture, dropped without much support into an alien one but with a lot of memories of a brutal war (and possibly some PTSD or similar), he might just have come apart.
In any case there's plenty of room for more understanding to develop out of this mysterious case. It doesn't presently make much sense. I do think there's probably a clear lesson that we shouldn't allow our government to set up murder squads, though that will be difficult since the CIA refuses to acknowledge that it had anything to do with the Zero Squad program and no one seems to be able to hold them to any account -- nor does this seem to be a one-off project by the Agency, but rather an ordinary part of its contribution to counterinsurgency operations. Others might prefer that we just not import the murders back home to America. That was, after all, the Blade Runner solution: yes to kick-murder squads of replicants, but no to letting them back on Earth. The morality of using either humans or replicants to carry out such dirty work, while keeping them at arms length, was not deeply explored by the story: it was raised as an exercise for the viewer to consider on his or her own. It might be worth thinking about.
* This incident of the pocket knife is another wild aspect of this story. The Guards are armed, famously, and after killing the Specialist Lakanwal picked up her weapon and continued firing on the crowd. The Major apparently preferred the knife at close range to his 9mm service weapon, which actually makes perfect sense to me -- knives are better close up than handguns if you know how to use both things well, especially if you are limited to full metal jacket ammunition like the military. He apparently wanted to rush in and grapple with the killer to avoid allowing that man to finish reloading the stolen weapon, in which case a knife is actually a much better choice as well. He was victorious, which is what really counts in such a moment. It's good to see a military officer who knows his business.
8 comments:
I had read that the major was not carrying a firearm, so the pocket knife was the best weapon available. I don't know that that's true; it's just what reports I read said.
As for the shooter being nearly naked, the photo that shows this also shows him on a stretcher. Since he suffered wounds and may not have been helpful, it's possible that the EMTs cut off his clothing. Pretty SOP for a trauma call when the patient can't or won't tell you where he's injured and it isn't obvious. We've all heard stories of people who get shot and don't know it until someone else notices the blood.
- Tom
Yes, I'm familiar with "trauma naked." I haven't seen anything in the press to reflect that, but it's a legitimate possibility.
The Major not carrying a firearm would be very strange: perhaps he was a chaplain out on patrol with an infantry unit? Every NG soldier I saw on both trips to DC was armed. The orders on this point don't usually allow individuals to decide not to carry their arms on patrol.
What I read was that he was going point to point to check on the troops. He himself was not on patrol or watch. That said, again, this is just the source I read and I have no idea what the real case was.
It does make sense of why he waited until the shooter was reloading before he attacked instead of returning fire immediately, though.
- Tom
It's also interesting that one soldier was ARNG and the other ANG. I have no insight into this particular deployment, but generally when Guard units are called up for this kind of duty it is the MP/SP units that go and, if there aren't enough of them, they are supplemented by infantry or other units. It's possible none of the soldiers involved were infantry.
- Tom
Yeah, so this is a super weird deployment. There have been a lot of MP units (I didn't run into any SP, but they may be involved), but the ones I mostly ran into were actual infantry. (Probably coincidentally, they were often units with Confederate Army heritage out of South Carolina or Georgia.)
I said back before they issued arms that I didn't expect them to be armed, which I didn't; but if they were, that it would probably just be the police units. That would be more usual for National Guard deployments inside the USA, where they're typically much more worried about accidental discharges than self-defense (and certainly not in conducting combat operations). Astonishingly, however, the decision was made to pass out M4 carbines, which is mostly what I saw.
None of this really makes a lot of sense in terms of how military operations inside the USA are usually done. As a result there's a lot more guesswork about why anything is happening the way it is.
Yeah, this all seems pretty weird. I think I've mentioned before that one state's Guard deploying to another state when that state's own Guard is not deploying is really unusual. I don't know of any other cases when this has happened, though I haven't researched it, either.
- Tom
Typically that has happened when the President doesn't trust the state's own guard to obey orders; for example, in the Civil Rights Era it might be done to forcibly desegregate schools. In the most famous case, however, the President actually sent a Regular Army Airborne unit of paratroopers to do it rather than trust any Guard unit at all.
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