Obama’s ‘secret troops’ in 75 nations

Behind his public rhetoric of global engagement and diplomacy, the US President, Mr Barack Obama, has secretly sanctioned the deployment of US Special Forces to 75 countries as part of a largely ‘secret war’ against Al Qaeda and other radical groups, a news report said on Sunday.

American troops are now operating in 75 countries compared with about 60 at the beginning of last year, the Washington Post reported on Sunday.

In the past 18 months Mr Obama has ordered a big expansion in Yemen and the Horn of Africa — known areas of strong Al Qaeda activity — and elsewhere in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa.

Mr Obama has asked for a 5.7 per cent increase in the Special Operations budget for fiscal 2011, for a total of $6.3 billion, plus an additional $3.5 billion in 2010 contingency funding, the report said.

It said Mr Obama has also approved pre-emptive Special Forces strikes to disrupt terror plots, and has given the units powers and authority that was not granted by Mr George Bush when he occupied the White House.

Commanders are now planning greater use of these Special Forces for pre-emptive or retaliatory strikes when a plot has been identified, or after an attack.

The former Bush officials, still smarting from accusations that their administration overextended the President’s authority to conduct lethal activities around the world at will, have asked similar questions.

“While they seem to be expanding their operations both in terms of extraterritoriality and aggressiveness, they are contracting the legal authority upon which those expanding actions are based,” Mr John B. Bellinger III, a senior legal adviser in both of Bush’s administrations, was quoted as saying.

The surge in Special Operations deployments, with intensified CIA drone attacks in western Pakistan, is the other side of the national security doctrine of global engagement and domestic values Mr Obama released last week.

Of the 13,000 US Special Forces overseas, 9,000 are divided between Afghanistan and Pakistan.