The US “War on Terror” has unleashed a wave of violence across the world, with nation states and militia movements carrying out operations for strategic objectives. Many have begun to question not only the war on terror narrative but also the nature of the operations conducted, with talk of false flag or black flag operations. This was raised at a meeting at the Institute of Strategic Studies, Islamabad, with a questioner asking about the war and use of flagship operations in Pakistan, with a focus on the Karachi airport and Mehran attacks. However, the panel overlooked the question and the audience could not comprehend how a government or agency could plan or initiate an operation against its own people. This triggered me to look into the issue deeper, and to my surprise there is academic work on the topic and many governments themselves have admitted their participation in false flag operations.
The name “false flag” has its origins in naval warfare where the use of a flag other than the belligerent’s true battle flag as a ruse de guerre, before engaging the enemy, has long been acceptable. According to Geraint Hughes, a flagship operation is one that is carried out by ‘military or security force personnel, which are then blamed on terrorists.’ DeHaven-Smith argues that the terminology has become looser in recent years due to the increasingly complex levels of “duplicity” and “international intrigue” between states. Some argue that false flag operations are methods used by states as a form of deep politics. In its most contemporary usage, the term may also refer to those events which governments are aware of and able to stop but choose to allow to happen, as a strategy to entangle or prepare the nation for war. Furthermore, the term “false flag terrorism” may even be used in those instances when violence is carried out by groups or organizations which, whether they know it or not, are being supported or controlled by an external nation for her strategic objectives.
A number of governments around the world have admitted the use of flag ship operations for political or strategic objectives. A major with the Nazi SS admitted at the Nuremberg trials that – under orders from the chief of the Gestapo – he and some other Nazi operatives faked attacks on their own people and resources which they blamed on the Poles, to justify the invasion of Poland. Nazi general Franz Halder also testified at the Nuremberg trials that Nazi leader Hermann Goering admitted to setting fire to the German parliament building, and then falsely blaming the communists for the arson. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev admitted in writing that the Soviet Union’s Red Army shelled the Russian village of Mainila in 1939, and declared that the fire originated from Finland as a basis launching the Winter War four days later. Israel admits that an Israeli terrorist cell operating in Egypt planted bombs in several buildings, including US diplomatic facilities, and then left behind “evidence” implicating the Arabs as the culprits. As admitted by the US government, recently declassified documents show that in the 1960’s, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up American airplanes and commit terrorist acts on American soil, to blame it on the Cubans later in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. And Official State Department documents show that – only nine months before the Joint Chiefs of Staff plan was proposed – the head of the Joint Chiefs and other high-level officials discussed blowing up a consulate in the Dominican Republic in order to justify an invasion of that country. The three plans were not carried out, but they were all discussed as serious proposals. A US Congressional committee admitted that – as part of its “Cointelpro” campaign – the FBI had used many provocateurs in the 1950s through 1970s to carry out violent acts and falsely blame them on political activists.
Although the FBI now admits that the 2001 anthrax attacks were carried out by one or more US government scientists, a senior FBI official says that the FBI was actually told to blame the Anthrax attacks on Al Qaeda by White house officials as they tried to link the anthrax attack to Iraq to force regime change in that country. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Council found that, in 1989, the Civil Cooperation Bureau (a covert branch of the South African Defence Force) approached an explosives expert and asked him “to participate in an operation aimed at discrediting the ANC [the African National Congress] by bombing the police vehicle of the investigating officer into the murder incident,” thus framing the ANC for the bombing. An Algerian diplomat and several officers in the Algerian army admit that, in the 1990s, the Algerian army frequently massacred Algerian civilians and then blamed Islamic militants for the killings. Former Department of Justice Lawyer John Yoo suggested in 2005 that the US should go on the offensive against Al Qaeda, having ‘our intelligence agencies create a false terrorist organization. It could have its own websites, recruitment centers, training camps, and fundraising operations. It could launch fake terrorist operations and claim credit for real terrorist strikes, helping to sow confusion within Al Qaeda’s ranks, causing operatives to doubt others’ identities and to question the validity of communications.’ Former US national security advisor Zibigniew Brezezinski, also a top foreign policy advisor to President Obama, has told the senate that the war on terror is ‘a mythical historical narrative’ which supports the claim of John Yoo that much has been manufactured and self designed for strategic objectives to be executed in the war on terror, whether in the Middle East, Pakistan or Afghanistan. The latter two countries have experienced a heavy load of cyclical violence since the inception of the US war on terror and given that flagship operations have been used to justify US foreign policy with ample evidence provided, one cannot rule out the same real politick games of the use of flagship operations to execute and extend strategic objectives in this region. The politics of fear and their use to mobilize public opinion and push nations into war have been ingrained in the White House psyche post 9/11.

 The writer is an assistant professor of political science at LUMS.

 @mk_zahid