“We need to make clear to people that the cancer is in Pakistan.” – U.S. President Barack Obama, in Obama’s Wars Sanjeev Miglani reported in Reuters on Sept. 23 of just how intricate the war within the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan really is. This observation comes on the heels of reporter-cum-demigod Bob Woodward’s book, Obama’s Wars. Woodward, a reporter for The Washington Post, is infamous for exposing the Watergate scandal with fellow colleague Carl Bernstein. Watergate led to the impeachment and resignation of the then U.S. President Richard Nixon. In Woodward’s latest book, the author’s usual ‘fly on the wall’ presence is evident, detailing infighting among senior officials of the administration, however more alarming is the actual gravity and importance of the discussions. What is certain is that the U.S. is supporting or operating under the purview of an other government agency (OGA), and in military terms, this usually refers to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Granted, the U.S. and its units are officially prohibited by Islamabad from operating over the border in Pakistan. However, the book elucidates an OGA that is financing various warlords’ highly skilled and handsomely compensated foot soldiers via proxy to carry out a more sophisticated mode of operations than previously thought in Pakistan. This information was largely disclosed in late July after WikiLeaks posted 76,000 classified U.S. military field reports on its website using various decryption methods. The reports reveal the secret war being conducted by Afghanistan’s 3,000 member Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams as instrumental. The Post paints a picture of the operations as, “a nerve centre in the covert war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda”. The OGA’s efforts, now operating on a vast scale, have included calculated assassinations of high-threat, midlevel insurgents, execution of unmanned drone attacks – a number now totalling over 70, and while in the combat zone, the collection of sensitive intelligence materiel. Absent is the long held belief that the U.S. conducted raids by way of Special Operations (SO) forces or conventional means. A further revelation illustrates that the Afghan OGA’s paramilitary wing, also known as the Special Activities Division, has been operating since 2001, at the onset of the invasion and ground assault in Afghanistan. The Afghan OGA has metamorphosed into a finely tuned killing machine, expanding its operations within the country and providing much needed support for SO forces. As Woodward claims, everyone in the Obama administration, from the president down, weighed in on the OGA’s importance and understandably, with differing opinions. However, it was the president himself who initiated a directive for a proxy that would eliminate the lethality of the threats from al Qaeda. Obama deduced that the path to success simply could not be traversed without arresting the development of a force running rampant within the tribal areas of Pakistan. On Sept. 23, The New York Times’ review of Obama’s Wars emphasized that the president, in addition to the war’s 2009 Strategy Review hoped to, “deny safe haven to al Qaeda”, “degrade the Taliban insurgency”, “[build] sufficient Afghan capacity to secure and govern their country”, while understanding that, “this approach is not fully resourced counterinsurgency or nation building, but a narrower approach”. The president’s modus operandi contrasts what the Reuters wire story poignantly points out: That financing shoots of the Afghan OGA increases the intrinsic importance of acting warlords and their militias. Therefore, for the U.S. it becomes a slippery slope, backing the very players it once hoped to squeeze out of a resolution formula. In trying to rescue Pakistan from becoming a failed state and sustaining the infrastructure of Afghanistan, arms support is being siphoned from Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) in Khost and Paktika, provinces that border Pakistan. From the major news sources’ perspectives to the WikiLeaks-made public reports, it appears that Obama’s Wars and its cancerous, rapidly growing intricacies have only just begun.