Background of Pohakuloa Training Area Garrison Commander
LTC Kevin E. Cronin
Lieutenant Colonel (LTC) Kevin Cronin is the Pohakuloa Training Area commander. Prior to his arrival to Hawaii Island, LTC Cronin served at the NATO Special Operations Headquarters (NSHQ) in Belgium as the Director of the NSHQ Operations and Coordination Center (NOCC).
LTC Cronin was commissioned as an Infantry officer in the U.S. Army upon graduation from the United States Military Academy in 2003. In 2008, following graduation from the Special Forces Qualification Course at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, he was assigned as a Special Forces officer.
LTC Cronin has served in a variety of assignments, ranging from tactical to strategic, including four deployments to Afghanistan, two deployments to Iraq, and deployments to Qatar, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan.
LTC Cronin’s previous command assignments include: Commander of Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) SFG (A) in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, Syria, and Lebanon; Commander of Special Forces Operational Detachment-Alpha 5131 in Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 5th SFG (A) in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, Iraq, Jordan, and Afghanistan; and a Rifle Platoon Leader in Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division in Fort Benning, Georgia and Iraq.
LTC Cronin’s select staff assignments include: Commander’s Action Group planner at NSHQ; Operations Officer for the Military Communications Channel in Doha, Qatar; Battalion Operations Officer for 1st Battalion, 5th SFG (A) in Fort Campbell, Kentucky; Special Assistant for Asia-Pacific, Middle East, Africa, and Cyber Policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) for Legislative Affairs; Special Operations Forces (SOF)/Counter-Terrorism (CT) Policy Adviser in the OSD for Policy; Special Projects Officer at the NATO Special Operations Component Command – Afghanistan (NSOCC-A)/Special Operations Joint Task Force – Afghanistan (SOJTF-A) headquarters in Kabul, Afghanistan; Aide-de-camp to the Commanding General, Maneuver Center of Excellence and Fort Benning, Georgia; and, Team Chief, Combined Joint Inter-Agency Task Force Shafafiyat (Transparency) at NATO International Security Assurance Force (ISAF) headquarters in Kabul, Afghanistan.
LTC Cronin holds a Master in International Public Policy with a concentration in Strategic Studies from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and is a former term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. LTC Cronin is a 2016 Shawn Brimley Next Generation National Security Leaders fellow at the Center for a New American Security. He also participated in the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army’s Strategic Broadening Seminar in the United Kingdom in 2015. From 2013-2014, he served as a U.S. Special Operations Command Legislative Affairs fellow in Washington, D.C.
Originally from Rowayton, Connecticut, LTC Cronin resides in Waimea, Hawaii. LTC Cronin is married to the former Anne Gillman of San Diego, California, and they have one beautiful daughter, Anna, born on Hawaii Island. Anne is a Foreign Service Officer in the U.S. Department of State.
LTC Kevin Cronin likely has some first-hand knowledge of CIA/US Special Ops Forces killings documented below.
AFGHANISTAN, HUMAN RIGHTS, MILITARY, PENTAGON, U.S., WAR CRIMES
Tracking CIA-Backed Zero Units in Afghanistan
January 12, 2023
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Deadly night raids. Faulty U.S. intelligence. A classified war loophole. Lynzy Billing has spent years investigating the civilian casualties of Afghanistan C.I.A.-backed Zero Units.
Road to Jalalabad, Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan, 2008. (Todd Huffman, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
In 2019, reporter Lynzy Billing returned to Afghanistan to research the murders of her mother and sister nearly 30 years earlier. Instead, in the country’s remote reaches, she stumbled upon the C.I.A.-backed Zero Units, who conducted night raids — quick, brutal operations designed to have resounding psychological impacts while ostensibly removing high-priority enemy targets.
So, Billing attempted to catalog the scale of civilian deaths left behind by just one of four Zero Units, known as the 02, over a four year period. The resulting report represents an effort no one else has done or will ever be able to do again. Here is what she found:
At least 452 civilians were killed in 107 raids. This number is almost certainly an undercount. While some raids did result in the capture or death of known militants, others killed bystanders or appeared to target people for no clear reason.
A troubling number of raids appear to have relied on faulty intelligence by the C.I.A.and other U.S. intelligence-gathering services. Two Afghan Zero Unit soldiers described raids they were sent on in which they said their targets were chosen by the United States.
The former head of Afghanistan’s intelligence agency acknowledged that the units were getting it wrong at times and killing civilians. He oversaw the Zero Units during a crucial period and agreed that no one paid a consequence for those botched raids. He went on to describe an operation that went wrong: “I went to the family myself and said: ˜We are sorry. We want to be different from the Taliban. And I mean we did, we wanted to be different from the Taliban.
The Afghan soldiers weren’t alone on the raids; U.S. special operations forces soldiers working with the C.I.A. often joined them. The Afghan soldiers Billing spoke to said they were typically accompanied on raids by at least 10 U.S. special operations forces soldiers. “These deaths happened at our hands. I have participated in many raids, one of the Afghans said, “and there have been hundreds of raids where someone is killed and they are not Taliban or ISIS, and where no militants are present at all.
Jan. 1, 2011: U.S. soldier watching as a helicopter provides cover to an explosive ordnance disposal team in Laghman Province, Afghanistan. (U.S. Army, Ryan C. Matson)
Military planners baked potential collateral damage into the pre-raid calculus of how many women/children/noncombatants were at risk if the raid went awry, according to one U.S. Army Ranger Billing spoke to. Those forecasts were often wildly off, he said, yet no one seemed to really care. He told Billing that night raids were a better option than airstrikes but acknowledged that the raids risked creating new insurgent recruits. You go on night raids, make more enemies, then you gotta go on more night raids for the more enemies you now have to kill.
Because the Zero Units operated under a CIA program, their actions were part of a classified war, with the lines of accountability so obscured that no one had to answer for operations that went wrong. And U.S. responsibility for the raids was quietly muddied by a legal loophole that allows the C.I.A. and any U.S. soldiers lent to the agency for their operations to act without the same level of oversight as the American military.
Congressional aides and former intelligence committee staffers said they don’t believe Congress was getting a complete picture of the C.I.A. overseas operations. Lawyers representing whistleblowers said there is ample motivation to downplay to Congress the number of civilians killed or injured in such operations. By the time reports get to congressional oversight committees, one lawyer said, they are undercounting deaths and overstating accuracy.
Afghan commandos during a night raid, December 2007. (Marie Schult, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons)
U.S. military and intelligence agencies have long relied on night raids by forces like the 02 unit to fight insurgencies around the globe. The strategy has, again and again, drawn outrage for its reliance on sometimes flawed intelligence and civilian death count. In 1967, the C.I.A. Phoenix Program famously used kill-capture raids against the Viet Cong insurgency in South Vietnam, creating an intense public blowback. Despite the program’s ignominious reputation a 1971 Pentagon study found only 3 percent of those killed or captured were full or probationary Viet Cong members above the district level — it appears to have served as a blueprint for future night raid operations.
Eyewitnesses, survivors, and family members described how Zero Unit soldiers had stormed into their homes at night, killing loved ones** at more than 30 raid sites Billing visited. No Afghan or U.S officials returned to investigate. In one instance, a 22-year-old named Batour witnessed a raid that killed his two brothers. One was a teacher and the other a university student. He told Billing the Zero Unit strategy had actually made enemies of families like his. He and his brothers, he said, had supported the government and vowed never to join the Taliban. Now, he said, he’s not so sure.
Little in the way of explanation was ever provided to the relatives of the dead or to their neighbors and friends — as to why these particular individuals were targeted and what crimes they were accused of. Families who sought answers from provincial officials about the raids were told nothing could be done because they were Zero Unit operations. “They have their own intelligence and they do their own operation one grieving family member remembered being told after his three grandchildren were killed in an airstrike and night raid. The provincial governor gave us a parcel of rice, a can of oil and some sugar as compensation for the killings. At medical facilities, doctors told Billing they had never been contacted by Afghan or U.S. investigators or human rights groups about the fate of those injured in the raids. Some of the injured later died, quietly boosting the casualty count.
Burying civilians in Afghanistan. (Ariana News)
In a statement, C.I.A. spokesperson Tammy Thorp said, “As a rule, the U.S. takes extraordinary measures — beyond those mandated by law to reduce civilian casualties in armed conflict, and treats any claim of human rights abuses with the utmost seriousness. She said any allegations of human rights abuses by a foreign partner are reviewed and, if valid, the C.I.A. and “other elements of the U.S. government take concrete steps, including providing training on applicable law and best practices, or if necessary terminating assistance or the relationship. Thorp said the Zero Units had been the target of a systematic propaganda campaign designed to discredit them because “of the threat they posed to Taliban rule.
The Department of Defense did not respond to questions about Zero Unit operations.
With a forensic pathologist, Billing drove hundreds of miles across some of the country’s most volatile areas visiting the sites of more than 30 raids, interviewing witnesses, survivors, family members, doctors and village elders. To understand the program, she met secretly with two Zero Unit soldiers over the course of years, wrangled with Afghanistan’s former spy master in his heavily fortified home and traveled to a diner in the middle of America to meet with an Army Ranger who joined the units on operations.
A market in Jalalabad, Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan, 2008. (Todd Huffman, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
She also conducted more than 350 interviews with current and former Afghan and American government officials, Afghan commanders, U.S military officials, American defense and security officials and former C.I.A. intelligence officers, as well as U.S. lawmakers and former oversight committee members, counterterrorism and policy officers, civilian-casualty assessment experts, military lawyers, intelligence analysts, representatives of human rights organizations, doctors, hospital directors, coroners, forensic examiners, eyewitnesses and family members — some of whom are not named in the story for their safety.
While America’s war in Afghanistan may be over, there are lessons to be learned from what it left behind. Billing writes:
The American government has scant basis for believing it has a full picture of the Zero Units performance. Again and again, I spoke with Afghans who had never shared their stories with anyone. Congressional officials concerned about the CIA’s operations in Afghanistan said they were startled by the civilian death toll I documented.
As my notebooks filled, I came to realize that I was compiling an eyewitness account of a particularly ignominious chapter in the United States’ fraught record of overseas interventions.
Without a true reckoning of what happened in Afghanistan, it became clear the U.S. could easily deploy the same failed tactics in some new country against some new threat.
Read her full report here.
This article is from ProPublica. —
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Jim Albertini Malu ‘Aina Center For Non-violent Education & Action P.O. Box 489 Ola’a (Kurtistown) Hawai’i 96760
