Secret Assault on Terrorism Widens on Two Continents

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 Aug 14, 2010

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White House officials worked to win support for their efforts in Yemen from President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

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Articles in this series will examine the secret expansion of the war against Al Qaeda and its allies.

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Attacking Al Qaeda in Yemen

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Counterterrorism Geography

By SCOTT SHANE, MARK MAZZETTI and ROBERT F. WORTH

This article is by Scott Shane, Mark Mazzetti and Robert F. Worth.

WASHINGTON — At first, the news from Yemen on May 25 sounded like a modest victory in the campaign against terrorists: an airstrike had hit a group suspected of being operatives for Al Qaeda in the remote desert of Marib Province, birthplace of the legendary queen of Sheba.

But the strike, it turned out, had also killed the province’s deputy governor, a respected local leader who Yemeni officials said had been trying to talk Qaeda members into giving up their fight. Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, accepted responsibility for the death and paid blood money to the offended tribes.

The strike, though, was not the work of Mr. Saleh’s decrepit Soviet-era air force. It was a secret mission by the United States military, according to American officials, at least the fourth such assault on Al Qaeda in the arid mountains and deserts of Yemen since December.

The attack offered a glimpse of the Obama administration’s shadow war against Al Qaeda and its allies. In roughly a dozen countries — from the deserts of North Africa, to the mountains of Pakistan, to former Soviet republics crippled by ethnic and religious strife — the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations, pursuing the enemy using robotic drones and commando teams, paying contractors to spy and training local operatives to chase terrorists.

The White House has intensified the Central Intelligence Agency’s drone missile campaign in Pakistan, approved raids against Qaeda operatives in Somalia and launched clandestine operations from Kenya. The administration has worked with European allies to dismantle terrorist groups in North Africa, efforts that include a recent French strike in Algeria. And the Pentagon tapped a network of private contractors to gather intelligence about things like militant hide-outs in Pakistan and the location of an American soldier currently in Taliban hands.

While the stealth war began in the Bush administration, it has expanded under President Obama, who rose to prominence in part for his early opposition to the invasion of Iraq. Virtually none of the newly aggressive steps undertaken by the United States government have been publicly acknowledged. In contrast with the troop buildup in Afghanistan, which came after months of robust debate, for example, the American military campaign in Yemen began without notice in December and has never been officially confirmed.

Obama administration officials point to the benefits of bringing the fight against Al Qaeda and other militants into the shadows. Afghanistan and Iraq, they said, have sobered American politicians and voters about the staggering costs of big wars that topple governments, require years of occupation and can be a catalyst for further radicalization throughout the Muslim world.

Instead of “the hammer,” in the words of John O. Brennan, President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, America will rely on the “scalpel.” In a speech in May, Mr. Brennan, an architect of the White House strategy, used this analogy while pledging a “multigenerational” campaign against Al Qaeda and its extremist affiliates.

Yet such wars come with many risks: the potential for botched operations that fuel anti-American rage; a blurring of the lines between soldiers and spies that could put troops at risk of being denied Geneva Convention protections; a weakening of the Congressional oversight system put in place to prevent abuses by America’s secret operatives; and a reliance on authoritarian foreign leaders and surrogates with sometimes murky loyalties.

The May strike in Yemen, for example, provoked a revenge attack on an oil pipeline by local tribesmen and produced a propaganda bonanza for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. It also left President Saleh privately furious about the death of the provincial official, Jabir al-Shabwani, and scrambling to prevent an anti-American backlash, according to Yemeni officials.

The administration’s demands have accelerated a transformation of the C.I.A. into a paramilitary organization as much as a spying agency, which some critics worry could lower the threshold for future quasi-military operations. In Pakistan’s mountains, the agency had broadened its drone campaign beyond selective strikes against Qaeda leaders and now regularly obliterates suspected enemy compounds and logistics convoys, just as the military would grind down an enemy force.

For its part, the Pentagon is becoming more like the C.I.A. Across the Middle East and elsewhere, Special Operations troops under secret “Execute Orders” have conducted spying missions that were once the preserve of civilian intelligence agencies. With code names like Eager Pawn and Indigo Spade, such programs typically operate with even less transparency and Congressional oversight than traditional covert actions by the C.I.A.

And, as American counterterrorism operations spread beyond war zones into territory hostile to the military, private contractors have taken on a prominent role, raising concerns that the United States has outsourced some of its most important missions to a sometimes unaccountable private army.

A Proving Ground

Yemen is a testing ground for the “scalpel” approach Mr. Brennan endorses. Administration officials warn of the growing strength of Al Qaeda’s affiliate there, citing as evidence its attempt on Dec. 25 to blow up a trans-Atlantic jetliner using a young Nigerian operative. Some American officials believe that militants in Yemen could now pose an even greater threat than Al Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan.

The officials said that they have benefited from the Yemeni government’s new resolve to fight Al Qaeda and that the American strikes — carried out with cruise missiles and Harrier fighter jets — had been approved by Yemen’s leaders. The strikes, administration officials say, have killed dozens of militants suspected of plotting future attacks. The Pentagon and the C.I.A. have quietly bulked up the number of their operatives at the embassy in Sana, the Yemeni capital, over the past year.

“Where we want to get is to much more small scale, preferably locally driven operations,” said Representative Adam Smith, Democrat of Washington, who serves on the Intelligence and Armed Services Committees.

“For the first time in our history, an entity has declared a covert war against us,” Mr. Smith said, referring to Al Qaeda. “And we are using similar elements of American power to respond to that covert war.”

Some security experts draw parallels to the cold war, when the United States drew heavily on covert operations as it fought a series of proxy battles with the Soviet Union.

And some of the central players of those days have returned to take on supporting roles in the shadow war. Michael G. Vickers, who helped run the C.I.A.’s campaign to funnel guns and money to the Afghanistan mujahedeen in the 1980s and was featured in the book and movie “Charlie Wilson’s War,” is now the top Pentagon official overseeing Special Operations troops around the globe. Duane R. Clarridge, a profane former C.I.A. officer who ran operations in Central America and was indicted in the Iran-contra scandal, turned up this year helping run a Pentagon-financed private spying operation in Pakistan.

In pursuing this strategy, the White House is benefiting from a unique political landscape. Republican lawmakers have been unwilling to take Mr. Obama to task for aggressively hunting terrorists, and many Democrats seem eager to embrace any move away from the long, costly wars begun by the Bush administration.

Still, it has astonished some old hands of the military and intelligence establishment. Jack Devine, a former top C.I.A. clandestine officer who helped run the covert war against the Soviet Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s, said his record showed that he was “not exactly a cream puff” when it came to advocating secret operations.

But he warned that the safeguards introduced after Congressional investigations into clandestine wars of the past — from C.I.A. assassination attempts to the Iran-contra affair, in which money from secret arms dealings with Iran was funneled to right-wing rebels in Nicaragua known as the contras — were beginning to be weakened. “We got the covert action programs under well-defined rules after we had made mistakes and learned from them,” he said. “Now, we’re coming up with a new model, and I’m concerned there are not clear rules.”

Cooperation and Control

The initial American strike in Yemen came on Dec. 17, hitting what was believed to be a Qaeda training camp in Abyan Province, in the southern part of the country. The first report from the Yemeni government said that its air force had killed “around 34” Qaeda fighters there, and that others had been captured elsewhere in coordinated ground operations.

The next day, Mr. Obama called President Saleh to thank him for his cooperation and pledge continuing American support. Mr. Saleh’s approval for the strike — rushed because of intelligence reports that Qaeda suicide bombers might be headed to Sana — was the culmination of administration efforts to win him over, including visits by Mr. Brennan and Gen. David H. Petraeus, then the commander of military operations in the Middle East.

The accounts of the American strikes in Yemen, which include many details that have not previously been reported, are based on interviews with American and Yemeni officials who requested anonymity because the military campaign in Yemen is classified, as well as documents from Yemeni investigators.

As word of the Dec. 17 attack filtered out, a very mixed picture emerged. The Yemeni press quickly identified the United States as responsible for the strike. Qaeda members seized on video of dead children and joined a protest rally a few days later, broadcast by Al Jazeera, in which a speaker shouldering an AK-47 rifle appealed to Yemeni counterterrorism troops.

“Soldiers, you should know we do not want to fight you,” the Qaeda operative, standing amid angry Yemenis, declared. “There is no problem between you and us. The problem is between us and America and its agents. Beware taking the side of America!”

A Navy ship offshore had fired the weapon in the attack, a cruise missile loaded with cluster bombs, according to a report by Amnesty International. Unlike conventional bombs, cluster bombs disperse small munitions, some of which do not immediately explode, increasing the likelihood of civilian causalities. The use of cluster munitions, later documented by Amnesty, was condemned by human rights groups.

An inquiry by the Yemeni Parliament found that the strike had killed at least 41 members of two families living near the makeshift Qaeda camp. Three more civilians were killed and nine were wounded four days later when they stepped on unexploded munitions from the strike, the inquiry found.

American officials cited strained resources for decisions about some of the Yemen strikes. With the C.I.A.’s armed drones tied up with the bombing campaign in Pakistan, the officials said, cruise missiles were all that was available at the time. Drones are favored by the White House for clandestine strikes because they can linger over targets for hours or days before unleashing Hellfire missiles, reducing the risk that women, children or other noncombatants will fall victim.

The Yemen operation has raised a broader question: who should be running the shadow war? White House officials are debating whether the C.I.A. should take over the Yemen campaign as a “covert action,” which would allow the United States to carry out operations even without the approval of Yemen’s government. By law, covert action programs require presidential authorization and formal notification to the Congressional intelligence committees. No such requirements apply to the military’s so-called Special Access Programs, like the Yemen strikes.

Obama administration officials defend their efforts in Yemen. The strikes have been “conducted very methodically,” and claims of innocent civilians being killed are “very much exaggerated,” said a senior counterterrorism official. He added that comparing the nascent Yemen campaign with American drone strikes in Pakistan was unfair, since the United States has had a decade to build an intelligence network in Pakistan that feeds the drone program.

In Yemen, officials said, there is a dearth of solid intelligence about Qaeda operations. “It will take time to develop and grow that capability,” the senior official said.

On Dec. 24, another cruise missile struck in a remote valley called Rafadh, about 400 miles southeast of the Yemeni capital and two hours from the nearest paved road. The Yemeni authorities said the strike killed dozens of Qaeda operatives, including the leader of the Qaeda branch in Yemen, Nasser al-Wuhayshi, and his Saudi deputy, Said Ali al-Shihri. But officials later acknowledged that neither man was hit, and local witnesses say the missile killed five low-level Qaeda members.

The next known American strike, on March 14, was more successful, killing a Qaeda operative named Jamil al-Anbari and possibly another militant. Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch acknowledged Mr. Anbari’s death. On June 19, the group retaliated with a lethal attack on a government security compound in Aden that left 11 people dead and said the “brigade of the martyr Jamil al-Anbari” carried it out.

In part, the spotty record of the Yemen airstrikes may derive from another unavoidable risk of the new shadow war: the need to depend on local proxies who may be unreliable or corrupt, or whose agendas differ from that of the United States.

American officials have a troubled history with Mr. Saleh, a wily political survivor who cultivates radical clerics at election time and has a history of making deals with jihadists. Until recently, taking on Al Qaeda had not been a priority for his government, which has been fighting an intermittent armed rebellion since 2004.

And for all Mr. Saleh’s power — his portraits hang everywhere in the Yemeni capital — his government is deeply unpopular in the remote provinces where the militants have sought sanctuary. The tribes there tend to regularly switch sides, making it difficult to depend on them for information about Al Qaeda. “My state is anyone who fills my pocket with money,” goes one old tribal motto.

The Yemeni security services are similarly unreliable and have collaborated with jihadists at times. The United States has trained elite counterterrorism teams there in recent years, but the military still suffers from corruption and poor discipline.

It is still not clear why Mr. Shabwani, the Marib deputy governor, was killed. The day he died, he was planning to meet members of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch in Wadi Abeeda, a remote, lawless plain dotted with orange groves east of Yemen’s capital. The most widely accepted explanation is that Yemeni and American officials failed to fully communicate before the attack.

Abdul Ghani al-Eryani, a Yemeni political analyst, said the civilian deaths in the first strike and the killing of the deputy governor in May “had a devastating impact.” The mishaps, he said, “embarrassed the government and gave ammunition to Al Qaeda and the Salafists,” he said, referring to adherents of the form of Islam embraced by militants.

American officials said President Saleh was angry about the strike in May, but not so angry as to call for a halt to the clandestine American operations. “At the end of the day, it’s not like he said, ‘No more,’ ” said one Obama administration official. “He didn’t kick us out of the country.”

Weighing Success

Despite the airstrike campaign, the leadership of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula survives, and there is little sign the group is much weaker.

Attacks by Qaeda militants in Yemen have picked up again, with several deadly assaults on Yemeni army convoys in recent weeks. Al Qaeda’s Yemen branch has managed to put out its first English-language online magazine, Inspire, complete with bomb-making instructions. Intelligence officials believe that Samir Khan, a 24-year-old American who arrived from North Carolina last year, played a major role in producing the slick publication.

As a test case, the strikes have raised the classic trade-off of the post-Sept. 11 era: Do the selective hits make the United States safer by eliminating terrorists? Or do they help the terrorist network frame its violence as a heroic religious struggle against American aggression, recruiting new operatives for the enemy?

Al Qaeda has worked tirelessly to exploit the strikes, and in Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric now hiding in Yemen, the group has perhaps the most sophisticated ideological opponent the United States has faced since 2001.

“If George W. Bush is remembered by getting America stuck in Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s looking like Obama wants to be remembered as the president who got America stuck in Yemen,” the cleric said in a March Internet address that was almost gleeful about the American campaign.

Most Yemenis have little sympathy for Al Qaeda and have observed the American strikes with “passive indignation,” Mr. Eryani said. But, he added, “I think the strikes over all have been counterproductive.”

Edmund J. Hull, the United States ambassador to Yemen from 2001 to 2004, cautioned that American policy must not be limited to using force against Al Qaeda.

“I think it’s both understandable and defensible for the Obama administration to pursue aggressive counterterrorism operations,” Mr. Hull said. But he added: “I’m concerned that counterterrorism is defined as an intelligence and military program. To be successful in the long run, we have to take a far broader approach that emphasizes political, social and economic forces.”

Obama administration officials say that is exactly what they are doing — sharply increasing the foreign aid budget for Yemen and offering both money and advice to address the country’s crippling problems. They emphasized that the core of the American effort was not the strikes but training for elite Yemeni units, providing equipment and sharing intelligence to support Yemeni sweeps against Al Qaeda.

Still, the historical track record of limited military efforts like the Yemen strikes is not encouraging. Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations, examines in a forthcoming book what he has labeled “discrete military operations” from the Balkans to Pakistan since the end of the cold war in 1991. He found that these operations seldom achieve either their military or political objectives.

But he said that over the years, military force had proved to be a seductive tool that tended to dominate “all the discussions and planning” and push more subtle solutions to the side.

When terrorists threaten Americans, Mr. Zenko said, “there is tremendous pressure from the National Security Council and the Congressional committees to, quote, ‘do something.’ ”

That is apparent to visitors at the American Embassy in Sana, who have noticed that it is increasingly crowded with military personnel and intelligence operatives. For now, the shadow warriors are taking the lead.

Muhammad al-Ahmadi contributed reporting from Yemen.

The Nation - 'Two, Three, Many Afghanistans'

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by Michael T. Klare

With little fanfare, the Defense Department has announced a revolution in military strategy--a transformation in global outlook and combat tactics whose only true precedent is the equally momentous turnaround engineered by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara during the Kennedy administration. Then, as now, an incoming administration inherited a strategy heavily weighted toward high-intensity warfare among well-equipped adversaries, mostly in Europe and Asia; now, as then, the response has been to redirect the Pentagon's attention toward low-intensity combat on the fringes of the developing world. The result back then was Vietnam; today it is Afghanistan and an unknown number of "future Afghanistans."

When Kennedy assumed the presidency in 1961, the Defense Department was governed by a military "posture" that emphasized nuclear war and massive tank battles on the plains of Europe. Sensing that the main theater of competition between the superpowers had shifted to proxy warfare in Asia, Africa and Latin America, Kennedy ordered McNamara to undertake a massive enhancement of US capabilities for what were then called "brush-fire wars" in the Third World. The president also authorized a vast expansion of the Special Forces--then a small and obscure Army unit intended for partisan operations behind Soviet lines in Eastern Europe--and gave them responsibility for promoting the newly fashionable concept of counterinsurgency.

"Subversive insurgency is another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origins--war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins; war by ambush instead of by combat; by infiltration instead of aggression," Kennedy said at West Point in 1962. "It requires in those situations where we must counter it...a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force, and therefore a new and wholly different kind of training."

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Kennedy's fierce patronage of counterinsurgency doctrine led to expanded US involvement in Southeast Asia and ultimately to the unmitigated disaster of Vietnam. In the wake of the war there, the US military largely abandoned its interest in counterinsurgency, fearing the specter of Che Guevara's 1967 call for "two, three, many Vietnams." Instead, it chose to focus on a renewed cold war in Europe and later, under the first President Bush, conventional combat against "rogue" states like Iran, Iraq and North Korea--basically recycling tactics developed for combat against Soviet forces. Although promising to modernize this posture after 9/11, the second President Bush merely grafted his "global war on terror" onto the rogue-state approach, choosing to invade Iraq rather than invent a new strategy aimed at radical Islamist insurgencies.

Now we have President Obama and his domineering Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, both of whom have criticized the Pentagon's emphasis on conventional combat at the expense of low-intensity warfare. Iraq, Obama has said, was the "wrong" war, a distraction from the more urgent task of defeating Al Qaeda and its network of allies, including the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban. To rectify this strategic bungling, as he sees it, Obama has been redeploying combat resources from Iraq to Afghanistan. But this is just the beginning of his grand vision: Obama seeks to fashion a new military posture that shifts the emphasis from conventional combat to brush-fire wars and counterinsurgency.

"The struggle against violent extremism will not be finished quickly, and it extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan," Obama declared at West Point on December 1. "Unlike the great power conflicts and clear lines of division that defined the twentieth century, our effort will involve disorderly regions, failed states, diffuse enemies." To prevail in these contests, "we'll have to be nimble and precise in our use of military power. Where Al Qaeda and its allies attempt to establish a foothold--whether in Somalia or Yemen or elsewhere--they must be confronted by growing pressure and strong partnerships."

Clearly, this is a long-term strategy with far-reaching implications. Even if Obama brings some forces back from Afghanistan in the summer of 2011, as he has pledged, US troops are likely to be engaged there (some perhaps in a covert mode) and in a number of other hot spots--"two, three, many Afghanistans," to put Che's dictum into contemporary parlance.

This strategy, first enunciated in a series of speeches by Obama and Gates, has been given formal character in the Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon's Congressionally mandated overhaul of strategy. Released on February 1, the QDR is expected to guide military planning over the next four years and to govern the Pentagon's budget priorities.

Like earlier Pentagon reviews, the 2010 QDR begins by reaffirming America's stature as a global power with global responsibilities--a burden no other country can shoulder. "The strength and influence of the United States are deeply intertwined with the fate of the broader international system," the document asserts. "The U.S. military must therefore be prepared to support broad national goals of promoting stability in key regions, providing assistance to nations in need, and promoting the common good."

But while this globalist mission has remained unchanged for many decades, the nature of the threats confronted by American forces has changed dramatically. "The United States faces a complex and uncertain security landscape in which the pace of change continues to accelerate," the QDR indicates. "The rise of new powers, the growing influence of non-state actors, the spread of weapons of mass destruction and other destructive enabling technologies...pose profound challenges to international order."

The United States also faces a danger not unlike that envisioned by Kennedy in 1961: the emergence of radical insurgencies in the corrupt and decaying nations of the developing world. "The changing international system will continue to put pressure on the modern state system, likely increasing the frequency and severity of the challenges associated with chronically fragile states," the QDR notes. "These states are often catalysts for the growth of radicalism and extremism."

In this environment, America's traditional advantages in conventional conflict--what the QDR calls "large-scale force-on-force warfare"--can no longer guarantee success. Instead, the US military must be prepared to prevail in any number of conceivable combat scenarios and employ the same sort of novel warfighting tactics as those used by America's rivals and adversaries. Our principal objective, the QDR affirms, is "ensuring that US forces are flexible and adaptable so that they can confront the full range of challenges that could emerge from a complex and dynamic security environment."

Within this mandate, no priority is given greater weight than the task of preparing for an unending series of counterinsurgency campaigns in remote corners of the developing world. "The wars we are fighting today and assessments of the future security environment together demand that the United States retain and enhance a whole-of-government capability to succeed in large-scale counterinsurgency (COIN), stability, and counterterrorism (CT) operations in environments ranging from densely populated urban areas and mega-cities, to remote mountains, deserts, jungles, and littoral regions," the QDR explains.

The language used here is instructive--both in the degree to which it reveals current Pentagon thinking and the ways it echoes Kennedy's outlook. "Stability operations, large-scale counterinsurgency, and counterterrorism operations are not niche challenges or the responsibility of a single Military Department, but rather require a portfolio of capabilities as well as sufficient capacity from across America's Armed Forces," the QDR states. "Nor are these type of operations a transitory or anomalous phenomenon in the security landscape. On the contrary, we must expect that for the indefinite future, violent extremist groups, with or without state sponsorship, will continue to foment instability and challenge U.S. and allied interests." As a result, "U.S. forces will need to maintain a high level of competency in this mission area for decades to come." (Emphasis added.)

As the QDR makes plain, this will require substantial retooling of military capabilities. In place of "large-scale force-on-force warfare," the Pentagon must be configured to fight many small-scale conflicts in dissimilar locations on several continents at once. This requires that forces be equipped for counterinsurgency-type operations: helicopters, small arms, body armor, night-vision devices, mine-resistant vehicles, aerial gunships, surveillance drones and the like. Some of this material has already been provided to forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the entire military will have to be re-equipped.

Also required will be increased military aid and training (provided by growing cadres of Special Forces) for the military and police forces of embattled governments in fraying Third World states.

"Terrorist groups seek to evade security forces by exploiting ungoverned and under-governed areas as safe havens from which to recruit, indoctrinate, and train fighters," the QDR notes. "Where appropriate, U.S. forces will work with the military forces of partner nations to strengthen their capacity for internal security.... For reasons of political legitimacy as well as sheer economic necessity, there is no substitute for professional, motivated local security forces protecting populations threatened by insurgents and terrorists in their midst."

Except for a slight modernization of terminology, these are exactly the words used by Kennedy to justify the deployment of thousands of counterinsurgency "advisers" in Vietnam, plus hundreds more in Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The danger is that America's "partner nations" are not capable of deploying "professional, motivated" forces, so US soldiers will be compelled to shoulder an ever-increasing share of the burden. As proved true in Vietnam--and as is being repeated today in Afghanistan--this will likely be the case when the local army and police are viewed by the majority of the population as tools of a corrupt and unresponsive government.

What should be cause for alarm is that despite the worrisome picture in Afghanistan, the Pentagon is determined to export this model to other areas, many for the first time, including Africa. "The need to assist fragile, post-conflict states, such as Liberia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sudan, and failed states such as Somalia, and transnational problems, including extremism, piracy, illegal fishing, and narcotics trafficking, pose significant challenges," the document notes. "America's efforts will hinge on partnering with African states, other international allies and partners, and regional and sub-regional security organizations to conduct capacity-building and peacekeeping operations, prevent terrorism, and address humanitarian crises."

The United States is already assisting the Ugandan government in its seemingly futile efforts to eradicate the Lord's Resistance Army, a brutal guerrilla group with no discernible ideology, as well as the Somali government in its (equally futile) campaign to rid Mogadishu of Al Shabab, a militant Islamic group linked to Al Qaeda. It is likely that advisory teams from the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, based at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, are engaged in similar operations in North Africa and the Sahel. (The CJTF-HOA is the combat arm of the US Africa Command, a multiservice headquarters organization established by Bush in 2008 and given expanded responsibilities since then by Obama.)

The Pentagon is also supporting counterinsurgency operations in Colombia, the Philippines and Yemen, among other countries. Typically, these operations entail deploying training and advisory teams, providing arms and intelligence information, and employing (often covert) specialized combat units. According to the QDR, "U.S. forces are working in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, Colombia, and elsewhere to provide training, equipment, and advice to their host-country counterparts on how to better seek out and dismantle terrorist and insurgent networks while providing security to populations that have been intimidated by violent elements in their midst." Again, one must ask, Just how deeply is the United States involved? Where is this leading? What happens when the "host-country counterparts" prove unequal to the task?

The worry that this will lead to an endless series of Vietnam- or Afghanistan-like counterinsurgencies is further heightened by the QDR's call for increased reliance on social scientists to better comprehend the perplexing social and cultural realities of these faraway places. Under its Minerva Initiative, the Defense Department is seeking "the intellectual capital necessary to meet the challenges of operating in a changing and complex environment." For those whose memory stretches back far enough, this will recall the infamous Project Camelot, a Vietnam-era Army effort to secure academic assistance in assessing public attitudes in Third World countries for counterinsurgency purposes.

The greatest risk in all this, of course, is that the military will become bogged down in a constellation of grueling, low-level wars. This is the prospect of "imperial over-stretch" spoken of by Yale historian Paul Kennedy in his 1987 classic, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. It is also, says Fareed Zakaria in The Post-American World, the scenario we must avoid if the United States is to escape the fate of the British Empire and other failed imperiums. "Britain's strategic blunder was to spend decades--time and money, energy and attention--on vain attempts to stabilize peripheral places on the map," Zakaria wrote in 2008. "The United States could easily fall into a similar imperial trap."

The Pentagon's renewed commitment to counterinsurgency and low-intensity warfare will also require a substantial investment in new hardware at a time when the country faces a record deficit, further eroding its long-term vitality. To obtain the added funds he deems necessary, Gates has asked for an $18 billion increase in the Pentagon's base budget for the 2011 fiscal year, raising total spending to $549 billion (which does not include combat costs in Iraq and Afghanistan). To gain additional financing for these projects, he has been willing to sacrifice some big-ticket items intended for major conventional wars, such as the F-22 jet fighter (discontinued in 2009).

Gates calls this shift in emphasis "rebalancing," and it is said to be the guiding principle of the new Pentagon budget. "Rebalancing our forces in support of these strategic priorities means that US forces must be flexible and adaptable to confront the full range of plausible challenges," Under Secretary of Defense Michèle Flournoy, one of the QDR's principal authors, told a Pentagon press briefing on February 1. "To underwrite this flexibility...we need more and better enabling capabilities...like intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, rotary-wing aircraft, language skills and so forth."

The danger here is that Congress--prodded by powerful interests in the military-industrial complex--will approve the specialized counterinsurgency equipment sought by Gates and Flournoy, as well as an array of costly, super-sophisticated weapons designed to fight a full-scale war with some future, Soviet-like "peer" competitor. Under these circumstances, the Pentagon budget will continue to grow.

The Obama-Gates strategy thus entails a double peril. On the one hand, it risks involvement in an endless series of wars, wearing down the military and turning more and more non-Westerners against the United States--exactly the outcome envisioned by Che in his famous 1967 dictum. On the other hand, the "rebalancing" sought by Gates could lead to higher spending on low-intensity hardware while failing to curb investment in high-end weaponry, thereby producing ever-increasing military budgets, a growing national deficit and persistent economic paralysis. In the worst case, both outcomes will occur, dooming the United States to retreat, humiliation and penury.

There is no reason to doubt that Obama and Gates believe they are acting in the nation's--and the world's--best interest by advocating a strategy of global counterinsurgency. Such a strategy could conceivably prevent Al Qaeda from gaining a temporary foothold in some "ungovernable area" on the fringe of the Islamic world. But it will not eliminate the conditions that give rise to Islamist extremism, nor will it ensure lasting peace. The Pentagon's new strategy can only lead, in the end, to a world of increased anti-Americanism and violence.

About Michael T. Klare

Michael T. Klare, Nation defense correspondent, is professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College. His latest book is Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy

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It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Pork! - BusinessWeek

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Boeing's C-17 cargo aircraft cost $250 million apiece. The Pentagon says it has plenty. But it's nearly impossible for Obama to kill a project that provides jobs in 43 states

By Ben Elgin and Keith Epstein

President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates want to leave the Cold War in the past—finally—and reshape the U.S. military into more of a counterinsurgency force. They have made reforming weapons acquisition a major priority, saying that some hardware designed for battling Soviet armies or other massive foes in vast open-field clashes ought to be replaced by lighter, less expensive gear. The Administration has pared billions from the budget for the Lockheed Martin (LMT) F-22 fighter, a super-sophisticated plane conceived in the 1980s for dogfights against Moscow's best. The Pentagon has also reined in a sprawling high-tech infantry project called Future Combat Systems that Boeing (BA) oversees. All told, a half-dozen major weapons systems have been eliminated for an estimated savings of more than $100 billion over coming decades.

But it's not like military spending is actually going down. At a projected $107 billion for 2010 alone—a 5% rise over this year—the Pentagon's base budget for planes, ships, missiles, and guns has grown more than 50% since 2000. Reforming and redirecting military procurement always riles members of Congress trying to protect jobs in their home districts. Lawmakers are teaming up with Lockheed, Boeing, and other defense contractors to push back fiercely on certain targeted programs, even when the Pentagon says it doesn't need the weaponry in question. In some areas, organized labor has joined the fight.

The C-17 Globemaster offers one illustration of successful opposition to the Obama-Gates push for control of weapons spending. C-17s are large cargo planes produced by Boeing that cost $250 million apiece. They have been used heavily since 1993 to transport troops, tanks, and supplies. Every year since 2006, the Pentagon has said that it has enough C-17s. And every year, Congress overrules the military and authorizes funds for additional planes. In October the Senate approved $2.5 billion in the 2010 budget for 10 more C-17s, which would bring the fleet to 215.

"It's about political engineering," says Mandy Smithberger, a national security staff member of the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington nonprofit. "Companies design weapons systems to make them difficult to kill."

The C-17 by most accounts has served the Pentagon reliably and well. The cavernous Globemaster is flying in both Iraq and Afghanistan. But the real reason Congress wants more of them has little to do with military need. Boeing has built the C-17's industrial base for political survivability.

The company has spread manufacturing across no fewer than 43 states. C-17 production lines employ more than 30,000 workers, many of them relatively well paid by factory-wage standards. Many of those jobs would be at risk if C-17 work ground to a halt.

The White House understands the challenge. "The impulse in Washington is to protect jobs back home, building things we don't need at a cost we can't afford," President Obama said in August in a speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention in Phoenix. "The special interests, contractors, and entrenched lobbyists—they're invested in the status quo, and they're putting up a fight."

Enthusiasm for the Globemaster crosses political lines. "We're fighting two wars and meeting humanitarian needs; we need these planes," says Senator Kit Bond (R-Mo.). "It is a defense industrial-base issue, too. It produces jobs in 43 states. But that is secondary. We wouldn't push that unless there is a real need." Boeing's defense business has its headquarters in St. Louis.

Bond, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), and 16 colleagues began circulating a letter in April urging members of the Senate Appropriations Committee to keep funding the plane despite clearly stated objections from the White House and Pentagon. In California, C-17 production employs 5,000 workers at a final assembly plant in Long Beach.

Bond's fellow Missourian, Senator Claire McCaskill, a Democrat, however, evinced ambivalence in comments to the media earlier this year about earmarking money for more Globemasters. Boeing noted that she didn't sign the letter to the Appropriations Committee. So the company mobilized to change her mind.

The aircraft manufacturer convened a strategy meeting with local labor leaders in mid-spring at its St. Louis offices. George C. Roman, a Boeing vice-president for government operations, helped lead the discussion. A key challenge described by the Boeing side was the need to shore up wavering support from legislators, including McCaskill, according to Robert A. Soutier, president of the Greater St. Louis Labor Council, who attended the gathering.

Shortly after the meeting, Soutier criticized McCaskill in the St. Louis media, questioning her support for thousands of local jobs. McCaskill responded quickly. She defended her C-17 bona fides and in May announced she was sending a letter to Obama and Gates emphasizing her backing for the Boeing cargo aircraft.

Since then, she has showed up at machinist rallies, met Boeing officials, and spoken out forcefully on the plane's behalf. Adrianne Marsh, a spokeswoman for McCaskill, called the earlier discord "a misunderstanding" and says the senator has advocated the program all along. McCaskill "believes the C-17 can stand on its own and compete for these dollars based on its merits," says Marsh.

Soutier says that communication has improved between Boeing and McCaskill and that he's pleased with the senator's support for the C-17. A Boeing spokesman declined to discuss the company's lobbying but said in a prepared statement: "We routinely meet with our employees, their representatives, elected officials, and other key stakeholders to provide updates on our business operations." The spokesman added: "We greatly appreciate the support the C-17 continues to receive. We look forward to continuing to work with both our customer and the Congress to ensure this valuable airlifter is available to support our war fighters and our nation's future airlift requirements."

In late September, as Congress restored money for 10 additional C-17s, the Administration stated that "it strongly objects to" the funding. White House spokesman Thomas Victor told BusinessWeek: "The President never thought this was going to be easy, but he and Secretary Gates are committed to pushing for these reforms."

Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), a prominent critic of Pentagon spending, went to the Senate floor on Oct. 5 to make a last-minute effort to strip funds from the defense budget for the new C-17s. "One would have expected the President and Secretary Gates to be outraged," he said. "However, we have heard barely a word of opposition from them." The next day, McCain's motion was defeated, 68 to 30.

John Murtha (D-Pa.), the powerful chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, said on Oct. 21 that he expects the fiscal 2010 budget to provide for the 10 additional Globemasters. He urged Boeing to trim the price of the plane to about $200 million each, but it remains to be seen whether the manufacturer will lower its bill.

Business Exchange: Read, save, and add content on BW's new Web 2.0 topic network

Machinists Throw a Wrench

While it fights to preserve the Pentagon budget for more C-17 cargo planes, Boeing is struggling with International Assn. of Machinists leaders over a proposed no-strike agreement in connection with the 787 passenger liner. According to the Seattle Times, talks are "deadlocked and hindered by distrust on each side." The Machinists have said they would agree to a no-strike deal through 2020 if Boeing guarantees a second 787 assembly line in Everett, Wash., among other conditions, the Times reported.

For more on Boeing's labor situation, go to http://bx.businessweek.com/Boeing/reference/

Elgin is a correspondent in BusinessWeek's Silicon Valley bureau. Epstein is a correspondent in BusinessWeek's Washington bureau.

Conferees' Report Details Defense Activities - washingtonpost.com

Image by justindc via Flickr

By Walter Pincus
Tuesday, October 13, 2009

If you want to get a sense of the broad range of Defense Department activities, there's no better reading than the 638-page House-Senate conferee report on the fiscal 2010 defense authorization bill released last week.

You could start with apparel. Each service has its camouflage uniforms, which are different even within services. What to do?

The House wants to standardize uniforms to increase "interoperability" of ground troops and "reduce tactical risk" -- so they don't shoot each other by mistake.

The Senate has different ideas but maybe the same goals. Senators like that camouflage uniforms "uniquely reflect the identity of the individual services" but they also want "interoperability." The Senate also directed that the comptroller general report back on his assessment of combat and camouflage uniforms in use on the battlefield.

The conferees made clear that none of this was to affect Special Forces, who "design and deploy combat uniforms to meet their specific mission requirements." They added, however, that "technological advances and improvements" Special Forces incorporate in their combat uniforms should be shared with the other services when "appropriate and cost effective."

Then there's hardware.

The conferees have some ideas for getting rid of some of that U.S. military equipment sitting in Iraq. They authorized Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, as long as he has the okay of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, to give as much as $750 million of military equipment now in Iraq or Kuwait to the military or security forces of Iraq or Afghanistan. And being members of Congress, they said Defense should be sure to report any transfer to them 30 days before it occurs.

Then there's the target range, but it's probably not the one that first comes to mind.

The proposed National Cyber Range is the Pentagon's participation through the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) in the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative. There is $50 million in next year's budget for it.

It would be a test range whereby both government and nongovernment agencies could try out against experts their cybersecurity systems and, for government agencies, any offensive attack programs. DARPA is to turn it over to a government entity in the next two years, but no partner has been selected.

The conferees said there was "a proliferation of network test beds" across the Defense Department, "creating an environment of excessive duplication and waste." They said they looked forward to the results of the assessment underway by the Pentagon's director of the Test Management Resources Center focused on network testing systems, including the National Cyber Range. And aren't we all?

Duplication and waste are not new descriptions when it comes to many defense programs. They are so entrenched that the Defense Department could be the only government agency to spend $1 billion over 10 years on a computer system that still does not work, and still avoid public criticism from Congress.

And that brings us to DIMHRS, which stands for the Defense Integrated Military Human Resources System. It was originally supposed to create one personnel record for each Army service member over a career and have it available to the soldier, as well as to combatant commanders, personnel and pay managers. The main obstacle to progress has been that DIMHRS was to replace at least 70 Army and Defense Department personnel and finance systems.

Even for the Pentagon, that's a lot. The first target date for operation was 2004. That was missed because there were questions of how much information was provided to the contractor and problems deciding how to replace or modify many of those older systems, according to a Government Accountability Office report. The new date was to be March of this year.

A 2006 Pentagon decision to change the program to make it service-wide was finalized last January, according to the GAO, but testing is underway by the Army and now the Air Force. With a new $70 million in fiscal 2010 defense funding, the gathering of "core" data of DIMHRS was to be continued, but then distributed to the individual services "to oversee, build-out, and deploy," according to the Pentagon budget.

The House-Senate conferees wrote that after investing nearly $1 billion, "the DIMHRS program has not successfully been developed or deployed because of a number of technical and organizational difficulties."

But the conferees decided on a solution: Rather than singling out anyone for blame, the panel said funding could continue but recommended an advisory panel be established to help the effort.

The American Leviathan - Nation

Image by danny.hammontree via Flickr

News travels fast across the red desert bush of remote Djibouti. Even as US military reservists erect a field hospital around a cluster of tents and blockhouses near a desolate watering hole, dozens of tribespeople are waiting for treatment in orderly rows. They arrive with maladies of every sort: bad teeth, diarrhea, fevers, colds, arthritis. At the triage center, an elderly tribesman has had a thorn removed from his foot, a wound that had been infected for months. At the dental surgery station, Navy Lt. Bill Anderson, an orthodontist from Northfield, New Jersey, will over the next few hours extract a dozen rotting or impacted teeth using instruments that sparkle in the late-morning sun.

The reservists are attached to a Djibouti-based task force of some 1,800 soldiers, marines, sailors and Air Force personnel. Embedded with them is an aid specialist from the Agency for International Development, which provides guidance for the operation. She is reticent and refers questions to the agency's country leader, Stephanie Funk. The next day, Funk acknowledges that USAID's solitary representation on the triage mission is symptomatic of a new age in US foreign policy--one in which America, in peacetime as much as in war, is personified abroad more by soldiers than by civilians. "If we had the numbers and the money to do fieldwork, we would, but our budgets have been declining for years," Funk said in her office on the US Embassy compound in Djibouti City. "The Pentagon has got both numbers and money. For every fifty of them, there's only one of me."

Quietly, gradually--and inevitably, given the weight of its colossal budget and imperial writ--the Pentagon has all but eclipsed the State Department at the center of US foreign policy-making. The process began with the dawn of America's post-World War II global empire and deepened in the mid-1980s, with the expansion of worldwide combatant commands. It matured during the Clinton years, with the military's migration into humanitarian aid and disaster relief work, and accelerated rapidly with George W. Bush's declaration of endless conflict in the "global war on terror" and a near-doubling of military spending.

In addition to new weapons and war fighters, the Pentagon's budget now underwrites a cluster of special funds from which it can train and equip foreign armies--often in the service of repressive regimes--as well as engage in aid development projects in pursuit of its own tactical ends. Although these programs must be conducted with State Department approval and are subject to Congressional review, legislative oversight and interagency coordination is spotty at best. The Pentagon, meanwhile, is pushing for full discretionary control over these funds--a move that would render meaningless the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act, which concentrated responsibility for civilian and military aid programs within the State Department.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has lamented the resource gap between civilian and military agencies, most pointedly in a July 2008 speech, when he warned of the "creeping militarization" of foreign policy. He has wryly pointed out how, given the Defense Department's $664 billion budget compared with the State Department's $52 billion annual outlay, Washington employs more military band members than it does foreign service officers. No one at the Pentagon, however, is calling for the restoration of State Department primacy over foreign affairs and a proper budget to finance it. Rather, Defense officials speak of a civilian-military "partnership" in which, some fear, an underfunded State Department would be reduced to a mere subcontractor for Pentagon initiatives.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has suggested she will re-establish the State Department as the fountainhead of foreign policy. But she has said little about the Pentagon's expanded funding authority, and her embrace of what she calls "the three Ds" of her mission--defense, diplomacy and development--implies DoD's preoccupations are in concert with her own. Nor has she suggested she might allow greater autonomy for USAID, where officials grumble about how their work is as routinely politicized by the State Department as it is by the Pentagon. Indeed, Clinton has yet to name a new permanent director.

Though Clinton has presided over a marked increase in USAID's budget, diplomats and politicians say an overhaul is way overdue. "Without a more robust aid agency," Richard Lugar, the ranking minority member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote in the August 9 Washington Post, "President Obama's pledge to double foreign assistance would be like adding a third story to a house that had a crumbling foundation." Lugar, along with Senator John Kerry, is promoting a bill that would give USAID the lead role in coordinating foreign assistance.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, is flexing its own policy-making muscle. As Bush's wars grew in scope, so too did the military's aid budget and its focus on nonlethal activities--what DoD once referred to as "military operations other than war." Now known by the conveniently vague and expansive handle of "stability operations," and funded by a war chest passed into law three years ago, these missions are often deeply at odds with the goals of diplomats and civilian aid workers. Perversely, the Pentagon is militarizing foreign policy even as it "civilianizes" the character of its activities abroad.

Civilians figure at least as heavily as generals and admirals in the pantheon of American militarism. It was George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld--with the collusion of Condoleezza Rice--who expanded and entrenched the Pentagon's franchise over foreign policy. Rumsfeld's contempt for civilian authority was demonstrated most clearly, and with devastating results, in the run-up to the war in Iraq. Aside from bulldozing the constitutional prerogatives of Secretary of State Colin Powell, he vigorously, if stealthily, subverted the nation's civilian leaders abroad. Before the US invasion, for example, he dispatched a three-man team to gather intelligence in several Middle Eastern states without informing the ambassadors of their activities, according to a source with intimate knowledge of the episode. The secret deployment has been widely interpreted as a direct violation of the executive Letter of Instruction to Chiefs of Mission, first signed by President Kennedy, which gave the US ambassador in his host country "full responsibility for the direction, coordination, and supervision of all Department of Defense personnel on official duty."

Rumsfeld also blocked NGOs from any substantial role in postwar Iraq, soft-stalling their efforts to obtain licenses to enter pre-invasion Iraq and stonewalling their requests for information on procedures once Saddam Hussein's regime had been destroyed. "The plans were classified," Sandra Mitchell, then a vice president for the International Rescue Committee (IRC), said in an interview at the time. "We would get answers like, 'We're working on it. Don't worry. We'll be handling this.'"

The results were calamitous, and since then the Defense Department has aggressively sought the support and expertise of civilian aid groups--so much so that InterAction, a coalition of American NGOs, was compelled to issue a code of conduct to its members to lessen the chances for blowback, which often comes from working with the military. "To the extent that we become identified with the US military, we become compromised," says George Rupp, president and CEO of the IRC. "We're trying to keep it from changing the way we do business, but things may be changing whether we like it or not."

Despite the Foreign Assistance Act's stipulation of State Department authority, the Pentagon accounts for nearly a quarter of America's budget for overseas direct assistance--up from near zero a decade ago--while USAID's share has declined to 40 percent from 65 percent during the same period. Moreover, as the Pentagon's funding capacity has expanded, so has its foray into humanitarian aid and social development. Directive 3000.5, a November 2005 Pentagon mission statement, defines stability operations as "a core U.S. military mission" to be conducted "across the spectrum from peace to conflict, to establish or maintain order in States and regions." It tasks US forces to develop, among other things, "a viable market economy, rule of law, democratic institutions, and a robust civil society," including "various types of security forces, correctional facilities, and judicial systems."

Any mission conducted "from peace to conflict...in States and regions" is by definition everlasting and all-encompassing, and Directive 3000.5 chills the foreign aid and diplomatic community. The document concedes that humanitarian and development work is often best performed by civilian experts, and it encourages their input. But it also makes clear that "US military forces shall be prepared to perform all tasks necessary to establish or maintain order when civilians cannot do so."

The Pentagon says it needs its own aid budget because assistance programs run by the State Department are overly bureaucratic. It argues that aid developed and administered directly by the Defense Department, such as the Pentagon's recent appeal for $400 million in emergency funding to train and equip the Pakistani army, will be more responsive and yield faster results. Critics respond that such a narrow focus on military concerns will crowd out other foreign policy priorities like the promotion of human rights, education and healthcare. "If DoD is concerned that civilian-led processes are too slow, then let's talk about how we fix those processes," says Gregory Elias Adams of Oxfam America. "Let's have a conversation about how the interagency process is broken and needs to be fixed. If civilian agencies do not have capacity to contribute to the mission, it will be military imperatives that carry the day."

In the January/February issue of Foreign Affairs, former ambassador J. Anthony Holmes noted how in June 2008 the State Department had only 10 percent more diplomats and support staff than it had a quarter-century ago, when there were twenty-four fewer countries in the world and US interests were concentrated in Europe and Northeast Asia. Unlike the military, which bases a fifth of its 1.6 million active-duty servicepeople overseas, the diplomatic corps posts nearly three-quarters of its people abroad. As a result, Holmes argues, the State Department lacks "surge capacity," the ability to train and retrain personnel or rotate them to hot spots without having to leave their posts empty in the interim.

Absent a far more aggressive restructuring of civilian aid and diplomatic agencies, their dependence on the military will only intensify. In April the White House backed away from a pledge to staff hundreds of posts in Afghanistan with civilians for lack of funding and said it would instead turn to the Pentagon. Meanwhile, efforts to set up an expeditionary corps of some 2,500 civilians under State Department leadership have snagged on interagency snits, Congressional lethargy and funding constraints.

The Obama administration has acknowledged the problem. In its budget for 2010, it calls for 1,300 new foreign service officers, and it is planning a near doubling of the State Department's foreign aid budget from 2008 levels--a step in the right direction, say aid workers and diplomats, but not nearly enough to meet the department's commitments. "I have never seen a better opportunity to rebalance the tool kit," says Gordon Adams, a Clinton administration national security expert and now a professor at the American University's School of International Service. "But there remains a serious discontinuity between the structure of Defense and the structure at State. One of the many questions [Secretary of State] Clinton will have to answer is how to deal with the military on a regional basis overseas."

It is overseas, after all, where US foreign policy is implemented, and it is there that the State Department's authority is so plainly obscured by the Pentagon's shadow. As part of a broader effort to reform the Defense Department's chain of command, the world was divided into operational zones in 1986. The centrality of these regional commands and the men who lead them--the best-known is Gen. David Petraeus, head of Central Command, or Centcom, which is responsible for US security efforts from the Persian Gulf to Central Asia--has increased as the Pentagon endows them with ever larger missions and budgets. In particular, the combatant commander has the authority to fund military cooperation agreements with governments in his area of responsibility, a mandate that was once concentrated within the Office of the Secretary of Defense. That prerogative alone gives the commanders enormous prestige with host governments at a time when their civilian counterparts, from ambassadors on down, have been pauperized by spending cuts that date back to Senator Jesse Helms's war on foreign aid in the 1990s.

In general, ambassadors and combatant commanders find common ground on many issues. But tensions, particularly in time of war, are inevitable. In 2003 then-Centcom commander Gen. John Abizaid wanted to build a $99 million counterterrorism facility in Jordan at the request of Jordanian King Abdullah II. The project was opposed as a needless extravagance by Edward Gnehm, US Ambassador to Jordan at the time. So Abizaid went around Gnehm by funding the training facility from his own budget, according to a source with intimate knowledge of the matter. (An e-mailed request to Abizaid's office for comment was not returned.) The New York Times reported on March 8, 2006, that for about two years the Pentagon had been dispatching Military Liaison Elements--special operations teams tasked with gathering intelligence on suspected terrorists and ways to destroy them--to various countries without the US ambassadors' knowledge. In Niger two years ago, the US chief of mission cut back the number of entry visas for US military personnel because of the country's political fragility and because the embassy lacked the resources to accommodate them, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office.

If Command Strategy 2016 is anything to go by, however, the Pentagon has no intention of waiting around. Issued in March 2007, it describes Southern Command, or Southcom, which has responsibility for Latin America and the Caribbean, as a Joint Interagency Security Command that would "provide enabling capabilities to focus and integrate interagency-wide efforts to address the full range of regional capabilities." As Adm. James Stavridis, then-leader of Southcom, elaborated at the time, "We want to be like a big Velcro cube that these other agencies can hook to so we can collectively do what needs to be done in this region."

Needless to say, many of those "other agencies" are reluctant to go along for the ride, particularly given the US military's checkered history in Latin America, where the Pentagon first began working independently with foreign governments. In 1988 lawmakers passed a bill ordering the military to arrest the flow of narcotics into the United States from Mexico, intensifying the failed "war on drugs" and lending thrust to the Pentagon's neo-imperialist lunge into Latin America. "Southern Command should not be the coordinating agency, because then they become the face of US assistance in foreign regions," says George Withers, a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America. "The agency that coordinates controls the agenda."

When he was chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Lugar dispatched aides around the world to quantify the effects of DoD's expanded presence overseas and its growing dominance of US security policy. The result was two reports--committee "prints," in Capitol Hill parlance--that provide an alarming account of how much of foreign policy has been ingested by the military. "As a result of inadequate funding for civilian programs," concludes the first of the two prints, released in December 2006, "US defense agencies are increasingly being granted authority and funding to fill perceived gaps. Such bleeding of civilian responsibilities overseas from civilian to military agencies risks weakening the Secretary of State's primacy in setting the agenda for US relations."

The report disparages the 12-to-1 spending ratio between the Pentagon and the State Department, which it says "risks the further encroachment of the military, by default, into areas where civilian leadership is more appropriate because it does not create resistance overseas and is more experienced." Left unchecked, it warns, the increase in the number of military personnel and Pentagon activities abroad could lead to "blurred lines of authority between the State Department and the Defense Department [and] interagency turf wars that undermine the effectiveness of the overall US effort against terrorism."

The report contains many examples of the need for civilian authority "to temper Defense Department enthusiasm." It cites an unnamed African country--"unstable, desperately poor, and run by a repressive government"--that appealed to the US military for help in fighting an insurgency. The Pentagon agreed and soon afterward hailed the nation as a "model country for security assistance." Civilian embassy officials, however, expressed concern at the proliferation of US military personnel there. "It would be a major setback," the print notes, "if the United States were to be implicated in support of operations shoring up the repressive regime, regardless of the stated intent of such training."

The wellspring for such operations is Section 1206 of the 2006 National Defense Authorization Act, which allocated the Pentagon $200 million to spend on lethal and nonlethal equipment, supplies and training to foreign militaries. Section 1206 remains a limited authority, though last year legislators extended its budgeting cycle to three years, added maritime security to its list of activities and topped up its allocation to $350 million. A key condition Congress laid down for 1206 approval--that the Pentagon submit its programs list to the State Department for "concurrence" or "dual-key" approval--remains. Despite this, 1206 funds have been invested in countries with highly autocratic governments.

The US government has a long history of bankrolling dictators in pursuit of strategic ends. But there is a difference between declaring such support as official policy--as is the case with Egypt, for example--and the Pentagon's dole, which Congress allots with only a perfunctory understanding of how the money will be spent. In August 2008 Senator Russell Feingold responded to the Pentagon's request for additional 1206 funding with a report that $6 million from the program had been given to the government of Chad, which according to the State Department is "engaging in extra-judicial killing, arbitrary detention and torture." Other recipients of 1206 funding are Algeria, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and Tunisia, all of which have abysmal human rights records.

Conspicuously absent from the debate over Section 1206 was Condoleezza Rice. At the time, Senator Patrick Leahy wrote Rice several letters imploring her not to cede unprecedented power to the Pentagon. According to Paul Clayman, an attorney who has worked for the State Department as well as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and others who were closely involved in the debate, the staff on Lugar's committee were staggered by Rice's passivity.

In April 2008 Rice and Gates testified jointly before the House Armed Services Committee. In addition to their mutual desire for augmentation of the Pentagon's Section 1206 channel, Rice also endorsed a new Pentagon-controlled allocation under Section 1207 of the defense bill that could fund State Department projects contingent on the defense secretary's approval. At one point, Rice was asked by Congressman Vic Snyder whether she still believed ambassadors should be the most senior representatives of US missions overseas. Naturally, Rice answered in the affirmative. What was striking was the fact that the question had to be asked in the first place.

Congress is now pushing back--sort of. In its version of the Pentagon's most recent supplemental budget, lawmakers stipulated that authority over the Pakistan counterinsurgency fund should reside with the State Department at the end of fiscal 2010. The House version of the bill called for State to assume immediate control of the fund, but the Senate prevailed in delaying the transfer, noting the department's "lack of capacity."

On the other hand, the House also appears to be leaning toward DoD in the 1206 debate. In a June report on the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2010, the House Armed Services Committee soft-pedaled its earlier position that 1206 programs should be transferred to State. Instead, it committed itself to the existing "dual key" framework and averred that "whatever the final, permanent form these authorities take, the Secretary of Defense must play a primary role in generating requirements." The report also asserts that "the Department of State still lacks the capacity to execute these authorities."

The Pentagon shows little inclination to relinquish its authority. An internal DoD memo issued last November characterized civilian agencies as too weak to help in counterinsurgency operations and declared that the Pentagon should be ready to lead such missions absent a "whole-of-government" approach. The document, leaked in January, warned that it would take civilian agencies at least a decade to develop the capacity to work effectively alongside the military. In February an unnamed "senior Pentagon official" told Inside the Pentagon, a weekly newsletter, that the military needed "a great deal of budgetary flexibility" in order to "proactively get ahead of problems before they become disasters." In May, Michael Vickers, soon to become assistant secretary of defense for special operations, told Congress it should increase spending "several fold" for funding under Section 1208, a budget mandate exclusive to the Pentagon in support of "foreign forces, irregular forces, [and] groups or individuals" engaged in combating terrorism. The oversight mechanism for 1208 programs is considerably less rigorous than those associated with 1206.

Civilian Washington, in other words, has reaped its own whirlwind. It was not a military cabal but a civilian cadre--Clinton in the 1990s, followed by Bush and his neoconservative courtiers--who expanded the reach and lethality of the military, despite the collapse of the Soviet Union. As the executioner of foreign policy, so much of which is now imposed from the business end of a Predator drone, why shouldn't the Pentagon serve also as its judge and jury? The answer, of course, is that America is a republic, a nation not of men but of laws, and the laws say foreign policy must be charted by civilians. Complacent politicians have neglected this trust, however, and the military now defines US interests abroad as much as it defends them. That is the bill for a leviathan. It is the wages of empire.

About Stephen Glain

Stephen Glain, a Washington, DC-based journalist, author and columnist for the Abu Dhabi National, is writing a book about the militarization of US foreign policy

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