Dear Colleagues and Friends,
With everyone's attention focused either on the
European elections, President Obama's
speech at West Point or the Ukraine, a story by Eric Schmitt in The International New York Times of
Tuesday, May 27, 2014 may not have caught your attention. I believe, however, that it provides an
insight into some of the major problems of American foreign policy.
What Mr. Schmitt reports is that the US has set up
covert programs to train and equip native teams patterned on their instructors,
the US Army Delta Force in several African countries. The program was advocated by Michael A.
Sheehan who formerly was in charge of special operations planning in the
Department of Defense and is now, according to Mr. Schmitt, holder of the
"distinguished chair at West Point's Combating Terrorism
Center." Mr. Schmitt quotes him as
saying, "Training indigenous forces to go after threats in their own country
is what we need to be doing." So
far allocated to this effort, Mr. Schmitt writes, is $70 million, and the
initial efforts will be in Libya, Niger, Mali and Mauritania.
How to do this, according to the senior US officer in
Africa, Major General Patrick J. Donahue II, is complex: "You have to make sure of who you're
training. It can't be the standard, 'Has
the guy been a terrorist or some sort of criminal?' but also, what are his
allegiances? Is he true to the country
or is he still bound to his militia?"
So let me comment on these remarks, on the ideas
behind the program, its justification and the history of such efforts. I begin with a few bits of history -- Disclosure: I am in the final stages of a
book that aims to tell the whole history, but the whole history is of course much too
long for this note.
Without much of the rhetoric of Mr. Sheehan and
General Donahue and on a broader scale, we have undertaken similar programs in
a number of countries over the last half century. Iran, Turkey, Indonesia, Guatemala, Egypt,
Iraq, Thailand, Chad, Angola to name just a few. The results do not add up to a success almost
anywhere. Perhaps the worst (at least
for America's reputation) were Chad where the man we trained, equipped and
supported, Hissène Habré, is reported to have killed about
40,000 of his fellow citizens. In
Indonesia, General Suharto, with our blessing and with the special forces we
also had trained and equipped, initially killed about 60,000 and ultimately
caused the deaths of perhaps 200,000. In
Mexico, the casualties have been smaller, but the graduates of our Special
Forces program have become the most powerful drug cartel. They virtually hold the country at ransom.
Even
when casualties were not the result, the military forces we helped to create
and usually paid for carried out the more subtle mission of destroying public
institutions. If our intention is to
create stability, the promotion of a powerful military force is often not the
way to do it. This is because the result
of such emphasis on the military often renders it the only mobile, coherent and
centrally directed organization in societies lacking in the balancing forces of
an independent judiciary, reasonably open elections, a tradition of civil
government and a more or less free press.
Our
program in pre-1958 Iraq and in pre-1979 Iran certainly played a crucial role
in the extension of authoritarian rule in those countries and in their violent reactions against us.
General
Donahue suggests that we need to distinguish among the native soldiers we train
and empower those who are "true to the country." But how?
We supported Hissène Habré so long that we must have known every detail of his
life. He is now on trial as war
criminal. General Suharto has never been
charged (nor have those Americans who gave him a "green light") for
his brutal invasion of East Timor. Both
probably believed that they met General Donahue's definition of
patriotism. And in Mali, our carefully
trained officers of the Special Forces answered what they thought was both patriotic
and religious duty by joining the insurgency against the government we (and we
thought they) supported. We have a poor
record of defining other peoples' patriotism.
And,
in the interest of more urgent objectives, we have been willing to support and
fund almost anyone as long as we think he might be of value. General Manuel Noriega, our man in Panama,
went on to spend 22 years in an American prison after we invaded his country and fought the soldiers we had
trained.
Indeed,
we have a poor record of even knowing who the people we train are. After the Turkish army carried out one of its
coups in the 1960s, when I was the member of the Policy Planning Council
responsible for the Middle East, I asked the appropriate branch of the Defense
Department who were the new leaders. All
of whom had been trained in America, often several times and during years. The
answer was that no one knew. Even in
army records, they were just Americanized nicknames.
And,
more generally, our sensitivity to the aspirations, hopes and fears of other
people is notoriously crude or totally lacking. Growing out of the Cold War, we thought of
many of them as simply our proxies or our enemies. Thus, we found Chad not as a place with a
certain population but just as a piece of the Libyan puzzle, and today we think
of Mali in the same way. Now we are
talking to training "carefully selected" Syrian insurgents to
overthrow Bashir. Do we have any sense
of what they will overthrow him for?
Beyond
these, what might be considered "tactical" issues are "strategic,"
legal and even moral
considerations. I leave aside the legal and moral issues -- such as what justification we have
to determine the fate of other peoples -- as they do not seem very persuasive among our leaders. But just focus on the long term or even
middle term results of the new policy:
the most obvious is that we meddle in and take some responsibility for
the politics of an array of countries in which we have little direct interest. And often with the obvious danger of a
deeper, more expensive and more painful result.
We are close to this commitment in Syria.
Less
obvious is that our activities, no matter how carefully differentiated, will be
seen to add up to an overall policy of militarism, support of oppressive dictatorships and
opposition to popular forces. They also
meld into a policy of opposition to the religion of over a billion people,
Islam. And they do so a great expense to our
expressed desires to enable people everywhere, including at home, to live
healthier, safer and decent lives.
I
end with a prediction: in practically
every country where Mr. Sheehan's and General Donahue's program is employed, it
will later be seen to have led to a military coup d'etat.
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