Covert US Military Training Goes to Africa
New U.S. plans for training security forces in four African countries recall
similar programs around the world, which often ended in the hand-picked
trainees slaughtering civilians or staging military coups, as ex-State
Department official William R. Polk recalls.
By William R. Polk
June 3, 2014
With everyone’s attention focused on the European elections or President
Barack Obama’s speech at West Point or the Ukraine,
<
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/27/world/africa/us-trains-african-commandos-
to-fight-terrorism.html?_r=0> a story by Eric Schmitt in The New York Times
on Tuesday 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 U.S. has set up covert programs to
train and equip native teams patterned on their instructors, the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 during
the 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 Bashar al-Assad. 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 at 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.
William R. Polk is a veteran foreign policy consultant, author and professor
who taught Middle Eastern studies at Harvard. President John F. Kennedy
appointed Polk to the State Department’s Policy Planning Council where he
served during the Cuban Missile Crisis. His books include: Violent Politics:
Insurgency and Terrorism; Understanding Iraq; Understanding Iran; Personal
History: Living in Interesting Times; Distant Thunder: Reflections on the
Dangers of Our Times; and Humpty Dumpty: The Fate of Regime Change.
Received on Tue Jun 03 2014 - 17:56:54 EDT