Archive for the 'State Department' Category

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently released an important report entitled COMBATING TERRORISM: The United States Lacks Comprehensive Plan to Destroy the Terrorist Threat and Close the Safe Haven in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas.  They found that:

The United States has not met its national security goals to destroy terrorist threats and close the safe haven in Pakistan’s FATA. Since 2002, the United States relied principally on the Pakistan military to address U.S. national security goals. Of the approximately $5.8 billion the United States provided for efforts in the FATA and border region from 2002 through 2007, about 96 percent reimbursed Pakistan for military operations there. According to the Department of State, Pakistan deployed 120,000 military and paramilitary forces in the FATA and helped kill and capture hundreds of suspected al Qaeda operatives; these efforts cost the lives of approximately 1,400 members of Pakistan’s security forces. However, GAO found broad agreement, as documented in the National Intelligence Estimate, State, and embassy documents, as well as Defense officials in Pakistan, that al Qaeda had regenerated its ability to attack the United States and had succeeded in establishing a safe haven in Pakistan’s FATA.

Much of the review was focused on the lack of a comprehensive approach, and in particular, the lack of application of so-called “soft power.”  The GAO recommended that:

… the National Security Advisor and the Director of the NCTC, in consultation with the Secretaries of Defense and State and others, implement the congressional mandate to develop a comprehensive plan to combat the terrorist threat and close the safe haven in the FATA. Defense and USAID concurred with the recommendation; State asserted that a comprehensive strategy exists, while the Office of the Director of National Intelligence stated that plans to combat terrorism exist.

The Rumsfeld plan for Afghanistan involved special forces, satellite uplinks to guide JDAMs, money, and partnership with the Northern Alliance (along with nefarious tribal warlords) - in general, a lack of adequate force projection.  The end result was that the Taliban and al Qaeda were pushed into neighboring Pakistan, and the consequences of this approach have yet to be fully realized.

The fact that the Taliban have made it clear that rejection of the U.S.-led war on terror is a precondition to successful talks causes skepticism concerning the value of soft power in Pakistan (if soft power is seen as negotiations and State Department involvement).  However, the absence of the State Department has been problematic in the past, and we have noted that the sole remaining democracy program for Iran was jettisoned by State, leaving nothing except student exchange programs.

If the war(s) are seen as a war, then State Department pressure on Iran would have helped Afghanistan long ago.  Regime change in Iran would have brought quicker stability to Iraq, thus freeing troops to be allocated to the campaign in Afghanistan.  Then the State Department could have engaged in the Afghanistan humanitarian situation which, by all accounts, is one of the worst on the globe.  Is it any wonder that “State asserted that a comprehensive strategy exists?”  How convenient.

As for the NCTC, they can’t possibly allocate the funds to grow the size of the Army and Marines, any more than they can tell the administration how to enact foreign policy or the congress how to vote.  Some of the blame must be laid at the feet of Congress, and unfortunately, in the report’s greatest failure, Congress gets off unscathed.

General Petraeus warned us.  In testimony before Congress in September of 2007, he said “You cannot win in Iraq solely in Iraq.”  He also said that “It is increasingly apparent to both coalition and Iraqi leaders that Iran, through the use of the Quds force, seeks to turn the Iraqi special groups into a Hezbollah-like force to serve its interests and fight a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq.”

Fast forward to the recent trip by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Iraq.  Alireza Jafarzadeh gives us some sense of what this was like for Iraq

Behind the orchestrated pomp and pageantry during the visit to Baghdad last weekend by the Iranian ayatollahs’ president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it was hard to miss the revulsion of Iraqis of all stripes. Adjectives like “historic” could not disguise the frustrating reality for Ahmadinejad and the ayatollahs: outside of Iraqi political spheres dominated by Tehran surrogates, they are seen as enemies of a secure, non-sectarian and democratic Iraq.

The greeting parties, in the Baghdad airport and later in various government buildings, were who’s who of Tehran’s proxies in Iraq’s government. They “listened to Ahmadinejad,” according to McClatchy News Service, “without need of translation into Arabic, clearly comfortable hearing his Farsi.” Not surprising; for more than two decades, they were employed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Qods Force, and the Ministry of Intelligence. Learning Farsi was a job requirement.

Outside of the very limited segment of Baghdad where Ahmadinejad visited, there was outrage. A young Baghdad resident told the New York Times, “I think Ahmadinejad is the most criminal and bloody person in the world. This visit degrades Iraq’s dignity.” Up north in Kirkuk, where Arab tribes and political parties rallied against Ahmadinejad’s visit, a tribal leader told the Times, “How can we tolerate this? Today we live under the regime of the clerics. The Iranian revolution has been exported to Iraq.” An Iraqi businessman added, “His visit is intended to reassure his followers here,” but is “provoking and enraging” the rest of Iraq … “Your mortars preceded your visit,” one placard read. Another read, “We condemn visit of terrorist and butcher Ahmadinejad to Iraq,” according to the Associated Press.

But those mortars fell strangely silent during the visit.  Azzaman is reporting what most main stream media is not, when they observe that:

Sunday was perhaps Iraqi capital’s quietest day since the country plunged into violence shortly after the U.S. invasion in 2003.

No car bomb explosions, shelling or kidnapping were reported and analysts attributed the calm to the landmark visit by Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Daily bombings, explosions and kidnapping have become part of life in Baghdad.

But the calm that descended on the restive capital on Sunday and Monday night was unprecedented, analysts said.

Many attributed the quiet to government’s decision to cordon off large parts of Baghdad and ban traffic in many districts and over several bridges.

But an Iraqi intelligence source said groups fighting U.S. troops and those responsible for the ongoing violence had put a temporary halt to their activities.

This shows, he said, how influential Iran has become in Iraq and the role it plays in assisting and arming these groups.

It didn’t take long for the bombs to begin again in Iraq after Ahmadinejad’s visit.  “Two bombs went off within minutes of each other in a crowded shopping district in the capital Thursday, killing at least 53 people and wounding 130—a reminder that deadly attacks are a daily threat even though violence is down.”

It isn’t difficult to catalogue actions to begin to hold the radical Ayatollahs and their henchmen accountable.  Here at The Captain’s Journal we have advocated the formulation and funding of an insurgency within Iran to assist in toppling the regime.  Some bolder recommendations from various corners (Newt Gingrich) have involved targeting oil.  For the more faint of heart there is simply political pressure and funding of opposition within Iran.

But even this last option is too much for the State Department.  As we pointed out three months ago, “In an overlooked and almost silent murder, the State Department recently worked directly against both the objectives of the executive branch of the government and the security interests of the United States by killing a program that would have aided democracy in Iran.”

The former director of President Bush’s flagship democracy program for the Middle East is saying that the State Department has “effectively killed” a program to disburse millions of dollars to Iran’s liberal opposition.In an interview yesterday, Scott Carpenter said a recent decision to move the $75 million annual aid program for Iranian democrats to the State Department’s Office of Iranian Affairs would effectively neuter an initiative the president had intended to spur democracy inside the Islamic Republic.”In my view, this pretty much kills the Iran democracy program,” Mr. Carpenter said of the decision by the State Department to subsume the program. “There is not the expertise, there is not the energy for it. The Iran office is worried about the bilateral policy. I think they are not committed to this anymore.”Mr. Carpenter, who headed the Middle East Partnership Initiative and was a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs until he left the Bush administration this summer, predicted the $20 million devoted to supporting the activities inside the Islamic Republic would be relegated to what he called “safe initiatives” such as student exchange programs, and not the more daring projects he and his deputy, David Denehy, funded, such as training for Web site operators to evade Internet censorship, political polling, and training on increasing recruitment for civil society groups.

Within a month or two of General Petraeus reminding us that we cannot win in Iraq if we engage Iraq alone, the State Department killed the sole remaining democracy project for Iran.  This intransigence within professional government employees and recalcitrance of even the administration to deal with Iran would be merely a strategic blunder if so many sons of America had not shed blood on Iraqi soil.  Because of blood, this stubborness has become sin - a failure in righteousness and morality and decency.  The blood of American warriors awaits vindication.

Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates made a provocative speech today at Kansas State University. It was sweeping and far reaching in terms of the mobilization and leveraging of symbiotic power of the United States as a complete, holistic nation state, to effect and achieve its ends, those ends being most particularly the security of the same. This symbiotic power couples multiple power centers (diplomacy, monetary, military, etc.) in a way that makes the combination of them more potent than the particulars taken separately, or so the vision goes. At The Captain’s Journal we have been hard on the State Department and their lack of participation in such endeavors, but Gates has laid down the gauntlet. In part, Gates said:

… my message today is not about the defense budget or military power. My message is that if we are to meet the myriad challenges around the world in the coming decades, this country must strengthen other important elements of national power both institutionally and financially, and create the capability to integrate and apply all of the elements of national power to problems and challenges abroad. In short, based on my experience serving seven presidents, as a former Director of CIA and now as Secretary of Defense, I am here to make the case for strengthening our capacity to use soft power and for better integrating it with hard power …We can expect that asymmetric warfare will be the mainstay of the contemporary battlefield for some time. These conflicts will be fundamentally political in nature, and require the application of all elements of national power. Success will be less a matter of imposing one’s will and more a function of shaping behavior of friends, adversaries, and most importantly, the people in between.Funding for non-military foreign-affairs programs has increased since 2001, but it remains disproportionately small relative to what we spend on the military and to the importance of such capabilities. Consider that this year’s budget for the Department of Defense not counting operations in Iraq and Afghanistan is nearly half a trillion dollars. The total foreign affairs budget request for the State Department is $36 billion less than what the Pentagon spends on health care alone. Secretary Rice has asked for a budget increase for the State Department and an expansion of the Foreign Service. The need is real.Despite new hires, there are only about 6,600 professional Foreign Service officers less than the manning for one aircraft carrier strike group. And personnel challenges loom on the horizon. By one estimate, 30 percent of USAID’s Foreign Service officers are eligible for retirement this year valuable experience that cannot be contracted out.Overall, our current military spending amounts to about 4 percent of GDP, below the historic norm and well below previous wartime periods. Nonetheless, we use this benchmark as a rough floor of how much we should spend on defense. We lack a similar benchmark for other departments and institutions.What is clear to me is that there is a need for a dramatic increase in spending on the civilian instruments of national security diplomacy, strategic communications, foreign assistance, civic action, and economic reconstruction and development. Secretary Rice addressed this need in a speech at Georgetown University nearly two years ago. We must focus our energies beyond the guns and steel of the military, beyond just our brave soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen. We must also focus our energies on the other elements of national power that will be so crucial in the coming years.

Most assuredly, the State Department will jump at the opportunity to spend more money, but the real question is this: will the State Department play along? As an observer of the vacillation, prevarication and recalcitrance of the State Department for years, I remain to be convinced that the so-called “lifers” in the department can be persuaded to actively support and participate in war in general and counterinsurgencies in particular. In order to apply this “soft” power, the department must effect the national policy set forth by the executive branch, and this doesn’t mean the “lifers” in the State Department. Two short examples will suffice to warn the reader that we may be expecting too much from the State Department as currently constituted.When the administration declared the Iranian Quds force a terrorist organization, Michael Ledeen dryly observed that:

The only real mystery is why anyone in the government felt that it was necessary to have a formal decision to declare the IRGC a bunch of terrorists. I guess that would be the lawyers, for whom it wasn’t sufficient to know that the entire Islamic Republic had been branded a sponsor of terrorism, and hence (a normal person would say) any part of it is ipso facto culpable of terrorist activity, and it’s particularly true of the IRGC, which directly kills people, both inside and outside Iran.

The point Ledeen makes is not that Quds should not have been designated a sponsor of terror. The point is that it is merely pro forma, a recognition of what has been the case for twenty years. But the same advocates of waiting on this declaration have advocated talking with Iran while it has almost gone nuclear. This soft power has never been coupled with hard power specifically because the State Department doesn’t work that way and doesn’t believe in it.This leads to the second example showing how many of the employees see in their mission, whatever that mission is. In an overlooked and almost silent murder, the State Department recently worked directly against both the objectives of the executive branch of the government and the security interests of the United States by killing a program that would have aided democracy in Iran.

The former director of President Bush’s flagship democracy program for the Middle East is saying that the State Department has “effectively killed” a program to disburse millions of dollars to Iran’s liberal opposition.In an interview yesterday, Scott Carpenter said a recent decision to move the $75 million annual aid program for Iranian democrats to the State Department’s Office of Iranian Affairs would effectively neuter an initiative the president had intended to spur democracy inside the Islamic Republic.”In my view, this pretty much kills the Iran democracy program,” Mr. Carpenter said of the decision by the State Department to subsume the program. “There is not the expertise, there is not the energy for it. The Iran office is worried about the bilateral policy. I think they are not committed to this anymore.”Mr. Carpenter, who headed the Middle East Partnership Initiative and was a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs until he left the Bush administration this summer, predicted the $20 million devoted to supporting the activities inside the Islamic Republic would be relegated to what he called “safe initiatives” such as student exchange programs, and not the more daring projects he and his deputy, David Denehy, funded, such as training for Web site operators to evade Internet censorship, political polling, and training on increasing recruitment for civil society groups.

We have advocated monies and support for the budding insurgency in Iran, so support for bloggers is mild compared to our recommendations; support for student exchange programs is wasteful, and if this is the kind of program that the State Department foresees with its increased funding, then the speech by Secretary Gates will have been to no avail. These were nice words describing nice ideas, but unfortunately they will conflict with the agendas of the “lifers” at the State Department. On to the next idea … Mr. Secretary.

In the spirit of The Strong Horse in Counterinsurgency, Victor Davis Hanson, who recently won the National Humanities Medal, observed of the turning of the Anbari tribes to the U.S.:

… the US military has eliminated a large number of terrorists, insurgents and general terrorists since 2003. Given the noxious fumes of Vietnam-era “body-counts�? we don’t mention this. But many of the sheiks suffered horrendous losses among their tribes to the US in the past four years that led to some demoralization and the simple absence of their more skilled and veteran fighters. So, when they weighed the odds—increasing oil-generated wealth on the one hand versus being mowed down by the US on the other—the choice was to join us.

I we have said previously, “the insurgency was defeated for a number of ancillary and contributing reasons, including tribal cooperation, security, money and largesse paid directly to concerned citizens and the sheikhs, and other factors.  But the primary reason that the U.S. forces have succeeded was that they were the stronger horse.  The Iraqis saw this and sided with a winner.”

But there is the issue of political reconciliation to address, and thus far, the progress being made in Iraq is ground up by design, due in no small part to the ineptitude and intransigence of the Maliki administration.  Progress still continues to be made in the Anbar province, even as the Anbar schema is applied to the balance of Iraq.  In the operational update with Col. Stacy Clardy III, Commander, RCT-2, Multinational Force West, we learned that the mayor who recently took over Haditha met with more than 200 sheikhs and tribal leaders (previously it would have been remarkable to get 30 in one place), and told them that “if you stand with the Americans, it’s just like if you stood with the Americans after World War II, in terms of Japan and Germany; you can see where they led them down the road to prosperity.  And if you look at those countries today, that is what we want here in Iraq.”

The Anbaris do indeed want this for themselves and Iraq.  They believe, though, that the Sunnis are more capable than the Shi’a at running a government, and at least in Iraq at the present time, and with the point of comparison being Maliki, they are likely correct.  But given the inexplicable and irrational commitment of the State Department to Maliki and the weak parliamentary system that was imposed on Iraq, the power sharing situation is unlikely to change in the near future.  For all of the good will, faith and rhetorical flourish of our friend the mayor of Haditha, sadly, his vision probably requires a U.S. presence and investment that is unlikely to come to pass unless progress is made on the national front.

As for Maliki and his handlers, there is a window of opportunity.  Thomas Ricks, reporter for the Washington Post, has written a clear-headed expose on the current thinking in the leadership of the Multinational Force concerning the administration and efforts (or lack thereof) at reconciliation and power sharing.  He opens:

Senior military commanders here now portray the intransigence of Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government as the key threat facing the U.S. effort in Iraq, rather than al-Qaeda terrorists, Sunni insurgents or Iranian-backed militias.

In more than a dozen interviews, U.S. military officials expressed growing concern over the Iraqi government’s failure to capitalize on sharp declines in attacks against U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians. A window of opportunity has opened for the government to reach out to its former foes, said Army Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the commander of day-to-day U.S. military operations in Iraq, but “it’s unclear how long that window is going to be open.”

The lack of political progress calls into question the core rationale behind the troop buildup President Bush announced in January, which was premised on the notion that improved security would create space for Iraqis to arrive at new power-sharing arrangements. And what if there is no such breakthrough by next summer? “If that doesn’t happen,” Odierno said, “we’re going to have to review our strategy.”

Thomas Ricks is an extraordinary reporter, but of course was working towards this particular story.  It is quite possible that rather than some stunning and remarkable step change in the political climate in Iraq, there is slow progress towards a stable nation-state while at the same time living with a low level of violence throughout the region.  Time will tell the story.  But at The Captain’s Journal we hold General Odierno in high regard, and concur that this window of opportunity not only must be utilized to the fullest extent, but also has been paid for by the tears, sweat, sacrifice and blood of American warriors.  The State Department should stand up and take note that it is just as immoral for the U.S. authorities to fail to pressure the Maliki administration for change as it is for the Maliki administration to remain unchanged.

Other resources:

Last Call: An Opportunity is a Terrible Thing to Waste, The Small Wars Journal Blog.