Washington puts its money on proxy
war By Nick Turse
In
the 1980s, Washington began funneling aid to
mujahideen rebels in Afghanistan as part of a US
proxy war against the Soviet Union. It was, in the
minds of America's Cold War leaders, a rare chance
to bloody the Soviets, to give them a taste of the
sort of defeat the Vietnamese, with Soviet help,
had inflicted on Washington the decade before. In
1989, after years of bloody combat, the Red Army
did indeed limp out of Afghanistan in defeat.
Since late 2001, the United States has
been fighting its former Afghan proxies and their
progeny. Now, after years of bloody
combat, it's the US that's
looking to withdraw the bulk of its forces and
once again employ proxies to secure its interests
there.
From Asia and Africa to the Middle
East and the Americas, the administration of US
President Barack Obama is increasingly embracing a
multifaceted, light-footprint brand of warfare.
Gone, for the moment at least, are the days of
full-scale invasions of the Eurasian mainland.
Instead, Washington is now planning to rely ever
more heavily on drones and special-operations
forces to fight scattered global enemies on the
cheap. A centerpiece of this new American way of
war is the outsourcing of fighting duties to local
proxies around the world.
While the United
States is currently engaged in just one outright
proxy war, backing a multi-nation African force to
battle Islamist militants in Somalia, it's laying
the groundwork for the extensive use of surrogate
forces in the future, training "native" troops to
carry out missions - up to and including outright
warfare. With this in mind and under the auspices
of the Pentagon and the State Department, US
military personnel now take part in near-constant
joint exercises and training missions around the
world aimed at fostering alliances, building
coalitions, and whipping surrogate forces into
shape to support US national-security objectives.
While using slightly different methods in
different regions, the basic strategy is a global
one in which the US will train, equip and advise
indigenous forces - generally from poor,
underdeveloped nations - to do the fighting (and
dying) it doesn't want to do. In the process, as
small an American force as possible, including
special-forces operatives and air support, will be
brought to bear to aid those surrogates.
Like drones, proxy warfare appears to
offer an easy solution to complex problems. But as
Washington's 30-year debacle in Afghanistan
indicates, the ultimate costs may prove both
unimaginable and unimaginably high.
Start
with Afghanistan itself. For more than a decade,
the US and its coalition partners have been
training Afghan security forces in the hopes that
they would take over the war there, defending US
and allied interests as the American-led
international force draws down. Yet despite an
expenditure of almost US$50 billion on bringing it
up to speed, the Afghan National Army and other
security forces have drastically underperformed
any and all expectations, year after year.
One track of the US plan has been a
little-talked-about proxy army run by the Central
Intelligence Agency. For years, the CIA has
trained and employed six clandestine militias that
operate near the cities of Kandahar, Kabul and
Jalalabad as well as in Khost, Kunar and Paktika
provinces. Working with US special forces and
controlled by Americans, these "Counter-Terror
Pursuit Teams" evidently operate free of any
Afghan governmental supervision and have
reportedly carried out cross-border raids into
Pakistan, offering their American patrons a
classic benefit of proxy warfare: plausible
deniability.
This clandestine effort has
also been supplemented by the creation of a
massive conventional indigenous security force.
While officially under Afghan government control,
these military and police forces are almost
entirely dependent on the financial support of the
US and allied governments for their continued
existence.
Today, the Afghan National
Security Forces officially number more than
343,000, but only 7% of their army units and 9% of
their police units are rated at the highest level
of effectiveness. By contrast, even after more
than a decade of large-scale Western aid, 95% of
the forces' recruits are still functionally
illiterate.
Not surprisingly, this massive
force, trained by high-priced private contractors,
Western European militaries and the United States,
and backed by US and coalition forces and their
advanced weapons systems, has been unable to stamp
out a lightly armed, modest-sized,
less-than-popular, rag-tag insurgency. One of the
few tasks this proxy force seems skilled at is
shooting American and allied forces, quite often
their own trainers, in increasingly common
"green-on-blue" attacks.
Adding insult to
injury, this poor-performing, coalition-killing
force is expensive. Bought and paid for by the
United States and its coalition partners, it costs
between $10 billion and $12 billion each year to
sustain in a country whose gross domestic product
is just $18 billion. Over the long term, such a
situation is untenable.
Back to the
future Utilizing foreign surrogates is
nothing new. Since ancient times, empires and
nation-states have employed foreign troops and
indigenous forces to wage war or have backed them
when it suited their policy aims. By the 19th and
20th centuries, the tactic had become de
rigueur for colonial powers like the French
who employed Senegalese, Moroccan and other
African forces in Indochina and elsewhere, and the
British who regularly used Nepalese Gurkhas to
wage counterinsurgencies in places ranging from
Iraq and Malaya to Borneo.
By the time the
United States began backing the mujahideen in
Afghanistan, it already had significant experience
with proxy warfare and its perils. After World War
II, the US eagerly embraced foreign surrogates,
generally in poor and underdeveloped countries, in
the name of the Cold War. These efforts included
the attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro via a proxy
Cuban force that crashed and burned at the Bay of
Pigs; the building of a Hmong army in Laos that
ultimately lost to Communist forces there; and the
bankrolling of a French war in Vietnam that failed
in 1954, and then the creation of a massive army
in South Vietnam that crumbled in 1975, to name
just a few unsuccessful efforts.
A more
recent proxy failure occurred in Iraq. For years
after the 2003 invasion, American policymakers
uttered a standard mantra: "As Iraqis stand up, we
will stand down." Last year, those Iraqis
basically walked off.
Between 2003 and
2011, the United States pumped tens of billions of
dollars into "reconstructing" the country, with
about $20 billion of it going to build the Iraqi
security forces. This mega-force of hundreds of
thousands of soldiers and police was created from
scratch to prop up the successors to the
government that the United States overthrew. It
was trained by and fought with the Americans and
their coalition partners, but that all came to an
end last December.
Despite Obama
administration efforts to base thousands or tens
of thousands of troops in Iraq for years to come,
the Iraqi government spurned Washington's
overtures and sent the US military packing. Today,
the Iraqi government supports the Assad regime in
Syria, and has a warm and increasingly close
relationship with longtime US enemy Iran.
According to Iran's semi-official Fars News
Agency, the two countries have even discussed
expanding their military ties.
African
shadow wars Despite a history of sinking
billions into proxy armies that collapsed, walked
away, or morphed into enemies, Washington is
currently pursuing plans for proxy warfare across
the globe, perhaps nowhere more aggressively than
in Africa.
Under President Obama,
operations in Africa have accelerated far beyond
the more limited interventions under his
predecessor George W Bush. These include last
year's war in Libya; the expansion of a growing
network of supply depots, small camps, and
airfields; a regional drone campaign with missions
run out of Djibouti, Ethiopia, and the Indian
Ocean archipelago nation Seychelles; a flotilla of
30 ships in that ocean supporting regional
operations; a massive influx of cash for
counter-terrorism operations across East Africa; a
possible old-fashioned air war, carried out on the
sly in the region using manned aircraft; and a
special-ops expeditionary force (bolstered by
State Department experts) dispatched to help
capture or kill Lord's Resistance Army (LRA)
leader Joseph Kony and his senior commanders.
(This mission against Kony is seen by some experts
as a cover for a developing proxy war between the
US and the Islamist government of Sudan - which is
accused of helping to support the LRA - and
Islamists more generally.) And this only begins to
scratch the surface of Washington's fast-expanding
plans and activities in the region.
In
Somalia, Washington has already involved itself in
a multi-pronged military and CIA campaign against
Islamist al-Shabaab militants that includes
intelligence operations, training for Somali
agents, a secret prison, helicopter attacks and
commando raids. Now, it is also backing a classic
proxy war using African surrogates. The United
States has become, as the Los Angeles Times put it
recently, "the driving force behind the fighting
in Somalia", as it trains and equips African foot
soldiers to battle Shabaab militants, so US forces
won't have to. In a country where more than 90
Americans were killed and wounded in a 1993
debacle now known by the shorthand "Black Hawk
Down", today's fighting and dying have been
outsourced to African soldiers.
This year,
for example, elite Force Recon marines from the
Special Purpose Marine Air Ground Task Force 12
(or, as a mouthful of an abbreviation, SPMAGTF-12)
trained soldiers from the Uganda People's Defense
Force. It, in turn, supplies the majority of the
troops to the African Union Mission in Somalia
(AMISOM) currently protecting the US-supported
government in that country's capital, Mogadishu.
This spring, marines from SPMAGTF-12 also
trained soldiers from the Burundi National Defense
Force (BNDF), the second-largest contingent in
Somalia. In April and May, members of Task Force
Raptor, 3rd Squadron, 124th Cavalry Regiment of
the Texas National Guard took part in a separate
training mission with the BNDF in Mudubugu,
Burundi. SPMAGTF-12 has also sent its trainers to
Djibouti, another nation involved in the Somali
mission, to work with an elite army unit there.
At the same time, US Army troops have
taken part in training members of Sierra Leone's
military in preparation for their deployment to
Somalia later this year. In June, US Army Africa
commander Major-General David Hogg spoke
encouragingly of the future of Sierra Leone's
forces in conjunction with another US ally, Kenya,
which invaded Somalia last autumn (and just
recently joined the African Union mission there).
"You will join the Kenyan forces in southern
Somalia to continue to push al-Shabaab and other
miscreants from Somalia so it can be free of
tyranny and terrorism and all the evil that comes
with it," he said. "We know that you are ready and
trained. You will be equipped and you will
accomplish this mission with honor and dignity."
Readying allied militaries for deployment
to Somalia is, however, just a fraction of the
story when it comes to training indigenous forces
in Africa. This year, for example, marines
traveled to Liberia to focus on teaching
riot-control techniques to that country's military
as part of what is otherwise a State
Department-directed effort to rebuild its security
forces.
In fact, Colonel Tom Davis of US
Africa Command (AFRICOM) recently told TomDispatch
that his command had held or planned 14 major
joint training exercises for 2012 and a similar
number were scheduled for 2013. This year's
efforts include operations in Morocco, Cameroon,
Gabon, Botswana, South Africa, Lesotho, Senegal
and Nigeria, including, for example, Western
Accord 2012, a multilateral exercise involving the
armed forces of Senegal, Burkina Faso, Guinea,
Gambia and France.
Even this, however,
doesn't encompass the full breadth of US training
and advising missions in Africa. "We ... conduct
some type of military training or
military-to-military engagement or activity with
nearly every country on the African continent,"
Davis wrote.
Our American
proxies Africa may, at present, be the
prime location for the development of proxy
warfare, American-style, but it's hardly the only
locale where the United States is training
indigenous forces to aid US foreign-policy aims.
This year, the Pentagon has also ramped up
operations in Central and South America as well as
the Caribbean.
In Honduras, for example,
small teams of US troops are working with local
forces to escalate the drug war there. Working out
of Forward Operating Base Mocoron and other remote
camps, the US military is supporting Honduran
operations by way of the methods it honed in Iraq
and Afghanistan.
US forces have also taken
part in joint operations with Honduran troops as
part of a training mission dubbed Beyond the
Horizon 2012, while Green Berets have been
assisting Honduran special-operations forces in
anti-smuggling operations.
Additionally,
an increasingly militarized US Drug Enforcement
Administration sent a Foreign-Deployed Advisory
Support Team, originally created to disrupt the
poppy trade in Afghanistan, to aid Honduras'
Tactical Response Team, that country's elite
counter-narcotics unit.
The militarization
and foreign deployment of US law-enforcement
operatives was also evident in Tradewinds 2012, a
training exercise held in Barbados in June. There,
members of the US military and civilian
law-enforcement agencies joined with counterparts
from Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados,
Belize, Canada, Dominica, the Dominican Republic,
Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, St Kitts and
Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines,
Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago to improve
cooperation for "complex multinational security
operations".
Far less visible have been
training efforts by US special-operations forces
in Guyana, Uruguay and Paraguay. In June,
special-ops troops also took part in Fuerzas
Comando, an eight-day "competition" in which the
elite forces from 21 countries, including the
Bahamas, Belize, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia,
Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El
Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Jamaica,
Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Trinidad and
Tobago and Uruguay, faced off in tests of physical
fitness, marksmanship and tactical capabilities.
This year, the US military has also
conducted training exercises in Guatemala,
sponsored "partnership-building" missions in the
Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Peru and Panama,
and reached an agreement to carry out 19
"activities" with the Colombian army over the next
year, including joint military exercises.
The proxy pivot Coverage of the
Obama administration's much-publicized strategic
"pivot" to Asia has focused on the creation of yet
more bases and new naval deployments to the
region. The military (which has dropped the word
"pivot" for "rebalancing") is, however, also
planning and carrying out numerous exercises and
training missions with regional allies. In fact,
the US Navy and Marines Corps alone already
reportedly engage in more than 170 bilateral and
multilateral exercises with Asia-Pacific nations
each year.
One of the largest of these
efforts took place in and around the Hawaiian
Islands from late June through early August.
Dubbed RIMPAC 2012, the exercise brought together
more than 40 ships and submarines, more than 200
aircraft, and 25,000 personnel from 22 nations,
including Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan,
Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore,
South Korea, Thailand and Tonga.
Almost
7,000 American troops also joined about 3,400 Thai
forces, as well as military personnel from
Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and South
Korea, as part of Cobra Gold 2012. In addition, US
marines took part in Hamel 2012, a multinational
training exercise involving members of the
Australian and New Zealand militaries, while other
American troops joined the Armed Forces of the
Philippines for Exercise Balikatan.
The
effects of the "pivot" are also evident in the
fact that once-neutralist India now holds more
than 50 military exercises with the United States
each year - more than any other country in the
world.
"Our partnership with India is a
key part of our rebalance to the Asia-Pacific and,
we believe, to the broader security and prosperity
of the 21st century," said US Deputy Secretary of
Defense Ashton Carter on a recent trip to the
subcontinent.
Just how broad is evident in
the fact that India is taking part in America's
proxy effort in Somalia. In recent years, the
Indian Navy has emerged as an "important
contributor" to the international counter-piracy
effort off that African country's coast, according
to Andrew Shapiro of the US State Department's
Bureau of Political-Military Affairs.
Peace by proxy India's neighbor
Bangladesh offers a further window into US efforts
to build proxy forces to serve American interests.
This year, US and Bangladeshi forces took
part in an exercise focused on logistics, planning
and tactical training, codenamed Shanti Doot-3.
The mission was notable in that it was part of a
US State Department program, supported and
executed by the Pentagon, known as the Global
Peace Operations Initiative.
First
implemented under George W Bush, GPOI provides
cash-strapped nations funds, equipment, logistical
assistance and training to enable their militaries
to become "peacekeepers" around the world. Under
Bush, from the time the program was established in
2004 through 2008, more than $374 million was
spent to train and equip foreign troops. Under
President Obama, Congress has funded the program
to the tune of $393 million, according to figures
provided to TomDispatch by the State Department.
In a speech this year, the State
Department's Andrew Shapiro told a Washington, DC,
audience that "GPOI is particularly focusing a
great deal of its efforts to support the training
and equipping of peacekeepers deploying to ...
Somalia" and had provided "tens of millions of
dollars' worth of equipment" for countries
deploying there.
In a weblog post he went
into more detail, lauding US efforts to train
Djiboutian troops to serve as peacekeepers in
Somalia and noting that the US had also provided
impoverished Djibouti with radar equipment and
patrol boats for offshore activities.
"Djibouti is also central to our efforts
to combat piracy," he wrote, "as it is on the
front line of maritime threats including piracy in
the Gulf of Aden and surrounding waters."
Djibouti and Bangladesh are hardly unique.
Under the auspices of the Global Peace Operations
Initiative, the US has partnered with 62 nations
around the globe, according to statistics provided
by the State Department. These proxies-in-training
are, not surprisingly, some of the poorest nations
in their respective regions, if not the entire
planet. They include Benin, Ethiopia, Malawi and
Togo in Africa, Nepal and Pakistan in Asia, and
Guatemala and Nicaragua in the Americas.
The changing face of empire With
ongoing military operations in Asia, Africa, the
Middle East and Latin America, the Obama
administration has embraced a six-point program
for light-footprint warfare relying heavily on
special-operations forces, drones, spies, civilian
partners, cyber-warfare and proxy fighters. Of all
the facets of this new way of war, the training
and employment of proxies has generally been the
least noticed, even though reliance on foreign
forces is considered one of its prime selling
points.
As Shapiro put it: "The importance
of these missions to the security of the United
States is often little appreciated ... To put it
clearly: When these peacekeepers deploy, it means
that US forces are less likely to be called on to
intervene."
In other words, to put it even
more clearly, more dead locals, fewer dead
Americans.
The evidence for this
conventional wisdom, however, is lacking. And
failures to learn from history in this regard have
been ruinous. The training, advising and
outfitting of a proxy force in Vietnam drew the
United States deeper and deeper into that doomed
conflict, leading to tens of thousands of dead
Americans and millions of dead Vietnamese. Support
for Afghan proxies during their decade-long battle
against the Soviet Union led directly to the
current disastrous decade-plus US war in
Afghanistan.
Right now, the US is once
again training, advising and conducting joint
exercises all over the world with proxy war on its
mind and the concept of "unintended consequences"
nowhere in sight in Washington. Whether today's
proxies end up working for or against Washington's
interests or even become tomorrow's enemies
remains to be seen. But with so much training
going on in so many destabilized regions, and so
many proxy forces being armed in so many places,
the chances of blowback grow greater by the day.
Nick Turse is the associate
editor of TomDispatch.com. An award-winning
journalist, his work has appeared in the Los
Angeles Times, in The Nation, and regularly at
TomDispatch. He is the author/editor of several
books, including the recently published
Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone
Warfare, 2001-2050 (with Tom Engelhardt). This
piece is the latest article in his new series on
the changing face of American empire, which is
being underwritten by Lannan Foundation. You can
follow him on Tumblr.
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