Page 1 of 2 Obama sears the arc of instability
By Nick Turse
It's a story that should take your breath away: the destabilization of what, in
the George W Bush years, used to be called "the arc of instability". It
involves at least 97 countries, across the bulk of the global south, much of it
coinciding with the oil heartlands of the planet. A startling number of these
nations are now in turmoil, and in every single one of them - from Afghanistan
and Algeria to Yemen and Zambia - Washington is militarily involved, overtly or
covertly, in outright war or what passes for peace.
Garrisoning the planet is just part of it. The Pentagon and US intelligence
services are also running covert special forces and spy operations, launching
drone attacks, building bases and secret prisons, training, arming, and funding
local security forces, and engaging in a host of other militarized activities
right up to full-scale war. But while you consider this, keep one fact in mind:
the
odds are that there is no longer a single nation in the arc of instability in
which the United States is in no way militarily involved.
Covenant of the arc
"Freedom is on the march in the broader Middle East," the president said in his
speech. "The hope of liberty now reaches from Kabul to Baghdad to Beirut and
beyond. Slowly but surely, we're helping to transform the broader Middle East
from an arc of instability into an arc of freedom."
An arc of freedom. You could be forgiven if you thought that this was an
excerpt from President Barack Obama's Arab Spring speech, where he said, "[I]t
will be the policy of the United States to ... support transitions to
democracy." Those were, however, the words of his predecessor George W Bush.
The giveaway is that phrase "arc of instability", a core rhetorical concept of
the former president's global vision and that of his neo-conservative
supporters.
The dream of the Bush years was to militarily dominate that arc, which largely
coincided with the area from North Africa to the Chinese border, also known as
the Greater Middle East, but sometimes was said to stretch from Latin America
to Southeast Asia. While the phrase has been dropped in the Obama years, when
it comes to projecting military power President Barack Obama is in the process
of trumping his predecessor.
In addition to waging more wars in "arc" nations, Obama has overseen the
deployment of greater numbers of special operations forces to the region, has
transferred or brokered the sale of substantial quantities of weapons there,
while continuing to build and expand military bases at a torrid rate, as well
as training and supplying large numbers of indigenous forces.
Pentagon documents and open source information indicate that there is not a
single country in that arc in which US military and intelligence agencies are
not now active. This raises questions about just how crucial the American role
has been in the region's increasing volatility and destabilization.
Flooding the arc
Given the centrality of the arc of instability to Bush administration thinking,
it was hardly surprising that it launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and
carried out limited strikes in three other arc states - Yemen, Pakistan, and
Somalia. Nor should anyone have been shocked that it also deployed elite
military forces and special operators from the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) elsewhere within the arc.
In his book The One Percent Doctrine, journalist Ron Suskind reported on
CIA plans, unveiled in September 2001 and known as the "Worldwide Attack
Matrix" for "detailed operations against terrorists in 80 countries". At about
the same time, then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld proclaimed that the
nation had embarked on "a large multi-headed effort that probably spans 60
countries". By the end of the Bush years, the Pentagon would indeed have
special operations forces deployed in 60 countries around the world.
It has been the Obama administration, however, that has embraced the concept
far more fully and engaged the region even more broadly. Last year, the
Washington Post reported that US had deployed special operations forces in 75
countries, from South America to Central Asia.
Recently, however, US Special Operations Command spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told
me that on any given day, America's elite troops are working in about 70
countries, and that its country total by year's end would be around 120. These
forces are engaged in a host of missions, from Army Rangers involved in
conventional combat in Afghanistan to the team of Navy SEALs who assassinated
Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, to trainers from the army, navy, air force, and
marines within US Special Operations Command working globally from the
Dominican Republic to Yemen.
The United States is now involved in wars in six arc-of-instability nations:
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. It has military
personnel deployed in other arc states, including Algeria, Bahrain, Djibouti,
Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi
Arabia, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates.
Of these countries, Afghanistan, Bahrain, Djibouti, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar,
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates all host US military bases, while the
CIA is reportedly building a secret base somewhere in the region for use in its
expanded drone wars in Yemen and Somalia. It is also using already existing
facilities in Djibouti, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates for the same
purposes, and operating a clandestine base in Somalia where it runs indigenous
agents and carries out counterterrorism training for local partners.
In addition to its own military efforts, the Obama administration has also
arranged for the sale of weaponry to regimes in arc states across the Middle
East, including Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Saudi Arabia,
Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen. It has been indoctrinating and
schooling indigenous military partners through the State Department's and
Pentagon's International Military Education and Training program.
Last year, it provided training to more than 7,000 students from 130 countries.
"The emphasis is on the Middle East and Africa because we know that terrorism
will grow, and we know that vulnerable countries are the most targeted," Kay
Judkins, the program's policy manager, recently told the American Forces Press
Service.
According to Pentagon documents released earlier this year, the US has
personnel - some in token numbers, some in more sizeable contingents - deployed
in 76 other nations sometimes counted in the arc of instability: Angola,
Botswana, Burundi, Cameroon, Chad, Congo, Cote d'Ivoire, Ethiopia, Gabon,
Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Liberia, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Niger,
Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo,
Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, Syria, Antigua, the Bahamas, Barbados,
Belize, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador,
El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua,
Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay, Venezuela,
Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar,
Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and
Vietnam.
While arrests of 30 members of an alleged CIA spy ring in Iran earlier this
year may be, like earlier incarcerations of supposed American "spies", pure
theater for internal consumption or international bargaining, there is little
doubt that the US is conducting covert operations there, too.
Last year, reports surfaced that US black ops teams had been authorized to run
missions inside that country, and spies and local proxies are almost certainly
at work there as well. Just recently, the Wall Street Journal revealed a series
of "secret operations on the Iran-Iraq border" by the US military and a coming
CIA campaign of covert operations aimed at halting the smuggling of Iranian
arms into Iraq.
All of this suggests that there may, in fact, not be a single nation within the
arc of instability, however defined, in which the United States is without a
base or military or intelligence personnel, or where it is not running agents,
sending weapons, conducting covert operations or at war.
The arc of history
Just after Obama came into office in 2009, then-Director of National
Intelligence Dennis Blair briefed the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Drawing special attention to the arc of instability, he summed up the global
situation this way: "The large region from the Middle East to South Asia is the
locus for many of the challenges facing the United States in the twenty-first
century."
Since then, as with the Bush-identified phrase "global war on terror", the
Obama administration and the US military have largely avoided using "arc of
instability", preferring to refer to it using far vaguer formulations.
During a speech at the National Defense Industrial Association's annual Special
Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict Symposium earlier this year, for example,
Navy Admiral Eric Olson, then the chief of US Special Operations Command,
pointed toward a composite satellite image of the world at night.
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