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he spectacle of Iraqi troops stripping off their uniforms
and ditching U.S. materiel worth millions of dollars in their headlong flight
out of Mosul, leaving much of Iraq’s north and east in the hands of the Islamic
State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, casts doubt on a main tenet of U.S. security
strategy: its heavy focus on host-nation militaries, irrespective of the
governments they serve.
Yet the latest formulation of U.S. counterterrorism
strategy, outlined by President Barack #Obama at West Point late last month, is
built around that very tenet. It is time to take stock of the hard lessons from
America’s inglorious history of dealing with local proxies and revise the
approach.
In #Iraq and #Afghanistan, the United States poured prodigious
resources into building and partnering with local forces, while officials
turned a blind eye to the toxic sectarianism and corruption (respectively) of
the two countries’ governments. Events in Iraq show the fundamental bankruptcy
of this approach.
ISIS’s lightning advance across Iraq’s Sunni heartland had
less to do with its strategic acumen or compelling vision than with how Iraqi
security institutions have come to embody the sectarianism, corruption and
nepotism of the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Even back in 2008,
the Iraqi security forces stubbornly blocked the reintegration of
American-backed “Sons of Iraq” that had fought against al Qaeda.
Some have suggested that more sustained U.S. mentoring and
advising—a residual force after the main withdrawal—could have averted the
current catastrophe by making the Iraqi Army more competent and less partisan.
But such notions vastly overstate U.S. leverage and influence.
It’s important to understand the limits of U.S. assistance:
It can help build security institutions, but it cannot shape how those
institutions are commandeered for personal, political or communal aims. Nor can
it substitute for a government seen as reasonably equitable and legitimate.
Although cases of mass desertion have been rare in
Afghanistan, and Afghan soldiers and police have stood their ground and borne a
terrible toll in the ongoing counterinsurgency campaign—losing more than 100
men per week during last year’s most intense period of fighting—more than a
third of the force trickles away each year through attrition. Today’s events in
Iraq bode ill for what will happen when the last U.S. forces leave in 2016.
In the meantime, units that receive U.S. training and
support have committed blood-chilling depredations against local civilians. The
chief of police of Kandahar province, a key U.S. ally during the 2010 troop
surge into the Afghan south, is notorious for having his men take members of a
rival tribe into the desert and shoot them. A spike in the number of internally
displaced persons beginning 2011 has been attributed not to Taliban excesses,
but to those of the undisciplined local militias organized by U.S. Special Forces.
Yet, in spite of these object lessons, the counterterrorism
approach Obama outlined at West Point would essentially subcontract America’s
war on al Qaeda to the armed forces of governments that are just as
counterproductive as Iraq’s and Afghanistan’s. As ISIS’s advance demonstrates,
this strategy runs the risk of exacerbating terrorist threats instead of
containing them.
At the National Defense University a year ago, Obama himself
recognized the limits of any exclusively military approach to jihadism. “In the
absence of a strategy that reduces the wellspring of extremism,” he emphasized
then, “a perpetual war … will prove self-defeating.” And yet, apart from his
vaguely worded insistence that Iraqis be “prepared to work together,” no
subsequent speech has unveiled such a concerted strategy. And, despite his
laudable reservations about rushing to the aid of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki without some sign of political reform, Obama still envisions a
perpetual war—just fought by others.
In his West Point speech, the president called for a new
“Counterterrorism Partnership Fund” – on top of at least $26 billion the United
States already earmarks for foreign security forces – “to train, build capacity
and facilitate partner countries on the front lines.”
In this war, the United States will be aligned with the
armies and security services of governments—Obama mentioned Yemen’s and
Somalia’s—that are no more legitimate in the eyes of their people than those of
Maliki in Iraq or Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan. And the likelihood that such
allies will either collapse at the first serious military challenge or prove
actively counterproductive is high.
Sarah Chayes is senior associate in the Democracy and Rule
of Law Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Frederic Wehrey is a senior associate in the Middle East
Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Military support, when lent to armies in repressive,
authoritarian states, tends to reinforce unpopular government and enable
practices that nourish extremism. In Egypt, under former dictator Hosni
Mubarak, or Nigeria today, for example, heavy-handed and rapacious police
forces have preyed upon ordinary people, shaking them down at market stalls or
in public transportation, arresting them on invented charges or descending on
their neighborhoods in vicious sweeps. The judicial system offers no recourse.
In prison, indignant men easily fall prey to terrorist propaganda and initial
training. Under the guise of “counterterrorism,” such regimes crack down on
political opponents.
To provide U.S. military equipment and training to
governments like these—even if the assistance is not directly used in physical
repression—still reinforces those governments and identifies the United States
with the abuses.
Consider U.S. military support to the Mubarak regime: More
than $1.5 billion in U.S. aid per year for the last three decades has yielded
few personal relationships or influence over military officers, but served as
an important source of funding and prestige, the equivalent of a U.S. imprimatur
for regime excesses. It is perhaps no wonder that Egyptians occupy the top
ranks of al Qaeda leadership, including the position left vacant by Osama Bin
Laden.
When U.S. support is provided to fragile, fractured states
with weak central authority—such as those with nominal sway over ungoverned
swathes of the Sahara and Sahel, Yemen or Afghanistan—it can contribute to
warlordism or the rise of sectarian or ethnic-based forces, as it has done in
Iraq. Their depredations fuel internal strife that can rapidly spin out of
control.
In Libya, the United States is training elite
counterterrorism forces and is planning to train the larger Libyan army. But
the country’s political landscape is so fractured that no single national army
exists. Entire air force and special operations units—the focus of a planned
U.S. assistance effort—have now defected to a retired general who has vowed to
“cleanse” Libya of Islamists. Any future U.S. support will be in de facto
partnership not with the state, but with one of many armed factions now vying
for control. In such a fractured landscape, outside military assistance will
lead to one of two equally undesirable outcomes: a strengthening of the
militias or a drift toward praetorianism or a possible coup.
A previous U.S. effort to train a Libyan counterterrorism
unit collapsed last year when its camp was raided by competing tribal
militias—resulting, before Mosul, in a massive transfer of U.S. military
materiel into the attackers’ hands. That unit, one of us discovered in
interviews, was drawn almost exclusively from western mountain tribes, rather
than representing Libya’s diverse regions and political affiliations.
Without careful effort to avoid such pitfalls, the new
counterterrorism approach – which largely expands past practices – will likely
produce the opposite of its intended effect. Holding the United States
responsible for colluding with local powers, what were originally local groups
with local aims might set their sights on U.S. interests, as they have already,
in some cases, done.
Nevertheless, even within what may be the least bad in a
range of imperfect options, there are ways U.S. assistance to local
counterterrorism forces can avoid inadvertently contributing to the very
extremism it seeks to curb.
First, where at all possible, law-enforcement approaches to
extremist violence are preferable to military ones. Any counterterrorism
support should be linked to a reform of local law enforcement agencies and
local judiciaries. Police and judicial officials need salaries they can live on
so as to reduce the pretext for corruption. Rules of evidence and procedure
should be tightened, and, when detainees are released, local communities should
be engaged to serve as guarantees for their ongoing good behavior, as was
piloted in Afghanistan in 2011.
Before a decision to work with local military units is made,
secondly, they and their prospective recruits must be carefully evaluated. Is
the unit a mainstay of an authoritarian, kleptocratic government, or of a
particular political leader? Is a single tribe, sect, ethnic group or other
network overrepresented in its ranks? Is U.S. support being used as a revenue
stream to enrich corrupt networks, or relieve the local government’s own
responsibility to provide for national defense? Have they refused to take
remedial measures when large-scale abuses have been documented? Any of these
factors are warning signs that U.S. counterterrorism support can be bent to
ulterior purposes, and might end up fueling popular grievances.
In cases where vetted units are judged to be appropriate
partners, America should not issue a blank check. Rigorous conditions and
oversight should govern military assistance and training. Indications of
financial irregularity, of gross recruiting bias or of inappropriate targeting
or other serious wrongdoing on the part of supported units should trigger an
automatic suspension of aid while an investigation is launched. Current U.S.
law provides for such procedures. Substantiated abuses should result in termination
of assistance and reimbursement of expenditures.
Finally, it is time for President Obama to back up his
proposition that force alone is not a sufficient response to extremist
violence. After two major counterterrorism speeches devoted to varieties of
military action, the president should unveil a civilian strategy that helps
push America’s allies in the fight against terrorism to undertake meaningful
political, economic and judicial reforms—in other words, to address the
well-springs of extremism—before insurgents are baying at the gates of the
capital city.
Sarah Chayes is senior associate in the Democracy and Rule
of Law Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Frederic Wehrey is a senior associate in the Middle East
Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Politico.
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