Pakistan has lashed out at America’s top-ranking military officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, on Friday, saying that its relations with the US have been further damaged by his remarks blaming the Islamabad government for the killing, torture and murder of a Pakistani journalist.
The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff shocked Islamabad by saying publicly what US officials had confirmed only in private: that the Pakistani government had “sanctioned” the killing of Syed Saleem Shahzad, the investigative reporter for Asia Times Online whose mutilated body was found on 30 May in a canal 40 miles from the capital. He had been writing about jihadist infiltration of the Pakistani military.
Pakistan’s information minister, Firdous Ashiq Awan, told a news conference Mullen had made an “extremely irresponsible and unfortunate statement”.
“This statement will create problems and difficulties for the bilateral relations between Pakistan and America. It will definitely deal a blow to our common efforts with regard to the war on terror,” she said, without going into details.
During 27 years in the Army, Ben Mericle survived tours in Bosnia, the Gulf War and Iraq. But it was only after coming home to West Palm Beach in 2006 that he came close to dying — by his own hand.
“I just wanted to disappear,” said Mericle, 50, recalling the many times he considered mixing a fatal cocktail from his prescribed medications and the prodigious amounts of alcohol he was drinking.
“I had so much anger. I wasn’t sleeping, had nightmares when I did, flashbacks. It was survivor’s guilt.”
Some do not survive, leading Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to identify the “emergency issue” facing the American military: a rise in the number of suicides.
On Wednesday, President Obama announced he will reverse a longstanding policy and begin sending condolence letters to the families of service members who commit suicide while deployed to a combat zone.
“This decision was made after a difficult and exhaustive review of the former policy, and I did not make it lightly,” Obama said in a statement. “This issue is emotional, painful, and complicated, but these Americans served our nation bravely. They didn’t die because they were weak. And the fact that they didn’t get the help they needed must change.”
Last year, 301 active-duty Army, Reserve and National Guard soldiers committed suicide, compared with 242 in 2009, according to Army figures.
$644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.
The May 3, 2011, unclassified “For Official Use Only” report is 142 pages. Prior to POGO’s publication of the full report, the only publicly available version was a 3-page “results in brief” on the DoD OIG’s website, first reported by Bloomberg News. The findings in the results in brief, while shocking on their own, pale in comparison to the detail contained within the full report. The DoD OIG scrutinized Army Aviation and Missile Life Cycle Management Command (AMCOM) transactions with Boeing that were in support of the Corpus Christi Army Depot (CCAD) in Texas. The audit focused on 24 “high-dollar” parts. Boeing had won two sole-source contracts (the second was a follow-on contract awarded last year) to provide the Army with logistics support—one of those support functions meant Boeing would help buy and/or make spare parts for the Army—for two weapons systems: the Boeing AH-64 Apache and Boeing CH-47 Chinook helicopters.
Overall, for 18 of 24 parts reviewed, the DoD OIG found that the Army should have only paid $10 million instead of the nearly $23 million it paid to Boeing for these parts—overall, taxpayers were overpaying 131.5 percent above “fair and reasonable” prices. The audit says Boeing needs to refund approximately $13 million Boeing overcharged for the 18 parts. Boeing had, as of the issuance of the audit, refunded approximately $1.3 million after the DoD OIG issued the draft version of its report. Boeing also provided a “credit” to the Army for another part for $324,616. The Army has resisted obtaining refunds worth several million dollars on some of the overpriced spare parts, in opposition to the DoD IG’s recommendations. For instance, one of the IG’s recommendations was that the Army should request a $6 million refund from Boeing for charging the Army for higher subcontractor prices even though Boeing negotiated lower prices from those subcontractors. In response, the Army said that “there is no justification to request a refund.”
In calculating what it says the Army should have paid, the DoD OIG assumed Boeing reasonably should charge a 34 percent surcharge fee for overhead, general and administrative costs, and profit, according to the audit report.
Above and beyond what the DoD OIG viewed as fair and reasonable (including the 34 percent surcharge), Boeing’s average overcharges to the Army for these 18 parts range from 33.3 percent to as much as 5,434 percent, based on the DoD OIG’s analysis.
What is even more shocking is the difference in prices the Army would have paid if it procured many of these parts directly from the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) and from the Army’s own procurement offices, the audit shows. The largest percentage differences cited in the DoD OIG report—such as the 177,475 percent example (which is not among the 18 parts the report focuses on)—compare DLA unit prices to Boeing unit prices.
The amount the U.S. military spends annually on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan: $20.2 billion.
That’s more than NASA’s budget. It’s more than BP has paid so far for damage during the Gulf oil spill. It’s what the G-8 has pledged to help foster new democracies in Egypt and Tunisia.
“When you consider the cost to deliver the fuel to some of the most isolated places in the world — escorting, command and control, medevac support — when you throw all that infrastructure in, we’re talking over $20 billion,” Steven Anderson tells weekends on All Things Considered guest host Rachel Martin. Anderson is a retired brigadier general who served as Gen. David Patreaus’ chief logistician in Iraq.
President Obama on Wednesday night informed the nation of his plans to withdraw 33,000 troops from Afghanistan by fall of next year, marking the beginning of the end of an increasingly unpopular war.
“The tide of war is receding,” Mr. Obama said from the White House, promising that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will both come to a “responsible end.”
Ten thousand troops will leave Afghanistan by the end of this year, the president announced, with another 23,000 leaving no later than September 2012. That would leave roughly 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan to continue the decade-long war.
[T]here are two reasons American planners hope to negotiate with the government of President Hamid Karzai an agreement to keep upward of 25,000 American forces in Afghanistan, even after the 30,000 “surge” troops are withdrawn over the next 14 months, and tens of thousands of more by the end of 2014.
Their first is to assure that Afghanistan never again becomes a base for attacks on the United States. But the more urgent reason is Pakistan. In his speech, Mr. Obama invited Pakistan to expand its peaceful cooperation in the region, but he also noted that Pakistan must live up to its commitments and that “the U.S. will never tolerate a safe haven for those who would destroy us.”
Pakistan has already made it clear, however, that it will never allow American forces to be based there. As relations have turned more hostile with the United States in recent months, it has refused to issue visas to large numbers of C.I.A. officers and seems to be moving quickly to close the American drone base in Shamsi, Pakistan.
For their part, administration officials make it clearer than ever that they view Pakistan’s harboring of terrorist groups as the more urgent problem. “We don’t see a transnational threat coming out of Afghanistan,” a senior administration official said Wednesday in briefing reporters before the president’s speech. Later he added, “The threat has come from Pakistan.”
President Obama plans to announce Wednesday evening that he will order the withdrawal of 10,000 American troops from Afghanistan this year, and another 20,000 troops, the remainder of the 2009 “surge,” by the end of next summer, according to administration officials and diplomats briefed on the decision. These troop reductions are both deeper and faster than the recommendations made by Mr. Obama’s military commanders, and they reflect mounting political and economic pressures at home, as the president faces relentless budget pressures and an increasingly restive Congress and American public.
The president is scheduled to speak about the Afghanistan war from the White House at 8 p.m. Eastern time.
Mr. Obama’s decision is a victory for Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has long argued for curtailing the American military engagement in Afghanistan. But it is a setback for his top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, who helped write the Army’s field book on counterinsurgency policy, and who is returning to Washington to head the Central Intelligence Agency.
Two administration officials said General Petraeus did not endorse the decision, though both Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who is retiring, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton reluctantly accepted it. General Petraeus had recommended limiting initial withdrawals and leaving in place as many combat forces for as long as possible, to hold on to fragile gains made in recent combat.
After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the George W. Bush administration flooded the conquered country with so much cash to pay for reconstruction and other projects in the first year that a new unit of measurement was born.
Pentagon officials determined that one giant C-130 Hercules cargo plane could carry $2.4 billion in shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills. They sent an initial full planeload of cash, followed by 20 other flights to Iraq by May 2004 in a $12-billion haul that U.S. officials believe to be the biggest international cash airlift of all time.
This month, the Pentagon and the Iraqi government are finally closing the books on the program that handled all those Benjamins. But despite years of audits and investigations, U.S. Defense officials still cannot say what happened to $6.6 billion in cash — enough to run the Los Angeles Unified School District or the Chicago Public Schools for a year, among many other things.
For the first time, federal auditors are suggesting that some or all of the cash may have been stolen, not just mislaid in an accounting error. Stuart Bowen, special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an office created by Congress, said the missing $6.6 billion may be “the largest theft of funds in national history.”
After months of popular protests against the regime, Bahraini officials are desperate to convince anyone who will listen, and most importantly to their long time allies in Washington, that the Persian Gulf island nation is returning to normal. On Tuesday Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa visited the White House, where he offered assurances that the regime is serious about political reform and engaging in a “national dialogue” with the country’s beleaguered opposition. Although it has directed muted criticism toward the Bahraini government, the Obama administration has offered repeated reassurances that it intends to stand by the ruling family. The White House appears to believe, or is banking on hope, that the Crown Prince is both willing and able to shepherd the country through the current crisis. But it may be time for the U.S. to reconsider its largest commitment to the Bahraini monarchy — the massive U.S. Fifth Fleet docked on the island — and the complicated relationship of mutual dependency that got us here in the first place.
Whatever opening there was for real dialogue in Bahrain, it appears to have closed. While the Crown Prince is busy touring Europe and the U.S. promoting himself as a force for moderation, it’s the hardliners in the royal family who currently hold power. Rather than reconciliation, their priority continues to be to oppressing — and often punishing – the protesters calling for a more representative government. The regime has taken extreme, frequently violent measures to destroy the country’s political opposition and defeat the forces of democracy.
Over the last few months, as the regime’s security forces have cracked down ever more brutally, the prospects for meaningful reform may well have passed. Since mid-March, when Saudi Arabia sent a contingent of its National Guard into Bahrain to help violently clear the streets of protesters, Bahrain has been the scene of terrible suffering. Hundreds languish in the country’s dungeons, where they are subject to horrifying torture and the humiliation of being paraded in front of military tribunals. Thousands of others have been sacked from their jobs.
The island’s Shiite majority, long politically marginalized and discriminated against, is paying the heaviest price. They have been stunned into silence by the vicious behavior of the Sunni regime. Bahraini politics have been polarized by sectarianism and the country’s rulers are systematically creating an apartheid state. Reconciliation, let alone accountability for those responsible for the violence, is a remote possibility. So deeply ingrained are mutual antagonisms that, if this conflict continues, the most likely outcome may be an enduring hostility and the potential for perennial violence.
The Obama administration has intensified the American covert war in Yemen, exploiting a growing power vacuum in the country to strike at militant suspects with armed drones and fighter jets, according to American officials.
The acceleration of the American campaign in recent weeks comes amid a violent conflict in Yemen that has left the government in Sana, a United States ally, struggling to cling to power. Yemeni troops that had been battling militants linked to Al Qaeda in the south have been pulled back to the capital, and American officials see the strikes as one of the few options to keep the militants from consolidating power.
On Friday, American jets killed Abu Ali al-Harithi, a midlevel Qaeda operative, and several other militant suspects in a strike in southern Yemen. According to witnesses, four civilians were also killed in the airstrike. Weeks earlier, drone aircraft fired missiles aimed at Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical American-born cleric who the United States government has tried to kill for more than a year. Mr. Awlaki survived.
The recent operations come after a nearly year-long pause in American airstrikes, which were halted amid concerns that poor intelligence had led to bungled missions and civilian deaths that were undercutting the goals of the secret campaign.
Officials in Washington said that the American and Saudi spy services had been receiving more information — from electronic eavesdropping and informants — about the possible locations of militants. But, they added, the outbreak of the wider conflict in Yemen created a new risk: that one faction might feed information to the Americans that could trigger air strikes against a rival group.
Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi politician who played a key role in persuading the administration of President George W. Bush to invade Iraq and overthrow dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003, said Tuesday that it’s time for U.S. forces to go home.
“Are Iraqis ready to carry the responsibility for their country?” he asked rhetorically during a panel discussion held with political supporters at his family compound in Baghdad. “Is Iraq ready to be its own master?”
“We want to be the masters of ourselves and to carry our responsibilities in this region,” Chalabi said.
Chalabi’s presentation comes as Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki struggles with whether to ask the U.S. to stay on past the Dec. 31 withdrawal date both countries agreed to three years ago. Maliki has taken no position, but he promised last month to seek advice from military experts and Iraqi political leaders and to make a decision by July 30 on whether to ask U.S. forces to remain.
To date, only the followers of Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al Sadr had come out publicly opposed to extending the American stay, with most Iraqi politicians remaining mum on the topic. Whether Chalabi’s formal opposition will matter is unclear. Although he’s a member of Iraq’s parliament from the largest political bloc, he doesn’t lead that bloc.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates must want Iran to build nuclear weapons. He didn’t say that directly. But how else should one interpret his latest threat against the embattled Persian Gulf state?
In what he said was his last major policy address, Secretary Gates expressed hope that Iraq would allow U.S. troops to remain. In fact, that’s a really bad idea, since America’s mission is over and Washington can’t afford to occupy the entire globe. Once defeated, forever occupied appears to be the secretary’s slogan. We are lucky that the Pentagon doesn’t still have army garrisons in Mexico, defeated back in 1848.
Secretary Gates talked about redeeming America’s blood “investment” and demonstrating that Washington planned to stay engaged in the region. He added: “It would be reassuring to the Gulf States. It would not be reassuring to Iran, and that is a good thing.”
Is it?
There obviously is much to dislike about Iran. An authoritarian theocracy with little sympathy for individual liberty. A troublesome meddler backing brutal Syria and aggressive Hezbollah. A regime with grudges against America’s favorite totalitarian theocracy, Saudi Arabia, and favorite democracy, Israel. A geopolitical adversary with strong connections in Iraq, which the Bush administration had hoped would become a base for American military operations. An untrustworthy government apparently developing nuclear weapons.
Obviously, none of these are good. But will failing to reassure Iran—in fact, doing the utmost to unsettle Iran—make the region safer? The fact that the regime is odious does not mean that it has no legitimate security concerns, concerns constantly exacerbated by Washington. If the United States does not reassure Tehran, the mullahs, and whoever might replace them, would be foolish to abandon their presumed nuclear program.
Riders on Boston subways and trolleys are accustomed to seeing placards that advertise research being conducted at the city’s many teaching hospitals. One that recently caught my eye, announcing an experimental “behavioral treatment,” posed this question to potential subjects: “Are you in the U.S. military or a veteran disturbed by terrible things you have experienced?”
Just below the question, someone had scrawled this riposte in blue ink: “Thank God for these Men and Women. USA all the way.”
Here on a 30 x 36 inch piece of cardboard was the distilled essence of the present-day relationship between the American people and their military. In the eyes of citizens, the American soldier has a dual identity: as hero but also as victim. As victims—Wounded Warriors —soldiers deserve the best care money can buy; hence, the emphasis being paid to issues like PTSD. As heroes, those who serve and sacrifice embody the virtues that underwrite American greatness. They therefore merit unstinting admiration.
Whatever practical meaning the slogan “support the troops” may possess, it lays here: in praise expressed for those choosing to wear the uniform, and in assistance made available to those who suffer as a consequence of that choice.
From the perspective of the American people, the principal attribute of this relationship is that it entails no real obligations or responsibilities. Face it: It costs us nothing yet enables us to feel good about ourselves. In an unmerited act of self-forgiveness, we thereby expunge the sin of the Vietnam era when opposition to an unpopular war found at least some Americans venting their unhappiness on the soldiers sent to fight it. The homeward-bound G.I. spat upon by spoiled and impudent student activists may be an urban legend, but the fiction persists and has long since trumped reality.
First dinner of the Nobel Women’s Initiative conference on ending sexual violence in conflict, and I had the good fortune to sit in on a wide-ranging conversation that started when Anu Bhagwati, the former US Marine Corps company commander who runs a campaigning organisation called the Service Women’s Action Network, told us that of the patients treated in US military veteran hospitals for sexual assault and harassment, 39 per cent are men.
These men have not necessarily been attacked for their sexual orientation, says Bhagwati, although homophobia is still very strong in the US military, along with discrimination against women. She believes one of the key features that leads to a man being sexually attacked by his male comrades-in-arms may be some form of outsiderness. She recounted the case of a tough 6-ft heterosexual man in the infantry, who spoke with an East European accent and was regularly teased, but then was gang-raped by his colleagues.
The phenomenon of sexual violence in the US military is massively under-reported — when the US airforce commissioned Gallup to do a poll, one in five serving women said they had been raped or otherwise sexually assaulted, and one in twenty men; but very few had formally reported the attacks to their commanding officer (or they may have tried, and been brushed aside and further victimised — Anu said the East European was actually discharged from the army for ‘being gay’. Rape survivors in the military are, she said, ‘hounded and hounded’, and the ‘final insult’ is to be kicked out for spurious reasons).
When the Department of Defence conducted a formal survey of gender relations in the military in 2010, it found around 19,000 sexual assaults happen a year (though nothing like this number are reported). 19,000 assaults a year breaks down to 52 rapes or assaults a day, most of them, says Bhagwati, on women, and most — contrary to what one might believe — on bases, not ‘in theatre’ where US forces are on active military service. Of the 3158 official reports made last year, only a quarter happened in theatre.
The first four Directors of the CIA (from 1947-1953) were military officers, but since then, there has been a tradition (generally though imperfectly observed) of keeping the agency under civilian rather than military leadership. That’s why George Bush’s 2006 nomination of Gen. Michael Hayden to the CIA provoked so many objections from Democrats (and even some Republicans).
The Hayden nomination triggered this comment from the current Democratic Chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein: “You can’t have the military control most of the major aspects of intelligence. The CIA is a civilian agency and is meant to be a civilian agency.” The then-top Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, Jane Harman, said “she hears concerns from civilian CIA professionals about whether the Defense Department is taking over intelligence operations” and “shares those concerns.” On Meet the Press, Nancy Pelosi cited tensions between the DoD and the CIA and said: “I don’t see how you have a four-star general heading up the CIA.” Then-Sen. Joe Biden worried that the CIA, with a General in charge, will “just be gobbled up by the Defense Department.” Even the current GOP Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Pete Hoekstra, voiced the same concern about Hayden: “We should not have a military person leading a civilian agency at this time.”
Of course, like so many Democratic objections to Bush policies, that was then and this is now. Yesterday, President Obama announced — to very little controversy — that he was nominating Gen. David Petraeus to become the next CIA Director. The Petraeus nomination raises all the same concerns as the Hayden nomination did, but even more so: Hayden, after all, had spent his career in military intelligence and Washington bureaucratic circles and thus was a more natural fit for the agency; by contrast, Petraues is a pure military officer and, most of all, a war fighting commander with little background in intelligence. But in the world of the Obama administration, Petraeus’ militarized, warrior orientation is considered an asset for running the CIA, not a liability.
That’s because the CIA, under Obama, is more militarized than ever, as devoted to operationally fighting wars as anything else, including analyzing and gathering intelligence. This morning’s Washington Post article on the Petraeus nomination — headlined: “Petraeus would helm an increasingly militarized CIA” — is unusual in presenting such a starkly forthright picture of how militarized the U.S. has become under the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner:
From Washington’s vantage, every Friday is becoming Black Friday in the Middle East. Muslim prayers turn to protests that keep building toward full-scale uprisings faster than anyone had predicted, and with potentially cataclysmic consequences nobody dares imagine. This Friday, the shock came in Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad runs one of the Middle East’s most repressive regimes. Across the country, protesters have grown ever more emboldened in recent weeks, and on Friday they poured into the streets by the tens of thousands to face the deadly fusillades of Assad’s security forces. More than 70 died. What did the White House have to say? From Air Force One: “We call on all sides to cease and desist from the use of violence.”
Surely President Obama can do better than that. Or perhaps not. The drama—the tragedy—increasingly apparent at the White House is of a brilliant intellect who is nonetheless confounded by events, a strategist whose strategies are thwarted and who is left with almost no strategy at all, a persuasive politician and diplomat who gets others to crawl out on limbs, has them take big risks to break through to a new future, and then turns around and walks away from them when the political winds in the United States threaten to shift. It’s not enough to say the Cabinet is divided about what to do. Maybe the simplest and in many ways the most disturbing explanation for all the flailing is offered by veteran journalist and diplomat Leslie H. Gelb: “There is one man in this administration who debates himself.” President Obama.
These patterns of behavior and their consequences have been on horrifying display in the blood-drenched streets of Misrata, Libya, where the population has begged for more support from NATO and the United States. But they did not begin with Libya, or with the surprise uprising in Tunisia in January or the stunning fall of Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak in February. They were evident from Year 1 of the Obama presidency in his excruciating deliberations over the Afghan surge, in the hand extended ineffectually to Iran, and the lines drawn in the sand, then rubbed out and moved back, and further back, in the dismal, failed efforts to build a Palestinian peace process. But in Libya the crisis of American tentativeness has grown worse almost by the day. Muammar Gaddafi holds on, despite Obama’s demand for him to leave, and the civilians that the Americans, their allies, and the United Nations vowed to protect are being slaughtered.
As US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates visited Baghdad yesterday, the New York Times reported:
Mr. Gates and American military commanders have made no secret of their view that some of the 47,000 American troops in Iraq should remain after 2011 as a stability force, particularly as tensions have flared between Arabs and Kurds in the north. But Mr. Gates said that the Iraqi government must first request that the American troops stay. That has not happened yet, much to the growing impatience of American commanders who say they need to know now in order to plan into 2012.
“We are willing to have a presence beyond that time,” Mr. Gates told the soldiers at Camp Liberty. “But we’ve got a lot of commitments around the world.” He added that “if folks are going to want us to have a presence, we’re going to need to get on with it pretty quickly in terms of our planning and our ability to figure out where we get the forces.”
He also said that although the Iraqis had shown interest in keeping some American troops in the country, “The politics are such, we’ll just have to wait and see.”
Mr. Gates was obliquely referring to the politics surrounding Mr. Maliki, who is hemmed in by a bloc of politicians loyal to the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr. Mr. Sadr, whose support Mr. Maliki relied on to secure a second term as prime minister, is opposed to any delay in the American withdrawal. Any extension of the American troop presence would require the politically risky decision by Mr. Maliki to ask for it.
The top American commander in Iraq, Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, made clear on Thursday that Iraq was not ready to defend itself, particularly from the skies. He said the Iraqis also needed help with intelligence gathering, logistics and the use of different weapons systems in coherent warfare. He said that there was a debate in the Iraqi government about whether the United States should stay or not, and that the wind of that debate was not blowing in one direction, “It’s blowing in every direction.”
Despite the uncertainties, Mr. Gates told the troops at Camp Liberty that “Iraq has been an extraordinary success story for the United States military.” In briefly reflective comments, he recalled for them the first of some dozen trips to Iraq as defense secretary, in December 2006, when violence was raging and he held a news conference at a nearby base while a firefight went on in the background.
Today, Mr. Gates said, countries in turmoil across the Middle East “would be happy if they could get to where Iraq is today — it isn’t perfect, but it’s new and it is a democracy and people do have rights.”
In conclusion, he recalled that when he took over as defense secretary, people said he would be evaluated by how Iraq turned out. “And I’ll let people judge for themselves,” he said.
Meanwhile, Al Jazeera‘s Jane Arraf tweets that demonstrators gathered in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square today, burning American flags and protesting against the continuation of the US occupation. The protesters also say even the US embassy — the biggest embassy in the world — is part of the occupation.
The Central Intelligence Agency has inserted clandestine operatives into Libya to gather intelligence for military airstrikes and to contact and vet the beleaguered rebels battling Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces, according to American officials.
While President Obama has insisted that no American military ground troops participate in the Libyan campaign, small groups of C.I.A. operatives have been working in Libya for several weeks as part of a shadow force of Westerners that the Obama administration hopes can help bleed Colonel Qaddafi’s military, the officials said.
In addition to the C.I.A. presence, composed of an unknown number of Americans who had worked at the spy agency’s station in Tripoli and others who arrived more recently, current and former British officials said that dozens of British special forces and MI6 intelligence officers are working inside Libya. The British operatives have been directing airstrikes from British jets and gathering intelligence about the whereabouts of Libyan government tank columns, artillery pieces and missile installations, the officials said.
American officials hope that similar information gathered by American intelligence officers — including the location of Colonel Qaddafi’s munitions depots and the clusters of government troops inside towns — might help weaken Libya’s military enough to encourage defections within its ranks.
In addition, the American spies are meeting with rebels to try to fill in gaps in understanding who their leaders are and the allegiances of the groups opposed to Colonel Qaddafi, said United States government officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the activities. American officials cautioned, though, that the Western operatives were not directing the actions of rebel forces.
A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment.
The United States and its allies have been scrambling to gather detailed information on the location and abilities of Libyan infantry and armored forces that normally takes months of painstaking analysis.
“We didn’t have great data,” Gen. Carter F. Ham, who handed over control of the Libya mission to NATO on Wednesday, said in an e-mail last week. “Libya hasn’t been a country we focused on a lot over past few years.”
Several weeks ago, President Obama signed a secret finding authorizing the C.I.A. to provide arms and other support to Libyan rebels, American officials said Wednesday. But weapons have not yet been shipped into Libya, as Obama administration officials debate the effects of giving them to the rebel groups. The presidential finding was first reported by Reuters.
As rebel forces backed by allied warplanes pushed toward one of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s most crucial bastions of support, the American military warned on Monday that the insurgents’ rapid advances could quickly be reversed without continued coalition air support.
“The regime still vastly overmatches opposition forces militarily,” Gen. Carter F. Ham, the ranking American in the coalition operation, warned in an email message on Monday. “The regime possesses the capability to roll them back very quickly. Coalition air power is the major reason that has not happened.”
Why make this point now? Because those outside Libya who believe that Western powers have stepped outside the terms of UN Res 1973 are eager to call for a timeout, insisting that the only legal conclusion to this war will come from a negotiated settlement.
The rebels’ own military capabilities, by measure of weaponry, training, organization and command remain distinctly limited. So, as NATO powers and others involved in the campaign convene in London on Tuesday to plot their next steps, they face the question of whether to use their military leverage to assault the regime on its “home” turf and effectively bomb it out of existence. There are good reasons to believe they’re unlikely to go that far.
NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Sunday that the alliance’s actions would be limited to implementing U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973, “nothing more, nothing less.”
And that resolution mandates foreign powers to protect Libya’s civilians through imposing no-fly zone and an arms embargo, and destroying armor and other heavy weaponry that menaces civilian population centers. But it says nothing about regime-change; on the contrary, it requires member states to work for an immediate cease-fire and a democratic political solution to Libya’s civil conflict.
If this is really a “civil conflict,” why hasn’t Gaddafi handed out weapons to all his loyal supporters? He said he’d arm a million civilians, but the fact that he hasn’t probably indicates that there are nowhere near that many Libyans he can trust.
If the Obama administration can be derided for using Orwellian language when calling this war a “time-limited, scope-limited military action,” the Gaddafi government’s own language should be viewed just as critically.
With good reason “civil conflict” is the exact term they have adopted in the hope that observers who find the intervention objectionable will help promote a narrative that legitimizes Gaddafi’s rule. The revolution is aimed at toppling a despotic regime, but if this is a civil war, who are we to take sides?
Amid repeated claims that Libya could turn into another Iraq or Afghanistan, there are growing calls for a negotiated solution. Such talk at the moment serves no purpose, apart from throwing a lifeline to the Gaddafi family and helping them maintain their grip on the country, or at least some of it.
Calls for negotiation are predicated on the idea that the situation in Libya will reach a political/military impasse. It might do, but it hasn’t yet – so there is no need to start behaving as if it had.
A more likely scenario, though, is that the Gaddafi regime will implode suddenly and fairly soon – in a matter of weeks rather than months or years. We should at least wait to see if that is what happens. Hardly anyone in Libya seriously believes in the leader’s eccentric Green Book ideology, and most of those who currently support him can be expected to abandon him once they perceive that he is on the way out.
So the effect of negotiations at this stage would be to help the Gaddafis salvage something. That certainly seems to be the aim of the leader’s son, Saif al-Islam, who has reportedly been trying to interest the US, Britain and Italy in a “transition plan”. Not surprisingly, Saif’s plan envisages Saif taking over from his father for a period of two to three years, while Libya is transformed from a revolutionary jamahiriyya into a liberal democracy. In the meantime, all the Gaddafis – despite their crimes over the years – would be granted immunity from prosecution.
Rebel Libyan forces were halted about 50 miles from Sirte on Monday as reinforcements loyal to Muammar Gaddafi were seen moving towards the strategically vital city.
Revolutionary forces had advanced more than 150 miles in two days, helped by coalition air strikes, breaking the stalemate at Ajdabiya and paving the way for hundreds of men to stream forward along Libya’s coastal road.
But despite a Libyan rebel claim that Sirte had been captured, there was no sign on Monday that the opposition was in control of the city, which marks the boundary between the east and west of Libya and has great symbolic importance as Gaddafi’s home city.
Instead, pro-Gaddafi troops in Sirte were being rallied by forces travelling east from Tripoli and other strongholds in 4×4 vehicles with light weaponry mounted on the rear, a break from the heavier artillery used so far by Gaddafi’s forces, which has been picked off with relative ease by coalition air strikes.
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