A military checkpoint on Colombia's Atrato River. Credit: Jesús Abad Colorado/IPS

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 19 2013 (IPS)

The United States needs to phase down its drug war and tighten the reins on its cooperation with local militaries and police in Latin America, according to a new report released here Wednesday by three influential think tanks.

Of particular interest is the increase in training deployments to Latin American and the Caribbean by the Special Operations Forces (SOF) – elite units like the Army’s Green Berets and Navy SEALS – due in part to the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and drawdown from Afghanistan.

Over the past decade, SOF ranks have more than doubled to about 65,000, and their commander, Adm. William McRaven, has been particularly aggressive in seeking new missions for his troops in new theatres, including Latin America and the Caribbean where they are training thousands of local counterparts.

“You can train a lot of people for the cost of one helicopter,” Adam Isacson, an analyst with the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), told IPS.

He noted that the increased investment in SOF was part of a much larger Pentagon strategy of maintaining a “light (military) footprint” in countries around the globe while bolstering its influence with local military institutions.

The Pentagon, however, is much less transparent than the State Department, and its programmes are often not subject to the same human-rights conditions and do not get the same degree of Congressional oversight.

Moreover, McRaven has sought the authority to deploy SOF teams to countries without consulting either U.S. ambassadors there or even the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), making it even more difficult for civil society activists to track what they’re doing and whether they’re working with local units with poor human-rights records that would normally be denied U.S. aid and training under the so-called Leahy Law.

Last summer, according to Isacson, McRaven’s command even tried to work out an agreement with Colombia to set up a regional special operations coordination centre there without consulting SOUTHCOM or the embassy.

“What these developments mean is that the military role in foreign policy-making is becoming ever greater, and military-to-military relations come to matter more than diplomatic relations,” he said. “What does that mean for civil-military relations not only in the region, but also here at home?”

The 32-page report, entitled “Time to Listen”, describes U.S. policy as “on auto-pilot”, largely due to the powerful bureaucratic interests in the Pentagon and the Drug Enforcement Administration and their regional counterparts that have built up over decades.

“The counter-drug bureaucracies in the United States are remarkably resistant to change, unwilling to rethink and reassess strategies and goals,” said Lisa Haugaard, director of the Latin America Working Group Education Fund (LAWGEF) which released the report along with WOLA and the Centre for International Policy (CIP).

The report also noted that new security technologies, including drones, whose use by the U.S. and other countries is growing quickly throughout the region, and cyber-spying of the kind that prompted this week’s abrupt cancellation by Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff of her state visit here next month, pose major challenges to the security environment and civil liberties in the region.

Total U.S. aid to Latin America hit its highest level in more than two decades in 2010 – nearly 4.5 billion dollars – due to the costs of the “Merida Initiative”, a multi-year programme for fighting drug-trafficking in Mexico and Central America, and a major inflow of assistance to help Haiti recover from that year’s devastating earthquake.

But aid fell sharply in 2011 – to just 2.5 billion dollars – and is expected to decline to just 2.2 billion dollars in fiscal 2014, which begins Oct. 1.

Military and security assistance also reached its height in 2010, at 1.6 billion dollars, but has since declined to around 900 million dollars, largely as a result of the phase-out of Plan Colombia and the Merida Initiative. Central America is the only sub-region in which aid, including non-security assistance, is increasing significantly.

But Isacson says dollar amounts can be deceptive, and while “big ticket” aid packages are down, “other, less transparent forms of military-to-military co-operation are on the rise,” in part due to the migration of many programmes’ management from the State Department, which has more stringent reporting and human rights conditions, to the Pentagon.

A troubling trend, according to the report, is that some countries, especially Colombia, have begun training military and police forces in their neighbours, often with U.S. funding and encouragement.

In that respect, these third-country trainers act as private contractors who are not subject to U.S. human-rights laws and whose cost is a fraction of that of their U.S. counterparts.

Despite their security forces’ own highly controversial human rights record, Colombian officers have been given major roles, for example, in Washington’s Central America Regional Security Initiative (CARSI) and the Merida Initiative, as well as in Honduras’ police reform, according to the report.

“Bringing the military into the streets can result in grave human-rights violations,” according to Haugaard who also noted U.S. involvement in poorly designed and heavy-handed counter-drug operations, such as one in Honduras last year in which four passengers in a river taxi were killed by a joint Honduran-DEA operation.

Washington’s record has not been all bad, according to the report, which praised the Obama administration’s insertion of human rights into its high-level bilateral dialogues with Mexico, Colombia, and Honduras and its emphasis on the importance of civilian trials for soldiers implicated in serious rights abuses in Colombia and Mexico.

The administration has also taken some steps to strengthen enforcement of the Leahy Law, which denies U.S. aid and training to foreign military units that are credibly accused of serious rights abuses, according to the report. It also praised Washington’s support for Colombia’s peace process and its defence of the Inter-American human rights system against recent attempts by Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia to weaken it.

Still, Washington’s own human rights record, including its failure to close the Guantanamo detention facility, its newly revealed extensive surveillance programmes, and a drone policy that justifies extra-judicial executions opens it to charges of double standard, the report noted.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

A Coalition special operations forces (SOF) member discusses a clearance plan with Afghan National Army Commandos from the 8th Commando Kandak during a clearance operation in Akhtar Village, Arghandab district, Zabul province Afghanistan Jan. 11, 2012. Credit: U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Jacob L. Dillon

By Gareth Porter and Shah Noori
WASHINGTON/KABUL, Mar 10 2013 (IPS)

Two weeks after Afghan President Hamid Karzai demanded the withdrawal of all U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) from Wardak province by this date, the issue remains suspended in negotiations between U.S. and Afghan governments.

U.S. Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel planned to discuss the matter with Karzai Sunday, but the meeting was postponed after a security incident in Kabul.

Negotiations between the U.S. military command in Kabul and the Afghan government over Karzai’s demand were going on last week as an investigation by a joint team of Afghan and U.S. Special Forces officers into human rights abuses by forces said to be linked to the SOF unit in the province continues.

“I can tell you that ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] and Afghan leaders are meeting,” ISAF spokesman Air Force Lt. Col. Lester T. Carroll told IPS Friday, and that Karzai’s demand for SOF’s withdrawal from Wardak “is being discussed”.

Attaullah Khogiani, spokesman for the governor of Wardak province, told IPS Saturday that the U.S. SOF unit is still in its base in Maidan Shar district, and that a joint U.S. SOF-Afghan government investigating team looking into complaints by Wardak’s population about Afghan armed men linked to the SOF unit has demanded more time.

The Karzai government has given the team three days to complete its investigation, but the team is saying it needs more time than that, according to Khogiani. The joint team is meeting with the families of victims of the crimes by the mysterious armed force in the province that has been blamed on the SOF, he told IPS in an interview.

The identity of the Afghan forces that have imposed a reign of terror in Wardak that prompted President Karzai to demand the withdrawal of the SOF from the province remains a mystery to Afghan officials and residents there.

Khogiani and other officials and residents of Wardawk interviewed by IPS in recent days say the Afghans are certain that the armed Afghans who have carried out murder, torture and extrajudicial detention of civilians in Wardak have been working for the SOF unit stationed there. But they still don’t know who they are or where they came from.

U.S. SOF units have been responsible for recruiting, training, arming and monitoring Afghan Local Police (ALP), which have committed abuses in the past. But many people in Wardak believe the armed Afghans terrorising the villages could not be ALP, because they are not from the villages themselves and in fact appear not to be from Wardak province at all.

Abdul Rahman, who commands a police checkpoint and is a village elder and district development council member in Maidan Shar district, told IPS that the armed men behind the abuses in that district are believed to be from an Afghan task force organised and supported by SOF in Kandahar and Helmand provinces.

Mohammad Jan Sarwary, a tall young man working for a mobile phone
company who lives in Narkh district, told IPS the armed force that entered his village in mid-February are not local police recruited by the SOF but Afghan task forces who are staying with SOF in the base.

“The people say they are Afghans who had been trained by the Special Operations Forces,” said Sarwary. “From their dialect we believe they are from Kandahar or Helmand provinces.”

Sarwary said a relative in his village told him that the militiamen had forced one of the residents to sit on an improvised explosive device with a gun pointed at his head. They threatened that if any of the members of the force were attacked by anyone in the village, they would blow up that individual.

Another possibility, which has not been raised by Afghans, is that the “counterterrorism pursuit teams” trained by the CIA and acting outside any Afghan chain of command have been carrying out operations in Wardak.

Afghan presidential spokesman Aimal Faizi announced Feb. 24 that Karzai had ordered his ministry of defence to “kick out US special forces from Wardak…within two weeks.”

The spokesman said it had become “clear that armed individuals named as U.S. special force[s] stationed in Wardak province engage in harassing, annoying, torturing and even murdering innocent people.”

Faizi mentioned the disappearance of nine people in “an operation by this suspicious force” and a separate incident in which “a student was taken away at night from his home, whose tortured body with throat cut was found two days later under a bridge.”

The spokesman later clarified that he was referring to “[t]hose Afghans in these armed groups who are working with the U.S. special forces….”

ISAF spokesman Brigadier General Gunter Katz immediately claimed that a review had already confirmed that “no coalition forces have been involved in the alleged misconduct”.

But the Los Angeles Times reported a U.S. official as confirming that four of the nine had been seized in joint U.S.-Afghan raids last November and December.

SOF commanders have reportedly brushed off the charges of abuse. Coalition officials told the Wall Street Journal Feb. 25 that the accusations were part of a Taliban propaganda campaign. “The fact is,” one official was quoted as saying, “we are badly beating the Taliban there.”

Hazrat Mohammad Jan, deputy provincial council chief in Wardak, told IPS, “We have gotten many complains from people across Wardak, especially from Narkh and Maidan Shar districts, over the last five months.”

The complaints have involved both the unidentified Afghan forces and the SOF units. The Afghan intelligence agency, police and governor’s office were all aware that the SOF were conducting raids and detaining people, but were powerless to stop them, according to Jan.

The inability of the government to respond to people’s complaints has created distrust of the government, Jan said.

Jan said Afghan commanders in Wardak and Kabul brought in elders from the areas terrorised by the men allegedly associated with the SOF to meet with the SOF commander in Maidan Shar and tell him about the abuses they have been suffering. When that did not bring any improvement, Jan said, they went to Kabul to plead with the SOF commander in Kabul. That didn’t help either, according to Jan.

Finally a delegation of Wardak people went to Kabul and complained to Karzai himself. Karzai then sent a representative to Wardak to get detailed accounts of misconduct by SOF personnel in Narkh and Maidan Shar, Jan said. After an official of the attorney general’s office also visited the province and heard similar accounts, Karzai made the decision to order the SOF out of the province.

The perception that U.S.-sponsored militias from outside the province are committing widespread abuses has spawned conspiratorial explanations in Wardawk.

Police officer and village elder Rahman said he believes the SOF units are deliberately allowing the people they trained to carry out actions to “make people in the province insecure”, so that “the people will react strongly.”

“2014 is near and the SOF is going to leave,” Rahman said, “and that’s why they are turning people against government, and also disrupting the transitional process and bargaining to get permanent bases and immunity” – a reference to two issues still under negotiation.

Karzai’s comment on Sunday that the U.S. and the Taliban were colluding to create insecurity reflected a similar conspiracy theory.

In the background of the controversy, meanwhile, are negotiations between U.S. and Afghan officials on U.S. Special Forces operations after the 2014 transition begins.

A Memorandum of Understanding signed May 12, 2012 between the U.S. military and the Afghan Defence Ministry was trumpeted by the Obama administration as giving the Afghan government control over such operations.

But a little-noticed provision of the agreement defined the “special operations” covered by the agreement as those operations that are “approved by the Afghan Operational Coordination Group (OCG) and conducted by Afghan Forces with support from U.S. Forces in accordance with Afghan laws.”

That meant that the SOF was still free to carry out other raids without consultation with the Afghan government, leaving the issue of their future still to be determined.

*Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan.