Bush Wants Big Increase In Foreign Military Training

by Jim Lobe Ê

The largest increase in defense spending since 1966, proposed to Congress by President George W. Bush includes hundreds of million dollars for training programs and joint exercises with foreign militaries overseas, many of which are likely to be kept secret from Congress if the administration has its way.

Bush also asked Congress to increase State Department-funded military aid and training programs by some 13 percent -- to about one-fourth of all U.S. foreign aid next year. The increase, which will be funded from money taken mostly from development aid, does not even include the costs of helping build, train, and equip a new national army for Afghanistan, as Bush promised he would do earlier this month.

In addition, the Pentagon is proposing funding entirely new anti-terrorist programs for foreign militaries, including one for $18 million in Hawaii, discreetly inserted into the 2002 defense bill approved by Congress without debate in December, that will reportedly be used to circumvent a Congressional ban on military training for the Indonesia.

"It's like the counter-insurgency era all over again," noted one Congressional aide in a reference to the period which culminated in Washington's withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973. "Only this time we're going to be fighting 'terrorism,' instead of 'communism'," said the aide, whose boss has been skeptical about expanding U.S. military commitments.

In fairness to Bush, the Pentagon had already expanded ties with a record number of foreign militaries under former President Bill Clinton.

For example, the International Military Education and Training (IMET) program, which is administered by the State Department in the United States, grew more than threefold in just the past eight years -- from $22 million in 1994 to $70 million in the current year.

Similarly, U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) units -- the stars of the military campaign in Afghanistan -- increased the frequency, range, and number of joint exercises they carried out with foreign forces abroad under the 11-year-old Joint Combined Exercise Training (JCET). In 1992, such exercises included forces from 92 countries; in 1999, the last year for which statistics are available, the number was a record 152, according to a recent study by Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF).

But, with the anti-terrorist war launched after the devastating Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon building outside Washington, the Bush administration appears determined to take U.S. military training and overseas deployments to an entirely new level.

The Pentagon is also reportedly cooking up plans for military training in Pakistan, which until the Sept. 11 attacks had been banned from receiving any military aid since 1990.

In addition, U.S. troops have returned in force under the anti- terrorist rubric to the Philippines for the first time since Washington gave up its bases there in 1991. The Pentagon has dispatched some 650 U.S. troops, including more than 150 SOF personnel to the southern Philippines to train Filipino soldiers fighting Abu Sayyaf, a small rebel band whose ties to Al Qaeda, if any, remain unclear.

While officially a "training" mission, armed SOF units will accompany Filipino soldiers in the field. The precise "terms of reference" defining their chain of command remains to be fully agreed, according to the latest reports.

SOF units were a key part of U.S. training overseas both in the counter-insurgency period of the 1960s and early 1970s and since 1991 under the JCET program.

While some JCET deployments have included civic action, such as landmine clearance, peacekeeping, and health services, their main purpose has been teaching counter-insurgency tactics, including to militaries -- such as those of Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and Turkey -- which were fighting insurgencies at the time that the exercises took place. Some 17,000 foreign troops trained under JCET exercises in 1999, according to the FPIF report.

Under Bush's proposed budget plans, Colombia, which already hosts several hundred U.S. military and intelligence personnel as part of Washington's "drug war," will also receive more training and support. He has asked Congress to approve about some $350 million to train and equip a second anti-drug brigade of 3,000 soldiers in Colombia to add to one trained and equipped over the past two years.

In addition, he is asking for $98 million to train and equip a new brigade that will be used to protect Occidental Petroleum Crop's Cano Limon oil pipeline from attacks by left-wing guerrillas. As with other operational training, the package is likely to include U.S. intelligence support.

All of these deployments worry human rights activists, especially those who recall the counter-insurgency era when U.S. forces were not only identified with abusive militaries, but, in some cases, actually taught them many of the tactics that led to some of the periods worst human rights violations.

"Given the pace at which military-to-military relations are being established and ratcheted up in the name of fighting terrorism, it is vital that Congress, the media, and the public reflect on the potential dangers of these commitments," said Lora Lumpe, the FPIF report's author.

"If we arm and train abusive forces in the name of fighting terrorism, we are likely to foster, rather than hinder, terrorism," she added.

But even finding about the extent of new U.S. military training commitments and deployments may become increasingly difficult, according to Lumpe, who noted that the administration last year tried hard to kill a Congressionally-mandated annual report on these programs and is expected to try to so again this year.

The fact that Washington has committed U.S. forces to combat areas in the Philippines without any Congressional review or consultation marks a troubling precedent, she said.

Reporters here and in the field have also complained about the secrecy surrounding the deployment of SOF units in Afghanistan and, more recently, in Somalia and, according to some reports, in Yemen as well.