U.S. 'secret
war' expands globally as Special Operations forces take larger role
by Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 4, 2010
Beneath its commitment to soft-spoken diplomacy and beyond the
combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration
has significantly expanded
a largely secret U.S. war against al-Qaeda and other radical groups,
according to senior military and administration officials.
Special Operations
forces have grown both in number and budget,
and are deployed in 75 countries, compared with about 60 at
the beginning
of last
year. In addition to units that have spent years in the Philippines
and Colombia, teams are operating in Yemen and elsewhere in the
Middle East,
Africa and Central Asia.
Commanders are developing plans for increasing the use of such
forces in Somalia, where a Special Operations raid last year
killed the
alleged head
of al-Qaeda in East Africa. Plans exist for preemptive
or retaliatory strikes in numerous places around the world, meant to be put
into action when a
plot has been identified, or after an attack linked to a specific
group.
The surge in Special Operations deployments, along with intensified
CIA drone attacks in western Pakistan, is the other side of
the national security
doctrine of global engagement and domestic values President
Obama released last week.
One advantage of using "secret" forces for such missions is that
they rarely discuss their operations in public. For a Democratic president
such as Obama, who is criticized from either side of the political spectrum
for too much or too little aggression, the unacknowledged CIA drone attacks
in Pakistan, along with unilateral U.S. raids in Somalia and joint operations
in Yemen, provide politically useful tools.
Obama, one senior military
official said, has allowed "things that
the previous administration did not."
'More access'
Special Operations commanders have also become a far more
regular presence at the White House than they were under
George W.
Bush's administration,
when most briefings on potential future operations were
run through the Pentagon chain of command and were conducted
by the defense
secretary or
the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
"We have a lot more access," a second military official said. "They
are talking publicly much less but they are acting more.
They are willing to get aggressive much more quickly."
The White House, he said, is "asking for ideas and
plans . . . calling us in and saying, 'Tell me what you
can do. Tell me how you do these things.' "
The Special Operations capabilities requested by the
White House go beyond unilateral strikes and include
the training
of local
counterterrorism forces
and joint operations with them. In Yemen, for example, "we are doing
all three," the official said. Officials who spoke
about the increased operations were not authorized to
discuss them on the record.
The clearest public description of the secret-war aspects
of the doctrine came from White House counterterrorism
director John O.
Brennan. He said
last week that the United States "will not merely respond after the
fact" of a terrorist attack but will "take
the fight to al-Qaeda and its extremist affiliates whether
they plot and train in Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and beyond."
That rhetoric is not much different than Bush's pledge
to "take the
battle to the enemy . . . and confront the worst threats before they emerge." The
elite Special Operations units, drawn from all four branches
of the armed forces, became a frontline counterterrorism
weapon for the United States
after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
But Obama has made such forces a far more integrated part
of his global security strategy. He has asked for a 5.7
percent increase
in the Special
Operations budget for fiscal 2011, for a total of $6.3
billion, plus an additional $3.5 billion in 2010 contingency
funding.
Bush-era clashes between the Defense and State departments
over Special Operations deployments have all but ceased.
Former defense
secretary
Donald H. Rumsfeld saw them as an independent force,
approving in some countries
Special Operations intelligence-gathering missions
that were so secret that the U.S. ambassador was not told they
were
underway. But the
close relationship between Defense Secretary Robert
M.
Gates and
Secretary of
State Hillary Rodham Clinton is said to have smoothed
out the process.
"
In some places, we are quite obvious in our presence," Adm. Eric T.
Olson, head of the Special Operations Command, said in a speech. "In
some places, in deference to host-country sensitivities,
we are lower in profile. In every place, Special Operations
forces activities are coordinated
with the U.S. ambassador and are under the operational
control of the four-star regional commander."
Chains of command
Gen. David H. Petraeus at the Central Command and others
were ordered by the Joint Staff under Bush to develop
plans to use
Special Operations
forces
for intelligence collection and other counterterrorism
efforts, and were given the authority to issue direct
orders to them.
But those
orders were
formalized only last year, including in a CENTCOM directive
outlining operations throughout South Asia, the Horn
of Africa and the
Middle East.
The order, whose existence was first reported by the
New York Times, includes intelligence collection in
Iran, although
it
is unclear
whether Special
Operations forces are active there.
The Tampa-based Special Operations Command is not entirely
happy with its subordination to regional commanders
and, in Afghanistan
and Iraq, to theater
commanders. Special Operations troops within Afghanistan
had their own chain of command until early this year,
when they
were brought
under the
unified direction of the overall U.S. and NATO commander
there, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, and his operational
deputy, Lt.
Gen. David
M. Rodriguez.
"Everybody working in CENTCOM works for Dave Petraeus," a military
official said. "Our issue is that we believe our
theater forces should be under a Special Operations theater
commander, instead of . . . Rodriguez,
who is a conventional [forces] guy who doesn't know how
to do what we do."
Special Operations troops train for years in foreign
cultures and language, and consider themselves a
breed apart from
what they
call "general
purpose forces." Special Operations troops sometimes bridle at ambassadorial
authority to "control who comes in and out of their country," the
official said. Operations have also been hindered in
Pakistan -- where Special Operations trainers hope to
nearly triple their current deployment
to 300 -- by that government's delay in issuing the visas.
Although pleased with their expanded numbers and funding,
Special Operations commanders would like to devote
more of their force
to global missions
outside war zones. Of about 13,000 Special Operations
forces deployed overseas, about 9,000 are evenly divided
between
Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Eighty percent of our investment is now in resolving current conflicts,
not in building capabilities with partners to avoid
future ones," one
official said.
Questions remain
The force has also chafed at the cumbersome
process under which the president or his designee, usually
Gates, must
authorize
its use
of lethal force
outside war zones. Although the CIA has the authority
to designate targets and launch lethal missiles in
Pakistan's
western tribal
areas, attacks
such as last year's in Somalia and Yemen require civilian
approval.
The United Nations, in a report this week, questioned
the administration's authority under international
law to conduct
such raids, particularly
when they kill innocent civilians. One possible legal
justification -- the permission
of the country in question -- is complicated in places
such as Pakistan and Yemen, where the governments privately
agree
but
do not publicly
acknowledge approving the attacks.
Former Bush officials, still smarting from accusations
that their administration overextended the president's
authority
to conduct
lethal activities around
the world at will, have asked similar questions. "While they seem
to be expanding their operations both in terms of extraterritoriality and
aggressiveness, they are contracting the legal authority upon which those
expanding actions are based," said John B. Bellinger
III, a senior legal adviser in both of Bush's administrations.
The Obama administration has rejected the constitutional
executive authority claimed by Bush and has based its
lethal operations
on the authority Congress
gave the president in 2001 to use "all necessary and appropriate force
against those nations, organizations, or persons" he determines "planned,
authorized, committed, or aided" the Sept. 11 attacks.
Many of those currently being targeted, Bellinger said, "particularly
in places outside Afghanistan," had nothing
to do with the 2001 attacks.
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