@joshuafoust and @goldentent were raising this old Atlantic story from May 2010 by Marc Ambinder claiming there were all these new American military presences around the world:
Last summer, the White House authorized a massive expansion of clandestine military and intelligence operations worldwide, sanctioning activities in more than a dozen countries and giving the military's combatant commanders significant new authority to conduct unconventional warfare.
Other "ex-ords" signed by combatant commanders include provisions for secret American bases and operations in countries like Georgia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and in the Dagestan region of the North Caucuses. In the latter space, U.S. soldiers were tasked with tracking down members of identified separatist groups with loose ties to Al Qaeda. One of those groups was responsible for the March 31 bombings in Kizlyar, according to American intelligence officials.
This story sounds a bizarre. American spies and bases in Georgia and Turkey, maybe (the US already has a base in Turkey), but those other countries like Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan and Russia's North Caucuses -- that just seems incredible. Those countries have really vigilant and deadly secret police and military intelligence agencies, and I can't see them sitting still for this kind of activity.
This is almost like the old movie about the Soviet submarine invasion of Cape Cod, "The Russians Are Coming," only in reverse.
But if you read the paragraph carefully, Ambinder isn't exactly saying there are bases in these countries, or that even there is planning for bases in these countries, he's saying there are provisions for bases and operations.
That the US might view these areas as places where they should have operations in case of emergency or even as a preventive action doesn't surprise me. There have been WikiLeaks cables indicating that the US trains special operatives to assist the Central Asian regimes with anti-terrorist activity.
Of course, there's a big difference between sneaking into a country and snooping around or using remote agents from that country, and having an entire full-fledged base.
I guess what the entire liberal and left intelligentsia in the US have to face is whether they are going to stomach above-the-ground, open, large, heavy military presences in countries where lots of people get killed and lots of state treasure is expended, or whether they have the new "smart" smaller-footprint warfare with drones and more clandestine special operations that are leaner and meaner.
The choice may only be between those two kinds of options, not some ideal human-rights-proof better way.
If you had to chose between invading Iraq, killing Saddam Hussein openly, and staying in the country for the next years with large numbers of troops, fighting insurgents and terrorists who kill many of the 100,000 unarmed people to die in the war instead of fighting actual equivalent combatants OR having a crack team sneak in and assassinate a leader or head of an insurgency and some key terrorists, then go home, which would you chose? 1960s or 2000s?
The problem is almost never debated this way by the intelligentsia -- usually the "smarter, small footprint special ops" version is debated in terms of its legality under international humanitarian law and the inadvisability of having any counter-terrorism or counter-intelligence going on at all, or at least, very little.
I imagine Nobel Peace Prize laureate Obama is never going to put it to the American public this way: "Look, would you rather I had had special ops to sneak in and kill dictators or terrorist leaders by using dirty tricks and clandestine methods, and send in a few drones that may not be the most human-rights conformative machines, and get in and out there with as little jostling as possible, or would you like me to do it the legal way (warfare is legal under humanitarian law, just regulated) and send in tens of thousands of troops and tanks and bombers and fight the old-fashioned way and attract terrorists to kill tens of thousands of innocent civilians?"
That is really the political proposition, because obviously the old 19th and early-20th century method of sending in troops that only fight other troops while carefully ensuring the evacuation of civilians or at least not targeting them is not an option. It is no longer practiced.
So really the intellectual proposition has to be, whether you have that smaller-footprint and more clandestine military footprint that will attract the fire of numerous lefty bloggers irate about illegality and secrecy, and all kinds of authoritarian regimes looking for soft targets for rhetorical condemnations -- or whether you do it the old-fashioned big, open, legal way and still have some of them attack you but also ensure that tens of thousands of civilians are massacred by terrorists and rebels.
And I don't know if in fact the intelligentsia even gets to decide this, as it sounds like the Obama Administration already made up its mind.
Marc Ambinder wrote last year that the Obama administration was "reluctant to allow such expansion" as it would be associated with the Bush administration's similar disregard for international norms.
But political imperatives, the threat of terrorism, and the knowledge of what the U.S. military can accomplish if its strings are cut away has slowly changed the minds of some of Obama's senior advisers. It is helpful that Congress has generally given the military a wide berth to conduct activities that intelligence agency paramilitaries would find objectionable.
The authorization to write the orders allow combatant commanders to put together task forces for almost any purpose, and draw from almost any existing military unit. JUWTFs are not classified and are in regular use. But until last summer, they tended to be formed for temporary and limited purposes. Even during the Bush administration, the military did not insert American personnel into Iran, which is what the Avocado execute order now permits.
And when you have a policy like that, it's what makes a man like Amir Mirza Hekmati, now charged with espionage and sentenced to death, completely vulnerable. He is said to have gone to Iran to visit his grandparents -- now he was likely tortured and a confession extracted:
"These accusations against Hekmati show only with thing: That this case is politically motivated," Abdul Karim Lahiji, vice president of the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights, told RFE/RL's Radio Farda. "Over the last decade, there have been numerous cases like this where people were accused [by the Iranian regime] for the same reasons -- and they are usually convicted."
In an interview with RFE/RL's Radio Farda, U.S. State Department Persian spokesman Alan Eyre said the Tehran regime had a history of making political arrests and forcing detainees to make false confessions. He also said the reports of Hekmati's death sentence had not yet been verified.
"If true, we strongly condemn the verdict of the court," Eyre said. "The charges that Hekmati worked for the CIA or was sent to Iran by the CIA are laughable. The Iranian regime has a long record of confronting individuals with baseless spying charges, extracting forced confessions, and jailing innocent American citizens for political purposes."
