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November 04, 2005

A new military-aid "slush fund"?

The Defense and State Departments are pushing Congress to approve a last-minute amendment that, if approved, will quietly undo forty-five years’ worth of safeguards and transparency over U.S. military aid.

According to last Saturday’s Washington Post, “Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is pressing Congress to grant the Pentagon new authority – and contingency funds totaling $750 million – to bolster counterterrorism, border security and law enforcement forces in other nations.” In other words, the Defense Department wants to use some of its own $400 billion-plus budget to provide military aid worldwide. And it wants to do so without being tied down by all of the conditions, protections, public reporting, and State Department involvement that have applied to U.S. military aid programs since the sixties.

Pentagon officials have been persistent in their pursuit of this new military-aid authority. This spring, they tried to insert the same $750 million slush fund in the original draft of the 2006 Defense Department Authorization bill, but ran into resistance from the Armed Services committees and from other lawmakers, such as Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar (R-Indiana), who are uncomfortable with cutting the State Department out of such a big military-aid effort.

That did not stop them, however. During the summer, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith (a now-departed über-neoconservative about whom Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, recently said, “Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man”) drafted a letter to Congress asking that the slush fund be approved. In one of his final acts in office, Feith managed to convince Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to co-sign this letter, even though it meant that the State Department was ceding control over an important new military-aid program.

Congress appears about to respond. According to the Post, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) is to introduce the $750 million program with an amendment to the Defense Authorization bill, which is before the Senate right now. (Inhofe may have introduced the amendment on Thursday the 3^rd; I am writing this from Colombia and am not completely up to date.)

If this amendment is introduced and approved, it will deal a severe blow to citizen oversight of U.S. military aid. Such oversight was a key purpose of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, which put the State Department in charge of foreign aid programs, including military aid programs carried out by U.S. forces (FMF, IMET, the Andean Counterdrug Initiative, and several others).

Authority over military aid went to the diplomats because State’s job is to look out for all U.S. interests overseas, including political considerations like human rights and democracy. The Pentagon, by contrast, focuses more narrowly on security and strategy. Most of the time, there is little conflict between these sets of interests. But perhaps one out of every few hundred arms transfers or training deployments is controversial. When that happens, State usually gets the final say.

Foreign Assistance Act programs are subject to close congressional oversight by both houses’ Foreign Relations and Foreign Operations Appropriations committees. Since little foreign-aid money ends up flowing into members’ districts, these committees provide relatively close scrutiny, whether from liberals concerned about human rights or from conservatives skeptical of the whole foreign-aid enterprise. Far less scrutiny is to be expected from the Armed Services and Defense Appropriations committees, which must oversee the entire gargantuan Pentagon budget, are further distracted by wars in the Middle East, and whose members have an interest in steering defense-related jobs to their districts.

The foreign aid committees have spent almost forty-five years adding refinements to U.S. military aid law, including bans on aid to countries that consistently violate human rights; the Leahy Amendment cutting aid to military units that violate human rights with impunity; prohibitions on police aid; and bans on aid to governments that came to power in military coups, proliferate nuclear materials, or support terrorism. There are also right-wing “refinements,” such as bans on aid to countries “de-certified” for narcotics non-cooperation; countries that refuse to shield U.S. personnel from International Criminal Court jurisdiction; and countries that are “controlled by the international Communist conspiracy.” Military aid through Foreign Assistance Act programs is also subject to public reporting – it is relatively easy to find out how much and what kind of aid each country gets.

However, the past ten to fifteen years have seen a steady movement of military assistance away from the Foreign Assistance budget and into the Defense budget. While the Pentagon could always use its own funds for joint exercises and regional-command activities, the 1990s saw new military and police-aid authorities for counter-narcotics assistance and the Special Forces’ Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) program. After September 11, a fast-growing Counter-Terrorism Fellowship Program sprouted within the Pentagon to provide military training. The new CTFP trained over 1,100 Latin American personnel in 2004. For the past several years, Defense-budget programs have funded the training of more Latin American military and police personnel than foreign aid-budget programs.

The Pentagon clearly prefers to use its own budget for military aid because it can operate more quickly (the foreign-aid budget process has become rather bureaucratic) and without having to deal with the State Department. It can deliver aid without regard to the human-rights and other conditions in foreign-aid law. (A weak version of the Leahy Amendment – with a waiver option – does appear in the Defense Appropriations bill.)

Defense-budget military aid gets delivered with almost no public reporting of what aid went to which country. We are still trying to get exact figures, for instance, indicating how much Defense-budget counter-narcotics military aid was to go to Colombia in 2005, and lack dollar amounts for most of the rest of the region since 2003. Getting information about how and where Defense-budget aid dollars were spent requires a lot of persistent asking, and answers usually come from some “unofficial” official source, such as a copy of some official’s PowerPoint presentation.

Is this the future of U.S. military aid – secrecy and the exclusion of the State Department? It may be, if the Inhofe amendment gets added to the Defense Authorization bill.

In order to avoid this outcome, we urge the Foreign Relations and Foreign Operations Appropriations committees to stick up for their jurisdictions. If military aid continues to move into the Pentagon budget, these committees will increasingly come to resemble irrelevant debating societies, while the real money flows through other channels.

We encourage the State Department to stick up for itself as well. If the Defense Department’s complaints are mainly about bureaucratization, then the process should be streamlined. But if the $750 million proposal owes more to a Pentagon effort to get State out of the picture, then the State Department must fight to keep playing the role for which it was founded. The State Department exists to manage the United States’ foreign affairs, and military aid is a key foreign policy tool. It is important, then that the changes made back in 1961 do not get reversed – at least not without a thorough, public, serious debate. Needless to say, that debate has yet to take place.

Posted by isacson at November 4, 2005 03:45 AM

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