Rumsfeld: ‘kinetic’ and out of control

Jim Hoagland has a ‘reported’ piece
in the Outlook section of today’s WaPo  that should be deeply
disturbing both to US citizens and to the rest of the world.  It’s
about the Bush administration’s  management (and mismanagement) of
the ‘Global War on Terror’. 

The scariest part of it is his reference to Rumsfeld’s continuing
insistence that the Pentagon be allowed to undertake what his people
euphemistically called “kinetic” operations anywhere around the world
without those teams coordinating their actions with either the local US
embassies (and their bosses back home in the State department) or with
the CIA.

Hoagie helpfully tells us that in today’s Washington, “kinetic”
actually means “war-like”.

Regarding the ongoing turf war between Rumsfeld’s Pentagon and (mainly)
the State Department, Hoagie writes:

The quest for a master plan for
counterterrorism originated in the
need to update or change pre-9/11 laws, presidential policy documents
and bureaucratic structures that treated international terrorism
directed at Americans primarily as a law enforcement problem, not as a
global struggle to be won on foreign battlefields with arms and ideas.

That
review stretched over two years in one form or another and appeared to
have been completed when NSPD 46 [that’s National Security Presidential
Directive] was formally adopted behind closed
doors by the Bush national security team one week before the public
release on March 16 of the administration’s National Security Strategy.
In fact, some crucial unresolved disagreements were simply passed over
in the interests of a show of consensus on “a statement of
aspirations,” in the words of one participant.

The most
contentious issues — particularly how far the Defense Department
should go in carrying out Bush’s direct order to “disrupt and destroy”
jihadist terrorist networks, even if they operate in friendly or
neutral countries — were left to be dealt with in annexes that are
being negotiated by the departments of State and Defense and the CIA…

The struggle for
control was absent in the emergency days after 9/11, when Bush gave the
“disrupt and destroy” order to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
That was followed by an “AQSL Ex. Ord.” — a directive that bin Laden
and 10 other members of al-Qaeda’s senior leadership be brought to
justice by all necessary means, “dead or alive,” as Bush said.

That
was the seed from which grew a broader plan of attack against
al-Qaeda’s networks, other jihadist bands and the jihadist ideology
that loosely unites them. But as the extremist Islamic movement
metastasized through the Middle East, Asia and Europe, Rumsfeld is said
to have pushed for a presidential directive that would contain clearer
definitions and authority for the Pentagon to carry out its “kinetic”
missions abroad.

“This war erases that old bright line
between
conventional warfare and diplomacy,” one official told me. “It has
moved soldiers and foreign policy experts alike up a ladder of
escalation, from trying to bring in bin Laden dead or alive to today’s
mission of destroying the entire jihadist movement and its ideology. We
can’t use old thinking and win. We can’t wait and win.”

A State
Department official put it differently: “We have been through the
immediate responses we can make and are now in a moment of looking
around, of focusing on the long term. It is important to assign the
right roles and responsibilities to the government agencies that will
lead the war on terror.”

I’ll just pause here and note that Hoagie, who worked as a reporter
for some 20 or more years before he moved into the ‘opinion’ department
of the paper, provides no named sources for any of his quotes at
all.  And since he was from the old school of “Daddy knows best”
journalism, he doesn’t even see the need to give any resons for the
anonymity.  (Current practice on the new spages of the NYT, for
example, is to write something like, “a source who agreed to speak only
on conditions of anonymity said… “)

Anyway, even though Hoagie’s attribution to sources is
old-fashioned, and even though I have disagreed with just about all the
opinions he’s
expressed, especially his flag-waving support for the invasion of
Iraq– despite those things, it strilkes me he does know and talk to
some interesting people inside the administration… So it’s good he
deigns to share some of what he learns with the WaPo’s readers, anyway.

So anyway, getting right back to his story there:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
stated her department’s concerns … bluntly during a
videoconference linking Bush’s top aides in mid-January. Letting the
Pentagon operate outside the U.S. ambassador’s control to roll up
extremist networks in foreign countries would make U.S. policy “almost
exclusively kinetic” — that is, warlike — she argued, to Rumsfeld’s
discomfort, according to a briefing given to colleagues by one official
involved in the meeting.

In testimony before the House Armed
Services Committee on April 4, Henry A. Crumpton, the State
Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism, made an oblique public
reference to the State Department’s continuing desire to change
relatively little. “Our best means of countering the multilayered
terrorist threat is to engage coordinated networks of interagency
Country Teams operating under the ambassador” in “an intimately
connected whole-of-government approach. We are not there yet, but we
have made progress,” he noted.

They are not there yet, in large
part because far-reaching
proposals from the Pentagon to find and deal
with Islamic extremists in a systematic way — “so that we are
not
chasing rabbits,” said one official — have stirred opposition from the
State Department and the CIA, which fear losing primacy abroad through
the militarization of foreign policy and intelligence operations.

The
New York Times lifted a corner of the veil surrounding the larger
conceptual battles by reporting in March on State and CIA opposition to
the Pentagon’s use of Military Liaison Elements, small teams of Special
Operations forces charged with finding and countering jihadist
networks.[‘Countering’… Now there’s
another intriguing euphemism, don’t you think? ~HC] They work
with local security forces or
on their own in
countries where central authority is weak or nonexistent, such as
Somalia.

“At this point, this would probably
amount to maybe 60
guys in 20 countries,” said one official. Added another, “It works in
the field in most cases, but creates more hierarchal trouble than it
should back here.”

Hoagie finishes the piece by noting that, despite wobbling on the issue
last year, Bush has now decided to “stand firm” with his designation of
the struggle his administration is engaged in as a “Global War on
Terrorism”. 

So the GWOT lives!!! And the rest of us should be very, very
scared…  Scared of those “Military Liasion Elements” who are
apparently roaming round the world, sometimes “liaising” with other
government’s forces and sometimes not… but rarely, it seems, liaising
in any serious way with the political branch of the US presence in the
country, i.e., the local US Embassy.  And scared too– most
especially if we are US citizens– by the continuing signs of disorder,
mismanagament, and factionalism inside and at the heart of the Bush
administration.

Indeed, Hoagie starts his piece with this:

This, from the same guys that brought us the chaotic and dysfunctional
“response” to last September’s Hurricane Katrina.  Except you’d
kinda think that when the challenge they’re facing is the major
challenge the nation faces (or so we have repeatedly been told) in the
field of national security, they’d try to at least get their lines of
responsibility and their basic game plan quite clear, wouldn’t you?

I don’t know, to be frank, which to be more scared of: the Bush
administration pursuing its belligerent (oh, sorry, make that
“kinetic”)  plans all around the world in a focused and
well-coordinated fashion–  or them doing the same thing but in a
chaotic, hopelessly inefficient, but also potentially quite
unsupervised mode…

I think, the latter.  God help us all.