The CIA undermines the efforts of the USA military
The CIA is a rogue agency, operating without sufficient oversight.
The foreign policy of the USA has vacillated between two goals:
building strong liberal democracies who can help us uphold a liberal democratic world order
building corrupt dictatorships whose leadership is willing to be bribed by us
If I can be forgiven for simplifying a complex situation, we can imagine the USA government, in the second half of the 20th Century, as having 4 main actors, where the foreign policy was concerned:
The President
The State Department
The military
The CIA
The President and the State Department and the military favored democracy more often that the CIA. About the only area where the CIA played a large role in encouraging democracy was in Communist Eastern Europe, where the CIA did what it could to get resources to dissidents. (It did very little in this regard. If you read a book by a Polish dissident such as Adam Michnik, it is interesting to note that the CIA does not factor into his narrative at all.)
In the fight against Communism, especially in Asia, all branches of the USA government worried about the Communists winning either fair or unfair elections. Here, as I’ve said many times before, a rigid idea about democracy kept the American leadership from thinking of creative “checks and balances” that might have allowed a type of democratic government that was better prepared to resist Communist subversion.
In my essay “Nation building: the only way the USA will ever win another war” I looked at the program of land reform that the USA carried out in Japan 1945-1949 and how this was essential to establishing democracy in Japan. Giving the poor Japanese peasants some land helped create a prosperous rural middle class, but even more important, it meant the peasants had the independence to vote as they wished — they could not be blackmailed by their old feudal lord, who might otherwise have threatened them with eviction for voting “the wrong way.”
A similar program in Vietnam might have won the loyalty of the peasants and thus limited the popularity of the Communists. Instead, the USA made no effort to win democratically at the level of the small village. In 1956 the USA did not protest when President Ngo Dinh Diem ended village democracy in Vietnam:
Diem abolished elections for village councils, apparently out of concern that large numbers of Viet Minh might win office. By replacing the village notables with appointed officials, Diem swept away the traditional administrative autonomy of the village officials, and took upon himself and his government the onus for whatever corruption and injustice subsequently developed at that level. These government appointees to village office were outsiders—northerners, Catholics, or other "dependable" persons—and their alien presence in the midst of the close-knit rural communities encouraged revival of the conspiratorial, underground politics to which the villages had become accustomed during the resistance against the French.
Later on, the USA would attempt to win “hearts and minds” at the level of the village, but I would ask, if you don’t think you can win a fair election, then you’re not really winning hearts and minds, are you? Or, to put that differently, an excellent measure of “winning hearts and minds” is to hold fair elections. If the Communists win then clearly more work needs to be done to win over the village peasants. A clever strategy, that we should pursue more often, is to ask what policies make the Communists popular, and then how much can we co-opt those policies? In retrospect, it seems clear that the land reform program that we pursued in Japan also would have been popular in Vietnam, and if we had been able to win fair elections at the village level, then the village leadership would have had a powerful legitimacy when they called on the peasants to resist any attempts by the Communists to undermine those elections. And, as in Japan, if we had created a property owning bourgeois class of peasants, they would have naturally rejected Communism.
More so, in 1954, at the Geneva Conventions, the USA had committed to elections in Vietnam in 1956, to unify North and South Vietnam under a democratically elected government. But it was clear that Ho Chi Minh was going to win, so the USA supported President Diem when he canceled the elections. But from that point forward, the USA was supporting a government that lacked democratic legitimacy. The government of President Diem then established a terrible reputation for corruption, which made it deeply unpopular with the peasants, whereas the Communist reputation for punishing corruption made the Communists more popular.
Worth asking is why the USA didn’t simply support popular policies? Why not promise the peasants what they wanted? Why not win them over? After all, if we can’t win them over in fair elections, how would we win them over once we start killing large numbers of people in an attempt to fight subversion? This seems like a missed opportunity.
But here is something else we should also wonder about: where was our creativity? The USA has several think tanks dedicated to foreign policy. We have many universities who are seen as having the world’s best departments of political science. We have the largest foreign policy establishment. What is all of this for? How can we have so many well educated people who generate so few good ideas? Why does the USA often stumble into disasters? Why can’t these smart people think of solutions?
There are good ideas out there, but most of the best ideas come from the fringes of our foreign policy activities, from the outer penumbra of people involved in the USA’s overseas adventures. One of the most interesting books on this subject, rethinking the USA approach to foreign policy, is Sarah Chayes’s book “Thieves Of State.” She worked with the USA military in an effort to fight corruption in Afghanistan during the years 2006-2009. In her view, we keep winning the wars, but then losing the peace, because we tolerate corruption in the government’s that are nominally our allies.
But let’s also ask, what if someone in the CIA sincerely disagrees with Sarah Chayes? Where is the right place for the disagreement to be discussed? After all, sometimes the smart people with establishment ideas are correct, but how do we generate a public consensus that can establish that they are correct? To give their argument its due, let’s admit it is reasonable to start with a hypothesis such as “The easiest way to advance the interests of the USA is to support a series of corrupt dictatorships.” But then we should ask, how do we evaluate if this hypothesis is true? If evidence accumulates that the long-term consequences of this strategy are bad for the USA, how do we feed that evidence back into the system? Where is the right lever of power by which we adjust the policies of the CIA?
And while the military and the State Department and the President often see the need to fight corruption, the CIA seems devoted to a policy of supporting corrupt officials, perhaps because they are so easy to bribe and manipulate. However, I am speculating: I don’t actually know what motivates the CIA because the CIA does not explain its guiding philosophy to the public. Which raises an issue of democratic accountability, which is a complex one where an intelligence service is involved. We have to balance several considerations, some of which contradict each other:
Every nation needs a competent intelligence service.
Every intelligence service needs to keep secrets.
In a democracy there needs to be some accountability for every branch of government.
Without accountability it is difficult to ensure the “competent” part of the need for “a competent intelligence service.”
While the Executive Branch and the Legislative Branch both contribute to the oversight of the CIA, it is also a secretive organization that seems to have far more autonomy than other parts of the government.
Regarding the kind of careful criticism, and creative new ideas, that come from people like Sarah Chayes, two different issues need to be discussed:
Is she correct when she says that, over the long-term, our support of corruption undermines our objectives?
Is there a way to formalize the way feedback from people like her can be input into the system?
As an aside, there is something almost comedic in the fact that people on the far-left and the far-right, who easily give into conspiracy theories, often attribute a stunning competence to the CIA, while everyone else, the people who care about the USA having a good intelligence service, regard the CIA as one of the most incompetent organizations in the government. In fact, when we review the history of the 20th Century, it seems the CIA only has failure after failure after failure, unless you are on the far-left, and maybe the far-right, and then you believe that the CIA achieved extraordinary things, almost supernatural things.
Seriously, if you are a fan of the CIA, and you want to make the strongest possible argument in its favor, what could you possibly say? In a handful of small, weak nations (Iran, Chile, Guatemala, Indonesia, Vietnam) it played a supporting role in helping a coup that brought a dictator to power who then ruled badly. In most cases, these dictators damaged the reputation of the USA, in ways that it will take the USA a century to recover from. All of these coups were justified on the basis of fighting Communism, which again raises the question of why exactly the CIA was not able to think of creative policies that might have won a fair election in a contest with Communism.
We should also note that the CIA only seems to have the slightest hint of success when dealing with very weak regimes. The CIA was not able to do anything about the leadership of the USSR, or the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, nor Cuba, nor Vietnam after we were defeated, nor Iran during 1979, nor most of the African nations that joined USSR alliances, or more recently, Russian and Chinese alliances, or extremist Islamist alliances.
But all of this only speaks to a lack of creativity at the CIA, and their incompetence. The CIA is actually worse than just incompetent. At times, the CIA actively undermines the USA military and gives crucial information to our enemies (or rather, frenemies).
In her book “Thieves Of State” Sarah Chayes tells several stories in which the military was undercut by the CIA. She was working with the military in Afghanistan in an effort to track down corrupt officials in the administration of President Karzai. Whenever her group had a meeting, the CIA tried to send some of its people to the meeting, in theory because the military and the CIA were allies, and therefore they should share information with each other. But it was also understood that the CIA had a close alliance with President Karzai, and whatever information the CIA could get, they would immediately report it to President Karzai so that he could better protect his corrupt officials.
I post here a long excerpt from her book.
Thieves of State
Why Corruption Threatens Global Security
By Sarah Chayes, 2015
Page 50–52
But we needed an objective system for ranking priorities – for choosing which provincial governor to ask President Karzai to remove first, or which Afghan National Army officer ISAF should cease supplying with ammunition, or against whom the MCTF should build its next, lone case.
A disciplined procedure existed for putting suspected insurgent leaders on the kill/capture list. It was a bottom–up vetting process. Via secure videoconference, each regional command would argue its case against the militants it judged the most dangerous. A single–screen “targeting packet” informed the discussion, featuring such elements as the likely impact on his network of killing him, potential conflicts with other military operations, the quality of the intelligence on which the recommendation was based, or legal considerations.
The Anti–Corruption Task Force used that targeting process as a model for its own. We had to weigh a different set of considerations, of course – the level of public outcry about the official’s corrupt behavior for example, whether theft of international funds was involved, his political affiliations, his connivance with the insurgency, or his involvement in drug trafficking. Our process differed, too, in that our weapons were less lethal.
Yet ironically, the prospect of turning off aid or denying a visa to someone was more complex than the prospect of shooting him. The potential unintended consequences were dizzying. Since international officials were in daily contact with potential targets, leaks were likely. And while Taliban targets could either be killed or captured, ours were subject to a far more varied menu of actions, requiring a custom–tailored selection for each case.
This complexity, and our own diversity, kicked up squalls of mistrust. U.S. law enforcement was adamant against inviting Europeans to our meetings. Stockholm syndrome, the Americans were sure, or plain naiveté would impel Europeans to warn Afghan officials of investigations, ruining months of painstaking work.
I didn’t mind the Europeans so much; I minded the CIA. I remember standing in the doorway before one meeting, chest inflated with a held breath, to bar an uninvited “regional affairs officer” from entering the room. The CIA was paying one of my prime targets – I had seen it with my own eyes – Karzai’s younger half–brother Ahmed Wali, who pulled the strings to most of southern Afghanistan, who stole land, imprisoned people for ransom, appointed key public officials, ran vast drug trafficking networks and private militias, and wielded ISAF like a weapon against people who stood up to him. The inhabitants of three provinces hated him.
But the CIA had been paying him for years. I had watched officers hand him a tinfoil–wrapped package of bills when I was over at his house for dinner one 2003 night. I never understood what they thought they were getting, but Ahmed Wali Karzai was an “asset.” The CIA was not joining our meetings to help, I knew it. Its aim was to learn our moves and protect its people.
I lost that battle. The CIA retained its seat at prioritization meetings, its silent representative taking meticulous notes, and never volunteering a shred of information.