Debunking the myth of "Left Wing NGOs" and insurgencies

So many misconceptions and lies, so little time. Mary Anastasia O'Grady carries water for the pro-Uribe contingent found in the conservative movement by trying to paint organizations--Non-Governmental Organizations or "NGOs"--that operate in war zones as "ultra-left" and "sympathetic to terrorists." She writes about the recent rescue of three American contractors and Ingrid Betancourt (and a handful of other unnamed souls) and opines that since the trickery involved convincing the FARC rebels that an aid organization was coming to help them, then it is proof that the FARC is in cahoots with the aid organizations.

This warrants attention because it adds to the already robust evidence that left-wing NGOs and other so-called human rights defenders, including Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and Colombian Sen. Piedad Cordoba, are nothing more than propagandists for terrorists.

When passions over kidnap victim Ingrid Betancourt and the other hostages were running high, these actors pressed Mr. Uribe to grant FARC demands. Now it is clear that the pressure was geared more toward strengthening the rebels' hand than freeing the captives.

Left-wing NGOs have made undermining the Colombian government's credibility a priority for many years. A 2003 internal report from the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá titled "A Closer Look at Human Rights Statistics" confirmed as much. It found that NGO analyses – for example by the Jesuit-founded Center for Popular Research and Education known as Cinep – of the human-rights environment contained a heavy bias against the government while granting a wide berth to guerrillas.

This is sheer wingnuttery in action--always blame the people in the war zone who aren't carrying guns.

The success of the raid is not proof of anything, other than the fact that the FARC is in decline and has a significantly reduced cadre. A ruse that never would have worked three or four years ago worked because of incompetence on the part of the FARC rebels, not on the brilliance of the plan itself. Why did all of those past attempts at rescue fail? Because the FARC reacted and moved accordingly. Why did that fail this time around? Because they didn't react and move--there was no experienced leader to see through the ruse--so they got complacent and tired, and that is deadly for a popular insurgency. The FARC has long been in decline--too many old members and not enough new blood. So much for their power.

Popular insurgencies are made up of the people--therefore, the NGO is usually in a difficult position of helping the people and inadvertently helping--you guessed it--the popular insurgency. That's not "so-called humanitarianism" as O'Grady snarls--it's basic humanitarianism. You know--taking care of people? Isn't that the job of the Colombian government? And isn't the Colombian governments' answer to helping the people to look the other way when narco-terrorists disguised as right-wing pro-government militia come barreling into town? Who would you prefer that they assist--the right wing death squads that shoot up villages or the insurgents themselves? The mission of the NGO is to help whoever needs help. I don't think they have time to ask for membership cards and ID. There aren't many good guys, but there sure are a lot of poor people who need help. It's unrealistic to think that an organization that isn't carrying guns in the war zone and is trying to help people wouldn't inadvertently help a few guerrillas. I'd be shocked if they didn't, but I'm an adult who lives in the real world.

Now, simply accepting a document from the US Embassy in Bogota is difficult--not that there is anything wrong with having a bias, but failing to accept that the bias could exist is almost enough to debunk the claim itself. If the embassy in the country that we give billions to is led by a political appointee of an administration that enthusiastically promises more billions in aid to that same country, then how is there any way to verify that the analysis made by that embassy is independent and verifiable? When was the last time the Bush Administration said anything substantive or critical about Colombia?

Where does that mentality come from? The likes of NGO Watch:

In May 2003, USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios delivered his now-infamous speech to NGOs at a conference organised by the US umbrella grouping InterAction. In it, he roundly scolded NGOs for not clearly and consistently identifying their aid activities in Afghanistan as funded by the US government, and admonished them that they needed to demonstrate measurable results if they wanted to continue to receive USAID funding in the future. Shortly after the speech (in a coincidence noted in press reports) a new website, ‘NGO Watch’, was launched by the conservative think-tanks the American Enterprise Institute and the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies.

The website project, kicked off by a conference entitled ‘NGOs: The Growing Power of an Unelected Few’, contends that the largely left-wing NGO sector wields undue influence over US foreign policy and US corporations. The venture has prompted a more than usual degree of concern among humanitarian practitioners, not least because several senior administration officials come from the two think-tanks involved.

The site’s founders declare that, ‘without prejudice’, they intend to ‘compile factual data about non-governmental organizations’, and much of what is on NGO Watch is no different from the information posted on any number of websites and consortia rosters. Yet some in the US NGO community suspect that the NGO Watch project was designed as a tool for the administration to bully non-compliant NGOs, so that those who insist on openly criticising the US government’s actions in Iraq and elsewhere will be held up for public lambasting on the site.

The tone of the language about NGOs (‘What are their agendas? Who runs these groups? Who funds them? And to whom are they accountable?’); its corporate sponsorship; and its underlying ideology indicate a heightened level of anti-NGO sentiment, uncomfortably close to official government circles. How real is the threat to NGOs and humanitarian action? Insiders at USAID and others in the US humanitarian community dismiss fears as conspiracy theory-mongering – an over-reaction fuelled by Euro-humanitarian indignation.

Yes, there are communication problems with the military, but USAID is a longstanding partner and protector of NGOs and fully understands the importance of their independence and the principle of neutrality, despite some surprising rhetoric from officials (Secretary of State Colin Powell’s talk of NGOs as ‘force multipliers’, for example). Natsios comes from an NGO background himself, and was known not to mince words with the US government.

I broke that up into paragraphs so that it can read better, and I hope I did not do disservice to the material. Abby Stoddard has been writing tirelessly about this subject, and she all but predicts the kind of backlash we are seeing in the wake of the rescue of the hostages in Colombia. If you think that the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society are looking out for mom, Apple pie, the truth, the American Way, and free and open exchanges of ideas, you're kidding yourself. They are the perpetuation of wingnuttery and neoconservative thought, plain and simple.

See the coincidence? In the same year that the US Embassy is claiming that NGOs are undermining the right wing government of Alvaro Uribe, the NGO Watch organization is created in order to further the bullying.

And that's the basis of O'Grady's criticism? More like the continuation of neoconservative goals and right wing intimidation of the people who, as I said, go into the war zone without guns and try to help the people. Undermining the contributions of NGOs allows the neoconservatives to operate in countries without any check on their power--with no one to document the atrocities from either side, the atrocities don't exist. I am not accusing the US government of atrocity--I'm saying that it is easier to bomb villages from a mile up by accident or by virtue of a bad piece of intelligence and write it off as "collateral damage" if there's no one helping the victims. Maybe I am accusing it of an atrocity. Instead of getting caught up in that, let's just acknowledge that horrible mistakes happen in war zones, and if there aren't busybodies running around taking notes, it is easier for a defense establishment to perpetuate the notion that they're saving the people from themselves and bringing them Democracy. I think we could use less of that.

Demonizing the NGOs is easier than dealing with the human rights nightmare that is the Uribe government:

Colombia’s right-wing paramilitary groups are immeasurably powerful. Through drug trafficking and other illegal businesses, they have amassed enormous wealth. They have taken over vast expanses of the country’s territory to use for coca cultivation or as strategic corridors through which they can move drugs and weapons. In recent years, they have succeeded in expelling left-wing guerrillas and strengthening their own control of many parts of the country. And thanks to this power, they now exert a very high degree of political influence, both locally and nationally.

Paramilitaries accrued their power and influence by force. “It is stipulated that there are borders and you have to win people’s respect, and so we had to kill people to show that you could not come in or go out of certain areas,” a demobilized paramilitary told Human Rights Watch. “It was not a fight for Colombia. It was a drug trafficking war,” said a former squad commander, discussing his experience as a paramilitary.

Considered terrorist organizations by the United States and Europe, over the last two decades paramilitaries have killed thousands of civilians; tortured, kidnapped, and stolen from tens of thousands more; and threatened and otherwise disrupted the lives of literally hundreds of thousands of Colombians, with almost no consequences for the perpetrators. To the contrary, paramilitaries have historically enjoyed the collaboration, support, and toleration of units of the Colombian security forces, a fact that has led many to refer to the paramilitaries as a “sixth division” of the army. Today, paramilitaries have made major gains in consolidating this impunity, along with their economic and political power, with the collusion of the Colombian government.

Two years ago, paramilitary commanders initiated demobilization negotiations with the administration of President Álvaro Uribe in the hope that they could obtain a deal that would allow them to avoid extradition and potentially lengthy prison terms in the United States for drug trafficking. Since the start of negotiations, thousands of paramilitaries have started to turn in weapons and enter government reintegration programs. This trend accelerated towards the end of 2004, when five paramilitary blocks entered the demobilization process by turning in weapons. The process is poised to accelerate much more rapidly: on June 21, 2005, the Colombian Congress approved a demobilization law that gives paramilitaries almost everything they want.

Why isn't there any accountability for this? Oh, that's right--lip service is paid to a phony war on drugs we never had any intention of fighting. Whatever keeps Uribe in power as a bulwark against Venezuela is the rule of the day. Why this country insists on opposing and pissing off people who have scads of oil is beyond me.

I should clarify something--in general, the NGOs operate without being armed. There are some instances where this is simply not possible. Stoddard has written about what the NGOs have to do to protect themselves. It's not widespread and it's not common practice, however. And that's what I was alluding to.

What can agencies do to defend themselves?

Some agencies have taken to hiring armed guards, but that's a very sensitive topic. No one knows who's doing it or where, and even within organizations themselves it's not discussed, because it's antithetical to the whole humanitarian stance.

When humanitarians try to fashion their own security approach, it's fashioned on what's called the "acceptance" side of the security triangle - blending in, reaching out to local populations, becoming known and trusted entities within the community, and making sure you're constantly projecting a neutral and impartial face. That works really well in some places, and has no effect in others. Certainly you can't base your security in Iraq or Afghanistan on acceptance at this point. So agencies have either gone completely to the deterrence side, traveling with military convoys, or they've gone completely in new and strange means of protective approaches. We've seen clandestine approaches, in which they take all marking off themselves, their cars, their aid, and deliver under the table, as it were, so that the beneficiaries themselves don't know where this aid is coming from.

And, yes, that means that the efforts of the NGO can and sometimes do end up supporting a popular insurgency within a population. Well, sometimes government aid ends up supporting things we don't agree with as well--like right wing death squads. Which is worse?

The Hostages No One Talks About

US citizens have been held hostage in Colombia for five years, and aside from very casual mentions in the media, they have largely been forgotten. Speaking their names isn't even something this government can do when it is on Colombian soil--it would draw attention to another diplomatic failure.

Don't be surprised if you have never heard of Marc Gonsalves, Thomas Howes and Keith Stansell; The [Washington] Post has published only three substantial stories about them in the past five years. All three are U.S. citizens who were working for Pentagon contractor Northrop Grumman when their surveillance plane crashed in a remote Colombian jungle on Feb. 13, 2003. Since then, they have been hostages of the FARC, confined with chains and forced to endure a nightmarish life of isolation, disease and brutality.

The three men were taken hostage after their plane crashed into the remote Colombian jungle. This was certainly not the first or only time the US has lost aircraft and personnel in Colombia:

In July 1999, an American spy plane monitoring the skies and intercepting communications traffic crashed into a mountainside in Colombia, killing the seven men on board - five of them US military personnel.

It's difficult to specify what, if anything, the Bush Administration has done to secure their release. By antagonizing the government of Hugo Chavez, the United States cannot expect any help from the Venezuelan allies of the FARC.

Even worse, from the perspective of the captives, their government and media rarely even speak about them. It's not just The Post: Both President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have visited Colombia in the past year, but neither mentioned Gonsalves, Howes and Stansell in their prepared public statements.

[Luis Eladio] Pérez, a former Colombian senator, could not help but feel the men's distress. At the time Bush visited, Pérez was chained by the neck to Howe. Taken hostage himself in June 2001, Pérez lived with the Americans from late 2003 to late 2004, and then again from October 2006 until his release in February. The 55-year-old politician was freed in a deal orchestrated by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and appears to be in remarkably good health now. But he is anguished about those he left behind. "It hurts me to be here enjoying coffee and knowing that they are there in the jungle chained to each other," Pérez told me. "I'm not happy to think of them rotting. I haven't stopped one day trying to help them."

Pérez came to Washington in part because the men gave him letters addressed to President Bush, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the presidential candidates and The Post, among others. FARC guards confiscated the letters, so Pérez is trying to deliver their messages himself. "They are asking the country to please not abandon them," he said. "They are saying that they love their country, they love the flag, that they are rotting in the jungle and please do something for them."

What could be done? Pérez wishes that Bush would consider the FARC's demand that two of its members imprisoned in the United States -- including one sentenced in January to 60 years for conspiring to hold the Americans hostage -- be exchanged for the three men. He points out that Colombian President Álvaro Uribe has expressed a willingness to exchange FARC prisoners for hostages and that French President Nicolas Sarkozy has promised to accept FARC detainees temporarily in France if it will lead to the release of Ingrid Betancourt, a former Colombian presidential candidate who holds French citizenship.

Taking care of our own and doing the difficult work of diplomacy is the Achilles heel of the Bush State Department. Letting a few narco-terrorists go would do what in the war on drugs? Set us back a decade or more? We're so far behind in the war on drugs that it wouldn't make a lick of difference if we let a few of them go. Good luck to them--anyone we let go would be ostracized by their former associates anyway. Keeping them in prison does what for us when we could let them go and get our personnel back?

It all comes down to the State Department. It used to work pretty well. It used to be something to be proud of. Good people led astray and held back and forced to retire is the best way to describe what we have right now. We have eviscerated our diplomatic corps. We have hundreds of empty positions and a desperate need to engage our friends, enemies, and neutral partners on every level.

Jackson Diehl goes on to say:

Among other things, the release of convicted FARC terrorists would undermine what has been a successful extradition program between Colombia and the United States and give a political boost to a crumbling movement. The implosion of the FARC has been a huge setback to Chávez, who was trying to rehabilitate it and use it as a vehicle to export his "Bolivarian revolution" to Colombia.

Therein may lie the Americans' best hope. Pérez confirms that the FARC "is looking for a political solution" in conjunction with Chávez. He's hoping its leaders can be convinced that such an end must begin with a unilateral release of the remaining hostages. "The FARC must make a decision," Pérez said. If Betancourt or other hostages die, he added, "it will be the end of the FARC." That would be a triumph for Colombia and for the Bush administration -- but not much consolation for three American families.

Perhaps the next President will solve the problem. Sad to say, we're just running out the clock.

Ties Between Venezuela and Colombian Rebels Alleged

In March of this year, the US government stated that the possibility of ties between the government of Venezuela and the FARC were unacceptable:

The United States accused unnamed members of Venezuela's left-wing government [in March 2008] of conspiring against neighboring Colombia by supporting Marxist guerrillas.

Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon, the top U.S. diplomat for Latin America, said files discovered on a rebel chief's computer in March contained "troubling" evidence about ties between some Venezuelan officials and guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

"It will either have to commit itself to using its relationship with the FARC to promote peace or it will have to explain why members of its government are conspiring against a democratic neighbor," Shannon said in a speech in California.

Venezuela quickly denied the claims:

Venezuela insists files seized by Colombian forces during a cross-border raid in Ecuador in March indicating Caracas-FARC links, are fake.

US intelligence has recently claimed the files retrieved from the laptop of the slain FARC's second-in-command Raul Reyes showed strong ties between Caracas and the FARC guerrillas.

"We don't recognize the validity of any of these documents," Venezuelan Ambassador to the United States Bernardo Alvarez said, AFP reported citing an article appeared in the Wall Street Journal on Friday.

"They are false, and an attempt to discredit the Venezuelan Government," he added.

Following the March 1 attack of a FARC camp in Ecuador by Colombian forces, Bogota claimed it had found files showing ties between the rebels, Venezuela and Ecuador.

Yesterday, the contents of the files were released:

High-ranking officials in Venezuela offered to help Colombian guerrillas obtain surface-to-air missiles meant to change the balance of power in their war with the Colombian government, according to internal rebel documents.

Venezuelan officials served as middlemen with Australian arms dealers and agreed to help the rebel commanders travel to the Middle East to receive missile training, according to files on computer hard drives seized by Colombian authorities and shown to The Washington Post. In interviews, Colombian officials said they have no evidence that the guerrillas obtained the antiaircraft missiles but added that Venezuelan authorities appear to have provided light arms, thousands of rounds of ammunition and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

The disclosures have already started to reverberate in the Bush administration and among Latin America policymakers on Capitol Hill, where a small group of Republicans has proposed classifying Venezuela, a major oil exporter to the United States, as a state sponsor of terrorism. The United States and Europe long ago blacklisted the rebel organization, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, as a terrorist group.

At Colombia's request, Interpol, the international police agency, has completed an extensive forensic analysis on the hard drives, which were confiscated in an army raid on a rebel camp on March 1. On Thursday, Interpol is expected to announce that there is no evidence that anyone tampered with the hard drives after they were seized, though the agency cannot vouch for the veracity of the rebels' claims, according to an American official knowledgeable about the study.

The documents are the latest to be released among 16,000 files and photographs being reviewed by Colombian and U.S. officials that describe meetings between FARC commanders and Venezuelan officials, including Interior Minister Ramón Rodríguez Chacín; the military intelligence chief, Gen. Hugo Carvajal; other top generals such as Clíver Alcalá; and Amilkar Figueroa, who organizes Venezuela's civilian militias.

Once again, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez rejects the findings:

President Hugo Chávez, who has publicly lauded the FARC and characterized Colombia's government as illegitimate, ridiculed the latest batch of correspondence Sunday as "imbecilic documents." He cast Colombian President Álvaro Uribe as a "manipulator" linked to drug trafficking and charged that the Bush administration is using the documents as a pretext to invade Venezuela from Colombia.

Communications Minister Andrés Izarra, speaking to a group of American newspaper editors on Tuesday in Caracas, called the findings "laughable."

"It's part of the lies that are spread around every day against what we are doing," he said.

Not everyone is backing the administration:

After a recent fact-finding trip to the region, Carl Meacham, a senior aide to Sen. Richard G. Lugar (Ind.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, noted in a report that a hard line against Venezuela could damage trade with the United States and inadvertently strengthen Chávez's position.

Colombian officials have also debated the ramifications of a tough stance, since it could endanger $6.5 billion in annual trade with Venezuela. Santos, the defense minister, said, "I want to normalize relations with Venezuela because it would be convenient for all of us." He added: "But to do that, they cannot help the FARC."

Colombian officials and former FARC guerrillas said the close ties between the group and Venezuela are not new, though officials in Chávez's government and rebel commanders have drawn closer since 2005.

***Whew*** I am sooo glad that's over!

The diplomatic crisis in Latin America has apparently been resolved, with Presidents Correa of Ecuador, Uribe of Colombia and Chavez of Venezuela all shaking hands and agreeing unanimously that the situation should be resolved diplomatically.

Tensions have been high for a week, since Columbian commandos crossed the border into Ecuador to kill FARC members as they slept in their encampment across the border in Ecuador. Ecuador took exception to having their sovereign territory violated, and recalled the Ambassador from Bogota.

The situation with Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela was the most serious threat to regional security that has materialized in years. The reconciliation took place just hours after the rhetoric ratcheted up significantly, with Mr. Correa condemning Colombia's "aggression", while Mr. Uribe accused Correa of having links with the FARC rebels, as a summit of Latin American countries got underway in the Dominican Republic.

"With the commitment of never attacking a brother country again and by asking forgiveness, we can consider this very serious incident resolved," said President Correa to thunderous applause and television cameras before the monumental handshake that precipitated the sigh heard round the world.

Are We Ready To Fight The Next War?

And what if the next war is in Colombia?

Can we "over learn" what is going on in Iraq? As Spencer Ackerman reports, The debate has already started in the "COIN" or counterinsurgency community in the US Army and continues:

In the spring of 2007, as the first wave of new combat brigades arrived in Baghdad to execute President George W. Bush’s troop surge, an Army lieutenant colonel named Paul Yingling booted up his computer at Ft. Hood, Tex. He received an email accusing him of moral cowardice. It was from Yingling’s friend, a fellow Iraq veteran and Army lieutenant colonel named Gian Gentile.

Gentile was concerned about a highly influential article that Yingling had written for the magazine Armed Forces Journal titled "A Failure In Generalship." The piece was incendiary. Yingling, barely 40 and an Iraq veteran twice over, had issued a j’accuse to the entire general officer corps for failing, over the previous 15 years, to anticipate low-intensity conflicts with insurgents and prepare U.S. troops accordingly. He further contended that the generals failed to deliver their best military advice to the Bush administration about the true costs of the war in Iraq, preferring not to challenge the White House’s optimistic fantasies. "Failing to visualize future battlefields represents a lapse in professional competence," Yingling had written, "but seeing those fields clearly and saying nothing is an even more serious lapse in professional character." The people he criticized have the power to end his career.

But to Gentile, Yingling was the lapsed officer. In his email, and then in a volley of op-eds and blog posts over the next year, Gentile derided Yingling for failing to call any general out by name. Worse yet, Gentile now contends that blaming the generals represents a myopia on the part of Yingling’s fellow counterinsurgency enthusiasts—until recently, he counted himself one—to accept the U.S. failure in Iraq. "By not naming names," Gentile, now a history professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, said in a phone interview, "he has left it open for the generals themselves to interpret who’s in the Yingling-screw-up crowd. The way that comes out, until the early months of the surge, he doesn’t want to say who but he really means [former Iraq commander and now Army Chief of Staff Gen. George] Casey, only a few units got it right and finally, maybe, we’re on the right track with Gen. Petraeus and the surge." Both Yingling and Gentile claim to have received heaps of supportive email from soldiers.

I think it's great that two eminent thinkers are having this debate in public, but what purpose does it serve to debate the surge in Iraq when the answer is right in front of you? And the question, in my mind, has always been, do you really think it was wise to occupy Iraq for as long as we have without forcing the Iraqi government to adhere to a strict timetable of political reconcilliation with the withdrawal of US forces as the ultimate goal? By my reckoning, US troops have handed the Iraqi government enough time for them to get the job done. Now that we see that they cannot accomplish reconcilliation, what does it serve our long-term interests to keep rewarding their failure with our blood and treasure?

That's my definition of victory--can we pull our troops out and leave behind a stable country? If not, then quit pretending our troops should be bled dry to kick the can down the road. We put them there, they gave the Iraqi government all the time it needed to mature, grow up, and decide its own fate. No amount of propping up the current Iraqi government is going to prevent an eventual collapse. And not one US soldier's life is worth propping up a failed government. Not one.

The chances of the next war looking like the Iraq war are what, exactly? If we're smart, we'll never get into another war like the Iraq War. Therefore, what good is a fundamental shift to COIN going to do us? We'll have a military outfitted to fight insurgents with the wrong gear and the wrong vehicles for a different kind of fight.

What if that next conflict is to be found in the region between Colombia and Venezuela? What if the flashpoint for the next war is a border fight for the bridges and crossing points in the city of Arauca? Does the US military have a plan to fight a war in the jungles of Southern Colombia or in the river country of Northeastern Colombia? You can find many distinct types of terrain in Colombia--and if we internalize an ability to fight in deserts or in urban areas, are we going to be ready to fight along rivers in jungles? What if we need US troops to cross numerous streams and rivers on foot--do they have the right boots? Who would we turn to when it came time to ramp up fast? We know that US troops have been going back and forth to Colombia for years. There are Special Forces advisors who have a lot of experience there. Will they be tapped to train others quickly enough if there is a conflict? Or will they be ignored because we are hell-bent on fighting the new war the way we fought the last war? What if most of those men are being snapped up by Blackwater to fight as Uribe's personal bodyguards?

What if they're all still in Iraq?

Say we spend the next few years reorganizing the military into smaller brigades equipped with Stryker vehicles. Say we build several divisions worth of these troops into a battle-ready force that can deploy quickly.

Well, what if the next challenge for America is to head off disaster in Colombia? Say, for example, that the larger. US-backed Colombian military is caught fighting a two-front war against Ecuador and Venezuela. And the outcome is a victory over Ecuador but a stalemate with Venezuela. I would speculate that a drawn-out, costly fight with Venezuela could deplete Colombia's Army just enough to force the population of Colombia to turn on the Uribe government. Now add in the possibility that Hugo Chavez would up the ante by ordering his troops to assist the FARC in their campaign against Uribe all throughout the country, timed with an offensive by Venezuelan troops against the border crossings on the frontier between the two countries.

The FARC are a completely different animal from what we fight in Iraq. They are made up of seasoned fighters who have fought in terrible terrain for decades. They are closer in zeal to what we fought in Vietnam than what we're fighting now in Iraq. A COIN mindset would probably help us if we were forced to intercede and help Colombia defeat the FARC.

But what good would it do if the Colombian Army collapsed and we had to drive back the convetionally-equipped Venezuelan Army? What if the only forces available to send were 82nd Airborne [light infantry] as opposed to troops more suited to fight in that terrain [air cav or the 101st Airborne]. What if neither were available, and we had to send a mixed bag of heavy and light combat units from different posts and different divisions? What if we had to send the 7th Special Forces Group and a patchwork of Guard units to support them?

Would there be a fundamental examination of what went wrong if we screwed up and sent the wrong troops? Who would be held accountable? If Yingling can't speak up (and this goes for Colonel H.R. McMaster and a few others as well) without fear of recrimination, when are we going to learn anything?

Let me pause and go back to the Ackerman article:

Gentile considers the counterinsurgents’ sense of beseigement to be ludicrous. To him, the military is undergoing a titanic shift in favor of counterinsurgency with little debate over the implications. "I worry about a hyper-emphasis on COIN and irregular warfare," he said in a phone interview, with "less mechanization, less protection and more infantry on the ground walking and talking with the people. It’s a potential recipe for disaster if our enemies fight the way Hezbollah did against the Israelis in the summer of ‘06."

He continued, "Petraeus sat on the promotion board. Do we really think H.R. won’t have a star on his shoulder? They’re the ones in control. I don’t see how they can think otherwise. They’re almost like the minority party that finally becomes the majority party and can’t get over the fact they’re the majority!"

Gentile even has a term for the counterinsurgents’ view of their place in the Army: he calls it The Matrix, after the mind-controlling Baudrillardian machine that alters the perception of reality in the eponymous Wachowski Brothers films.

There was a time when he would have swallowed the blue pill. Gentile served two tours in Iraq, first in Tikrit in 2003 under Odierno and then in western Baghdad in 2006, commanding an armored cavalry squadron. Despite what he calls a counterinsurgents’ "master narrative," whereby counterinsurgency arrives in Iraq first in Tal Afar with McMaster and then in Baghdad with Petraeus, Gentile said that units—including his own—applied COIN practices throughout the war. "Clearly, there are examples of units not getting it," he said. "But I believe that at the tactical level—infantry scouts, platoons, companies and battalions—performed [counterinsurgency operations] by the book even before FM 3-24." Yet, Gentile observed, conditions in Iraq got worse, not better.

That realization turned Gentile from a COIN practitioner to a COIN skeptic. Essentially, he swallowed the red pill to escape the Matrix during the triumphalism surrounding the troop surge in 2007. Counterinsurgency, he now believes, has a role in a modern military, but an excessive focus on it serves as an alibi to avoid recognizing that the U.S. military is not omnipotent. "I think Andrew Bacevich, at the policy-strategy level, has basically nailed it," Gentile said, referring to the retired Army colonel who contends that Iraq is an irredeemable strategic mistake. "He points out the limits of what American military power can accomplish."

Yingling finds his friend’s argument to be, at the least, premature. To him, there are too many vestiges of an improperly-footed military encumbering counterinsurgency to conclude that it has been fully tested and found wanting. "Why are our acquisition priorities the same as before 9/11?" he said from Ft. Hood, where he commands the 1st Battalion, 21st Field Artillery. "My field artillery battalion, we’ve got a multi-launch rocket system to guard detainees. We built the wrong Army in the 1990s and now we’re breaking it apart to fight the war we’ve got." He continued, "The notion that America’s power as a nation is somehow at its limits today as we spend four percent of our GDP on defense and have an active-duty Army of half a million just doesn’t square with history."

Nor can he accept Gentile’s argument that "A Failure In Generalship" needed to name names. "The failures of our general officer corps, through Vietnam and Iraq, occur independently of a single individual," said Yingling, who learned counterinsurgency while soldiering for McMaster in Tal Afar. "To focus on individual culpability misses the point. There’s a structural problem with how the armed forces develop senior leaders. And until we address it, we’ll keep getting the same result."

Just as Gentile believes there’s a place for counterinsurgency in the military, neither does Yingling adopt a zero-sum approach to conventional warfare. "The high-intensity [side of things], I certainly don’t want to abandon it," he said. "There’s a good debate to be had about what that balance should be."

We should always strive to have the right troops to send to the right kind of fight. We should NEVER be in a position to send "whoever's available" to fight in a harsh climate with the wrong gear. Anyone remember the Korean War, and how we sent National Guardsmen from the Dakotas and over-pampered occupation troops from Japan with the wrong uniforms and with outdated equipment without any training for the geography that they were expected to fight in? It would be criminally incompetent to send US troops to a South American conflict with the wrong uniforms and the wrong gear. We should have a ready force to send--not a mixed bag of troops from several different commands who were unlucky enough to be on alert when the shit hit the fan.

Has the US military addressed the fundamental problem of air lifting large formations to the battlefield? Virtually every military operation in Colombia requires navigating terrain that isn't suited to vehicles and is much better suited for the use of helicopters--so do we have enough helicopters to send? Or do we rely on the Osprey-equipped Marines? And isn't it time to focus on what we should be using the Marines for? Do we have a big enough Navy to secure transport of a heavy unit to Colombia? Do we take control of the Panama Canal to prevent half of our forces from being separated from the other half if Venezuela decides to move on Panama? Relations between the two have been chilly for years.

It's all well and good to internalize COIN. But what good will it do us if the next war has a fundamentally different set of goals and situations that have nothing to do with scenarios taught by officers who have embraced COIN as their central organizing principle?

UPDATE I - PALE RIDER

The next thing I should do is explain why I think this:

"If you organize the military to fight a Counterinsurgency War, then the civilians who control the military are probably going to involve the military in a Counterinsurgency War."

Organizing yourself to get into another strategic blunder probably isn't the smartest way to effectively prepare our troops to defend American interests.

My Bullshit Detector is Beeping Like Crazy

Colombia is accusing the FARC rebels of seeking the components of a radioactive "dirty bomb" that would scatter radioactive debris over a geographic area. The charge was leveled by Colombia's vice president, Francisco Santos, at a U.N. disarmament meeting in Geneva. It upped the rhetorical ante considerably.

Santos claims that a raid against the rebel group had yielded a laptop with information that indicated the rebel terrorists were actively seeking radioactive material. "This shows that these terrorist groups, supported by the economic power provided by drug trafficking, constitute a grave threat not just to our country but to the entire Andean region and Latin America," he said in a statement that was posted in Spanish on the UN disarmament conference's Web site.

He did not indicate with whom he believed the rebels were negotiating, and offered no empirical evidence to support his claims that the rebels were seeking 50 kilograms, or 110 pounds, of uranium.

I'm not saying unequivocally that the story is entirely without merit, I'm saying the odds are about 50/50 that it is entirely without merit. Here is what is making my bullshit detector go crazy - besides the lack of supporting evidence. You don't exactly process uranium with cases of ether. It's slightly trickier than manufacturing cocaine and requires lab equipment that is a bit more sophisticated than you will find in a mobile, makeshift jungle lab.

Given the track record of lying by this administration and it's allies, the presence of American troops in Colombia and the fact that Venezuela is an OPEC member, and let's just say I need to see a hell of a lot more proof than a ranting diatribe delivered while beating frantically on the terrorist fear-drum by Colombia's vice president.

Here's What Neglecting Our Obligations Gets Us

Hey, wouldn't it be nice to have the ability to do something when things like this happen?

CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez moved tanks to the Colombian border and mobilized fighter jets on Sunday, warning Bogota could spark a war after its troops struck inside another of its neighbors, Ecuador.

Reacting to Colombia's killing on Saturday of a Colombian rebel over the border in Ecuador, a Venezuelan ally, Chavez also withdrew all of his diplomats from Bogota in the worst dispute between the neighbors since he came to office in 1999.

"Mr. Defense Minister, move me 10 battalions to the frontier with Colombia immediately, tank battalions. The air force should mobilize," Chavez said, adding he will bolster his military's presence along the 1,400-mile (2,200-km) border.

"May God spare us a war. But we are not going to allow them violate our sovereign territory," the ex-paratrooper added on his weekly TV show.

Colombia's military said on Saturday troops killed Raul Reyes, a leader of Marxist FARC rebels, during an attack on a jungle camp in Ecuador in a severe blow to Latin America's oldest guerrilla insurgency. The operation included air strikes and fighting with rebels across the frontier.

The anti-U.S. Chavez, who had warned a similar operation in Venezuela would be "cause for war," threatened to send Russian-made fighter jets into U.S. ally Colombia if its troops struck inside his OPEC country.

As this escalates, we'll see just how much actual leverage we have in areas of the world that we've been neglecting. We don't need a full blown war in South America right now, or anywhere else, for that matter. We don't have the resources to step in and protect our interests.