Losing the War on terror :
Who We help is hurting
Dennis Jett
Ambassador Jett is a professor of international affairs at the Pennsylvania
State University. A former career diplomat, he was U.S. ambassador to
Peru and Mozambique and has served on the National Security Council
and in American embassies in Argentina, Israel, Malawi and Liberia.
© 2012, The Author Middle East Policy © 2012, Middle East Policy Council
E
ver since the attacks of Septem-
ber 11, 2001, one of the highest
priorities of the U.S. govern-
ment has been to prevent an-
other terrorist assault on American soil. A
major component of the response to that
challenge has been to provide security
assistance to a number of countries in the
Middle East and other parts of the world.
By aiding some of those governments,
however, we are making ourselves less
secure and more likely to be attacked again
in the future. And the way we are provid-
ing the assistance is not merely wasteful; it
further compounds the problem. But don’t
tell that to the U.S. government. It would
rather not know and only measures its suc-
cess by how much money it throws at the
problem and whether it gets a receipt for it.
Security assistance to fragile states
has become an essential part of America’s
strategy to defend itself. Nearly a decade
after 9/11, then Secretary of Defense
Robert Gates wrote in Foreign Affairs 1 that
“the main security challenge of our time”
was the possibility that failed states would
become the launching pad for new attacks
on the American homeland. His recom-
mendation for dealing with that threat was
to provide military and other training to the
security forces in those failing states.
As described in my article in Middle
East Policy last year, 2 such a policy puts
the United States in the position of sup-
porting the world’s most repressive and
corrupt regimes. It is little more than an
updated version of the Kirkpatrick Doc-
trine from the Cold War: a rightwing dicta-
tor was always preferable to a leftwing
populist because the former was an ally in
the struggle against Communism, and the
latter was not. Now any regime, no matter
how repressive, is our friend if it professes
to be on our side in the so-called global
war on terror. This makes the pious dec-
larations of support for democracy by the
State Department appear disingenuous to
the rest of the world. Undermining Ameri-
can public diplomacy is not the only cost
of the Gates Doctrine, however, if it results
in American arms and assistance being pro-
vided to governments that use them against
their own people.
The “global war on terror” was the
term invented by the Bush administra-
tion to describe its response to 9/11 and to
136
M iddle e ast P olicy , V ol . XiX, N o . 3, F all 2012
justify the programs it undertook to win
that supposed war. Of course, “terror” is
an all-consuming fear, and terrorism is a
tactic that will be used as long as there are
fanatics who kill innocent people to make
a political point. So waging war on either
is nonsensical; there is no ultimate victory
over an emotion or a tactic.
But that did not seem to matter, and
the press echoed that theme and used
the phrase
enough that
it became the
shorthand
description
for the main
threat to
U.S. secu-
rity. 3 Even
though it initially denied dropping the term
“global war on terror,” the Obama admin-
istration looked for other ways to describe
its efforts and now uses different euphe-
misms. 4 The logic persists, however. If this
is war, it demands a military solution. And
the quickest way to victory is to train the
troops involved in the fighting, regardless
of who they are or what they are really
fighting for.
A recent article in The New York Times 5
illustrates the danger of such a policy and
how it might create more terrorists than it
eliminates. The article described in detail
how demonstrators in Bahrain, who have
been demanding more democracy and
less corruption from their government, are
beginning to direct their anger toward the
United States as their hopes for meaningful
reform fade. While that frustration may not
lead the demonstrators to actually become
terrorists, it provides a strong incentive
for them to support people who are. Like
Gates, proponents of furnishing assistance
to the security forces in places like Bahrain
insist that it is necessary because of the
security threat posed by these countries if
they become failed states. They add that
these programs are administered in a way
that helps ensure they have the intended
effect without the negative impact critics
predict.
Neither argument is true. The programs
are unnecessary and a waste of money,
given that their results are as uncertain as
they are un-
sustainable.
Worse still,
the American
government
appears to not
want to know
the effect
of what it is
doing and only measures its success by the
metric of how much money is spent.
The security-assistance programs are
unnecessary; fragile states do not pose that
big a threat. Stewart Patrick of the Council
on Foreign Relations wrote a book on this
specific issue last year. 6 In it, he argues
persuasively that “globally, most fragile
states do not present significant security
risks, except to their own people, and the
most important spillovers that preoccupy
U.S. national security officials are at least
as likely to emanate from stronger devel-
oping countries, rather than the world’s
weakest countries.”
Yet the U.S. government presses ahead
with arms sales and security training to
precisely those kinds of countries. Perhaps
this is one reason there is no meaningful
attempt to measure whether the training is
accomplishing the goals that it is supposed
to achieve. This should not be surprising to
anyone who understands how governments
and international organizations operate.
They often do what they can do instead of
If this is war, it demands a military
solution. And the quickest way to victory
is to train the troops involved in the
fighting, regardless of who they are or
what they are really fighting for.
137
J ett : L osing the W ar on t error
of Diplomatic Security, Office of Antiter-
rorism, (DS/T/ATA) had a number of prob-
lems in administering the ATA program:
• The counterterrorism coordinator provid-
ed minimal guidance to help prioritize
which countries would receive ATA.
• Neither the counterterrorism coordinator
nor diplomatic security attempted to sys-
tematically align ATA programs with an
assessment of what the countries needed.
• Neither bureau systematically assessed
the outcomes of the ATA program and,
therefore, could not determine its effec-
tiveness or its sustainability.
In response, the State Department
did not disagree with any of the report’s
findings and called the GAO’s conclu-
sions “fair.” It noted that the GAO review
highlighted the difficulties in attempting to
reduce to numeric terms the benefits of the
ATA program, but it added that an effort
was underway to develop “a methodol-
ogy to quantify levels of achievement of
foreign governments in the area of fighting
terrorism, which can be applied interna-
tionally and against the differing capabili-
ties of each country.” The department also
said it considered “the need to align lim-
ited resources with national security and
foreign policy objectives to be essential.” 8
While the State Department agreed with
what needed to be done and emphasized its
importance, over four years later, there was
scant evidence of any progress.
The Office of the Inspector General
(OIG), in its capacity as the internal audi-
tor of the State Department, recently began
putting its inspection reports on its website
with only slight redactions for national-
security reasons. In April 2012, the OIG
posted its evaluation of the ATA program, 9
which examined how the assistance was
what they should do. And they measure
what they want to measure, not what they
ought to measure.
That is in part because of the nature of
what governments do. In the private sector,
measurement is generally easy. If a compa-
ny decides to build a product, it constructs
a factory, acquires raw materials, manufac-
tures a product, advertises it and sells it.
The process is complex, but quantifiable.
And as long as the company can convince
the consumer to choose its product through
its advertising, it will be able to make a
profit and measure down to the dollar how
much money was made from one year to
the next. Maximizing next quarter’s bot-
tom line is thus the goal and the yardstick
by which progress is measured.
Governments and international orga-
nizations, on the other hand, usually don’t
have the advantage of precise measure-
ments of what they are doing or how suc-
cessful they are. Because of this, in order
to demonstrate short-term results, there
is less concern for long-term goals. The
solution to a problem is to throw money at
it. The measure of success is whether the
money gets spent in the time allotted by
the budget cycle. Getting a receipt so the
money can be accounted for also matters,
but what it actually does is too difficult to
measure and therefore often ignored.
That won’t sound like an exaggera-
tion to anyone who has seen development
agencies like the World Bank in operation.
But anyone who thinks this description
could not apply to the U.S. government
should consider the following. In Febru-
ary 2008, the Government Accountability
Office issued a report on the State Depart-
ment’s Antiterrorism Assistance Program
(ATA). 7 The GAO study concluded that the
State Department’s Office of Coordinator
for Counterterrorism (S/CT) and its Bureau
138
M iddle e ast P olicy , V ol . XiX, N o . 3, F all 2012
countries. As a result, the Depart-
ment has no assurance that the ATA
program is achieving its intended
statutory purposes or that the overall
or individual programs are successful.
Further, DS/T/ATA has no basis for
determining when partner countries
are capable of sustaining their own
ATA programs without U.S. support. 11
The 1983 act passed by Congress
establishing the ATA program requires
that the Hu-
man Rights
Bureau be
consulted
about what
countries are
provided as-
sistance and
the nature
of that as-
sistance. Congress wrote that provision
into the law in an effort to deny assistance
to known abusers of human rights. The
Human Rights Bureau’s vetting simply
consists, however, of a name check to see
if any of the potential trainees are known
to the bureau to be individuals who have
abused human rights.
The problem is that repressive regimes
do not make known the names of those
in their security forces who commit such
crimes, and there is no functioning judi-
cial system that would ever charge and try
them for such abuses. Indeed, the entire
security apparatus in such countries can
generally be considered to be one large
mechanism for abusing human rights, sup-
pressing political opponents and keeping
the regime in power. It would be as ridicu-
lous as training members of the Khmer
Rouge because the Human Rights Bureau
did not have the names of the individual
being provided to the 22 countries in the
bureaus of Near Eastern Affairs and South
and Central Asian Affairs.
It is important to note that, of these 22
countries that receive such assistance, 12 are
considered by the human-rights organization
Freedom House to be repressive autocratic
regimes. All 12 fall into its worst category in
its annual assessment of political rights and
civil liberties 10 and are classified as coun-
tries that are “not free.” Another nine were
considered
only “partly
free”; only
one, India,
was consid-
ered to be
“free.”
The OIG
report did
not deal with
that aspect of the antiterrorism assistance
program in these countries, but it did find
that there was still no system to evaluate
the effectiveness of the training or any at-
tention paid to how the skills taught would
be sustained by these security forces once
they no longer had American aid:
In FY 2010 the ATA program trained
nearly 2,700 participants . . . at a cost
of approximately $1,800 per student
per day of training. However, DS/T/
ATA could not determine the ATA
program’s effectiveness because it had
not developed specific, measureable,
and outcome-oriented program objec-
tives or implemented a mechanism
for program evaluation. In addition,
DS/T/ATA and CT [the successor of
S/CT] were not consulting with the
Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights
and Labor (DRL), when selecting
partner countries or when determining
the assistance to be provided to those
Less than two weeks of training for
$23,000 has to be an astoundingly high
cost in anyone’s book, especially if the
State Department has no idea of what it is
accomplishing or whether it will produce
any lasting changes.
139
J ett : L osing the W ar on t error
his country and publish everything he
knew about the agency in his book Inside
the Company. 13 Agee did have a point,
however. The agency found the Soviet
Union to be a hard target that it had little
luck in penetrating. It devoted extensive
resources to recruiting agents in Latin
America, not because the region was im-
portant, but because government officials
there were so easy to buy.
A much more recent example is the
reconstruction of Iraq. Given the frequent
lack of security and the response of the
Iraqi people to an occupying army, nation
building was an impossible task. But it had
to be undertaken to show that the war was
not a complete failure and to obscure the
fact that the country had no weapons of
mass destruction, anything to do with 9/11
or any meaningful ties to al-Qaeda.
Peter Van Buren is a foreign-service
officer who was the leader of two provin-
cial reconstruction teams that were sup-
posed to be leading the efforts at economic
development in Iraq. He found a system
riddled with waste, fraud and mismanage-
ment and one that was primarily concerned
with getting the money spent without
much concern for what it was actually ac-
complishing. His best example of this was
a chicken-processing plant that, because
of the inadequacy of the local capabilities
for handling fresh food, was a complete
and utter failure. It was the perfect Potem-
kin project, however, and every time an
official from Washington or a journalist
wanted to see what was being accom-
plished, the factory was started up. Chick-
ens were bought on the local market to run
through the plant as the visitor toured the
facility and then discarded once the digni-
tary left. The number of chickens that were
processed depended on the rank of the
visitor, with higher-level officials getting a
trainees on their list of known human-
rights abusers.
While the attention paid to human
rights is negligible, the amount of money
spent is not. During the nine fiscal years
from 2002 to 2010, a total of $1.369 billion
was spent on the ATA program, of which
$873 million went to the 22 countries in
North Africa, the Middle East and Central
and South Asia that were evaluated in the
OIG report. The average training course
lasted 13 days and cost about $23,000 per
student. Less than two weeks of training
for $23,000 has to be an astoundingly high
cost in anyone’s book, especially if the
State Department has no idea of what it is
accomplishing or whether it will produce
any lasting changes.
Despite claiming in its response to
the GAO that a methodology was being
developed to measure the effectiveness
of the program, over four years later the
OIG found “nearly all of the performance
indicators and targets used to define suc-
cess or failure of a country program were
ambiguous, were not measurable, or lacked
meaning.” 12
Is it too difficult to measure what is
being accomplished in a program like
the ATA? Or, when there is a mandate to
show results, is it simply easier to throw
money at the problem and ignore what it is
accomplishing as long as there is a receipt
for the money spent? If it were this, it
would not be the first time that the govern-
ment, when faced with a challenge, did
what it could and not what it should. And it
would not be the first time that the results
were less important than the appearance of
action and initiative in pursuing a high-
priority goal.
During the Cold War, the highest prior-
ity was to fight Communism. Philip Agee
was a CIA officer who decided to betray
140
M iddle e ast P olicy , V ol . XiX, N o . 3, F all 2012
uncovering of a bomb factory. The
Bahraini Government’s discovery of
several facilities for producing highly
explosive bombs is of deep concern.
We commend the Government of
Bahrain for its counterterrorism ef-
forts and for conducting a thorough
and professional investigation that
has eliminated a serious threat to
Bahrain and to its people. There is
no justification for any party holding
such material, the use of which would
exact an enormous human toll and
severely escalate tensions in the coun-
try. Violent acts are counterproductive
to the reconciliation efforts, which
are crucial to building a prosperous,
secure, peaceful future for the people
of Bahrain.
The report of the discovery of the
bomb factories and their tons of explosives
came from the government of Bahrain,
which has a vested interest in showing it is
facing a dire threat. That threat is appar-
ently too serious to permit any legitimate
democratic opposition. If the Arab Spring
has demonstrated anything, however, it
is that the autocrats in the Middle East in
today’s globalized world can repress their
people for only so long. Encouraging the
government of Bahrain to make democrat-
ic reforms and to limit corruption would
be a more effective strategy than selling it
arms or providing its security forces with
more training. That would require pro-
found and lasting changes but would be
a better way to protect American security
than the methods being employed.
One of those hired by the U.S. gov-
ernment to train the Bahraini police is a
former Philadelphia and Miami police
chief. He said the current climate could
overwhelm his efforts to remake the force,
which has been implicated in torture and
greater number of chickens slaughtered for
their benefit.
Van Buren’s book, 14 We Meant Well:
How I Helped Lose the Battle for Hearts
and Minds of Iraqi People, laid all this out
in great and amusing detail. Rather than
gleaning rewards for revealing so many
fundamental flaws in such an important
program, the book and his other writings
earned him the wrath of his superiors. The
department took away his security clear-
ance and was doing all it could to fire him.
The ATA program is not the only one
in which the appearance of accomplish-
ing short-term goals is far more important
than whether those goals will last longer
than the footfalls of the last departing
American. The Commission on Wartime
Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, a bi-
partisan legislative commission, looked at
billions of dollars spent on U.S.-funded re-
construction efforts in those two countries.
The commission said it saw no indication
that the Pentagon, the State Department or
the U.S. Agency for International Develop-
ment were “effectively taking sustainabil-
ity risks into account when devising new
projects or programs.” 15
So instead of worrying about what is being
accomplished and how long it will last, the
government tends to do things to show it
is doing things and to discourage anyone
who points out that the emperor is naked.
That defense mechanism kicks in when
it comes to protecting the recipients of
these programs as well as the programs
themselves. For instance, the State Depart-
ment press spokesperson, Victoria Nuland,
opened the June 28, 2012, noon press
briefing with the following statement:
I have one thing at the top, and then
we’ll go to what’s on your minds.
This is with regard to Bahrain and its
141
J ett : L osing the W ar on t error
1 Robert M. Gates, “Helping Others Defend Themselves — The Future of U.S. Security Assistance,” Foreign
Affairs 89, no. 3 (May/June 2010).
2 Dennis Jett, “U.S Security Assistance in the Middle East: Helping Friends or Creating Enemies?” Middle
East Policy 18, no. 1 (Spring 2011).
3 Seth C. Lewis and Stephen D. Reese, “What Is the War on Terror? Framing through the Eyes of Journalists,”
Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 86, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 85-102, http://umn.academia.edu/
SethLewis/Papers/642365/What_is_the_War_on_Terror_Framing_Through_the_Eyes_of_Journalists.
4 Scott Wilson and Al Kamen, “Global War on Terror Is Given a New Name,” Washington Post, March 29,
2009. Also see, “No Ban on ‘Global War on Terror’: U.S. Officials,” AFP, March 25, 2009.
5 Kareem Fahim, “As Hopes for Reform Fade in Bahrain, Protestors Turn Anger on United States,” New York
Times, June 23, 2012.
6 Stewart Patrick, Weak Links: Fragile States, Global Threats and International Security (Oxford University
Press, 2011).
7 U.S. Government Accountability Office, Combating Terrorism: State Department’s Antiterrorism Program
Needs Improved Guidance and More Systematic Assessment of Outcomes (GAO-08-336), Report to the Rank-
ing Member, Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, Committee on Oversight and Govern-
ment Reform, House of Representatives, 110 th Cong., 2 nd sess., February 2008.
8 Ibid., 33.
9 “Evaluation of the Antiterrorism Assistance Program for Countries under the Bureaus of Near Eastern Af-
fairs and South and Central Asian Affairs,” Report of Inspection, U.S. Department of State and the Broadcast-
ing Board of Governors, Office of Inspector General, (AUD/MERO-12-29), April 2012, http://oig.state.gov/
documents/organization/190722.pdf.
10 Freedom House’s rankings for 2011 can be found on its website at http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/
freedom-world/freedom-world-2011.
11 Office of Inspector General, “Evaluation of the Antiterrorism Assistance Program,” 1.
12 Ibid., 7.
13 Philip Agee, Inside the Company (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975).
14 Peter Van Buren, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for Hearts and Minds of Iraqi People
(Holt, Henry and Company, 2011).
15 Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “U.S. Projects in War Zones Are Unsustainable, Study Finds,” Washington Post,
June 3, 2011.
16 Fahim, “As Hopes for Reform Fade.”
killings. He summed up the situation rather
succinctly: “It’s a heavy lift, changing the
culture. If there’s no political solution here,
it’s all for naught.” 16
The U.S. government doesn’t have the
patience or the funds for the long-term ef-
fort needed to strengthen the institutions of
democracy, however. Money for arms and
other security assistance is easy to find,
while support for strengthening the courts,
legislative branches, civil society and the
press never is. Such a strategy is designed
to do what is easy now, even though it pro-
duces results that don’t matter, rather than
do the heavy lifting of changing a society
more fundamentally. That, however, is the
best way to really protect this country from
a future terrorist attack.
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