TESTIMONY BEFORE THE SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE ON IRAQ

WILLIAM E. ODOM, LT GENERAL, USA, RET.

Republished on Global Geopolitics Net – Global Intel Net

Monday, May 19, 2008

(C) Copyright 2008 William E. Odom, LT General, USA, Ret.

All rights reserved.

This report is being presented on Global Geopolitics Net and the Global Intelligence News blog with permission from the author. The full text of General Odom’s Senate testimony of April 2, 2008 follows below:

TESTIMONY BEFORE THE SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE ON IRAQ

By William E. Odom, LT General, USA, Ret.

2 April 2008

Good morning, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee. It is an honor to appear before you again. The last occasion was in January 2007, when the topic was the troop surge. Today you are asking if it has worked.

Last year I rejected the claim that it was a new strategy. Rather, I said, it is a new tactic used to achieve the same old strategic aim, political stability. And I foresaw no serious prospects for success.

I see no reason to change my judgment now. The surge is prolonging instability, not creating the conditions for unity as the president claims.

Last year, General Petraeus wisely declined to promise a military solution to this political problem, saying that he could lower the level of violence, allowing a limited time for the Iraqi leaders to strike a political deal. Violence has been temporarily reduced but today there is credible evidence that the political situation is far more fragmented. And currently we see violence surge in Baghdad and Basra. In fact, it has also remained sporadic and significant in several other parts of Iraq over the past year, notwithstanding the notable drop in Baghdad and Anbar Province.

More disturbing, Prime Minister Maliki has initiated military action and then dragged in US forces to help his own troops destroy his Shiite competitors. This is a political setback, not a political solution. Such is the result of the surge tactic.

No less disturbing has been the steady violence in the Mosul area, and the tensions in Kirkuk between Kurds, Arabs, and Turkomen. A showdown over control of the oil fields there surely awaits us. And the idea that some kind of a federal solution can cut this Gordian knot strikes me as a wild fantasy, wholly out of touch with Kurdish realities.

Also disturbing is Turkey’s military incursion to destroy Kurdish PKK groups in the border region. That confronted the US government with a choice: either to support its NATO ally, or to make good on its commitment to Kurdish leaders to insure their security. It chose the former, and that makes it clear to the Kurds that the United States will sacrifice their security to its larger interests in Turkey.

Turning to the apparent success in Anbar province and a few other Sunni areas, this is not the positive situation it is purported to be. Certainly violence has declined as local Sunni sheiks have begun to cooperate with US forces. But the surge tactic cannot be given full credit. The decline started earlier on Sunni initiative. What are their motives? First, anger at al Qaeda operatives and second, their financial plight.

Their break with al Qaeda should give us little comfort. The Sunnis welcomed anyone who would help them kill Americans, including al Qaeda. The concern we hear the president and his aides express about a residual base left for al Qaeda if we withdraw is utter nonsense. The Sunnis will soon destroy al Qaeda if we leave Iraq.

The Kurds do not allow them in their region, and the Shiites, like the Iranians, detest al Qaeda. To understand why, one need only take note of the al Qaeda public diplomacy campaign over the past year or so on internet blogs. They implore the United States to bomb and invade Iran and destroy this apostate Shiite regime.

As an aside, it gives me pause to learn that our vice president and some members of the Senate are aligned with al Qaeda on spreading the war to Iran.

Let me emphasize that our new Sunni friends insist on being paid for their loyalty. I have heard, for example, a rough estimate that the cost in one area of about 100 square kilometers is $250,000 per day. And periodically they threaten to defect unless their fees are increased. You might want to find out the total costs for these deals forecasted for the next several years, because they are not small and they do not promise to end. Remember, we do not own these people. We merely rent them. And they can break the lease at any moment. At the same time, this deal protects them to some degree from the government’s troops and police, hardly a sign of political reconciliation.

Now let us consider the implications of the proliferating deals with the Sunni strongmen. They are far from unified among themselves. Some remain with al Qaeda. Many who break and join our forces are beholden to no one. Thus the decline in violence reflects a dispersion of power to dozens of local strong men who distrust the government and occasionally fight among themselves. Thus the basic military situation is far worse because of the proliferation of armed groups under local military chiefs who follow a proliferating number of political bosses.

This can hardly be called greater military stability, much less progress toward political consolidation, and to call it fragility that needs more time to become success is to ignore its implications. At the same time, Prime Minister Maliki’s military actions in Basra and Baghdad, indicate even wider political and military fragmentation. We are witnessing is more accurately described as the road to the Balkanization of Iraq, that is, political fragmentation. We are being asked by the president to believe that this shift of so much power and finance to so many local chieftains is the road to political centralization. He describes the process as building the state from the bottom up.

I challenge you to press the administration’s witnesses this week to explain this absurdity. Ask them to name a single historical case where power has been aggregated successfully from local strong men to a central government except through bloody violence leading to a single winner, most often a dictator. That is the history of feudal Europe’s transformation to the age of absolute monarchy. It is the story of the American colonization of the west and our Civil War. It took England 800 years to subdue clan rule on what is now the English-Scottish border. And it is the source of violence in Bosnia and Kosovo.

How can our leaders celebrate this diffusion of power as effective state building? More accurately described, it has placed the United States astride several civil wars. And it allows all sides to consolidate, rearm, and refill their financial coffers at the US expense.

To sum up, we face a deteriorating political situation with an over extended army. When the administration’s witnesses appear before you, you should make them clarify how long the army and marines can sustain this band-aid strategy.

The only sensible strategy is to withdraw rapidly but in good order. Only that step can break the paralysis now gripping US strategy in the region. The next step is to choose a new aim, regional stability, not a meaningless victory in Iraq. And progress toward that goal requires revising our policy toward Iran. If the president merely renounced his threat of regime change by force, that could prompt Iran to lessen its support to Taliban groups in Afghanistan. Iran detests the Taliban and supports them only because they will kill more Americans in Afghanistan as retaliation in event of a US attack on Iran. Iran’s policy toward Iraq would also have to change radically as we withdraw. It cannot want instability there. Iraqi Shiites are Arabs, and they know that Persians look down on them. Cooperation between them has its limits.

No quick reconciliation between the US and Iran is likely, but US steps to make Iran feel more secure make it far more conceivable than a policy calculated to increase its insecurity. The president’s policy has reinforced Iran’s determination to acquire nuclear weapons, the very thing he purports to be trying to prevent.

Withdrawal from Iraq does not mean withdrawal from the region. It must include a realignment and reassertion of US forces and diplomacy that give us a better chance to achieve our aim.

A number of reasons are given for not withdrawing soon and completely. I have refuted them repeatedly before but they have more lives than a cat. Let try again me explain why they don’t make sense.

First, it is insisted that we must leave behind military training element with no combat forces to secure them. This makes no sense at all. The idea that US military trainers left alone in Iraq can be safe and effective is flatly rejected by several NCOs and junior officers I have heard describe their personal experiences. Moreover, training foreign forces before they have a consolidated political authority to command their loyalty is a windmill tilt. Finally, Iraq is not short on military skills.

Second, it is insisted that chaos will follow our withdrawal. We heard that argument as the “domino theory” in Vietnam. Even so, the path to political stability will be bloody regardless of whether we withdraw or not. The idea that the United States has a moral responsibility to prevent this ignores that reality. We are certainly to blame for it, but we do not have the physical means to prevent it. American leaders who insist that it is in our power to do so are misleading both the public and themselves if they believe it.

The real moral question is whether to risk the lives of more Americans. Unlike preventing chaos, we have the physical means to stop sending more troops where many will be killed or wounded. That is the moral responsibility to our country which no American leaders seems willing to assume.

Third, nay sayers insist that our withdrawal will create regional instability. This confuses cause with effect. Our forces in Iraq and our threat to change Iran’s regime are making the region unstable. Those who link instability with a US withdrawal have it exactly backwards. Our ostrich strategy of keeping our heads buried in the sands of Iraq has done nothing but advance our enemies’ interest.

I implore you to reject these fallacious excuses for prolonging the commitment of US forces to war in Iraq.

Thanks for this opportunity to testify today.

About the Author:

Lieutenant General William E. Odom, U.S. Army (ret.), is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS. He is also an adjunct professor at Yale University. As director of the National Security Agency from 1985 to 1988, he was responsible for the nation’s signals intelligence and communications security. From 1981 to 1985, he served as assistant chief of staff for intelligence, the army’s senior intelligence officer. From 1977 to 1981, General Odom served in the Carter administration as military assistant to the president’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. As a member of the National Security Council staff, he worked on strategic planning, Soviet affairs, nuclear weapons policy, telecommunications policy, and Persian Gulf security issues.

Popularity: 15% [?]

The Rise and Fall of Shining Path

Global Geopolitics Net – Global Intel Net
Tuesday, May 06, 2008

© Copyright 2008 Council on Hemispheric Affairs, COHA. All rights reserved.
Link to the original article on COHA.org

By Waynee Lucero, Research Associate, COHA.org

In the Beginning:

The Shining Path (Sendero Luminosos) Maoist guerrillas were formed by university professor Abimael Guzman in the late 1960s and were based upon Marxist ideology. At the time, Guzman was teaching philosophy at San Cristóbal of Huamanga University, while engaging in left-wing politics. He attracted many like-minded young academics to his cause of staging a radical revolution in Peru. He visited the Peoples Republic of China in the mid-1960s and his collection of inchoate ideas was profoundly influenced by a mumble-tumble of Maoist theories, which became the basis of the ideological foundations of the Shining Path. In 1980, he launched his campaign to overthrow the Peruvian government.

The Shining Path’s main goal was to destroy existing Peruvian political institutions and replace them with a communist peasant revolutionary regime, while resisting any influence coming from other Latin American guerrilla groups like the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), as well as from foreign ideologies. According to researchers, Shining Path’s basic strategy was to use violence to bring down the country’s imperfect democratic institutions, prevent citizens from participating in local government, destroy Peru’s economy, and to thwart government-sponsored programs to provide aid and services to the population. As a result of a series of clandestine meetings, Shining Path officials established a military school to teach young recruits military tactics and weaponry use. At first, Shining Path was successful in many of its endeavors because the Lima authorities were beset by organizational instability, corruption, and were ill-prepared to fight the internal war that would foreshadow the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent villagers caught in the middle of the struggle.

The Revolution Begins:

Shining Path formally initiated its uprising against the Peruvian government in 1980 after decades of inequality and marginality immiserated the peasantry. Led by Guzman, the revolution based itself mainly in the rural areas of the country where it carried out the bulk of its activities; this tactic had been used by other revolutionary guerrilla groups like Colombia’s FARC, due to usual presence of a weak government, as was the case in Peru. The country’s armed forces did not have the necessary physical presence in the area to allow it to effectively deploy against the revolutionary cadres. This lack of on-site military credibility on the government’s part gave Shining Path the opportunity to deploy its forces to wage an effective guerrilla war against its enemies with near impunity. Shining Path initially based its headquarters in the mountainous region of Ayacucho and Huanta, to the remote regions around the central selva and south of Vilcabamba (the site of the last Inca resistance). Characteristically, it launched attacks on agricultural areas in the Upper Huallaga Valley and the southern part of Puno, which also helped to sever any lingering urban ties for its recruits. Guzman played the role of all-powerful military and spiritual leader of his organization; in this sense, Shining Path was organized as a hierarchical cult rather than on a cell-based model.

Buying and Selling:

Similar to the FARC in Colombia and other revolutionary insurgencies, Shining Path in part funded its operations through the process of narcotrafficking, ransoms from kidnapping and forced taxes on small businesses and individuals. Shining Path also required Colombian dealers and buyers operating locally to pay higher than prevailing prices for raw coca in return for protection and the opportunity to buy weapons from them. Today, on a much smaller scale, Shining Path is attempting to revive and re-establish such a financial relationship. It has been listed by U.S. authorities as a terrorist organization based on the tactics it has utilized which include car bombings, kidnappings, and staged political assassinations. In 2006, Shining Path ranked 41 on the U.S. list of top terrorist organizations. Initially, Shining Path targeted local authorities (mayors, governors and mid-level bureaucrats) police barracks, and local political leaders. However, experts believe that by 1983, the group gradually began to target wealthy peasants and state agency heads with violence and the threat of abduction, as well as launched comparable attacks against left-wing activists, grass-roots organizers, and left-liberal intellectuals. This change in strategy eventually proved counterproductive for the insurgents because they were not able to capture the hearts and minds of the average Peruvian by their violent tactics. Instead, villagers were subject to the unremitting brutality by Shining Path and were unprotected by the military and intelligence services. Both the first Alan Garcia administration and his successor, Alberto Fujimori, used intimidation to tromp out local citizens. The Garcia government, as did the Belaúnde government before it, used tortures and randomly assassinated citizens for their alleged backing or at least sympathy for Shining Path.

Peruvian Citizens Caught in the Middle:

There is no doubt that the average Peruvian often experienced traumatic brutality from both government forces and Shining Path. The U.S. Department of State, among other sources, determined that the combined death total caused by several decades of conflict reached at least 70,000. The total death toll from the beginning of the uprising in 1980 to 1990, just before the decade-long conflict under Fujimori, can be found in a study conducted by DESCO, in which fatalities attributed to the conflict between the government and Shining Path have been carefully scrutinized. The mid-1980’s, during the Garcia administration, proved to be the years in which a surge of fatalities occurred. This includes casualties inflicted upon ordinary Peruvian citizens, government personnel and security forces, as well as Shining Path recruits. In the early years of the revolution, Shining Path was estimated to have ten to fifteen-thousand members; with its recruitment efforts targeted at the most poverty stricken areas of the country and in the Quechua-speaking part of the highlands. Harsh tactics were an integral step in the organization’s operation and its devilishly skillful propaganda efforts were employed to engage those in the general population who were experiencing the greatest degrees of injustice at the hands of Lima authorities. A key factor contributing to the large number of resulting fatalities in the uprising was that the government found it difficult to distinguish between a Shining Path member and an ordinary inhabitant of the Altiplano, because of the similar native attire. In 1983, President Belaúnde was reported to have announced a 60-day national state of emergency, in which he suspended civil liberties and gave the police broad powers to seize suspected guerrillas for up to ten days without charges. In this account, 200 people were reported as being arrested just 24 hours after the announcement was made. The country had been attempting to move towards democracy before Shining Path declared its war, but President Belaúnde’s action in declaring martial law along with several of these authoritarian initiatives, countermanded the democratic trend taking place in Peru. Ordinary citizens were forced to pay the price, as the then Peruvian leader earned the well-deserved reputation for tolerating human rights abuses.

Under Garcia and Fujimori, the country again found itself caught in the middle of mounting ideological strife and was made to suffer severe human rights abuses from both Shining Path and government forces.

Shining Path singled out the poor, indigenous populations, whose interests it disingenuously claimed to have at heart. It forced farmers to slash production to subsistence levels and to destroy whatever modern farm equipment the campesinos possessed. In addition, Shining Path imposed puritanical regulations that outlawed fiestas and prohibited drinking as part of a strategy of strong-arming local populations into submission and self-abnegation. Any person believed to be sympathetic to the government or to even slightly disagree with Shining Path’s fundamental beliefs, was a candidate to be tortured and killed. Outlandishly, Shining Path then abandoned its professedly leftist ideology and began to identify leftists as candidates to be kidnapped, tortured and/or murdered.

Not surprisingly, Shining Path failed to capture the hearts and minds of the natives due to this extremely bizarre metamorphosis. With leftist and trade union officials being specifically targeted, more and more Peruvians learned to lean more heavily in favor of government efforts to bear down on Shining Path’s revolutionary operations. In the DESCO study, leftist assassinations carried out by Shining Path began to rise a few years after the revolution was triggered—peaking in 1988 and then slowly declining. In 1992, now under Fujimori, assassinations increased drastically, and then dropped after Guzman’s capture. During the Garcia era, leftist assassinations were targeted against two main groups when ideological factors gave way to more bare-boned battles between Shining Path and the government: Garcia’s American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) and the more radical United Left (IU). Shining Path’s tactic to force individuals into submission was a strategy calculated to eliminate the competition. Considering its goals of ousting foreign influence and rival organizations, it was Shining Path’s sudden and unpredictable strategy to turn against its own people as well as like-minded potential allies which foredoomed its end. In the ensuing struggle, large numbers of deaths occurred, helping to transform its revolution into a stark case of conflicting interests. The question of principle was increasingly not in play.

In 1992, the Alberto Fujimori administration staged a coup against itself which led to the dissolving of Congress and the dismantling of the country’s legal system. This cynical ploy enabled his administration and the military police to carry out large numbers of murders and kidnappings of those though to be enemies of the state without having an opposition party or legal capacity capable of challenging various illegal acts.

The various degrees of power under the administrations Belaúnde, Garcia and Fujimori worked to subvert law and order more than to uphold it. Under these governments, Lima’s security forces exponentially increased the murders of ordinary Peruvians, who were suspected of being part of the Shining Path. In addition to the unrestricted power of the government, the Fujimori administration did little to solve the country’s stressful economic situation. Research reports at the time found that 4.5 million people in Peru were living in extreme poverty (lack of sanitation, water, electricity, and gas). Fujimori then sought to enlarge the death squads that carried out orders to kidnap, torture and murder those suspected of being part of the Shining Path or known to harbor anti-Fujimori sentiments. For example, in 1997, the gruesome discovery of anti-Fujimori activist Mariella Barreto Fiofano’s body was found with her hands cut off and spine broken in half. This demonstrated how far the regime was prepared to go in order to suppress and silence those it saw as its foes.

The Decline of Shining Path:

After his 1992 auto-coup, Fujimori took control of the press and almost all of the country’s other institutions, promising a return to democracy within a year. This formula enabled him to rule Peru by decree, with a massive number of killings taking place during this period as the result of fierce fighting between Shining Path and Lima’s security forces. On September 12, 1992, Abimael Guzman was captured by local authorities without a drop of blood spilled. This resulted in a major decrease of fatalities and the shrinking of the Shining Path’s armed effectiveness. One of Guzman’s top lieutenants had been interrogated after being detained and eventually was induced to reveal some of Guzman’s hiding places. By the local authorities rummaging through trash cans looking for any signs of his presence, the security forces were able to close in on him, finally locating him and placing him under arrest. Subsequently, Fujimori displayed him in an outdoor cage so the press could witness this act of public humiliation—simultaneously boasting of his success. Since capturing Guzman meant the destruction of Shining Path’s hierarchy, the group began to disintegrate due to organizational issues and opposition in the ranks. Research by DESCO demonstrates this decline in political assassinations of moderate leftist figures as part of the general trend after Guzman was captured. Looking back on the process, the government was able to bring down Shining Path, but only at the cost of suppressing civil rights and by carrying out a barrage of human rights violations against Peru’s general population. A few years after his capture, Guzman called for a supposed peace deal which caused the Shining Path to split into two groups: those who insisted on continuing to fight and those who wanted to put down their arms. Since then, the Shining Path has not come near having the success that it achieved as a guerrilla group in the mid-1980s. It has remained relatively quiet in comparison to the past, racking up relatively few kidnappings and murders.

The Return of Shining Path:

Recent reports show that Shining Path may be making something of a comeback, reorganizing its cadres and military capabilities to combat the Peruvian state. Over the past decade a number of Shining Path leaders have been peacefully apprehended. For example, news articles reported in 1999 that Ramirez Durand, who goes by the nom de guerre “Comrade Feliciano,” had been cornered, along with three women rebels, after being pursued for two weeks by a force of more than 1,500 commandos. Durand was captured without a shot being fired.

On March 25, 2008 Shining Path rebel members working with drug traffickers killed a police officer and wounded 11 on anti-drug patrols. The unit is said to have been led by one of Shining Path’s last remaining leaders—Comrade Artemio. Comrade Mono—who eventually was caught in March of this year was, in fact, part of another branch of the Shining Path hierarchy. Their apprehension demonstrated that police efforts have been achieving some success in dismantling the organization. Along with these efforts, Peruvian authorities currently hold ex-President Fujimori. Fujimori now faces trial for corruption, fleeing his presidential office, and the ordering of death squads. Others are to be tried for a range of human rights and law violations. This shows that Peruvians may finally be witnessing some sort of justice, rather than the past neglect of democratic standards and the exercise of privilege in the country. Peruvians are responding to this movement toward justice. “Human rights groups in Peru and family members of the victims killed in a 1992 massacre are celebrating now that four members of a paramilitary group will spend between 15 and 35 years in prison” (LivinginPeru.com).

In recent months, there have been accounts of political kidnappings and murders which could be an indication of the recrudescence of the Shining Path. Other reports have told of police forces closing in on them. Shining Path is rumored to be financing their reviving terrorist activities by charging for protecting drug-traffickers and intertwining the organization with coca production and distribution networks. Consequently, Peruvians may soon find themselves dealing with an increase in drug violence, a growing insurgency and an increase in government repression.

This analysis was prepared by COHA Research Associate Waynee Lucero
May 6th, 2008

The Council on Hemispheric Affairs, founded in 1975, is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan, tax-exempt research and information organization. It has been described on the Senate floor as being “one of the nation’s most respected bodies of scholars and policy makers.” For more information, please see our web page at www.coha.org; or contact our Washington offices by phone (202) 223-4975, fax (202) 223-4979, or email coha@coha.org.

Popularity: 12% [?]