Hot for Teacher
by Clay Risen

This week Ethiopia announced that it would withdraw its forces from Eritrea, bringing to a final end one of the decade's bloodiest, strangest armed conflicts — during the two-year conflict over 50,000 soldiers were killed on both sides, having dug themselves into World-War-I-style trench warfare over a few hundred square miles of desert.

The conflict was strange because the two countries had just concluded a costly war in 1991, after which Eritrea, formerly a province of Ethiopia, won its independence. It was strange because the leaders of the two countries were said to be best friends. And it was strange because neither country could afford the conflict, with Ethiopia still suffering from calamitous, drought-induced hunger and Eritrea stuck in the midst of the costly process of nation building.

But perhaps the strangest part of the Eritrean-Ethiopian War was the curious role of the American military. Officially, our country had a minor role in the peace efforts, preferring to let other African nations negotiate an end to the conflict. Unofficially, however, the United States was a key behind-the-scenes player, spending over $4 million in FY2000 to train the armies on both sides (oddly, the funds were split evenly). According to the Center for International Policy, the training events, held separately, involved 45 Eritreans and 30 Ethiopians, teaching a range of conventional and unconventional military skills.

It is hard to say what the exact nature of the training was, however, because the whole thing was carried out under a highly secret, low-profile Pentagon program known as Joint Combined Exchange Training. Not only is JCET one of the military's most vaguely titled programs, but it is also one of its most active — in 1997 alone, JCET teams were deployed 231 times in 100 countries. JCET is the kind of program that is often mentioned but rarely explained; budgets published by the Department of Defense list JCET under "miscillaneous expenses." In and of itself, JCET seems like a harmless military affair, but many observers on both the right and the left have warned that the Pentagon is using the program to create its own foreign policy operation, unsupervised by the State Department and unaccountable to the civilian government.

JCET is the quiet little brother of IMET (International Military Education Training), a program harshly criticized in Congress for having trained soldiers in Colombia and Indonesia who went on to commit human rights violations. Unlike IMET, however, JCET is carried out exclusively by the Special Operations Command, and there is little Congressional oversight — Congress not only has no say over the approval of JCET missions, but it only learns of the program's activities through a once-a-year status report (Over the last few years several members of Congress have been pushing for a change, but to no avail).

While IMET focuses more on teaching military organization and administration, JCET deals exclusively with specialized, combat-oriented tasks — unconventional warfare, close-quarter combat, sniper training and foreign internal defense. It is this last item that has raised the most concern, because it very explicitly teaches things like crowd control and riot supression, the kinds of skills popular with dictatorships and other such generally unpopular regimes. But whereas most military aid programs are restricted by the Leahy Act, which bans their deployment in countries suspected of gross human rights violations, JCET is not. In Colombia, for example, conventional U.S. forces are limited to training counter-narcotics efforts; meanwhile, JCET teams are free to train Colombians in counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism and urban combat, the kinds of skills that build more lethal armies, but not necessarily better ones.

There is little empirical evidence of JCET's successes and failures, nor is there thorough data on the positive or negative effects it has had on foreign militaries. There is, however, pretty good evidence of JCET-trained soldiers committing human rights violations in Indonesia, and, in any case, JCET does not require its trainees to submit to background checks to weed out folks who have a knack for employing torture and other, well, anti-social behaviors.

But the really noteworthy thing about JCET is the extent to which the Pentagon is using it in parts of the world where the State Department has little or no influence, essentially developing its own foreign policy (this at a time when the State Department is facing a fiscal crisis, having to reduce its staff and close a number of non-essential consulates; the Foreign Service, at roughly 4,000 officers, is already smaller than the 4,500-man-strong Special Forces Command).

The vast majority of the world's conflicts, in any case, are too precise to be handled by the diplomatic corps, an organization more suited to state-to-state negotiations and treaty-signing ceremonies. While the world's industrialized nations are experiencing unprecedented periods of peace and economic prosperity and solve their problems in ball rooms and at state dinners, lesser-developed regions are caught in seemingly unending low-intensity conflicts, conflicts that so far have defied attempts at diplomatic solutions — the multi-nation war in Congo, the Colombian civil war and Indian and Pakistani sparring over the Kashmir. Turkey and Sri Lanka are stuck in drawn-out conflicts with minority rebels. These are the archetypes of the war of the future — small-scale, protracted conflicts — and for an enormous number of people, they already define their daily existence.

In the vacuum left by the State Department, it is easy to imagine the influence that JCET will have in the international arena. JCET teams, unfettered by civilian, much less Congressional, approval, go into a country and train officers, officers who will use that training to climb high in their country's military and even civilian ranks. And perhaps, from a hard-core realist's perspective, this is a good thing — after all, hasn't U.S. foreign policy always been about puppet-making? If war between lesser-developed nations is inevitable, isn't it a good idea to be able to pull their strings?

Nevertheless, the idea that the Pentagon is quietly militarizing our international relations, and doing it in ways that may directly contradict the efforts of the civilian government, should keep more than a few of us up at night. It's enough to imagine JCET teams silently meddling in other countries' affairs; now think about how the JCET program may also be silently rewriting American foreign policy in places we didn't even know it existed.

Just as Special Forces teams went into Eritrea and Ethiopia, they also carried out JCET missions in Namibia, Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe, all countries involved in the current multi-national Congo War. But whereas the operations in the Horn of Africa seem to have gone off without a hitch, reports show that the JCET-trained officers of some of the latter countries have gone on not only to commit human rights abuses, but possibly even to employ tactics learned in JCET programs, something that brings to question the limits of JCET in improving foreign militaries at all — of course, the problem being, once again, that we can never know. JCET's classified nature means that we can only guess what our military is up to, and we can only hope that they know what they're doing.

E-mail Clay Risen at risenc@yahoo.com.