hired.”
Cheney’s little “augmentation” program had proved a godsend to the Clinton administration. “It is often necessary to use LOGCAP in these missions,” noted the Government Accounting Office report on Bosnia in 1997, “because of the political sensitivity of activating guard and reserve forces.”
That political sensitivity is there for a reason. Mounting an overseas military operation should force a national gut-check about wars that presidents might otherwise rush us into. It lessens the possibility of stranding our military in conflicts the country doesn’t support or, worse, doesn’t care about. Having a work-around for that political sensitivity must have felt like genius to those who wanted war without the hassle, but even in the short run, that work-around had clear unintended consequences. Not only was there little public debate about the merits of a major American deployment, there was also less pressure to bring the mission to a quick conclusion. American peacekeeping troops were in the Balkans for more than eight years, without the general public much noticing. Even at the time of the initial deployment, little more than a third of the country was closely following the story; only a fifth understood the details of the US contribution to the international peacekeeping force. The American public, according to a Pew Research Center poll, was much more interested in a recent blizzard and a weekend-long federal government shutdown. Eight years into the Balkan mission, the American public was even less engaged.
“Deploying LOGCAP or other contractors instead of military personnel can alleviate the political and social pressures that have come to be a fact of life in the U.S. whenever military forces are deployed,” wrote Lt. Col. Steven Woods in his Army War College study about the effects of LOGCAP. “While there has been little to no public reaction to the deaths of five DynCorp employees killed in Latin America or the two American support contractors from Tapestry Solutions attacked (and one killed) in Kuwait… U.S. forces had to be withdrawn from Somalia after public outcry following the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Mogadishu….
“Additionally, military force structure often has a force cap, usually for political reasons. Force caps impose a ceiling on the number of soldiers that can be deployed into a defined area. Contractors expand this limit.” To infinity and beyond, in other words, with a pay-to-play pop-up army.
By the time Bill Clinton left office in 2001, an Operation Other Than War, as Pentagon forces called them, could go on indefinitely, sort of on autopilot—without real political costs or consequences, or much civilian notice. We’d gotten used to it.
By 2001, the ability of a president to start and wage military operations without (or even in spite of) Congress was established precedent.
By 2001, even the peacetime US military budget was well over half the size of all other military budgets in the world combined.
By 2001, the spirit of the Abrams Doctrine—that the disruption of civilian life is the price of admission for war—was pretty much kaput.
By 2001, we’d freed ourselves of all those hassles, all those restraints tying us down.
CHAPTER 8
“One Hell of a Killing Machine”
THE HOUBARA BUSTARD IS NOT A PARTICULARLY LARGE OR regal bird. It looks a little like what you might get if you bred a common pheasant with an ostrich—like a miniature ostrich with a shorter neck and legs, or maybe a pheasant on steroids, with a stretched neck, sprinter’s legs, and a much more impressive wingspan. But the little fella has recently provided crucial assistance in making America’s war in Afghanistan (and its spillover in Pakistan) the longest-running military hot show in our nation’s history.
In May 2011, Pakistan got its nose out of joint when US Special Forces sprung a surprise mission on a compound in Abbottabad and offed the most infamous terrorist on the planet, without giving a heads-up to the host government. The Pakistani military and intelligence service found itself having to explain how the target, Osama bin Laden, could have been living in tranquility just a few miles down the road from Pakistan’s most important military academy, in a neighborhood crawling with current and retired military officers. Was Pakistani intelligence that incompetent, or were they protecting bin Laden? And then they had to explain how a US strike force and its very big helicopters could fly into Abbottabad, spend nearly an hour on the ground, and then leave the country with bin Laden’s carcass in tow without being detected, let alone stopped.
While President Obama and the rest of America took a celebratory victory lap, the Pakistanis found the entire episode hugely shaming—but not so much on the bin-Laden-in-our-backyard count. They really fixated on the lack of respect accorded their nation by the United States. “American troops coming across the border and taking action in one of our towns… is not acceptable to the people of Pakistan,” former president Pervez Musharraf said the day after the raid. “It is a violation of our sovereignty.” Worse, word quickly leaked out that President Obama had not only ordered that the Pakistani military and its intelligence service be kept in the dark while the mission was being planned and executed, he had his team ready to do battle with any Pakistani military forces that tried to stop the operation once in progress.
The Pakistani parliament called the country’s military and intelligence chieftains into a rare (and marathon) closed-door session, where the generals had a spot of trouble in covering their respective lapses, but they did deftly deflect much of the civilian ire: the United States, they reminded everyone, was the bad guy here. The generals had little trouble encouraging parliament to formally demand that, henceforth, the United States would ensure that “Pakistan’s national interests were fully respected.” Ally
The CIA’s rather dumpy-looking high-tech unmanned aircraft had been used mainly for surveillance in the early stages of the war in Afghanistan. But they could also be armed with Hellfire missiles. Very occasionally from 2004 to 2007, and more frequently in 2008, the Bush administration used drones to launch airborne attacks on suspected terrorists in Pakistan. When the Obama administration took over in 2009, the number of drone attacks spiked; the next year the 2009 numbers more than doubled. The Obama administration refused as a matter of policy to officially acknowledge the CIA’s drone attacks, but in the days following a big get, they announced that some key Al-Qaeda or Haqqani Network leader “was killed,” as if the event were an act of providence or, like a rainbow, a remarkable atmospheric happening.
Meanwhile, in North and South Waziristan, the presence of the drones has become a hated fact of life—the locals reportedly call them “wasps.” So this was a very popular move in Pakistan, telling the CIA to get the hell out of Shamsi, that there would be no more lethal American drones launched from Pakistani soil… or else. Or else what? Well, Pakistan’s air marshal reminded the Obama administration, the F-16 jets the United States had sold the Pakistani Air Force could knock the drones out of the sky. Team Obama did not flinch. These drone attacks had become the centerpiece of Obama’s recalibration of America’s Global War on Terror, even if we didn’t call it that anymore. The strikes had proved Democrats could be as serious about killing bad guys as Republicans were. In fact, the successes had been among the few bright spots on a fairly bleak political landscape for a young, inexperienced, first-term president. The Obama administration had no intention of pulling up stakes in Shamsi. “That base is neither vacated nor being vacated” was the anonymous but official word from Washington. It was a Mexican standoff in Balochistan.
Here’s where the Houbara bustard provided a little wiggle room in what otherwise looked like a very knotty situation. This tiny forgotten strip of land that held the airbase in Shamsi, it turned out, did not actually belong to Pakistan; it had been quietly signed over to the United Arab Emirates twenty years earlier, in a show of friendship. You see, Balochistan, aside from being full of spectacular Garden of Eden natural wonders, is among the few wintering grounds of the Houbara bustard, a bird held in high esteem among hunters from the UAE and Saudi
