Defense Secretary Robert Gates takes his seat to testify before the Senate Appropriations Committee in Washington, on June 15, 2011. (Photo: Philip Scott Andrews / The New York Times)

For the past two months, however, Secretary of Defense Gates has been on a farewell tour of US think tanks, universities and military academies, advocating policies that will make Panetta's job extremely difficult.

In 2006, Secretary of Defense Gates had easy shoes to fill. His predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, had become unpopular in the Pentagon, on Capitol Hill and even in the White House. Rumsfeld was particularly uncivil in dealings with subordinates.
The confirmation process for Gates was not a grilling, but a love fest. He faced no questions about his politicization of intelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1980s; his knowledge of Iran-contra, which was documented in the independent counsel's investigation; or his lack of experience on vital matters such as weapons acquisition and the need for military reform.

To key members of the Senate, particularly members of the Senate Armed Forces Committee, Gates was the "morning-after" pill who would abort Don Rumsfeld.

They had forgotten Gates, the cold war ideologue who had suppressed objective intelligence in order to advocate for policy.

Recently, Gates has been on a duplicitous one-man mission that will complicate the Obama administration's efforts to withdraw forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and make significant cuts in the defense budget. On the one hand, he concedes that the military budget is bloated, winning praise for his toughness. On the other hand, he fights actual reductions, winning the praise of the military.

At Kansas State University in 2009, Gates became the first secretary of defense to acknowledge that the United States was spending too much on defense and needed to spend more on diplomacy. But soon after, he gave a blunt "no" to the idea of transferring funds to the State Department from the budget of the Defense Department, which is more than ten times the budget for diplomacy. At the Eisenhower library in May 2010, Gates proclaimed that the massive federal deficit required an examination of the "gusher" of defense spending. In May 2011, however, at the American Enterprise Institute, Gates emphasized that defense spending did not contribute to the deficit and should not be a part of any deficit-reduction program.

Gates has argued successfully for annual increases in defense spending, which has climbed to nearly $690 billion, exceeding the total cost of defense spending in the rest of the world. (The mainstream media consistently refers to a 2012 defense budget of $553 billion, but this figure does not include $118 billion for military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya and $18 billion for nuclear weapons programs.)

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Secretary of Defense Gates has been particularly devious about his claims of achieving savings in weapons procurement. He takes credit for cutting $300 billion in spending on defense programs and eliminating waste in the amount of $178 billion. But the $300 billion in savings was garnered from platforms, such as the F-22, that were eliminated, or programs, such as the Army's Future Combat System, that were canceled. These so-called savings were invested in other programs, however, and not returned to the Treasury. Gates asked the annual Navy League convention in 2010 why the Navy needed 11 carrier battle groups; he then gave an emphatic "no" in Congressional testimony to the possibility of eliminating even one carrier battle group.

On his farewell tour of college campuses and right-wing think tanks, Gates consistently warned against reducing defense spending to the levels recommended by President Obama and his deficit commission. Gates made "false comparisons" to reductions after the Korean and Vietnam Wars as well as those made at the end of the cold war. He never mentioned that the "hollow force" that he described at the end of the cold war managed to win the 1991 Iraqi war in less than three weeks, and evicted the Taliban government and al-Qaeda from Afghanistan in 2001 in less than a month.

Gates' recent advocacy will complicate the tasks of his successor. These tasks include completing the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq, beginning the withdrawal from Afghanistan, significantly reducing the defense budget and reforming the Pentagon's weapons acquisition process. In recent weeks, however, he has traveled to Baghdad and Kabul; in both capitals he contradicted the positions taken by President Obama, calling for a continued US presence in Iraq, a token withdrawal from Afghanistan and no cuts in the defense budget. Now, Panetta will have to grapple with the challenge of tying strategy to force plans and bringing the budget back into balance with current resources.

Gates favors a continuation of current force levels in Afghanistan in order to move the Taliban to the negotiating table. He ignores the fact that the Taliban has demonstrated limited if any interest in negotiations. He chooses to ignore the signing of an unprecedented accord at the White House in November 2009 that committed the Obama team to significant withdrawals from Afghanistan. President Obama prepared this unusual "Terms Sheet" to ensure that the principals would honor the "conditions for accelerated transition" to Afghan authorities in July 2011. The document was designed both to limit the ability of the Pentagon to drag its heels on withdrawal and to reduce the power and influence of the uniformed military. Panetta, having been undercut by Gates, will have to deal with continuing tension between the White House and the uniformed military on troop withdrawals.

In his lectures at Notre Dame University and the American Enterprise Institute in May, Gates warned against any freeze in defense spending, leaving Panetta to deal with procurement policies and military missions that the United States can no longer afford. As the former director of the Office of Management and Budget, Panetta presumably understands that the United States, with less than 25 percent of the world's economic output and more than 50 percent of the world's military expenditures, will have to curtail certain weapons and missions. The defense budget has grown over 50 percent in the past ten years and now exceeds the pace of spending of the cold war era as well as the peacetime buildup of President Ronald Reagan.

Gates has left Panetta with the task of shaping deployment plans. A re-examination of current troop deployments must include the tens of thousands of US troops stationed in Europe and Asia, more than six decades after the end of World War II; hundreds of bases and facilities the world over; and excessive US willingness to project power in areas such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya where vital national interests are not at stake. The United States also needs to abandon the chimera of national missile defense at home and the need for a regional missile defense in East Europe.

Panetta will have to reform the weapons acquisition process that Gates has ignored for the past five years. This process has been beset with military mismanagement, huge cost overruns and little Congressional scrutiny. Gates, who labels himself a cost cutter, will leave the Pentagon with more defense acquisition programs at a greater cost than those existing at the time he become the Obama administration's secretary of defense.

Panetta will have to deal with increasingly expensive (and some even dubious) weapons systems such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a new class of ballistic missile submarine and a new fleet of aerial refueling tankers for the Air Force. The Marines want a new amphibious vehicle even though they haven't conducted an amphibious landing since 1951. Gates calls all these systems "absolutely critical" for the nation's defense, but these weapons no longer reflect a balance between cost effectiveness and our national security.

Fifty years after President Dwight D. Eisenhower's warning about the "military-industrial complex," it is time to address the "undue influence" of the Pentagon and the "misplaced power" of the military-industrial-Congressional lobby.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

NOTE FROM LARRY: Mel is an old friend and was a preeminent analyst at the CIA. I may not always agree with him but he is a thoughtful, considerate person. You don’t have to agree with him either but I encourage you to address your differences with him on substantive grounds. It is in this kind of give and take that we learn.

During the worst days of the cold war, the United States and the Soviet Union learned that their third-world clients had great leverage over their benefactors. The Soviets could not get assistance to the Palestinians in Lebanon without paying off Syria. The Soviets became increasingly involved in Africa because the Cubans shamed Moscow into greater support for Angola and Ethiopia. A succession of US administrations has learned that Israel has more influence over US policy than Washington would like to acknowledge. Until the United States agreed to a "one China" policy, Taiwan had far too much leverage over the actions of the United States in East Asia. And for the past 60 years, the tail has wagged the dog in US-Pakistani relations.

The US-Pakistani relationship is one of the most complicated bilateral relationships in the world. Since the start of the cold war, the United States has needed support from the Islamabad government and, as a result, has ignored Pakistani perfidy. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the United States needed secret bases in Pakistan for U-2 reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union and, therefore, disregarded Pakistani military dictatorships. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the United States needed logistical support for its secret opening to China and overlooked human rights violations in Pakistan.

In the 1980s, Pakistan served as a conduit for US assistance to the anti-Soviet mujihadeen forces and, therefore, ignored Pakistan's secret development of nuclear weapons. For the past ten years, the United States has needed Pakistan as a conduit for supplies to US military forces in Afghanistan as well as a base for CIA drone aircraft that are used against al-Qaeda elements in Pakistan. As a result, the Bush and Obama administrations have ignored Pakistan's support for state terrorism.

US unwillingness to challenge Pakistan's nuclear ambitions allowed the proliferation of nuclear technology in the third world. The CIA learned as early as 1979 that Pakistan was operating a clandestine uranium facility. President Jimmy Carter did not react to this intelligence and President Ronald Reagan asserted that "nuclear proliferation was none of our business." This foreshadowed a closer military relationship with Pakistan even when Pakistan's military dictator, Gen. Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, ordered the hanging of the civilian president he had expelled from office, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and canceled elections.

From 1981 to the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, the United States relied on Pakistan to bleed the Soviet occupation force in Afghanistan. During this period, the CIA continued to collect intelligence on Pakistan's development of nuclear weapons, but the White House looked the other way. In 1986, CIA deputy director Robert Gates ordered the CIA's directorate of intelligence to provide no intelligence on Pakistani nuclear activities to the Senate and House intelligence committees. Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush issued exemptions to Pakistan in order to circumvent the Pressler Amendment that required an end to military assistance for Pakistan's crossing of the nuclear threshold. A waiver from President Bush in 1989 permitted the sale of F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan although it was known that A.Q. Khan, the father of the Pakistani nuclear program, was supplying nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea.

In the past decade, there has been no country that has sponsored more state terrorism than Pakistan. Radical Islamists in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate have been training and funding Islamic terrorist organizations for the past three decades, including the Lashkar-e-Taiba that conducted the December 2008 attack in Mumbai, India, as well as the Afghan Taliban, which seized the Afghan capital in 1994. The attack on a Pakistani naval base in Karachi late last month indicates that terrorist organizations have infiltrated the Pakistani military as well. The full story of Osama bin Laden's secret hideout in a military community close to the Pakistani capital may never be known, but it certainly begs serious questions about Pakistani cooperation with even al-Qaeda.

So, what is to be done? The United States is on a fool's errand in Afghanistan and must pursue a diplomatic and political strategy there in order to extricate itself. A smaller US footprint in Afghanistan would make the United States far less dependent on Pakistan. Moreover, US support to the Afghan military ($13 billion) is beginning to rival the size of Afghanistan's gross national product ($16 billion). The United States is building an Afghan military that Afghanis will never afford.

Pakistan continues to be one of the major recipients of US largesse, receiving more than $20 billion in US aid since the 9/11 attacks. Very little of that aid has gone to economic development that Pakistan so sorely needs; nor has it gone to battling terrorism and Islamic forces on Pakistan's border with Afghanistan. Instead most of this money has gone to a Pakistani military force that is an obstacle to US success in Afghanistan. We cannot end military support to Pakistan as long as we need its support in identifying the terrorists who have sanctuary there.

It is also time for Afghanistan and Pakistan to build their own governments with their own resources. The US role in creating huge military establishments in Afghanistan and Pakistan has been an obstacle to good governance in both places. In any event, no counterinsurgency has been successful against an insurgency like the Taliban with a sanctuary such as Pakistan offers. As long as the Afghan Taliban is our enemy and Pakistan's ally, there will be no success for the United States.

Finally, the United States must end its heavy reliance on the military instrument in the conduct of foreign policy in general. US military occupation in the Islamic world has been the greatest recruitment tool of the Islamic extremists. It was US military aid that helped to create a sanctuary for anti-Soviet extremists in the 1980s; we are now fighting those same extremists. The "Arab Spring" demonstrated the inability of military assistance to have a beneficial impact on democratic change in the Middle East. A heavy US military footprint in Iraq and Afghanistan, moreover, has weakened US economic and diplomatic security; it must be reduced and eventually eliminated.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

NOTE FROM LARRY: Mel is an old friend and was a preeminent analyst at the CIA. I may not always agree with him but he is a thoughtful, considerate person. You don’t have to agree with him either but I encourage you to address your differences with him on substantive grounds. It is in this kind of give and take that we learn.

On January 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued his prophetic warning about the military-industrial complex, anticipating the increased political, economic, military and even cultural influence of the Pentagon and its allies. Several weeks earlier, he had privately told his senior advisers in the Oval Office, "God help this country when someone sits in this chair who doesn’t know the military as well as I do." Several months after his inauguration in 1953, he warned against warfare that had "humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

In the spring of 1961, I was part of a small group of undergraduates who met with the president’s brother, Milton Eisenhower, who was then president of Johns Hopkins University. Milton Eisenhower and a Johns Hopkins professor of political science, Malcolm Moos, played major roles in the drafting and editing of the farewell speech of January 1961.

The actual drafter of the speech, Ralph E. Williams, relied on guidance from Professor Moos. Milton Eisenhower explained that one of the drafts of the speech referred to the "military-industrial-Congressional complex" and said that the president himself inserted the reference to the role of the Congress, an element that did not appear in the delivery of the farewell address. When the president’s brother asked about the dropped reference to Congress, the president replied: "It was more than enough to take on the military and private industry. I couldn’t take on the Congress as well."

In addition to the Congress reference, an entire section was dropped from the speech that dealt with the creation of a "permanent, war-based industry," with "flag and general officers retiring at an early age [to] take positions in the war-based industrial complex shaping its decisions and guiding the direction of its tremendous thrust." The president warned that steps needed to be taken to "insure that the ‘merchants of death’ do not come to dictate national policy." The section also warned against any belief that some "spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties." President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq and President Barack Obama’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan certainly come to mind.

Although the cold war ended two decades ago with the collapse of the Soviet Union, recent presidents have found no way out of increased military deployments and expenditures, nor have they challenged the national security influence of the military. No president since Eisenhower has genuinely understood the dangers of the Pentagon’s increasing influence over our national security policy. Eisenhower made sure that he was never outmaneuvered by his military advisers, particularly on such key issues as the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam, which his immediate successors thoroughly bungled. President John F. Kennedy never understood that the Pentagon anticipated the failure of the CIA in Cuba in 1961 and hoped to use its air power to achieve success. President Lyndon B. Johnson failed to challenge pleas from the Pentagon for more force and additional troops in Vietnam until it was too late.

Unlike Kennedy and Johnson, Eisenhower ignored the hysteria of the bomber and missile gaps in the 1950s, as well as the unnecessarily heightened concerns about US security in the National Security Council report NSC-68 in the late 1940s and in the Gaither Report in the mid-1950s, which called for unnecessary increases in the strategic arsenal. Eisenhower ignored the many Democrats and Republicans who advocated for increased defense spending and even cut the military budget by 20 percent between 1953 and 1955 on the way to balancing the budget by 1956.

Eisenhower clashed with the military mindset from the very beginning of his presidency. He knew that his generals were wrong in proclaiming "political will" the major factor in military victory and would have shuddered when General David Petraeus proclaimed recently that political will is the key to US success in Afghanistan. Eisenhower knew that military demands for weaponry and resources were always based on inexplicable notions of "sufficiency," and he made sure that Pentagon briefings to the Congress were countered by testimony from the intelligence community.

Henry A. Kissinger was one of the rare national security advisers and secretaries of state who understood Eisenhower’s point of view. During the ratification process for the first Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty (SALT I) agreement in 1972, he countered conservative and military opposition to SALT and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with two questions opponents of arms control could never answer: what is strategic sufficiency, and what would we do with strategic sufficiency if we had it?

Eisenhower warned in his farewell address in 1961 that the United States should not become a "garrison state," but, nearly fifty years later, we have developed a garrison mentality with unprecedented military spending, continuous military deployments, exaggerated fears with regard to "Islamo-terrorism" (and, now, cyberwars) and exaggerated aspirations with regard to counterinsurgency and nation-building. Eisenhower understood that it was the military-industrial complex that fostered an inordinate belief in the omnipotence of American military power.

Eisenhower knew the limits and constraints on use of force and did not fall prey to the type of planning that led to Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs, Johnson’s Vietnam, Reagan’s Grenada, Bush II’s Iraq and now Obama’s Afghanistan. He started no wars and wisely settled for a stalemate in Korea. He stood alone in heavily criticizing the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956, and he ignored criticism for not assisting the Hungarian uprising weeks later.

Finally, Eisenhower understood that too much spending on defense would weaken both the economy and national security. "Every gun that is made," Eisenhower said, "every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies … a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." Ironically, Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev made the same charge in a speech in 1977, a move that signaled Moscow’s interest in detente with the United States – a signal that the Carter administration ignored.

Unfortunately, with the possible exception of President Richard Nixon, we have not had a president who understood the military mindset and was willing to limit the influence of the military. Democrats such as Kennedy, Johnson and Clinton as well as Republicans such as Reagan, Bush I and Bush II have deferred too readily to the military. They devoted too many resources to the military and often resorted to the use of power instead of diplomacy and statecraft.

The twin military setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, where failed counterinsurgency strategies have cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives, should lead to a serious national security debate to prevent the mistakes of the past two decades. Such a debate should include subjects that aren’t susceptible to a military solution, such as nationalism, religious fundamentalism, ethnic violence and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan immediately come to mind.

Currently, Obama must deal with a military that wields far too much influence on Capitol Hill and within the intelligence community, controls too much of the US economy and has the leading policy voice on security issues. Our economy will continue to suffer if we don’t reduce the rising costs of defense ($800 billion), intelligence ($80 billion) and homeland security ($45 billion) in order to make essential investments in education, transportation, and research and development. In his first two years as president, Obama too often catered to the interests of the military. Now he must begin the task of demilitarizing US national security policy. In doing so, he would do well to heed the philosophy and advice of Eisenhower, who stood alone in countering America’s infatuation with military power.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

NOTE FROM LARRY: Mel is an old friend and was a preeminent analyst at the CIA. I may not always agree with him but he is a thoughtful, considerate person. You don’t have to agree with him either but I encourage you to address your differences with him on substantive grounds. It is in this kind of give and take that we learn.

Last month, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released a blistering report that documented a secret drug interdiction program in Peru that was responsible for the death of an American missionary and her infant daughter in 2001. The report provided a detailed study of the efforts of senior CIA leaders, including Deputy Director John McLaughlin and Deputy Executive Director John Brennan [photo], to cover up Agency malfeasance,  stonewalling the White House, the Congress and the Department of Justice (DOJ) on the flaws of the interdiction program. Brennan, who was President Obama’s original choice to be CIA director until the report complicated the confirmation process, is currently the deputy director of the National Security Council (NSC).

McLaughlin was the "villain" in the politicization of intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, according to the chief of the Iraq Survey Group, David Kay. Few people remember that it was McLaughlin who actually delivered the "slam-dunk" briefing to the president in January 2003. Nevertheless, the Obama administration named McLaughlin to lead the internal investigation of the CIA’s intelligence failures in the attempted bombing of a commercial airliner and the shootings at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009.

The detailed report on Peru documents a culture of corruption and deceit at the highest levels of the CIA as well as the interventions of CIA lawyers to stop the DOJ from pursuing prosecutions in the case. The CIA office of general counsel’s aggressive campaign to prevent a criminal prosecution of the agency officers culminated with Deputy Director McLaughlin’s letter to the assistant attorney general that promised "significant disciplinary action" if CIA officers "lied or made knowingly misleading statements" to the Congress, DOJ, the NSC or office of inspectors general (OIG) investigators. The report carefully documents the lies and the stonewalling, but no "significant disciplinary action" has ever been taken.

The CIA tried to present the 2001 shootdown as an anomaly in an otherwise successful program. In fact, the inspector general (IG) report documents procedural failures in all 15 shootdowns that the CIA was involved in between 1995 and 2001. There were no examples of full compliance with intercept procedures in any of the shootdowns. CIA officers knew of and condoned the violations, which formed an "environment of negligence and disregard for procedures," according to the report.

Violations of procedures required to intercept and shootdown drug trafficking aircraft occurred in all 15 shootdowns in which the CIA participated. CIA personnel in Peru provided innacurate statements reporting that all required procedures had been conducted, high-level agency offficials endorsed these reports and they were passed to Congress and the NSC. In many cases, suspect aircraft were shot down within minutes of being sighted by Peruvian fighter aircraft, without being properly identified, without being given required warnings and without being given time to respond to warnings. Visual signals were not even conducted in the 11 shootdowns that occurred in daylight.

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Agency officers and lawyers forwarded inaccurate information to senior agency managers as well as to Congress and the NSC. The office of general counsel specifically advised the Peru Task Force not to report findings dealing with malfeasance. Agency lawyers violated their legal obligations as US attorneys by making sure that reports of violations did not appear in any formal report and, therefore, could not be provided to the Senate intelligence committee, the NSC and the DOJ.

Even CIA Director George Tenet provided incomplete and misleading briefings to the Congress in testimony that was reviewed by John Moseman, the director’s chief of staff and John Rizzo, the deputy general counsel. The failure of the CIA to keep Congress and the NSC fully informed of the program violated the agency’s legal obligations. The family of the 2001 victims received $8 million from the US government on the basis of the false assertion that the missionary shootdown was an aberration in a "program that otherwise had complied with presidentially-mandated procedures."

The Peru report in 2008 as well as IG reports on renditions and detentions in 2004 and the 9/11 study in 2006 created great animosity toward the OIG within the CIA. Senior members of the National Clandestine Service and the Office of General Counsel were infuriated by the indepedent and hard-hitting IG investigations. They convinced CIA director General Michael Hayden to weaken the role of the OIG. Hayden directed his special counsel to conduct oversight of the IG’s work. This action violated the law that created the statutory IG in 1989 and ignored procedures that were in place to examine the work of the IG.

The unwillingness to pursue failures and to hold senior officials accountable have been part of a larger pattern of corruption over the past three decades. There were a series of phony intelligence assessments prepared by the CIA in the 1980s, including a tailored report linking the Soviet Union to the attempted assassination of the pope in 1981, for which there was no accountability. (The leader of this campaign to politicize intelligence on the Soviet Union currently serves as President Obama’s secretary of defense.) There were specious documents prepared in 2002 and 2003 to pave the way for the use of force in Iraq, including a National Intelligence Estimate and an unclassified white paper, once again without accountability. In fact, the authors of these reports had their careers advanced, while occasional critics were marginalized.

Sadly, President Obama has totally abandoned his campaign commitment to accountability. He has refused to take any action on accountability for torture and abuse, and his administration has refused to pursue legal action against the CIA for the destruction of the tapes that documented the sadistic behavior of CIA employees and contractors. The CIA officer most responsible for the destruction of the tapes, Jose Rodriquez Jr., said that it would be less damaging to destroy the tapes than to allow them to be seen. Rodriquez, who successfully fought a subpoena to testify before the House intelligence committee, could not have been more right.

Clearly, President Obama is following in the footsteps of many of his predecessors, who simply hoped to control controversy at the CIA by failing to address problems directly. His early admonition that he would look forward and not backward has certainly been applied to the CIA. This approach has not worked well in the past and will fail in the end. As a constitutional lawyer, President Obama must realize that the stature of international law is diminished when a nation violates it with impunity and that the stature of a nation is diminished when it commits crimes against humanity.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

NOTE FROM LARRY: Mel is an old friend and was a preeminent analyst at the CIA. I may not always agree with him but he is a thoughtful, considerate person. You don’t have to agree with him either but I encourage you to address your differences with him on substantive grounds. It is in this kind of give and take that we learn.

President Barack Obama and CIA Director Leon Panetta have managed to accomplish what the Bush administration and three CIA directors failed to do over a five-year period – significantly compromise the position of the CIA’s statutory Inspector General (IG) and its Office of the Inspector General (OIG).

In announcing the completion of the CIA’s internal review of the tragic suicide bombing at an agency base in Afghanistan in late December, Panetta acknowledged that the review was prepared by senior officers of the CIA’s counterintelligence division, that the report would be provided to the OIG in "keeping with past practice," and that – despite the deaths of seven agency operatives and contractors – no one would be held accountable.

Even before the review was undertaken, it was obvious that gross negligence had taken place and that basic operational tradecraft had been observed in the breach. The review, however, concluded that the failure was "systemic," and Panetta ascribed the failure to too much zeal. This is the same Leon Panetta who told agency employees after his confirmation last year that the CIA’s task was to "tell it like it is, even if that’s not what people always want to hear. Keep it up. Our national security depends on it."

Panetta is being totally disingenuous in declaring that the sharing of the report with the OIG was consistent with "past practice." The report, of course, should have been prepared in the OIG, which is exactly what previous practice dictated over the past 20 years. In assigning the report to the counterintelligence division, Panetta clearly allowed one of the divisions negligent in the vetting of the suicide bomber, a double agent, to protect colleagues from harm to their careers. No organization or entity should ever allow an operational component involved in a serious operational failure to inspect itself.

More seriously, Panetta’s failure to assign the review to the new statutory IG, who was confirmed last month, was a blatant challenge to the legislative creation of a statutory or "independent" IG in the wake of the Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-1980s. Despite a political campaign that emphasized the need for openness and accountability, President Obama clearly indicated that he had no interest in serious internal investigations at the CIA. He left the post of the IG vacant for more than a year and a half.

It was the inadequacy of previous CIA investigations that led to the creation of the statutory IG, who would be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was negligent in not demanding that the president immediately appoint a successor to the previous IG, John Helgerson, who retired in February 2009. Statutory IGs were created in 1978 at most government agencies as part of a post-Vietnam reform process, but the CIA was exempted from the law until 1990.

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Helgerson, in fact, earned the ire of three CIA directors (George Tenet, Porter Goss and General Michael Hayden) who mounted an unprecedented attack on the CIA’s only independent watchdog. Since these three directors were involved in the decisions that led to secret prisons in Eastern Europe and Southwest Asia, the use of torture and abuse, and the rendition of individuals who were guilty of no crimes against the United States, it was understandable that they would try to block any serious investigations. Indeed, they worked assiduously to cover up the 9/11 accountability report of the CIA’s IG.

In addition to the 9/11 report, Helgerson was responsible for an IG report that investigated the CIA shootdown of a missionary plane in Peru in 2001 and the CIA cover-up of the shootdown. Representative Peter Hoekstra (R-Michigan), then- ranking minority member of the House Intelligence Committee, documented the dissembling of the CIA to cover up the agency’s involvement in a drug interdiction program in Peru that led to the loss of innocent lives. Hoekstra accused CIA director Tenet with misleading the congress. Meanwhile, the CIA has never addressed the serious procedural and institutional problems that were exposed in a report from the OIG on the Peru program, which concluded that agency officials deliberately misled congress, the White House, and the Justice Department.

President Obama has demonstrated time and again that he is unwilling to address the CIA’s controversial – possibly illegal – actions, and CIA director Panetta is making sure that no internal oversight body does so. The president seems to have succumbed to what his favorite philosopher, Reinhold Niebuhr, terms the "false security to which all men are tempted" – the security of power.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

NOTE FROM LARRY: Mel is an old friend and was a preeminent analyst at the CIA. I may not always agree with him but he is a thoughtful, considerate person. You don’t have to agree with him either but I encourage you to address your differences with him on substantive grounds. It is in this kind of give and take that we learn.

President Harry S. Truman created the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947 to ensure that the policy community would have access to independent intelligence analysis that was free of the policy advocacy of the Department of State and the Department of Defense.

The CIA’s most important analytic mission was the production of national intelligence estimates (NIEs) and assessments that tracked significant political and military developments and provided premonitory intelligence on looming threats and confrontations.

One gauge for measuring the success of the CIA’s intelligence analysis is to measure the Agency’s performance before and during four controversial wars: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Three presidents (Truman, Eisenhower, and Johnson) did not interfere with the production of intelligence analysis in these crises; two presidents (Nixon and George W. Bush) tried to slant intelligence analysis; and now President Obama is fighting a war without benefit of the estimative capabilities of the intelligence community.

President Truman wanted sensitive intelligence with the bark on, and that is what he and President Dwight Eisenhower got from the CIA during the Korean War. Unfortunately, the CIA made a series of fundamental errors in its judgments, including failures to understand the policies and actions of North Korean leader Kim Il Sung, ascertain the nature of Kim’s dialogue with the Soviets and the Chinese, provide strategic warning of Kim’s decision to go to war, and anticipate China’s entry into the war.

As a result of these failures, President Truman named the first civilian director of the CIA – Allen Dulles – and supported the creation of an elite Office of National Estimates (ONE) under Harvard Professor William Langer, a senior Office of Strategic Services (OSS) analyst during World War II. ONE consisted of two offices, an upper tier known as the Board of National Estimates (BNE), composed of senior government and academic officials, and an estimates staff composed of intelligence professionals who drafted NIE’s. ONE quickly became the focal point of the CIA’s intelligence analysis until it was abolished in 1973 by CIA director James Schlesinger, who shared the Nixon administration’s desire to end ONE’s independence and its dominance within the intelligence community. 

The CIA and ONE did some of their best work before and during the Vietnam War when they told the Johnson and Nixon administrations that the South Vietnamese government was corrupt and would not be a capable ally in the war against the North and that the strategic bombing campaign would fail. The CIA also prepared excellent analysis on North Vietnam’s order of battle, which was far more accurate than the politicized intelligence coming from the Pentagon. While Johnson and Nixon did not try to tailor the intelligence analysis of the CIA, they did something worse. They ignored the intelligence that could have prevented the US disaster in Vietnam – and they were contemptuous of the analysts who produced these assessments. Eventually, President Nixon forced the resignation of CIA director Richard Helms for allowing the production of these unwelcome NIE’s and appointed Schlesinger as CIA director, hoping to stop the flow of bad news on Vietnam and remove the "existing regime of anti-Nixon Georgetown dilettantes and free-range liberals." 

The Iraq war, of course, brought forth the worst in CIA tailoring of intelligence, particularly in the run-up to the war. The CIA cherry-picked the evidence to support the Bush administration’s case for war and thoroughly corrupted the intelligence process to convince Congress and the American people of the need for war. In October 2002, the CIA produced a phony intelligence assessment on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD), followed by a declassified white paper on WMD which was nothing less than an exercise in policy advocacy and thus a violation of the CIA’s charter. The efforts of Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, Lewis Libby, to tailor CIA intelligence have been well documented. The failure to tell truth to power in the case of the Iraq war is the most serious intelligence failure in U.S. history. 

The Obama administration’s decision-making on the Afghan War has been both puzzling and disappointing. Obama campaigned on the basis of greater openness and transparency in government as well as a willingness to consult diverse viewpoints. His decision-making on Afghanistan has not reflected those promises, a shortcoming particularly apparent in light of his failure to commission NIE’s on Afghanistan in 2009 before the decisions were made to significantly expand U.S. forces there. This is in stark contrast to the Vietnam War, when there was a strong debate within the intelligence community on Southeast Asia and the White House and the National Security Council were well apprised of the discussion. 

An intelligence assessment could help to answer questions on crucial points regarding the course of the Afghan War, including the relations between the Taliban and Al Qaeda, the success of a counterinsurgency campaign without the benefit of a stable indigenous government, the unwillingness of Pakistan to degrade and disrupt Taliban efforts to launch military or terrorist attacks, and the uncertainty of stabilizing governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Either President Obama does not believe that the CIA and the intelligence community have the resources to provide useful insight into these matters, or he realizes that the findings of such an assessment would not be helpful to the policy he has already decided to pursue.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

NOTE FROM LARRY: Mel is an old friend and was a preeminent analyst at the CIA. I may not always agree with him but he is a thoughtful, considerate person. You don’t have to agree with him either but I encourage you to address your differences with him on substantive grounds. It is in this kind of give and take that we learn.

Bob Woodward’s "Obama’s Wars" offers a disturbing account of President Barack Obama’s lack of leadership and the flawed decision-making practices of his national security team. Although Woodward never explicitly says so, he makes a strong case that President Obama has redefined and expanded a war that neither he nor his leading advisers believe will end successfully for the United States. The bottom line is that Obama endorsed a decision in which he almost certainly doesn’t believe. He and his national security team must realize that the Afghan situation in July 2011, when we are supposed to begin the withdrawal of troops, will be no different than it is today.

His account suggests that very little thought was given to the geopolitical and military consequences of the decision to increase the fighting force, the costs and duration of the war and the geopolitical consequences of the decision to escalate.

The discussion of domestic consequences was limited and superficial, even wrong headed. Worst of all, short shrift was given to the major problem in the area, the threat of a nuclear-armed Pakistan where the government is slowly falling apart, the military is openly challenging the government and the insurgency is gaining strength.

The decision-making process was flawed from the start. The White House never requested a National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan from the director of national intelligence. The intelligence community, moreover, played an insignificant role and CIA director Leon Panetta advised that "no Democratic president can go against military advice, especially if he [Obama] asked for it…. So just do it. Do what they say." The State Department was also a nonplayer, with no effort made to revive the policy planning staff, which has become a speech-writing group for the secretary of state.

The decision last year to introduce 30,000 additional soldiers and Marines was based on four assumptions – all of them false: US force can degrade the Taliban, Afghan security forces will be prepared to take over the fight, the Afghan government can be stabilized and the sanctuaries in Pakistan can be closed. Pakistan has demonstrated neither the willingness nor the capability to challenge the presence of the Afghan Taliban in the tribal areas of Pakistan. No counterinsurgency campaign has been successful when the insurgents have had access to a sanctuary.

Woodward details how Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and leading flag officers (including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen, David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal) boxed in the president on the decision and publicly campaigned for more troops while the decision-making process was underway. The uniformed military essentially intimidated President Obama, who was overly concerned that Gates would resign or that the generals would go public with their criticism.

Eventually, even the president became impatient with his sphinx-like secretary of defense. When nearly two hours had gone by at an important meeting and Gates had said nothing, President Obama facetiously said, "Bob, I’d love to hear what you’re thinking. I know still waters run deep. What’s on your mind?" National security Adviser Gen. James Jones, who was unsure about Gates, observed that the secretary of defense "tended to hang back, figure out which way decisions were going, where everyone else, including the president, was leaning and then jump that way." These are the characteristics of a staff man or a windsock, not a cabinet official.

Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the senior adviser for Afghanistan and Pakistan, thought that Gates was overly deferential to the military and, in failing to assert civilian control at the Pentagon, didn’t serve the president. Lute observed that Gates held his cards "close – being so quiet, so subdued," which wore thin. (Lute’s description matches my own experience at the CIA, watching Gates as an adviser to CIA Director Casey nearly 30 years ago.) As Woodward points out, Gates was "playing the role of the new Cheney – whispering confidentially in the ear of an inexperienced commander in chief. It gave him extraordinary leverage."

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While Generals Petraeus and McChrystal campaigned for more troops, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Gates remained largely silent at key meetings of the National Security Council. And when President Obama asked for options from the Pentagon for reducing the troop strength, he was ignored by the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Eventually, the president had to go to the deputy chairman of the Joint Chiefs to obtain the information he was seeking. (This is ironic. In the late 1990s, President Bill Clinton asked for options from the Pentagon for dealing with the challenge from the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda and the Pentagon produced nothing.)

When President John F. Kennedy realized how poorly he was served by the military and the intelligence community in the Bay of Pigs debacle, he became more skeptical of military advice. As a result, he did a far better job of leadership in the Cuban missile crisis the following year. One can only hope that President Obama will understand how poorly he has been served by his military leadership on Afghanistan and that he recognizes that the military wields far too much influence in the White House and on Capitol Hill and controls too much of the depleted US treasury. President Obama should have paid more attention to the advice of Vice President Joe Biden as well as the offline counsel from a small group of courageous three- and four-star generals, some active duty and some retired, who detailed the holes in the Pentagon’s demands for additional force in Afghanistan. A review of last year’s decision on troops will be reviewed in December, and we can only hope that the president widens the circle of decision makers.

"Obama’s Wars" is Bob Woodward 16th book and there are no surprises in style or methodology for his legion of readers. Woodward is an ordinary writer; the book reads like a government memorandum. Woodward is not an analyst and doesn’t pretend to be. He provides glorious anecdotes, but he obfuscates his sources and misuses quotation marks. He is no judge of character or capability, turning the senile CIA Director William Casey into a strategic genius in "Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987," and actually presenting President George Bush as a genuine leader and commander in chief in "Bush at War." Woodward is typically kind to the people who give him long interviews and he can be exceedingly mean to those officials who don’t. Ask Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

But Woodward does have access, including access to those people who rarely speak on the record to journalists. In his excellent book, "The Brethern," (written with Scott Armstrong), he got Justice Potter Stewart to discuss the machinations of the Supreme Court. In "The Commanders," he got the chairman of the joint chiefs, Gen. Colin Powell, to reveal many secrets from George H.W. Bush’s administration. And in "Obama’s Wars," he had access to virtually all the key players, who revealed a startling lack of wisdom, vision and leadership. Woodward demonstrates the dysfunctional nature of the entire national security bureaucracy and, intentionally or unintentionally, makes a good case for why we should have gotten out of Afghanistan yesterday.

Of course, Woodward has his critics, who cavil about his "gossip mongering," ignoring the sensitive information that appears in the book. Johns Hopkins University Professor of strategic studies Eliot Cohen virtually accuses Woodward of treason for providing information that will help such enemies as Taliban leader Mohammad Omar and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Cohen is an armchair warrior who has defended the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and his op-ed appeared in the pro-war Washington Post. But even Boston University Professor of history and international relations Andrew Bacevich, who opposes both wars, dismisses the book as gossip mongering and accuses Woodward of titillating and not informing. Both are wrong.

We know that President Obama has studied the lessons of the Vietnam and presumably recognizes Afghanistan as a similar briar patch. We can only hope that he remembers George Santayana’s observation that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

NOTE FROM LARRY: Mel is an old friend and was a preeminent analyst at the CIA. I may not always agree with him but he is a thoughtful, considerate person. You don’t have to agree with him either but I encourage you to address your differences with him on substantive grounds. It is in this kind of give and take that we learn.

The "double envelopment" or pincer movement is a classic military maneuver that finds the flanks of the opponent under simultaneous attack from the opposing forces. The maneuver may have been used as early as the Battle of Marathon in the fifth century BC, and there are accounts of Hannibal using the double envelopment at the Battle of Cannae in 216 BC. Gen. Robert E. Lee used the technique successfully in the Second Battle of Bull Run in 1862, when the Confederate forces threatened the lines of communication between the Union forces and the political leadership in Washington. The German Sixth Army was a victim of double envelopment at the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942, and Gen. George Patton used the technique successfully against German forces in World War II.

Now, President Barack Obama finds himself the victim of a political double envelopment in which the Pentagon, having ostensibly agreed to a strategy calling for discussion of withdrawal from Afghanistan, is already campaigning and planning for an extended stay. On one flank, the Pentagon is undertaking a huge base expansion program that will support a regional military strategy against Russia, China and Iran. On the other flank, the senior military leadership is walking away from any notion of even gradual withdrawal beginning in 2011.

President Obama seemed reluctant last year when he announced his decision to enlarge the US military presence in Afghanistan. He demonstrated his uncertainty by combining the decision to send an additional 30,000 soldiers and Marines with a commitment to begin discussions for withdrawal in December of this year in order to begin a withdrawal process in July 2011. Vice President Joe Biden strongly opposed the decision to expand the force presence, but he was outflanked by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who received predictably strong support from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and senior general officers.

Now, one general after another is walking away from any discussion of a major review of policy, let alone withdrawal, with on-the-record comments in support of an extended stay in Afghanistan. The Pentagon’s campaign began two weeks with Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, arguing that he had not come to Afghanistan to preside over a "graceful exit." General Petraeus indicated that his support for any decision to begin the withdrawal of forces next summer would depend on how the war was proceeding. He presumably believes that he can repeat the success of the surge in Iraq, which he campaigned for in 2007.

In the wake of General Petraeus’ remarks, Gen. James Conway, the commandant of the Marine Corps, said that President Obama’s July 2011 deadline to begin US troop withdrawal was "giving our enemy sustenance." General Conway seemed to be particularly dismissive of any discussion of withdrawal, noting that President Obama was "talking to several audiences at the same time when he made his comments regarding July 2011." The US commander in charge of training Afghan security forces, Gen. William Caldwell IV, told Pentagon reporters on August 23 that he will not complete his mission of training an Afghan force until after the deadline. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen has been the most aggressive military leader in making the case for a long-term commitment to Afghanistan. And General McChrystal probably should have been fired for insubordination in the fall of 2009 when he rejected the idea of using drone aircraft and special forces to defeat al-Qaeda before a final decision had been made.

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This is very much different from the private comments of the military leadership to President Obama last year when he conducted his high-level review of Afghan policy. In the Oval Office in October 2009, Secretary of Defense Gates and Admiral Mullen pledged their support to President Obama’s plan and committed themselves to making sure that Generals McChrystal and Petraeus would stop their public discussion of the policy debate. Vice Chairman of the JCS, Gen. James Cartwright, also pledged fealty. And in late November, only days before the West Point speech, President Obama asked General Petraeus if he was certain of progress over the next 18 months that would allow the withdrawal to begin in 2011. Gates, Mullen and Petraeus agreed that it could be done and that the Afghan Army could take over the mission at that time.

The pace of US military construction in Afghanistan certainly does not suggest an interest or expectation of an early withdrawal. Major expansion is taking place at three US air bases in southern and northern Afghanistan and none of these projects is expected to be completed before the latter part of 2011. In other words, long after President Obama has pledged to begin the withdrawal of US forces, the Pentagon is allocating hundreds of millions of dollars for air bases in key regions. The House of Representatives has already approved more than $1 billion for additional base construction in addition to the more than $5 billion allocated to build facilities for the Afghan Army and the national police. Neither Afghan institution has demonstrated that it can maintain security in the country, let alone take on the growing Taliban forces.

President Obama has learned some harsh lessons about civilian-military relations over the past year. The secretary of defense and the Pentagon’s military leadership are working energetically to undermine the president’s call for an end to the cynical policy of "don’t ask, don’t tell," which undermined the role of gays serving in the military. When the Obama administration was discussing Afghan policy at the highest levels last year, senior general officers campaigned for a significant expansion of US forces long before any decision was actually made. General McChrystal was eventually forced to resign as commander of US forces in Afghanistan because he and his staff were contemptuous toward civilian decision makers.

The president denied that he was "jammed" by the military in the fall of 2009 when the toughest decision of his presidency had to be made. It is clear, however, that the military is trying to manipulate President Obama on the next round of decision making. It was 50 years ago that President Dwight D. Eisenhower told his senior advisers, "God help this country when someone sits in this chair who doesn’t know the military as well as I do."

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

NOTE FROM LARRY: Mel is an old friend and was a preeminent analyst at the CIA. I may not always agree with him but he is a thoughtful, considerate person. You don’t have to agree with him either but I encourage you to address your differences with him on substantive grounds. It is in this kind of give and take that we learn.

President Barack Obama has been a major disappointment to a liberal community that rallied to his call for genuine change. His administration has made no attempt to investigate the crimes that were committed by the Bush administration, including torture and abuse, secret prisons and renditions. President Obama rescued Wall Street, but not Main Street. And he has expanded the self-destructive war in Afghanistan, where there is no end in sight. President Obama cannot be blamed for the failure to close Guantanamo, but he continues to favor preventive detention. But the president’s most inexplicable failure, in view of his Harvard Law School background and commitment to constitutional rights, is his unwillingness to name a statutory inspector general (IG) at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

First, some background. The CIA’s transgressions in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s led to the creation of a statutory and independent IG, appointed by the president with the advice and consent of the Senate.

A powerful IG was required because the CIA’s internal investigations of its role in the sale of arms to Iran were inadequate in comparison with the investigations of Congressional and independent counsels. Until the creation of the statutory IG, Congressional oversight committees were not given full access to the CIA investigations, and not even the Justice Department received reports detailing suspected illegalities. The efforts of CIA director William Casey to prevent the attorney general from receiving reports on illegalities led Sens. Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania) and David Boren (D-Oklahoma) to sponsor a bill to create an independent IG.

The most recent IG, John Helgerson, proved to be an effective watchdog. This earned him the ire of the last four CIA directors, who mounted an unprecedented attack on the the CIA’s only genuinely independent watchdog. Helgerson retired in February 2009 and has not been replaced. Clearly, CIA management prefers to operate without oversight. But it is less clear why President Obama, apparently with the shocking support of Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-California), has chosen to name no successor to Helgerson.

It is essential to understand the important work of the CIA’s IG. In 2004, the Office of Inspector General (OIG) produced the only official and authoritative study of the abuses of the CIA detentions and interrogations program. It also produced seminal studies of accountability for the 9/11 attacks as well as the CIA shooting down of a missionary plane in Peru in 2001 and its subsequent coverup of the shooting down. A former Deputy Director for Intelligence and Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, John Gannon, has labeled this work "vindictive," but it is simply the IG doing his job. The current CIA Director, Leon Panetta, has continued the policies of his three immediate successors (George Tenet, Porter Goss and Michael Hayden), ensuring the absence of aggressive internal investigations. These directors have ignored provisions in the 1989 law that required them to inform Congress of attempts to hinder the IG in the execution of his duties.

President Obama is also continuing, if not intensifying, the policies of his predecessor, George W. Bush. He is moving aggressively to punish unauthorized leaks to the press and to limit the actions of government whistleblowers. At the same time, the president and the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee have made sure that there are no outlets for legitimate whistleblowers. The Obama administration has resorted to a state security defense to prevent revelations of renditions policies in US courts and has threatened to cut off sensitive intelligence to Britain if a British court reveals details of the CIA renditions in Europe.

The current case of Thomas Drake, formerly with the National Security Agency (NSA), demonstrates President Obama’s repressive approach. Drake appears to be a classic whistleblower; his revelations to the media were designed to strengthen NSA’s capabilities in the exploitation of email and cell phone information. He did not reveal secret intelligence and did not go to the press until he failed to elicit responses from the IGs at the NSA and the Department of Defense as well as the Congressional intelligence committees. Nevertheless, Drake has been indicted for illegal "retention" of classified information and faces years in prison.

Neither President Obama nor Senator Feinstein has shown any interest in the criminal investigation of the CIA’s destruction of videotapes five years ago that documented sadistic interrogations in CIA prisons. They are also fighting the use of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to strengthen Congressional oversight of the intelligence community, which was favored by CIA Director Panetta in the 1980s when he was a Congressman. Today, of course, Panetta opposes the use of GAO in oversight of the CIA.

Currently, the only entity with real oversight capability over the CIA is the OIG. President Obama’s failure to name a statutory IG ensures that there will be neither oversight nor accountability in the intelligence community. The president is unwilling to address the CIA’s controversial, possibly illegal, actions and is making sure that no internal oversight body does so. President Obama seems to have succumbed to what his favorite philosopher, Reinhold Niebuhr termed the "false security to which all men are tempted" – the security of power.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

The New York Times‘ David Brooks minimized General Stanley McChrystal’s remarks in Rolling Stone magazine as "kvetching." For the Times‘ Maureen Dowd, McChrystal and his "smart-aleck aides" were merely engaging in "towel-snapping" jocularity. The Washington Post editorial board noted that Afghan President Hamid Karzai called McChrystal the "best commander of the war," and concluded that the general should be retained as the Afghan commander. The Post and Times‘ editorial boards have called for the replacement of President Obama’s key civilian advisors on Afghanistan. Meanwhile, these papers and many others have downplayed the critical issue that dominates this sad affair – the fundamental importance of civilian supremacy in military policy and decision-making.

There is no more important task in political governance than making sure that civilian control of the military is not compromised and that the military remains subordinate to political authority. Unfortunately, President Obama has demonstrated too much deference to the military, retaining the Bush administration’s secretary of defense as his own; appointing too many retired and active-duty general officers to such key civilian positions as national security adviser and intelligence tsar; and making the Pentagon’s budget sacrosanct in an age of restraint.

The reappointment of General David Patraeus as commander of forces in Afghanistan places the general on an extremely high political plateau that makes it more difficult to discuss alternatives to the failed counter-insurgency strategy, and places too much influence in the hands of the Pentagon on decisions involving war and peace. President Obama recognized the McChrystal affair as a challenge to civilian control and leadership, but the appointment of Petraeus enhances the political power of the military and could become an obstacle to the president’s exercise of civilian control in the near term. Too many influence people view Petraeus as the answer to our Afghan problems; he isn’t.

The imbalance in civilian-military influence is far more threatening to the interests of the United States than any developments in Afghanistan. President Nixon’s ending of the draft has created a professional military, which has fostered the very cultural behavior that General McChrystal demonstrated in his contempt for civilian leadership. The Goldwater-Nichols Act in 1986 created regional commanders-in-chief (CINCs) who expanded the martial reach of the United States in the post-Cold War world; these CINCs have become more influential than U.S. ambassadors and assistant secretaries of state in sensitive Third World areas. The Act created a powerful chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, during Desert Storm in 1991, the chairman often ignored the secretary of defense and personally briefed war plans to the president. It is noteworthy that the Act passed the Senate without one vote of opposition.

The contemptuous remarks of McChrystal and his aides are very familiar to anyone who has spent a great deal of time around senior military officers, particularly special operations officers. Upon arrival at the National War College in 1986 to join the faculty after a 20-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, I assumed that the major threats to U.S. security emanated from the Soviet Union, China, and various Third World trouble spots. I soon learned that the typical U.S. military officer believed the major threats to U.S. security were the media, the Congress, and liberal Democrats. Since the end of the draft, the officer corps has become increasingly conservative and libertarian, and it is a rare officer who votes as a Democrat. In the 1970s, more than half of all senior officers considered themselves independents; currently, the overwhelming majority of senior officers are registered Republicans, and there are very few registered Democrats.

Special operations officers are even more conservative than their traditional brethren, and it is noteworthy that the nickname for all commanders of the Joint Special Operations Command, like McChrystal, is "The Pope." Ironically, McChrystal is a registered Democrat, a social liberal, and an Obama supporter in the 2008 election.

Key congressional figures and influential journalists are already calling for the resignation of the president’s representative in Afghanistan, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, who provided the White House with two important cables in November 2009 warning against any additional military deployments to Afghanistan. Eikenberry’s advice was lapidary: he warned that Karzai was not an "adequate strategic partner" and that his government lacked the "political will or capacity to carry out basic tasks of governance;" he said that we have "overestimated the ability of Afghan security forces to take over by 2013…and underestimated how long it will take to restore or establish civilian government;" and he argued that "more troops won’t end the insurgency as long as Pakistan sanctuaries remain…and Pakistan views its strategic interests as best served by a weak neighbor." He bluntly argued against a premature decision regarding a troop increase, favoring "alternatives beyond strictly military counterinsurgency efforts within Afghanistan."

Eight months later, the situation in Afghanistan has worsened, and Eikenberry’s diagnosis has become more prescient. Even McChrystal has said that there’s no way we can kill our way out of Afghanistan. And there is no way that U.S. forces will be able to build a civilian government in Afghanistan and then mediate between the government and the Afghan people, objectives that are central to the Petraeus-McChrystal counter-insurgency strategy.

It is time for President Obama to remind the Pentagon that decisions regarding national security must be made by civilian officials and that the service academies and the war colleges must stress the central importance of civilian control. During my 18 years at the National War College, various commandants steadily cut back the number of hours devoted to the U.S. political process, and made it more difficult to introduce contrarian lecturers who understood the importance of disagreement and diversity of perspective. The military culture may require an authoritarian and hierarchical structure, but it must understand the importance and sanctity of the egalitarian and individualistic values of U.S. democracy.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s profound and prophetic Farewell Address in 1961 warned against the excesses of the military-industrial complex, and he also expressed the hope that his successors at the White House understood the demands of the military and the necessity for limiting and restraining those demands. Unfortunately, our most recent presidents in the wake of the end of the Cold War have not been willing to limit the influence of the military and have placed too much power in the hands of the Pentagon. President Obama must take note.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

Consortium News Editor’s Note: President Obama has sought to counter right-wing and Republican attacks on him as “soft” on national security by staffing top positions with retired senior military officers, but the shortage of civilian experts has created an imbalance in how geopolitical problems are viewed.

Now, with the choice of a retired general to replace an ex-admiral as “intelligence czar,” Obama is repeating the pattern, as former CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman notes in this guest essay:

President Barack Obama’s appointment of retired Gen. James Clapper as the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) demonstrates the Pentagon’s enormous influence over the President and indicates that there is little likelihood of genuine reform of the hidebound intelligence community.

Once again, the President has appointed a general officer to an important strategic position that should be in the hands of an experienced civilian who understands the need for change.

President Obama has given career military officers the key positions of national security adviser, ambassadors to Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia and DNI (on two occasions in a 17-month period). Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is about to name a retired general who was responsible for special operations in Afghanistan as the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism.

These career military officers are not known for strategic thinking, having been trained to focus on worst-case assessments of geopolitical problems. It is no wonder that there have been few diplomatic successes during the Obama administration, that the State Department remains underused and without influence and that the humongous Pentagon budget remains largely untouchable.

In the political panic that followed the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration permitted the creation of two large bureaucratic entities – the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Office of National Intelligence (ONI).
Both have been largely sclerotic and demonstrated genuine incompetence, DHS during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and ONI during the attempted suicide bombing of a commercial airliner in 2009.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration has convinced the mainstream media that Clapper’s predecessor, retired Adm. Dennis Blair, was forced to resign because of the pathetic performance of the intelligence community in December 2009 when the young Nigerian bomber was permitted to board a commercial airline.

Blair also was hurt by the Central Intelligence Agency’s incredible incompetence in a series of events that led to the successful bombing attack against its most important operational base in Afghanistan.

In fact, Blair cannot be blamed for these intelligence failures. The CIA, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), the National Security Agency (NSA) and the State Department were all at fault for the attempted suicide bombing.

The State Department ignored the Nigerian’s multiple-entry visa for the United States; the State Department and the CIA ignored warnings from the Nigerian’s father; the NSA didn’t exploit collection opportunities that would have provided significant information; and NCTC failed to pursue information that would have placed the Nigerian on a no-fly list.

Part of the problem also could be blamed on Congress for its ill-considered, post-9/11 “reforms.” The NCTC should have had operational control of counterterrorism operations, but the 2004 statute that created Blair’s position specifically states that the NCTC director "may not direct the execution of counterterrorism operations."

President Obama’s principal adviser on counterterrorism, John Brennan, should have taken this problem to Congress, where it needs to be corrected; he still hasn’t done so. None of the numerous human errors that were made could be placed at Blair’s door; yet except for Blair’s ouster, no one has been held accountable or even responsible.

Blair’s major problem was one he shares with many general and flag officers who lack experience in Washington but are placed in sensitive political positions for which they are not prepared.

As a result, Blair created unnecessary battles within the intelligence community that he was destined to lose, particularly the effort to control the appointment of chiefs in CIA stations that are located in U.S. embassies around the world. Station chiefs have always been CIA operations officers and it simply made no sense to raise the possibility of placing NSA officers or Defense Intelligence Agency officers as station chiefs.

Blair lost that battle, but that did not stop him from trying to halt all clandestine operations in France, which would have weakened the CIA’s counterterrorism mission and placed the CIA too close to a French intelligence operation that has been penetrated by foreign intelligence over the years.

Blair also never established a personal rapport with President Obama, despite his regular visits to the White House to conduct intelligence briefings. Military officers typically lack the background and experience to provide these largely geopolitical briefings, which should be given by intelligence professionals.

If President Obama were truly interested in intelligence reform, he would have abolished the Office of National Intelligence and the position of intelligence czar or at least placed the DNI in civilian hands to counter the Pentagon’s control of intelligence personnel and intelligence spending.

The Pentagon already controls nearly 85 percent of the $70 billion intelligence budget and nearly 90 percent of the 100,000 intelligence personnel. Active duty and retired general officers now command nearly all of the major institutions of the intelligence community, although my 18 years on the faculty of the National War College confirmed my impression that military officers are not distinguished in the fields of strategic intelligence or geopolitical problem solving.

Strategic management of the 16 agencies of the intelligence community is the DNI’s major challenge, but the last three intelligence czars have been unqualified general and flag officers. The absence of an independent civilian to counter the power of military intelligence threatens civilian control of the decision to use military power and makes it more likely that intelligence will be tailored to suit the purposes of the Pentagon.

The President’s erratic decision making on Afghanistan over the past year points to military domination of the decision-making process.

Finally, the mainstream media, particularly The New York Times, has demonstrated an ability to accept briefing guidance from the White House on the Clapper appointment and an inability to scrutinize Obama’s actions.
Saturday’s New York Times, for example, cited Clapper’s "decades of experience" without mentioning that his experience in communications intelligence and military spy operations is not relevant to his major missions as intelligence czar.

The Times credited the President with "pushing the reset button" in order to "recalibrate the intelligence structure," when Clapper’s appointment really amounts to new wine in old bottles.

The Times also discussed Clapper’s ability to refashion and reorganize the intelligence community, without noting that the Pentagon’s undersecretary of defense for intelligence has veto power over the ability of the DNI to transfer personnel or budgetary authority from individual intelligence agencies into joint centers or other agencies in order to integrate strategic intelligence.

Clapper is familiar with this problem even if the mainstream media isn’t; he served as undersecretary for intelligence for both Secretaries of Defense Robert Gates and Donald Rumsfeld.

At that time, moreover, Clapper was responsible for managing the Counterintelligence Field Activities Office, which managed an illegal database that included information about antiwar protests planned at churches, schools and Quaker meeting halls. Perhaps, some of these issues will be raised at his Senate confirmation hearings.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

David Ignatius, The Washington Post’s self-appointed apologist for the Central Intelligence Agency, has struck again. Last year, Ignatius argued that it was "just plain nuts" to investigate the CIA’s assassination program because "nobody had been killed." He lambasted Attorney General Eric Holder for considering the appointment of a prosecutor to investigate possible CIA war crimes because these "unauthorized practices" merely involved "kicks, threats and other abuse."

Now, Ignatius argues that CIA Director Leon Panetta has left his "mark on the CIA," foolishly crediting the director with stepping up aggressive operations in the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa and waging the "most aggressive operation in the history of the agency" against al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

The CIA and its National Clandestine Service (NCS) have conducted a successful campaign against Panetta, who has sustained the culture of cover-up that has governed the agency since William Casey and Robert Gates collaborated to hide the crimes of Iran-Contra. Panetta has lobbied the administration to limit the investigation of possible crimes that include torture and abuse as well as erroneous renditions. He supported the heavy redaction of the Inspector General’s report of 2004, which is the most authoritative account on record of the CIA’s interrogation practices and the use of torture and abuse against detainees.

Panetta has demonstrated no concern with the CIA’s destruction of nearly 100 interrogation videotapes, and he has made sure that the Obama administration has not appointed a new statutory Inspector General to replace John Helgerson, who retired more than fifteen months ago. The senior members of the NCS, who would be threatened by any independent investigation of their actions, have convinced Panetta to leave vacant the position of statutory IG for the first time in the more than two decades since the law was passed to create the post.

Panetta has also blocked release of an investigation of the cover-up of CIA’s shoot-down of a missionary plane in Peru in 2001 that led to the deaths of a missionary and her seven-month-old daughter. An IG report from Helgerson documented the CIA’s failure to follow presidential orders controlling the operation. Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Michigan), whose district is home to the family of the victims, is the only congressman to express interest in this case, but he has received no support from the leaders of the Congressional intelligence committees. Panetta has used his Hill background effectively to make sure that there are no embarrassing investigations.

Ignatius ignores the fact that Panetta’s "mark" on the CIA includes two major intelligence failures that took place last December. There was the intelligence analysis failure on Christmas Day, when the CIA and other intelligence agencies missed reporting that could have prevented a Nigerian suicide bomber from boarding a US commercial jetliner. Several days later, a suicide bomber succeeded in killing six CIA officers and contractors in an operation that totally ignored clandestine tradecraft. Ignatius foolishly credits Panetta with more aggressive techniques in the fight against al-Qaeda, forgetting that policy is made elsewhere. The credit belongs to the Obama administration, not to an intelligence agency.

Ignatius also foolishly credits Panetta with "choosing his own deputy, Michael Morell," who "defies the preppy, blue-blood CIA stereotype." Blue bloods left the CIA several decades ago even before the Cold War ended. Morell, in fact, is a CIA careerist, a protégé of his predecessor, Steve Kappes, who was the ideological driver of torture and abuse as well as extraordinary renditions. Morell will allow the senior members of the NCS to continue to run the CIA, and he will make sure that CIA remains without a statutory IG.

Finally, Ignatius credits Panetta with a five-year plan to create a more diverse workforce; to improve the study of foreign languages, and to recruit more operational officers with nonofficial cover. If Ignatius had done a little research, he would have found that these boilerplate recommendations were central to the five-year plans of Panetta’s three predecessors (George Tenet, Porter Goss and Michael Hayden). The more things change, the more they stay the same.

One change is likely to take place, however. Ignatius will continue to be an apologist for the CIA, but he may no longer be The Washington Post’s leading apologist. With the hiring of Marc Thiessen, a former speechwriter for the Bush administration, the Post now employs the man who wrote speeches for both President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney justifying torture and abuse, secret prisons and renditions. He will certainly try, but not even Ignatius will be able to top the efforts of Thiessen.
 

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

Karl Rove. (Photo: chicagopublicradio)

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates gave a provocative and even dangerous speech at the National Defense University (NDU) last week that revealed the cold-war thinking of a key holdover from the Bush administration. With language reminiscent of the worst days of the cold war in the 1950s, Gates argued that the “demilitarization of Europe – where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it – has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st century.” He concluded that a perception of European weakness could provide a “temptation to miscalculation and aggression” by hostile powers. Gates didn’t name these so-called hostile powers; indeed, it would have been ludicrous to try to do so.

Instead of haranguing the European members of NATO, who don’t share our views about the threat of international terrorism or the need for a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan (or Iraq for that matter), the United States should be reducing its own global military presence, including its commitment to NATO. For the past several years, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, Gates has been making the case for turning NATO into an instrument for the projection of power abroad, using Afghanistan as an example of an expanded global role. The international coalition did not work well in Iraq; it is not working well in Afghanistan; and the results of these efforts point to the dysfunction of NATO as a military alliance. Did Gates notice that the coalition government in Netherlands collapsed on the eve of his speech because of the controversy over keeping Dutch troops in Afghanistan?

A little more than a year ago, President Obama gave a hopeful inauguration speech that demonstrated he understood the need to reverse US national security policy. His rejection of the “false choice between our safety and our ideals” was a denunciation of the Bush administration’s subversion of the Constitution in the wake of 9/11. His emphasis on earlier generations that “understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please,” appeared to be a rejection of Bush’s “long war” against terror that has created more enemies than friends. In stressing that the “world has changed, and we must change with it,” Obama sounded the clarion call for new policies.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration has pursued the expansion of the military mission, which was begun by the Bush administration in the wake of 9/11. In the last few months, the president has approved a defense budget with a greater focus on counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations. These efforts will require greater long-term spending and will require the Pentagon to control programs dealing with security assistance and training that should be in the hands of civilian foreign policy institutions, particularly the Department of State. At the same time, there has been no institutionalized effort to set priorities for the military mission, to make choices and to accept tradeoffs in weapons systems and military requirements.

In addition to expanding the war in Afghanistan, dispatching 30,000 additional troops on a fool’s errand, President Obama has endorsed the Justice Department’s virtual exoneration of the authors of the torture memoranda, and called for increased defense spending. The president wants a new strategic arms agreement with Russia, but he won’t drop the idea of NATO membership for Georgia and the Ukraine as well as an expanded ballistic missile defense in East Europe, which are obstacles to completion of the arms agreement. The unproven national missile defense remains the most expensive weapons project in the Pentagon’s budget. In his State of the Union speech, the president endorsed cuts in domestic spending at the same time he was increasing our spending on the military ($708 billion), the intelligence community ($75 billion) and homeland security ($55 billion), which exceeds the spending of the rest of the world.

The Pentagon’s budget for 2011 accounts for nearly 5 percent of the US economy, and calls for increased spending for all of the services as well as most weapons systems. Defense spending has doubled in real terms over the past decade, and the turnaround time for some weapons systems now takes nearly two decades. The Republicans demanded and received huge increases in spending on modernization for nuclear weapons in return for the hope of their support for ratification of a nuclear arms treaty with Russia. Does anyone in the Obama administration genuinely believe that the Republicans will provide the support needed to actually ratify the soon-to-be-completed treaty? Does anyone believe that the $11 billion allocated for training the Afghan army and police will lead to a greater Afghan role in the fight against the Taliban? Meanwhile, key members of the military-industrial complex (e.g., Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, General Dynamics and Raytheon) spent more than $80 million dollars in lobbying for $100 billion in defense contracts. Does President Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex nearly 50 years ago ring a bell?

Perhaps, President Obama should take a few minutes out of his busy day to compare Gates’ speeches at the NDU in the Obama administration to the speeches the secretary gave at the NDU during the Bush administration. Perhaps, the similarities in theme and thrust would concern the president, unless he is content to continue the policies of militarization of his predecessor. And, perhaps, it is time for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to sit up and take notice that her stewardship over US foreign policy has been weakened by the secretary of defense’s domination of the foreign policy agenda. Then again, perhaps she is content to travel around the world at a record-setting pace while ignoring the tough issues that bedevil US national security. Instead of wringing our hands about the demilitarization and pacification of Europe, which should be welcomed, perhaps someone in the Obama administration should be examining the need for reducing the power of the Pentagon, including a freeze in defense spending and rebuilding the tools of diplomacy.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.