Expansion of military bases overseas fuels suspicions of U.S. motives
BY MICHAEL KILIAN
Chicago Tribune
Posted on Tue, Mar. 23, 2004
http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/news/politics/8258973.htm
WASHINGTON - (KRT) - In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States has dramatically expanded its military presence in the Middle East and Central Asia, building a vast network of bases designed to counter what military officials call an "arc of instability."
U.S. military installations in the region extend from Turkey to near the Chinese border, and from former Soviet republics in the north to the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. The facilities surround Iran; are situated in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and are close to Syria and Lebanon. Several were created to address the confrontation with Iraq, and continue to support operations there.
"No one could have anticipated in the summer of 2001 that the United States would be basing forces at Karshi Khanabad, Uzbekistan, or conducting a major military operation in Afghanistan," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told Congress last year.
Experts fear the ubiquity of U.S. forces may fuel belief in radical Islamic claims that America is bent on controlling the oil and politics of the Islamic world. A poll that the nonpartisan Pew Research Center conducted in Muslim nations in the region found significant portions of their populations believed just that.
Experts believe the threat implicit in a nearby American military presence - especially after the Iraq invasion - could inflame Islamic nations such as Iran.
"The first thing to recognize is that other countries will view this in different ways than we do," said Marcus Corbin, senior analyst for the Washington-based Center for Defense Information. "They will view this sometimes as an aggressive, hostile encirclement. Iran is probably the best example. It is almost literally surrounded. A huge chunk of its borders are with countries where the U.S. has vastly increased its presence or become a close ally.
"The point is to realize how threatening this is to other people," he added. "This is hard to do, because we don't necessarily think of ourselves as a crusading people invading other countries willy-nilly."
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has rejected the notion that the United States is interested in a permanent, large-scale presence in the Middle East and Central Asia and has stated that once the Taliban and al-Qaida have been defeated, the United States will have no bases in Afghanistan.
But the United States now has bases or shares military installations in Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
Rumsfeld and Pentagon officials are soon expected to unveil plans for a new U.S. military "footprint" on the rest of the world. The plan is expected to include a shift of resources from the huge Cold War-era bases in Western Europe to new and smaller ones in Poland and other Eastern Europe nations as well as a relocation of U.S. troops in South Korea.
The planners are also surveying American facilities in the Middle East and Central Asia, but changes there are more likely to deal with the size and impact of the U.S. profile there than with the number of facilities.
The U.S. military's defense strategy, officials say, is focused on asymmetric threats, and on the need to respond quickly anywhere in the world.
Pursuing a strategy of "places, not bases," the administration wants to strengthen its alliances with friendly countries in the region - and its access to their military facilities. But it doesn't want to engage in extensive base building, as it did in Western Europe after World War II and in northeast Asia after the Korean War.
"What's unlikely is to have permanently stationed U.S. forces in all these places," said Michelle Flournoy, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and threat reduction. "We're more likely to see a situation where we periodically go into a base and do exercises and build up the infrastructure to make it more usable in the future. Then we leave again or rotate forces in and out."
In keeping with Rumsfeld's "transformation" policy of converting the U.S. military from its heavy, largely static Cold War mode to smaller, lighter, more flexible and more rapidly deployed units, these forward outposts would be lightly garrisoned but capable of accommodating a large surge of American military power.
"That's what we did in (Operation) Iraqi Freedom," said retired Vice Adm. Arthur Cebrowski, Defense Department director of force transformation. "We had (a) garrison in Kuwait. We enormously strengthened that garrison and then we stepped off from that garrison against objectives (in Iraq)."
The U.S. military presence in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and the new location at Manas, Kyrgyzstan, near the Chinese border, for example, involves garrisons of about 3,000 troops each.
"We have no plans to put permanent bases in this part of the world," Rumsfeld said at a news conference in Uzbekistan last month.
But some big, permanent bases in the region are likely.
"What people aren't telling you is that `places, not bases' depends on having bases somewhere," said Kurt Campbell, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Asia and now director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies' International Security Program.
Key to continued American involvement in the region would be not only the Camp Doha troop base and two air bases in Kuwait, but also the big Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, which has a 15,000-foot runway needed for air refueling tankers, and the U.S. Navy base at Juffair in Bahrain, headquarters for the fleets patrolling the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea.
According to Campbell, the viability of such U.S. outposts depends on whether the host country is a stable democracy and is willing to provide support and security.
"One of the problems we see with a variety of these bare-bones military facilities in the Central Asian republics and elsewhere in the Middle East is that some of those conditions do not exist," Campbell said. "Local populations, if not hostile, are uncomfortable with the implications of an American presence."
He predicted that some of these U.S. outposts "may be short-lived."
"The initial rationale for some of this global pre-positioning is to get closer to the flame - to be able to act, vis-a-vis Iraq and elsewhere," he said. "What's unclear to me is do we really want to get a lot closer? I think there are some very real hesitations associated with what happens when you put U.S. forces together in an environment. It can actually spur exactly the kinds of political consequences that you want to avoid."