WASHINGTON: US training of foreign militaries increased steeply during the 1990s and seems poised for rapid expansion in coming months.

The largest increase in defence spending since 1966, proposed to Congress by President George W. Bush this week, includes hundreds of million dollars for training programmes and joint exercises with foreign militaries overseas, many of which are likely to be kept secret from Congress if the administration has its way.

Bush also asked Congress to increase State Department-funded military aid and training programmes by some 13 per cent to about one-fourth of all US foreign aid next year. The increase, which will be funded from money taken mostly from development aid, does not even include the costs of helping build, train, and equip a new national army for Afghanistan, as Bush promised he would do last week.

In addition, the Pentagon is proposing funding entirely new anti-terrorist programmes for foreign militaries, including one for 18 million dollars in Hawaii, discreetly inserted into the 2002 defence bill approved by Congress without debate in December, that will reportedly be used to circumvent a Congressional ban on military training for the Indonesia.

“It’s like the counter-insurgency era all over again,” noted one Congressional aide in a reference to the period which culminated in Washington’s withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973. “Only this time we’re going to be fighting ‘terrorism,’ instead of ‘communism’,” said the aide, whose boss has been sceptical about expanding US military commitments.

In fairness to Bush, the Pentagon had already expanded ties with a record number of foreign militaries under former President Bill Clinton.

For example, the International Military Education and Training (IMET) programme, which is administered by the State Department in the United States, grew more than three-fold in just the past eight years — from 22 million dollars in 1994 to 70 million dollars in the current year.

Similarly, US Special Operations Forces (SOF) units — the stars of the military campaign in Afghanistan — increased the frequency, range, and number of joint exercises they carried out with foreign forces abroad under the 11-year-old Joint Combined Exercise Training (JCET). In 1992, such exercises included forces from 92 countries; in 1999, the last year for which statistics are available, the number was a record 152, according to a recent study by Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF).

In the wake of the attacks, Washington has offered new counter-terrorism assistance, including training, to a growing list of countries, including

some with dubious human-rights records, including Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan — where Washington has already begun building and improving military bases for use in the longer term — as well as Tajikistan, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Yemen.

The Pentagon is also reportedly cooking up plans for military training in Pakistan, which until the Sept 11 attacks had been banned from receiving any military aid since 1990.

In addition, US troops have returned in force under the anti- terrorist rubric to the Philippines for the first time since Washington gave up its bases there in 1991.

Under Bush’s proposed budget plans, Colombia, which already hosts several hundred US military and intelligence personnel as part of Washington’s “drug war,” will also receive more training and support.

He has asked Congress to approve about some 350 million dollars to train and equip a second anti-drug brigade of 3,000 soldiers in Colombia to add to one trained and equipped over the past two years.

In addition, he is asking for 98 million dollars to train and equip a new brigade that will be used to protect Occidental Petroleum Crop’s Cano Limon oil pipeline from attacks by left- wing guerrillas. As with other operational training, the package is likely to include US intelligence support.

All of these deployments worry human rights activists, especially those who recall the counter-insurgency era when US forces were not only identified with abusive militaries, but, in some cases, actually taught them many of the tactics that led to some of the periods worst human rights violations.

But even finding about the extent of new US military training commitments and deployments may become increasingly difficult, according to Lumpe, who noted that the administration last year tried hard to kill a Congressionally-mandated annual report on these programmes and is expected to try to so again this year.

The fact that Washington has committed US forces to combat areas in the Philippines without any Congressional review or consultation marks a troubling precedent, she said.

Reporters here and in the field have also complained about the secrecy surrounding the deployment of SOF units in Afghanistan and, more recently, in Somalia and, according to some reports, in Yemen as well. —Dawn/The InterPress News Service