Sunday 1 May 2011 18.00 BST
- Article history
The question in a British context only surfaced mistily when Admiral Alan West (aka Baron W of Spithead) was appointed minister for security in Gordon Brown's government of a few of the talents – also featuring Alan Sugar as Donald Chump. And then the question, as the mists cleared, grew more sharp-edged. What on earth was an old sea dog doing in charge of UK anti-terrorism defences from Bahrain to Bradford? Answer: calm down, dear, it's only politics. Enter Leon Panetta and David Petraeus.
Is it remarkable when (under media cover of royal nuptials) America's head of the CIA becomes secretary of state for defence while the army's supreme, charismatic leader in Afghanistan is named his successor as chief of Langley operations? Answer: not particularly, in an American context. US governments are used to seeing military men move into high-profile jobs and CIA bosses shuffle over to the Pentagon. (The retiring defence secretary is Robert Gates, whose CIA record in calling the end of the cold war was embarrassment wrapped in incomprehension).
Analysis at Washington office level takes such shifts in its stride. Where will Panetta find a cumulative $400bn cuts? Should Petraeus really have been chairman of the joint chiefs? But step back and think strategic shifts. The CIA isn't men in suits any longer. From Pakistan right across the Hindu Kush, it has become just another kind of frontline military resource, typically shouting one simple message: send in the drones. And you can replicate that over Tripoli, or in the badlands north of Sana'a. The agency watches, waits and orchestrates sudden death from the skies.
One clinching argument for Petraeus's appointment, apparently, is that he's not quitting the Afghan scene. He'll be overhead still, pressing buttons. Put him and Panetta in harness together and you've got perfect integration. Except – as my lord of Spithead discovered, perhaps – intelligence is crucially different.
Intelligence agencies exist to help political leaders understand what's going on. They're there to research and analyse, not join the marines. OK: their western prognostication record is pretty wretched. Utterly deluded in Iraq, one eye closed in Kabul, caught napping from Cairo to Benghazi. But at least their advice can be judged case by case. At least the president or PM in question can take his own decisions.
Factor in a confusion of roles and the whole edifice creaks. Pakistan's great problems began when its military intelligence agency was allowed to make and implement policy – and drag the army and quasi political bosses along in its wake. (Let's invent a new force and call them the Taliban!) The folly that cracked open the Soviet Union was rule by KGB and GRU, with the army and gerontocratic party bosses trailing behind. And now you wonder if America isn't beginning to slither into the same silly trap.
Petraeus is a warrior (and embryo politician), not a spook. He's a man of action, not a backroom boy. He insists he can move and shape what's going on. And Panetta, from his time at Langley, has surely developed some of that same stance. So there are checks without necessary balances. So, rather than take individual problems to Obama to decide, the agency and the Pentagon, perfectly aligned, are primed to press for, and implement, concerted action around a consensus opinion.
There's nothing more vital for America and Europe than getting policy on terrorism, on a changing Muslim world, on Hamas and Fatah, clear-headed and freshly flexible. No turf wars, no entrenched agenda. Does that work when a dominant general, fresh from the fray, is told to play master planner and enforcer? It doesn't – as already Pakistan, furious about overbearing CIA interference, starts to protest. Who's in charge? Has the general gone away, or is he more powerful than ever? They're confused, and confusion is the seedbed of disaster. Send in the clowns?
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