Counter-terrorism: Our enemy's enemy is not our friend

In an article looking like a follow-up to his article on CIA 'black sites', Dana Priest of the Washington Post wrote an article on the related, but separate effort by the CIA to work with other nations' security services to curb terrorism. The article highlights ways in which the CIA can work multilaterally to curb terrorism without violating the U.S.'s treaty obligations the way it did with the 'black sites' (which also violated many of the host country's laws). While this tactic is preferable, there are still ugly situations in which the U.S. is placed. As we should have learned in the 1980s with our Central American experiences in Nicaragua and El Salvador (among other places), supposing our friends are those who are opposed to the terrorists can lead to questionable judgments. In fact, if we take a hypothetical situation and exclude the hostility of the U.S. to Saddam Hussein, under the enemy's enemy theory, he could have been an ally to the U.S. because his secular government was, despite what the Bush Administration implied in the run-up to the war, wary of the Islamic fundamentalists that attacked us on 9/11. What stopped that particular alliance was Bush's oedipal 'he tried to kill my daddy' response. However, in countries in which the U.S. has not been militarily involved in the past 15 years, we have stumbled into some embarrasing cooperation agreements. Until the Uzbek government evicted the U.S. military from its airbases for our criticism of the massacre at Andijan, we were quite cozy with a brutal regime and the Washington Post article suggest that in the realm of CIA-intelligence service cooperation, we are still working with the Uzbek dictatorship to quell the threat of terrorism. There are indications that Uzbekistan has not been the exception to the rule (it just highlights the separations in expectations on human rights grounds betwen the State Department and the CIA).

Another interesting point is raised in the article on the difference between George Tenet and Porter Goss, the former and current heads of the CIA. Tenet took a much more activist approach in courting foreign intelligence services while Goss has been more laid back, avoiding chances to recruit new intelligence allies. While that may release the U.S. from questionable partners, it may also hinder the effort to cooperate with non-abusive regime's intelligence services and hinder efforts to combat terrorism.