Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [338]
In our first visit in June 2002, weeks After the Colombian elections, I told Uribe we might be willing to lend a hand by offering assistance in an integrated counterinsurgency campaign that strategically combined American and Colombian political, intelligence, economic, and military assets. If we were going to do more than just focus on trying to intercept drug shipments and spraying coca fields, there was one major hurdle: the U.S. Congress. Fearing direct American involvement in a guerrilla war in Latin America, Congress had imposed strict limits on intelligence sharing and military activities with the Colombians. The only authorized missions were those designed to reduce drug production, and there was even a congressionally imposed limit on the number of American military personnel to be allowed in Colombia at any given time.
Working with policy officials Doug Feith, Peter Rodman, and Roger Pardo-Maurer, we were able to reorient our assistance to Colombia toward counterterrorism and targeting the FARC guerrillas. The Congress agreed to change our authorities to allow for more than just the narrow focus on drugs. Our goal was to help the government of Colombia assert control—effective sovereignty, as we called it—over its entire territory.
In President Alvaro Uribe, we had the most skillful partner we could have hoped for. Unassuming and slight in build, Uribe was unafraid to take on the FARC and reclaim Colombian territory (he also commanded the overwhelming support of the Colombian people, reaching a 91 percent approval rating at one point).2 With expanded authorities and intelligence cooperation, we could take the fight to the enemy. An energetic Army Reserve Special Forces noncommissioned officer who had fought alongside the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s, Pardo-Maurer aggressively sought interagency and bipartisan support. Without adding a dollar to our budget, we made our aid far more effective than it had been before. Drug production decreased, and hundreds of thousands of acres of land were taken back from the FARC. The campaign to win back Colombia from the terrorists proved to be a major success.
Another significant success involved one of the most worrisome nations in the world—the Libya of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. The State Department had long listed Libya as a leading sponsor of international terrorism. Libya was also notorious for its multiyear pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. The Gaddafiregime was responsible for the 1988 terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland, which killed 270 people, including 189 Americans.
After 9/11, the Bush administration had a rare opportunity to persuade Libya—and perhaps some other terrorist-supporting or WMD-pursuing regimes—to choose a different path. I believed that if we put sufficient pressure on Afghanistan and Iraq, other countries might recognize that their interests in self-preservation meant that they too needed to end their support for terrorism and their WMD programs. This was the case with Gaddafi, who, After we invaded Iraq, reportedly told Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi that he did not want to become the next Saddam Hussein. It was not mere coincidence that only a few days After Hussein was plucked in such a degraded state from his subterranean spider hole and imprisoned in Iraq, Libya’s dictator acknowledged and agreed to dismantle his country’s long-running nuclear and chemical weapons programs.3
Though our activities elsewhere in the Middle East were gaining few headlines—we wanted it that way—the United States and its partners were also capturing and killing terrorists outside of Afghanistan and Iraq. Sensitive operations involving the CIA and U.S. special operations forces were ongoing in the Horn of Africa, Northern Africa, Pakistan, and Yemen, where terrorists had fled After we put pressure on them in their former sanctuaries in Afghanistan and Iraq. By developing relationships and establishing a presence in those countries beforehand, we made it harder