Foreign
Militaries, Domestic Tension
When
the Egyptian military toppled President Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood
politician elected in the summer of 2012, the Obama administration tied itself
in rhetorical knots trying to avoid declaring the obvious – that the July 3
event was a coup.
The
White House was clearly uneasy about cutting off a key strategic partner like
the Egyptian military, a move that would be required under a provision
regularly renewed by Congress that bars aid to any government that comes to
power through a coup.
-snip-
Leahy
and advocates of tough restrictions on the military’s ability to partner with
foreign security forces say there are good reasons for the current laws and
they worry there will be less accountability if more programs come under
Pentagon control.
“That
is a subject of great concern to me,” says Gordon Adams, an expert on the defense
and foreign affairs budgets at the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan Washington
think tank. The more Special Operations Command controls security assistance,
he says, “the more in the black it is, the more it is going to have a pure
security focus.”
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