Gordon Adams on the Pentagon-Pakistan "slush fund"

Gordon Adams has a great post on Democracy Arsenal which takes a closer look at Pentagon payments to Pakistan (which are only now coming under scrutiny in congress). Here's a clip (Note: there's more on DoD's usurpation of roles once performed by State in Adam's Bulletin of Atomic Scientists article...):

The Los Angeles Times of November 18, 2007 reports that the Pentagon is looking into Coalition Support payments to Pakistan (of which $5.3 b have been made to date), because documentation of the Pakistani spending supposedly being reimbursed is too thin...One unnamed official, who tracks these payments, told the LA Times: “"Backdoor subsidies is what it can look like to some more skeptical observers, because there hasn't been good oversight and the amounts involved have been so great.  There is suspicion that it's a slush fund."

No kidding! Count me a “skeptical observer.”  So now the Pentagon, which has no expertise at making foreign assistance payments directly to other governments or at tracking them after they are made, are going to play catch-up ball with this program. MORE

The government already has such a program and tracking system – it is called the Economic Support Funds program, with a policy decision process run by the State Department, and an implementation process run by USAID.

But, given that Don Rumsfeld’s Pentagon had no faith in or lost love for State when the war started, all those emergency supplementals for the so-called Global War on Terror, or GWOT gave the funding to Defense, and Defense, alone, with no cross-check with the foreign policy institutions of American government.

This program just continues a sad and sorry trend toward the dismantling of our foreign policy institutions, imperfect as they are, and the empowerment of the Defense Department to conduct our nation’s foreign and security policy. Today DOD is increasingly doling out the funds that support that policy, whether they are Coalition Support Funds for Pakistan (and Jordan and others), or emergency reconstruction aid through the military’s Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP - over $3 b. since 2004), or the big kahuna, a military assistance program called “Train and Equip” for which we have already spent over $20 b. in Afghanistan and Iraq, which is now going global.

These programs all have their analogs at State-USAID, whether it is ESF, devel,opment assistance, or Foreign Military Financing. But all this activity is going on outside the foreign policy authorities of State, or, at best, with the “concurrence” of the Secretary of State. But DOD draws up and implements the programs, using their own budget and their own authorities.

Oversight on these programs fails in three ways. Defense has never run major foreign assistance programs in the past, so they have no preparation for conducting oversight. In any case, DOD’s mission is to get the GWOT military job done, not track spending or make sure it is aligned with overall U.S. foreign policy.

State fails, too. It can only audit this spending after the fact, has a small staff to conduct such oversight, and it does not have authority to do even that with respect to Coalition Support Funds.

Congressional oversight fails because these programs use defense funds and are not scrutinized by the Foreign Relations committees or their matching appropriators. DOD’s funds for these programs appear large, but they are a drop in the bucket in a $600 b. plus defense budget. So neither the Armed Services committees nor the defense appropriators have or take the time to give these growing programs the kind of scrutiny they require.

Coalition support funding was a disaster waiting to happen – lots of money, little oversight, and a corrupt government on the other end. It is time to reexamine whether Coalition support is even worthwhile and to take authority over these programs away from DOD, who cannot do the job, and put it where it belongs – the foreign policy institutions of the executive branch.

And it is time for Congress to wake up and realize that its foreign relations committees are lost in the wilderness on this program, and need to sit up and take notice, before whole chunks of U.S. security policy are being run by DOD with little foreign policy oversight or accounting control.