Issue
DECEMBER 4, 2020 LAST UPDATED 9:53 ET
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohamed bin
Zayed Al Nahyan attend an official welcome ceremony in Abu Dhabi, United Arab
Emirates, Oct. 15, 2019 (AP photo by Alexander Zemlianichenko).
The U.S.
Desperately Needs a Strategy to Deal With Russia’s Mercenary Armies
Candace Rondeaux Friday, Dec. 4, 2020
Reports this week that the United Arab
Emirates is potentially financing Russian mercenaries in Libya affiliated with
the notorious Wagner Group, according to a Pentagon watchdog, appear to be
sending mini shockwaves through Washington. But the UAE has long had a fixation on
mercenaries, and the fact that Russia is a regular supplier of
soldiers of fortune should surprise no one. Much more worrying is the lack of
policy coherence in Washington on what to do about it.
A seemingly insatiable appetite for
proxy wars and hired guns has helped fuel the rise of these shadow armies.
President-elect Joe Biden’s administration can quickly get at least one thing
right by standing up a joint task force on the proliferation of privatized
militaries and their implications for American national security. If Congress
is smart, it will take aggressive legislative steps to ensure that happens.
As first reported by Foreign Policy,
the Defense Department’s Inspector General in a recent report cited an
assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency that the UAE “may provide some
financing” for the Wagner Group’s operations in support of Libyan strongman
Khalifa Haftar. The news comes as members of Congress and human rights groups have
called for a halt to a pending $23 billion U.S. arms deal
with the UAE. It hardly seems like a coincidence that the
revelations, buried in a dense, 100-page
Pentagon report, follow congressional scrutiny of the Trump
administration’s aggressive push to ram through the sale of F-35 fighter jets and
drones to Abu Dhabi. The Pentagon report also noted that U.S. Africa
Command estimated that there were approximately 2,000 Russian-backed Syrian
fighters in Libya, echoing similar reporting from
Libya, including a recent U.N. report on mercenary
activity.
It’s anyone’s guess whether the UAE’s
apparent links to the Wagner Group will be enough for Congress to override
President Donald Trump’s potential year-end veto of a bipartisan Senate
resolution blocking the sale to the Emirates. But the allegations point to two
troubling challenges that Biden’s incoming national security team will face as
it tries to square the circle on Russia’s growing influence in both the Middle
East and Africa with America’s own long history of backing military strongmen
and authoritarian regimes there. First, Russia’s use of private military
security contractors to expand its reach threatens to complicate U.S. ties in
the Gulf considerably. Second, it could distract from the important U.S. goals
of winding down military engagement in the Middle East and stabilizing U.S
partners in the region and across Africa, if more careful consideration isn’t
given to policy options for dealing with the problem of mercenaries and
privatized militaries.
As it is, Congress and the American
people have developed a strong allergy for any further U.S. military
entanglements in the Middle East, including arms sales to the UAE and Saudi
Arabia for their disastrous war in Yemen. The UAE probably hasn’t done itself
any more favors if it has in fact cut deals to fund Russian mercenaries
implicated in human rights violations in Libya. The best evidence of that is
the ongoing tussle between the Trump administration and a bipartisan group of
lawmakers in the House and Senate that has repeatedly tried to block White
House-supported arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, given their abysmal
human rights record in Yemen, where they have been implicated in
war crimes using American weapons.
The fact that Russia is a regular
supplier of soldiers of fortune should surprise no one. More worrying is the
lack of policy coherence in Washington on what to do about it.
Last year, Trump invoked an emergency
provision in the Arms Export Control Act to sidestep a congressional halt on
billions of dollars in arms deals with both Gulf countries, and he then vetoed bipartisan measures
meant to stop the sales. Revelations about the UAE’s possible ties
to the Wagner Group are an indication that the schisms between Congress and the
White House over Emirati military adventurism is still problematic, even as
Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo scramble to stitch up their legacy
in the region via a series of last-minute normalization deals
between Israel and Arab states, which started with the UAE last summer. Saudi
Arabia would be the biggest prize. It also suggests potential internal divides
within key U.S. national security agencies that could persist long after Trump
is gone, making coordinated policy responses to Russia’s use of private
military contractors difficult for the next administration.
Russian paramilitaries are strengthening
the grip of authoritarians in both the UAE and Egypt, two of America’s supposed
allies in the region. Wagner Group operatives are likely supporting Russian
military air operations in Libya from the Egyptian coastal towns of Marsa
Matruh and Sidi Barrani, just over the border. Given the additional
implications of the heated competition between Russia, Turkey and other players
over the oil- and gas-rich waters of the Mediterranean, including off of
Libya’s coast, and the impact of proxy forces in Libya on migration, it is
obvious that European security interests will also
be affected by Russian mercenary operations for the foreseeable
future.
Even though U.S. intelligence agencies
are increasingly unified in their assessment that Russian mercenaries and the
front companies that the Kremlin uses to manage them pose a substantive threat
to U.S. interests, the Pentagon, the State Department and the Treasury
Department seemed divided over how to deal with this problem. That could be
another potential headache for Biden.
AFRICOM has been notably and commendably
aggressive in publishing detailed information about
the movements of Russian paramilitaries and materiel in Libya, as well as joint
Russian air operations with Haftar’s breakaway Libyan National Army. The
Treasury Department, too, has come down hard on the network of Russian firms backed by Kremlin insider
Yevgeny Prigozhin, sanctioning him for his alleged business
interests in a variety of security arrangements spearheaded by the Wagner Group
and the tangled web of Russian
political consultants and hackers for hire. The
State Department’s Global Engagement Center has also laid out detailed evidence
of the labyrinthine inner workings of Prigozhin’s suspected role in
Russia’s disinformation machinery.
Yet no U.S. government body has laid out
a compelling case for what, if anything, should be done about the fact that,
with or without Prigozhin, Russia’s deployment of privatized forces poses a
host of challenges for Washington and its allies. Most of the information about
the Wagner Group has been revealed through credible but unofficial channels of
enterprising investigative reporting. But other than the recent European blacklisting of
Prigozhin, reports in the media appear to have done little to
convince the EU and other U.S. allies of the need to take the problem of
Russian-backed mercenaries more seriously.
That is a glaring policy gap given all
the uproar at the Pentagon and the State Department about the rising threat of
great-power competition. Even if Biden’s team is unable to take up this thorny
issue of mercenaries more broadly right away, the new Congress can compel it to
do so in the next National Defense Authorization Act. It could stipulate that
the Pentagon work with the Treasury and State Departments to prepare a joint,
public report on the security challenges from Russian-backed privatized armies
in the Middle East and North Africa. If such a report turned up substantially
more credible evidence of the mercenaries’ widely suspected ties to widespread
money laundering, sanctions evasions, corruption and other illicit trade, then
Congress could take further action. At a minimum, Congress should consider
outsourcing deeper and more substantive monitoring of these shadow armies to a
body like the congressionally mandated Helsinki Commission, which already got
off to a good start by raising the issue publicly in a
hearing last year.
Whatever comes next from Biden and
Congress, inaction against the Wagner Group and the rest of Russia’s mercenary
network is no longer an option.
Candace Rondeaux is a senior fellow and
professor of practice at the Center on the Future of War, a joint initiative of
New America and Arizona State University. Her WPR column appears
every Friday.
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