WASHINGTON - In the early 1990s, the United States began beefing up Georgia's army as the tiny republic gained its independence from the collapsing Soviet Union - an effort accelerated after 9/11 in what President Bush said was a fight against al-Qaida.
That "train and equip" program is part of a growing, global American initiative to bolster military forces in such unlikely and unstable places as Ethiopia. Chad, Albania, Kazakhstan, Sri Lanka, Lebanon and Yemen.
Cease-fire
Russian military reportedly violates truce. PG 3A
But critics, pointing to the week's violent events in Georgia, say it is a dangerous form of proxy warfare that can get out of hand.
Indeed, after receiving American training and equipment worth more than $1.5 billion since 1992, Georgia used its military forces last week in a confrontation, not against al-Qaida terrorists, but with Russia. Georgia's bid to reassert control over the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia exploded into an international crisis.
"What happens when your client pursues an agenda that isn't your agenda?" observed Steven Biddle, an expert on warfare at the Council on Foreign Relations.
U.S. military assistance convinced the Georgians that "at the end of the day we would come to their aid," said Charles Kupchan, professor of international relations at Georgetown University. "It was a very serious miscalculation."
In a rhetorical escalation yesterday, Bush issued a stern statement from the White House that portrayed Russia as the aggressor and stressed that the United States "stands with the democratically elected government of Georgia."
As invading Russian troops and paramilitary forces took up positions outside the central Georgian city of Gori, blocking all east-west traffic in the country and reportedly looting and burning homes, Bush said he expects Russia to "cease all military activities in Georgia."
He said Russia should honor its commitment to withdraw "all Russian forces that entered Georgia in recent days." The phrase made no mention of the several thousand Russian "peacekeeping" troops stationed in the South Ossetia and Abkhazia regions since the mid-1990s.
Bush dispatched Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to stop in Paris to confer with European Union officials and then proceed to Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, to "rally the free world in the defense of a free Georgia."
