Obama must not make the same mistakes as Bush
By Tony Karon, The National, December 13, 2008

… the claim by the hawks that Iran has enough material for one nuclear bomb is a little misleading: if it spent another year or so feeding its low-enriched uranium through its centrifuges to attain weapons-grade enrichment, it would have enough material for a bomb – but it could only do this by breaking with the NPT, kicking out the IAEA inspectors and unsealing the stored uranium, thereby alerting the world to its intentions. Nothing like this has happened, of course, despite Iran’s defying the demand of the UN Security Council that it halt all uranium enrichment to satisfy concerns over the transparency of its programme: even the enrichment in defiance of UN demands is taking place under the monitoring of the IAEA.

The standoff, then, isn’t so much about what Iran is doing now, as about what Iran could do if it maintains a uranium-enrichment capability on its soil. Iran insists that enrichment is its right under the NPT; the Western response is that Iran can’t be trusted to exercise all the rights it enjoys under the NPT, because this would give its leaders the option of breaking out of the NPT and moving very quickly to assemble a bomb. Amid the deadlock, Iranian negotiators seek mechanisms for reassuring the West of its intentions, and Western negotiators seek to coax the Iranians into refraining from exercising all of its NPT rights in exchange for various economic carrots. But neither side is moving.

Nor is this policy likely to be any more effective in the hands of Mr Obama than it was in the hands of Bush. That is because it is obsessively focused on preventing Iran from obtaining a particular weapons capability, without addressing the circumstances that might provoke it into doing so. The primary problem is not the weapons themselves – after all, the US enjoyed a nuclear monopoly for only three years, and has since learnt to live with at least eight other countries, among them friend and foe, having attained strategic nuclear capability. The problem is the strategic conflict between Iran and the US and its allies, in which such a weapons capability would change the balance of power.

Nations typically pursue nuclear capability as the ultimate guarantor of their survival, because they deter any enemy from using conventional or nuclear military superiority to eliminate a regime. And if Iran were to seek nuclear weapons capability, a sober analysis suggests that its aim would be to assure its own survival rather than to initiate a suicidal exchange with any other nation. [continued…]

Tehran diplomat says nuclear sanctions have united Iran
Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran’s ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency interviewed by the Los Angeles Times, December 13, 2008

LAT: What should they have done, what could they have done, to build trust instead of build suspicion?

Ali Asghar Soltanieh: They should have studied Iranian culture. We have maybe five or six types of phrases to tell somebody to sit down. One of them is very friendly. The other one is something unacceptable. . . .

There is a confidence deficit from our side too. We have suspicions too. They should have sat down at the negotiation table, and just reviewed both sides in a very pragmatic, realistic and equal footing.

As soon as they use the notion of preconditions, it’s destined to failure, because we would never accept such preconditions. This is again part of our culture, because it is humiliation. I will never accept the Americans as a superpower. We made a revolution in order not to accept anybody as a superpower; this is the crux of the matter. [continued…]

Report spotlights Iraq rebuilding blunders
By James Glanz and T Christian Miller, New York Times, December 14, 2008

An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.

The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag — particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army — the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.

In one passage, for example, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is quoted as saying that in the months after the 2003 invasion, the Defense Department “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the number would jump 20,000 a week! ‘We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.’ ”

Mr. Powell’s assertion that the Pentagon inflated the number of competent Iraqi security forces is backed up by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former commander of ground troops in Iraq, and L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator until an Iraqi government took over in June 2004.

Among the overarching conclusions of the history is that five years after embarking on its largest foreign reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War II, the United States government has in place neither the policies and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake such a program on anything approaching this scale. [continued…]

The other front
By Sarah Chayes, Washington Post, December 14, 2008

I arrived in Kandahar in December 2001, just days after Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar was chased out. After a moment of holding its breath, the city erupted in joy. Kites danced on the air for the first time in six years. Buyers flocked to stalls selling music cassettes. I listened to opium dealers discuss which of them would donate the roof of his house for use as a neighborhood school. I, a barefaced American woman, encountered no hostility at all. Curiosity, plenty. But no hostility. Enthusiasm for the nascent government of Hamid Karzai and its international backers was absolutely universal.

Since then, the hopes expressed by every Afghan I have encountered — to be ruled by a responsive and respectful government run by educated people — have been dashed. Now, Afghans are suffering so acutely that they hardly feel the difference between Taliban depredations and those of their own government. “We’re like a man trying to stand on two watermelons,” one of the women in my cooperative complains. “The Taliban shake us down at night, and the government shakes us down in the daytime.”

I hear from Westerners that corruption is intrinsic to Afghan culture, that we should not hold Afghans up to our standards. I hear that Afghanistan is a tribal place, that it has never been, and can’t be, governed.

But that’s not what I hear from Afghans. [continued…]

Sarah Chayes interview (video)
Bill Moyers Journal, February 22, 2008

After reporting for National Public Radio in the Balkans, North Africa, and the Middle East, as well as nearer her base in Paris, Sarah Chayes left journalism in 2002 to help rebuild Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban regime. She has launched a cooperative in the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, producing fine skin-care products from local fruits, nuts, and botanicals. (www.arghand.org) The aim is to discourage opium production by helping farmers earn a living from licit crops, as well as to encourage collective decision-making. From this position, deeply embedded in Kandahar’s everyday life, Ms. Chayes has gained unparalleled insights into a troubled region.

Beginning in 2002, Ms. Chayes served in Kandahar as Field Director for Afghans for Civil Society, a non-profit group founded by Qayum Karzai, President Hamid Karzai’s older brother. Under Ms. Chayes’s leadership, ACS rebuilt a village destroyed during the anti-Taliban conflict, launched a successful income-generation project for Kandahar women, launched the most popular radio station in southern Afghanistan, and conducted a number of policy studies. Later, she ran a dairy cooperative. [continued…]

With house arrest Pakistan curbs, lightly, a leader tied to Mumbai attackers
By Richard A Oppel Jr and Salman Masood, New York Times, December 13, 2008

On a normal Friday afternoon the line of cars and red Honda motorbikes outside the Qadssiya mosque stretches to a gas station a half mile away. Eight thousand worshipers typically come to hear Hafiz Muhammad Saeed preach at the headquarters of the organization he leads, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the charity that fronts for the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba. The two-tiered mosque can accommodate only a portion of the crowd, so the remainder spill out onto a broad concrete courtyard.

But this Friday the road outside was clear, and the few thousand who showed up were all able to fit inside. The day before, the Pakistani authorities had put Mr. Saeed under house arrest and closed dozens of the group’s offices across the country. Many followers were unnerved.

“The government has created a panic,” said Mohammed Nawaz, 35, one of the mosque administrators, who estimated that only one in four people came to this week’s services. “Our leader has been arrested, so what happens if they come to prayers? Not a lot of people have come today. People are not certain what will happen next.” [continued…]

9 is not 11
By Arundhati Roy, TomDispatch, December 12, 2008

We’ve forfeited the rights to our own tragedies. As the carnage in Mumbai raged on, day after horrible day, our 24-hour news channels informed us that we were watching “India’s 9/11.” And like actors in a Bollywood rip-off of an old Hollywood film, we’re expected to play our parts and say our lines, even though we know it’s all been said and done before.

As tension in the region builds, U.S. Senator John McCain has warned Pakistan that, if it didn’t act fast to arrest the “bad guys,” he had personal information that India would launch air strikes on “terrorist camps” in Pakistan and that Washington could do nothing because Mumbai was India’s 9/11.

But November isn’t September, 2008 isn’t 2001, Pakistan isn’t Afghanistan, and India isn’t America. So perhaps we should reclaim our tragedy and pick through the debris with our own brains and our own broken hearts so that we can arrive at our own conclusions. [continued…]

Media pick up where they left off 8 years ago
By Jamison Foser, Media Matters, December 13, 2008

To anyone who lived through the media feeding frenzy of the 1990s, during which the nation’s leading news organizations spent the better part of a decade destroying their own credibility by relentlessly hyping a series of non-scandals, the past few days, in which the media have tried to shoehorn Barack Obama into the Rod Blagojevich scandal, have been sickeningly familiar.

Whenever reporters think — or want you to think — they’ve uncovered a presidential scandal, they waste little time in comparing it to previous controversies. Yesterday, CNN’s Rick Sanchez tried desperately to get the phrase “Blagogate” to stick — the latest in a long and overwhelmingly annoying post-Watergate pattern of ham-handed efforts to hype a scandal by appending the suffix “-gate” to the end of a word.

Sanchez’s efforts to create a catchphrase aside, the criminal complaint filed against Blagojevich this week isn’t the Watergate of the 21st century — though it shows signs that it may become this decade’s Whitewater. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — The difference between now and eight years ago is that now the media has a powerful co-conspirator in its relentless effort to trivialize public life: the blogosphere. But while journalists are like ticks encourging themselves on the back of the pig of capitalism, bloggers — who by and large gain no personal profit from their petty fascinations — are like rats who enjoy nothing more than breathing in the sweet aroma that wafts out of the pigs’ pen…

I hope I didn’t offend anyone! (Of course I’m not talking about all bloggers and all journalists — just making a point.)

Gore’s great shout out
By Andrew Light, Wonk Room, December 13, 2008

In front of a capacity crowd in the largest hall available at this year’s UN climate change conference, Al Gore gave a dramatic address on the possibilities and the hurdles before the climate change community. The biggest, longest applause line by far (complete with hoots and whoops) went to his indirect endorsement of Bill McKibben’s 350 campaign inaugurated on the instigation of an argument first floated by NASA’s James Hansen in a paper released shortly after last year’s UN climate change meeting in Bali. According to Hansen, “We need to reduce from today’s atmospheric CO2, about 385 parts per million, to 350ppm. We are already too high to maintain the climate to which humanity, wildlife, and the rest of the biosphere are adapted. (. . .) This target must be pursued on a timescale of decades.” [continued…]

Is the US ready to tackle global warming?
By Paul Woodward, The National, December 14, 2008

By the time the UN climate conference in Poland wound up on Saturday, expectations that under the incoming Obama administration America will rise to the challenge of tackling climate change, were not as strong as they had been. A prediction that next December’s meeting in Copenhagen might merely lay the groundwork for further talks and not a ratifiable treaty, was met with dismay by many of the conference participants.

Betsy Taylor, an NGO observer at Poznan wrote: “Over the past few days, several US opinion leaders have adopted a very pessimistic stance on the prospects of achieving meaningful federal climate policy in the United States or a deal in Copenhagen. These political insiders allegedly want to help manage expectations for the incoming Obama administration but their ‘we can’t’ attitude is grabbing the headlines here and at home and causing a growing sense of resignation just as hopes had risen with the promise of a new American president.” [continued…]

Palestinian presidential follies
By Gersham Gorenberg, The American Prospect, December 11, 2008

Despite all appearances, the United States only has one president at a time. Come Jan. 9, however, the enigmatic entity known as the Palestinian Authority could have two rival presidents — one in the besieged non-state of Gaza, the other in the fragmented Israeli protectorate in the West Bank. Each will claim to be the sole legitimate leader of the Palestinians. The mutually destructive rift between the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip and the Fatah-governed territory in the West Bank will deepen and be harder to bridge.

If Barack Obama entertains the notion of pushing for Palestinian-Israeli peace — as I hope he does — he’ll find that the challenge has become even more daunting. George W. Bush, the fading presence still in the White House, won’t do anything to solve the latest Palestinian political crisis. To the extent that the United States has an influence, Obama will need to act — shall we say, pre-presidentially. [continued…]

The changing face of Israel
By John Mearsheimer, TPMCafe Book Club, December 12, 2008

Avraham Burg obviously believes that the occupation has had a deeply corrupting effect on Israel. But there is something else going on inside Israel that worries him greatly: the changing nature of that society. He says, for example, that “Israeli society is split to its core,” and although he does not detail the specifics of that divide, it is apparent that it has a political and a religious dimension. He believes that the political center of gravity in Israel has shifted markedly to the right. Indeed, he believes that the left has “decreased in numbers and become marginal.” He also sees the balance between secular and religious Israelis shifting in favor of the latter, which is why he writes that “the establishment of a state run by rabbis and generals is not an impossible nightmare.”

I would like to try to buttress Burg’s analysis by pointing out some trends in Israeli society that are having and will continue to have a profound effect on the Jewish state over time, but which are hardly talked about in the mainstream media here in America. Specifically, I would like to focus on the growth of the ultra-Orthodox or Haredi in Israel, and emigration out of Israel, or what one might call “reverse Aliyah.” [continued…]

Gen Hayden and the claimed irrelevance of presidential appointments
By Glenn Greenwald, Salon, December 8, 2008

Until five weeks ago, I literally never heard anyone claim — in either party — that it was irrelevant who the President appointed to his Cabinet and other high-level positions. I never heard anyone depict people like the Defense Secretary and CIA Director as nothing more than impotent little functionaries — the equivalent of entry-level clerical workers — who exert no power and do nothing other than obediently carry out the President’s orders.

In fact, I seem to recall pretty vividly all sorts of confirmation fights led by Democrats over the last eight years (John Aschroft, John Bolton, Alberto Gonzales, Michael Hayden, Steven Bradbury) — to say nothing of the efforts to force the resignation or dismissal of people such as Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Gonzales — that was based on exactly the opposite premise: namely, that it does matter who is empowered to lead these agencies and departments, and specifically, that their ideology not only matters, but can, by itself, warrant rejection. Nobody ever claimed that Ashcroft, Bolton or Hayden were “unqualified.” It was their beliefs and ideology that rendered them unfit for those positions, argued Democrats.

When and why did everyone suddenly decide to change their minds about this and start repeating the mantra of some Obama supporters that high-level appointments are irrelevant because only the President counts? For the people who now make this claim to justify Obama’s appointments, were any of them objecting during any of the above-listed confirmation fights that those fights were wasteful and unjustified because presidential appointments are irrelevant? [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — To suspend judgment on Obama’s cabinet appointments before either he or they have taken office is not exactly giving anyone a free ride. And the idea that Obama’s choices have been driven by a false dichotomy drawn between competance and ideology seems bogus.

Two issues are really at play:
1. A real tension between ideology and pragmatism, and
2. The leadership skills of the incoming president.

1. Now more than ever, governance requires evidence-based decision making. If there is reason to think that any of Obama’s picks have ideological fixations that compromise their ability to engage in nimble adaptation, he’s choosing the wrong people.

2. Obama has said: “Understand where the vision for change comes from, first and foremost. It comes from me. That’s my job, to provide a vision in terms of where we are going and to make sure then that my team is implementing [that vision].”

That doesn’t mean that we should now mindlessly express support for all his cabinet choice. What it does mean is that once he’s in office we need to pay attention to whether his vision really is molding the decision-making process, or whether his subordinates are off pursuing their own agendas.

At this point I’m willing to make what might sound like a naive assumption: it is that those who have accepted plum positions do not see these simply as servings from the pie of political power; they see themselves as having a unique opportunity to play a part in the Obama presidency. In other words, they see that Obama brings with him an exceptional political resource. It’s not political capital with a mandate to impose an agenda; it’s political goodwill that will allow Obama to soften opposition to measures that would otherwise meet stiff resistance.

The question that the success or failure of the next administration hinges upon is this: will Obama’s flexibility turn out to be his greatest strength or his greatest weakness?

Naturally, as someone who tends to view the world through a loosely Taoist prism, my expectation is that we’ll see flexible strength. We’ll see…

The Taliban are back
The International Council on Security and Development, December 8, 2008

While the international community’s prospects in Afghanistan have never been bleaker, the Taliban has been experiencing a renaissance that has gained momentum since 2005. At the end of 2001, uprooted from its strongholds and with its critical mass shattered, it was viewed as a spent force. It was naively assumed by the US and its allies that the factors which propelled the Taliban to prominence in Afghanistan would become moribund in parallel to its expulsion from the country. The logic ran that as ordinary Afghans became aware of the superiority of a western democratic model, and the benefits of that system flowed down to every corner of the country, then the Taliban’s rule would be consigned to the margins of Afghan history.

However, as seven years of missed opportunity have rolled by, the Taliban has rooted itself across increasing swathes of Afghan territory. According to research undertaken by ICOS throughout 2008, the Taliban now has a permanent presence in 72% of the country. Moreover, it is now seen as the de facto governing power in a number of southern towns and villages. This figure is up from 54% in November 2007, as outlined in the ICOS report Stumbling into Chaos: Afghanistan on the Brink. The increase in their geographic spread illustrates that the Taliban’s political, military and economic strategies are now more successful than the West’s in Afghanistan. Confident in their expansion beyond the rural south, the Taliban are at the gates of the capital and infiltrating the city at will.

Of the four doors leading out of Kabul, three are now compromised by Taliban activity. The roads to the west, towards the Afghan National Ring Road through Wardak to Kandahar become unsafe for Afghan or international travel by the time travellers reach the entrance to Wardak province, which is about thirty minutes from the city limits. The road south to Logar is no longer safe for Afghan or international travel. The road east to Jalalabad is not safe for Afghan or international travel once travellers reach the Sarobi Junction which is about an hour outside of the city. Of the two roads leaving the city to the north only one – the road towards the Panjshir valley, Salang tunnel and Mazar – is considered safe for Afghan and international travel. The second road towards the north which leads to the Bagram Air Base is frequently used by foreign and military convoys and subject to insurgent attacks. [continued…]

Risk factors
By Geroge Packer, The New Yorker, December 15, 2008

Some commentators have simply demanded that Pakistan rid itself of the virus of extremism that threatens its own security as well as its neighbors’. But which Pakistan is going to do it? The weak civilian government of President Asif Zardari? The two-faced security services? The tribal leaders along the Afghanistan border? The huge, overwhelmingly poor, tumultuous population? The core problem is that Pakistan is no longer really a country, if it ever was. [continued…]

Convoy attacks trigger race to open new Afghan supply lines
By Richard Norton-Taylor, Julian Borger and Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian, December 9, 2008

Nato countries are scrambling for alternative routes as far afield as Belarus and Ukraine to supply their forces in Afghanistan, which are increasingly vulnerable to a resurgent Taliban, the Guardian has learned.

Four serious attacks on US and Nato supplies in Pakistan during the past month, including two in the past three days, have added to the sense of urgency to conclude pacts with former Soviet republics bordering Afghanistan to the north.

Nato is negotiating with Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to allow supplies for Nato forces, including fuel, to cross borders into Afghanistan from the north. The deal, which officials said was close to being agreed, follows an agreement with Moscow this year allowing Nato supplies to be transported by rail or road through Russia. [continued…]

Confusion persists over suspects arrested in Pakistan
By Laura King, Los Angeles Times, December 9, 2008

Pakistani officials offered contradictory statements Monday as to whether an accused mastermind of the Mumbai attacks was among those arrested when Pakistani troops swooped down a day earlier on an alleged militant camp.

A terse statement from the military late Monday acknowledged an unspecified number of arrests in Sunday’s operation in the Pakistani-controlled slice of Kashmir, but it did not address whether Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi, a senior figure in the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group, was in custody.

Witnesses said troops sealed off the camp, outside the regional capital, Muzaffarabad, and briefly battled those holed up within.

Two senior Pakistani officials said early Monday that they believed Lakhvi was among those arrested, but two others said later in the day that, to their knowledge, Lakhvi was not one of more than a dozen suspected militants detained. All four officials spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the issue. [continued…]

Gates’ plan to fix the Pentagon
By Fred Kaplan, Slate, December 5, 2008

It is unusual for an incoming Cabinet officer to spell out a precise agenda or to define the standards by which his performance should be judged before the president has even been sworn in. But that’s exactly what now-and-future Defense Secretary Robert Gates has just done with an article in the upcoming issue of Foreign Affairs.

Gates probably didn’t set out to do that when he wrote the article, which was based on a speech he delivered at the National Defense University in September, before the election had taken place.

Yet the article, titled “A Balanced Strategy: Reprogramming the Pentagon for a New Age,” urges his successor at the Pentagon to take particular actions. Now that he’s turned out to be his successor, we can watch how closely he follows his advice. [continued…]

Situation in Somalia seems about to get worse
By Jeffrey Gettleman, New York Times, December 6, 2008

Somalia’s transitional government looks as if it is about to flatline. The Ethiopians who have been keeping it alive for two years say they are leaving the country, essentially pulling the plug.

For the past 17 years, Somalia has been ripped apart by anarchy, violence, famine and greed. It seems as though things there can never get worse. But then they do.

The pirates off Somalia’s coast are getting bolder, wilier and somehow richer, despite an armada of Western naval ships hot on their trail. Shipments of emergency food aid are barely keeping much of Somalia’s population of nine million from starving. The most fanatical wing of Somalia’s Islamist insurgency is gobbling up territory and imposing its own harsh brand of Islamic law, like whipping dancers and stoning a 13-year-old girl to death.

And now, with the government on the brink and the Islamists seeming ready to seize control for the second time, the operative question inside and outside Somalia seems to be: Now what? [continued…]

Transition’s timing hits climate talks
By Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post, December 8, 2008

Barack Obama’s pledge to make the United States a leader in confronting global warming raised hopes that his election would rapidly end the long impasse in international negotiations over climate change, but the timing of the presidential transition has severely dimmed those expectations as the current round of talks comes to a head this week in Poland.

The U.S. delegates still report to President Bush, and they made it clear last week that they will not commit to specific reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that would bind the incoming administration. Obama, meanwhile, has hewed to his one-president-at-a-time policy and declined to send his representatives to the Poznan meeting, as many had expected.

The result, a number of negotiators say, is that the world will have a hard time meeting the long-standing 2009 target for reaching a binding agreement on carbon emissions reductions to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

The delicate state of the global climate talks — weighted down by the worldwide financial crisis — highlights the challenges the negotiators face. The Bush administration and its allies successfully resisted setting specific climate goals during the past few negotiating rounds, and there are doubts that Obama can get Congress to approve a sufficiently ambitious national carbon cap by the time delegates meet again next December in Copenhagen. And without a U.S. commitment in place, other nations will be reluctant to sign a deal. [continued…]

Capitalist fools
By Joseph Stiglitz, Vanity Fair, December, 2008

There will come a moment when the most urgent threats posed by the credit crisis have eased and the larger task before us will be to chart a direction for the economic steps ahead. This will be a dangerous moment. Behind the debates over future policy is a debate over history—a debate over the causes of our current situation. The battle for the past will determine the battle for the present. So it’s crucial to get the history straight.

What were the critical decisions that led to the crisis? Mistakes were made at every fork in the road—we had what engineers call a “system failure,” when not a single decision but a cascade of decisions produce a tragic result. Let’s look at five key moments. [continued…]

Obama vs. Osama
By Michael Crowley, The New Republic, December 24, 2008

Around the time of the November election, John Nagl, a retired Army Colonel, took a helicopter ride across Afghanistan. What he saw below worried him. Nagl, who is 42 with trim brown hair and academic eyeglasses, spent three years in Iraq, including as part of a tank battalion in the Sunni Triangle, where he witnessed brutal combat in the war’s worst years. A West Point graduate and Rhodes Scholar, Nagl applied the lessons of his Iraq experience to the Army-Marine Counterinsurgency Field Manual, which he helped write and which was published last year. He currently specializes in the study of war and counterinsurgency at the Center for a New American Security, a center-left Washington think tank, and it is in this capacity that he recently traveled to the Afghan war zone. As his military chopper swooped over high mountain ridges and plunging valleys, he grimly surveyed the size and the inhospitality of the Afghan terrain. Winning in Afghanistan, he realized, would take more than “a little tweak,” as he put it to me from back in Washington a few weeks later, when he was still shaking off the gritty “Kabul crud” that afflicts traveler’s lungs. It would take time, money, and blood. “It’s a doubling of the U.S. commitment,” Nagl said. “It’s a doubling of the Afghan army, maybe a tripling. It’s going to require a tax increase and a bigger army.”

For the left in the Bush era, America’s two wars have long been divided into the good and the bad. Iraq was the moral and strategic catastrophe, while Afghanistan–home base for the September 11 attacks–was a righteous fight. This dichotomy was especially appealing to liberals because it allowed them to pair their call for withdrawal from Iraq with a call for escalation in Afghanistan. Leaving Iraq wasn’t about retreating; it was about bolstering another front, one where our true strategic interests lie. The left could meet conservative charges of defeatism with the rhetoric of victory. Barack Obama is now getting ready to turn this idea into policy. He has already called for sending an additional two U.S. brigades, or roughly 10,000 troops, to the country and may wind up proposing a much larger escalation in what candidate Obama has called “the war we need to win.”

But, as Nagl understands at the ground level, winning in Afghanistan will take more than just shifting a couple of brigades from the bad war to the good one. Securing Afghanistan–and preserving a government and society we can be proud of–is vastly more challenging than the rhetoric of the campaign has suggested. Taliban fighters are bolder and crueler than ever–beheading dozens of men at a time, blasting the capital with car bombs, killing NATO troops with sniper fire and roadside explosives. Meanwhile, the recent savagery in Mumbai has India and Pakistan at each other’s throats again, a development that indirectly benefits Afghan insurgents. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — The Taliban seem to have picked up a trick from native American Indians: they’re sending smoke signals. They come out of Peshawar. The smoke rises up and the message goes out: here are your precious tax dollars going up in smoke. Send us a few more dozen Humvees; we’ll happily burn them up too. After 100 military trucks went up in smoke on Sunday, a US military spokesman assured reporters, “It’s a very insignificant loss in terms of everything transported into Afghanistan.” Within 24 hours another 50 containers had been torched. How many more statements can Col. Greg Julian come out with before he starts being called “Kabul Bob”?

America’s failure in Afghanistan seems no less certain than that of the Soviet Union. The only unanswered question is whether in the aftermath we can avoid experiencing similar economic ruin. The signs are not good.

“How badly do we want to win this war to ensure that nobody can use this territory to kill three thousand Americans again?” John Nagl asks. “I’m willing to pay an extra dollar a gallon of gas for that to happen–who’s with me?”

Let’s have a referrendum. If Americans can be assured of the absolute secrecy of the ballot, I suspect most will slyly opt for the cheaper gas.

Taliban expanding foothold in Afghanistan, report finds
By Yochi J. Dreazen, Wall Street Journal, December 7, 2008

The Taliban have expanded their footprint in Afghanistan and now have a permanent presence in nearly three-quarters of the country, according to a new report.

The Paris-based International Council on Security and Development, a think tank that maintains full-time offices in Afghanistan, said the Taliban have spread across much of the country and are beginning to encircle the capital, Kabul.

The group said Taliban fighters have advanced out of southern Afghanistan, a region where they often hold de facto governing power, and carry out regular attacks in western and northwestern Afghanistan as well as in and around Kabul. Taliban forces can be found in 72% of Afghanistan, up from 54% a year earlier.

“While the international community’s prospects in Afghanistan have never been bleaker, the Taliban has been experiencing a renaissance that has gained momentum since 2005,” the report said. “The West is in genuine danger of losing Afghanistan.” [continued…]

Militants strike as Pakistan cracks down
By Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times, December 9, 2008

Asia Times Online has learned that the public faces of the Jamaatut Dawa, such as its chief Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, will be spared. But people such as Zakiur Rahman, the commander-in-chief of the LET, are marked men for interrogation by a joint US Federal Bureau of Investigation-ISI team for their alleged role in the Mumbai attack.

A senior member of the LET confirmed to Asia Times Online that there had been a raid on one of the Jamaatut Dawa’s offices, and warned that if Zakiur Rahman was grilled, it would be tantamount to civil war in Pakistan.

“So far the province of Punjab [the largest Pakistani province] has been spared from all sorts of violence, but if such action is carried out, Punjab will also burn in violence,” he said.

The latest move might go some way to appeasing the US, but militancy cannot be easily stamped out – it has a habit of re-inventing itself. [continued…]

Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, ‘Mumbai mastermind’, among 12 arrested in Pakistan raids
By Zahid Hussain and Jeremy Page, The Times, December 8, 2008

Pakistani security forces have raided a training camp used by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the militant group blamed for last month’s attack on Mumbai, and arrested at least 12 of the group’s activists, government officials said today.

One Pakistani official told The Times that among those arrested was Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, LeT’s operations chief, whom Indian officials have accused of masterminding the Mumbai attack.

The raid last night near Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, was Pakistan’s first attempt to respond to mounting pressure from India and the United States to take action against LeT after the Mumbai strike.

It is unlikely to satisfy either Delhi or Washington unless Islamabad follows up by prosecuting those arrested and taking further action against other militant groups linked to attacks on Indian soil. [continued…]

Pakistan’s spies aided group tied to Mumbai siege
By Eric Schmitt, Mark Mazzetti and Jane Perlez, New York Times, December 8, 2008

Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based militant group suspected of conducting the Mumbai attacks, has quietly gained strength in recent years with the help of Pakistan’s main spy service, assistance that has allowed the group to train and raise money while other militants have been under siege, American intelligence and counterterrorism officials say.

American officials say there is no hard evidence to link the spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, to the Mumbai attacks. But the ISI has shared intelligence with Lashkar and provided protection for it, the officials said, and investigators are focusing on one Lashkar leader they believe is a main liaison with the spy service and a mastermind of the attacks. [continued…]

Pakistan militant group builds web of Western recruits
By Sebastian Rotella, Los Angeles Times, December 8, 2008

The Pakistani extremist group suspected in the Mumbai rampage remains a distant shadow for most Americans. But the threat is much nearer than it seems.

For years, Lashkar-e-Taiba has actively recruited Westerners, especially Britons and Americans, serving as a kind of farm team for Islamic militants who have gone on to execute attacks for Al Qaeda, a close ally. The Pakistani network makes its training camps accessible to English speakers, providing crucial skills to an increasingly young and Western-born generation of extremists. [continued…]

Revenge of the nerds
By Peter Beinart, The Daily Beast, December 8, 2008

By electing Barack Obama, the American people have proved a lot of political clichés wrong: that Americans wouldn’t elect a black man, or a northern Democrat, or a senator, or someone without extensive national security experience in a time of war. But there’s another cliché that has also bitten the dust, even though it hasn’t received much attention. By electing Barack Obama, Americans have showed that you can win the presidency without appearing dumb.

For more than a half-century, anti-intellectualism has had a pretty good run in presidential politics. In fact, Republicans would never have gotten where they are without it. In the 1950s, when the modern conservative movement was born, the right had a problem: It was seen as elitist, a hangover from the depression years, when Thomas Nast-style plutocrats opposed social security, labor unions and federal aid to the poor. Conservatives needed a way to turn the tables, to show that liberals—those self-proclaimed tribunes of the common man—were the real elitists. That’s where anti-intellectualism came in. If FDR had practiced class warfare, the Cold War right turned to brain warfare instead. William F. Buckley, founder of the right’s flagship publication, National Review, began going around saying that “I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.” [continued…]

Pakistan could be listed as state sponsor of terrorism
By Paul Woodward, The National, December 7, 2008

A proposal to place Pakistan on the US government’s list of state sponsors of terrorism is again being reconsidered long after it was first raised in 1992, according to The Times of India. A decision is not expected until after Barack Obama takes office in January and in the intervening period, Islamabad’s response to the Mumbai attack will determine whether Washington moves forward with such a sanction. [continued…]

End of the line for Islamabad
By Fareed Zacharia, Newsweek, December 6, 2008

Whether the Pakistani military was involved in the Mumbai attacks remains unclear. The Indians certainly think so. “The attackers were trained in four places in Pakistan by men with titles like colonel and major. They used communication channels that are known ISI channels. All this can’t happen without the knowledge of the military,” one Indian official told me. They’re not alone in their suspicions. “This was a three-stage amphibious operation. [The attackers] maintained radio silence, launched diversionary attacks to pull the first responders out of the way, knew their way around the hotels, were equipped with cryptographic communications, credit cards, false IDs,” says David Kilcullen, a counter-insurgency expert who has advised Gen. David Petraeus. “It looks more like a classical special forces or commando operation than a terrorist one. No group linked to Al Qaeda and certainly not Lashkar has ever mounted a maritime attack of this complexity.” Which would be worse: if the Pakistani military knew about this operation in advance, or if they didn’t?

The situation in South Asia is very complicated. But one thing is clear. All roads lead through Rawalpindi, the headquarters of the Pakistani military. For decades it has sponsored militant groups like Lashkar and the Taliban as a low-cost strategy to bleed India and influence Afghanistan. It now faces a choice. Unless Pakistan changes how it conceives of its interests and strategy, the country will remain an unstable place, distrusted by all its neighbors. Even the Chinese, longtime allies, have begun worrying about the spread of Islamic extremism. Pakistan needs to take a civilian, not a military, view of its national interest, one in which good relations with India lead to trade, economic growth and stability. Of course, in such a world Pakistan wouldn’t need a military that swallows up a quarter of the government’s budget and rules the country like a privileged elite.

The one country that could do more than any other to change the military’s mind-set is America. For India to bomb some Lashkar training camps would be to attack the symptoms, not the source of the rot—and would only fuel sympathy for the militants among ordinary Pakistanis. To the contrary, what the world needs is for Pakistan to decide on its own that its prospects are diminished by tolerance of such groups. American diplomacy has been fast and effective so far. But we must keep the pressure on Islamabad, and get countries like China and Saudi Arabia involved as well. President-elect Barack Obama has proposed aid to Pakistan that has sensible conditions attached, meant to help modernize the country. [continued…]

A new path for Afghanistan
By Lakhdar Brahimi, Washington Post, December 7, 2008

A new strategy is urgently required. It must be a collective effort of Afghans and all their foreign partners. Three sets of questions — yet to be answered properly — should provide the starting point for discussions.

First, what is the Taliban, whom does it represent, how powerful is it and what does does it want? Are Afghans leaving or joining its ranks, and why? How much of the insecurity in Afghanistan can rightfully be attributed to the Taliban?

Second, what will it take to build a strong relationship of mutual confidence between Afghanistan and Pakistan? Such a relationship is indispensable, because it is a geopolitical reality that peace cannot be sustained in Afghanistan if Pakistan is opposed to it.

Third, to what degree are major developments in the region affecting the relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan and, more generally, shaping the context for progress in Afghanistan?

Seven years ago, the Taliban was routed and vanished from Kabul and other big cities, but it never surrendered to anyone. It stood to reason that its intentions and strength would have a major bearing on the country’s future. The United Nations therefore made two suggestions in early 2002: to reach out to those members of the Taliban potentially willing to join the political process; and to deploy the ISAF outside of Kabul, with significantly increased strength. Both fell on deaf ears. I regret bitterly not having advocated even more forcefully for these proposals at the highest levels. Their pursuit then might have changed the course of events in Afghanistan. [continued…]

U.S. plans a shift to focus troops on Kabul region
By Kirk Semple, New York Times, December 7, 2008

Most of the additional American troops arriving in Afghanistan early next year will be deployed near the capital, Kabul, American military commanders here say, in a measure of how precarious the war effort has become.

It will be the first time that American or coalition forces have been deployed in large numbers on the southern flank of the city, a decision that reflects the rising concerns among military officers, diplomats and government officials about the increasing vulnerability of the capital and the surrounding area.

It also underscores the difficult choices confronting American military commanders as they try to apportion a limited number of forces not only within Afghanistan, but also between Afghanistan and Iraq. [continued…]

Shall we call it a depression now?
By Robert Reich, December 5, 2008

Today’s employment report, showing that employers cut 533,000 jobs in November, 320,000 in October, and 403,000 in September — for a total of over 1.2 million over the last three months — begs the question of whether the meltdown we’re experiencing should be called a Depression.

We are falling off a cliff. To put these numbers into some perspective, the November losses alone are the worst in 34 years. A significant percentage of Americans are now jobless or underemployed — far higher than the official rate of 6.7 percent. Simply in order to keep up with population growth, employment needs to increase by 125,000 jobs per month.

Note also that the length of the typical workweek dropped to 33.5 hours. That’s the shortest number of hours since the Department of Labor began keeping records on hours worked, back in 1964. A significant number of people are working part-time who’d rather be working full time. Coupled with those who are too discouraged even to look for work, I’d estimate that the percentage of Americans who need work right now is approaching 11 percent of the workforce. And that percent is likely to raise.

When FDR took office in 1933, one out of four American workers was jobless. We’re not there yet, but we’re trending in that direction. [continued…]

Biden unwelcome in Senate huddles, where Cheney wielded power
By Lisa Mascaro, Las Vegas Sun, December 7, 2008

In a move to reassert Congressional independence at the start of the new presidential administration, the vice president will be barred from joining weekly internal Senate deliberations, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said in an interview with the Las Vegas Sun.

Reid’s decision to exclude Vice President-elect Joe Biden from the Senate arena where he spent most of his adult life is intended to restore constitutional checks and balances that tilted heavily toward the executive branch during the Bush presidency.

One of the most outward symbols of that power shift in the Bush years has been Vice President Dick Cheney’s attendance at weekly Senate Republican strategy luncheons. Cheney’s access to lawmakers enabled the White House to extend its reach into the legislative branch in ways unmatched in modern presidential history. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Joe Biden’s selection as Barack Obama’s running mate was seen by many as a major concession to the Washington establishment, but what we can now see Biden was willingly taking on was something that seems unprecidented in politics: to accept a position of diminished power. This really shows his class as an elder statesman — a man who values the restoration of constitutional power above any personal ambitions he may once have cherished. Let’s not forget that it’s less than a year ago that Biden gave up his bid to become president. Sure, he now gets to be vice-president, but in that role he promises to the antithesis of Dick Cheney in the most selfless of ways.

News coverage of climate entering ‘trance’?
By Andrew C Revkin, New York Times, December 5, 2008

I recently asked whether the world is poised to enter an Obama-style “trance” on climate policy given the focus on economic turmoil and plunge in oil prices, which have in the past seemed synchronized with concerns about transforming energy policy. (Keep in mind that the chief executive officer of Gulf Oil said Wednesday that oil could drop to $20 a barrel and gasoline $1 a gallon).

Now Maxwell Boykoff, who studies the media and climate change at Oxford University, has come up with an initial snapshot looking at climate stories over the last four years in 50 newspapers in 20 countries and (along with a colleague, Maria Mansfield) finds that the media may be entering a climate trance (or ending a bubble, depending on your view).

He’s presented these data (click on graph at right) in a side event at the Poznan, Poland, climate conference, where the main event — the high-level sessions — begin early next week. What’s your take on this graph?

In an e-mail, Dr. Boykoff said: “Apart from that Oceania blip in mid-2008, it does seem like stagnation or decreasing coverage. I’m curious about links between that and possible interpretations by negotiators of decreased public pressure to put forward a strong agreement leading into Copenhagen.” [continued…]

Brazil’s decision on deforestation draws praise
By Joshua Partlow, Washington Post, December 5, 2008

Brazil’s decision to set a target for reducing deforestation by 70 percent over the next decade to combat climate change was hailed by environmentalists Friday as a significant goal for a major polluting country.

“This is an enormously important step,” Stephan Schwartzman, an Amazon expert with the Environmental Defense Fund, said by telephone from a climate change conference in Poland. “This is the first time that a major developing country, whose greenhouse gas emissions are a substantial part of the problem, has stepped up and made a commitment to bring down its total emissions. Brazil has set the standard. Now we want to see the U.S. and President Obama come up to it.”

The clear-cutting and burning of the Amazon rain forest for cattle and soybean ranches, roads and settlements makes up one of the world’s largest sources of the types of gases that contribute to global warming. Since reaching a recent peak of 10,588 square miles of forest destroyed in the Amazon in 2004, deforestation dropped for the next three years, before rising slightly this year to 4,621 square miles, according to data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, which monitors deforestation. [continued…]

Israeli settler youth on the rampage in Hebron
By Tony Karon and Aaron J Klein, Time, December 5, 2008

The biblical city of Hebron burned late into the night Thursday, as militant Israeli settler youth went on a violent rampage through Palestinian neighborhoods, burning the property of, shooting at and beating random Palestinians they came across. The militants were reacting to an eviction earlier that day by Israeli security forces of settlers occupying a Hebron house whose ownership is in dispute. Initial indications were that the rioting settlers had injured at least 15 Palestinians, two or three of whom had suffered gunshot wounds, and Israeli security officials were on high alert to prevent any attempted settler terrorist attacks on Palestinian mosques or other facilities. Israeli security officials told Time of their fear that the current confrontation could prompt some militants to try to emulate Baruch Goldstein, the settler lionized by extremists for his massacre of 29 Muslims in a shooting spree at the tomb of Abraham in 1994. [continued…]

Hebron settler riots were out and out pogroms
By Avi Issacharoff, Haaretz, December 5, 2008

An innocent Palestinian family, numbering close to 20 people. All of them women and children, save for three men. Surrounding them are a few dozen masked Jews seeking to lynch them. A pogrom. This isn’t a play on words or a double meaning. It is a pogrom in the worst sense of the word. First the masked men set fire to their laundry in the front yard and then they tried to set fire to one of the rooms in the house. The women cry for help, “Allahu Akhbar.” Yet the neighbors are too scared to approach the house, frightened of the security guards from Kiryat Arba who have sealed off the home and who are cursing the journalists who wish to document the events unfolding there.

The cries rain down, much like the hail of stones the masked men hurled at the Abu Sa’afan family in the house. A few seconds tick by before a group of journalists, long accustomed to witnessing these difficult moments, decide not to stand on the sidelines. They break into the home and save the lives of the people inside. The brain requires a minute or two to digest what is taking place. Women and children crying bitterly, their faces giving off an expression of horror, sensing their imminent deaths, begging the journalists to save their lives. Stones land on the roof of the home, the windows and the doors. Flames engulf the southern entrance to the home. The front yard is littered with stones thrown by the masked men. The windows are shattered and the children are frightened. All around, as if they were watching a rock concert, are hundreds of Jewish witnesses, observing the events with great interest, even offering suggestions to the Jewish wayward youth as to the most effective way to harm the family. And the police are not to be seen. Nor is the army. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — pogrom (pə-grŏm’, pō’grəm) – Definition: An organized, often officially encouraged massacre or persecution of a minority group, especially one conducted against Jews.

Avi Issachacharoff’s choice of the term might be appropriate in communicating the gravity of what is happening in Hebron, yet when Palestinians make up the overwhelming majority of the residents this cannot be called a pogrom. What it seems more reminiscent of is an echo that few Israelis dare mention: the attacks on Arabs that were instrumental in bringing about the creation of Israel.

Pakistan won’t cooperate with India
By Sumit Ganguly, Wall Street Journal, December 5, 2008

Now in the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, when a substantial corpus of circumstantial evidence is confirming a Pakistani connection, Mr. Zardari is recycling old, familiar tactics. He immediately rebuffed Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee’s request to extradite some 20 suspects to India. And he insists that India proffer evidence of Pakistani complicity before the country takes any steps to bring the culprits to book. Moreover, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed and Maulana Masood Azar, the heads of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, continue to operate openly in the Pakistani cities of Lahore and Quetta.

This puts India in a tough spot. The Congress Party-led government in New Delhi cannot reveal the sources and methods of its intelligence intercepts — especially at a moment as politically fraught as the present. Indian policy makers also cannot be seen to do nothing. It is a dangerous impasse.

Given these circumstances, if the U.S. wishes to bolster its growing relationship with India and demonstrate its seriousness in combating the global jihadi menace, it needs to call Pakistan’s bluff. Only sustained American pressure designed to induce Pakistan to dismantle what Indian security analysts refer to as “the infrastructure of terror” will produce the right outcome. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — India and its allies would do well not to blithely parrot American and Israeli rhetoric by using phrases like “the infrastructure of terror”. The conundrum in Pakistan is this: how do you dismantle the infrastructure of terror with dismantling the state?

Who are the Taliban?
By Anand Gopal, TomDispatch, December 4, 2008

If there is an exact location marking the West’s failures in Afghanistan, it is the modest police checkpoint that sits on the main highway 20 minutes south of Kabul. The post signals the edge of the capital, a city of spectacular tension, blast walls, and standstill traffic. Beyond this point, Kabul’s gritty, low-slung buildings and narrow streets give way to a vast plain of serene farmland hemmed in by sandy mountains. In this valley in Logar province, the American-backed government of Afghanistan no longer exists.

Instead of government officials, men in muddied black turbans with assault rifles slung over their shoulders patrol the highway, checking for thieves and “spies.” The charred carcass of a tanker, meant to deliver fuel to international forces further south, sits belly up on the roadside.

The police say they don’t dare enter these districts, especially at night when the guerrillas rule the roads. In some parts of the country’s south and east, these insurgents have even set up their own government, which they call the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (the name of the former Taliban government). They mete out justice in makeshift Sharia courts. They settle land disputes between villagers. They dictate the curricula in schools. [continued…]

Policing Afghanistan: An ethnic-minority force enters a Taliban stronghold
By Graeme Wood, The New Yorker, December 8, 2008

In the nineteen-eighties, the Soviet occupation largely spared the Hazara homeland, but they mounted an insurgency nonetheless, singing revolutionary songs whose villains were Pashtuns rather than Soviets. By the nineteen-nineties, when the Sunni Taliban formed around Mullah Omar, the Hazaras had found an Iranian-backed Shiite, Abdul Ali Mazari, to oppose him. Mazari led Hazara attacks on the Taliban, but, in 1995, he was captured, tortured, and thrown from a helicopter near Ghazni, southwest of Kabul. After Mazari, no Hazara leader reached national prominence until the formation of the Karzai government, in 2002. During the Taliban ascendancy, Muhammad Khan and all his men lived in Iran, as refugees. Khan himself has spent twenty years there—most of his life—and he speaks with a slight Iranian accent. Having been treated poorly as refugees, these Hazaras have no lingering fondness for Iran, but they have benefitted from the country’s superior educational standards. This, together with their determination to reëstablish themselves in what some Hazaras regard as their ancestral homeland, makes them effective janissaries for NATO.

The formation of police units like Khan’s gives the Hazaras greater authority outside their own territory than they’ve had in a century. It is also a classic counter-insurgency gambit. Tom Donnelly, a defense analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, who has undertaken a book-length study of NATO in Afghanistan, compares it to the American use of Shiite militias to fight Sunni insurgency in Iraq. “It’s a common tactic in irregular warfare situations to pit the rivalries of an ethnically diverse populace against each other,” he told me. The difficulty is finding a way to avoid unleashing a dispossessed minority on a rampage of revenge against the group it is asked to control.

Alessandro Monsutti, an anthropologist who has studied the Hazaras, fears that the short-term gain of the Hazara units’ efficacy may be outweighed by long-term harm. “They’re very efficient for narrow, military targets,” he told me. “But what about rebuilding the country?” Donnelly, too, acknowledges that the use of ethnic militias could lead to explosive retribution when NATO leaves Afghanistan. (European use of privileged local minorities in colonial Africa contributed to the continent’s most destructive post-colonial wars, including the Rwandan genocide.) The Hazaras have not, historically, fared well in combat with the Pashtuns, although the policemen at Pashmul seem eager to try their luck. When Vollick asked them where he could get more police like them, they replied that they could raise a militia of a thousand men in their homeland, in Daykundi Province. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — During an era in which democracy has been held up as the panacea for most of the world’s problems, something far less idealistic but probably of much more practical value is being overlooked: self-policing.

A fundamental requirement of sustainable civil order is that law enforcement be indigenous. Wherever “the law” looks different — be that in Hazara-policed Pashtun Afghanistan, Israeli-controlled Hebron, or a black inner city with a predominantly white police force — the sense that order is imposed by oppressors on the oppressed, will override a collective interest in civil order.

The real Bill Ayers
By William Ayers, New York Times, December 6, 2008

Now that the election is over, I want to say as plainly as I can that the character invented to serve this drama wasn’t me, not even close. Here are the facts:

I never killed or injured anyone. I did join the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, and later resisted the draft and was arrested in nonviolent demonstrations. I became a full-time antiwar organizer for Students for a Democratic Society. In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village. The Weather Underground went on to take responsibility for placing several small bombs in empty offices — the ones at the Pentagon and the United States Capitol were the most notorious — as an illegal and unpopular war consumed the nation.

The Weather Underground crossed lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense. Our effectiveness can be — and still is being — debated. We did carry out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam war.

Peaceful protests had failed to stop the war. So we issued a screaming response. But it was not terrorism; we were not engaged in a campaign to kill and injure people indiscriminately, spreading fear and suffering for political ends.

I cannot imagine engaging in actions of that kind today. And for the past 40 years, I’ve been teaching and writing about the unique value and potential of every human life, and the need to realize that potential through education. [continued…]

Team of heavyweights
By Henry A Kissinger, Washington Post, December 5, 2008

President-elect Barack Obama has appointed an extraordinary team for national security policy. On its face, it violates certain maxims of conventional wisdom: that appointing to the Cabinet individuals with an autonomous constituency, and who therefore are difficult to fire, circumscribes presidential control; that appointing as national security adviser, secretary of state and secretary of defense individuals with established policy views may absorb the president’s energies in settling disputes among strong-willed advisers.

It took courage for the president-elect to choose this constellation and no little inner assurance — both qualities essential for dealing with the challenge of distilling order out of a fragmenting international system. In these circumstances, ignoring conventional wisdom may prove to have been the precondition for creativity. Both Obama and the secretary of state-designate, Sen. Hillary Clinton, must have concluded that the country and their commitment to public service require their cooperation.

Those who take the phrase “team of rivals” literally do not understand the essence of the relationship between the president and the secretary of state. I know of no exception to the principle that secretaries of state are influential if and only if they are perceived as extensions of the president. Any other course weakens the president and marginalizes the secretary. The Beltway system of leak and innuendo will mercilessly seek to widen any even barely visible split. Foreign governments will exploit the rift by pursuing alternative White House-State Department diplomacies. Effective foreign policy and a significant role for the State Department in it require that the president and the secretary of state have a common vision of international order, overall strategy and tactical measures. Inevitable disagreements should be settled privately; indeed, the ability of the secretary to warn and question is in direct proportion to the discretion with which such queries are expressed. [continued…]

The broken state
By Nir Rosen, The National, November 28, 2008

In August of this year I flew in to Kabul, a bustling city undergoing a construction boom, with shopping malls, new banks, restaurants and traffic jams, where I stayed in a hotel catering to weary journalists and aid workers. I arranged to meet two Taliban commanders who agreed to take me to their province, Ghazni – about 100 miles south of the capital. They picked me up one day from a posh Kabul neighbourhood in an innocuous-looking car and we headed south. We drove past barren rocky mountains, desolate Afghan Army checkpoints being punished by the wind, roadside shacks selling food and drinks and herds of camels.

Heading southwest from Kabul, we crossed into Wardak province, and into a war zone. The burning carcasses of supply lorries meant for American and British bases in the south littered both sides of the road, and craters blown by the roadside bombs the Taliban deploy against convoys blocked our path every few minutes. Before long we were forced to stop by a battle raging ahead between the Taliban and American and Nato forces, whose explosions shook the car.

There are too many symptoms of Afghanistan’s decline to inventory, but the roads are an easy place to start, a clear sign of the shrinking zone of order that now barely reaches beyond the outskirts of Kabul. We were driving on the “ring road”, the most critical thoroughfare in Afghanistan, and the fastest, most direct and practical way of travelling between major cities – if you ignore the mounting risk. It is the only road that even resembles a motorway in Afghanistan, and the only viable route for large supply convoys. The only alternatives are small provincial roads, many just gravel or dirt – on which a journey can take days rather than hours. The section of the ring road between Kabul and Kandahar, rebuilt with international funds in 2003, was a crucial connection between the two main American bases at Bagram and Kandahar and linked the two halves of the country, reducing a two-day trip to six hours. Now bridges along the route have been destroyed, and the transport of supplies to support the Afghan government and coalition forces has become difficult. The Taliban continue to mount audacious ambushes against convoys, destroying dozens of lorries at a time and killing some of the drivers. [continued…]

Looking for the ideal spot to make a speech
By Helene Cooper, New York Times, December 4, 2008

President-elect Barack Obama’s aides say he is considering making a major foreign policy speech from an Islamic capital during his first 100 days in office.

So where should he do it? The list of Islamic world capitals is long, and includes the obvious —Riyadh, Kuwait City, Islamabad — and the not-so-obvious — Male (the Maldives), Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), Tashkent (Uzbekistan). Some wise-guys have even suggested Dearborn, Mich., as a possibility.

Clearly it would be cheating for Mr. Obama to fly to Detroit, talk to Dearborn’s 30,000 Arab residents and call it a day. And Male and Ouagadougou, while certainly majority Muslim, can’t really be what Mr. Obama’s aides have in mind when they talk about locales for a high-profile speech that would seek to mend rifts between the United States and the broader Muslim world.

So Burkina Faso and the Maldives are out. But that leaves a whole swath of Islamic capitals, all ready to be spruced up for Mr. Obama to make his speech. I’ve thought hard about this, and asked a few people — diplomats even — which capital Mr. Obama should pick.

The consensus, after an entire day of reporting, is Cairo. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — The consensus in the NYT newsroom might be Cairo, but unless Helene Cooper is cheating (because team Obama already gave her a tip), I suspect she’ll turn out to be wrong. My bet goes on Doha. Rather than honor an old tyrant like Husni Mubarak, I think Obama will be more interested in forging a closer relationship with Qatar’s prime minister and foreign minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem bin Jabor Al Thani, perhaps the only Middle Eastern leader who has demonstrated a knack for dealing effectively with every major player in the region.

Blackwater guards indicted in deadly Baghdad shooting
By Del Quentin Wilber, Washington Post, December 6, 2008

Five Blackwater Worldwide Security guards have been charged in a September 2007 shooting that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead and raised questions about the U.S. government’s use of security contractors in combat zones, according to two sources familiar with the case.

The guards, all former U.S. military personnel, worked as security contractors for the State Department, assigned to protect U.S. diplomats and other nonmilitary officials in Iraq.

Federal prosecutors obtained the indictment Thursday, and it was sealed. Channing Phillips, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District, declined to comment on the investigation. The exact nature of the charges could not be determined. The five security guards are expected to surrender to authorities on Monday, the sources said.

Authorities have not publicly identified the guards.

The indictment caps a year-long investigation into the shooting, which occurred Sept. 16, 2007, when the guards’ convoy arrived in Baghdad’s bustling Nisoor Square. [continued…]

If this isn’t terrorism, what is?
By Tom Gross, Wall Street Journal, December 1, 2008

Last week in Mumbai we witnessed as clear a case of carefully planned mass terrorism as we are ever likely to see.

The seven-venue atrocity was coordinated in a highly sophisticated way. The terrorists used BlackBerrys to stay in touch with each other during their three-and-half-day rampage, outwitting the authorities by monitoring international reaction to the attacks on British, Urdu and Arabic Web sites. It was a meticulously organized operation aimed exclusively at civilian targets: two hospitals, a train station, two hotels, a leading tourist restaurant and a Jewish center.

There was nothing remotely random about it. This was no hostage standoff. The terrorists didn’t want to negotiate. They wanted to murder as many Hindus, Christians, Jews, atheists and other “infidels” as they could, and in as spectacular a manner as possible. In the Jewish center, some of the female victims even appear to have been tortured before being killed.

So why are so many prominent Western media reluctant to call the perpetrators terrorists? Why did Jon Snow, one of Britain’s most respected TV journalists, use the word “practitioners” when referring to the Mumbai terrorists? Was he perhaps confusing them with doctors? [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Ever since the Mumbai attacks, The Wall Street Journal has been determined to ferret out the real culprits behind this hideous event. The consensus — at least among the editorial board — appears to be clear: the Western media is responsible. If it wasn’t for all those mealy-mouthed leftist journalists who have a hard to with terms like “terrorist” or “Islamic extremist”, then this kind of thing would be far less likely to happen. This is what I would call brain-dead commentary for a comatose audience.

And what would I call the young men who attacked Mumbai? I have no problem with “terrorists”. The problem is that the term does so little to illuminate the nature of what happened. In fact, all it is is a way of saying: “This is horrible and we must stop it happening.” Yes it is and so we must, but saying as much is a rather ineffectual exercise. Moreover, it is intended to imply that those who don’t participate in the exercise are in some sense sympathetic with terrorism.

There is one way of viewing the Mumbai attacks as terrorism that is instructive and extremely disturbing. Viewed as a template for an attack it raises the possibility that a similar attack could occur anywhere else.

As David Ignatius writes:

What would happen if roving gunmen infiltrated U.S. cities and started shooting? Most U.S. police departments aren’t well prepared to deal with such “active shooters,” as they’re called. Police are trained to cordon off an area that’s under attack and then call in a paramilitary SWAT team to root out the gunmen. But what if the attackers keep moving and shooting? The response can be haphazard, as was clear in such disparate incidents as the 2002 Beltway sniper attacks in the Washington area and last year’s massacre at Virginia Tech.

“Mumbai is a worst-case ‘active shooter’ problem,” says a former CIA officer who helped organize a DHS pilot program on the subject last summer for police chiefs. “It had multiple shooters, multiple locations, mobile threats, willingness to fight the first responders and follow-on SWAT/commando units, well-equipped and well-trained operatives, and a willingness to die. Police department commanders in America should be scratching their heads and praying.”

Forewarned is forearmed, and the Mumbai attacks are a powerful demonstration of the danger for cities around the world. The reason to discuss such threats isn’t to feed anti-terrorism hysteria. There was far too much of that fear-mongering and spasmodic reaction after Sept. 11, which had the effect of destabilizing the United States almost as much as it did its enemies. The challenge is to understand the adversary so that if an attack comes, the authorities will respond with cool heads and steady aim.

Ignatius also notes:

The Mumbai attacks were a ghastly reminder of the threat still posed by al-Qaeda and related terrorist groups. The militants have the training, the logistical support and, most of all, the determination to pull off spectacular attacks. They read their enemies’ tactical vulnerabilities well — understanding in this case that urban police forces have trouble combating moving bands of shooters. And they appeared to have had a cleverly divisive strategic goal — of reanimating tension between India and Pakistan just as the two were beginning to make common cause against terrorism.

This points to the crucial dimension of the Mumbai attacks: irrespective of the personal motives of the gunmen, this was a political act with a strategic motive. By labelling it “terrorism” we actually make it more likely — not less — that the planners will accomplish their strategic goal.

The more the Indian government’s opponents goad it to act tough, the more likely it becomes that India will in effect capitulate to the terrorists by accepting the invitation to engage in a military confrontation with Pakistan.

To say that the terrorists hate Hindus, Jews, Christians, the West and modernity is to miss the point. This was a strategic attack designed to provoke India, divert Pakistani forces away from the Afghan border and across to the Indian border, thereby taking pressure off the Pakistani Taliban, strengthening their efforts in Afghanistan and increasing the vulnerability of supply lines to NATO forces.

Whether the attacks can be prevented from fulfilliing their strategic aim depends on the ability of politicians to maintain cool heads and not like rabid dogs, simply snarl the word “terrorist”.

India names Mumbai mastermind
By Geeta Anand, Matthew Rosenberg, Yaroslav Trofimov and Zahid Hussain, Wall Street Journal, December 3, 2008

India has accused a senior leader of the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba of orchestrating last week’s terror attacks that killed at least 172 people here, and demanded the Pakistani government turn him over and take action against the group.

Just two days before hitting the city, the group of 10 terrorists who ravaged India’s financial capital communicated with Yusuf Muzammil and four other Lashkar leaders via a satellite phone that they left behind on a fishing trawler they hijacked to get to Mumbai, a senior Mumbai police official told The Wall Street Journal. The entire group also underwent rigorous training in a Lashkar-e-Taiba camp in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, the official said. [continued…]

Afghan strategy poses stiff challenge for Obama
By Michael R Gordon, New York TImes, December 2, 2008

There has been much debate in recent weeks about the usefulness of talking with Taliban insurgents and encouraging them to put down their arms. But the prevailing view among senior American military officers is that such efforts are unlikely to be fruitful until the United States and its allies have more military leverage. Many insurgents, intelligence analysts say, have little motivation to reconcile with the Afghan government now, because they believe that the government is weak and that they are on the winning side.

Surveying the battlefield, even advocates of troop increases are forecasting a long struggle. The directors of the multinational Counterinsurgency Training Center in Kabul, Col. John Agoglia of the United States Army and Lt. Col. Trent Scott of the Australian Army, say that more American and international troops are needed to protect the Afghan population and hold ground that can eventually be handed off to expanded and better trained Afghan forces. But they have some sobering advice for the commanders of newly deploying units.

“They must deploy prepared for a long fight,” Colonels Agoglia and Scott said in an e-mail message. “They must think long term and realize that victory is unlikely on their watch. They must build a solid foundation on which their successors build on gains made.” [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Barack Obama has repeatedly said “we will be straight with the American people.” When it comes to Afghanistan, being straight with the American people comes down to this: acknowledging that the war has now become a contest of patience.

Who has greater patience? The Americans or the Taliban?

Most Americans need know nothing about the Taliban in order to answer that question. When it comes to contests in patience, America invariably loses.

Shift on U.N. seen in Rice nomination
By Michael A. Fletcher and Colum Lynch, Washington Post, December 2, 2008

As one of President-elect Barack Obama’s closest campaign advisers and a fellow opponent of the war in Iraq, Susan E. Rice was regarded as a lock for a senior post in Washington after the election.

But Obama decided instead to put her in New York, in a more visible role — ambassador to the United Nations — and thereby send a message to the world’s diplomats: The United States will look more kindly, come Jan. 20, on multilateralism and U.N. peacekeeping missions.

Obama said yesterday that he is restoring Rice’s position to a Cabinet-level rank, an indication that he views the job as central to his goal of fostering more international cooperation.

“Susan knows the global challenges we face demand global institutions that work,” Obama said. “She shares my belief that the U.N. is an indispensable and imperfect forum.”

Rice, 44, says her connection to Obama was forged in part by a shared opposition to the war in Iraq, but she is the only top figure in Obama’s national security team who opposed the war. She is also the only one with a close relationship with Obama, after working as his senior foreign policy adviser during the campaign. [continued…]

The enforcer
By Fred Kaplan, Slate, December 1, 2008

To those who worry that Hillary Clinton will turn Foggy Bottom into a fiefdom devoted to her own agenda and ambition, I have two reassuring words: James Jones.

Everything that President-elect Barack Obama has said and done these past few weeks indicates that this is going to be an administration run from the White House. His selection of Jones as national-security adviser signals that this will very much be the case in foreign and military policy.

A retired four-star general with 40 years of service in the Marines, Jones was a company commander in Vietnam; commander of an expeditionary unit protecting the Kurds of northern Iraq in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War; chief of staff of the joint task force supplying aid to Bosnia-Herzegovina; and—his last position before retiring last year—SACEUR, the supreme allied commander, Europe.

While stationed stateside, he had been, at various times, the Marine Corps’ liaison to the U.S. Senate; deputy chief of staff for plans, policies, and operations at Marine headquarters; military assistant to Secretary of Defense William Cohen (President Bill Clinton’s third and final Pentagon chief); and the Marine Corps commandant.

In other words, he knows the ins, outs, back alleys, and dark closets of the national-security realm.

His former colleagues use the same words to describe him: very smart, very organized, methodical, deliberate. It may be telling that Obama has been seeking advice lately from two other generals who served as national-security advisers: Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft. Anthony Zinni, a retired Marine general who’s known Jones for 30 years and followed a similar career path, told me in an e-mail that he sees Jones as “a Scowcroft type of NSA,” elaborating, “He works hard to build consensus and has a lot of patience. He doesn’t like to seek confrontation but won’t shrink from a fight. … He doesn’t seek the limelight but will be the hand behind keeping things on track and focused.” [continued…]

Team of rivals
By Nathan Field, The National, October 10, 2008

Nothing must aggravate al Qa’eda more than Hizbollah’s enduring popularity in the Arab world. The leaders of al Qa’eda are forced to hide in the mountains along the Afghan-Pakistan border, watching virtually every Arabic television station call them “terrorists” – while commentators compete to sing the praises of the “resistance” led by Hizbollah.

No political group has more respect on the streets of predominantly Sunni countries like Egypt than Hizbollah. In a 2008 Zogby Arab Public Opinion poll, 27 per cent of Arabs chose Hassan Nasrallah as their ideal leader – putting him in first place. The Egyptian Sunni religious scholar Dr Abla Khadawy expressed the sentiments of millions of Arabs when she told the Egyptian paper al Masri al Youm in June that Nasrallah was the “hope of the Umma” and praised Hizbollah for returning “some of our lost dignity”. >

Contrary to prevailing perceptions in the West, the Arabic media draws a sharp distinction between “resistance” and “terrorism”, with marked impact on the reputations of Hizbollah and al Qa’eda. The “resistance” – which also includes groups like Hamas and insurgents fighting the US in Iraq – is celebrated for its defence of Arab interests. On pan-Arab satellite networks, it is not uncommon for guests and commentators to proudly pay tribute to the Muqawama. [continued…]

Revising jihad
By Nathan Field, The National, November 27, 2008

Al Qa’eda doesn’t enjoy the best press in the Arab world, but the savage attack against the organisation that filled an Egyptian newspaper for two weeks in late 2007 was still remarkable. Every aspect of its operations was subjected to withering criticism, and its leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri, were assailed with a barrage of insults.

The critic in question, Sayyid Imam, was no ordinary writer: he was a man with impeccable jihadist credentials, writing from the Egyptian jail where he is serving a life sentence. Active in militant circles since his student days at Cairo University, Imam, also known as Dr Fadl, was a long-time associate of Zawahiri who participated in the Afghan jihad against the Soviets and then served as the Emir of the Egyptian terror group al Jihad from 1987 until 1993, having moved with bin Laden and Zawahiri to Sudan to continue the work of jihad. Most importantly, Imam had written two theoretical books that embraced an ultra-literal interpretation of the Quran, which Jihadists, including bin Laden and Zawahiri had been using to justify their violence.

Many in the United States took Imam’s text – formally called Rationalising Jihad in Egypt and the World, but typically known as the Revisions – as a serious blow to al Qa’eda, suggesting that the defection of Imam and other prominent figures augured a turn by jihadists, fed up with al Qa’eda’s excessive violence, against bin Laden and Zawahiri. Many commentators saw the Revisions as a potential turning point in the Global War on Terror. But now, a year later, Imam has published his follow-up, a long screed called The Exposure – and the sequel confirms that last year’s round of optimism was little more than wishful thinking. [continued…]

Wanted: a new grand strategy
By Fareed Zacharia, Newsweek, November 29, 2008

Barack Obama’s campaign for president began with his opposition to the war in Iraq. But before last week’s terror attacks in India, the subject of foreign policy had disappeared, almost completely overshadowed by the economic crisis. This doesn’t mean that international issues will be ignored. No doubt the national-security team Obama is announcing this week will be quick to tackle the many issues in their inbox, and will likely do so with intelligence and competence. There are enough problems to occupy them fully—Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Al Qaeda, Iran, Russia—and they will face unexpected crises like the Mumbai assaults. But we must hope that as president, Obama does more than select a good team, delegate well and react intelligently to the problems that he will confront. He must have his administration build a broader framework through which to view the world and America’s relations with it— a grand strategy. At this moment, the United States has a unique opportunity to push forward a vision that aligns its interests and ideals with those of most of the world’s major powers. But it is a fleeting opportunity.

Grand strategy sounds like an abstract concept—something academics discuss—and one that bears little relationship to urgent, jarring events on the ground. But in the absence of strategy, any administration will be driven by the news, reacting rather than leading. For a superpower that has global interests and is forced to respond to virtually every problem, it’s all too easy for the urgent to drive out the important. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Since Obama got elected, a torrent of unsolicited advice has been poured in his direction — much from “true believers” and much from those same faithful exhibiting a curious lack of confidence in Obama’s capacity to forge his own approach. There’s been a somewhat paternal fear that might get pushed around; that having shifted from the make-believe world of the campaign he might now flounder a bit as he sets his bearings in the real world. In spite of this, all the evidence so far, suggests that he truly does know his own mind and knows — at least in broad brush strokes — the course on which he is now about to embark.

In presenting his national security team yesterday, Obama reiterated what should now be seen not just as some cute piece of campaign rhetoric, but the cornerstone of his approach to governance:

The common thread linking these challenges is the fundamental reality that in the 21st century, our destiny is shared with the world’s from our markets to our security. From our public health to our climate, we must act with that understanding that now more than ever, we have a stake in what happens across the globe.

This is a global perspective that was not merely lacking in the Bush administration but that has in fact yet to evolve in the American psyche.

Obama has set himself the goal of nothing less than changing the way Americans perceive the world.

Keep that in mind each time you come across commentary that refers to his centrist approach, his willingness to compromise, and his pragmatism — all of which are evident but none of which should overshadow this radical objective.

Mumbai Massacre may sink Bush-Obama strategy
By Tony Karon, Rootless Cosmopolitan, December 1, 2008

Pakistan… is teetering, and it’s not hard to imagine a descent into chaos that prompts yet another military takeover. In fact, the only chance Washington has of achieving its goal of uniting India and Pakistan in a common struggle against Islamist militancy is if it is able to convince the skeptical Pakistani military establishment to pursue that course. Current indications don’t exactly inspire confidence that either the Bush Administration or the Obama Administration will be any more likely to resolve the India-Pakistan conflict than they are to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And that, in turn, suggests that if it does send more troops to Afghanistan next year, the Obama Administration will be sending them into another quagmire. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — The more troops that are sent into Afghanistan, the more the risk of not merely being bogged down but quite literally trapped. US supply lines through north west Pakistan are already subject to attacks, disruption and occassional suspension. The more troops there are, the more heavily the US becomes dependent on an umbilical cord that the ISI can allow to be severed whenever it wants.

Redefine victory in Afghanistan
By Andrew J. Bacevich, Newsweek, November 29, 2008

In Afghanistan today, the United States and its allies are using the wrong means to pursue the wrong mission. Sending more troops to the region, as incoming president Barack Obama and others have suggested we should, will only turn Operation Enduring Freedom into Operation Enduring Obligation. Afghanistan will be a sinkhole, consuming resources neither the U.S. military nor the U.S. government can afford to waste.

The war in Afghanistan is now in its eighth year. An operation launched with expectations of a quick, decisive victory has failed signally to accomplish that objective. Granted, the diversion of resources to Iraq forced commanders in Afghanistan to make do with less. Yet that doesn’t explain the lack of progress. The real problem is that Washington has misunderstood the nature of the challengeAfghanistan poses and misread America’s interests there.

One of history’s enduring lessons is that Afghans don’t appreciate it when outsiders tell them how to govern their affairs—just ask the British or the Soviets. U.S. success in overthrowing the Taliban seemed to suggest this lesson no longer applied, at least to us.

But we’re now discovering that the challenges of pacifying Afghanistan dwarf those posed by Iraq. Afghanistan is a much bigger country—nearly the size of Texas—and has a larger population that’s just as fractious. Moreover, unlike Iraq, Afghanistan possesses almost none of the prerequisites of modernity; its literacy rate, for example, is 28 percent, barely a third of Iraq’s. In terms of effectiveness and legitimacy, the government in Kabul lags well behind Baghdad—not exactly a lofty standard. Apart from opium (last year’s crop totaled about 8,000 metric tons), Afghans produce almost nothing the world wants. [continued…]

Obama chooses an unlikely team of hawks
By Peter Beinart, Time, November 26, 2008

It’s precisely because Obama intends to pursue a genuinely progressive foreign policy that he’s surrounding himself with people who can guard his right flank at home. When George W. Bush wanted to sell the Iraq war, he trotted out Colin Powell–because Powell was nobody’s idea of a hawk. Now Obama may be preparing to do the reverse. To give himself cover for a withdrawal from Iraq and a diplomatic push with Iran, he’s surrounding himself with people like Gates, Clinton and Jones, who can’t be lampooned as doves. [continued…]

Hawks for Hillary
By Barron YoungSmith, The New Republic, December 1, 2008

I spoke with a number of conservative foreign-policy eminences to find out. Many of them were surprisingly optimistic about Obama’s new top diplomat. “On the whole I’m quite pleased,” explains Richard Perle, former chairman of the Defense Policy Board and an architect of the Iraq war. “She seems to me quite tough-minded. That’s not a worldview, but it is a predisposition. That’s a good thing. It’s not an easy world out there.”

Perle says he would rather have a hawkish Democrat than a Chuck Hagel-style Republican as a token bi-partisan appointment. “I heard about others on the list [for secretary of state] that I wouldn’t be happy about,” he says. “Those were mostly Republicans.” [continued…]

Gates’s top deputies may leave
By Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post, December 2, 2008

Although President-elect Barack Obama’s decision to keep Robert M. Gates at the helm of the Pentagon will provide a measure of continuity for a military fighting two wars, many of Gates’s top deputies are expected to depart their jobs, according to senior defense and transition officials.

Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, Gates’s right-hand man in running the Pentagon day to day, is widely expected to leave his post, said the officials, one of whom noted that England’s speechwriter is reportedly taking another job.

Leading candidates to replace England include Obama campaign adviser Richard J. Danzig, who could eventually replace Gates; Pentagon transition review team co-leader Michèle A. Flournoy; and possibly former Pentagon comptroller William J. Lynn, said Obama transition officials and sources close to the transition.

The anticipated turnover of many key positions suggests that although Gates will help provide some continuity, the status quo will not necessarily endure at the Pentagon. [continued…]

India demands Pakistan hand over fugitives
By Robert F Worth, New York Times, December 2, 2008

India increased pressure on Pakistan on Tuesday, demanding that Pakistan arrest and hand over about 20 people wanted under Indian law as criminal fugitives, saying that the gunmen responsible for the three-day rampage in Mumbai last week arrived by ship from Karachi, the Pakistani port.

With tensions high between Islamabad and New Delhi after the bloody terrorist attacks in Mumbai, the Indian foreign minister, Pranab Mukherjee, appeared to rule out an immediate military response against Pakistan, saying that “no one is talking about military action.” However, he still insisted that “every sovereign country has its right to protect its territorial integrity” and was quoted as saying it was difficult for Pakistan to continue the current peace process with Pakistan after the assaults, which killed 173.

The Associated Press reported that the Bush administration had warned India before the attacks that terrorists appeared to be plotting a mostly waterborne assault on Mumbai, quoting a senior administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of intelligence information. [continued…]

Group accused in India carnage thriving despite ban
By Candace Rondeaux and Craig Whitlock, Washington Post, December 1, 2008

In January 2002, the government of Pakistan reluctantly announced that it would ban Lashkar-i-Taiba, a Kashmiri guerrilla group suspected of crossing the border into India and storming the Parliament in New Delhi, an incident that nearly triggered a war between the two nuclear-armed countries.

Almost seven years later, Lashkar-i-Taiba, or Army of the Pious, once again stands accused of helping to carry out a stunning terrorist attack in India, this time in Mumbai. The group, although technically still outlawed in Pakistan, has managed to expand its membership, its operational reach and its influence among the constellation of radical Islamist networks seeking to spark a revolution in South Asia.

Inside Pakistan, Lashkar still operates training camps for militants, runs a large charitable and social-services organization that has been embraced by Pakistani officials, and even has designated spokesmen to handle inquiries from the news media. [continued…]