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…]

Indian forces battle pockets of militants
By Keith Bradsher and Somini Sengupta, New York Times, November 29, 2008

As the crisis in Mumbai neared its 48th hour, Indian commandos were battling to overcome stubborn resistance by militants on Friday, seeking to end the bloody assault on India’s financial and entertainment capital that has shaken the nation and raised perilous regional tensions with Pakistan.

Shortly before night settled over the stricken city, the police said the death toll had reached 143 with the discovery of 24 bodies in the luxury Oberoi hotel, where guests were set free on Friday after being holed up in their rooms as security forces re-asserted control of the building. But officers did not explain why the operation to flush out a handful of assailants in other places had taken so long.

Commandos slid down ropes from a hovering Army helicopter on Friday morning as they stormed a Jewish center that had been seized. The blue-uniformed troopers landed on the roof and soon made their way inside Nariman House, home to the Hasidic Jewish group Chabad-Lubavitch. The caution and pace of their maneuvers suggested the authorities were keen to avoid civilian casualties. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — For the individual gunmen involved in this attack their motives may have been personal and diverse. Time reports: “A gunman, holed up in Mumbai’s Oberoi Trident hotel where some 40 people had been taken hostage, told an Indian news channel that the attacks were revenge for the persecution of Muslims in India. ‘We love this as our country but when our mothers and sisters were being killed, where was everybody?’ he asked via telephone.”

Given that the tactical choice of using guns instead of bombs meant that the perpetrators inevitably risked capture, it seems possible that this team of gunmen may have been made up of groups of two, three or four men each of which had its own ideological agenda and none of which shared or necessarily were aware of the agenda of their sponsors. Even so, the broad character of the operation — it’s focus on Mumbai’s internationalism, its novelty, and its potential to have a far-reaching geopolitical impact — all of this strongly suggests that this was not simply a blood-curdling cry of vengeance from a group that sees itself standing up for India’s oppressed Muslims. Were it such, the target would have unambiguously been Hindus.

Attributes suggest outside help
By Craig Whitlock and Karen DeYoung, Washington Post, November 28, 2008

Counterterrorism officials and experts said the scale, sophistication and targets involved in the Mumbai attacks were markedly different from previous terrorist plots in India and suggested the gunmen had received training from outside the country. But they cautioned it was too soon to tell who may have masterminded the operation, despite an assertion from a previously unknown Islamist radical group.

Officials in India, Europe and the United States said likely culprits included Islamist networks based in Pakistan that have received support in the past from Pakistan’s intelligence agencies.

Analysts said this week’s attacks surpassed previous plots carried out by domestic groups in terms of complexity, the number of people involved and their success in achieving their primary goal: namely, to spread fear.

“This is a new, horrific milestone in the global jihad,” said Bruce Riedel, a former South Asia analyst for the CIA and National Security Council and author of the book “The Search for Al Qaeda.” “No indigenous Indian group has this level of capability. The goal is to damage the symbol of India’s economic renaissance, undermine investor confidence and provoke an India-Pakistani crisis.” [continued…]

India says trawler may have delivered attackers
By Krittivas Mukherjee, Reuters, November 28, 2008

An Indian-owned fishing trawler may have been used to deliver militants who attacked Mumbai from the sea, a top coast guard official said on Friday.

“Whether the trawler was hijacked or not is being investigated, but some of the things found on the trawler are bad news,” he said, declining to be named. “The boat was used to drop off men.” Indian investigators say the militants who attacked Mumbai, killing around 120 people, arrived by sea in rubber dinghies, but are trying to trace the ship which ferried them close to the city.

India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pinned the blame for the attacks on militants based in a neighbouring country, usually meaning Pakistan. [continued…]

India’s suspicion of Pakistan clouds U.S. strategy in region
By Jane Perlez, New York Times, November 28, 2008

The terrorist attacks in Mumbai occurred as India and Pakistan, two big, hostile and nuclear-armed nations, were delicately moving toward improved relations with the encouragement of the United States and in particular the incoming Obama administration.

Those steps could quickly be derailed, with deep consequences for the United States, if India finds Pakistani fingerprints on the well-planned operation. India has raised suspicions. Pakistan has vehemently denied them.

But no matter who turns out to be responsible for the Mumbai attacks, their scale and the choice of international targets will make the agenda of the new American administration harder. [continued…]

Claims emerge of British terrorists in Mumbai
By Angela Balakrishnan, The Guardian, November 28, 2008

It is too early to tell whether British-born Pakistanis were among the Mumbai terrorists, Gordon Brown said today in response to claims at least two Britons were involved.

The Foreign Office is investigating reports on the Indian channel NDTV that quoted Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of Mumbai, saying there were British links to the attacks. [continued…]

City under siege
By Dr. Shashi Tharoor, The Daily Beast, November 28, 2008

Today, the platitudes flow like blood. Terrorism is unacceptable; the terrorists are cowards; the world stands united in unreserved condemnation of this latest atrocity. Commentators in America trip over themselves to pronounce this night and day of carnage “India’s 9/11.” But India has endured many attempted 9/11s, notably a ferocious assault on its national Parliament in December 2001 that nearly led to all-out war against the assailants’ presumed sponsors, Pakistan. This year alone, terrorist bombs have taken lives in Jaipur, in Ahmedabad, in Delhi and (in an eerie dress-rehearsal for the effectiveness of synchronicity) several different places on one searing day in the state of Assam. Jaipur is the lodestar of Indian tourism to Rajasthan; Ahmedabad is the primary city of Gujarat, the state that is a poster child for India’s development, with a local GDP growth rate of 14%; Delhi is the nation’s political capital and India’s window to the world; Assam was logistically convenient for terrorists from across a porous border. Mumbai combined all four elements of its precursors: by attacking it, the terrorists hit India’s economy, its tourism, and its internationalism, and they took advantage of the city’s openness to the world. A grand slam.

Indians have learned to endure the unspeakable horrors of terrorist violence ever since men in Pakistan concluded it was cheaper and more effective to bleed India to death than to attempt to defeat it in conventional war. Attack after attack has proven to have been financed, equipped and guided from across the border, the most recent being the suicide bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, an action publicly traced by American intelligence to Islamabad’s dreaded military special-ops agency, the ISI. The risible attempt to claim “credit” for the Mumbai killings in the name of the “Deccan Mujahideen” merely confirms that wherever the killers are from, it is not the Deccan. The Deccan lies inland from Mumbai; one does not need to sail the waters of the Arabian Sea to the Gateway of India to get to the city from there. In its meticulous planning, sophisticated coordination and military precision, as well as its choice of targets, the assault on Mumbai bore no trace of what its promoters tried to suggest it was: a spontaneous eruption by angry young Indian Muslims. This horror was not homegrown. [continued…]

Keeping Robert Gates as secretary of defense is a great idea
By Fred Kaplan, Slate, November 26, 2008

If the reports are true that Robert Gates will stay on as President Obama’s defense secretary, the move is a stroke of brilliance—politically and substantively.

In his nearly two years at the helm of the Pentagon, Gates has delivered a series of speeches on the future direction of military policy. He has urged officers to recognize the shift in the face of warfare from the World War II legacy of titanic armored battles between comparably mighty foes to the modern reality of small shadow wars against terrorists and insurgents.

More than that, he has called for systematic adjustments to this new reality: canceling weapons systems that aren’t suited to these kinds of wars and building more weapons that are; reforming the promotion boards to reward and advance the creative officers who have proved most adept at this style of warfare; rethinking the roles and missions of the individual branches of the armed services; siphoning some of the military’s missions, especially those dealing with “nation building,” to civilian agencies. [continued…]

Iraq backs deal that sets end of U.S. role
By Alissa Rubin and Campbell Robertson, New York Times, November 28, 2008

With a substantial majority, the Iraqi Parliament on Thursday ratified a sweeping security agreement that sets the course for an end to the United States’ role in the war and marks the beginning of a new relationship between the countries.

The pact, which still must be approved by Iraq’s three-person presidency council, a move expected in the next few days, sets the end of 2011 as the date by which the last American troops must leave the country.

Its passage, on a vote of 149 to 35, according to a parliamentary statement, was a victory for Iraq’s government as well as for the often fractious legislative body, which forged a political compromise among bitterly differing factions in 10 days of intense negotiations. [continued…]

Cyber-attack on Defense Department computers raises concerns
By Julian E. Barnes, Los Angeles Times, November 28, 2008

Senior military leaders took the exceptional step of briefing President Bush this week on a severe and widespread electronic attack on Defense Department computers that may have originated in Russia — an incursion that posed unusual concern among commanders and raised potential implications for national security.

Defense officials would not describe the extent of damage inflicted on military networks. But they said that the attack struck hard at networks within U.S. Central Command, the headquarters that oversees U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, and affected computers in combat zones. The attack also penetrated at least one highly protected classified network.

Military computers are regularly beset by outside hackers, computer viruses and worms. But defense officials said the most recent attack involved an intrusive piece of malicious software, or “malware,” apparently designed specifically to target military networks. [continued…]

Some in Arab world wary of Clinton
By Michael Abramowitz, Washington Post, November 23, 2008

There is possibly no person President-elect Barack Obama considered for secretary of state who is more reliably pro-Israel than Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), the woman to whom he appears likely to give the job sometime after Thanksgiving.

During the Democratic primary campaign, Clinton said the United States could “obliterate” Iran if it launched a nuclear attack on Israel. She said the United States should not negotiate with Hamas, the militant group that controls the Gaza Strip, unless it renounced terrorism. “The United States stands with Israel, now and forever,” Clinton told AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, at its conference in June.

Yet Clinton is also the former first lady who famously broke with her husband’s administration in 1998 and said Palestinians should have a state of their own. Ten years later, the comment seems unexceptional, but at the time it prompted the White House to make clear she was speaking only for herself.

Clinton’s foreign policy views will be scrutinized closely in the weeks ahead, but as her past statements on the Middle East illustrate, she has a considerable track record that provides evidence for several plausible explanations of how she might try to focus U.S. diplomacy. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Much of the debate around the wisdom (or lack of it) in selecting Hillary Clinton as secretary of state seems to imply that by putting her in that position Obama will be delegating foreign-policy making to her. In other words, as Bob Woodward claims, Obama has been persuaded to “give Hillary and Bill the world.” I find this highly implausible. Moreover, the gaping hole in much of this discussion so far is the fact that we simply do not know why Obama has picked Clinton, but maybe some context can shed some light.

A campaign is underway to make the Saudi-initiated Arab League peace plan (first presented in 2002) the central framework upon which a resolution to the Middle East conflict can be negotiated. It’s too early to tell whether this campaign is aimed at persuading Obama to put this at the top of his foreign policy agenda, or whether he’s already on board and the efforts of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, Shimon Peres and others are simply groundwork in preparation for a presidential initiative.

If it’s the latter, then it’s reasonable to assume that when Obama offered Clinton SoS, he alerted her to the fact that she would have an important role to play in pushing the Arab peace plan forward. The fact that she’s perceived as a hawk and strongly pro-Israeli would then become assets — not deficits — if she fully supported Obama’s initiative.

So much for the speculation. What should not be lost sight of is that, as The Post says: “she would be responsible for implementing a foreign policy established in the end by Obama.” The Clintons are not about to be given the world.

Obama to take on torture?
By Michael Isikoff, Newsweek, November 22, 2008

Despite the hopes of many human-rights advocates, the new Obama Justice Department is not likely to launch major new criminal probes of harsh interrogations and other alleged abuses by the Bush administration. But one idea that has currency among some top Obama advisers is setting up a 9/11-style commission that would investigate counterterrorism policies and make public as many details as possible. “At a minimum, the American people have to be able to see and judge what happened,” said one senior adviser, who asked not to be identified talking about policy matters. The commission would be empowered to order the U.S. intelligence agencies to open their files for review and question senior officials who approved “waterboarding” and other controversial practices.

Obama aides are wary of taking any steps that would smack of political retribution. That’s one reason they are reluctant to see high-profile investigations by the Democratic-controlled Congress or to greenlight a broad Justice inquiry (absent specific new evidence of wrongdoing). “If there was any effort to have war-crimes prosecutions of the Bush administration, you’d instantly destroy whatever hopes you have of bipartisanship,” said Robert Litt, a former Justice criminal division chief during the Clinton administration. A new commission, on the other hand, could emulate the bipartisan tone set by Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton in investigating the 9/11 attacks. The 9/11 panel was created by Congress. An alternative model, floated by human-rights lawyer Scott Horton, would be a presidential commission similar to the one appointed by Gerald Ford in 1975 and headed by Nelson Rockefeller that investigated cold-war abuses by the CIA. [continued…]

The ‘good war’ isn’t worth fighting
By Rory Stewart, New York Times, November 23, 2008

Afghanistan does not matter as much as Barack Obama thinks.

Terrorism is not the key strategic threat facing the United States. America, Britain and our allies have not created a positive stable environment in the Middle East. We have no clear strategy for dealing with China. The financial crisis is a more immediate threat to United States power and to other states; environmental catastrophe is more dangerous for the world. And even from the perspective of terrorism, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are more lethal.

President-elect Obama’s emphasis on Afghanistan and his desire to send more troops and money there is misguided. Overestimating its importance distracts us from higher priorities, creates an unhealthy dynamic with the government of Afghanistan and endangers the one thing it needs — the stability that might come from a patient, limited, long-term relationship with the international community.

We invaded intending to attack Al Qaeda and provide development assistance. We succeeded. By 2004, Afghanistan had a stable currency, millions more children in school, a better health system, an elected Parliament, no Al Qaeda and almost no Taliban. All this was achieved with only 20,000 troops and a relatively small international aid budget.

When the decision was made to increase troops in 2005, there was no insurgency. But as NATO became increasingly obsessed with transforming the country and brought in more money and troops to deal with corruption and the judiciary, warlords and criminals, insecurity in rural areas and narcotics, it failed. In fact, things got worse. These new NATO troops encountered a fresh problem — local Taliban resistance — which has drawn them into a counterinsurgency campaign. [continued…]

Militants and military brace for a winter of war in Afghanistan
By Laura King, Los Angeles Times, November 23, 2008

In recent years, the first snow falling on the jagged mountain peaks of Afghanistan has ushered in a seasonal slowdown in fighting between insurgents and the Western forces that overthrew the Taliban in 2001.

This winter looks to be different. Snow and icy terrain aside, both sides have made it clear that they plan to keep fighting, each contending that the harsh conditions favor them more than their enemy.

“We’ll be pursuing them, and pursuing them aggressively, whatever the conditions, and they know this,” said Canadian Brig. Gen. Richard Blanchette, chief spokesman for NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, a vow amplified by the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Army Gen. David D. McKiernan, in a speech in Washington on Tuesday. [continued…]

Ringed by foes, Pakistanis fear the U.S., too
By Jane Perlez, New York Times, November 23, 2008

A redrawn map of South Asia has been making the rounds among Pakistani elites. It shows their country truncated, reduced to an elongated sliver of land with the big bulk of India to the east, and an enlarged Afghanistan to the west.

That the map was first circulated as a theoretical exercise in some American neoconservative circles matters little here. It has fueled a belief among Pakistanis, including members of the armed forces, that what the United States really wants is the breakup of Pakistan, the only Muslim country with nuclear arms.

“One of the biggest fears of the Pakistani military planners is the collaboration between India and Afghanistan to destroy Pakistan,” said a senior Pakistani government official involved in strategic planning, who insisted on anonymity as per diplomatic custom. “Some people feel the United States is colluding in this.”

That notion may strike Americans as strange coming from an ally of 50 years. But as the incoming Obama administration tries to coax greater cooperation from Pakistan in the fight against militancy, it can hardly be ignored. [continued…]

In Somalia, piracy and state breakdown
By Rami G. Khouri, Daily Star, November 22, 2008

You know we’re in trouble when much public sentiment in the Arab world probably backs the Somali pirates who recently captured a Saudi Arabian supertanker carrying $100 million of crude oil. If there is a single incident that captures the strange dynamics that have defined our region for the past 50 years or so, this is it: Lawless brigands of a collapsed, poverty-stricken and often violent state grab the paramount symbol of the modern Arab world – an oil tanker heading for the West! – and the rest of the Arab world remains mostly silent and indifferent.

This week in Beirut and on a working visit to Jordan, I asked people for their views of the seizure of the Saudi tanker. I heard three striking and frightening responses: mostly shrugs of the shoulder, some perfunctory expressions of distaste for criminal piracy, and an occasional wicked sense of glee by a few stressed people whose daily lives were increasingly becoming a losing battle to make ends meet, and who experienced vicarious thrills in the daring defiance of the pirates.

Somali piracy has suddenly captured international attention, because global sea-borne assets are now threatened, though the suffering and death of Somalis remain strangely invisible to the outside world. The global response has been a colossal failure in understanding what all this really means. Most comments I have heard focus on the need for greater security cooperation, a sort of “surge-at-sea” strategy to defeat the pirates militarily. This is probably futile in the long run if it only focuses on defeating criminality without addressing the underlying causes of state collapse that gave birth to the piracy phenomenon in the first place. [continued…]

To do: Somalia
By Jonathan Stevenson, The New Republic, November 21, 2008

The fraught 1992-93 U.S.-led humanitarian intervention, U.S. backing for Ethiopia, and civilian casualties caused by recent American counterterrorism strikes have eroded Somali respect for the United States. But Obama’s singular status as the first African American president substantially renews American diplomatic credibility with all Africans, including Somalis.

Expending political capital on such a knotty problem–over a dozen transitional governments have tried and failed over the past 17 years–might seem imprudent at first blush. But the Somalis’ very recalcitrance has yielded such low expectations that very little would actually be at risk. Moreover, an earnest attempt at conflict-resolution in Somalia would enable Mr. Obama to showcase the differences between him and his predecessor.

Mr. Bush was a self-described “gut player,” uninterested in the cultural subtleties of other peoples, and it showed in a foreign policy that was often ineffective on account of its insensitivity. By contrast, Mr. Obama is surrounding himself with true regional experts, including Africanists who have made it their business to understand Africans and their politics in all their complexities. Somalia’s notorious clan system makes for extreme political atomization, and makes any power-sharing solution an especially daunting prospect. Yet the clan network also disperses power from the bottom up, and, properly harnessed, could systematically limit the trajectory of a top-down movement like radical Islamism. [continued…]

Somali Islamists ‘hunt pirates’
BBC News, November 21, 2008

Somali Islamist insurgents have begun searching for the pirates who hijacked a giant Saudi-owned oil tanker last Saturday, reports say.

A spokesman for the al-Shabab group, Abdelghafar Musa, said hijacking a Muslim-owned ship was a major crime and they would pursue those responsible.

The pirates are thought to be trying to obtain a multi-million dollar ransom. [continued…]

Is it OK to be liberal again, instead of progressive?
By Michael Lind, Salon, November 21, 2008

If the conservative era is over, can liberals come out of their defensive crouch and call themselves liberals again, instead of progressives?

In the last two decades, Democratic politicians, including Barack Obama, have abandoned the term “liberal” for “progressive.” The theory was that Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush — and Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Pat Buchanan — had succeeded in equating “liberal” in the public mind with weakness on defense, softness on crime, and “redistribution” of Joe the Plumber’s hard-earned money to the collective bogey evoked by a former Texas rock band’s clever name: Teenage Immigrant Welfare Mothers on Dope.

I’ve always been uncomfortable with this rather soulless and manipulative exercise in rebranding, for a number of reasons. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — To my mind, neither liberal nor progressive are particularly useful terms. “Progressive” seems a rather hollow slogan when self-applied. If an agenda can objectively be described as being progressive, all well and good, but when its own proponents say it’s progressive it says little more than we know about a product when it gets branded “new and improved.”

On the other hand “liberal” has the connotations of personal freedom, but in America liberty is pretty much a bipartisan value. To be liberal, as in open-minded, is a good thing, yet who — whatever the facts might otherwise indicate — sees themselves as closed-minded? Then again, from a conservative point of view, liberal can connote the hedonistic libertine. Thus the culture wars get framed as pitting those Americans who have values against those who supposedly lack them.

What unambiguously distinguishes the left from the right is our view of the relationship between the individual and society. For the right, the interests of society are best served by protecting the interests of the individual; for the left it is the reverse. Our core value is that we are in this together. We believe in the common good. We believe that an understanding that “we share a common destiny” is more than a social ideal; it has become a global imperative.

Middle East priorities for Jan. 21
By Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Washington Post, November 21, 2008

The election of Barack Obama to be the 44th president is profoundly historic. We have at long last been able to come together in a way that has eluded us in the long history of our great country. We should celebrate this triumph of the true spirit of America.

Election Day celebrations were replicated in time zones around the world, something we have not seen in a long time. While euphoria is ephemeral, we must endeavor to use its energy to bring us all together as Americans to cope with the urgent problems that beset us.

When Obama takes office in two months, he will find a number of difficult foreign policy issues competing for his attention, each with strong advocates among his advisers. We believe that the Arab-Israeli peace process is one issue that requires priority attention. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — It’s good to see two foreign-policy heavyweights, Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, advocate that the Arab-Israeli conflict should receive priority attention by President Obama. Their argument, in diplomatically tempered language, is however a bit tepid. Not only does the issue need to be among those at the top of Obama’s agenda but the current administration’s policy of promoting division among Palestinians needs to be explicitly reversed. To say that “if the peace process begins to gain momentum, it is difficult to imagine that Hamas will want to be left out,” is to imply that Hamas’ current isolation is self-imposed.

The issue that needs to be grasped by the incoming administration as well as the next Israeli government is that Palesinian unity will not merely serve the interests of the Palestinian people; it is the only basis upon which a viable peace agreement can be built. The effort to destroy Hamas through a war of attrition in which Gaza has been placed under siege for the last two years, has failed.

Recognition of Israel’s right to exist, and renunciation of violence, need to be seen not as necessary preconditions for entering into political negotiations but seen instead for what they realistically are: the reward for the successful completion of those negotiations.

Recasting the war on terrorism
By Spencer Ackerman, The Washington Independent, November 20, 2008

Buoyed by high expectations for the first year of Barack Obama’s administration, an informal coalition of progressive national-security and civil-liberties experts are urging the president-elect to redefine the war on terrorism.

Eight years of the Bush administration’s approach to counterterrorism have yielded two open-ended and bloody wars; a massively expanded security apparatus, and spending on defense far outpacing outlays on domestic programs, even during a crisis-plagued economy.

Yet while liberals have spent much of this time opposing the Bush administration’s agenda, many of their proposals for Obama go beyond merely rolling back President George W. Bush’s policies — withdrawing from Iraq, shuttering the Guantanamo Bay detention complex, abolishing torture — to offer new areas of emphasis, like stabilizing Afghanistan, an Arab-Israeli peace and a re-envisioned balance between security and liberty. [continued…]

Fighting terrorism fairly and effectively
Human Rights Watch, November 16, 2008

Over the past seven years, the US government’s consistent disregard for human rights in fighting terrorism has diminished America’s moral authority, set a negative example for other governments, and undermined the goal of reducing anti-American militancy around the world. The use of torture, unlawful rendition, secret prisons, unfair trials, and long-term, arbitrary detention without charge has been both morally wrong and counterproductive. [Read the report]

Liberty and security: recommendations for the next administration and Congress
The Constitution Project, November 18, 2008

“Liberty and Security: Recommendations for the Next Administration and Congress reflects the ongoing, collaborative efforts of a coalition of more than 25 leading organizations and 75 individuals to provide policymakers with a framework for addressing liberty and security issues. The catalogue includes recommendations drawn from the shared knowledge and experience of a broad coalition of groups devoted to exploring the intersection of civil liberties and national security. [continued…]

Waxman ushers in new era
By Mike Lillis, The Washington Independent, November 20, 2008

On Capitol Hill’s Rayburn office building, in the private chambers of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, hangs an enormous satellite photograph of the planet earth. Beneath the picture is a couch, where, according to sources familiar with the committee, long-time Chairman John Dingell is fond of sitting. From that couch, they say, the venerable Michigan Democrat, who has served for 53 years, has been known to point up to the photo and say, “That is the jurisdiction of this committee.”

Now, Dingell is no longer in control of the world.

House Democrats Thursday morning took the remarkable step of ousting Congress’s longest-serving member as head of the powerful energy panel. They replaced Dingell with the more liberal Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Cal.), whose energy plans are more in-line with those of President-elect Barack Obama.

The vote — 137 to 122 — marked a stunning defeat for the party’s seniority system.

Environmentalists, though, are thrilled. For decades, Dingell has fought successfully against efforts to adopt stricter emissions rules and force Detroit’s automakers in the direction of greater fuel-efficiency. With the arrival of an Obama administration next year, many climate-change groups had wondered how the new president would sneak his ambitious energy plans past the powerful head of the energy panel. Now he won’t have to. Waxman, a fiery environmentalist who has butted heads with Dingell on these issues, is seen to symbolize the end of Dingell’s obstructionism. [continued…]

Fear stalks the world’s economies
By Alan Beattie and Michael MacKenzie, Financial Times, November 20, 2008

Fears of a severe recession gripped financial markets on Thursday as dire US unemployment figures helped drive long-term interest rates to record lows.

Economic news across the world was almost uniformly bad as slumping Japanese exports threatened to push the economy deeper into recession and the Swiss central bank unexpectedly slashed interest rates by a full percentage point. [continued…]

The lame-duck economy
By Paul Krugman, New York Times, November 21, 2008

Everyone’s talking about a new New Deal, for obvious reasons. In 2008, as in 1932, a long era of Republican political dominance came to an end in the face of an economic and financial crisis that, in voters’ minds, both discredited the G.O.P.’s free-market ideology and undermined its claims of competence. And for those on the progressive side of the political spectrum, these are hopeful times.

There is, however, another and more disturbing parallel between 2008 and 1932 — namely, the emergence of a power vacuum at the height of the crisis. The interregnum of 1932-1933, the long stretch between the election and the actual transfer of power, was disastrous for the U.S. economy, at least in part because the outgoing administration had no credibility, the incoming administration had no authority and the ideological chasm between the two sides was too great to allow concerted action. And the same thing is happening now.

It’s true that the interregnum will be shorter this time: F.D.R. wasn’t inaugurated until March; Barack Obama will move into the White House on Jan. 20. But crises move faster these days. [continued…]

Report sees nuclear arms, scarce resources as seeds of global instability
By Peter Finn and Walter Pincus, Washington Post, November 21, 2008

The drive for dwindling resources, including energy and water, combined with the spread of nuclear weapons technology could make large swaths of the globe ripe for regional conflicts, some of them potentially devastating, according to a report released by the National Intelligence Council yesterday.

The report, Global Trends 2025, covers a range of strategic issues, including great-power rivalry, demographics, climate change, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, energy and natural resources. It makes for sometimes grim reading in imagining a world of weak states bristling with weapons of mass destruction and unable to cope with burgeoning populations without adequate water and food.

“Those states most susceptible to conflict are in a great arc of instability stretching from Sub-Saharan Africa through North Africa, into the Middle East, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and South and Central Asia, and parts of Southeast Asia,” the quadrennial report says.

At the heart of its deepest pessimism is the Middle East, which it suggests could tip into a nuclear arms race if Iran goes ahead with such weapons. [continued…]

Killing of al-Qaida smuggler in Syria was joint Syrian, U.S. effort
By Richard Sale, Middle East Times, November 21, 2008

Washington has long run a back channel to Damascus through Syria’s air force intelligence, the Idarat al-Murkabarat al-Jawiyya, U.S. sources said.

On Oct. 26, Syrian intelligence alerted U.S. forces in Iraq to Abu Ghadiyah’s whereabouts, at which time, U.S. Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) operatives began to track him, probably through his satellite telephone.

Four Blackhawk helicopters took off for the northeastern Syrian village of al-Sukkiraya, about five miles from the Euphrates river, an area where a compound of new homes was being built, according to U.S. intelligence officials.

At this point, the raid went wrong. As the U.S. Special Forces poured out of the aircraft, shots were fired and a gunfight broke out that lasted for 10 to 15 minutes. Abu Ghadiya was to have been captured and flown to Iraq for interrogation. Instead he was killed in the fighting, along with seven Syrian civilians, including four children, most of them members of the same family.

“There weren’t to have been any civilian casualties, no collateral damage,” a U.S. intelligence official said. “We wanted the [expletive] alive.” The U.S. raiding team carried off two captives for interrogation.

“The problem with these kinds of tactics lies with the fact that so many things can go wrong, and they usually do,” said Middle East expert Tony Cordesman. “You don’t want to solve one problem only to create a dozen others.”

But the praise of U.S. officials for Syria’s part was deeply appreciative. “The Syrians were perfect; they gave us the works,” said one U.S. official familiar with the incident. [continued…]

Judge orders five detainees freed from Guantánamo
By William Glaberson, New York Times, November 21, 2008

In the first hearing on the government’s justification for holding detainees at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, a federal judge ruled Thursday that five Algerian men were held unlawfully for nearly seven years and ordered their release.

The judge, Richard J. Leon of Federal District Court in Washington, also ruled that a sixth Algerian man was being lawfully detained because he had provided support to the terrorist group Al Qaeda.

The case was an important test of the Bush administration’s detention policies, which critics have long argued swept up innocent men and low-level foot soldiers along with high-level and hardened terrorists. [continued…]

Al Qaeda coldly acknowledges Obama victory
By Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane, New York Times, November 20, 2008

In a propaganda salvo by Al Qaeda aimed at undercutting the enthusiasm of Muslims worldwide about the American election, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy condemned President-elect Barack Obama as a “house Negro” who would continue a campaign against Islam that Al Qaeda’s leaders said was begun by President Bush.

Appealing to the “weak and oppressed” around the world, the Qaeda deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, said in a video released Wednesday that the “new face” of America only masked a “heart full of hate.”

For years, the terrorist network sought to fuel anti-Americanism with prolific audio and video recordings vilifying President Bush as the leading American “crusader” against Muslim nations. The election of Mr. Obama, a black man who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia and whose father was from a Muslim family, has muddied Al Qaeda’s message. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — So, the big story is that Ayman al-Zawahiri insulted Obama by calling him a “house negro.”

The best retort to that I’ve come across was from Mary Mitchell: “Obama isn’t going to the White House to serve the man. He is the man.”

But as everyone has glommed on to the race element in the al Qaeda missive, there’s another part that seemed to get missed: Zawahiri played the Muslim card straight down the GOP line.

He said of Obama:

You were born to a Muslim father, but you chose to stand in the ranks of the enemies of the Muslims, and pray the prayer of the Jews, although you claim to be Christian, in order to climb the rungs of leadership in America.

Just as some scare-mongering Obama critics suggested, al Qaeda appears to be casting Obama as an apostate.

Hillary Clinton justifiably got jumped on when she said Obama was not a Muslim “as far as I know.” Zawahiri seems to be using an even more thinly-veiled insinuation when he says “you claim to be a Christian.” Likewise, Zawahiri compares Obama with Malcolm X not just to make an unfavorable contrast between one black leader and another but to imply that one was being a true Muslim and the other not. In other words, that Obama has betrayed both his race and his faith.

My guess is that Adam Pearlman had a hand in drafting this message, not simply because of the English subtitles but because in part it seems to have been aimed at those white Americans who still believe Obama is a secret Muslim.

Giving up on God
By Kathleen Parker, Washington Post, November 19, 2008

As Republicans sort out the reasons for their defeat, they likely will overlook or dismiss the gorilla in the pulpit.

Three little letters, great big problem: G-O-D.

I’m bathing in holy water as I type.

To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn’t soon cometh.

Simply put: Armband religion is killing the Republican Party. And, the truth — as long as we’re setting ourselves free — is that if one were to eavesdrop on private conversations among the party intelligentsia, one would hear precisely that. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Even though I’m neither a Republican nor a Christian, I can’t resist pointing out that Kathleen Parker seems to have got it the wrong way around: the GOP doesn’t need to dump God; the evidence — at least if one accepts Rev Arnold Conrad’s impeccible reasoning — is that God already dumped the GOP.

“You raise up leaders and you pull them down,” Rev Conrad solemnly said to God while praying at a McCain rally in early October. No doubt Conrad has since pulled out that universal escape clause — God works in mysterious ways — but I’d like to know what he (Conrad, not God) is really thinking now.

O Lord, what made you make McCain pick Sarah Palin? And why couldn’t the financial crisis have come in November instead of September? You liked Bush well enough to get him elected twice, so why are you now casting us out into the wilderness? O Lord, why have you forsaken the GOP?

I guess the only council I can offer is to say, when it comes to politics, don’t bet your life on a swing voter — especially the ultimate swing voter. He’s clearly the most capricious of them all.

Did U.S. push detention of American without charges?
By Jonathan S. Landay, McClatchy, November 17, 2008

An American Muslim subjected to several years of intense FBI scrutiny and questioning about links to terrorism has been held without charges, access to a lawyer or contact with his family for nearly three months by the security services of the United Arab Emirates.

The case of Naji Hamdan, coupled with FBI interrogations of an American citizen secretly detained without charges in East Africa, raises the question of whether the Bush administration has asked other nations to hold Americans suspected of terrorism links whom U.S. officials lack the evidence to charge.

That allegation is central to a lawsuit that the American Civil Liberties Union was planning to file Tuesday in federal court in Washington against President Bush, Attorney General Michael Mukasey and FBI Director Robert Mueller.

“If the U.S. government is responsible for this detention and we believe it is, this is clearly illegal because our government can’t contract away the Constitution by enlisting the aid of other governments that do not adhere to the Constitution’s requirements,” said Ahilan Arulanantham of the ACLU’s southern California office. [continued…]

Iran said to have nuclear fuel for one weapon
By William J Broad and David E Sanger, New York Times, November 20, 2008

Iran has now produced roughly enough nuclear material to make, with added purification, a single atom bomb, according to nuclear experts analyzing the latest report from global atomic inspectors.

The figures detailing Iran’s progress were contained in a routine update on Wednesday from the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has been conducting inspections of the country’s main nuclear plant at Natanz. The report concluded that as of early this month, Iran had made 630 kilograms, or about 1,390 pounds, of low-enriched uranium.

Several experts said that was enough for a bomb, but they cautioned that the milestone was mostly symbolic, because Iran would have to take additional steps. Not only would it have to breach its international agreements and kick out the inspectors, but it would also have to further purify the fuel and put it into a warhead design — a technical advance that Western experts are unsure Iran has yet achieved. [continued…]

Twenty reasons why we’re not consuming
By Nouriel Roubini, Forbes, November 20, 2008

This week’s news about October retail sales (-2.8% relative to the previous month and now down in real terms for five months in a row) confirm that the U.S. has entered its most severe consumer-led recession in decades. At this rate of free fall in consumption, real gross domestic product growth could be a whopping 5% negative or even worse in the fourth quarter of 2008. And this is not a temporary phenomenon: Almost all of the fundamentals driving consumption are heading south on a persistent and structural basis.

Consider the many severe negative factors affecting consumption. One can count at least 20 separate or complementary causes that will sharply reduce consumption in the next several years: [continued…]

The Pentagon’s argument of last resort on Iraq
By Tom Englehardt, TomDispatch, November 20, 2008

It’s the ultimate argument, the final bastion against withdrawal, and over these last years, the Bush administration has made sure it would have plenty of heft. Ironically, its strength lies in the fact that it has nothing to do with the vicissitudes of Iraqi politics, the relative power of Shiites or Sunnis, the influence of Iran, or even the riptides of war. It really doesn’t matter what Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki or oppositional cleric Muqtada al-Sadr think about it. In fact, it’s an argument that has nothing to do with Iraq and everything to do with us, with the American way of war (and life), which makes it almost unassailable.

And this week Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen — the man President-elect Obama plans to call into the Oval Office as soon as he arrives — wheeled it into place and launched it like a missile aimed at the heart of Obama’s 16-month withdrawal plan for U.S. combat troops in Iraq. It may not sound like much, but believe me, it is. The Chairman simply said, “We have 150,000 troops in Iraq right now. We have lots of bases. We have an awful lot of equipment that’s there. And so we would have to look at all of that tied to, obviously, the conditions that are there, literally the security conditions… Clearly, we’d want to be able to do it safely.” Getting it all out safely, he estimated, would take at least “two to three years.” [continued…]

Is Obama a Middle East ‘splitter’?
By Gideon Rachman, Financial Times, November 17, 2008

Historians are sometimes divided into lumpers and splitters. The splitters like to chop problems up into lots of small bits. The lumpers like to link them altogether.

Would-be Middle East peacemakers can be categorised in the same way. The lumpers want a “comprehensive peace settlement” that links together all the problems in the region – Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Israel-Palestine, even Iran. The splitters want to deal with all these problems separately….

I think, as a matter of practical politics, Mr Obama will have to be a splitter. The state of the American economy is going to eat up most of his working day. When he turns to foreign policy, the Israeli-Palestinian problem will come fairly low down his list of priorities – behind, in rough order of urgency, Iraq, Afghanistan, climate change, Iran, international economics and Russia. He will see the Iranian nuclear issue as too important to await progress on Israel-Palestine. Withdrawal from Iraq is a central pledge of his administration, regardless of what is happening with Israel. If an Obama administration sees chances to make progress on Lebanon, or with Syria, it will take them as they arise.

European diplomats who have dealt with the new American team say that they have been assured that Mr Obama does regard the Israel-Palestine problem as a priority and something that the new administration intends to start work on quickly. (It is generally held that President Bill Clinton left the Middle East peace process until too late in his second term and that this mistake has been repeated by President George W. Bush.) A “serious” commitment by Mr Obama need not mean launching immediately into an important global conference. Simply appointing a high-profile envoy would be regarded as a good earnest of intent.

Mr Obama may well oblige on the envoy front. But I doubt he will want to spend much political capital and time on the Middle East peace process when there are so many other priorities clamouring for his attention.

A decision to put the Israeli-Palestinian question on the back burner would, however, be a shame. That is not because it necessarily holds the key to solving all the other problems of the Middle East. It is because the situation – although relatively quiet at the moment – remains dangerous, unstable and a disaster for the population. Ignore the Palestinian problem when things are quiet and it is liable to force its way back on to the agenda – by blowing up at an even more inconvenient time. [continued…]

Top Obama aide denies report president-elect will back Arab peace plan
Haaretz, November 18, 2008

A senior adviser to Barack Obama on Sunday denied reports that the U.S. president-elect plans to throw his weight behind the 2002 Arab peace plan, which calls for Israel to withdraw from all territories captured during the 1967 Six-Day War in exchange for normalized ties with the Arab world.

The British Sunday Times said Obama expressed this sentiment during his visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories last July.

Dennis Ross, Obama’s adviser on Middle East policy, issued a statement Sunday, saying “I was in the meeting in Ramallah. Then-senator Obama did not say this, the story is false.” The Times cited a senior adviser who quoted Obama as telling Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas: “The Israelis would be crazy not to accept this initiative. It would give them peace with the Muslim world from Indonesia to Morocco.”

According to the Times, Obama, who is due to take office as the U.S. president on January 20, has been urged by leading bipartisan figures in the American foreign policy establishment to embrace the plan, which was first proposed by Saudi King Abdullah in an interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — The multipronged lobbying effort that is clearly underway right now is not necessarily aimed at trying to push the Middle East peace process to the top of Obama’s foreign policy agenda — a goal that would be unrealistic when Iraq and Afghanistan require so much attention. Rather, this seems like an attempt to grasp the opportunity to set aside Oslo, the Road Map, and Annapolis and reframe the peace process in terms of a comprehensive solution. In and of itself, this is a useful exercise because it implicitly acknowledges that the current process is dead without undiplomatically declaring its failure.

Hamas, Israel trying to rewrite truce
By Karin Laub, AP, November 17, 2008

A June truce between Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers comes up for renewal next month and it looks like both sides are trying to dictate more favorable terms.

That would explain why Israel and Hamas have been trading rocket fire and air strikes for two weeks, even as they keep saying they’re interested in a continued cease-fire. But the attempt to establish new ground rules could easily spin out of control, especially if there are civilian casualties.

Domestic concerns further complicate the situation.

Israel is holding general elections Feb. 10 and the cross-border violence has become campaign fodder. [continued…]

When will Obama give up the Bin Laden ghost hunt?
By Robert Baer, Time, November 18, 2008

In a talk to the Atlantic Council this week CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden said Osama bin Laden is alive. I’ll take his word for it. But bin Laden’s strange disappearance makes one wonder what exactly happened to him. The last relatively reliable bin Laden sighting was in late 2001. A video that he appears in last year shows him with a dyed beard. More than a few Pakistani intelligence operatives who knew bin Laden scoff at the idea he would ever dye his beard. They think the tape was manipulated from old footage, and that bin Laden is in fact dead. But then again, they would have an interest in making us believe bin Laden is dead, since it would relieve American pressure to find him by any means necessary, including going into Pakistani territory.

And what about all the other audiotapes bin Laden has put out since 9/11? Experts will tell you that off-the shelf digital editing software could manipulate old bin Laden voice recordings to make it sound as if he were discussing current events. Finally, there’s the mystery why bin Laden didn’t pop up during the election. You would think a narcissistic mass murderer who believes he has a place in history would find it impossible to pass up an opportunity to give his opinion at such a momentous time, at least dropping off a DVD at the al Jazeera office in Islamabad.

I asked a half dozen of my former CIA colleagues who have been on bin Laden’s trail since 9/11. What surprised me was that none would say for certain whether he is alive or dead. Half assumed he is dead, the other half assumed he is alive. I suppose a lot of their timidity has to do with the still open wounds about the CIA’s missing an event like Saddam’s destruction of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. It would be so much easier to miss the death of a single man. [continued…]

Russia to cut oil export duty by third
By Isabel Gorst, Financial Times, November 17, 2008

Russia plans to cut its oil export duties by a third next month, offering much-needed relief to companies that have been making a loss on their crude exports.

Exporting oil from Russia, the world’s second biggest producer, has become unprofitable as a result of the fall in the price of crude and heavy taxation.

Oil companies had been warning they were being forced to cut their exports, intensifying the financial crisis engulfing Russia.

The Russian government has been calling on the companies to sustain their exports, and indicated on Monday that there would be a steep cut in oil duty to reflect the fall in oil prices. [continued…]

The tribal fallacy
By Nicholas Schmidle, The Atlantic, November 13, 2008

The Pakistani government has flirted with divide-and-conquer tactics in the past by taking sides in internecine squabbles in the tribal areas. But rather than siding with tribes against the Taliban, Pakistan often tries to play one Taliban faction off another. It distinguishes between “good” and “bad” Taliban: the “good” ones focus on fighting U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, and the “bad” ones target Pakistani troops and politicians. Baitullah Mehsud and Maulana Fazlullah of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan are both “bad.” In April 2007, a mini-civil war in South Waziristan pitted “good” Taliban fighters from the Ahmadzai Wazir tribe, under the command of Maulvi Nazir, against several hundred “bad” Uzbek militants belonging to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and to al-Qaeda. The Uzbeks had killed scores of Pakistani tribal chiefs. When the fighting began, the Pakistani army sided with the Taliban and provided helicopter- and artillery-fire. The ranking general later told me that he ordered soldiers to strip off their uniforms, don a shalwar kameez, and lead the “good” Taliban to victory. (The incident, while encouraging, highlighted the degree to which Washington and Islamabad’s security priorities are mismatched. Among the rash of recent drone attacks in the tribal areas, several missiles have targeted “good” Talib Maulvi Nazir and his associates in South Waziristan.)

Meanwhile, the Pakistanis have had little success enlisting ordinary tribesmen to rebel against the Taliban. Their failure should be worrying. Without the support of ordinary tribesmen in Iraq, the Anbar Awakening and the defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq would have been unthinkable. The same holds true in northwestern Pakistan. Yet the Pashtun tribes have been understandably reluctant to join the government. During Musharraf’s regime, sporadic, overhyped military offensives failed to dislodge the Taliban, and any malik, or tribal chief, suspected of sympathizing with the government was branded a spy and slaughtered. Khalid Aziz, a former political agent in North Waziristan, told me that, in the past, “If a malik or his family was attacked, we used to do everything to redeem the malik’s honor. The current administration has unfortunately disowned these policies.” [continued…]

A pact with the devil
By Pepe Escobar, Asia Times, November 18, 2008

The big bang is not that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s majority Shi’ite/Kurdish 37-member cabinet in Baghdad has approved the draft of a security pact with the George W Bush (and Barack Obama) administrations allowing the US military to stay in Iraq for three more years; it’s that the 30-strong Sadrist bloc will move heaven and Earth – including massive nationwide protests – to bloc the pact in the Iraqi National Assembly.

The proposed Status of Forces Agreement not only sets a date for American troop withdrawal – 2011 – but also puts new restrictions on US combat operations in Iraq starting on January 1 and requires a military pullback from urban areas by June 30. The pact goes before parliament in a week or so.

Sadrist spokesman Ahmed al-Masoudi stressed this Sunday that the pact “did not mean anything” and “hands Iraq over on a golden platter and for an indefinite period”.

Masoudi is right on the money when he says the overwhelming majority of popular opinion is against it and the Sadrists and many Sunni parties insist a popular referendum to approve it is essential. [continued…]

Iraqi and American critics of security pact speak up
By Campbell Robertson and Steven Lee Myers, New York Times, November 18, 2008

Iraqi and American critics of a security agreement governing American troops in Iraq voiced their objections on Monday, a day after the Iraqi cabinet approved the pact and sent it to Parliament for ratification.

In Iraq, opposition has created an unlikely association between the followers of the anti-American Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who rejected the agreement out of hand, and some Sunni politicians, including ones who support the deal but are trying to wrest concessions from the Iraqi government.

Ghufran al-Saadi, a Sadrist lawmaker, said opponents had collected 115 signatures, primarily from Sadr supporters and members of the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party, demanding that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and several cabinet members appear in Parliament to answer questions about the agreement, which governs the presence of American troops in Iraq through 2011. Parliament has 275 members. [continued…]

Government near to collapse, says Somalia leader
By Xan Rice, The Guardian, November 17, 2008

President Abdullahi Yusuf of Somalia has admitted that his government is on the verge of collapse and that Islamist groups now control most of the country.

In a speech to Somali MPs gathered in the Kenyan capital Nairobi at the weekend, Yusuf said that the government only had a presence in the capital Mogadishu and in Baidoa, “and people are being killed there every day. Islamists have taken over everywhere else.”

His frank admission confirms what is known but seldom publicly acknowledged by those with a stake in Somalia’s future, from Ethiopia, whose continued occupation unites the different Islamist groups against a common enemy, to the UN and western countries, which have backed the warlord-heavy government for years. [continued…]

Turkey could be good mediator with Iran: Erdogan
AFP, November 15, 2008

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday Ankara could play a positive part if it were to act as a mediator in the stalled negotiations with Iran over its suspect nuclear program.

“If Turkey plays such a role, it could have a positive impact on the process,” Erdogan told a press conference in Washington after arriving to take part in the summit of G20 leaders on the economic crisis.

He said Turkey would be able to exert some influence on the dragging dossier because it was Iran’s neighbor. [continued…]

Bill’s $500,000 Kuwait lecture
By Salameh Nematt, The Daily Beast, November 18, 2008

The National Bank of Kuwait (NBK) has paid $500,000 to Bill Clinton for a single lecture he delivered in Kuwait City on Sunday on his assessment of Barack Obama’s foreign and economic policies. It was delivered the day after the Kuwaiti stock market resumed trading after it was suspended by order of a Kuwaiti court on Thursday to avoid a total collapse.

Without mentioning reports that Clinton’s finances were coming under close scrutiny as his wife, Hillary Clinton, is being vetted for the job of secretary of state, the Arab-language Kuwaiti newspaper Awan published a front-page story under the headline “Clinton’s lecture at NBK cost $500,000.” [continued…]

Cabinet post for Clinton roils Obamaland
By Ben Smith, Politico, November 18, 2008

Barack Obama’s serious flirtation with his one-time rival, Hillary Clinton, over the post of secretary of State has been welcomed by everyone from Henry Kissinger to Bill Clinton as an effective, grand gesture by the president-elect.

It’s not playing quite as well, however, in some precincts of Obamaland. From his supporters on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, to campaign aides of the soon-to-be commander-in-chief, there’s a sense of ambivalence about giving a top political plum to a woman they spent 18 months hammering as the compromised standard-bearer of an era that deserves to be forgotten.

“These are people who believe in this stuff more than Barack himself does,” said a Democrat close to Obama’s campaign. “These guys didn’t put together a campaign in order to turn the government over to the Clintons.” [continued…]