A Blue View

Belt Tightening Finally Comes To The Pentagon

It took the Great Recession and a Democratic President but it seems the Defense Dept. might actually start cutting back on the annual growth of its budget. The NY Times:

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has ordered the military and the Pentagon’s civilian bureaucracy to find tens of billions of dollars in annual savings to pay for war-fighting operations, senior officials said Thursday.

His goal is $7 billion in spending cuts and efficiencies for 2012, growing to $37 billion annually by 2016.

Every modern defense secretary has declared war on Pentagon waste and redundancy. And there have been notable, but relatively narrow successes, in closing and consolidating military bases or in canceling a handful of weapons systems.

But if Mr. Gates’s sweeping plan is fully enacted, none of the armed services or Pentagon civilian agencies and directorates would be immune from the pain of annual cost-cutting, which would become institutionalized across the Defense Department.

The spending guidelines were delivered orally to senior military officers and civilian officials before Mr. Gates’s departure this week for an Asian security conference in Singapore, and the official signed guidance will be issued over coming days.

The goal is to force all of the Defense Department agencies and organizations, and all of the armed services, to save enough money in their management, personnel policies and logistics to guarantee 3 percent real growth each year, beyond inflation, in the accounts that pay for combat operations.

Current budget plans project growth of only 1 percent in the Pentagon budget, after inflation, over the next five years.

“Given the nation’s fiscal situation, there is an urgency to doing this, rather than shifting more of the nation’s resources toward national defense,” William J. Lynn III, the deputy defense secretary, said in an interview.

Mr. Gates’s spending orders offer a considerable incentive to the armed services. Each dollar in spending cuts found by a military department would be reinvested in the combat force of that branch, and not siphoned away for other purposes.

Senior officials acknowledge that powerful constituencies are expected to line up in opposition to cuts of favorite programs — with criticism anticipated from the defense industry, Congress, military headquarters, Pentagon personnel and retirees.

“We will need to address the reasons things are in the budget in order to be able to reduce overhead,” Mr. Lynn said. “We are going to have to be engaged in dialogue with industry, with Congress, with other agencies, with the White House and inside the Pentagon — all the stakeholders.”

The new directives are aimed at three distinct areas of spending.

Once DADT Is Repealed, The Military Faces A Broad Range Of Decisions: Married Housing Anyone?

As this NY Times story makes clear, the military is no different than civilian society: no longer being forced into a closet is far from nondiscrimination and equality. "Gays in the military" is going to be a political issue for a long time I beleive.

For opponents of the ban against homosexuals serving openly in the military, the steps by Congress this week to repeal the policy, known as “don’t ask, don’t tell,” were a major victory. But now they are girding for what may be an equally difficult task: the transition to a force where straight and openly gay servicemen and women live, work and fight alongside one other.

Some homosexuals in the military say they are worried about how that process will work and whether they will be treated differently if they publicly acknowledge their sexual orientation. Some raised concerns about being harassed, assigned to separate barracks or shunned by colleagues who had been friendly before.

“In an idyllic world, getting rid of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ and saying ‘Everyone here is welcome’ is great,” said a 29-year-old lesbian in the Army National Guard, who asked that her name be withheld because she could still be discharged under the rule.

“But the policy actually allowed for a lot of protections,” the soldier said. “Getting rid of it completely without modifying it is kind of worrisome. The number of incidents against gays in the military is going to increase.”

Indeed, both opponents and supporters of the ban say a host of thorny practical questions will face the Pentagon if Congress gives final approval to legislation allowing the repeal of the ban, which could happen this summer.

Will openly gay service members be placed in separate housing, as the commandant of the Marine Corps has advocated? What benefits, if any, will partners or spouses of homosexual service members be accorded? Will all military units be required to treat homosexuals the same? And what training will heterosexual officers and enlisted troops receive to prepare them to serve with openly gay soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines?

“The reality is, getting rid of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ doesn’t ensure that all lesbian and gay service members will be equal on that day,” said Aubrey Sarvis, executive director of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. “There will continue to be challenges to make full equality for gays and lesbians in the armed forces a reality.”

Similar questions were asked when blacks were allowed to integrate previously all-white units. But that transition was not without its difficulties too, including instances of racial violence.

A Pentagon panel has begun studying the issues around gays serving openly as part of a broad review of homosexuality in the military, which will include surveys of thousands of service members and their families. The panel, led by Gen. Carter Ham, the commander of the United States Army in Europe, and Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon’s top legal counsel, is supposed to deliver its report by Dec. 1.

Under an amendment moving through Congress, once that report is finished, the White House and senior Pentagon leadership must certify that repealing the ban will not be disruptive to the military. Once that certification is made, final repeal will occur within 60 days.

The House approved the amendment on Friday as part of the bill authorizing more than $567 billion in Pentagon programs and spending. The Senate Armed Services Committee approved the amendment on Thursday, and the full Senate is expected to take up the authorization bill later this summer.

“It could be late 2011 before this is implemented,” said Alex Nicholson, executive director of Servicemembers United, a nonprofit organization.

Supporters of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” who still hope they can stop it from being repealed, fear the effect on the military if it is.

The One Document That Crystallizes The Difference Between Obama & Bush

This NY Times report on Obama's "New Foundations" strategy makes the diff clear: he is an intelligent, sophisticated thinker not blinded by hegemonic fervor as was his predecessor:

President Obama’s first formal National Security Strategy argues that preserving American leadership in the world hinges on learning to accept and manage the rise of many competitors, and dismisses as far too narrow the Bush era doctrine that fighting terrorism should be the nation’s overarching objective.

In a 52-page document that tries to balance the idealism of Mr. Obama’s campaign promises with the realities of his confrontations with a fractious and threatening world over the past 16 months, Mr. Obama describes an American strategy that recognizes limits on how much the United States can spend to shape the globe.

An America “hardened by war” and “disciplined by a devastating economic crisis,” he argues, cannot sustain extended fighting in both Iraq and Afghanistan, while fulfilling other commitments at home and abroad.

“The burdens of a young century cannot fall on American shoulders alone,” Mr. Obama writes in the introduction of the strategy being released on Thursday. “Indeed, our adversaries would like to see America sap our strength by overextending our power.”

That line is just one of many subtle slaps at President George W. Bush. Much of the National Security Strategy, which is required by Congress, reads as an argument for a restoration of an older order of reliance on international institutions, updated to confront modern threats. While Mr. Bush’s 2002 document explicitly said the United States would never allow the rise of a rival superpower, Mr. Obama argues that America faces no real military competitor, but that global power is increasingly diffuse. “To succeed, we must face the world as it is,” he says.

The principal author of the report, Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser, noted in an interview that Mr. Obama’s move to replace the G-8 nations with a broader group, called the G-20, that includes China, India and Brazil, recognizes this reality. “We are deeply committed to broadening the circle of responsible actors,” Mr. Rhodes said.

Although the administration has put renewed focus on the war in Afghanistan and escalated C.I.A. drone strikes against militants, the strategy rejects Mr. Bush’s single-minded focus on counterterrorism as the organizing principle of national security policy. Those efforts “to counter violent extremism” — Mr. Obama avoids the use of the word “Islamic” — “are only one element of our strategic environment and cannot define America’s engagement with the world.”

He goes on to argue that “the gravest danger to the American people and global security continues to come from weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons.” And he dwelled on cyber threats, climate change, and America’s dependence on fossil fuels as fundamental national security issues, issues that received relatively little or no attention in Mr. Bush’s 2002 document, although his administration focused on them more in its second term.

“It is a rather dramatic departure from the most recent prior national security strategy,” Susan Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations, said in an interview.

Mr. Bush’s 2002 document articulated a vision of American power that foreshadowed the American involvement in Iraq. Mr. Obama’s version could fuel the ongoing debate about whether his philosophy expands or constricts American influence.

Critics already argue that Mr. Obama does not place enough importance on fighting terrorism or fully embrace America’s singular role in the world as he seeks the favor and cooperation of other nations.

A section on the use of force makes no mention of pre-emptive attacks against countries or non-state actors who may pose a threat, as Mr. Bush did in 2002, just six months before the invasion of Iraq. But Mr. Obama does not explicitly rule out striking first.

“While the use of force is sometimes necessary, we will exhaust other options before war whenever we can, and carefully weigh the costs and risks of action against the costs and risks of inaction,” he says. When it is necessary, he adds, “we will seek broad international support, working with such institutions as NATO and the U.N. Security Council.”

Mr. Bush’s aides said they would not seek a “permission slip”’ for such actions. Mr. Obama phrases that idea differently, writing, “the United States must reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend our nation and our interests, yet we will also seek to adhere to standards that govern the use of force.”

Mr. Obama also defines national security more broadly than his predecessor did, making the case, for example, that reducing the deficit is critical to sustaining American power. He emphasizes issues like the economy, education, climate change, energy and science. In that way, he tries to draw a broader theme linking his presidency to the notion of a “new foundation,” the phrase he previously has coined as a slogan for his domestic program.

“Our national security begins at home,” the strategy says.

"Can The U.S. Government Assassinate U.S. Citizens Based On Secret Evidence?"

Michael Schearer asks an important question:

The National Security Council says yes, based on a classified review of the evidence against U.S. born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is suspected to be residing somewhere in Yemen and working with Al-Qaeda. But as Spencer Ackerman points out, this decision seems to set up a rather daunting legal precedent.

The administration may very well be making the correct evaluation of the threat al-Awlaki poses. But if citizenship means anything, it means that a citizen can't be killed because the government uses secret evidence to say he or she is an intolerable threat.

Or does it?

"Obama’s Nuclear Strategy Intended as a Message"

An analysis from the NY Times:

At the heart of President Obama’s new nuclear strategy lies a central gamble: that an aging, oversize, increasingly outmoded nuclear arsenal can be turned to the new purpose of adding leverage to the faltering effort to force Iran and North Korea to rethink the value of their nuclear programs.

The 50-page “Nuclear Posture Review” released on Tuesday acknowledged outright that “the massive nuclear arsenal we inherited from the cold-war era” is “poorly suited to address the challenges posed by suicidal terrorist and unfriendly regimes seeking nuclear weapons.”

Nonetheless, the new strategy aims to use the arsenal to do just that, despite considerable skepticism that any new doctrine or set of White House announcements is likely to change the calculus for North Korea or Iran.

Mr. Obama’s new strategy makes just about every nonnuclear state immune from any threat of nuclear retaliation by the United States. But it carves out an exception for Iran and North Korea, labeled “outliers” rather than the Bush-era moniker of “rogue states.” The wording was chosen, Mr. Obama’s senior advisers said, to suggest they have a path back to international respectability — and to de-targeting by the United States.

Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates made the choice explicit. “There is a message for Iran and North Korea here,” he told reporters on Tuesday.

Nonnuclear states that abide by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty would not be threatened with nuclear retaliation by the United States — even if they conducted conventional, biological or cyber attacks. But, he added, “if you’re not going to play by the rules, if you’re going to be a proliferator, then all options are on the table in terms of how we deal with you.”

A number of analysts argued that by publicly painting a target on Iran and North Korea the administration could, perhaps unwittingly, bolster hard-liners in those countries, who have made the case that nuclear weapons are the only way to ensure their safety against American plotting.

The opposite critique came from two senior Republican Party national security experts — Senators John McCain and Jon Kyl, both of Arizona — who contended that the pressure was not direct enough.

“We believe that preventing nuclear terrorism and nuclear proliferation should begin by directly confronting the two leading proliferators and supporters of terrorism, Iran and North Korea,” they wrote. “The Obama administration’s policies, thus far, have failed to do that, and this failure has sent exactly the wrong message to other would be proliferators and supporters of terrorism.”

To Mr. Obama and his aides, the “outlier” approach is all part of a broader strategy of adding to the pressure on both countries. Over the past year, they have aided the interception of North Korea’s shipping. They have sought to develop new sanctions against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and to undermine its nuclear program with a program of covert action.

Robert S. Litwak, vice president for programs at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said that Mr. Obama had expanded an effort begun by President George W. Bush to globalize the effort to contain the nuclear aims of both nations.

Obama Revamps, And Limits, U.S. Nuclear Doctrine

NY Times:

President Obama said Monday that he was revamping American nuclear strategy to substantially narrow the conditions under which the United States would use nuclear weapons.

But the president said in an interview that he was carving out an exception for “outliers like Iran and North Korea” that have violated or renounced the main treaty to halt nuclear proliferation.

Discussing his approach to nuclear security the day before formally releasing his new strategy, Mr. Obama described his policy as part of a broader effort to edge the world toward making nuclear weapons obsolete, and to create incentives for countries to give up any nuclear ambitions. To set an example, the new strategy renounces the development of any new nuclear weapons, overruling the initial position of his own defense secretary.

Mr. Obama’s strategy is a sharp shift from those of his predecessors and seeks to revamp the nation’s nuclear posture for a new age in which rogue states and terrorist organizations are greater threats than traditional powers like Russia and China.

It eliminates much of the ambiguity that has deliberately existed in American nuclear policy since the opening days of the cold war. For the first time, the United States is explicitly committing not to use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, even if they attacked the United States with biological or chemical weapons or launched a crippling cyberattack.

Those threats, Mr. Obama argued, could be deterred with “a series of graded options,” a combination of old and new conventional weapons. “I’m going to preserve all the tools that are necessary in order to make sure that the American people are safe and secure,” he said in the interview in the Oval Office.

White House officials said the new strategy would include the option of reconsidering the use of nuclear retaliation against a biological attack, if the development of such weapons reached a level that made the United States vulnerable to a devastating strike.

Mr. Obama’s new strategy is bound to be controversial, both among conservatives who have warned against diluting the United States’ most potent deterrent and among liberals who were hoping for a blanket statement that the country would never be the first to use nuclear weapons.

Mr. Obama argued for a slower course, saying, “We are going to want to make sure that we can continue to move towards less emphasis on nuclear weapons,” and, he added, to “make sure that our conventional weapons capability is an effective deterrent in all but the most extreme circumstances.”

The release of the new strategy, known as the Nuclear Posture Review, opens an intensive nine days of nuclear diplomacy geared toward reducing weapons. Mr. Obama plans to fly to Prague to sign a new arms-control agreement with Russia on Thursday and then next week will host 47 world leaders in Washington for a summit meeting on nuclear security.

The Evolving Media Meme: Obama Is Like LBJ After All. First Health Care, Now Nuclear Deal W/Russia

NY Times:

President Obama was angry. He was on the phone with President Dmitri A. Medvedev last month to finalize a new arms control treaty with Russia, only to be confronted with new demands for concessions on missile defense. A deal that was supposed to be done was unraveling.

President Obama and Michael McFaul, the president’s top adviser on Russia, listen during a phone call with President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia on Feb. 24.

“Dmitri, we agreed,” Mr. Obama told Mr. Medvedev with a tone of exasperation, according to advisers. “We can’t do this. If it means we’re going to walk away from this treaty and not get it done, so be it. But we’re not going to go down this path.”

Mr. Obama hung up and vented frustration. Some of his advisers had never seen him so mad. A picture taken by a White House photographer captured his grim face in that moment of uncertainty. For a year he had been trying to forge a new relationship with Russia, starting with a treaty to slash nuclear arsenals. And for a year Russia had been testing him, suspecting he was weak and certain it could roll over him.

If Mr. Obama overestimated his powers of persuasion in reaching quick agreement with the Russians, they misjudged how far they could get him to bend. In the end, they compromised on nonbinding language. And so, after all the fits and starts, all the miscalculations, the vodka toasts that proved premature and the stare-downs that nearly sank the whole enterprise, Mr. Obama hung up the phone again with Mr. Medvedev on Friday, this time having finally translated aspiration into agreement.

The president then stepped before cameras to tell the world that next month the United States and Russia would sign a “new Start” treaty paring back their still formidable nuclear arsenals, cutting the legal limits on deployed strategic warheads by 30 percent and on launchers by half. Just as important, it will establish an inspection regime to replace one that expired in December.

The announcement culminated a negotiation that sprawled across time and space in ways that Mr. Obama hardly expected when he kicked it off, a process that dragged on four months past its deadline and leapt from London to Moscow to Geneva to Singapore to Copenhagen to Washington. For a new president, the effort became a crucible of diplomacy and a tutorial in the complexities of international security.

This account of how Mr. Obama reached agreement is based on interviews with American officials and Russian insiders, many of whom requested anonymity to discuss confidential negotiations. It is a story with twists and turns that included 10 rounds of talks by full-time negotiators in Geneva but ultimately kept coming around to intense personal negotiations between Mr. Obama and Mr. Medvedev, who met or talked by telephone 14 times to hash through disputes.

“When President Obama’s domestic positions were weakened in recent months and he was completely consumed in his crusade for health care reform, making all other issues irrelevant, it is surprising how much attention he kept on Start,” said Sergei M. Rogov, director of the Institute for U.S. and Canada Studies in Moscow, referring to the treaty. “Even being 24-hours-a-day busy on health reform, he had a 25th hour for Start.”

And a 26th and maybe a 27th.

“It’s been much harder than we anticipated,” said a senior Obama administration official involved in the process. “We thought it would be relatively easy.”

It was not. <Continue reading.>

Military To Revise DADT

NY Times:

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates will announce measures on Thursday to make it more difficult for the military to expel openly gay service members, an interim plan while the Pentagon examines repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, officials said.

Officials said the new steps would include a requirement that only a general or admiral could initiate action in cases where service members were suspected of violating the prohibition against openly gay service in the armed forces.

The guidelines would also raise the standard required for evidence to be presented in such cases, an effort to prevent “malicious outing” by a third party or jilted partner, officials said.

Congressional action would be required to repeal the ban.

But the new measures, expected to be announced Thursday at a Pentagon news conference, would make good on Mr. Gates’s pledge to Congress last month that the military would move toward enforcing the current policy in a fairer, more humane manner.

“We believe that we have a degree of latitude within the existing law to change our internal procedures in a manner that is more appropriate and fair to our men and women in uniform,” Mr. Gates said last month.

A review is to be completed by the end of the year on how the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy might be ended. President Obama has called for Congress to repeal the law.

Head Of Army & Air Force Wary Of DADT Repeal

NY Times:

The top generals from the Army and the Air Force expressed deep concern on Tuesday about moving rapidly to lift the ban on openly gay service members, saying it could make it harder for their forces to do their jobs while fighting two wars.

The comments by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the Army chief of the staff, and Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, the Air Force chief of staff, may provide political cover for members of Congress who oppose President Obama’s call for repealing the policy known as “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

“I do have serious concerns about the impact of repeal of the law on a force that’s fully engaged in two wars and has been at war for eight-and-a-half years,” General Casey told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We just don’t know the impacts on readiness and military effectiveness.”

In a separate appearance before the House Armed Services Committee, General Schwartz cautioned that there was little research on how the policy change might affect Air Force personnel deployed for combat, surveillance and support missions around the world.

“This is not the time to perturb the force that is, at the moment, stretched by demands in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere without careful deliberation,” General Schwartz said.

Both generals — one representing the Army, the nation’s largest armed service, and one from the Air Force, the newest — spoke with what sounded like carefully considered language.

Both expressed reservations about moving too swiftly to change the policy, and both endorsed the decision by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to deliberately review the issue before acting. And both pledged that they would fully carry out any decision of Congress about gay men and lesbians in the military. Changing the policy that Congress imposed 16 years ago would require legislative action.

It had been an open secret in the corridors of the Pentagon that some senior generals held a different view of “don’t ask, don’t tell” from that expressed by Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, before Congress this month.

“No matter how I look at the issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens,” Admiral Mullen said.

Admiral Mullen, the first serving chairman to support repeal of the ban, said it was his personal belief that “allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do.”

Petraeus Agrees With Obama, Not Cheney, On Interrogation Methods & Closing Gitmo

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New Study Of Foreign Militaries Shows No Ill Effects From Openly Gay Soldiers

NY Times:

A comprehensive new study on foreign militaries that have made transitions to allowing openly gay service members concludes that a speedy implementation of the change is not disruptive. The finding is in direct opposition to the stated views of Pentagon leaders, who say repealing a ban on openly gay men and women in the United States armed forces should take a year or more.

The study, “Gays in Foreign Militaries 2010: A Global Primer,” is to be released Tuesday by the Palm Center, a research group at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The Palm Center has no official position on “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the American law that bans openly gay service members, but the group has become a leading force among advocates for repeal. The principal author of the study is Nathaniel Frank, who also wrote the book “Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America.”

The 151-page study, which updates existing studies on gay service members in Britain, Canada, Australia, South Africa and other countries, offers the first broad look at the issue in foreign militaries since Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for an end to “don’t ask, don’t tell” earlier this month.

The report concludes that in foreign militaries, openly gay service members did not undermine morale, cause large resignations or mass “comings out.” The report found that “there were no instances of increased harassment” as a result of lifting bans in any of the countries studied.

In addition, the report says that none of the countries studied installed separate facilities for gay troops, and that benefits for gay partners were generally in accordance with a country’s existing benefits for gay and lesbian couples.

On implementation, the study said that most countries made the change swiftly, within a matter of months and with what it termed little disruption to the armed services. Mr. Frank said the study did not look at what happened if the change was implemented gradually because, he said, “I don’t think any of the militaries tried it.”

Mr. Frank’s report cited a 1993 RAND study on the effects of allowing openly gay members to serve in the American military, which concluded that “phased-in implementation might allow enemies of the new policy to intentionally create problems to prove the policy unworkable.” On personnel policy decisions of this nature, the RAND study said, “Any waiting period permits restraining forces to consolidate.”

Petraeus: "I've served with gay soldiers ... I fully support the Sec of Defense" On DADT

Meet the Press

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MR. GREGORY:  Can I ask it a slightly different way, if you don't want to talk about what specifically is being learned?  Presuming that both U.S. forces and Pakistani officials are doing the interrogation, do you wish you had the interrogation methods that were available to you during the Bush administration to get intelligence from a figure like this?

GEN. PETRAEUS:  I have always been on the record, in fact, since 2003, with the concept of living our values.  And I think that whenever we have, perhaps, taken expedient measures, they have turned around and bitten us in the backside.  We decided early on in the 101st Airborne Division we're just going to--look, we just said we'd decide to obey the Geneva Convention, to, to move forward with that.  That has, I think, stood elements in good stead.  We have worked very hard over the years, indeed, to ensure that elements like the International Committee of the Red Cross and others who see the conduct of our detainee operations and so forth approve of them.  Because in the cases where that is not true, we end up paying a price for it ultimately.  Abu Ghraib and other situations like that are nonbiodegradables.  They don't go away.  The enemy continues to beat you with them like a stick in the Central Command area of responsibility.  Beyond that, frankly, we have found that the use of the interrogation methods in the Army Field Manual that was given, the force of law by Congress, that that works.  And...

MR. GREGORY:  Well...

GEN. PETRAEUS:  And that is our experience...

MR. GREGORY:  In terms of recruitment threats...

GEN. PETRAEUS:  ...in, in the years that we have implemented it.

MR. GREGORY:  In terms of recruitment threats, do you consider the prison at Guantanamo Bay in the same way?  Do you consider it to be related, or do you think, in other words, should it be closed, or do you believe it was short-sighted to set a deadline certain for its closure?

GEN. PETRAEUS:  I've been on the record on that for well over a year as well, saying that it should be closed.  But it should be done in a responsible manner.  So I'm not seized with the issue that it won't be done by a certain date.  In fact, I think it is--it's very prudent to ensure that, as we move forward with that, wherever the remaining detainees are relocated and so forth, whatever jurisdiction is used in legal cases and so forth, is really thought through and done in a very pragmatic and sensible manner.

GOP Obstructionism: Another Clear Example Of How The GOP Rejects Their Own Ideas When Obama Agrees To Them

NY Times:

John Walker Lindh and David Hicks were both young Muslim converts who traveled to Afghanistan to join the Taliban and were captured there in 2001 by American troops. But then their cases diverged — in ways that might surprise anyone following the fierce political debate over how the Obama administration should treat terrorism suspects.

Bush administration officials decided to charge Mr. Lindh, an American, in the civilian criminal justice system. He was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison and will not get out until at least 2019.

Mr. Hicks, an Australian, was treated as an enemy combatant — the approach now pressed by President Obama’s Republican critics. He went before a military commission at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and got a seven-year sentence with all but nine months suspended. He is already free.

The Dec. 25 arrest of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian accused of trying to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner, has reignited an old argument over how to treat terrorism suspects. Republican critics have denounced the decision to charge Mr. Abdulmutallab criminally, read him his rights and give him a lawyer. He was a combatant in Al Qaeda’s war on the United States, critics say, and should have been treated accordingly.

But the assumptions behind the criticism — that the military approach will gain more intelligence, avoid the meddling of government-paid defense lawyers and lock away a convicted terrorist for a longer sentence — are undercut by the record since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

In eight years, the Bush administration said it had obtained at least 319 convictions in “terrorism or terrorism-related” cases in the civilian justice system, according to a Justice Department budget document. A study by the Center on Law and Security at New York University found convictions in nearly 9 of 10 cases, with a 16-year average sentence for those convicted of terrorism.

Only two accused terrorists arrested in the United States, Ali al-Marri and Jose Padilla, were moved temporarily into the military system. But after legal challenges by the lawyers supplied to all detainees who face military justice, the Bush administration moved both cases back to civilian courts, where Mr. Padilla was sentenced to 17 years in prison and Mr. Marri to 8 years.

Meanwhile, at Guantánamo, just three men were convicted by military commissions, largely because the tribunals drew countless legal challenges. Two of the three men convicted, including Mr. Hicks, are now free.

Robert M. Chesney, an expert on national security law at the University of Texas, said the attacks on the Obama administration’s handling of Mr. Abdulmutallab were “mired in misinformation, some of it willful.”

Mr. Chesney said the Republicans were largely to blame for what he called “a bizarre public discussion that is 90 percent politics and 10 percent substance,” since they never complained when the Bush administration handled terrorism cases the same way. But he said the Obama administration might have invited the attacks by itself applying partisan spin to security.

Poll: 75% Support Gays Openly Serving In Military; 66% Think It's Discrimination To Not Allow It

First a Wash Post poll (complete data):

Three-quarters of Americans say that they support openly gay people serving in the U.S. military, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, a finding that could lend momentum to the Obama administration's effort to dismantle the policy known as "don't ask, don't tell."

The level of public support for allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly far outpaces that in the spring of 1993, when Congress and the Clinton administration established the policy ...

The percentage of Americans who say they support gays openly serving is the same as a Post-ABC News poll found in July 2008; both are far above the 44 percent who said so in May 1993. In the new poll, majorities across party lines favor such a policy, with support among Democrats (82 percent) and independents (77 percent) higher than among Republicans (64 percent).

The poll also reveals several sharp demographic divides. Men (65 percent) and seniors (69 percent) are far less likely than are women (84 percent) and young adults (81 percent under age 30) to say that gays should be allowed to serve if they have disclosed their sexual orientation. Knowing a gay person makes a big difference: Among those who say they have a gay friend or family member, 81 percent support allowing gay people to serve openly, compared with 66 percent who say they do not know someone who is gay.

There's an even more surprising (and positive) separate poll finding:

According to the Quinnipiac University poll  ... 66 percent, describe the policy as discrimination.

“By a solid margin, American voters say go ahead and allow gays to openly serve in the military,” said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “Voters think 2-1 that keeping gays from serving is discrimination. But they are much more mixed on exactly how the transformation of the military will occur and how the Pentagon should adjust to the needs of gay soldiers, sailors and Marines.”

GOP Politicians "are going out there, they are unknowing of the facts, and they are making charges and allegations that are not anchored in reality”

NY Times:

The White House pushed back Sunday against Republican criticism of its approach to terrorism, calling it “not anchored in reality” as a national security debate that was largely muted in recent years roared back to center stage with an angry intensity.

After a week of sustained attacks led by former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska and a host of Congressional Republicans, President Obama and his aides argued that they were handling terror suspects much as the previous administration did, dismissing Republican complaints as politically motivated.

“The most important thing for the public to understand is we’re not handling any of these cases any different than the Bush administration handled them all through 9/11,” Mr. Obama told CBS News on Sunday. “They prosecuted 190 folks in these Article Three courts,” he added, referring to civilian courts. “Got convictions. And those folks are in maximum security prisons right now. And there have been no escapes.”

Mr. Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, was more scathing about the Republican criticism. “Quite frankly, I am tiring of politicians using national security issues such as terrorism as a political football,” Mr. Brennan, a longtime Central Intelligence Agency officer, who also worked under President George W. Bush, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “They are going out there, they are unknowing of the facts, and they are making charges and allegations that are not anchored in reality.”

The White House rebuttal came a day after Ms. Palin drew rousing applause at a convention of Tea Party activists by declaring that “we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law.” Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Ms. Palin followed up her critique of Mr. Obama by attacking what she called “this perceived lackadaisical approach that he has to dealing with the terrorists.”

The exchanges reflected a stark escalation in rhetoric in recent weeks as the uneasy truce on terrorism that existed at the beginning of the Obama presidency evaporated. The Republican critique of Mr. Obama as a Miranda-reading, soft-on-terror president attempts to tap into an historic vulnerability for Democrats, with midterm elections on the horizon and the president already on the defensive on a health care bill and the economy.

Strategists in both parties said the argument had gained new traction with the attempted Christmas Day bombing of an airliner, the missed deadline for closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and the collapse of the plan for a trial in New York of the self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. Some Democrats worried that Mr. Obama was losing control of the issue politically.

“Terrorism has really become an issue again,” said Leslie H. Gelb, a former president of the Council on Foreign Relations. “It’s jumped to a much higher level because of the Christmas bomber that scared the willies out of people.” And, he added, “for the most part, the narrative has been taken out of the White House’s hands.”

Republicans said they were seeing growing alarm after a year of Mr. Obama’s policies. “People suspended judgment and wanted to let him play his hand,” Karl Rove, the former adviser to Mr. Bush, said of the president. But the Christmas Day bombing attempt “has caused doubts about how he is handling this to bubble to the surface.” ...

Has Hell Frozen Over? Fox News Calls McCain A Flip-Flopper Over DADT While Their Military Analyst Strongly Backs Repeal.

The clearest evidence yet that this policy is going to go ...

Change Comes To Federal Health Care: Pentagon To Offer Plan B, Morning After Pill

Wash Post:

The Department of Defense will begin making the morning-after pill Plan B available at all of its hospitals and health clinics around the world, officials announced Thursday.

The decision came after a recommendation by the Pentagon's Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee, an advisory panel that voted in November to include Plan B and the generic Next Choice on the list of drugs all military facilities should stock. The Pentagon accepted the recommendation Feb. 3, a spokeswoman said.

The decision is the latest the Obama administration has made reversing politically sensitive policies involving women's health that were implemented during President George W. Bush's administration. Previously, the Obama administration has announced that it was rescinding a federal regulation that would have expanded the ability of health-care workers to refuse to provide medical care they found morally objectionable, including abortion and Plan B; has lifted federal restrictions on human embryonic stem cell research; and has restored funding to international family-planning groups.

Women's health advocates had long been pushing the Obama administration to allow the sale of the morning-after pill at military facilities. The same panel made a similar recommendation in 2002, but the policy was never implemented.

"It's a tragedy that women in uniform have been denied such basic health care," said Nancy Keenan of NARAL Pro-Choice America, which estimated that the decision would affect more than 350,000 women in the military. "We applaud the medical experts for standing up for military women." ...

While most medical experts consider the drug to be a form of emergency contraception, some abortion opponents consider it equivalent to a surgical abortion.

DADT Hearing: "For me personally, it comes down to integrity -- theirs as individuals, and ours as an institution." And Nation.

Wash Post:

The Pentagon's top leaders declared Tuesday for the first time that -- after decades of opposition and equivocation from the armed forces -- they support an end to the ban on gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military.

"Speaking for myself and myself only, it is my personal belief that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do," Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee. His words were echoed by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who said the Pentagon is preparing for a repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" law. That law has stood for 17 years, ...

Despite the remarkable shift in position by the Pentagon's leaders Tuesday, there remained serious questions about whether Congress and the White House are ready to keep pace.

A House bill that would overturn "don't ask, don't tell" has 187 co-sponsors, but Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), a powerful committee chairman, opposes it and has not let it come up for a vote.

The Senate, which invited Gates and Mullen to testify Tuesday, is moving cautiously. Worried that they lack the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster, Senate leaders said they might try to add a temporary moratorium on discharges of gay service members to a defense spending bill, whose passage would require only majority approval.

President Obama said in his State of the Union address last week that he wants to work with Congress to repeal the law, but he has resisted pleas by gay rights groups to sign an executive order that would instantly mandate a change. On Tuesday, Vice President Biden promised to end the "don't ask, don't tell" policy by the end of the year.

Speaking on MSNBC, he also defended the administration against critics who have questioned why the issue has become pressing now.

Richard Socarides, a Clinton White House official who served as an adviser on gay issues, predicted that Congress would take its cues from the military and eventually vote to allow gays to serve in the open. Mullen's public statement, in particular, he said, will influence lawmakers.

"It was highly significant, coming in a very historic setting and from the highest-ranking military man in our government, in uniform," Socarides said. "I found it quite compelling and an eloquent statement."

Mullen, 63, told senators that he had knowingly served with gays since 1968, when he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, and that he thought it was wrong that they were forced to hide their sexual orientation.

"No matter how I look at the issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens," he testified.

"For me personally, it comes down to integrity -- theirs as individuals, and ours as an institution," he added.

Mullen's remarks contrasted sharply with the Pentagon's position in 1993, when admirals and generals -- including Gen. Colin L. Powell, serving as chairman of the Joint Chiefs -- rebelled against President Bill Clinton's attempt to integrate gays into the military. As a compromise, they supported the "don't ask, don't tell" legislation, which allows gays to serve as long as they hide their sexual orientation.

Republican senators said they worry that a change in the law could undermine morale, disrupt unit cohesion and affect recruiting, especially at a time when the military is fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "Has this policy been ideal?" asked Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a Navy veteran. "No, it has not. But it has been effective."

Three years ago, McCain said he would support ending the ban once the military's top brass agreed to do so. But on Tuesday, he said he was "disappointed" with the testimony from Mullen and Gates.

Despite objections from Republicans who said he is acting prematurely, Gates said he had appointed a Pentagon team to study a possible repeal. The team, which will have until the end of the year to finish its work, will be led by Gen. Carter F. Ham, commander of the U.S. Army, Europe, and Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon's legal counsel.

Gates cautioned, however, that the military would move slowly and that it would need at least a year beyond that -- until 2012 -- to fully integrate a change.

In the meantime, however, Gates said the Pentagon will determine, within 45 days, whether it has the authority to enforce the current policy more loosely, resulting in fewer discharges. For instance, Gates said he thinks the military could "raise the bar on what constitutes reliable information" about a service member's sexual orientation, ignoring allegations filed by snitches or third parties.

Although Mullen said he supports ending sexual discrimination in the military, he said it is unclear how other members of the Joint Chiefs, as well as the rank and file, would react.

Does DADT Effectively End Today?

Wash Post:

President Obama's top defense officials will tell the Senate on Tuesday that the military will no longer aggressively pursue disciplinary action against gay service members whose orientation is revealed against their will by third parties, sources say.

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Michael Mullen also are expected to announce the creation of a group to assess how to carry out a full repeal of the decades-old "don't ask, don't tell" policy, which requires gay soldiers to keep their sexual orientation secret.

But Gates and Mullen are also expected to tell senators that it could take years to integrate gay men and lesbians fully into the military, defense officials said. Two appointees will be named to oversee a group that will draw up plans for integrating the armed forces, according to sources familiar with the Pentagon's deliberations on the subject. The planning effort is expected to take up to a year.

Among the issues to be addressed by the group: whether gay soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines will face any restrictions on exhibiting their sexual orientation on the job; whether the Pentagon will be obligated to provide for their domestic partners; and whether straight military personnel could be compelled to share quarters with gays.

"I don't think anyone is underestimating the seriousness of the issue, or the complexity of it," said a senior military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because Gates and Mullen had yet to testify.

The remarks before the committee are part of the administration's effort to follow through on Obama's pledge in last week's State of the Union address to end the policy.

"This year, I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are," Obama said.

Last summer, Gates asked the Pentagon's legal counsel whether the military could ignore allegations made by snitches, civilians or other third parties. Under such a scenario, gay military personnel would face discharge only if they themselves declare their sexual orientation.

Despite persistent objections in some corners, the Pentagon's senior leaders have largely come to terms with Obama's stance on the issue and are operating under the assumption that the law banning gays from serving in the military will be repealed, Pentagon officials said.

Google Catches The Chinese Government With Its Hand "In The Cookie Jar." What's Obama To Do?

NY Times:

Last month, when Google engineers at their sprawling campus in Silicon Valley began to suspect that Chinese intruders were breaking into private Gmail accounts, the company began a secret counteroffensive.

It managed to gain access to a computer in Taiwan that it suspected of being the source of the attacks. Peering inside that machine, company engineers actually saw evidence of the aftermath of the attacks, not only at Google, but also at at least 33 other companies, including Adobe Systems, Northrop Grumman and Juniper Networks, according to a government consultant who has spoken with the investigators.

Seeing the breadth of the problem, they alerted American intelligence and law enforcement officials and worked with them to assemble powerful evidence that the masterminds of the attacks were not in Taiwan, but on the Chinese mainland.

But while much of the evidence, including the sophistication of the attacks, strongly suggested an operation run by Chinese government agencies, or at least approved by them, company engineers could not definitively prove their case. Today that uncertainty, along with concerns about confronting the Chinese without strong evidence, has frozen the Obama administration’s response to the intrusion, one of the biggest cyberattacks of its kind, and to some extent the response of other targets, including some of the most prominent American companies.

President Obama, who has repeatedly warned of the country’s vulnerability to devastating cyberattacks, has said nothing in public about one of the biggest examples since he took office. And the White House, while repeating Mr. Obama’s calls for Internet freedom, has not publicly demanded a Chinese government investigation. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who had been the most senior U.S. official to talk of the seriousness of the breach, discussed it on Thursday with a Chinese diplomat in Washington, however, and a senior administration official said there would be a “démarche in coming days” — a diplomatic move.

On Thursday, China’s Foreign Ministry deflected questions about Google’s charges and dismissed its declaration that it would no longer “self-censor” searches conducted on google.cn, its Chinese search engine. A ministry spokeswoman said simply that online services in China must be conducted “in accordance with the law.”

In interviews in which they disclosed new details of their efforts to solve the mystery, Google engineers said they doubted that a nongovernmental actor could pull off something this broad and well organized, but they conceded that even their counterintelligence operation, taking over the Taiwan server, could not provide the kind of airtight evidence needed to prove the case.

The murkiness of the attacks is no surprise. For years the National Security Agency and other arms of the United States government have struggled with the question of “attribution” of an attack; what makes cyberwar so unlike conventional war is that it is often impossible, even in retrospect, to find where the attack began, or who was responsible ...

Even as the United States and companies doing business in China assess the impact, the attacks signal the arrival of a new kind of conflict between the world’s No. 1 economic superpower and the country that, by year’s end, will overtake Japan to become No. 2.

"A failure to connect the dots ... We are at war ... A series of additional corrective steps"

First, the speech (transcript) ... Part I

Part II:

Then the NY Times report (read the official security review summary, read the President's Directive on corrective actions):

President Obama on Thursday ordered intelligence agencies to take a series of steps to streamline how terrorism threats are pursued and analyzed, saying the government had to respond aggressively to the failures that allowed a Nigerian man to ignite an explosive mixture on a commercial jetliner on Christmas Day.

President Obama pledged not to “succumb to a siege mentality,” sacrificing civil liberties, but called for expanding the criteria for adding people to watch lists.

The president also directed the Homeland Security Department to speed the installation of $1 billion in advanced-technology equipment for the screening of passengers, including body scanners at American airports and to work with international airports to see that they upgrade their own equipment to protect passengers on flights headed to the United States.

He said intelligence reports involving threats would be distributed more widely among agencies. He instructed the State Department to review its visa policy to make it more difficult for people with connections to terrorism to receive visas, while making it simpler to revoke visas to the United States when questions arise.

“We are at war,” Mr. Obama said, releasing an unclassified version of a report on the attempted attack.

He pledged not to “succumb to a siege mentality” sacrificing the country’s civil liberties for security, but he called for expanding the criteria for adding people to terrorism watch lists.

Change Comes To Climate Change Monitoring: The CIA Is Now Helping

NY Times:

 

The nation’s top scientists and spies are collaborating on an effort to use the federal government’s intelligence assets — including spy satellites and other classified sensors — to assess the hidden complexities of environmental change. They seek insights from natural phenomena like clouds and glaciers, deserts and tropical forests.

The collaboration restarts an effort the Bush administration shut down and has the strong backing of the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In the last year, as part of the effort, the collaborators have scrutinized images of Arctic sea ice from reconnaissance satellites in an effort to distinguish things like summer melts from climate trends, and they have had images of the ice pack declassified to speed the scientific analysis.

The trove of images is “really useful,” said Norbert Untersteiner, a professor at the University of Washington who specializes in polar ice and is a member of the team of spies and scientists behind the effort.

Scientists, Dr. Untersteiner said, “have no way to send out 500 people” across the top of the world to match the intelligence gains, adding that the new understandings might one day result in ice forecasts ...

The monitoring program has little or no impact on regular intelligence gathering, federal officials said, but instead releases secret information already collected or takes advantage of opportunities to record environmental data when classified sensors are otherwise idle or passing over wilderness.

Secrecy cloaks the monitoring effort, as well as the nation’s intelligence work, because the United States wants to keep foes and potential enemies in the dark about the abilities of its spy satellites and other sensors. The images that the scientific group has had declassified, for instance, have had their sharpness reduced to hide the abilities of the reconnaissance satellites.

Controversy has often dogged the use of federal intelligence gear for environmental monitoring. In October, days after the C.I.A. opened a small unit to assess the security implications of climate change, Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, said the agency should be fighting terrorists, “not spying on sea lions.”

The Puzzle They Keep Failing At

 

"GOP Seizes on Security as Issue"

Wall St Journal:

Political furor over the attempted bombing of Northwest Flight 253 has thrust national security back to the center of American politics, with Republicans and the White House scrambling to blame each other for intelligence lapses and present themselves to voters as tougher on terrorism.

Strategists in both parties believe that terrorism and, more broadly, foreign policy could emerge in the November midterm elections and in President Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign as key issues for voters who have been focused primarily on the economy.

GOP opinion leaders such as former Vice President Dick Cheney have seized on the attack to question President Barack Obama's grasp of foreign affairs. Republican Party officials have sent fund-raising appeals that take aim at Mr. Obama's response to the episode.

Republican strategists said in interviews that they saw an opportunity to regain the traditional advantages on security issues that failed them in the past two national campaigns, as the economic downturn and public opposition to President George W. Bush's policies in Iraq took primacy in voters' minds.

The White House and its allies, meanwhile, have responded by mounting a campaign to assert Mr. Obama's bona fides as a strong commander in chief while blaming Bush policies in Iraq for emboldening al Qaeda to plan attacks such as the one Christmas Day in the skies over Detroit.

Their efforts include using a White House Web site posting personally rebuking Mr. Cheney for "seven years of bellicose rhetoric" and arguing that al Qaeda during Mr. Bush's tenure "regenerated" to establish "new safe havens" in Yemen and Somalia. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the man accused in the botched effort to down Northwest Flight 253, allegedly trained in Yemen.

In an interview, David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama, said it was "unbecoming" for Republicans to "seize political opportunity" from a terrorist attack. Mr. Axelrod added: "We have not tried to exploit the [counterterrorism] successes that we've had."

Nonetheless, administration officials have pointed to the arrests in 2009 of Najibullah Zazi, a Colorado man accused of plotting a bomb attack on the U.S., and David Headley, accused of participating in the deadly 2008 attack in Mumbai. "At some point, when we can talk about those things, you'll see a highly integrated and highly capable intelligence community that did terrific work," an official told reporters Thursday.

In a back-channel strategy designed to undermine GOP attacks, White House allies have raced to inform liberal bloggers that some of the leaders of the al Qaeda branch claiming credit for the attack had been released from the Guantanamo Bay prison during the Bush administration.

Several Republican strategists conceded in interviews that the releases of those detainees could be a political vulnerability. But they say that the Christmas bombing attempt can now be used to argue that the Obama plan to close Guantanamo would put the country at risk.

"We know that a number of the detainees released by the Bush administration returned to the battlefield," said Liz Cheney, a former State Department official and daughter of the former vice president. "The terrorists left at Guantanamo now are the worst of the worst. Previous experience should bolster the case for not releasing them."

Hypocrite Cheney Does It Again; White House Hits Back

Wash Post:

The political war over the failed Christmas Day bombing of a U.S. airliner showed no signs of abating Wednesday as leaders of both parties escalated their attacks, employing fiery rhetoric in assessing blame for the Detroit incident.

Former vice president Richard B. Cheney led a GOP offensive to assail President Obama's leadership on national security, charging that the American people are less safe because, Cheney believes, Obama is "pretending" that the United States is not at war with terrorists.

"We are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren't, it makes us less safe," Cheney, one of Obama's strongest critics, said in a statement to Politico. "Why doesn't he want to admit we're at war? It doesn't fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn't fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency -- social transformation -- the restructuring of American society."

Top aides to Obama and Democratic leaders pushed back aggressively, accusing Cheney and other Republicans of politicizing the incident in ways they say Democrats did not during previous terrorist acts.

"Cheney was out there today saying that the president doesn't recognize that we have a war on terror," White House senior adviser David Axelrod said in an interview. "This is the president who has made a very tough decision to refocus our efforts in Afghanistan after seven years of drift."

Democrats said the Bush administration -- chiefly Cheney -- failed to keep its focus on the fight against al-Qaeda as it pursued war in Iraq.

"This president is not interested in bellicose rhetoric, he is focused on action," White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer wrote on a blog. "Seven years of bellicose rhetoric failed to reduce the threat from al Qaeda and succeeded in dividing this country. And it seems strangely off-key now, at a time when our country is under attack, for the architect of those policies to be attacking the president."

For days, a chorus of GOP leaders has sought to portray Obama as weak on national security because of his administration's response to the incident as well as the intelligence and security failures that allowed Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to board a Northwest Airlines flight carrying an explosive.

Republicans said Obama should have interrupted his Hawaiian vacation before Monday to address last Friday's attack. But Democrats called this a double standard, saying they did not attack then-President George W. Bush when he said nothing during his vacation in Crawford, Tex., for nearly a week after shoe bomber Richard C. Reid's failed attack in 2001.

"Republicans are simply hypocrites," Democratic National Committee spokesman Brad Woodhouse said. "There is nothing -- no bounds whatsoever -- to what they will politicize for their own political gain."

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) on Wednesday said the Detroit incident is evidence that Obama should reconsider his decision to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. "It's time for the president to halt terrorist transfers to other countries, including Yemen."

The detainees who ended up in the al-Qaeda leadership in Yemen were released not by Obama but by Bush two years ago.

Change Comes To Government Secrecy

NY Times:

President Obama declared on Tuesday that “no information may remain classified indefinitely” as part of a sweeping overhaul of the executive branch’s system for protecting classified national security information.

In an executive order and an accompanying presidential memorandum to agency heads, Mr. Obama signaled that the government should try harder to make information public if possible, including by requiring agencies to regularly review what kinds of information they classify and to eliminate any obsolete secrecy requirements ...

He also established a new National Declassification Center at the National Archives to speed the process of declassifying historical documents by centralizing their review, rather than sending them in sequence to different agencies. He set a four-year deadline for processing a 400-million-page backlog of such records that includes archives related to military operations during World War II and the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

Moreover, Mr. Obama eliminated a rule put in place by former President George W. Bush in 2003 that allowed the leader of the intelligence community to veto decisions by an interagency panel to declassify information. Instead, spy agencies who object to such a decision will have to appeal to the president.

As a presidential candidate, Mr. Obama campaigned on a theme of making the government less secretive. But in office his record has been more ambiguous, drawing fire from advocates of open government by embracing Bush-era claims that certain lawsuits involving surveillance and torture must be shut down to protect state secrets.

Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, expressed cautious optimism about Mr. Obama’s new order, saying it appeared to be “a major step forward” from the vantage point of those who believe the government is too secretive.

“Everything depends on the faithful implementation by the agencies,” Mr. Aftergood said, “but there are some real innovations here.”

Mr. Obama also suggested that his administration might undertake further changes, saying he looked forward to recommendations from a study that Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, is leading “to design a more fundamental transformation of the security classification system.”

Bush: What's Been Found & What's Still Missing (cartoon)

 

Poll: Majority Wants Lieberman Thrown Out Of Democratic Caucus. Cap-and-Trade A Reason To Keep Him?

Marc Ambinder:

A Research 2000 poll confirms what we assumed to be true: Democrats are not happy with Joe Lieberman.

In fact, 81 percent of Democrats want Lieberman stripped of his Senate Homeland Security Committee chairmanship if he joins with Republicans to block health care reform, compared to only 10 percent who think he should retain it. See the full results here.

Independents agree, 43 percent to 30 percent; all voters also agree, 47 percent to 32 percent. 802 voters were polled by Research 2000 for the Progressive Campaign Change Committee, which has commissioned polling on moderate Democratic senators averse to ambitious health care reform since the debate heated up over the summer.
Lieberman came close to having his chairman's gavel stripped after the election, and it was assumed that he retained it because of 1) the conciliatory signals sent by then-President-elect Obama, and 2) the fact that Democrats needed his vote on critical pieces of President Obama's agenda--like, for instance health care reform ...

If Lieberman is a solid "no" on health care, the only thing preventing the caucus from removing him as chairman is his vote on climate change legislation. He's working on cap-and-trade legislation with Sens. John Kerry (D-MA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC); the three released a general framework for legislation last week, but The Washington Post noted that it showed they hadn't agreed to much yet. Lieberman's stance on cap-and-trade appears aggressive: in releasing that framework, Lieberman stressed that the bill will be intended to "punish" polluters, and he took the lead on cap-and-trade legislation in the last Congress.

Whether that's enough to keep him in Democrats' good graces--or whether he'd stop working on cap-and-trade if his removed as chairman--is anyone's guess.

Obama's Nobel Prize Cartoons

NY Times Analysis Of The Obama Doctrine (aka The Nobel Speech)

NY Times:

President Obama used his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize on Thursday to defend the idea that some wars were necessary and just, remind the world of the burden the United States had borne in the fight against oppression and appeal for greater international efforts for peace.

“We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: we will not eradicate violent conflicts in our lifetimes,” Mr. Obama said, addressing the paradox of receiving an award for peace as commander in chief of a nation that is escalating the war in Afghanistan as it continues to fight in Iraq. “There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.”

He delivered a mix of realism and idealism, implicitly criticizing both the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as inadequately appreciating the dangers of the world, and President George W. Bush as too quick to set aside fundamental American values in pursuit of security. And he embraced the concept of American exceptionalism, the idea that the United States has a special role as a defender of liberty, even as he promoted multilateralism.

In that way, he continued a pattern evident throughout his public career of favoring pragmatism over absolutes.

The address — delivered at once to a European audience that has grown skeptical about American power and to a domestic audience watching closely to see how he would handle the acceptance of an award that even he acknowledged he did not yet deserve — represented one of the broadest declarations of his foreign policy doctrine. He said that others deserved the award more, noting that his “accomplishments are slight,” but he accepted the prize with a strong endorsement of America’s place in the world.

“Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this,” Mr. Obama said. “The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.”

The Nobel lecture, a 36-minute address that the president and his aides completed on an overnight flight from Washington, carried echoes of several American presidents, from Jimmy Carter to Mr. Bush, but Mr. Obama singled out one above all: John F. Kennedy.

Mr. Obama cited Mr. Kennedy’s focus on “not a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions.”

Mr. Obama called for more robust international sanctions against nations like Iran and North Korea that defy demands for them to curtail their nuclear programs.

Weeks after being criticized for not speaking out more publicly in defense of human rights while in China, he suggested that quiet diplomacy was sometimes the most productive path, even if it “lacks the satisfying purity of indignation.” ...

The Nobel chairman, Thorbjorn Jagland, opened the ceremony by explaining how the committee came to its decision two months ago. He said Mr. Obama’s leadership had been a “call to action for all of us.” As he invoked the story of Dr. King, the winner of the prize in 1964, he turned to Mr. Obama, saying, “Dr. King’s dream has come true.” ...

Mr. Obama’s speech was sober, with his remarks only sparingly interrupted by applause. He was applauded when he renewed his pledge to ban torture and close the prison at the American base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

“We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend,” Mr. Obama said. “And we honor those ideals by upholding them not when it is easy, but when it is hard.”

To a European audience of academics, diplomats and Nobel laureates, he said there was “a deep ambivalence about military action today,” which he said he suspected was rooted in “a reflexive suspicion of America.” But he offered a forceful defense of the United States, saying the lessons of history should ease those suspicions. And he urged his audience to envision a hopeful future.

“Let us reach for the world that ought to be,” he said, “that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls.”

He did not dwell on the specifics of his announcement last week that he would send 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan. But that decision, which attracted scores of peaceful demonstrators here, set the framework that Mr. Obama returned to again and again as he sought to explain his policy as an extension of the post-World War II system that contained the cold war.

“A decade into a new century, this old architecture is buckling under the weight of new threats,” Mr. Obama said. “The world may no longer shudder at the prospect of war between two nuclear superpowers, but proliferation may increase the risk of catastrophe. Terrorism has long been a tactic, but modern technology allows a few small men with outsize rage to murder innocents on a horrific scale.”

Great Insight Into Obama's Morals & Foreign Policy: His Nobel "Lecture"

Definitely worth watching and a fitting complement to Obama's Post-Imperial Presidency:

Read the transcript.

Obama's Post-Imperial Presidency

Newsweek's cover story this week by Fareed Zakiaria is excellent and well worth reading.  Here's an excerpt:

{12:30 UPDATE: the speech Obama gave at the Nobel ceremony is a must watch complement to what Zakaria is arguing here}

... Here lies the tension in Barack Obama's policy. He wants a clearer, more discriminating foreign policy, one that pares down the vast commitments and open-ended interventions of the Bush era, perhaps one that is more disciplined even than Bill Clinton's approach to the world. (On the campaign trail, Obama repeatedly invoked George H.W. Bush as the president whose foreign policy he admired most.) But America is in the midst of a war that is not going well, and scaling back now would look like cutting and running. Obama is searching for a post-imperial policy in the midst of an imperial crisis. The qualified surge—send in troops to regain the momentum but then draw down—is his answer to this dilemma. This is an understandable compromise, and it could well work, but it pushes off a final decision about Afghanistan until the troop surge can improve the situation on the ground. Eighteen months from now, Obama will have to answer the core question: is a stable and well-functioning Afghanistan worth a large and continuing American ground presence, or can American interests be secured at much lower cost?

This first year of his presidency has been a window into Barack Obama's world view. Most presidents, once they get hold of the bully pulpit, cannot resist the temptation to become Winston Churchill. They gravitate to grand rhetoric about freedom and tyranny, and embrace the moral drama of their role as leaders of the free world. Even the elder Bush, a pragmatist if there ever was one, lapsed into dreamy language about "a new world order" once he stood in front of the United Nations. Not Obama. He has been cool and calculating, whether dealing with Russia, Iran, Iraq, or Afghanistan. A great orator, he has, in this arena, kept his eloquence in check. Obama is a realist, by temperament, learning, and instinct. More than any president since Richard Nixon, he has focused on defining American interests carefully, providing the resources to achieve them, and keeping his eyes on the prize.

In 1943 the columnist Walter Lippmann defined foreign policy as "bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation's commitments and the nation's power." Only then could the United States achieve strategic stability abroad and domestic support at home. Consciously or not, President Obama was channeling Lippmann when he said, "As president I refuse to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, or our interests." In his speech he quoted only one person, a president of the opposite party, Dwight Eisenhower, who said of national-security challenges, "Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs." Obama added that "over the past several years, we have lost that balance." He is hoping to restore some equilibrium to American foreign policy.

"In the end," said the president last week, "our security and leadership does not come solely from the strength of our arms." He explained that America's economic and technological vigor underpinned its ability to play a world role. At a small lunch with a group of columnists (myself included) last week, he made clear that he did not want to run two wars. He seemed to be implying that these struggles—Iraq and Afghanistan—were not the crucial path to America's long-term security. He explained that challenges at home—economic growth, technological innovation, education reform—were at the heart of maintaining America's status as a superpower.

It is now clear that Obama is attempting something quite ambitious—to reorient American foreign policy to-ward something less extravagant and adversarial. That begins with narrowing the war on terror; scaling back the conflict with the Islamic world to those groups and countries that pose serious, direct threats to America; and reaching out to the rest. He has also tried to develop a better working relationship between America and other major powers like Russia and China, setting aside smaller issues in hopes of cooperating on bigger ones. This means departing from a bipartisan approach in which Washington's role was to direct the rest of the world, pushing regimes large and small to accept American ideas, and publicly chastising them when they refused. Obama is trying to break the dynamic that says that when an American president negotiates with the Chinese or Russians, he must return with rewards or concessions—or else he is guilty of appeasement ...

Ultimately, however, one hopes that President Obama will keep another lesson of Vietnam firmly in mind.

"Gates Calls July 2011 the Beginning, Not End, of Afghan Withdrawal "

They're starting to unwind the spin that so angered me in the Shiny Object post. Here's the AP:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the initial U.S. troop withdrawal in July 2011 might involve only a small number of troops and that Americans should expect a significant U.S. military presence in Afghanistan for two years to four years more.

Just as in Iraq, the U.S. eventually will turn over provinces to local security forces, allowing the United States to bring the number of troops down steadily, according to Gates, who appeared on three Sunday talk shows with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to discuss President Barack Obama’s new Afghan war plan ...

He rejected suggestions that setting a transition date would embolden the Taliban. They read newspapers and are able to determine public opinion in the United States and Europe, he said

Gates said he doesn’t believe the Taliban will get more aggressive, and would welcome it if they lay low until the target date in 2011 because that would give coalition troops opportunities to make great progress in stabilizing Afghanistan.

Clinton said one area that may not show much progress is winning over Taliban leaders.

They “have to renounce al-Qaida, renounce violence. They have to be willing to abide by the constitution of Afghanistan and live peacefully,” she said.

“We have no firm information whether any of those leaders would be at all interested in following that kind of a path,” she said. “In fact, I’m highly skeptical that any of them would.”

But both Clinton and Gates said having a target date will help move both countries toward a successful transition.

“What we’ve done and what the president’s direction to the commanders on the ground is very clearly: We want this to move. We want it to move quickly,” said Clinton.

Obama’s combination of a troop increase and a transition target is intended to balance “a demonstration of resolve with also communicating a sense of urgency to the Afghan government that they must step up to the plate in terms of recruiting their soldiers, training their soldiers and getting their soldiers into the field,” Gates said

“It’s an effort to try and let the Afghans know that while we intend to have a relationship and support them for a long time, the nature of that relationship is going to begin to change in July of 2011,” Gates said. “And as the security component comes down, the economic, development and the political relationship will become a bigger part of the relationship.”

Today's AfPak Cartoons

Obama Authorizes Increased Use Of CIA Drones in Pakistan To Match The Increased Troops In Afhganistan

NY Times:

The White House has authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.’s drone program in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, officials said this week, to parallel the president’s decision, announced Tuesday, to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. American officials are talking with Pakistan about the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first time — a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas — because that is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide.

By increasing covert pressure on Al Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan, while ground forces push back the Taliban’s advances in Afghanistan, American officials hope to eliminate any haven for militants in the region.

One of Washington’s worst-kept secrets, the drone program is quietly hailed by counterterrorism officials as a resounding success, eliminating key terrorists and throwing their operations into disarray. But despite close cooperation from Pakistani intelligence, the program has generated public anger in Pakistan, and some counterinsurgency experts wonder whether it does more harm than good.

Assessments of the drone campaign have relied largely on sketchy reports in the Pakistani press, and some have estimated several hundred civilian casualties. Saying that such numbers are wrong, one government official agreed to speak about the program on the condition of anonymity. About 80 missile attacks from drones in less than two years have killed “more than 400” enemy fighters, the official said, offering a number lower than most estimates but in the same range. His account of collateral damage, however, was strikingly lower than many unofficial counts: “We believe the number of civilian casualties is just over 20, and those were people who were either at the side of major terrorists or were at facilities used by terrorists.”

That claim, which the official said reflected the Predators’ ability to loiter over a target feeding video images for hours before and after a strike, is likely to come under scrutiny from human rights advocates. Tom Parker, policy director for counterterrorism at Amnesty International, said he found the estimate “unlikely,” noting that reassessments of strikes in past wars had usually found civilian deaths undercounted. Mr. Parker said his group was uneasy about drone attacks anyway: “Anything that dehumanizes the process makes it easier to pull the trigger.”

Yet with few other tools to use against Al Qaeda, the drone program has enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress and was escalated by the Obama administration in January. More C.I.A. drone attacks have been conducted under President Obama than under President George W. Bush. The political consensus in support of the drone program, its antiseptic, high-tech appeal and its secrecy have obscured just how radical it is. For the first time in history, a civilian intelligence agency is using robots to carry out a military mission, selecting people for killing in a country where the United States is not officially at war.

Is The Announced 18 Month Exit Date Just A Shiny Object Designed To Draw Our Attention? Are Both Obama & The GOP Being Disingenuous?

As I posted yesterday, pairing a 30k troop increase with a date on which they will start leaving might be a wise, Solomon-like decision or an attempt to split the baby down the middle (depending on your view of the likely effectiveness of the new strategy).

Today, however, I'm starting to wonder if the exit date part of the equation is actually a shiny object designed to draw the attention of, and appease, Obama's & the GOP's respective bases. Are both Obama, in the prominence he gives the exit date, and the GOP, in their vocal rejection of a timeline, being disingenuous?

From the Wall St Journal:

The timeline has emerged as the linchpin in Mr. Obama's strategy to quickly turn the tide against Afghan insurgents, pressure the Afghan government to do its part and win over Americans skeptical of any escalation nine years into the conflict. It calls for 30,000 fresh troops to be deployed by next fall, and start returning less than a year later.

That should provide "sufficient time in order to train Afghan national security forces to assume control of providing security," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Wednesday. That argument was repeated from Kandahar to Capitol Hill Wednesday, by Mr. Gates, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of allied forces in Afghanistan, and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The withdrawal timeline also doesn't apply to the 68,000 U.S. troops there now, or other troops under NATO command.

From the NY Times:

The American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, made the same point while speaking to reporters in Kabul, the Afghan capital. He said he was “absolutely supportive of the timeline” laid out by Mr. Obama, but he also cautioned that the timeline was flexible and “is not an absolute.”

“It’s not, ‘At 18 months, everybody leaves,’ ” the general said.

So the thing that seems to be how surge proponents on the left are selling the new strategy ("this is the beginning of the end, we're leaving Afghanistan in 18 months") and how surge proponents on the right are critiquing it ("you can't tell the enemy you're leaving in 18 months if you want to win") is not actually going to happen. American forces will not begin "leaving" Afghanistan in 18 months, only the "surge" troops will be.

What do you think?

Obama's Mission In Afghanistan Is Narrower Than Bush's

Wash Post:

President Obama's decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan looks at first like a defeat for his vice president, who pushed hard for holding down the number of U.S. troops in the country. But the plan also gives Vice President Biden a lasting victory: a strategy that lays out far more modest goals for the embattled nation.

Biden originally argued that it would be fruitless -- perhaps even naive -- to add more forces in the hope of stabilizing Afghanistan by shoring up its central government. Besides the country's fragmented political history and his own doubts about President Hamid Karzai, Biden viewed Afghanistan as a much different and more difficult place than Iraq, with a far higher illiteracy rate and fragmented civil society, senior administration officials said.

Obama ultimately sided with the dire assessment of his top field commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, that without a massive increase in troop levels the war would be lost. But Biden's central point -- that the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan should be limited to denying al-Qaeda a haven in the country from which it planned the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks -- shifted the debate within the administration.

The result is a set of goals that are among the most limited of the eight-year war. "All along, you may recall, I'd been arguing the strategy is more important than the numbers. And the president laid out the strategy: This is a regional issue; number one priority al-Qaeda, number two Pakistan, number three giving the Karzai government a fighting chance to be able to sustain itself," Biden said Wednesday morning on CBS News. "The existential threat to the United States remains in the mountains in Pakistan. That's where we have to keep the focus." ...

Biden's more skeptical view also reflected the thinking of Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and McChrystal, who have emphasized working with local tribal authorities and village elders to drive out the Taliban and stabilize the country, thereby minimizing the role of the Karzai government.

"I have believed ever since I got this job that we have been too focused on the central government in Kabul and not enough on the provinces, districts and tribes," Gates told lawmakers Wednesday.

The defense secretary, who brokered a compromise between skeptics of escalation and military commanders, also seemed to reflect Biden's concerns by noting in his testimony that the administration's earlier Afghan policy review was seen as a "commitment to full-scale nation-building."

It was a strategy that "sounded very open ended," Gates said.

Even so, the secretary privately expressed concern about a fixed timeline for withdrawal, signing on only after the White House added language saying troop cuts would be based on conditions in Afghanistan, officials said.

"Obama’s War Speech Wins Over Some Skeptics"

NY Times:

A month ago, Donnie Jones, a 40-year-old Republican who lives outside Dallas, told pollsters that he was not sure President Obama had a plan for the war in Afghanistan. But after hearing the president speak Tuesday night, Mr. Jones feels reassured that Mr. Obama not only has a plan, but also one he can generally support.

“My hope is that we leave enough troops there to help the Afghan army.” Louis Bruso Jr., independent voter from Jamaica, Vt.

Margaret Gilbert, 62, a Democrat from Portsmouth, Va., told the same pollsters that she did not want the United States to send more troops to Afghanistan. But after listening to Mr. Obama, Ms. Gilbert now believes that he has no choice.

And Dave Cegledi, a 66-year-old independent from Olmsted Falls, Ohio, says he does not like Mr. Obama any more today than he did in November. But Mr. Cegledi thinks the president gave a good speech — good enough, indeed, that he might vote for him for re-election if the strategy for Afghanistan works.

Mr. Obama intended his speech on Tuesday at West Point to rally Americans behind his plan to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan and to set an 18-month timetable for starting a withdrawal. And interviews on Wednesday suggested that, while opinions on the war remained wildly diverse, Mr. Obama managed to persuade a significant number of people on both sides of the political aisle, though it was impossible to know how many.

Many Democrats who opposed the war said they now understood the need for escalation, in some cases to the point of supporting it. And Republicans who had thought Mr. Obama unwilling or unable to send more troops praised his decision, though many also criticized him for articulating a timetable for bringing troops home.

“I like the fact that he’s sending more troops,” said George Bronner, 45, a Republican from Knoxville, Tenn. “This speech does change my opinion about Obama, and it changes it for the better. I didn’t think he was going to step up to the plate and get more people over there.”

The people interviewed on Tuesday night and Wednesday were randomly selected from a list of respondents to a poll conducted last month by CBS News, which is a frequent partner with The New York Times on national polls ...

Clearly, Mr. Obama’s plan poses a risk of alienating supporters who had wanted him to swiftly scale back the American military presence in Afghanistan. Betty Holstine, a Democrat from Belle, W.Va., said that she had turned against the war after deciding that the death toll was too great and that she was now on the verge of turning against Mr. Obama as well.

“I was so eager to trust somebody to make things better,” Ms. Holstine, 70, said, “and perhaps I put too much faith and trust in the man. I just felt really disappointed and betrayed that it simply isn’t happening.”

Similarly, Dorothy Lingenfelser, a Republican from Lawrence, Kan., who a month ago said she approved of Mr. Obama’s performance, said she was furious with him for sending more troops.

“I think we ought to take care of people in the United States before we go take care of them in Afghanistan,” Ms. Lingenfelser, a 77-year-old retired factory worker, said. “I liked Obama before, but now I’m through with him.”

More common were Democrats who said they continued to support Mr. Obama even as they held their nose about his plan.

“Sending more troops is a very bad idea,” said Robert Labar, 60, a Democrat from Modesto, Calif. “But I know that the right guy is in the White House, and we just have to go along with what he wants to do.”

And there were several Democrats who said the president had convinced them of the need to dispatch more troops.

“I believe him; I trust him,” said Dianna Sampson, 60, a Democrat from Dayton, Ky., who a month ago said she wanted to reduce troop levels. “He met in a room with a lot of people, and this is what they came up with. It wasn’t just this idea out of the blue.”

Though most of the Republicans interviewed said they were pleased that Mr. Obama was sending more troops, many expressed skepticism about his motives ...

Mr. Obama seemed to do well among independents, several of whom said they felt more comfortable with him after the speech.

“He did a better-than-fair job,” said Fran Turner, 75, an independent voter from San Antonio, who told the pollsters last month that she opposed Mr. Obama’s performance as president. “Not a perfect job, but a good job.”

In particular, Ms. Turner said she was pleased Mr. Obama had taken his time in making a difficult decision, something many Republicans found fault with.

“I go back to the old saying, ‘Measure twice, cut once,’ ” she said. “Once you’ve jumped in, you’re in. Bush jumped in, and he didn’t know how to get out. Obama is thinking twice and cutting once. I really like that.”

If Health Care Must Be Paid For, Then So Do The Wars

While I'm still trying to figure out what I think about Obama's new Afghan strategy, I am certain that if the requirement for extending health insurance coverage to 45 million Americans is that it has to be paid for, then so do America's wars. After all, if the lessor threat to American security can be put on our credit card, then why can't the greater threat (read: The Taliban Helped Kill 3,000 Americans On 9/11. Since Then, 360,000 Have Died From Lack Of Health Insurance. Which Is The Bigger Threat?)?

Here's the Wash Post:

President Obama's decision to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan ensures what was already inevitable: The cost of the wars in that country and Iraq is about to exceed $1 trillion. Less certain for Congress is how to pay for it.

The new Afghanistan strategy will cost at least $30 billion more than current spending, and Democrats were divided Tuesday on what to do. Key leaders rejected a proposal from liberal members to impose a "war tax" that would hit workers earning as little as $30,000 a year, but they offered no plan of their own.

Before leaving for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., Obama huddled with about 30 top lawmakers from both parties at the White House, winning support from key Republicans for the new strategy. "Republicans are going to be supportive of funding for these troops," Rep. Jerry Lewis (Calif.), the senior Republican on the House Appropriations Committee, said after the meeting.

But Lewis rejected calls for increased taxes and instead urged Obama to pare back money to federal agencies, many of which are slated to receive double-digit increases in funding for fiscal 2010. Other Republicans suggested using unspent stimulus funds.

GOP support could be critical to the new strategy's success on Capitol Hill, where overall cost concerns have grown in the run-up to Obama's announcement. Congress is days away from approving the annual Pentagon spending bill, which includes about $130 billion in funds for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Once that bill is approved, the Pentagon's total tab for the wars will come to more than $1 trillion since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan eight years ago, according to the Congressional Research Service.

A third of those funds have gone to the Afghan front, but that region is quickly becoming the more expensive battleground. If the new funding is approved, the total cost for next year's operations in Afghanistan will come to about $100 billion. That's up from $43 billion for fiscal 2008 and $55 billion for fiscal 2009, according to the research service.

Obama's proposal would place more than 200,000 troops altogether in Afghanistan and Iraq. If the troop level across both nations averages 75,000 through the next decade, the operations will cost an additional $867 billion -- more than the $848 billion health-care legislation the Senate is considering.

In his speech, Obama said that "we simply cannot afford to ignore the price of these wars" and vowed to work with Congress on the cost of his strategy.

Reality On The Ground Complicates Obama Plan: Desertions Undermine Afghan Army

From Al Jazeera:

An exclusive Al Jazeera investigation has found that the number of existing security forces in Afghanistan has been greatly exaggerated with widespread desertions by members of the army and police.

Senior officials in the Obama administration say US troops will start to return home from July of 2011. That is when Afghan forces are supposed to be ready to take over.

But an investigation by Al Jazeera's James Bays shows that may not be feasible.

NATO, Afghanistan & Pakistan React To Obama Strategy

NY Times:

As political and military leaders across the globe pondered the import of President Obama’s announcement of his Afghan strategy, the NATO secretary general said Wednesday he believed other members of the alliance would contribute 5,000 soldiers — and possibly more — to make a “substantial” increase to the 43-nation coalition fighting the Taliban.

Speaking at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels, the official, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said he anticipated “at least 5,000 more forces from other countries in our alliance and possibly a few thousand more” to bolster NATO’s current contingent of around 42,000 soldiers in Afghanistan. The figure fell somewhat short of American hopes, voiced by officials before the president’s speech, that the NATO allies would contribute up to 8,000 additional soldiers ... Elsewhere, the appeal drew an ambivalent response.

France and Germany immediately ruled out an immediate commitment of more ground forces. But Poland was reported to be considering increasing its contingent by 600 soldiers from its current level of 2,000, Reuters reported, and a Spanish newspaper said Spain might increase its deployment by 200 soldiers to 1,200. Britain pledged to press other allies to boost their contingents and Italy hinted at an unspecified increase beyond its current 2,800 soldiers in the patchwork of foreign troops in Afghanistan, known as the International Security Assistance Force.

Apart from NATO’s response to the president’s plan to send around 30,000 more American soldiers, officials in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan were examining the implications on their countries, both of them gripped by intertwined Taliban insurgencies.

In Kabul, Foreign Minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta said that despite some tough language in President Obama’s speech and an outline for a drawdown of troops starting in 18 months, the president “sharply stated his commitment to Afghanistan.”

Mr. Spanta said he was not worried about Washington’s target of 18 months for Afghan security forces to take responsibility for security. “I personally believe it must go faster. We must take up the burden and I am not alone in thinking this,” he said. He was speaking after signing an agreement with the American ambassador to Kabul, Karl W. Eikenberry, to open the first United States consulate in Afghanistan in the relatively peaceful northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif.

The opposition leader, Abdullah Abdullah, who pulled out of the presidential election in November accusing President Hamid Karzai of widespread fraud, welcomed the extra troops.

“Unfortunately, we should not need more troops after eight years but we do,” Dr. Abdullah said in comments relayed by an aide. He cast doubt on the likely ability of the Afghan government to assume control in two to three years. “That cannot be guaranteed by anyone, that’s the question mark,” he said.

Across a long and mountainous border in Pakistan, distrust of American intentions runs deep, partly because the United States abandoned the region after the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, and there is widespread fear in the security establishment of a repetition of those events.

Newspapers, anticipating the speech, struck a skeptical tone. The News, a daily, acknowledged in an editorial that Mr. Obama was trying to change the substance of American-Pakistani relations, but that the trust deficit was so deep that “it is unlikely that Islamabad will be more attentive to an apparently war-weary U.S. and NATO than it was to a fire-breathing Bush administration eight years ago.”

An editorial in The Nation, a nationalist daily strongly critical of the United States, struck a more strident tone: “The time has come for Pakistan to demand rather than to continue giving in to U.S. interests.” ...

French President Nicolas Sarkozy called Mr. Obama’s speech on Tuesday night “courageous, determined and lucid, giving new impetus to the international commitment” but he did not commit to adding to France’s nearly 3,750 troops now in the war zone.

International Newspaper Coverage Of Obama's New Afghan Strategy

Der Spiegel:

US President Barack Obama promised a large increase in the number of American troops in Afghanistan. But at the same time, he promised to begin pulling them out already in 2011. His speech offered many details, but little vision. And Obama failed to adequately explain a war that many no longer support.

London Times:

White House officials said that he had ordered the military to hit the Taleban hard and fast. He wants to show quick gains in the battle for the hearts and minds of the civilian population. Unstated, but as important to the White House, is the battle to shore up crumbling support for the war at home ...

President Karzai of Afghanistan has been told in the clearest terms that the plan is also heavily contingent on his performance. He must drop corrupt ministers and governors and institute real reforms within a Government that is at present viewed as a deeply unreliable partner. Mr Karzai has also been told that Mr Obama is holding the option to delay or halt troop deployments if his Government does not meet specific benchmarks, or targets, both on the political and military fronts.

Gordon Brown, who was briefed by Mr Obama on Monday, said the plan was “to create the space for an effective political strategy to work, weakening the Taleban by strengthening Afghanistan itself”. He added that the strategy called for “transfer of lead security responsibility to the Afghans — district by district, province by province — with the first districts and provinces potentially being handed over during the next year”.

Times of India:

US President Barack Obama's plans to boost troop numbers in Afghanistan need to ensure there is "no adverse fallout" on Pakistan, the country's foreign ministry said on Wednesday.

"Pakistan looks forward to engaging closely with US in understanding the full import of the new strategy and to ensure that there would be no adverse fallout on Pakistan," the ministry said in a statement.

The Afghan Taliban said that President Barack Obama's plan to send tens of thousands of extra troops to the country would not work and would only strengthen their resolve. "This strategy by the enemy will not benefit them. However many more troops the enemy sends against our Afghan mujahideen, they are committed to increasing the number of mujahideen and strengthen their resistance," the Taliban said in a statement e-mailed to media on Wednesday.

A Wise, Solomon-like Decision Or Splitting The Baby Down The Middle: Major American Newspapers Coverage Of Obama's New Afghan Strategy

The spin the major American newspapers have taken in their analysis pieces of Obama's new Afghan strategy is interesting.

The Wall St Journal played it uncharacteristically neutral:

Obama Bets Big on Troop Surge
Extra 30,000 U.S. Soldiers for 18 Months; Republicans Say Timetable Poses Risk

President Barack Obama announced Tuesday a surge of 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, along with plans to begin withdrawing the reinforcements in 18 months -- a potentially high-risk political and military strategy.

Such a firm date for troop drawdowns was unexpected. Administration officials hope that will pressure Kabul to reform its notoriously corrupt government. At the same time, it allows the White House to begin bringing soldiers home ahead of the 2012 elections.

With Tuesday's address, Mr. Obama made Afghanistan his war ... By increasing U.S. forces to nearly 100,000 -- while limiting their deployment -- Mr. Obama appeared to be trying to thread a middle path between a plan proposed three months ago by his commander in Kabul, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, which sought an open-ended commitment, and proponents of a more limited engagement.

The NY Times' perspective is stated right in their headline:

Two Messages for Two Sides

President Obama went before the nation on Tuesday night to announce that he would escalate the war in Afghanistan. And Mr. Obama went before the nation to announce that he had a plan to end the war in Afghanistan.

If the contrasting messages seemed jarring at first, they reflect the obstacles Mr. Obama faces in rallying an increasingly polarized country that itself is of two minds about what to do in Afghanistan. For those who still support the war, he is sending more troops. For those against it, he is offering the assurance of the exit ramp.

He used language intended to appeal to different parts of the spectrum, at times echoing former President George W. Bush in reasserting America’s moral authority in the world while repudiating what he sees as the mistakes of the Bush years and insisting that “America has no interest in fighting an endless war in Afghanistan.” He tried to persuade people on both sides of the divide — and a Congress that must finance the war — to swallow their misgivings and come together long enough to see if his strategy works.

While the most comprehensive analysis was provided by the Wash Post:

President Obama assumed full ownership of the war in Afghanistan on Tuesday night with a speech arguing that the fastest way out of the conflict is a rapid and significant escalation of it. But the muted response from key Democratic congressional leaders and the skepticism from Republicans about an exit strategy signaled that the president faces a stiff fight to sell the policy.

Obama adopted the risky approach of both calling for a sizable troop surge -- bigger in terms of percentage than the Iraq surge ordered by then-President George W. Bush -- and outlining an exit strategy in the same speech. That was a clear acknowledgment of the fragile state of public opinion after eight years of conflict in Afghanistan, as well as the political divisions.

Obama stood his ground against his critics and wrapped his new policy in a call for the kind of national unity that existed in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. His speech was clearly argued and reflected his determination to chart his own course to disrupt al-Qaeda while preventing Afghanistan from becoming a quagmire like Vietnam.

While he granted most of the request for troops from his top commander in Afghanistan, the reshaping of the timing and deployment of those forces during the decision-making process allowed White House officials to argue that the result was the president's own, not a rubber-stamp of the Pentagon's vision.

But those changes -- and the commitment to begin leaving Afghanistan in July 2011 -- may not be enough to head off a major battle within his own party to fund an expanded war.

Rebuilding Destroyed Nations Is Tuff

Wash Post:

The revised strategy for Afghanistan that President Obama will announce Tuesday is expected to focus new resources on training Afghan security forces and shoring up the central government, an approach certain to revive a debate about the possibilities and the limits of nation-building.

From Somalia, Cambodia, East Timor and the Balkans in the 1990s to Iraq today, world powers have at best a mixed record when it comes to establishing functional, stable governments in countries devastated by war. The efforts have been long and costly, tangible results often hard to measure, and support for a prolonged involvement difficult to maintain.

Congressional leaders have already voiced deep skepticism about pouring billions more dollars into an American-led war that so far has shown little progress toward making Afghanistan self-sustaining.

"You can't be half in and half out," said Jonathan T. Howe, a retired Navy admiral who led an ill-fated U.N. reconstruction effort in Somalia in 1993. Howe went to Mogadishu in March of that year with an $856 million budget and a mandate to rebuild Somalia virtually from scratch. Six months later, after 18 U.S. soldiers were killed in a bloody street battle in Mogadishu, the operation was in tatters and President Bill Clinton ordered American troops to withdraw.

Howe, who now lives in Florida, remains convinced that the Somali mission might have succeeded "if we could have just gotten the right resources." He added: "It would have taken time -- and I think Afghanistan is going to take time."

Diplomats and officials involved in past nation-building efforts generally agree that the process works best when warring factions are ready to make peace. Elections, while important to lend legitimacy to a new government, should not be rushed -- creating lasting institutions is more important. The international community must have realistic, if modest, goals. Regional experts need to be consulted, and neighboring countries should be brought on board.

And nation-building should be done primarily by the people of the country involved, with the outside world there to assist, diplomats said.

Above all, there must be resources.

"More manpower and more money produces better, faster results," said former U.S. diplomat James F. Dobbins, now with the Rand Corp., who has had firsthand experience in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. "There is a correlation between the commitment and the achievement."

He added: "Lesson one was decisive force. Employ a force decisive enough and impressive enough to deter any violent resistance." ...

Today's AfPak Cartoons

 

Senate Report: Bin Laden Was 'within our grasp' At Tora Bora

Wash Post (read the report):

Osama bin Laden was unquestionably within reach of U.S. troops in the mountains of Tora Bora when American military leaders made the crucial and costly decision not to pursue the terrorist leader with massive force, a Senate report says.

The report asserts that the failure to kill or capture bin Laden at his most vulnerable in December 2001 has had lasting consequences beyond the fate of one man. Bin Laden's escape laid the foundation for today's reinvigorated Afghan insurgency and inflamed the internal strife now endangering Pakistan, it says.

Staff members for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Democratic majority prepared the report at the request of the chairman, Sen. John Kerry, as President Barack Obama prepares to boost U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

The Massachusetts senator and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate has long argued the Bush administration missed a chance to get the al-Qaida leader and top deputies when they were holed up in the forbidding mountainous area of eastern Afghanistan only three months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Although limited to a review of military operations eight years old, the report could also be read as a cautionary note for those resisting an increased troop presence there now.

More pointedly, it seeks to affix a measure of blame for the state of the war today on military leaders under former president George W. Bush, specifically Donald H. Rumsfeld as defense secretary and his top military commander, Tommy Franks.

"Removing the al-Qaida leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat," the report says. "But the decisions that opened the door for his escape to Pakistan allowed bin Laden to emerge as a potent symbolic figure who continues to attract a steady flow of money and inspire fanatics worldwide. The failure to finish the job represents a lost opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism."

The report states categorically that bin Laden was hiding in Tora Bora when the U.S. had the means to mount a rapid assault with several thousand troops at least. It says that a review of existing literature, unclassified government records and interviews with central participants "removes any lingering doubts and makes it clear that Osama bin Laden was within our grasp at Tora Bora."

The Secret Service As Homer (cartoon)

 

Soldiers Have Been Coming Home From War Forever; Now It's On The News & YouTube

 

NY Times:

EARLIER this month at the Jacksonville Jaguars’ Military Appreciation game, Brandon Becar, 11, and relatives proudly stood on the football field in front of 45,000 people. The stadium’s giant video screen flashed a prerecorded greeting from his father, stationed in Iraq. Brandon grinned and flexed his muscle.

Suddenly the crowd roared. Brandon turned, bewildered. Dashing across the field toward him came a figure in fatigues: Maj. Kevin Becar, surprising his son with an early two-week leave. “We both totally zoned out where we were,” Major Becar recalled. “He was just bawling, and we melted into each others’ arms.”

Read this and weep. Go ahead. It’s that season. And these surprise military homecoming tales are the definition of heartwarming.

But view ’em — as have millions through TV news broadcasts, YouTube and countless other Web sites — and just blubber:

A 2-year-old opens the door to a costumed Santa. He gives her M&M’s and, gingerly, she hugs him. Then her stunned mother lets loose a yelp — “It’s Daddy!” — home six weeks early from Afghanistan. And while Mommy smooches Santa, thumping his chest (“You stinker!” “This is the best Christmas ever!”), the child looks quizzical. “Da-dee?”

In recent years, the popularity of surprise soldier homecomings, videotaped for posterity, has grown: dozens of such moments have been posted on the Internet. Fathers in fatigues — it’s almost always fathers — surprise children in classrooms, at a Valentine’s Day dance, popping out of a gift-wrapped box at a school assembly. Occasionally, as in a Veterans Day ceremony at a Tennessee elementary school, the local TV news lies in wait.

Network anchors sniffle. Public relations people beam. Parents describe unparalleled elation. But as these surprise reunions become embedded as this generation’s narrative of the returning vet, psychologists and others who work with military families question whether these surprise visits best serve the children themselves. Debates on blogs, like Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, ask, Do these videos celebrate or exploit?

“Some people think it’s totally fine,” said Lillian Connolly, a mother of four who leads support groups for military families in Brockton, Mass. “But I recommend to families not to surprise children. The child has been without a parent for so long. The child can hold anger. You never know how they’re going to react.”

Mrs. Connolly, whose husband is on his third deployment in Iraq for the Army Reserve, added: “And in front of the media? I don’t think it’s fair.”

Candace Weir disagrees. She helped engineer a surprise for her daughters this month, dropping them with her mother for a weekend and driving to Fort Campbell, Ky., to pick up her husband, Specialist Chris Weir, just returned from Iraq.

That Monday morning, Kylee, 6, and Ashlyn, 4, attended an early Veterans Day assembly at Oak Grove Elementary School in Cleveland, Tenn. Who should stride in? The girls were floored — and then over the moon.

Months before, to prepare them for his mid-deployment visit, Mrs. Weir tried the calendar countdown. But the military could only give a two-week estimate of his date. “It was an emotional rollercoaster,” she said. “One day he was coming home — and the next he wasn’t.” The girls’ anxiety was particularly acute because their uncle died in Iraq in 2006; their father had volunteered to complete his brother’s service.

“My kids were upset and crying and thought Daddy was supposed to be home by now,” Mrs. Weir said. “The surprise thing worked better. And they really loved it.”

The adulation from classmates at these special moments can be reparative, parents say. Peers may finally empathize with the turmoil of a child whose parent is deployed. How bad could a little glory be?

“Nobody paid attention to me, it was all about Hannah,” said Master Sgt. Joseph Myers, of the video in June that vaulted onto national broadcasts showing the reaction of his 10-year-old — freeze-frame expressions ranging from incredulity to ecstatic relief — when he walked into her Randolph Elementary School class at Universal City, Tex.

Hannah still Googles her name to read new posts, he said, “and to check what ranking she is on the viewings at YouTube.”

FOR viewers, these moments have a voyeuristic magnetism. They are mini-dramas, representing the anxiety of the ultimate parent-child separation, with a radiant resolution. Institutions that facilitate them can’t help but benefit from the emotional spillover.

Chief among them: the military. Jon Myatt, a spokesman for the Florida Department of Military Affairs, said those called up — doctors, butchers, accountants like Major Becar — live in communities where people may not understand military families’ ordeal. These reunions and their publicity give a window into their lives. “You don’t get that on the nightly news very much,” Mr. Myatt added.

And while opposition to the Vietnam War corroded the reception of those veterans, he said, the intimacy of these public reunions helps viewers separate their feelings about current wars from the troops themselves: “Everyone was touched by this moment,” he said, “and that’s a wonderful outcome.”

Still, he said, surprises with younger children work best: “They’re not as self-conscious when it comes to crying and hugging their father. Teenagers are worried about their peers.” ...

The veteran’s homecoming is such a potent milestone that it’s been a theme in books, paintings and film — “The Odyssey,” Norman Rockwell’s “Homecoming G.I.,” William Wyler’s “Best Years of Our Lives.” Elizabeth Samet, a professor of English at West Point, viewed some reunion videos and noted that when some of the young children peered uncomprehendingly at a man in a uniform running toward them, she was reminded of Hector’s return to Troy in “The Iliad”: his young son “doesn’t recognize his father because he is still wearing armor.”

FOR centuries, whatever unfolded during those reunions — children shrieking with joy or clinging to their mothers’ knees — took place in privacy. Today, because of the orchestration and omnipresent cameras, the “surprise” homecomings make viewers essential to the reunion itself, much like reality TV shows. But what happens after the cameras are turned off?

That’s when the complex adjustment for soldier and family begins. “The expectation is that it will be wonderful and happy and we hope so,” said Mark Pisano, a school psychologist at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

“But sometimes, all he wants to do is sleep, because he has been sleeping in a hole in the desert for weeks,” he said. “That is understandable but hurtful.”

For children, he added, mid-deployment visits can be notoriously rough, because in a short period they are whipsawed between the euphoria of reunion and the anguish of departure. In workshops, he advises families to prepare their children. Minimize surprises.

Last month, Lillian Connolly’s husband returned for a mid-deployment visit. Staff Sergeant Joseph Connolly called from the airport; the plane had landed early. “I told him, ‘I don’t like to be surprised!’ ” Mrs. Connolly said. “ ‘You have to wait until I shower and wear the outfit I planned.’ He has me waiting a year, does he not? Well, he can wait 20 minutes.”

The deployments don’t get easier: “Every time my boys get off Skype with him, their eyes are full of water.”

Major Becar, home for a 14-day visit, stayed hidden at a friend’s home for a few days until he could surprise his son at the Jaguars’ game.

“I had no idea the effect it would have on everyone else,” he said of the reunion. The V.I.P. treatment, appearances on a morning TV show and sports talk radio. “It shows how patriotic everyone is and wants to see good news,” Major Becar said.

Reached 48 hours before returning to Iraq, Major Becar said Brandon’s school excused him to stay with his father throughout the visit. “I’ve been with him 24/7.”

He lowered his voice; Brandon was nearby. “The last couple of days as he looks at me, I know he’s thinking about me leaving. He’s starting to act differently.” The major began choking up. “It just kills me to think how tough this is for him.”

Obama's Dilemma (cartoons)

The Questions Senator Obama Posed About Afghanistan That President Obama Needs To Answer

John Dickerson:

For the last several months, President Obama has been trying to answer Sen. Obama's questions. The president's Afghanistan strategy review has been focused on the same issues Obama raised with Condoleezza Rice in January 2007, when he was on the Senate foreign relations committee and she was testifying about the troop surge in Iraq. Sen. Obama wanted to know how the president was going to force a reluctant partner to perform and when the president would say "enough is enough" if progress wasn't made.

Obama focused then on the three C's (he didn't call them that because he doesn't like gimmicks): contract, conditions, and consequences.

• Was there a contract between the American and Iraqi governments that included agreed-upon benchmarks the Iraqis promised to meet to show they were building a sustainable government?
• Would the sending of future troops and money be conditioned on the Iraqis meeting those benchmarks?
• And what were the consequences if those benchmarks were not met?

The question for President Obama's Tuesday night address at West Point is whether he will be able to meet his own test. It's clear he's been trying to. That's why his deliberations have been so careful, say aides. He's pressed the Pentagon to come up with clear guidelines for an exit strategy and measures to ensure that Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government reduces corruption and is able to build a viable military.

In recent interviews, President Obama has promised that he will give the American people exactly what Sen. Obama was asking for from Condoleezza Rice. "We will be able to present to the American people in very clear terms what exactly is at stake, what we intend to do, how we're going to succeed, how much it's going to cost, how long it's going to take," he told NBC News.

But can Obama really do this? He seems to be promising a kind of antiseptic blueprint, measuring inputs and outputs and signaling points along the way where a little calibration will keep everything on track. The political benefit of this is that the more clearly the president draws the exit, the more easily he will be able to convince people that a troop increase is needed to reach it. But as the Illinois state senator pointed out in his famous 2002 speech opposing the Iraq war, even successful engagements are of undetermined length and cost.

Or, to put it another way:  Obama needs to get pretty specific on Tuesday in order to win support for his strategy (that's if Americans who have heard war promises before are still able to be convinced by them). Yet the more specific his claims, the more he boxes himself in down the road if things don't turn out as he pledges.

Will Obama be able to provide precision about the U.S. arrangement with the Karzai government? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called the Afghan government "an unworthy partner." If that's true, all the more reason to get its commitments in writing—and attach them to automatic punishments. Not only would this keep Karzai in line it would help build domestic political support for the operation.

What President Obama knows that Sen. Obama didn't talk about much is that public pressure on a client state can have the opposite of the intended effect. Karzai can't be seen as a mere puppet. If he is, he will lose legitimacy among his constituents, which in turn will weaken his ability to lead, which will make it more difficult for the United States to leave. In the end, it may not be in President Obama's interest to be as specific as Sen. Obama might have liked.

The last question Sen. Obama asked in the hearing about Iraq is President Obama's greatest challenge in Afghanistan: Under what circumstances is the United States prepared to withdraw its troops? What are the consequences if the Karzai government doesn't perform as the president asks?

This week president Obama said he is going to "finish the job" in Afghanistan. He made that commitment because a secure Afghanistan is vital to America's national security. At the same time, however, the claim undermines the idea of serious consequences for a government that doesn't perform. If I know you're going to finish the job no matter what, what's my incentive to make interim payments?

In January 2007, Sen. Obama ran out of time before he could get real answers from the secretary of state. On Tuesday night, he'll have as much time as he needs to answer all of his own questions.