A Blue View

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.” ...

Someone Who's Dying To Get Attention (cartoon)

 

The KSM Trial: If Not Manhattan, Where?

Turns out the Southern District of New York includes much more than just Manhattan, so while moving the trial might be a political setback for the Administration, it is easily overcome. The NY Times (also see The New American "cult of selfishness ... the sour, us-first mood that’s settled over the country"):

Since November, the administration had been preparing to move the highest-profile Guantánamo prisoners — Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four accomplices accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — to Manhattan for a federal criminal trial.

But overwhelming opposition from New York politicians concerned about costs, disruptions and security now has the Justice Department scrambling to come up with a Plan B, even as Congress threatens to block money to pay for a criminal 9/11 trial altogether. That could force the administration to revive the very option that the president and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. had rejected: military commissions at Guantánamo for the 9/11 plotters.

For a president who campaigned on a promise to close Guantánamo, and who just missed a self-imposed one-year deadline to get the job done, the meltdown of a potential Manhattan 9/11 trial is the latest measure of the stubborn complexity of his national security inheritance.

“It’s obviously proven a lot more difficult than a lot of us expected to close Guantánamo,” said Sarah E. Mendelson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, who has studied the issue intensively. She called the turnaround of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and other New York officials “disappointing” and the costly security plan they proposed for Manhattan excessive, given the major Al Qaeda trials held there in the past with far less disruptive procedures.

“We need to develop a greater resiliency in this country on security issues,” she said. “The administration needs to remind the American public that we have convicted 195 international terrorists in federal courts since 2001.”

Stop The Fear Mongering And Instead "analyze failures in homeland security the way we do airplane catastrophes"

Fareed Zakiara:

In responding to the attempted bombing of an airlineron Christmas Day, Sen. Dianne Feinstein voiced the feelings of many when she said that to prevent such situations, "I'd rather overreact than underreact." This appears to be the consensus view in Washington, but it is quite wrong. The purpose of terrorism is to provoke an overreaction. Its real aim is not to kill the hundreds of people directly targeted but to sow fear in the rest of the population. Terrorism is an unusual military tactic in that it depends on the response of the onlookers. If we are not terrorized, then the attack didn't work. Alas, this one worked very well.

The attempted bombing says more about al-Qaeda's weakened state than its strength. In the eight years before Sept. 11, al-Qaeda was able to launch large-scale terrorist attacks on several continents. It targeted important symbols of American power -- embassies in Africa; a naval destroyer, the USS Cole; and, of course, the World Trade Center. The operations were complex -- a simultaneous bombing of two embassies in different countries -- and involved dozens of people of different nationalities who trained around the world, moved significant sums of money and coordinated their efforts over months, sometimes years.

On Christmas an al-Qaeda affiliate launched an operation using one person, with no special target, and a failed technique tried eight years ago by "shoe bomber" Richard Reid. The plot seems to have been an opportunity that the group seized rather than the result of a well-considered strategic plan. A Nigerian fanatic with (what appeared to be) a clean background volunteered for service; he was wired up with a makeshift explosive and put on a plane. His mission failed entirely, killing not a single person. The suicide bomber was not even able to commit suicide. But al-Qaeda succeeded in its real aim, which was to throw the American system into turmoil. That's why the terror group proudly boasted about the success of its mission.

Is there some sensible reaction between panic and passivity? Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the9/11 Commission and later a senior State Department official in the Bush administration, suggests that we should try to analyze failures in homeland security the way we do airplane catastrophes. When an airliner suffers an accident, major or minor, theNational Transportation Safety Boardconvenes a group of nonpartisan experts who methodically examine what went wrong and then issue recommendations to improve the situation. "We approach airline security with the understanding that it's a complex problem, that we have a pretty good system, but that there will be failures -- caused by human beings, technology, or other factors. The point is to constantly fix what's broken and keep improving the design and execution," says Zelikow.

Imagine if that were the process after a lapse in homeland security. The public would know that any attack, successful or not, would trigger an automatic, serious process to analyze the problem and fix it. Politicians might find it harder to use every such event for political advantage. The people on the front lines of homeland security would not get demoralized as they watched politicians and the media bash them and grandstand with little knowledge.

Overreacting to terrorist attacks plays into al-Qaeda's hands. It also provokes responses that are likely to be large-scale, expensive, ineffective and possibly counterproductive. More screening for every passenger makes no sense. When searching for needles in haystacks, adding hay doesn't help. What's needed is a larger, more robust watch list that is instantly available to all relevant government agencies. Almost 2 million people travel on planes in the United States every day. We need to isolate the tiny percentage of suspicious characters and search them, not cause needless fear in everyone else.

As for the calls to treat the would-be bomber as an enemy combatant, torture him and toss him into Guantanamo, God knows he deserves it. But keep in mind that the crucial intelligence we received was from the boy's father. If that father had believed that the United States was a rogue superpower that would torture and abuse his child without any sense of decency, would he have turned him in? To keep this country safe, we need many more fathers, uncles, friends and colleagues to have enough trust in America that they, too, would turn in the terrorist next door.

Obama: I Have “no intention of sending U.S. boots on the ground” To Yemen & Somalia

NY Times:

President Obama said he has “no intention of sending U.S. boots on the ground” to Yemen and Somalia amid mounting concern about terrorist cells in those countries.

In excerpts of an interview with People magazine released on Sunday, Mr. Obama said that the “border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan remains the epicenter of Al Qaeda,” though he acknowledged that the group’s branch in Yemen has become “a more serious problem.”

But his administration is seeking to emphasize international cooperation, rather than military action, to confront the problem in Yemen.

“I never rule out any possibility in a world that is this complex,” said Mr. Obama. But, he added, “in countries like Yemen, in countries like Somalia, I think working with international partners is most effective at this point.” ...

As with the situation in Pakistan, fighting extremist strongholds in Yemen puts the United States government in a difficult position. Yemeni leaders have made it clear over they past week that they do not want American forces on their soil. However, security experts say that the government might be too weak to effectively fight the terrorist elements. Instead, the U.S. has sent $70 million in military aid to the country – a figure it plans to double this year – and Yemen has stepped up raids against militant outposts in recent months.

Mr. Obama’s remarks echoed those of his top military commanders in recent days. In an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria earlier this week, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said sending U.S. troops to Yemen is “not a possibility.”

And in an interview that aired Sunday with the network’s Christiane Amanpour, General David H. Petreaus said he also does not want to send American forces to Yemen. “We would always want a host nation to deal with a problem itself,” he said.

In playing down any talk of American military intervention in Yemen, the Obama administration is apparently trying to strike a conciliatory tone to people in the region.

“One of the things that we have to understand is that unlike a traditional war, the threats that we face and our allies face are not always going to be centered or localized in a particular geographic area, but are rather networks that are connecting over cyberspace,” Mr. Obama said. “And how we project ourselves to the world, the message we send to Muslim communities around the world, the overwhelming majority of which reject Al Qaeda but where a handful of individuals may be moved by a jihadist ideology, what counter-messaging we have to them -- all those things — continue to be extraordinarily important.”

He added, “We can’t return to sort of a garrison-state notion that we’re just going to hunker down and this is only an issue of firepower and boots on the ground.”

Sunday Afternoon Relaxation

I hope that no one in the GOP sees this video or they're going to add "not fighting ghost killers" to their list of evidence that Obama is weak on terror, joining the equally stupid "he doesn't say War on Terror" and "he'd Mirandize the 911 terrorists":

In The Know: War On Terror

Liz Cheney Goes On The Attack With 24-Like Video

Al Qaeda Or NBA? (cartoon)

 

"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.

Security Lapse Cartoons

Kabuki Airport Security

I'm sorry, I just don't get the clamoring for full body scanners; they just seem way too ineffectual for the money:

1. We're going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on machines that may break laws against the production of pornographic images of children and thereby prevent anyone under 18 from being scanned. Certainly makes sense since there aren't any 17 year old terrorists out there.
2. Further, as The Lede reports, the machines are likely to blur out the places terrorists would hide bombs:

   Stephen Phipson, the president of Smiths Detection, a British company that makes scanning machines, sought to reassure readers of Time that his company’s machines could be set up to avoid picturing genitals, since “our software can blur out parts of the body.”

   Then again if the man who went through security in Amsterdam on Christmas day with explosives concealed in his underwear had encountered a full-body scanner that blurred out that part of his body, it seems fair to ask if he would have been caught or simply waved through to board his flight for Detroit.

3. Finally, no one, their manufacturers included, claim these machines can see a bomb in a body cavity or even under folds of fat.

So they're fantastically expensive machines that give the appearance of high-tech security but would still allow the Christmas bomber to board that Detroit flight and motivate terrorists to recruit children and fat people. They certainly seem iron clad to me.

And while we're pouring all this money into these ineffectual machines, half of all the cargo on commercial flights are not inspected at all. That's right, we're considering spending all this money on these problematic, ineffectual machines while not inspecting half of all the cargo sitting in the bellies of the same planes we've been full body scanned to sit in.

This is so stupid it can get us killed!

Here's the The Lede:

While a lot of attention has been paid in recent days to the need to find better ways to screen passengers and their luggage, as aviation security officials try to keep terrorists — or Slovak security officials — from smuggling explosives onto passenger jets, it remains an uncomfortable fact that entirely unscreened packages are still routinely loaded into the cargo holds of those same airplanes.

According to the Transportation Security Administration, it currently screens “at least 50 percent” of the packages loaded into the cargo holds of passenger jets alongside travelers’ suitcases. Last February, the security administration announced that it had “issued security directives to all air carriers requiring that they screen 50 per cent of cargo placed on passenger aircraft,” and was working to meet an August, 2010 deadline set by Congress in 2007 to ensure the screening of every package that flies on these planes.

The following month a report by the Government Accountability Office explained that “TSA’s approach relies on the voluntary participation of shippers and freight forwarders,” in a program where most of the screening is to be done by private companies at the locations where goods are loaded into boxes.

Last month, though, a follow-up report by the GAO noted that “TSA and the industry face a number of challenges including the voluntary nature of the program, and ensuring that approved technologies are effective with air cargo.” The GAO also noted that “TSA also does not expect to meet the mandated 100 percent screening deadline as it applies to air cargo transported into the U.S., in part due to existing screening exemptions for this type of cargo and challenges in harmonizing security standards with other nations.”

On Tuesday, Lauren Gaches, a press officer for the Department of Homeland Security, confirmed to The Lede that passenger jets continue to fly with unscreened packages on board.

Why 'Connecting the Dots' Is So Hard (cartoon)

Because there are so damn many of them:

Cheney Cartoons

Today's Health Care Cartoons

 

Yemen & Afghanistan (cartoons)

Bush Appointed Federal Judges Strengthen Obama's Hand With Terrorism Suspects

Not only did 2 out of the 3 judges on the DC Court of Appeals provide Obama with more authority than his government lawyers asked for, they also seemed to "to poke a stick in the eye of the Supreme Court” on its recent detainee decisions. From the NY Times:

A federal appeals court panel on Tuesday strongly backed the powers of the government to hold Guantánamo detainees and other noncitizens suspected of committing terrorist acts.

In a sweeping opinion, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found that the presidential war power to detain those suspected of terrorism is not limited even by international law of war.

The decision, if it is not reversed by the Supreme Court, could apply to all cases involving detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, since all of those cases are heard by the District of Columbia Circuit. As a result, the Obama administration will have a stronger position when opposing a court order to release a terrorism suspect.

In its ruling, the court denied a request by Ghaleb Nassar al-Bihani, a former cook for a Taliban paramilitary brigade, to be released from the detention center at Guantánamo. It is the first case to directly apply a landmark 2008 Supreme Court decision that allowed prisoners to challenge their detention.

Mr. Bihani, who is from Yemen, was captured in 2002 when his brigade surrendered. He challenged his detention with a petition for habeas corpus, which the courts did not act on before the decision of the 2008 Supreme Court case, Boumediene v. Bush, which said federal judges had jurisdiction to hear such claims.

Last year, a federal district court denied Mr. Bihani’s petition for release; Tuesday’s decision upheld the lower court.

Mr. Bihani argued that his continued detention violated international law because he was not part of the military of a nation at war, and had not committed “a direct hostile act” like firing his weapon. His petition for release, he said, should have been reviewed under standards like those for criminal defendants in the United States.

But the court found that granting such a high level of protection to the rights of detainees like Mr. Bihani would affect the military’s entire approach to war.

“From the moment a shot is fired, to battlefield capture, up to a detainee’s day in court, military operations would be compromised as the government strove to satisfy evidentiary standards in anticipation of habeas litigation,” the opinion said.

A lawyer for Mr. Bihani did not return calls seeking comment. A Department of Justice spokesman also declined to comment.

Eric M. Freedman, a law professor at Hofstra University and an expert in habeas cases, said the appeals court had “gone out of its way to poke a stick in the eye of the Supreme Court” by taking a view that expands government power beyond the limits laid out in decisions like Boumediene.

The 25-page opinion was written by Judge Janice Rogers Brown and joined by Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, both appointees of President George W. Bush. Both are considered among the most conservative judges on the circuit.

The third member of the panel, who joined in denying Mr. Bihani’s petition but not in the complete reasoning of the decision, was Judge Stephen F. Williams., a senior judge who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan. In a concurring opinion, Judge Williams, wrote that the majority’s argument that the president’s war powers are not bound by the international laws of war actually “goes well beyond even what the government has argued in this case.”

The Privacy vs. Security Debate

Two divergent comments left on Example Images From Full Body Scanners:

Tommy said...

I think the biggest invasion of privacy would be me and my belonging being scattered from 30,000 feet because somebody was ables to smuggle a bomb aboard the plane 04 January 2010 at 09:44 AM

Jack Bridges said...

I can't believe how Americans are so willing to trade away their freedom and privacy in the name of security. What's next? Implanting everybody with a microchip so we can always trace their location, all in the name of catching people who commit crimes? Or how about putting a recording device inside everyone's home, or training children to spy on parents, so we can catch potential terrorists?

Besides, full body imaging isn't a real solution. An explosive device implanted in the body or body cavity won't be detected by a scanner. Moreover, it could be extracated and exploded in flight or remotely exploded by a cell phone. And even if we drive the terrorists off the airlines, do we not think they will move to buildings, busses, stadia (the plural of stadium), and other crowded places?

Fighting terrorism is a real problem requiring serious solutions, such as exploring the root causes, increasing border security, swift and severe retribution, better tracking of nuclear materials, and intelligence. Of course, as long as people are willing to give up our freedom, what are we really defending? 04 January 2010 at 04:49 PM

And the view of a cartoonist who agrees with Tommy:

 

What do you think?

{11:30 Update} The NPR show On Point had a very interesting discussion on this topic. If you haven't heard it, you can listen here.

Yemen & Afghanistan (cartoons)

GOP's "scurrilous line of attack ... is unfounded -- no matter how often it is repeated"

Sunday's Wash Post editorial:

Soft on terror? Not this president

THERE IS, it seems evident, more than enough blame to go around in the botched handling of the botched Christmas bombing. Not for some Republicans. With former vice president Richard B. Cheney in the lead, they have embarked on an ugly course to use the incident to inflict maximum political damage on President Obama. That's bad enough, but their scurrilous line of attack is even worse. The claim that the incident shows the president's fecklessness in the war on terror is unfounded -- no matter how often it is repeated.

These critics have set up a straw Obama, a weak and naive leader who allegedly takes terrorism lightly, thinks that playing nicely with terrorists will make them stop, and fails to understand the threat that the United States faces from violent extremists. Mr. Cheney said that the incident had made "clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war." Likewise, Republican Study Committee Chairman Tom Price (R-Ga.) called on Mr. Obama to "recognize that we are at war with a murderous enemy who will not relent because we heed political correctness, acquiesce to international calls for deference or close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay." Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano "and the rest of the Obama administration view their role as law enforcement, first responders dealing with the aftermath of an attack. And we believe in a forward-looking approach to stopping these attacks before they happen."

There are two ways to show how baseless these attacks are: examining Mr. Obama's words and examining his actions ...

It is possible to disagree with the administration's decision to bring criminal charges against the suspect in the failed airplane bombing, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, although we think that was the proper course. It is possible to fault, as we have, some of the administration's public statements in the immediate aftermath of the attack. And as the president has acknowledged, the incident revealed failures in intelligence and in security screening that must be urgently identified and corrected. The country would benefit from a serious and bipartisan effort in Congress to ensure that the lessons of the Christmas attack are learned. A groundless campaign to portray Mr. Obama as soft on terror can only detract from that effort.

Example Images From Full Body Scanners

Which is more intrusive, some TSA official you can't see looking at images like this or a TSA official right in front of you putting their hands all over your body? It's not clear to me which is the bigger invasion of privacy. Is it to you?

 

Learn how these full-body scanners work.

Dusting Off Those Recommendations (cartoon)

 

Spy vs. Spy Intelligence Sharing (cartoon)

 

The Puzzle They Keep Failing At

 

The New Peep Show At Logan

 

"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."

Passing Of A Year & A Decade (cartoons)

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.

The View Of The Xmas Bomber From Nigeria (cartoon)

 

Obama: "The government was at fault ... a systemic failure has occurred ... totally unacceptable"

NBC Nightly News report:

Chuck Todd elaborates on Obama's "blunt" remarks on the government's intelligence failure:

GOP Eyes Political Opportunity In Obama Admin Response To Xmas Bomber

The Wash Post below discusses how the Republicans are trying to exploit the failed attempt to blow up that plane in Detroit and how their strategy "might have legs".  The most telling summary can be provided by these two paragraphs (taken out of sequence):

The Republican strategy is further complicated by the fact that the nation's counterterrorism intelligence and security procedures were created after Sept. 11, 2001, by Bush and congressional Republicans. Current watch-list systems were put in place years ago and have not changed. In addition, the former Guantanamo Bay detainees who showed up in the al-Qaeda leadership in Yemen were released by Bush two years ago.

The health-care debate demonstrated how successful Republicans and their allies can be in selling a message to the American people, even when some of their facts are in doubt.

Here's the Post's article:

Republicans are jumping on President Obama's response to the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a U.S. airliner as the latest evidence that Democrats do not aggressively fight terrorism to protect the country, returning to a campaign theme that the GOP has employed successfully over the past decade.

Since before Obama was sworn into office, Republicans have been building a case that he is weak on national security, and in the wake of the intelligence and security failures that led to last week's incident, they think that narrative might stick. Congressional Republicans and GOP pollsters said they believe the administration's response to the failed attack on a Detroit-bound plane -- along with Obama's decisions on the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the intelligence lapses connected to November's massacre at Fort Hood, Tex. -- damage the Democratic brand.

After dispatching surrogates to speak on his behalf over the weekend, Obama tried to quell critics who thought he had been quiet for too long by addressing the nation Tuesday for the second time in two days. But Republicans said his admission of "systemic failures" by U.S. intelligence agencies -- which did not share fully or act upon information about the Nigerian suspect on the Northwest Airlines flight -- underscored what they have been arguing for days. The result of the GOP offensive could be to create doubt, even fear, among the American public that Obama cannot protect them.

Republicans spent much of the 2008 campaign criticizing Obama for his lack of national security experience and have not relented since he took office almost a year ago. Eleven months out from the 2010 midterm elections, however, pollsters said it is difficult, if not impossible, to predict whether the issue will drive voters.

The nation's economy and health-care reform are sure to be dominant themes. But if the public remains concerned about the safety of air travel and about international terrorism, the Republican attacks on Obama could be "very influential," said Andrew Kohut, a veteran pollster and president of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.

"I don't know if it has legs, but it certainly has potential if it has legs," Kohut said.

As the GOP seeks a path out of the political abyss in the 2010 elections, its leaders seem to be turning to the issue of terrorism, which worked for them in the 2002 congressional midterms and in President George W. Bush's 2004 reelection.

"They just don't get it," Rep. Peter Hoekstra (Mich.), the ranking Republican on the House intelligence committee, wrote in a fundraising letter for his gubernatorial campaign. "These are the same weak-kneed liberals who have recently tried to bring Guantanamo Bay terrorists right here to Michigan!"

But the strategy could be as risky as powerful for Republicans, who open themselves to criticism that they are exploiting acts of terrorism for partisan gain. In 2008, attacking Obama on national security proved to be a losing strategy, for both Democratic candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.).

David Axelrod, Obama's senior adviser, who has battled Republicans on national security issues for decades, said the GOP is hoping to reclaim its political power on the issue.

"They can run on rhetoric," Axelrod said in an interview Tuesday. "We will run on our record when the time comes. . . . The president's record, I think, is very clear and very strong. This president has taken the fight to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Somalia, in Yemen. He has focused on the threat in a way that it hasn't been."

Still, Kohut said national security is "fertile territory for the GOP."

"It's one of the few cards that Republicans still continue to hold over the Democrats," he said. "It is something that is exploitable by them."

Xmas Bomber Cartoons

"We should have a muslim-only check in line at our airports" (animated cartoon)

 

Airport Security Cartoons

Republican Senator DeMint Holds Up Nomination Of Obama's TSA Chief Over Unionization

McClatchy:

An alleged attempt to blow up a transatlantic flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas would be all-consuming for the administrator of the Transportation Security Administration -- if there were one.

Instead, the post remains vacant because Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) has held up President Obama's nominee in an effort to prevent TSA workers from joining a labor union.

DeMint, in a statement, said Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's alleged attempted attack in Detroit "is a perfect example of why the Obama administration should not unionize the TSA."

For now, DeMint said, the TSA has "flexibility to make real-time decisions that allowed it to quickly improve security measures in response to this attempted attack." He said that if organized labor were involved, union bosses would have the power "to veto or delay future security improvements at our airports."

Two Senate committees have given their bipartisan blessing to Erroll Southers, a former FBI special agent and a counterterrorism expert who is Obama's nominee. But DeMint has objected to a full Senate vote, saying he wants additional testimony to clarify Southers's stand on unionizing the TSA, a shift Democrats support.

An acting administrator is in place at the TSA, the division of the Department of Homeland Security that oversees airport security ...

Reid spokesman Jim Manley said Monday that the majority leader is working with the White House to get Southers confirmed "as quickly as possible." Manley charged that "Republican obstructionism has prevented TSA from having the leadership in place that the organization deserves."

DeMint's objection creates a procedural hurdle that will probably take at least three days of debate and test votes to overcome.

Southers is assistant chief for homeland security and intelligence for the Los Angeles World Airports Police Department. He is also an associate director at the University of Southern California's Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events, and he served as a deputy director of homeland security for California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R).

Airports Tigten Security (cartoon)

 

The President Calibrates His Response To Airliner Incident

Wash Post:

For Obama, who campaigned on a promise of restoring respect for individual rights and shifting away from the Bush-era "war on terror," the struggle between security and freedom is defining his presidency much as it did his predecessor's. Three of his most important national security speeches -- one at the National Archives in the spring, one announcing a troop increase in Afghanistan and one accepting the Nobel Peace prize on Dec. 10 -- addressed the need for a reasonable balance between competing goals.

After the attempted terrorist act, Obama sought answers to questions about the suspect and asked for new security steps at airports, White House officials said. But he did not ask to raise the nation's threat level -- and, in fact, left the decision entirely to Napolitano, senior officials said. Nor did he rush to address the public on camera, though he is likely to do so in the next few days, an official said.

Obama did not directly bring up the subject of protecting civil liberties in the aftermath of the Christmas Day case, a senior adviser said. If he calibrated his message, it was by allowing others to toe the national security line for the first few days. "It's not that the president sat back and thought, 'How do I find the middle course?' " an official said on Sunday. "The president was presented with the facts and said, 'What are the steps we need to take to protect the American people and make sure they understand all the requisite steps are indeed being taken and implemented?' "

The middle road is not without peril, as the president and his advisers have discovered. Throughout his first year in office, Obama disappointed liberals in his party with a series of policies -- from his failure to close the Guantanamo Bay military facility to his retention of the Bush policies of indefinite detention of prisoners and military commissions. But with other moves, such as trying the accused Sept. 11 plotters in federal court and opening a domestic detainee facility in Illinois, Obama has made good on civil-liberties-related campaign pledges -- provoking conservative ire.

That was the case on Sunday, when Michigan's Peter Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said that the Obama administration should be held accountable for the near-catastrophe aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253. Hoekstra said that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's presence on the flight was part of a pattern of administration neglect on preparedness questions, stemming from a failure to recognize essential dangers. "The threat to the United States is real. I think this administration has downplayed it," he said on Fox News.

Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) called for the administration to tip further in the direction of security, even if it comes at the expense of some individual rights. "We do need the full-body scan, especially when you have countries like Nigeria, which have inadequate security to begin with; then you have passengers transiting in Amsterdam and coming here," he said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

But Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), chair of the intelligence subcommittee of the House Homeland Security Committee, said this weekend that the administration has to be cautious. "Civil liberties matter, and we must stay mindful that an overreaction has the potential to overwhelm the system and fail to make us more safe," she said in an interview.

American Muslims React To 5 Youths Arrested In Pakistan

Wash Post:

Five college-age Northern Virginia men were arrested in Pakistan this month after allegedly being recruited over the Internet to join al-Qaeda, and many Washington area Muslims are questioning whether condemnation is enough ...

Since Sept. 11, 2001, as American Muslims have seen repeated arrests of young European Muslims on terrorism charges, many in this country came to believe that the stronger integration of young American Muslims in the United States would help immunize them against the disaffection that leads to extremism. Magid said he has met in recent years with other Muslim leaders to talk about social networking to counter radicalism in Europe, "but we never thought about it for here."

Now, Magid said, "I have to be a virtual imam," meaning that Muslim groups need a larger and more effective online presence. Referring to extremists, he said: "Twenty-four hours, they're available. I want to be able to respond to that."

Until now, many Muslim leaders have focused on what they considered external threats to young people, such as Islamophobia or the temptations of modern, secular life. Now they say it is time to look inward, to provide a counterweight to those who misinterpret Koranic verses to promote violence -- and to learn what rhetoric and methods appeal to young people.

Radicals "seem to understand our youth better than we do," said Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation. "They use hip-hop elements for some who relate to that." Bray said "seductive videos" gradually lure young people, building outrage over atrocities committed against Muslims. Extremist videos "play to what we call in the Muslim youth community 'jihad cool' -- a kind of machismo that this is the hip thing to do."

For some, a new approach cannot come too soon. Zaki Barzinji, 20, a Sterling native and former president of Muslim Youth of North America, said mosques are "sort of in the Stone Age when it comes to outreach. Their youth programs are not attractive, not engaging . . . . They're shooting in the dark because it's always adults who are planning this outreach."

Nor is the threat limited to the Internet, Barzinji said, adding that groups of "traveling Muslim proselytizers" sometimes appear at Virginia Tech, where he is a senior, often attracting foreign students, who tend to be more socially isolated.

"US ups funds for Israeli missile defense"

Jerusalum Post:

US Barack Obama has signed a defense spending bill that includes $202 million in funds for Israel's missile defense programs, the White House announced Monday ... increasing the amount of money given to Israeli missile defense projects developed in coordination with the United States.

The Arrow-3, a controversial program that initially faced push-back from US Pentagon officials, will now get $50m. as opposed to the $37m. originally requested by the administration.

In addition, the short-range ballistic missile defense program will get $80m., with the balance for the existing long-range program. The total is some $25m. more than was approved last year.

"We are tremendously pleased with the ongoing cooperation between the United States and the State of Israel in the area of missile defense," an Israeli official said after Obama signed the bill this weekend.

He noted that cooperation to deal with mutual threats has gone on for the past decade, and that "we're very pleased with the continuing commitment, as has been demonstrated in the allocation for 2010."

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.

64% Of Americans Agree That "America's safety and security are at stake in Afghanistan"

CNN (full results):

Americans agree with the Afghanistan policy Barack Obama announced on Tuesday night at West Point in large measure because they agree with the arguments the president made in that speech, according to a new national poll.

In his prime time address at the U.S. Military Academy, where Obama spelled out his decision to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to the war, the president stressed that America's safety and security are at stake in Afghanistan. A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation national survey released Sunday morning indicates 64 percent of Americans agree with the president, with one in three saying the country's safety and security is not at stake in Afghanistan. According to the poll, 63 percent of people questioned also agree with Obama that the U.S. action in Afghanistan is morally justified.

"That's one major way that Afghanistan is different from Iraq in the public's mind," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "At the time of the Iraq surge in 2007, most Americans questioned whether that war was justified."

The president met with military and civilian advisers for three months before announcing his Afghanistan decision. Obama said he needed that time to review the options available. Did he take too long to decide? Fifty-six percent say no, with 43 percent feeling three months was not necessary.

But Obama also said that his objectives in Afghanistan included preventing terrorists from re-establishing a base of operations in that country and establish a stable government that the terrorists will not be able to overthrow. The poll indicates less than four in ten believe that those goals will be reached.

"As a result, nearly six in ten say defeat is possible, but an equal number also say victory is possible. Most Americans think a stalemate is the likeliest outcome, something that may make an exit strategy harder to implement if that prediction comes true," adds Holland.

Forty-two percent of people questioned in the poll say they watched the president's Tuesday night address on Afghanistan. Of those who viewed the speech, 34 percent say it makes them more likely to support Obama's polices on Afghanistan, 16 percent said the address makes them less likely to back Obama's strategy, and 50 percent said it had no effect.

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.

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.

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.

Swiss Ban Minaret Cartoons

Follow up to: "Swiss Ban Building of Minarets on Mosques"

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 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.

Today's AfPak Cartoons

Comparing The Soviet & American Afghan War Experience

Wall St Journal:

There are major differences between the two conflicts. For one, unlike the isolated Soviet Union, America operates in Afghanistan under a United Nations mandate, part of a coalition of 42 allies. Allied dead, currently 1,528, are barely one-ninth the Soviet toll. Afghan civilian deaths are a small fraction of the estimated one million killed in the 1980s.

Afghans who compare the two campaigns acknowledge the differences, yet argue that these aren't always in America's favor. An examination of this debate over the Soviet experience offers an insight into what American troops are up against -- and the issues President Obama must weigh as he decides the course of an unpopular and costly war he didn't start.

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev also faced a troop-increase request during his first year, for a war he had inherited. Soviet generals in 1985 asked for tens of thousands more soldiers to bolster their 100,000-strong contingent, roughly the same size as the current Western force in Afghanistan.

Mr. Gates, discussing that period in his 1996 memoir "From the Shadows," wrote: "The Soviets had to either reinforce or lose. Because they clearly were not winning." Gen. McChrystal used similar language in his recent warning about possible American "failure" in Afghanistan unless adequate resources are committed. Mr. Gorbachev ended up authorizing a small troop surge; 18 months later, he announced plans for a withdrawal.

The U.S. Army, in a 1989 secret "lessons learned" study of the Soviets' campaign, said they simply didn't have enough boots on the ground. "Insufficient forces were available to expand appreciably the area of physical control, or to identify and attack many insurgent targets at the same time," said the study, now partially declassified. "When major operations were conducted in one part of the country, forces had to be drawn from other areas."

Mr. Gates's knowledge of how the Soviet occupation and its brutalities inflamed local anger contributed to his initial skepticism about a U.S. surge. "I worry a great deal about the size of the foreign military footprint in Afghanistan," he told a Senate hearing in April. "Soviets were in there with 110,000 troops, didn't care about civilian casualties and couldn't win."

Gen. McChrystal, at his meeting with Mr. Gates in Belgium, managed to persuade the defense chief that the U.S., unlike the Soviets, is still welcomed by most Afghans. The general argued that certain tactics such as using Afghan rather than American soldiers for house searches could further blunt perceptions of the U.S. as an occupier and put the momentum in America's favor.

"I take seriously Gen. McChrystal's point that the size of the footprint is [less important than] the nature of the footprint and the behavior of those troops and their attitudes and their interactions with the Afghans," Mr. Gates said in September after talks with military leaders.

Gen. McChrystal has explicitly addressed concerns about falling into Moscow's pitfalls. In his August assessment of the war, he quoted Abdul Rahim Wardak, President Hamid Karzai's defense minister, as telling the U.S.: "Unlike the Russians, who imposed a government with alien ideology, you enabled us to write a democratic constitution and choose our own government. Unlike the Russians, who destroyed our country, you came to rebuild."

Yet many Afghans, including some other cabinet ministers, are drawing parallels between the two foreign interventions, and the comparisons are not always this flattering.