Getting Off on Technicalities -- The Pittsburgh G-20 Summit Agenda Posted by David Shorr

Before I head to Pittsburgh next week for the G-20 summit, I have a few pre-summit thoughts. One of my favorite topics on this blog and elsewhere is to talk about international cooperation as a matter of ongoing diplomatic effort, particularly the diplomacy needed in order to build a peaceful, prosperous rules-based international community. In other words, synching up governments to deal with international problems is a job someone actually has to do. For different kinds of problems, this cooperation takes different forms and is carried out at varying levels of officialdom. And that is today's topic, because the way you look at the practicalities of cooperation shapes not only your view of summit meetings, but also the broader process by which nations can get into closer alignment and tackle global challenges.

I spent part of last week in Washington with my Canadian friends from the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI). They've put out a new report (1.33 MB) previewing the Pittsburgh summit, and in our meetings they kept referring to the items on the financial reform agenda as "technical." When I listened to my colleagues' description, I thought to myself "maybe sort of, I guess, but not really." Those of us who are not steeped in credit markets and banking regulation would have a tough time following the ins and outs of the current economic policy agenda, it's true. In terms of how I think of technical in the policy making context, these are not technical matters at all.

For me, the distinction between technical and political issues is a crucial one, and worth highlighting (more below the fold).

Moving Forward on Missile Defense Posted by Adam Blickstein

From NSN's Daily Update:

President Obama announced this morning that he is terminating the Bush administration’s failed Eastern European missile defense system.  At a press conference this morning, the President said that “The best way to responsibly advance our security and the security of our allies is to deploy a missile defense system that best responds to the threats that we face, and that utilizes technology that is both proven and cost effective.”

Conservatives have been quick to go on the attack, arguing that this will leave Europe exposed to an Iranian attack. These arguments are not based in fact, as not only do the canceled missile defense systems have significant technological shortfalls, but they would also fail to protect against Iranian missiles because of both their location and technological advances in Iranian missile technology. Furthermore, from a geopolitical perspective, the European missile defense was a disaster.  It worsened relations with Russia without even providing a credible defense against their nuclear arsenal, further undercutting nonproliferation efforts.

NSN today also held a press call discussing this decision with nonproliferation expert and President of Ploughares Fund Joe Cirincione, missile defense expert and  senior advisor to the Center for Defense Information Philip Coyle, and intelligence expert and senior fellow at the Arms Control Association Greg Thielmann. The audio can be found here.

Debating Safe Havens Posted by Patrick Barry

Michael notes some excellent points from Paul Pillar's op-ed this morning, but to say that it "expos[es] one of the key flawed assumptions underpinning the US effort in Afghanistan," mis-characterizes an important and unresolved point of contention within the CT\Intel communities over the importance of al-Qaeda central and the role of safe-havens.  Consider Pillar's assertion that "[t]he preparations most important to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks took place not in training camps in Afghanistan but, rather, in apartments in Germany, hotel rooms in Spain and flight schools in the United States."  That's a legitimate reading, but it's also far from incontestable.  Paul Cruickshank had this to say when Steve Walt made a similar argument last month:

9/11 Commission Report and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's interrogation reports make it clear that the key planning for the attacks took place on Afghan soil. It was in an al Qaeda camp in the Kandahar area in late 1999 that Mohammed Atta and his gang were groomed to become suicide bombers and directed to launch the 9/11 attacks.

Any argument disputing the idea that safe-havens matter should have to deal with the legitimate evidence to the contrary.  It has to deal on some level not only with a pretty authoritative interpretation of the attacks on 9/11, but also a more recent body of evidence linking high-profile terrorist attacks or plots with the Afghanistan-Pakistan region (2005 London Bombings, 2006 plot to blow up transatlantic flights, assessment by Brown Government and British CT officials that 3/4 of foiled plots link back to the region). 

That's not to say that Cruickshank is right.  In fact, testimony from senior intelligence officials suggests that a fully-resourced COIN mission might not be integral to the success of CT operations in the region.  And even if it were, Pillar's argument that "[t]hwarting the creation of a physical haven also would have to offset any boost to anti-U.S. terrorism stemming from perceptions that the United States had become an occupier rather than a defender of Afghanistan," is powerful.  There are lots of assumptions worth examining and re-examining.  But it's not enough to point to a shrewd argument say voilà! Assumptions exploded! This debate is far, far from settled. 

The Safe Haven Fallacy Posted by Michael Cohen

In the Washington Post, Paul Pillar has today's must-read piece exposing one of the key flawed assumptions underpinning the US effort in Afghanistan: that a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan risks again becoming a safe haven for al Qaeda. Pillar doesn't argue that such an event is impossible, but that even if it were to happen it wouldn't really matter all that much:

How important to terrorist groups is any physical haven? More to the point: How much does a haven affect the danger of terrorist attacks against U.S. interests, especially the U.S. homeland? The answer to the second question is: not nearly as much as unstated assumptions underlying the current debate seem to suppose. When a group has a haven, it will use it for such purposes as basic training of recruits. But the operations most important to future terrorist attacks do not need such a home, and few recruits are required for even very deadly terrorism. Consider: The preparations most important to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks took place not in training camps in Afghanistan but, rather, in apartments in Germany, hotel rooms in Spain and flight schools in the United States.

In the past couple of decades, international terrorist groups have thrived by exploiting globalization and information technology, which has lessened their dependence on physical havens.

As Pillar points out, al Qaeda has become more of an "ideological lodestar" rather than an operational organization - indeed since September 11th no major al Qaeda attacks have been organized and implemented from the current al Qaeda safe haven in Pakistan. And from an ideological standpoint, al Qaeda current influence in the Muslim has decreased significantly. Indeed, it seems that the best way to turn the Muslim world again against the United States and embolden and empower al Qaeda . . .. is to remain an occupying force in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future. As Pillar correctly notes:

Instead, the issue is whether preventing such a haven would reduce the terrorist threat to the United States enough from what it otherwise would be to offset the required expenditure of blood and treasure and the barriers to success in Afghanistan, including an ineffective regime and sagging support from the population. Thwarting the creation of a physical haven also would have to offset any boost to anti-U.S. terrorism stemming from perceptions that the United States had become an occupier rather than a defender of Afghanistan.

Read the whole piece here

9/11: Why We Shouldn't Declare Victory (Anytime Soon) Posted by Shadi Hamid

On the anniversary of 9/11, Matt Yglesias posed the question of how does this all end? I largely agree with Matt and my colleague Michael Cohen that terrorism and al-Qaeda style extremism are not as important today as they might once have been. The terrorist threat is being managed relatively effectively, and we shouldn’t hype the threat to justify doing bad things we probably otherwise shouldn't be doing.

But this is looking at it all quite narrowly. September 11 wasn’t simply about a handful of extremists trying to blow us up. 9/11 was an indictment not of us, or them, but of the way things were. The attacks told us that the Middle East had lost its way. Of course, we knew that before, but the attacks provided the kind of confirmation that was difficult to ignore. Sadly, the way things were on 9/11 in the Middle East is largely the way things are now, 8 years later, and this is perhaps a tragedy worth reflecting on.

As the memory of 9/11 fades, so too does our will to re-assess our policies in the Middle East. If we "declare victory" now, then the impetus for what one might call a "strategic re-orientation" in the Middle East becomes less obvious and certainly less urgent. Meanwhile, the decision to elevate the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace is laudable, but it is almost too obvious of a course. Yes, it will help us in the region (assuming we succeed). But it is not, I suspect, the holy grail of U.S.-Mideast policy that many might hope it is. Of course, I also hope I’m wrong.

What was needed after September 11 was for progressives to hunker down and begin to answer some first-order questions about what we believe on foreign policy. What do we believe about America’s role in the world? What do we wish America to become? Are we to become a traditional, realist power concerned solely with our national security, narrowly-defined? Or do we still lay claim bolder aspirations? But in an age of pragmatism (“we will not necessarily do the right things, but we will do them more effectively”), debates about beliefs and principles are apparently not so fashionable.

When Democrats were in the embattled minority, worried that it would be years, if not longer, before we once again assumed the levers of power, we spent time, perhaps too much time, grappling with vexing questions about what a progressive foreign policy might look like. It is really remarkable how in the Obama era, the project of at least trying to answer those questions appears to have been postponed indefinitely. Tthat’s not necessarily a bad thing. But we will have to revisit them sooner or later.

In the aftermath of 9/11, we had an opportunity to present a different vision of what we thought the Middle East could become, and how we could help it along that slow, but unmistakably important process. Opportunity lost?

Afghanistan Mission Creep Watch - The We Must Prevail Version Posted by Michael Cohen

I have just returned from vacation/travel and the first day after a long trip is always the most difficult to get back into the swing of things, but I would utterly remiss if I didn't comment on the bloated, monstrosity that is masquerading as an op-ed about Afghanistan on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.

First of all it took three US Senators, Graham, Lieberman and McCain (that's a 3% of the institution) to write this chest-thumping insult to reasoned and well calibrated policy-making. And this op-ed has everything:

There is gratuitous flag-waving:

Growing numbers of Americans are starting to doubt whether we should have troops in Afghanistan and whether the war there is even winnable. We are confident that not only is it winnable, but that we have no choice. We must prevail in Afghanistan.

It relies on dubious, but scary assumptions:

We remain at war because a resurgent Taliban, still allied with al Qaeda, is trying to restore its brutal regime and re-establish that country as a terrorist safe haven. It remains a clear, vital national interest of the United States to prevent this from happening.

Offers hero worship of a guy in a uniform:

We have an exceptional new commander on the ground, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who has begun a top-to-bottom overhaul of all aspects of our war policy and put forward a dramatically new civil-military strategy that clearly identifies failed policies and prioritizes the proven principles of counterinsurgency, including protecting civilians, creating legitimate and effective governance, and boosting economic development.

By the way, does it matter that the Afghan government is neither effective nor legitimate and doesn't seem to have a keen grasp of how to encourage economic development. The Karzai government: it's the Holy Roman Emperor of the 21st century.

Warns of dreaded "failure"

More troops will not guarantee success in Afghanistan, but a failure to send them is a guarantee of failure.

AND

We have reached a seminal moment in our struggle against violent Islamist extremism, and we must commit the "decisive force" that Gen. McChrystal tells us carries the least risk of failure.

It goes without saying here, by the way, that McCain, Liebermans and Graham make no effort to tell us what success, victory or winning in Afghanistan actually looks like.

Shifts responsibility for failure to others:

Our problems in Afghanistan are not because the Taliban are invincible or popular. They are neither. Rather, our problems result from what was, for years, a mismanaged and underresourced war.

Who was serving in Congress as that war was mismanaged and underresourced; (not only serving by the way, but all members of the Senate Armed Services Committee); and who was cheerleading for an invasion of Iraq that opponents of the war - like Barack Obama - warned would lead to resources being taken away from Afghanistan and the fight against al Qaeda?

And demonstrates some fairly impressive historical illiteracy:

The U.S. walked away from Afghanistan once before, following the Soviet collapse. The result was 9/11. We must not make that mistake again.

Can we end the canard once and for all that somehow it's America's fault that Afghanistan fell apart after the Soviet withdrawal? You know who is really to blame - the Soviet Union!! Do people understand that the Najibullah regime stayed in power for several years after the Soviet withdrawal, that the Afghan Army fought quote effectively against the mujaheddin, that things didn't go south until the Soviets cut off aid, and that Najibullah wasn't replaced by the Taliban, that things really fell apart during the civil war that followed the fall of Najibullah's government and that perhaps the Afghans themselves have to bear some responsibility for what happened, like for example the warlords who currently find save haven in the Karzai government . . . and I could go on and on.

Of all the absurd historical analogies made about Afghanistan this is the most pernicious and inaccurate. Should the US have done more to help Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal? Probably. Would it have made a huge difference either way? Likely not. Are we to blame for the rise of the Taliban? Please. The notion of American omnipotence never ceases to amaze me - as if we had sent a few hundred million dollars to Afghanistan every warlord would have gotten in a circle and sung Kumbaya.

And now comes the best part of this op-ed:

Yet an increasing number of commentators, including some of the very same individuals who opposed the surge in Iraq and called for withdrawal there, now declare Afghanistan essentially unwinnable. Had their view prevailed with respect to Iraq in 2006 and 2007, the consequences of our failure there would have been catastrophic.

Similarly, the ramifications of an American defeat in Afghanistan would not only be a devastating setback for our nation in what is now the central front in the global war on terror, but would inevitably further destabilize neighboring, nuclear Pakistan. Those who advocate such a course were wrong about Iraq, and they are wrong about Afghanistan.

Just so we are clear, Lindsay Graham, Joe Lieberman and John McCain actively supported and cheerleaded on behalf of a war that is arguably the greatest foreign policy and national security mistake in American history. BUT, because they argued for an increase in troop strength in 2007 that happened to coincide with the easing of ethnic violence in Iraq, the declaration of a cease fire by the Mahdi Army and the turning of Sunni militias against AQI we should listen to them. And we shouldn't listen to the people who actually argued fighting that war in 2003 - that these three Senators never wavered in their support for. The ability of Iraq war supporters to explain away their failures of judgment by hiding behind the ephemeral "success" of the surge is truly amazing.

What is most frustrating about this op-ed is that it puts enormous political and even emotional pressure on the President to continue fighting the war in Afghanistan, but simply ignores the many serious problems that we are seeing today - the corruption of the Karzai regime, the continued presence of Afghan Taliban safe havens in Pakistan, the lack of an effective civilian surge, the failure of the Afghan government and security forces to support a counter-insurgency mission etc. These are serious policy issues that cannot just be elided over with hoary proclamations that "we must prevail."  It's these types of arguments based on platitudes and simplistic arguments that truly cheapen what is a critically important policy debate.

This President spent eight months running around the country telling the American people that John McCain was reckless and wrong about US national security. He was right and it appears that the American people generally concurred. But now, with increasingly large members of the President's own party saying that we should not be sending more troops to Afghanistan why should he listen to John McCain's platitudes about victory in Afghanistan? He shouldn't.

If I was Barack Obama, when folks like Graham, Lieberman and McCain write that America has no choice and we have to prevail in Afghanistan . . . I'd be running for the exits.

When Foreign Policy Wonks Go Domestic Posted by Heather Hurlburt

Walter Russell Mead, a centrist/conservative who writes thought-provoking, even fun stuff from his perch at the Council on Foreign Relations, had a piece up on Politico about the supposed populist turning away from liberalism.  As a foreign policy wonk who actually worked in domestic policy at the White House, I feel eligible to comment:

 1.  The short-term poll movements he cites are probably most reflective a. of right-wing hyper-activity on the airwaves and b. the well-documented fact that attitudes become more conservative and closed in economic hard times -- the obverse of how much social reform tends to proceed in good times.  My response would be that people got too excited about the "wave" around Obama and are now too despairing about current polls.

2.  The frame he chooses to put on the discontent is highly problematic -- where institutions are failing to deliver, it's at least as much because they have been underresourced and undermiend by conservatives in government as because of some abstract failure of the "liberal" system.

3.  The one element of truth I see in this is that before the emergence of Obama, it seemed clear that mass alienation from government was growing to level unprecedented at least since the 1960s.  It was too optimistic to imagine that one man could reverse this.  But it is wrong and self-serving to see this as a rejection of liberalism.  And it is wishful thinking (just ask our communist friends) to see Americans as ready to dethrone the upper middle classes.  The potential for real populist revolts in America is always blunted by how desperately most of us aspire to the homes, schools and lifestyles of the pointy-heads.

The G-20 -- Arguing Over the Shape of Future Summit Tables Posted by David Shorr

In foreign policy wonk vernacular, "arguing over the shape of the table" is basically the same as "fiddling while Rome burns" -- a reference to Vietnamese peace talks that, for the longest time, were consumed with matters of protocol. As world leaders head towards Pittsburgh for a G-20 summit next week, I'd argue that the shape of the table for future summits really needs to be sorted out, and soon. Over on TPM Cafe, I recently posted a piece together with my Canadian colleagues Alan Alexandroff and Andy Cooper of Centre for International Governance Innovation. We're also holding a pre-Pittsburgh briefing tomorrow morning at the National Press Club (coffee/danish at 8:30; briefing at 9), but for those who can't make it, let me offer a few added points.

Recent global power shifts have left the G-8 leading industrialized nations without the influence they once had, and for years they have tried different ways to engage rising global and regional powers. Instead of pulling these key players into intensified cooperation, though, this leaves a great deal of ambiguity and ambivalence. The last G-8 summit in Italy convened four different groupings of various sizes. Does that kind of shape-shifting summitry offer leaders a chance to use leader-to-leader face time to craft major policy steps? The Pittsburgh G-20 meeting will be the fourth G summit in less than a year. Is that a sustainable diplomatic tempo?

The reason for all this improvisation is clear. The formal responsibility for deciding who takes part in G summits is the government hosting the meeting. Structurally, these meetings are no different from a party for which the host draws up the guest list. Which leaves one of the world's most important diplomatic forums driven by the fear of offending anyone.

Given the agenda that beckons -- climate change, nuclear nonproliferation, economic stagnation -- it's time to stop improvising and procrastinating. We need summit reform that establishes a new pattern for cooperation with a) set membership (between 13-20 nations, we call it 'G-X') and b) a broad agenda, including but not limited to the global economy. Here are four guidelines for reform:

1. Emphasize action. All too often, diplomacy is the art of papering over differences and creating the appearance of action. The leaders at these summits have a unique ability to change policy, reach compromise, and support action. Let's use it.
2. Overcome differences. The agenda of the G-X should be comprised of issues fraught by policy and priority differences and needing high-level impetus. It's not that serious divisions among pivotal states will suddenly dissolve, but a diplomatic focal point would at least provide a proper forum and set of expectations.
3. Minimize distractions. Focusing a G-X on critical and sensitive issues will be a discipline. Please, no more sprawling communiques that say something about everything.
4. Maximizing consultations. Just as the US depends on others to achieve any of its major goals, a limited grouping of countries like the G-X won't be able to impose its will. But the need for a more consensual style of international leadership doesn't negate the basic need for leadership. The key will be extensive consultation and consensus-building through other multilateral and bilateral channels.

I hope we see some of you at the National Press Club tomorrow morning.

September 11th, 2009 Posted by Michael Cohen

It's hard for to believe that it's been eight years since my mother woke me up with a panicked phone call on the morning of September 11th, 2001 to tell me that a plane had just flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. I had been sleeping in after a very long night and remember oh so vividly groggily  turning on the TV and seeing the incongruous sight of the Twin Towers belching out smoke and flames. While my life has taken many twists and turns since that day the events of that time still resonate with me very deeply - the haunting missing posters with pictures of happier moments that hung in subway stations, on building walls and lampposts, the acrid odor of burning jet fuel, which you could smell for weeks even months after and of course the social conversations that inevitably evolved into the one question that seemingly everyone wanted to answer - "where were you the morning of?"

But above all, my thoughts of September 11th always come back to my good friend Brock Safronoff, who along with thousands of others on that terrible morning lost his life. Five weeks before September 11th, I attended Brock's wedding in Staten Island. A week later I went to his funeral.  There is always a tendency to sanctify the deceased but it is not an exaggeration to say that Brock was a special person and one of the genuinely nicest people I've ever known. (I used to always joke with him that he had no business living in New York City; he was just too nice a guy). And like me he shared a debilitating addiction to Detroit sports teams that involved us spending many Sundays in our 20s drinking beer at a bar on the Upper East Side watching Lions football games - with George Plimpton no less! You can read more about Brock here and here.

While my thoughts of Brock are always tinged with sadness; they are equally tinged with anger - anger at the more than 4,000 American soldiers who have died avenging his death in Iraq, and angry that more Americans will die in Afghanistan chasing the phantom of al Qaeda.

One thing that occurred to me this morning when I was thinking about the significance of today is that al Qaeda, the organization that wreaked such havoc eight years ago is today a spent and hollow force. If you believe yesterday's article in the Guardian, the organization is down to a more 6-8 leaders and 200 core operatives; they are having a difficult time recruiting new members and their nihilistic ideology, which has seemingly killed more Muslims than Americans, is both discredited and dismissed throughout most of the Arab world. Since 9/11 they have not been able to launch a single major attack against the United States - there are only two major attacks associated with core al Qaeda (London and Madrid) and even there the connection is tenuous. In the end September 11th ended up being the end not the beginning of al Qaeda's war with America.

Except this is only partially true, because the United States instead of responding like a sober and mature great power played precisely into the rhetoric of al Qaeda and Bin Laden by invading and occupying an Arab country for more than 6 years and engaging in the sort of torture techniques that strike at the very heart of what America stands for as a nation. Our response to September 11th has been both disproportionate and counter-productive - indeed while al Qaeda is barely able to muster an attack against America we continue to chase them around the world in military adventures that have seemingly no end in sight and increasingly, only limited purpose. al Qaeda has lost the war and yet we continue to fight them at cost of both treasure and blood.

I can only note with extraordinary irony that today in Washington lawmakers are arguing about spending a trillion dollars to fix our health care system even though it is estimated that 18,000 Americans die every year because they lack health insurance. To put that in perspective, that's 144,000 people in the eight years since September 11th.

And yet the United States has spent well over a trillion dollars in both direct and indirect costs in fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because 3,000 Americans, including my friend Brock Safronoff, were killed on September 11th, 2001.  It makes what is already a sad day that much sadder to consider. But hopefully we, as a nation, can learn from the mistakes of the past eight years to make the next eight that much better and smarter.

10,000 more kids alive per day: Foreign Aid that Works Posted by Heather Hurlburt

The next time someone tells you that foreign aid never works, here's your one line comeback, thanks to UNICEF via the ONE Campaign:  10,000 fewer children under five die every day because of public health interventions that the US government and private organizations have been at the forefront of helping make happen.

Thanks to scaled up support for simple, relatively inexpensive solutions like anti-malaria mosquito nets, measles vaccinations and vitamin supplements, the number of children dying before their fifth birthdays each year has been cut to the lowest level ever on record, 8.8 million, according to a report released today by Unicef.  "This enormous global progress-10,000 fewer children dying each day than in 1990-is something to celebrate and carry forward," said ONE President and CEO David Lane. "We know that in countries where we invest in smart ways, we get results that save children's lives.

And how was this accomplished?  UNICEF says:

Public health experts attribute the continuing decline to increased use of key health interventions, such as immunizations, including measles vaccinations, the use of insecticide-treated bednets to prevent malaria and Vitamin A supplementation. Where these interventions have increased, positive results have followed.

This implies a mix of community-based infrastructure, national government commitment to making the health of the poor a priority, and international activism in providing the relevant drugs free or at reduced cost.