The Education of Doug Feith Posted by Patrick Barry

It's not at all surprising to read today's New York Times opinion section and find that Doug Feith continues to be a font of lazy thinking.  This time he uses the tragic bombing of a shrine to Pashtun Poet Rhaman Baba to outline his scheme for countering Islamic extremism through a public diplomacy initiative patterned after Radio Free Europe:

If it had the equipment and personnel for the job, the United States could broadcast radio programs for the Pashtuns commemorating Rahman Baba’s life and poetry, thus helping to revive the collective memory of Sufism and inspiring opposition to the Taliban. Other programs could highlight the cultural and physical devastation wrought by the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

The United States conducted impressive strategic communications during the cold war. Radio Free Europe, Voice of America and other programs conveyed information and ideas that contributed to the discrediting and ultimate defeat of Soviet communism.

Strategic communications directed at the Muslim World, patterned after Radio Free Europe? Sorry Doug, maybe you shuld have gotten involved with al-Hurra, the Bush administration's attempt to replicate the success of Cold-War era public diplomacy, but which has been widely regarded as a sham by the Muslim world. 

There is unquestionably a need for the U.S. to update its public diplomacy infrastructure.  But to do it via analogies that show no appreciation for the complexities of the audience we're trying to reach, such as how a conservative, sometimes violent strand of Islam reacts with longstanding political and juridical grievances (see Joshua White discuss the current state of affairs in Swat), is just not the way to go. 

NSN Daily Update 3/30/09 Posted by The National Security Network

See today's complete daily update here.

What We’re Reading

Tensions rise between the Iraq Security Forces and Sunni fighters, with military clashes in Baghdad over the weekend.  Radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s faction splintered, weakening the movement and raising hopes for political stability.

Officials say that Abu Zubaida’s harsh interrogation, including waterboarding, produced false leads and no useful information.

General David Petraeus rejected former Vice President Dick Cheney’s statements that President Obama’s detainee policy makes Americans less safe.  He also said that “if one violates the values we hold so dear, we jeopardize [our troops]”

Legislation will be introduced this week in Congress to lift the travel ban on Cuba.

Commentary of the Day

The LA Times looks at challenges for the G-20 and criticizes the Obama administration’s protectionism.

Robert Kagan doesn’t see any downside to the Obama administration’s approach to Iran.

Ludmilla Alexeeva and Gregory Shvedov urge the United States to continue supporting democracy worldwide.

Jonathan Alter says that Obama, like Franklin Roosevelt, is “making an early down payment on big ideas."

Keeping an eye on the Hague Posted by James Lamond

This coming week Europe is going to be full of summits.  Two of them- the NATO Summit and the UN Hague Donors conference- are going to focus a great deal on Afghanistan.  While much of the attention will be placed on the NATO Summit, it is important to keep an eye on the Hague- this is where some of the most important decisions will be made regarding the international effort in Afghanistan.

In his speech today, rolling out his Afghanistan Pakistan plan, President Obama said,

“At the same time, we will shift the emphasis of our mission to training and increasing the size of Afghan Security Forces, so that they can eventually take the lead in securing their country. That is how we will prepare Afghans to take responsibility for their security, and how we will ultimately be able to bring our troops home…

“To advance security, opportunity, and justice – not just in Kabul, but from the bottom up in the provinces – we need agricultural specialists and educators; engineers and lawyers. That is how we can help the Afghan government serve its people, and develop an economy that isn’t dominated by illicit drugs. That is why I am ordering a substantial increase in our civilians on the ground. And that is why we must seek civilian support from our partners and allies, from the United Nations and international aid organizations – an effort that Secretary Clinton will carry forward next week in the Hague.”

Michael GoldENfarb and the Middle Path Posted by Ilan Goldenberg

I'll have more on my take on Obama's Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy over the next few days as I digest it.  But in the meantime just wanted to clear up some silliness from Michael Goldenfarb.   Goldenfarb uses a quote from an administration official saying Obama is going "all in," and compares it to my argument that Obama is unlikely to choose the "all in" approach advocated by his former boss John McCain.  He then concludes:

The president is going "all in" and adding more troops to the fight. His most vocal supporters on the left had no idea this was coming and if you'd asked them yesterday what they thought of such a plan they would have said it was neocon fanaticism. Now watch how they fall into line. But this policy announcement shows just how little influence, and how little insight, the progressives have right now on this administration.

Ummmm..  Really.  4,000 new troops for training purposes is "all in"?  What is Goldenfarb talking about?  Unfortunately, the Politico article that Goldenfarb cited is now been updated and no longer includes either the official he quoted or two paragraphs later another official saying that of the three options Obama chose the middle course.  But it's pretty simple.  Just look at the objectives of the White House review.  It's primarily about counter-terrorism with a recognition that you have to do some counterinsurgency and a lot of civilian capacity to get there. 

Contrary to conservative claims that most progressives don't support this approach, there is and has generally been strong support for this.  CAP supported it both with it's report this week and a similar report in November of 2007.  And Obama's approach is very much in line with NSN's principles document from a month ago. 

I really don't get how conservatives are claiming victory?  Especially since this is a war they chose to neglect for years as the situation deteriorated.

Assessing Obama's Af-Pak Strategy Posted by Patrick Barry

Rather than discuss every aspect of Obama's Afghanistan strategy in one sprawling blog post, I would rather spend some time focusing on individual features of it in a bit more detail.  One dimension of the administration's strategy that cries for attention is the expansion of the regional diplomatic consultation to include all the relevant international players.  It's difficult to overstate how critical it will be to look beyond Pakistan to countries like China, Russia, Iran, India, Tajikistan, and the other Central Asian States.

One advantage of well-executed international diplomacy involving Afghanistan's neighbors is that it confers benefits on simultaneous US efforts to stabilize Afghanistan internally. Afghanistan's diverse ethnic and tribal composition exhibits why this approach is so important.   Similar to Iraq, which is pockmarked by Sunnis, Shia, and Kurds, Afghanistan has many ethnic and and tribal constituencies that exist in uneasy relationship to one another. In most cases, these ethnic and tribal groups also share affiliations or relationships with the surrounding countries - Tajiks with Tajikistan and Iran; Pashtuns with Pashtun communities in Pakistan; Uzbeks with Uzbekistan; etc. - and respond both positively and negatively to  pressure and incentives from those neighbors. A historical example that illustrates how important outside influence can be is the 2001 Bonn Agreement, which re-established the Afghan state.  During these negotiations, Iran pushed Afghanistan's Tajik minority into a political settlement, a move that averted internal political strife.  Without Iran's positive intervention, the country might have plunged into ethnic violence immediately following the American invasion.  Today, with so many of Afghanistan's surrounding countries enjoying strong relationships with Afghanistan's ethnic and tribal populations, coordinating international involvement makes sense from the perspective of establishing an internal equilibrium. 

But regional diplomacy is also important for Afghanistan in terms of how the surrounding countries relate to one another.  You can see this most acutely in terms of Pakistan.  During the last 6 years, President Bush sought to influence the thrust of Pakistan's policy toward Afghanistan by relying heavily on his personal relationship with President Musharraf.  This personalist diplomacy allowed Musharraf to easily pursue a double game, supporting US objectives with one hand, and undermining them with the other.  If instead, the US had developed a better functioning international compact or working group on Afghanistan similar to what the Obama administration now recommends, we might have been able to leverage more pressure from say, China, to use their close trade relationship to further encourage a change in Pakistan's policies. 

There are countless other economic and security issues in both Afghanistan and Pakistan that beg for international cooperation.  The coordination challenges alone are daunting. But I was pleased to see diplomacy feature within the administration's strategy. 

Afghanistan Experts React to Afghanistan Strategy Review Posted by Adam Blickstein

Today, NSN held a conference call examining President Obama's Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy review with Amb. James Dobbins, former Special Envoy to Afghanistan and director of International Security at RAND, as well as Alex Thier, director of the Future of Afghanistan Project at the United States Institute of Peace who just returned from the region. Below are some quotes from the call, and full audio can be heard here. NSN's broader analysis of the strategy can be found here.

Amb. James Dobbins: "I thought Obama’s presentation and the material that’s been put out by the White House was trying to do two things simultaneously. One, it tried to refine and somewhat narrow our rationale for our engagement in Afghanistan, while on other hand, actually, significantly expanding the effort. So there’s going to be more troops, more money, more civilians, more aid for Pakistan, more pressure on Afghanistan and Pakistan to implement reforms, and an effort to get more of an international focus, but as the President stressed, with a fairly narrow rationale in mind...One innovation, if you will, as compared to the Bush Administration strategy...was the more explicit linking of Afghanistan and Pakistan, more explicitly acknowledge of the dimensions of the problem in Pakistan, and a commitment to expand assistant to, and put pressure on, Pakistan and to make that an international priority, and that is an advance over where we were a few months ago."

Alex Thier:  "The first thing that I think we are seeing, really for the first time since 2001, is a right sizing of the effort in Afghanistan, and now Pakistan, to meet the goals.  In many ways this is sort of the looking glass version of the what the Bush Administration did, which had very high flown rhetoric about Marshall Plans and nation-building, and yet dramatically under resourced every aspect of that, both from military, civilian, and political. What this strategy is doing, in some ways, is redefining the objectives, to say what the ultimate United States goal in Afghanistan and Pakistan is first and foremost a security goal. But the way we achieve that security goal is by creating a stable Afghanistan and a stable Pakistan embedded in region with neighbors that are cooperative, rather than hostile."

Getting Democracy Promotion Right Posted by Michael Cohen

There was a smart article by Dick Gephardt and Vin Weber in Politico yesterday on the issue of how the Obama team should think about democracy promotion and, in particular, democracy assistance.

Democracy assistance comes in various forms. Some is “top-down” aid — i.e. assistance to the governments of emerging democracies to improve their performance; other assistance is more “bottom-up,” — supporting independent and politically active civic groups at the grass roots. While the former can be provided directly by government, much of the latter is best provided through nongovernmental channels.

This is a smart way to approach the issue, but it's incomplete.  While some countries need financial resources, others (particularly the poorest nations) really are better served by the sort of technical assistance that strengths institutions and helps governments govern more effectively. Countries without well-developed transparency and accountability standards stand a very real risk of squandering the financial resources they receive. But the further a country is on the development trajectory the better chance resources will not only be used properly, but they will produce results.

As to the second point, Gephardt and Weber are spot-on that we need to better support independent and politically active civil society groups - and we should be using non-governmental channels to do it. Obviously this means the NED, but it should also include multilateral organizations like the UN Democracy Fund and we should be thinking about ways to use the Millennium Challenge Corporation as a tool for encouraging recipient countries to bring local actors into the assistance process (both in designing aid initiatives and implementing them).

But Gephardt and Weber also raise another really important point:

Nongovernmental democracy assistance must be supplemented by the vigorous defense of democracy activists under attack by repressive regimes, even those with which we are linked for security and other reasons. As the recent release of the Egyptian opposition figure Ayman Nour makes clear, autocrats who seek our goodwill know that we care about how they treat their citizens. We need to reinforce that message at every opportunity, including through meetings with democracy activists when U.S. officials are making foreign visits.

Yes, yes and yes! But that must be taken a step further. We need to protect not only democracy activists. We need to protect the NGOs and other civil society actors that are at the vanguard of local democracy promotion activities.

There is today a global effort by autocratic and semi-authoritarian regimes to limit the ability of NGOs and other non-state groups to operate effectively (Russia and Kazakhstan are at the forefront, but we're also seeing it in China, Ethiopia and much of the Arab World). We are seeing restrictions on freedom of association, denial of legal status for NGOs, impediments to fundraising—both internationally and domestically, and interference and restrictions on their political activities.  We should not underestimate the risk to democratization that such laws represent.

If restrictions on the activities of non-state actors become institutionalized, the negative impact could be long lasting and difficult to reverse. If autocratic or illiberal regimes are permitted to believe they can, with impunity, prevent NGOs from engaging in civil society activities or political advocacy, other countries will adopt similar approaches.  

The State Department must establish stronger linkages between the treatment of civil society organizations and non-state actors, and U.S. bilateral relationships. Responses to civil society interference should run the gamut, from the issuing of démarches and expressions of concern and scheduled meetings with democracy advocates and civil society groups to the discontinuation of bilateral assistance and even economic or trade sanctions, if necessary.

But, if the United States is to empower civil society and local non-state actors as the vanguard of its democracy promotion agenda, it must be prepared to protect and defend these groups.

To the Point on Afghanistan Posted by Ilan Goldenberg

I was on NPR's To the Point yesterday discussing Afghanistan with Ahmed Rashid, Andrew Exum, Les Gelb, and Robert Greenwald.  A very diverse set of opinions and some really interesting conversation. 
Listen here

Let's Be Honest About Afghanistan Posted by Michael Cohen

So I've been following the intra-blog debate between Pat and Ilan with some interest and allow me to offer my two cents here.

Pat is right to dismiss both the all-in and minimalist approach. While Ilan is correct that they hold some currency in political circles neither has any chance of being implemented by the Obama Administration. After claiming during the campaign that Afghanistan was the central front in the war on terror - and declaring as President that we are losing the Afghan war -- there was simply zero chance that Obama would adopt a minimalist approach. Politically, he can't do it.

As for the maximalist approach, this is, frankly political background noise. The Obama Administration, from what I can tell, has zero interest in nation building in Afghanistan or maintaining a long-term miitary commitment - and even if they wanted to the constraints on the military probably make it impossible. The relevance of this approach is only as a talking point to be used by Republicans (and Joe Lieberman) to attack the Administration. This is not to mention the fact that I would imagine there is very little domestic support for such an approach.

So basically the Obama Adminstration, for strategic and political reasons, was always going to seek out some sort of middle ground. This was never truly a debate between three possible options; it was more of a Goldilocks debate - how we avoid getting into too deep, but how to we ensure we don't too little.

I'm hardly surprised that those arguing for a focus on counter-terrorism versus the COIN-dinistas have won the internal White House debate. I supposed what I'm more surprised by is that this was a serious debate. Let's face it, Barack Obama has big plans, both domestically and internationally. The last thing he wants to do is find himself mired in a guerrila war in Afghanistan, particularly when the adoption of a COIN strategy means more money, more soldiers and no definite chance of achieving a positive result.

The plan as I understand it basically involves building up the Afghan security services, using the US military to go after remnants of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan engaging Afghanistan's neighbors and strengthening Kabul's governing institutions (as much as that is possible). This is not a plan for turning Afghanistan into a Jeffersonian democracy or even a sustainable political entity - this is a plan for declaring victory in 18-24 months and going home. 

Perhaps if this strategic review had occurred 7 years ago there might be a different end result for the Afghan people. But tragically that didn't happen and instead the Obama Administration is left to pick up the pieces of a failed policy and a failed state. And thus the Goldilocks plan we will see unveiled tomorrow.

Pat is Wrong Posted by Ilan Goldenberg

So I don't usually like to have intra-blog debates but I feel like I have to fire back at Pat about his critique of my post on Obama's options in Afghanistan.

First, Pat dismisses the all in approach as irrelevant.

First we have the ‘all-in’ approach.  I’d start by asking whether the basic premise of this plan isn't flawed at its core, since our troop commitments to Iraq, the strain on our military, the economic crisis, and competing strategic priorities make a limitless engagement of the kind described by Senators McCain and Lieberman completely unrealistic. An all-in style approach is probably the closest you can credibly get. 

I agree that it would be nuts.  But it is still politically relevant.  John McCain was the Republican nominee for President only five months ago.  And while it's unlikely that Obama would choose this option, it is an option that is being pushed by Fred Kagan and Max Boot and may have been supported by people who only six months ago ran this country.  You can't exactly call it irrelevant.  I thought it was crazy in late 2006 to put another 40,000 troops into Iraq given that the place was falling apart and the American public had just very clearly expressed its discontent with the President by voting in a Democratic congress.  But the President did it.

Instead Pat writes

The strategy that comes closest to the all-in approach, while still being legitimate, is CAP's 10-year plan for Afghanistan.

OK.  So basically by slight of hand Pat just replaced the Max Boot and Fred Kagan plan with Larry Korb and the Center for American Progress.  He then argues that Larry Korb is not all that different than Barack Obama and there is therefore not much of a difference between the all in approach and something along the middle path.  I feel that Larry and our friends at CAP wouldn't be too happy about this interpertation. 

Pat then goes on to argue that the Get Afghanistan Right approach also shouldn't count in his analysis, despite the fact that it represents an important constituency in the Democratic portion.  Instead he presents Les Gelb as the central minimalist option and then says Gelb isn't all that different than the middle path.  I think Pat has a point about tying Gelb and GAR together.  It's not clear they are necessarily both minimalist and Gelb clearly lies somewhere between GAR and the middle approach.  But Gelb's plan very specifically calls for putting a clear timetable on the whole thing and for focusing most on containment and detterence instead of truly trying to make major changes on the ground.  And as we all remember from the Iraq debate, that point is critical.  It sends all kinds of signals across the region and also has a major impact on the political frame in the United States.  And is a point where he and folks like Alex Thurston agree.

So basically at the end what Pat manages to do is dismiss all the stark options as irrelevant or unrealistic.  But just because he views them that way does not mean they don't exist.  They do.  And important constituencies on the American political spectrum are pushing for them.