Debacle in Moscow
By Charles Krauthammer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/15/AR2009101502763.html

About the only thing more comical than Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize was the reaction of those who deemed the award "premature," as if the brilliance of Obama's foreign policy is so self-evident and its success so assured that if only the Norway Five had waited a few years, his Nobel worthiness would have been universally acknowledged.

To believe this, you have to be a dreamy adolescent (preferably Scandinavian and a member of the Socialist International) or an indiscriminate imbiber of White House talking points. After all, this was precisely the spin on the president's various apology tours through Europe and the Middle East: National self-denigration -- excuse me, outreach and understanding -- is not meant to yield immediate results; it simply plants the seeds of good feeling from which foreign policy successes shall come.

Chauncey Gardiner could not have said it better. Well, at nine months, let's review.

What's come from Obama holding his tongue while Iranian demonstrators were being shot and from his recognizing the legitimacy of a thug regime illegitimately returned to power in a fraudulent election? Iran cracks down even more mercilessly on the opposition and races ahead with its nuclear program.

What's come from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton taking human rights off the table on a visit to China and from Obama's shameful refusal to see the Dalai Lama (a postponement, we are told)? China hasn't moved an inch on North Korea, Iran or human rights. Indeed, it's pushing with Russia to dethrone the dollar as the world's reserve currency.

What's come from the new-respect-for-Muslims Cairo speech and the unprecedented pressure on Israel for a total settlement freeze? "The settlement push backfired," reports The Post, and Arab-Israeli peace prospects have "arguably regressed."

And what's come from Obama's single most dramatic foreign policy stroke -- the sudden abrogation of missile defense arrangements with Poland and the Czech Republic that Russia had virulently opposed? For the East Europeans it was a crushing blow, a gratuitous restoration of Russian influence over a region that thought it had regained independence under American protection.

But maybe not gratuitous. Surely we got something in return for selling out our friends. Some brilliant secret trade-off to get strong Russian support for stopping Iran from going nuclear before it's too late? Just wait and see, said administration officials, who then gleefully played up an oblique statement by President Dmitry Medvedev a week later as vindication of the missile defense betrayal.

The Russian statement was so equivocal that such a claim seemed a ridiculous stretch at the time. Well, Clinton went to Moscow this week to nail down the deal. What did she get?

"Russia Not Budging on Iran Sanctions; Clinton Unable to Sway Counterpart." Such was The Post headline's succinct summary of the debacle.

Note how thoroughly Clinton was rebuffed. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared that "threats, sanctions and threats of pressure" are "counterproductive." Note: It's not just sanctions that are worse than useless, but even the threat of mere pressure.

It gets worse. Having failed to get any movement from the Russians, Clinton herself moved -- to accommodate the Russian position! Sanctions? What sanctions? "We are not at that point yet," she averred. "That is not a conclusion we have reached . . . it is our preference that Iran work with the international community."

But wait a minute. Didn't Obama say in July that Iran had to show compliance by the G-20 summit in late September? And when that deadline passed, did he not then warn Iran that it would face "sanctions that have bite" and that it would have to take "a new course or face consequences"?

Gone with the wind. It's the United States that's now retreating from its already flimsy position of just three weeks ago. We're not doing sanctions now, you see. We're back to engagement. Just as the Russians suggest.

Henry Kissinger once said that the main job of Anatoly Dobrynin, the perennial Soviet ambassador to Washington, was to tell the Kremlin leadership that whenever they received a proposal from the United States that appeared disadvantageous to the United States, not to assume it was a trick.

No need for a Dobrynin today. The Russian leadership, hardly believing its luck, needs no interpreter to understand that when the Obama team clownishly rushes in bearing gifts and "reset" buttons, there is nothing ulterior, diabolical, clever or even serious behind it. It is amateurishness, wrapped in naivete, inside credulity. In short, the very stuff of Nobels.

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/obama_to_enter_diplomatic_talks?utm_source=videoembed


Why Joe Biden's War Plan Spells the Rebirth of Al Qaeda
Because you can chase the pests out of Afghanistan and into Pakistan all you want, but unless Obama really wants to clean up the world's most decrepit apartment, the parasites are just going to come back. A call for continued nation-building.
By Thomas P.M. Barnett
http://www.esquire.com/the-side/war-room/biden-afghanistan-strategy-101609

Now that we know the damn kid was sleeping in his attic, can we return to Topic A? As in Afghanistan (and, lest anyone in the administration forget, Pakistan), for which Vice President Biden has been getting a lot of attention: Arianna Huffington is calling for his head, Newsweek is hailing him as a soothsayer, and most of America is wondering when the hell President Obama's going to make up his mind on "his war."

As I detailed here last week, it's a dangerous path for Obama to tread somewhere between "all-in" (Stanley McChrystal's method of controversy, with more troops, more nation-building, and more counterinsurgency) and "strategic disengagement" (Biden's weapon of choice, with more drones, more nation-leaving, and a refocusing on counterterrorism). On the one hand, I can almost see why the president would side with his veep: By essentially shifting "the good war" from Afghanistan to Pakistan, Obama purportedly saves money, lives, and support from an increasingly frustrated electorate. And when you've got Pakistan looking like a Harrison Ford movie after a Saturday military siege, a Monday car bombing, a Thursday police assault, and this morning's suicide attack as just the latest in a string of violence there, it looks good for an American president to ditch a Vietnam-like "quagmire" in Afghanistan for Al Qaeda-hunting in Pakistan. In effect, we'd be taking a "good-enough" outcome on one front for the promise for the limited liabilities of another front where the people don't really want us and the army's already going after the bad guys anyway.

Trouble is, Biden's logic ignores our past successes in Iraq, the current state of globalization, the future of Afghanistan, and, perhaps reinforcing all three, the haunting presence of Al Qaeda. If Obama submits to Biden, as I suspect he will, is there any reason to think America won't simply preside over the rebirth of Al Qaeda? Probably not. Whether it's Bin Laden and Co. or some successor entity, whether it's doubling back to a faltering Afghanistan or reconstituting itself in Central Asia's restive Fergana Valley or somewhere in the Islamic upper-half of Africa, it'll be back.

Why? Al Qaeda-style fundamentalism is fueled by globalization's continuing advance into regions previously held off the grid from its revolutionary embrace (one woman's liberation is another man's "Westoxification"). And, no, even if America tires of its role as the world's bodyguard, globalization will rumble on, driven on by the demands for a better life on the part of those three billion new capitalists in the east.

But with everything Obama's currently got on his reform plate back home (not to mention the nuclear newbies North Korea and Iran abroad), is that such a bad strategic risk to endure? And given Al Qaeda's increasing loss of popular appeal across the Islamic world, won't its next iteration be a pale reprise? If continuing with this mafia-style warfare means that Tony Soprano gets replaced by his imbecile son, I like America's odds over the long haul.

After all, thanks to our vigorous, across-the-board efforts since 9/11, just about every national-security expert discounts Al Qaeda's ability to create system-wide shocks to the global economy. Yes, bombs will continue to go off in bad neighborhoods. And, yes, Britain's MI-5 will eventually suffer a major loss in its near-perfect record of policing that "wormhole" that connects Karachi to London. But what else is new? In the grand scheme of things, the continuing rise of a global middle class renders all such localized violence meaningless. We need to stay focused on the game-changing dynamics of being a world leader. So maybe Joe Biden's right: maybe we shouldn't obsess over the isolated drunks fighting in the stands.

So if America is to remain a global Leviathan, and make safeguarding globalization's evolution its primary task, why not just go back to the pre-9/11, "limited regret" strategic management style? You know, we come, we kill, but we don't clean up.

But here's the fly in the ointment: The primary reason why I've consistently rejected the "Afghanistan-as-Vietnam" analogy is that, as opposed to that Cold War struggle, we face virtually zero opposition from the region's panoply of great powers — namely, Russia, Turkey, Iran, India, and China. None of them want to see us fail in Afghanistan and Pakistan, except to the degree that our continued involvement there keeps us distracted from any direct confrontations with them — Iran especially.

My argument has long been this: If America wants, in the classic counterinsurgency sense, to "win" in Afghanistan — and, by doing so, foreclose the doubling-back option for Al Qaeda while proving to Pakistan our staying power — we need to accept that the outcome there will constitute more of a proximate victory for the region's great powers than for ourselves. In short, either our "blood" yields somebody else's "treasure," or we're inevitably bled dry as a superpower.

That's where I come up against a stone wall on the Biden redirect, absent some effective finishing-up effort in Afghanistan. Historically, the regional great power that's largely gotten its way in Afghanistan is Pakistan. If we help strengthen Afghanistan to the point of being able to control the territory that marks its fake border with Pakistan, then the only serious long-term solution would appear to be a "soft border." That grants the Pashtun some real autonomy. But for that to work for Islamabad, a similar effort would have to be made in the south vis-a-vis India over the Kashmir — Pervez Musharraf's old idea.

Sound complicated? You're getting the big picture.

My point: Joe Biden seems to be forgetting that this region maintains a colonial legacy as a cluster of fake states with unreal borders. So there can be no abandoning the responsibilities of nation-building there because, no matter where you choose to go "light" in your counterinsurgency efforts, you're still reinforcing failed states somewhere else with your counterterrorism gunplay.

So if Obama rallies behind Biden's somewhat precious definition of the "great game," he better be ready to dispatch Hillary Clinton pronto to a host of great-power capitals — not those of our NATO allies, but to those of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation member states (Moscow, Beijing, and the "observers" in New Delhi and Tehran) — to determine the price they'll be willing to pay to make this enduring problem go away for good. By that point, of course, Al Qaeda will already be back in the saddle in Kabul.


The Real Trouble with Afghanistan and Obama
Underneath all this week's he-said/she-said over the war's future lies a self-inflicted wound: Our young president has lost sight of what matters in the military conflict that will define him, and lost sight of it to another Boomer-era vice president's guilty conscience.
By Thomas P.M. Barnett
http://www.esquire.com/the-side/war-room/obama-new-afghanistan-strategy-100809?click=main_sr

Should I surge or should I go now? It's the question that has Washington — and, indeed, the world — abuzz over America's future in Afghanistan. First it was the military's convenient leak to Bob Woodward of the starkest assessment of the war to date (Failure!). Then, a week ago, it was General Stanley McChrystal's smacking down of the Joe Biden "fewer troops, more Al Qaeda hunting" plan (Short-sighted!). Then Bob Gates told him, in so many words, to shut up and listen to the Communicator in Chief (Eyebrow-raising!). On Tuesday, President Obama had the ears of thirty legislators, but it seemed to set the Afghan debate further off course than anywhere near consensus (Grumpy old men! And a liberal catfight!).

By this morning, with Kabul rocking and Obama stalling, the question many Americans were asking seemed perfectly natural: So how many troops are we gonna send, Mr. President? And therein lies Team Obama's Bushian dilemma: They've created such huge expectations of a definitive decision on the war that no matter which way the president turns, he will have backed himself into a strategic corner from which he cannot escape. All the leaks and sound bytes and "senior White House official" signal shifts have made some number more important than the most complex military conflict of our time. It's Truman-versus-MacArthur and Bush-versus-Fallon all over again, but the fallout could lead to trouble the likes of which we didn't even see in Iraq. Here's what Obama has been ignoring (Chain of command? China? Petraeus? A firm hand? Anyone?), and why it will all come back to haunt him sooner than he or Stan McChrystal would like to admit.

Truth or Consequences, Afghanistan: Potential Fallout Along the Chain of Command

I was at the Pentagon on Monday, just around the time Gates was giving his "candidly but privately" spiel, and every conversation I had kept coming back to the same concern: "How can we show positive impact in Afghanistan over the next couple of months?" Believe me — when your national-security establishment wraps itself around the axle like that, your narrow strategic mindset ain't no secret.

But if the administration doesn't go along with the recommendations of its handpicked commander (and there were signs this afternoon that it was leaning away from the McChrystal plan and back toward Biden's strategy), then it will have effectively repudiated McChrystal's command with a highly publicized vote of no confidence. By extension, the White House will have completed its marginalization of McChrystal's boss, General David Petraeus. Which, given that the Iraq surge hero and Central Command chief has been urged to run for president in 2012, may be politically hard to resist for Obama's politically savvy advisors. But, again, the political savvy is getting the best of Team Obama when it comes to Afghanistan — this is a war, not an election, with many more lives at stake than a few of the best and brightest, and they'd be stupid to muddle or confuse the two.

The more profound consequence of choosing the Biden option, however, would be to repudiate what is working in Afghanistan. The troops are already pissed off at the anti-McChrystal hyperbole, and limiting our footprint for more drones amounts to a public discounting of the American armed forces' tremendous effort in recent years to transform into an effective instrument of "small wars" counterinsurgency — especially the Army and Marines. Again, by extension, such a decision would tarnish Gates's legacy-in-the-making as bureaucratic godfather to this stunning institutional evolution. I mean, if this was a capacity our military lacked going into Afghanistan and Iraq, only to subsequently develop it under extreme duress, will it be the decision of the Obama administration to immediately shelve our hard-earned capability in a "war of necessity" just because Joe Biden said so?

Worse yet, the world will interpret any "half measures" (John McCain's fighting words) as a signal toward our inevitable withdrawal (watch for the phrase "exit strategy"). And once that happens, world leaders — friend or foe — will immediately start interpreting any statements by Obama that threaten to use force as, you know, threatening to pin-prick with fancy robotic bombers. Waffling, in other words, doesn't answer that Pentagon-wide concern.

The Obama Doctrine: A Product of Another Vietnam-Shadowed Veep

And yet Obama will almost certainly seek to split his Big Afghanistan Decision down the middle (Talk big but act small!). That won't work, and not just because the world's bad boys will think of the American military as a bunch of high-tech pansies — because it reeks of Obama speak for permanent downshifting in our long-term commitment to Afghanistan's future, which, by extension, makes everybody nervous about Pakistan's future.

And so, by shorting Afghanistan, the president may end up inadvertently declaring The Obama Doctrine: (1) yes, Iraq was a one-of-a-kind war, never to be repeated; and (2), in Clinton-era Colin Powell speak honed for the counterterrorism era, we go anywhere we want to kill anyone we want, but as far as the locals are concerned, they can simply fuck off.

In doing so, Obama will position himself internationally as both a full-blown wimp (Jimmy Carter much?) and a sanctimonious cynic (hellooooo, Bill Clinton!), confirming French president Nicolas Sarkozy's first impression that under that fabulous exterior lies a fabile young president.

What's so intriguing and tragic about Obama's indecisiveness here is that it's been triggered by yet another vice-presidential, Boomer-era "wise man" determined to right the wrongs of the Vietnam era. With George W. Bush, it was Jerry Ford's chief of staff Dick Cheney who was determined to restore the power of the imperial presidency, and with Barry, it's Joe Biden (his '72 Senate upset win in Delaware was fueled by his fierce opposition to the war), who, along with 'Nam vets John Kerry and Chuck Hagel, counsels our JFK-ish president to get out of this quagmire now — while he still can. Despite all of Obama's campaign rhetoric about bringing a post-Boomer perspective to the White House, on this crucial call he appears as captive to that mindset as his two predecessors were.

And yes, the perverse influence that links them all is Obama's kitchen-cabinet adviser Colin Powell (aka Two-Face), who never met a war he didn't want to decisively win but likewise never met a post-war situation he didn't want to assiduously avoid. If you want a poster-child for how Vietnam still screws up presidencies, then General Powell's your man. Just understand that, later on, he'll deny everything to Bob Woodward.

Esquire contributing editor Thomas P.M. Barnett is the author of Great Powers: America and the World After Bush.