Government Executive - Authors - James Kitfield

How James Mattis Tried to Explain Trump to the World

James Kitfield, The Atlantic — Mon, 28 Aug 2017 09:34:50 -0400

The stifling heat of the tarmac beneath the wings of his C-17 aircraft, the dragon’s breath backwash from nearby helicopters, and the unmistakable, acrid smell of summertime Baghdad must have brought back distant memories when Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis touched down there earlier this week. Like many of his peers, Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general, came of age as a field commander in the Afghan and Iraq wars, earning his nickname of “Mad Dog” as the commander of 1st Marine Division during the 2003 invasion, and in the subsequent fierce battles for Fallujah. A keen student of history, he popularized the division’s motto “no better friend, no worse enemy,” paraphrasing a maxim attributed to Roman general Lucius Cornelius Sulla.

All these years later, Mattis was returning to Iraq at a hopeful moment, with U.S.-backed Iraqi forces having recently recaptured the city of Mosul from the Islamic State after months of bloody urban fighting. Just the night before his arrival in Baghdad, President Donald Trump had also announced additional U.S. forces for the Afghan war and a new strategy formulated by Mattis, National Security Adviser and Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, and General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the joint chiefs. Trump’s tight circle of generals, which includes John Kelly, the White House chief of staff and a retired Marine four-star general, aims to reclaim an inheritance that the U.S. military fought and bled for, which the generals believe was nearly squandered in the waning years of the Obama administration.

The return to Iraq and the events of the past week marked an inflection point for Mattis, the first former general to serve as a secretary of defense since General George C. Marshall 70 years ago. Speaking to reporters in Baghdad on August 22, Mattis praised the leadership of Haider al Abadi, the prime minster of Iraq, and his security forces. “Cities have been liberated, people freed from ISIS … The economy is recovering. Clearly, Iraq is reengaging with the region, and ISIS is on the run.”

For Trump’s generals, what’s also notable is who is no longer inside Trump’s inner circle. Just before leaving for the Middle East, Mattis and the rest of Trump’s national-security team gathered at Camp David to finalize the new Afghan war strategy. Notably absent from the meeting was just-fired White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon, the populist provocateur who had fought bitterly and, increasingly, publicly with McMaster over the way forward in Afghanistan. Kelly, reportedly, all but ushered Bannon out the White House door. In the struggle for the soul of the Trump administration’s foreign and national security policies, Bannon’s ouster was a seminal moment. His hyper-nationalism and anti-globalist ideology is the antithesis of their worldview: By training, education, and hard experience, they are pragmatic realists and internationalists.

And yet: Just as Mattis sought to reassure nervous allies, back home there were numerous reminders that the populist and intemperate impulses of his boss will not be tamed. After Trump’s disastrous response to the violent protests in Charlottesville, in which he equated neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klansmen, and white supremacists, with the counter-protesters who opposed them, Trump gave a disciplined speech on Monday unveiling the new Afghan strategy before uniformed service members at Fort Meyer, Virginia. Reading from a teleprompter, he cited U.S. troops as the “inspiration our country needs to unify, to heal.” Then, the very next day in a campaign-like rally in Phoenix, a bellicose and ad-libbing Trump was once again hammering the “us versus them” themes that propelled him to the presidency.

In another divisive move, the White House will reportedly soon issue guidance to the Pentagon barring transgender persons from serving in the military, a ban that Trump initially unveiled weeks ago in a surprise tweet that reportedly caught Mattis by surprise and left him “appalled.” That tension was evident throughout the week, as Mattis travelled to Iraq, Jordan, Turkey, and Ukraine.

In many ways, Mattis’s return to Iraq was a triumph. The conventional wisdom among senior U.S. military leaders has long been that the Obama administration’s decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from the country in 2011 was a strategic mistake. After ISIS overran roughly a third of both Syria and Iraq in 2014, President Obama essentially conceded the point, returning U.S. military forces to the country that summer, and beginning operations against the group in Syria.

U.S. commanders had chafed, however, at the Obama administration’s sensitivity to the number of U.S. “boots on the ground,” and restrictive rules of engagement that required White House approval for many lethal strikes. Mattis thus moved to accelerate the anti-ISIS campaign, deploying more forces, and, with Trump’s approval, pushing the authority to launch lethal strikes down to U.S. field commanders.

To limit the ability of ISIS fighters to retreat and regroup, and for foreign fighters to slip through the coalition dragnet and return to their home countries and launch terrorist attacks, Mattis also developed an “annihilation strategy”: Rather than allowing ISIS fighters to flee from one battle to the next, the strategy calls for coalition forces to first encircle ISIS strongholds such as Mosul and Raqqa before starting operations to recapture them. U.S. military officials credit the strategy for limiting the number of ISIS fighters able to escape and live to terrorize another day. Mattis also did some damage control, asking Kurdish leaders to postpone a scheduled independence referendum.

On his trip, Mattis also suggested that the United States might leave a residual U.S. military force in Iraq for the foreseeable future, living up to the spirit of the Strategic Framework Agreement, a 2008 partnership first signed by President George W. Bush and his Iraqi counterpart. “[We] will continue standing by the Iraqi people and their military…to maintain the stability that has been earned at a very, very high price.”

The fight against ISIS has both unified Iraq and solidified the partnership between Washington and Baghdad, Jon Alterman, the director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me from Iraq, where he arrived just after Mattis’s visit. “To the extent that the Iraqis were concerned that the United States would abandon them again, Mattis and Trump’s other generals all send the opposite message. They all have an intimate familiarity with Iraq, they know exactly where it is on a map, and they are looking for ways to leverage the costs and sacrifices the United States has already made here.”

Mattis’s warrior pedigree and reputation also calmed nerves in Jordan, where this week for the first time as defense secretary he met with King Abdullah II, a staunch U.S. ally. Like the other Sunni-Arab regimes in the Middle East, Jordan’s was concerned by the Obama administration’s opening to Iran through the nuclear deal, and the perception that America no longer strongly opposed its destabilizing role in the region. By contrast, then-General Mattis had been eased out by the Obama administration as head of U.S. Central Command because of his harsh rhetoric about Iran.

Where Iran is concerned, Mattis is now unmuzzled. In a rare recent interview with The Islander, the newspaper of Mercer Island High School, he described the Iranian regime as “acting more like a revolutionary cause.” This is a government that attempted to murder the Saudi ambassador to Washington, and employs surrogates like Lebanese Hezbollah that continues to threaten Israel and kill Israeli tourists, he noted. It has also supplied ballistic and anti-ship missiles to Houthi rebels in Yemen who have used them to attack Saudi Arabia and international shipping; at home, it continues to imprison many young Iranians, Mattis said. Iran is also “the only reason” Syrian President Bashar al Assad remains in power, he said. “So Iran is certainly the most destabilizing influence in the Middle East.”

Yet even on the territory of a staunch ally like Jordan, there was an element of damage control to Mattis’s visit. Shortly after Trump’s trip to nearby Saudi Arabia in May, where he bonded with Saudi royals and the other gulf monarchs, Riyadh and the other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council announced a blockade of Qatar, home to a major U.S. military base, over its alleged financing of terrorism. Trump has publicly backed the Saudis, working at cross purposes with Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who have sought to diffuse the crisis.

The next leg of Mattis’s trip offered a stark reminder of just how far west the shadow of authoritarianism has crept in recent years. In Ankara on August 23rd, he met with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey, and his foreign-affairs and national-security team. As Mattis told reporters, Turkey is a “frontline state against terrorists right there in Syria…[and] a frontline state on dealing with refugees, who are traumatized as any you’ll ever find in the history of the world.”

In recent months, senior U.S. military officials have continually stressed to Turkey that Washington’s decision to arm and train Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) has been narrowly focused on enabling them to recapture Raqqa from ISIS. The United States has also helped the Turkish military rebuild after its recent operations in northern Syria. The U.S. intelligence community continues to share intelligence with Ankara about the Kurdish terrorist group PKK, which seeks an independent Kurdish state in southeastern Turkey, and has waged a deadly, decades-long terrorist campaign in Turkey.

“We have done everything we can to address Turkish concerns, and I personally have made on the order of nine visits to Turkey to speak with my counterpart there,” General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told me. “The Turks have indicated publicly that they don’t like the fact that we armed the [largely Kurdish] Syrian Democratic Forces, so this issue has been a challenge and an irritant in U.S.-Turkish relations, there is no doubt about that.”

There is also no doubt that when Mattis, Dunford, and other senior U.S. officials visit Turkey these days, they no longer encounter the reliable NATO ally and Muslim democracy that the United States once held up as a model for the Islamic world. Erdogan has publicly blamed Washington for seeking to unseat him in last year’s failed coup; he has also consolidated power, brutally suppressing political opposition to his Islamist agenda by arresting tens of thousands of academics, government officials, journalists, secularists, and members of non-governmental organizations. Turkey still allows the U.S. military to use Incirlik air base for its anti-ISIS campaign, but increasingly its relations with the United States and other NATO allies are transactional, no longer based on shared values such as democracy and human rights.

“In his meeting with Mattis, Erdogan continued to criticize U.S. support for the Syrian Kurds, but the bigger issue is this systematic smear campaign that the Turkish government and government-controlled media have kept up against the United States and NATO countries,” Aykan Erdemir, a former member of the Turkish parliament and a senior fellow at the Washington-based Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told me. “The United States is not only in danger of losing the Erdogan government as a reliable ally, but it is also starting to lose the hearts and minds of 80 million Turks who are increasingly skeptical of the West.” Indeed: 72 percent of respondents in a recent opinion poll viewed the United States as the country’s top security threat.

To conclude his tour of world crises, Mattis stopped in Kiev on Ukraine’s Independence Day. The optics of his visit drove home just how profoundly constant controversies, major personnel upheavals, and the rise of Trump’s generals have altered the trajectory of his administration. Last summer at the Republican National Convention, with Trump constantly praising Vladimir Putin and his inner circle reaching out to the Russians, his campaign quietly managed to remove a plank calling for U.S. support of Ukraine with lethal weaponry from the party platform. Since then, multiple investigations have been launched into Russia’s meddling in the election and the Trump campaign’s possible collusion in those efforts, and Congress has passed veto-proof legislation ensuring that the White House cannot relax sanctions put in place after Russia annexed Crimea and supported separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine.

In Kiev on Thursday, Mattis signaled that, while no decision had yet been made on whether the U.S. will provide Ukraine with defensive weapons, he personally supports the move. “I will go back now having seen the current situation and be able to inform the secretary of state and the president in very specific terms what I recommend for the direction ahead,” Mattis told reporters in Kiev, standing alongside Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. “Defensive weapons are not provocative unless you are an aggressor, and clearly Ukraine is not an aggressor since it is their own territory where the fighting is happening.”

Of course more weapons in the region could also escalate the conflict by emboldening Poroshenko and challenging Putin’s strongman image. A similar dynamic in Georgia in 2008 led to a Russian invasion and de facto annexation of two Georgian provinces.

“If we escalate in Ukraine when Putin is facing upcoming elections and more dependent than ever on his tough guy credentials, it could easily change Moscow’s calculus in a dangerous way,” Dmitri Simes, a Russia expert and president of the Washington-based Center for the National Interest, told me. The more diplomatic path would be for the United States to pressure both Ukraine and Russia to honor the Minsk Agreement that was supposed to end the conflict, he said. But with the Trump administration under investigation for potentially secret ties to Russia, Congress would likely oppose any pressure on Ukraine.

Simes also worries that, with generals so ascendant in the Trump administration, military solutions will naturally begin to take precedence over diplomatic ones. “I hear only good things about Mattis, and generals are important in terms of reassuring our allies and providing sound military strategies and advice to the president,” Simes said. “But there is a long American tradition of having civilians with strong national security credentials in these jobs, and for a good reason. As the old saying goes, war is too important to be left to the generals.”

In a week that included a new strategy for the Afghan war, a triumphant return to Iraq, and a tour of global hotspots, Mattis attempted to both reclaim the legacy of the U.S. military’s longest wars and mitigate the damage done to U.S. alliances by the administration’s “America First” foreign policy. The challenge for him and Trump’s other generals is that the epicenter of the growing instability and uncertainty they encounter overseas is increasingly the White House itself.

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Please Back Away From the Partisan Brink

James Kitfield — Thu, 23 Mar 2017 08:00:00 -0400

U.S. presidential elections have historically served as fulcrums of national renewal. They bring new energy and fresh ideas to the often enervating business of governing, satisfying the drive for reform and continual self-improvement that are central to the American character. As Alexis de Tocqueville once noted, “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.” Every four years we consider our faults anew, and decide which candidate is best equipped for the job of repair.

Yet increasingly our politics of hyper-partisanship, deep division and permanent campaigning are grinding that cycle of national renewal to a halt. New presidents are immediately confronted by an opposition party unified in obstructionism. The zero-sum, all-or-nothing dynamic of campaigns -- where there are only winners and losers -- never really gives way to the necessary “win-win” of governing, where progress is only achieved through coalition-building, mutually beneficial compromise, and consensus. Our faults go unrepaired and big problems fester, whether it’s a crumbling domestic infrastructure, dramatic declines in U.S. military readiness, or the unsustainable accumulation of debt. Signs of such decay are already clearly evident.

There is plenty of blame to go around for this dangerous predicament, across the political divide and at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. Policymakers and government officials in Washington must recognize the very real threat partisan paralysis poses to our nation’s welfare, and live up to their oaths to protect the republic. Even after a turbulent and often controversial start by the Trump administration, there are still positive steps that both Republicans and Democrats can and should take to reach common ground, and put the nation and its institutions on a firmer footing.

A good place to start would be rapidly accelerating the staffing of federal agencies, which are collectively hanging out “help wanted” signs. While President Trump has had 18 members of its Cabinet confirmed by the Senate, he has made very few nominations for the more than 500 vital posts that form the second and third tiers of government leadership. These officials traditionally make the wheels of bureaucracy turn. Reports are rife of leadership vacuums at major departments such as State, Defense, Treasury, Commerce, Health and Human Services, and Homeland Security. Federal employees are alarmed not only about the rudderless drift at their agencies, but also about their jobs and livelihoods.

There are a number of causes of what has been described as the slowest personnel staffing of a presidential transition in decades. These include the surprising nature of President Trump’s electoral victory and a subsequent lack of advance planning; a transition hampered by restarts and resignations; a five-year lobbying ban that has discouraged some qualified candidates from considering government service; a Trump loyalty test that has eliminated many potential candidates who have been critical of the president in the past; and a presidential managerial style heavily reliant on a tight circle of family and trusted aides. Senate Republicans have also blamed Democrats for foot-dragging during the confirmation process. “Democrats are slowing [the confirmation process] so much that it’s almost irrelevant whether we get the names,” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has said. “It’s the slowest process since Abraham Lincoln.”

Whatever the causes, this leadership vacuum in the upper reaches of government is dangerous. Presidents often face crises early in their tenures, frequently within their first year in the Oval Office: think George H.W. Bush launching an invasion of Panama; Bill Clinton dealing with the Black Hawk Down debacle in Somalia; George W. Bush rocked by the worst attack on the homeland since Pearl Harbor; and Barack Obama confronting a global financial meltdown and a losing war in Afghanistan. Today multiple potential crises lie just beyond the visible horizon, from North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs and provocations, to Russian and Chinese aggression in their near abroad, to a war against ISIS in an unraveling Middle East. If the White House and Congress cannot work together to accelerate the staffing of the federal government, the ship of state will soon enter perilous waters with an inexperienced captain and only a skeletal crew on deck.

President Trump has made a priority of quickly destroying the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and affiliated Islamist extremist groups, which has already resulted in his sending more U.S. service members into harm’s way. Trump should thus ask for, and Congress should grant, the authority that was wrongly denied his predecessor -- a congressional Authorization for the Use of Military Force against ISIS. Sens. Tim Kaine, D-Va., and Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., have already proposed a bipartisan authorization that should be dusted off and vigorously debated.

U.S. troops deploying to combat deserve to know that the American people and their representatives in Washington are united behind them, and a wartime commander-in-chief armed with congressional authorization is less likely to be second-guessed when inevitable setbacks occur. The exercise would also provide an overdue reminder that the Founding Fathers gave Congress the sole power to declare war and “raise and support armies” for a reason. With a White House so willing to test the boundaries of the separation of powers, Congress should recall the wisdom of the words of Constitutional Convention delegate Elbridge Gerry in 1797, who said he “never expected to hear in a republic a motion to empower the executive alone to declare war.”

President Trump has wisely proposed spending more on defense to address a creeping readiness and modernization crisis, but he would pay for it with draconian cuts in non-defense agencies. Once it becomes clear that this unbalanced budget is “dead on arrival” on Capitol Hill, in the words of Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., the administration and Congress will run up against the constraints of the 2011 Budget Control Act, with its automatic sequester spending caps on both defense and non-defense discretionary spending.

The Budget Control Act is a testament to legislative gridlock, a poison pill designed to be so toxic that it would force compromise on Republican and Democratic budget negotiators whose stubbornness had shut down the federal government and threatened a default on U.S. debt. And since 2011 the inability of politicians to do their job and find common ground has forced that bitter pill down the Pentagon’s throat, triggering arbitrary spending caps and wreaking havoc on U.S. military planning and readiness even in a time of war.

Virtually every plank in the Trump administration agenda -- tax cuts along with major tax reform, a large infrastructure bill, increased defense spending, building a border wall -- will require a deal between Republicans and Democrats to move beyond the Budget Control Act. The potential for new streams of revenue in a major tax overhaul could be the wrecking ball that finally topples this monument to Washington’s partisan dysfunction. That alone would be a worthy signal of national renewal.

James Kitfield is a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, and co-editor of the recent anthologies, Triumph and Tragedies of the Modern Presidency and Triumph and Tragedies of the Modern Congress. He is also a former senior correspondent at Government Executive.

Photo illustration: Flickr user Nicolas Raymond

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Balance of Power

James Kitfield — Wed, 09 Jul 2014 16:00:00 -0400

At the top of the United States military’s vast, global bureaucracy sits the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest-ranking military officer and the president’s senior military adviser. The chairman sits between the service chiefs on one side, and the combatant commanders on the other. The chiefs are responsible for developing, training and equipping the armed forces for the future. The commanders are responsible for deploying those forces, and their focus is on the crises of the day. Between them in that “supply and demand” equation sits Gen. Martin Dempsey, mitigating disputes and fashioning trade-offs.

As U.S. combat forces withdraw from Afghanistan this year, the service chiefs are trying to manage a force drawdown as combatant commanders cope with myriad crises. That has made Dempsey’s job one of the most difficult of any chairman of the Joint Chiefs in modern times. Defense One contributor James Kitfield recently discussed those challenges with Dempsey. Edited excerpts follow:

Even before the U.S. has pulled its last combat troops out of Afghanistan, the administration is being criticized for its reluctance to use military force in response to numerous other crises. How do you balance the demands for a U.S. military response with a stressed force and war-weary American public?

Dempsey: When you look at what the military instrument of power can accomplish, it is more effective in dealing with strength-on-strength situations than it is in dealing with strength-on-weakness scenarios. And we’re finding that a weakening of structures and central authority is pervasive in today’s world. The Middle East is a poster child for that dynamic. But if you look at almost any sector of civilization—from international organizations, to big corporations to places of worship—their authority has diminished over the past decade. That has to do with the spread of technology that has made information so ubiquitous. But the result has been a weakened international order. And it’s harder to articulate the proper use of military power in that environment.

How does a weakening international order impact your thinking on the best uses of military power?

Dempsey: It means you have to rebalance the instrument of military power. I would suggest to you that there are basically three ways we can influence the security environment around the world: direct military action, building partnership capacity and enabling other actors. Honestly, this is not magic, and there’s not much more to it than that.

Over the past 10 years we’ve done most of our heavy lifting on the direct action side. Increasingly, we are doing more, however, to build partners so that they can counter threats in their own regions. We are also enabling other nations to act. A good example is the way we’re partnering with the French in Mali [to counter al Qaeda-linked terrorists] in West Africa.

As I look forward and think about the need to rebalance the use of military power, I think we will need less direct action because it is the most costly, disruptive and controversial use of American power. By contrast, we need to do more in terms of building partners.

When talking about the many threats and challenges the U.S. military must respond to, you break them down into a “Two, Two, Two and One” construct. Can you walk us through your thinking?

Dempsey: There are the two heavyweights in Russia and China. There are two middleweights in Iran and North Korea. There are two networks, in terms of al Qaeda and its affiliates. And then there’s the one new domain, which is cyber. All of them require a somewhat different approach. In terms of the two heavyweights, for instance, I’m not predisposed to the idea that our relationship with either Russia or China will inevitably lead to conflict. In fact, there’s every reason to believe that we should be able to chart a path that won’t lead to confrontation. But Russia’s actions in Ukraine are troubling precisely because they are disrupting the international order we ascribe to, which holds that national boundaries are decided through an internal electoral process, and not from the outside.

And your preferred response?

Dempsey: This is a moment for NATO to decide what it intends to be in the future. The NATO alliance has done a great job in partnering with us in Afghanistan. That showed the alliance was willing to look beyond its own borders and become a regional force for good and stability. Now I think the crisis in Ukraine is causing NATO to look back to its own backyard, and forcing it to decide whether it still has the capability and capacity to reassure its member states that the alliance remains credible. The Ukraine crisis is a challenge to the international order, and we should respond to it as part of our NATO alliance.

Are you concerned that the civil war in Syria, which continues to attract thousands of Islamist jihadi fighters, begins to resemble the civil war in Afghanistan in the 1990s that gave rise to al Qaeda and the Taliban?

Dempsey: There is a historic, sectarian fault line that runs from Beirut, Lebanon, all the way to Baghdad, Iraq. And Syria has become a magnet for militants who want to wage jihad against the West or internally against other Muslims. But I don’t believe the military instrument of power by itself is going to change the fundamental dynamics there. So our approach is to continue to work with regional partners, and to enable those partners by building capacity.

You have issued dire warnings about the impact of budget cuts associated with the sequester spending caps. Are you frustrated that no one seems to be listening?

Dempsey: I’ve discovered that the two hardest words to adequately articulate in my line of work are “risk” and “readiness.”

Risk is hard because the meaning is so dynamic. It’s a combination of capability and intent on the part of those people who would do us ill, and you can measure capability but it’s hard to measure intent.

Readiness is also very dynamic, and it means something different for each service. So when you tie the words “risk” and “readiness” into documents like the Quadrennial Defense Review or the Defense Strategic Guidance, often people will hear what they want to hear.

Do you stand by your statement that U.S. military forces are on a path of decline that, unless reversed, will reach a point where “it would be immoral to use that force”?

Dempsey: The problem is we’re kind of the victims of our own success. Whenever a crisis comes up—whether it’s a humanitarian crisis, disaster relief, or particularly a security threat—we tend to just deal with them. Frankly, that is disguising the suffering our men and women in uniform are enduring from all this uncertainty. How big a force will we be? How ready will we be? Will we have the money necessary to equip and train ourselves properly?

The greatest risk we run as an armed force is uncertainty. That’s not to say I would embrace sequestration spending levels, because I actually believe they will take us to a level that puts the nation at risk. But I do think there is a level of spending between where we are [sequestration spending caps] and where we could do the nation’s bidding. We need budget certainty, flexibility and more time.

How much more time do you need to downsize and reshape U.S. military forces?

Dempsey: We can’t do this one year at a time, or even in five-year increments. If you let us spread this challenge over 10 years, however, with more flexibility and budget certainty, then we can figure it out, and do the things that make us the world’s greatest military. We can reshape the force, recapitalize and modernize its equipment, train it to our former high standards, and also treat the young people who are going to leave the service with dignity and respect. But if we continue down this path of one-year-at-a-time, death-by-a-thousand-cuts budgets, without certainty, flexbility or adequate time, then I worry that we could break this force. Lacking those things, and driven to sequestration spending levels, we will end up with a U.S. military that is both too small and not ready.

Do you feel the stress of so many wartime deployments has taken a toll?

Dempsey: When you visited me in Iraq in 2003-2004, if you had asked me then what would happen if these troops have to do three or four more deployments over the next decade, I would have told you that it would break the force. Forget the costs and even the human dimension of those who wear the uniform, I just didn’t believe that the families could bear up under that kind of pressure. And yet they did. Even today, in some cases soldiers are more worried about not deploying than about having to deploy again. So when you ask me about the health of the all-volunteer force, I can’t answer in any other way than to say they’re magnificent.

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Behind Eric Shinseki's Downfall

James Kitfield, National Journal — Mon, 02 Jun 2014 10:01:33 -0400

Eric Shinseki's staff was practically on a death watch Thursday, the prognosis darkening as the day wore on.

The early release of an interim report by the Veterans Affairs Department's inspector general had come as a surprise, and its finding that possibly fraudulent record keeping to hide extraordinary wait times at VA health facilities was a "systemic problem nationwide" prompted dozens of House Democrats and a fifth of the Senate Democratic caucus to join a Republican chorus calling on Shinseki to resign. An impassioned meeting between the VA secretary and veterans groups yielded only tepid support.

Then late in the day a thunderclap: a former mentor and key supporter, retired four-star Gen. Barry McCaffrey, told The Wall Street Journal it was time for Shinseki to step down.

"Ric Shinseki is right out of central casting as the kind of person who should be leading the VA, but my reasoning was that Congress is deep into a political theater and hypocrisy right now on this issue and will be right up until the November elections, and Ric lacked the political instinct to go for the jugular and not be used as a convenient punching bag on Capitol Hill," McCaffrey told National Journal in explaining his decision. "So at 72 years old, Ric has served his country his entire life with quiet professionalism, and I think he's earned the right to hand over the reins now and let someone else try and solve these problems."

With support crumbling among Democrats and the White House eyeing a mid-term election that could hand the Senate to Republicans and threaten the president's legacy, Shinseki's public apology this morning, followed quickly by President Obama's acceptance of his resignation, were all but preordained. "He doesn't want to be distracting. That was Ric's judgement," Obama said in the White House briefing room. "I agree. We don't have time for distractions."

In the end Shinseki was undone by his attempts to scale twin peaks of American dysfunction: a VA health system overwhelmed by veterans wounded and damaged by more than a decade of war, and Washington's hyper-partisan politics on the issue of health care. As a retired four-star general and former soldier, he also knew that responsibility ultimately rests with the commander at the top, and Shinseki had no ready answer to the question posed by the scandal: Given problems associated with long waiting times and inappropriate scheduling schemes to mask them that trace back many years, why didn't he know that a systemic problem existed?

When Obama made Shinseki one of his first Cabinet picks in 2008, the officer seemed to check all the boxes. He was a disabled veteran who lost half his foot to a landmine and received Purple Heart medals on both tours in Vietnam. As Army chief of staff, Shinseki had clashed publicly with former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, testifying that the postwar occupation of Iraq would require several hundred thousand troops, far more than what the Pentagon was estimating. History proved Shinseki right—and Rumsfeld disastrously wrong—a point not lost on a new president who made opposition to the Iraq War a focal point of his campaign.

Ironically, Shinseki saw the job of VA Secretary as a second chance to end his career on a less controversial note (Rumsfeld famously made him a lame duck as Army chief by naming his successor more than a year before Shinseki's retirement). "I took this job because you don't often get 'do-overs' in life," Shinseki told National Journal in a 2011 interview. "For me, this job is a big do-over, because I get to take care of people I served with in Vietnam, as well as people whom I sent to war as Army chief of staff."

A change agent in the Army who worked to make the service lighter and more rapidly deployable, Shinseki set about reforming the vast VA bureaucracy with a strategic campaign fought on three fronts: cutting a persistent backlog of disability claims; improving veterans' access to VA services; and reducing homelessness among veterans. A large part of his legacy will be the notable progress he made on each front. The result has been a VA health service that is consistently rated by veteran patients in independent surveys to be among the best in the nation, and equal to or better than private-sector hospitals.

However, the VA health system has also struggled mightily to cope with a population of wounded veterans swelled by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including nearly half a million service members suffering from posttraumatic-stress disorder by some estimates, and more than a million service members expected to separate from military service and join the ranks of veterans between 2011 and 2016. They are adding to the increased demands of an aging population of Vietnam veterans, whose disability claims spiked by 250,000 after Shinseki made the decision to finally settle Agent Orange claims because "it was the right thing to do."

That is the context behind the recent VA IG report that the health care system in Phoenix grossly misstated how quickly veterans were receiving care, with some waiting 115 days for an initial appointment and 1,700 veterans languishing on an unofficial wait-list. It was just the latest reminder that the VA system's supply of health care lags significantly behind growing demand.

Sources close to Shinseki also believe the scandal and his response became hopelessly entangled in the partisan politics surrounding Obamacare, with Republicans determined to make the failings of national health care in general a primary focus in upcoming elections. A number of Republicans have responded to the scandal by calling for the privatization of the Veterans Health Administration, for instance, and Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., engaged in an unusually vitriolic public argument with veterans groups after criticizing them, just before Memorial Day, for not demanding Shinseki's resignation.

"Part of the dynamic was Republicans who favor privatization saw criticisms of the VA health system and of Shinseki as an easy way to impugn 'socialized medicine,' which made Democrats who might be sympathetic to such a single-payer system nervous," said a senior VA official.

Shinseki was determined to stay above that political scrum, and like a good general he trusted subordinates to bring him bad news as well as good. The honor and integrity that Shinseki bought to the job, said the official, thus made him reluctant to engage in political infighting, or to question the truthfulness of his lieutenants. "It's like a Greek tragedy that way," he said. "The very attributes that made him perfect for the job also contributed to his downfall."

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African Terrorist Threat Not Far From Obama’s Mind

James Kitfield, National Journal — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 12:00:59 -0400

When President Obama lands in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, next week, he will see a city that reflects the rapid changes that are reshaping Africa. The traffic-snarled streets are a riot of bright color, with buildings painted in splashes of pink and orange sherbet, and pedestrians dressed in blaring red dresses and screaming yellow soccer shirts. On the shoreline, large container ships will be stacked to the horizon of the Indian Ocean, bespeaking the economic miracle that has brought Africa’s average economic growth rate on par with Asia’s at nearly 6 percent.

But amid the chaotic traffic of Dar es Salaam--or “Haven of Peace”--Obama will see signs of a more fragile continent, threatened by terrorist groups drawn to its persistent poverty and ungoverned spaces. And he will be reminded of those dangerous forces on Tuesday, when he lays a wreath at the memorial for the victims of al-Qaida’s 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya that killed 224 people.

Because of African sensitivities about the presence of foreign military forces on the continent, the White House has gone to great lengths to stress that the president’s trip will focus on trade and investment, democratic institution-building, and reaching out to young Africans. But in many private discussions, counterterrorism partnership will also feature prominently.

“The growing threat that al-Qaida affiliates are posing to nations in north, east, and southwest Africa has really changed the dynamic by making counterterrorism a growth business on the continent, and there are some great capabilities we can offer those nations who want to partner with us,” Maj. Gen. Carlton Everhart II, AFRICOM’s senior Air Force commander, said in a recent interview.

Indeed, even as the U.S. military winds down operations in Afghanistan, Pentagon leaders see the threat from terrorists and extremists groups growing in much of Africa. They include al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, which emerged from Algeria’s civil war of the 1990s and has amassed an estimated $90 million over the past decade from drug smuggling and kidnapping for ransom. The group was linked to the Benghazi consulate attack in Libya that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans last September; the assault on a natural-gas complex in Algeria in January that killed dozens of foreign oil workers, including three Americans; and the seizure of Northern Mali earlier this year by a loose confederation of Islamic extremists, criminal groups, and Tuareg mercenaries.

U.S. forces stationed in Djibouti, Africa, have used drones to target al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen, and they are supporting African Union forces fighting the Qaida-affiliated terrorist group Al Shabaab in Somalia. According to U.S. military sources, Tanzania has also requested that the Pentagon help train Tanzanian forces for deployment in the nearby Democratic Republic of Congo as part of an African Union force.

In response to those growing threats and demands, the U.S. military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) has increased its presence, weapons systems, and operations in Africa. It’s no accident that the new commander of AFRICOM is Gen. David Rodriguez, an experienced operational commander who helped manage the surge of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Rodriguez recently told a Senate panel that the U.S. military needs to increase intelligence gathering in Africa by a factor of 15 to better track terrorist groups.

Because of African sensitivities and colonial past, AFRICOM maintains its headquarters in Germany and has only a light footprint on the continent that is centered in the tiny East African country of Djibouti, home to what’s known as the Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa. Observant air travelers visiting Djibouti sometimes catch sight of U.S. Predator drones sitting on the taxiway on the military side of the airbase. Periodically, French Mirage and U.S. F-16 fighter jets, Japanese P-3 Patrol aircraft, and French Puma and U.S. HH-60 helicopters can also be seen launching from an airport where military aircraft and civilian airliners share a single runway.

But since Benghazi, AFRICOM has established a new rapid-reaction Embassy Response Force in Djibouti to conduct potential embassy evacuation missions in East Africa. The Marine Corps has deployed a counterpart located at the Naval Air Station in Sigonella, Spain, to cover North Africa.

Meanwhile, AFRICOM has built a new base for unmanned aerial drones in Niger to support operations in Mali, adding to a constellation that includes U.S. drone bases in Djibouti, Arba Minch in Ethiopia, and the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean.

“Rising threats combined with the drawdown in Afghanistan and elsewhere has led to speculation that Africa is becoming a theater of expansion for the U.S. military, and certainly in recent months we’ve seen some evidence of increased activity,” said Richard Downie, deputy director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Still, quiet U.S. military support for French troops in Mali and African Union troops in Somalia fit into an AFRICOM pattern of adopting a supporting role when possible.

“It’s true that [the Pentagon’s U.S. Africa Command] has been a key partner to a number of African nations,” said Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes just before the trip, citing U.S. military support to African troops fighting Qaida-affiliated terrorist groups in Mali and Somalia, and hunting for the messianic warlord Joseph Kony in the Central African Republic. “But all of those are U.S. operations in support of African partners who are really in the lead.”

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Analysis: What Is a ‘Red Line’ Worth?

James Kitfield, National Journal — Fri, 03 May 2013 09:39:21 -0400

The United States can’t bluff. That is the consensus inside the White House on the issuing of “red lines,” including President Obama’s publicly declared prohibition against Syria using or transferring its chemical weapons, or Iran acquiring a nuclear bomb.

“We’ll be in the [White House] security room, and [the president] will turn to other people and say, ‘As Joe here would say, big nations can’t bluff,’ ” said Vice President Joe Biden, speaking in March to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee on the U.S. policy of preventing Iran from attaining nuclear weapons by whatever means necessary. “And presidents of the United States cannot and do not bluff. And President Barack Obama is not bluffing.”

Immediately after Israeli and British officials announced last week that the regime of strongman Bashar al-Assad had apparently crossed the red line and used chemical weapons against Syrian rebels, hawks in Congress and allies in the region put intense pressure on the administration to back up its threats with military action. Within days, reports surfaced that Obama was preparing to send lethal weaponry to the Syrian opposition, a risky escalation of U.S. involvement in the conflict that the administration has resisted for two years. Top officials are concerned enough about Russian reaction to the move that they have dispatched Secretary of State John Kerry to Moscow. In a news conference this week, Obama made it clear that if Syrian use of chemical weapons is proven, the red line will be honored and action taken.

Expert opinion varies widely on whether more-assertive U.S. leadership in the Syrian crisis is wise, or whether it is misguided policy. With another red line on Iran’s nuclear program looming as early as this year, however, it’s worth considering the risk-versus-reward equation when trip wires are placed around complex diplomatic crises. If the stakes are unusually high, the red line particularly bright, and the commitment to act firm, these kinds of ultimatums can be a useful deterrent. In crises where the facts are murkier and the commitment more situational, however, they can blow up in your face.

“In matters of war and peace, you generally don’t want to back yourself into a corner by drawing lines in the sand that automatically trigger reaction, because that denies you flexibility in negotiations where you want to preserve all options,” said R. Nicholas Burns, director of the Future of Diplomacy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Now that Assad appears to have crossed the red line, he said, the Obama administration has to follow through. “In the Middle East especially, where politics are turbulent and passionate, preserving U.S. credibility is important,” he said. “Iran, Israel, and even North Korea are watching closely now to see if the United States is going to back up its threats.”

Indeed, some of the drawbacks of demarcating firm red lines are already evident in the Syrian crisis. The news that Assad had likely used chemical weapons was first revealed by Israel, which has its own reasons for forcing Washington’s hand. Setting the trip wire at the use of chemical weapons might also be interpreted by the Syrian regime as implying that anything short of the mark is permissible, up to and including slaughtering 80,000 Syrians with conventional arms. In the case of Iran, there’s ample evidence that Tehran is gaming both the U.S. and Israeli red lines, producing just enough enriched uranium for a rapid “breakout” capability if it decides to build a nuclear weapon, but not quite enough to cross the line and trigger a military strike.

“My sense is that President Obama declared his red lines to Syria and Iran as a short-term maneuver to relieve pressure from hawks in Congress and Israel to take more-forceful military action,” said Paul Pillar, a professor in Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program, and a former career analyst with the CIA. “Now that Syria seems to have crossed his red line, we’re seeing that such short-term diplomacy of the moment carries long-term risks.”

During the Cold War’s nuclear-arms race, however, both U.S. and Soviet red lines provided useful deterrents to confrontation. Though it abhorred Soviet crackdowns against independence movements in Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, Washington understood that to intervene directly in Eastern Europe would cross a red line. The Soviets went so far as to cross a U.S. red line when they deployed nuclear missiles to the Western Hemisphere, provoking the 1963 Cuban missile crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon. Moscow withdrew the missiles.

The absence of clearly articulated red lines when they actually exist in a nation’s policies can also prove provocative. In an infamous 1950 press conference, Secretary of State Dean Acheson outlined America’s defensive perimeter in Asia and omitted South Korea. Six months later North Korea invaded the South, and the United States found itself in a bloody war. In July 1990, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie met with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to discuss his massing of troops on the border with Kuwait. Many experts believe Saddam interpreted her statement that the United States did not “take a stand on Arab-Arab conflicts” as a green light, and he invaded Kuwait the next month. Once again, the United States went to war to defend a red line it had failed to expressly articulate.

According to Brian Michael Jenkins, a longtime national security expert at Rand and the author of the recent book When Armies Divide, red lines are a powerful though dangerous diplomatic tool to be used only when the stakes are highest and the potential consequences thoroughly understood.

“And you should never, ever declare a red line as a bluff,” Jenkins said. For the U.S., it would seem this means that it’s time to raise or fold.

This article appears in the May 4, 2013, edition of National Journal.

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How the Government Searches for the Boston Marathon Bomber

James Kitfield, National Journal — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 09:17:24 -0400

When FBI special agent Richard DesLauriers promised that “We will go to the ends of the Earth” to find the terrorists responsible for the bombing of the Boston Marathon and bring them to justice, he was not making an idle threat. The post-9/11 record strongly suggests that the U.S. authorities will indeed get their man.

Inevitably, the tragic terrorist attack in Boston, coupled with reports that poison-laced letters have been sent to Congress and the White House, have recalled disturbing memories of 9/11. However, Wednesday’s news that authorities believe they already have video of the likely bomber, along with detailed forensic analysis of the type of bombs used, are reminders that law enforcement and intelligence officials have counterterrorism capabilities at their disposal today that would have been unthinkable before Sept. 11, 2001.

Even as DesLauriers spoke, for instance, a globe-spanning network of Joint Terrorism Task Forces and intelligence fusion centers, and the tens of thousands of analysts and operators who run them, were already scouring all-source intelligence for a telltale clue or whiff of digital exhaust. Intercepted telephone calls and e-mail exchanges, surveillance camera footage, airline manifests, hotel registries, car-rental records, tips from informants and the public—all of it was being fed into powerful computers and matched against a database of half-a-million suspected terrorists maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center in Northern Virginia. All it will take for the entire network to narrow its focus into a “hard stare” is for two seemingly disparate data points to align, allowing analysts to connect the dots.

“After the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government took the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission very seriously, and it transformed the way terrorism cases are handled by giving law enforcement and intelligence agencies more resources, more legal authorities, and a lot of cutting-edge technologies to reduce the chances of future attacks,” said Laura Dugan, a principal investigator for the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism. “Collectively that has greatly enhanced our counterterrorism capabilities, but it should be no surprise that an attack like Boston still happened. Most terrorism experts will tell you that the real surprise is another terrorist attack didn’t occur sooner.”

Important post-9/11 reforms include the creation of the Department of Homeland Security to harden domestic targets and guard against attacks; establishment of the National Counterterrorism Center to act as a clearing house for collection and analysis of all-sources of intelligence; and passage of the Patriot Act, the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Amends Act, and other legislation greatly expanding the authorities of U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies to secretly monitor communications with suspected terrorists, and track terrorist financing. Many of the firewalls separating foreign and domestic intelligence-gathering, and military and civilian intelligence agencies, were also dismantled.

As the lead agency in domestic terrorism investigations, the FBI has arguably been most transformed by the post-9/11 reforms. The bureau has expanded beyond from its traditional role as a post-facto criminal investigative service, turning instead into a domestic-intelligence-gathering agency with a mission to preempt acts of terrorism before they occur. The result has been a wholesale change in the corporate culture of the FBI, with the bureau increasingly focused on infiltrating terrorist groups and preempting domestic terrorist plots in “stings” orchestrated by informants.

Though controversial, those tactics and the U.S. government’s post-9/11 record speak to the effectiveness of the reforms. Between 9/11 and the Boston terrorist attack, only 14 Americans were killed by jihadi terrorists on U.S. soil (13 were shot at Ft. Hood, Texas, in November 2009 by Army Major Nidal Hassan; and one Army recruiter was killed in front of a recruiting office in Little Rock, Ark., in a July 2009 drive-by shooting). According to a Rand Corporation study, between 2001 and 2012, 41 terrorist plots were launched by homegrown terrorists. Of those, 38 were uncovered and foiled by U.S. law enforcement agencies. Of the 14 most serious plots, 10 were disrupted by FBI “stings.”

“That’s really a remarkable record,” said Rand counterterrorism expert and author Brian Michael Jenkins. It reflects, he notes, the synergistic effect of improved intelligence-sharing, changes in surveillance law, a determination to disrupt terrorist plots before they hatch, and growing U.S. expertise in large-scale terrorism investigations stretching back to the first World Trade Center attack in 1993.

Barely a whiff of digital exhaust is all it takes to activate a global network of surveillance sensors, supercomputers, intelligence-fusion centers, and the analysts and operators who run it. One of half-a-million suspected terrorists in the U.S. database logs onto the grid somewhere—and the network’s trackers pick up the scent. The network’s power rests in its ability to rapidly synthesize enormous amounts of all-source intelligence and discern “patterns of life,” the better to anticipate a target’s next move and initiate a strike.

“So when President Obama and the FBI stand up and say, ‘We will bring these terrorists to justice,’ I have a high degree of confidence that they are actually right,” Jenkins said. “There will likely be more false leads, and it could take weeks, months, or even years rather than hours and days. But I believe they’ll ultimately identify and bring the Boston bomber or bombers to justice.”

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Plenty of Clues, Few Leads on Motive of Bomber

James Kitfield, National Journal — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 08:14:56 -0400

For a generation of Americans that collectively bears the psychic scar tissue of Sept. 11, 2001, any act of terror invokes memories of the terrorist attack that reshaped their lives and largely defined the past decade. So the nearly simultaneous bombings of the Boston Marathon that killed three and injured more than a hundred bystanders instantly suggests the work of al-Qaida or its affiliates in the pantheon of Sunni Islamic extremist groups.

Law enforcement and counterterrorism officials know, however, that terrorism comes in many guises. That’s why after being briefed by the FBI, President Obama decried the act without pointing a finger at a likely actor.

"Anytime bombs are used to target innocent civilians it is an act of terror,” Obama said this afternoon. "What we don’t yet know, however, is who carried out the attack, or why. Whether it was planned and executed by a terrorist organization, foreign or domestic, or was the act of a malevolent individual.”

In fact, initial evidence offers enticing clues that point in each of those directions—a foreign terrorist organization, likely affiliated with or inspired by al-Qaida and its strategy of striking the U.S. homeland; domestic terrorists, probably from the anti-federal-government, nativist Right, whose ranks have been growing in recent years; or a “lone wolf or wolves,” acting independently and inspired by an ideology yet to be determined.

"The real challenge for investigators and analysts is that the Boston attack could plausibly be the work of anyone on that short list of suspects, because both right-wing domestic extremist groups and al-Qaida and its affiliates have embraced this strategy of exhorting ‘lone wolves’ to act out on their own with terror attacks,” said Brian Michael Jenkins, a counterterrorism expert and author at the Rand Corporation. “And until we have more reliable evidence, any ‘who dunnit’ exercise is pure speculation.”

The fact that the attackers targeted the Boston Marathon might suggest an al-Qaida connection, Jenkins noted, because for years the terrorist organization has exhorted followers to attack mass sporting events. Osama bin Laden’s personal notebooks captured in the raid on his Abbottabad complex, for instance, included threats against the Commonwealth Games in India and European football tournaments.

If the Boston bombing is linked to al-Qaida, some experts believe the method suggests lone wolves inspired by its ideology rather than experienced terrorists that trained in its camps and established a sleeper cell in the United States. The al-Qaida sleeper cells responsible for the Madrid train bombings in 2004 (191 killed and more than 1800 injured) and the London transport bombings of 2005 (52 killed and more than 700 wounded) used much more capable bombs that produced far more carnage. Even the failed plots of al-Qaida-trained operatives have been more ambitious, including former New York pushcart operator Najibullah Zazi, who headed a homegrown cell that plotted to bomb New York City subways; and Faisal Shahzad, a Connecticut resident trained by the Pakistani Taliban who drove a car bomb into Times Square and attempted to detonate it.

"Compared to all of those plots, which were quite sophisticated and frequently involved the multiple detonation of more powerful bombs, the Boston attack seems relatively rudimentary to me,” said Philipp Mudd, a former top counterterrorism expert at the FBI and CIA, and author of the new bookTakedown: Inside the Hunt for Al Qaeda. The choice of a very soft target such as the marathon, rather than a harder, more iconic symbol of American power like the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, or the Federal Reserve, he said, does not suggest the culmination of a sophisticated, foreign-driven conspiracy years in the making.

“This feels like a simpler, smaller conspiracy, but we won’t know until more evidence is revealed,” Mudd said. “If this turns out to actually be an al-Qaida plot, my reaction will be, ‘Is that all you’ve got left?’ ”

On the other hand, the timing of the attack on “Patriot’s Day,” which coincides with the April 15 deadline for filing federal taxes, suggests a possible link with right-wing, antigovernment extremist groups. Both the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building by antigovernment extremist Timothy McVeigh (168 dead, more than 680 injured) and the federal government’s siege of the Waco compound of sect leader David Koresh (76 dead) occurred in April. Both incidents remain potent symbols to antigovernment extremist groups.

"If the Boston attack turns out to be the work of right-wing extremists it really shouldn’t surprise us, because these groups are not a new threat, and they have been growing in numbers and power in recent years,” Mudd said. “What would be notable is that they are once again turning to terrorism as a tactic, which is increasingly common around the world.”

Indeed, one of the most recent and devastating terrorist attacks by an ideologically-inspired extremist was the 2011 bombing and shooting spree in Norway by the antigovernment white supremacist Anders Behring Breivik (77 killed). Nor is the ideology that inspires terrorism necessarily antigovernment or pro-Islamic extremism. Unabomber Ted Kaczynski carried on his deadly terrorist bombing campaign for 17 years in service to a self-styled manifesto that decried the encroachment of the “techno-industrial” system.

“In the 1970s I was involved in the search for the Alphabet Bomber in California, who detonated a bomb at L.A. airport that killed three people and injured many others,” said Jenkins of Rand. “It turns out he was protesting sexual taboos, which none of us even knew existed in Southern California in the 1970s. So it was all in this man’s twisted imagination, yet he was still a very lethal bomber. The point is, you never know where the evidence will take you in these cases, and you have to follow where it leads.”

Some experts believe the very fact that the evidence so far could lead in several plausible directions, and that no one has claimed responsibility for the Boston attack, is cause for concern. “What worries me is that five or ten years ago we would have had a pretty good idea who to point the finger at after an attack like this, but the list of suspects has grown,” said Bruce Hoffman, a counter-terrorism expert and director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University. “So just when Americans collectively believed we had turned a corner, and we could drop this long preoccupation with terrorism, this attack will force the country to re-calibrate the threat once again.”

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Outsourcing the Fight Against Terrorism

James Kitfield, National Journal — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 09:29:25 -0400

MANDA BAY NAVAL BASE, Kenya—The C-12 twin-engine turboprop drops through a break in the clouds, and Kenya’s tropical Lamu Archipelago, surrounded by coral-green waters, emerges like a lost continent. Cuticles of virgin white beach line a jungle that stretches back into the country’s interior. Banking, the pilot spots a short airstrip cut out of the foliage. The station below is one of the remotest outposts in an expanding U.S. network of staging bases in Africa. The clouds close when the rainy season arrives in mid-March, and Manda Bay can go for weeks, even months, without so much as a mail drop. The C-12 touches down on an unlit runway and stops.

Out comes Maj. Gen. Ralph Baker, commander of the Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa. The organization was once a sleepy command focused on digging wells and liaising with local militaries. Now CJTF-HOA is remaking itself into a counterterrorism force bent on defeating transnational extremist groups in a region the size of America’s Eastern Seaboard. Baker is here on a hot January day to inspect a forward operating site crucial in his campaign to help destroy the terrorist group al-Shabaab in Somalia. American policymakers are already talking about how these battles offer a model for the fight against other Qaida affiliates in Africa.

Waiting on the tarmac is Lt. Carl Chase, who leads a detachment of Navy Seabee engineers who have been working round-the-clock shifts for months to finish a runway extension before the rainy season arrives. Once completed, it will allow larger aircraft like C-130s to land and supply Americans or African Union troops. Baker climbs into Chase’s SUV and rides down the long asphalt road lined with baboons the size of teenagers. (A viral video shows two Marines playfully trying to put a T-shirt on one such neighbor. Both ended up in the hospital. “Other than car wrecks, close encounters with the wildlife is the top cause of injury to my people in Africa,” the general says.)

Entering the base, Baker’s convoy passes black-clad Kenyan antiterrorism commandos mustering in the sun. Farther on, it glides by a platoon of Kenyan Special Boat Forces trained by U.S. special operations forces to deploy on inflatable, rigid-hull boats. They are learning repackaged lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan, including countering IEDs, gathering intelligence, and marksmanship. “We’ve seen that enhanced training pay big dividends,” a senior U.S. officer says.

In fact, many African Union troops battling Shabaab militants in Somalia have been trained, equipped, and sustained by an international coalition led by the United States and coordinated through the State Department and CJTF-HOA. Last summer, for instance, Kenyan rangers trained by American Green Berets ran joint exercises with the Kenyan boat forces here. In September, armed with operational doctrine right out of the U.S. special forces handbook, they made an amphibious landing at the Somali port city of Kismayo and quickly routed Shabaab insurgents from their last urban stronghold—denying the terrorists a key port of resupply from the Arabian Peninsula.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, where U.S. officers honed the tactics they teach here (Baker did several combat tours in Iraq), Americans led the fight against terrorists and insurgents. But in Washington, policymakers are now focused on shaving budgets and bringing home troops. And, Baker says, “there are not a lot of governments who want a big U.S. military footprint in their countries.” So Pentagon strategists need a cheaper way to fight militant Islamists—many of them operating, unmolested, in Africa—who would unseat our allies or attack our homeland.

In Africa, they think they’ve found it. The call it the “train, assist, and enable” model, and they’re testing it on a large scale. The officials teach the counterterrorism lessons learned in the last decade to foreign militaries, empower them with U.S. capabilities such as intelligence-gathering, and then let the African militaries police their own backyards. “That doesn’t mean the United States will never again intervene militarily in another country with boots on the ground,” Baker says. “But the more proactive we are in engaging with foreign partners, and the more predictive we are in identifying common threats, the less likely a future U.S. intervention will be necessary.” U.S. officials here call this “African solutions to African problems.” Which is convenient, because borderless Islamist militants are also American problems. This model represents a new style of American war-fighting for an era of austerity. Call it leading from the shadows.

Obama and Karzai: Iraq redux?

James Kitfield, National Journal — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 15:26:14 -0500

When President Obama and Afghan President Hamid Karzai sit down to lunch at the White House tomorrow, they will attempt to hash out a workable separation agreement. The White House would like to withdraw as many of the remaining 68,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan as rapidly as possible between now and the end of 2014, and leave as few as necessary behind to continue supporting Afghan Security Forces and striking terrorist targets in the region. Karzai will argue for pledges of maximum U.S. monetary support for years to come, with minimal strings attached that might impinge on Afghan sovereignty and his own room to maneuver domestically. Both leaders will be driven towards hard-bargaining by publics that are bone-weary of the relationship and the conflict at its core.

Casting a pall over the lunch will be the painful example of Iraq. In that case both sides also attempted to negotiate the end to an unpopular war, and the presence of a residual U.S. force to help stabilize the country on its path towards democracy. Instead the talks broke down and U.S. forces withdrew completely at the end of 2011. Iraq has been beset by violence and mired in political stalemate ever since, even as the government in Baghdad has drifted closer towards Iran.

“I can easily see an Iraq-like deadlock in negotiations develop because the United States is already talking troop levels in a residual force of just a few thousand, which is so low as to prove unsupportable, and Karzai wants almost total control and Afghan ownership going forward because he believes both were unduly surrendered during the ’surge’ of U.S. forces,” said Paul Hamill, a former communications adviser to Karzai who is now chief executive officer of the American Security Project. “The danger is that if no agreement is reached for a substantive residual U.S. force, the U.S. Congress is unlikely to keep providing the resources that Afghanistan desperately needs.”

Already, the talks have stumbled over the same issue that tripped-up U.S.-Iraq negotiations: Afghan resistance to granting U.S. forces immunity from prosecution post-2014. After winning concessions from the United States in terms of Afghan authorities assuming control of most Afghan detainees and taking the lead in “night raids,” Karzai has balked at the idea of prosecutorial immunity for U.S. soldiers. Once again, U.S. officials say that is a red line they will not cross.

“As status of forces agreements do around the world where we have U.S. forces stationed on foreign soil, the bilateral security agreement [under discussion with Afghanistan] will establish jurisdictional arrangements to include immunities,” said Douglas Lute, deputy assistant to the president for Afghanistan, told reporters this week. “As we know from our Iraq experience, if there are no authorities granted by the sovereign state, then there is no room for a follow-on U.S. military mission.”

Even if an agreement is reached on a U.S. – Afghan status of forces agreement, there are myriad potential stumbling blocks to a smooth U.S. exit and transition of power in Afghanistan. Some experts believe a minimum U.S. force of up to 30,000 troops would be needed post-2014 to provide nascent Afghan Security Forces with critical enablers such as airlift, logistics, surveillance, command-and-control, medevac and long-range artillery. White House officials reportedly favor troop level options of between 10,000 and 3,000, and have insisted that a “zero option” is also on the table. Afghanistan will also hold critical presidential elections in 2014, in the midst of the NATO pullout. Charges of corruption during the last presidential election in 2009 plunged the country into crisis, and even though Karzai is banned from another term some experts believe he will try and prove kingmaker, with unpredictable results. Without Karzai’s well-established patronage system, it’s unclear that a new president will even be able to extend the federal government’s control beyond Kabul.

“There are both a security and a political transition underway in Afghanistan, and the latter is by far the more dangerous and uncertain,” said former ambassador to Afghanistan James Dobbins, an analyst for the RAND Corporation. “I don’t see the Afghan Army running away in 2014, but the Afghan government could certainly fail as the result of a botched transition.”

For those reasons, Dobbins believes tomorrow’s talks at the White House should be infused with a sense of urgency. “The Obama administration should avoid the situation that developed with Iraq, where we didn’t ask the Iraqis until very late in the process what kind of residual U.S. force they even wanted, which led to the failure of any agreement,” said Dobbins, speaking this week at the Atlantic Council in Washington. “Of course, the obstacle to the current talks is Karzai’s apparent desire to drive the hardest bargain possible, and some of his objectives are both undesirable and unreasonable.”

Hello guys – Perhaps the most agonizing foreign policy issue President Obama has faced is what to do about Afghanistan, the “war of necessity” he ran on in 2008. When he meets with Afghan President Hamid Karzai tomorrow, the discussion will center on the last two outstanding issues still to be decided about the country’s longest-ever war: how fast to withdraw the remaining 68,000 American troops between now and the end of next year, and what, if any, residual U.S. force to leave behind post-2014 to help support Afghan Security Forces and conduct counter-terrorism strikes? The body language of the Obama administration is to get out quick and leave as few troops behind as possible, but both decisions would add risk to an enterprise already stretching the limits of its margins of error.

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Analysis: The military knows it has a morality problem

James Kitfield, National Journal — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 09:35:30 -0500

National Journal. “We must be alert to even the perception that our Nation’s most senior officers have lost their way.”

If they want to take Dempsey’s question seriously, senior leaders should ask themselves: Have the exigencies of war fostered a rules-don’t-apply attitude of unquestioned privilege among the top ranks, corrupting a culture of high standards and accountability? Isn’t it remarkable that Petraeus and his successor as top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John R. Allen, were both ensnared in the same email scandal? (Allen denies wrongdoing.) Why did Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sinclair, a married former deputy commander of the 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan, become involved with five women (he is under investigation after being accused of adultery, sexual misconduct, and forcible sodomy)? Did colleagues of Col. James H. Johnson III, former commander of the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Iraq, know that he was involved in a bigamous relationship with an Iraqi woman, and that he was attempting to steer government contracts to her father? Why did Gen. William (Kip) Ward, the four-star head of Africa Command, deem it acceptable to take his wife and a large entourage on lavish government-paid trips before he was stripped of a star and ordered to repay $82,000 to the Treasury?

For that matter, what does it say about the evaluation and promotion system for senior leaders that the Navy has been forced to relieve 60 senior officers from command in the past three years (a 40 percent rise over the previous three-year period), including Rear Adm. Charles Gaouette, who was dismissed from his command of the Stennis aircraft carrier group for “inappropriate leadership judgment” while it was deployed to the Middle East?

The fact that so many of the elite -- the officers rigorously selected and groomed by the military -- have behaved so badly shows just how deep the rot is, says Don Snider, a senior fellow at West Point’s Center for the Army Profession and Ethic. “Moral corrosion has spread throughout the entire profession of arms as a result of a decade of war,” he says. “War … creates a culture where cutting corners ethically becomes the norm.” So much so that military leaders are willing to look the other way. “I can almost guarantee you that in each case of ill-discipline by a senior officer, other people in the command knew exactly what was going on and either didn’t say anything, or it didn’t matter what they said.”

The problem goes much deeper than high-profile cases such as the massacre of 17 Afghan civilians by a U.S. soldier earlier this year, the “sport killing” of three Afghan civilians last year by soldiers from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, or the torture and debasement of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Adm. Jonathan Greenert, chief of naval operations, says that his biggest concerns aren’t defense cuts or arsenal upgrades. He thinks the military must reverse what Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has called a “silent epidemic” of sexual assault in the ranks. According to the Veterans Affairs Department, one in five women report sexual trauma during their service. The admiral says that his second priority is coping with a military suicide rate that is up 22 percent over last year and may reach as high as one death per day this year.

Military sociologists and clinicians worry that the suicide rate is just the leading indicator of a tide of mental and physical suffering. This includes unacceptably high rates of substance abuse (binge drinking among service members ages 18 to 35 is 50 percent higher than among civilians, and, in surveys, up to one in four Army soldiers admit they abuse prescription drugs); divorce (the military divorce rate rose 38 percent from 2001 to 2010); and depression and posttraumatic stress disorder (a 2008 Rand survey found that one in five veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan -- some 300,000 people -- are suffering either from major depression or PTSD).

Prolonged exposure to combat triggers such intense emotions -- fear, revulsion, regret, sadness, grief, survivor’s guilt -- that some psychiatrists at the VA have coined a new name for the malady: “moral injury.” All of this threatens “to impede the reintegration into society of a whole generation of veterans,” says David Segal, a sociologist who directs the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland.

In response to the recent scandals, Dempsey has completed an initial review of ethical standards in the senior ranks. The findings are serious enough that he is creating a panel on “professional ethics,” which will include respected retired generals and academic experts. Its first order of business should be to consider whether the “moral injury” that so obviously afflicts the rank and file has spread to the military’s top echelon, and to the institution writ large.]]>

Analysis: The path to war with Iran

James Kitfield, National Journal — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 14:09:46 -0400

Declaring that an Iranian nuclear weapon would be intolerable to Israel and run counter to U.S. security, Obama offered Tehran a stark choice: The regime could abandon its suspected nuclear weapons program and “choose a path that brings them back into the community of nations, or they can continue down a dead end,” said Obama, who then went further than any U.S. president had in describing what lay at the end of that road. “Iran’s leaders should understand that I do not have a policy of containment; I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. And as I have made clear time and again during the course of my presidency, I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests.”

In a stroke, Obama took off the table the policy of “containment” and deterrence of a new nuclear power that the United States adopted in response to the Soviet Union, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea all crossing the nuclear threshold. Either Tehran would have to abandon its suspected nuclear weapons program, or the president was all but pledging a preventive war to destroy it. Seemingly disparate headlines of recent weeks—increasingly frenetic shuttle diplomacy to try and restart stalled talks with Iran over its nuclear program; an unusually public spat between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over “red lines”; the deployment of the largest U.S. naval armada to the Persian Gulf in years, to include two aircraft carrier battle groups—are all indications that Iran continues to hurtle down that dead end.

On Friday evening, the Senate passed a resolution, cosponsored by more than three-fourths of the chamber, ruling out a strategy of containment in response to Iran's nuclear program.

Dennis Ross was a former special adviser to Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Iran from 2009 to 2011. “Once President Obama made the decision that his objective was preventing Iran from getting a bomb, that put us in a different place diplomatically, because once diplomacy fails you really have no choice but to act,” Ross said on Friday in a conference at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Obama doesn’t make impulsive decisions. There was a debate within the administration over prevention versus containment, and he made a very well-thought-through decision to adopt prevention. And as someone who has watched him in action in the national-security arena, I take his decision very seriously. There’s no question President Obama wants to give diplomacy every chance of working, but there is also no doubt in my mind that if diplomacy fails he is prepared to use force.”

The problem is that the diplomacy surrounding Iran’s nuclear program is failing, despite international isolation and crippling sanctions that have caused the Iranian currency to plummet in value. That failure was evident in a late August report by the United Nations nuclear watchdog. The International Atomic Energy Agency said that Iran had doubled the number of centrifuges enriching uranium at an underground facility protected from airborne attack, and had blocked the agency from inspecting a site where previous weapons-development work is suspected.

Last week, European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton met with Iran's head nuclear negotiator to try and restart stalled talks, and to express serious concern that Iran is accelerating its suspected nuclear weapons program. Ashton is expected to deliver her findings to the P-5 Plus One (the United States, France, Britain, China, Russia, and Germany) this week at the U.N. General Assembly meetings in New York.

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s recent outburst against the Obama administration reveals the sense of urgency Israel feels as Iran continues to bury more centrifuges deeper underground, entering a “zone of immunity” from Israeli airstrikes. “The world tells Israel: ‘Wait, there is still time.’ Wait until when? Those in the international community who refuse to put red lines before Iran don’t have the moral right to place a red line before Israel.”

After Netanyahu’s comments caused a diplomatic dustup, he held an hour-long, private phone conversation with Obama that Ross characterized as very serious. Both sides narrowed differences, he said, over how long diplomacy should be given to work, whether some sort of ultimatum should be delivered to Iran to bring talks to a head, and at what point Iran’s program crosses a “red line” that might prompt Israel or the United States to strike.

An Iranian nuclear weapon is seen as an existential threat by Israeli leaders, none of whom believe “containment” of a nuclear-armed Iran is feasible, said David Makovsky, an Israel expert and senior fellow at the Washington Institute. Hard-wired into the Israeli DNA is an ethos of self-reliance, he noted, and an instinctive suspicion of security guarantees given by the international community, or for that matter by the United States.

“The debate in Israel at the elite policy level is not about American capabilities, but about American resolve if diplomacy and sanctions fail,” he said. “It’s no secret that Israel would prefer if the United States was involved in a military strike, not only because it would be more effective, but also because Washington would be critical in maintaining sanctions on Iran even after a strike.”

As Washington and Jerusalem try and synchronize their timeline for action, Israel will be under intense pressure by the Obama administration to stay its hand and give diplomacy time to work. The Obama administration, or for that matter a Mitt Romney administration, will be under intense pressure from Israel to either green light an Israeli strike that would almost certainly draw U.S. forces into the conflict, or else specify as clearly as possible what “red line” would prompt the United States to fulfill Obama’s pledge and launch its own strike.

“Israel and the Obama administration are already deeply involved in a wide-ranging campaign of cyberattacks and sabotage against Iran’s nuclear program,” said Patrick Clawson, an Iran expert and director of research at the Washington Institute. Coming up with a final offer that gives Iran what it says it wants in terms of a civilian nuclear program might be useful in clarifying the situation, he said, “because right now we are headed towards war.” ]]>

Defense Department struggles to deal with sexual assaults

James Kitfield — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 15:39:23 -0400

LACKLAND AIR FORCE BASE, Texas -- Every Friday, on a grassy parade ground ringed by vintage warplanes, a freshly minted class of airmen takes the oath of duty and is officially “welcomed into the blue.” Young men and women who arrived at basic training as confused and frightened individuals seven weeks earlier march by the reviewing stand in precise formation. Nowhere is the U.S. military’s unique alchemy -- turning unformed young citizens into a warrior fraternity—on clearer display.

After the ceremony, families wander around Lackland in clusters, visiting dorms where every bed and closet is organized according to strict military specification. In the mess hall, the voices of military training instructors rise above the din, shouting at trainees one moment and commending them the next—the instructors serving as mentors, role models, and even parental figures. “I constantly remind my trainers that they are the most influential person in a trainee’s life, and they must embody our core values,” said Master Sgt. Greg Pendleton, commandant of the military training instructors at Lackland. If the MTI’s fail to instill in trainees a willingness to sacrifice self for the good of the unit and submit to unquestioned authority, they will have made the Air Force weaker, not stronger. “That’s why what’s happened here as a result of some bad apples is so disheartening,” Pendleton said. “The training corps is better than that.”

What happened is this: One instructor has been convicted of rape and multiple cases of aggravated sexual assault of female trainees, and 16 other trainers have been charged or are under investigations for crimes ranging from aggravated sexual assault to improper sexual relationships with 42 female trainees.

That places Lackland atop an infamous list of military sexual-abuse scandals, including the Navy’s Tailhook convention in Las Vegas in 1991 (83 female and seven male victims of sexual assault by more than 100 Navy and Marine Corps aviation officers); the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in 1996 (12 Army officers charged with sexually assaulting female trainees); the Air Force Academy in 2003 (12 percent of female graduates reported having been victims of rape or attempted rape, and 70 percent said they had been sexually harassed); and the Marine Barracks in Washington in recent years, where the documentary The Invisible War interviewed five female Marines who reported having been raped (the Corps investigated and disciplined four of the women after they reported the rapes but punished none of the accused officers).

Two days after seeing The Invisible War, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta directed commanders to elevate all sexual-assault investigations to a reviewing authority headed by a higher-ranking colonel. He also began creating “special-victim units” in each branch. It was a start.

But the most alarming aspect of the Lackland story is its predictability, because the very values Pendleton is trying to inculcate (obedience, self-sacrifice, stoicism in the face of deprivation) are the ones that predators exploit in these scandals. The Defense Department’s own data suggest that, far from representing an isolated incident, Lackland is just the latest outbreak of what Panetta has called a “silent epidemic” of sexual assault in the ranks. Based on the Pentagon’s most recent survey on the issue in 2010, the epidemic affects more than 19,000 victims each year. Meanwhile, according to annual Veterans Affairs Department surveys, 20 percent of female veterans screen positive for “military sexual trauma,” as do 1 percent of male veterans—many of them victims of male-on-male rape. Cumulatively, the data suggest that hundreds of thousands of current and former members of the military have been raped, sexually assaulted, or subjected to “unwanted” sexual contact. In 2010 alone, the VA conducted nearly 700,000 free outpatient counseling sessions to veterans suffering from military sexual trauma.

And the military-justice system has failed to check that epidemic. Persistent, corroborated accounts (by victims and sex-crimes experts) describe a command climate that tends to cast suspicion and blame on victims. Too often, the system treats reports of rape and sexual assault not as heinous crimes to be prosecuted harshly but as unwanted distractions from “good order and discipline” to be dealt with, hastily, at the lowest command level. Frequently, this means simply transferring or demoting suspected perpetrators for “sexual harassment” and referring distraught victims to uniformed mental-health experts who diagnose them with “personality disorders” and help wash them out of the military.

A decade of conflict has almost certainly exacerbated the scourge. The Army had to relax its recruitment standards to fill the ranks at the height of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and an anonymous 2008 survey by the Naval Health Research Center reported that as many as 15 percent of incoming recruits had either committed or attempted rape before entering the military—twice the rate of their civilian cohorts. Counterinsurgency warfare also placed service members in a high-stress/low-oversight environment that was tailor-made for sexual predators: 25 percent of women and 27 percent of men who claimed “unwanted sexual contact” said that the assaults occurred in combat zones. Army investigators received increased reports of combat-theater rapes only after units returned to their home bases, where victims felt safer to report the assaults. (Of more than 130 women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, nearly 40 percent died of “noncombat-related” injuries, often gunshots. Some were suicides, but others occurred under suspicious circumstances. A number of the deaths came after the women reported being raped.) “About half the women we see with military sexual trauma also have trauma from combat exposure,” said Deleene Menefee, a psychologist at the VA’s medical center in Houston. “On top of taking fire from the enemy outside the gates, they’ve had to cope with the trauma and fear of being attacked by the enemy from within.”

Read the full story, "The Enemy Within," at NationalJournal.com

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Afghanistan: Eyeing the exits

James Kitfield, National Journal — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 09:57:00 -0400

In late May, for instance, Lt. Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, the second-in-command in Afghanistan, told NPR: “Personally, I would like to stay at 68,000 through the first part of [2013], and then again we’ll make an assessment.” The top commander, Gen. John Allen, told the Senate Armed Services in March, “Sixty-eight thousand is a good going in number, but I owe the president some analysis on that.”

U.S. commanders are angling for maximum force levels because, in their view, the situation in Afghanistan is already reaching its maximum in risk tolerances. “In terms of the mission, the main risk we face is not finishing the work of clearing the Haqqani network from areas in the east that are very close to Kabul,” said Lt. Gen. Dan Allyn, until recently the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan’s Regional Command East, speaking on Thursday at the Institute for the Study of War in Washington. If the United States keeps the remaining 68,000 troops in-country through next year’s fighting season, it can finish that job, he said. Otherwise U.S. commanders will have to hand the burden to Afghan Security Forces that are still struggling to stand on their own. “That’s not an insignificant risk,” he said.

If history is any judge, however, the generals may not get their wish for a pause in troop withdrawals. The White House is reportedly considering a plan backed by National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon to pull 10,000 more troops out by the end of December, for instance, and then 10,000 to 20,000 more by next June.

“I’m very concerned, because the track record of our generals getting their way on troop levels is not good,” said retired Gen. John “Jack” Keane, the former vice chief of staff of the Army and an architect of the Iraq surge, also speaking at the Institute for the Study of War. The last U.S. commander in Iraq wanted to maintain a residual force of roughly 20,000 troops, he noted, and got zero. U.S. commanders likewise requested an Afghan surge of 40,000 to 60,000 troops, and had to settle for 30,000. U.S. commanders wanted those surge forces to remain in Afghanistan through 2013, a request that was also rejected when the September 2012 deadline was set for their withdrawal. “So I hope General John wins the argument about keeping the current level of forces in place, but if he does, it will be the first time one of our generals won an argument on force levels,” Keane said. “I think the national-security team will do what they can to reduce the number.”

Talk of an accelerated withdrawal comes even as some NATO planners are proposing that the Afghan Security Forces be reduced from 352,000 to 230,000 after 2015, as a way to save $2 billion a year in international funding. “So now we are talking about pulling 100,000 NATO troops out of Afghanistan and shrinking Afghan forces by 100,000 plus, even as we leave in place these sanctuaries for Taliban insurgents inside Pakistan,” Keane said. “I think that will bring the Afghan mission to the brink of failure.”]]>

WikiLeaks' collateral damage

James Kitfield — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500

"All this stuff has been leaked," attorney David Coombs said. "A year and a half later, where's the danger? Where's the harm?"

Manning may well be the misguided young idealist who allegedly told an acquaintance in an Internet chat room that he just wanted "people to see the truth." He may have sensed a kindred soul in WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has likewise defended the benefits of exposing the inner workings of the Pentagon and State Department to a little sunlight, no harm, no foul. Leaked cables from the U.S. Embassy in Tunisia detailing the corruption and lavish lifestyle of the ruling family may even have added fuel to the spark that became the Arab Spring, as some Tunisian demonstrators have argued.

Whether you see Manning and Assange as heroic whistleblowers or traitors, however, the argument that they caused no harm is dubious. In fact, the WikiLeaks episode is one of those rare cases from which almost no player has escaped unscathed.

Consider the case of "Arturo" (not his real name), a dissident from a very authoritarian country which has strained relations with Washington. When a classified State Department cable detailing a conversation he had with an American diplomat was published by WikiLeaks, Arturo was outed in the state-controlled media as a collaborator or possible spy for the United States. And just like that, Arturo is a man without a country.

"If you told me that an informal 20-minute conversation with an American diplomat would be detailed in a classified State Department cable and made accessible to a young soldier in Baghdad, who would give it to WikiLeaks to publish to the entire world, I would have thought you were describing the plot of a bad Hollywood movie," said Arturo, who has sought asylum in the West. "Yet here I am, caught in this madness because of the U.S. State Department's error and the recklessness of WikiLeaks, unable to return home to my family."

Certainly the U.S. military has been impacted by l'affaire WikiLeaks. The Pentagon has been forced to explain why it allegedly made hundreds of thousands of classified State Department cables accessible to a young private first class barely out of high school, and to clamp down on the access to intelligence by frontline troops.

"The Manning case has presented us with a difficult conundrum, because the power of the intelligence and analytical work we do is a function of our access to information," said a senior U.S. military officer who was directly in Manning's chain of command. "That access comes with a certain amount of risk, though, and in this case an unscrupulous individual used it to cause us harm. The danger is that we overcorrect, however, and so compartmentalize information access that we affect our ability to leverage intelligence-based analysis, which is one of our strengths."

The collateral damage of the WikiLeaks episode has also impacted the State Department and its relations with foreign governments. Foreign officials now know that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton ordered U.S. diplomats to act almost as spies, collecting personal information on them to include credit card data, frequent-flier numbers and even biometric information. In meetings in Moscow and Paris, U.S. diplomats are in the uncomfortable position of having referred to Vladimir Putin as "alpha dog" and Nicholas Sarkozy as "the emperor with no clothes." Diplomats also have to convince foreign officials that this time, really, they can keep a private conversation private.

"Diplomacy is a combination of open and confidential communication, and by betraying confidences that people shared with the U.S. government, those leaked cables hurt our credibility," said Nicholas Burns, professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Politics at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "As a former diplomat, I strongly believe that the WikiLeaks case has been a heavy blow to the conduct of successful diplomacy, and thus injurious to U.S. national security."

The Fourth Estate has also come under uncomfortable scrutiny as a result of the WikiLeaks case. Though a number of media outlets sought to redact names from the leaked cables that could endanger the individuals involved, generally the media acted as a willing conduit for whatever secrets WikiLeaks was willing to expose, without questioning the motives of the source.

"I think WikiLeaks challenged professional journalistic ethics, because to take information from a prejudiced source whose primary intent is simply to embarrass governments in general, and the U.S. government in particular, and to distribute that as widely as possible is not providing a great service to the public," said Marvin Kalb, the longtime CBS newsman who currently focuses on the impact of media on public policy as a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. "Given the motivation of the source, as an editor I would have thought long and hard about simply passing that information along."

Ironically, the U.S. military's throwing the book at Bradley Manning for allegedly "aiding the enemy" and violating the Espionage Act could also have the collateral effect of discouraging future whistleblowers and stemming the critical flow of information between official Washington and the media. Though the Army has said it will not seek the death penalty, the 23-year-old Manning could face a life sentence if convicted.

Stephen Aftergood is a specialist in government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. "I think the whole WikiLeaks episode is a setback for the cause of open government, because it has triggered a predictable tightening of control on government information, and greater internal surveillance of classified networks," he said. "The next would-be 'leaker' will face a much tougher challenge, which is regrettable because some leaks of classified information really do serve the public interest."

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Senate minority leader accuses Justice of misleading Congress

James Kitfield — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500

The operation was a secret program run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms that allowed weapons to fall into the hands of drug cartels in Mexico, in hopes that they could be traced. Some of the weapons were found at the crime scene in the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Arizona.

At a House hearing last week, Republican lawmakers accused Attorney General Eric Holder of withholding key evidence in the case, such as emails, and of heavily redacting the documents it did provide. Despite Holder's contention that he is awaiting the results of an inspector general's investigation into the case before handing over some documents. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., a former chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, threatened possible impeachment proceedings, though he declined to specify against whom.

McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, added to the rhetorical pressure on the Justice Department on Sunday. "We do believe [the Justice Department] is misleading Congress. I don't know what they are hiding, but we have asked for information, and they are stonewalling us," McConnell said on Fox News Sunday.

When asked whether the Justice Department was knowingly misleading Congress, and whether he would call for resignations, McConnell was noncommittal. "I'm not calling on any one's resignation today, but I am calling on them to be more forthcoming with strait answers," he said. "I don't know if it's `knowingly,' or not, but I don't believe they have been particularly truthful to Congress.

"I know that [Justice Criminal Division head Lanny Brueur] has misled Congress," he said. "So what are they hiding? I understand this might be embarrassing, but misleading Congress is not the way to go."

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Iran containment strategy cast in doubt

James Kitfield — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

If it proves true, Tuesday's announcement by senior Obama administration officials that the Quds Force -- the elite special-operations unit of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard -- was linked to a plot to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States in Washington, D.C., and subsequently bomb the Saudi and Israeli embassies here, clearly crossed a post-9/11 redline.

Attorney General Eric Holder announced the arrest of one naturalized U.S. citizen and the warrant for an Iranian at large for conspiring to bomb and kill Saudi Arabian Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir and allegedly planning to blow up the two embassies.

The plot was "sponsored and ... directed from Iran and constitutes a flagrant violation of U.S. and international law," Holder said at a news conference. "The U.S. is committed to holding Iran accountable for its actions," he said.

A Tehran willing to engage in such high-risk behavior defies the "rational actor" presumption that lies at the heart of nuclear deterrence. In Washington, Riyadh, and Jerusalem, governments are reconsidering their Iranian strategies and recalibrating their "acceptable risk" calculations relating to Iran's nuclear program.

"State-sponsored terrorism is not new territory for Iran, which in the past has been guilty of assassinating Iranian dissidents in Europe and directing terrorist bombings in Argentina in the 1990s and against U.S. forces in Lebanon in the early 1980s," said Brian Michael Jenkins, a longtime terrorist expert at the RAND Corporation. "But if the Quds Force is truly behind this latest plot, it has raised the stakes into a totally different category by plotting attacks on U.S. soil. An Iranian government that is willing to take that kind of risk is pretty close to reckless, and that raises serious questions about how they would act with nuclear weapons."

Washington has arguably not witnessed such an act of state-sponsored terrorism since 1976, when Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet ordered the assassination of former Chilean official Orlando Letelier, who was killed in a car-bomb explosion in the capital. The risk of direct U.S. military retaliation is also inherent in such terrorist plots. When Libyan agents bombed a disco in Germany frequented by U.S. service members in 1986, for instance, President Ronald Reagan sent long-range bombers to Tripoli. Bill Clinton responded to al-Qaida attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 with cruise-missile strikes on terrorist facilities. In the post-9/11 era, it has been understood that a state-sponsored terrorist attack on the United States would be considered paramount to an act of war.

"Iran has been in a tense showdown with Saudi Arabia, and it has been simultaneously emboldened by the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq and frightened by the Arab Spring democracy movement that has destabilized its ally Syria," said Daniel Byman, a counterterrorism and Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution. "Given that Iran has historically approved such Quds Force operations at a very high level, if the plot is true, it may suggest that all those forces and pressures are making Tehran much more risk tolerant."

One possible explanation is an increasingly tense power struggle inside Tehran between Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Given that he is losing that battle, a desperate Ahmadinejad could conceivably believe that provoking an attack by the United States could allow him to consolidate power as the defender of Iran against "the Great Satan." But even given Ahmadinejad's history as a firebrand and ideologue, the plot to launch multiple bombings in Washington at this time seems uncharacteristically reckless.

Robert Baer is a counterterrorism and Iran expert formerly with the CIA. "The Quds Force has never been this sloppy, using untested proxies, contracting with Mexican drug cartels, sending money through New York bank accounts, and putting its agents on U.S. soil where they risk being caught. It reads more like a Hollywood script than an actual Quds plot," he said in an interview. "I'm sure the administration is acting on solid evidence, and possibly this is the work of some rogue element of the Quds Force that for some reason is intent on embarrassing Tehran. But something doesn't add up. The Quds Force is simply better than this."

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Domestic policy in Washington, Baghdad at play in troop-level decision

James Kitfield — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400

For its part, the White House is determined to fulfill President Obama's pledge to finally end an unpopular and costly war in Iraq and begin "nation building at home." In Baghdad's Green Zone, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has apparently concluded that coalition politics at home and the unpopularity of an eight-year occupation block him from requesting in public the continued U.S. presence he knows Iraq needs.

The result is heightened risk that the democratic transition both nations have staked so much blood and treasure on could fail at the finish line.

The Iraqis had indicated that they might have been willing to accept 10,000 residual U.S. forces, a senior U.S. military official with extensive experience in Iraq told National Journal. The smaller number seems to have been based on "very little analysis of the actual mission requirements," he said, adding that the final decision on U.S. troop levels will be carefully watched by two key constituencies -- the Iranian government and the Iraqi people.

A smaller military presence will have Iraqis bending to Iranian pressure, the official claimed, warning against "unintended messages" with this troop decision.

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta insists that no final decision has been made on U.S. troop levels after the current status of forces agreement with Iraq expires at the end of December. As they have for many months, U.S. officials continue to insist that the ball is in Baghdad's court, and they await a request from Iraq on the desired level of U.S. forces. With the clock now winding down on withdrawing the remaining forces, however, Panetta reportedly supports the White House preference for only a few thousand troops remaining. That runs counter to a reported proposal by Gen. Lloyd Austin III, the senior commander in Iraq, for a continued presence of between 14,000 to 18,000 U.S. troops.

"Would it be desirable for the U.S. to have 14,000 to 18,000 troops in Iraq next year to deter Iran, help Iraqi security forces intervene against critical threats from terrorists or insurgents, to conduct counterterrorism raids, and to help man checkpoints along the tense northern border between Kurds and Arabs? Yes, all of that would have been desirable," said Anthony Cordesman, a strategic analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "Unfortunately, for 18 months, U.S. and Iraqi officials have tried to reach a strategic framework agreement that would spell out the continuing U.S. presence, and they have failed because no Iraqi politician can be seen openly inviting a big U.S. force to remain in their country."

The Obama administration has given no indication of which missions might fall by the wayside if the decision is made to leave only 3,000 to 4,000 troops in Iraq. U.S. forces could continue to help deter Iran with fixed-wing airpower from an air base in Kuwait and from aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf, for instance, and the State Department is already scheduled to assume responsibility for training Iraqi police forces. Even at the lower force levels, the U.S. military could conceivably follow through with plans to establish three training centers to provide sustainment training for Iraqi army battalions, senior military sources say, and to jointly conduct targeted counterterrorism operations with Iraqi Special Forces units.

But military officials say a smaller presence couldn't adequately protect State Department or U.S. Agency for International Development missions, claiming that one brigade combat team would be enough to protect either one of them but not both.

Even if a residual U.S. force provided training to the Iraqi military, and the State Department relied on private contractors to provide security for the largest embassy compound and diplomatic footprint in the world, U.S. troops could not continue to patrol the ethnic divides inside Iraq between Kurds and Arabs, Sunnis and Shiite. Yet it was tensions along those ethnic and sectarian fault-lines that nearly plunged the country into civil war in 2007.

"The most important missions you forgo at the lower troop levels are the confidence-building measures that U.S. forces routinely undertook, which offered psychological assurances to the Iraqis just by virtue of our troops being there," said Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow and defense analyst at the Brookings Institution. "There are a lot of nefarious forces and extremism still at work in Iraqi politics and society and lingering ethnic tensions. At lower U.S. troop levels, I think there's at least a moderate risk that events could spin out of control and once again lead to civil war."

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Deficit debate drags military into political fray

James Kitfield — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The Pentagon is understandably nervous that the congressional deficit-reduction super committee will deadlock in November or its compromise deal will be voted down, automatically triggering as much as $1 trillion in cuts to defense spending over the next decade.

Defense hawks who could traditionally be counted on to protect the military's interests are in relatively short supply on the committee, revealing a growing rift between pro-defense and anti-tax advocates in the Republican Party and the focus of a more liberal Democratic caucus on protecting entitlements. Meanwhile, by forcing uniformed leaders to plead for a preferred outcome to the impasse, lawmakers have dragged the U.S. military into the middle of a partisan political argument, ground from which it rarely emerges unscathed.

In unusually blunt terms, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mike Mullen argued recently that the automatic trigger would essentially amount to shooting the hostage.

"The chiefs are gratified that an agreement was struck to raise the debt ceiling, and we believe the terms of that deal are, at least in the near term, reasonable and fair with respect to future cuts," Mullen said at an August 4 press conference, referring to roughly $400 billion in cuts over 10 years already contained in the initial debt-ceiling deal. "But the chiefs, to a one, share a concern about the devastating impact of further automatic cuts should the Congress fail to enact additional deficit-reduction measures.… We've looked into that abyss, if you will, and it is the service chiefs' view that it is very dangerous for the country."

With all 12 lawmakers now named to the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, however, some experts are giving even odds to the possibility of a deadlock that triggers the automatic cuts. Despite including a number of lawmakers supportive of a strong national defense, the committee is weighted more toward anti-tax Republicans and Democratic defenders of entitlement programs than toward reliable "defense hawks."

As the scope of the automatic cuts becomes clearer in the months ahead, however, they are likely to cause unease among both Democrats and Republicans. As commander in chief, Barack Obama has fought hard to shield his administration and party from criticisms that they are "soft on defense," for instance, a charge that could gain resonance in an election season if the automatic trigger on cuts is pulled.

"I think the debt deal contains a poison pill for both parties, because I don't think Democrats can afford to be indifferent to automatic cuts that would gut national defense and possibly impact the paychecks and health care of thousands of troops on their fourth or fifth combat deployments," said retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, a former commander of U.S. Southern Command. "The whole deal is a sham exercise by a Congress that has proven incapable of the compromises necessary to do its job and provide for the national defense."

Certainly, congressional Republicans will be put into an increasingly awkward position in the coming months. Ever since Ronald Reagan's peacetime defense buildup in the early 1980s reversed the "hollow force" legacy of Jimmy Carter, the Republican Party has built its brand on a platform of low taxes and a strong defense. As it emerged in the last moments before an unprecedented national default, the debt-ceiling deal seems configured to force Republicans into a Sophie's Choice between the two. Understanding this, the Republican chairmen of the House Armed Services, Budget and Defense Appropriations panels sent a letter to the White House last week demanding that the administration spell out the national security implications of the automatic cuts.

"President Obama is trying to frame this debate as a choice between tax hikes or massive defense cuts, because he knows that conservatives hate both and thus might blink," James Carafano, a defense analyst with the conservative Heritage Foundation, told National Journal. "Conservatives aren't stupid. They know exactly what the administration is trying to do. However, I'm not sure what the Republicans' super-secret plan is for trying to thread this needle."

Absent such a plan, there is plenty of recent evidence suggesting that Republicans on the super committee might not blink on tax revenues, triggering the across-the-board cuts aimed disproportionately at the Pentagon. That's in keeping with the view of experts who say that the anti-tax and pro-defense planks in the Republican platform were never equally weighted.

"I remember talking to [former Republican House Speaker] Newt Gingrich during the 1990s Republican Revolution, and I asked him whether the party was more supportive of tax cuts or a strong national defense, and he didn't hesitate to say `tax cuts,'" said Richard Kohn, professor emeritus of history and peace, war and defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "And that was a dozen years ago, before anyone heard of a tea party that now probably outnumbers defense hawks two-to-one in the Republican Party."

Loren Thompson is president of the Lexington Institute, a defense consulting firm. "The Republicans named to the super committee are a perfect illustration of the growing fissure in the national party between the anti-tax and pro-defense wings, because on the one hand you have a reliable defense hawk like Senator Jon Kyl [R-Ariz.], and on the other you have an anti-tax stalwart like Senator Patrick Toomey [R-Pa.]," he told National Journal. The Defense Department's problem is that the energy in the Republican caucus has shifted towards the tea party's anti-tax positions, he said, even as a more liberal Democratic caucus is focused like a laser on defending threatened entitlement programs. "That's why my gut feeling tells me this deal was thrown together quickly, and that few members of Congress even grasp how massive the cuts will be on the Pentagon if sequestration is triggered."

Holding the Pentagon hostage to an eventual bipartisan debt agreement holds other risks. Such brinksmanship drags the U.S. military squarely into the middle of a hyper-partisan political argument, for instance, a no-win position for an institution that relies on the support of both parties. "I think military leaders can publicly state the case that sequestration is incompatible with even the minimal requirements of our national defense, period. That would be proper and useful," said Michael O'Hanlon, a defense analyst with the Brookings Institution. "If they venture into describing what that deal looks like or sketch out its parameters, however, that crosses over the line."

Yet as the Thanksgiving deadline approaches, U.S. military leaders will have little choice but to echo and amplify Adm. Mullen's warning that compromise is essential and triggering across-the-board cuts out of the question. Republicans might construe that as public pressure to raise taxes, and they will be right. That's why negotiators have long considered hostage standoffs a worst-case scenario: They are unpredictable by nature, typically a sign of desperation, and the hostages often end up as collateral damage regardless of the eventual outcome.

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General gives upbeat assessment of progress in Afghanistan

James Kitfield — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0500

KABUL, Afghanistan -- On the eve of a long-anticipated review of Afghan war strategy, Defense Secretary Robert Gates met here Tuesday with his wartime commander, who gave a relatively upbeat assessment of the war effort.

Army Gen. David Petraeus reported that U.S. and allied forces had not only arrested the momentum of the Taliban in many parts of the country, but had also reversed it in important areas, including Helmand Province and the region around the former insurgent stronghold of Kandahar.

Next year, the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Forces in Afghanistan also plan to begin transitioning control of key areas to Afghan security forces, to include the capital.

"We've made important progress in recent months, both on the ground and psychologically, because we've demonstrated that ISAF and Afghan security forces can take away areas that mean a great deal to the Taliban," Petraeus told reporters.

His assessment appeared to counter the impression he left Monday on ABC's Good Morning America, when he declined to express confidence that the White House goal of withdrawing from Afghanistan in 2014 would be met. "I think no commander ever is going to come out and say, 'I'm confident that we can do this,'" he said on the program.

"But again, I don't think there are any sure things in this kind of endeavor," he added. "And I wouldn't be honest with you and with the viewers if I didn't convey that."

Tuesday, Petraeus said the "counterinsurgency math" was finally beginning to add up. Increasing the size of allied forces by 80,000 troops in the past two years, tripling the number of U.S. civilians deployed in Afghanistan, and expanding the size of Afghan security forces -- which are on track to reach 304,000 by November 2011 -- are making the difference, he said.

"But clearly the Taliban still has freedom of movement and arguably momentum in some areas, so there's a lot of work that remains to be done," he said.

The four-star general acknowledged that the progress to date has been purchased at high cost, with 2010 representing the deadliest year of the war in terms of U.S. casualties.

"All of these operations have been really hard-fought, with some really tough casualties," he said. "The enemy will fight when you take away something that matters to him."

Perhaps the most welcome recent development was the declaration at NATO's recent summit in Lisbon, Portugal, that the alliance would turn over security responsibilities for the entire country to Afghan forces by the end of 2014, quelling concerns that had been raised by President Obama's July 2011 deadline to "begin" withdrawing U.S. forces.

"The importance of NATO heads of state accepting the goal of Afghan forces assuming the lead in operations throughout the country by the end of 2014 can't be overstated," said Petraeus.

"I was in a remote Afghan village recently, and all of the elders had already gotten the message about 2014, and that commitment meant a great deal to them," he added. "They saw it as the international community pledging to stay with them in this tough fight through 2014, with the character of our support changing as Afghan forces step forward."

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Master of disaster reflects on Deepwater Horizon's enduring lessons

James Kitfield — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

At some point in the next week, BP will likely initiate the "bottom kill" procedure that permanently plugs the Macondo well, bringing to an end the worst maritime oil spill in American history. No more 24/7 video of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. No more weekly tutorials on the intricacies of deepwater oil drilling. No more sludge cloud shadowing the Obama administration's every move in the 2010 summer of discontent. Now only the clean-up and long-term repercussions remain to sort out.

Perhaps no one has a better first-hand grasp of the Deepwater Horizon disaster than retired Adm. Thad Allen, the national incident commander who also coordinated the federal response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Recently, National Journal spoke with Allen about lessons learned from the crisis and federal response, and how they might affect future policy. Edited excerpts from that interview follow.

NJ: How do you respond to critics who say the federal government's response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster was too slow given the magnitude of the problem?

Allen: Look at the actual timeline. The explosion on the Deepwater Horizon occurred on April 20th. As commandant of the Coast Guard, I got a call just before midnight that there was an uncontrolled fire on a rig in the gulf, with an unknown number of people killed and injured. That night the Coast Guard evacuated a lot of people from the site of the explosion, and we launched a two-day search for the 11 workers who were never found, even as we moved lots of equipment towards the site. Then, early in the afternoon on April 22nd, the entire rig collapsed and sunk. Hours after the rig sunk, I was in the Oval Office along with [Homeland Security Secretary Janet] Napolitano, briefing President Obama on our initial response. So I don't buy the argument that we were slow in responding. I certainly didn't lean back in the saddle.

NJ: Did you immediately understand the severity of the crisis?

Allen: As events unfolded, the enormity of the problem started revealing itself. We weren't dealing with a single, monolithic oil slick like the 11 million gallons that spilled from the Exxon Valdez. This was an uncontrolled discharge, with 53,000 barrels each day spewing in different directions depending on the prevailing winds and currents, creating hundreds of thousands of separate oil slicks. The United States had never dealt with that situation before. Very quickly we were forced to spread our assets from the southern Louisiana coast to the Florida panhandle. That's when we realized that the required response was going to dwarf what was anticipated in BP's response plan.

NJ: Why did response plans seem so outdated and inadequate to the magnitude of the crisis?

Allen: Basically because oil spill response is all predicated on the lessons of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster. The legislation that came out of that disaster focused on tanker safety and phasing out single-hull oil tankers, on making sure the party responsible for the disaster meets its liability requirements, and on cleanup as directed by the Oil Pollution Act. That was the regulatory scheme established for responding to oil spills.

However, in the 10 years after that accident, while we were primarily focused on the safety of tankers and the Alaska pipeline, oil drilling was moving offshore and going deeper underwater. So the technology changed, and the overall response structure didn't keep pace with those changes and the emerging threat. You could say the same thing about Coast Guard inspection regimes, which we are in the process of rethinking. Right now, for instance, the Coast Guard is not required to approve a company's oil spill response plan, because that goes through the Minerals Management Service. I suspect that will change in the future.

NJ: Given that BP seemed so culpable in causing the disaster, did it make sense that the company also had such a prominent -- some would say dominant -- role in the cleanup effort?

Allen: Well, in the regulatory regime created after the Exxon Valdez, BP was the "responsible party" in both statute and regulation, which meant that it had to bear the costs associated with the spill. For that to happen, however, we had to bring them into the command structure to write the checks for everything from boom to catering. As the "responsible party," BP was also required to have contractors in place to clean up the spill, while the government had oversight over that operation. The public didn't understand that arrangement very well. The notion of BP having such a key role in the response after seeming to cause the problem understandably didn't sit well, and that relationship was tough to manage. BP had divided loyalties, so to speak. It was responsible to the public for the cleanup, but at the same time it had a fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders.

NJ: Do you think that divided responsibility should be addressed?

Allen: Well, I think we need to take a very hard look at the role of the "responsible party" in the command and control of a cleanup operation after an oil spill. You need someone in the command post to represent the oil industry, but it might be better if they didn't have a fiduciary connection to a specific corporation. BP might have taken the resources needed for the cleanup and put them into a blind trust, for instance, that was administered by a trustee who actually writes the checks. That might mitigate the appearance of a conflict of interest in the public's mind. Ultimately, we need to decide what we really mean by "responsible party" in these types of situations. It's a very interesting public policy question.

NJ: Do you think it's a problem that the oil industry has a monopoly on the technologies involved in deep-sea drilling and oil-well capping?

Allen: By law, the oil companies had to essentially create a capability in the private sector to respond to oil spills after the Exxon Valdez. The decision was made by government to rely on private contractors. As you point out, that reliance was most acute at the wellhead, which was five miles below the surface of the ocean. There is no government in the world that owns the means to do deep-sea drilling. Neither the Navy nor the Coast Guard had anything like that capability. The technology was entirely in the hands of private companies, so the government's role at that point became one of oversight. An overarching question as we look to the future is whether that capability should be solely in the hands of the private sector, or do you want some measure of that capability in the public sector so that the government can mount an immediate response?

NJ: Doesn't that question seem all the more important given how little time and energy BP spent in preparing an adequate spill response?

Allen: One problem we ran into was that during normal operations, all of the oil produced in the gulf is shipped back to shore via pipelines. When we had to bring oil to the surface after the accident, there was no obvious way to transport or collect it. To make that happen, BP had to bring a floating production system from the North Sea that uses tankers to shuttle the oil to shore. To bring the oil to the surface, we brought in freestanding, floating pipes called "risers" that are used off the shore of Angola. So our solution amounted to the North Sea meets Angola in the Gulf of Mexico. Lashing all that together took 85 days, because none of it had been put together that way in the past. So one lesson we learned is the need for a system like that on day one, rather than on day 85. The oil companies are already thinking hard about such a system.

NJ: As was the case with Hurricane Katrina, there seemed to be significant tensions, disconnects and finger-pointing between federal, state and local authorities. Is that inevitable in trying to mount "whole of government" responses to far-reaching disasters?

Allen: I think these efforts will always be, in some ways, unique and a work in progress. Any time there is a gap between what local officials want and what they see being done on the federal level, there's going to be pointed discussions about the best way forward. And to paraphrase Tip O'Neill, all oil spills are local. They manifest themselves differently in different places, depending in part on varying types of local government and political structures. I'm there to provide unity of effort, for instance, and the law assumes I interface with state officials, who in turn interact with their local officials. In places where you have more autonomous home rule, such as Louisiana's parishes, however, the challenge of smoothly integrating federal, state and local responses is greater. We also ran into the problem that some of the affected areas along Louisiana's coast were really isolated and difficult to get to, and that only added to the complexity of the operation.

NJ: Would you change methods for estimating the scope of an oil spill, especially in light of widespread suspicions that BP and the government underestimated the amount of oil dispersed into the gulf?

Allen: I think for any future oil spills we should rely only on official government estimates based on the findings of an independent team of scientists. That was ultimately the solution we adopted. There was so much angst over how much oil was spilling that I created a flow-rate technology team of scientists led by the head of the U.S. Geological Survey. They estimated that the well was spilling 53,000 barrels a day into the gulf, plus or minus 10 percent. That's how we came up with the top-line figure of 4.9 million barrels. That's a lot of oil.

NJ: Is it enough oil to cause you personally to question the wisdom of deepwater drilling?

Allen: Whenever I'm asked that question, my reply is the same: That's way above my pay grade. I will say that in this case we had a "fail-safe" system that turned out not to be fail-safe. So if we are going to continue to allow drilling at 5,000 feet below the ocean's surface, on a seabed that only robots can reach and where operations resemble Apollo 13 more than a standard oil drilling operation, then we had certainly better know how to deal with another failure if it were to occur.

NJ: You've had a direct hand in responding to devastating crises ranging from the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina to the earthquake in Haiti and the gulf oil spill. Have you drawn any overriding lessons about the nature of government responses to such destructive incidents?

Allen: When considering future responses to big events like these, I think we will have to decide on a social contract that spells out what citizens can expect from their government. Because the universe of potential interventions, and the expectations of the citizenry, are both growing in ways that outstrip traditional funding sources and statutory guidelines. For instance, what's the government's responsibility for dealing with the long-term socioeconomic and behavioral health impacts of these events? Nowhere in government statute or regulations will you find guidance on how to deal with those kinds of issues. I don't know if a whole society can acquire post-traumatic stress disorder, but you definitely see disaster fatigue set in after these major events. You can see it in the gulf region right now. So we as a nation are ultimately going to have to deal with the public policy issues raised by these big national traumas.

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Haiti response effort brings lessons from Katrina

James Kitfield — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0500

When the after-action reviews of the recent catastrophic earthquake in Haiti are finally written, the tragedy will likely prove another major milestone in gauging U.S. disaster response. For an early preview, National Journal spoke with the man tasked with salvaging the Katrina operation and an insider during the Haiti crisis, Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Thad Allen. Edited excerpts from that interview follow.

NJ: Do you see any similarities in the challenges presented by Hurricane Katrina and the recent Haitian earthquake?

Allen: Well, one similarity is that in both cases you lost the continuity and much of the capacity of the local governments, though there was not a total decapitation of local leadership. So as a responder you have to do everything in support of a severely weakened local government, and that can complicate things. In both cases, the local government's command-and-control capabilities and the local infrastructure were also severely damaged by the disaster, presenting a further complication.

NJ: After the flooding in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina, the difficulty of determining exactly who was in charge seemed to cripple the government's initial response.

Allen: I tell everyone that in New Orleans after Katrina, we weren't dealing with a hurricane anymore, but rather the equivalent of the use of a weapon of mass effect, but without criminality. I characterize it that way because if we had been dealing with the aftermath of a terrorist attack that caused the flooding, there would have been a legal basis for the federal government to move in and take charge. In that case, the FBI would have been in charge of the investigation, and the city in effect would have been a crime scene. The entire response could have been managed under the pre-emptive authority of the federal government. In the absence of criminal or terrorist activity, however, there was no legal basis for such a pre-emption of local authority. My challenge was thus to structure the response so that the federal government was in support of the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana. On several occasions Mayor [Ray] Nagin said that I was trying to be the federal mayor of New Orleans, which couldn't have been further from the truth. I was trying to use the resources of the federal government to empower his response to the disaster.

NJ: Do you see similarities to the challenges presented by the Haitian disaster response?

Allen: I see similarities as well as significant differences. Haiti was orders of magnitude bigger, with over 100,000 casualties versus roughly 3,000 during Katrina. On the other hand, the displaced population from each disaster was roughly 1.5 million. Another similarity is the problem that, once those people were displaced, they really didn't have anything to go back to. In Haiti, of course, there was much less of an ability to absorb that population elsewhere.

NJ: Do you see similarities in the command-and-control challenges? Allen: Yes. From the very start, everything the U.S. government did had to be in support of the leaders of a sovereign Haiti. The U.S. official directly responsible for supporting the government of Haiti is Ambassador Ken Merten, as the chief of the U.S. mission there. Since ambassadors aren't necessarily experts in disaster response, resources flowed in under the auspices of USAID [the U.S. Agency for International Development]. USAID has the statutory authorities for coordinating help to foreign countries, and it immediately dispatched a senior leader to coordinate civilian U.S. support on the ground in Port-au-Prince.

Because of the scope of the disaster, the response also required a lot of capabilities that only reside in the U.S. military, to include command-and-control systems, communications, logistics, security and transport. So a Joint Task Force Haiti was established, led by the deputy commander of U.S. Southern Command, Lt. Gen. Ken Keen, and including components of all the armed forces, maritime, land and air. So you very quickly had a command structure take shape, led on the ground by Ambassador Merten as U.S. chief of mission, who was supported on the civilian side by USAID and on the military side by Joint Task Force Haiti, both of which are also on the ground in Port-au-Prince. NJ: Was such a bifurcated support structure similar to what you established after Katrina?

Allen: Yes. After Katrina, I served as the principal federal official on scene, leading the federal response in support of the mayor and governor. In turn, I was supported by Lt. Gen. Russ Honore, who led Joint Task Force Katrina for U.S. Northern Command. And of course at the top of the structure today is the government of the sovereign country of Haiti. That is also similar to cases where the federal government has to organize disaster response while respecting the authority of state and local officials.

NJ: Yet isn't an international relief effort a further complicating factor?

Allen: Absolutely. Another piece of this puzzle is a substantial United Nations mission in Haiti which has been working a host of issues there for years. The U.N. mission also suffered severe loss of personnel and its command-and-control capabilities. You have many other nations trying to flow aid to Haiti, just as you have NGOs [non-governmental organizations] on the ground in Haiti, in many cases for years. They've established relationships in the country that often make them the most effective organizations for "retail" distribution of aid to the Haitian people.

All of these actors and efforts had to be carefully choreographed so that the right commodities arrived in the right sequence, reflecting the priorities established by the Haitian government, or otherwise the pipeline of aid would have gotten clogged up.

NJ: How does that work in reality? Allen: A good example is airspace control. Early on we reached an agreement between the United States and Haiti for a U.S. military team to come in and establish air traffic control for the most efficient management of the airspace. Haiti's leaders established priorities, because this can't be seen as a U.S.-centric effort. Based on those priorities, the air traffic unit put together a daily plan allocating landing slots based on the requirements and priorities given to certain types of commodities, whether it was water, food, medical supplies, etc. Timing and sequencing was critical to that plan. If you have too many plane loads of commodities, but you lack the transport vehicles to move them, or the security forces to get them where they need to go, or the NGOs in place to distribute them, then the pipeline quickly becomes blocked. Like I said, everything has to be choreographed.

NJ: Given that USAID is not traditionally responsible for emergency disaster relief, did it make sense to name USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah as the principal official in charge of coordinating the U.S. relief effort?

Allen: In my view it worked very well. Very early on, President Obama directed all of his Cabinet secretaries to lean very far forward in helping to ensure that everything that could be done to help Haiti was done. Over several discussions I had with [Homeland Security Secretary Janet] Napolitano and [Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator W. Craig] Fugate, we decided that the best thing we could do was take our capabilities in domestic emergency response and apply them to the command structure established for Haiti.

Of course, inside the United States, FEMA is the agency coordinating and integrating a whole-of-government response to domestic disasters. So we detailed a detachment of Coast Guard and FEMA personnel over to the USAID command center in Washington, where Administrator Shah was organizing the relief effort. We also dispatched an incident management team led by a senior Coast Guard officer and FEMA official to help the USAID group in Port-au-Prince. That team bought a mobile emergency response system communication suite, which provided essential command-and-control to me during Katrina. In that way, the Department of Homeland Security became a force multiplier in support of USAID.

NJ: Didn't the Department of Homeland Security also play a role in evacuating U.S. citizens from Haiti after the earthquake?

Allen: We had already exercised a Homeland Security Task Force Southeast, with an operation plan and standing doctrine for dealing with a mass migration event like we saw with the Cuban boat lift in 1980, and two Haitian mass migrations in 1994 and 1995. At the time, we thought we might have to deal with another mass migration from Cuba in the event that Fidel Castro died.

After the earthquake in Haiti, my counsel to Director Napolitano was to activate Homeland Security Task Force Southeast and just reverse it. Instead of trying to prevent a mass migration, we surged to safely and securely evacuate U.S. citizens from Haiti. Under the organizational structure we had established for the task force, it was led by the Coast Guard admiral who commands the 7th District in Miami, it included all of the component agencies of the Department of Homeland Security, and it reported directly to Director Napolitano. When we look back on the Haiti response, I think you'll discover that Task Force Southeast successfully organized one of the largest and safest evacuations of American citizens in recent memory.

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Afghanistan is Obama's war now

James Kitfield — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

President Obama has called Afghanistan a "war of necessity" and the central battlefield in the fight against Al Qaeda and its network of violent extremist groups. Some of his earliest moves in office were to craft a new strategy for the conflict, to hand-pick diplomats and generals to implement it, and to throw 21,000 more U.S. combat troops into the fight. Then the bloodshed spiked, the chaos worsened with fraudulent August elections, and an urgent request for 40,000 additional troops -- and conceivably as many as 80,000 -- landed like a grenade in the White House Situation Room.

If Obama approves the 40,000-troop increase requested by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, allied troop levels would near the peak deployed during the Iraq war. Little wonder that senior White House aides have been nervously eyeing polls showing that a majority of Americans now oppose sending more troops, and no surprise that they are reading books on Vietnam, where U.S. soldiers fought and bled for five years after the 1968 Tet offensive arguably broke the will of the American public.

As the administration reconsiders its strategy for Afghanistan, everyone understands that the United States stands at an important crossroads in the "long war" against violent Islamic extremism. And Obama's decisions are framed -- and boxed in -- by two pivotal moves made by his predecessor: President Bush's 2003 decision to invade Iraq, thus his failing to finish the job against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan; and his 2007 decision to "surge" troops in Iraq to stave off almost certain defeat there. The Iraq war leaves Obama with exhausted troops, not to mention a war-weary public and fewer political and economic resources with which to fight in Afghanistan. And the Iraq surge -- despite the fact that the extra troops were but one ingredient in the strategy -- gives the military and Obama's Republican opponents a precedent that he can ignore only at the risk of being called weak.

"Clearly the decision on what to do in Afghanistan will be the most difficult Obama has yet to make, and I suspect the most difficult of his presidency, for the simple reason that there are no good options," said Paul Pillar, a former career CIA analyst and a counter-terrorism expert now at Georgetown University. In its internal deliberations, Pillar suspects, the administration is discovering that it's far easier to point out the weaknesses in someone else's strategy for Afghanistan than to propose a successful plan of its own.

"I'm encouraged that the administration is exploring a lot of variables in painstaking detail, however, and questioning some basic assumptions about the war in Afghanistan," he said. Pillar argues that the core issue is not whether McChrystal's counterinsurgency strategy is appropriate to the mission of defeating Al Qaeda and stabilizing Afghanistan. "Rather, it's whether we as a nation have the resources and stamina to continue a war that at eight years and counting has already lasted longer than ground combat in Vietnam. Polls suggest that Americans are fast losing patience with this war."

War fatigue has cast a long shadow over the administration's deliberations on Afghanistan, raising fears that events in an unpopular war could eclipse the considerable promise of Obama's presidency. The controversy over McChrystal's public comments and the leaking of his classified assessment to the media; the sharp-elbowed jockeying in Congress between opponents and supporters of the proposed surge in troops; and the alarmed statements by officials in the region and by NATO allies over the administration's perceived waffling all point to the high stakes involved. Fairly or not, and regardless of whether the commander-in-chief chooses to pull back, stand pat, or increase forces, Afghanistan is about to become Obama's war.

"All presidents would like to focus on their domestic agenda, and they all learn that whether or not you care about foreign policy, it cares about you," said Peter Feaver, who served on Bush's National Security Council staff during the Iraq surge in 2007. "Whatever direction the president decides to go now, Obama is going to own Afghanistan. And that means it's going to start crowding out other parts of his agenda."

Losing Ground

After weeks of intense deliberations and five sessions with his top national security advisers, odds are that Obama will eventually support McChrystal's counterinsurgency strategy and his request for tens of thousands more troops. The strategic and political risks weigh against a radical departure from that strategy, or a rejection of the military and diplomatic leaders the administration chose just last spring.

Already Obama has informed congressional leaders that he will not substantially reduce the approximately 68,000 U.S. troops who will be in Afghanistan by the end of 2009. And he hopes NATO allies will keep their 32,000 troops in the country. Yet sustaining that level may become untenable as the situation worsens. This year has already proven by far the most costly in terms of U.S. and allied casualties, and the Taliban now controls or contests increasingly broad swaths of Afghan territory. An intelligence estimate given to the White House indicates that the number of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan has nearly quadrupled since 2006 (from 7,000 to 25,000), The Washington Times reported. In his stark, 66-page assessment of the situation, McChrystal warns that unless the Taliban's momentum is checked in the next 12 months, the war may be irretrievably lost.

Given that deteriorating situation, it's hardly surprising that the White House staff is experiencing buyer's remorse over Afghanistan. After the administration's review of the war last spring, Obama trumpeted a new strategy that narrowed the primary goal to "disrupting and defeating" Al Qaeda. Less was made of the fact, however, that McChrystal believes achieving even that limited goal requires a classic counterinsurgency strategy involving thousands of ground forces to secure population centers and difficult nation building by civilians.

Obama's national security team is now questioning nearly all the fundamental assumptions underlying such a counterinsurgency strategy. Most notably, it has explored the option of adopting a much narrower counter-terrorism strategy focused on striking Qaeda leaders in Pakistan's border region. Other options under consideration include accelerating the handoff of security responsibilities to the Afghan army and police; empowering regional tribal leaders and warlords; cutting deals with "reconcilable" elements of the Taliban to brunt the momentum of the insurgency; and enlisting the help of regional powers to lessen the war's burdens. At first glance, each option holds out the tantalizing promise of doing less and still not losing in Afghanistan.

In its internal and external deliberations, the Obama team has also challenged long-held conventional wisdom on the war. If the Taliban regained power in Afghanistan, would it really risk offering sanctuary again to Al Qaeda, given the U.S. wrath it incurred in 2001? Given Al Qaeda's greatly diminished status and sanctuary in Pakistan's tribal region, would it truly matter if the group did regain greater freedom of movement in Afghanistan? What if the nation-building quotient of counterinsurgency doctrine is just too difficult in one of the poorest, most illiterate countries in the world, a place with few of the functioning institutions or traditions of nationhood? Finally, would the deployment of even 40,000 additional U.S. troops be enough to cover this vast, geographically imposing land without breaking the back of already exhausted U.S. ground forces?

That serious people advocate each of those options and arguments points to the gravity of the situation. Experts who have wrestled with the challenges in Afghanistan caution, however, against expectations that any one element of today's holistic counterinsurgency strategy offers an easy fix in isolation.

Anthony Cordesman is the longtime national security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, and is one of a group of outside advisers brought in by Gen. McChrystal last summer to help develop his counterinsurgency strategy. "A lot of these proposals for shifting to a counter-terrorism strategy or handing security responsibility to Afghan forces are primarily arguments for not increasing U.S. troop levels as opposed to real options, because they are decoupled from the realities and complexities of the situation on the ground," he told National Journal. "How are you going to target insurgent or Qaeda leaders when their networks are dispersed and they are deeply embedded in cities, and it's impossible to identify them without boots on the ground gathering intelligence? What schedules, plans, and density of assets are you going to put behind building Afghan security forces? As long as this ongoing debate on strategy is decoupled from resources and measures of effectiveness, it will remain a purely philosophical argument. Unfortunately, wars are rarely fought between philosophers. And this really is a 'worst-case' war."

Lessons In Counterinsurgency

When McChrystal was asked whether he could support the narrower counter-terrorism strategy favored by Vice President Biden that uses armed Predator drones and Special Forces units to target Qaeda leaders in Pakistan, his reply caused a furor. "The short answer is no," he told an audience at a London think tank. Such a narrow focus would lead to "Chaos-istan," said McChrystal, who was later quoted in Newsweek warning against half-measures. "You can't hope to contain the fire by letting just half the building burn."

McChrystal's comments raised a valid question about the propriety of a field commander publicly advocating a position while the White House was still reviewing overall war strategy. His comments, however, reflect a deeply held belief in U.S. military ranks -- forged over the past eight years in the crucibles of Iraq and Afghanistan -- that "whack-a-mole" operations targeting individual terrorist or insurgent leaders are important but insufficient when confronting a full-blown insurgency.

Current military thinking holds that once insurgencies reach a critical mass in unstable societies, counterinsurgency tactics of "clear, hold, and build" are required to win back public support for the government by providing persistent security, economic development, and basic services. Or, as the adage goes, the military has to drain the swamp in which insurgents swim beneath the surface. Those counterinsurgency imperatives were written into official military doctrine by Gen. David Petraeus, the architect of the Iraq surge and head of the U.S. Central Command. They are featured prominently in war college curricula and are taught at military training centers. More important, counterinsurgency concepts now inform the combat experiences of a generation of U.S. military officers.

According to a senior officer in the Special Forces, which along with the CIA are primarily responsible for targeting terrorists, counter-terrorism operations are extremely difficult to conduct without the presence of ground troops to gather human intelligence on the whereabouts of bad guys and to protect the populace from reprisals for their cooperation. In that sense, such strikes are an important enabler of a wider counterinsurgency campaign, helping to keep terrorist or insurgent leaders off-balance to buy time for strengthening indigenous security forces and government institutions.

"The argument that you can just focus on counter-terrorism strikes with Predator drones and Special Forces operations ignores the fact that if you were going to search the planet for the single most qualified person to execute such a plan, you would pick Stanley McChrystal, and he doesn't think it's feasible," said Frederick Kagan, a counterinsurgency expert at the American Enterprise Institute who was influential in helping to craft U.S. counterinsurgency strategy for Iraq. Kagan notes that McChrystal, as the head of clandestine Special Forces and CIA hunter-killer teams in Iraq, bagged the most-wanted Qaeda leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

"We actually tried the counter-terror approach for years in Iraq, where we had enormous numbers of classified forces hunting bad guys with the support of 150,000 U.S. conventional forces," Kagan said. "And even though we killed hundreds of bad guys in conditions far more conducive to counter-terror operations than anything you'll find in Afghanistan and Pakistan, violence continued to go off the charts until we faced a calamity. We learned the hard way that counterinsurgency tactics are what you need to defeat an enemy like this."

Narrowing The Target

Advocates of a narrower approach argue that current strategy needlessly conflates Al Qaeda with the Taliban militants who offered it sanctuary before 9/11. Although the groups maintain links to this day, Al Qaeda remains the only entity in the witches' brew of violent extremist groups in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region that specifically targets the homelands of the United States and Europe for terrorist attack. Its goal is to coerce the West into withdrawing support from "apostate" regimes in the Muslim world. By contrast, the hydra-headed Taliban insurgency mostly aspires to gain power and influence regionally in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Certainly, U.S. counter-terrorism operations have scored a string of successes against Qaeda and Taliban leaders in Pakistan. Just since January 2008, U.S. air strikes in Pakistan's tribal and border regions have reportedly killed 15 top-tier Qaeda and Taliban leaders and 16 second-tier commanders. Dead senior leaders include the head of the Pakistan Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud; senior Qaeda commanders Abu Laith al-Libi and Mustafa al-Jaziri; Qaeda weapons of mass destruction expert Abu Khabab al-Masri; and Osama bin Laden's son Saad.

"We are conducting successful counter-terror operations in Pakistan without significant boots on the ground, as we have in places such as Somalia and Yemen, both of which could just as easily serve as a future sanctuary for Al Qaeda as Afghanistan," former CIA analyst Pillar said. "The bigger issue is whether the presence or absence of a physical sanctuary for terrorist groups makes that much of a difference in terms of protecting the American people from terrorist attack. In my view, it doesn't make enough of a difference to justify a long and costly counterinsurgency campaign."

Even if the United States and NATO withdrew from Afghanistan on an indeterminate timeline, and the country reverted to the state of civil war that characterized it in the 1990s, some experts believe that the threat to the U.S. homeland would remain largely unchanged. In this view, the Taliban would most likely prove just one of a number of militant groups fighting for power in a faction-riven Afghanistan. If the Taliban did eventually regain control, the group might prove reluctant to offer sanctuary to a greatly diminished Al Qaeda.

"First of all, Al Qaeda has been almost completely decimated, and if its remaining members came out of hiding in Pakistan and moved to Afghanistan, they would be easier to target," said Marc Sageman, the author of Leaderless Jihad and a former CIA officer who served as liaison to the Afghan mujahedeen fighting the Soviets in the late 1980s. Pointing to the insurgents' hit-and-run ambushes and roadside bombings, he doubts that the disparate groups fighting under the Taliban banner could march on Kabul as a coherent military force. Sageman also notes that the Taliban needed seven years to seize power after the Soviet Union left in 1989.

"Even if the Taliban took power and offered sanctuary to Al Qaeda, you wouldn't see the re-emergence of large terrorist training camps and bases for the simple reason that the Western powers would destroy them as soon as they were built," he told National Journal. "So for all those reasons, if our primary goal is to protect the U.S. homeland from transnational terrorists, I don't see any value added by a large counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan."

Underlying the growing skepticism of counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan are worries that the U.S. military has defaulted to an unsustainable and expensive paradigm of nation building. Given the strategic stakes involved once U.S. forces invaded Iraq, and the Bush administration's much-touted emphasis on spreading democracy as an antidote to the root causes of terrorism, a counterinsurgency campaign may have been the only viable alternative in Iraq circa 2007. Given the evident strain on U.S. ground forces and decline in public support, however, it doesn't necessarily follow that counterinsurgency will work in the much less hospitable environs of Afghanistan in 2009, or in the next ungoverned space the terrorists decide to occupy.

"On Afghanistan I cast my lot with the 'go home ... sort of' school," Steven Metz, a professor of national security affairs at the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute, recently wrote on National Journal 's National Security blog. "I've long held that an approach to counterinsurgency that is contingent on re-engineering societies that do not desire it is folly. That is, I believe, more true in Afghanistan than anywhere I can think of. If the true strategic objectives are to prevent Afghanistan from providing bases for terrorists who might attack the United States or the West, and to prevent Pakistan nuclear weapons from falling into their hands, there are much more efficient and effective ways to do that than attempting to re-engineer a medieval society. We could, in other words, develop a counter-terrorism strategy that is acceptably effective and efficient."

Keeping The Pressure On

Can the United States and its allies really keep Al Qaeda and associated groups at bay with a narrower counter-terrorism strategy? Certainly, Al Qaeda has failed to launch a follow-on terrorist spectacular on the United States since 9/11, or against Europe since the Madrid and London bombings of 2004 and 2005. Yet virtually all major terrorist plots against the U.S. or Europe since 2005, including the recent arrest in Denver of suspected plotter Najibullah Zazi, share a common thread: links to Qaeda enablers and training camps in Pakistan.

One person who thinks that the surviving Qaeda core in Pakistan still represents the most dangerous threat in the global terrorist pantheon is Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, the federal interagency body that collates intelligence on terrorists. He recently testified before the Senate that the Qaeda "core is actively engaged in operational plotting and continues recruiting, training, and transporting operatives, to include individuals from Western Europe and North America."

As the Obama administration reviews the strategy in Afghanistan, officials are likely asking themselves what elements of current U.S. operations have led to increased success in targeting Qaeda leaders and thwarting terrorist plots hatched in Pakistan. According to some counter-terrorist and intelligence experts, key aspects include containing Qaeda leaders to a limited space in Pakistan's tribal areas where Western intelligence agencies can focus their intelligence-gathering assets. In the words of one expert, it's "like looking down a soda straw" at one region.

The effectiveness of armed Predator drones also depends on benign airspace and nearby bases to increase their "loiter" time over unsuspecting targets, and both are supplied by a willing Pakistani government and security services. Finally, and most important, the dramatic increases in successful strikes and thwarted plots point to improved intelligence-sharing between Western and Pakistani intelligence services.

All of those advantages could potentially disappear, experts say, if friends and foes see the United States as backing away from its commitment to the stability of Afghanistan. Regional powers and their proxies would almost certainly interpret such a strategic shift as a signal that Afghanistan is once again in play and that the United States cannot be counted upon.

"The larger issue that doesn't get talked about in this debate on strategy is the fact that any indication that the United States is thinking about bugging out exacerbates our two biggest problems in the region, which is the Pakistani government's reluctance to crack down on the Taliban, and corruption in the Afghan government," said Andrew Krepinevich, a counterinsurgency expert and the president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. "If the Pakistani security services think we're leaving, they will start cutting deals with the Taliban again as a hedge against India and Iran's influence in Afghanistan. Similarly, if [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai thinks we're heading for the exits, he'll never crack down on corruption because he'll need to cut deals with warlords to play them off against each other."

Marin Strmecki served as special adviser on Afghanistan to the Defense secretary between 2003 and 2006. "The problem I have with the length of time the Obama administration is taking to commit to a counterinsurgency strategy is that it will be read as weakness by regional actors and the insurgents themselves, and that sets in motion all the wrong kinds of dynamics," he told National Journal. In Afghanistan, different groups will look for regional sponsors to vie for power in a post-American environment, he said, likely signaling a return to a civil war of the type that first opened the door to the rise of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the 1990s.

"In Pakistan it's important to remember that the nexus of terrorist and extremist groups have three major goals," Strmecki said. "They are plotting attacks against the West, seeking to restore the Taliban to power in Afghanistan, and undermining the stability of Pakistan. We have to combat all three threats simultaneously, because as soon as you focus on any one at the expense of the others, the extremists will gravitate there. That's the problem I have with people who just want to focus on counter-terrorism -- you cannot neatly divide this threat."

Any doubts that the extremists are constantly probing for the perceived weakest link in that triad was dispelled this month. With the Pakistani army poised to launch an offensive against militants in the south Waziristan region and the United States distracted by the Afghan elections and strategy review, extremists in Pakistan lashed out with some of the boldest attacks of the conflict to date. Militants seized hostages at the Pakistani army headquarters in Rawalpindi, destroyed the World Food Program offices of the United Nations in Islamabad, and killed scores of people during a suicide bombing at a market in the Swat Valley.

"Despite whatever future we might wish for Afghanistan, the United States and its allies have only two fundamental interests there that are worth waging war to secure," said Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who is also a member of McChrystal's strategic advisory team. "Those are keeping Afghanistan from becoming a base for extremists striking the West, or from destabilizing Pakistan. We tend to talk most about the former, but the second is the more important interest."

Certainly Al Qaeda and its affiliates could find sanctuary in other countries, and certainly the United States doesn't have enough combat brigades to send on counterinsurgency missions to all of those places. But Biddle believes that Al Qaeda poses a uniquely potent threat in the Afghan and Pakistani soil of its inception. "A terrorist and insurgency threat that takes root in Afghanistan is almost ideally suited geographically to destabilize Pakistan," he said. "In Pakistan itself you have an enormous country with an active insurgency and a large nuclear arsenal, and serious security challenges that the United States has very few tools to counter. In such a dangerous situation we should invoke the Hippocratic oath and at least do no harm. And if the Taliban were to collapse the government in Afghanistan and take power there, it would do serious harm to the government across the border in Pakistan."

Indeed, the recent attacks in Pakistan serve as a reminder that the wild tribal regions and ungoverned spaces of Afghanistan and Pakistan are not just any sanctuary. Those mountains and remote valleys launched the mujahedeen's great victory over the Soviet Union, hatched the 9/11 plot to attack the United States, and shielded Osama bin Laden through eight years of war and the world's most intensive manhunt. These areas were the birthplace of a dream to lure the United States and its allies into a military defeat on the home turf of the Islamic extremists, as a prelude to the toppling of local apostate regimes and a return of the Islamic caliphate. Just eight years into this long war, with the Taliban gaining ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Al Qaeda helping to unsettle Somalia and Yemen, it seems unlikely that bin Laden is reviewing his own long-term strategy.

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Expert says nuclear terrorism is not a major threat

James Kitfield — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Seven years after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, experts and presidential candidates continue to put nuclear terrorism atop their lists of the gravest threats to the United States. Yet Brian Michael Jenkins, a longtime terrorism expert with the Rand Corp., says that the threat lies more in the realms of Hollywood dramas and terrorist dreams than in reality. There has never been an act of nuclear terrorism, he notes, yet the threat is so potentially catastrophic that it incites fear -- and that fear fulfills a terrorist's primary goal. National Journal Staff Correspondent James Kitfield interviewed Jenkins about his research into nuclear terrorism for his new book, Will Terrorists Go Nuclear? Edited excerpts from the interview follow.

NJ: Why did you decide to delve so deeply into the psychological underpinnings of nuclear terror?

Jenkins: Well, I couldn't write about the history of nuclear terrorism, because at least as of yet there hasn't been any. So that would have been a very short book. Nonetheless, the U.S. government has stated that it is the No. 1 threat to the national security of the United States. In fact, according to public opinion polls, two out of five Americans consider it likely that a terrorist will detonate a nuclear bomb in an American city within the next five years. That struck me as an astonishing level of apprehension.

NJ: To what do you attribute that fear?

Jenkins: I concluded that there is a difference between nuclear terrorism and nuclear terror. Nuclear terrorism is about the possibility that terrorists will acquire and detonate a nuclear weapon. Nuclear terror, on the other hand, concerns our anticipation of such an attack. It's about our imagination. And while there is no history of nuclear terrorism, there is a rich history of nuclear terror. It's deeply embedded in our popular culture and in policy-making circles.

NJ: So the fear of nuclear terrorism is not new?

Jenkins: Almost as soon as the people involved in the Manhattan Project tested an actual atomic bomb they started to wonder about the possibility of someone using it for terrorist purposes. In the 1970s, some talented nuclear weapons designers studied the issue of whether someone outside of a government program could possibly design and build a workable nuclear weapon. They concluded it was possible, and then postulated who might do such a thing -- terrorists! So, in a way, the threat preceded any terrorist actually thinking about the issue. To a certain extent, we educated the terrorists on the subject.

NJ: Hasn't Al Qaeda, in particular, focused considerable energy on nuclear weapons?

Jenkins: Yes, because terror is the use of violence to create an atmosphere of fear that causes people to exaggerate the strength of the terrorists, and they are very good at that. So in Al Qaeda's media jihad there is a recurrent theme of nuclear terrorism. They realize that if they put the words "terrorism" and "nuclear" in proximity to each other it creates added fear. It also excites their constituency, because nothing excites the powerless more than the idea of ultimate power.

NJ: Are you saying that Al Qaeda is interested in nuclear weapons only in the abstract, as a propaganda tool?

Jenkins: No. Al Qaeda has actual nuclear ambitions, there is no doubt about that. When Osama bin Laden was in Sudan, he tried to acquire some nuclear material. The efforts were mostly amateurish, and Al Qaeda was the victim of some scams. Qaeda [leaders] also had meetings with some Pakistani nuclear scientists while in Afghanistan. So, clearly, they were thinking about nuclear weapons. If bin Laden were able to acquire a nuclear weapon, I also suspect that he would use it. My larger point is that Al Qaeda has already become the world's first nonstate nuclear power without even having nuclear weapons.

NJ: Do you mean by its ability to incite fear of nuclear terrorism?

Jenkins: Yes, and we contribute to that fear. The message clearly coming out of Washington for the last seven years has been a relentless message of fear. We've spent the years since 9/11 discussing every conceivable vulnerability of our society. We talk about the next catastrophic attack not as a matter of "if" but "when," implying that it's unavoidable.

NJ: We've created a perfect incubator for terrorist propaganda?

Jenkins: Yes, because the whole dynamic lends itself to sensationalism and overdramatization. In a sense, terrorism is a form of theater anyway, and its message is amplified in America's media-drenched society. I've actually had government officials say to me, "We'll deal with nuclear terrorism the way Jack Bauer does on 24." And I have to remind them that, you know, that's a television show. It's not real life.

NJ: Why do you think nuclear terrorism connects so powerfully with the American psyche?

Jenkins: Because beneath the veneer of our American optimism are layers of anxiety. We as a nation have been fascinated with the theme of decline and doom going back centuries. We worry about losing our pre-eminent place in the world. We worry that our borders cannot protect our culture [against threats] from without, and [we worry] about subversion from within. If you want to write a best-seller, just write a book [such as] The End of Days or The Late, Great Planet Earth. For the many biblical literalists among us, talk of a nuclear apocalypse and Armageddon just confirms their faith. As the ultimate doomsday scenario, nuclear terrorism condenses a lot of the free-floating anxieties in American society.

NJ: How do you break this chain reaction of fear?

Jenkins: The first thing we have to do is truly understand the threat. Nuclear terrorism is a frightening possibility but it is not inevitable or imminent, and there is no logical progression from truck bombs to nuclear bombs. Some of the steps necessary to a sustainable strategy we've already begun. We do need better intelligence-sharing internationally and enhanced homeland security and civil defense, and we need to secure stockpiles of nuclear materials around the world.

Nations that might consider abetting terrorists in acquiring nuclear weapons should also be made aware that we will hold them fully responsible in the event of an attack. We need to finish the job of eliminating Al Qaeda, not only to prevent another attack but also to send the message to others that if you go down this path, we will hunt you down relentlessly and destroy you.

NJ: What should political leaders tell the American people?

Jenkins: Rather than telling Americans constantly to be very afraid, we should stress that even an event of nuclear terrorism will not bring this Republic to its knees. Some will argue that fear is useful in galvanizing people and concentrating their minds on this threat, but fear is not free. It creates its own orthodoxy and demands obedience to it. A frightened population is intolerant. It trumpets a kind of "lapel pin" patriotism rather than the real thing. A frightened population is also prone both to paralysis -- we're doomed! -- and to dangerous overreaction.

I believe that fear gets in the way of addressing the issue of nuclear terrorism in a sustained and sensible way. Instead of spreading fear, our leaders should speak to the American traditions of courage, self-reliance, and resiliency. Heaven forbid that an act of nuclear terrorism ever actually occurs, but if it does, we'll get through it.

NJ: Seven years after the 9/11 attacks, how do you rate the effort to destroy Al Qaeda?

Jenkins: On the negative side of the ledger is the fact that Al Qaeda's top leadership is still intact. The organization has managed to reconstitute itself and find sanctuary inside Pakistan. [Qaeda leaders] remain committed to large-scale acts of violence, and their narrative still has considerable traction with angry young Muslim men, whether in Karachi, Cairo, London, or Paris. Their communications have increased in volume and are increasingly sophisticated.

NJ: What about the positive side of the ledger?

Jenkins: There is no doubt that we have significantly degraded Al Qaeda's operational capability. The leadership is in hiding and on the run, and we've removed some key figures whose talent is not easily replaced. It's much more dangerous and risky for Al Qaeda to operate now. Through an unprecedented level of cooperation among intelligence and law enforcement agencies around the world, we have significantly reduced [its] ability to execute large-scale attacks of the like we saw regularly in the period between 2001 and 2006. The inability to pull off those large terrorist spectaculars that acted as recruiting posters, in turn, has slowed the flow of new recruits. Al Qaeda's indiscriminate violence has also provoked a backlash in the Muslim community, putting [it] on the defensive in places such as Iraq.

NJ: What do you consider Al Qaeda's greatest vulnerability?

Jenkins: Irrelevancy. As the world moves on to new issues, these virtual jihadists are locked into a closed-loop discourse on the Internet that is increasingly irrelevant. They are participating in a fantasy. That's the biggest fear of the terrorists: One day Osama bin Laden will issue his 450th proclamation, and no one will really be listening.

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Progress in Afghanistan gets rockier

James Kitfield — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

HELMAND PROVINCE, Afghanistan - The CH-47 helicopter carrying Gen. John Craddock and his aides banks sharply, and the machine gunner positioned by the open rear door strains in his harness. The kaleidoscope below rolls from the verdant greens of the Helmand River basin to brown scrublands and then the bleached-white desert. Soon, the CH-47's shadow is joined by those of a Marine Cobra gunship and an armed Huey helicopter. They are escorting the supreme commander of the NATO alliance into one of the most isolated outposts in the global war on terrorism. It is the very heart of Taliban territory.

The helicopters touch down in a stinging swirl of sand and dust at Forward Operating Base Dwyer. The compound is little more than an encirclement of concrete barriers and concertina wire serving as a firebase and ground-combat headquarters for the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit in Helmand province. Craddock emerges from the chopper to shake hands with marines clad in full body armor, their faces dripping with sweat. They seek relief from the 120-degree heat in the shade of their lean-tos. Inside the mess tent, where visitors are briefed, dust chokes the air.

Isolated and forlorn, FOB Dwyer sits west of the crossroads town of Garmsir. Though life may be miserable on this flat patch of land, the location has this to recommend it: unobstructed fields of fire separate it from the Taliban insurgents who are using rocket-propelled grenades, suicide bombers, and massed infantry in increasingly bold attacks on U.S. and NATO outposts and bases. At FOB Dwyer, there is no sneaking up on Lt. Col. Anthony Henderson and the rest of the men of 1st Battalion, 6th Marines.

The soldiers of the U.S. Army's 503rd Infantry Regiment were not so lucky. On the night of July 13, an estimated 200 Taliban insurgents nearly overran their outpost in mountainous east Afghanistan; the assault left nine U.S. paratroopers dead and many more wounded. On August 18, Camp Salerno near the Pakistan border repulsed an attack by as many as 10 suicide bombers backed by infantry. On the same day, a force of approximately 100 Taliban insurgents ambushed an elite French-led reconnaissance patrol, killing 10 paratroopers. It was the deadliest day for French troops in 25 years.

Those attacks and a rising number of roadside bombs and suicide bombers help explain why 2008 is on pace to become the deadliest year in Afghanistan for allied forces since the Taliban was toppled in 2001. In the past three months, more foreign troops have been killed and wounded in Afghanistan than in Iraq. That fact reflects the success of counterinsurgency operations in Iraq, as well as a strategic shift by a Qaeda-enabled insurgency of Islamic militants who find safe haven in neighboring Pakistan. The impact of those sanctuaries is evident in larger-scale and more-sophisticated Taliban attacks, including a mass prison break in Kandahar province in June that freed hundreds of imprisoned insurgents, and the July 7 bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul that killed 41 people.

In the midst of Afghanistan's warm weather "fighting season," Helmand province in the south has earned a reputation as a hotbed for the resurgent Taliban. Canadian forces responsible for this area in NATO's Regional Command South have suffered more than 90 casualties since deploying here in 2006, leading Ottawa to threaten to withdraw its troops unless reinforcements arrived this year. Commanders thus sent the 2,500 marines of the 24th MEU to Helmand to shore up a shaky alliance. In many ways, the marines' experience in nearly six months of counterinsurgency operations in the province is a microcosm of the fitful progress, intermittent backsliding, and mounting challenges that have come to characterize the wider Afghan war.

"These marines have taken the best practices of counterinsurgency doctrine and applied them, and they've shown once again that if you just provide people with security, they will get on with their lives," Craddock tells a reporter accompanying him on a recent trip to Afghanistan. A cerebral general with a quiet intensity, Craddock knows better than most, however, that security is just the initial prerequisite in the holistic strategy of development, jobs, and governance that creates the virtuous cycle of any successful counterinsurgency. From the beginning, operations in Afghanistan have lacked the coordination and international commitment to sustain that cycle.

"We can get the security piece perfect," Craddock concedes. "But if the Afghan government and army aren't ready to step in and help hold and rebuild, it will all be for naught."

He notes, for example, that NATO has promised more training teams for the critical task of mentoring Afghan army units, but member nations have stubbornly failed to deliver on their commitments. "Shame on them," Craddock says. "Corruption is still tearing at the fabric of the Afghan government, and that also has to change. So I fear we are losing momentum in Afghanistan. If we don't turn things around soon, we'll start slipping backwards."

Clear, Hold, and Hope

Lt. Col. Kent Hayes knows all about the blood, sweat, and excruciating effort needed to lay the initial security piece of the counterinsurgency puzzle. The rangy executive officer for the 24th MEU explains that the Marines' original plan to act as a roaming strike force in Helmand had to be torn up after the first battle with the Taliban. The enemy unexpectedly stayed and fought fiercely for more than a week rather than relinquish Garmsir. An estimated 400 insurgents died. Marine commanders immediately realized that the town was a critical resupply and logistics hub for insurgent operations throughout the province.

"Our original mission was to act as a quick-reaction force for the ISAF commander in Kabul so he could throw us at any escalating crisis in this area," Hayes says. But Gen. David McKiernan, the commander of NATO's International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, understood the strategic importance of Garmsir and instead ordered the marines to stay in the town and implement a classic counterinsurgency operation of "clear, hold, and build." Hayes says that his troops are "not normally in the business of owning ground, but I guess you could say we've rented Garmsir for a while."

After clearing the town of insurgents, the marines held it by establishing routine neighborhood patrols to keep the Taliban at bay. The MEU's civil-affairs unit reached out to the district governor, tribal sheiks, and local imams in Garmsir and the surrounding region, organizing the first shura -- or traditional governance council -- that the area had seen in three years. Local leaders were empowered to pick and prioritize development projects.

With improved security, the Red Crescent humanitarian organization moved in with aid for 1,400 displaced families. The marines, using their own money from the Commander's Emergency Response Program, launched small reconstruction projects: digging wells and repairing irrigation canals; delivering medical services; rebuilding damaged homes; even buying a new speaker system for the local mosque.

The Afghan Civilian Assistance Program, which the United Nations and the U.S. Agency for International Development support, started longer-term projects.

Within weeks, an abandoned bazaar reopened and was swarmed with shoppers. By late summer, nearly eight weeks had passed without the 24th MEU having a single contact with Taliban insurgents, whom the locals were increasingly willing to identify for the marines.

Hayes is unequivocal in naming the key to the 24th MEU's success in Helmand province: "It's a real simple concept -- we learned during this mission that the best way to combat this type of enemy is to mass forces and stay. We actually replaced a small British force that was spread thin trying to cover too much ground with too few troops. Instead, we flooded a town that was strategically important to the enemy with overwhelming forces. That's the way you can win this kind of fight -- with boots on the ground."

No Staying Power

After two tour extensions, however, the 24th MEU is scheduled to leave Afghanistan this month. Until the Pentagon can follow through on recently announced plans to deploy an additional 4,500 troops to Afghanistan early next year -- still well short of the 10,000 urgently requested by U.S. commanders here -- there are no fresh U.S. or NATO units to take the place of the marines. That fact highlights an inconvenient reality: NATO and the United States remain chronically short of troops and equipment in Afghanistan. Taliban commanders understand that, too.

Heavy pressure from the U.S. to squeeze additional forces out of NATO at last spring's Bucharest Summit netted only about 2,000 troops; and badly needed helicopters donated by the Czech Republic are still languishing in that country because NATO lacks the money to transfer them to Afghanistan.

The plan now is for the 24th MEU to pass along the mission of "holding and building" in Garmsir to the Afghan army and the national government in Kabul. Yet Afghanistan's 63,000-man army is woefully inadequate to sustain security gains in a country of 30 million people, a majority of whom are illiterate and live at subsistence level.

Six years after taking power, a weak central government in Kabul struggles to extend its control beyond the capital. Afghanistan has few roads and some of the most challenging terrain in the world. Government corruption is so pervasive that one knowledgeable Afghan official in Kabul privately estimated that government employees siphon the equivalent of $5,000 per Afghan citizen from the pool of international aid each year. Afghan's 79,000 national police, meanwhile, are better known as shakedown artists than law enforcers.

"A year ago when I was here, there was a lot more optimism that the country was moving in the right direction," says retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, a decorated combat veteran and West Point professor who accompanied Craddock on his recent trip to Afghanistan. "Now there's this sense of concern and surprise among NATO and Afghan officials that the enemy has gotten much stronger and better equipped, and is willing to take on their forces. I don't think the situation here will yield a disaster in 2009, but it's getting worse and violence is skyrocketing. The question is, what are we going to do about it?"

The situation in Musa Qala, another town in Helmand province, may foreshadow what could occur in Garmsir when the U.S. Marines leave. After capturing and holding Musa Qala for much of 2007, the Taliban was ejected by the Afghan army earlier this year. What happened next was sadly indicative of the lack of follow-through that has so often marred operations in the Afghan war.

"After we recaptured Musa Qala, the government was very slow to start any reconstruction, and there are still no new schools or hospitals or clinics," Gen. Mohammad Zaher Azimi, a spokesman for the Afghan Defense Ministry, said in an interview. He pointed out that unemployment is actually worse in Musa Qala today than when the Taliban controlled it. "In some cases, the Taliban have even convinced the locals that they governed better," he said, because the insurgents don't have the bureaucratic red tape that the government has and, for all their brutality, aren't as corrupt or open to bribes as are underpaid Afghan government officials and judges. "So, yes, it's very important in these operations to show people that it's the Afghan government that will step in and make their lives better."

The failure to do so was painfully obvious to McKiernan. "There is some governance and development finally beginning to take hold inside Musa Qala," the general explains. "But when you travel just a few kilometers north or south, you run into the presence of the Taliban again."

A Sense of Siege

The NATO flags arrayed outside ISAF headquarters in Kabul flew at half-staff during a reporter's recent visit. In the early years of the operation, flags were lowered for three days to mark the death of any NATO or allied soldier. But casualties mounted so quickly this year that headquarters' staff was forced to shorten the commemoration period to one day. June was the worst month of the war for ISAF soldiers: 49 were killed in action.

The rising toll partly reflects the allied forces' decision to take the fight to the Taliban in areas where the insurgents previously roamed free, such as in Helmand. ISAF officials point out that 70 percent of the violence is still concentrated in about 10 percent of the country's southern and eastern regions.

After more than $120 billion in investments by the international community over seven years, ISAF officials can cite some impressive achievements in Afghanistan, among them school construction and a rise in student enrollment from 1 million to 6.5 million, including 2 million girls formerly denied an education under the Taliban. Eighty-two percent of Afghans now benefit from basic health services versus 8 percent in 2001. The "ring road" connecting many of the country's far-flung provinces with the capital is nearly completed.

Yet officials concede that the Taliban has grown stronger. The spike in allied casualties is partly the result of the Taliban's using more asymmetric attacks -- suicide bombings, roadside bombs, kidnappings, and assassinations, the signature techniques honed by al Qaeda in Iraq and other Iraqi insurgents.

This development squares with intelligence indicating that Islamic extremists once drawn to Iraq are now flocking by the hundreds to Pakistan's tribal areas, where Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants are thought to be hiding. Al Qaeda is known to provide training, equipment, and suicide martyrs to its old allies in the hydra-headed Taliban insurgency, itself a "syndicate" of loosely affiliated Pashtun clans, subtribes, and terrorist groups.

Flush with hundreds of millions of dollars from taxing poppy and opium traffickers, and free to recruit in the Pashtun region's ubiquitous madrassas, or Islamic religious schools, the Taliban faces few attacks in Pakistan other than an occasional strike by a U.S. Predator unmanned aircraft, such as the one that killed four Islamist militants on September 4, and an occasional cross-border raid similar to the controversial operation by U.S. Special Forces on September 1 in south Waziristan that killed as many as 20 people.

Pakistan vehemently criticized that operation as an infringement on its territory. After its own brief offensive in the tribal areas in late August, Pakistan announced the suspension of all military operations against the Taliban and Islamist militants for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which ends in early October.

"Overall, the Pakistan military has significantly reduced its level of activity near the border, which we think is connected to the informal cease-fires that the civilian government has reached with insurgents in the tribal areas earlier this year," said ISAF spokesman Mark Laity. "As a result, we're seeing many more insurgents crossing over from Pakistan than in the past."

Of equal concern, U.S. military intelligence analysts perceive a new Taliban strategy behind the bands of insurgents infiltrating across the border and establishing cells in the villages and towns around Kabul. Their suspected purpose is to undermine the Afghan government and sow fear through high-profile terror attacks. The mujahedeen fighters exploited a similar strategy against the Soviets and their puppet government in Kabul in the 1980s.

A series of spectacular attacks -- an assault by Taliban commandoes on the swanky Serena Hotel in January that killed eight; an assassination attempt on President Hamid Karzai in April; the Indian Embassy bombing in July; the killing of four International Rescue Committee aid workers in August -- has begun to create a sense of siege in the capital. The Taliban is "working very hard to establish footholds around all the major approaches to Kabul," said a U.S. intelligence officer. "We think they mean to stay and fight through the winter."

Civilian Casualties

U.S. and coalition officials are also dealing with the blowback from a series of errant allied air strikes such as the one on August 23 that, according to the Afghan government and the United Nations, killed more than 90 civilians. The ISAF disputes those figures but has reopened an investigation into the bombing. That incident followed a July 6 air strike that killed 27 civilians at a wedding party, most of them children and women, including the bride.

A number of analysts blame the ISAF's liberal use of airpower in part on its effort to compensate for a lack of troops on the ground. According to the U.S. Institute of Peace, allied forces have dropped an average of 80,000 pounds of munitions a month in Afghanistan since June 2006, compared with an average of 5,000 pounds in 2005. Largely as a result, civilian casualties have skyrocketed 68 percent in the past year.

Taliban propagandists seize upon the civilian deaths. The incidents also erode public support for the coalition's presence and exacerbate tensions between the ISAF and the Afghan government, which complained bitterly on September 1 after Western troops reportedly killed three Afghan children and wounded seven other civilians in an errant artillery strike.

"Whenever there is an incident with civilian casualties, Karzai's phone just lights up and his office is overrun by tribal elders screaming about foreigners killing the Afghan people," said a senior NATO official in Kabul, acknowledging that the Afghan government has begun to demand ultimate authority over allied air strikes.

On a recent evening, McKiernan arrives in his office for a late-night interview. With a sigh, he sinks his athletic frame into an armchair, the strain evident on his drawn face. As ISAF commander, McKiernan tracks the big picture in Afghanistan, and he has identified three critical "imperatives" for succeeding in Afghanistan: improving the capacity of the Afghan government and security services; bolstering the will and commitment of the NATO alliance and other allied nations; and denying the Taliban uncontested sanctuary in Pakistan.

"Look, I've been a soldier for 36 years, and I want to be absolutely adamant about one point -- we're here to win. Failure is not an option in Afghanistan," he says. "I know that may sound like a cliche, but it's true. I'll also tell you the Afghan people are worth fighting for. The vast majority do not want to see the Taliban re-emerge back in power. So we will win, and the insurgency will lose. How long that will take, and how much suffering will occur before we reach that point, well, I can't answer that question."

The Ticket Home

At Kandahar Air Base in southern Afghanistan, a Dutch colonel escorting a group of recent visitors steers carefully on the blacktop to avoid old Soviet land mines that drift along with the mud during the rainy season. He points to surrounding hills from which Taliban insurgents still fire rockets at the base. Thankfully, the rockets are notoriously inaccurate.

"One hit about 20 meters in front of my door last week," the Dutch officer volunteers. "Rather than explode, it just showered the front of my barracks with gravel."

Kandahar, once home base for the Taliban, remains especially uneasy. After the daring prison break here on June 13, which freed an estimated 350 Taliban prisoners along with hundreds of common criminals, the insurgents mined roads and destroyed bridges leading into the city. Hundreds of Taliban then amassed in the Arghandab district just to the north. For a while, Afghan government and NATO officials feared that the Taliban was poised to launch an all-out assault to retake Kandahar.

What happened next was a rare bright spot in what has been a gloomy fighting season in the Afghan war. Using its own Russian-made Mi-17 helicopters, the Afghan Defense Ministry deployed Afghan army reinforcements from Kabul and elsewhere to Kandahar. In just days, and with limited ISAF help, they routed the Taliban. U.S. officials say that the Afghan army is now taking the lead in 70 percent of operations in eastern Afghanistan.

These nascent successes underscore, however, that U.S. and allied commanders came late to the realization that creating viable Afghan security forces is their ultimate ticket home. A multiethnic army serves as a critical foundation for societies, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, that are torn by ethnic divisions and insurgencies. Yet the responsibility for training, equipping, and mentoring the Afghan army and police was initially assigned piecemeal to individual NATO nations. Precious years were lost.

"Unlike Iraq," Azimi said, "where more than a hundred thousand U.S. troops were deployed and tens of millions of dollars devoted to training their security forces, in Afghanistan there was a gap of two or three years after the fall of the Taliban where no one really focused on the Afghan army." Afghanistan's population of 30 million is larger than Iraq's, but its modest 63,000-man army (with 80,000 authorized) is dwarfed by Iraq's army of more than 580,000 soldiers. "Given our present security problems and geographic challenges, it's pretty clear that we simply do not have enough soldiers," Azimi said.

By nearly all accounts, the situation began to change for the better after the United States in 2007 assumed overall control of the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan and greatly increased the resources and personnel devoted to training and mentoring Afghan forces. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has approved $17 billion for the effort, with plans to essentially double the size of the Afghan army to 120,000 troops.

War by Consensus

Despite the increased U.S. contribution and the growing consensus on the need to build an Afghan army as quickly as possible, American commanders remain frustrated by NATO's failure to deploy the promised number of Operational Mentor Liaison Teams ("Omelets" in NATO-speak). These 12-to-19-person training teams serve as a vital link between forward-deployed Afghan army and police units and ISAF support such as airpower, medical evacuation, and resupply. The inherent danger of their mission was driven home in June when 18 police trainers from the Security Transition Command were killed in action. It was the worst month of the war for the command.

Some NATO member states such as Germany now refuse to allow their OMLTs to accompany Afghan units into combat in the volatile southern and eastern parts of the country. Others have failed to field the training teams altogether, apparently because of the financial costs. The result is a shortage of 20 mentoring teams and 2,300 trainers.

"As we've tried to generate these training and mentoring teams that NATO nations agreed to supply, we've fallen flat on our faces," Gen. Craddock, NATO's supreme allied commander, admitted. "I've talked at every meeting of the North Atlantic Council [NATO's governing body], and at every foreign ministers council. At one [meeting] I brought a big cup and labeled it 'Contributions,' and I reminded all the defense chiefs that their respective heads of state agreed to meet this requirement, so where is your bid? And I didn't get anything! So yeah, I'm frustrated."

Privately, European officials respond that the United States was so distracted by Iraq in recent years that it was slow to realize that the situation was deteriorating in Afghanistan. Sometimes governments in Europe have also moved cautiously in increasing support for a war that is widely unpopular with their citizens and has proven surprisingly bloody for nations that thought they were joining peacekeeping operations.

"When NATO agreed to expand its control to southern Afghanistan in 2006, no one really anticipated the difficulty of the fighting," said one European official in NATO. "Maybe we were in denial, but this has been a culture shock for a lot of us." American officials were frustrated when the alliance had 35,000 troops in Afghanistan but only 8,000 troops in the volatile south, he said, and they are still unsatisfied with NATO's 52,000 troops in Afghanistan and 22,000 in the south.

"The curve in troop deployments keeps going up, the number of nations contributing forces has increased, and national restrictions on troops are slowly being relaxed," the official said. "So we're heading in the right direction, but the progress has admittedly been slow and painstaking."

Untamed Border

The towering mountains of the Hindu Kush and the warlike Pashtun tribes that inhabit them have witnessed more than their share of fighting over the centuries, from the retreat of Alexander the Great's armies 2,000 years ago to the massacre of nearly the entire British garrison in Afghanistan at the Grandamak Pass in 1842 to the humiliation of the vaunted Soviet military in the 1980s.

Today, it is the United States and the Western alliance that are trying to tame the "Durand Line" border that separates Afghanistan and Pakistan, which was drawn up in 1893 by Britain's colonial government in India but never recognized by local tribes. A visit to a lonely outpost at the mouth of the Khyber Pass suggests that the fate of not only Afghanistan but also Pakistan, and ultimately the wider war against al Qaeda and the Islamic extremists drawn to this region, may hinge on the outcome of the current border campaign.

The Khyber Border Coordination Center sits in the shadows of the Hindu Kush next to the remnants of an old mud fort. During the visit to its modern tactical operations facility, a reporter observed officers sitting at computer stations, monitoring flat-screen televisions that broadcast video from unmanned aerial drones. At their fingertips are satellite phones, tactical radios, and ordinary cellphones. What is unique, however, is the array of national uniforms inside the center, where teams of Afghan and Pakistani army officers work, eat, and live together, alongside their NATO counterparts.

"This outpost represents a historic event. This has never been tried before," says U.S. Brig. Gen. Mark Milley, deputy commander of NATO's Combined Joint Task Force-101, which is responsible for eastern Afghanistan. As he speaks, Afghan and Pakistani officers fidget and eye each other uncomfortably. "We're trying to build mutual confidence and trust between the officers of two countries who have never had much of either," Milley says.

Because of its unusual nature, the center has no direct operational mission in the effort to interdict insurgents. Instead, the hope is that the center will facilitate regular intelligence-sharing across the border so that information can move up each nation's chain of command. Milley concedes that the arrangement at the coordination center -- the first of six planned joint border outposts -- is very much a work in progress.

"I'd say our military-to-military coordination with the Pakistani side is good, and I talk to my counterpart on the other side of the border every day. But it's not perfect," Milley tells a reporter. "The Pakistani Frontier Corps soldiers are all locals, so they know what is moving on their side of the border and what people are up to. I'm fairly confident that when they see bad guys moving, they'll let us know most of the time. Will they let us know all the time? No."

But trying to exert minimal control of the 1,600-mile Afghan-Pakistan border with only a handful of joint border outposts shows that the relationship between these traditional rivals remains antagonistic. Privately, U.S. intelligence analysts say that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate still attempts to wield influence inside Afghanistan by maintaining close ties to elements of the Taliban insurgency, and both U.S. and Afghan officials have accused the directorate of supporting the terrorists who bombed the Indian Embassy in July.

In the meantime, the Combined Joint Task Force-101, anchored by the U.S. 101st Airborne Division, tries to detect and interdict insurgents spilling out of the countless valleys and gorges of the Hindu Kush into Afghanistan. That "valley-to-valley fight," they say, is made all the more difficult by tribal, ethnic, and clan relationships so complex that people in a single valley can speak as many as seven Pashtun dialects. The nearly impenetrable tribal dynamic has worked against any application of the "Anbar model" used in Iraq, which allowed U.S. commanders to reach tactical alliances with tribal sheiks willing to turn against al Qaeda.

"That tactic of making alliances with certain tribes and clans to fight against others was used by the Soviets, and people in Afghanistan have a bad memory of it," says a senior Afghan officer. "It's a discredited concept here."

Meanwhile, as long as the syndicate of about 14 terrorist and insurgent groups that make up the Taliban and its allies operates freely on the other side of the border with Pakistan, commanders of the joint task force know they will essentially have to fight a rearguard holding action.

"The border remains one of the most important strategic operational issues I confront, because there is infiltration from every significant sanctuary on the Pakistani side," Milley says.

Increasingly, the Taliban is using newly constructed roads to hasten its movement toward Kabul, and to conduct ambushes that disrupt development projects and interdict allied supply lines. In June, for instance, Taliban forces set fire to a military supply convoy of 50 trucks just 40 miles south of the capital, killing some 40 local contractors. Ninety percent of U.S. goods to Bagram, the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan, come overland by road on an eight-day journey from Pakistan's Karachi port through the Khyber Pass.

"Roads are fundamental because the Taliban knows that people will use them to move products to market and break the insurgency's grip over their lives, and roads also connect the Afghan government to the people," Milley says. "Another of my top priorities is securing the Khyber Pass road as the main east-west axis, which like all roads in Afghanistan leads to the capital. And Kabul remains the center of gravity in this country."

Ungoverned Spaces

After the briefing at the Khyber Coordination Center, visitors sit down to a traditional Afghan meal that the local officers prepared. They smile at Gen. Craddock, who had come from halfway around the world. Asked his impression of the border campaign briefing, Craddock's answer reflects the military knowledge that insurgencies that enjoy uncontested sanctuary have rarely, if ever, been defeated.

"Look, this is the Hindu Kush, and there aren't enough soldiers in anyone's army to seal this border off completely," he says. "But we do need to control major access points and make it as difficult as possible to cross illegally." More important, Pakistan has to be persuaded to increase pressure on insurgent safe havens, he adds.

Top U.S. military officials forcefully insisted on that when they met with their Pakistani counterparts on August 26 aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln in the Indian Ocean.

"We already know that when insurgents can just roll back into a safe haven whenever we pressure them, that's just a terrible situation," says Craddock, recalling one of the primary lessons not only of counterinsurgency warfare but also of the 9/11 attacks. "The ungoverned spaces where no legitimate authority exerts control breed trouble for us. We know that."

Lifting off from the Khyber Pass outpost, Craddock's helicopter followed the green ribbon of the Kunar River west toward Kabul. Only a short flight away in the other direction was the most dangerous ungoverned space of them all -- the mountain area in which Qaeda terrorists have surely regrouped and where Osama bin Laden is likely hiding. He and his top associate, arch terrorist Ayman al-Zawahiri, have lost many fellow jihadists in the seven years of fighting that has raged since 9/11. But their strategy of trying to lure the United States and its allies into a protracted fight on their home turf -- and their dream of repeating the victory they won over the Soviets -- remains very much alive.

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