Government Executive - Authors - Michael Hirsh

After Ukraine, Will the U.S. Become an Energy Superpower?

Michael Hirsh, National Journal — Fri, 21 Mar 2014 12:16:47 -0400

Not surprisingly, Republican leaders are already denouncing President Obama for being too mild in his response to Russian President Vladimir Putin's expansionist course in Ukraine and defiance of the West. What is much more likely to emerge as a bipartisan national strategy, especially in the long run, is a future that both Obama and Republicans have been touting: America's prospective role as an energy export superpower.

Thanks to breakthroughs in the controversial technique of fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, the United States recently passed Russia as the world's largest producer of natural gas. Similarly the United States is expected to overtake Saudi Arabia and Russia as the world's top oil producer by 2017, also because of new technologies, according to the International Energy Agency. The United States still possesses an astonishing total of about $128 trillion in "technically recoverable" oil and gas resources alone, amounting to eight times the national debt, says the Institute for Energy Research, a right-leaning nonprofit foundation in Washington.

Unlocking a somewhat larger portion of those resources of oil and gas in an environmentally cautious way, while also launching a massive new investment program in green and other technologies, would strike directly at the heart of Putin's apparent strategy for resurrecting Russia, some experts say. It would also mark a distinct contrast from the personal sanctions applied so far against his top cronies, which appear not to have dissuaded Putin at all.

The Russian leader has long believed that Russia's power lies in its oil and gas resources (he even wrote a paper on the subject as a graduate student in St. Petersburg), and he has not been shy about applying this as leverage against the former Soviet bloc countries on his periphery and against Western Europe, where the reluctance to sanction Moscow more severely is clearly linked to its dependence on Russia for more than a third of its oil and gas.

Strikingly, Putin has appeared to become so reliant on the economic potential of energy that he has done relatively little to open up and modernize Russia's economy, despite what should have been a globally competitive tech sector stemming from the nation's history as a defense and scientific giant.

In recent weeks, both conservative outlets such as The Wall Street Journal editorial page and prominent liberal platforms of opinion like The New York Times have suggested that the United States increase its natural-gas exports to help Western Europe and reduce Putin's leverage, especially over Ukraine, which before the standoff obtained about 90 percent of its natural gas from Russia. Some Republicans on Capitol Hill have also used the crisis to plug pet projects like the Keystone pipeline and press the Obama administration to license more natural-gas exports. Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska, has called for lifting the ban on U.S. oil exports.

In truth, there is probably not much the U.S. can do in the immediate future to shift the economic dependence for Europe dramatically; the necessary plants and facilities will take years to build. The more realistic question is longer term: whether such a strategy should become a kind of energy analogue to Cold War containment policy, in part to counter what now looks like a long-term Putin strategy toward reasserting Russian influence in the former Soviet sphere.

America's rise to energy independence and exporter status would achieve the multiple aims of undermining the sources of Putin's power and influence, drawing Western Europe closer, keeping China from allying its own future too closely to Moscow's (despite persistent wooing by Putin), and further freeing America of dependence on another region that has become increasingly fractious and undependable: the Arab world. The United States appears to be facing an era of enduring political instability in oil-producing countries like Iraq and Iran, and less and less dependable diplomatic relations with allies such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.

Such a strategy would also, not coincidentally, go a long way toward solving America's chronic debt problem, which has become a grim barometer of other countries' assessment of the United States' so-called decline as a superpower. And grasping hold of a new energy future is, almost uniquely, an issue that both parties seem now to agree on, despite the anxieties of the environmental lobby.

"If we could tap into even a smidgen of that wealth, we would solve our fiscal problems," says James Pinkerton, a former official in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and a fellow at the New America Foundation. "Now, with the prospect of a new Cold War, we might look at the strategic imperative of using that hydrocarbon power to deflate the Russians. It worked in the '80s for Reagan against the Soviets. It could work in the teens for the U.S. against Putin."

During the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney unveiled an aggressive program to open up more oil and gas drilling on federal lands. Some Western Democrats in the Senate who have already been vocal in support of expanding energy exports say the last few weeks have revved up interest in revisiting the sticky issue of balancing environmental protection against resource development, and finding a way around objections to fracking and other controversial technologies. "The Crimea issue has definitely raised the issue's profile," says Jennifer Talhelm, spokeswoman for the Democratic Senator Tom Udall.

Obama, even while touting America's future as an energy exporter, has been cautious in his approach, until now. But that may soon change too, especially as 2016 rolls around. Who has been among the strongest supporters of a new American geopolitical energy strategy in recent years? Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

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Why the CIA Is Still Doing Drones

Michael Hirsh, National Journal — Tue, 25 Feb 2014 09:44:42 -0500

It's been more than a year since incoming CIA Director John Brennan signaled his intention to shift drone warfare to the Pentagon as soon as possible. Brennan, a career spook, was said to be determined to restore the agency to its roots as an espionage factory, not a paramilitary organization. And President Obama endorsed his plan to hand drone warfare over to the military, according to administration officials.

>But a funny thing happened on the way back to cloak-and-dagger. According to intelligence experts and some powerful friends of the CIA on Capitol Hill, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the agency may simply be much better than the military at killing people in a targeted, precise way—and, above all, at ensuring that the bad guys they're getting are really bad guys. And that distinction has become more important than ever at a time when Obama is intent on moving away from a "permanent war footing" and on restricting targeted killings exclusively to a handful of Qaida-linked senior terrorists.

No public data exist on the accuracy and reliability of the strikes launched by the CIA versus those by the Pentagon, says Bill Roggio of The Long War Journal, who has tracked drone attacks. And the administration has insisted that all targeted killings must meet the same threshold. Obama said in a landmark speech at the National Defense University last year, "Before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured—the highest standard we can set." Nonetheless, the Pentagon's most recent botched hit in Yemen, a territory shared by the CIA and the Defense Department, pointed up problems with the military-run program that have long worried detractors. The strike in December killed a dozen people in an 11-vehicle convoy that tribal leaders later said was part of a wedding procession.

In extraordinarily blunt but little-noted remarks last year about the covert programs, Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, worried that the Pentagon simply incurs too much "collateral damage" and too often acts on bad intelligence. While the CIA exercises "patience and discretion," she said, "the military program has not done that nearly as well.… That causes me concern."

Some intelligence experts insist the key difference is tradecraft, especially the "long intelligence tail"—an extensive dossier justifying action—the agency insists on compiling on potential targets before they are hit. "Because of the blowback that's occurring, the agency is extremely cautious in terms of its intelligence justification," says Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counterterrorism official. "They're being very, very careful." CIA officials tend to collect human and electronic intelligence for longer periods on the ground, and they use on-the-ground assets to help identify and mark targets.

The military, by contrast, is focused more broadly on its traditional mission of force protection, with looser rules of engagement and fewer worries about justifying its actions to Congress, which the CIA is required to do under Title 50 of the National Security Act. "The military is always driven by protection of forces," says Giraldi, as opposed to the usually small-scale tracking of senior terrorists that the CIA specializes in. "They are seeing a different kind of target, and they are tending for that reason to be more proactive than the agency would be. They see a threat over the horizon, and they're going to whack it."

Yet the president has increasingly expressed a preference for less whacking—lethal force—and more nuanced ways of dealing with potential enemies. Administration officials have grown much more mindful of warnings that the anger and potential radicalization of local populations arising from collateral damage could outweigh any success coming out of the drone programs. This is especially true as new jihadist splinter groups emerge in Syria and other chaotic parts of the Middle East that may not now have designs on U.S. targets but could, with sufficient motivation, buy into a new anti-American narrative.

>Perhaps that is why there has apparently been little pushback in the administration on the halting moves to check the CIA out of the killing business. Still, the administration says Obama is determined to continue the "transition," and is developing policy standards and procedures. "The plan is to transition to these standards and procedures over time, in a careful, coordinated, and deliberate manner," says National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden. "I'm not going to speculate on how long the transition will take, but we're going to ensure that it's done right and not rushed."

On Capitol Hill, some legislators are pushing the Pentagon to certify that U.S. Joint Special Operations Command, which conducts the military strikes, can match the CIA's capabilities and targeting methodology before the shift to the Defense Department goes forward.

Earlier this month, The Washington Post reported that Congress is using a secret provision in a spending bill to block Obama's plan to shift control of the U.S. drone campaign to the military.

Part of the dispute may be about turf, because neither the CIA nor the Pentagon wants to lose funding. In his written answers to the Senate Intelligence Committee before his confirmation, Brennan said targets are picked "on a case-by-case basis through a coordinated interagency process" involving the Pentagon, the CIA, the State Department, and other agencies. But, in fact, behind the scenes the CIA has not always cooperated in sharing the vetting process, especially in Pakistan, intelligence experts say.

In addition, the CIA operates only outside declared war zones, such as in Pakistan or Yemen. But some experts remain puzzled about why the CIA and the Pentagon maintain different thresholds for action. "Why can't the CIA do what it's designed to do, which is to gather intelligence and then hand it over to the military, which is supposed to kill the bad guys?" Roggio asks.

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The NSA's Future: A Tale of Two Committees

Michael Hirsh, National Journal — Fri, 02 Aug 2013 17:22:13 -0400

Russia granted Edward Snowden a year's worth of refugee status on Thursday, and that may be just enough time to determine whether America's most prominent dissident will achieve his stated goal of dismantling the National Security Agency's "architecture of oppression," as he called it.

A groundswell of congressional support for major new restrictions on the NSA, combined with pressure from the nation's most powerful tech companies, is almost certain to force some of those changes into being. And the battle lines are already being formed between the judiciary and intelligence committees in both the House and Senate. Firebrand defenders of privacy rights on the judiciary committees are seeking to shut down or fundamentally overhaul surveillance, while Intelligence committee members who tend to stand behind the NSA are trying to preserve as much as they can of what they consider an essential program.

The ideas range from the extreme, shutting the telecommunication and Internet monitoring programs down altogether—something almost certain not to happen—to more feasible ideas that might preserve the heart of the program but add more transparency to the process. Such ideas include one that is gaining momentum in both the House and Senate—appointing a privacy advocate to take the other side against government requests for surveillance in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court—declassifying portions of the FISA orders, making them available to more members of Congress, and redesigning the phone-records collection program so that the NSA does not take possession of all the data itself.

NSA advocates counter that the vacuuming up of huge amounts of data is technically necessary, in part because of the nature of the diffuse threat of terror from small "super-empowered" individuals or groups [like the Boston Marathon bombers] and the need to jump out a few "hops" beyond their immediate phone contacts in order to detect all of them; and in part because the data is disposed of by the private sector too soon. And they fear that greater transparency of any kind will compromise the program, revealing sources and methods to potential terrorists and teaching them how to avoid surveillance.

But even the most stalwart defenders agree that some changes are likely to come. Those familiar with the thinking of Rep. Mike Rogers, the powerful chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, say that some privacy concerns will have to be addressed in order to keep the programs functioning. On the Senate side, Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee, told ABC's "This Week" that "I do think we're going to have make some kind of changes to make things more transparent."

Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of that committee, says that she knows of "no federal program for which audits, congressional oversight and scrutiny by the Justice Department, the intelligence community and the courts are stronger or more sustained." Nonetheless, Feinstein has already proposed several changes in order to assuage critics, including making public every year the number of Americans' phone numbers submitted as queries of the NSA database, along with the number of referrals made to the FBI and warrants to collect the content of any call; publishing the number of times in a year that any company is required to provide data pursuant to FISA's business records provision; making available to all members of Congress all classified FISA court opinions, in a secure location; reducing the NSA's five-year retention of phone records to two or three years; and employing more liberal members of the FISA court.

At the moment, the House debate seems more energized, with the shockingly close defeat of an amendment that would have effectively defunded Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allows the government to force telecommunications companies such as Verizon and AT&T to turn over business records if they are deemed "relevant" to a terrorism investigation. The failed amendment would have restricted such searches only to those persons already targeted by a federal probe. Now the odd-bedfellow alliance that collected 205 votes for that bill—consisting of libertarian right-wingers like Justin Amash, R-Mich., and liberal Democrats such as John Conyers, the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee and another Michigander -- are already planning for a counterattack by supporters of the program.

The NSA opponents say they know the intelligence committee members, along with the Obama administration (which is already releasing some phone data collection information) will try to grant cosmetic concessions while trying to preserve the heart of the surveillance program. "The intelligence committee is going to be working very hard to head off any substantive change to the programs," says a Democratic congressional aide. "The one thing in our favor is that it's the Judiciary Committee, and not HPSCI, that has primary jurisdiction" over the legality of domestic surveillance.

It is the Intelligence Committee, however, that oversees many national-security programs and prepares the budget for the NSA, among the other intelligence agencies. And while Rogers and Feinstein have both expressed concern about the sweep of the NSA's data vacuuming, both insist it is necessary, both Section 215 and another provision of FISA, section 702, that covers the other recently declassified NSA program called Prism, which is intended to target the Internet traffic of foreign suspects by tapping into U.S-based servers.

On the House side, Rogers released a joint statement with Intelligence Committee ranking member Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., before the vote on the Amash-Conyers amendment that said the data collection program "has been integral in preventing multiple terrorist attacks, including a plot to attack the New York Stock Exchange in 2009." They said the amendment "would have an immediate — and potentially fatal — operational impact and make America more vulnerable to terrorist attacks."

But in the Senate, Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy, D-Vt., disputed that assessment in hearings held this week. He suggested there was no evidence that the program had prevented acts of terrorism, and "if this program is not effective, it has to end." Leahy said a classified list of uses of the phone record program "does not reflect dozens or even several terrorist plots that Section 215 helped thwart or prevent, let alone 54 as some have suggested."

NSA Director Keith Alexander has contended that the programs conducted allowed U.S. authorities to disrupt 54 "events," 42 of which "involved disrupted plots."

Earlier this week, Leahy proposed a bill -- the "FISA Accountability and Privacy Protection Act of 2013" – that mirrored to some degree the moves made in the House. In part, it too would allow the government to obtain records using Section 215 only when it could establish that the information is relevant to an authorized investigation and somehow linked to a foreign terrorist group or foreign power. Again demonstrating the power of the emerging libertarian-liberal alliance, it was co-sponsored by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah.

And so, while leaker Edward Snowden hides in Russia, the debate he started in Washington will unfold in the ensuing months. The outcome will turn in part on the shifts in public opinion. The most recent national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted July 17-21, found that 50 percent of the public still approve of the government's collection of telephone and Internet data as part of anti-terrorism efforts, while 44 percent disapprove. That was actually a slight increase in favor of the NSA from a month before, when 48 percent approved and 47 percent disapproved.

At the same time, however, Pew found that 56 percent of Americans say that federal courts fail to provide adequate limits on the programs. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll also found dramatically rising concerns about intrusions into privacy related to the data collection.

Many opponents of the NSA's practices, including such prominent names in the House as James Sensenbrenner, R.-Wis., co-author of the Patriot Act, and California Democrat Zoe Lofgren, say they do not want to shut down the surveillance programs, only restrict them to the actual language of the actual FISA act, which requires that the NSA only collect information directly relevant to a national security investigation. If that doesn't happen, they warn, then the battle will be resumed when the statute is "sunsetted" on June 1, 2015.

And they are indicating that they feel the nation has been led astray because too much trust was put in the intelligence committees that were supposed to be overseeing the NSA programs. Says the Democratic congressional aide: "In lot of ways it was an Intelligence Committee-driven solution, with no input from rank-and-file members, that got us into this mess."

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How Obama Learned to Deal with the Taliban

Michael Hirsh, National Journal — Fri, 21 Jun 2013 09:24:05 -0400

One thing is clear: the United States fumbled the rollout of peace talks with the Taliban, leading to the latest dustup with Hamid Karzai, the mercurial president of Afghanistan. But all that flying dust—harsh words, conciliatory phone calls late into the night—has obscured a more important development: The Taliban may well be weakening and worried about their future.

If true, that would amount to a huge achievement for Barack Obama, who inherited a mostly failed Afghanistan policy from George W. Bush. Make no mistake: This has become entirely Obama's war over the last four years. The president deliberated for six months in 2009, then mounted his own personal mini-surge, shifted his generals around with an almost Lincoln-like alacrity, and ultimately assembled a nearly 350,000-strong Afghan national fighting force in near-record time—a force that has just this week taken over the lead in operations across Afghanistan. The Taliban are estimated to have a force just one-tenth that size.

Now, after many months in which the Taliban leadership were reluctant to say publicly what they were telling Afghan officials privately—that they are getting a little weary of fighting fellow Afghans and wanted to start up peace talks—that appears to be happening, even if the process has been delayed by a new diplomatic tiff between Washington and Kabul.

It could mean the first serious sign that, after the American and NATO withdrawal of most combat troops at the end of 2014, the country could hold together after all, even with a minimal U.S./NATO presence. And that the U.S.-led "counterinsurgency" scheme could see some meager success after all. The Taliban's fitful willingness to talk would appear to bear out claims from senior Afghan officials that I heard during a trip to Afghanistan in May: that the Taliban are "confused" about their goals, beset with worries about whether they can sustain a successful "spring offensive," and second-guessing themselves about the wisdom of fighting Afghan forces directly, as opposed to "foreign occupiers" -- the U.S. and NATO.

The Taliban are clearly still divided, and the Americans perhaps a little too eager to talk, since what were once preconditions for the talks—cutting all ties with al Qaida—have now become "end goals," in the words of State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki. (The Taliban appear to have fudged that promise by promising only, in a statement, that the movement will not "allow others to use Afghan soil to pose a threat to the security of other nations.") Yet even as the tentative deal to open up a Taliban office in Qatar for talks was announced, the Taliban claimed responsibility for a rocket attack on Bagram air base that killed four Americans the same day. Asked Wednesday whether that assault would scuttle the talks, Psaki replied: "We didn't expect that they would decry al-Qaida and decry terrorism immediately off the top. This was – this is an end result, or an end goal, I should say. It's a bumpy road. We always knew it would be."

Unfortunately several of the early bumps in the road were placed there, unnecessarily, by Washington, in what must be seen as a somewhat inauspicious beginning for Jim Dobbins, the new Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. It's really not a great start when your boss, Secretary of State John Kerry, is forced to make two phone calls to Karzai to explain why: 1) the Americans allowed the Taliban to lay claim to being the true representatives of the Afghan government by referring to themselves as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as the country used to be known under Taliban rule, and presenting itself as a government in exile; 2) after months of insisting that both the war and peace talks needed to be "Afghan-led," why Washington would announce bilateral talks between the U.S. and Taliban, cutting Karzai out.

U.S. officials say the Taliban simply lied about how they would describe their the new office in Qatar, and that Washington always intended to bring in Karzai. Even so, Karzai, who is sometimes seen as unstable in Washington, has often played a savvy game of orchestrating diatribes against the U.S. in order to solidify his domestic political base. He promptly called off not only any talks with the Taliban but also suspended negotiations over the all-important post-2014 security partnership with the United States.

Most of this was for show, but again the larger question is how much does the Taliban really want peace, and does this really represent a shift by its top leadership? U.S. officials say yes, though they're not certain. "We do believe that the Taliban Political Commission, as they call themselves -- which is now based in Doha -- are the authorized, fully authorized representatives of the movement, and authorized by Mullah Omar himself," a senior administration official said this week. "They declare that about themselves, and that's our understanding based on all the reporting." He said the Haqqani network, a Taliban ally, is also represented in Doha.

Karzai will stay on board, despite his fulminations. He knows he has no choice if the Afghan government is to survive after 2014. But the real question is whether the Taliban are truly getting tired of fighting, as the most hopeful U.S. and NATO accounts say, and whether, as Masoom Stanekzai, the chief of the Afghanistan Peace and Reintegration Program, says, they lack a "political vision" for the future other than to try to become a legitimate, and largely non-violent, political movement. No one knows, but a willingness to talk is usually a sign of weakness, not strength. And that is a good sign. So is the realistic approach being taken by Dobbins, who was the Bush administration's first special envoy to Afghanistan back in the fall of 2001 and knows all the pitfalls, despite these early fumbles. "I think we need to be realistic," said someone familiar with Dobbins' thinking. "This is a new development, a potentially significant development. But peace is not at hand."

True, yet something close to Obama's only real goal may be: keeping Afghanistan from becoming once again a staging ground for al Qaida, as it was before 9/11. And that, however lacking in glory, would still be a victory.

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Analysis: The President's Turbulent European Vacation

Michael Hirsh, National Journal — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 17:42:27 -0400

President Obama's honeymoon with the world is over.

What was it, exactly, about Obama's controversy-marred trip to Germany and the G8 Summit in Northern Ireland that fell so flat? Ummm, how about … everything?

There were the snarky words from Vladimir Putin, who expressed an almost Soviet-esque distance from Washington in his views about Syria. "Of course our opinions do not coincide," the Russian leader said bluntly. There was the coded warning from Chancellor Angela Merkel about spying on friends, and her and Obama's continuing frostiness over the issue of economic stimulus versus austerity. Above all, there was Obama's vague attempt at the Brandenburg Gate to capture some wisp of his past glory by pledging vague plans to cut nuclear arms and an even vaguer concept of "peace with justice."

The "peace with justice" line was a quote from John F. Kennedy, Obama's attempt to steal just a little of JFK's thunder from 50 years before. He didn't come away with much, winning just a smattering of applause from a crowd that was one one-hundredth the size of JFK's. A crowd that, at about 4,500, was also much, much smaller than Obama drew as a candidate in 2008.

Not only is the honeymoon long over, folks. The marriage is becoming deeply troubled and, increasingly, loveless.

On June 26, 1963, you may recall from your history books, Kennedy flew to West Berlin, which was isolated behind the Iron Curtain, and declared "Ich bin ein Berliner" to delirious roars from a crowd of 450,000 Germans who immediately understood that he was telling them that "all free men, wherever they may live," stood behind them.

Some linguists later quibbled that Kennedy should have said "Ich bin Berliner," and that by adding the "ein" he was really saying, "I'm a jelly doughnut," since "Berliner" was the name of a pastry in some parts of Germany. In truth, the Germans didn't misunderstand JFK for a moment, and his speech instantly became one of the most famous and inspiring in modern history.

In contrast to JFK, and Ronald Reagan's almost-as-famous line 24 years later -- "Mr, Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" -- Obama came across as more of a jelly doughnut, a little soft and perhaps too sweet inside, especially compared to the hard-edged Putin. After their meeting, it was clear that Putin, right or wrong, was pursuing a set course on Syria and other issues, frankly backing the regime of Bashar al-Assad, while Obama was continuing to temporize over how much and what kind of aid he would give to the Syrian rebels.

"We cannot dictate the pace of change in places like the Arab world, but we must reject the excuse that we can do nothing to support it," the president declared in his Brandenburg Gate speech. It wasn't much of an applause line. Even after announcing that his "red line" had been crossed in Syria, Obama rejected air strikes and then told Charlie Rose that aid will be delivered "in a careful, calibrated way" because "it is very easy to slip slide your way into deeper and deeper commitments."

Compare that to Putin's active military support of Assad, which has helped the Syrian dictator regain the advantage against the rebels, and Putin's harsher words. After his meeting with British Prime Minister David Cameron, in opposition to arming the rebels, Putin declared: "You will not deny that one does not really need to support the people who not only kill their enemies, but open up their bodies, eat their intestines in front of the public and cameras. Are these the people you want to support? Is it them who you want to supply with weapons? Then this probably has little relation to humanitarian values that have been preached in Europe for hundreds of years."

And even as he quoted Kennedy in his Brandenburg Gate speech Obama appeared to hop lightly from topic to topic, much as his foreign policy has. "The Russians know what they want. I think we've in a situation of strategic drift for several years," says John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School.

Indeed, as I have previously written, to a degree that the administration has not really acknowledged, Russia under Putin has become the chief countervailing force to U.S. power and influence around the world, even more so than China, which often follows Moscow's lead in the U.N. Security Council.

So now, instead of the Americans, it's the Russians who are delivering up the challenging quotes, and drawing the hard lines, in Europe. History may well still be on Obama's side, as he suggested by touting Berlin's "lesson of the ages" in his speech. The audiences, perhaps not so much.

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The Surveillance State: How We Got Here

Michael Hirsh, National Journal — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 09:25:05 -0400

On December 20, 2002, a Senate Intelligence Committee that included Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., today one of the most vociferous critics of the so-called "surveillance state," came to the following conclusion in its official report on the mistakes that led to 9/11: The National Security Agency had harmed U.S. counterterrorism efforts that might have prevented that terrible day because of the agency's "failure to address modern communications technology aggressively."

The report, a joint effort of the Senate committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, blamed "NSA's cautious approach to any collection of intelligence relating to activities in the United States, and insufficient collaboration between NSA and the FBI regarding the potential for terrorist attacks within the United States."

The Senate-House report said the NSA simply could not keep up with the explosion of information technology. "Only a tiny fraction" of the NSA's 650 million daily intercepts worldwide "are actually ever reviewed by humans, and much of what is collected gets lost in the deluge of data," the report said. In interviews at the time, then-NSA Director Michael Hayden explained why: The NSA, originally authorized to conduct monitoring only overseas, was effectively a Cold War dinosaur that was going "deaf" since its main mission of tracking "signals intelligence," known as Sigint, from the Soviet Union had ended.

"We have gone from chasing the telecommunications structure of a slow-moving, technologically inferior, resource-poor nation-state—and we could do that pretty well – to chasing a communications structure in which an al-Qaida member can go into a storefront in Istanbul and buy for $100 a communications device that is absolutely cutting edge, and for which he has had to make no investment in its development. That's what we've got to deal with," Hayden told me in an interview in mid-2002.

In congressional testimony leading up to that critical Senate-House report, Hayden explained the NSA had gone from tracking a relatively small number of Soviet communications pipelines — microwave transmissions, for example, from Moscow to various ICBM bases — to trying to keep up with billions of conversations on phones and emails in a world in which technological borders had been erased, and much of this traffic was now being routed through the United States. This huge new challenge was coming at a time when the super-secret agency had "downsized about a third of its manpower and about the same proportion of its budget in the '90s," the era of the so-called post-Cold War peace dividend, Hayden said in his testimony. "That's the same decade when mobile cell phones increased from 16 million to 741 million—an increase of 50 times. That's the same decade when Internet users went from about four to 361 million."

These perceived deficiencies, and the NSA's aggressive efforts to redress them since then, make up the real backdrop to the latest scandal that has engulfed Washington, this time over what appears to be a massive infringement of American civil liberties. And despite the outrage voiced by senators such as Wyden and other critics, the truth about what the NSA and intelligence and investigative community is doing is far more complex than the rhetoric might lead you to believe.

Most important of all, almost the entire U.S. government has been on board in promoting it.

After many struggles and failures in the last decade, the NSA did finally come up with new approaches to keeping up with the traffic. One such approach was the NSA's "PRISM" program, disclosed Thursday by The Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper. The newspapers revealed that the NSA and FBI have set up a program to tap directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, "extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track one target or trace a whole network of associates," as the Post wrote. The program was reportedly set up in cooperation with the major companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. Congress, following up on its original report, had given the government authority to do this under the Protect America Act in 2007 and the FISA, or Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Amendments Act of 2008, which immunized private companies that cooperated voluntarily with U.S. intelligence collection.

The NSA has also conducted a regular program to monitor phone conversations. The agency and the FBI, now cooperating much as the original Senate-House report urged them to do, won a secret order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority for three months to amass the telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon, according a report in The Guardian. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the order appeared to be merely a "three-month renewal of what has been in place for the past seven years." Feinstein and many other senators defended the program that they themselves set in motion in the last decade. Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., chair of the House intelligence committee, said that "within the last few years, this program was used to stop a terrorist attack in the United States."

Nonetheless, the NSA/FBI programs have raised very real concerns over whether this domestic surveillance has violated constitutional protections of privacy for Americans, despite efforts to restrict the data collection to foreign sources. Intelligence professionals counter that the perception of a Big-Brother-like surveillance state must be balanced against the equally real concerns about tracking terrorists that date back to 9/11, issues that have still not been fully resolved today.

The challenge is that even now, in spite of these programs, the intelligence community remains overwhelmed by data, and as the Boston Marathon bombings in April showed, it is very difficult to piece together clues in time to stop an attack. "There are massive gaps in our ability to actually analyze data. Much of the data just sits there and nobody looks at it," says one former NSA official who would discuss classified programs only on condition of anonymity. "People can do pretty horrific things on their own. Whether with explosive devices, or chemicals or biological agents. Everybody's walking around with these devastating weapons. How are you going to stop that?"

Intelligence professionals say that it is only with mass data collection that they can find the key "intersections" of data that allow them to piece together the right clues. For example, if an individual orders a passport and supplies an address where some suspicious people are known to be, that might raise some concerns – without, however, leading to a definite clue to a plot. Yet if the same person who ordered the passport also buys a lot of fertilizer at another address, then only the intersection of those two data points will make the clues add up to a threat that authorities can act on. In a Jan. 30, 2006 op-ed in The New York Times headlined "Why We Listen," former NSA senior director Philip Bobbitt provided a vivid example of how this "threat matrix" works. On Sept. 10, 2001, he wrote, the NSA intercepted two messages: ''The match begins tomorrow'' and ''Tomorrow is zero hour.'' They were picked up from random monitoring of pay phones in areas of Afghanistan where Al Qaeda was active. No one in the intel community knew what to make of them, and in any case they were not translated or disseminated until Sept. 12. But, Bobbitt wrote, "had we at the time cross-referenced credit card accounts, frequent-flyer programs and a cellphone number shared by those two men, data mining might easily have picked up on the 17 other men linked to them and flying on the same day at the same time on four flights."

In the early years after the 2002 congressional report, the NSA sought to redress this problem, setting up a giant $1 billion-plus program called Trailblazer that was to have brought the agency up to date in such pattern analysis and "data mining." The program was to have transformed the NSA's blizzard of signals intelligence into an easily searchable database.

But Trailblazer turned into such a boondoggle. What went wrong? The NSA, using traditional defense contractors like Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), sought to do too much at once, applying a clunky top-down solution to what was a Silicon Valley problem, Ed Giorgio, who was the chief codebreaker at NSA for 30 years, told me in an interview in 2006. "The biggest problem with Trailblazer was there was a grand theory of unification that was going to solve the problem, as if the 'central committee' could really do what's best done by a distributed network of people," he said. Fred Cohen, a former computer scientist at Sandia Labs, said then that what the NSA failed at was "to put out enough small money to enough different creative thinkers to explore a lot more possibilities."

Now the NSA has apparently done just that, deploying America's most advanced tech companies in its restless search for threats.

On March 12 of this year, at a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Wyden asked James Clapper, the director of national intelligence: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" Clapper responded: "No, sir." When Wyden followed up by asking, "It does not?" Clapper said: "Not wittingly. There are cases where they could, inadvertently perhaps, collect—but not wittingly."

In an interview on Thursday, Clapper sought to clarify his remarks. "What I said was, the NSA does not voyeuristically pore through U.S. citizens' e-mails. I stand by that," he told National Journal.

Clapper's earlier denial was broader than that, of course, and his narrower version this week isn't going to satisfy critics -- especially as details of PRISM leak out. But make no mistake: Wyden knew the answers before he asked the question. Wyden, in fact, along with another Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, Mark Udall of Colorado, has been warning for some time that the programs he helped to promote a decade before had now, in his view, overreached. "I do not take a back seat to any member of this body in terms of protecting the sources and methods of those in the intelligence community," Wyden said in a speech at the end of 2012. But he said those programs "should never be a secret from the American people."

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Intelligence Chief: I Didn't Lie About NSA Surveillance

Michael Hirsh, National Journal — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 17:17:53 -0400

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Thursday that he stood by what he told Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., in March when he said that the National Security Agency does not "wittingly" collect data on millions of Americans.

"What I said was, the NSA does not voyeuristically pore through U.S. citizens' e-mails. I stand by that," Clapper told National Journal in a telephone interview.

On March 12, at a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Wyden asked Clapper: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" Clapper responded: "No, sir." When Wyden followed up by asking, "It does not?" Clapper said: "Not wittingly. There are cases where they could, inadvertently perhaps, collect—but not wittingly." Clapper did not specify at the time that he was referring to e-mail.

The exchange came more than a month before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court granted a secret order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority for three months to amass the telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon, according a report in The Guardian. Although the court order was signed 10 days after the Boston Marathon bombings, on Thursday the two senior senators on the Intelligence Committee described the order as a regular renewal of an ongoing program. "As far as I know, this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been in place for the past seven years," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the committee chairwoman, told reporters. The ranking member, Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., also said the program was "nothing new. This has been going on for seven years." He added: "Every member of the United States Senate has been advised of this. To my knowledge there has not been any citizen who has registered a complaint. It has proved meritorious because we have collected significant information on bad guys, but only on bad guys, over the years."

Still, the disclosures about the NSA's domestic surveillance, which was unheard of before 9/11, and the secrecy with which the administration has pursued such intelligence gathering, raised questions about how forthcoming U.S. officials have been in acknowledging domestic snooping. Clapper's response to Wyden, and his later explanation of the meaning of his answer, are a case in point.

The Verizon records, it is true, apparently did not include actual content or conversations, but rather only information such as phone numbers, call duration and ID numbers.

A senior administration official told reporters on Thursday that the telephone data allow "counterterrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States."

Clapper, asked to reflect on his tenure as DNI for a special issue of National Journal, also commented on the intelligence community's handling of the Sept. 11, 2012, Benghazi attack that left U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three other Americans dead. "The major lesson I learned from that is, don't do talking points," Clapper said. A painstakingly edited set of "talking points" became the focal point in the Benghazi imbroglio after U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, whom President Obama just named as his national security adviser, went on TV and blamed the incident on "spontaneous" protests, rather than terrorists. E-mails released by the White House revealed extensive editing that simplified the talking points down, leading to accusations that information about terrorist involvement was being covered up by the Obama administration. At the time, the president was in the middle of a reelection campaign in which he was claiming that he had "decimated" al-Qaida.

But Clapper said the "fact is that we did not have a clear picture and in fact had contradictory indications at the time" of who the culprits in the attacks were. Even today, he said, with a much better idea of the attackers' identity, investigators still believe the perpetrators were a "mixed bag of people" that included elements of Ansar al-Sharia, an Islamist militia group, as well as "looters and vandals." He said one problem was that "people seemingly wanted to ascribe only one motivation. It was either-or when in fact it was a combination of all of the above."

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Susan Rice and Samantha Power: Less Change Than Meets the Eye

Michael Hirsh, National Journal — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 11:44:50 -0400

In appointing Susan Rice as his new national security adviser, President Obama appears to be taking two big risks at once: openly defying Republicans who have made her the centerpiece of the Benghazi imbroglio, and embracing a new interventionist view of the world that may well get him into trouble overseas at some point, perhaps in Syria.

Such is what will you hear some pundits write. In fact, on both scores, there is far less risk here than meets the eye. And the same goes for Obama's nominee to succeed Rice as U.N. ambassador, the fiery Samantha Power, whom Tara McKelvey of The Daily Beast once described memorably as "the femme fatale of the humanitarian-assistance world."

Why? First, because the GOP has effectively no say over the Rice appointment, which doesn't require confirmation, and it has little or no ammunition with which to oppose Power, who served an uncontroversial tenure in Obama's first term as head of the National Security Council's human-rights office and as chair of the president's new Atrocities Prevention Board. With the Republicans off chasing other scandals—in particular, the administration's role in allegedly deploying the IRS to pursue tea partiers—it has also largely escaped notice that Rice was largely vindicated by the White House's release of its e-mail traffic over Benghazi a few weeks ago.

The e-mails effectively demonstrated that, rather than covering up intelligence, Rice was only laying out the intelligence community's own summary in TV interviews last fall when she infamously attributed the deaths of Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012 to "spontaneous" protests. The e-mails revealed that both the CIA and the State Department had, without dispute, kept that description in their "talking points," and that Rice had nothing to do with the main debate between the two agencies over how to describe the incident. According to a U.S. intelligence official familiar with the drafting of the "talking points," the edited changes were simply attempts by the two agencies to "find the appropriate level of detail for unclassified, preliminary talking points that could be used by members of Congress to address a fluid situation." Here, too, Rice had no involvement with the discussion, even though she and then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton were said to have been the main advocates of U.S. participation in the NATO intervention over Benghazi to prevent humanitarian slaughter in 2011. Nevertheless, the controversy prompted Rice to withdraw her name from consideration as secretary of State back in December.

Second, while both Rice and Power have a reputation for being aggressive advocates of overseas intervention, in contrast to outgoing National Security Adviser Tom Donilon (known for taking a more traditional realpolitik view of national interests), in truth both women have embraced far more nuanced views than they often are credited with. Like Obama himself, both Rice and Power have moderated their views on U.S. military intervention abroad over the years, in large part because of the backlash from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, preferring to resort to diplomatic pressure, "moral suasion" and other tools. Neither woman, in fact, has been a pronounced voice on military intervention in the civil war in Syria.

In appointing Power last year to head his Atrocities Prevention Board, Obama cautioned that while he believed "preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest … that does not mean that we intervene militarily every time there's an injustice in the world. We cannot and should not." Power, a former journalist who first came to public notice as the author of an impassioned Pulitzer-winning book advocating intervention against genocide, A Problem from Hell, said in an interview at the time that she was completely in sync with the president's cautious views about intervention. She said it was very misleading to confuse atrocity-prevention with military intervention, and that the board was mainly an attempt to set up bureaucratic procedures and raise consciousness. In the case of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, for example, she noted, the Clinton administration never even held a "principals' meeting" about the slaughter, and it didn't use indirect methods such as radio jamming to prevent the Hutu paramilitary, the "Interahamwe," from calling for the murder of Tutsis—methods the Obama administration might use today.

Rice is also said to be passionate about atrocity-prevention and human rights, probably far more than Donilon. She has described herself as haunted by the Clinton administration's failure to do anything to prevent the Rwandan atrocity, at a time when she was a director on the National Security Council. In an interview in 2008, Rice told me she was too "junior" to have affected decision-making then, but that "everyone who lived through that feels profoundly remorseful and bothered by it." In a speech in 2009, Rice broke down in tears as she described visiting Rwanda six months after the mass murders, walking through a field strewn with decomposing corpses. "For me, the memory of stepping around and over those corpses will remain the most searing reminder imaginable of what our work here must aim to prevent," she said.

Still, human-rights advocates have accused Rice of also playing a game of realpolitik, or compromising with dictators such as current Rwandan President Paul Kagame, with whom she has a long relationship, also to avoid direct U.S. involvement overseas. In a 2009 essay in The New York Review of Books headlined "Kagame's Secret War in the Congo," Howard French, a longtime New York Times correspondent in Africa, called the largely ignored conflict "one of the most destructive wars in modern history" and suggested that Rice had either naively or callously trusted new African leaders such as Kagame and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda to stop future atrocities.

Rice's defenders say she is only reflecting the president's cautious views, as might be expected of an adviser who has been among the closest to him since the beginning of his campaign for the presidency in 2007. While Kagame has a checkered human-rights record at best, he has also supplied economic growth and stability, Rice's advocates say. And while Rice, like Donilon, is said to have sharp elbows in handling staff, and some foreign policy elites have questioned her temperament, she also brings impressive, even unprecedented credentials to the White House. A Rhodes scholar out of Stanford who is considered intellectually brilliant, she is "the first Africa expert ever to be a principal in the U.S. government," says a former State Department adviser who supports her. Much in the vein of Hillary Rodham Clinton at State, Rice sees a need to promote economic development as well as human rights and personal liberty, he says. "This is someone who understands complex challenges. She'll be a 21st-century national security adviser."

So, once again, it's game on at the two ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. The president, who indicated with his rollout of federal Appellate Court nominees Tuesday that he's ready for a new round of fights with the GOP, may be gambling that Susan Rice is no longer worth much of a tussle.

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How the Afghan Conflict Will Be Decided

Michael Hirsh, National Journal — Thu, 16 May 2013 16:45:03 -0400

KABUL, Afghanistan – Gen. Sher Mohammad Karimi thumbs excitedly through a brochure prepared for him by Textron, the U.S. defense contractor. “This is what I want!” the Afghan army chief of staff says, pointing to a picture of the latest technology in armored troop carriers.

Outside Karimi’s window, the giant, $92 million new defense headquarters that Washington is building for him is nearly finished; Karimi moves in in September. “Pentagon No. 1. This no. 2,” Karimi’s adjutant, Col. Mohammed Shah, says proudly in broken English. What Shah means is that the vast domed structure atop a hill—which resembles nothing so much as the Temple Mount—is expected to be the second-largest defense headquarters in the world, a distinct oddity in one of the poorest countries in the world. The Pentagon is also spending about a billion dollars on Karimi’s pride and joy, a new Mobile Strike Force. That includes $58 million on brand-new armored vehicles designed especially for the Afghan army by Textron (and which are deemed so state of the art that Canada just bought some for itself).

More than anywhere else, the future of Afghanistan will be decided here, in the heart of the new Afghan security structure on which Washington is spending billions of dollars. And it may well be decided in the next six or seven months, when the latest “fighting season” ends and the mettle of Karimi’s new Afghan National Security Forces are truly tested. As of the end of June, the ANSF will move from planning and leading operations for the entire country. Asked in an interview what his plan was for defeating the Taliban, Karimi replied: “We will never allow the Taliban to take over the country. That’s the plan.”

It doesn’t sound like much of a plan, but Karimi had better be right. This has been a horrific week for U.S. casualties, culminating in a suicide bombing in Kabul on Thursday that killed six Americans and at least nine other people. The casualties, which included the deaths of four U.S. soldiers killed by a roadside bomb near Kandahar on Tuesday, will almost certainly harden President Obama’s commitment to hand this decade-long quagmire over to the ANSF as quickly as possible.

Like other Afghan and U.S. military officials, Karimi says the 334,000-strong ANSF are far stronger and more organized than they have ever been, reducing the insurgency to nighttime raids and occasional IED and suicide bombings. “We have kept, and protected, all the areas we are responsible for,” Karimi says. U.S. and Afghan officials now describe the Taliban as “confused” about their strategic aims, though the insurgents are not ready to talk peace, by all accounts.

Still, the Taliban-led insurgency, said to consist of no more than about 30,000 fighters, has made much of the country too dangerous to travel. And Thursday’s bombing points up the complex nature of the enemy, whose leaders perceive how quickly support for the war is fading in the U.S. and NATO countries and aims to launch “spectacular” attacks like Thursday’s to quicken the departure of the 50-nation International Security Assistance Force, which consists of 28 NATO and 22 non-NATO countries and is led by the United States. The American victims were two soldiers and four civilian contractors, a NATO source said. An extremist group called Hezb-e Islami under the Pakistan-based warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar claimed responsibility for the attack. A former Afghan prime minister, Hekmatyar is not part of the Taliban but occasionally fights alongside them—and sometimes against them. Other attacks have been blamed on various factions that are also supplied out of Pakistan, especially the notorious Haqqani network, which is also loosely allied with the Taliban.

Whoever this multifaceted enemy really is now, it’s increasingly apparent that most of the hardest fighting will still be left to the Afghans and Americans. For that, Karimi says he’s going to need a lot of U.S. military assistance well after the end of 2014, the deadline for withdrawal. “We still need their help and support, maybe for another five to 10 years,” he says. Lt. Gen. Nick Carter, the deputy commander of ISAF under Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, tends to back Karimi’s assessment. “For some time to come it’s our expectation that we will need to supply the Afghans ... [with] air support, certainly, counter-IED support, logistic support, and a number of areas where their capabilities are not at the level where they need to be at,” Carter said in an interview last Saturday. He says the U.S. and NATO will have to “train, advise, and assist”—the post-2014 catchphrase—probably until at least 2018.

But those plans are barely sketched out. U.S. and European officials interviewed here this week appeared to agree on one thing: Most of ISAF is waiting on Obama, whose administration is currently engaged in secret negotiations with Karzai’s government on the size and shape of the U.S. force that will be left in Afghanistan after the final drawdown of the 63,000 or so American troops that remain.

That force is expected to number perhaps 8,000 troops, complemented by another 4,000 or so from NATO and ISAF countries. But France and Canada have already announced they are leaving Afghanistan completely, and thus far only Germany has stepped up with an offer of 600-800 troops post-2014.

Can it work? “As we are tired of fighting, so are the Taliban,” insists Karimi, who was interviewed before Thursday’s attack. “They are not united. They have different approaches. Pakistan is supporting the Taliban, but Pakistan has its own [economic] problems. So it is not easy for Pakistan to continue sustaining them." Indeed, despite all the negative trends here now—enemy attacks may well be up, one reason NATO doesn’t even track them anymore—Thursday’s assault on the convoy was a rare “spectacular” in recent months. “The Taliban have more propaganda than actually what they can do,” said Karimi. “They announced [their spring offensive] and started it about two weeks ago. So where is it?”

Well, it’s still here, as a horrific week has demonstrated. Karimi may be right that the Afghan army will hold the center of the country, and that the Taliban are no longer taking over and holding large sections of Afghanistan. The ANSF now outnumbers the Taliban by 10-to-1. Even in the face of U.S. and NATO withdrawal, the long-term commitments Washington and other capitals are making, however reluctantly, will very possibly change the age-old equation that has often seemed to doom Afghanistan to a state of permanent war.

But it still promises to be a very long haul, no matter how much money and effort America pours into the new Afghan army.

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NATO’s Plan for Afghanistan Post-2014: A ‘Stable Instability’

Michael Hirsh, National Journal — Mon, 13 May 2013 09:22:06 -0400

KABUL – Many Americans think we’re winding down in Afghanistan by the end of next year, for better or for worse.

We’re not.

Despite America’s evident desire to extricate itself from the nation’s longest war, Taliban fighters, criminal gangs and other insurgents continue to terrorize much of Afghanistan, making travel around the country as difficult as it’s ever been. And the grim bargain that has dogged U.S. efforts in Afghanistan since the beginning of President Obama's “surge” still holds: the United States must find a way to supply and support an Afghan national army and police force that Washington has largely built but which is barely in its adolescence, although it is already ten times the size of the fierce Taliban insurgency it is fighting.

Senior commanders with the American-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which consists of 28 NATO countries and 22 other participating nations, say that substantial aid and military support is going to be necessary well after the scheduled withdrawal at the end of 2014. “For some time to come it’s our expectation that we will need to supply the Afghans-- [with] air support, certainly, counter-IED support, logistic support, and a number of areas where their capabilities are not at the level where they need to be at,” Lt. Gen. Nick Carter, the deputy ISAF commander, said in an interview in Kabul over the weekend. “It’s our expectation that we’ll need to continue to build those areas for some time to come and probably beyond 2014.”

Asked how many years in the future that role might go, Carter, a British officer, said he believes that ISAF will need to “set the horizon out to 2018. … It will take between three and five years to achieve. And it’s important for people to understand that."

Within weeks, probably by the end of June, ISAF is expected to move to the final, fifth phase of its “handover” to the Afghan army and police. At that point the combined Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), as they are known, are expected to take the nominal lead in planning and directing all missions nationwide against the insurgents; currently ANSF is said to be doing that for about 85 percent of the country. The U.S. and other ISAF countries are then to assume a purely “train, advise and assist” role. But Carter and others say the ANSF is still falling short in effective leadership, command and control, logistics and medical evacuation, in training its personnel effectively, and in integrating the army’s warfare strategy with the Afghan police and central and provincial government agencies. These deficiencies will continue long after 2014.

In the end, securing Afghanistan’s future is likely to be more far expensive than Washington and other NATO capitals have fully reckoned with yet. It won’t be an easy political choice, either, coming at a time when the U.S. defense budget has been slashed by the sequester and European NATO nations must conform to economic austerity policies.

Indeed, the rhetoric back in Washington often does not seem to square with the reality over here. Since last year’s presidential election, Obama administration officials have indicated that America’s military is heading for the exit in Afghanistan as quickly as possible. “This year, we’ll mark another milestone—Afghan forces will take the lead for security across the entire country,” President Obama said at a joint news conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in January. “And by the end of next year, 2014, the transition will be complete—Afghans will have full responsibility for their security, and this long war will come to a responsible end.”

But Carter, in a blunt assessment, indicated that ISAF is under no illusions about the war ending in the foreseeable future and that, even after years more of effort, the optimal results will not be pretty. Asked whether the ultimate outcome ISAF is aiming for would be a version of the somewhat cynical term attributed to former ISAF commander Gen. David Petraeus --“Afghan Good Enough,” meaning a democratic government that remains corrupt and weak, and an unsatisfactory Afghan security force that barely holds the country’s center – Carter said he prefers to use another term to describe Afghanistan's likely future: “a stable instability.” Outside of major cities such as Kabul, Kandahar and Herat, he says, substantial portions of the country will not be very “connected” to the central government. But at the same time the Taliban will not be able to take over the country again, said Carter, who serves as deputy to Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford, the ISAF commander.

That’s not necessarily a disaster for ISAF, Carter said, adding, “I’m sure that’s going to be the case in large parts of Central Asia for some time to come.” In many parts of Afghanistan, especially rural areas, a combination of local, often corrupt interests will be dominated by warlords, drug lords, tribal leaders or insurgents who will “pursue their own interests.” He said that it was “rather like West Virginia” or “parts of the United Kingdom and Europe where groups pursue their own interests.”

Still, most details of these more ambitious plans have yet to be negotiated, Carter said. While President Obama is committed to withdrawing the remaining 63,000 or so U.S. troops by the end of 2014, his administration is still negotiating a post-2014 strategic partnership with Karzai that calls for a residual U.S. force numbering from 5,000 to 10,000 troops, according to various reports. Karzai, meanwhile, recently revealed that he has been discussing the use of as many as nine military bases to be used by the United States and ISAF after 2014. Carter confirmed that ISAF is considering the need for that many bases in order to support and supply six Afghan corps, as well as provide a headquarters, air support mission and training facility.

Reflecting the grim assessment, NATO defense ministers also recently announced that they would seek to maintain the ANSF at its current strength of about 334,000 (the Taliban are said to number about 30,000, though no one is certain of the total) or higher, rather than cut it down to about 230,000, as previously planned.

So far, however, of the NATO countries only Germany has officially offered to provide up to 800 troops to supply training after the 2014 deadline.

A January report by Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction concluded that the Afghans had failed to supply accurate numbers in meeting their goal to “train and field” 352,000 ANSF forces by October 2012, and that “Afghanistan is expected to have a ‘financing gap’ of $70 billion during the transformation decade of 2015–2024, with billions of additional dollars needed for years to follow.”

Carter indicated that it was critical for ISAF to support the ANSF in substantial ways after 2014 in order to address Afghan fears of abandonment. “We would regard the center of gravity in this campaign as being Afghan confidence,” he said. “We have to demonstrate a commitment to them that goes beyond the pledges at Chicago and Tokyo,” referring the May 2012 NATO summit in Chicago and an international conference on Afghan development aid later that year in Tokyo, at which the U.S., Germany, Japan, Britain and other donors offered some $16 billion.

Senior Afghan officials also say a longer-term commitment is the only way to marginalize the Taliban. In an interview on Sunday, Mohammad Stanekzai, the CEO of the Afghanistan Peace and Reintegration Program, said that NATO’s “credibility” is at stake.

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Analysis: Incompetence, but No Cover-up in Benghazi.

Michael Hirsh, National Journal — Wed, 08 May 2013 17:46:30 -0400

There was tragic incompetence, plainly, in the Obama administration’s handling of the Benghazi attacks, and even possibly some political calculation. It is a record that may well come to haunt Hillary Clinton, the first Secretary of State to lose an ambassador in the field in more than three decades, if she runs for president in 2016.

But the obvious Republican effort to turn this inquiry into the Democratic (Obama) version of the Iraq intelligence scandal that has tarred the GOP since the George W. Bush years -- led by that least-credible of champions, the almost-always-wrong Darrell Issa -- is just not going to amount to much.

The testimony Wednesday by three highly credible witnesses before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee added to the serious questions that have been raised for months about Benghazi. Last December, Clinton’s own “Accountability Review Board” --- chaired by two major national-security figures, retired Amb. Thomas R. Pickering and Adm. Michael Mullen—detailed a broad failure of U.S. intelligence and policy-making over the deaths of Amb. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

Statements and testimony in recent days from the three State Department officials, led by Stevens’ former deputy in Libya, Gregory Hicks, only appeared to underline the administration’s failure to take action, futile though it might have been, to save the lives of its emissaries. Hicks, in prepared testimony, said the U.S. military turned down his request for help during the attack, both special operations troops and F-16 fighters. Another witness, Mark Thompson, the deputy coordinator for operations at the State Department, was expected to say that Hillary Clinton sought to cut her department’s counterterrorism bureau out of the chain of decision-making, suggesting that she was downplaying the rise of terrorism in keeping with the administration’s political line during the 2012 presidential campaign (which Clinton has already denied). The last witness, Eric Nordstrom, the diplomatic outpost’s former chief security officer, has said that the Benghazi compound failed to meet security standards despite serious security threats.

The most moving -- if still-not-quite scandalous -- testimony came from Hicks, who described how he virtually begged for help as Stevens and his colleagues were being killed that night of Sept. 11, 2012. The help never came. The administration’s response has been that Hicks, a diplomat, is no expert in military capabilities, and his allegations have already been directly rebutted by both Gen. Martin Dempsey, the Joint Chiefs chairman, and former Defense Sec. Leon Panetta. Dempsey testified in February that it would have taken “up to 20 hours or so” to get F-16s to the site, and he called them “the wrong tool for the job.” Panetta testified that “the bottom line” is that “we were not dealing with a prolonged or continuous assault, which could have been brought to an end by a U.S. military response, very simply, although we had forces deployed to the region. Time, distance, the lack of an adequate warning, events that moved very quickly on the ground prevented a more immediate response.”

The military may yet have more to answer for as it conducts its own internal followup. And, without question, all of these statements Wednesday tend to bolster the critique of last year’s State Department report, which concluded that the administration had failed to appreciate the growing Islamist threat in Libya. As the report put it, “there was little understanding of militias in Benghazi and the threat they posed to U.S. interests.”

What there is still no evidence of, however, all these months later, is a deliberate cover-up by Obama, Clinton or other senior officials concerning what they knew about the attack and when. As occurred last fall, in the heat of the presidential campaign, much of the questioning on Wednesday focused on why four days after the attacks, on Sept. 15, intel briefers sent U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice off to tape the Sunday talk shows with talking points that suggested Stevens’ death was the result of “spontaneous” protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo against a short film made in California lampooning the Prophet Mohammad. According to Hicks, in a phone call after Rice’s appearance he specifically asked Beth Jones, the acting assistant secretary of State for the region, “why the ambassador had said there was a demonstration when the embassy had reported only an attack.” Hicks had said previously he thought what happened was “a terrorist attack from the get-go.”

Hicks' testimony appeared to lend credence to longstanding GOP charges that the administration was deliberately hiding evidence that new al-Qaida-linked terrorist groups were at work killing Americans, since one of the president’s big talking points in the election was that he had decimated al Qaida.

In fact, however, even today it is not clear exactly what happened to precipitate the Benghazi attack, and Libya remains somewhat in a “fog of war” situation just as it was during the Benghazi attacks. It was only a week ago that the FBI posted images of three suspects captured by surveillance cameras the night of the attack, asking the public's help in identifying them. Just two weeks ago the French embassy in Tripoli was hit by a mysterious car bomb, injuring two guards.

Intelligence officials say it took a week or so after Rice’s TV appearances to clarify, for certain, that there had been no protest before the assault on the compound —and that, as the office of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in a statement on Sept. 28, two weeks after Rice spoke, that “it was a deliberate and organized terrorist attack carried out by extremists.”

The intelligence community continues to maintain the same defense: that at the time of Rice’s appearance it simply did not have a good grasp of what had happened, and in some cases could not divulge classified information that was coming in about the attack. “The [talking] points were not edited to minimize the role of extremists, diminish terrorist affiliations, or play down that this was an attack,” a U.S. official told National Journal on Wednesday. “ It is important not to overlook that there are legitimate intelligence and legal issues to consider, as is almost always the case when explaining classified assessments publicly. First, the information about individuals linked to al-Qaeda was derived from classified sources. Second, when early links are tenuous it makes sense to be cautious before pointing fingers to avoid setting off a chain of circular and self-reinforcing assumptions and reporting. Finally, it is important to be careful not to prejudice a criminal investigation in its early stages.” And Rice, to her credit, did say that Sunday that her statement was “based on the best information we have to date.” She also referred to “extremist elements, individuals, [who] joined in …”

All this will no doubt come back to haunt Hillary Clinton should she decide to run for president; in some cases, she appeared to have been too removed from the events in Benghazi. Hicks at one point testified that that he personally spoke to Clinton at 2 a.m. on the night of the attacks, which makes the administration’s vague description in subsequent days even more suspicious.

But that hardly adds up to a cover-up. In the end, Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the chairman of the committee, may find himself digging yet another dry well, as he has done so many times. Even before he took over the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, with zero evidence in hand, Issa called Obama “one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times.” In his relentless search for evidence (and headlines) since, he has found nothing to back up that statement, including his highly publicized and largely fruitless hearings last June into the the Justice Department’s botched “Fast and Furious” gun-tracking program.

Benghazi was a tragedy. It will, almost certainly, remain a political issue. What it is not – by a long shot -- is a scandal yet.

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It’s Obama’s Economy—at Last

Michael Hirsh — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 16:57:00 -0500

For most of his first term, President Obama successfully sold a line to the public that economists will tell you is, at least in part, intellectual snake oil. He managed to blame our historically slow economy almost entirely on President George W. Bush. Polls taken right after the 2012 election showed that one of Mitt Romney’s biggest failures—and the GOP presidential candidate had staked almost everything on this point—was persuading U.S. voters otherwise.

But this week’s dramatic economic news, timed with the start of Obama’s second term, suggests that the political debate, if not the actual economy, is at an important milestone. On Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrial average reached new levels, shooting well above 14,000 and exceeding the closing records set in October 2007 just before the Big Crash. On Friday, a new jobs report finally gave Obama what he's wanted for four years: an unemployment rate that's below where he started as president, 7.7 percent. The Labor Department said nonfarm payrolls vastly outpaced expectations by increasing 236,000 in February, dropping the unemployment rate to the lowest level since December 2008, from 7.9 percent in January. Also this week, the Federal Reserve Board reported that Americans have recovered the staggering $16 trillion lost in wealth since the recession.

So, let’s call it, folks: As of March 8, 2013, this has become Obama’s economy.

It’s been a good week, and his acolytes are crowing: ‘Damn is that a good jobs report,’ former chief economist Austan Goolsbee tweeted. ‘Woot woot!’ House Speaker John Boehner, struggling to put some bad spin on a bust-out week of economic news, reminded everyone, “Unemployment in America is still way above the levels the Obama White House projected when the trillion-dollar stimulus spending bill was enacted.” Shades of the Romney campaign! Pretty lame.

But the harshest truths about the Obama economy are not ones Republicans would be eager to highlight. First, things are not really as good as the numbers suggest, and they are all but certain to get worse. If the $85 billion in cuts in the federal budget sequester go through as planned, gross domestic product will slow 0.5 percent, and about 750,000 jobs could be lost by the end of the year, the Congressional Budget Office says. The big numbers on Wall Street are also deceiving, says Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff, who along with coauthor Carmen Reinhart tracked 800 years’ worth of economic recoveries in a landmark 2009 book, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. “One of the paradoxes we point out in our book is that very often the equity markets reach and surpass previous levels within a few years, despite the fact that the economy takes decades to recover,” Rogoff said in an interview.

In addition, this is a very different American economy than the one we thought we had before the recession, and not in a good way. It’s not just that 7.7 percent unemployment is still very high and something of a grim new “normal,” along with still-high long-term unemployment. The problem is also that we’ve ended up with a far less equal economy. And there is little prospect of a consensus over tax reform or deficit reduction that will change that, no matter how many dinners Obama arranges with leading Republicans, like the one this week.

“The recovered wealth – most of it from higher stock prices – has been flowing mainly to richer Americans,” the Associated Press reported. This corroborates earlier data from prominent economists such as Emmanuel Saez of the University of California (Berkeley), whose work has shown that the wealthiest 1 percent of the country actually made out better, in percentage terms, during Obama's "recovery" than they did from 2002-07 under Bush.

Even the high Dow numbers conceal a darker truth about inequality and a still-ailing economy beset by bottomed-out interest rates that make bonds unattractive. “Those low interest rates are the sign of an economy that is nowhere near to a full recovery from the financial crisis of 2008, while the high level of stock prices shouldn’t be cause for celebration; it is, in large part, a reflection of the growing disconnect between productivity and wages,” Paul Krugman writes in The New York Tiimes.

In addition, Wall Street, the culprit behind the last disaster, may be at least as hard to rein in as it was four years ago. On the positive side, results of "stress tests" this week showed that 17 of the nation’s 18 largest banks will survive even if the economy plummets 5 percent and the Dow Jones industrial average falls to 7,221.7. But there is a new frothiness in the market that worries close watchers such as Neil Weinberg, the editor-in-chief at American Banker, who see new temptations abroad to underprice risk, coming at the same time that even Attorney General Eric Holder is warning that the biggest banks have grown not only too big to fail, but too big to prosecute. (In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Holder delivered an implicit rebuke to his former Cabinet colleague, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who permitted Wall Street to resurrect itself in what is largely its former image.)

So, yes, this is sure to be seen as Obama’s economy now. And while many of the trends are upward, in other respects what is being revealed now is the inadequacy of his first-term responses. A few years ago, some pundits, persuaded by the expert spinning of first-term economic adviser Lawrence Summers and Geithner, bought the Obama line that between the president's stimulus plan and his health care reforms, he was rectifying economic inequities that have grown since the Reagan era. The health care law, wrote David Leonhardt of The New York Times in 2010, amounted to “the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago.”

But Saez says Obama-era changes such as the health care surcharge on upper incomes, along with an increase in top tax rates back to the Clinton level, will have only minor impacts, especially relative to the changes that occurred after the New Deal. “It’s a medium-to-small-size change that, in my view, is not going to dramatically lead to a deconcentration of pretax income,” he said in a recent interview.

So, there’s little time to crow. Obama has his work cut out for him if he wants “his” economy to look like a positive legacy four years from now.

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Analysis: How Obama Fumbled Afghanistan

Michael Hirsh, National Journal — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 11:00:00 -0500

Until he took the job as President Obama’s special representative, Richard Holbrooke was known as one of the toughest, smartest, and most nimble diplomats of his era. He had plenty of ego, but few people doubted Holbrooke’s effectiveness.

So what happened to make Holbrooke so seemingly ineffective in dealing with Afghanistan and Pakistan in the years leading up to his sudden death in December 2010? Vali Nasr, a Johns Hopkins University professor who served as Holbrooke’s deputy, writes in a new book, The Dispensable Nation, that the main cause of Holbrooke’s difficulties was politics inside the Obama administration and, in particular, a White House that actively stymied him. This was especially true when it came to Holbrooke’s most important initiative: a bid to open up talks with the Taliban while the United States and NATO still had large numbers of troops in the country and, therefore, leverage, and before Obama’s announced the U.S. withdrawal.

Nasr’s account of his and Holbrooke’s frustrations holds up well to scrutiny. Holbrooke was pushing for talks with the Taliban back in 2009, but he made little headway with the White House that year or the next, according to several officials other than Nasr. Until he died, Holbrooke was trying to get the administration to see the larger picture, his widow, Kati Marton, told me last May. “He was pushing reconciliation with the Taliban when no one wanted to hear about it,” she said. “He knew that ultimately they would have to come to him to negotiate.”

But, as Nasr writes, “the president failed to launch diplomacy and then announced the troop withdrawal in a June 2011 speech, in effect snatching away the leverage that would be needed if diplomacy were to have a chance of success.” Nasr also writes that “the president had a truly disturbing habit of funneling major foreign-policy decisions through a small cabal of relatively inexperienced White House advisers whose turf was strictly politics. Their primary concern was how any action in Afghanistan or the Middle East would play on the nightly news, or which talking point it would give the Republicans.”

There is a lot to this as well, says another intimate of Holbrooke’s who was familiar with his thinking at the time. “The president was not at all interested in [Holbrooke’s] long game,” said this friend. “The people who run this administration are same ones who got Obama elected.... [Holbrooke] was up against a bunch of former congressional staffers and former campaign operatives who had just pulled off this magnificent feat, and they were going to run the presidency as they ran the campaign.”

As I wrote last May after a trip to Afghanistan, quoting observers inside and outside the administration other than Nasr, Holbrooke was intensely frustrated by White House interference; he felt curtailed in his actions by then-National Security Adviser James Jones and a coterie of close aides around Obama. This was especially true when Holbrooke sought to tackle the larger regional issues, in particular the tense relationship between India and Pakistan, which the Pakistani military and ISI use to justify their support of Islamist radicals. The White House denied his request to make India and specifically Kashmir part of his portfolio, although that disputed province, situated between Pakistan and India, has given birth to numerous Pakistan-supported jihadist groups. Nor did Holbrooke get support from the White House when he sought to confront Afghan President Hamid Karzai over corruption, critics say.

It will never be known, of course, whether a grand opportunity for diplomatic success was missed. The Taliban has passed up several opportunities since to negotiate. At the same time, reconciling seemingly irreconcilable adversaries was a Holbrooke specialty, as long as he had support from the White House. This was true during the Clinton administration. Indefatigable in the clinches as a negotiator, Holbrooke was known as “the bulldozer.” When Bosnia’s civil war looked intractable, Holbrooke brought all the parties to Dayton, Ohio, where he essentially locked them up until they arrived at a deal. Later, as U.N. ambassador, negotiating a giant dispute over dues owed to the United Nations, Holbrooke managed to patch things up between two groups that were almost as hostile to each other as the former Yugoslav factions were: Republicans in Washington and U.N. bureaucrats in New York City. ( “Boy, did it come down to the wire,” Holbrooke recalled to me about the latter, lesser-known negotiation. “Five straight nights of negotiating.... Very much like the last day of Dayton.”)

One key to Holbrooke’s success at both Dayton and the U.N. was full support from the White House and a freedom to make executive decisions—a latitude that, as Obama’s special representative, he was supposed to have had. But it didn’t work out that way. In his memorial speech about Holbrooke in January 2011, Obama told the diplomat’s family that he was “personally grateful” to them because “I know that every hour he spent with me in the Situation Room … was time spent away from you.”

But, in fact, Holbrooke spent very little time with Obama. As Nasr writes, “Holbrooke knew that Afghanistan was not going to be easy. There were too many players and too many unknowns, and Obama had not given him enough authority (and would give him almost no support) to get the job done. After he took office, the president never met with Holbrooke outside large meetings and never gave him time and heard him out. “

Nasr also writes of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s frustrations as secretary of State. “Both Clinton and Holbrooke, two incredibly dedicated and talented people, had to fight to have their voices count on major foreign policy initiatives,” he says. This is largely true as well, based on my reporting and other accounts. Obama himself, when asked by CBS’s Steve Kroft in a farewell interview with Clinton what the biggest foreign policy achievement of his first term was, gave an answer that inadvertently confirmed that his secretary of State was just another player. “For us to be able to wind down one war, to be on the path of ending a second war, to do that in a way that honors the enormous sacrifices our troops have made, to sustain the pressure on al-Qaida and terrorist organizations so that not only did we avoid a significant terrorist attack on the homeland, but we're able to dismantle the core leadership of al-Qaida. That's all a consequence of the great work that Hillary did and her team did and the State Department did in conjunction with our national security team,” Obama said.

In fact, Clinton had little to do with any of these initiatives. Although she allied with then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates in 2009 to press for a 30,000-troop surge to Afghanistan, Obama later sided with Vice President Joe Biden in paring this force down and withdrawing it quickly. The Iraq withdrawal plan was also handed over to Biden and his team. At an early meeting in 2009, according to one senior administration official, “all of sudden Obama stopped. He said, ‘Joe will do Iraq. Joe knows more about Iraq than anyone.” And the counterterrorism strategy came straight out of the White House (Coordinator John Brennan) and the CIA under then-Director Leon Panetta.

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Analysis: The Rehabilitation of Chuck Hagel

Michael Hirsh, National Journal — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:42:34 -0500

Having been ushered into his job as Defense secretary with the biggest dissenting Senate vote in U.S. history, Chuck Hagel appears to be already a politically damaged figure. And now, adding injury to insult, the first thing the new Defense secretary must do is go back to the Congress that roughed him up during his confirmation process and … beg some more. In order to minimize the effects of the imminent sequester, Hagel needs legislative authority to give him more discretion to move around money as the Defense Department is hit with $46 billion in cuts.

So it’s bound to be a rough first few days. “We need to figure this out,” Hagel told Pentagon employees in a town hall-style meeting shortly after being sworn in on Wednesday.

But Hagel and his team are quickly laying plans for what happens after the sequester hits in what is likely an effort to rehabilitate his image. Hagel will take his first overseas trip “in the very near future,” according to a Defense official. Though Pentagon officials won’t say, the new secretary is almost certain to visit U.S. troops in Afghanistan or elsewhere around the world, feeding off the popularity he is already enjoying among the military as the first enlisted man ever to be named the department's chief.

It’s traditional, of course, for a new Defense secretary to visit troops abroad, but Hagel is also stressing his credentials as a champion of veterans — most recently, as senator, coauthoring the post-9/11 GI bill — at a time when there are going to be a lot more of them returning home in coming months. “Much of my life has been about doing everything I could in some way to help veterans and their families,” Hagel told the Pentagon employees. “I'm more proud of that than any businesses or anything else I've been involved in.”

So Hagel may remain unpopular on Capitol Hill, but as he works to earn appreciation and sympathy from his new charges around the world, that could give the critics in Congress pause. Expect, for one thing, to hear repeated allusions to Hagel’s combat service in Vietnam as a perfect preparation for the winding down of two decade-long wars. “Secretary Hagel knows what it’s like to come home from war,” says an aide.

And Hagel has publicly expressed anguish over the number of military suicides stemming from post-combat stress after deployment in Afghanistan and Iraq. “Look at what we’ve done to our force structure,” he told National Journal in 2011. “There are a record number of suicides, record divorces. It’s devastating what we’ve done to our poor [military] people.” Hagel, says the aide, will “absolutely” be focusing on many of these internal Pentagon issues, such as mental health, post-traumatic stress disorder, and sexual harassment.

And with a president who appears fully in sync with him, Hagel has every intention of overseeing a new era in American defense policy, one that is likely to be pared down. Through Hagel, Obama in his second term is likely to restore a traditionally conservative way of thinking about foreign policy and the use of force that hasn’t been seen in decades, perhaps since the Eisenhower years. Obama’s first-term reluctance to intervene in Libya — before he finally decided on a support role for France and Britain, and through NATO — and his vetoing of a proposal to arm Syrian rebels are strong indications of where the president is going, and that approach reflects Hagel’s deeply held views as well.

That may never be popular with the neoconservatives who still revile Hagel, but it’s likely to gain the support of the American people. According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, only about a quarter of Americans (27 percent) say the U.S. has a responsibility to do something about the fighting in Syria, while more than twice as many (63 percent) say it does not.

Hagel will also be building new bridges to his sometime critics, including those who are more hawkish than he. Aides say one of the first congratulatory calls Hagel got after his confirmation came from former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who once upon a time was known as a pro-interventionist hawk. (In his memoirs, Colin Powell wrote that when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the Clinton years, he almost had "an aneurysm" when Albright asked him: "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?")

Hagel aides, meanwhile, are still doing postmortems on Hagel’s ill-fated Senate confirmation hearing — and readying him for his next appearance. Pentagon officials who had briefed Hagel were shocked that so few of the questions he was asked were related to the issues he’d been briefed up on — current policy on deployments and budget issues, which he is much more likely to asked about next time. “He prepped for all the things he would do as secretary of Defense,” says the aide. “But we were caught off guard by an Armed Services Committee that allowed a TV to be rolled into the room to play an Al Jazeera video from three years ago.” Hagel was then asked, by freshman Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, about an old, indistinct interview in which he did not rebut a caller's charges that Israel had committed war crimes. “How do you prepare for that?” the aide said.

Hagel will likely be far more prepared now — for a comeback, among other things.

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Analysis: Chuck Hagel, Strategic Thinker

Michael Hirsh, National Journal — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 11:33:20 -0500

It looks awfully likely that Chuck Hagel will squeak through confirmation as President Obama's Defense secretary. But it is also likely that he'll enter the Pentagon a damaged figure, a nominee tainted by the lingering impression that he is not ready to handle the vast complexities of a defense budget slated for slashing. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., in telling Fox News Sunday that he would no longer block a Hagel vote, still indicated he was shifting his position reluctantly. He called Hagel "one of the most unqualified, radical choices for secretary of Defense in a long time."

Unqualified? Radical? Hagel did himself no favors, of course, with his unsteady performance at his confirmation hearing two and a half weeks ago. But what has gone largely unnoted by the punditocracy is that, over the past decade or so, the former Republican senator from Nebraska has distinguished himself with subtle, well-thought-out, and accurate analyses of some of America's greatest strategic challenges of the 21st century--especially the response to 9/11--while many of his harshest critics got these issues quite wrong.

Even Hagel's defenders, scarce though they still seem today, have not addressed this question well. Consider Thomas Friedman, perhaps the most widely read foreign-affairs columnist of our time. In a column in The New York Times on Dec. 25, Friedman supported the Hagel nomination even though he said Hagel's views on Israel and Iran were "out of the mainstream."

"The legitimate philosophical criticism of Hagel concerns his stated preferences for finding a negotiated solution to Iran's nuclear program, his willingness to engage Hamas to see if it can be moved from its extremism, his belief that the Pentagon budget must be cut, and his aversion to going to war again in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, because he has been to war and knows how much can go wrong," Friedman wrote. "Whether you agree with these views or not, it would be nothing but healthy to have them included in the president's national security debates."

This was faint praise indeed. Perhaps it might even be more "healthy" to have a Pentagon chief whose views on these issues have so often proved right in contrast to so many others, including Friedman himself. Much has been made of Hagel's opposition to the Bush administration's turn toward Iraq a decade ago, but what is more important are the reasons Hagel gave at the time for this lonely stand. In an interview he did with me in the summer of 2002, Hagel laid out a sophisticated vision of a foreign policy that needed to balance "realism and idealism," one that was governed, above all, by a careful assessment of what it might mean to divert precious resources--both human and monetary--to Iraq when Afghanistan was still so unfinished.

"We are involved in something here we've never had to face before," Hagel said as the Bush administration turned its war machine toward Iraq, expressing concern to me that the minuscule security forces left behind in Afghanistan would not be enough. "The coalition forces run the risk of having not an adequate force on the ground to be able to give the Afghans under the [Hamid] Karzai government a reasonable chance to succeed with the monumental task that government has," he said. "I have always believed that once we engaged in Afghanistan the way we did, we had to see it through not just for Afghanistan but also because our prestige was on the line. The greatest risk is allowing that to unwind and go backward."

As we now know, Afghanistan did unwind and go backward, thanks in large part to U.S. inattention. In the first years after the fall of the Taliban, aid amounted to just $67 a year per Afghan, a meager figure compared to nation-building exercises such as Bosnia ($249) and East Timor ($256), according to Beth DeGrasse of the U.S. Institute of Peace. Jim Dobbins, Bush's former special envoy to Kabul, told me in an interview in 2006 that Afghanistan was the "most under-resourced nation-building effort in history." Another senior Bush administration official, former reconstruction coordinator Carlos Pascual, also said at the time that the State Department had "maybe 20 to 30 percent" of the people it needed in Afghanistan.

Yet as much as Hagel raised concerns about backsliding in the actual theater of the war against al-Qaida, he also worried presciently about U.S. overreach, as well as alienating allies around the world that were critical to fighting a global struggle against transnational terrorists. Hagel foresaw that unless Washington was more careful about the exercise of hard power, we would find ourselves in the very crisis we are in today, with a $600 billion-plus defense budget that the president and Congress have now mandated be cut by $500 billion over the next decade. Hagel saw that, in Iraq, America was taking on an already weakened leader who the senator said probably didn't have weapons of mass destruction, and at the same time empowering another regime (Iran) that badly wanted WMDs--a dire development further documented on Monday by The Washington Post, which reported that the Iranian-backed Shiite group Asaib Ahl al-Haq, the "League of the Righteous," is exerting new political power in Iraq.

Hagel also delivered some of the earliest warnings about the potentially disastrous effects of George W. Bush's ill-grounded "Axis of Evil" speech, in which the president needlessly alienated Tehran only days after the Iranians had actually delivered up aid and support to stabilize post-Taliban Afghanistan. Ironically, Bush's own officials on the ground in Afghanistan, such as Dobbins, had testified to Iran's measured policies at the time. They noted that at a 2002 donor's conference in Tokyo that occurred only a week before the Axis of Evil speech, Iran pledged $500 million--at the time, more than double the Americans' contribution-- to help rebuild Afghanistan. "Iran actually has been quite helpful in Afghanistan," Hagel, then a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Congressional Quarterly on Feb. 1, 2002. "And we're giving them the back of our hand." Hagel added: "We're not isolating [the Iranians]. We're isolating ourselves.... We ought to be a little more thoughtful. That [axis] comment only helps the mullahs."

Hagel was, in other words, displaying a deeply knowledgeable, well-grounded sense of the actual (monetary) and strategic costs of war, a critical faculty that will be badly needed in the months ahead as he grapples with the possibility of sequestration and budget cuts. His skepticism has since been vindicated by a large number of studies of the titanic costs of launching wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, amounting to multiple trillions of dollars. A Rand Corp. study in 2010 even concluded that the chaos in Iraq following the U.S. invasion "stalled or reversed the momentum of Arab political reform; local regimes perceive that U.S. distraction in Iraq and the subsequent focus on Iran have given them a reprieve on domestic liberalization."

What were Hagel's critics of today, and even some of his lukewarm defenders, saying at the same time? On March 13, 2003, seven days before the Iraq invasion, the Times' Friedman wrote: "This war is so unprecedented that it has always been a gut call-and my gut has told me four things. First, this is a war of choice. Saddam Hussein poses no direct threat to us today. But confronting him is a legitimate choice-much more legitimate than knee-jerk liberals and pacifists think. Removing Mr. Hussein-with his obsession to obtain weapons of mass destruction-ending his tyranny and helping to nurture a more progressive Iraq that could spur reform across the Arab-Muslim world are the best long-term responses to bin Ladenism."

Chuck Hagel, of course, was no knee-jerk liberal. He was, demonstrably, smart and strategic about the risks of a terrible expense in blood and treasure that lay ahead-- far more than many others. And he deserves more credit for that than he is getting. Perhaps Hagel is, after all, just the man to tackle the Defense Department budget.

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Why Obama Thanked Hillary

Michael Hirsh, National Journal — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 12:43:00 -0500

In a remarkable moment Sunday night, President Obama explained to CBS’s Steve Kroft that he had requested a 60 Minutes interview jointly with his outgoing secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton, because "I just wanted to have a chance to publicly say thank-you."

Obama has, in truth, good reason to feel grateful to his former political rival--far more than the public generally knows. In an impressive display of discipline and devotion after one of the fiercest primary fights in American political history, Clinton managed to submerge her political ego almost totally during her four years in office. Yet her journey from dominant Democratic political figure--a presidential candidate seen at one point as an easy winner over the upstart Obama--to loyal messenger and defender of the Obama faith wasn’t easy. And, to Clinton's credit, it happened almost entirely out of the headlines.

For his part, Obama achieved precisely what he may have set out to do beyond gaining what he called, in the 60 Minutes interview, an "extraordinary talent" in his administration. He effectively eliminated any public criticism or second-guessing that might have otherwise come from his chief former rival or her popular and influential husband, former President Clinton, who had harshly criticized Obama during the primaries.

The expectations, at the beginning, were quite otherwise. Shortly after Obama made her his surprise selection as secretary of State in the fall of 2008, Washington crackled with speculation about all the internal bickering that the arrival of Hillary would cause in the new administration. As George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, a former Clintonite himself, put it in his blog at the time: "Which meme will win out: 'Team of Rivals' or 'Too Much Clinton'?"

As the president acknowledged Sunday night, he had asked her to be his secretary of State in part because in 2008 he knew he would have his hands full with a collapsing economy, and he needed someone who was "already a world figure" to take care of foreign policy. The implication was that she would be the dominant figure. But that didn’t happen. Instead, Clinton quickly found that foreign policy was being run mostly out of the White House. Or as a senior State Department official put it to me a little over a year into the administration: "If you ask, 'Who is Barack Obama's Henry Kissinger?' the answer, of course, is that it's Barack Obama." Indeed, for a long time in the early months of the administration Clinton seemed to become almost an unperson as she mastered her brief at State, to the point where friends and admirers who had always known her as a policy dynamo--someone who had always found big issues to “own”--were baffled at her seeming lack of influence.

And by several accounts, the wounds of the primary campaign stayed raw well into the new administration. For much of the first year the mood between the Obama and Clinton camps reflected an uneasy truce. Clinton aides could feel a cold wariness emanating from the Team Obama loyalists at the White House, especially political strategist David Axelrod, then-press secretary Robert Gibbs and Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s closest aide. At the beginning, Clinton “was not in the inner circle. That was clear,” one close associate said in 2010, speaking on condition of anonymity. Clinton in turn “complained about a lack of dissenting voices in the administration,” said another longtime Hillary friend who knew her as first lady. “In the beginning she would say, ‘They want this, they want that,’ meaning the White House. It took a while for her to start saying ‘we.’ "

In addition, her bluntness abroad occasionally caused consternation in the West Wing. In 2009, before the Arab Spring, Clinton hinted that she was developing a policy to turn the Arab dictators into anti-Tehran bloc, and in a speech she boldly called for the Arab regimes to become part of a Cold War-style "defense umbrella” against Iran’s nuclear program. The New York Times soon quoted “a senior White House official” as saying that Clinton was speaking for herself. That was the last anyone heard of the defense umbrella.

In an interview two years ago, Clinton herself acknowledged the beginning was a bit rough, at least for her and the president's political aides. “I really think there was very little distance between the president and myself. But I think it is fair to say that people who supported both of us may have taken longer to shake off the vestiges of a very hard-fought campaign.Because that’s just the nature of the beast.”

Still, Clinton kept the muttering around her to a minimum and mounted an all-out effort to close any gaps between her and “her president,” and if Obama’s gratitude today is any indication, she largely succeeded. A critical moment, Clinton aides said, came at the global climate talks in Copenhagen in December 2009. She had carried weight before, especially during the Afghanistan policy review, when she aligned with then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates to persuade Obama to add another 30,000 troops in a “surge.” But “Copenhagen was the Aha! moment for both of them,” said a senior Clinton assistant.

The gathering of 133 countries, convened to negotiate a successor to Kyoto, was on the verge of complete breakdown. In a spontaneous decision, Obama and Clinton barged into a meeting that Chinese premier Wen Jiabao was holding with the leaders of Brazil, India, and South Africa to block simple climate controls such as“MRV,” or measurement report and verification of greenhouse-gas emissions. Smiling and shaking hands as if it were just another meet-and-greet, Obama and Clinton worked the room together as they had each done individually on the campaign; then the president sat down andstarted negotiating, with Clinton to his left sliding position papers over to him. When the Chinese finally caved, both Obama and Clinton knew that a critical moment had come two days before when she had flown in by surprise to deliver a major sweetener--what was effectively a global bribe--an offer of $100 billion from the rich countries by 2020 to help the poorer nations cope with climate controls. This had isolated Beijing. In effect, Obama closed the deal Clinton had set up.

In the final two years of her tenure, though she never really regained the foreign-policy initiative from the White House, Clinton still had considerable influence, especially in pressing the president to intervene in Libya, and in stiffening the administration’s spine occasionally by pressing for a harder line against Beijing and Tehran, particularly over Internet freedom. In the 60 Minutes interview, Obama said: “It has been a great collaboration over the last four years. I'm going to miss her.” There is every reason to think he meant it.

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Analysis: What Obama's missing in Afghanistan

Michael Hirsh, National Journal — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 09:20:35 -0500

As America’s longest war winds down, there is a giant hole in Washington's thinking where a strategy should be. Despite the hopeful talk that came out of his summit in Washington with Afghan President Hamid Karzai last week, President Obama is in danger of losing control of South Central Asia entirely, sacrificing a decade’s worth of blood and treasure as he begins his second term. Most of the focus now is on how rapid the U.S. troop drawdown will be. But the bigger problem for Obama is the absence of a U.S. diplomatic vision for the region -- and a diplomat to execute it.

More than 11 years after 9/11, the United States still has no comprehensive approach to the region that yielded up the worst-ever attack on America’s continental soil. Despite Obama’s pledge to remain committed to helping Afghanistan until at least 2024, the administration has failed to conceive of and articulate a strategy that would at once exert intense pressure on Pakistan to cease its policies of granting haven to and support for Taliban-allied insurgents in Afghanistan; shore up the hopes and lives of the many Afghans who still want to rescue their country from the Taliban, and coax India and other surrounding countries with which Washington has relationships into playing more of a supporting role in these efforts.

Most commentary on Afghanistan tends to dwell on the failure, or meager results, of America’s counterinsurgency strategy rather than what has been an unquestioned success. Over the past decade Obama, and George W. Bush before him, managed to construct one of the most comprehensive military alliances in history, with 27 other NATO nations and 22 non-NATO countries deploying nearly 45,000 troops in Afghanistan at present, in addition to the 68,000 U.S. troops there. And yet there has been no commensurate effort to transform this military structure into a united diplomatic front that could jointly place pressure on Pakistan, whose recalcitrant behavior continues to be perhaps the single biggest obstacle to defeating the Taliban. Despite last summer’s Tokyo donors’ conference and the NATO summit in Chicago last May, U.S. diplomats continue to see the Pakistan problem as mainly a bilateral one. But the evidence is to the contrary. It isn’t just American lives that have been lost; it is also hundreds of British, French, Canadian, Italian, German, Danish and Australian lives, to name just a few.

The upshot is that although Obama has committed the United States to a ten-year strategic partnership with Afghanistan after 2014 -- and NATO nations chipped in with $16 billion in aid pledges in Tokyo last summer -- Washington and other major powers continue to allow a middle-sized developing country, Pakistan, to defy them with virtual impunity. Even as some of the most powerful nations on earth have pursued tough multilateral sanctions against Iran, they have not threatened Pakistan with a similar fate, despite Islamabad’s role in aiding in the deaths of their soldiers. And Pakistan, although nuclear-armed, can stand isolation even less than Iran can. Its biggest strategic fear is an economically rising India, and sanctions would mean Islamabad risks losing economic, and thus military, ground to its arch-rival.

“We have to be willing to escalate the pressure, which in my view has to include Pakistan's very difficult economic circumstances," Zalmay Khalilzad, the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq and the United Nations, told me last spring. "It is a failure of diplomacy of the highest order.” U.S. and NATO officials remain hesitant about offending Islamabad because of a paralyzing fear that, if Pakistan becomes destabilized, its nuclear arsenal could fall into the wrong hands.

This drift in policy shows no signs of abating. On the contrary, since the sudden death of Richard Holbrooke on Dec. 13, 2010, there has been no a senior diplomat in place with enough authority, toughness, and vision to handle the problem, according to U.S. and European officials . Holbrooke’s replacement as Obama’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, career Foreign Service officer Marc Grossman, was widely considered to have been ineffective and provoked infighting from the State Department’s South and Central Asian Bureau. But Grossman retired in mid-December, and his job went to an even more junior diplomat, his deputy David Pearce.

Cynics in Washington tend to write Afghanistan off as a failure anyway; so why not just rush for the exits? But based on a trip I made there last May, such talk may be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Abandonment is a national trauma in Afghanistan, similar to what Hiroshima means to the Japanese or 9/11 means to Americans. Afghans recall what happened in 1989, when President George H.W. Bush abandoned the country after the mujahedeen forced a Soviet withdrawal; and then again in 2002, when Bush's son, George W., turned his attention and resources to Iraq while the Taliban quietly regrouped. That is why many Afghans said the psychology changed after the news of long-term U.S. and Western commitments, which tended to undercut the Taliban’s ostensible plan to simply wait out Western withdrawal.

Yet if America is making a commitment, America must also have a strategy. Last month marked the two-year anniversary of Richard Holbrooke’s death. His widow, the writer Kati Marton, told me in an interview last year that only months before his death at age 69, Holbrooke had begun to grow confident that he could deliver a strategic vision for the region that would address the fundamental issues in the U.S.-Pakistan relationship. "The thing that keeps me awake some nights,” she said, “is that I'm not at all sure he had that conversation with the president."

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Joe Biden: The most influential vice president in history?

Michael Hirsh, National Journal — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 12:25:57 -0500

Barack Obama just can’t get enough out of Joe Biden these days. And anybody who’s been following Biden’s steady ascent in stature over the last several years -- from gaffe-happy presidential contender to one of the most powerful vice presidents in U.S. history -- couldn’t be less surprised.

Perhaps the only surprise at all is that, in contrast to a year ago, it took Biden quite this long to become the president’s point man on the latest round of fiscal talks. The exact reason for the delay is not clear. Perhaps it is that, only a week and a half ago, Obama had called on his vice president to lead a commission to expedite recommendations on a truly serious national issue, gun violence (as opposed to the present trumped-up issue, fiscal reform, which requires only the smidgen of political courage necessary to depart from ideological rigidities). Maybe Obama wanted to keep his veep’s powder dry for that.

Or maybe it is just that, in the awkward pattern of political dance partnerships that have emerged over the last couple of years, whenever Obama and Speaker John Boehner fail to execute – as they did after the “Plan B” debacle -- it’s Biden and his old Senate colleague, Mitch McConnell, who step into the spotlight. The Biden-McConnell duo didn’t cut it during last year’s cliffhanger over the debt limit, of course. But in a sign of just how important a figure the vice president has become in Washington, Biden’s absence until now has been one reason that Republicans doubted Obama’s seriousness about cutting a deal, my colleague Chris Frates reported last week.

As the inevitable brinkmanship plays out, it’s useful to step back and look at just how central a role Biden has played throughout Obama’s presidency.

Over the past four years, Biden has insinuated himself into the White House, while seeming hardly to try, in a way that no other vice president in memory has done. He and Obama, both consummate pragmatists although they tend to be liberal in outlook, have achieved something close to a mind meld across a whole range of issues, including foreign policy, the economy, and political strategy. Biden said it outright in his speech during the presidential campaign: “I literally get to be the last guy in the room with the president. That’s our arrangement.” That’s no small thing in a town where power is often measured in minutes of presidential face time.

It wasn’t long ago that Biden’s predecessor, Dick Cheney, was seen as the gold -- some might say sulfurous -- standard in vice presidential power. Biden himself, ironically enough, once described Cheney as “probably the most dangerous vice president we’ve had,” because of what many observers saw as Cheney’s undue influence over George W. Bush.

But in terms of the sheer number of issues Biden has influenced in a short time, the current vice president is bidding to surpass even Cheney. Fiscal issues and guns are only a small sampling of this vice president’s portfolio. Back in 2010, it was Biden’s office that, in the main, orchestrated the handover to the Iraqis. It is Biden’s view of Afghanistan that has, bit by bit, come to dominate thinking inside the 2014 withdrawal plan. On financial reform, it was Biden who prodded an indecisive Obama to embrace, at long last, Paul Volcker’s idea of barring banks from risky trading, according to Austan Goolsbee, formerly the head of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. The VP also tilted the discussion in favor of a bailout of the Big Three auto companies, according to Jared Bernstein, Biden’s former economic adviser. “I think he made a difference in president’s thinking," Bernstein said. "He understood the importance of the auto companies to their communities, and throughout the country.”

In an interview in the fall of 2010, Biden could hardly contain his enthusiasm for his partnership with Obama. The phrase “Barack and I … ” fell from his lips naturally, with no hint of diffidence. He told me then that to his continuing surprise Obama has continued to “turn over big chunks” of policy to him to handle, whether it’s Iraq, middle-class issues, overseeing the recovery act. At an early meeting, “all of sudden, Obama stopped. He said, ‘Joe will do Iraq. Joe knows more about Iraq than anyone.…. The [Economic] Recovery Act, he just handed it over” to Biden, according to a senior administration official who attended the meetings and would talk about internal discussions only on condition of anonymity.

All of this power makes for quite an irony. Until his ascent to veep, Joe Biden was largely known as an amiable guy with a brilliant smile and a rather big mouth in which he frequently inserted his foot. And it’s not as if anyone could have expected that he’d be much more impressive as vice president. The vice presidency is a job that has tried to be taken seriously throughout U.S. history—and usually failed. John Adams, the nation’s first vice president, bitterly derided his job as “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived.” Like Adams, it was often men who had tasted real power who had the most disdain for the job. John Nance Garner, a former House speaker and FDR’s equally slighted No. 2, declared the job wasn’t “worth a bucket of warm spit” (it’s believed he used an even saltier term). In modern times the vice presidency began to grow in stature, especially as the hair-trigger calculus of the Cold War required presidents to keep their putative replacements informed. But the job remained for the most part a funeral-attending, snooze-inducing post, barren of almost all constitutional duties.

The previous two vice presidents, Cheney and his predecessor, Al Gore, significantly changed that power dynamic. But on Biden’s watch the “OVP”—Office of the Vice President-- has become something even more: almost a conjoined twin to the presidency, organically linked and indivisible from the Oval Office. Cheney succeeded for a time by creating a kind of shadow presidency, but there’s nothing shadowy about Biden. Indeed, Biden remains, in many respects, the anti-Cheney.

Yet in two critical respects the Delaware Democrat and the Wyoming Republican do resemble each other. Both are known to be confident in pushing their views, and both became masters of the Washington insider game. Whereas John Adams was not invited to participate in meetings of George Washington’s Cabinet, Biden handles so many issues that when, say, the national-security team leaves the Oval Office, he is often left alone chatting with Obama because he needs to be part of the discussion when the economic team arrives to brief the president. He will also often sit down with Obama in the residence before an important National Security Council meeting.

Now, if Barack Obama does leave a lasting legacy on gun violence that comes out of the terrible tragedy in Newtown, Conn., Biden will be a big part of it. And if anything like an agreement is reached on fiscal issues, Biden is likely to be part of that as well. His long Senate tenure, and the many relationships he developed across the aisle, are once again proving crucial. As I reported in the fall of 2010, shortly before the looming congressional election that gave the Republicans—and the tea party—the House, no one has more experience working with the other party, reaching across the aisle, and that talent may be critical to just keeping the government going in the coming months. “He can sit down in foreign policy or other issues and find a common interest and drive the ideas forward. Look at what he did with Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond” in passing the chemical-weapons treaty and crime bills, respectively, in the ‘90s, his former chief of staff (and later successor), Ted Kaufman, noted back then. “I mean, Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond! You don’t get more conservative than that.”

Actually, you do, as the current breed of Republicans has demonstrated in this era. But if anyone can talk to Mitch McConnell, it’s Joe Biden. Whose stock is still rising steadily.

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Analysis: Is Chuck Hagel being punished for stance on Iraq?

Michael Hirsh, National Journal — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 10:43:17 -0500

In his Pulitzer-winning book Profiles in Courage, which told the stories of eight U.S. senators who defied their parties and public opinion to stand up for what they believed was right, John F. Kennedy wrote: "A man does what he must--in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures--and that is the basis of all human morality."

At a time when Republican leadership in Washington seems to be all but absent, and courage nonexistent, perhaps we should remember that an antiabortion GOP senator with a respectable lifetime rating of 84 from the American Conservative Union made the same choice, a decade ago, as the heroic figures portrayed in JFK’s book. In the process, Chuck Hagel effectively sacrificed his political career for his beliefs—which, by and large, turned out to be right.

Let’s not kid ourselves or the reading public. Hagel may have said some questionable things about Iran, Israel, and “the Jewish lobby” over the years. But it is largely because of his sin of defiance a decade ago, and for the bigger sin of getting the biggest strategic choice of the 21st century right when so many others—both Republicans and Democrats—got it wrong that Chuck Hagel is persona non grata on Capitol Hill today. Given the rising resistance to him, it is looking less likely that Hagel will be the next Defense secretary (after all, President Obama hasn't even nominated him yet). But if that’s the case, we at least ought to be clear on the reasons.

Here’s the record. Beginning in early 2002, shortly after President Bush declared in his State of the Union speech that America must take on the “Axis of Evil” consisting of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, Hagel began speaking his mind about the increasingly errant course of the administration’s “war on terror,” which even then was losing sight of the real quarry, al-Qaida. "Iran actually has been quite helpful in Afghanistan," Hagel, then a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Congressional Quarterly on Feb. 1, 2002, in his initial act of apostasy. "They pledged twice what the United States did to the interim [Afghan] government. They have found some common interests with us that have been helpful.... We're giving them the back of our hand.” Presciently, Hagel added: "We're not isolating [the Iranians]. We're isolating ourselves.... We ought to be a little more thoughtful. That [axis] comment only helps the mullahs."

Hagel’s reading of the situation was dead-on. As it turned out, Bush’s “Axis of Evil” conceit backfired disastrously--first, in losing whatever positive ground America had gained with Iran; and second, in beginning to sow serious doubts among U.S. allies about what had been, until then, a united global front against al-Qaida. As some of us have previously reported, immediately after 9/11, U.S.-Iranian relations grew closer than at any time since the fall of the shah. Washington wanted Iran's help in Afghanistan, and Iran gave it, partly out of fear of an angry superpower and partly to be rid of its troublesome Taliban neighbors next door.

Indeed, according to an interview I did with Jim Dobbins, Bush's first envoy to Afghanistan, five years after Hagel’s comments, the Nebraska Republican had it right. The leader of the Iranian delegation to the Bonn talks on postwar Afghanistan, Javad Zarif, had been enormously helpful to the U.S. on a number of fronts. Zarif, a good-humored University of Denver alumnus who would later become Iran’s U.N. ambassador, even urged the American delegation to commit Afghanistan to democratization, Dobbins said. And toward the end of the Bonn talks, Dobbins told me in 2007, "we reached a pivotal moment." The various parties had decided that American-backed Hamid Karzai would lead the new Afghan government. But Karzai was a Pashtun tribal leader from the south, and it was Tajik rivals from the Northern Alliance who had actually occupied the capital. At 2 a.m. on the day before the deal was to be signed, the Northern Alliance delegate, Yunus Qanooni, was stubbornly demanding the vast majority of ministries in the new government. After negotiators gathered in the suite of United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, Zarif translated for Qanooni. Finally, according to Dobbins, at close to 4 a.m., the Iranian leaned over to whisper in the Afghan's ear that he’d have to take less: " 'This is the best deal you're going to get.' " Qanooni said, " 'OK.' "

That moment, Dobbins said, was critical. "The Russians and the Indians had been making similar points," he said. "But it wasn't until Zarif took him aside that it was settled.... We might have had a situation like we had in Iraq, where we were never able to settle on a single leader and government." A month later, Tehran backed up the political support with financial muscle: at a donor's conference in Tokyo, Iran pledged $500 million (at the time, more than double the Americans' contribution) to help rebuild Afghanistan.

Imagine, then, the reaction from Tehran after Bush included Iran in his Axis of Evil. "Those who were in favor of a rapprochement with the United States were marginalized," Mohammad Hossein Adeli, an Iranian Foreign Ministry official, told Newsweek in 2007. "The speech somehow exonerated those who had always doubted America's intentions."

As the year 2002 wore on, and Bush’s designs on Iraq became clearer, Hagel began to speak out more against the administration’s direction, and to urge more peacemaking efforts between Israelis and Palestinians instead, despite the recalcitrance of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Appearing on CNN on Jan. 12, following Senate colleagues such as John McCain and Joe Lieberman who were already talking about the need to take on Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, Hagel said: “I think it would be unwise and dangerous if the United States would move unilaterally against Iraq. My fundamental question is, "What happens next? So if you take Saddam Hussein out who governs? Do you let Iraq be fractured into many components?”

Hagel also began calling for a real national debate about Iraq. It is one that never really occurred, as Democrats were afraid of being seen as squeamish and as leading pundits like Thomas Friedman of The New York Times began calling blithely for a “war of choice” against Iraq. Hagel found himself increasingly alone. "We need a national dialogue," Hagel told The Times in July 2002. "That was a debate we didn't have with Vietnam." But even as other skeptics faded, Hagel refused to relent in his public skepticism. Why was he so isolated? As Michael O’Hanlon of Brookings (another Iraq skeptic turned hawk) explained around that time: "There's no real political benefit to opposing Bush. If we oppose him and he does go to war, there is a definite political cost."

Hagel began paying that cost. Once frequently mentioned as a Republican prospect for president, he grew increasingly strident and alone. He began to cast doubt on the administration’s case for war, saying in August 2002 that the CIA has "absolutely no evidence" that Iraq possesses or will soon possess nuclear weapons (another correct view). Ultimately, in a moment of weakness, Hagel backed the Senate’s war-powers resolution in the fall of 2002, but he reached across the aisle to work with then-Sen. Joe Biden to restrain Bush’s freedom to invade. And, as 2003 got under way, Hagel kept calling for more time for U.N. inspectors (who, unbeknownst to most of the American public, were being given unfettered access to all of Saddam’s WMD sites, bar none).

"We should give them that time and continue to share intelligence and information with them that will assist them in identifying possible weapons sites and supplies," Hagel said. A week before the invasion, on March 6, he told CNN: “The diplomatic channels have not yet been fully exhausted,” adding that Bush needed to stress his efforts at the U.N. “America must be seen as a just and careful and wise leader. If we are able to project that image, then I think nations will come with us, even if we have to use a military option.”

Later, after the invasion, and as the Iraqi insurgency rose, Hagel began to criticize the administration’s management of the war; but by then, of course, he had plenty of company.

The truth about Chuck Hagel is that he saw before most that America was embarking on an unparalleled strategic disaster by diverting its attention from al-Qaida a decade ago. He saw, and had the courage to say, that his own president and party were failing to anticipate the enormous cost of going into Iraq and of losing focus in Afghanistan. He saw that Bush was isolating himself by inventing an entirely new war that both defied world opinion and—in another enormous strategic misconception—gave al-Qaida new life by vindicating Osama bin Laden’s once-unheeded warnings to his fellow Islamists that the real peril was the “far enemy,” the United States. As Hagel divined, by invading Iraq, Bush displaced the dictatorships in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other “near” regimes as the bogeyman in the jihadi imagination.

We are still paying dearly for that mistake in blood and treasure, and yet very few people who supported it--senators, pundits, editors--have shown the integrity thus far to admit that they were wrong. And that Hagel was right.

In Washington, one is forgiven many things: sex scandals, massive errors of judgment. Being right is another matter. For too many lawmakers on Capitol Hill, it would be just too uncomfortable to have Hagel restored to power. He would be a living, nagging reminder of just how much they got wrong.

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White House wavers on Hagel, considers others for Defense

Michael Hirsh, National Journal — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 11:00:00 -0500

Besieged by criticism from right and left, and considerable skepticism from his former Senate colleagues, Chuck Hagel appears to be following the path of Susan Rice as a trial-balloon nominee who finds himself quickly losing altitude in Washington. And as happened with Rice, the White House is now signaling that it may soon puncture Hagel's hopes.

Just as occurred with Rice, the U.N. ambassador whose prospective nomination as secretary of State—leaked to the media—flamed out in the face of widespread criticism of her, President Obama appears to be rethinking his choice for Defense secretary.

A senior administration official told National Journal on Sunday that it was “fair” to say Obama is considering candidates other than Hagel for Defense secretary, in particular Michele Flournoy, who was under secretary of Defense for policy in Obama's first term, and Ashton Carter, the current deputy Defense secretary. Only a week ago, Bloomberg News reported that Hagel was Obama’s top choice.

The White House's revised characterization of Hagel’s standing came after what was, for the former Republican senator, a particularly discouraging series of comments on the Sunday-morning talk shows. Outgoing Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, an independent, told CNN’s “State of the Union” that it would be “a very tough confirmation process,” while on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Hagel’s former fellow Republican in the Senate, Lindsey Graham, said Hagel’s would be “a challenging nomination.” Graham added: “I don’t think he’s going to get many Republican votes.”

While much of the criticism centers on questions of whether Hagel has been a strong enough supporter of Israel and tough enough on Iran--as well as past comments he made about gay people--he is also paying, in part, for his bluntness and bravery in advocating unpopular positions during his 12 years in the Senate. Hagel’s gutsy and prescient stand against his own party and President George W. Bush in the run-up to the Iraq invasion—and his criticism of the war’s management afterwards—all but cost him his political career, turning him from a possible GOP presidential contender into a pariah within his party.

As early as the spring of 2002, as stories began to circulate that Bush was intent on going to war with Iraq, Hagel, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, began warning against the overextension of U.S. power. "We can't just say, 'Let's go take Saddam Hussein out,'" he said at a luncheon in June 2002. "I suppose that militarily we could. But you'd better understand what's coming, if we do. We could inflame the Arab-Muslim world like nothing we've ever seen."

Hagel also endeared himself to Obama with foreign-policy advice when the latter was a freshman senator, and later recommended that the Democratic presidential candidate pick Hagel’s longtime ally in the Senate, Joe Biden, as his running mate. (The two had worked together to tone down the war authorization act passed by Congress before the Iraq invasion.)

But now, in what appears to be another failed trial balloon, Obama may be calculating that the political cost of pushing through a Hagel nomination at a time of critical talks over fiscal issues may be too high. A similar pattern played out with Rice. In mid-November, The Washington Post reported that, according to senior administration officials, Rice would “almost certainly” get the State Department job. But by early December, as it became clear that Rice’s support in the Senate was tenuous at best, a senior administration official signaled that the president was backing off, telling National Journal that Obama was “genuinely conflicted” between choosing Rice and Sen. John Kerry. Rice ultimately took the hint and withdrew, and Kerry was nominated last week.

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Analysis: Ambition and anguish drive John Kerry

Michael Hirsh, National Journal — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 14:49:30 -0500

What kind of secretary of State will John Kerry be? The best answer to that question probably lies in something Kerry said 41 years ago, long before he became a politician—a statement that is still, unquestionably, the most memorable thing Kerry has ever said. With his thick hair gone gray, his long face looking longer and more world-weary with the years, it’s easy to forget that this is the same John Kerry who rocketed to national celebrity in April 1971 in a riveting appearance before the sameSenate Foreign Relations Committee he now chairs.

Kerry was then a 27-year-old Navy lieutenant who had lost his best friend, Dick Pershing, in Vietnam. The newly returned vet was anguished about his own guilt, having admitted on Meet the Press that he had “committed the same kinds of atrocities as thousands of others in that I shot in free-fire zones … joined in search-and-destroy missions, and burned villages.” Despite his Silver Star and three purple hearts, Kerry had also decided the whole war was terribly wrong, and the cost of its needless expansion was now being counted in the young Americans still dying needlessly, day after day. “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” Kerry asked the rapt senators in a quavering voice.

It is a question that has resonated through the years, on through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even driving Bruce Springsteen to write a song (“Last to Die”) and pen a note to Kerry on the album cover (which hangs on his Senate office wall): “John, thanks for the inspiration.” It is also a point of view that he shares with the man who has just nominated him to be secretary of State, Barack Obama—Kerry is expected to be easily confirmed—who has repeatedly made clear that war must always be a last resort.

According to Kerry aides and friends, the experience of bitter personal loss in a war he thought never should have been fought has since shaped his entire political career, and it will unquestionably shape what is expected to be the tenure of a decidedly activist secretary. “Kerry knows the cost of ignoring diplomacy, of seeing foreign policy through a military prism,” says Jonah Blank, a former key aide to Kerry on the Foreign Relations Committee. “He really believes in the power of diplomacy. He’s the kind of person who’s going to get on a plane when other people without his experience might say it’s a waste of time.”

Beyond that, Kerry is plainly ambitious. It’s not just that his chance at State is almost certainly, for Kerry, the last brass ring in a political career once so full of promise, but which all but ended with a humiliating loss to George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election, a defeat that left a sour taste because of his apparent passivity in the face of outrageous slanders about his Vietnam war service. It’s also that, as historian Douglas Brinkley, a Kerry biographer, writes in Foreign Policy, Kerry, the son of a career Foreign Service officer, “was raised to be a public servant.” “I think he really would like to go down as one of the great secretaries of State,” says Blank.

To do that, Kerry knows he must go beyond what his friend and predecessor, Hillary Rodham Clinton, has done. Clinton has reset America’s diplomatic agenda, and is leaving office as a popular public figure, but she has no signature diplomatic triumph or doctrine to her name. During her tenure she left most high-level mediation to regional envoys such as George Mitchell and Richard Holbrooke.

Kerry knows he must get his hands dirty with direct mediation, and he has far more experience at that than Clinton does. As chairman he has made many restless trips abroad and carried the administration’s water in the well of the Senate, marshaling votes on the START pact, leading a valiant if failed effort on climate change, and mediating in Sudan. Another reason Kerry is Obama’s pick is that he served an invaluable role in bringing Hamid Karzai along in Afghanistan long after other key envoys, including Richard Holbrooke, had given up on the Afghan president. Kerry also knows that is likely to be in a part of the world that looks all but intractable right now: the Middle East. While there are no immediate prospects for peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians, Kerry would be expected to play a key role in overseeing transition in Syria and continuing to isolate Iran. He will also undoubtedly be the point person in pushing Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, who is also a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood group that gave birth to Hamas, to play a broker’s role in breaking through the diplomatic permafrost that has prevented negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians for most of the 21^st century.

As Brinkley puts it: “Just as he learned everything he could about Southeast Asia from the 1960s to the 1990s, Kerry has amassed an encyclopedic knowledge of the Middle East—often putting him ahead of his potential future boss on the region's urgent crises. He was the first senator to call for President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt to step down, pressed the administration to create a no-fly zone in Libya to topple Muammar el-Qaddafi, and has been a sharp critic of Syria's murdering of its own citizens, having meticulously tested Bashar al-Assad's willingness to change his ways in 2009 and come away unimpressed."

A key issue will be Kerry’s relationship with Obama, which is seen as compatible in personality and worldview without being cozy. Indeed, Kerry will always be aware that he was the president’s second choice after U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, who withdrew from consideration after coming under intense fire from Republican critics. Rice, said one Obama aide, represented “Obama’s foreign policy in a way that Kerry doesn’t, in other words a new way of being a Democrat on foreign policy.” It was a reference to Obama’s carefully cultivated self-image as a tough commander in chief willing to apply diplomatic leverage to get what he wants and use power aggressively, especially covertly. Still, this aide said, Obama has enormous respect for Kerry.

As ever with Kerry, caution and passion will remain at war inside him. Some who are loyal to him think that he wants to be a pragmatic elder statesman but the restless young Kerry, the war veteran inside him, won’t allow it. “There’s a side of him that doesn’t want to be Henry Kissinger, that still wants to be the John Kerry of 1971,” one of his advisers told me in 2010.

Holbrooke, perhaps the foremost U.S. diplomat of his generation until his sudden death in December 2010, said in one of his last interviews that Kerry’s reduced political horizons have made him a much better public official. “He reached for the biggest of the brass rings, which he had spent his whole life preparing for,” Holbrooke said in an interview with National Journal. “Then he hoped to be Obama’s running mate, hoped to be Obama’s secretary of State. He got nothing, and emerged as chairman of this committee, and one of the most effective ones ever, in terms of his focus and his activism abroad.”

No doubt we’ll see even more of that John Kerry in the years ahead.

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Team of Mentors: Biden, Kerry, and Hagel Are Obama's Senate Mafia

Michael Hirsh, The Atlantic — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 13:00:00 -0500

In the summer of 2008, while the two of them were on a trip to Afghanistan, then-Senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, gave a bit of advice to then-presidential candidate Barack Obama.

"I told Obama he should pick [Joe] Biden as his running mate," Hagel recalled in a 2010 interview. "I said, 'He understands governance better than anyone else. In particular, he understands Congress. He understands how it fits together like no one else you could get. He's got the political piece. He 's got the policy piece. There's nobody in his league.'"

On August 25 of that year, Obama did indeed name Biden as his vice-presidential nominee. The move surprised many people. But apparently not Hagel.

Today, Hagel is reportedly President Obama's top choice to be defense secretary, while John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat and another old Obama colleague from the Senate who has influenced the president's thinking on Afghanistan (as have Hagel and Biden), is expected to be named secretary of state, perhaps this week. Biden, meanwhile, has become one of the most powerful and influential vice presidents ever, even by his own testimony. "I literally get to be the last guy in the room with the president," Biden said in a speech in 2012. "That's our arrangement."

It's difficult to say what the presence of this Senate "team of mentors" might mean for Obama's second-term foreign and defense policy, but they will probably counsel extreme caution in most things, with a wild-card possibility of bold new action in other areas, for example Mideast peacemaking. Kerry and Hagel, a generation older than Obama, are both Vietnam vets known for their prudence and judiciousness (Hagel even came out against Obama's "surge" in Afghanistan). That suggests something close to the status quo on Iran's sanctions policy, and Obama's mix of tough realpolitik and engagement toward China. But interestingly, both Kerry and Hagel are also men who've fallen somewhat into eclipse with something to prove. In Hagel's case, the onetime GOP star found himself persona non grata in his party after his fierce opposition to the Iraq invasion and later the surge. As Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, Kerry has had to claw his way back to respectability in the Democratic Party after his humiliating loss to George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential race, a defeat made all the more embarrassing by the "Swift-boating" attacks Kerry endured over his record as a war hero in Vietnam.

Is Chuck Hagel a pacifist?

Michael Hirsh, The Atlantic — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 10:14:01 -0500

Chuck Hagel is, by his own admission, haunted by Vietnam. When asked to explain his early opposition to George W. Bush's 2003 Iraq invasion in an interview in 2011, the former Nebraska senator harked back to his experience as an Army private fighting the Tet offensive in 1968. That maverick stance cost Hagel his reputation as a leading Republican, and it may be one reason why President Obama is now considering him as his next Defense secretary, with Leon Panetta set to retire. "We sent home almost 16,000 body bags that year," Hagel told me. "And I always thought to myself, 'If I get through this, if I have the opportunity to influence anyone, I owe it to those guys to never let this happen again to the country.' "

When Obama mounted a Bush-like "surge" in Afghanistan in 2009, Hagel wasn't happy either. "I'm not sure we know what the hell we are doing in Afghanistan," Hagel told me in 2010. "It's not sustainable at all. I think we're marking time as we slaughter more young people." Hagel had also opposed the surge in Iraq. In a dramatic moment on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2007, Hagel implored his fellow Republicans to stop avoiding the truth about what he called the futile "grinder" of Iraq, and asked them not to send in more troops. "Don't hide anymore; none of us!" Hagel declared, raising his voice. Although several Republicans expressed misgivings, in the end only Hagel voted in favor of the nonbinding resolution.

Read the entire story at The Atlantic.

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How the main candidates for Defense chief differ

Michael Hirsh, National Journal — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 15:00:00 -0500

Chuck Hagel is, by his own admission, haunted by Vietnam. When asked to explain his early opposition to George W. Bush’s 2003 Iraq invasion in an interview in 2011, the former Nebraska senator harked back to his experience as an Army private fighting the Tet offensive in 1968. That maverick stance cost Hagel his reputation as a leading Republican, and it may be one reason why President Obama is now considering him as his next Defense secretary, with Leon Panetta set to retire. “We sent home almost 16,000 body bags that year," Hagel told me. "And I always thought to myself, ‘If I get through this, if I have the opportunity to influence anyone, I owe it to those guys to never let this happen again to the country.’”

When President Obama mounted a Bush-like “surge” in Afghanistan in 2009, Hagel wasn’t happy either. “I’m not sure we know what the hell we are doing in Afghanistan,” Hagel told me in 2010. “It’s not sustainable at all. I think we’re marking time as we slaughter more young people.” Previously Hagel also opposed the surge in Iraq. In a dramatic moment on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2007, he implored his fellow Republicans to stop avoiding the truth about what Hagel called the futile “grinder” of Iraq, and asked them not to send in more troops. “Don't hide anymore; none of us!” Hagel declared, raising his voice. Although several Republicans expressed misgivings, in the end only Hagel voted in favor of the nonbinding resolution.

All of which raises a question: is Chuck Hagel a pacifist? Hagel, a warrior who earned two purple hearts in Vietnam, would say certainly not. And he can lay claim to a certain amount of prescience; like Obama himself, who first came to national renown in 2002 by speaking against the planned Iraq invasion as a “dumb war,” Hagel saw earlier than most in Washington the pitfalls of launching a new war (Iraq) in the middle of an ongoing one (Afghanistan). "Many of those who want to rush this country into war and think it would be so quick and easy don't know anything about war," he told me in the summer of 2002. "They come at it from an intellectual perspective versus having sat in jungles or foxholes and watched their friends get their heads blown off. I try to speak for those ghosts of the past a little bit."

Michelle Flournoy, the former under secretary of Defense who is also a leading candidate to replace the soon-to-depart Leon Panetta, is also somewhat haunted by the ghosts of Vietnam, by her own account, but in a very different way than Hagel. Though far too young (she turned 52 on Friday) to have served there with the 66-year-old Hagel, Flournoy warned in a speech this week that military planners might still be too “risk-averse” because of the Vietnam experience. She said the military was endangered by a new "Vietnam syndrome" in which planners might seek to avoid the lessons of counterinsurgency and guerrilla warfare simply because the last decade of this kind of conflict has been so costly in Iraq and Afghanistan.

At a time when Hagel was worried about the cost of the Afghan surge in bodybags, Flournoy was promoting the idea as a leading supporter of counterinsurgency strategy in 2009. During this period, a fierce debate occurred inside the Obama administration over whether to pare down the U.S. presence in Afghanistan and Pakistan to mere “counterterror operations”—the position taken by Vice President Biden, a longtime Hagel ally—or whether to mount a larger counterinsurgency or “hearts-and-minds,” nation-building-type war. After leaving the Pentagon, Flournoy took over the Center for New American Security, known as “COIN central.”

Yet Flournoy is no neocon hawk, says her former Pentagon aide, Janine Davidson. “She knows what battles to choose,” says Davidson, who worked as deputy assistant secretary for plans under Flournoy. “She’s very pragmatic about the application of military in an engagement and prevention role… think she has a very grounded sense of what America’s role in the world should be should be and how the military should support that role.”

Hagel’s blunt views are also a reminder that, if Obama is hoping to look bipartisan in naming a Republican to a top post, he’s not picking a man in good standing with the GOP. Hagel, who was once seen as a potential Republican presidential nominee, became persona non grata inside the party after his opposition to Iraq and never regained his standing. Nor has he ever let up in his criticism of what he called “mad, wild dash into Iraq,” which he blamed on “the lack of any clear strategic critical thinking” about the causes of 9/11. “I think when history is written of this 10-year period, it will record the folly of great-power overreach,” he said in 2011.

In the end, if Hagel is chosen, his views may be more in tune with the American public’s—and Obama’s. The American public is clearly war-weary. According to a new Pew poll, only about a quarter of Americans (27 percent) say the U.S. has a responsibility to do something about the fighting in Syria, while more than twice as many (63 percent) say it does not.

Yet Hagel’s blunt criticism of the Afghan surge, which has already been wound down (some 68,000 pre-surge U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan), would put him directly at odds with the president he would serve. In a 2010 interview, he also criticized the president’s decision to send in additional armor with the troops. “It’s a huge mistake to get bogged down with over 100,000 American troops. And this latest decision to bring in armor, that’s astounding to me at a time when we’re trying to work our way out. When you sink in a battalion of armor, sophisticated tanks, you’re going in deeper. You’re not getting out. The optics of that go back to Vietnam. When people see tanks in their country, they think occupation. That’s not something that’s winnable.”

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Analysis: Obama gets a solution to his Susan Rice problem

Michael Hirsh, National Journal — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 09:13:24 -0500

It was a classic Washington exit: stealthy and swift, with few fingerprints. President Obama didn’t want to be seen as backing down. So Susan Rice — one of his most devoted aides since 2007 — gave him the way out, seemingly all on her own.

“If nominated, I am now convinced that the confirmation process would be lengthy, disruptive, and costly — to you and to our most pressing national and international priorities,” Rice wrote on Thursday in a letter withdrawing her name from consideration as secretary of State.

In a statement in response, Obama said that “while I deeply regret the unfair and misleading attacks on Susan Rice in recent weeks,” he “accepted her decision.” He added that Rice will continue as his U.N. ambassador for the time being.

This was all the part intended for public consumption. The underlying reality is this: The president is almost certainly furious about this turn of events — which represents the first major defeat he’s suffered since his reelection — but he’s a savvy enough politician to know how to back off without seeming to back down. While floating Rice’s name for secretary of State in the media was always something of a trial balloon — she was never formally nominated or even publicly declared by the administration to be the leading candidate to replace Hillary Rodham Clinton — Obama appeared to really want to appoint her, calling her “extraordinary” and excoriating GOP attacks on her with unusual (for him) personal pique.

But as the weeks passed, it became clearer that Rice’s biggest political problem was no longer just the klatch of Republican senators, led by John McCain, who were fiercely criticizing her for allegedly misleading statements on the attack at the U.S. consulate that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya on Sept. 11.

After a series of strikingly unsuccessful meetings on Capitol Hill in which she failed to impress even moderate Republicans such as Susan Collins of Maine, Rice also found herself facing resistance from foreign-policy elites who questioned her temperament and her record. In addition, human-rights critics were up in arms over her behavior toward African dictators, particularly her role in allegedly holding up publication of a U.N. report that concluded the government of Rwandan President Paul Kagame, with whom she has a long and close relationship, was supplying and financing a brutal Congolese rebel force known as the M23 Movement.

That may have been the tipping point, though an official on Rice's team declined to say so. As she put it herself in her letter to Obama, the president had some other “pressing national international priorities.… It is far more important that we devote precious legislative hours and energy to enacting your core goals, including comprehensive immigration reform, balanced deficit reduction, job creation, and maintaining a robust national defense and effective U.S. global leadership.”

In other words, the Obama team was quickly coming to realize that, even though it appeared he had considerable leverage over the Republicans following a more-robust-than-thought reelection victory, a Rice nomination was simply going to cost him too much political capital, especially when it came to a long-term budget deal.

Two administration officials did not respond to e-mailed questions asking whether Rice’s letter had been solicited by the White House.

So exit Susan Rice, and enter a far more confirmable candidate, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who has long coveted the job at State, having acted largely as an advocate for the administration’s policies over the past four years as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. Last week, two officials on the Obama team told National Journal that the president was “genuinely conflicted” about which one to choose. Now Obama no longer has to be.

Still, giving State to Kerry also means opening up a Senate seat in Massachusetts. That would prompt a special election that could allow recently defeated Republican Sen. Scott Brown to recapture a seat in 2013, a risk Democrats may prefer not to take given that they have a slew of other vulnerable seats on the line in 2014.

Evade one risk in Washington and another always appears.

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