PPI’s Will Marshall and Jim Arkedis have a piece in the Detroit News this morning on the defense budget. Here’s an excerpt:
Recently, Republican and Democratic leaders of Congress unveiled their choices to head the so-called “super committee” entrusted with forging a long-term agreement to reduce the nation’s deficit.
The stakes are high for the Department of Defense. Should the super committee fail to propose legislation, or a divided Congress fail to pass a compromise, the deal to avert national default would automatically trigger a $500 billion cut from the Pentagon’s budget. Added to the $350 billion already cut by the deal, the Pentagon’s budget could shrink by $850 trillion over 10 years.
If the Department of Defense is forced to make such a substantial contribution to deficit reduction, one point is clear: Our political leaders remain unwilling to tackle the national deficit’s two main cost drivers — entitlements and taxes.
Nothing is set in stone, but the congressional super committee now faces two crucial questions: Should defense contribute more toward deficit reduction? And, if so, how do we save?
Our answers are that defense can contribute, but carefully.
Continue reading in the Detroit News by clicking here.
Seven months ago, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed strong U.S. opposition to the Palestinians’ unilateral statehood bid at the United Nations. One month ago, Congress threatened to cut off U.S. aid for the Palestinian Authority if it carried on. Yet President Mahmoud Abbas is still moving full-speed ahead to September with his U.N. initiative.
The Obama administration and Congress have rightfully taken a firm stance against unilateral recognition of a Palestinian State. But with every sign indicating that the Palestinian leadership won’t be changing course, it’s time for the White House to assert a more active approach to blunt the potential impact of this collision.
The United States must begin a vigorous public effort to lobby other countries, large and small, to oppose the Palestinian effort and join President Barack Obama in pressuring the PA to call it off. Acting decisively now, we can persuade the Palestinians not to press ahead with this damaging course – which undermines our quest for peace and risks anti-Israel terrorism and violence on the Palestinian side, when carelessly raised hopes are dashed.
The good news is that the administration has plenty of opportunities to speak out. Last week, a delegation of 18 Washington-based ambassadors from four continents took part in a fact-finding mission to Israel and the West Bank. They were not from major international players but smaller countries like Albania and Macedonia in the Balkans and St. Lucia and Grenada in the Caribbean.
The administration should start by inviting these 18 ambassadors to the White House and directly appealing that their countries vote against the Palestinian bid. In this game by numbers, the smaller countries—which account for a sizable portion of the U.N. General Assembly—can make a meaningful difference.
This can underscore for the Palestinians and the international community the peace is the goal — not just statehood — and there are no short cuts to negotiation.
Libyan rebels—the “rats” as Muammar Qaddafi calls them—are closing in on the eccentric dictator. Although a hundred things could go wrong in post-Qaddafi Libya, Americans should always welcome a tyrant’s fall.
Rather than ponder what comes next, the ever-parochial U.S. media is fixated on whether Qaddafi’s ouster will boost President Obama’s sagging poll ratings. Thus do all those ordinary Libyans who gave and risked their lives to liberate themselves get reduced to bit players in Washington’s never ending political melodrama.
Obama deserves some credit for lending a hand, but he wasn’t the instigator of the Libyan intervention. That honor goes to France and Britain, who were most determined to prevent Qaddafi from carrying out threats to obliterate regime opponents. Already mired in two wars, the United States was happy to fall in behind its allies, and after some opening salvos, content itself with mainly providing logistical support.
So credit NATO as well as the rebels if Qaddafi is toppled or flees. Assuming Libya does not dissolve into Iraq-style chaos, either outcome would be a big morale boost to an alliance that hasn’t gotten much respect lately. NATO’s decision to enforce a “no fly, no drive” zone in Libya was widely panned as ineffectual, a half measure that would make Europeans feel good but only prolong the violence and end at best in stalemate. On the other side, non-interventionists of the left and right complained that NATO has used its U.N. mandate to protect civilians as cover for waging an offensive war on the regime.
Well, that’s true—NATO’s real, if undeclared, goal has been regime change. Airstrikes on regime ground forces first stopped Qaddafi’s drive on the rebel stronghold of Benghazi, and have played a critical role in the rebels’ counterattack since then. A heavy NATO bombardment paved the way for their dramatic entry into Tripoli over the weekend. Maybe the Chinese or Russians are scandalized by NATO’s loose construction of the U.N. resolution, but strictly playing defense would undoubtedly have led to more bloodshed.
NATO’s success may or may not breathe new life into the creaky old alliance, which suffers from a cloudy rationale and steep cuts in European defense spending. It would, however, challenge assumptions about the supposed folly of using limited force in situations where the strategic stakes don’t justify “all-in” intervention. Foreign policy realists recoil at the idea of limited war— recall the Powell Doctrine, which says go in big or don’t go in at all—but in fact such interventions have become the norm since the end of World War II. None of the NATO allies has a compelling strategic interest in what happens in Libya, but there as elsewhere a strong humanitarian case for intervention could be made.
If Libya turns out well, it will be another step toward entrenching the “responsibility to protect” as a new global norm. But isn’t this a slippery slope? If limited war worked to prevent massacres in Libya, don’t we have a moral obligation to intervene next in Syria, whose thuggish dictator has killed close to 2,000 civilians over the last five months?
Well, no. International politics, like domestic politics, is the art of the possible. Each case is unique and requires its own careful balancing of prudential and moral considerations. Given Libya’s relative backwardness and Qaddafi’s political isolation, the risks of Western military intervention there are less than in Syria. Call it opportunism if you like, but it beats the perverse logic of denying anyone help because we can’t help everyone.
The most persuasive objections to the Libyan intervention have always turned on the question of what comes after Qaddafi. Have we opened the door to radical Islamists, as many U.S. conservatives fear? Can the National Transitional Council (NTC) established by the rebels last February, and united mostly by hatred of Qaddafi, sustain the support of a fragmented, tribal society? Will a rural country without a large, educated middle class be able to establish a stable, representative and effective government?
We’ll see. But having abetted the NTC’s victory, the NATO allies should have considerable leverage over the course of events there, especially if they are willing to follow military with economic and political support. In any event, Qaddafi’s imminent fall will likely invigorate the Arab spring and encourage a tougher regional and international response to Syrian dictator Basher al Asad’s depredations in Syria.
That alone would be a solid return on NATO’s modest investment in helping Libyans free themselves from a mad tyrant.
In the GOP’s Establishment v. Tea Party battle, this round, at least, looks like it was won by the outsiders. And, so it seems, the Establishment looks to be fine with that.
After making a big political show last week of storming out of Vice President Joe Biden’s fiscal negotiations over taxes, Republican Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) appears to have made a decision: cutting the Pentagon’s budget is less sacrosanct to conservatives than raising revenue. Cantor has positioned himself firmly against tax increases while using the Tea Party’s focus on spending cuts as political cover to give the appearance that he’s willing to give ground on Defense spending. “Everything is on the table,” Cantor said when referring to Defense cuts, implicitly endorsing the position of Tea Party-backed freshman Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) who says we “can’t afford” this Republican “sacred cow” anymore.
Not so fast, my friends. Cantor is trying to have his cake and eat it, too, stipulating that any reduction in Defense “belongs in the appropriations process.” This handful of words goes a long way when you parse them. In short, there are two major problems with this caveat:
First, and in English, that means Cantor is willing to give a nod towards reducing Defense spending on paper and in the press, but knows full-well that Republicans in charge of the House Armed Services and Appropriations Committees can fight to reinstate cut programs on a case-by-case basis at a later date.
Second, fixing the problem in the appropriations process focuses solely on weapons systems, which are, after all, the things that get appropriated. But weapons systems are hardly the lone driver of the Defense budget’s exorbitant rise over the last decade. As I’ve detailed in a PPI Policy Memo, personnel costs are the somewhat hidden story of Defense spending, even though Secretary Gates has stated that military health-care costs are “eating the Defense Department alive.”
A serious reduction in the Pentagon’s budget would agree to both reducing personnel costs and making any weapons systems reductions part of a legally-enforceable deal between the parties. Cantor doesn’t seems prepared to do either.
Worse, some Democrats are falling for Cantor’s slight-of-hand. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) seemed ready to embrace Cantor’s apparent willingness to talk defense cuts, saying, “If we can get $100 billion from reducing unneeded military spending, that’s better than $100 billion in taxation.” The risk is that in Frank’s haste to cut military spending, he is signing up for a deal that the Republicans have no intention of keeping.
We must scrutinize the Defense budget as part of a realistic national deficit reduction plan. But let’s do it the right way: reductions in Defense spending must come from personnel as well as weapons, and be enforceable over the long term. Eric Cantor is disingenuous about serious cuts, and Barney Frank seems too eager to reduce military spending to get a realistic deal from Republicans.
President Obama is taking heat for announcing troop withdrawals last night without clarifying U.S. war aims in Afghanistan. Yet his basic strategy couldn’t be clearer. It is to depart Afghanistan gradually – a fighting withdrawal – to maximize the odds that the Taliban won’t be able to take over once U.S. troops are gone.
It may not work, but it’s hard to see a better alternative. The United States can’t “win” this war in any conventional sense. We can’t defeat the Taliban, which unfortunately has an ethnic and popular base in Pashtun regions. We can’t afford nation-building in Afghanistan right now, even if we knew how to do it. We can’t make the central government fundamentally less corrupt and more effective in delivering basic services. The best we can do is to build and train Afghan security forces, bolster local resistance to the Taliban and degrade the insurgents’ military strength.
This course at least gives Afghans a fighting chance to keep the Taliban at bay without foreign help, and may reinforce efforts to find a political resolution to the conflict. Otherwise, the United States faces an unpalatable choice between getting out quickly and hoping for the best, or an endless military engagement to prevent Afghanistan from once again becoming a haven for Islamist militancy and terror plots.
The political media interpreted Obama’s decision to withdraw 10,000 troops as a bid to split the difference between a public that seems increasingly disenchanted with the war and U.S. military leaders, who believe we are making progress against the insurgency. In fact, the president’s purpose was to buy time for the U.S. military to continue its campaign to weaken the Taliban. Here’s the headline we should have seen: “Obama promises three more years of war.”
The president plans to draw down an additional 20,000 troops by next summer, but that will leave over 60,000 U.S. troops in the fight until 2014. He argued that his surge of 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan has succeeded in dislodging the Taliban from broad swaths of the south. Meanwhile, drone attacks have taken a heavy toll on al Qaeda and Taliban leaders in Pakistan, and of course U.S. forces finally caught up with Osama bin Laden. It wasn’t quite a “mission accomplished” moment, but Obama clearly believes these tactical gains justify a more deliberate withdrawal than many in his own party – and a growing band of restive Republicans – would like.
In a sense, Obama is applying the Iraq template to Afghanistan. His pledge during the campaign to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq by 2012 helped cool anti-war passions at home and give Gen. David Petraeus’s surge a chance to work. Likewise, by setting a date certain for an end to U.S. operations in Afghanistan, Obama buys time to build on the U.S. military’s hard-won successes.
The big difference, though, is that Iraq’s Sunnis turned against al Qaeda. The Taliban is an indigenous insurgency, not an imported conspiracy like al Qaeda. And the longer U.S. forces stay in Afghanistan, the more they risk triggering a broader and more nationalistic revolt against the latest foreign invader.
Obama is betting that we have a brief window of opportunity to wear down the still unpopular Taliban before that sort of transformation can take place, and before war-weary Americans give up on the Afghan mission. It’s not a bet that inspires confidence, but for now it’s the least-bad option.
Yesterday, Jim Arkedis, director of PPI’s National Security Project, gave his take on what the president should say in his speech on the Afghanistan troop draw down. A day later, let’s compare the two to see if the president’s speech lived up to Arkedis’ hopes.
Key Similarities:
● The president prescribed a troop withdrawal plan that brought home all of the surge troops by the end of 2012 similar to Jim’s desired troop withdrawal.
● Both agreed on the need for a political solution as the pinnacle of a successful resolution to the Afghanistan conflict.
● The two argued the withdrawal in terms of recent U.S. accomplishments on the ground in Afghanistan.
● Finally, both understood that America’s role in Afghanistan is not as a nation builder but as facilitator of democracy.
The Big Differences:
● A grand strategy: the president’s speech was lacking on details on America’s grand strategy for the end of the war.
● The troop numbers: the extra 3,000 troops advocated by Obama and in a slightly shorter timeframe reverberates politically. It allows the president to say during the 2012 that America has returned more than just the surge troops but has made a down payment on returning all of our servicemen home by 2014.
● The president had a larger economic focus, bringing up the concept of nation building at home instead of abroad.
● Frankness on the Afghanistan: the president lightly glazed over the current reality of Afghan-U.S relations.
● The president delved into Pakistan and Libya, which Jim avoided.
● The president did not address the recent U.S Senate Foreign Relations Committee report that aid was not having a tangible impact on Afghanistan’s infrastructure.
Both the president and Arkedis agreed on the key concepts of an appropriate Afghanistan withdrawal. The troop totals were nearly similar, and both advocated for a more progressive internationalist view of American foreign policy, emphasizing a support for enabling democracy without verging on nation building.
A majority of the differences were explainable due to the president’s position in global politics. A harsh yet true statement by the president has a larger impact on foreign relations then the statement of a policy analyst. For example in the case of U.S-Afghan government relations, the president has properly taken the high road, while letting his subordinates like U.S Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry handle the harsher rhetoric.
The president’s position as a global leader, however, does not prevent him from being frank with the American people. A recognition by the president that currentaidmechanismsare not working would have been the honest route. Talking foreign aid reformation would not have been politically pretty but could have dovetailed into Obama’s focus on the economy without creating an inverse relationship between domestic on defense spending.
A lack of a grand strategy by the president was also disappointing. In his December 2009 speech, the president outlined specific goals he wished for our troops to meet during the surge. Achieving these goals was the cornerstone of his rationale for the levels of troop withdrawal. A similar approach in the president’s most recent speech would have been logical.
Finally, the conflation of defense and domestic spending implied by the president’s decision to “to focus on nation building here at home” seems a bit troubling. Implying a choice between rebuilding America and securing it is a false choice: The United States should make crucial spending choices on security and domestic programs independent of one another.
The overarching themes of the president’s speech could largely have been predicted ahead of time, with news reports needling administration officials for the troop reduction totals. Political realities are understandable, and given the political landscape the president did a reasonable job in addressing the major issues, especially in terms of term withdrawal numbers and America’s role abroad. We hope that specifics on strategy and a clarification of the president’s domestic spending plan are presented in the upcoming round of interviews with administration officials.
Links to the president’s speech and Jim’s “speech”.
Here’s a message that President Obama would do well to tell to the American people tonight:
Good evening, my fellow Americans.
The last time I addressed you on Afghanistan in 2009 from West Point, it was to announce a new direction in that campaign. I appreciate that you might be getting tired of these kinds of speeches. Though our deployment in Iraq is winding down, America remains involved in two major war zones and a mission to protect Libya’s civilians.
I get it. We’ve been at war for nearly ten years, and we’re tired of it. Particularly in this time of economic difficulty, many are rightly asking tough questions: What are we doing there? Is America’s mission still keeping us safe as we spend billions of dollars every month? Can we come home now that we’ve killed Osama Bin Laden?
Back in December 2009, I argued that the state of our mission in Afghanistan was not well. We had the wrong strategy and not enough bodies on the ground to execute a strategy that fit the realities of the situation. That is why I announced a surge of 30,000 troops, bringing the American-lead coalition’s total deployment to approximately 132,000. I also promised during that speech that in July 2011–next month–our troops would start to come home. I am here tonight to make good on that promise.
Importantly, these forces were given a new mission in 2009: first and foremost, they were to protect Afghan civilians from the Taliban, which was designed to give the Afghan people the time and space to rebuild their country. This strategy has been successful in places, but less so in others.
At the time of the surge, the Taliban were on the verge of reasserting control over key areas of the country. I can report that we have undoubtedly reversed the Taliban’s momentum. We’ve made real security gains across significant parts of the country: the north and west regions are more stable, while volatility in the south and east. We’ve invested time, money, and effort into Khandahar, an important city of 800,000 in the southeast and traditional base of Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban. We’ve experienced marked security gains in Khandahar but, as in other areas of the country, we’re keenly aware that those gains remain fragile and reversible.
Furthermore, much of Afghanistan’s government is still a difficult partner. Corruption remains rampant, with officials, businesses and warlords are pocketing too many American taxpayer dollars that they shouldn’t. President Hamid Karzai continues to issue unhelpful statements, and proves time and time again that he’s hardly his country’s answer to George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. We understand that he’s playing to his domestic political audience most of the time, but the fact is that Americans have sacrificed too much in blood and treasure for the good of Afghanistan to be used as a punching bag by an ungrateful host.
Meanwhile, we continue to train Afghanistan’s security forces in hopes that they’ll assume many of America’s military duties. Afghan forces are increasing in size and competence but only in fits and starts. They’re frankly not quite ready yet.
Having taken all this into account, it is time to adjust our posture in Afghanistan again, and I’m not just talking about troop numbers. No doubt that headlines across the country will focus tomorrow on the number of withdrawing soldiers I’m about to announce. It’s crucial that we discuss not only how many will be left — an important factor that effects military families across the country — but what those that remain Afghanistan will do.
We know that the war in Afghanistan ends with a political solution. The United States leaves Afghanistan for good when its governing partners renounce violence towards the United States and each other, and agree to rule Afghanistan for its own sake. Throughout this process, I am keenly aware that it’s in America’s national security interest that Afghanistan never again become the base of operations for an attack against our country. As president, I will not hesitate to return large-scale forces to the region if I feel our security is threatened.
While searching for this political solution, we must also acknowledge that it’s highly unlikely that we will ever fully eradicate the Taliban or the remnants of al Qaeda. That is why this war ends with an agreement amongst Afghanistan’s tribes, ethnic groups, government, and yes, some weakened Taliban, to peaceably rule the country.
Based on the gains we’ve achieved in the last 18 months, I’m confident that we are putting ourselves, and Afghanistan’s government, in a strong position against the Taliban’s leadership. We’ve hit them hard, and they are reeling. Yes, we’ve killed Bin Laden, but that’s not the end of the road: we will continue to keep the American boot on the throats of al Qaeda and the Taliban through night raids and missile strikes.
Furthermore, we will continue to protect Afghanistan’s citizens in major cities and towns, like Khandahar and Kabul, by maintaining our current strategy in those places. We can sustain required manpower levels in those cities by withdrawing forces from areas that are reasonably safe. And we will redouble our training efforts and turn over patrols to competent Afghan security forces as fast as we can.
We will press for more aid money, sustainable development and government reform within Afghanistan’s governments. We are Afghanistan’s partner, but only so long as America’s money is spent more wisely than it has been.
I believe we can accomplish this mission by withdrawing 30,000 troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2012. I reserve the right, as Commander-in-Chief, to reevaluate this decision if the United States’ major national security interests are threatened by a degradation of security conditions in Afghanistan.
This war has lasted too long and cost too much. With this new plan, I firmly believe we are doing right by America’s hardworking military, their families, our citizens, and our national interests.
Both the House of Representatives and the president have shown that when it comes to Libya, NATO is not the only organization susceptible to bouts of friendly fire. A bipartisan group of ten congressmen sued the president last Wednesday for not getting Congressional approval of military action in Libya, thereby violating the War Powers Act of 1973. President Obama responded by stating that combat in Libya does not equate to the full-blown “hostilities” described in the Act, while simultaneously disregarding dissenting legal opinions from both the Pentagon and the Justice Department.
Amid this mess, there’s only one thing that’s clear: expending energy to politically posture over the War Powers Act has real costs. While both sides remained tied up in this debate, they remain distracted from our national objectives: ousting Qaddafi and, more broadly, keeping public discourse focused on the economy.
Three main issues undermine the Republican’s charge that the Obama administration has exceeded its brief vis-à-vis the War Powers Act: historical enforceability issues, potential political consequences, and questionable motives.
First, enforcement of the War Powers Act is difficult at best. While the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan received congressional support, presidential indifference to the Act has been historically bipartisan. Reagan invaded Grenada in technical violation of the War Powers Act, while Clinton received no congressional backing for the humanitarian intervention in Kosovo. Furthermore even legal precedent stands against enforcement: A District of Columbia appellate judge dismissed a similar War Powers Act suit over Clinton’s action in Kosovo, stating that the case was “nonjusticiable.”
Second, efforts like the one suggested by Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) to defund military action in Libya are futile at best. Despite their desire to protect the sanctity of legislative branch, representatives are wary of pitting a stand against executive overreach against depictions of betraying American troops abroad mid-mission.
And third, even leader Boehner’s position on the issue has been tumultuous at best. In 1999, Boehner called the War Powers Act “constitutionally-suspect” during the U.S intervention in the Balkans, noting that its implementation was “likely to tie the hands of future presidents.” The Majority Leader’s tenuous position on the issue only gives the impression that the congressman is willing to weaken future presidents in order to maximize present political gains.
At the same time though, it’s not clear why the president doesn’t want to play War Powers ball on Libya. In an editorial Friday, the Washington Post echoed similar sentiments on the president’s stance, while declaring that the vague nature of the law did not excuse Obama from abiding by it.
It seems as if the president is calculating that the cost-benefit analysis the situation favors a patient approach. By waiting for political realities to douse the House’s passions, the president avoids entangling himself in jurisdictional politics. While it is wise that the president is conserving the power of the bully pulpit for economic issues, political realities make a quick solution to the War Powers controversy a presidential necessity. A protracted War Powers debate plays right into the desired Republican narrative: the administration is distracted from focusing on jobs and the economy.
Furthermore, such a swift conclusion would not even require a public retraction of the president’s position. A bipartisan group in the Senate led by Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) is working on a non-binding resolution to validate the effort in Libya.
So as not to compromise his current position, the president should actively support the Senate resolution to ensure its passing. Even though the resolution would likely die on arrival in the House, and therefore not satisfy the legal requirements of the War Powers Act, it provides the president with the opportunity of congressional approval for military action in Libya. Senate approval gives Obama the platform to transcend bickering over constitutional authority and argue that America needs to focus on getting rid of our deficit and Qaddafi. The McCain-Kerry resolution provides the congressional support necessary to move beyond the War Powers Act spat and onto more pressing priorities.
General Chen Bingde, head of the general staff of China’s People Liberation Army (PLA), has confirmed that his country is constructing its first aircraft carrier, an ex-Soviet Varyag set to begin sea trials next year. Spy-masters in Washington and London have been monitoring the ship’s progress for some time, but Gen. Chen’s comments are the first public commentary on its existence. Purchased from a Ukrainian shipyard in 2002 for $20million by a Macau-based company, the original contract stipulated that the vessel could not be used for military purposes. The buyer claimed the ship would be converted into a floating amusement park, complete with a hotel and casino. Whoops.
Adding an aircraft carrier to its fleet continues to amplify the PLA’s global reach capabilities, and at a time when China is asserting a more aggressive strategic posture in the South China Sea. China has made maritime territorial claims there, drawing ire of the United States and countries in the region, which have insisted instead freedom of international waterways.
That’s why, in part, confirmation of the aircraft carrier is likely to raise the hackles of policy makers in Western capitals, fearful–despite Beijing’s claims to the contrary–that the addition of a major instrument of power projection represents an obvious threat.
While such fears are well-founded, it’s also important to place the Chinese military expansionism within a proper context. In that vein, PPI has offered a series of memos on China’s military over the course of 2010, including this piece explicitly on its Navy. U.S. Naval War College Professor Mike Chase concludes:
[T]he U.S. will need to strengthen its ties to key countries in East Asia and develop strategic and tactical military concepts and capabilities that would allow it to counter China’s growing military power. Meanwhile, U.S. policy makers must seek collaboration with the Chinese military in an effort to highlight the benefits of being a global stakeholder to Beijing.
Other pieces in the series are on China’s military budget and priorities and Beijing’s anti-access/area-denial strategy. Read them here. And finally, back in December, PPI did a fantastic panel discussion featuring Chip Gregson, Asst. Secretary of Defense for Asia, Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), as well as Joe Nye, Jim Fallows, and the aforementioned Mike Chase. Check out the video here.
Last week reports emerged about attempted cyber attacks against the internal networks of three major U.S. defense contractors: Lockheed Martin, L-3 Communications, and Northrop Grumman. All of the attempted hacks tried to access the companies’ internal networks using compromised remote-access security tokens, which are believed to be linked to yet another hack that occurred at a different government contractor, RSA, in March.
Amidst news of last week’s attacks, DoD is preparing a formal cyber strategy and a list of deployable cyber weapons. The strategy is not in response to the incursions, but as the first formal cyber strategy written by the Pentagon, it obviously has bearing on USG’s response to them, as well as future assaults.
The strategy is not yet public, but two important provisions are known: First, that the Pentagon may use conventional force to respond to a cyber attack against the U.S.; second, that the strategy explicitly contains an authorization framework, reportedly requiring the military to obtain presidential approval before deploying cyber weapons.
While it’s time that the U.S. government assembled clear policies to respond to cyber attacks, it is important to recognize the unique challenges contained therein. Two of the most important are 1) assigning responsibility for an attack and 2) assuring that any retaliation avoids excessive collateral damage.
First, unlike attacks with conventional weapons, an attacker has more opportunities to hide his origin in cyberspace. For example, state actors can create plausible deniability behind contracted criminal groups, a tactic likely used by Russia and China. It’s unclear how the new strategy will deal with this point.
Second, if the U.S. government is able to correctly attribute an attack, its response would have to comport with international law, specifically a statute known as the Law of Armed Conflict (LoAC). The United States is bound to the LoAC through multiple treaties such as the 1907 Hague Conventions and the 1949 Geneva Conventions, as well as through customary international law. Two elements of the LoAC pose particular challenges in the cyber realm: proportionality and distinction.
Proportionality may be a particularly tough nut to crack, as we know that the Pentagon’s policy will permit retaliating against a cyber attack with conventional weapons. It’s new ground, and the argument could be made that launching a missile in response to a computer-based attack is inherently disproportionate. However, we must recognize that a cyber attack has the ability to cause actual loss of life if, for example, it were aimed at air traffic control systems and caused planes to crash. Under the new policy, only an attack of this magnitude would allow a conventional response to a cyber attack, and it is imperative that such a response be proportionate.
Distinction is another problematic element of the LoAC because cyber weapons can have unintended consequences. The amount of damage that a conventional weapon does is known before it is used even though it may damage unintended targets. Not so in the cyber world: Vital military and civilian assets may reside on the same network, thus making it difficult to limit damage to the legitimate military target. Furthermore, cyber weapons are different because entities that reside in cyberspace are interconnected on a global scale: attacking a target on a server in China can also cause damage to another server in Canada. This actually happened in 2010 when the U.S. military took down a jihadist website hosted in Saudi Arabia that led to disruption to more than 300 servers in Saudi Arabia, Texas, and Germany.
These are only a couple of considerations that complicate the use of cyber weapons, and developing a strong cyber capabilities must occur within the context of these considerations. With so much of its vital national assets relying on the Internet, the U.S. must equip itself with both the strong defensive capabilities and project power in cyberspace, as well as with robust policies to regulate these capabilities.
Football, they say, is a game of inches. So too, is Middle East peace making — both figuratively, and in some cases quite literally. President Obama was reminded of that last week when his comments about terms of reference for future Israel-Palestinian peace negotiations provoked a significant public debate, and in some cases, a furious reaction.
Many Republicans – some acting out of purely political motives – and many Democrats, myself included – acting out of genuine concern – reacted quickly and negatively when President Obama adopted as American policy on Israeli-Palestinian peace talks what had previously been described by this Administration as a “Palestinian goal”– that is, a Palestinian state “based on the 1967 lines, with mutually agreed swaps.”
In the view of some, including the White House, that statement was not new U.S. policy. Those views assert that negative reactions suggesting otherwise “misrepresented” the president’s statement, or perhaps more importantly, his intended meaning.
But as we know, when it comes to issues about Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict, nuance matters. This is a place where inches count.
Reaction to that one passage in the “Winds of Change” address, and the media’s almost singular focus on the matter, overshadowed what was one of the most important and impressive speeches of President Obama’s tenure. And in the end it was only a handful of missing words, representing real-world American commitments that were at the heart of the commotion.
There was so much to celebrate in his address: From the soaring and inspiring vision of a boundless future of prosperity for billions of people across the Middle East who have never known freedom, to the impressive and important commitments to Israel’s security, and to America’s determination to stand up for its values and interests in defeating efforts to isolate and delegitimize Israel at the United Nations and beyond.
In fact, an address that was billed as a landmark speech about change in the Arab world was one of the President’s most impressive and pro-Israel addresses of his presidency.
But you’d probably never know that. And that’s a shame.
By saying that an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal should be based on the 1967-lines with mutually agreed swaps, but omitting the next key phrase – “that take into account demographic changes and realities on the ground” – it was by just a few inches that the president missed the goal line of putting his statement in line with a half century of his predecessors.
It was the vagueness of his remarks, and the omission of a key few words, which necessarily go hand-in-hand, that caused so much alarm.
The truncated phrase was treated with great significance, because this Administration has consistently declined to affirm the validity of a 2004 official letter of commitments from President Bush on behalf of the United States to the Prime Minister in Israel, in which among other key commitments, the U.S. reaffirmed its promise to ensure that Israel would have “defensible borders” distinct from the 1967 lines that would accommodate demographic changes and reality on the ground – ie, major Israeli population centers in the West Bank.
Furthermore, despite the president’s repeated calls for a Jewish State, he has yet to embrace the position taken and assurance provided by Presidents Clinton and Bush that under any final peace accord, the refugee question will be addressed within the borders of a Palestinian State, and not Israel.
Had the Obama Administration previously embraced that letter and those critical U.S. promises, there would have been not nearly the outcry.
But that inexplicable breakdown, seeming to call into question America’s commitment to assurances made in writing by an American president to the State of Israel, codified by Congress, and endorsed in the Clinton Parameters of January 2001, laid the groundwork for the stinging reaction to the President’s incomplete reference to the ’67 lines.
In that context, like Tonto to the Lone Ranger, the Israelis were left asking, ‘What do you mean by swaps, Kimosabe?’
A few days later, President Obama gave another speech on the Middle East, this time even more pro-Israel, but once again, you may not know that, either.
Among the important things President Obama made clear in his second address on the Middle East at the AIPAC policy conference, was that, indeed, he agreed with his predecessors, Presidents Bush and Clinton, that any changes on the ground in a peace agreement must reflect today’s demographic realities and Israel’s unique security needs. His statements on that matter put him firmly in-line with American leaders going back to the 1960s, when President Johnson first established America’s policy that no one could expect Israel to go back to its indefensible 1949/1967 lines.
Why does that matter? History and perspective, of course. Consider the Israeli perspective: In the 1967 Six-Day War, in which Israel survived a miraculous third attempt by a combined force of Arab armies to ‘drive the Jews into the sea’, the nascent Jewish state made important territorial gains.
The city of Jerusalem, after 19 years of Jordanian rule that suppressed freedom of worship for Jews and Christians, was liberated and reunified. The West Bank, known for millennia and in the Old Testament as Judea and Samaria, was brought back into contact with the rest of Israel. The Golan Heights, for years a launching pad from which the Syrian army terrorized Israeli towns, was won in an epic and heroic battle. And the Sinai Desert and Gaza Strip, soon to be offered to Egypt in exchange for peace, were conquered.
Like the Sun rises, Russia and other Arab allies at the United Nations pressed their condemnations of Jewish State. In a typically hypocritical move targeting Israel, some in the world body demanded that for the first time in history land won in a defensive war be fully returned to the aggressors.
The United States – defending its ally Israel, our interests in the region, and basic fairness – rejected that approach. Our elected leaders understood that it was the very indefensible boundaries of 1949/67 encouraged Arab aggression and dreams of destroying the Jewish State and the Jewish People. The United States understood that Israel could not ever be expected or pressured to go back to what became know as ‘the Auschwitz borders.’ That is why America fought so hard to ensure that UN Resolution 242 specifically did not force Israel had to relinquish all of the land it had captured in its war of self-defense, did not force Israel back to indefensible borders and need not exchange territory in a one-to-one ratio.
That is the diplomatic tradition many feared the president was undermining, at a time when Israel is under threat from a genocidal Hezbollah to the north, an unstable Egypt and Syria to its south and northeast, and a Hamas/Fatah unity government that seems ready to abandon the peace process on multiple fronts. The Palestinians rushed to enshrine the president’s position as new preconditions for talks.
But they’re likely to be disappointed. The president made it clear during his second AIPAC speech that he is aligned with those decades of American diplomacy stretching back to the U.S. stand on UNSC 242. That is precisely the diplomatic tradition that the President embraced during his AIPAC speech, a clarification that – again – has been under-appreciated by some.
Perhaps realizing that his first remarks were incomplete and left an impression he had not intended, President Obama, in his speech to AIPAC, built on the pro-Israel foundation of his Winds of Change Address, not only completing the thought he’d begun the prior week, but expanding on several themes in praise-worthy ways.
President Obama powerfully restated in emphatic and unmistakable terms how strenuously the United States will oppose Palestinian efforts to attain unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state in the absence of peace and an end to all claims. This clear leadership stance, and the president’s forceful denunciation of efforts to delegitimatize and isolate Israel are deeply appreciated and underscore the President’s commitment to safeguarding the Jewish state.
Notable was the President’s statement that Israel cannot be expected to negotiate with Hamas, which he rightly called a terrorist organization. His explicit call once again for the Iranian proxy to meet the quartet conditions – recognizing Israel and its right to exist, renouncing violence, and accepting prior agreements between the PA and Israel, was fundamentally important, and ensures that Hamas must fundamentally change, or else remain a pariah.
The President also explicitly signaled his support for a long-term, but not permanent, Israeli military and security presence in the Jordan Valley. This stance is vital, and like his effort to align administration policy with administrations past, is not just commendable, but significant. And in both speeches, the President stressed not only “ironclad” American support for Israel’s security, but insisted that a future Palestinian state be demilitarized.
His remarks on issues beyond the narrow question of the Israel-Arab dispute are also vitally important – in particular, Iran. Again, President Obama said clearly and unequivocally that Iran cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons and that it is American policy to prevent them from doing so.
Both speeches were strongly pro-Israel in the broadest sense. From the President’s vision of a Middle East made up of progressive Arab states more focused on investing in their own human capital and building tolerant, prosperous societies – rather than scapegoating Israel, to his embrace of Israel and its future as a Jewish state with peaceful neighbors, there is much to appreciate. It’s time to say so.
Americans, conditioned by harsh experience to expect nothing but trouble from the Middle East, have been thrilled and inspired by the Arab Spring. But now a practical question looms: Just how far are we prepared to go to help these rebellions succeed?
Early successes in Tunisia and Egypt may have created a false impression of the brittleness of the region’s ancien regime. Elsewhere, dictators and autocrats are proving harder to dislodge. And despite the toppling of longtime strongman Hosni Mubarak, democratic consolidation in Egypt is anything but assured.
Around the Middle East, popular demands for individual freedom, economic justice and self-determination have hit a stone wall of reaction and sheer inertia. Hopes that liberal democracy will take hold in the region hang in the balance.
For the United States, the strategic stakes are enormous. Consider, for example, what the end of the al-Assad family’s monopoly on power in Syria might mean. In addition to opening up one of the region’s most sinister police states, it could deprive Iran of its most dependable ally, further isolating Tehran’s rebarbative clerics. Peace with Israel might be too much to hope for, but regime change could loosen Syria’s ties to the rejectionist front of Hezbollah and Hamas, and curb its murderous meddling in Lebanon.
Yet what’s happening across Syria now is a kind of rolling Tiananmen Square, as Assad unleashes tanks and snipers on protestors, killing nearly 1,000 civilians and counting. This brazen reign of terror makes a mockery of President Obama’s admonitions to Assad to “lead the transition” or get out of the way. Assad is no part of the solution, he is the problem, and Washington needs to hold him accountable for his crimes.
The administration should press for a U.N. investigation that would pave the way for indicting Assad and his cronies in international tribunals for crimes against humanity. In truth, Washington has limited leverage on Assad, but it ought to play a long game, doing everything possible to delegitimize his regime, empower human rights and democracy activists, and strengthen civil society in Syria.
Also high on our priority list is Yemen, where al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is busy plotting terror attacks on the United States. Despite strong internal and external pressure, President Ali Abdullah Saleh has thrice reneged on promises to step down. This augurs more civil strife and chaos, and opportunities for Islamists to entrench themselves in the country’s ungoverned spaces. Given the terror threat, the United States needs to play a more forceful hand in getting Saleh to yield to popular demands that he resign, paving the way to elections and a more representative government.
Libya is of less consequence, but the United States already is embroiled in the revolt against Muammar Qaddafi, albeit in a supporting role. NATO air strikes have prevented the dictator’s forces from carrying out his threats to crush the rebels. The opposition, however, lacks the organization, weapons and military training to defeat his armed forces. The prospect here is for stalemate and protracted civil war, unless the United States and its allies undertake to equip the rebels with the tools they need to finish the job.
Egypt poses an especially thorny problem for U.S. diplomacy. As the biggest Arab country and political trendsetter, what happens there will have major repercussions throughout the region. Although popular protests brought down longtime strongman Hosni Mubarak, political power is firmly in the hands of the army’s senior officers. As Larry Diamond notes, the army has arrested thousands of peaceful demonstrators and is trying them in military tribunals. It also has ignored growing attacks by Islamist extremists on Coptic Christians, perhaps as a way of underscoring its indispensability as the sole bulwark of social stability in Egypt. Also worrisome is a compressed timetable for Egypt’s first post-Mubarak elections, which will be held in September. That gives the nation’s authentic democratic forces little time to organize a counterweight to the Muslim Brotherhood, which could be poised to score big gains.
In Egypt, fortunately, the United States does have leverage. The military has received billions in U.S. aid, and Obama last week promised additional economic assistance. Washington can best sustain the momentum of the Arab Spring by using its influence to prevent the Egyptian military from blocking a transition to democratic and genuinely civilian rule.
Until now, Washington has been mainly a spectator to an indigenous popular rebellion against tyranny, corruption and injustice in the Middle East. To ensure that these movements for freedom and self-determination aren’t rolled back, we ought to be prepared to give at least some of them a decisive push.
America has no wasta. Lacking substantive relationships is especially damning in the Arab world, because it is the informal connections, or wasta, which spells the difference between influence and irrelevance. Problem is that while Arabs might eat Cincinnati-style chili at the Dead Sea, teeny-bop to Justin Beiber, and yearn for democracy, there is very little person-to-person connection between America’s consumers of these products and the Arab world’s.
In his 2009 Cairo speech, for example, the president rightly called for a “new beginning” in U.S.-Arab relations. He doubled down late last week, with a speech designed to cement America on the side of the little guy across the region. But without wasta, no matter how well-intended or thought out, President Obama’s vision for the region will flounder.
Capitalizing on the socially networked revolutions and protests, the Millenial generation is the best place to start building wasta. Famously community-oriented, cussedly apolitical, yet relentlessly idealistic, the Millenials understand the importance of inter-connectedness. Eschewing romantic crusades for the nitty-gritty of service, this generation builds a better world one project at a time. To help transform the region, the president should summon his inner Kennedy. Mobilizing the Millenials, Obama could create a new Peace Corps to meet the Arab world’s challenges: The Sharaka (together). The Sharaka would not only deliver developmental aid across the Middle East, it would help mend America’s tattered image, assist in the region’s democratization, and earn Obama some wasta.
I have come to appreciate the need for a Sharaka-like organization from direct experience. Over the past two summers, I have led Millenials on service-learning trips to Madaba, Jordan. Located 20 miles south of Amman, Madaba is famous for its archeological ruins and mosaics. Settled by Christian Bedouins, Madaba now boasts a Muslim majority, largely comprised of Palestinians. Situated in the heart of the city is our home base, the Latin Patriarchate School for Girls. Utilizing the connections our State Department lacks, my school, Gannon University, gained entrée to the region through that most time-worn wasta of the Levant: the Catholic Church.
A Catholic school in a religiously mixed city is hardly representative of the Arab world. Madaba and the Latin Patriarchate School for Girls, however, are the exceptions that prove the rule. Even here, in a relatively affluent and tolerant city, the Arab Spring’s echoes are felt. In a scene reminiscent of Tahir Square, last week scores of Madabans marched peacefully to call for the mayor’s resignation. Moreover, Christian and Muslim, alike, Madabans call for democracy, freedom, and meaningful reform.
After teaching English in the Catholic schools, my students and I spend the afternoon at the Sharaka Center for Democracy. Intended as a community hub to inculcate democratic practices, Sharaka connects us to Madaba’s Muslim community. Eager to learn English, children and professionals flock to Sharaka to learn a world language and engage with Americans.
In serving thousands of hours over the past two summers, my students not only have earned the wasta our State Department lacks, they have been changed. Unlike their peers, who harbor deep anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiments, these Millenials are friends with hundreds of Muslim and Christian Arabs. They understand Arabs needs a partner, not a hegemon. Presidential speeches matter and American leadership remain crucial, but the path to influence, in the Arab world, begins with befriending our Arab brothers and sisters.
President Obama made the cardinal mistake yesterday of stepping on his own message. His “winds of change” speech was supposed to formalize an historic shift in U.S. policy toward the Middle East. Instead, Obama managed to put the spotlight on the one thing in the region that seems impervious to change: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Grabbing the headlines were a set of new principles Obama introduced late in his speech for reframing stalled peace negotiations. His call for Israel to withdraw to its pre-1967 borders drew a swift rebuke from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom Obama meets today at the White House. Merits aside, the controversy over this oddly-timed change in U.S. policy has overshadowed the new doctrine the president meant to announce to the world: America henceforth will back reform and democracy in the region.
Conservatives predictably have hailed this as no change at all, merely a restatement of George W. Bush’s “freedom agenda” for the Middle East. But there’s a crucial difference: the impetus for economic and political change in the region is now coming from the ground up – from its long-suffering people, not from Washington. In fact, by defusing tensions between the United States and the Muslim world, Obama probably made it easier for indigenous movements seeking freedom and democracy to arise in the region.
The Arab revolt is widely seen as legitimate because it is not, in fact, an American project. Obama made clear in his speech that Washington is catching up to events in the Middle East, not leading them.
It’s odd that no one in the White House thought to apply the same lesson to the Israeli-Palestinian issue. If the parties to the conflict aren’t themselves motivated to make peace, no amount of outside pressure from the United States, nor any set of innovative “parameters” for negotiations imported from Washington will break the deadlock.
Unfortunately, the flap over Obama’s apparent revision of long-standing U.S. policy toward the conflict reinforces the myth – fostered by Arab dictators and the many U.S. Middle East experts who have invested their careers in peace processing – that Israeli occupation of Arab lands is the region’s core “problem.” Yet the region’s long-suffering people are writing a new narrative that focuses not on Israel, but on the corrupt and despotic rulers who have smothered their aspirations for individual dignity, economic opportunity, and self-determination.
In aligning U.S. policy with these aspirations, Obama ended the bankrupt policy of propping up friendly autocrats. He also restored the missing “d” in his strategic trinity of defense, diplomacy and development – democracy.
The president reaffirmed his view that Muammar Qaddafi must go, and he had suitably harsh words for Iran’s clerical dictatorship, which is intensifying its repression to keep an increasingly restive society under wraps. For consistency’s sake, Obama insisted that pro-U.S. rulers in Yemen and Bahrain share power and respect minority rights, respectively. These, however, are easy cases – too easy. Obama said not a word about the difficult problem of managing U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia, which for good reason feels deeply threatened by the uprisings sweeping the region.
Obama also struck a jarringly false note in urging Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad to “lead the transition, or get out of the way.” This formulation reflects the weirdly persistent illusion among U.S. policy makers that Assad, who inherited his dictatorship, can somehow be transformed into an agent of democratic reform. In many ways, Assad is worse than his father. He turned Syria into a prime transit point for suicide terrorists en route to kill Americans and civilians in Iraq; he has subverted democracy in Lebanon and funneled arms to Hezbollah and Hamas; and, he has made Syria a virtual satrap of Iran. The administration has announced sanctions on Assad and other Syrian leaders responsible for the bloody crack-down on demonstrators, but America’s interests clearly lie with regime change in Damascus.
Despite such qualms, Obama’s speech at last has aligned America’s values with its long-run interests in the political and economic modernization of the wider Middle East. It’s a shame, though, that this strategic pivot has been obscured by a perplexing and ill-timed attempt to resuscitate Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.
PPI President Will Marshall is featured today in Democracy Digest on President Obama’s Middle East speech. Please click this link to read the entire article:
The Arab revolt is history’s unanticipated gift to President Obama. It enables him to move beyond a desultory flirtation with “realism” and to realign U.S. policy toward the Middle East with liberal values that do turn out, after all, to be as attractive to Arabs as they are to Americans.
It’s true that Obama comes late to the region’s dance of democracy. It’s also true that Washington’s embrace of the popular uprisings hasn’t been utterly consistent. But such cavils pale beside the important fact that, however hesitantly and belatedly, Obama is abrogating America’s Faustian bargain with Arab tyrants.
In the short-term, this break with the sterile politics of “stability” could confront U.S. policy makers with complications and some nasty, unintended consequences. Over the long haul, however, reinforcing homegrown demands for economic opportunity, free expression and political pluralism is the best antidote to the region’s endemic misgovernance and convulsive political violence.
The president is set to deliver a major address today on the Middle East. Here are five things his speech must include:
1. The Obvious: America stands by people the world over who seek freedom of expression and exercise of their democratic rights.
2. Frankness: Decades of American administrations have struck Faustian bargains with despots throughout the Middle East. The quid pro quo has been American financial support — militarily and otherwise — in exchange for regional stability.
3. An Admission: This policy has run counter to America’s best ideals, and in the end, it has failed. Autocracies are inherently unstable governing systems, and oppressed peoples will sooner or later rise up to win their freedoms as is manifest in the extraordinary events of this year.
4. A Light Touch: America still has many allies across a region where democracy is not the norm. But make no mistake: While America values its relationships with our allies, we remain committed to creating democratic openings in their societies. Our allies need only to look at the events of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya to realize that continuing along the same path is a fool’s errand.
5. A Plan of Action: America knows that the region’s people will judge us by our actions, not our words. While some our diplomatic efforts with allies may occur behind closed doors, we will visibly support the advancement of democracy by putting aside a larger pot of money to build civil societies in countries where they lacking. The National Endowment of Democracy should funnel much of this money to NGOs, political parties, and free media platforms so it is not tainted by its source.
PPI’s Will Marshall and Jim Arkedis have a piece in the Detroit News this morning on the defense budget. Here’s an excerpt:
PPI Senior Fellow Josh Block writes in 
Libyan rebels—the “rats” as Muammar Qaddafi calls them—are closing in on the eccentric dictator. Although a hundred things could go wrong in post-Qaddafi Libya, Americans should always welcome a tyrant’s fall.
In the GOP’s Establishment v. Tea Party battle, this round, at least, looks like it was won by the outsiders. And, so it seems, the Establishment looks to be fine with that.
President Obama is taking heat for announcing troop withdrawals last night without clarifying U.S. war aims in Afghanistan. Yet his basic strategy couldn’t be clearer. It is to depart Afghanistan gradually – a fighting withdrawal – to maximize the odds that the Taliban won’t be able to take over once U.S. troops are gone.
Yesterday, Jim Arkedis, director of PPI’s National Security Project, gave his 
Both the House of Representatives and the president have shown that when it comes to Libya, NATO is not the only organization susceptible to bouts of friendly fire. A bipartisan group of ten congressmen 
Last week 
Football, they say, is a game of inches. So too, is Middle East peace making — both figuratively, and in some cases quite literally. President Obama was reminded of that last week when his comments about terms of reference for future Israel-Palestinian peace negotiations provoked a significant public debate, and in some cases, a furious reaction.
Americans, conditioned by harsh experience to expect nothing but trouble from the Middle East, have been thrilled and inspired by the Arab Spring. But now a practical question looms: Just how far are we prepared to go to help these rebellions succeed?
President Obama made the cardinal mistake yesterday of stepping on his own message. His “winds of change” speech was supposed to formalize an historic shift in U.S. policy toward the Middle East. Instead, Obama managed to put the spotlight on the one thing in the region that seems impervious to change: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The president is set to deliver