Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flew to the States this week to try to break an impasse to the stalled peace talks. The visit, with VP Joe Biden in New Orleans, seems to have provoked the latest round of public bickering over the construction of settlements in Jerusalem.

This time, an international exchange between Bibi, Obama, and Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erakat makes it look like the sides remain miles apart.

Netanyahu: “Jerusalem is not a settlement. Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.”

Obama: “This kind of activity [settlement construction] is never helpful when it comes to peace negotiations.”

Erakat: “The international community must respond to Israel’s unilateral measures by instantly recognizing a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders.”

You know it’s bad if the three main players are barely talking about the same issue. I’ve argued that litigating these cases in the press is counter-productive, and in general I stand by that.  If you’re going public, it’s because you’ve lost the private battle.  In previous cases, it has proved particularly counter-productive when there’s public daylight between Obama and Netanyahu, necessitating a come-together meeting in July.

However, is it possible that the current round of public fighting is a coordinated attempt to provide the Israelis and Palestinians with room to compromise?

After all, Netanyahu’s rightist coalition partners will never permit a full suspension of settlement building. But the Palestinians have essentially made a suspension of settlements a litmus test for further talks. Is it possible then that Obama’s public push against settlement construction is designed as a foil for Netanyahu?  Will standing up to Obama in public on the settlement issue create enough goodwill within the more conservative caucus of Netanyahu’s coalition?

If the two sides sit down soon, the answer might be yes.

Photo credit: Premasagar

At last, some good news from Afghanistan: The New York Times reported last week that U.S. and Afghan forces are “routing” the Taliban in Kandahar province. In the northwest, Special Operations forces and air strikes have taken a heavy toll on insurgent commanders and “shadow governors,” according to The Washington Post.

These tactical gains are impressive. But they also spotlight the weakest link in our strategic chain, and no, it’s not Afghanistan’s mercurial leader, Hamid Karzai, or the corrupt and feckless central government. It’s Pakistan.

President Obama’s surge seems to be taking hold, but coalition forces can’t break the insurgency’s back as long as Pakistan continues to provide a sanctuary for the Taliban and allied terrorist groups.

Aided by better intelligence and a highly accurate new mobile rocket, in addition to more troops, coalition forces have successfully targeted Taliban leaders and driven insurgents from strongholds they have long held in Kandahar. The onslaught apparently has demoralized some Taliban foot soldiers, who are said to resent their high command for urging them to stand and fight from the relative safety of Pakistan.

U.S. officials say they are under no illusion of crushing the insurgency altogether, but they hope that, by inflicting heavy losses, they can turn the tide and induce top Taliban leaders to enter into peace negotiations with the Afghan government.

But there’s a problem: insurgent leaders are slipping over the border to Pakistan, where they can regroup for new attacks, or simply wait for NATO forces to leave. Says Gen. David Petraeus, “There is quite relentless pressure. It forces them on the run. But again, if you don’t take away the safe haven, it doesn’t have a lasting effect.”

And the Quetta Shura, whose leader, Mullah Omar, was so hospitable to al Qaeda when the Taliban ran Afghanistation, continues to orchestrate and finance the insurgency from Pakistan with impunity. If the United States and NATO are to permanently weaken the Taliban and force them to the negotiating table, that has to change.

Zalmay Khalilzad, a former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, argues that Pakistan’s double game threatens to prolong America’s costly intervention. On the one hand, Pakistan is an indispensible partner: it supplies the main supply routes for coalition forces, and tacitly colludes with drone strikes against al Qaeda and Taliban targets. On the other, Pakistan gives sanctuary not only to the Quetta Shura and but also the notorious Haqqani terrorist network, whose ties with Pakistani intelligence go back to the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan.

Pakistan’s military leaders, he says, “believe that our current surge will be the last push before we begin a face-saving troop drawdown next July. They are confident that if they continue to frustrate our military and political strategy – even actively impede reconciliation between Kabul and Taliban groups willing to make peace – pro-Pakistani forces will have the upper hand in Afghanistan after the United States departs.”

Khalilzad is right: the United States can’t allow our supposed ally to subvert our strategic goals in Afghanistan. Yet just last week, the administration announced a new $2 billion military aid package to Pakistan. This comes on top of a five-year, $7.5 billion civilian aid package for Pakistan approved last year.

This is the kind of thing that gives engagement a bad name. We need a more challenging approach: The United States should demand that Pakistan break decisively with Islamist terrorist groups and not allow its territory to be used as a staging point for attacks on its neighbor. If Pakistan refuses, we should target insurgent havens anyway and freeze aid. If it complies, we should make a long-term commitment to strengthening Pakistan’s economic and governing institutions, and to mediating regional conflicts.

U.S. officials have been reluctant to put too much pressure on Pakistan to act against the Haqqani network and the Afghan Taliban leadership. They don’t want to undermine the democratically elected government of President Asi Ali Zardari, or risk alienating Pakistan’s military and intelligence services, which are cooperating in the U.S. campaign against al Qaeda.  But Pakistan already has demonstrated the military ability to reclaim tribal areas when it suited its purpose.  Up until now, Pakistan has tried to have it both ways: help America fight al Qaeda, while retaining ties to terrorist groups to influence future events in Afghanistan (and to keep the pot boiling in Kashmir). Such ambivalence collides with America’s strategic interest, and it’s time for Pakistan to choose.

You’d think this morning’s Washington Post article by Greg Miller should throw some cold water on the relatively upbeat assessment I made yesterday:  I said Petraeus is “trying to hit the Taliban leadership hard, driving it to the negotiating table from a position of weakness,” which “might be speeding up a potential resolution to the conflict.”

The headline appears to play me the fool: “Taliban unscathed by U.S. strikes”.  Ouch, right?  It would appear, based on the first few paragraphs of Miller’s piece, that the Taliban is doing fine:

Escalated airstrikes and special operations raids have disrupted Taliban movements and damaged local cells. But officials said that insurgents have been adept at absorbing the blows and that they appear confident that they can outlast an American troop buildup set to subside beginning next July.
It ultimately assesses that “there is little indication that the direction of the war has changed.”

But wait just a minute. Disrupting the Taliban isn’t the goal of the recent increase in op-tempo.  The article fails to dis-aggregate the Taliban writ-large from its relatively small cadre of leaders.

While the organization plods on in a holistic sense, Petraeus’ raids and airstrikes are designed to telegraph a message to the leadership:  “You can keep fighting, but you, Mr. Senior Taliban Leader, might be next.”  With that life and death calculation staring them in the face, Petraeus rightly calculates that the Taliban’s leadership will be more interested in talking — a negotiation that will tip the leverage in NATO’s favor.

This is the same fundamental misunderstanding of international sanctions against Iran.  No one believes they’ll put a fundamental break on the Iranian economy.  But they will make life tougher on the mullahs, who now have to work hard to skirt them.  The calculation is that one day, Tehran will say, “Man, I’m sick and tired of all this running around.  Maybe we should sit down and negotiate with the West and we can get back to life as normal.”

Neither calculation may end up as an unqualified success, but the instincts behind them are right.

Let’s say you’re jonesing for a smoothie at your favorite hipster juice bar.  Not content with the strawberry, papaya, and kiwi in your standard Mangosteen Madness™, you pony up for a little something extra.  Let’s go crazy – say you drop the extra 78 cents on the counter and tell the Smoothie King to throw in a “Caffeine Charge” just to make sure the day keeps on sailing by.

That’s kind of what’s happening in Afghanistan these days.  The “clear, hold, and build” of counterinsurgency doctrine may be the Mangosteen strategy, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that General Petraeus is doubling down with a “Caffeine Charge” of his own.  He’s trying to hit the Taliban leadership hard, driving it to the negotiating table from a position of weakness.

As Dexter Filkins detailed in the NYT a few weeks ago, NATO military operations in Afghanistan have aggressively targeted Taliban militants with airstrikes and Special Forces operations.  Well-reputed columnists like David Ignatius, Joe Klein, and Fred Kaplan all write that this marks a shift away from the counterinsurgency strategy that Petraeus literally wrote the book on.  However, Paula Broadwell, a guest-author on Tom Ricks’ blog, disagrees, noting that the recent increase in counter-terrorism operations is an important subset of an across-the-board op-tempo increase in all COIN disciplines.

Despite disagreements over the shift, the important point is that it might be speeding up a potential resolution to the conflict.  General Petraeus has long said that we’re not going to kill or capture our way out of Aghanistan, and he told Katie Couric over the summer that negotiations are “historically the way counterinsurgency efforts ultimately have been concluded.”

The issue is ensuring that negotiations, quietly underway, take place on the most favorable grounds possible to America.  And if that goal is achieved, then semantics about COIN vs. CT won’t matter in the end.

Photo credit: terriseesthings

The Israeli-Palestinian peace talks effectively died this week.  That’s what happens when you take your case to the press.

Though the hard left no doubt cheers a Palestinian effort to seek unilateral recognition from everyone from the UN Security Council to the Poughkeepsie Dog Catchers Society, it’s simply neither a serious nor well-considered effort.

The move is bad for everyone, including peace-seeking Palestinians.  A UNSC resolution will be vetoed by the Americans and will split the Europeans; its failure will then cause regional Arab powers to blame everyone but themselves at a time when Arab engagement is crucial to success.

The PA went public with this ill-conceived demand as a response to Bibi Netanyahu’s impossible pre-condition offer of extending a moratorium on settlement construction only in return for Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.  Doing so is a non-starter for the PA – it would essentially prevent ex-patriot Palestinian refugees from staking a claim to property and/or cash from the Israeli government.

Bibi’s demands were the beginning of the end, and should have spurred the Obama administration’s negotiators to keep the talks quiet at all cost.  Of course, maybe they tried, and tried hard, but the two parties were never on the same page from the beginning.

A resolution to this conflict will only be achieved through painstaking negotiations behind closed doors. When the parties begin to litigate their case in the court of international public opinion, it is nothing more than a desperation Hail Mary on 4th-and-a-million with no time on the clock.

If talks aren’t dead, they’re in a coma and on life support.  The White House needs to get both sides to shut up, and find a face-saving way for Bibi to extend the settlement moratorium that somehow addresses – or agrees to delay – the question of Israel’s Jewishness/Palestinian refugees.

Failing that, we’ll look to start these talks up again under the next Israeli government.

This post is the fifth in a series about the Progressive Military

I knew my entire life that I was going to join the military at 18.  There was never a time where I can recall I thought anything else.  It wasn’t pushed on me; it was just something I always understood.  My father and several of my uncles are Vietnam vets, my cousin is a Gulf War vet, and my grandfather and his brothers were in World War II.  Iraq is my own particular war.  In my family, we serve in the military.  Many other American families share the same story.

I was always good academically and very active in school activities.  As my high school graduation approached people would ask me or my parents where I was going to college and what I was going to do.  Doctor?  Lawyer?  Architect?  The answer was no, he’s shipping off to be a Private in the U.S. Army.  The looks were telling.  Someone even offered ‘there’s other ways to pay for college, you know.’

For many there are not.  I served with guys in the Army who will tell you that if they hadn’t joined they would be in the poorhouse, in jail, or dead in some alleyway.  My father was a tough Chicago kid who volunteered at the height of the Vietnam War because he wanted better than sketchy factory jobs.  He got it.  After ‘Nam, he used the GI Bill to get a degree and a job.  He just retired after thirty years of looking out for abused kids with the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.  The opportunity the military gives has paid dividends not only for my father, but for me and my family, not to mention the thousands of kids my dad helped over the years.

Thirty years after him and at exactly the same place, Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri, I started my military career.  I could look out of my barracks window and see across the drill square the same building he had lived in.  They shaved my head, gave me a uniform, and a job with a steady paycheck, medical and dental care, a retirement system, and other benefits.  I grew up in rural southern Illinois, where the unemployment rate today ranges between 9 and14 percent.   A lot of people I grew up with haven’t fared as well, even some of those that went to college.

I had to work hard for it, but I did it, me and over 26 million other American veterans, many of whom might not have otherwise had such opportunities.  Today, communities around military posts are more prosperous than industrial cities, tech centers, and college towns.  The opportunities granted by military service help Americans of all kinds; studies have found military communities are among the least segregated in the country.

The military not only put money in our pockets, but it has given us work experience we couldn’t get elsewhere.  Only around 15 percent of our troops are actually ‘trigger-pullers’; over half work in technical and medical fields and another third work in administration and logistics.  These military jobs more often than not have a direct equivalent in the civilian market.  It’s no secret that military life creates disciplined, principled, and dedicated workers, an asset to any employer or a good basis for starting a business.

Almost a quarter of Americans have a college degree today and the increasing demand for and availability of degrees to the larger population owes much to the GI Bill.  Since 1944, it has helped over 21 million veterans join the educated workforce.  The Post 9-11 GI Bill will help hundreds of thousands of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans not only get an education, but help pay their cost of living while doing so, something the GI Bill hasn’t done since the 1980’s.  It has been touted as part of the economic recovery program by providing the opportunity for many former troops to qualify for better jobs than the currently scarce entry level positions available to those that have only a high school diploma.  This is especially important while unemployment among young veterans is estimated at 21 percent.  If you can’t find a job, at least you can go to school.

I didn’t join the military just to go to college or for the opportunities.  There are many that did and there’s nothing wrong with that.  They have earned the thanks of the nation.  The GI Bill is a progressive policy that does just that for Americans that might not otherwise have had the opportunity.  Serving in the military gives many Americans the chance they need for a career or a good start in life.  As for me, I have decided to study law in the end.  Without the opportunity the military has given to me and to my family, I would not have been able to.  Millions of other Americans share the same story.

Photo credit: US Army Africa

Some Democrats tune out Tony Blair not only because he backed the invasion of Iraq, but because he committed the unpardonable sin of articulating the case for war far more convincingly than George W. Bush.

That’s too bad, because Britain’s ex-prime minister has some important things to say about the conflict formerly known as the “war on terror.” On this issue, in fact, the Obama administration could use a dose of Blairite clarity and candor.

Blair was in New York this week to accept the “Scholar-Statesman” award from The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. In his acceptance speech, he argued that the United States and the “civilized world” must combat not just al Qaeda, but also the extremist ideology that inspired the 9/11 attacks:

“I do not think it is possible to defeat the extremism without defeating the narrative that nurtures it. And there’s the rub. The practitioners of the extremism are small in number. The adherents of the narrative stretch far broader into parts of mainstream thinking.”

This inconvenient truth highlights a critical vacuum in U.S. counterterrorism policy. While the Obama administration has ramped up the military campaign to oust al Qaeda from Afghanistan (and pound its sanctuaries in Pakistan), it has been less successful in checking the spread of the Islamist doctrine, which casts Muslims as victims of western oppression and disrespect.

Blair believes western efforts to blunt the force of the extremist narrative by apologizing for policies, such as support for Israel, are counterproductive. They undercut rather than fortify the position of Muslim moderates, and they provoke a backlash from western publics against what’s seen as pandering to extremists.

Although he was too diplomatic to say so, Blair’s call for confronting the extremist narrative head-on challenges current U.S. policy.

President Obama has wisely retired the “war on terror” language he inherited from his predecessor. As Reza Aslan has noted, Bush’s relentlessly martial rhetoric lent credence to the idea that the United States was locked in a “cosmic war” with Islam. By narrowing the focus to al Qaeda (and its Taliban protectors in Afghanistan), Obama has sought to reassure both foreign and domestic audiences that the United States is drawing careful distinctions and not making unnecessary enemies.

So far, so good. But even if we demolished what’s left of al Qaeda tomorrow, our problems wouldn’t be over. Its ideology already has migrated to affiliates in Iraq, Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere, which have adopted the same gruesome tactics of suicide bombers and mass casualty attack. And while their victims are mostly Muslims, as Blair noted, too many in the Muslim world seem sympathetic to their narrative of victimhood, if not their methods.

This ambivalence was captured perfectly by one of a group of Somalians from Virginia captured in Pakistan. He said, in effect, we’re not terrorists, we’re jihadists come to help our fellow Muslims defend themselves against western aggression.

So Tony Blair is, as the Brits say, spot on. To reduce the threat of terrorist attacks, the United States must wage a two-track fight. One is the military campaign to disrupt and destroy al Qaeda. The other should be a “whole of government” effort to counter the extremist narrative. I’ll have more to say in future posts about its key elements, but it starts by engaging directly with Muslim publics and by firmly rejecting the false premises of the extremist story.

Photo credit: Washington Institute for Near East Policy