I pity journalists on the terrorism beat.  Take Greg Miller and Peter Finn’s piece in the Washington Post this morning, entitled “CIA sees increased threat in Yemen,” referring to the al Qaeda splinter group called Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (or AQAP). The journalists’ challenge is to quantify the scale and immediacy of the “threat”, an amorphous term that implies danger, yet remains extraordinarily difficult to quantify.

The story, based on analysis from the CIA, describes AQAP as the “most urgent threat to U.S. Security.”  It’s critical to properly categorize the threat because left undefined, the average American’s basis of comparison for a terrorism is the devastation of September 11th.  Hell, I spent five years trying to brief relatively high-ranking Pentagon officials on this stuff, and 9/11 was their point of departure too.  Nuance is important in defining terrorist threat – without it, government officials tend to over-react, going into CYA-mode (that’d be “cover your ass”) that guards against today’s headline rather than the overall, long-term picture.

Of course, part of the problem is that the CIA source in the article is only willing to go so far with the information he/she provides – sufficing at such vague quotes as “increased threat” and “on the upswing” while pointing to evidence of the group’s prowess that we already have:  the Christmas Day plot and radical cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi’s increasing activity.  Give away more, and the source could  end up busted.

So what are we talking about here?  Does the “increased threat” mean AQAP can pull off a massive terrorist attack on American soil? How far from its base in Yemen can the network reach?  Is it a threat to American only interests in the Middle East region? Is the network confined to smaller attacks? Civilian or military targets? What?

As the article asserts, AQAP may now be more dangerous that Osama Bin Laden’s war-ravaged and hiding clique, but that’s a dangerous comparison to make.  The United States has dedicated nearly ten years to degrading al Qaeda’s core group, and AQAP’s relative strength – and the resources dedicated to combatting them – should be understood within that context.

And that’s why in absolute terms, I wouldn’t lose sleep over AQAP launching a massive, 9/11-style attack against the United States just yet.  That’s because the terrorist threat is measured by marriage of a group’s intentions plus its capabilities: AQAP may really, really want to strike New York (intent), but hasn’t yet developed the operational expertise of training, financing, internal security, and logistics (capabilities) to succeed.

Currently, I’d assess that AQAP  has the intentions and capabilities to threaten American security in two ways: First, we’re likely to see a continuation of small attempts against public targets in the U.S.,  in the mold of the Christmas Day attempt.  These attacks will be launched by single operatives that have plausible cover and legit paperwork to slip over the American border.  However, coordinating a massive terrorist attack with many operatives against thousands of Americans continues to remain several years off.

Second, the group likely does pose a threat to American interests in Yemen or the broader region.  The 10th anniversary of the USS COLE bombing is upon us, which serves as a fitting reminder that Bin Laden’s al Qaeda has successfully executed complex terrorist attacks against hardened American targets in Yemen before.  But until AQAP pulls off an attack of this nature – like an embassy bombing akin to the 1998 attacks in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam – I can only assess that the group’s ability to project power will remain confined to the region.

In sum, AQAP remains one to watch.  The intelligence community is right to be concerned about the group’s apparently amassing capabilities, but keep in mind that terrorist attacks are often a building-block process: a group must crawl before it can walk, and walk before it can run.

Right now, AQAP seems to be taking its first few steps.  The IC seems to recognize that, and will be working hard to knock it back on all fours.

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When Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari played the terrorism card Monday appealing for flood relief funds, I had to stop my eyeballs from reflexively rolling back in my head.  Zardari called the flood the “ideal hope of the radical” and cast relief efforts as a struggle between his government and Islamic extremists.  On the surface, it sounds cheap, it sounds disingenuous.  Worse yet, it sounds like something George W. Bush would say.  But desperate to spur the international community and its sluggish financial response to the crisis, Zardari made a calculated pitch framed in stark terms:  help us or the terrorists win.

The thing is, he might just have a point.  The flood might not be the radical’s ideal hope, but there is certainly an opportunity to further divide Pakistani’s allegiances.

Disaster relief is the ultimate test of a government’s competence.  Its citizens are dying, homeless, and starving, and they know where the buck stops.  If the government fails to address basic survival needs, a vacuum in public trust can open almost instantaneously.

On the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, it’s fitting to examine the dispassionate political parallels.  After winning the 2004 election with 51 percent of the vote, Bush’s approval hovered just shy of 50 percent through mid-2005.  When Katrina hit in mid-2005, his ratings nose-dived from 48 percent in June to 39 percent by November.  After a brief recovery in late 2005, Bush was toast for the rest of his presidency, leaving office with an awesomely bad 23 percent on Election Day 2008.

Zardari has Bush-like unpopularity: the Pew Research Center’s July poll gave him just a 20 percent favorability rating amongst Pakistanis, and a full 77 percent say his influence is downright negative.  Just 25 percent rate the national government as having a “good influence”.

It is safe to say that if Zardari’s government continues to fail delivering swift relief aid, that Pakistanis are ready to support whoever will.  One of those possibilities is Zardari’s chief rival, Nawaz Sharif, who has garnered a tidy 70 percent approval rating and maintains a deep desire to return to the top of Pakistani politics.  While the U.S. should have no great preference for individuals over democratic institutions, a messy political fight in the midst of relief efforts would only cause more suffering.

A more serious concern is the Pakistani Taliban, which could draw on the example of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.  That group has won hearts and minds in the public services business in southern Lebanon, too.

Zardari may never be America’s best bud, but he understands that it is in Pakistan’s interest to have a working strategic relationship with the United States.  While humanitarian grounds should be enough to motivate the world’s rich countries to give generously to Pakistan, that hasn’t proven the case.  Short-term political instability and Taliban opportunism should be.

Photo Credit: DFID – UK Department for International Development’s photostream

It took a lot of arm-twisting, but Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced last week that Israel and the Palestinians have agreed to return to the bargaining table. The Obama administration’s faith in the power of diplomacy, which some consider misplaced, is about to face its sternest test.

It’s not hard to find grounds for pessimism. For one thing, Palestinian President President Mahmoud Abbas agreed to participate only under heavy U.S. pressure. He had to give up his demand that Israel continue the freeze on settlements as a precondition for talks, though the “Quartet” (the U.S., Europe, Russia and the United Nations) cooked up a face-saving declaration last Friday.

The agenda for negotiations has been left intentionally vague, so as to give neither side a pretext for refusing to participate. Somehow, the dynamic of face-to-face talks itself is supposed to lead to a peace deal over the next 12 months. Yet there’s been little change in the internal political realities – the West Bank/Gaza split and Netanyahu’s dependence on right-wing coalition partners to govern – that have made this such an unpropitious time for a comprehensive peace settlement.

The operative theory here seems to be that U.S. can more effectively pressure both sides to make concessions – through “bridging proposals” – in the context of direct negotiations. For example, Netanyahu will more likely extend the moratorium on new settlements, lest he be accused of scuttling the talks. U.S. officials also believe that Netanyahu’s hard-liner credentials will make it easier for him to sell a skeptical Israeli public on any deal reached with the Palestinians.

It’s also widely assumed that Abbas needs to demonstrate that his relative moderation and support for a two-state solution can deliver concrete benefits to Palestinians. But if Yassir Arafat, who presided over a more unified Palestinian authority couldn’t bring himself to embrace a two-state deal, its hard to see how a far weaker Abbas can, especially with Hamas looking over his shoulder.

Nonetheless, it’s axiomatic in U.S. diplomatic circles that it’s always better to have the two sides talking than not. The absence of hope for a political solution leaves the field to the radical rejectionists: Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.

Maybe so, but two large doubts hang over the coming talks. First, it’s not clear, for either Netanyahu or Abbas, that perpetuating the status quo, for all its frustrations, is a riskier course than making difficult concessions on territory, refugees, the status of Jerusalem and other traditional sticking points. Second, it’s not evident that either leader, even if he thought such risks worth taking, could forge a domestic consensus for a peace deal. So why shove them together now?

The answer may have more to do with America’s efforts to combat radicalism and violent extremism in the region than any profound yearning for peace among Israelis and Palestinians. If so, it’s going to be a long year.

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The story leading the day in the New York Times and Washington Post details the release of some 90,000 U.S. military documents by Wikileaks. Many of which detail the level of coordination between elements within Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, and the Taliban operating in Afghanistan.  In fact, the Taliban and ranking officers within the ISI have worked together is not “news.”  Pick up a copy of Steve Coll’s brilliant Ghost Wars, which ably details the relationship.  Here’s an excerpt from a PBS Frontline interview with Coll on the topic:

Frontline: You describe [the Taliban] as a client of the ISI.

Coll: They received guns; they received money; they received fuel; they received infrastructure support. They also, we know, had direct on-the-ground support from undercover Pakistani officers in civilian clothes who would participate in particular military battles.

Frontline: Is it a fair characterization to say that the Taliban were an asset of the ISI?

Coll: They were an asset of the ISI. I think it’s impossible to understand the Taliban’s military triumph in Afghanistan, culminating in their takeover of Kabul in 1996, without understanding that they were a proxy force, a client of the Pakistan army, and benefited from all of the materiel support that the Pakistan army could provide them, given its own constrained resources.

The Taliban were important to the ISI in the late 1990s for another reason. The ISI also promoted a rebellion against what it regarded as Indian occupation in Kashmir. The Taliban in Afghanistan provided logistical support, training and other bases that the ISI could use to train and develop its Kashmir rebellion as well.

To sum it up:  The ISI has used the Taliban for more than 15 years as a proxy force in Afghanistan.  First, they served as a bulwark against the spread of Soviet communism.  Old habits die hard, so when the Americans arrived, the ISI viewed collaboration with the Taliban as a natural point of influence that could be used to suit its interest — namely, keeping Afghanistan weak and unstable and impossible to dominate its neighbor.

Some in the blogosphere have treated Wikileaks’ revelation with a yawn.  Check out Andrew Exum’s dripping-with-sarcasm post comparing the shock-value of the story to news that Liberace likes dudes.  So sure, if you’re in the expert community, it’s easy to brush off as a non-story.

However, getting these stories out to major news outlets has relevance.  Spencer Ackerman points out that the Wikileaks information provides a “new depth of detail” about the long-held ties.

More importantly, it raises the issue to a level that people controlling the purse strings can’t ignore.  I’ll bet you a crisp dollar bill that John Kerry has read Ghost Wars.  I’ll double down on the fact that Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, soon moves lickity-split to convene an oversight hearing that reexamines the $500 million that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just promised to the Pakistanis last week for two hydroelectric projects, a pledge that comes on the heels of a massive $7.5 billion Pakistan aid package.  Keep in mind that this assistance was essentially conditioned on strengthening the Pakistani civilian government at the expense of its military and intelligence services and was accepted by the Pakistanis after some rather significant heartburn in Islamabad.

The bottom line is that widespread public disclosure of the depth of the Taliban-ISI contacts ultimately creates leverage for the Americans, and that’s a good thing.

UPDATE:  It occurred to me last night that by saying leverage created by the release of classified information was “a good thing” may have tacitly endorsed the idea that I favor future leaks of classified information.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  As a veteran of five years inside the intelligence committee, I deplore leaks of all kinds — they harm sources and methods, which in turn jeopardizes the IC and military’s abilities to collect information germane to America’s national security.  That leverage was created by the release of information is a fortunate byproduct of the leak.  My preference would been to have none at all.

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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton raised concern over human rights during her trip to Vietnam, a country she last visited in the waning days of her husband’s presidency.  Per the NYT:

Noting Vietnam’s recent jailing of democracy activists, attacks on religious groups and curbing of Internet social-networking sites, Mrs. Clinton said she raised the status of human rights in a meeting with a deputy prime minister, Pham Gia Khiem. … She said the United States would press Vietnam to do more to protect individual freedom. …

Mrs. Clinton’s comments were notable, given that she has played down human rights concerns in visits to Vietnam’s neighbor, China. But her timing, at the outset of the visit, suggested that she wanted to make her point, and move on.

The last line is particularly intriguing, and offers potential fodder to critics from across the political spectrum: from conservatives wed to George Bush’s “Freedom Agenda” to liberal critics to issue-focused NGOs, like Human Rights Watch and Freedom House. Is the Secretary of State just making her point and moving on? Have human rights become simply a talking point, as Secretary Clinton unfortunately suggested before her first trip to China in early 2009?

Despite her regrettable gaffes about China, she’s said that her more nuanced approach is “designed to make a difference, not prove a point.” So what is Secretary Clinton’s approach, exactly?

In Russia, a country desperate for some international respect, a stern human rights stare-down could prove counter-productive. The balance between economics, bilateral security, multi-lateral security, climate change and personal freedoms demands measured engagement. Would, for example, Russia have cooperated on New START or Iran sanctions if the Obama administration issued one human rights tongue-lashing on top of another? Anything’s possible, but such agreements would have undoubtedly been more difficult to come by.

That’s why, in big countries as Will Marshall wrote on this site the other day, Secretary Clinton is focused on building civil societies:

In an important speech that got little attention back home, she unveiled what she called a 21st century approach to promoting democracy by defending civil society. Clinton described an independent civic sector as a nursery for democratic citizenship, no less critical to a free society than representative government and a market economy. And she warned of a spreading global backlash against civil society…. This marks a significant departure from the Bush administration’s approach to democracy, which centered on demands for elections and accountable political institutions. …

Clinton aimed more modestly, but shrewdly, at bolstering a particular aspect of liberty – freedom of association. In authoritarian countries, civil society or “third sector” organizations play an especially vital role in building the infrastructure of liberal democracy. … [Clinton’s approach is] deeply subversive, in that it enables indigenous reformers to carve out space for civic action that is independent of state control. By defending the right of CSOs to organize and operate, and receive international support, the United States and other free countries can promote democracy from the ground up.

It’s in this vein that Secretary Clinton addressed an audience on cyber freedom at the Newseum earlier this year.

Some countries have erected electronic barriers that prevent their people from accessing portions of the world’s networks. …  They’ve expunged words, names, and phrases from search engine results. They have violated the privacy of citizens who engage in non-violent political speech. These actions contravene the Universal Declaration on Human Rights.

Expect the direct challenging on human rights to continue behind closed doors, but expect the Obama administration to take a more indirect, but ultimately more effective path in public.

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After digesting three days’ worth of the Washington Post’s TopSecretAmerica series, consider me unimpressed.

As I said in my initial post, I do generally support the series’ aim — to demonstrate that we’ve had a massive intelligence community bureaucracy sprout up since 9/11, and that oversight and public accountability seem to be lacking. That point is well-taken, and one that I support.

My critiques are simple: TopSecretAmerica is neither even-handed nor nuanced. It paints the intelligence community in a broad-brush negative light while ignoring many of its achievements in the last decade.

The series’ point of departure seems to be that the intelligence community is a secretive monster. The articles lean too heavily on the notion that big, expensive and secretive mean scary and, by implication, counter-productive: Companies put the bottom line before country, no one knows what happens at Ft. Meade, and the super-nerds of the NSA are too affluent … and … what? The country is weaker for it?  We don’t know for sure, but that’s the impression I get.

Rarely do the authors acknowledge that much of the money spent in the IC actually, you know, helped keep Americans safe. KSM’s capture? Al-Zarqawi’s death?  Catching the Times Square bomber in 53 hours? The Russian spy ring? The recent slate of high-level Taliban takedowns in Afghanistan and Pakistan? All these, and more, were left conspicuously off the final draft. Of course, this is the IC’s inherent PR nightmare: its shortcomings are publicly scrutinized; its successes often remain hidden.

Instead of striking a proper balance that tells a measured story of waste, overlap and needless spending mixed with strategic intelligence successes, “TopSecretAmerica” is too quick to throw the baby out with the bath water.

The lack of nuance is equally disappointing. As intelligence analysts, the contractors I worked with couldn’t have been more conscientious, patriotic employees. They were crucial components of our analytic team. Should they have been replaced by civilian employees on a purely cost basis (for purely economic reasons)? Probably, and the government is working to facilitate that transition (a point mentioned in the text). But that’s only part of the charge the Post levels against them — did my colleagues value their shareholders more than their country? No way.

And should my colleagues be lumped in with the protective service contractors who did irreparable harm to America’s mission by murdering Iraqi citizens? No, but to the intelligence novice, it’s easy to lump all contractors under one umbrella. A distinction should have been made.

Take the issue of overlap. In instances the Post highlights, yes, analytic overlap, most egregiously in the form of the “soccer ball syndrome“, creates inefficiencies that should be sussed out in better oversight.

However, overlap can provide necessary perspective to individual customers. In my old job, I was once the U.S. government’s foremost expert on maritime terrorism in the Strait of Gibraltar. That’s quite a niche, huh? I focused on all the major terrorist groups in Spain, Morocco, and Gibraltar (amongst other responsibilities) just like every other CIA or DIA analyst charged with those countries. But I did so with an eye towards my Department of the Navy customer as a maritime and regional specialist. If a group’s activity suddenly indicated a maritime inclination in that area, I took over as the lead because I was the subject expert.

Overlap makes contributions elsewhere, too. In another personal example, I worked with my agency’s team in Spain to determine, based solely on random, personal connections between my colleagues and their Spanish intelligence contacts, that Islamic extremists, not ETA as the Spanish first decreed, were responsible for the Madrid bombings of March 2004. Once we — the Navy — issued our initial report stating this possibility, other more appropriate agencies took over.

The lack of oversight in intelligence spending must be addressed, but let’s not forget the IC’s valuable successes, either.

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The Washington Post’s new series Top Secret America is well intentioned:

When it comes to national security, all too often no expense is spared and few questions are asked – resulting in an enterprise so massive that nobody in government has a full understanding of it.

That’s right. As an intelligence community analyst for some five years, I’ve seen plenty of the bureaucratic inefficiencies, excess and unchecked spending, and unwieldy sprawl that have mushroomed since 9/11. From this perspective, it’s important that questions get asked, money be justified, and overlap — where necessary and possible — be reduced.

My beef with the article — the first in a three-part series — is that it is framed as “big = bad.” Its thesis seems to be that more construction, more analysts, more information, more publications are all fleecing America. The series’ lede lays out this premise:

The investigation’s other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings – about 17 million square feet of space.

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year – a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

If you’re writing a piece of investigative journalism that is an implicit call for more oversight, pointing out physical size is an obvious organizing frame that seems to illustrate the problem. If there are a bunch of big buildings and no one knows what happens in them, are they necessary?

The problem, however, is delving into why physical size is symptomatic of the problem. Here, the article falls short — lost is that some of these mysterious, large building have contributed to our national security. Raw size isn’t the intelligence community’s problem.

For example, former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair released the IC’s budget for the first time. At $75 billion, it’s almost twice the State Department’s, but only ten percent of DoD’s (however, though the Pentagon’s intel spending is counted in Defense’s budget). If increased oversight improves efficiency by — oh, pick a number — 15 percent, the IC’s budget is still $64 billion and the vast majority of those new buildings out in suburban Maryland are still being built.

Or take the National Security Agency’s budget, the agency that controls our satellite spies that listen in to bad people (when not embroiled in Bush-era domestic eavesdropping cases). It’s budget has doubled.   Based on the “big = bad” frame, you might think this is inherently negative. I’d argue that there’s more to the story, and that the increase in signals intelligence collection has kept the country safer by forcing Al Qaeda to use arcane and slow means of communicating.

Buried are two important reasons why size matters, a link that should be made more explicitly. First:

The overload of hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and annual reports is actually counterproductive, say people who receive them. Some policymakers and senior officials don’t dare delve into the backup clogging their computers.

IC bean-counters value quantity over quality, the latter being more difficult to judge. I can’t tell you how many times we were told to “produce more,” irrespective of whether that production had any mission impact. A lot of dog shit is more valuable that one diamond. That’s because budgets are justified by numbers.

And second:

[S]ecrecy can undermine the normal chain of command when senior officials use it to cut out rivals or when subordinates are ordered to keep secrets from their commanders.  One military officer involved in one such program said he was ordered to sign a document prohibiting him from disclosing it to his four-star commander, with whom he worked closely every day, because the commander was not authorized to know about it.

Almost four years ago, I was in a meeting with the new intelligence chief for a certain country I was working on. He was briefed by my boss’s boss on a variety of secret operations my organization had going in the area. When the chief asked for further information about a specific operation, my boss’s boss continued on for several minutes about all the amazing intelligence we’re getting from it.

It was highly inconvenient that I knew better: in truth, that operation had been shut down for over a year, and continued to exist on paper only. My boss’s boss was giving the new chief a complete snow job, only to give the appearance of competence and justify more money. I decided to quit that afternoon.

In sum, there’s been no question that the intelligence community was ill-equipped to deal with the new security threats facing the country that grew in complexity and immediacy between the end of the Cold War and 9/11. An overhaul was necessary, and the community continues to face growing pains in the aftermath of that reorganization and the increased budgets that come along with it.

The central tension in intelligence spending is striking a balance between dollars and security. Much of the post-9/11 intel money has effectively contributed to the country’s security, an inconvenient truism that’s glossed over in the Post’s new series. In the remaining articles, I hope the focus is on the marginal rate of increased security for every dollar spent. And in cases where we’re not getting enough bang for our buck, I hope there’s a better explanation of what drives those inefficiencies. Raw size is an occasional indicator of a deeper problem, not the problem itself.

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President Obama has reorganized U.S. foreign policy around a new trinity of diplomacy, development and defense. That’s been a sore point among some progressive internationalists, who see the omission of a fourth “d” – democracy – as an overreaction to George W. Bush’s messianic freedom agenda.

Administration officials insist that they aren’t abandoning democracy, just promoting it in new and more subtle ways. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently offered an intriguing case in point.

As Americans celebrated Independence Day, Clinton was in Krakow, Poland for the 10th anniversary gathering of the Community of Democracies. In an important speech that got little attention back home, she unveiled what she called a 21st century approach to promoting democracy by defending civil society. Clinton described an independent civic sector as a nursery for democratic citizenship, no less critical to a free society than representative government and a market economy. And she warned of a spreading global backlash against civil society.

Over the last six years, Clinton noted, 50 governments have clamped down on the ability of civil society or non-governmental organizations to operate freely. She called out persistent violators by name: not just usual suspects like Russia, China and Iran, but also aspiring autocracies like Venezuela under Hugo Chavez and some, such as Egypt and Ethiopia, that are closely allied with Washington. “An attack on civic activism and civil society is an attack on democracy,” she told the assembly.

This marks a significant departure from the Bush administration’s approach to democracy, which centered on demands for elections and accountable political institutions. “All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you,” Bush declared in his 2004 inaugural address. Against the backdrop of the war in Iraq and the war on terror, however, Bush’s freedom agenda acquired a menacing and coercive aura. And when the United States insisted on elections in Gaza, only to see Hamas win in 2006, many critics questioned whether elections are always the right starting point in democracy promotion.

Clinton aimed more modestly, but shrewdly, at bolstering a particular aspect of liberty – freedom of association. In authoritarian countries, civil society or “third sector” organizations play an especially vital role in building the infrastructure of liberal democracy. The United States learned the hard way during the Bush years that democracy can rarely be imposed by force, and from the top down. Support for local voluntary associations, on the other hand, is harder to caricature as some heavy-handed U.S. attempt to “export democracy.” Yet it’s deeply subversive, in that it enables indigenous reformers to carve out space for civic action that is independent of state control. By defending the right of CSOs to organize and operate, and receive international support, the United States and other free countries can promote democracy from the ground up.

Also intriguing was Secretary Clinton’s choice of venue. The Community of Democracies (CD) was launched in 2000 by then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs Bronisław Geremek. Although originally seen as a way to consolidate the wave of democratic reformism that swept the world after the end of the Cold War, the Community often seemed adrift during the last decade. Lax membership rules haven’t helped: some of its 104 members aren’t by any stretch genuine democracies.

If it is going to be a force for democratic solidarity in the world, the CD needs a clear and invigorating mission. Clinton suggested one: rallying the world’s democracies to support embattled civil society groups. She proposed a four-part plan:

1. Setting up a mechanism at the CD for monitoring repressive measures against civil society organizations.
2. Encouraging the United Nations Human Rights Council to champion the right of association.
3. Enlisting regional organizations such as the Organization of American States, the African Union and the Arab League to protect civil society.
4. Creating some sort of “rapid response mechanism” to bring joint diplomatic pressure to bear on governments that suppress civil society.

In addition, Clinton said the United States would contribute $2 million to a new fund dedicated to helping NGOs targeted by repressive rulers.

True, these are not especially bold measures. And the Human Rights Council, dominated by autocratic regimes, can scarcely be trusted to defend human rights, let alone the right to associate. But Clinton rather deftly managed to elevate the issue of defending civil society without turning it into a purely American demand or preoccupation. In fact, a CD working group headed by Canada is expected to take the lead.

An internationalist approach, in which America coaxes rather than trying to dominate, is essential at a time when distrust of U.S. unilateralism still lingers, even in a relatively friendly forum like the CD. Our task now is to work with like-minded countries to make defense of civil society an international norm, just as Americans were instrumental in getting the United Nations to adopt the International Declaration of Human Rights after World War II. In this respect, Secretary Clinton’s speech was a strong start.

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“Is America really Israel’s ally? You think so? We’re not so sure.” An Israeli Defense Force reservist said this to me during a post-dinner drink on a deck overlooking the captivating Sea of Galilee last week.

My response was curt — “You better start believing it. Otherwise, you’re screwed.” Okay, perhaps that wasn’t terribly “PC” and perhaps my tone did little to convince him. After all, my reservist friend wasn’t particularly predisposed towards diplomatic nuance — he opposed any peace deal whatsoever.

However, the sentiment he expressed — that Israel is alone, that it has been abandoned and that it can only count on itself — is deeply embedded in Israel’s national psyche. I’m not here to argue whether this world-view is correct, but like it or not, it’s important to recognize that it exists, and that it lies at the heart of many Israeli foreign policy decisions.

It was hardly just one IDF reservist that tingled my spidey-sense. A top-level Israeli ex-peace negotiator was even more explicit: “Are we paranoid? Yes.” The IDF soldier based along the “blue line” separating Israel and Lebanon believed what UNIFIL — the UN’s peacekeeping force along the border — was doing “is not sufficient” to protect Israel.

The former peace negotiator went on to recount a meeting with a well-known European newspaper’s editorial board. When the board asked what the Israeli government disliked about the newspaper’s writing style, he responded succinctly: “To be sure comma,” a phrase that typically starts the sentence that ends with, “Israel has the right to defend itself.”

That caveat –“To be sure, Israel has the right to defend itself” – is standard fare among American and European opinion columns that go on to criticize Israeli actions. From his perspective, that disclaim glosses over the threats Israel lives under — international terrorist groups in southern Lebanon and Gaza bent on firing rockets and sending suicide bombers into his country, coupled with the stress of a perpetually unstable region, and Iran’s repeated threats of Israeli destruction. His point was: that in Washington, London or Paris, it’s easy to discount the seriousness (would it really make sense for Iran to attack?), scale and immediacy of these threats as these cities don’t live under them every day.

But in Israeli eyes, these threats loom larger. That’s what drove Israel’s unapologetic heavy hand in the 2nd Lebanon War, in Operation Cast Lead, and during the flotilla incident when so many Palestinian civilians were killed in the fighting. Israel is prepared to endure the resulting international condemnation, because civilian causalities and a soiled reputation are lesser evils when compared with looming national security threats, “It’s us or them, and I’d rather it be them. We can’t count on anyone else, so we’ll do it ourselves.”

In short, Israel is banking on military victories to create the appearance of invincibility. Israel reasons that, if the Arab countries believe they can defeat Israel militarily, why then would the Arabs be interested in a peace agreement. Yet that sentiment lands Israel in a catch-22 — if Israel appears militarily invincible, then why negotiate peace? The answer is, of course, that the longer conflict drags on, the higher the cost of appearing invincible will be — in lives, resources, and reputation.

Israel shouldn’t be given a pass for its heavy-handed actions, particularly ones that needlessly take the lives of innocent civilian bystanders. But understanding Israel’s conflicted inner-monologue is a critical component in brokering a lasting peace.

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