For the first time in 20 months, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators will sit down face-to-face in Washington, DC this week.  Building on a year and a half of shuttle diplomacy “proximity talks” shepherded by George Mitchell, the White House’s Middle East envoy, this Wednesday, September 1, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu will sit down with his Palestinian counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas.

There’s been broad skepticism surrounding these talks from the get-go.  Is the Obama administration convening talks for domestic political reasons within a pessimistic geo-political environment, or because there’s actual hope?  My colleague Will Marshall shares this decidedly luke-warm take: “It’s not hard to find grounds for pessimism,” he wrote last week here on ProgressiveFix.

Here are five ways to gauge the talks’ success:

1. Cameras
Yes, yes – a press conference ain’t much, what with the security and happiness of millions hanging in the balance.  But the mere act of holding a joint press conference with Obama stewarding Abbas and Netanyahu at least indicates the talks were a basis for some extraordinarily cautious optimism.  It would be better than, say, both leaders departing quietly in the middle of the night without so much as a word to the cameras.  But this is the low bar the situation demands.

2. Netanyahu’s position on the settlement moratorium
Upon assuming office last year, Netayahu issued a 10-month moratorium on construction in Israeli settlements in the West Bank.  It is due to expire in late September, and Netanyahu, facing right-wing pressure from within his coalition, has said that building will resume.

It is, of course, a shame that the extraordinarily complex issue of where and how to build settlements has been reduced to the binary choice of “build” or “don’t build”.  That’s why if Netanyahu, fresh off a positive meeting with Obama in July, can finesse his pledge to continue construction (and please his political base) while giving ground somewhere to show the Palestinians and Obama that he’s serious, we might be in business.

3. Level of buy-in from the “moderate” Middle Eastern countries
Jordan’s King Abdullah and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak are planning to attend.  While neither leader is on extraordinarily solid political ground domestically (which may turn out to be the understatement of the year for Mubarak, who faces a potentially explosive election), Abbas needs their blessing to create breathing room with the likes of the nay-sayers in the Arab League, who are already predicting failure but remain generally supportive of talks because of Obama’s “sincerity”.  Building an Arab coalition around a deal is key, so watch whether they are vocally supportive of the meeting and what message they take back home.

4. A statement from Hillary Clinton
She’ll be the direct intermediary between the two, so watch her closely. Everything from body-language to expression to the actual words out of her mouth will be important.  If there’s a tense, negative air surrounding the talks, the Secretary might just literally embody them.

5. Reactions in Israeli press
Israel has a wide selection of English language publications of good quality, like the Jerusalem Post and Ha’aretz.  Keep an eye on what they’re saying – for them, the talks will be issue #1 this week and will no doubt maintain lively commentary.  They were the bell-weather for Netanyahu’s trip to DC in July, and the Israeli English-language press deemed that trip a success, which became the de facto public narrative.

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Gasp!  The CIA is paying bad people in Afghanistan!

The New York Times implies there’s a problem with fighting corruption in the Afghan government while paying the corrupt, in this case Mohammed Zia Salehi, the chief administration on Afghanistan’s National Security Council:

Mr. Salehi’s relationship with the C.I.A. underscores deep contradictions at the heart of the Obama administration’s policy in Afghanistan, with American officials simultaneously demanding that Hamid Karzai root out the corruption that pervades his government while sometimes subsidizing the very people suspected of perpetrating it.

That’s not right.  If we begin holding every official in Afghanistan to some vague corruption-based litmus test, the intelligence community would be completely handcuffed: I’d bet you a paycheck that you could pin some sort of corruption charge on every single official in the entire country.

After all, it’s a bit of a Catch-22, right?  If Afghanistan was a graft-free Jeffersonian democracy, CIA wouldn’t have such a need need to recruit unsavory sources like Salehi.  But the country is a mess, and our intelligence community better damn-well have its ear to the ground.  And if we really want to stop corruption at the highest level, Salehi has regular access to the biggest fish of them all:  Karzai.  That’s highly valuable.

I understand the desire to keep things above-board, but tough situations demand hard choices, and paying a well-placed but corrupt source is clearly the lesser evil.

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U.S. officials say they have al Qaeda on the ropes in Pakistan. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for al Qaeda’s homicidal ideology, which is spreading to extremists in other Muslim countries. This poses new risks for Americans, and highlights a big hole in President Obama’s counter-terrorism policies.

According to The Washington Post, the Central Intelligence Agency now rates al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a Yemen-based offshoot, as an even greater threat than Osama bin Laden’s original. Under the “spiritual” guidance of Anwar a-Aulaqi, a cleric and U.S. citizen, AQAP is busy plotting attacks on America, including a failed attempt earlier this year to set off a car bomb in Times Square.

As my colleague Jim Arkedis pointed out yesterday, this doesn’t mean AQAP is capable of staging 9/11-scale attacks on our country. But since Aulaqi also counseled Nidal Malik Hasan, the U.S. Army major accused of gunning down 13 Americans at Fort Hood last year, the AQAP threat seems real enough.

Meanwhile, in the Hobbesian nightmare that is Somalia, another al Qaeda affiliate, Al Shabab, launched a suicide attack this week that killed 32 people at a Mogadishu hotel. Last month, the group claimed responsibility for a massacre of over 70 people watching the World Cup at a bar in neighboring Uganda.

And just last week, al Qaeda’s Iraq franchise launched a suicide attack that killed 57 job seekers at an army recruitment center in Baghdad.

What’s the message in all this carnage? That al Qaeda continues to offer the brand of choice to aspiring jihadists, who are more than willing to use its gruesome tactics to advance their local ambitions.

What can our government do to stop this contagion of suicide and mass casualty terror attacks?

Self-defense requires that we shift some military and intelligence resources to these new hot spots. But unless we want to be drawn into a never-ending game of terrorist whack-a-mole, we also need to do a better job of discrediting the ideology that motivates al Qaeda and its affiliates to kill in Islam’s name.

A trenchant strategy for doing just than is detailed in Fighting the Ideological Battle, an excellent study by the Washington Institute for Near East Studies. It begins with a step that the Obama administration unfortunately has been reluctant to take, for fear of conflating violent extremism and Islam: acknowledging the essentially ideological nature of the terrorist threat. We need to openly contest and challenge the Islamist catalogue of grievances, the better to drive the wedge deeper between them and the decent majority of Muslims who no part of their apocalyptic visions.

Our government also needs an explicit strategy for shoring up failing or fragile states that are particularly vulnerable to extremist violence. It’s no accident that al Qaeda and its offshoots flourish in ungoverned spaces within countries like Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Finally, we need to keep driving home the essential point about al Qaeda’s growing global franchise: its victims are overwhelmingly civilians, and Muslim civilians at that. That’s why, even as al Qaeda franchises have cropped up, support for terror attacks on civilians has fallen among Muslim publics. And al Qaeda’s vicious tactics have sparked a backlash even from some of the organization’s founders and leading theoreticians. Rather than being overly sensitive about lending credence to the Islamists’ “clash of civilizations” rhetoric, our government should miss no chance to stand in solidarity with the victims of Islamist ideology.

Photo credit: U.S. Army photostream

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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