Last week, I wrote that the terrorist events in Moscow meant that Russia was about to choose between two distinct paths for its democratic aspirations. Either Vladimir Putin would reincarnate his 2004 persona and use the attacks to further retard Russian democracy, or new President Dmitri Medvedev would leverage the blasts as a catalyst that liberates him from Putin’s yoke and parries his attempts at a new power-grab. At the time, I was hopeful for the second outcome, but betting on the first.

Unfortunately, this op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times slid me more towards the Putin-power-grab outlook. I had failed to appreciate that, well, there’s a different political culture in Russia that protects the “czar” and blames his underlings:

In other countries, leaders might pay a political price for not preventing a startling attack like the suicide bombings in the Moscow subway last Monday. Not here, at least not so far. If anything, terrorism and unrest in Russia’s predominantly Muslim regions have long served to strengthen Mr. Putin’s hand.
[…]
He plays on a piece of Russian folk wisdom that is roughly translated as “the good czar, bad advisers” — the belief that, throughout history, a Russian leader with the right intentions is often betrayed by underlings. That is why Mr. Putin, the prime minister and former president, is often shown in public scowling and lecturing other officials.
[…]
“When it comes to terrorism, Putin knows how — and this is a very important aspect of his political mastery — to protect himself from what might otherwise be considered his responsibility,” said Sergey Parkhomenko, a political commentator and radio talk show host in Moscow.
[…]
On Thursday night, he headed to Venezuela to see President Hugo Chavez for a visit that was intended to display the Kremlin’s muscular foreign policy and its warm relations with an antagonist of the United States. It was less than two days after a Chechen extremist had claimed responsibility for the subway attacks, and had promised there would be more.

It’s an important reminder that learning what’s in the political DNA of our partners and rivals is essential if the U.S. is to craft effective long-term partnerships and exert its influence wisely on the global stage.

America’s hot-and-cold relationship with China just blew a little warmer. Last Wednesday, Beijing for the first time agreed to take part in drafting a UN Security Council resolution for new sanctions against Iran.

This would be the fourth round of UN sanctions aimed at pressuring Tehran to halt its nuclear program. So far, efforts to give those sanctions real bite have foundered on the implicit threat that China (and perhaps Russia) would veto them in the Security Council. Both countries have extensive economic ties with Iran, and China, invoking its own unhappy experience with European imperialism, traditionally has championed “non-interference” in other countries’ internal affairs.

So it may be significant that, having tried and largely failed to “engage” Iran on the nuclear standoff, the White House has apparently successfully engaged China to deepen Tehran’s international isolation. But there are already signs that Beijing is not quite ready to jump this particular Rubicon.

Iran’s nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, wasted no time in jetting off to Beijing for meetings with Chinese officials. “Many issues came up in talks on which China accepted Iran’s position,” Jalili told reporters. “We jointly emphasized during our talks that these sanctions tools have lost their effectiveness.”

The Chinese Foreign Ministry issued a statement that offered no hint that Beijing has changed its attitude toward Iran’s drive for nuclear capabilities, instead calling on all parties to “step up diplomatic efforts, and show flexibility, to create the conditions to resolve the Iranian nuclear issue through dialogue and negotiation.”

All this suggests we’re in for protracted haggling in the Security Council over language that, in the end, probably won’t induce the Islamic Republic to stop enriching uranium in defiance of UN strictures. The fundamental problem is not that China is indifferent to nuclear proliferation or intent on “protecting” a valuable trading partner. The fundamental problem is that China doesn’t seem ready yet to assume the responsibilities of global leadership, as we would define them.

From Sudan to Iran, China puts the amoral pursuit of its own interests – in these cases, assuring access to the energy it needs to fuel its rapid growth – ahead of larger conceptions of international cooperation and order, or even its own undoubted interest in stemming nuclear proliferation. The idea of “enlightened self-interest” that underpins U.S. internationalism has an unnatural and vaguely sinister ring to officials in the Middle Kingdom. For now at least, it’s hard to imagine the historically self-contained and inward-looking Middle Kingdom spending trillions of renminbi, say, to support a Pacific analogue to NATO, or an architecture of international institutions dedicated to collective problem-solving.

The Obama administration nonetheless deserves credit for nudging Beijing toward an outward view of global obligations commensurate with its growing geopolitical weight. But in the crunch – pressuring Iran to forsake nuclear weapons – we’d do well to have realistic expectations of how far China is really prepared to go.

While the Moscow bombings have brought out fighting words and suggestions of a scorched-earth response from Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin – a reaction that I cautioned against in my previous post – President Obama’s has been perfectly pitched. He has expressed solidarity with the Russian people and sympathy for the killed and injured. The president has made a notable attempt to distance himself from overly emotional Bush/Putin-style rhetoric about terrorism, reasoning (correctly in my mind) that pounding a fist on the table and screaming about revenge only plays into the terrorists’ hands.

I would urge one note of caution, however. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, appearing on Canadian television, compared the Moscow terrorist attack to those in the West: “We face a common enemy, whether you’re in a Moscow subway or a London subway or a train in Madrid, or an office building in New York, we face the same enemy.” I’d counsel the State Department to be a bit more nuanced here. True, one can argue that the ultimate motivation in all these attacks was to establish part of the Muslim caliphate that stretched from North Africa to Southeast Asia. But it’s a tricky argument to make when part of the history of that motivation is independence from Moscow (whether you’re a pure separatist or one motivated by Muslim ideology).

Endorsing a “common enemy” might encourage the Kremlin to continue heavy-handed tactics against its own people, not to mention attempting to retroactively justify, say, the invasion of Georgia by conflating it with terrorist motivations. Or, to continue Putin’s 2004-2005 precedent, throw language like this back into American faces when he uses it to justify another power-grab…like his return to the presidency. Seriously — he’s not above it, and this might be exactly what’s coming.

Foggy Bottom should be clear on these distinctions about a common enemy, particularly when there’s no evidence of direct al Qaeda involvement in the Moscow bombings.

Nearly 36 hours after the attacks in Moscow’s subway system, reports indicate that nearly 40 are dead and more than 70 have been injured. As of this writing, no group has claimed responsibility, though heavy suspicion has fallen on Muslim separatist groups based in southern Russia’s Caucasus region, the primary source of terrorism in Russia since the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. More on that in a second.

There were two bombings, conducted quasi-simultaneously (about 40 minutes apart) at two busy metro stations in Moscow’s city center. The Lubyanka station is located near the headquarters of Russia’s Federal Security Service (the legacy organization of the KGB), which points to a message the attackers may have been hoping to convey; the second scene at the Park Kultury Station is located a few stops to the south along the same metro line. If you’d like to see some interesting citizen-journalism of the attacks’ aftermath, click over to the NYT’s The Lede blog.

Much has been made of the attackers’ identity — two women dressed in black robes with explosives and shrapnel packed underneath their garments. Female suicide bombers have been used by Chechen separatists dating back to 2002 and are commonly — and disturbingly — referred to as “black widows.” Furthermore, female suicide bombers are hardly a new phenomenon. If memory serves, they’ve been used as long ago as the early 1990s by the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. Terrorist groups — even those with no formal ties to one another — observe each others’ tactical successes and adopt the effective ones. The use of unsuspecting women has made the rounds in terrorist circles, even if Western audiences still find the tactic shocking.

It’s important to appreciate the dynamic nature and motivations of the Caucasus’ separatist groups over the last decade and the Russian government’s response to them. Boris Yeltsin first installed the then-little-known ex-KGB chief Vladimir Putin as prime minister in 1999, and Putin vowed to crush the Chechen separatist movement. In the early-to-mid 2000s, the group was a relatively structured militia that was responsible for mostly large-scale terrorist attacks. The group most famously conducted the 2004 siege at the Beslan school that killed over 300 people, many of whom were school children; it was also responsible for the 2002 siege at a Moscow theater.

In large part, Putin was responsible for successfully dismantling the organizational hierarchy behind those acts, killing leaders like Shamil Basayev and Abdul Khalim Sudalayev in 2006. He used victories like those to consolidate power behind the Kremlin, saying political power-grabs like eliminating the direct election of regional governors were necessary to defeat terrorism. Can you imagine if Bush had eliminated the election of state governors after 9/11? Just a bit of a stretch, right?

But as often happens with insurgent organizations, cutting off their head rarely kills them. Moscow’s success only caused the resistance to morph over the last four or five years from a top-down military-style structure to more of a flat, non-hierarchical, Islamic-based motley crew. Here’s an excellent run-down on the insurgency’s changing nature and motivation from WaPo’s Philip Pan late last year:

Russia has long blamed violence in the region on Muslim extremists backed by foreign governments and terrorist networks, but radical Islam is relatively new here. In the 1990s, it was ethnic nationalism, not religious fervor, that motivated Chechen separatists. That changed, though, as fighting spilled beyond Chechnya and Russian forces used harsher tactics targeting devout Muslims.

In 2007, the rebel leader Doku Umarov abandoned the goal of Chechen independence and declared jihad instead, vowing to establish a fundamentalist Caucasus Emirate that would span the entire region. After Moscow proclaimed victory in Chechnya in April, he issued a video labeling civilians legitimate targets and reviving Riyad-us Saliheen, the self-described martyrs’ brigade that launched terrorist attacks across Russia from 2002 to 2006.

It would appear on the surface that the Kremlin has failed to appreciate this change. In my mind, the new shape and motivations of the Chechen insurgency would call for more of a counter-insurgency style strategy that has been adopted by the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, Putin has vowed a continued heavy hand, saying, “The terrorists will be destroyed!” This is of course what any national leader must say to placate a fearful and confused domestic audience, but may begin to ring a bit hollow in light of Putin’s similar rhetoric of 1999:

“Putin said [before these attacks], ‘One thing that I definitely accomplished was this [stopping the Chechen threat],’ and he didn’t,” said Pavel K. Baev, a Russian who is a professor at the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo.

“My feeling is this is not an isolated attack, that we will see more,” Mr. Baev said. “If we are facing a situation where there is a chain of attacks, that would undercut every attempt to soften, liberalize, open up, and increase the demand for tougher measures.”

In my next post, I’ll take a look at how the U.S. has responded to the attacks.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/worldeconomicforum/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

I’d like to think Noah Shachtman started to think seriously about his latest policy proposal around the time he wrote this policy memo for PPI in January. But it’s more likely he had been chewing over the idea — articulated in the current issue of Wired magazine — to break up the National Security Agency (NSA) far earlier.

It’s a fairly daring proposal on the surface because, after all, even those of us who have worked in the intelligence community don’t have a great handle on what makes the NSA tick. Dissemination of intelligence products is so tightly controlled — even within the intelligence community — that we at NCIS would sometimes wonder (jokingly) if the NSA was actually on our side.

Here’s the gist:

NSA headquarters — the “Puzzle Palace” — in Fort Meade, Maryland, is actually home to two different agencies under one roof. There’s the signals-intelligence directorate, the Big Brothers who, it is said, can tap into any electronic communication. And there’s the information-assurance directorate, the cybersecurity nerds who make sure our government’s computers and telecommunications systems are hacker- and eavesdropper-free. In other words, there’s a locked-down spy division and a relatively open geek division. The problem is, their goals are often in opposition. One team wants to exploit software holes; the other wants to repair them. This has created a conflict — especially when it comes to working with outsiders in need of the NSA’s assistance. Fortunately, there’s a relatively simple solution: We should break up the NSA.

Noah advocates essentially splitting the offense (signals intelligence) from the defense (information assurance). Think of it in football terms: O and D can peacefully co-exist under a head coach in the NFL because they’re both working against a different team. But in the cyberwars, it’s unclear who the other team is, and the NSA runs the risk of putting its O and D on the field against one another.

To alleviate this problem, Shachtman wants to create a new Cyber Security Agency with the information assurance directorate. He believes the new CSA would be more trusted and thus able to coordinate better with outside cyber stakeholders. The directorates already have separate budgets and oversight, so it shouldn’t be all that painful.

That sounds about right to me.  However, I should note that Noah’s piece doesn’t elaborate on the drawbacks of this approach. Is that because they’re aren’t any, or because we wouldn’t know them until it’s too late? That’s worth looking into.

Now that the Obama administration has chastised Israel for expanding settlements in East Jerusalem, it should turn its attention to Mughrabi Square.

Palestinian students gathered earlier this month to dedicate a square in the West Bank town of El Bireh to the memory of Dala Mughrabi, a young woman responsible for the worst terrorist attack in Israel’s history. The 19-year-old Mughrabi led a Palestinian terror squad that landed on a beach near Tel Aviv in 1978. In the ensuing massacre, 38 Israeli civilians were killed, including 13 children. An American photographer, Gail Rubin, was also slain.

According to the New York Times, the event was organized by the youth wing of Fatah, the ruling party led by President Mahmoud Abbas. Amid Israeli protests that it would violate their pledges to refrain from “incitement,” most top Palestinian leaders skipped the ceremony. But not all, as the Times reported:

“We are all Dala Mughrabi,” declared Tawfiq Tirawi, a member of the Fatah Central Committee, the party’s main decision-making body, who came to join the students. “For us she is not a terrorist,” he said, but rather “a fighter who fought for the liberation of her own land.”

The incident was overshadowed by the uproar over Israel’s announcement – during a visit by Vice President Joe Biden — of plans to add 1,600 housing units in East Jerusalem.

U.S. officials reacted furiously, calling the announcement an “insult” and demanding apologies from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Some observers see the U.S. outrage as contrived and likely counterproductive. After all, the settlement freeze announced last year by Netanyahu had explicitly exempted East Jerusalem. Others, like my colleague Jim Arkedis, saw the rebuke as essential to reestablishing America’s credentials as an “honest broker” in Middle East peace talks.
In any case, U.S. leaders ought to be at least as upset by the glorification of terrorists as they are by Israel’s settlement policies. Apparently emboldened by the settlement furor, Abbas told U.S. peace envoy George Mitchell this week that Palestinians have a “national right of resistance” to Israeli occupation.

Rebranding terrorism as “resistance” not only undermines prospects for a just resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict, it also validates the barbarous crimes against humanity perpetrated by al Qaeda and other extremist groups. That’s why U.S. leaders must categorically reject Palestinian attempts to justify attacks on civilians and to make martyrs out of murderers.

We interrupt this somewhat unscheduled progressive glee to make a brief point about national security. The Washington Post has a pointed op-ed today on Guantanamo Bay and military tribunals.

Now, let’s be clear: There are differing views within the progressive movement about the viability, constitutionality and political realities of trying terrorism suspects. There has been significant grief from progressive quarters that the administration is laying the groundwork to reverse its decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court. (For the record, my personal view is that I stand with what the president said at the National Archives last year.) But lost in this division, there’s one issue in the Post‘s piece that we progressives should seize:

Congress and the president should hammer out a set of rules to guide judges on how to handle the Guantanamo habeas cases still wending their way through the system. And they need to agree on a legal framework to govern indefinite detentions now and in the future. [Italics mine]

Let us not forget that the Bush administration force-fed Obama this shit-sandwich. Rather than construct a legal framework to deal with terrorism detainees, the Bush White House took a pass by locking them up in GTMO and hoping the problem would never resurface. It really didn’t, until the Bushies were back cutting brush at Crawford. So, if progressives want to avoid fights and internal fallouts over terrorism suspect issues in the future, they have to define the rules of the road.

And while we can argue about the threshold of evidence regarding civilian vs. military trials, one idea that merits serious consideration is something that PPI has pushed in the past — national security courts. Here’s an excerpt from our “Memo to the New President” by Harvey Rishikof:

The thrust of the idea is to have a dedicated set of federal trial judges working with an expert bar of federal and military prosecutors and defense counsel — all with high-level security clearances. Such a court could accommodate the particular challenges of prosecuting terrorism cases in a manner wholly consistent with the Constitution, the common law, international conventions, and the relevant statutes.

This would be no sealed-off Star Chamber; trials would be open to the public unless there were truly compelling reasons to limit access in a particular case. Such openness would help give our own people and our allies the necessary proof that the United States is reasserting its identity as a champion of human rights and due process.

It’s a good idea that deserves consideration as part of the solution, even if the national security court use is ultimately mixed in with civilian and/or military trials. But the Obama administration could make things a lot easier on itself if it solved the problem with an institutional fix, and not just muddling through like they are with KSM.

…and now you can return to smiling ear-to-ear about health care.

Reports of just how warped the North Korean regime is occasionally filter out to the broader world from time to time. This dispatch in the New York Times has got to be one of the more grotesque stories we’ve heard in a while:

North Korea has arrested and possibly executed its top financial official as it struggles to contain chaos set off by its botched attempt to halt inflation through a radical currency revaluation, according to news reports Thursday in South Korea.

[…]

Mr. Pak “was executed at a firing range in Pyongyang on the trumped-up charges of being an antirevolutionary element as public sentiments worsened over the failure of the currency reform,” reported the South Korean news agency Yonhap, quoting unnamed sources in North Korea.

Here’s where Mr. Pak screwed up:

In late November, North Korea suddenly told its people that it would introduce new banknotes, ordering them to turn in their old bills for new ones at a rate of 100 to 1. It also put a cap on how much old money they could swap for the new currency.

The shock measure was meant to arrest runaway inflation and crack down on illegal markets in the socialist state. But it only aggravated the food crisis, creating shortages and soaring prices, and reportedly led to isolated but highly unusual outbursts of protest in the totalitarian state.

I should note that Mr. Pak’s execution hasn’t been confirmed. But if it is, this is really serious stuff that the U.S. can’t ignore. When it comes to the internal machinations of a completely isolated society like North Korea, the West often writes off these kinds of stories. “They’re nuts,” you can almost hear a few desk officers in Foggy Bottom exclaim as they throw their hands in the air, “What are we supposed to do with this?”

But sooner or later during the Obama administration, the West will sit down with North Korea. The temptation is often to focus only on the nuclear issue, because it is obviously the most pressing concern for American national security. However, it’s critical that Western negotiators engage Pyongyang on human rights as well — if nothing else (and here’ s the cynic in me), asking hard questions about Mr. Pak’s disappearance creates diplomatic openings on other fronts, and will create incentives for the North Koreans to give ground elsewhere. And if we’re lucky, raising the issue might just protect Mr. Pak’s successor, too.

Nowruz is Iran’s new year, celebrated every spring. You may recall that last year, President Obama scored a ton of points from just about all quarters by sending this personalized Nowruz video message directed straight at Iran’s people. It was a great move that bypassed any formal communication with the mullahs in Tehran and successfully engaged Iranians on a personal level. From last year’s video:

You, too, have a choice.  The United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations.  You have that right — but it comes with real responsibilities, and that place cannot be reached through terror or arms, but rather through peaceful actions that demonstrate the true greatness of the Iranian people and civilization.  And the measure of that greatness is not the capacity to destroy, it is your demonstrated ability to build and create.

This year’s Nowruz (#1389 if you’re scoring by the Persian calendar) takes place on March 20th. And suffice it to say that some things have changed since then: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole an election last June from Mir Hossein Mousavi, which triggered millions-strong, largely peaceful (on the civilian side, anyway) demonstrations in Tehran over several weeks. The mullahs actually remain fairly divided lot, but since the Revolutionary Guards hold the balance of power in Iran, the status quo will reign for the time being. However, the protests continue to flare up, but with diminishing strength, on every subsequent public holiday or event. Their potency has been contained in large part because the Ayatollah learned the importance of crushing momentum from the country’s experience in 1979.

This raises the question: After a tumultuous year in American-Iranian “relations” that has seen the Obama administration change tack from guarded optimism of dialogue to renewed talk of targeted sanctions, what (if anything) will the administration do this Nowruz? With Tehran’s crackdown on social media and internet freedom, it might be more difficult to get a similarly successful message through. But it’s worth a try, given the negligible price of recording a three-minute message from the Oval Office.

If he does record something, part of the president’s Nowruz goodwill message to Iranians should focus on expanding Internet access in Iran, which began in earnest earlier this month when the White House lifted restrictions for the first time on U.S. companies exporting online software like chat and data-sharing programs. That’s an incredibly important step, and has been generally described as a win-win-win for Iranians, companies and American diplomatic efforts. But lifting restrictions is just one side of the equation — actively promoting this kind of software in Iran should follow next.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/arasmus/ / CC BY 2.0

President Obama gave away his $1.4 million Nobel Peace Prize award yesterday, and where national security is concerned, he literally put his money where his mouth is.

The largest donation—$250,000—was given to Fisher House, an organization that builds “comfort homes” on the grounds of major U.S. military installations that allow service members’ families “to be close to a loved one at the most stressful times—during the hospitalization for an unexpected illness, disease, or injury.”  It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that President Obama would choose a charity like Fisher House, given the First Lady’s focus on the cause since the beginning of her husband’s presidency.  And with America’s military facing unprecedented strains, every drop in the bucket helps.

The president also gave $100,000 to AfriCare, which promotes health, food security, and access to water in Africa.  This donation mirrors Obama’s long-standing efforts to alleviate poverty in Africa, which dates back to his days in the Senate when he offered the 2007 Global Poverty Act that aims to cut the number of people living on a dollar a day in half by 2015.

Finally, Obama dropped 100 large on the Central Asia Institute, whose story is chronicled in the book “Three Cups of Tea.”  I wasn’t a huge fan of the book’s style, per se, but the CAI’s work is remarkable in and of itself, and it certainly deserves every penny for carrying out such an important mission of educating girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The donations are very embodiment of the notion that American national security policy is about more than the blunt instrument of military force (an idea most recently forwarded by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mullen).  When force is used, it should be done in a careful and judicious manner that accounts for the extended effects on our fighting men and women.

If you supported the Obama administration on this one, it couldn’t have turned out any better.

Back in September, the White House decided to swap missile defense programs. Out was a ground-based system in Eastern Europe that depended on a stationary missile battery and radar station in Poland and the Czech Republic, respectively. It was geared towards a long-range ballistic missile threat, and was over cost, over schedule, and under-performing to boot.

Conservatives howled that the White House was “abandoning its Eastern European allies” to a salivating Russia. Or was it a salivating Iran? Either way, conservatives were all worked up in a tizzy that, despite our mutual-defense pact with Poland and the Czech Republic, surely we were doing irreparable  damage to the NATO alliance.

In the Eastern European system’s place, the Obama administration (with unanimous support from the Joint Chiefs) decided to deploy a sea-based system that was designed to counter a short-to-medium Iranian ballistic missile threat because it had higher technical capabilities and could be deployed more rapidly. Part of the White House’s justification was a new intelligence estimate that said Iran was focused on its short-to-medium range missiles.

So, six months on, how’s that workin’ out for you?

It appears the White House may have—gasp—known what it was doing. I’m a day or so behind on this, but the Wall Street Journal reported this week that … wait for it … Iran has in fact started production of the Nasr1, a highly accurate short range cruise missile:

Iran said it has started a new production line of highly accurate, short-range cruise missiles, which would add a new element to the country’s arsenal.

Gen. Ahmad Vahidi told Iranian state TV Sunday that the cruise missile, called Nasr 1, would be capable of destroying targets up to 3,000 tons in size.

The minister said the missile can be fired from ground-based launchers as well as ships, but would eventually be modified to be fired from helicopters and submarines.

I’m curious as to how a cruise missile is fired from a helicopter, but I digress. The point is that the Obama has matched the current threat with appropriate, functioning, defensive capability. Game over!

And how about that abandonment? Here’s Eugeniusz Smolar, the director of the Center for International Relations in Warsaw, who said to the Guardian adopting the Obama administration’s approach was an easy call for Poland:

“This [new] proposal is much more Europe oriented because the new system is to deal more with the medium- and short-range threats, and this is exactly what Poland has been seeking,” Smolar said.

He added that the new plan is also “more NATO oriented, which is good, because it means there will be much less tension among the allies who have been complaining that Poland has been doing its own agreement with the U.S. outside of NATO.”