issue: Foreign Policy & Defense

Miranda Rights and the Public Safety Exception

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Over the last couple of weeks, Republicans have been going hard against the administration over its handling of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man being held for attempting to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day.

On January 26, several high-ranking Senate Republicans sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder asserting that the administration rushed into giving Abdulmutallab constitutional Miranda rights without first coordinating with all necessary national security agencies and ignored him as a possible “intelligence resource.” This week, Newt Gingrich appeared on “The Daily Show” to slam the “mirandizing” of Abdulmutallab (falsely claiming that the same treatment for “shoe bomber” Richard Reid was fine because he was a U.S. citizen — Reid is British), while Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) called for the removal of John Brennan, the White House’s top counterterrorism official.

Last week, Holder wrote a five-page letter to Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, defending the administration’s actions. Holder cited numerous incidents in the past in which terrorists had been apprehended, given constitutional rights, and then successfully cultivated as intelligence assets.

Despite what the Republicans claim, authorities can, in fact, obtain intelligence from terror suspects after Miranda rights are given. Moreover, there is a legal provision that could allow them to question terrorists before granting them their Miranda rights. As Holder stated in his letter, there is a public safety exception to the Miranda rule that allows authorities to question a suspect before reading him his Miranda rights if they believe an immediate danger to public safety exists.

Here’s how it works. Authorities on the scene of a terrorist act or attempt can make the determination whether or not a danger to public safety exists. If authorities determine that such a danger exists, as would be the case in almost any terrorist attack or attempted attack, they could invoke the public safety exception to allow them to question the suspect for some time before reading them their Miranda rights. After authorities are satisfied that they have gathered the information necessary to protect against imminent threats, the prisoner can then be given his rights. The suspect can challenge the use of the public safety exception and the length of questioning in a subsequent court hearing, where it would be up to a judge to decide whether use of the exception was justified. In clear-cut cases like Abdulmutallab’s, the exception would almost certainly always be upheld.

The public safety exception to Miranda was used in Abdulmutallab’s case. But in a way, that’s beside the point: Reports indicate that Abdulmutallab continues to give up valuable intelligence even after his rights were read to him. It’s an important point to remember: the public safety exception need not be a precondition to extracting information from suspected terrorists. Questioning after Miranda can take place with the suspect’s attorney present, which obviously can yield good information, as is reportedly the case with Abdulmutallab.

I tire of the notion, so often trumpeted by conservatives, that protecting constitutional rights and protecting national security are diametrically opposed ideas. Holder’s letter points out that even the Bush administration charged over 300 people with terrorism-related charges under the civilian justice system, with all traditional constitutional rights respected. We’ve used existing civilian law to combat terrorism in the past, and there is no reason to discontinue the practice now. America’s principles have endured for more than two centuries. Compromising them now is unnecessary and it will not make us safer.

The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of the Progressive Policy Institute.

Cheney’s Terrorists

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The following is a guest column from Major General Donald Edwards, Vermont Army National Guard (Ret.), who served in the military for 37 years.

Just last week, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair declared with certainty that there will be another terrorist attack aimed at the United States within the next six months. With the Obama administration pursuing record numbers of drone attacks and taking out top al-Qaeda leaders, it’s hard to understand how this could be the case. But the paradox becomes clearer if we take a quick trip back through time to examine the track record of one particular individual: Vice President Dick Cheney.

As a former military officer, it is immensely difficult to speak out against our former vice president. While he was in office, I believed that it was inappropriate to criticize Dick Cheney. But now that he is no longer in government, I am compelled to speak my mind about his disastrous national security policies.

In the days and years following September 11, 2001, Vice President Cheney stood out as the chief architect of a calamitous approach to U.S. foreign policy that resulted in a weakened United States and the recruitment of a new generation of terrorists dedicated to anti-American jihad. The Bush-Cheney contribution to terrorist recruitment is clear from the numbers: In 2000, there were 423 international terrorist attacks. The Iraq War heralded a sharp spike in terrorist attacks, which continued with a 607 percent average yearly increase. Eight years later, there were 11,770 international terrorist attacks, as the terrorists birthed by the Bush-Cheney policies grew up.

Unlike Dick Cheney, who glorifies conflict but has never put his own body on the line, I am a retired military officer. I know firsthand the long list of security threats that our country faces. And I know that Cheney’s reckless strategy, out of touch with today’s threats, made that list longer. The first rule of grand strategy – from Sun Tzu to General Petraeus – is to choose your own battlefield. On September 12, 2001, the United States was in a position to frame the security threats of the new century as the world united against violent, radical extremists. Osama bin Laden, on the other hand, was eager to frame his battle as the West versus Islam. The Bush administration walked onto al-Qaeda’s battlefield and began fighting Osama bin Laden’s war.

As even former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld realized, winning the fight against al-Qaeda requires killing more terrorists than we create. Instead, Cheney served as a prime recruiter for our enemies. Al-Qaeda featured Guantanamo Bay in its recruiting videos, citing its evasion of the Geneva Conventions as “evidence” of American’s lack of moral standing and antipathy toward Islam.

Defeating al-Qaeda turns on human intelligence, which requires careful infiltration, relationship-building, cultural research, and triangulation of information. But conservatives based their intelligence-gathering tactics on Hollywood movies: bust a knee cap hard enough, and the truth will pour out like blood. In reality, interrogators rarely know whether they have the right knee cap — and even if they do, actual intelligence agents know that busting it is likely to yield a string of lies, misinformation, and false leads. Instead of generating information and creating leads, Cheney’s strategy led to an Arab generation growing up on images of Abu Ghraib.

Finally, quashing al-Qaeda requires focusing on the countries where the movement had built relationships and infrastructure. For over a decade, al-Qaeda’s senior leadership had lived in and erected training camps along the Afghan-Pakistan border. Meanwhile, Bin Laden’s roots lie in Yemen, and he repeatedly recruited the radically loyal tribes originating in that country for his riskiest missions. Yet the past administration ignored Yemen and starved Afghanistan for troops in order to launch a war in Iraq, where there were no terrorists. Terrorist attacks spiked following the invasion of Iraq, and have continued to grow since.

For a generation of young Arabs now in the prime terrorist age range of 18-25, September 11 was their first political memory. The Bush-Cheney strategy handed Al Qaeda the colors they needed to paint a false picture of “America versus Islam.” It produced hundreds of terrorists who learned that they could be heroes by fighting the West — the West that tortured and indefinitely detained Arab brethren and killed women and children.

And to think we had an opportunity, in the wake of 9/11, to bring about a smarter, more hopeful strategy. America was unified and ready to sacrifice on September 12. If our leaders had called on the best and brightest to learn Arabic or join the CIA, we would now have a flood of fresh intelligence experts. If they had asked us to declare our independence from oil – demanding that auto companies innovate and asking environmentalists to accept a resurgence of nuclear power – we would have stopped funding the bullets that are now going into terrorist guns.

We have not heard the last from Cheney’s terrorists. We cannot waste another day. We must act immediately to build the covert networks we need to fight terrorists. We must prioritize shutting down Guantanamo — a gift that keeps on giving for Al Qaeda — and not make it a political football. And we must understand that, as we did during the fight against the Soviet Union, claiming the higher ground in the debate is strategically important. Cheney sold America’s greatest weapon – our moral authority and our freedoms — on the cheap. Let’s win it back, before more of Cheney’s terrorists strike again.

Update: The original version of this piece did not include the author’s full rank and title. We regret the error.

Human Rights Really Is the Key

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Here I sit in my soon-to-be snowbound DC office, preparing for the certain doom that lurks behind the next menacing cloud. I should be standing in line with 542 of my neighbors at Safeway, buying two weeks’ worth of bread, milk, frozen pizzas, and Miller Lites for this 36-hour storm, but instead, I’m too busy brooding on the notion that the Obama administration has to do a better job on human rights.

A few days ago on Iranian television, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad let it slip that after months of heel-dragging, outright refusal, and/or disinterest, he was suddenly intrigued by a long-dead international uranium swap, designed to remove low-enriched uranium from Iran in exchange for higher-enriched uranium needed by Iran’s medical facilities. I’m brushing over the details, but the goal of the exchange was to provide Iran with uranium required for humanitarian purposes while denying Tehran the practice of performing the enrichment — an experience that could be applied to making a nuclear bomb.

Ahmadinejad isn’t really serious about suddenly embracing the international community’s offer, of course. But by appearing interested in continuing dialogue, Iran was attempting to drive a wedge between members of the UN Security Council as talk of new sanctions against the regime are discussed. Guess what? It’s working. China, a veto-wielding member of the Security Council that isn’t too hot on punishing a fellow despotic regime, has reacted positively to Ahmadinejad’s overtures, calling any discussion of sanctions now premature in light of a possible diplomatic solution.

It’s a critical juncture — any diplomat worth his salt knows that the international community shouldn’t back away, but should keep pushing sanctions to force Tehran to prove its seriousness. But China is letting them off the hook. Why? In part, it’s because China has the U.S. back on its heels.

Consider two recent events: The U.S. agreed to sell $6.4 billion of military equipment to Taiwan, and President Obama set a meeting with the Dalai Lama. The Chinese continue to warn that such actions endanger U.S.-China relations and they profess to be deeply offended. The pattern of events is clear — the U.S. does something, China gets offended, and the U.S. is thrown on its heels.

It’s time to level the playing field. Instead of having to explain or apologize for American actions, the Obama adminstration should knock China off the offensive by opening another diplomatic front: human rights. Every time China is offended for something we’ve done, the Obama administration has to hit right back, and hard, about China’s disregard for basic rights and freedoms. Secretary Clinton’s speech on Internet freedom was a good start, but the issue needs to be highlighted every time the Chinese take offense at an American decision. It puts China on the defensive by having to explain their actions, and would free the White House to pressure China on other issues, like Iran — another candidate for the same human rights treatment.

Charters and Civil Rights

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Gary Orfield, a UCLA education professor, has long been the nation’s foremost chronicler of racial segregation in schools. According to today’s Washington Post, a new study by Orfield’s Civil Rights Project shows that public charter schools are less racially diverse than traditional schools.

“As the country continues moving steadily toward greater segregation and inequality of education for students of color in schools with lower achievement and graduation rates, the rapid growth of charter schools has been expanding a sector that is even more segregated than the public schools,” the report concludes.

This assertion seems suspect on several grounds, and it illustrates the pitfalls of viewing the public charter school movement through the frame of the nation’s great school integration battles of the 1960s and 1970s.

For one thing, minority families are freely choosing charter schools. In the bad old days of Jim Crow, they were forced to attend segregated schools. Later, as many whites fled the cities to avoid sending their children to integrated schools, black families were left behind and had no choice but to attend their local district school. As Orfield and others have documented, this “re-segregation” in impoverished urban neighborhoods was a disaster for big city school systems.

Public school choice arose in Minnesota in the late 1980s to give parents the option to send their children to schools outside their local districts. The charter school idea was conceived in part as a way to bring innovative public schools to the students, rather than forcing them to travel to other districts to find them.

The Charter Record in D.C.

 

As it happens, Washington is in the vanguard of the public charter movement (full disclosure: I’m a member of the D.C. Public Charter School Board). About 84 percent of charter school students here are black, compared with 78 percent in traditional public schools. Why have so many charters located in poor and working-class minority neighborhoods? Because it is precisely the kids in those communities who urgently need better education options. The city’s regular public schools have historically ranked near the bottom in comparisons of major urban education systems, although Mayor Adrian Fenty and Chancellor Michele Rhee have launched a determined effort to lift their performance.

The city’s 58 charter schools have given low-income black and Latino children something they never had before: a choice of where to attend school, as well as an array of innovative learning programs tailored to diverse interests and learning styles. That 28,000, or 38 percent, of D.C.’s students have exercised that choice — in effect voting with their feet — attests to the need for new options. And the shrinking of the traditional school sector’s “market share” was no doubt a big factor behind Fenty’s decision to take it over.

The important question, as Charter School Board Vice Chairman Brian Jones observed to the Post, is not the racial composition of charters, it’s whether they are providing a better education than traditional schools.

The answer is fiercely contested in the research community. Here the evidence is mixed: Many of the District’s best schools are charters, but not all charters are performing well. That’s why our Board has shut down four schools and accepted the voluntary surrender of charters from seven more since 2003.

Why Segregation Is Not the Issue

 

There’s considerable irony here. When I was advocating for charter schools back in the early 1990s, many Democrats in my native Virginia and other southern states were suspicious. Given the region’s bad racial history, they feared that charters would become a new, publicly funded version of the old “segregation academies” – private schools to which white families turned to avoid sending their children to school with blacks. That’s one reason Virginia has lagged in charter school innovation.

In this respect, the Orfield report indirectly raises a very interesting question: Why aren’t there more charter schools in white neighborhoods in Washington and other major cities? Given that the dismal reputation of urban education is a chief catalyst for suburban flight, more charters might be a good way to keep more middle-class families (white and black) in the urban core.

If charters are less racially diverse than other public schools, it’s largely because they are cropping up in the urban communities that desperately need school innovation and choice. Since many charters aim at closing the educational achievement gap between white and minority students, it seems perverse to cast them as agents of school segregation.

There is a civil rights issue here, but with all respect to Gary Orfield, it’s not segregation. It’s that too many low-income black, Latino, and immigrant students are trapped in dysfunctional urban school systems.

Stand with Westphalia

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The “aught” decade that just ended was bracketed by 9/11, perpetrated by al-Qaeda terrorists who had enjoyed havens in Sudan and Afghanistan, and a thwarted Christmas 2009 airline bombing by a Nigerian terrorist, who learned his craft in Yemen. The years were filled with a running, halting effort to prevent the Taliban from re-taking the Afghanistan government. Throughout the millennial decade, a postmodern theme dominated: terrorists virtually taking over weak states that should have been eliminating them.  Today, as we enter a shiny new decade, we should embrace a cozy and decidedly pre-modern tradition: the system of sovereign states that has served us well since the 17th century.

The world has been governed by an arrangement of sovereign nation-states with fixed boundaries since the Treaty of Westphalia was signed in 1648. But that system faces threats today. In a fascinating article in Foreign Policy, Atlantic staff writer Graeme Wood described today’s worrisome “quasi-states”—ethnic enclaves that have currency and governments, yet are not officially recognized by the United Nations. Wood includes Abkhazia, an entity of 190,000 that separated from Georgia after a war in the early 1990s; Somaliland, a refugee enclave from a Somalian dictator’s brutality in the late 1980s; and Kurdistan, which stamps visas “Republic of Iraq-Kurdistan Region.”

No less worrisome are weak nation-states that are currently facing threats to their sovereignty from terrorist groups within their borders. The attempted airplane bombing by a Nigerian disciple of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which has taken root in Yemen, is only the latest reminder.

Like termites eating away at a building’s foundation, a weak commitment to states ultimately threatens to topple the internal and external order provided by the Westphalian system, with America and our allies directly in the path of collapse. The system’s bad actors—groups who refuse to respect states per se—have perversely, if predictably, turned on the greatest state of them all, the United States. And so the system needs to defend itself, with the U.S. at the lead.

The destabilization latent in both quasi-states and weak nation-states is aggravating already dangerous conditions in many of the world’s hotspots. In Lebanon, Hezbollah currently controls two cabinet seats and 11 seats in the 128-member Parliament; the cabinet recently voted to defy a UN order for Hezbollah to disarm. In Gaza, Hamas took official governmental powers through elections in 2006, yet has failed so far to provide decent government services, while clashing with Fatah—previously the best hope for progress and stability—and fighting progress with Israel.

Prior to last year, Pakistan had essentially conceded the northwest Federally Administered Tribal Areas to al-Qaeda and the Taliban; today, violent clashes occur in the region, but the terrorists are far from subdued. Meanwhile, in Yemen, al-Qaeda operatives are moving into formal positions in the government. And in Afghanistan, the Taliban is marching again on Kabul; President Obama’s new strategy aims principally to “degrade” the Taliban, in the hopes that the Afghan state can save itself.

With almost a year to review, discussion is now beginning about what President Obama’s foreign policy doctrine exactly is. As the inevitable fray begins, here’s one big doctrinal idea: let’s dedicate America’s resources, both hard and soft, to nurturing strong states around the world, undergirded by constitutionalism and the rule of law, and pressing those actors who would otherwise create sub-states and quasi-states either to put down their weapons and join states, or suffer the oblivion that recalcitrant terrorist methods deserve.

In the coming decade, the U.S. must focus like a laser on the threat non-state actors pose to the world order.  The fronts spread throughout the world.  We need to pressure warlords in Afghanistan to join the government by making private militias unacceptable and illegal.  We should push Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza to forgo violence, recognize Israel, and become legitimate.  We need continually to support and reform the government in Yemen, while fighting al-Qaeda’s intrusions.  In our own hemisphere, we need to render illegitimate the paramilitary groups who are currently re-arming in Colombia and threatening the government there.

In all of these cases, we should employ all the multilateral instruments at our disposal, working with NATO and the UN and also organizations like the IMF and the World Bank to deploy both carrots (including trade and other economic incentives) and sticks (sanctions and, in the case of aggression or imminent threats, force).

There is also much we can do unilaterally.  The FY 2010 omnibus spending bill passed by Congress shows we’re on the right track in using our “soft power” to help consolidate states.  For instance, the budget increases monies to the Millennium Challenge Corporation, which incentivizes governments to undertake democratic reform, 26%, to $1.105 billion.  And in Yemen, the FY 2010 budget nearly doubles our FY 2010 economic support funds from $21 billion to $40 billion, which should help strengthen the government there.

However, there are flaws that demonstrate the need for a more systemic approach.  In Pakistan, under Congress’s 2010 budget, our military assistance will drop, from $300 million in FY 2009 to $238 million in FY 2010, and economic support barely rising, from $1 billion to $1.04 billion.  These decisions risk undermining a Pakistani government that has recently made promising steps toward finally confronting the non-state actors within its borders.

All in all, disparate strands including Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Colombia need to be woven into a coherent, international approach, led by the United States. The issue isn’t so much quasi-states like Abkhazia and Somaliland, as interesting and troubling as they are. More urgent are non-state actors seeking to become states that directly threaten our security. And so the past should be prologue: we should stand with Westphalia, now more than ever.

Simmer Down, America

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The headlines make it sound like we’ll all be dead by July…

WaPo: “Officials warn of looming terror risk”
NYT: “Senators warned of terror attack by July”
CBS News: “CIA Chief: Al Qaeda Poised to Attack U.S.”

…but I’d still go ahead planning that BBQ on the 4th, because even if there is an attack, the headlines portray a threat environment that — while serious — probably isn’t as menacingly “looming” as they make it seem.

Here’s the actual exchange between Senate Intelligence Chairwoman Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, CIA chief Leon Panetta, and FBI Director Robert Mueller:

Senator Feinstein: What is the likelihood of another terrorist attempted attack on the U.S. homeland in the next three to six months? High or low? Director Blair?

Blair: An attempted attack, the priority is certain.

Sen. Feinstein: Mr. Panetta?

Panetta: I would agree with that.

Sen. Feinstein: Mr. Mueller?

Mueller: Agree.

That’s a little bit more nuanced than the writers would have you believe. The journalists’ apparent ironclad certainty about an impending terrorist attack distorts the intensely political context surrounding the issue and ignores the degraded threat al Qaeda central poses.

It’s important that the issue was raised during Senator Feinstein’s questioning and not during the intel chiefs’ opening statements. If they brought it up right off the bat, that would imply there was specific intelligence about an ongoing plot. Given the context of this exchange, security heads don’t appear to have anything concrete that is specific and imminent. They’re hedging their bets.

Now Senator Feinstein is right to ask tough questions like this — that’s her job. But if you’re a high-ranking intelligence official, and the senator overseeing your department asks you about the possibility of an attempted attack, who in their right mind would ever say, “Naaah, I think it’s all good. Nothing to worry about here…”? If that’s your answer and there is even a small-scale attempt (like the one on Christmas), then you can kiss your job goodbye.

Finally, we need to put al Qaeda’s attack capabilities in context. Senator Feinstein correctly qualified her question to ask about an attempted attack; it’s a critical word that gets ignored. Because over the next six months, I don’t believe that either AQ’s senior leadership or its international affiliates will regain the logistical competence to attempt a massive attack on the scale of 9/11. Far more likely is the small-time attempt perpetrated by individuals who, as Director Panetta mentioned, have “clean” histories and are — by definition — more difficult to collect intelligence on.

Or to reinterpret the security chiefs’ answers, “Yes, there is the high probability that someone we could never hope to know about will attempt a minor terrorist attack in the United States. It may or may not be successful, depending on how competent and lucky the operator is. To say otherwise would ignore such individuals’ patterns of recent behavior. But another 9/11 — though possible — is far less likely.”

Obama’s Budget: Turning the Aircraft Carrier Around

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Trying to write a post on the defense budget is nearly an exercise in futility. In something like 500 words, it’s nearly impossible to make an overarching judgment that neatly summarizes the bill for the largest government department in the world. That said, let’s give it a shot!

My frame of reference for Pentagon budgeting is in one sense deeply personal. Now I don’t want to make myself sound like a saint, but as a civilian DoD employee for five years, I was always very conscious that I had a responsibility to be mindful of taxpayer dollars I was spending. I experienced — anecdotally and systematically — just how atrociously, rigidly wasteful and yet astoundingly petty the Pentagon can be. In other words, the way the Pentagon spends cash is downright goofy.

Here’s an idea of where I come from: Yours truly got to spend about two months in Australia working security for a bilateral U.S./Australian war-gaming exercise. I was rather surprised when the government computer reservation system insisted that I stay at the four-star hotel in Sydney at somewhere like $350 a night, when the perfectly acceptable three-star, $150-a-night alternative down the street was available. Now I enjoyed the feather pillows and mints, but would have preferred to swap them for the cheaper hotel plus my inexplicably denied business class airfare on the 26-hour trip.

Then there was my counterterrorism watch center office — completely renovated and upgraded by 2003 to actually resemble something close to the set of 24. Trust me, it was awesome — you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a brand new LCD TV, and I had three classified computer networks at my desk, something almost unheard of throughout DoD. Cost to taxpayer? $5 million. And it would have been a good investment, too, had the Base Realignment and Closing Commission not decided to close the office by 2011.

The FY2011 budget, released yesterday, won’t correct any of those, ahem, anomalies soon. And my experiences have ingrained enough skepticism that I don’t do cartwheels when the Pentagon announces — as it did this year — that “this budget did not defer hard choices, but made them.” As small-time as my stories are, they’re symptomatic of a well-established culture that isn’t going to change with one document. I think it’s probably more accurate to say, “this budget did not completely defer hard choices, but started the process of trying to change the DoD’s culture and the way it spends money. And that’s really tough.”

Though inefficient spending will continue on large and small scales, the Obama administration’s budget priorities are finally focused on the military’s most immediate needs. After eight years of Rumsfeld’s appalling financial sleight-of-hand and willful suspension of reality, Secretary Gates has actually paid necessary attention to funding personnel and equipment needed to compete in the wars we’re in. Rumsfeld’s obsession was technology — he thought whiz-bangs and gadgets could win our wars so soldiers didn’t have to! Then came Afghanistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan (again), which proved that technology could kill a lot of stuff really fast, but that winning the peace required more boots on the ground than he bargained for. So after extended deployments that have exhausted our troops and worn out their equipment, this budget dedicates funding to address the shortcomings of the Bush administration.

The budget’s other highlight addresses how the Pentagon does business. A serious Cold War hangover, Rumsfeld’s technological focus, and two wars have created a race-to-the-bottom culture where defense contractors pitch highly complex systems as cheaply as possible. The industry has conditioned itself to underestimate cost and development time and are amazingly left to evaluate their products’ own successes — hardly a recipe for optimal competition in the best interests of the taxpayer. This budget begins the process of taming that lion:

Our objective is to achieve predictable cost, schedule and performance outcomes based on mature, demonstrated technologies and realistic cost and schedule estimates. We are also implementing initiatives that will increase the numbers and capabilities of the acquisition workforce, improve funding stability, enhance the source selection process, and improve contract execution. Our intent is to provide the warfighter with world class capability while being good stewards of the taxpayer dollar.

It’s a wonderful notion, albeit one that will probably take a generation’s worth of acquisitions to truly implement.

I’ve obviously left out so, so much about this budget. It is encouraging to know that the administration appears in tune with what our military needs, and what the taxpayer can reasonably support. Turning an aircraft carrier takes a long time, and it will be years before we get a read on how well the new mindset is taking hold.

Elevating Human Rights on the U.S. Policy Agenda for Iran

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PPI Fellow Mike Signer joined a panel discussion sponsored by the Center for American Progress on “Elevating Human Rights on the U.S. Policy Agenda for Iran.” He was joined by Geneive Abdo, Fellow and Iran Analyst at The Century Foundation, and Hadi Ghaemi, Coordinator at International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. The panel was moderated by CAP’s Matthew Duss.

A First Glance at the Quadrennial Defense Review

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Flipping through the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, a report prepared by the Defense Department every four years for Congress, an image of Ricky Ricardo telling Lucy that she has a lot of ‘splainin’ to do comes to mind.

It’s not that the Quadrennial Defense Review (or more precisely, its executive summary that I’ve just torn through) is “bad” per se. But it certainly requires a bit of context to understand the coded defense-ese. In its purest form, the QDR is supposed to be a review of the Pentagon’s strategy and priorities. In short order, strategic priorities are turned into budgetary ones, as billions of dollars pour into programs that execute the top-tier missions.

The good news is that in this year’s version, certain strategic priorities are credibly enshrined. The Pentagon articulates Secretary Gates’ highly sensible focus on the wars we’re in. (That might seem like a no-brainer, but read the 2006 QDR, where Rummy essentially ignored Iraq and Afghanistan, choosing to focus on pie-in-the-sky “transformation” issues instead.) Other “new” priorities like counter-insurgency, climate/energy, and caring for America’s service members also get deserved top-billing and, eventually, new defense dollars. Reforming the acquisition process also gets a significant nod – but more on that in a second.

As for broad strategies, umbrella priorities like “Prevent and deter conflict” and “Prepare to defeat adversaries on a wide range of contingencies” are necessary missions that the Pentagon has to undertake. I mean, who’s going to do it? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? And certainly, because future conflict and contingency operations will take on unknown forms, their presentation in the QDR has to permit for both continued dollar flow to needed weapons programs while allowing room for unanticipated spending to mitigate new and emerging threats.

The I Love Lucy parallel was triggered only when I dug down within those blanket priorities. Lurking in the fine text is language that suggests the Pentagon continues to evade hard choices. Most glaringly, the QDR continues to include one little phrase with huge implications: U.S. military forces must maintain “the ability to prevail against two capable nation-state aggressors.” Many experts expected this long-held doctrine to be cut from the 2010 QDR because the “two theater” approach — considered almost a placeholder in the strategic void post-USSR, pre-9/11 — was essentially out-of-date in the 21st century. With America preoccupied with a new range of threats arising from rogue and failed states, maintaining this nebulous mission was of dubious importance.

This language distorts priorities. On the one hand, continuing the “two theater” approach is an invitation to defense contractors to pitch too many potentially unnecessary weapons systems, at the expense of new ones better suited to the conflicts we’re actually embroiled in now.  And because this is how the Pentagon has always done business, we’ll probably buy more than we really need. On the other hand, this QDR is clear about the need to reform defense acquisition — and has highlighted cuts in the F-22, Future Combat Systems, and the DDG-1000 — even though it doesn’t state how to institutionalize the reform. (If you’re looking for a place to start, Jordan Tama’s memo to the president is a good one.)

And that’s a central tension in the QDR — can the Pentagon continue to add missions without scaling back others? There is no question that the Defense Department needs to maintain a healthy defense industrial base to do what we need to defend America’s interests. But Pentagon officials need to think harder about how to align that vital goal with the new threats of unconventional warfare. In short, the QDR has to make a clean break with outdated strategic assumptions so that our finite military resources can go where they’re needed most.

The Republican Response: Was that Army Sgt. Supposed to Be There?

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I went slack-jawed during the Republican response when — lo and behold — right behind Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and in plain view of the cameras sat an Army Staff Sergeant in full uniform:

Per paragraph 4.1.2.15 of the official DoD Directive on “Political Activities by Members of the Armed Forces,” armed forces member explicitly MAY NOT:

Attend partisan political events as an official representative of the Armed Forces, except as a member of a joint Armed Forces color guard at the opening ceremonies of the national conventions of the Republican, Democratic, or other political parties recognized by the Federal Elections Committee or as otherwise authorized by the Secretary concerned.

In other words, unless authorized by the Secretary of the Army, the staff sergeant was breaking the law.

I suppose this begs the question of whether the McDonnell’s speech constitutes a “partisan political event.” After all, he gave it in his role as governor of his state in response to the president’s State of the Union address, a nonpartisan political event.

But McDonnell didn’t give a State of the State speech. He was giving the Republican response to the State of the Union. The speech was carried on the website www.soturesponse.com with the blazing headline: REPUBLICAN ADDRESS TO THE NATION. Sounds like a partisan event to me.

Republicans like to tout their ties to the military as a proxy for being strong on the issue of national security. But by thrusting this uniformed Army Staff Sergeant front-and-center on national TV and endangering the poor guy’s career (he’ll probably be reprimanded for misconduct), I think we have to ask a very serious question: Do Republicans actually care about the military, or do Republicans just view military members as as political pawns to be trotted out at election time?

Update: According to the Virginia Voices blog at WaPo, the Army Staff Sergeant in question was Robert Tenpenny. Staff Sergeant Tenpenny admirably served with Gov. McDonnell’s daughter in Iraq, and I’m sure he considered it an honor to be seated behind his friend Jeanine’s father as he delivered the most important speech of his life. I can understand how in the excitement of being selected for such a prime spot, he may not have realized the consequences of that choice. However, he probably should have erred on the side of caution — my active duty coworkers in DoD were always very careful about this stuff in 2004 and 2006. A Navy friend of mine refused to so much as stand in the crowd at a Jim Webb rally because of the regulation.

That said, I’m also confident that the RNC knew what it was doing in its heavy-handed staging of the event.

State of the Union: Commander-in-Chief as Cheerleader

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In the most raucous and gutsy State of the Union I can remember — the president challenged Democrats to not run for the hills, thrust the onus of governance on Republicans, and stared down Chief Justice John Roberts — national security policy came and went with hardly a whimper. It’s not that the president didn’t spent a significant chunk of his speech on the topic (he did), but rather that what he said didn’t break new ground.

If there was a newsworthy tidbit of policy, it was the president’s call to secure all loose nuclear material within four years. It was a smart way to package the issue, tying nuclear terrorism to Obama’s repeated goal to eventually have a world without nuclear weapons. Republicans will no doubt jump at that line as the latest in a twisted attempt to paint Obama as naive and weak. It’s not true, of course — eliminating nuclear weapons is the right long-term goal, but their reduction will come in concert with other countries as part of a slow, negotiated, equitable drawdown over decades.

Otherwise, the president gave a set-piece rundown of the broad set of national security priorities. He vowed to continue the withdrawal in Iraq, even though the disturbing increase in violence over the last few weeks and barring of ex-Ba’athists from the March parliamentary elections are both cause for significant concern. He charted a path out of Afghanistan, framing the choice to send more troops there as one of the hard choices of governance that won’t make him popular. And he vowed to continue to take the fight to al Qaeda while acknowledging shortcomings within the intelligence community (that, if you’ve been buying what I’m selling, is a more nuanced problem than he’d have time to explain). On the AQ score, the administration actually deserves more credit than it has received — if the harshest critics examine the record, they’ll find that, for example, the White House was sending top officials to Yemen well before the Christmas attempt.

The policy implications aside, I thought the most impressive rhetorical flourish about American national security and foreign policy actually came in the first part of the speech that was dedicated to the economy. Extolling the virtues of American ingenuity and innovation, Obama compared America to China, India, and Germany — three countries the president said that weren’t waiting to revamp. He challenged Americans to beat those countries, saying he refused “to accept second-place for the United States of America.”

Bam. That’s what Americans need to hear from this president: that he’s ready to lead, that — just like we’re doing in Haiti — America acts internationally because “our destiny is connected to those beyond our shores,” and that the United States is the greatest country in the world. Now, if you’re reading this blog, chances are that you’re a progressive who might have some doubts about what America has done in Iraq, or questions about why we’re in Afghanistan. But regardless of any questionable past policies (and without getting into a debate about them here), Americans need to hear from this White House that America is a strong force for good in the world. I worry that the president hasn’t made that case strongly enough all the time. This was a good start.

We Shouldn’t Negotiate with the Taliban’s Top Leaders

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The notion of integrating top Taliban commanders into the Afghan government is gaining traction among influential members of the Obama administration. Joe Biden likes the idea, as apparently does Richard Holbrooke, while Gen. Stanley McChrystal has indicated he could see a role for Taliban members in government.

On the surface, it’s an attractive solution. The administration is rightly skeptical of the election-stealing Afghan President Karzai, who continues to rule a corrupt regime. “(Sigh.) Fine. Let the Taliban into government,” you can almost hear war-weary NSC officials dejectedly admit, “at least it’ll help get us the #@*% out of there.”

Unfortunately, it’s a short-sighted solution that will ultimately undermine NATO’s many hard-won victories in Afghanistan over the last eight-plus years.

Before digging into the why, it’s important to clarify exactly what’s under consideration. Today, the WaPo reported that in an effort “energize the peace process,” the U.N. has lifted sanctions against five former Taliban officials who are prepared to renounce violence. These converts fall in a different category than what the White House is currently debating. While reconciliation with the likes of hard-core top Taliban elements like Mullah Omar is out of the question, an administration official conceded that the White House was discussing “above low- and mid-level fighters.”

Stop right there: Those low- and mid-level fighters are far enough. Above that pay-grade, the Taliban’s mid-tier officers are in it not just for the paycheck, but for steadfast ideological convictions that are much harder to genuinely convert.
And that ideology fundamentally rejects the pillars supporting government in Kabul. As Barbara Elias writes in a hard-hitting essay for Foreign Affairs, governing within an even partially Westernized democracy is out of the question:

Their [the Taliban’s] legitimacy rests not on their governing skills, popular support, or territorial control, but on their claim to represent what they perceive as sharia rule. This means upholding the image that they are guided entirely by Islamic principles; as such, they cannot make concessions to, or earnestly negotiate with, secular states.

In other words, we should be highly suspicious when the likes of Taliban leader Mullah Omar makes overtures about playing “our role in peace and stability of the region,” as he did in the fall. It’s a trap – the Taliban’s leaders want to join government to overthrow what it sees as a traitorous regime supported by infidel Western tyrants, not to act as a constructive governing partner. Once sharing power, the Taliban’s ideological resolve will only harden as its members refuse to accommodate otherwise constructive solutions forwarded by their more secular domestic or international partners.

It is far more constructive to remove the ideologues’ foot soldiers, which is precisely the aim of a potential $1 billion program for jobs and education for the Taliban’s grunts. Depriving the Taliban of its army is critical to removing its ability to peddle fear and repression outside of power. Integrating its non-contrite higher-ranking officers into the government just gives them a different kind of army.

That’s why it is yet again gut check time for the White House. Working with the most vile members of the Taliban is a great temptation, but will prove a fool’s errand.

Cold Confusion

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The news that the president is going to propose a three-year “freeze” on appropriations for non-defense discretionary programs (with veterans and homeland security programs exempted) is creating a lot of consternation among progressives today.

But folded into this consternation is a significant amount of confusion. The term “budget freeze,” long the default-drive Republican fiscal austerity “idea,” usually connotes an across-the-board flatlining of spending in non-exempt accounts, a total commitment to the budgetary status quo that neatly allows its proponents to avoid separating sheep from goats and offending any constituency for any particular program. If that’s what Obama was proposing, it would indeed be inconsistent with any new jobs initiative, or indeed, with key elements of the “middle-class relief” agenda the administration just announced. But that’s not what he is proposing; it is instead really an overall spending “cap” under which specific programs could be increased or decreased, presumably depdending on their usefullness in creating jobs or other worthy social goods. It’s an approach that Bill Clinton, back in 1992, called “cut and invest.”

Since it’s Congress, not the administration, that will actually make appropriations decisions, and since members of Congress and the committees they chair which often serve as the most powerful constituencies for programs with little real justification, it can definitely be argued that any real “freeze” would look more like the across-the-board variety (indeed, that’s what happened to Clinton’s “cut and invest” budget when Congress got its hands on it in 1993). Alternatively, it can be argued that the whole thing is mainly rhetorical, given public concerns about government spending.

But in conjunction with the president’s push for a bipartisan “deficit commission” that would be empowered to make recommendations on long-term budget savings that would be submitted to Congress for an up-or-down vote, the “freeze” proposal, whatever it actually means, will definitely upset progressives fearing that Obama is “going Hoover” in economic policy. And make no mistake, there’s one objection to the “freeze” idea that’s not based on confusion: if you really do believe that the federal government needs to be running larger short-term deficits in order to provide Keynesian stimulus to consumer demand, then any domestic spending limits, however selective in application, will strike you as a very bad approach.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Is the New Bin Laden Tape Really Him?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Nerd alert: My brother Bob and I have a long-standing competition to identify anonymous celebrity voice-overs on TV ads (and we’re pretty good — picking out Gene Hackman shilling for Lowes is amateur hour), but I don’t claim to ID celeb voices for a living. That’s why I can’t definitively say that the recently released Bin Laden tape isn’t him, but I suspect there’s a decent chance that it just might not be.

Last January, Bin Laden released a 22-minute tape on the eve of the Obama inauguration about everything from Israel to the economic crisis. The long-winded diatribe, replete with OBL’s standard Koranic references, was standard fare from al Qaeda’s chief taco. His tapes of May and March 2008 were also 22 minutes. That’s a far cry from this week’s version, which barely clocks in at 22 words (actually 144, but you get my drift), according to the Middle East Media Research Institute’s transcript.

Second, keep in mind that al Qaeda’s senior leadership has always had its eye on the big prize — the spectacular attack that generates either genuine fear or awe for its daring size, scale, or target. In 1998, they leveled two American embassies simultaneously; in 2000 they struck at the heart of the American military by blowing a massive hole in the side of an American Navy destroyer; and 9/11 speaks for itself. Even AQ’s latest significant attempt at a large-scale operation – the multi-flight Heathrow plot in 2006 – was an impressive feat of imagination. But in this tape, a man claiming to be Bin Laden embraces not a spectacular success that improves upon complex and sickeningly impressive plots, but a complete failure of an attempt that he likely had nothing to do with.

Then again, maybe even notable failures at small operations are enough these days. It’s possible that the combination of a tighter American safety net and the embarrassing overreaction of the pundit class has convinced AQ that small-fry attacks are sufficient to carry AQ’s fundraising and recruiting goals in the current climate. So if this was really OBL on the tape, it would signal a major degradation of AQ’s modus operandi and attack capabilities.

But the irregularity continues to bug me — it doesn’t make sense that Bin Laden would essentially admit al Qaeda is a shell of its former self. That’s why I keep thinking someone might be masquerading as the big man. By tying the Christmas Day attempt to Bin Laden, the real perpetrators of the plot — al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula — could gin up money and recruits in its aftermath.

It would be a serious scandal within Islamic extremist circles if the CIA came out in the next 24 hours and declared the tape fake, so I have to imagine that even uppity terrorists aren’t that stupid. Then again, perhaps the CIA should consider floating a trial balloon about the tape’s “questionable authenticity” just to see what sort of reaction it generates.

Secretary Clinton, Cyber Diplomacy, and Google

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Echoing FDR in reference to cyber-repression in places like Vietnam, North Korea, Tunisia, and Uzbekistan, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton today outlined her vision of a world with five Internet freedoms: freedom of expression, freedom of worship, freedom to connect online everywhere, freedom from fear of cyber attacks, and freedom from want – the idea that information networks are a “great leveler” that can help lift people out of poverty.

Clinton’s speech clearly signals that fostering free access to the Internet can be a powerful tool that can help loosen the grip of the most repressive regimes. And to that end, she launched a new $15 million project for grassroots civic participation and new media capabilities in the Middle East and North Africa. Small, to be sure, but a worthy start.

But on the panel following Secretary Clinton’s speech, Rebecca MacKinnon of the Open Society Institute warned that though online access no doubt promotes openness, the Internet is not “freedom juice” that can be simply injected into a country and hope that all its oppressive tendencies vanish. That’s because places like China have done a devilish job of networking authoritarianism – a policy that toes a tight line by plugging into the global economy while blocking the receipt of global information. China is of course hardly alone – up to 40 countries (including some nominal democracies) now censor Internet content.

Finally, Clinton had a few words pointedly directed at private sector Internet companies, whom she encouraged to embrace the principals of openness as part of American companies stand for:

I hope that refusal to support politically motivated censorship will become a trademark characteristic of American technology companies. It should be part of our national brand. The private sector has a shared responsibility to help safeguard free expression … And when their business dealings threaten to undermine this freedom, they need to consider what’s right, not simply the prospect of quick profits.

Thus far, Google is the standard-bearer on this issue. The company’s slogan – Don’t Be Evil – has been invoked as it weighs whether to withdraw from China following allegedly government-sponsored cyber attacks on Google-housed email addresses of human rights activists. Since Google and its ilk in effect own the leverage of cyber-diplomacy, it makes sense that the State Department is cajoling them in this direction. I’d expect to see more Foggy Bottom conferences with various Silicon Valley CEO’s to drive home this point in the near future. That’s a good thing.

Finally, the business argument is worth examining. Contrary to the American market, Google isn’t quite as ubiquitous in China as it is stateside. That said, the WSJ grades Google.cn’s results (under censorship) as superior to its Chinese rival Baidu. The article concludes, “From a policy standpoint, the worst move China could make would be to force Baidu’s main competitor out of the country, leaving Baidu with no incentive to spend on R&D and improve its results.” But I’m not so sure — if China wants to stem the flow of information, why would they need a better search engine?

America Acts in Haiti

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

With a hat tip to Spencer Ackerman for flagging the video (and accompanying sentiment), scenes like this symbolize what America stands for:

Watch as LA County rescue workers pull a victim from the rubble; the crowd erupts with spontaneous applause and chants of U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

I worry that there’s a strain within progressive America that doubts our country’s place in the world. I worry that America’s actions over the last decade have irreparably damaged progressives’ image of America as a great nation that was conceived to do great things.

To be sure, the Iraq war has triggered worthy reflection on that point. But my uber-fear is that with President Obama’s decision to adopt a new strategy in Afghanistan, progressives’ degraded concept of America has been legitimized now that one of their own has allegedly–if falsely in my opinion–“followed in Bush’s footsteps.”

Not to trivialize the point by being colloquial, but with issues like Iraq, it is unfortunately and tragically true that America screws up sometimes, and royally so (and Massachusetts, don’t think I’m just looking at that ranch in Crawford). Let’s remember that though even gross misjudgments in policy may raise questions about what America is, the worst errors are ultimately set right. America will remain a great place that does wonderful and selfless acts of kindness. It does so for two reasons–because it can and because that what it was meant to do.