I’ve been fortunate to spend the holidays with my family up in British Columbia. We’re not from the Great White North, mind you, but a few days in the Canadian wilderness have been a welcome opportunity to forget about my everyday professional concerns. With the health care bill passed and the pressing Afghanistan strategy speech now well behind us, I was happy to have the break.

Until our trip home, that is. Your faithful blogger sits in the Vancouver airport, having just struggled through the newly enacted, draconian security procedures enforced in the wake of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s failed attempt to bomb a Northwest flight into Detroit on Christmas Day. All carry-on items were banned from the main cabin (I’m fortunate to be able to hand-carry my laptop through security, one of the few exemptions), each passenger was given a full pat-down (a wad of old Kleenex in my Levis provoked a particularly displeased look from my security guard), and each of the 16 pockets in my winter jacket were thoroughly searched.

Lost amidst the rush to batten down the hatches is any sense of rationality about airport security. It’s a classic case of diminishing marginal returns — every extra dollar the TSA or DHS spends on airport security buys us far less than a buck’s worth of permanent safety. Look no further than the 2006 Heathrow plotters: in response to their desire to ignite liquid explosives in sports drink bottles, liquids on flights were banned. Guess what? You can’t bring your Gatorade on the plane, but Abdulmutallab still got through with a different device. What’s more, the present level of heightened security might make us feel safer in the short term, but it is ultimately unsustainable due to a combination of inadequate resources and an abundance of annoyed passengers.

Worse than heavy-handed is the reaction from Washington’s political classes. Rep. Peter King (R-NY) wasted little time in claiming that America’s terrorism screening system didn’t work; his colleague Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) tried to paint the administration as weak on terrorism. Questions abound: why wasn’t Abdulmutallab caught on the no-fly list? Why wasn’t his father’s warning to the U.S. embassy in Nigeria heeded?

The reaction to Flight 253 underscores the need to change the tenor of America’s national dialogue about terrorism. Implicit in the criticism of the administration’s handling of terrorism is an assumption that with the “right,” effective security measures, America can somehow erect an impenetrable wall around its borders.

It’s time to stop kidding ourselves: We can’t. With the hundreds of thousands of names on security lists, and millions of daily passengers in and out of America’s domestic airports and international destinations, someone determined, smart, careful, and — perhaps most important — lucky will be able to get through, no matter how airtight we believe America’s defenses to be. As a counterterrorism analyst for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, I would write something similar in each threat assessment for U.S. Navy ships pulling into any given port-of-call.

Improvements to the system should be made, of course. But rather than overreacting with new airport procedures, bickering over watch-lists, and politicizing the issue, we’re better off spending our energy addressing terrorism’s root causes. That’s the best way to ensure our security.

President Obama seems determined not to overreact to the narrowly failed attempt by Islamist terrorists to massacre Americans on Christmas Day. Three days passed before he issued a statement on the attack.

Obama clearly believes that a measured response is preferable to his predecessor’s bellicose bluster and call for an unrelenting U.S. “war on terror.” That’s probably right, but the plot by al Qaeda’s Yemen branch to blow up a U.S. airliner also demands urgent and resolute action from America’s commander in chief.

First, the White House must shake up America’s homeland security bureaucracy. The U.S. got a break when the father of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be suicide bomber aboard Northwest Flight 253, warned our embassy in Nigeria that his son had fallen under the spell of radical Islam. Inexplicably, however, Abdulmutallab’s name was not placed on the “no-fly” list, nor was he stripped of the U.S. visa he had previously acquired.

As Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano admitted Sunday, the system emphatically did not work, and the White House must quickly find out why and hold those responsible for its failure strictly accountable.

It was also disturbing that Abdulmutallab had no trouble clearing airline security with explosive chemicals sewn into his underwear. But spending billions on millimeter-wave machines, and subjecting all passengers to even more time-consuming and invasive searches may not be the wisest response. Terrorists are inventive and will always find ways around screening regimes. A better use of transportation security resources is to identify high-risk passengers and subject them to higher levels of scrutiny.

Second, the White House clearly must give higher priority to preventing Yemen from becoming a haven for Islamist radicals. The plot was hatched by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, in retaliation for U.S. counterterrorism assistance to the Yemeni government. The U.S. must step up those efforts, but we should also consider investing more in counter-radicalization programs such as have been used in Saudi Arabia and Europe to dissuade young Muslims from embracing extremism.

Third, Obama needs to challenge Muslim spiritual and lay leaders to confront the scourge of jihadist fanaticism in their midst. The willingness of young men and women to slaughter innocents in Islam’s name is first and foremost a Muslim problem. Its victims – including the thousands of civilians randomly murdered in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and elsewhere — are chiefly Muslims.

Islamist radicalism is an ideology, one shaped by a particularly virulent and violent form of religio-ethnic identity politics. It feeds on myths of external oppression and cultivates a sense of victimhood. Only credible Muslim leaders can put the lie to these myths. Only credible Muslim religious authorities can discredit the cult of martyrdom that glamorizes suicide killers and terrorists.

President Obama is right to search for ways to protect Americans from Islamist terror without feeding the jihadist narrative of a U.S.-led war on Islam. But he and other world leaders should speak clearly to the Muslim world about its responsibility to confront those who kill and terrorize in Islam’s name.

President Obama, in accepting his Nobel Prize, spoke in lofty terms about the requirement that all nations, weak and strong, must adhere to the legal standards that govern the use of force. He noted that the U.S. had played a leading role in creating that legal framework. And he went on to underline that the U.S. too must respect international law: “America cannot insist that others follow the rules of the road if we refuse to follow them ourselves. For when we don’t, our action can appear arbitrary, and undercut the legitimacy of future intervention — no matter how justified.”

And yet the absence of any public discussion or analysis of the legal issues raised by America’s efforts against terrorism is striking. Whether it be torture and extraordinary rendition, military commissions, the targeted killing by drone attacks in Pakistan, the planning of CIA assassination squads, the large number of civilian deaths in air strikes in Afghanistan, or even the prospect of military strikes in Iran, all of these raise significant and complex international law issues. But you will not find any meaningful discussion of those issues in the media, or indeed in the talking points, blogs, or analysis produced by most liberal or progressive organizations.

Consider the contrast between the media coverage of such topics and the analysis of the issues surrounding the Israeli operations in Gaza earlier this year. There were countless articles examining the legal significance of the claims that the Israeli use of force was disproportionate, that civilians and civilian structures had been targeted, and that Israeli forces were using illegitimate munitions. The coverage was often sympathetic to the Israeli position, but there was nonetheless an examination of the legal issues involved. In contrast, when in the same month American forces killed Afghani civilians in air strikes, there was no such analysis – the entire discussion revolved around the strategic and political ramifications of killing civilians.

Liberal advocates say in private that they did not want to raise the international law arguments against torture, because such arguments “do not play well” in middle America. So the focus of the debate in this country was on the ineffectiveness of torture, and how counterproductive it could be. That is a dangerous argument to stake one’s entire position on. The fact is that the prohibition of torture is one of the very few peremptory norms in international law (known as jus cogens norms) – meaning it is one of the most bedrock principles of international law that nations may not derogate from under any circumstance. The other such norms include the prohibitions on slavery, genocide, and piracy. Yet in America, the debate was over when and under what circumstances we might derogate from the norm, and liberals were afraid to raise the law, because it does not “play well.”

The danger in all of this is that if liberals and progressives are afraid to make the argument for international law and the rule of law, then the argument will not get made. Progressives, afraid of looking weak, abandon the defense of the rule of law in favor of functional arguments. And so the country lurches ever rightward, in a one-way ratchet effect, with crucial principles being left by the side of the road as political liabilities.
Yet this country is supposed to be a “nation of laws” that preaches to the world the importance of the rule of law. These principles are supposed to be foundational, part of the constitutional DNA of the nation. They are part of the identity that is presented to the rest of the world. It cannot reject international law without doing violence to its own notions of the importance of law and the rule of law.

Moreover, as President Obama said, if the U.S. does not respect and observe the international legal standards, then it will lose its legitimacy and moral authority in the world. And that means that the extent to which American policy conforms to international law, from military commissions to targeted killings in Pakistan, must be part of the national discourse. So progressives have to engage the legal issues more, both to help preserve the country’s identity as a nation of laws, and to help ensure that we at least understand whether policy complies with the law.

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

A great new piece from Shadi Hamid in the latest Democracy: A Journal of Ideas on “The Cairo Conundrum” — the seeming paradox between peace and stability in the Middle East. Hamid examines American policy towards Egypt, arguing convincingly:

[T]he pursuit of peace came to depend on prevailing authoritarian structures. Unless autocracy can be made permanent–and there is little reason to think that it can–this state of affairs is unsustainable. If Obama wishes to repair relationships with Middle Eastern governments, then he may, in the process, alienate the other key constituency he seemed to be speaking to [in Cairo] on June 4: the millions of everyday Arabs and Muslims hoping for more freedom and democracy.

He offers a dual-track approach to break the longstanding American mindset that democracy and stability in Egypt are a zero-sum game. The first track is “positive conditionality” — offering even more aid to Egypt, provided the government meets a series of democratization benchmarks. Should it fail in the first year, the money would be denied but rolled over into an accumulating fund. The entire amount would remain available once Egypt fulfilled the requirements; fail to do so, and the price of non-compliance would grow every year. The second track is “Islamic engagement” whereby the administration would facilitate political participation with moderate Islamist parties that renounce violence.

Hamid’s formula may not prove to be ultimately successful — after all it is quite possible that Egypt would be happy to accept ever-increasing American donations while feigning a reformist bent. But as long as the White House remains continually engaged across the spectrum of Egyptian politics, it is quite possible that Hamid’s formula of grassroots pressure married to large financial incentives could move Egypt along the path to democratic openness.

David Brooks, oh how you are a dying breed: the rational, thoughtful conservative who holds true to his core values while having the humility to actually grant the other guy a point.

He also may have a man-crush on the president. Which is why it’s perhaps not so surprising that Brooks’ most recent column follows up on a point I made a few days ago: that Barack Obama’s foreign policy is grounded in thoroughly progressive values. Here’s an excerpt:

In 2002, Obama spoke against the Iraq war, but from the vantage point of a cold war liberal. He said he was not against war per se, just this one, and he was booed by the crowd. In 2007, he spoke about the way Niebuhr formed his thinking: “I take away the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction.”

His speeches at West Point and Oslo this year are pitch-perfect explications of the liberal internationalist approach. Other Democrats talk tough in a secular way, but Obama’s speeches were thoroughly theological. He talked about the “core struggle of human nature” between love and evil.

More than usual, he talked about the high ideals of the human rights activists and America’s history as a vehicle for democracy, prosperity and human rights. He talked about America’s “strategic interest in binding ourselves to certain rules of conduct.” Most of all, he talked about the paradox at the core of cold war liberalism, of the need to balance “two seemingly irreconcilable truths” — that war is both folly and necessary.

Brooks used the term “liberal internationalism” to describe Obama’s approach, something not dissimilar from what we at PPI prefer to call “progressive internationalism.” Here’s what PPI said back in 2003:

Progressive internationalism stresses the responsibilities that come with our enormous power: to use force with restraint but not to hesitate to use it when necessary, to show what the Declaration of Independence called “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind,” to exercise leadership primarily through persuasion rather than coercion, to reduce human suffering where we can, and to create alliances and international institutions committed to upholding a decent world order.

The Obama administration has taken a lot of heat for being “too realist” in its approach to foreign policy. Certainly there’s evidence to support that claim: Brooks says the White House “misjudged the emotional moment when Iranians were marching in Tehran.” And there was the uncomfortable incident when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sidestepped the issue of human rights in China because they “couldn’t interfere with the global economic crisis” (which she recently tried to rectify in a speech at Georgetown). True enough, at least for now.

However, when books are written on the Obama administration’s foreign policy, I’d bet the prevailing narrative will be that of an administration that sought to identify and resolve discrete national security challenges while guided by keen attention to America’s values. Closing Guantanamo is perhaps the best example thus far.

Three cheers for Dick Durbin, the senior senator from Illinois.

Rather than offering shrill, partisan talking points at the prospect of closing the Guantanamo prison—equal parts Islamic extremist recruiting tool and human rights stain on our national psyche—Senator Durbin has consistently offered a pragmatic, progressive voice that is steadfast in its resolve to close Gitmo while ensuring the security of the country. The result is today’s announcement that the administration will likely open the detention facility in Thompson, Illinois as the destination for many of Guantanamo’s detainees.

When conservatives were doing their best Chicken Little impersonation about the alleged perils of bringing hardened terrorists to American soil, Durbin rebuffed Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich, calmly telling NBC’s David Gregory on Meet the Press that:

Continuing Guantanamo, unfortunately, makes our troops less safe.  The bottom line as I see it is Guantanamo should close in an orderly way. … The fact is that closing Guantanamo, that announcement by the president, as well as abandoning torture techniques and so-called enhanced interrogation, finally said to the rest of the world that it’s a new day.  Join us in a new approach to keeping this world and America safe.  I think it was a break from the past we desperately needed. …

[W]hen we checked with the director of FBI, Mr. Mueller, he said there’s no question that supermax facilities, not a single escape, we limit the communication of these detainees and prisoners, and we can continue to do that. …

I’d be OK with them in a supermax facility, because we’ve never had an escape from one.  And as I said, we have over 340 convicted terrorists now being held safely in our prisons.  I just don’t hear anyone suggesting releasing them or sending them to another country.  That isn’t part of the prospect that we have before us. …

With this stance, Durbin shows how rational solutions are hardly mutually exclusive from either American values or safety: closing Guantanamo is a moral and security imperative, and the idea that America’s well-being is threatened by terrorists in supermax facilities is nothing more than a political scare tactic.

And as a result of Durbin’s sensible position, it looks like job-starved Illinois will be rewarded in the process. The state will retro-fit the empty Thompson prison to meet the new security standards, and then have to staff the facility once open.  Thompson sits in Carroll County, IL, where unemployment rests at 11.1 percent; a refurbished facility could bring as many as 3,000 jobs.

And though this is anecdotal evidence, I asked Mike Satlak—my college buddy, an Oswego, IL resident, and in the interest of full disclosure, a Dick Durbin fan—about the prospect of moving prisoners to rural Illinois.  “I’m not scared at all of any security threat, I live 120 miles from Thompson and it could really use the jobs.”

Word hit the street over the weekend that senior CIA officials have been pushing the Obama administration to expand unmanned aerial drone attacks against targets in Quetta, Pakistan. In the spies’ cross hairs are top Taliban commanders based in that city, a massive regional population center.

If counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations aren’t your cup of tea, you may have missed the ever-expanding role that unmanned drones have played in Pakistan. While it’s true that President Obama has recently signed off on the program’s expanded use to now include more of Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, the issue of targeting Quetta seems to have given the White House some pause:

A former senior CIA official said he and others were repeatedly rebuffed when proposing operations in Baluchistan or pushing Pakistan to target the Taliban in Quetta. “It wasn’t easy to talk about,” the official said. “The conversations didn’t last a long time.”

That sounds about right — attacking Quetta is a bridge too far in the drone war. Here’s why.

Many question whether we should have an unmanned drone program in the first place. There are strong and reasoned arguments from intelligent analysts who believe the costs of a drone program outweigh its benefits. The strongest argument is that by unintentionally causing civilian casualties with off-target or ill-timed strikes, the program agitates and alienates the population that the counter-insurgents are supposed to be protecting and winning over.

After this story first broke, I agreed with the basic premise of that argument, but said that drone attacks should be “extraordinarily limited, not stopped” because they were a “valuable tool in certain rare circumstances,” like when corroborated evidence places a senior Al Qaeda figure in a relatively remote location. Further, I developed five criteria as guidelines to determine when those might be. My fourth criterion is that it’s “unrealistic to say that drones won’t fire on population centers because then the targets would just hide in plain sight. However, the U.S. must carefully weigh the chance of civilian casualties and seek to avoid them — by using smaller missiles, modifying times of the strikes, etc. — at all costs.”

Quetta is a city of 850,000 people, and it is difficult to imagine that innocent civilians could be reasonably avoided in any single strike — no matter how good the intelligence is. Therefore, the administration is right to endorse the general practice while opposing its application in this specific instance.

I was struck by the unexpected tone of President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech — instead of spending the entire address laying out a vision to achieve world peace, he spent the first half addressing the odd position in which he finds himself: receiving the prize while serving as commander-in-chief of a nation involved in two wars.

In the process, he laid out the most compelling ideological foundation for a progressive view on national security I have ever heard him give:

We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.

I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King said in this same ceremony years ago — “Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.” As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life’s work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there is nothing weak — nothing passive — nothing naïve — in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

I raise this point because in many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter the cause. At times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America, the world’s sole military superpower.

Yet the world must remember that it was not simply international institutions — not just treaties and declarations — that brought stability to a post-World War II world. Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest — because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples’ children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.

This is where progressives should stand on national security: we must acknowledge that there is evil in the world and show a resolve to make tough choices when America’s vital national security interests are at stake. Our preference is to not use force, but when all other options have been exhausted and our security remains directly threatened, force may be the last resort.

Over the course of the past week, the Swedish government, which currently holds the EU’s soon-to-be-extinguished rotating presidency, suggested that the European Union’s foreign ministries declare Jerusalem a divided city and the future capital of a Palestinian state. The draft statement also implied that the EU would recognize a unilateral Palestinian declaration of statehood.

The Israelis reacted harshly, and lobbied the Europeans to change the statement, which now reads, “If there is to be a genuine peace, a way must be found (through negotiations) to resolve the status of Jerusalem as the future capital of two states.”

Even the milder declaration hasn’t exactly received much enthusiasm from the Israelis, while garnering divided support between the Arab League and Palestinian Authority.

Skeptics say that Sweden’s stab at forging European unity was a cynical attempt to leave a legacy from its last crack at the EU presidency (with the advent of Herman Von Rompuy’s more permanent ascent to that post) to either show symbolic solidarity with Palestine or to forge a joint European position on an important issue.

And though the Palestinians are, of course, content to receive international backing, let’s be honest: This effort at joint European diplomacy looks like amateur hour and risks further destabilizing an already fragile process.

A few months ago, I had lunch with a friend involved in European social-democratic circles. He said (and I’m paraphrasing), “Europe can’t do anything on the diplomatic front with Israel/Palestine, but if America can broker a deal, we are ready and anxious to pay for the whole thing: security, development, trade… you name it.”

My friend was right — Europe hasn’t invested much diplomatic capital in the Middle East peace process. Issuing public and controversial statements of questionable utility could only upset – and, in the worst case, undo — the hard, delicate, behind-the-scenes work of the American administration.

We’d love for Europe to pay; but for now, we’d also love for it to shut up.

You win some, you lose some: This morning NATO announced it would add 7,000 troops to the alliance’s Afghanistan deployment, a coup for Secretary Clinton and a much-needed boost to President Obama’s surge strategy. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that Germany is unlikely to be part of that mix.

Berlin, which has the third-largest deployment in the country, is holding off from committing more troops until a multinational planning conference in January. A few weeks ago, during a swing through Washington, German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg was still bullish, if vague, about the prospects for additional soldiers.

But what a difference a few weeks can make. Since then, the Kunduz truck-bombing scandal has claimed several heads, including those of the labor minister (formerly the defense minister) and the country’s top uniformed officer. It has also forced an embarrassing about-face from zu Guttenberg, who initially said the attack was justified but now says it was “militarily inappropriate.”

The scandal has sent public support for the war, already tenuous, into a tail spin. According to a new poll by ARD-Deutschlandtrend, 69 percent want Germany to withdraw immediately, a dramatic rise since the last survey, in September. The primary reason, according to 75 percent of respondents, is a loss of trust in the government’s ability to be “full and honest” about Afghanistan. The war is also fueling left-wing violence in Berlin and Hamburg, including a recent firebombing of a federal police station in the capital.

Merkel and zu Guttenberg remain steadfast behind the mission, but their coalition partners, the Free Democrats, are using the scandal to push for reduced combat roles and an accelerated withdrawal timetable. Their leader, Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, has said the January conference is not a “donor conference for troops” and declared in “a clear statement from the government” that Berlin will begin moving its soldiers to training and civil-affairs operations, rather than combat.

Even in the news reports surrounding NATO’s additional commitment, analysts expressed hope that Germany would commit more than 1,000 additional troops to Afghanistan come January. Unless the political dynamic inside the country changes dramatically in the next few weeks, those hopes will be dashed.