Danger Room has a great scoop.

Salman Al-Awdah, a Saudi cleric who played an influential role in Osama Bin Laden’s early radicalism, called the Fort Hood shootings “irrational” and an “empty thought.” Al-Awdah said, “Incidents [such as the Ft. Hood shootings] have bad consequences, and undoubtedly this man might have a psychological problem; he may be a psychiatrist but he [also] might have had psychological distress.”

Though Bin Laden had once described Al-Awdah as his “ideal personality,” the cleric has somewhat moderated his stance recently, having condemned 9/11 even while subsequently signing a 2004 letter that called for jihad against U.S. forces in Iraq.

It’s a notable differentiation. In the past, Al-Awdah has distanced himself from terrorism targeting civilians, while endorsing military ones.  Even though Ft. Hood was technically not in the field of battle, many of its soldiers were headed out to Iraq or Afghanistan, or just returning home. You’d think Al-Awdah would view them as culpable as forces in a war zone.

I’ve written previously that I don’t believe Ft. Hood was terrorism. That Al-Awdah passed on an opportunity to legitimize the attack — instead emphasizing Nidal Hassan’s mental illness — only underscores my analysis.

Eugene Robinson is a wonderful writer with whom I quite often agree.

But if such a talented, astute observer of the American political landscape hasn’t deciphered why we’re in Afghanistan, and that those costs are worth bearing, then the White House better prepare for an all-out charm offensive once the strategy and troop-level decisions have been made.

In Robinson’s most recent column, he laments:

Sending more troops will mean more coffins arriving at Dover, more funerals at Arlington, more stress and hardship for military families. It would be wrong to demand such sacrifice in the absence of military goals that are clear, achievable and worthwhile.

And what goals in Afghanistan remotely satisfy those criteria?

[…]

As long as our goals in Afghanistan remain as elusive as they are now, Obama shouldn’t be sending troops. He should be bringing them out.

As I’ve argued countless times, though America has long since grown tired of the seemingly endless wars, there are — and will continue to be — compelling national security reasons to remain in Afghanistan and adopt much of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy.

However, that’s not the point of my post. Rather, it’s that I expect the White House to soon announce another deployment of some 30,000+ troops to Afghanistan. President Obama must be prepared to explain our security interests as he sends more Americans into harm’s way. Distracted, I imagine, by the endless health care debate, the president must soon do a better job of selling the public on his administration’s latest controversial decision.

Someone — possibly the White House’s man in Kabul himself — seems to be making life tough for U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry. After expressing objections about the Karzai government’s endemic corruption and reliability as a partner, Eikenberry put his thoughts into writing, which then ended up in the low-profile pages of the Washington Post and New York Times.

Yikes.

My first reaction was that Eikenberry leaked the memos himself to publicly turn the screws on Afghani President Hamid Karzai. After all, the only real leverage the Obama administration has right now is to take its football and go home. Impressing that possibility on Karzai as part of the public debate may compel el presidente to make an actual — rather than window-dressing — effort to clean up his act.

Andrew Exum at Abu Muqawama worries that the leak will undercut any sort of credibility Eikenberry had with Karzai. I don’t think that’s true — I’m sure the anti-corruption message was loud and clear, if previously made behind closed doors.

Furthermore, the administration is reportedly leaning towards a counterinsurgency strategy that aims to protect 10-12 major population centers throughout the country. In theory, this means working more with regional governments, tribal leaders, and local warlords in a plausible attempt to bypass Kabul and marginalize Karzai.

Regardless, Eikenberry’s objections underscores for President Obama that an exit strategy should be a more concrete part of the deployment plan. If the Way Out wasn’t included in the strategy thus far, then Eikenberry’s contributions should end up as a net positive.

Was the attack on Fort Hood terrorism?

Politicians like Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) are being careful not to call terrorism outright, but are beginning to raise the issue.

Addressing the issue of Nidal Hasan’s relationship with a former Virginia-based imam Anwar al-Aulaqi, Hoekstra said, “For me, the number of times that this guy tried to reach out to the imam was significant.” Hoekstra added, “Al-Qaeda and radical jihadists use the Internet to spread radical jihadism….So how much of [Hasan’s] lashing out is a result of…his access to radical messages on the Internet and the ability to interact?”

“I believe that the responses from Aulaqi were maybe pretty innocent,” Hoekstra continued. “But the very fact that he’s sent e-mail…to this guy and got responses would be quite a concern to me.”

While I was tempted to make fun of Hoekstra (“He sent an email?!?!?! You’re right, Congressman, it must be a plot!”), after reading Aulaqi’s post-incident statement praising Hasan’s actions, it’s clear that there is enough cause for concern to warrant a discussion. Aulaqi’s words are pretty chilling: “The only way a Muslim could Islamically justify serving as a soldier in the U.S. Army is if his intention is to follow the footsteps of men like Nidal.”

However, based on what we know now, the available evidence suggests that the Fort Hood tragedy was a case of a very sick man who reacted violently to his impending deployment to Afghanistan. In other words, it was not terrorism.

Depending on if you ask the State Department, E.U., or United Nations, definitions of the term will slightly vary. However, all definitions agree that terrorism’s aim is “to provoke a state of terror in the general public or in a group of persons or particular persons, intimidate a population to compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act.” (UN Security Council Resolution 1566, 2004)

On balance, Hasan’s case does not meet this standard.

While you could argue that Hasan’s attack was motivated by a 2007 speech where he recommended Muslims should be released from military service as conscientious objectors, that “policy” recommendation was more reflective of his growing objections, mental confusion, and discomfort as a Muslim in the American military. It was personal, not political.

Consider his life story: A second-generation Muslim-American, he joined the military probably more for what it offered (an education) than because of his conviction to serve. His faith grew, and he became more aware of objections to the military’s deployments, eventually hiring a lawyer and offering to repay tuition fees in return for a discharge.

As a psychiatrist, he was exposed to an endless parade of mentally and physically traumatized service members whose experiences no doubt reinforced Hasan’s objections to military service and deployment to a war zone, and placed him in a more fragile mental state.

All the while, he maintained communication with the former imam, Aulaqi (now based in Yemen), whose own (and possibly very different) motivations for hating the U.S. may have indeed influenced Hasan to “do something” about his upcoming deployment. While Congress will also surely question the FBI about what it knew about their communications, hindsight is 20/20, and the bureau’s assessment at the time – that the emails between Aulaqi and Hasan did not warrant an investigation – was appropriate given its finite resources.

But at the end of the day, Hasan acted alone, and was probably driven by being a Muslim-American in the military who was exposed to a series of encounters that degraded his emotional health. Closer to the 2007 tragedy at Virginia Tech, Hasan’s killing spree seems more the product of deep mental instability and personal anxieties that manifested themselves in the most horrific way possible.

Twenty years ago today, I was a seventh grader at the American Community School in Surrey, England. My family had lived in the U.K. for two years (we’d stay for two more) because my father was the European sales manager for an American chemical company.

Even at such a young age, I liked to think that I was seeing the Cold War from the “front lines.” I was riveted the first time our family crossed into West Germany, and I felt pride when my middle school cross-country and baseball teams would compete on British-American military bases. I was particularly fascinated at the Moscow Music Peace Festival, though I’m sure as much for the appearances by Motley Crue and Skid Row as for its rather striking implications about freedom, openness, and globalization.

In truth, I led an obnoxiously comfortable life in a quite English town. But the broader experience of living abroad during a time of such sweeping change fueled my budding consciousness with an interest in geo-politics and foreign policy, and, of course, rock and roll.

Conservatives will crow today about Ronald Reagan’s role in the entire affair, drawing a straight line between the Gipper’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” and the crumbling of 70 years of Communism. Of course, the Soviet Union’s demise was far more complex. George Packer’s column in The New Yorker sums it up far better than I could ever hope to:

The wall came down not because Ronald Reagan stood up and demanded it but because on the evening of November 9th, at a televised press conference in East Berlin, a Party hack named Günter Schabowski flubbed a question about the regime’s new, liberalized travel regulations. Asked when they took effect, Schabowski shrugged, scratched his head, checked some papers, and said, “Immediately,” sending thousands of East Berliners to the wall in a human tide that the German Democratic Republic could not control. Soldiers and Stasi agents didn’t shoot into the crowd, but things could easily have gone otherwise.

The revolutions of 1989 were made possible by a multiplicity of conditions: the courage of East Bloc dissidents and the hundreds of thousands of fellow-citizens who finally joined them; American support for the dissident movements and containment of the Soviet Union; the disastrous economies of the Communist countries; the loss of confidence among ruling-party élites; the crucial forbearance of Mikhail Gorbachev. For Europe’s Communist regimes to disappear so suddenly and bloodlessly (Romania was a different story), everything had to fall into place, above and below, within and without. Such circumstances are improbably rare, and they can’t be mechanically replicated by the laws of history or by divine design or by universal human aspiration. A false lesson drawn from 1989 involves a kind of shallow eschatology of totalitarianism: this is how it always happens—the people rise up, the regime withers and dies, peace and democracy reign. The chaos that followed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was in part a consequence of this thinking. In planning the postwar period in Iraq, George W. Bush and some of his advisers had 1989 in mind—“like Eastern Europe with Arabs,” as one official put it.

President Obama’s decision on what to do next in Afghanistan turns on the answer to a basic question: How severe a threat does the Taliban pose to America?

Some commentators believe the answer is: very little. America’s real enemy, al Qaeda, is hiding out next door in Pakistan. The implication is that we can live with the Taliban as long as it doesn’t invite bin Laden and company back.

A corollary to this view is that both the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban are Pashtuns who have historically united to repel foreign invaders from their rugged heartland in the Hindu Kush. From this proposition it follows that, as New York Times columnist Nick Kristof recently argued, sending more western troops to Afghanistan will only provoke a wider nationalist uprising.

There’s undoubtedly some truth in that. But it ignores the Afghan Taliban’s roots in the madrassas. The Taliban is defined by its puritanical vision of Islam and determination to impose strict sharia law wherever it holds sway, from Afghanistan in the late 1990s to Swat Valley earlier this year.

The problem, from the standpoint of U.S. safety, is that the Taliban’s Islamist outlook (as well as the bonds forged in the 1980s struggle against Soviet invaders) engenders strong solidarity with al Qaeda. In a fascinating article in Foreign Affairs, Barbara Elias dissects the Taliban-al Qaeda relationship:

The Taliban cannot surrender bin Laden without also surrendering their existing identity as a vessel for an obdurate and uncompromising version of political Islam. Their 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 concession to, or earnestly negotiate with, secular states.

What this suggests, of course, is that a Taliban restoration in Afghanistan could easily lead to al Qaeda’s return. It also means, according to Elias, that the Taliban probably can’t be split or co-opted the way Sunni insurgents in Iraq were.

Recall that Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar ignored U.S. demands (punctuated by the Clinton administration’s ineffectual missile strike in 1998) to expel Osama bin Laden and his Arab co-conspirators. Even on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, he refused, saying, “We cannot do that. If we did, it means we are not Muslims…that Islam is finished. If we were afraid of attack, we could have surrendered him the last time were threatened and attacked. So America can hit us again.”

In other words, protecting al Qaeda was more important to Taliban leaders in 2001 than holding onto power. What has changed? After eight more years of joint struggle against the U.S., how likely is it that a triumphant Taliban would bar anti-American terror groups from setting up training camps in Afghanistan?

Meanwhile, Howard Altman reports on The Daily Beast that al Qaeda picked its number three man, Mustafa abu al-Yazid, to be its chief in Afghanistan. “And in that role, he has built new and potentially deadly ties to the Taliban – forging alliances that may greatly complicate the Obama administration’s decisions about what to do in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Altman writes.

That’s exactly right. We need to learn more about the ties and mutual interests that bind the Afghan Taliban and what’s left of al Qaeda. But these reports underline the danger to U.S. security of blithely assuming that the Taliban would never again play host to America’s sworn enemies. That’s not a risk progressives should be prepared to take.

This item is cross posted at The Huffington Post.

It looks like the White House is circling in on a new strategy in Afghanistan that focuses on protecting major population centers like Kabul, Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz, Herat, Jalalabad, and a few other large villages.

If endorsed, it would adopt the major elements of General McChrystal’s proposed counterinsurgency strategy, albeit on a more limited scale that perhaps acknowledges that 40,000 additional troops aren’t enough to effectively pacify the entire country. Or, as the New York Times put it:

At the heart of this strategy is the conclusion that the United States cannot completely eradicate the insurgency in a nation where the Taliban is an indigenous force — nor does it need to in order to protect American national security. Instead, the focus would be on preventing Al Qaeda from returning in force while containing and weakening the Taliban long enough to build Afghan security forces that would eventually take over the mission.

This strategy would certainly prevent the Taliban from regaining control of the country, thereby denying al Qaeda the petri dish it needs to reconstitute an ability to attack the U.S.

Furthermore, this is a realistic approach about what we can achieve, even with increased — but finite — resources. It may simply not be a sensible use of resources to deploy tens of thousands of American forces to Helmand, a massive southern province that has 20 percent of the land, but only three percent of the population.

However, the fundamental question is whether this strategy effectively cedes control over large swaths of the country to the Taliban where al Qaeda elements could re-enter and rebuild its abilities. One senior administration addressed that point, saying, “We are not talking about surrendering the rest of the country to the Taliban.”

But under this scenario in Helmand, field commanders would compensate for the lack of a full-time troop presence by keeping pressure on insurgents with drone strikes, aided by intelligence from local populations about pockets of Taliban. But by ceding control to the Taliban, we could be alienating the local population — the eyes and ears necessary to target the drones.

And finally, a potential side effect of protecting select urban areas is that as the only stable regions, they might be flooded by rural villagers that don’t want to live under the Taliban. Would this increase the burden on troops to the point that their presence has diminishing returns as the cities swell with refugees?

Consider me cautiously optimistic, but nervous.