On 22 January 2009, President Obama released a series of Executive Orders that signaled a wholesale review of the entire legal architecture underpinning the Government’s detention of terrorist suspects. The orders indicate the new administration’s fundamentally different approach to the treatment of so-called “enemy combatants”, including a willingness to abide by standards of international law. However, last week, conflicting views between military judges regarding the suspension of the case of a Guantanamo detainee demonstrated that the transition to a new, legally sanctioned system may be hindered by officials held over from the Bush administration.
The three orders issued by President Obama address different aspects of the procedures put in place by the Bush administration to detain and elicit information from suspected terrorists. The first order establishes an immediate review of all individuals detained at Guantanamo Bay and, in the meantime, imposes a halt on all military commission proceedings. The order also crystallises President Obama’s promise to close the Guantanamo Bay facility within a year and requires the current detention of individuals at Guantanamo to be in conformity with the Geneva Conventions. In contrast to the first order, which focuses specifically on the Guantanamo Bay facility, the second order examines detention of terrorist suspects at a macro level, establishing a Special Task Force to identify lawful policy options “for the disposition of individuals captured or apprehended in connection with armed conflicts and counterterrorism operations”. Finally, the third order addresses concerns about torture by the US Government, stating that all detainees must be treated humanely in accordance with Common Article III of the Geneva Conventions. This follows an admission last month by judge Susan Crawford, who presides over the military commissions, that certain interrogation techniques used by the US military amounted to torture. (more…)
I thought that Chris Preble had some worthwhile points in his recent blog post on America’s future strategy on Afghanistan. In particular, I agree with Chris that it’s right to first determine the strategy and then determine the resources needed for that strategy rather than the other way around. Frequently political campaigns on national security issues get reduced to the question of more or less troops. If a candidate wants to prove his/her toughness, the answer frequently is more troops. So, yes, it’s right for us to give serious thought as to what our long term goal in the region should be.
With that said, I foresee that the goal of a stable Afghanistan that empowers its citizens is both possible and necessary for long term American security. In terms of long term goals, if we end up setting our sights too low, we risk returning to the very situation there that led to the rise of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the first place.
I admit that more troops might be part of the answer in Afghanistan, but only part. I, like most people who watch the region closely, believe that a more regional comprehensive approach is sorely needed. That will necessitate a greater commitment of the whole toolbox of American engagement – the military, diplomacy, and development.
I do take issue, however, with Andrew Bacevich’s December 31, 2008 article referenced by Chris that argued that we should focus our attention, not on building democratic institutions in Afghanistan, but rather on co-opting warlords who can be bribed sufficiently to do our bidding: (more…)
As outgoing CIA Director Hayden points out, Mexico poses a great threat to U.S. security, second only to Al Qaeda. I’m glad at least SOMEONE is remembering our suffering neighbor who has been plagued with drug violence for decades, only to have it recently explode into unprecedented brutality and death in 2008.
Kristin Bricker, a correspondent for narcoshpere.com, writes that “Mexico’s daily El Universal, which began counting drug war executions four years ago, reports that 5,612 people were executed in Mexico’s drug war in 2008. This year’s deaths more than doubled 2007′s total of over 2,700 executions. By El Universal’s estimates, about 8,463 drug executions have occurred during the first two years of Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s six-year term in office.”
Saying Mexico has a “drug-problem” is a gross understatement. Cuidad Juárez-a city with a population of approximately 1.5 million and just across the border from El Paso, Texas-saw more than 1,300 murders in drug-violence in 2008: (more…)
Senator Joseph Lieberman, the Wall Street Journal‘s favorite former Democratic Vice Presidential nominee, predicts that “Afghanistan will be a quagmire for Al Qaeda” provided, that is, that we don’t listen to the “whispers on both the left and the right [warning] that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires, that we should abandon any hope of nation-building there, [and that] additional forces sent there will only get bogged down in a quagmire.” For us.
So, to clarify, it seems that Afghanistan will be a quagmire for someone, and ensuring that it is quagmire for the other guys requires that we send more U.S. troops, more U.S. civilian personnel, and more U.S. taxpayer dollars into the country. Got it. (For reference, Merriam-Webster defines “quagmire“ as “a difficult, precarious, or entrapping position.”)
Lieberman is not alone in calling for firm resolve in the face of “difficult, precarious or entrapping” challenges — firm resolve measured, as it always is for the hawks, by more troops and more money. Distressed by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s suggestion that we need more achievable goals in the graveyard of empires, the Washington Post, called on political leaders “to make clear to the country” that the mission in Afghanistan “will require years more patience and sacrifice to get right.”
It is premature to predict that President Obama will revisit his pledge to send more troops to Afghanistan, but I’m encouraged that the White House and the Pentagon are on the same page — determining the appropriate strategy, first, and then allocating resources commensurate with that strategy. (In other words, not falling victim to the trap that more troops is synonymous with success, and less troops is the equivalent of surrender.) The essential questions include “What exactly will these additional troops be doing?” and “How likely is it that they will achieve success where our efforts over the past few years have largely failed?”
For my part, I’m more convinced by the arguments of those who were right about Iraq before it was fashionable, and who know a thing or two about what sacrifice and firm resolve actually entails. On that score, I highly recommend Andrew Bacevich’s article in Newsweek.
And for those of you who think that such warnings have only risen to the surface in the face of our recent difficulties in Afghanistan, I will merely point out that my colleague Ben Friedman was out in front on this issue nearly a year ago, and there have been cautious notes sounded on nation building in Afghanistan almost from the moment we went in.
Perhaps, now, someone in the White House is listening.
Folks,
Just a short post from me this morning. The Baltimore Sun just ran an op-ed I co-authored with my friend Howard Salter titled “Will Obama Act to End Darfur Tragedy?” In the piece we consider whether the administration will look to leverage the forthcoming arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir to secure a peace agreement for Darfur.
Our piece has come out on the same day as this Washington Times editorial which urges the President to shun the Court. I’m not shocked at the stance taken by the WT but am curious to see what take my fellow bloggers and visitors to ATA have on this issue.
Cheers
For many, bipartisanship is an ideal of unqualified importance in politics. It not only bears prescriptive weight, for it is what good leaders should aspire to, bipartisanship in practice reflects a healthy polity, as cooperative behavior among differently minded politicians is thought to be the hallmark of a well-functioning democracy. Some detractors, of course, have painted a much less rosy picture, but such hecklers tend to incorrectly present bipartisanship as a set of useless “pretty platitudes” rather than as an unrealized but meaningful normative ideal.
This view of bipartisanship has always seemed a little philosophically naïve to me, a little too neat to be right. And here’s why. First, bipartisanship is not one unified thing but is rather a bundle of related ideas and practices. Bipartisanship is not mere civility. It requires a number of interlocking attitudes, practices, and normative commitments, namely:
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As I noted earlier, President Obama has started to stock his administration with some terrific foreign policy talent in order to tackle the plethora of challenges facing the country and the international community. Nevertheless, despite the fact that he has some of the best diplomats working for him, it is clear that securing a settlement on a number of these issues will not be easy. I am sure that the administration will find, on occasion, that its efforts to resolve complicated disagreements will be stymied. When that happens, I hope that the President and his foreign policy team will show a willingness to engage analysts outside government who can help them develop creative solutions to these challenges.
My belief, shared by others who blog here at PSA, is that the events of the past few years have illustrated that we need more creativity in our foreign policy discussions to avoid the stalemates and groupthink that have proven to be so costly. Fortunately early indications suggest that the President is keenly aware of the risks posed by groupthink and “the bubble” that can form around the Commander-in-Chief. I was very happy to see that he recently attended an off-the-record dinner hosted by Lee Hamilton at the Wilson Center featuring scholar Haleh Esfandiari; Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid and Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi. My hope is that those who now work for the President follow his lead and seek to engage analysts outside government and take advantage of the creative thinking that is being undertaken on issues ranging from India/Pakistan to US/Russia relations. Illustratively, I noticed that my friend Naveed Ashraf discussed the idea of a Kashmir Union in this recent Dawn op-ed: (more…)
We at PSA love Google. We use Gmail for our mail client, we’ve subscribed to Google Adwords to publicize our work, and we’re all signed up for Google News alerts on various terms revolving around “bipartisanship” and “foreign policy.” There was a time, not long ago, when those news alerts were manageable. We’d get perhaps one new story a day, maybe a few each week, and try to bring them to our supporters through occasional links in our e-mail updates, and on the PSA homepage. For the past month, we’ve been practically buried under a landslide of news articles, editorials and analyses triggered by the Obama Administration’s strong focus on bipartisanship. That should be great news for PSA, and for all of us who support the call for a renewed bipartisan center in US foreign policy.
Well, I’m sorry to say that so far, the news is not so good. First, the stories aren’t, for the most part, dealing with national security and foreign policy, the areas where we believe bipartisan cooperation is most appropriate and most desperately needed. Alright, that’s quite understandable and forgivable, since the Administration must deal with the massive economic crisis foremost on everyone’s mind, which of course has major national security and foreign policy implications I won’t get into now. But the other not so good part of the news deluge is that bipartisanship doesn’t seem to actually be happening, at least not the way both we and our new President (apparently) hoped that it would.
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Just how badly has America been hurt by eight years of the Bush administration? Let us consider these words:
AMERICA IS in unprecedented decline. The self-inflicted wounds of the Iraq War, growing government debt, increasingly negative current-account balances and other internal economic weaknesses have cost the United States real power in today’s world of rapidly spreading knowledge and technology. If present trends continue, we will look back at the Bush administration years as the death knell for American hegemony.
We’ll have more in a moment but try and guess where those words were published, The Nation, Harper’s Magazine, Mother Jones, Atlantic Monthly, New York Review of Books, New Yorker, or other liberal publication?
Nope, not even close. Those words were written by political scientist Robert A. Pape of the University of Chicago and appear in the current issue of The National Interest. TNI’s honorary chairman is Henry Kissinger. This is not a place known for its sympathy for antiwar protesters. So, it is revelatory, to say the least, to see them publish Pape’s article.
When a group like TNI publishes an article that echoes the like of Paul Kennedy’s famous 1987 book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 8 it is the equivalent of the memorable phrase from the Apollo 13 moonshot, “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”
Let’s return to Pape. For those who have watched with dismay over the past eight years the hubris and arrogance of the American unilateralists and hegemonists he comes across as a refreshing gin and tonic.
For nearly two decades, those convinced of U.S. dominance in the international system have encouraged American policy makers to act unilaterally and seize almost any opportunity to advance American interests no matter the costs to others, virtually discounting the possibility that Germany, France, Russia, China and other major powers could seriously oppose American military power. From public intellectuals like Charles Krauthammer and Niall Ferguson to neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz and Robert Kagan, even to academicians like Dartmouth’s William Wohlforth and Stephen Brooks, all believe the principal feature of the post-cold-war world is the unchallengeable dominance of American power. The United States is not just the sole superpower in the unipolar-dominance school’s world, but is so relatively more powerful than any other country that it can reshape the international order according to American interests. This is simply no longer realistic.
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President Obama has tapped Gary Samore to be the White House WMD Coordinator. This is a position that was recommended by the 9/11 Commission and legislated by Congress in 2007, but the Bush Administration chose not to create the post. The new White House office will likely be part of the NSC and reportedly have a staff of up to ten charged with coordinating efforts to prevent WMD proliferation and terrorism.
In our WMD Report Card, PSA strongly supported this new position and made the following recommendations:
Put someone in charge. There is a critical need for a top-level official with authority to make government-wide decisions on funding and programs. Someone needs to be responsible for turning our resolve into results.
Build the blueprint. We need a strategic plan that links all existing programs together, prioritizes funding across the Federal Government, and coordinates implementation. We can no longer afford to hope that our patchwork of programs and initiatives will naturally cohere into an effective whole.
Samore does not have an easy task ahead of him. The programs in question are spread out across multiple Departments, including State, Defense, Energy and Homeland Security. Secretaries Clinton, Gates, Chu and Napolitano will each have their own strong ideas about how to move forward on preventing WMD terrorism and proliferation. This isn’t just herding cats — this is herding lions.
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All blog posts are independently produced by their authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of PSA. Across the Aisle serves as a bipartisan forum for productive discussion of national security and foreign affairs topics.
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