We are now excited to announce the new class of PSA Congressional Fellows .  They are 29 staffers from the House and Senate, including personal, committee, and caucus staffers.  They cover homeland security, foreign affairs, military and defense, and other issues for their Members of Congress, and they bring a wide range of career experiences to the Fellowship.

The interest we saw in the high volume of applications for the Fall Session reflects the underappreciated desire for bipartisanship among Hill staffers.  The goal of our Program is to bring foreign policy staffers from both parties together to meet each other, learn skills together, and reflect on their roles in the policy process together.  It is a forum for them to make new friends and connections, share common interests, and to learn through experience that differences can be discussed openly and honestly, and in the context of a shared purpose of making better policy.

I am excited to welcome our new Fellows, and on behalf of all of us at PSA, congratulations to them.  We look forward to a great Fall.

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While Washington and Brussels brace for a troop request above and beyond the more than 100,000 U.S. and NATO troops already there, the underlying question is the one that really matters: What is success in Afghanistan, and what is it worth in blood and treasure?

Afghanistan was once viewed as the good war. Iraq symbolized the imperial extension of American power, while Afghanistan symbolized the necessary use of American power in the national defense. Richard Haass famously called Iraq the “war of choice” and Afghanistan the “war of necessity,” but in a recent New York Times op-ed , Haass signaled a potentially significant shift in establishment foreign policy thinking by labeling the Afghan war now a war of choice.

In declaring this, Haass defined success in Afghanistan as “bringing into existence an Afghan government strong enough to control most of its territory” and wrote that there are “alternatives to current American policy” to achieve this goal. He is quick to point out that labeling Afghanistan a war of choice doesn’t make it “good” or “bad,” but rather begs the question of “whether military involvement would probably accomplish more than it would cost and whether employing force is more promising than the alternatives.”

On the side of making a significant, continuing American commitment to Afghanistan, we must consider the delicate balance between Pakistan and India in the country, the potential basing of al Qaeda, the massive opium trade, the possible return of Taliban control in Kabul, and the numerous humanitarian concerns. By toppling the government, we assumed responsibility not just to Afghanistan but to Central Asia, and abandoning it at this point would seriously harm U.S. interests in the region, including energy resources and terrorism, for decades.

Conversely, even if we find a way to eliminate the possibility of the return of al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, they could continue to base across the border in the minimally governed Federally Administered Tribal Area of Pakistan where they currently operate out of. And if not there, they could move to Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, or any number of failed or semi-failed African states. After all, that’s the nature of transnational terrorism, it doesn’t depend on sanctuary any one particular nation, just one somewhere.

Further, there is no strategic resource in Afghanistan, such as oil, that makes it inherently in the national interest as there is in Iraq, and there are few American investments there, even now. And most importantly, we don’t know that we can succeed there even if we commit a large amount of troops and aid for an extended period of time.

George Will wrote yesterday that the prospects for success in Afghanistan are too remote. If success requires hundreds of thousands of troops stationed there for perhaps a decade, then Will believes that to be “inconceivable.” Will proposes a similar reduced strategy to what Haass proposed, with far fewer troops limited to drone and Special Forces strikes.

But the light at the end of the tunnel doesn’t have to be a decade away. Gen. McChrystal’s report estimates that the Afghan National Army won’t be ready to lead for three more years. If our continued military commitment to Afghanistan for that limited period of time, along with the new development and diplomatic strategies and new leadership of the Obama Administration, can greatly increase the chance of leaving an independent Afghanistan capable of self-governance, then that may be a commitment well worth making. Given the real interests the U.S. has there, and the change in strategy only still being implemented by a new U.S. Administration, a continued commitment to improving security and humanitarian in Afghanistan is well worth our while…for now.

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The SENSE simulation is unique in the breadth of stakeholders included in the scenario. I played a parliamentarian (one of six), but there was also a president with a cabinet of ministers covering all the major governance areas, a central bank, international donors, international and local NGO’s, private domestic firms and a multi-national corporation.

SENSE is also unique in that it uses computers to process the decisions of these many actors to constantly update the status of Akrona. Depending on your role, you are able to update certain elements of the simulation based on the decisions you make, and you can track the decisions made by other players. For instance, while I was sitting at a parliament computer yesterday, I was quite pleased to see the Minister of Finance cut spending in the civil budget and start paying down the national debt.

You do learn about dryer things like the elements of GDP, the interplay between the central bank’s discount rate, the import tariff rate, and the national debt. But the simulation excels at teaching what cannot be learned in a book, and I came away from the simulation with a new appreciation of the human factors of reconstruction. As a parliamentarian who controlled the pace at which sectors of the economy were privatized, the corporate tax rate, import and export tariffs, and the overall budget allocation to defense and civilian spending, there were constant requests made of me. Either government ministers were asking me to privatize the telecommunications sector, or a domestic firm was asking me to lower corporate taxes and raise import tariffs on agriculture, or the Ministry of Defense was pushing me to raise the portion of the budget spent on defense. Through all this haze, I was trying to figure out what was the right policy for the country and for my ethnic group (the Akroni), and I soon realized that any decision I made might make one or two groups happy, and make everyone else angry and think I was incompetent. When adding that psychological element into the chaotic and fast-paced environment we were faced with, I came to a new appreciation of what post-conflict governments face.

There is no easy solution, there is no solution that makes everyone happy, and there is rarely a “right” policy or solution. It’s a series of tradeoffs and compromises and reactions to unfolding events. And morale flags. Feeling that you have no power to effect the change you want is demoralizing, as is realizing that you are losing battles that you think are important. On the flip side, seeing your goals achieved is an exhilarating feeling. These human elements affect how the different stakeholders interact, and getting stuff done relies so much more on that than one might expect without having done the simulation. I highly recommend this experience to anyone who can participate, and I also look forward to continuing the NSC simulations with the PSA Congressional Fellows.

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It is this realization that has confirmed the skepticism many had about Moussavi in the first place. While viewed as closer to the reformist camp, Moussavi would have been president inside a system run by the Supreme Leader and his cohort. Powerful institutions in Iran, including the Revolutionary Guard, have institutional interests that are threatened by moves toward a more pragmatic foreign policy. Human rights problems and intransigence on the international stage were more likely than not to continue under Moussavi, albeit perhaps to a lesser extent.

But what is striking about the apparent election rigging is that we now have evidence that the Iranian elite viewed Moussavi and the movement he came to represent as a threat to their interests and their view of a Revolutionary Republic. Before, more optimistic watchers, myself included, hoped that the unpopularity of the Ahmadinejad government due to its poor handling of the economy and bumbling aggression on the international stage would lead the Supreme Leader to sanction the election of a reformist, though establishment, candidate to succeed Ahmadinejad. This hope held out promise that the Obama administration’s friendly overtures may have eventually been returned. We now can say with some certainty that the Supreme Leader does not countenance a near-term future of normalized relations with the United States.

While this turn of events is truly disheartening for those of us who felt that normalized relations with Iran were important to the stability of the international system, it is important to note that this may enhance consensus on Iran in the international community. For years, debate and disagreement in international discussions weakened the ability of the United States to implement a firm policy course on Iran. It may now turn out to be easier for the Obama administration to persuade allies to have a united front. Whether the new policies involve increased sanctions or other options, unity will be important. Having Moussavi in office, while not dramatically changing the policy course of the Iranian state, would certainly have made such consensus more difficult to achieve.

This electoral trouble presents an opportunity, though it was one no one wished for. It is an opportunity into which policymakers can insert themselves and influence events. The Supreme Leader may have gotten his wish for a second Ahmadinejad term, but with the Iranian polity more precarious than before, the U.S. government and the international community have a chance to move the policy ball forward on one of the world’s most intractable security issues.

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Former Bush speechwriter David Frum argues for a bigger GOP tent. Referring to the two Republican senators from Maine, Frum argues, “It ought to be obvious to any Republican why we need to make room for politicians like Snowe and Collins in our party. It’s not like we have so many votes that we can afford to throw them away.” Frum worries that while some Republicans are more concerned about the “quality” of Republican elected officials, “quantity” is required to govern. Meanwhile, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor has started a new group, the National Council for a New America, to lead the GOP to a new understanding with the American voter, and perhaps to electoral success.

It is certainly amusing to many Democrats to watch the Republican hand wringing. “I wonder if this is how Republicans felt all those years,” some must wonder, recalling the Democratic Party’s own recent periods of strategic chaos, when Karl Rove’s claims of an enduring Republican majority seemed just a little too plausible. David Brooks calls the jubilation among Democrats “the joy of pulverization,” of scoring another touchdown when you’re already up by four. For Republicans, he calls it “demoralization piled on top of demoralization.”

Christine Todd Whitman, the former Republican governor of New Jersey who had a famously unhappy tenure as President Bush’s EPA Administrator, penned a New York Times column lamenting one-party control of Washington.

To the extent we lose more members of the Republican Party, we lose what ability we have left to affect policy, and that is going to be devastating to our nation. Our democracy desperately needs two vibrant parties.

This is about much more than the switch of one senator or even than the potential 60-vote supermajority Democrats may now soon achieve. After all, power is fleeting and the political winds fickle; laws enacted by one Congress can be overturned by the next. As Whitman wondered in her column, what will happen when one party holds such sway over the two political branches of our federal government? While it is easy to see why this is a bad development for Republicans, Democrats may find that Specter’s switch raises as many questions for them as it answers.

The last two experiences of one-party dominance – Republicans from 2003 to 2007, and Democrats from 1993 to 1995 – serve as cautionary tales.

The period of Democratic dominance in Congress during the first two years of President Clinton’s term was followed infamously by the electoral drubbing in 1994 that opened the door on nearly a decade of Republican majorities in Congress. Even prior to Clinton, Democratic majorities in both chambers during President Carter’s term preceded a Republican resurgence lasting three successive presidential elections.

Republicans’ dominance in the two Congresses on either side of the 2004 Bush reelection campaign did include the overhaul of Medicare, but also included a failed attempt at Social Security reform. The two elections since the four years of Republican dominance, 2006 and 2008, have seen tidal waves in favor of Democratic candidates: during the 109th Congress starting in 2005, Republicans began with 232 House members and 55 Senate members. Republicans now hold only 178 House seats and, with Specter’s switch, only 40 seats in the Senate.

If the opportunities for Democrats to advance their agenda seem to be many, so are the perils. Recent history tells us that sometimes the best path to losing power is having too much of it in the first place.

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