I have a few more musings on the "readjusting the war clocks" issue, specifically the question of accelerating the Afghan battle clock by getting more help from Pakistan. What might the outlines of a deal with Pakistan look like? I don't have specifics, but I can think of some design features and suggest some out-of-the-box things to think about. In the spirit of stimulating the strategic policy planners who have better access to the information necessary to do this exercise right, here are some considerations.

General Design Features

The absolutely essential element is explicit quid pro quo. It is fine for us to offer intangible, mood-setting quids, but their quo better be tangible and clearly spelled out in advance. The entire deal would not have to be public; indeed perhaps some elements would have to stay confidential. But the deal would have to be worth it to risk the inevitable leaks and set-backs and it is only worth it if Pakistan delivers concrete action.

The United States would also have to be willing to step back from the deal if the other players are not doing their part. This is harder to do than it sounds because, once established, every "deal" develops political inertia and American leaders can be reluctant to break it off even when it is clearly not delivering.

What should we ask for?

I would let General McChrystal draw up the list of asks, but I am pretty sure it would involve the movement of sizable Pakistani military units to put pressure on the areas that most affect the Taliban's freedom of movement as well as the sharing of intelligence that would substantially change the local balance of power on either side of the Durand line.

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General McChrystal's recent report that the Kandahar operation is on a slower track than expected puts the Obama administration's familiar "two clocks" strategic dilemma in sharp relief. Any war has two clocks, one driven by domestic politics and the other driven by battlefield outcomes. The challenge for the commander-in-chief is to manage both clocks so that success on the battlefield is achieved before time runs out on the domestic political clock. The dilemma is particularly acute in democracies, where the impatience of leaders far from the battlefront can put in jeopardy the ability of the government to continue fighting, regardless of the stakes. If you think this is a new, post-Vietnam problem associated with small wars in far-off-lands, just ask General Washington about "sunshine patriots" or President Lincoln about "Copperheads"

If the clocks get out of synch there are only two ways to re-synch them: Accelerate the battlefield clock or slow down the domestic politics clock.

General McChrystal's report was a warning that he does not think he can accelerate the battlefield clock, at least not tactically/militarily on the battlefield.  Getting our NATO allies to deliver on promised resources to help accelerate the training of the Afghan security forces would help, as Jackson Diehl points out in a perceptive column today, but even if they materialized tomorrow their impact would not be felt for a year. I agree with Bill Kristol that there are doubtless more things that could be done on the civilian side of the Afghan surge, but they too would not have near-term effects. Getting Pakistan to pressure the Taliban on their side of the border more effectively would help even more, and perhaps it is time to consider some out-of-the-box options like developing a very explicit quid pro quo arrangement with Pakistan: drawing up a list of their strategic "asks" and putting a concrete price tag in terms of anti-Taliban/pro-Afghanistan actions on each of them. If Pakistan delivers more, we will deliver more.  It would be worth some strategic planning shop doing brainstorming on this point.

The inconvenient truth, however, is that notwithstanding Obama's courageous but belated decision to authorize the surge last December, much of Team Obama's efforts have unwittingly slowed the battlefield clock down.  In fact, if in January 2009 one had sat down and tried to formulate a plan for slowing down the clock in Afghanistan, one might have devised the following:

• Foster the belief in the region that the United States is about to abandon the effort, thereby encouraging your side to hedge and their side to intensify their efforts. The best way to do this is to announce arbitrary withdrawal timelines that have nothing to do with conditions on the ground.  Also, shortly after reaffirming the campaign commitment to this "war of necessity," conduct a follow-on, much publicized "should we even be here" review calling into question the exact strategy you had just trumpeted.
• Convince your key ally that you are doing everything you can to undermine him.  The best way to do this is to criticize him in public, to draw attention to his myriad deficiencies and to brag to reporters about administering "tough love" to him.  Also, promote his domestic political rival, convincing him that your thumb is on the electoral scale against him, incentivizing him to compensate with ballot-stuffing of his own.
• Stir up civil-military friction by chastising your battlefield commanders and accusing them of playing media politics.  The best way to do that is to give a sympathetic reporter unlimited access to White House political advisors who can brag about the way the President dressed down the generals and also brag about trapping those generals into committing to "win or leave" short timelines.  Of course, it will help if senior Administration officials contradict each other publicly and in candid not-for-attribution comments as to the actual significance of the arbitrary timeline.

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What does the ongoing BP oil spill imbroglio in the Gulf have to do with the war in Afghanistan? Probably not much, from the vantage point in the United States. But here in London this week, the two issues are being linked in some ways that should be worrisome for the Obama administration. 

Two particular stories have featured in headlines in the major U.K. newspapers this week: BP's plummeting share price from President Obama's rhetorical attacks, and the London visit by Secretary Gates and General Petraeus urging a continued strong U.K. troop commitment to the NATO mission in Afghanistan (followed by Prime Minister David Cameron's surprise visit to Afghanistan today).  Separate though they may be, the two stories are combining to produce one narrative in the minds of many British citizens: the Obama administration is attacking a pillar of our economy while urging us to sacrifice even more blood and treasure in Afghanistan. 

BP of course bears the most blame for the catastrophic spill, as well as responsibility for stopping it and remedying the damage. And in the first few weeks after the rig exploded, there was little sympathy for BP even here in the United Kingdom. Most U.K. media coverage initially focused on the horrific environmental damage being wrought as well as the Obama Administration's apparent insouciance as the oil continued to gush.

But now that attacking BP (or "British Petroleum" as Obama calls it, even though that has not been the company's name since 1998) has emerged as a core tactic in the Obama Administration's scramble to arrest their own falling political fortunes, they risk doing real damage to relations with a key ally and the largest non-U.S. troop contributor to Afghanistan.

As recently as two months ago, BP was Britain's largest company by market cap, and is a core holding of most British pension funds. In other words, it is not just BP executives or investors in the City who take a hit when BP's share price plummets, but also every average Brit who has any type of stake in a retirement fund.  Which is most of the country -- many of whom have also grown weary and skeptical of their nation's military role in Afghanistan. 

Last week had already demonstrated one unintended consequences of the administration's intensifying campaign against BP: the vocal attacks that drive the share price down also erode billions of dollars in market value and diminishes the resources BP will have available to pay for the damage, clean-up, and compensation. The White House needs to be mindful of not going too far and triggering a second unintended consequence of further eroding British support for their force posture in Afghanistan. Fortunately at the U.K. end, Prime Minister Cameron, at least up to this point, is trying deftly to strike a balance and not further escalate tensions with the United States either over BP or over Afghanistan.

Pursuing a unified grand strategy is always a hard task, but this situation shows even more acutely the challenges of linking domestic and foreign policy such as the Obama administration's National Security Strategy attempts to do. Last week it was American strategic interests in Asia that got short shrift, as Obama cancelled (again) his Australia/Indonesia trip to focus on the BP spill. This week it is the U.S.-U.K. relationship that is suffering, as a beleaguered White House tries to shore up its domestic political standing at the expense of relations with a key ally.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is in South America this week participating in the 40th General Assembly of the Organization of American States in Lima, Peru. From there she travels to Ecuador, Colombia, and onto Barbados to meet with Caribbean leaders. The Associated Press says a "crowded agenda" awaits her, but don't expect much in substance to come out of the trip. 

Secretary Clinton has been game, but she is reaping the whirlwind of Obama campaign operatives relentlessly pummeling President Bush for supposedly "ignoring" the countries of the Western Hemisphere. In doing so, they stoked outsized expectations around the region about what would result from an Obama presidency. The fact is not much has resulted and the last thing our neighbors see is anything like a supposed golden era of U.S. engagement with our neighbors.

Indeed, many Latin countries are flaunting their lack of interest in strong ties with the United States. Whether it is the anti-American and anti-democratic agendas pursued by Hugo Chavez and his ilk or Brazil's efforts to carve out a separate role for itself on the global stage by pushing an Iran nuclear deal that the United States rejects or keeping alive the issue of Honduras' ousted president Manuel Zelaya that the Obama administration clearly wants to move past, divergent pursuits are overtaking a commonality of purpose.

Neither is the OAS General Assembly the most accommodating venue for the administration to re-seize the initiative. Rather than a useful platform to address real problems in the hemisphere, such as criminality, corruption, and bolstering democracy, the meeting is more a cacophony of voices airing pet parochial grievances that will only magnify our differences, platitudes aside.

Of course, not all is gloom-and-doom in the region.  There are positive stories -- including Colombia's return from the brink of narco-fueled chaos, Peru's upbeat economic performance, the Central American-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement, and Mexico's desire to cooperate more closely on the war on drugs -- but these initiatives were well in train before the current administration took office.

The administration has its work cut out for it in trying to create momentum in the service of the shared interests we still do have with a number of countries in the Americas. But that will not be created in visits to Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, and other precincts currently infatuated with the anti-American fad. Instead, it will come with continuing to work with like-minded governments unabashed about identifying with our vision for the hemisphere of prosperity for all through free peoples and free markets.

President Obama's decision to cancel for the second time his trip to Australia and Indonesia so that he can ostensibly focus more on the Gulf oil spill is understandable as a political matter. He depends on the support of the American people, and not on Australian and Indonesian voters. But as a matter of foreign policy, this is a bad decision, and not in America's strategic interests. 

There is never a "good" time to neglect Asia, but even so this announcement comes at a particularly bad time. North Korea's recent aggression has escalated regional tensions, China is coyly hedging its bets and maneuvering for advantage, and American allies such as Japan, South Korea, and Australia are looking towards the United States for strategic reassurance, not neglect. Australia and Indonesia were already left standing at the altar back in March when President Obama cancelled his visit the first time in order to focus on getting his health care bill passed (and technically, this is now his third cancelled visit to Indonesia if one counts the scrubbed Jakarta stop from his November 2009 Asia trip). Even the stop on Guam is important not just for boosting the morale of American service members but also as a signal to the region of America's presence and power-projection capabilities. All things considered, the White House's recent boasts about "restoring [American] leadership" in Asia now ring especially hollow. 

The cancelled trip is also unfortunate because the domestic political problems behind it are largely of the White House's own making. Of course the oil spill itself is not their fault, and as many have noted, there is not very much that the White House can do to stop the leak -- BP is still in the lead. But the Obama administration bears responsibility for the subsequent political crisis for at least two reasons. First, this White House has repeatedly made audacious assertions and raised colossal public expectations about the competence of government in general, and President Obama in particular, to solve problems. From the push to expand government control over the health care system to the grandiose campaign rhetoric that his election would mark the moment when "the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal," this is not an administration marked by modesty about government's role.  Second, for over a month after the spill began, the White House was remarkably inattentive to the political imperatives of at least displaying attention and concern. (Perhaps they finally realized they had a problem when voices ranging from David Gergen to James Carville joined the ranks of critics). So now the White House finds itself in a political panic and overcompensating at the expense of a national security priority.

The Asia trip cancellation also highlights another potential weakness of the White House's recently released National Security Strategy. The NSS calls for "a broad conception of what constitutes our national security," and of the need to maintain strong economic, health and education policies at home as ways to bolster national security abroad. On one level this is a truism, though on another level, as Mike Gerson points out, "it is shameless to use a national security document to advance a debatable domestic agenda."  

Even worse, however, is when this linkage between domestic and foreign policy cuts in the opposite direction, and short-term domestic politics trump long-term foreign policy priorities. Such as when low presidential approval ratings from a botched response to an oil spill leads to major slights against an important ally and a strategic emerging power. Australia is the only nation to have fought alongside the United States in every single war from World War I to Afghanistan and Iraq. Indonesia, as this administration's capable Asia policy hands know, is a new partner of considerable strategic potential. Both nations deserve better than this. Most important, American interests in Asia demand better than this.

If President Obama wants to solve America's immigration dilemma, he should avoid mixed messages. On May 19, he naively sided with visiting Mexican President Felipe Calderón who complained that Arizona's new immigration control law could lead to racial profiling. This last week, he ordered 1,200 National Guard troops to the southwest border and requested an additional $500 million from Congress to step up border enforcement.

While his words may have pleased undocumented migrants (a potential constituency) and immigration lawyers, his deeds seemed too much like bait for Republican votes on upcoming reform legislation. In both cases, he forgot to do his homework. 

For starters, he was too quick to criticize the Arizona law. It hardly differs from federal statute that penalizes illegal entry, or a 2007 Prince William County, Virginia ordinance that allows police to check the immigration status of detainees. As amended, the Prince William law ensured that the status of all detainees would be reviewed, not just those who looked like migrants. Fears of profiling abated. With similar tweaking, worries over the Arizona law are likely to recede. 

Obama also backed up his Mexican counterpart without knowing the history behind his remarks. President Calderón (an otherwise fine leader and good friend of the United States) carps at our immigration policies to satisfy Mexican voters -- including entrenched elites who resist land tenure and market reforms that would end monopolies and expand jobs at home. His predecessor Vicente Fox felt compelled to do so and now it seems to have become a ritual.

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It is a hard task to produce a National Security Strategy. The challenges are manifest, including: addressing multiple audiences (international, domestic, the U.S. government's national security agencies, Congress, the media, scholars, pundits -- and yes, even erstwhile policy-makers-turned-bloggers), balancing precise policy guidance with lofty principles, describing complex objectives in clear prose, and anchoring sound ideas in a coherent framework. The Obama administration team has clearly put much time, thought, and effort into producing this document, and for that they are to be congratulated.

On substance, how does the Obama administration's first NSS stack up? As I wrote earlier this week, the basic pillars of the strategy are sound and moreover show considerable strains of continuity in U.S. foreign policy -- including continuity with the Bush administration's grand strategy. Peter Feaver makes these points in more detail and shows numerous consistencies between the Obama NSS and the 2006 Bush administration NSS.

However, now that I've had a chance to read the entire Obama administration NSS, I worry that as a strategy blueprint the overall sum is less than the parts. In other words, it fails to articulate a compelling strategic logic that connects an analysis of opportunities and threats with resources, policies, and goals.

Why? To begin, it is too heavy on process and light on strategy. Much of the document is devoted to heralding worthy things like "engagement," "cooperation," and "partnerships." These are all essential methods of foreign policy, of course, but they are more means rather than ends in themselves. Yes, the "strategic approach" chapter includes sections on "The World as It Is" and "The World We Seek." Yet both of these sections are regrettably thin. The former offers up the customary points on the challenges and opportunities of globalization. The latter identifies the "world we seek" as "a just and sustainable international order," but does not adequately specify what this order should look like. A stable balance of power among nation-states? The global expansion of free market democracies? A world in which multilateral institutions and transnational communities eclipse the nation-state system? Or some combination of these, or another world order altogether?

A few other thoughts on various particulars:

• The section on the campaign against al Qaeda says almost nothing on al Qaeda's ideology and very little on the battle of ideas dimension of the campaign. What is the administration's understanding of extremist ideology and how to defeat its pernicious yet persistent appeal? Unfortunately, this NSS only offers an anemic paragraph with the awkward title of "Contrast Al Qaida's Intent to Destroy with our Constructive Vision."
• While the NSS rightfully devotes more rhetorical attention to the promotion of human rights and democracy, it unfortunately puts too much emphasis on the U.S. example alone ("More than any other action that we have taken, the power of America's example has helped spread freedom and democracy abroad"). Going back to Puritan John Winthrop's "City Upon a Hill" sermon in 1630, this strain of American exceptionalism has a distinguished tradition. Yet when it comes to promoting democracy abroad, just being an example is often insufficient. Freedom activists around the world such as Chinese dissidents, Iranian Green Movement protesters, Cuban prisoners of conscience, and Egyptian reformers already see the United States as a positive model. What they want is active American advocacy and support -- even when that support might cause friction in diplomatic engagement with their own governments.
• For an otherwise high-minded and forward-looking document, the NSS unfortunately lapses a few times into using straw-men caricatures ("we reject... an endless campaign to impose our values" -- as if any serious voice has advocated that?) or occasionally indulging in what could read as gratuitous digs at the Bush administration.
• The NSS a few times lumps "Russia, India, China" together as emerging nations of influence. While true in the "BRIC" sense, in a strategic sense this risks downplaying the important distinction between India as an emerging partner of the U.S. while Russia and China continue to play more (at best) ambiguous roles, and at worst have the potential to become peer competitor threats.

These points notwithstanding, there is still much that is good in the strategy. The real evaluation, of course, will come as the Obama administration continues to develop and implement these policies in a very challenging world.

President Obama's West Point speech on Saturday provides a great example of the structural continuities in American foreign policy. As president and commander-in-chief, Obama now embraces and owns policies that he previously eschewed. For example, after running his campaign denouncing the Iraq War and doubting the surge, he is now essentially declaring Iraq a victory ("this is what success looks like: an Iraq that provides no safe-haven to terrorists; a democratic Iraq that is sovereign, stable, and self-reliant.") After spending much of his first year in office downplaying if not ignoring democracy and human rights promotion, he is now making democracy and human rights promotion one of the four pillars of his national security strategy. After previously rhetorically distancing himself from American exceptionalism, he now says that a "fundamental part of our strategy is America's support for those universal rights that formed the creed of our founding."

In short, through a combination of the burdens and responsibilities of office, prevailing geopolitical realities, the deep cultural currents of U.S. foreign policy, the bureaucratic systems that reinforce those cultural currents, and the crucible of learning that takes place every day in the toughest job in the world, the President Obama of today acts and sounds considerably different than the one elected in November 2008. (John Hinderaker over at Powerline -- a site never hesitant to criticize the Obama administration -- makes a similar favorable observation about the speech and its essential continuity with U.S. foreign policy). This is not at all to say that his foreign policy is identical to that of his predecessors -- in important ways it does differ, and as I have written elsewhere, often not for the better -- but only to point out that truly profound structural changes in American foreign policy are very rare. And generally for good reason.

Some media coverage, such as Peter Baker's New York Times article, attempts to portray the speech as a "repudiation" or at least distancing from the Bush administration's grand strategy, and makes much of the fact that he did not emphasize "unilateral American power" or affirm "pre-emption" or "prevention." Baker is one of the very best, and best-sourced, White House correspondents around, so it may be that his article reflects some additional background conversations with Obama administration staff attempting to advance a particular message. But at least when it comes to the text of the speech, here I think Baker's article overshoots. 

For example, in the midst of discussing the importance of international cooperation, Obama described American leadership in "steering those currents in the direction of liberty and justice" -- in other words, a polite way of saying that American power and influence will continue to shape the international order. Or the fact that President Obama did not explicitly affirm the possibility of the preemptive use of force does not mean that his Administration actually rejects it. As historian John Gaddis has shown, since the days of John Quincy Adams (while Secretary of State to James Monroe), American presidents have reserved, and sometimes used, the right to take action against looming threats. Unless President Obama were to explicitly reject the possibility of ever using force in a preemptive or preventive manner to protect the nation (highly unlikely), it will remain an option within American national security doctrine. 

In his speech, President Obama also previewed his soon-to-be-released National Security Strategy, ostensibly built around the four pillars of connecting renewal at home with strength abroad, integrating diplomacy and development, building international cooperation and international institutions, and promoting human rights and democracy. As basic principles, these are sound. Whether they will amount to a coherent strategy (which needs to identify end goals, identify threats or obstacles to those goals, and explain how and why the tenets of the strategy will defeat those threats and overcome those obstacles) remains to be seen, once the NSS document itself is released.

I have been reflecting on President Obama's foreign policy thus far and I think I have identified what my Duke colleague Ole Holsti might call his "operational code": the link between beliefs and behavior that generates a predisposition, a general pattern of action that, more often than not, points to the options taken or not taken. Of course, as with any leader, there is a fair bit of ad hoc cost-benefit calculation and some making it up as they go along. But I also think there is a strategic logic that one can trace through it and that explains a remarkable number of the choices President Obama and his team have made. 

I call it the "yes, but" strategic logic because what Obama has sought to do is systematically neutralize (in a rhetorical debating sense of the term) the laundry list of complaints about US foreign policy that other countries use as excuses whenever we would push them to help us on pressing American priorities like Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and so on. We would ask for help on Iraq because it was so vital, and they would say, "Yes, but you haven’t done anything on Israeli settlements." We would ask for help on strengthening the nuclear nonproliferation regime and they would say, "Yes, but you have your own nuclear arsenal." We would ask for help on preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and they would say, "Yes, but what about the Israeli nuclear arsenal?" or (in Russia's case), "Yes, but what about your missile defenses in Poland?" We would ask states to encourage moderate Muslims to speak out more forcefully against terrorists and they would say, "Yes, but what about Guantanamo?" Etc. etc.

Well, I think Obama has sought to build his own "yes, but" response. "Yes," in the sense that he tends to agree with the complaint, and "but" in the sense that he has a good talking point to offer in rebuttal: "But we signed an exec order closing GITMO," "But we slapped Israel around on settlements," "But we have committed to global nuclear zero," "But we have publicly endorsed a Middle East nuke-free zone," "But we have committed to climate change," "But we have shut down the Polish missile defense site," and so on.

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Secretary Gates's speech in Kansas sounds as though budget axes will be falling all over the Department of Defense. In an homage to Dwight Eisenhower, Secretary Gates said "what I find so compelling and instructive was the simple fact that when it came to defense matters, under Eisenhower real choices were made, priorities set, and limits enforced." I'm in favor of cutting defense spending to help get America's fiscal house in order, and commend Secretary Gates for turning his attention to budgetary discipline.  

But both the Kansas speech, and the Naval Institute speech he delivered a week prior (in which he also questioned procurement programs), had an odd ring to them. You wouldn't know by listening to these speeches that Gates has had the ability these past three years to accomplish any of the work he deems essential. Neither he nor the administration has yet given us a strategy that defines what they believe the United States needs to do in the world, how our military activities fit into that broader framework, and what size and type of military we therefore need.  

President Eisenhower had a strategy for securing the international order at a price consistent with his overall objective of maintaining America's economic power. That strategy entailed racing to purchase intercontinental missiles armed with nuclear weapons to threaten complete destruction of the Soviet Union, pushing ahead protections for us against such missiles by enemies, substituting nuclear for conventional forces, preventing a Soviet conquest of Western Europe by using nuclear weapons on the territory of our allies, declining to fight peripheral wars -- even in support of our closest allies -- or assist liberation movements, engaging the CIA in overthrowing governments that trended communist and often replacing them with dictators.  

It was a cost-effective strategy with some terrible consequences. But it accepted the risks and effects of its choices. In the Basic National Security Strategy, priorities were established, alternative means of achieving our objectives analyzed, cabinet secretaries debated the trade-offs and created a whole of government approach. In the National Security Council meeting notes from the BNSP reviews, on several occasions the secretary of the treasury refuses to support the strategy as unaffordable, and the president sent DOD back to find other ways to achieve the necessary national objectives.

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The Loop is reporting that President Obama will appoint Jim Jeffrey to be the next U.S. Ambassador to Iraq. I think this is an inspired choice and the most hopeful news to come out of Iraq in some time. Jeffrey has extensive experience with Iraq policy, serving as both deputy chief of Mission and as the State Department's Iraq Coordinator, and this first-hand knowledge will be a very useful asset.

I had some doubts about Chris Hill, Obama's first choice to be ambassador to Iraq. I think a charitable assessment is that Hill has not been as bad as I feared but also not as successful as his predecessor, Ryan Crocker. If Tom Ricks is right it has been a lot worse than that.  

The recent news out of Iraq has been troubling and there are ominous warnings that the political paralysis in Baghdad could lead to a revival of more virulent sectarianism. Of course, the situation in Iraq is nowhere near as dire as it was in 2006, but that is due in part, I believe, to the efforts of the U.S. country team in Baghdad, especially during the critical 2007-2008 years. As U.S. involvement in Iraq shifts to more of an advisory role, the need for a strong and capable ambassador -- one who can cooperate effectively with both the U.S. military and our Iraqi partners (both inside and outside the government) -- is acute.

If the Loop report is accurate, President Obama may well have found such an ambassador and I hope he has a speedy confirmation.

I have been struck by how the various sides in the war on terror debate have all found justification for their prior positions in the unfolding drama of the Times Square terrorist. Advocates of treating terrorism primarily as a law enforcement problem praise the rapid forensics that caught the suspect (albeit, just barely). Critics point to the near-misses and other troubling details and renew their complaints about the Obama-Holder approach to terrorism.

So far, everyone seems pretty sure that their prior convictions were sound. Alas, I am no exception. It seems to me that the following four points, all of which I already believed, are supported by this case:

• We are safer but not yet safe. It is much harder today for terrorists to launch the kind of mass-casualty terrorist spectacle they launched on 9/11 -- let alone an even more devastating WMD attack -- than it was a decade ago. That does not mean the terrorists have given up their desire to kill Americans. There is still a terrorist threat.
• The amateurish nature of recent attacks is not proof that we can relax our guard. On the contrary, the amateurish nature of recent attacks seems rather to confirm the wisdom of many of the counter-terrorism policies the United States has adopted since 9/11. The attacks are amateurish because more devastating options have been made harder to execute.
• We cannot avoid taking action that motivates at least some terrorists. Reportedly, the Times Square terrorist was motivated by the drone strikes, a tactic that was begun under Bush (though had antecedents in the Clinton and even Reagan eras) and substantially ramped up under Obama. While some on the far left have rejected the drone-strike tactic altogether, and many more have raised questions about certain aspects, there is a strong bipartisan consensus that some version of this tactic -- killing key terrorist leaders that cannot be captured -- is a necessary component of any sound counter-terrorism policy. During the Bush years, many partisan Democrats advanced the theory that terrorists were motivated chiefly by Bush foreign-policy choices, choices the critics thought were foolish anyway like invading Iraq or not coercing Israel into making more concessions to Palestinians in the peace process. Obama's campaign accepted this premise, and seemed to offer a new era in which America would stop doing things to fuel the terrorists. It is now obvious that even Obama has not avoided actions that motivated someone to become a terrorist. Of course, this does not mean that we should cavalierly ignore Muslim sensibilities or gratuitously insult them. Obama is right to try to calibrate our language and approach to avoid pointless provocations. Likewise, we should debate the wisdom of foreign policy choices like the invasion of Iraq or the proper approach to Middle East peace and in those debates the extent to which terrorists can exploit the issue for propaganda purposes is a relevant, but by no means dispositive, consideration. For a hardened core of would-be terrorists, however, there is nothing we can or should do to fully assuage their hatred.
• Terrorist safe havens still matter, even in the age of al Qaeda 2.0. The terrorist movement may be more decentralized and web-based -- a necessary response to our counter-terrorism policies -- but terrorists still exploit safe havens if they can get access to them. Al Qaeda's great innovation was leveraging a vast infrastructure devoted to the weaponization of resentment and targeting it on the United States and our global interests -- turning angry individuals into terrorists willing to kill Americans and be killed for their cause. There were many key nodes in this infrastructure, but one of the most important was a safe-haven, a destination where would-be recruits were assembled, winnowed, trained, equipped, and finally commissioned. The invasion of Afghanistan and the denial of safe havens in that country is thus a vital step in the war on terror. Since the success of the initial invasion, however, some have speculated that the terrorist threat has morphed into an entirely web-based phenomenon, where the only "safe-haven" the terrorist needs is a virtual on-line one. If that day ever comes -- and I am skeptical -- we are certainly not there yet. Even an attack as unsophisticated as the Times Square attack, which in theory could have been hatched entirely through individual web-based research, apparently involved trips to North Waziristan. Control of territory still matters, which means that the Bush-era emphasis on helping responsible regimes establish effective governance is still an important part of the war on terror.

It is possible that these and other similar points are merely evidence that I am a victim of confirmation bias, seeing in a new case only those things that confirm what I already believed. If so, I am probably in very good company. At least I am willing to ask: what in this case disproves these four points?

The Obama administration is already gearing up its push for Senate ratification of the recently signed New START agreement between the United States and Russia, with hearings that began yesterday and a vote possible by the end of the year. As senior administration officials make their case around town at various think tanks and before Congress, they need to do a better job of refining their message to make sure it stands up to scrutiny.

In a speech last week at the Atlantic Council, undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Ellen Tauscher stated three times that the New START agreement "does not constrain U.S. missile defense programs." Despite the repetition, Tauscher's claim, like that of other Administration officials, is simply not accurate.

Article V, Section 3 of the text states: "Each Party shall not convert and shall not use ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) launchers and SLBM (submarine-launched ballistic missile) launchers for placement of missile defense interceptors therein. Each Party further shall not convert and shall not use launchers of missile defense interceptors for placement of ICBMs and SLBMs therein. This provision shall not apply to ICBM launchers that were converted prior to signature of this Treaty for placement of missile defense interceptors therein." This section makes clear that the treaty does indeed constrain one possible way for the U.S. to develop missile defense capabilities. This may not be the way the current administration envisions developing its missile defense system, but that isn't what Tauscher claimed. (A White House fact sheet issued March 26 is more accurate in stating, "The Treaty does not contain any constraints on testing, development or deployment of current or planned U.S. missile defense programs..." [emphasis added].)

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Tom Donnelly, blogging over at AEI's Center for Defense Studies has an interesting reaction to my earlier post on Obama's NSS. Donnelly is a good friend and, despite harboring deep-seated suspicions about academic political science (or, as he would insist, because he harbors those suspicions), he always has something interesting and important to say.

He notes, for instance, that the drafters of Obama's NSS can draw on two very different streams of Obama rhetoric, one that seems to celebrate exceptional America's role in the world and another that seems to be bothered by that role. The tone of Obama's NSS could change dramatically, depending on which stream dominates.

I found some of Donnelly's other points less convincing. He claims, for instance, that speechwriters had the pen in the drafting of the Clinton and Bush NSS's. That is not true for Clinton's first, nor for either of Bush's two NSS's. Of course, speechwriters had some influence, if only because the president's existing body of spoken text on foreign policy is some of the source material for an NSS. But the drafting, for better or worse, was in the hands of strategists, not speechwriters. Whether this has been the case for Obama has not been reported yet, but here I suspect Donnelly might be on firmer ground, given the prominence of speechwriter Ben Rhodes in recent weeks.

But where he really loses me is his proposal to give the Senate a formal role in ratifying the NSS. Donnelly despairs that the NSS is not sufficiently strategic and is too oriented to political communication. Then he recommends something that would exacerbate those very problems. Indeed, it would be hard to identify a proposal that would make the NSS even less strategic in orientation and more oriented to political theater than to give the U.S. Congress a formal role in approving the document. "There are too many cooks watering down the stew, let's add 100 more and, by the way, let's make sure each of them considers themselves to be a principal whose vote is co-equal with the President's." The mind boggles at the potential for Cornhusker Kickback and Louisiana Purchase mischief.

This idea is so manifestly wrong-headed that I suspect Donnelly may have a more devious strategy in mind. Perhaps his goal is to kill off the NSS once and for all as an act of (note to editor: stand by for gratuitous abstruse academic reference) Schumpeterian creative destruction. Perhaps Donnelly hopes that out of the wreckage of his proposal would come new, more strategic modes of planning.

I prefer to reform the NSS process on the margins. Bolster the strategic planning offices, especially at the White House. Give them more resources and authority to monitor implementation and to trigger ad hoc strategic reviews (such as the one that produced President Bush's Iraq surge strategy). Give the NSC a greater role in OMB budget review. Bolster strategic planning capabilities at State and other non-defense players.

I do think the strategic planning process could be improved, but I don't think the process is as dysfunctional as Donnelly does. In fact, I have a question back over to him: what great or near-great power has done better strategic planning in the post-Cold War era, and, for that matter, when was the golden era of U.S. strategic planning?