Obama got a few things right in his speech on Afghanistan. First, he actually gave a speech, a change from most of his presidency. Second, he reminded everyone of the war's purpose and (implicitly, at least) the reason why the United States is fighting the Taliban. He quite strongly defended the idea that stabilizing Afghanistan is necessary to denying safe haven to al Qaeda, an idea that some liberal critics have begun to question. He also suggested that the United States will continue its training and counterterrorism missions after 2014, which will require the continued presence of U.S. troops. His hesitancy to say so openly until this point has been a major source of confusion and misreporting about the U.S. withdrawal.

He got a few things wrong.

1. He said "Over the last three years, the tide has turned." The tide did not turn in May 2009. There was an inflection point in early 2007, when President Bush first ordered an increase in U.S. troops and quintupled assistance to the Afghan army and police, which was accelerated by Obama's surge that he announced in December 2009 and implemented in 2010, and followed by a military turning point in 2011, when violence actually decreased for the first time in the war. "Three years" is a political claim that the tide turned when Obama took office, a blatant mischaracterization and a politicization of the efforts of the troops who have served for a decade.

2. Obama also said that the defeat of al Qaeda "is now within our reach." This is also false, but this claim is more dangerous because of the complacency it will breed among the public. Better analysts than I, like Seth Jones and Mary Habeck, have persuasively highlighted al Qaeda's resilience.

3. Obama repeated the error of announcing a withdrawal timetable, the original sin of his Afghanistan policy from which we have not, and may not ever, recover.

4. He said, "Our goal is not to build a country in America's image." There are several problems with this. First, Obama refutes an argument no one is advancing. Second, he is trying to reassure us that we are keeping our sights pitched at a realistically low level and that we are not undertaking an impossible mission, but the real danger has always been the opposite: that we haven't tried hard enough and we've continually crippled ourselves by thinking too small. The idea that reconstruction and stabilization in Afghanistan is a mythically impossible mission that goes against the laws of history and culture is one of the most enduring, pernicious, and groundless myths of the last decade.

5. He said that our goal is not to "eradicate every vestige of the Taliban." I sympathize slightly here, because I think the administration is right to undertake limited talks with the Taliban. But even if we undertake talks with the Taliban in private, it is still important to stigmatize them in public because of their ongoing insurgency, support to terrorism, and violation of human rights. So long as "Taliban" means theocracy backed by violence, we absolutely should eradicate them. The talks are designed to prompt defections for whom the label "Taliban" means something else.

6. Obama completely omitted any mention of the Afghan government, our civilian capacity development efforts, or the need to invest more time and more civilian personnel in reconstruction and development. I understand why: his "civilian surge" has completely failed to have any appreciable effect. Obama (rightly) sent hundreds more U.S. civilians to Afghanistan, but they largely stayed behind the wire and Obama actually cut aid for governance program by $1.5 billion -- a third of the total -- from 2011 to 2012. None of the indicators of governance have shown significant improvement since 2009. This is a major failing because, as Obama himself pointed out, stability is necessary for U.S. interests.

Here we go again.

President Obama has reportedly asked for military options in Syria, including "humanitarian airlifts, naval monitoring of Syria and the establishment of a no-fly zone, among other possibilities," according to the New York Times.

If the Syrian people are morally justified in fighting against their own government, then it is permissible (though not necessarily prudent) for the United States and other international actors to come to their aid. That is why the United States is and should be at least rhetorically and diplomatically on the side of the protesters and rebels. Further assistance might take the form of humanitarian assistance and money, with training and weapons a next step. But should it include a U.S. military deployment?

It's a hard case to make. Just because the Syrians have a just cause doesn't make it our fight. It becomes our fight if intervening in Syria a) would further U.S. national security interests, b) at an acceptable cost, c) with a reasonable chance of creating a situation in Syria better than the present one.

We certainly have a greater national security stake in Syria than we did in Libya, but is it enough to justify an intervention? Here's the best case I can make: we are fighting a 30-year Cold War against Iran, and anything we can do to contain and limit Iran's influence is good. Toppling the regime in Syria eliminates Iran's main regional ally and a major transit route for weapons and Hezbollah. Therefore, we should take advantage of the unique opportunity that the Syrian uprising affords us and make regime change in Damascus official U.S. policy. Fellow Shadow Government contributor John Hannah made a similar argument last year.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that's a sufficiently vital interest; I'll revisit it in a little bit. We still have to ask if an intervention is achievable and cost-effective. Here the argument for intervention becomes even harder. There is no international coalition supporting an intervention in Syria, making it harder to assure the Syrians of the benevolence of any intervention. The split in Syria is alarmingly along sectarian lines, suggesting there would be little chance of forming a national unity government after the fall of Assad and risking a replay of the 2006-7 Iraqi civil war. The nature of the fighting in Syria makes an outside intervention harder: rebels control no territory, a no-fly zone would be simply irrelevant, a no-drive zone would be tantamount to invasion.

Furthermore, Obama showed in Libya that he is willing to topple a regime and then walk away, leaving the hard work of peacebuilding to others and casting serious doubt on the future of post-Qaddafi Libya. That precedent bodes ill for a post-Assad Syria. Additionally, the domestic political pressure to reduce U.S. spending makes it hard for Obama, or any American policymaker, to push for the kind of large-scale reconstruction and stabilization assistance that a post-war Syrian would need. In short, there is a sadly low probability that we could overthrow Assad, replace him with something better, and avoid chaos.

More broadly, I doubt that we have the kind of political will necessary to make an intervention of this sort effective. I admit this can be a self-fulfilling prophecy (the more we write about how little political will we have, the less political will we have). I especially hate it when this kind of argument is leveled against the intervention in Afghanistan, a place where we have demonstrated astonishing political will for more than a decade. And I dislike the argument because it implies a defeatist, pessimistic take on American capabilities. I tend to agree with Robert Kagan that the stories of our decline and fall are greatly exaggerated.

Nonetheless, some realistic pessimism is appropriate in this particular case. Does anyone think the Obama administration, or the American foreign policy establishment generally, has what it takes to do a Syrian intervention right? I want to believe that we can do this because it is almost a textbook-perfect case of where our interests and our ideals have aligned with rare harmony. But if I, the last champion of nation-building, am skeptical, is anyone else going to believe it is possible?

Now let's return to our interests at stake in Syria. Our involvement in Syria would essentially be a proxy fight in our broader campaign against Iran. But there is a danger in choosing to make Syria a battlefield. We might sink time, money, troops, and energy into regime change in Syrian; meanwhile, Iran successfully completes and weaponizes the nuclear cycle. Syria would be a pyrrhic victory. We run the risk of confusing a sideshow with the main event. The main event is Iran and its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Will intervening in Syria prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons? Who is an intervention most likely to slow down: Iran, or the United States?

Given the difficulty of doing a Syrian intervention right and the fact that it is not the primary U.S. interest in the region, I am not currently persuaded that an intervention would be good U.S. policy. (I know it is heretical to say that anything that happens in the Middle East is not absolutely vital to American interests. But I am increasingly convinced that this particular emperor is naked.) That may change if, for example, the Syrian uprising demonstrates much greater capacity and unity, if the international community begins to coalesce around an anti-Assad position, or if Assad himself starts to look for a way out, the achievement of which should be the focus our diplomatic strategy. Until then, masterly inactivity might be our best military strategy.

Meanwhile, take a moment to reflect: Syria is precisely the sort of mission we should be able to do, but Obama's decision that "U.S. forces will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations" effectively takes it off the table. The fact that we lack the capacity and the will to act when it would be both in our own self-interest and in defense of humanitarian ideals is one of the most damning things that can be said about Obama's defense strategy. That he is now asking for military options for Syria suggests he knows it.

Ambiguity has surrounded the various deadlines that President Obama laid out for the war in Afghanistan since he took office.  In 2009, he said that U.S. troops would begin to come home in 2011.  In 2011, he said the U.S. and its international partners would transition to Afghan lead by 2014.  Now, he says the U.S. will end its combat role next year.  The shifting goalposts obscure a crucial issue:  are these deadlines for a complete withdrawal of U.S. troops, or for transitioning to Afghan leadership with continued U.S. and NATO assistance?  The difference will probably determine the outcome of the war.

Obama said in his June 2011 speech about the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan that "Our troops will continue coming home at a steady pace as Afghan security forces move into the lead.  Our mission will change from combat to support.  By 2014, this process of transition will be complete, and the Afghan people will be responsible for their own security."  Recently, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced that the U.S. is moving up the deadline to 2013.

ISAF similarly announced in 2010 that "We reaffirm our support for President Karzai's objective for the Afghan National Security Forces to lead and conduct security operations in all provinces by the end of 2014."  Yet ISAF went on to say that "the Alliance's commitment to Afghanistan will endure beyond ISAF's current mission."

So the United States and NATO will continue to "support" the Afghans with an unspecified long-term "commitment" after the transition.  Is "support" understood to mean the continued presence of U.S. and NATO military trainers and contractors embedded with the Afghan army?  Some reports suggest the NATO Training Mission is planning to substantially decrease its supporting personnel and activities as soon as next year.  Given the current plan to transition the lead combat role to Afghan security forces such a plan appears not only confusing, as the Afghan forces will require more support than ever as their responsibility increases, but dangerous.

The administration's shifting positions surely reflect deliberate ambiguity to maximize policymakers' wiggle room, a disagreement among senior policymakers, or both.  They sound like a call for withdrawal, but they allow the U.S. and NATO to keep a small number of troops in country for training and logistical support if necessary.  And it will be: keeping some international forces deployed in Afghanistan beyond 2014 is almost certainly necessary to keep the Afghan Army viable, consolidate the gains of the last two years, and maintain a robust counterterrorism capability in the region.

The problem is that almost everybody believes that 2014 is a withdrawal deadline.  For example, the New York Times, in reporting Panetta's remarks, said that the current U.S. and NATO plan calls for "withdrawing all combat troops by the end of 2014."  But the Department of Defense said in a subsequent news release, clarifying Panetta's comments, that "Barack Obama has made clear that U.S. troops will have an enduring presence in Afghanistan beyond 2014 -- in counterterrorism and ‘train, advise and assist' roles, for example."  If it were so clear, a clarifying press release would be unnecessary.

The problem is that even if the Times and other media outlets are getting the story wrong, the public believes their inaccurate version because the Obama administration is giving mixed signals.  In December Ambassador Croker said about the 2014 deadline, "I don't know what we're going to be doing in 2014."  If America's Ambassador to Afghanistan does not even know whether or not American troops are withdrawing, it is safe to say that the administration does not have a policy.

Meanwhile, the widespread expectation that U.S. forces will completely withdraw from Afghanistan by 2014 could become politically impossible to resist.  Iraq is an instructive precedent.  The 2011 deadline in Iraq was never meant to be a deadline for complete withdrawal.  U.S. and Iraqi policymakers understood that 2011 was to be a transition during which the status of U.S. forces would be normalized and a long-term foundation laid for continued U.S. and NATO training assistance.  Misperception, political pressure, and public opinion in both the United States and Iraq complicated negotiations, making it easier for Obama and Maliki to walk away from the whole thing. 

Obama is risking a similar dynamic in Afghanistan.  He may win a few points with his political base for appearing to move towards a complete withdrawal in 2014, but virtually no one outside of the anti-war left believes a complete withdrawal on a set timetable would be helpful for the Afghans, the Pakistanis, or the United States.  Obama himself has repeatedly stressed the need for a responsible withdrawal.  The war is only now entering its culminating phase and the ultimate outcome, for good or ill, will probably be decided by the choices, battles, and negotiations of the next two years more than the previous ten.  It is a poor time to indulge in politically-expedient ambiguity.

One of the frustrating things about watching news coverage of Afghanistan is the regularity with which old ideas or initiatives are breathlessly reported as new. The premier example is Taliban reconciliation.

President Hamid Karzai first called for the Taliban to reconcile with the Afghan government after his election -- in 2004. The Bush administration developed a reconciliation policy around the same time frame, establishing as redlines that the Taliban must renounce violence, sever ties to al-Qaida, and accept the Afghan constitution -- the same redlines the Obama administration is adhering to, according to all the press reporting on it. We've been pursuing a negotiated end to political violence in Afghanistan for eight years. As Mitchell Reiss rightly points out, we were even talking with the Taliban during the Clinton administration.

Nonetheless, the idea pops up every 18 months or so as the new silver bullet that promises to end our involvement in the region on the cheap. And when it does, it reopens a tired debate between, on the one hand, those who reject all negotiations as a morally-troubling compromise with evil, and, on the other, those eager to accept any face-saving deal that allows a decent interval between our withdrawal and the outbreak of civil war.

Allow me to imitate President Obama here and reject the false choice between two straw men. Both sides are wrong. Negotiations are a useful tool and probably the best means to end the war. It would be more satisfying to have a Taliban surrender ceremony and a Kandahar War Crimes Tribunal. I would love to see a president or a general pound his fist on the table and bellow "Taliban delenda est!" but that seems unlikely.

On the other hand, talks are not an abandonment of our war aims or our Afghan allies. Talking with the Taliban does not lessen our commitment to defeating the Taliban as a military force. Talking is not an alternative to defeating the Taliban's military capability, but a key weapon with which to do so. Talks are a weapon in the arsenal of counterinsurgency. Even if we fail to secure an immediate ceasefire, by talking with our enemies,* we sow discord between hardliners and moderates, encourage defections, plant disinformation, gauge their morale, and force them to ask what their true war aims are (force footsoldiers to ask what they are risking their lives for). These can all have useful battlefield effects.

What matters is not whether or not we talk with the Taliban, but what kind of agreement emerges at the end of talks. This seems to be where the Obama administration is on shaky ground. Obama and his team seem eager, too eager, to get any agreement from the Taliban on a set timetable. But it should be the content of an agreement, and its enforcement mechanisms, not its timing, that matters the most. Done right, an agreement could be the best and most cost effective opportunity to secure our interests in South Asia, including denying safe haven to al-Qaida, reversing the momentum of the Pakistani Taliban insurgency, and denying Iran a proxy in Kabul. Done wrong, a settlement could be the excuse the U.S. invokes to justify abandoning the region as its collapses around us.

All this begs the question: if we've been trying to reconcile with the Taliban for eight years, why haven't we succeeded yet? The answer is because until 2010-2011, we were losing the war. The Taliban had no incentive to sit down at the negotiating table because they believed, with good reason, that they stood to gain more by fighting than by talking.

The fact that they are now openly talking about negotiations with the United States and the Afghan government, even seeking to open a political office in Qatar, is an indicator that the increased military pressure of the last two years is working. As DoD announced in October, violence actually decreased in 2011 for the first time in at least five years. The Taliban no longer believe they're winning. At least some of the Taliban leadership seem to believe they have more to gain from talking than fighting. Our military progress has started to change their cost-benefit calculation. This a heartening sign that, at long last, our tactical military successes are contributing to strategic progress.

That explains why negotiations are not a silver bullet. They only work when the enemy feels talks are the only alternative to defeat. Talks must be matched with ruthless, withering firepower. Talks are not cheap, and they are not easy. To get the Taliban to agree to a ceasefire that protects our interests in the region, we have to keep up the military pressure for some time yet. The deadline for withdrawal directly harms this goal. It is abundantly clear that the deadline is the greatest strategic threat we face in Afghanistan and one of Obama's worst foreign policy blunders.

*Despite the vice president's vast expertise in foreign policy and military affairs, I humbly disagree with his characterization of the Taliban. People who regularly seek to kill American soldiers in combat are our "enemies."

My colleagues have offered good criticisms of the defense budget and strategy unveiled by President Obama and Secretary Panetta last week. Let me add to the chorus with two more points.

First, the defense strategy is an explicit and unfortunate rejection of parts of the Quadrennial Defense Review completed less than two years ago by former Undersecretary Michelle Flournoy. The QDR rightly, repeatedly, and explicitly argued that the United States needs to retain a large-scale stability operations capability. "The United States must retain the capability to conduct large-scale counterinsurgency, stability, and counterterrorism operations" (emphasis added). "DoD will continue to place special emphasis on stability operations," because stability missions will be a permanent requirement of the 21^st century environment. "Stability operations, large-scale counterinsurgency, and counterterrorism operations are not niche challenges...Nor are these types of operations a transitory or anomalous phenomenon in the security landscape." That is why "U.S. military forces must plan and prepare to prevail in a broad range of operations...Such operations include...conducting large-scale stability operations."

The new defense strategy, by contrast, openly admits that "U.S. forces will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations."

The abandonment of a decade's worth of investment and grinding experience in stability operations is a dangerous risk that willfully ignores the realities of the contemporary security environment. Weak and failing states, and the rogue actors who operate within them, represent a real threat to regional and global stability. In response, the  U.S. and UN have launched more than two dozen stabilization and reconstruction efforts between them since the Cold War -- averaging about one per year -- and there is no sign that demand for such operations is easing. We have gradually and painfully improved our ability to execute such missions, and they are a real contribution to U.S. national security. Cutting back on stability operations now will throw away our hard-fought gains and expose us to new risks from across the globalizing, fragile world.

My second criticism of the new defense strategy, and some responses to it, is that it is still captive to the decades-old debate about how many wars we need to fight simultaneously. Since World War II, U.S. military planners have argued that we need to fight two major theater wars at the same time. The two-war doctrine has become something like Holy Writ or an idée fixe. The idea was somewhat well-founded during the Cold War when we plausibly could have faced simultaneous crises in, for example, Germany and Korea, or Germany and Cuba.

However, holding onto this idea for the last twenty years has looked increasingly disconnected from reality. Obama's new strategy goes through contortions to claim that we will, sort of, maybe, continue to be able to almost fight and nearly win two wars at the same time. But it fails, like every defense strategy has for two decades, to explain why this precise formulation is worth defending.

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In my previous three posts, I argued that the world today is more dangerous than it was during the Cold War because the threat from Russia and China is still present, on top of which we face new threats from new nuclear autocracies hostile to the United States, including North Korea, soon Iran, and possibly Pakistan.

In addition to the old-fashioned state-centric threats of hostile nuclear powers, the United States now faces a whole new category of threats that simply did not exist during the Cold War:  the threats that come when state failure meets globalization, when non-state actors can operate with impunity outside the write of any law but act with global reach because of new technology.  These are the threats that are the current fads of IR and security studies:  pirates, organized crime, drug cartels, human traffickers, WikiLeaks, hackers, the global Islamist "pansurgency," and, yes, terrorists.  (Throw in pandemic disease and ecological disaster and you get all the research funding you want.)

There is nothing new about the existence of many of these actors, of course.  Pirates and terrorists have existed for centuries.  However, their ability to present an immediate and large-scale threat to the United States is new, or at least greater than during the Cold War.  Travel and communication is easier and weapons technology is more lethal, state failure is more widespread (giving them more space to operate with impunity), while U.S. and allied border, port, and infrastructure security has not kept up.

I earlier argued that the faddish, new-fangled theories about non-state actors were overstated.  They are, but that doesn't mean they're completely wrong.  Osama bin Laden and Julian Assange clearly did massive and irrevocable harm to the United States in ways literally inconceivable for a non-state actor during the Cold War; the same may be true of the drug gangs in Mexico today.  Coupled with the United States' almost complete lack of homeland security, and there is a very real possibility of large-scale, massive, direct harm to the U.S. homeland from a globalized non-state actor.

The preeminent threat of this type is, of course, the global campaign by violent Islamist militants and terrorists to eject the "west" from "Muslim lands," overthrow secular governments and replace them with Islamic regimes, and establish the supremacy of their brand of Islam across the world.  (I agree here with David Kilcullen's characterization of the conflict as a global insurgency).  Violent Islamist movements have done most of their direct damage to people and states across the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia.  But those attacks certainly don't make the world safer for the United States, nor would their victory in, for example, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.  And the movement has, of course, directly attacked the United States and our European allies.  Note that violent Islamist groups-whether al Qaida or Hamas or Hezbollah or al Shabaab or Lashkar-e Taiba-typically flourish in and around weak and failing states.

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In my previous two posts I began my argument that the world today is actually more dangerous than it was during the Cold War.  I argued that the basic threat of great power rivalry with China and Russia has not gone away and, in the case of China, has increased.

My second argument is that, in addition to Russia and China, we now face up to three new entrants in the lists of authoritarian nuclear powers hostile to the United States:  North Korea, Iran, and possibly Pakistan.  During the Cold War the United States faced only one or two hostile nuclear powers at a time.  We may soon be facing five. And the new nuclear powers are likely to present a direct threat to the American homeland in the near future, similar to the threat posed by the Soviet Union and China during the Cold War.

North Korea and Pakistan have nuclear weapons (which they didn't during the Cold War) and Iran is almost certainly going to get them.  North Korea and Iran are avowed enemies of the United States; Pakistan is teetering on the brink.  All three states have invested in medium and long-range ballistic missiles that could hit U.S. allies and, in all likelihood, will soon be able to produce missiles that could hit the U.S. homeland.

It is true that North Korea's nuclear arsenal is probably very small, and Iran is likely to have a small arsenal for a few years yet.  But they only need a few warheads to pose a major threat to the United States.  The Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear warheads, but after the first hundred or so each additional nuclear weapon doesn't add much more threat to the United States:  you can already wipe out our entire civilization several times over.  Given a few more years, Iran and North Korea will both probably have built enough warheads and developed the long-range ballistic missiles to pose an existential threat to the United States equal to that posed by the Soviet Union's and China's nuclear arsenals during the Cold War.

In addition to their nuclear capabilities, all three states have some of the largest conventional forces in the world today.  It is true that all three countries are poor and lack a sophisticated military-industrial base, and Iran's and North Korea's conventional militaries have been debilitated by sanctions.  I don't doubt our ability to win a hypothetical conventional war with any state.  But because of their sheer size, even strictly conventional, non-nuclear wars with Iran, North Korea, or (heaven forbid) Pakistan would surely be much more costly in lives and treasure than anything since Vietnam, and possible since World War II.

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In my last post I noted that Peter, among others, has argued that the United States is safer today than during the Cold War.  I conceded that we are safer in some ways:  Russia no longer holds to an overtly hostile and globally expansionist ideology, and the United States is less likely to be a front-line state in a militarized conflict with Russia or China.

Nonetheless, I want to argue that overall, the international environment is more dangerous today than during the Cold War.  In this post I want to focus on one point:  the threat from Russia and China has not gone away and, in the case of China, has greatly increased. 

Threat is comprised by capability and intent.  Let me look at both factors in both countries.  First, Russia has one of the greatest military capabilities in the world.  Russia's army and nuclear forces remain among the largest and most formidable around.  Russia's conventional forces are more professional and more technologically well-equipped than they were during the Cold War.  So are ours, of course, but the point is that Russia's military is one of the few that should at least give us pause before we get into a fight with it.  On purely material grounds, Russia remains one of the few powers capable of posing a serious danger to us.

What about intent?  As I conceded above, the main change regarding Russia since the Cold War is its ideology.  It no longer purports to be leading a global revolution to overthrow all capitalist states.  But that does not mean Russia has friendly or peaceful intentions towards the United States.  In fact, Russia's contemporary ideology-call it authoritarian and nationalist, coupled with limited expansionism-remains highly troubling.  Russian officials have been fairly clear about their intent to balance against the United States, oppose unipolarity, and revive Russia's hegemony over its near-abroad-none of which are consistent with U.S .interests.

U.S. and Russian interests clash most clearly in eastern Europe-especially the Baltics and Ukraine.  Remember that Russia probably cyberattacked Estonia-a NATO ally-in 2007 and did in fact invade Georgia, to whom we had promised future NATO membership, in 2008.  In response to Russia's invasion of Georgia, the U.S. Air Force flew Georgian Army units from Iraq back to Georgia so they could fight Russian forces, which could plausibly be interpreted as American participation in hostilities and an act of war against Russia.  The Russo-Georgian war was the closest we have come to World War III since the Cuban Missile Crisis, something virtually everybody missed in 2008.  Look for the sequel in Ukraine, or possibly the Baltics, sometime in the next decade.  It is not hard to imagine Putin allowing these flashpoints to spiral dangerously to win nationalist plaudits at home.

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