Peter Feaver's blog

By Peter Feaver

President Obama has said that he is very angry about the leaks coming out of Afghan Strategy Review 2.0:

"I think I'm angrier than Bob Gates about it," Mr. Obama replied. "We have deliberations in the situation room for a reason; we're making life and death decisions that affect how our troops are able to operate in a theater of war. For people to be releasing info in the course of deliberations is not appropriate."

"A firing offense?" Reid inquired.

"Absolutely," Mr. Obama responded.

His anger is understandable, and I have some sympathy for it. It is hard enough to decide what to do without having these internal deliberations play out on the front pages of the papers. Frustration over leaks is an occupational hazard of working in any administration. Every member of Shadow Government can cite multiple times when the president or other principals expressed similar anger during the Bush years.

Still, my sympathies are not unqualified. The longer the review drags on, the more unrealistic it is to expect that the process can continue to be leak-free. The president is right to want to deliberate leak-free, and the president has the right to extend the process as long as he wants, but at some point -- and I don't know when that point is, but now that we are around day 92 82 since McChrystal initially filed his report, we can safely say we are past that point -- the blame for the leaks must be a shared matter. (Editor's Note: It is 82 days as of today and won't be 92 days until after the Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday, which is when the White House hints it will announce a decision ... unless they decide to spring the announcement on the ultimate of late-Friday dumps, Black Friday, in which case it would only be slightly less than 92 days.)

And speaking of assessing blame, with the exception of the original leak of the McChrystal report (the provenance of which is still debatable and I am losing confidence in my own hunch that it was Holbrooke or someone connected to him), it is not too hard to tell who is doing most of the leaking: very senior White House folks (I am thinking assistant-to-the-president-level, and higher). The most informative stories have outlined in some detail the objections raised by VP Biden and Chief of Staff Emanuel to the bigger footprint options. Those stories frame the Biden/Emanuel objections in very favorable terms. Most of the leaks (again with the exception of the initial McChrystal report leak) have had the effect of making it slightly more difficult for Obama to pick the option most favored by McChrystal and the other senior military brass.

I suspect that the president, the vice president, and the White House chief of staff have a pretty good idea who are the unnamed SAO's (senior administration officials) in many of the more detailed stories. And I am very confident that the more junior level officials on the Obama national security team believe that the top rank folks (who have the widest latitude for talking to the press) know who are those SAO's.  

So my bottom line is that I expect that the Obama SAO's will not be deterred from leaking, despite the president's strongly expressed outrage.

Pete Souza/White House via Getty Images

By Peter Feaver

For nearly a week, I have been thinking about a comment my friend and fellow civil-military relations specialist Eliot Cohen made in a Washington Post story about President Obama struggling to come to terms with his role as "commander-in-chief." I am quoted in the story, too, but the part that really gripped me was this quote from Cohen:

With this decision, he's really going to own this war, and he's going to be sending young men and women to their deaths. And when that realization sets in, it's a very grim thing. He may have known it intellectually before, but what I think is happening is he's learning it viscerally."

Cohen's larger point, and the general thrust of the article, is spot-on. Throughout the painfully long and awkward Afghan Strategy Review 2.0 -- with all of the back-stabbing leaks and blame-throwing -- it is increasingly clear that the president is visibly wrestling with his commander-in-chief duties, and doing so at a gut level (vice an abstract intellectual level) for the first time.

I also think that Cohen captures accurately the president's own thinking about the gravity of the choice before him: with his decision, Obama will acknowledge that he "owns this war." I have probably said something similar myself in commentary about the strategy review process.

But the more I think about it, the more I think that this insight is misleading in a fundamental way. Obama may well think that he does not yet own the Afghan war and will only own it once he finally decides this issue. But in truth he has "owned" the war for many months now, and it is a dangerous conceit for the president or his team to think otherwise.

Of course, Obama legally "owned" the Afghan war on Inauguration Day. One could also say that Obama has politically "owned" the Afghan war ever since he decided to base his presidential campaign foreign policy platform on the premise that the Bush team had taken its eye off of the ball of the "necessary" war in Afghanistan.  

But in policy terms, President Obama took ownership of the war when he announced the results of his Afghan Strategy Review 1.0 back in March. That decision, announced with great fanfare and some too-clever-by-half spin, was an ownership moment. At that moment, Obama was "sending young men and women to their deaths," to use Cohen's evocative language.

When it became Obama's war in policy terms, he took responsibility for the success or failure of the war. Regardless of what the president decides in the coming weeks, if America ultimately prevails in Afghanistan, Obama will deserve credit and if we do not, Obama will deserve blame. Historians will endlessly debate how much, but inescapably some credit or blame must belong to the current president.

I think the president is more likely to make a wise decision if he confronts the Afghan situation with eyes unclouded by wishful thinking. One such wishful thought would be if the president convinced himself that he only "owns" the Afghan war once he renders his decision on the current review -- or even more wishfully, only if he authorizes McChrystal's escalation. The truth is Obama owns this war right now, and the sooner he accepts that, the more effectively he will be able to lead the country.  

The world is waiting for America's commander-in-chief, but unlike Godot, he is already here.

MASSOUD HOSSAINI/AFP/Getty Images

By Peter Feaver

Our sister blog, The Cable, reads the tea leaves and has concluded that President Obama has made his decision on Afghan Strategy Review 2.0 and is preparing for a roll-out sometime around the 19th or 20th of November. Senior officials are clearing their schedules, giving heads-up to allies, and generally girding their loins for a major public relations push. But a push for what?

McClatchey reports that, as expected, the president will split the difference between his warring advisors. He will embrace the counterinsurgency approach recommended by General McChrystal and other military advisors. He will reject the narrower approach favored by Vice President Biden and other political advisors. But he will not authorize the upper-bound of military resources McChrystal requested. If the McClatchey report is accurate, the final choice comes close to resembling the option dubbed "McChrystal light," but probably not light enough to avoid a political battle with the anti-war faction at home.

As slow and painful as the review process has been, the hard part is just beginning and the Obama team seems fully aware of this. According to the McClatchey report:

Administration officials also want time to launch a public relations offensive to convince an increasingly skeptical public and a wary Democratic Congress -- which must agree to fund the administration's plan -- that the war, now in its ninth year and inflicting rising casualties, is one of "necessity," as Obama said earlier this year.

"This is not going to be an easy sell, especially with the fight over health care and the (Democratic) party's losses" of the governors' mansions in New Jersey and Virginia last week, said one official.

Persuading the public to support his new strategy will be hard, and the clumsy review process has made it harder.  But it is not impossible.  President Bush faced far more daunting political odds in January 2007 when he opted for the Iraq surge. Some of the lessons the Bush team learned could be of value to the Obama team as they plan their roll-out:

• The media will focus on the numbers, but the President should focus on explaining the strategy and demonstrating his commitment to seeing it through because the numbers are likely to change. President Bush opted for the upper-most bound of the recommended surge of troops -- 5 Brigade Combat Teams (BCT) -- and yet when General Petraeus took over, he actually requested additional troops beyond those. Because Bush never publicly discussed the 5 BCT surge as the "uppermost bound," he could finesse these additional requests without triggering whole new "surge debates" each time. Obama should be careful not to paint this as the "last and final time we will send additional troops." That may be his fervent hope, but he should not handcuff himself to a hope.
• The president will need a convincing answer for why he is authorizing a smaller surge than McChrystal requested. It is the president's call to make, but the experience of the Iraq war is a painful one in this regard. Secretary Rumsfeld still faces scathing criticism for trimming the troop requests of the original invasion -- for appearing to have authorized a bit less than needed rather than a bit more than was required. Obama must persuade the public not to view him as a latter-day Rumsfeld.
• The president and his political appointees, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State, should carry the lion's share of the political water in persuading Congress and the American public. But they cannot do it alone, because polls indicate that the public trusts the military far more than the president to "make the major decisions on overall military strategy and the number of troops needed" -- by a whopping 62-25 percent spread. That means that Obama will need General McChrystal to validate publicly Obama's decision, just as General Petraeus validated publicly Bush's surge decision. The Obama team must be ready to call the critics to account if the anti-war faction attempts to smear McChrystal the way they tried to smear Petraeus. As much as possible, the generals should be left to focus on the military fight and kept out of the political fight.
• The president should spend the political capital to preserve bipartisan support for the new strategy. Unfortunately, support for the Iraq surge came down to the slimmest of Republican-only margins (plus Senator Lieberman). Here Obama has a decided advantage and he should exploit it. Republicans are far more committed to a robust approach in Afghanistan than were Democrats in Iraq and Obama could bring them on board. To do so, he should drop the partisan trashing of the previous administration and finally deliver on his campaign promise to seek a genuine partnership with Republicans. On this issue, he will need robust support from the center and the right and he should take the requisite steps to secure it.
• The president will have to accept the unfairness of the media, which will scrutinize his proposal with excruciating rigor while giving a breezy pass to the alternative strategies promoted by his critics. The media never rigorously evaluated the proposals of the Iraq surge critics and so the political debate over the surge was never on a level playing field.  President Obama and his team should expect the same kind of treatment, and indeed may be facing the same chorus of critics. The opponents of the old Iraq surge are girding their loins to fight a new Afghan surge. The Obama team must do more than simply whine about it. Instead, they must take upon themselves responsibility for explaining the myriad problems with off-shore counter-terrorism, McChrystal Super Light, or any of the other alternatives that arm-chair generals promote. By and large, the watchdog media will likely give the critics a free pass.

Of course, the most important lesson is the most obvious one: pick the right strategy. President Bush was able to prevail politically over the surge opponents because, at the end of the day, the surge produced dramatic results on the ground. Had the surge not reversed the trajectory in Iraq, then no amount of domestic political resolve could have saved it.

If President Obama's choice is a similarly wise one, and if he devotes the concentrated effort to explaining his choice to a skeptical Congress and American public, Obama can reverse his Afghan slide. If not, our wartime Commander-in-Chief will face even more daunting decisions down the road.

NICOLAS ASFOURI/AFP/Getty Images

It seems that no one can resist the temptation to opine on the one-year anniversary of President Obama's election. Shadow Government is no exception. In coming posts, Shadow Gov bloggers will answer any or all of four key questions:

• What, if anything, has surprised about Obama's foreign policy since the election?

• What one thing should be singled out for praise?

• What one thing should be singled out for constructive criticism?

• What prediction, if any, about where we might be 1 year from now?

In blogoyears, it has seemed like a lifetime since President Obama culminated his historic campaign with a decisive victory. But in reality, it was only a year ago. Imagine a latter-day Rip Van Winkle who went to sleep hung-over from the election night festivities and waking up to reality today. What would strike him about President Obama's foreign policy? Here are our answers...

PETER MUHLY/AFP/Getty Images

By Peter Feaver

Surprise?

I am surprised at how quickly President Obama lost confidence in the Afghan strategy he announced to great fanfare in March and how slowly and publicly (with daily read-outs and extensive tick-tock backgrounders) he is conducting Afghan Strategy Review 2.0. I expected that he would find it politically very challenging to maintain support for his war policies, but I did not expect he would make the job so much harder in this way. If this review results in (a) a sound strategy that (b) President Obama wholeheartedly commits himself to so (c) he spends the political capital necessary to forge a domestic and international coalition behind it, then the do-over will have done some good. But it feels like such a positive outcome is slipping away.

Praiseworthy?

The best decision President Obama made in the foreign policy arena is one of the first decisions President-elect Obama made: keeping Secretary Gates. This step took some political courage on his part, because he had based his electoral campaign on a scorched-earth critique of President Bush. Keeping Secretary Gates and some other key figures (such as Iraq/Afghanistan czar Lt. Gen. Doug Lute) ensured a stable transition and meant that for the first half of the year there were very few transition-related hiccups. Given how difficult it is to change commander-in-chief horses in midstream, this is a great accomplishment.

Constructive criticism?

The aspect of Obama foreign policy that most concerns me may be the flip-side of the praiseworthy piece: how long it is taking for Obama to settle into the role of wartime commander-in-chief. It could be that the decision to continue the bulk of President Bush's war council (and thus its policies) reflected a decision to delay taking ownership responsibilities for the war. To my reading, that is the connective thread that stitches together various problematic aspects of Obama's foreign policy thus far: peddling stale campaign rhetoric long after its sell-by date; repudiating his own comprehensive Afghan Strategy Review and launching a new one; developing a tin ear for civil-military relations and wartime alliance relations; spending so little time explaining his national security policies to the American people; giving his political team such a prominent role in national security; etc.

Prediction?

I think it is highly unlikely that the national security team that is in place today will be in place one year from now. I would not want to bet which principal will leave, but the betting money is someone will leave. Personnel transitions tend to be associated with friction and other mischief, and the causal arrow can go in both ways: intra-team friction leads to early departures and new arrivals disrupt established modus vivendi. So my prediction is that the "no drama Obama" mantra will have proven unsustainable by November 2010. This is not something to celebrate nor is it something to dread. Every administration has to deal with shake-ups and I wouldn't be surprised if President Obama proves he can deal with it better than most.

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

File this away under "who will guard the guardians", subfile "who will fact-check the fact-checkers." Media Matters, the leftist advocacy group that "fact checks" the media for alleged pro-conservative, pro-Republican bias, complained about a recent Politico story.  They took special exception to a point I made. 

The Politico story was about all the ways that President Obama seems to be getting away with activity that would have sent critics (critics like Media Matters, for instance) around the bend if President Bush had tried it. In the Politico story, the reporter quoted me saying that critics would have howled if Karl Rove and other political/communicator types had been as prominently featured in the strategy review that led to the Iraq surge as David Axelrod and the other Obama communicators are featured in Obama's current (second) Afghanistan strategy review. I told the reporter I was worried that this would give the appearance that Obama was viewing Afghanistan narrowly through a partisan political lens and it would complicate an already delicate civil-military situation.

Up gotchas Media Matters to claim that Karl Rove really did participate in national security strategy reviews, citing a Washington Post story about the the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), which included Rove, Karen Hughes, and other communicators, as well as policy people such as Condoleeza Rice and Steve Hadley.

The problem with the Media Matters claim is that the WHIG was not involved in deciding national security strategy -- what to do in Iraq (or Afghanistan) to protect our national security interests.  Rather it was involved in deciding national security communications strategy -- i.e., how best to explain to Congress, to the American public, and to the world what and why the President had decided regarding the national security strategy. In other words, the policy team advised the president on what should be done and the communications/political team advised the President on how to persuade the American people that he had decided correctly.  

Both functions are appropriate and necessary, but under President Bush the policy came first and drove the communications/politics, rather than vice-versa. In short, Karl Rove did not sit in on the national security strategy meetings. If Media Matters has additional evidence, I would be interested in seeing it, but if all they can point to is the WHIG, then they need better internal fact checkers (and perhaps not trust everything they read or hear in the media).  

Now a more interesting critique would claim President Bush had the political-military balance wrong. Perhaps President Obama is recognizing that his decision on Afghanistan is inescapably a political one, and that the choice of the right national security strategy hinges crucially on an assessment of what America's domestic political system will support. In that case, it might make sense that Obama's political team has a seat at the table.

I think there is something to this line of reasoning, but at least in the Iraq case I don't think it would have altered the course of history much. I don't think having the political team at the table during the Iraq surge debate would have changed the outcome -- except, perhaps, to have hastened the surge decision slightly. According to Bob Woodward's account of the surge, some of those who opposed it did so out of concerns for its political doability (would Congress support the surge and would the American people stand for it?).  Perhaps having the political team to weigh in on that question would have settled the matter more quickly. Such hypotheticals are hard to pin down with certainty.

But some things seem pretty certain to me. If the Bush political team had been as prominently involved, the critics would have howled at the time. And because President Obama has involved his political team, he will have to answer the question: to what extent was this decision - whatever it turns out to be--  driven by political considerations, especially election and re-election considerations? 

NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images

By Peter Feaver

The mounting criticism of the Karzai family has got me thinking the same thing that Tom Ricks is thinking: When President Obama looks at Karzai does he see Diem? I am hoping he sees Maliki.

Diem was the leader of South Vietnam who famously frustrated President Kennedy (and before him, President Eisenhower, and before him the French). He enjoyed more legitimacy than any other South Vietnamese leader did in the early 1960s, but he ran a corrupt and somewhat ineffective government. He also got embroiled in sectarian conflicts with the Buddhists that further split South Vietnamese society. The American advisory and support commitment seemed to be handicapped by Diem's weakness and Kennedy perceived the American effort to be slowly collapsing. In response, Kennedy ramped up the pressure on Diem to do more, but Diem seemed only capable of doing less. Finally, Kennedy took a fateful step and authorized U.S. acquiescence in a coup to depose Diem, which transpired in early November 1963. During the course of the coup, Diem was assassinated.  

What came after Diem, however, was worse: years of political paralysis caused by successive coups. With each new political crisis, the South Vietnamese government got progressively weaker, and the need for greater U.S. involvement to stave off a catastrophic defeat got progressively stronger. Looking back on the matter in later years, the Johnson team concluded that toppling Diem had been a severe blunder, a pivot point in the gradual American slide into quagmire.

As it happens, the Bush team confronted its own "Diem" question in Iraq in 2006. The new Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki presided over a fledgling Iraqi government that suffered from some of the same weaknesses: corruption, ineffective governance, and debilitating sectarian squabbles. As President Bush wrestled with how to reverse the negative trajectory in Iraq, one nagging question seemed decisive: Is Prime Minister Maliki part of the problem or part of the solution? Bush even dispatched National Security Advisor Hadley to Baghdad to take his own soundings on this question. Hadley's memo was leaked to the New York Times so you can read his assessment yourself.  

While the option never had serious proponents within the administration, some arm-chair strategists outside of government even advocated the "Diem option" in Iraq: somehow replacing Maliki with some other Iraqi leader who would, it was hoped, prove more to our liking. President Bush decisively rejected such talk and instead authorized a series of efforts to bolster the Maliki government -- steps collectively called the "bet on Maliki" option. Since then, there has been plenty in Iraqi governance to complain about, but I think most people would agree that the two and half years since the surge in Iraq have gone better than the two and half years after the coup that deposed Diem.

President Obama and his advisors seem to be wrestling with this fundamental issue in Afghanistan and the optics and the body language seem more oriented towards Diem rather than Maliki. Of course, the analogies are not perfect and the Afghan situation must be evaluated on its own terms. But Obama would also be well-advised to reflect on the historical record and the dangers of undermining even frustratingly weak and corrupt allies when there are not obviously better alternatives ready to take their place -- and when American efforts to install a new leader might inspire resentment rather than support among the people he would ostensibly govern.

STF/AFP/Getty Images

Robert Kagan gets the Iranian issue exactly right and his question is also right: What kind of poker player is President Obama? 

Negotiating with Iran is by definition an unavoidable part of pursuing the diplomatic option with Iran. President Obama should not be faulted for trying to negotiate a deal with Iran. But negotiations must remain a means to an end, and here the record with Iran stemming back many years is an unhappy one: the Iranian regime is a master at turning the means into the ends, where the goal increasingly becomes "preserve and prolong the negotiations" rather than "reach a deal." Unfortunately, that seems to be happening again now. All of the players, including Russia, are returning to form.

This is precisely why I argued that it was important to get the negotiating leverage that comes with ramped-up sanctions before negotiations started rather than after they had been shown to fail. If we had that leverage on Iran now, then every delay and every dither would gradually strengthen our hand and weaken Iran's. Our options would improve because theirs would get bleaker. Without that leverage, the opposite happens and is indeed happening right now: every delay and dither puts Iran in a slightly stronger position vis-à-vis the world community.

Perhaps the poker analogy could be improved slightly with one tweak: without the sanctions, we are playing poker with our seat on fire but with the sanctions we would be playing poker with Iran's seat on fire. Even a Nobel Prize winning poker player will have a tough time getting success in the first instance, but even a so-so poker player might have success in the second.