After giving the Obama team a pass for the first couple weeks on the likely al Qaeda 9/11 anniversary attacks in Benghazi, the media is finally asking tough questions. And what they are finding raises troubling questions about what the Obama administration did before, during, and after the al Qaeda anniversary attacks.

Republicans risk over-reacting to this evolving storyline, particularly with the "Obama lied, Ambassador died" meme that is rising in certain sectors of the pundit world.

We may find evidence that Obama or his spokespeople lied -- that is, said things that they knew at the time were not true --  but I haven't seen convincing evidence of that yet.  And, frankly, I would be surprised if that were the case. Most often, what partisans call "lies" are actually something far less sinister: inferential errors and wishful thinking. Since Democrats have peddled for years their own Big Myth about the Bush Administration "lying" about Iraqi WMD, the desire to pin that same tale/tail on the donkey is understandable. But Republicans should hold themselves to the higher standard they wish Democrats would meet rather than sink down to the level of their partisan attackers.

Based on what is presently known, the following 5-step scenario seems far more plausible to me:

1. Initial reports were confusing (initial reports are always confusing) and left open myriad possibilities, ranging from the fairly benign (Youtube-inspired hooligans got out of control) to the most malignant (Zawahiri exacted his revenge).
2. Romney's initial messaging on the 9/11 anniversary attacks went over poorly and the media outrage, partly real and partly manufactured, eclipsed coverage of the underlying attacks. 
3. The Obama team did everything they could to keep the media focus on Romney's stumbles. Partly this involved tut-tutting about what Romney said, but mostly this required not feeding an alternate storyline that indicated the attacks might have been linked to a resurgent Al Qaeda. They could accomplish the latter simply by repeating what was known -- there was a lot of Youtube-inspired hooliganism -- and keeping quiet about anything that might simply be suspected, even as those suspicions grow stronger and stronger.
4. The Obama team also responded in typical campaign mode: They protected the candidate and did not say anything that would raise doubts about Obama's foreign policy and national security prowess until the facts accumulated to the point where some concession was necessary. At that point, they conceded the minimum and insisted on waiting until the outcome of a (hopefully lengthy) investigation that (again hopefully) will not report out until well past election day.
5. The Obama team was bolstered in steps 3 and 4 by one further factor: wishful thinking. As David Ignatius spells out so clearly: "The administration has a lot invested in the public impression that al-Qaeda was vanquished when Osama bin Laden was killed on May 2, 2011. Obama would lose some of that luster if the public examined whether al Qaeda is adopting a new, Zawahiri-led strategy of interweaving its operations with the unrest sweeping the Arab world." In the language of political science, the Obama team had a strong motivated bias that colored the way they interpreted ambiguous data. They were receptive to information that reinforced what they wanted to believe and viewed with suspicion and skepticism information that challenged this view.

Given that 5-step scenario, the only tricky thing for the administration was navigating the evolving messaging, which they accomplished in three moves:

Initial message: A rowdy crowd was enraged by video, not a resurgent Al Qaeda.

Interim message: Anytime a ambassador is killed by armed thugs that is self-evidently a kind of terrorism.

Eventual message: We have long called the murderous attacks terrorism and we are learning more about the degree to which networks of violent extremists, some of them inspired by AQ, but not tactically controlled by AQ central, helped in those attacks.

This is all very understandable, and I just don't have much patience for the view that pretends to be genuinely shocked that the Obama team has been playing politics with national security at this stage in the campaign.

Perhaps we also shouldn't be shocked that the media let them get away with it for so long. The political game of footsie I outline above was only viable if the media played along, which they were willing to do for a while but no longer. The media was willing to play along because they are biased, even when they do not want to be. They find it easier to understand people like themselves, Democrats, and have to work harder to understand people not like themselves, Republicans. They are as prone to reading events through pre-established filters -- for instance, the filter that says Romney is gaffe-prone on national security and Obama has a strong record on terrorism -- as everyone else. And they must work in the hostile environment of the White House's "Chicago rules," which punishes reporters who challenge the administration. The better reporters overcome this, and we can see the fruits of their labors in the new scrutiny and skepticism of recent stories.

Campaigns should certainly point out and push back against biased media coverage, but campaigns should also understand that media bias is a given, rather like the Electoral College, and strategize accordingly. 

I am tardy on commenting on things my Shadow Gov colleagues have already commented wisely upon, but as I was wont to tell my dissertation advisors back in the day, "better late than never."

Some thoughts on the security team shuffle:

• The Crocker appointment is good news for everyone concerned (except the Bush School in Texas A&M, which loses a fine Dean).President Obama is to be congratulated on cajoling Crocker back into the diplomatic fray. However, unlike my blogpost which is only a few days tardy, this move is probably a year-and-a-half overdue. Obama did his Afghanistan policy no favors by leaving Ambassador Eikenberry in his post so long even though it was evident that Eikenberry (albeit a fine patriot who has served honorably) was not able to forge the constructive relationship with either the Afghan or the coalition military partners that the job demanded. For all of the reporting on Obama's Afghan policy, I have never heard a satisfactory answer to why Obama stuck with Eikenberry as long as he did.

• The Panetta appointment is a reasonable one. It is high time a Democrat held the post, and Panetta more than checks the partisan Democrat box. His strong suit is budget, and the fiscal challenges at DoD are daunting. His appointment confirms what Obama has been signaling for quite some time: the administration views Defense as a promising place to make deeper cuts. That is worrisome, but it is reality; elections have consequences. My concerns are twofold. First, as Tom Mahnken pointed out, the system is facing some very serious civil-military relations challenges. It is not clear to me that Panetta has the background or experience to deftly handle that part of the job; the most successful Democratic SecDef I can think of, Bill Perry under President Clinton, had extensive DoD experience before he took the top job. Second, for all his strengths, Panetta is not a strategist (unlike some of the other names that were floated, such as Richard Danzig, John Hamre, or Michelle Flournoy -- and unlike his predecessor). This means that the strategy deficit that FP colleague Tom Ricks earlier noted just got a wee bit bigger. It probably doesn't help that one of the most able strategists in the administration just got moved, which brings me to....

• The Petraeus appointment leaves me a bit puzzled.Why move your best strategist away from a line function to an advisory one, and one that is by tradition supposed to be scrupulously neutral on policy? For that matter, if you are insistent on moving him from line to staff, why not move him to Chairman of the JCS, the position he is most qualified for? Of course, I know the answers to these questions: the CIA has a major and growing operational role and in that respect Petraeus will likely excel; the White House wants Petraeus on a tight leash and feels that in the CJCS position he would be to Obama what Colin Powell was to Bill Clinton, a thorn in the flesh; at CIA, Petraeus is constrained from calling out the administration if policy errors lead to disasters in Afghanistan, Iraq, and/or Libya. All in all, this is a shrewd move that is optimized for President Obama's 2012 electoral strategy. How good it will be for American national security strategy is still to be determined.
  Read on

Faithful readers of Shadow Government know that there are good reasons to be wary about China's strength (as explained here and here).

But this short report in today's Washington Post reminds us that there are also ample signs of China's weakness. And there can be many ways in which a weak China could be just as vexing as a strong one.

The Post reports that state censors interrupted the Obama-Hu news conference and substituted a black screen for Hu's response to questions from a reporter about China's human rights record. Hu's response was hardly revelatory, though he did acknowledge that China's record was not perfect and that more progress needed to be made -- a statement so banal that it could be said about every country, indeed President Obama has said much the same thing about the United States.

A regime that will not allow its own leader's banal public remarks to be broadcast at home is a regime that is so insecure it doubts its own legitimacy. Remember, these are remarks that were playing live to the entire world, yet Chinese propagandists were apparently afraid to let their own public hear them.

So while signs of Chinese growing strength should not be ignored, neither should we ignore signs of lingering, and perhaps deepening, weakness. Indeed, the two can combine to pose special challenges for U.S. foreign policy, producing the very bellicose hypernationalism and overconfident adventurism that we have seen in the past year.

In 1998 the United States fired cruise missiles at al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan to try to decapitate the group after it bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa. The United States knew about bin Laden and the whereabouts of his camps because, according to Steve Coll's Ghost Wars, "the National Security Agency had tapped into bin Laden's satellite telephone and kept track of his international conversations."

After the missile strike, according to the 9/11 Commission Report, a prominent newspaper revealed the United States' knowledge about bin Laden's phone. As a result, "al Qaeda's senior leadership ... stopped using [the satellite phones] almost immediately. ... This made it much more difficult for the National Security Agency to intercept his conversations." U.S. intelligence lost its most valuable source for tracking the world's most dangerous terrorist.*

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, emphatically could have been prevented if the United States was able to protect classified information. The newspapers' complicity in divulging classified information helped murder some 2,977 people.

I make this point now in response to those who believe the protection of classified information is unjust. There is an anonymous movement now among anarchist hackers to attack government and corporate websites to protest the prosecution of Julian Assange and defend WikiLeaks. Judging from the responses to my last post, in which I advocated the passage of a Secrecy Act, some readers of Foreign Policy would sympathize with the hackers.

The most common argument is that protecting information, and prosecuting offenders, is a violation of free speech. That is simply not true. The Supreme Court has never upheld First Amendment absolutism. There are legal and reasonable restrictions on what people are allowed to say, print, or broadcast. It is illegal to incite a mob to violence. It is illegal to libel others. It is illegal to make false claims in advertising about a product. It is illegal to utter profanity on broadcast television or radio. And it is, in fact, illegal to reveal information that would cause immediate harm to U.S. national security. This was uncontroversial during World War II, when sailors and their families were routinely trained that "loose lips sink ships."

You may quibble with the application of these rules (the rule about profanity seems more and more anachronistic), but it is flatly untrue that citizens or the press have the right to say absolutely anything, anytime, in any medium. Few should disagree with the principle that there are restrictions on speech; the debate is really where the line ought to be drawn and how to enforce it. I argue that we should actually try to enforce the principle at least a little when it comes to protecting classified information, which would be a significant change from our current habit of not enforcing it at all.

Once again, it goes without saying that the Obama administration needs appropriate oversight and accountability, which is why we have the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, among other organs. No doubt they need to work better. And perhaps there ought to be a standing body charged with reviewing the government's classification decisions. But the need to protect classified information is as obvious as our government's failure to do so.

*(Some newspapers have tried to debunk this story by claiming there was no specific leak of the information about bin Laden's phone, or that it had been leaked previously to no effect. Of course the newspapers have an interest in exonerating themselves. Their efforts are unconvincing. If their claims are true, it is actually more damning that the information about bin Laden's satellite phone stemmed not from a specific leak but from a general culture of impunity among the media to disclose intelligence sources and methods. And the August 1998 reporting plainly had an effect on bin Laden, even if the information had been reported earlier. Both the 9/11 Commission and Clinton-era NSC staffers Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon wrote in The Age of Sacred Terror, bin Laden stopped using his phone "instantly" after the publication of the story.)

One of the more interesting aspects of my recent two-year sojourn in London was getting to know British conservatism firsthand. The word "Conservative" in the British context is ambiguous in that it can refer to the party ("Conservative" with a capital "C"), the movement, or the ideological persuasion -- or sometimes two of the above, or sometimes all three at once. The commonalities between British and U.S. conservatism are many, and these shared convictions can also be found among conservatives across the Anglosphere, such as in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. These include commitments to free markets, limited government, the family and other mediating institutions in civil society, personal responsibility, robust national defense, and respect for tradition.

Yet on other issues, American conservatism is exceptional. There is very little in the way of a pro-life movement in Britain, for example, and even the most right-wing British Tory wags their heads in bemusement at the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Of course the exceptions and curiosities go both ways; there is little prospect of a grassroots movement emerging in the United States on behalf of fox-hunting, which still finds impassioned advocates in Britain, especially among Tories.

Amidst the commonalities to be found with conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic, there are diversities as well, not only between but among them. For example, there are vigorous debates within conservative camps in both Britain and the United States on numerous foreign-policy and national security issues, such as democracy and human rights promotion (a worthy endeavor or a fool's errand?), defense budgets (increase or curtail?), the Afghan war (vital national interest or quagmire?), and the rise of China (looming security threat or lucrative new market?). Regular readers of Shadow Government have likely noticed some of these debates being played out on our pages among our contributors.

In Britain, arguably the single most important website for British conservatives is the aptly-named ConservativeHome. Under the able leadership of Tim Montgomerie and his crack team, ConservativeHome played an essential role in the resurgence of the Tories in recent years. Combining original content, article aggregation, bespoke polling data, and candidate profiles, the site became a unique forum for debating conservative ideas while advancing the conservative cause. It continues to be an influential voice, and is regularly read by Parliament, Whitehall, 10 Downing Street, and in the British media and think-tanks. And yes, ConservativeHome has the exquisite good taste to link on occasion to Shadow Government posts, thus helping expand our readership in Britain

Following in the tradition of the Beatles, Monty Python, and David Beckham, ConservativeHome is now the latest in a distinguished line of British exports to arrive on U.S. shores. The U.S. version of the site was launched this week, and I encourage all Shadow Government readers to check it out. Its British roots notwithstanding, ConservativeHome USA is ably overseen by Ryan Streeter, a red-blooded American patriot living and working in the heart of the heartland, Indiana. (In full disclosure, Ryan is also a close friend and former White House colleague of mine, as is deputy editor Natalie Gonnella). It promises to be a vital new voice in the pantheon of U.S. conservative websites, and will be an important venue for airing (sometimes diverse) views on domestic and foreign policy, as well as serve as a platform for profiling prospective congressional and White House candidates.

Moreover, ConservativeHome will provide an ongoing link between American conservatism and kindred movements across the Anglosphere. All have much to learn from each other. For example, Tuesday's features will include some thoughts from British Chancellor George Osborne on lessons learned thus far from the ambitious British deficit reduction program. This might be of particular interest to the new GOP majority in the House of Representatives. Other upcoming features this week will include articles by Peter Feaver and yours truly highlighting front-burner national security issues that will confront the new Congress and prospective GOP presidential candidates -- and there will be references to recent Shadow Government posts that offer insight on these issue.

The Shadow Government team extends a warm welcome and congratulations to ConservativeHomeUSA on its launch and maiden week. Do take a look.

So what to make of the WikiLeaks story? First of all, it covers a period of several years; and there is no doubt that the United States and NATO didn't get everything right in all of those years, especially from 2004 to 2007. The two big stories -- ISI's fishing in troubled Afghan waters, and the deaths of civilians -- are not really news at all.

If the Department of Defense's leadership is to be believed -- and I for one, believe them -- Pakistan has put a lid on ISI. No doubt the Pakistani experience with its own Taliban gave the military and intelligence community something to think about. Equally, the Karzai government has gone out of its way to work with Islamabad, often to the chagrin of New Delhi. And no one denies that civilian loss of life, a by-product of every war ever fought, has diminished since General McChrystal issued new rules of engagement that themselves have frustrated many in the military (proving yet again that one cannot satisfy everyone -- would WikiLeaks have leaked disgruntlement with the new ROE's? I doubt it.)

The people behind WikiLeaks make no secret of their opposition to the Afghan war. Some would like to see American troops prosecuted as war criminals. WikiLeaks sees itself as providing the world with the Pentagon Papers Redux, though no one in his or her right mind could compare the Gulf of Tonkin incident that prompted the Vietnam War buildup with the destruction of the World Trade Center. That says more about the WikiLeaks crowd than about the sins their papers purport to reveal.

At the end of the day, the WikiLeaks papers will change few opinions. Those who want us out of Afghanistan will cite them ad nauseum; those who recognize the stakes for what they are -- the need to preclude that country from once again serving as a breeding ground for al Qaeda and their copycats -- will give them short shrift. What matters more is whether General Petraeus can affect the turnaround that made him a war hero in Iraq. If he does, the WikiLeaks papers will make good grist for historians' footnotes, and nothing more. 

There are two breathless stories today that are hyped as shock and awe assaults on the national security establishment. I have read both and tried several times to muster the requisite emotion, but both struck me as the analytical equivalent of fizzles.

The first and biggest, is the Washington Post's long-awaited investigative series on the growth of the national security establishment. Taking its cue from British tabloids, the Post has breathlessly promoted this series with its own brand -- "Top Secret America" --  sensational headlines -- "A Hidden World, Growing Beyond Control" -- and extravagant but somewhat unprovable claims -- such as the charge that the intelligence community failed to connect the dots in a timely manner on the recent terrorist attempts because of the redundant nature of the system. Its most innovative aspect is a series of nifty interactive features that allow tailored searches and graphics-rich displays of two basic (and I would have thought, well-established) facts: (1) that the national security world is complex and (2) that defense spending has grown in the last decade. Bottom line: This is a very glossy website that so far seems to try a bit too hard to shock viewers with how much gambling is going on in the casino.

The series has just begun and perhaps future installments will offer more bombshell revelations, but the first installment leaves me wondering what the fuss was about. The major claim that the complexity of the intelligence community has made it hard to manage in a centralized fashion is neither new nor proven in a novel way. I am sympathetic to the charge -- anyone who has worked in government understands how complex the national security establishment is and can probably name a publication or an organization that, in one person's humble opinion, could be dropped without fatally wounding national security. The difficulty is that when you aggregate across a variety of experienced perspectives, you do not come up with a common list of things to axe. One man's meat is another man's fluff, and vice-versa. You need look no further than this very series to establish this fact. The Washington Post team have spent two years talking with scores of people and compile all of the complaints without producing (yet, yet ... perhaps the best is yet to come) any coherent and viable set of reforms.  

The two leads, Dana Priest and Bill Arkin, have a wealth of experience bringing obscure matters to a more general audience (full disclosure: Bill and I co-moderated a discussion group at washingtonpost.com called Planet War for a time). I would like to think that some of the purple prose got foisted upon them by editors desperate to generate traffic to the website. So perhaps the series will develop in a more constructive direction.  

I have less high hopes for Jacob Heilbrunn's crocodile tears complaint about the waning of establishment Republicans on foreign policy. He begins with the hook that one of the leading Republican contenders for 2012, Mitt Romney, came out opposed to the new START treaty with Moscow, a treaty supported with varying degrees of enthusiasm by several senior Republican wise men. But debates among Republicans about the wisdom of specific compromises on specific nuclear arms control treaties is as old as, well, nuclear arms control. Indeed, because Heilbrunn explicitly avoids taking up the merits of the case either way, he does not demonstrate that this new debate is especially shallow or even especially vigorous.

Alas, the piece goes downhill from there and quickly reaches farce by the fourth paragraph, which reads:

Just as Republicans have united by reflexively saying no to Obama's domestic program, so they are also attacking his approach to foreign affairs as tantamount to a new round of Carteresque appeasement of foreign adversaries. Any deviations from the catechism, such as Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele's comment that Afghanistan is "Obama's war" and may not be winnable, are excoriated with the verbal equivalent of a death sentence by stoning in Iran. The liturgy is enforced by the likes of Liz Cheney or William Kristol and obediently recited by party leaders such as Republican House whip Eric Cantor, who informed the Heritage Foundation on May 4 that America's defenses are "hemorrhaging" and that Obama's "policies bespeak a naive moral relativism in which the United States bears much responsibility for the problems we face around the world.

I have read this paragraph several times and I still can't make sense of it. Republicans have not reflexively criticized Obama's foreign policies. The "stoning" of Michael Steele by other Republicans was actually a defense of one set of Obama's foreign policies regarding Afghanistan. Bill Kristol has been one of the loudest supporters of Obama on the foreign policy in question. And so on.

But beyond mere sloppy editing, the paragraph and the entire piece betrays a more fundamental wrong-headedness. It wants to claim that there is a new Republican orthodoxy on foreign policy, and, of course, that the new orthodoxy is flawed and a rejection of the old Republican establishment. But the evidence it presents actually reveals something else: a rich panoply of debate among Republicans today and throughout the Cold War. Doubtless some of those positions were flawed and some of them are flawed today (put it this way, George Will and Bill Kristol cannot both be right about Afghanistan). But there is no orthodoxy and it is certainly not reflexively opposed to everything the Obama administration has attempted to do on national security. And, of course, neither is it reflexively anti-establishment. Even a casual reader of the Shadow Government blog will find a range of opinion, and we are hardly the full spectrum of Republican foreign policy specialists.  

I can imagine an interesting piece doing the intellectual geography of mapping out various Republican debates. But I haven't read that piece yet, and somehow I doubt it will begin with the premise that Republican intellectuals have sold out to the barbarians.

Two big pieces, both worth reading, but count me just poked, not provoked.

This week the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere held a hearing  on threats to press freedom in the Americas. It could not have been timelier.

Latin America has never been a particularly accommodating environment for journalists, with threats stemming mostly from criminality (primarily of the narcotrafficking kind) and corruption, as practitioners of those dark arts are all too willing to eliminate anyone that dares to ask impertinent questions about their enterprises.

But things have taken a turn for the worse of late.  More governments are starting to get into the act.  These radical populists, which include Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Bolivia's Evo Morales, and Ecuador's Rafael Correa, are so determined to smash their respective ancien régimes and "refound" their countries that no opposition is brooked, and any media outlets not sufficiently supportive of their efforts must be put out of business -- always under a patina of "legality," mind you.

Not surprisingly, the primary culprit and ringleader in this regard is Hugo Chavez.  On the very day of the subcommittee hearing, the owner of Venezuela's last opposition television station was fleeing the country ahead of a government warrant for his arrest.

Guillermo Zuloaga of Globovisión has long been a target (he was briefly arrested in March for saying publicly that Venezuela lacked freedom of expression) because he has refused to knuckle under to Chavez's pressure to broadcast only pro-government propaganda.  In 2007, Chavez drove another independent station, RCTV, off the air by ordering that its license not be renewed.  Since then, the few remaining outlets not controlled by the government have toned down any criticism of Chavez lest they meet the same fate.

Journalist support groups around the world have decried Chavez's latest ham-handed attempt to silence his domestic critics, and the Obama administration weighed in with its own riposte: "We are seriously concerned in Venezuela about the arrest order for Guillermo Zuloaga," State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said this week. "This is the latest example of the government of Venezuela's continuing assault on the freedom of the press."

Chavez has responded vociferously to the administration's criticisms (including those by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during her recent swing through the region), claiming it is the Obama administration's interventionist attitude that makes it impossible to have good bilateral relations, thereby placing it in the same position as -- horror of horrors -- the Bush administration.

So far, there is no indication the Obama administration is falling for this silly ploy.  And that is a good thing.  International affairs of state are not popularity contests, nor does one have to crawl down into the sewer with the likes of Hugo Chavez to get one's point across, defend our interests, and stand with those who share our values. If the consequences weren't so tragic for the Venezuelan people, one could almost thank Chavez for proving again those essential points. 

I find Fareed Zakaria always intriguing even, or perhaps especially, when I am not fully persuaded by his argument. Today, he writes:

President Obama gets much credit for changing America's image in the world -- he was probably awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for doing so. But even devoted fans would probably say it is too soon to cite a specific foreign policy achievement. In fact, there is a place -- crucial to U.S. national security -- where Obama's foreign policy is working: Pakistan.

I agree more or less with all four claims in that opening paragraph: Obama deserves credit for improving America's image; image is the only plausible justification for giving Obama the Nobel prize; Obama's foreign policy achievements have been sparse thus far; and the results and prospects in Pakistan are less gloomy than one might have predicted a year ago. However, the Pakistan claim is the dodgiest of those claims and I am only partially persuaded by Zakaria's reasoning.

Zakaria argues that success (so far) in Pakistan is due to four factors, three of which he credits to the Obama team:

1) Obama properly recognized that prospects in Afghanistan are linked to Pakistan and dramatized this fact by referring to the problem as the Af-Pak problem.
2) Obama used sticks and carrots to pressure Pakistan: sticks in the form of outreach to Pakistan's rival, India; carrots in the form of massive aid.
3) Obama has put in time and effort, specifically a "whole of government" approach to Pakistan.
4) Obama got lucky because the militants over-reached in Pakistan with their brutality.

My problem with this argument is that all of these factors, except perhaps the "AfPak" label and luck (!), pre-date the Obama administration by some margin. 

• The Bush team saw Afghanistan and Pakistan as linked, indeed the very first move after 9/11 was sending Deputy Secretary Armitage to Pakistan to threaten Musharraf to get on-side; ever since, the Afghanistan and Pakistan policy lines have been intertwined.  The problem was that sometimes this meant that progress on one line led to progress on the other but just as often it meant that a set-back on one line led to a set-back on the other.
• The Bush team used sticks and carrots with Pakistan, indeed the very same sticks and carrots of outreach to India and generous aid to Pakistan. 
• The Bush team likewise devoted considerable time and effort to Pakistan and tried the same whole of government approach.
• The militants certainly over-reached in Pakistan and have been over-reaching for quite a long time.  The one difference is that Bush was unlucky, in the form of a mostly unrelated over-reach by Musharraf when he challenged his Supreme Court Justice Chaudhry back in 2007.

It is possible that Obama has tweaked the mix of these policies just right and this has produced better results.  It is more possible that simply the steady accumulation of continuing basically the same things has produced more progress.  And it is perhaps most possible that the critical ingredients distinguishing between progress and reversals is the adoption of the McChrystal surge strategy in Afghanistan, good luck, and circumstance.

Consider this: if the situation in Pakistan was worsening, there would be plenty of explanatory factors available to blame.  First, just as Bush was stuck with the compromised Musharraf regime as partner, Obama is stuck the equally but differently compromised Zardari regime as partner.  Second, numerous bureaucratic snafus have largely hobbled the "whole of government" effort.  Third, the way the Pakistani aid package was, well, packaged produced a sharp backlash in Pakistan -- it is hard to know whether to code this a carrot or a stick or a poisoned carrot. Fourth, the tortuous Afghan Strategy Review 2.0 and the botched roll-out provided as much confusion as clarification in the region, at least initially.

In short, it seems it would be no harder to explain a lack of progress as it is to explain progress. Under the circumstances, a modified version of the old Scot verdict, "not yet proven," seems warranted.

To be fair, Zakaria duly caveats the Pakistan argument.  One cannot accuse him of naïve boosterism on this issue.  Indeed, he closes with a warning against naïve optimism on Pakistan and warns the Obama administration that relations with Pakistan are like running on a treadmill: "If you stop, you move backward -- and most likely fall down." He may be more right than he realized: it could be like running on a treadmill in that you can be doing the right things for a very long time and at great effort and still not appear to be any closer to your final objective.

Disturbing leaks keep flowing from the once-tight Obama national security ship of state. The latest is in today's New York Times, which publishes the complete text of the cable sent by Ambassador Eikenberry, U.S. envoy to Afghanistan, last fall at the height of the administration's Afghan Strategy Review 2.0.

The gist of the Eikenberry memo has been known for a long time because of the numerous leaks during the review. We already knew that Eikenberry was skeptical about the surge option and tried to derail it late in the review process. But the leak of the complete cable itself is nonetheless a dramatic step in the evolving Afghan story, and its timing and content is revealing.

First, the timing and provenance of the leak is telling. The NYT story claims that the leaker was motivated only in fleshing out the historical record:

The official said it was important for the historical record that Mr. Eikenberry's detailed assessments be made public, given that they were among the most important documents produced during the debate that led to the troop buildup."

This is a highly implausible rationale -- it is far more likely that the leak is an indication that the internal debate over Afghanistan is ongoing. The roll-out of the Afghan Strategy Review 2.0 revealed serious confusion at the highest levels: Had the president committed himself to an irrevocable withdrawal timeline or had he committed himself to a conditions-based withdrawal schedule? Was the United States doing counterinsurgency in Afghanistan or were we doing something else? More recently there have been additional leaks attacking Gen. McChrystal for the pace of the surge and suggesting that the president's team members are  not all pulling on the oars in the same direction. Against this backdrop and on the eve of the president's State of the Union address, today's leak of a months-old Eikenberry cable is more likely just another volley in the circular firing squad. It may even be a bit of the "Chicago payback" that Obama advisors reportedly threatened to inflict on the military for prevailing in the internal debate. Bottom line: From the administration's point of view, leaks are never opportune, but this one is especially poorly timed and indicates serious problems within the national security team.

Read on

By Peter Feaver

It is not every day that one gets a chance to rattle the cage of the boss, so when I read the contribution from ForeignPolicy.com czarina Susan Glasser to the Washington Post's compilation of "worst ideas of the decade" I knew I had to respond -- even if it means I can kiss my year-end bonus good-bye.

Glasser's argument is the conventional wisdom, painstakingly assembled over years of partisan arm-chair generalship: if only the United States had deployed more ground troops into Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, we may have killed or captured the al Qaeda leadership at Tora Bora. Grumbling about the Tora Bora mission could be heard within hours of the battle, but got much louder during the 2004 campaign when Senator Kerry made it a standard attack line. The failure to tamp down violence in Iraq after the fall of Saddam served to further fan the flames of this critique -- too-light-a-footprint caused us troubles in Iraq and that "proves" we had too light a footprint in Afghanistan. This fall, the critique got revived when Senator Kerry's committee published a report which purports to validate the argument.  

My problem with the Tora Bora critique -- both its generalized form and the particular form advanced by Glasser -- is that it conveniently forgets that the reason bin Laden was "trapped" in Tora Bora in the first place is that Secretary Rumsfeld and General Franks and CIA Director George Tenet defied both the conventional war plans and the conventional wisdom to mount the very light-footprint campaign that Glasser et al. are complaining about. If Rumsfeld and Franks and Tenet had used the conventional warplan that involved a heavy U.S. ground presence  instead of the rapidly deployable light-footprint that Glasser denounces, the invasion of Afghanistan would have happened some time in 2002, if then.  If Rumsfeld and Franks and Tenet had listened to the conventional wisdom during the early weeks when the light-footprint approach appeared to be faltering, they would have abandoned the Afghan effort long before the battle in Tora Bora.  

The Rumsfeld/Franks/Tenet approach was an innovative gamble that performed much better than anyone, especially bin Laden, expected. For this reason, and for this reason alone, there was a chance to capture/kill bin Laden at Tora Bora.

Pushed to its logical conclusion, the Tora Bora critique reduces to the claim made by Monday morning quarterbacks everywhere. The Tora Bora critics assure us in hindsight that they would have approved every pass that was successful and all the aspects of the game plan that worked, but they also would have known not to throw the pass that got blocked and they would have changed the game plan at exactly the right moment.  

It is unfortunate that bin Laden escaped. It may even be the case that redeploying the U.S. Rangers that were on the ground in a different fashion might have produced a different result. And I am certainly not going to defend every decision made by Rumsfeld or every scintilla of spin advanced by the Pentagon press shop. But before I am going to take seriously the conspiracy theory that we "allowed Osama to escape" just to prove a light-footprint theory of warfare, I want to hear the critics acknowledge that we had bin Laden within reach at Tora Bora precisely because we were willing to try the very light-footprint approach they denounce.

A story out of Pakistan today shows that the rhetorical/policy trimming that marred President Obama's Afghan escalation speech has done some damage to the prospects for the policy. The bottom line: the Pakistanis are not doing what we need them to do because they interpreted the escalation-plus-timeline as an indication of Obama's irresolution. Or, as the reporter put it:

The core reason for Pakistan's imperviousness is its scant faith in the Obama troop surge, and what Pakistan sees as the need to position itself for a regional realignment in Afghanistan once American forces begin to leave."

This story provides a timely, if unfortunate, rebuttal to the president's own efforts at post-speech spin control. Obama went on "60 Minutes" on Sunday to offer a vigorous defense of the West Pont speech.

What struck me was this exchange recorded in the transcript:

KROFT: The West Point speech was greeted it was a great deal of confusion.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I disagree with that statement.

KROFT: You do?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I absolutely do. 40 million people watched it. And I think a whole bunch of people understood what we intend to do.

KROFT: But it raised a lot of questions. Some people thought it was contradictory. That's a fair criticism.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I don't think it's a fair criticism. The situation in Afghanistan is complex, and so people who are looking for simple black and white answers won't get them. And the speech wasn't designed to give those black and white answers.

Part of my job here, I believe, is to make sure that the American people understand what we're getting into. What we where we've been and where we're going. And they're not simple. I think that what you may be referring to is the fact that on the one hand I said, "We're gonna be sending in additional troops now." On the other hand, "By July 2011, we're gonna move into a transition phase where we're drawing out troops down."

KROFT: Right.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: There shouldn't be anything confusing about that.

KROFT: Well--

PRESIDENT OBAMA: First of all, that's something that we did in Iraq. And we executed over the last two years in Iraq. So, I think the American people are familiar with the idea of a surge.

In terms of the rationale for doing it, we don't have an Afghan military right now, security force, that can stabilize the country. If we are effective over the next two years, by putting in these additional troops -- clearing enough space and time for the Afghan security forces to get set up in an effective way -- that then frees us up to transition into a place where we can start drawing down.

The alternative is to stand pat where we are, in which you never have a stable Afghan security force. And we are potentially signed up for being in Afghanistan for the next decade.

This is remarkable and a bit scary, because Obama's defense is so fundamentally misleading. It is, if you will forgive the historical reference, a moment when President Obama channels the predecessor he usually avoids talking about, the one who answered a direct question with the memorable line: "It depends on what the meaning of the word is is."

For let's concede at the outset that President Obama, like President Clinton, may be technically correct. Because so many people watched the speech, and even more heard about the speech, it is almost a statistical certainty that "a whole bunch of people understood what [the Obama administration] intended to do," especially if we accept a conventional interpretation of "whole bunch" to be in the hundreds, thousands, or even ten thousands.

But Kroft's leading question is more honest than Obama's response was, because the confusion arising out of Obama's "deadline" was far, far more consequential than the statistical probability that some fraction of the audience got it.  For days after the speech, administration officials offered contradictory clarifications, with Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen clearly suggesting that the deadline was a token target that would not drive the withdrawal schedule and spokesman Gibbs talking about the deadline as "etched in stone."

The policy compromise embodied in the speech and the underlying policy decision was in fact intended to square a number of circles. It was an escalation-with-a-prearranged-deadline-for-beginning-a-withdrawal-but-vagueness-about-how-fast-and-the-conditions-under-which-the-subsequent-withdrawal-would-happen sort of compromise.

It was designed to let administration hawks say we are in this war to win it and administration doves to say that we are not making an open-ended commitment to win this war. 

It was designed to split Obama's opposition so that, as has happened, some Republicans praised the escalation part and other Republicans excoriated the artificial deadline part, and some anti-war Democrats bit their tongues over the escalation and clung bitterly to the artificial deadline while others saw the artificial deadline as a fiction and loudly denounced the escalation.

It was designed to confuse domestic political enemies and it achieved that goal. An unintended consequence was that it also confused international allies, as the Pakistan story makes clear. Reasonable people can debate whether President Obama had better options that were less confusing. Reasonable people can debate whether the benefits of the confusion outweigh the costs of the confusion. Reasonable people will conclude -- and I am one of them -- that on balance the speech and the underlying policy position were worth supporting.

But -- and here is the absolutely crucial part -- no reality-based observer can pretend that the speech and the underlying policy was not confusing. To pretend otherwise is either to peddle absurd spin or, worse, to be so infected with a bunker mentality that one is operating in a bubble.  

As a general rule, I don't like media interpretations that reduce to "the president and the White House team are in a fantasy world bubble." In my experience, that allegation has been leveled many times when I know for a fact that it has been untrue. But if the administration really believes that the "deadline" that is not really a deadline has not produced confusion at home and abroad, then I am hard-pressed to come up with explanations that do not mention bubbles.

Win McNamee/Getty Images

By Peter Feaver

The post-Afghan-announcement spin has been almost as interesting as the announcement itself. Over on our sister blog, Tom Ricks raps my knuckles for finding fault with Obama's rhetoric and assures us that the speech was likely effective with its intended audience: Obama supporters.

Color me "still not persuaded." Mind you, I agree that Obama aimed the speech at his supporters, especially his supporters who like to think that all of Obama's problems can be blamed on his predecessor (supporters like Tom, for instance). I further agree that the policy compromise, particularly the promise to begin the withdrawal in 18 months, was aimed at his supporters. I just don't think the speech was effective at doing so. Mine is not a partisan observation, since folks who have drunk far more Kool-Aid than Tom, folks like Chris Matthews, for instance, also found the speech ineffective.

But what matters is not the relative artfulness vs. artlessness of the speech. What will have lingering impact is the 3-month review, not the 30-some minute speech. And here I believe, the case is fairly dispositive. Despite the spin coming out of the White House, this review, and its general untidiness, almost certainly did more damage to public/political support for the war than it helped. Several dedicated Obama supporters have tried to persuade me that Obama has been masterful throughout this process and their case just does not withstand careful scrutiny.

To make the case that this was masterful, one has to make a far-fetched counterfactual argument that the (declining) support we see today is somehow stronger (and much, much stronger) than it would have been in early September if the president had made the decision in a timely manner. Further, one must argue that going forward the president is better poised to keep that support shored up despite all of the other damage (such as to our NATO and regional allies) that has been done in the intervening 3 months.

But Obama did not use the three month interval to shore up domestic support for the war and, on the contrary, it is likely that domestic support for his policy is lower today than it would have been had he conducted the review in a less clumsy fashion. Instead of spending the time reassuring wobbly Democrats, the team spent their time doing a near-Diem on Karzai, upbraiding the military brass, and, of course, complaining about how the previous team never ever asked any hard questions. This gave both time and material to strengthen the anti-war sentiment at home (to be sure it is not a juggernaut, but it is undeniably stronger on Dec. 3 than it was on Sept. 3, as the three month slide in poll numbers makes clear), to re-cement in Pakistan's mind that the United States is an unreliable ally, to undermine the utility of the two principal civilian players in the Afghan mission (Holbrooke and Eikenberry), to convince the major NATO allies that they were right to start edging to the door, and to sow all sorts of doubts in the minds of the U.S. military.

Now the policy compromise itself is indeed intended to shore up that support (buying Dem acquiescence with an arbitrary commitment to give a "mission accomplished" speech in July 2011) while doing the least amount of damage to the actual policy (give McChrystal close to what he asked for, give himself enough wiggle room to keep waging the war after his 2011 "mission accomplished speech"). But it did not take him 3 months of painstaking review to find that that compromise. It was available to him all along. So far, the Obama team has not leaked any evidence to suggest that the arbitrary date was derived from careful analysis of what is actually doable on the ground in Afghanistan: eg. How fast can we really stand up the ANA or how fast can we really strike a mortal blow at the Taliban. In the absence of that sort of analysis, it is more likely that the target date was arrived at by analysis of two other fixed calendars -- calendars that were known long ago: the troop PERSTEMPO schedule and the 2012 presidential primary calendar. If so, that Solomonic compromise was fully discernible from the beginning and Obama could have announced it to roughly the same level of cheers and jeers in early September.

So the long review was not really about buying time to shore up public or political support for the war. That does not mean that the delay served no political purpose. It may be that the long delayed review served two other political goals, one successfully and the other less so.

First, the delay bought time and freed up legislative/political bandwidth to pass Obamacare. Had Obama announced the Afghanistan decision in September, he would have greatly complicated the politics of health care. Having angered his left-wing base on Afghanistan, he might have felt obliged to tilt even further to the left (and sooner) on health care. As it is, he still faces a fight in the Senate, but health care looks to be in far better shape today than it did in early September. In that respect, this is a very close analog to President Johnson's 1964-1965 strategic calculation: dither on national security policy long enough to get the higher priority domestic programs through.  

Second, the delay bought time and freed up political space to do a full-court press to mobilize base turnout in the off-year elections. This domestic objective was not successfully reached, but it was not for lack of trying on the part of the White House who deployed Obama to an extraordinary degree in an effort to win both New Jersey and Virginia. Given how desperate both candidates were for a strong turn-out of the left-wing base in the election, it would be only natural for the political advisors who played such an integral role in Obama's Afghan Strategy Review 2.0 to want to delay any policy decision that would anger the base until after the election.

Mind you, I am not sure that these domestic political calculations were the primary factors dictating the pace of the review. It may very well be the case that the dithering was largely due to Obama's own discomfort with the decision. However, I am pretty sure that the delay was not primarily or even secondarily about doing the ground work necessary to reassure Obama supporters that the president had done due diligence before ordering an escalation for a war that only a few months earlier all of those people were championing as the good and necessary war.

There is one final way in which the 3-month delay might linger. One theme emerged fairly consistently from all of the leaking and sniping: Please give Obama credit for doing the kind of serious analysis and question-asking and military-request-heeding that you-know-who never did. This was a natural extension of the permanent political campaign  and, while tiresome, might at least be defensible if it were true and well-aimed. But it has been neither. The key charges have been shown to be false (for instance, see here and here).

But perhaps worse than repeatedly leveling false charges, the attacks are poorly aimed: whether intended or not, the folks hit by these attacks are members of Obama's own Afghanistan security team. The people who "failed" to do the serious analysis, question-asking, and military-request-heeding, as the president's spokesman Gibbs makes clear, were the folks in charge throughout 2008. The problem is that they happen to include some of the same people on whom Obama now relies, including his Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and his White House Afghan war czar General Doug Lute. One could argue that since the attacks are false to begin with, there is no damage done and the people hit with those attacks are not going to get upset. Yet, when Secretary Gates goes to some lengths to explain that what the president said last night about deadlines was really not much of a deadline, one cannot help but wonder whether he is showing that he can dish it out as well as take it. And when the White House hits back within the same news cycle one cannot help but wonder whether we are heading into a stormy patch personnel-wise on national security.

JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

By Peter Feaver

I had some sympathy for the Obama folks when I read this newspaper account of yesterday's meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki. Apparently, it was a solid, business-oriented meeting. And since President Obama has reportedly stopped holding regular video-teleconferencing with Maliki (a staple of US-Iraqi relations under the last Administration), this meeting was especially important.

What caught my eye was President Obama's comment at the end of the story: ""Overall," Obama said, "we have been very encouraged by the progress that has been made."

This statement struck me as both honest and misleading. Honest, because if you start with a January 2007 frame of reference -- say then-candidate Obama's claim that surge was going to have no impact on violence -- then the progress has been remarkable and very encouraging. But it also struck me as misleading in the sense that it did not also say that the recent spike in violence, and even more the recent flare-up of Arab-Kurdish tensions, is undoubtedly discouraging, and I would be surprised if the Obama team did not feel the same. Of course, as the Post story related, Obama also acknowledged that there are "tough days ahead" in Iraq. But the overall message was one of progress, a word he invoked 6 times in the prepared remarks and 3 times in the answer to the first question and that is the lede for the story.

That got me wondering: would those folks (say the mainstream Bob Woodward or Tom Ricks, let alone other people in the nuttier fringes of the Bush-bashing chorus) who established a cottage industry lambasting Bush Administration rhetoric as "happy talk" rise up and start calling a foul on President Obama? President Bush regularly caveated his statements of progress with reminders that there were "tough days ahead" and, if memory serves, Rumsfeld was the guy who coined "long, hard slog." In their coverage of Bush, sometimes the reporters would include mention of the caveats and qualify their lede accordingly; sometimes the reporters would include mention of the caveats and yet stick to a "happy talk" lede; and sometimes the reporters would simply omit any mention of the caveats, perhaps the better to advance the "happy talk" lede. Regardless of how many times President Bush presented carefully caveated assessments, the Bush-bashers could always rest their indictment on one or two off-the-cuff uncaveated remarks.

At what point will Obama's rhetoric on Iraq suffer this same fate? I hope never and, even more, I hope it never deserves to. It is appropriate for President Obama to balance "if it bleeds, it leads" coverage with mention of developments that are not getting as much press attention. And it is appropriate for President Obama in public to exhort the Iraqis towards greater progress by emphasizing the positive rather than dwelling on the negative. In fact, President Obama has talked so little in public about Iraq I would welcome virtually anything he said. Of course, I also hope that President Obama is as candid and clear-eyed about the challenges in private as his predecessor was, and I hope he continues to offer appropriate caveats even if he is stressing a publicly optimistic message. If the "happy talk police" give him the free pass they never gave his predecessor, so be it. The Iraqi challenge is hard enough without having to duck "police" brutality, even if it is only rhetorical.

SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images