Pity poor Lebanon. Earlier this month, the murderous regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad imposed a government in Beirut dominated by the terrorist group, Hezbollah -- which, as it happens, we were reminded just this morning, likely carried out the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005. Before our very eyes, the Lebanon of not-so-distant memory -- pluralist, free-wheeling, open to the West and the values of liberalism -- is being snuffed out by U.S. enemies. And by all appearances, no one can really be bothered, including, sadly enough, the Obama administration.

Six months ago, the pro-Western Saad Hariri (Rafiq's son) walked into an Oval Office meeting with President Obama as Lebanon's prime minister. He walked out a mere caretaker. Syria and Hezbollah chose precisely that moment to collapse his government. The immediate cause was Hariri's refusal to comply with the demand that he terminate his government's support for the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) -- whose first indictments, handed down today, finger Hezbollah for carrying out the horrific bombing that killed his legendary father.

But the gambit to take down Saad was also widely understood to have a more strategic purpose, a humiliating slap at Obama and the United States. The message could not have been clearer: Such will be the fate of the United States' friends who dare defy the ascendant Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah axis. Obama, and Washington, can do nothing to protect you.

Read on

Reading through the various detailed accounts, and keeping in mind that we are still learning new things and unlearning things we thought we knew barely a day ago, I am struck by the following aspects of the affair:

• This clearly marks that we are in the post-Gates era. Obama stuck his toe in the Rubicon when he over-ruled his superstar secretary of defense to launch the Libya operation. He crossed over to the other side when he decided to do the SEAL strike rather than the bombing strike recommended by Gates. The baton of "most influential security voice" has passed from Gates to someone else, perhaps to his successor, Panetta, who ran the military operation.
• This was also clearly a post-Clinton choice. Obama took the riskier option, the one with a much higher potential downside, rather than the "safe" choice that would assuredly destroy the target with almost no chance of U.S. casualties or fiascos. During the Clinton era, that was how bin Laden was handled, with a risk-minimization strategy of stand-off strikes. Obama's reliance on drone strikes elsewhere echoes that earlier period, but with this SEAL attack he clearly chose the risk-acceptant option. If the operation had failed, Obama would have been indelibly marked as another Jimmy Carter. It may be an exaggeration, but not by much, to say that he bet his second term on the tactical proficiency of U.S. Special Forces.
• The president showed he could "walk and chew gum." Some early carping noted that the president played a half-round of golf and found time to rehearse his gag skit for the White House Correspondent's dinner on the margins of this operation. He did more than that: around the same time he was making this momentous decision, he also made the decision to end the nonsense about his birth certificate. Outsiders may complain about the incongruity, but insiders will recognize that this is the reality of the office. The president has to go from an emotionally draining meeting with a grieving widow to a photo-op with Girl Scouts to a meeting where he decides on a political strategy for selling his economic policies to a meeting where he decides whether to authorize a drone strike. Each meeting is the most important meeting of the day (or more) for everyone else in the room except the president. Sometimes the different lines bleed into each other -- did the president choose the bin Laden option that offered the best chance of avoiding a "deather" conspiracy theory because he was concurrently dealing with a "birther" conspiracy theory? Other times, the president must compartmentalize.
• The decision parameters played to an Obama strength and away from an Obama weakness. A reporter pointed this out to me: Obama could take his time in making this decision, which allowed him to set up the deliberate process he seems to favor. The administration has not done well when trying to respond to rapidly evolving events visible to everyone else -- witness the shaky response to the June 2009 Green Revolution in Iran, the 2011 Arab Spring, and the rapidly collapsing situation in Libya. On the bin Laden strike, Obama did not have unlimited time, but he did have more time and, importantly, more space away from public pressure, to weigh the decision before acting
• Still no sign of the vice-president. I realize I have belabored this point beyond what it probably merits, still it is striking that the tic-toc describes a debate between Obama and Gates, and the steely-eyed resolve of Panetta and Brennan, and merely the fingering of a rosary bead by the vice president. I asked a reporter who participated in an extensive backgrounder and was told that the vice president wasn't mentioned. What gives? 

As the world's attention remains rapt with the surge of "people power" in North Africa and the Middle East toppling and threatening to topple unpopular dictators, the Brookings Institution this week hosted a panel discussion on ways the United States could better co-operate with the five-decade-old Castro dictatorship in Cuba.

Talk about a monumental case of bad timing.

Keynoting the session was former New Mexico governor and self-styled diplomatic troubleshooter Bill Richardson, who was in Cuba as recently as last August leading a trade mission of businessmen looking to cut deals with the Castro regime.  (Agricultural products are exempt from the embargo.)

Apparently oblivious to the irony of advocating normalizing relations with the Castro dictatorship even as thousands are risking their lives to oppose tyrannies elsewhere, Governor Richardson forged ahead with ways the Obama administration could improve relations with the Castro regime by lessening current U.S. sanctions.

Among them, removing Cuba from the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism. According to Richardson, "My view is that this terrorism list is not very consistent. It's an emotional issue." In other words, Cuba's listing lacks merit or substance.

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For an administration that claims there is no conflict between our interests and our values, the Obama administration has sure seemed to have a difficult time balancing U.S. interests in a stable Egypt with the U.S. values of a democratic Egypt.

The administration is in a legitimately tough position deciding how much support to continue giving an authoritarian government that has proved useful to us. But as the protests have worn on, the president, like Secretary Clinton, hit a better balance, calling on the Mubarak government to set in motion a transition to free elections. Vice President Biden was characteristically maladroit, claiming Mubarak was not a dictator and explaining that all the Egyptian protesters were seeking was "a little more opportunity." The Pentagon was characteristically calm and forward leaning, reaching out to the Egyptian defense establishment -- which is indistinguishable from the Egyptian government at its highest levels -- to urge professionalism and restraint.

The Egyptian military has already delivered on the only important near-term military request the United States is likely to make: not using force against the protesters. How might democratization in Egypt affect U.S.-Egyptian military cooperation? Short of an Iranian-style Islamic government overtly hostile to the United States, Mubarak's departure is unlikely to affect military cooperation with the United States. The United States does not actually rely on the Egyptian military for much militarily, and most of that which the United States does is very much in their interests to continue. But it could affect Egyptian-Israeli cooperation, with enormous consequences for the United States.

For military purposes, the United States relies on the Egyptian government in three main ways: 1) acting as a transit for U.S. military forces, 2) preventing Egypt from becoming a base for terrorist activity that would affect the United States, and 3) protecting Israel.

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Some quick thoughts on the bombing in Stockholm last weekend that injured two and killed the suicide bomber:

First, this attack, like so many that have occurred over the past two years, shows the interconnectedness of the Salafi jihadist groups. The Stockholm bomber, Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly, was radicalized in Britain; almost certainly travelled to Iraq and Jordan for jihad training; explicitly carried out his attack in the name of the Islamic State (of Iraq); and was encouraged to do so by a Swedish jihadist in Somalia.

Second, the radicalization of Abdaly confirms that Britain's reputation for creating extremists is well-deserved. Before 2001, al-Abdaly had led the normal life of a Swedish young man -- his friends commented on his Israeli girlfriend, his beer-drinking, and his partying while in high school. All this changed once he arrived in Luton, Britain, which has become infamous as a center for radical Islam. Abdaly was transformed into an extremist over the course of the next few years, perhaps by the preaching of al-Muhajiroun, a radical group whose former leader, Anjem Choudary, has said that the suicide bombing should be seen as a "severe warning" and "should not come as a surprise."

Third, arguments that involvement in the Iraq war or the fighting in Afghanistan is what truly angers the extremists no longer ring true. In his martyrdom statement sent to Swedish law enforcement and media, Abdaly accused the Swedes of failing to sufficiently condemn the drawings of Lars Vilks and of having any presence at all in Afghanistan (however peaceful their participation). If ordinary Swedes can be singled out as worthy of death for these policies, then no one is safe from suicide bombing.

Finally, Iraqi officials have just warned that more attacks are on the way: Abdaly's attempt, captured insurgents have said, is just the first of many more plots planned for the Christmas season in both Europe and the United States.

The New America Foundation convened a conference this week to showcase the work of Robert Pape, in the hopes that his policy prescriptions will be picked up as an alternative to our current strategy in Afghanistan. This would be a terrible idea. 

Pape's research shows that the majority of suicide bomb attacks occur in places occupied by U.S. military forces; from this he concludes that we should adopt a strategy of "offshore balancing." By which he means to remove U.S. forces and rely on military strikes into the countries, along with more effective political and economic engagement. Neither the research nor the prescriptions are sound bases for policy.

To say that attacks occur where U.S. forces are deployed is to say no more than Willy Sutton, who robbed banks because "that's where the money is." Pape's approach ignores the context in which deployment and stationing of U.S. forces occurs. We send troops to advance our interests, protect our allies, and contest the political and geographic space that groups like al Qaeda and the Taliban are operating in. Of course the attacks will stop if we cede those political objectives. But the troops are not the point, the political objectives are the point.

The second important context Pape glosses over is that suicide attacks do not occur wherever in the world U.S. troops are deployed. Troops stationed in Germany, Japan, or South Korea are not at risk of suicide attacks from the people of those countries. This is not just about U.S. troops, but also about the societies we are operating in. It is about a radical and violent interpretation of Islam that we are using military force to contest.

The policy prescriptions Pape advances are also problematic. An offshore balancing approach means that we will not be engaged with military forces on the ground, and yet what we have learned in the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan is that we achieve our objectives most fully when indigenous forces are partnered with us and made able to take over the work of U.S. forces in the fight. They have greater legitimacy, local knowledge, and make the outcome most durable. That was the Bush administration's strategy in Iraq, and it is the purported approach of the Obama administration in Afghanistan. Pape's policies have no way to achieve that improvement in the capacity of partner forces.

An offshore balancing approach is also inherently retaliatory and has been shown to increase the resistance of affected populations to supporting our objectives. We threaten to use force from the safe confines of distance; that use of force may have pinpoint accuracy but will often be less precise and cause more civilian casualties than forces on the ground, which will again feed into public attitudes about whether to support U.S. goals. Instead of working with the people most affected and helping build their capacity to protect themselves, offshore balancing does little to change the problem in positive ways.

Except for the "improved" political and economic activity. How that will be undertaken in a deteriorating security environment is mysterious. Moreover, if we could do any better at the provision of political and economic engagement, we'd already be doing that.

Convincing allies the U.S. will commit itself to fight unless we have troops stationed where we expect the fight to occur has always been difficult. The history of the Cold War is replete with transatlantic discussion of extended deterrence: would the United States really send the boys back over if Germany were attacked? Would the United States really use nuclear weapons when our own homeland would be at risk of retaliation? It seems unlikely those concerns would be attenuated in societies we are less politically and culturally similar to than we are to Europeans.

In short, Robert Pape's "offshore balancing" approach would reduce violence by giving our enemies what they want: our disengagement, the ability to terrorize with impunity the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other places where the battle of ideas about Muslim modernity is engaged.

The 9/11 anniversary is a traditional time for taking stock of the war on terror, and the conventional wisdom has issued its verdict: the United States "over-reacted." The evidence the pundits offer includes the following: (a) the United States spent a great deal of money; (b) thousands of U.S. soldiers lost their lives; (c) the anti-terror bureaucracy is much larger than it was before; (d) policy favored the national security end of the long-standing continuum running from unfettered civil-liberties to absolute national security; and (e) al Qaeda has not launched another successful 9/11 sized attack on U.S. soil. Indeed, Osama Bin Laden is on the run and has become a marginalized figure.

The conventional wisdom would be more persuasive if the pundits engaged systematically and critically with the hypothesis that (a) plus (b) plus (c) plus (d) contributed to (e). As far as I can tell, they simply ignore that possibility.

However, the conventional wisdom does get one thing right: With a national security challenge of the magnitude posed by the 9/11 attacks, it is likely that U.S. strategists got some things wrong (and some things right... that part seems to have eluded the pundits). Strategy has an unavoidable trial-and-error element to it, and anniversaries are good moments for stock-taking.

I won't pretend to offer a complete list, but here are two I would flag in each column.

Two things we got wrong in the weeks immediately following 9/11:

• Mismatching goals and capabilities of U.S. ground forces. The Bush administration entered office with a clear national security vision of transforming the military. There were a number of elements to this: redressing a decade of drift on weapons procurement and readiness; investing in generation-skipping technologies to extend America's military advantage into the out-years; reforming wasteful Pentagon practices; creating a more agile and lethal force; and downsizing the extremely expensive ground forces (expensive not only because of up-front operational costs but even more because of downstream personnel costs). This transformation agenda was premised on the notion that we were in a period of strategic pause -- we would not need to deploy the military in combat in the near future, certainly not for a lengthy ground combat operation, so we could afford to take some near-term risk to invest in long-term improvements. After 9/11, that premise was less plausible, though the Afghanistan operation arguably was sustainable under the old assumptions. Iraq clearly was not. The error was a strategy gap combining a decision to confront Iraq with a decision not to expand the size of the ground forces. By the time the administration had closed this gap in 2007, the strains to the All-Volunteer Force were acute.
• Missing the opportunity to "nationalize the burden" through some sort of broad-based measure like a gas tax. I understand why the administration was leery about raising taxes. They had inherited an economy heading into a recession and the psychological shock of the 9/11 attacks threatened to impose severe economic pain out of proportion to the actual physical damage of the attacks. The president's call for the public to resume normal economic activity was sound (but could have been worded more carefully so as to avoid the tendentious parodies that followed it). A gas tax would have had some economic downsides, but in retrospect probably not as great as was feared at the time. It would also, however, have brought some symbolic upsides, making clear that every American was paying for the security we valued. Ever since, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have struggled against the perception that the burdens of the war are disproportionately born by a few Americans. Some of this is inevitable with an All-Volunteer Army. But the failure to find a persuasive rebuttal to that perception has been unfortunate and, in retrospect, avoidable.

Two things we got right in the weeks immediately following 9/11:

• Recognition that confronting Bin Laden would require all elements of national power. The Bush administration arrived in office believing that the Clinton approach to terrorism in general and to Bin Laden in particular was unstrategic and artificially truncated. But they were slow to act on this insight until the 9/11 attacks. After that, they showed extraordinary resourcefulness in tapping all of government, not just law enforcement and the military. The conventional critique from "anti-militarists" that the Bush administration only used military power is self-evidently wrong. Instead, there were remarkable innovations in law enforcement techniques, intelligence operations, diplomatic initiatives, and soft-power campaigns. Not all of these new measures proved effective, but it seems clear that none of them would have worked at all if they were complemented only with a few salvos of stand-off airstrikes -- the only military tool Bin Laden saw the United States use against him since he launched his war in the 1990s. The decision to utilize a robust military effort with other instruments of statecraft put al Qaeda on the run and, pace the conventional wisdom pundits, is probably why al Qaeda poses less of a threat today than it did when we confronted them in the aftermath of 9/11.
• Determination to confront the ideological roots of al Qaeda terrorism without falling into a religious war. The events of the past month stand in sharp contrast to the months immediately following the 9/11 attacks. It is ironic that our society has had a tougher time dealing with the religious issue almost a decade later than we had dealing with it when the passions and wounds were so fresh. The handling of this issue by the Bush administration looks rather deft in retrospect and in comparison with recent events. And, of course, the American people deserve enormous credit. Critics say that Americans should be held to a higher standard than other societies, where persecution of  religious minorities is rife and where attempts to stir up religious violence are often successful. We met that higher standard after 9/11 and political leaders on both sides of the aisle deserve some credit.  

In sum, the record is mixed, but hardly as negative as the conventional wisdom paints.  

Now that administration officials have announced that the Pakistani Taliban (the TTP) were behind the recent attempted bombing of Times Square, we can turn to the question of why there have been so many threatened and actual attacks on the United States inspired by, or actually emanating from, places where the United States is not involved in an active war. A look at arrests in the United States from May 2009 to the present shows dozens of such cases -- many involving multiple suspects -- linked to places like Somalia, Yemen, and of course Pakistan. Four of the plotters (Abulhakim Mujahid Muhammad (Yemen), Nidal Malik Hasan (Yemen), Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (Yemen), and Faisal Shahzad (Pakistan) managed to carry out attacks, although only two were "successful."

One can see how exceptional this is by looking at previous years. In 2008 there was only one such case -- Bryant Neal Vinas -- and he was caught before he could carry out his planned attack. The previous year saw about two dozen cases, but many can be traced back to Iraq or Afghanistan and, as in 2008, none led to actual attacks. The questions are: Why has there been such a spike in cases this past year, and why were four of them able to advance beyond planning to attacks? This second question might be beyond the scope of anyone outside the government, but it is worth asking, in any case. The first question, however, does have some public data points that might help to answer it.

The New York Times believes that targeting Taliban figures led directly to the attacks on the United States, as anger over the deaths of Pakistani jihadist leaders like Baytullah Mehsud have spilled over into the United States. While there seems to be something to this assertion, there must be other factors at play as well. This was, after all, the strategy followed by the Bush administration, but only now has it led to a spike in plots against the American homeland from not only the Pakistani Taliban, but other jihadist groups worldwide.

Read on

In a stunning development, a leading member of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, which unifies Pakistani Taliban groups under the authority of Mullah Omar and Osama bin Ladin, has claimed responsibility for the attempted attack on Times Square. The failed car bomb is yet another reminder that our enemies have not gone away, and the rush to take credit for it shows that they still want to kill as many Americans as possible. The lethality of the attempt should not be underestimated. Authorities on the scene described the propane canisters and gasoline tanks in the car, and experts have said that a successful detonation of the bomb would have created a fireball that might have killed dozens of pedestrians. But if this bomb was like the one recovered in 2007 from Piccadilly Circus, and comparisons are already being made with that earlier failed attempt, the car might also have contained nails and other metal objects intended to kill even more people in an explosion.

This attempted attack is also a reminder that the administration's conviction that "solving" the Israel-Palestine conflict will end the terrorist threat to the United States is mistaken. We cannot negotiate away or mollify the desire by al Qaeda, the Taliban, or other Salafi-jihadis to kill us, because the men who subscribe this ideology do not want a just peace between Israel and Palestine with two states living side by side:  they want the destruction of Israel. They also do not have reasonable demands for the United States, e.g., a desire that the U.S. stop "meddling" in the affairs of the Muslim-majority world:  they want the United States destroyed.

One other important point: we have now been lucky twice in just a few months -- the "underwear bomber" only failed to bring down the flight into Detroit because he did not correctly detonate his bomb. In much the same way, hundreds were spared in Times Square solely because the car bomb failed to explode. Lucky can only take you so far, however, and we need to be more than "lucky" if another attempt is going to be stopped.

Karl Rove is back in the news with his memoirs doing something that he claims the Bush administration did not do vigorously enough: re-litigating the past. I will have more to say when I finish reading the book, but for now I want to talk about one of the highlights flagged in several interviews: Rove's claim that if the administration had known the true extent of Iraq's WMD stockpile and programs it would not have pushed the use of force resolution in October 2002 and invaded in 2003.

This claim leapt out at me because I remember President Bush giving a somewhat different answer a few years ago. For instance, in December 2005 Bush was asked more or less this exact same question and he gave this response:

HUME: Can you say today that if you had known then what you know now about the weapons, that you would have made the same decision.

BUSH: I said it today, and I said it at the last speech I gave. And I've said it throughout the campaign to the American people. I said I made the right decision. Knowing what I know today, I would have still made that decision.

HUME: Now if you had this -- if the weapons had been out of the equation, because the intelligence did not conclude that he had them, it was still the right call?

BUSH: Absolutely.

In a valedictory interview, he was asked this question again and his answer was less dogmatic:

GIBSON: You've always said there's no do-overs as President. If you had one?

BUSH: I don't know -- the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn't just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that's not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.

GIBSON: If the intelligence had been right, would there have been an Iraq war?

BUSH: Yes, because Saddam Hussein was unwilling to let the inspectors go in to determine whether or not the U.N. resolutions were being upheld. In other words, if he had had weapons of mass destruction, would there have been a war? Absolutely.

GIBSON: No, if you had known he didn't.

BUSH: Oh, I see what you're saying. You know, that's an interesting question. That is a do-over that I can't do. It's hard for me to speculate.

At some level, of course, this is an impossible hypothetical counter-factual and so there is nothing sinister in the fact that one of Bush's key advisors would give a different answer from the president nor even in the fact that the President would give a different answer at different times. Bush is at work on his own memoirs and so doubtless he is wrestling with this very issue himself and so his views may evolve still further.

And we should not exaggerate the contradictions in these various answers. Both Bush and Rove say that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein and both would say that if Iraq continues on the basically positive trajectory it has been on since the surge decision the war will have been "worth it."

But I think Rove's point is important and basically right. There were good reasons to promote regime change in Iraq and good reasons to oppose it. But the strongest case for the urgency of dealing decisively with Iraq in 2002 hinged on Iraq's WMD arsenal and its pursuit of capabilities to expand that arsenal. Had the true condition of that arsenal (limited) and the true status of the pursuit (ongoing but slower than suspected and put on a somewhat slower track deliberately pending the final collapse of the sanctions regime) been known by the Bush administration, the president's national security team would have pursued other more urgent priorities in the war on terror. And had it been known more widely in Congress, there would not have been such strong bipartisan support for the use of force resolution; all of the major Democratic senators in 2002 with ambitions for the 2004 presidential run supported the use of force resolution because they agreed with the consensus view that Iraq had a formidable WMD arsenal and was seeking to expand it still further. And had it been known more widely in the international community, the argument with our allies would have been over the existence of an Iraqi threat rather than over the best strategy for dealing with it.

There were a few iconoclasts who guessed more accurately the truth about the Iraqi WMD program in 2002, but they were outliers -- not unlike the outliers today who claim that Iran has no nuclear weapons ambitions whatsoever. Then, as now, it would seem quite a gamble to base an entire security strategy on an iconoclastic view that, if wrong, would be disastrously wrong. And, of course, we only know these truths because  the Duelfer report provided the intrusive fact-finding that was impossible while Hussein was in power. The situation in mid-2002 was one of a non-existent inspection regime and a collapsing sanctions regime; those and other dots pointed to the consensus that formed the basis of the Bush policy.

Rove's point is important in one further respect -- it rebuts a core tenet of the most fervent Bush-haters, those who believe that Bush wanted war in Iraq for any number of reasons, none of them having to do with the threat Bush claimed Iraqi WMD posed to the national interest of the United States. Those who think the Iraq war was about some Freudian impulse to best the father, or about seizing Iraqi oil, or about boosting Halliburton's profits, or what-have-you must believe that Rove is wrong -- that Bush would have figured out some other way to generate a war. These canards live on and, in some circles, may even enjoy the status of conventional wisdom. Given those circumstances, Rove is right to litigate the matter again.

I am coming late to the debate over whether it is inappropriate for President Obama to continue his vacation despite the Christmas day terrorist incident. But the issue apparently still resonates, and the vigor of the White House counter-attack on critics shows that it remains hyper-sensitive to the charge (or “hyper-vigilant” as the reporter euphemistically put it).

Defenders of the administration complain that President Bush did not interrupt his vacation in December 2001 to offer comment on the “shoe bomber” so it is unfair to criticize the Obama administration for its initially laidback (“the system worked”) response. Critics of the administration complain that for years the Democrats made political sport out of juxtaposing images of President Bush on vacation with images of national security problems around the globe so it is time for some partisan chickens to come home to roost.

My own view is sympathetic to the administration (though not to the administration’s defenders). I find aspects of the Obama response troubling, but I don’t think the focus of criticism should be on how often the president plays golf, or on what is happening at the precise moment he is on the golf course, or on what he said right before or right after a golf shot. I understand the optics problem, as would any White House staffer, and Obama’s handlers probably can be faulted for some sketchy stage-craft. And I understand the desire of Republicans to finally dish out some of the guff they have taken for 8 years from blowhards. The towering hypocrisy of Bush critics who pretend that a vacationing Bush was a sign the president was fecklessly AWOL while a vacationing Obama is a sign the president is masterfully calm in a crisis would be breathtaking if it were not so depressingly predictable.

Let’s bash away at hypocritical pundits, but let’s not bash away at the White House -- not for taking a vacation, anyway. The Obama team has struck me as tired and in acute need of a vacation for months now.  Being president is an exceptionally tiring job, and staffing the president is no day at the beach either.  The pace of a normal White House is fatiguing in the extreme, and this team has prided itself in attempting to do more than any other White House attempted. Every seasoned Washington hand I know has made more or less the same observation: the Obama team has tried to do too much and it is starting to show.

We should keep in focus the human element of being president (and there is good political science, much of it from my Duke colleague Ole Holsti, to help us keep that focus). A tired president , a stressed-out staff, a clogged in-box -- this is all recipe for missteps.  The missteps may be relatively trivial: clumsy spin, shoddy stage-craft, or cranky outbursts.  Or they could be more significant: diplomatic gaffes, failure to connect intelligence dots, or other fundamental miscalculations.

We still do not have a clear enough picture into the back-story to the abortive Christmas Day attack to know precisely what went wrong, so it would be premature to suggest that fatigue was a factor.  But it is not premature to suggest that a tired White House is less capable of dealing effectively with the aftermath than a rested White House would be.

President Obama and his team need R&R more than anyone who has commented on their performance thus far, including me.  Unless there is credible evidence that they are shirking the national security portfolio while on vacation -- and so far, I have not seen much evidence of that -- I say let them play golf.

By Peter Feaver

President Obama's announcement that, in his view, there was a "systemic failure" that almost enabled al Qaeda to make its long-sought and long-denied follow-up strike on U.S. soil has got me reconsidering my view that it is premature to fire Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano.

Obama's statement, fueled by fresh revelations of how warnings went unheeded, is an abrupt reversal from the administration's original stance which peddled the view that the abortive terrorist attack was an indication that the system had worked well. Coupled with Obama's vague warning that there would be "accountability at every level" it now looks increasingly likely that the administration's missteps amount to firing offenses for at least some. But for whom and when?

Pending fresh revelations, I will stick to my view that we don't know enough yet to determine the level and degree of administration failure and thus the proper type of accountability. We need the oversight hearings first. We do know enough, however, to know that the hearings must be an absolute top and urgent priority. We should demand that the Obama administration cooperate with those hearings and not stone-wall, as some have claimed they are doing. And we do know a bit more about lines of inquiry for those hearings.

Beyond my initial suggestion that the hearings focus on the impact, if any, of the Obama's administration's effort to replace the "war" mind-set with a "law enforcement" mind-set throughout the counter-terrorism bureaucracy, I would add one more: are the failures and missteps that almost led to catastrophe on Christmas day partially a result of the intense feuding between the CIA and the Director of National Intelligence that has characterized the Obama tenure from the start? That charge is leveled in the Post story and it is not wildly implausible. Certainly experienced insiders have been warning of just such a possibility: that the cumulative effect of the numerous steps Obama has taken and not taken -- for instance, the decision to pursue what Vice President Cheney has called a politically motivated investigation of CIA counter-terror activities during the early Bush years, or the failure to resolve turf fights between the Director of the CIA and the Director of National Intelligence -- would yield excessive caution and breakdowns in interagency coordination on operational matters. Cheney's warning looks prescient in light of recent reporting.

But let's acknowledge that the picture is still unclear and the reporting still based on fragmentary evidence and anonymous quotes from insiders who may have their own self-protection incentives to distort the picture. All the more reason to get key administration officials to testify on the record and under oath. What they have to say may simply underscore the difficulty of providing adequate security in an age of globalization and transnational terrorist networks, or it may very well amount to a strong repudiation of some key aspects of Obama's approach to the terrorist threat. If it is the latter, then President Obama should acknowledge this forthrightly and take whatever steps are necessary, changing policy and perhaps personnel.

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.

By Peter Feaver

Professor Andy Bacevich, a prolific critic of American foreign policy, has proposed an intriguing grand strategy for the conflict formerly called the war on terror: let's approach the war on terror as if it were another Cold War. Since Andy knows first-hand the personal tragedy of these wars -- his son died while serving in the Army in Iraq -- his powerful voice of moral authority garners a respectful audience every time he speaks on the subject.

I am sympathetic to the Cold War frame and offered it as a useful way for thinking about the problem of terrorism almost exactly 8 years ago, as did other commentators -- notably, Eliot Cohen. We thought that the framework was a useful antidote to the pre-9/11 mindset which viewed terrorism narrowly through the lens of law enforcement and thus limited policymakers only to a very restricted set of law enforcement tools. The broader Cold War frame incorporated all of the law enforcement tools, plus additional ones. I don't remember Andy (whom I consider to be a friend and long-time debating partner) being persuaded by our reasoning then; I rather recall him thinking it would lead to what he calls American "militarism." But evidently he has come around to our point of view now.

In so doing, he joins President Bush, who used that frame in his 2006 National Security Strategy and his follow-on National Strategy for Combating Terrorism. The three pillars Andy highlights would all produce emphatic head-nodding from any Bush administration alum. Pursue decapitation, meaning tracking and killing the terrorist leaders? Of course, and the Bush administration dramatically ramped up these efforts. Pursue containment, meaning improving law enforcement, tracking vigorously international financial transactions and weapons transfers?  Absolutely, and the Bush administration was very innovative in these areas. Compete with the jihadis on both a material and an ideological terrain? Again, this was a centerpiece of the Bush administration effort.

Even Andy's eloquent peroration -- "The upshot is that by modifying the way we live -- attending to pressing issues of poverty, injustice, exploitation of women and the global environmental crisis -- we might through our example induce the people of the Islamic world to consider modifying the way they live." -- reads like one of President Bush's speeches. If a Bush speechwriter were penning it, he might throw in a reference or two touting No Child Left Behind, the President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, the Malaria Initiative, the efforts in women's education, and the increased funding for renewable energy, all of which (and more) were viewed in much the same way Andy is suggesting here: part of an all-elements-of-national-power comprehensive approach to combating terrorism at both the material and ideological levels.

Now I recognize that many people, chief among them the current administration, would all argue that the Bush administration should have done even more on all of those dimensions. But the strategic pillars Andy recommends did comprise important parts of the Bush strategy and, on each of these dimensions, the Obama team has been trying to do the same thing, only harder, faster, and better.

Where he departs from what might be considered Bush/Obama orthodoxy is when Andy suggests that we can accomplish all of this even better if only we would abandon the fight in Afghanistan and also in Iraq (the Iraq point is implicit in his most recent articulation, but explicit elsewhere in Andy's writings). That is the novel bit of his proposal: the notion that the Cold War frame works better if only we would get out of Afghanistan (and Iraq). That was not President Bush's view and, so far at least with respect to Afghanistan, that is not what President Obama has embraced.

Nor does it follow inexorably from the Cold War frame. One can view the larger conflict as a Cold War, and still believe it is essential to prevail in theater combat in Afghanistan. One can even argue, as McChrystal, Petraeus, Bush, and Obama have, that prevailing in Afghanistan is an important -- Obama used to call it a necessary -- step in prevailing in that larger contest. Andy's new spin on grand strategy is in promising that we have a better shot at winning the larger contest if only we embrace the inevitability of defeat in Afghanistan and Iraq. And the sooner the better.

It is a very enticing vision, but it rests on some hazy premises. Yes, we would prefer to be able to whack the terrorists from afar and do so in a fashion in which no civilians die. But who will give us the pin-point intelligence (and so much more of it than we are getting now), after we have abandoned our erstwhile allies in Afghanistan and Iraq? How often will the terrorist leaders we are hunting show up within range of assault helicopters away from civilian population centers, thus allowing us to do the Delta Force strikes Andy favors rather than the Predator strikes we have increasingly relied upon?  How can we be sure that our departure will encourage the Muslim world to see the terrorists as offering only a "retrograde version of Islam" and not, in fact, as the "stronger horse" that has defeated its second great superpower?

As long as one elides over these tough questions, one can stay focused on this promise that we can have it all and for less sacrifice, more gain for less pain, more security for less security operations. Such a vision is far more enticing than McChrystal's somber and stark catalogue of the costs entailed in pursuing success, or the similarly painstaking evaluation of the alternatives that leaves Steve Biddle endorsing a surge in Afghanistan.

Indeed, Andy's message is so enticing, I would be surprised if we don't hear this chorus growing. The question is: Will President Obama join it?