Taking Note

Baghdad Endgame and Afghan Ambiguity

Out of one war, working our way out of the other, was President Obama's message Tuesday night in announcing the withdrawal of the last U.S. combat forces in Iraq.

The president claimed credit, legitimately, for having stuck to his campaign promise and timetable to end the American war in Iraq--an unprovoked war that shredded the credibility of American global leadership.  His Republican adversaries were reduced to complaining that Obama had opposed his predecessor's gamble on a big troop increase, or "surge," in the war's fifth year  -- though they modestly decline to claim due credit for having started the war in the first place.

Obama was, however, notably more ambiguous about his determination to achieve his complementary campaign pledge to succeed in Afghanistan. 

Facing the Pakistan Flood

Great natural disasters are a defining moment for nations and their friends. They have vast humanitarian and often political consequences, nationally and internationally. The Pakistan flood is another of those sudden earthshaking disasters. The continuing flood, already almost a month old, would have overwhelmed Pakistan no matter whether its President was ineptly slow to fly home to lead the rescue. The world has to help, but the American response -- almost always the most important for poorer countries -- has been slow, still inadequate, but growing. Read more at Huffington Post.

Kosovo Status Talks Redux

How do you deal with a government, in today’s case Serbia’s, that refuses to accept reality, achieves defeat, and persists in proposals that continue to defy reality? Clearly with difficulty, certainly in a divided Brussels.

Serbia prolonged its agony over Kosovo’s independence for over a decade. In the last two years Serbia  successfully blocked an independent Kosovo’s further  integration into the world by getting the UN General Assembly to ask the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for an advisory opinion on whether Kosovo’s declaration of independence in 2008 was legal. To the Belgrade government’s consternation and domestic political embarrassment Serbia did not get the answer it wanted—the Court declared it not illegal. But defeat has apparently not diminished the Serbian government’s determination to resume negotiations and secure a political arrangement with Kosovo the rest of the world and indeed most of Serbia know is impossible. Thus Belgrade is proposing another UN General Assembly resolution calling for new “status” talks between the two parties to work out an agreement on the status of Kosovo, while simultaneously declaring that the independence of Kosovo is forever unacceptable to Serbia—an approach that one would guess is not appealing to Pristina.Whether their effort gets very far remains to be seen.

Salvaging Afghanistan

"Salvaging Afghanistan" originally appeared on The National Interest Online on Wednesday morning 6/23/2010

The charge of hand-wringing is again heard in the land, mostly from our friends on the Right. Have any doubt about our war in Afghanistan after close to nine years and you are hand-wringing. Eighteen months into the new administration, two strategic reviews, and fifty thousand more troops later—and still, expressing doubt qualifies you for a top hand-wringing citation.

The sad fact is that there has not been enough hand-wringing over Afghanistan, except by General McCrystal, a sore winner who at least up till now pretty well got what he asked for. The upcoming administration review, supposedly due out in December, offers Obama—with two years to go till the election—the last chance of cutting through the fog of Afghan discourse to decide conclusively whether he gets out or gets in deeper.

Giustozzi on the Taliban

On a non-McChrystal Afghanistan note, I wanted to draw attention to a newly-released report by Antonio Giustozzi published by The Century Foundation. The report, "Negotiating with the Taliban: Issues and Prospects," gives an updated description of various aspects of the Taliban’s organization with an eye toward how the nature of the group’s structure and control would impact potential negotiations. The report incorporates Giustozzi's most recent fieldwork in Afghanistan in April 2010.

Among the key arguments is that the Taliban are best described as a decentralized as opposed to a fragmented organization. While the size and hierarchy within underlying networks vary,Giustozzi goes on to argue that “[a]t the very top, all these networks are kept together by links of personal loyalty to the Amir al Momineen , Mullah Omar.” Obviously, such a conclusion has ramifications for conceiving of and framing a process for a political settlement and militates against the viability of piecemeal approaches toward theTaliban assuming continued resilience of a loose but enduring organizational structure.

Karzai and the Taliban -- Let the negotiations begin

On June 12, 2010, The New York Times reported that Afghan President Hamid Karzai has new doubts that the US and its NATO allies can defeat the Taliban. As a consequence, these days he is seeking to negotiate some sort of peace settlement with the insurgents. However, The Times states, certain members of his own administration are resisting this effort and are openly decrying what he is doing. But is that which Karzai is looking for such a dangerous proposition? Isn't this exactly what the Obama Administration is itself desirous of?

Investment Recouped in Canceled Missiles

President Obama's conservative critics have carped about his Russia "reset," his moves toward nuclear build-down, his hesitant opening to Iran, and the supposedly insipid sanctions he squeezed out of the Security Council on Iran's nuclear program this week.  They sneered at his Nobel Peace Prize last fall, saying it was an award for rhetoric since he had produced no results. 

Where, they have demanded, is the beef?

Today there is a very big beef delivery from the Moscow policy stockyards, one that will feed speculation in policy circles from Washington to Tehran.  The Russians have canceled the long-planned sale of S-300 missiles to Iran.

Ain't gonna make war no more

Seventy years ago today -- June 10, 1940 -- some of my older relatives in Rome recall, they and their fellow schoolchildren were shepherded into the vast Piazza Venezia to fill the crowd cheering Benito Mussolini's hypnotic announcement that Italy was now at war against "the plutocratic and reactionary democracies of the west."   The war-intoxicated crowd, shouting "Guerra, guerra!" like the chorus in Bellini's Norma, would all too soon drink the bitter dregs of what they demanded.

Italy's disastrous military performance in the war has made this anniversary an obscure historical footnote, in contrast to those of the attacks by its more potent Axis allies on Poland, the Soviet Union, and Pearl Harbor.  Still, Mussolini's march of folly warrants a moment's reflection on history: What he that day called "the struggle between two centuries and two ideas" would result, after five dolorous years, in the fundamental transformation in international relations and international order that has made such wars of aggression all but inconceivable today.

Battling nuclear inertia goes beyond sanctions

"If I had known it was going to be this popular, I would have done this a long time ago," President John F. Kennedy is said to have joked with aides when enthusiastic audiences cheered his mentions of the partial nuclear test ban treaty in 1963.

Fast forward fifty years, however, and Barack Obama gets scant acknowledgment from a cynical capital and indifferent press for tightening the noose on nuclear weapons and nuclear dangers.  He may get grudging credit for winning today’s overwhelming U.N. Security Council vote for toughened sanctions against Iran’s runaway nuclear program, but Washington seems willfully blind to any connection between nonproliferation and disarmament.

A Gaza test for Obama national security strategy

Any audiologist administering a hearing test would see Israel’s heavy-handed attack on Turkish relief vessels bound for Gaza as an alarming sign of an entire political class slipping into profound deafness, no longer hearing even its most important ally.  Israeli commandos launched the raid just five days after the Obama administration released a new national security strategy that rejected its predecessor’s blustery endorsement of preemptive strikes and instead affirmed collective “enforcement of international law.”