There’s a story in The New York Times about some people inside the military who want to export the alleged success of the Anbar Awakening to Pakistan. Shawn Brimley and Ilan Goldenberg raise some good skeptical notes, but there’s this whopper of a fly in the ointment lurking deep, deep, deep in to the story:

The training of the Frontier Corps remains a concern for some. NATO and American soldiers in Afghanistan have often blamed the Frontier Corps for aiding and abetting Taliban insurgents mounting cross-border attacks. “It’s going to take years to turn them into a professional force,” said one Western military official. “Is it worth it now?”

It’s too bad that the quotation here really has nothing to do with the issue at hand, which is that the people we’re proposing to fund are fighting alongside the Taliban. That’s not “unprofessional” it’s just not in America’s strategic interests. The last thing we need is a better funded, trained, and equipped more professionalized pro-Taliban military force in Pakistan. I wish the article had looked at this a bit deeper.

I’ve written in the past in praise of the Clinton administration’s focus on terrorism as it closed out its second term, and the misguided nature of the Bush administration’s decision — from Day 1 — to refocus things on Iraq. Of course, not all Clinton administration officials were especially prescient on this score:

The effort to contain Iraq over the past 10 years, “while it is far from satisfactory,” has been better than nothing, Holbrooke said. However, “the lack of sufficient solidarity among the enforcing nations and voting nations has undermined” the effort, he added.

The economic embargo imposed after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait remains in force until the UN certifies that Iraq has eliminated its weapons of mass destruction. But nations have violated the sanctions and three permanent members of the UN Security Council have been pressing for the certification. In the meantime, Iraq has refused to allow UN weapons inspectors into the country since December 1998. “Saddam Hussein’s activities continue to be unacceptable and, in my view, dangerous to the region and, indeed, to the world,” Holbrooke continued, “not only because he possesses the potential for weapons of mass destruction but because of the very nature of his regime.

“His willingness to be cruel internally is not unique in the world, but the combination of that and his willingness to export his problems makes him a clear and present danger at all times,” he said.

The Bush administration “will have to deal with this problem, which we inherited from our predecessors and they now inherit from us,” Holbrooke said.

Now the good news is that Holbrooke didn’t follow that up with “so Bush should invade the country for no real reason.” Then again, neither did Bush start saying we should invade Iraq for no real reason back in January 2001. But after 9/11, Bush saw a political opportunity to build support for an invasion of Iraq, and Holbrooke agreed with him since, after all, Saddam’s “willingness to be cruel internally is not unique in the world, but the combination of that and his willingness to export his problems makes him a clear and present danger at all times” so an invasion seems like a good idea once it’s politically possible.

I’m not very excited by the prospect of Hillary Clinton making him Secretary of State.

Laura Rozen reports on how Freedom’s Watch, the group that made a name for itself whipping GOP support for the surge, is now gearing up to propagandize for the next war. One thing they’ll have plenty of as they make the case for bombing Iran is money:

Its top donors include Sheldon Adelson, the CEO of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, a philanthropist for pro-Israel causes, and, according to Forbes, the third wealthiest man in the United States; John Templeton, a conservative philanthropist; Mel Sembler, a shopping mall developer from Florida, former U.S. ambassador to Italy, and a board member of the American Enterprise Institute; Matthew Brooks and Richard Fox, co-founders of the Republican Jewish Coalition; and Kevin Moley, a former advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney and past U.S. ambassador to international organizations. One of group’s financial backers told the New York Times that Freedom’s Watch easily expected to raise $200 million in donations by November 2008. Raising big money “will be easy,” said the anonymous benefactor, who added “that several of the founders each wrote a check for $1 million.

In addition to being really rich, Mel Sembler — and a few other relatives in Florida — is a very generous donor to sundry Republican politicians and Joe Lieberman. Adelson is much the same, but used to gives to Democrats as well as Republicans — Harry Reid got $1,000 in 1995 (presumably casion-related rather than national security), Carl Levin got $1,000 in 1996, the DNC (i.e., Bill Clinton’s re-election campaign) got $100,000 in 1996 — but no Dems whose names I recognize seem to have gotten Adelson bucks in quite some time.

Foreign Policy interviews Mahmud Ali Durrani, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, and he’s none too pleased about charges that Pakistan ought to better account for the aid money we give them:

This all illustrates a general problem with aid as a tool of influence. If you see a country that just seems awesome and worth supporting, you can give them a bunch of money and there it is. But if you see a regime that’s not especially awesome, and think your aid money can rope them into a web of influence, you find that trying to actually use the aid to manipulate the other country prompts more than a little of the old nationalist backlash. Doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing in some circumstances, but there are real limits to what can be achieved this way.

I really meant to attend this GW event with Stephen Biddle, Nora Bensahel, and Larry Corb on Friday but I wound up unable to make it. Marc Lynch was there and recounts Biddle’s argument that the surge might work: “if everything goes right and if the US continues to ‘hit the lottery’ with the spread of local ceasefires and none of a dozen different spoilers happens, then a patchwork of local ceasefires between heavily armed, mistrustful communities could possibly hold if and only if the US keeps 80,000-100,000 troops in Iraq for the next twenty to thirty years.”

I guess I agree with that. To me, it sounds like a very good reason to leave. I’m not sure where Biddle stands on that, since he’s usually tended to stay a bit cagey as to what policy recommendations he would make. At any it seems clear to me that even the “optimistic” scenarios for Iraq now amount to promising to bear huge costs for a smallish chance at an unclear payoff.

I was looking for some background on yesterday’s ludicrous op-ed from Fred Kagan and Michael O’Hanlon about how we need to prepare to invade Pakistan, and I found this Charles Knight blog post from the spring. The post noted that Kagan and O’Hanlon collaborated on an essay for this book from the Stanley Foundation — a collection of papers where one Republican and one Democrat team up to write something about US national security policy.

Well, what Pollack and O’Hanlon came up with was the need for a dramatic expansion in America’s ground forces. And it turns out that one of the scenarios they canvassed to justify this troop build-up was precisely this sort of “stabilization” mission in Pakistan.

Mostly this goes to show how senseless it is to make “bridging the partisan divide” as such a goal of an intervention into the American political debate. There are lots of people with Republican Party backgrounds who have sensible things to say about aspects of US national security policy, and a person like Steve Clemons at New America who’s gone to great lengths to try to find such people and get them networked with the progressives who’ve been leading the pushback against the Bush administration is a very valuable endeavor. But a Fred Kagan-O’Hanlon teamup, just like this teamup of Ivo Daalder and Robert Kagan makes things worth rather than better. A bad idea doesn’t become better just because you can find some Democrat somewhere who supports it.