Jackson Diehl starts his latest column on a promising note: “For five years Washington-based officials and pundits have repeatedly made the mistake of predicting that the next six or 12 months in Iraq would be decisive.” He then, however, just goes on to engage in the same fallacy: “Yet, for once, saying that the next six to 12 months will win or lose the war just might be right.” And it becomes even less promising from there:

The number of American soldiers in Iraq started coming down last month. By July it will have dropped from the peak of 180,000 it reached briefly in November to 130,000, or 15 brigades, the force level before the surge. The Pentagon has until March to judge how Iraqis react to the initial withdrawals — whether violence in volatile places such as Anbar province remains low or escalates again as U.S. troops depart. Then another decision will be made, on whether to reduce the force by five more brigades, to a total of about 100,000 troops, by the end of 2008.

This decision ought to be based entirely on whether Iraq’s progress can continue with an American force 40 percent smaller than it was at the surge’s peak. But external politics is already intruding: Gen. George Casey, the architect of the failed U.S. military strategy in Iraq pre-Petraeus, is already pushing for the full reduction, on the grounds that the Army needs to reduce its exposure in Iraq. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, whose strategic preoccupation has been arriving at a force level in Iraq that could win bipartisan acceptance in Washington, has said publicly that he’d like to hit the 100,000 target.

The idea that America’s policy toward Iraq “ought to be based entirely” on conditions in Iraq, and that anything else constitutes the intrusion of “external politics” is really foolish. When considering US policy toward Iraq — or toward Mexico or Afghanistan or Kenya or Pakistan or Russia or wherever else — we have to try to do the right thing all things considered. To observe that were we willing to commit an unlimited quantity of resources to the country for an unlimited period of time we might be able to improve conditions in Iraq is silly. Suppose we dedicated infinite resources to security and economic development in nearby Haiti? Or Jamaica — slightly further away, but conveniently inhabited by English-speakers? Our willingness to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in Jamaica forever and ever ought to be based entirely on the crime and unemployment rate of Kingston, but unfortunately external politics is already starting to intrude.

But, of course, nobody would write something like that. But if General Casey thinks we need to expeditiously reduce our force levels in Iraq to 100,000 in order to rescue the Army from dangerous “overexposure” to Iraq, isn’t that worth taking seriously on the merits? Diehl doesn’t seem to want to grapple with it, but Casey and the joint chiefs seem to me to believe that because it’s true. Now Diehl also says that if we reduce to that level, the security gains of the “surge” are likely to go away. I tend to agree with that as well. Which is what makes the surge so foolish — why embark on an unsustainable course of action? Certainly it’s what makes talk of the surge’s success so foolish. The goal, after all, was to put Iraq on a sustainable path. But the surge force levels aren’t sustainable. And the security gains are unlikely to be sustainable if we move our force levels to a sustainable level.

That’s not “external politics” meddling with a solid plan, it’s reality crashing down.

DoD photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Sean Mulligan, U.S. Navy

I’d never found Tariq Ali’s thoughts on international relations particularly enlightening, though he’s always had a great prose style. On the ins-and-outs of Pakistani politics, however, he’s been consistent must-reading throughout the crisis. The latest:

Some of us had hoped that, with her death, the People’s Party might start a new chapter. After all, one of its main leaders, Aitzaz Ahsan, president of the Bar Association, played a heroic role in the popular movement against the dismissal of the chief justice. Mr Ahsan was arrested during the emergency and kept in solitary confinement. He is still under house arrest in Lahore. Had Benazir been capable of thinking beyond family and faction she should have appointed him chairperson pending elections within the party. No such luck.

The result almost certainly will be a split in the party sooner rather than later. Mr Zardari was loathed by many activists and held responsible for his wife’s downfall. Once emotions have subsided, the horror of the succession will hit the many traditional PPP followers except for its most reactionary segment: bandwagon careerists desperate to make a fortune.

It’s hard to tell if that prediction of a split should be read as a genuine prediction or else just an expression of what he hopes will happen, since it’s clear that Ali doesn’t care for Nawaz Sharif and views himself as a PPP supporter of sorts.

A year from now there will still be over 100,000 American soldiers in Iraq.

Elizabeth Bumiller leads her retrospective on Benazir Bhutto with wise words: “Benazir Bhutto always understood Washington more than Washington understood her.” This is the kind of thing I was driving at when I observed that “it’s much easier for Pakistani actors to manipulate US policy than the reverse.” We don’t have American political leaders who speak fluent Urdu, went to Pakistani schools, and count a wide swathe of influential members of the Pakistani elite as among their personal friends.

We can and should take steps to improve the US governing class’ understanding of foreign countries, but we shouldn’t have any illusions about our ability to totally upend the imbalance in Pakistani elites’ ability to understand the US versus our elites’ ability to understand Pakistan. Our efforts to meddle can have a big impact (since the United States is a very large, rich, and powerful country) but they seem unlikely to have the intended impact.

Steve Clemons observes that “the fact that the leading Democrat contenders had nothing to say about the Annapolis Summit raises legitimate questions about whether they have the commitment and wherewithal to tackle the complexity of America’s defining challenge in this era.” I think that’s true. At the same time, the political calculus that led the leading candidates to completely ignore the summit is pretty straightforward. And I wouldn’t really want to have a nominee (or, for that matter, a president) who couldn’t do basic politics. In other words, you actually want a certain level of craveness from your political leaders. But you don’t want too much. You want the person who’ll take risks at the right time not the one who never takes risks or the one who shoots from the hip all the time.

More reasons to be infuriated with the new airline security regime:

The folly is much the same with respect to the liquids and gels restrictions, introduced two summers ago following the breakup of a London-based cabal that was planning to blow up jetliners using liquid explosives. Allegations surrounding the conspiracy were revealed to substantially embellished. In an August, 2006 article in the New York Times, British officials admitted that public statements made following the arrests were overcooked, inaccurate and “unfortunate.” The plot’s leaders were still in the process of recruiting and radicalizing would-be bombers. They lacked passports, airline tickets and, most critical of all, they had been unsuccessful in actually producing liquid explosives. Investigators later described the widely parroted report that up to ten U.S airliners had been targeted as “speculative” and “exaggerated.” [...]

“The notion that deadly explosives can be cooked up in an airplane lavatory is pure fiction,” Greene told me during an interview. “A handy gimmick for action movies and shows like ‘24.’ The reality proves disappointing: it’s rather awkward to do chemistry in an airplane toilet. Nevertheless, our official protectors and deciders respond to such notions instinctively, because they’re familiar to us: we’ve all seen scenarios on television and in the cinema. This, incredibly, is why you can no longer carry a bottle of water onto a plane.”

But, hey, you can never put too much hassle into air travel.

I’ve linked to John Burns’ lengthy 1998 Benazir Bhutto profile for The New York Times before, but since she’s back in the news here it is again. It makes clear that her corruption (and that of her husband, nicknamed “Mr. Ten Percent”) wasn’t run-of-the-mill developing world graft, but really big-time stuff by Pakistani standards.

I don’t mean to just harp on the failings of the dead, and political assassinations of this sort are a horrible thing, but it’s not a good idea for western journalists to get into the habit of lionizing massively corrupt politicians just because they worked on the Crimson (I seem to recall that Pol Pot went to a fancy western university while Abraham Lincoln was self-taught). Michael Hirsch says “In the end, Benazir Bhutto could become in death the kind of hero for democracy in Pakistan that she never quite became in life.” Maybe so.

To follow up on yesterday’s post on Ken Pollack, it’s worth considering in more detail his recommendation that Iraq “move to something closer to a cantonal system along Swiss lines.” Now, Switzerland is a very successful multiethnic country. One that, unlike Belgium and Canada, isn’t even wracked by periodic political crises over its multiethnic nature.

At the same time, ethnosectarian conflict is a major problem in many parts of the world. Not just Iraq, but Lebanon, Russia (Chechyna), China (Sinkiang/”East Turkestan”), Turkey (Kurdistan), Congo, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, etc., etc., etc. If you could really solve these problems by simply pointing out that the Swiss political system is very successful, don’t you think we wouldn’t have all these problems? But, of course, the thing about Switzerland is that Swiss society is so very rare. And that’s just the rub — there’s an extraordinary sociological naiveté involved in these recommendations that Iraq just be less like a war-torn post-colonial state and become more like a stable western one. Of course Iraq should become more like a stable western country and less like a war-town post-colonial state. But how?

It’s hard these things don’t just happen because the American ambassador says they ought to. The situation is different, the age-structure of the population is different, the attitude of the neighbors is different, the oil makes a big difference, the presence of a giant foreign occupying army is different, everything about it is different.

(Beyond all that, how much familiarity do we really think Kenneth Pollack has with the Swiss constitution? Nothing in the article suggests that he really means that Iraq ought to have the distinctive features of the Swiss constitution — tons of direct democracy, a seven-person collective presidency, a bicameral parliament, etc., etc., etc.)

It seems that UN missions around the world are being hobbled by a shortage of helicopters. This really seems like something that should be a solvable problem and yet no member states seem willing to let the UN use any. This is classic penny wise, pound foolish behavior. Some UN helicopters to do peacekeeping and peace enforcement missions successfully will prevent situations from spiraling out of control and then requiring much more costly interventions.

Thank God. A new Kenneth Pollack article! About Iraq! In The New Republic! Yes! It seems that the surge is working. Or, more precisely:

The bottom line in Iraq remains complicated. We should be heartened by recent progress, but we should not assume we have won yet, either: Failure is still at least as likely as success. But all is far from lost in Iraq, and the outlines of a successful strategy are finally appearing. Nevertheless, if the Bush administration is going to engineer lasting achievements from the accomplishments of the surge so far, it still has a lot to do and little margin for error.

There are a few flies in the ointment. For example: “the country’s central government remains a highly counter-productive force.” That’s no problem, though. Rather than deal with the central government being a highly counter-productive force rather than a useful partner by leaving Iraq, we could just order up a new government: “by substituting one coalition for another within the current Council of Representatives (COR), but by advancing the date for elections (from late 2009 to late 2008 or early 2009) to get an entirely new COR.” We can also help out by speeding the dismembering of the Iraqi state: “it may be necessary for Iraq to move to something closer to a cantonal system along Swiss lines.”

At any rate, it’s important to keep the stakes in mind:

As both of these examples illustrate, such campaigns require lots of time. In Iraq, several important factors, including the fortuitous and well-exploited “Anbar awakening,” in which large numbers of Sunni tribes turned on their former allies in Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and other Salafi extremist groups, has speeded progress. But there are three hurdles the United States must clear if it is to convert initial success into victory and leave Iraq as the next Northern Ireland, instead of the next Vietnam. This will still require considerable skill–and not a little luck.

To be honest, all you ought to need to say to make the case for withdrawal is “according to the proponents of staying, Northern Ireland is the best case scenario.” I mean, that’s crazy.

But to note a couple of analogistic points, they speak English in Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland is tiny, and the idea of just importing the Swiss political system to a foreign country with totally different traditions (and geography!) is silly.

The Center for American Progress’ Brian Katulis is one of our key actually serious experts rising on the scene, and conveniently enough he’s just been in Pakistan for three weeks talking to a wide variety of players. His commentary on the current situation is worth paying attention to:

All too often in recent years the United States has looked to elections in other countries as the primary indication for success or failure in a country’s progress toward political reform. The US has also become singularly focused on individual leaders like Bhutto. Her murder is a tragedy, and Musharraf has called for a three-day mourning period. As the world remembers her contributions, it should also keep her record in perspective. Under Bhutto, Pakistan provided support to the Taliban in the 1990s. Some observers note that Bhutto was not the saviour of democracy she claimed to be, including Bhutto’s niece in a recent, biting op-ed in the Los Angeles Times. And it was also in part on Bhutto’s watch that Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father Pakistan’s nuclear programme, built an international network that led to dangerous transfers of nuclear technology.

As Pakistan enters an even more complicated period, US policymakers should resist the temptation to see the situation in simplistic, black-and-white, freedom-versus-terror terms. Past experience in Pakistan and elsewhere demonstrates that putting our hopes on a single leader or a single election rarely makes Americans safer or advances stability and prosperity in other countries.

I think that’s well-said. You can find more Katulis here and also here: “Earlier this month in Lahore, an official in a leading opposition party complained to me about U.S. policy’s almost singular approach and obsession with individual leaders rather than institutions and the whole society: ‘Why does President Bush say, “Mr. Musharraf is my friend?” Why doesn’t he say, “Pakistan is our friend”?’” To put that question in a non-rhetorical context, I think it reflects the legacy of imperialism — it’s an effort to approximate the concept of “indirect rule” by cultivating mutually beneficial relationships between the US and individual foreign political leaders rather than mutually beneficial relationships between peoples.

Clearly, political assassinations are a bad thing. Equally clearly, political assassinations in a place like Pakistan seem to herald instability, and instability in Pakistan is frightening. That said, I think it’s worth being clear about something — from the perspective of someone who’s never spoken to Benazir Bhutto or any members of her inner circle, it seems like she was a really bad person and a terrible political leader. The main thing she did when in office was steal. A lot. Of money. From her extremely poor country. You have, basically, tens of millions of incredibly poor people in Pakistan. You have shitty infrastructure. You have a shitty school system. And you’re the Prime Minister. What do you do about it? You steal an incredible sum of money, while helping your associates likewise steal an incredible sum of money.

I’m not aware of anything changing for the better in Pakistan when she was running things. And as far as her credentials as a democratic opposition leader, it’s worth noting that she’s not the democratically elected leader who was deposed in Musharraf’s coup — her rival Nawaz Sharif was. Her plan was to use her strong base of support in the US to cajole Musharraf into some kind of power-sharing agreement with her. And if she’d gotten a bigger share of the power, she would have used it to steal more money.

Now, of course, the trouble is that I don’t know what I’m talking about. But the vast majority of people who do know what they’re talking about know what they’re talking about . . . based on talking to Bhutto and members of her political party. Bhutto was well-connected in the West. Her party is less Islam-inflected than its main rivals, which is appealing to westerners. She went to western schools as did a lot of her associates. They know people. But being “well-informed” about the situation through close ties with a partisan actor inside Pakistan is arguable no better than being totally uninformed. What you want is real expertise — in-depth knowledge of the Pakistani situation, ability to speak to players who don’t speak English and don’t attend Western universities, wide-ranging associations with Pakistanis and ability to follow the Pakistani press.

But almost nobody has that. Which is why most of all, I sympathize with this statement from Zbigniew Brzezinski:

I think the United States should not get involved in Pakistani politics. I deplore the absence of democracy in Pakistan, but I think admonitions from outside, injecting exile politicians into Pakistan, telling the Pakistan president what he should or should not wear, that he should take off his uniform, I don’t really think this is America’s business and I don’t think it helps to consolidate stability in Pakistan.

I don’t know whether or not it’s “our business” but the point is that we’re unlikely to be able to do this effectively. The US, being rich and strong, has a good deal of influence to throw around in Pakistan. But it’s much easier for Pakistani actors to manipulate US policy than the reverse. We don’t have the know-how, we don’t have the expertise, and we never will. What we need to do is focus on what we can know — what are our key interests in Pakistan — and articulate them clearly and consistently combined with the proviso that we’re willing to work with whatever kind of leadership Pakistan has on ways to advance our interests. Trying to pick the “best” faction and then shift things around so they wind up in power seems like a doomed mission. In general, the idea that the correct response to 9/11 was for the United States to start engaging more vigorously in efforts to micromanage political outcomes in Muslim countries seems badly mistaken. We need to make our policies more robust against internal political disagreements in the Islamic world, not do a better job of picking sides.

Some time ago, I wrote an op-ed which noted that “Lee Feinstein, a former deputy director of the policy planning staff at the State Department and now Clinton’s top national security staffer, wrote in the January/February 2004 issue of Foreign Affairs that ‘the biggest problem with the Bush preemption strategy may be that it does not go far enough.’” The article, which can be found here, was cowritten with Anne-Marie Slaughter who objected to the way I used that quotation and my general construal of her piece. Since the same clause from the Foreign Affairs article then wound up in a Frank Rich column I thought it’d be best to get in tough with Professor Slaughter and clarify her views rather than debate the quote and its context. She’s written back (speaking for herself):

I would not rule out unilateral action under any circumstances; a nation that had chosen to try unilaterally to stop the genocide in Rwanda in the face of both global and regional inaction would be hard to condemn. Similarly, it is imaginable that the United States or any other nation could conclude that it had absolutely no choice but to use force to defend its vital interests. But the entire point of our article was to minimize the likelihood of either of these situations ever occuring by embracing doctrines in the humanitarian and the non-proliferation area that would spur non-military collective action early in the game and would ensure global or at least regional authorization of force if it came to that. It is worth remembering that Kofi Annan himself told the General Assembly in September 2003, after the invasion of Iraq: ““It is not enough to denounce unilateralism, unless we also face up squarely to the concerns that make some States feel uniquely vulnerable, since it is those concerns that drive them to take unilateral action. We must show that those concerns can, and will, be addressed effectively through collective action.” Lee and I had been running a roundtable for the American Society of International Law and the Council on Foreign Relations called “Old Rules, New Threats” for several years before the invasion of Iraq; this article was the outgrowth of a lot of that thinking.

As far as the desirability of collective action, almost certainly short of force, to check nuclear proliferation I’m in complete agreement. I also should say that I definitely agree that “the United States or any other nation could conclude that it had absolutely no choice but to use force to defend its vital interests.” This, though, is one of those cases where I think the phrase “vital interests” obscures more than it reveals. Unilateral force to secure vital interests? Sure. But which interests are the vital ones? The UN Charter recognizes the inherent right of a state to act in self-defense. If Hungary starts launching air strikes on Ukraine tomorrow, no number of Security Council vetoes change the fact that it’s legitimate for Ukraine to fight back. Similarly, the Charter recognizes a right to collective self-defense. If a country is attacked somewhere, the United States is within our rights to come to that country’s assistance. And, indeed, we’re arguably obliged to come to their assistance.

Slaughter’s proposal is that we should try to develop new international legal norms that would strengthen collective commitments to non-proliferation rules (no disagreement from me) but also legitimate unilateral action in certain case to pursue non-proliferation goals. My strong guess is that if pursued in good faith this project is just going to prove unworkable. One doesn’t want to see a new interpretation of international law gain strength that would legitimize an Arab League preventive attack on Israel and its nuclear program. Nor would one want to see a unilateral Indian assault on Pakistan.

If you go back and read the original Foreign Affairs article, the authors seem to be aware of this problem and include language designed to make sure that those cases aren’t covered. Which is good. But it’s also, I suspect, too transparent. The international community isn’t going to accept a new principle of international law that’s very narrowly tailored to US policy priorities. But the US doesn’t actually want to unleash unilateral preventive war as a major force in the world in general, it’s only a tool we would want to have under narrowly tailored rules or else (as in the Bush doctrine) as a straightforward matter of double-standards.

That said, understood the way Slaughter lays it out in the blockquote above, I’m not sure there’d be any harm in trying to explore the possibilities in this direction and negotiation and dialogue on this general issue should, if pursued in good faith (an important proviso), generate something useful on the international scene.

Looks like Russia’s alternative to GPS is now nearing completion at least as far as coverage of Russian territory is concerned. Plans are underway to further expand the system. This doesn’t seem like a big deal, really, but it’s a signal of how other countries are coming to chafe under American hegemony and looking for practical ways to undercut it.

At the end of the day, that kind of trend is very bad for us. Consider, say, Iran. If Moscow and Beijing look at Iranian nuclear activities and think to themselves “nuclear proliferation is bad” then we’re in good shape. If they look at Iranian nuclear activities and think “if checks the Americans, it’s okay by us” then we’re in terrible shape. But both ways are valid interpretations of the situation. Under the circumstances, it’s vitally in our interests to create the kind of climate of international cooperation where the odds favor major foreign powers seeing events through the proliferation frame rather than the “check America” frame. Thus far, we’re not doing a very good job of it.

Spencer Ackerman talks to Barnett Rubin. Rubin says that with Bhutto dead, American strategy is “in tatters.”

Turns out a professional political blogger really ought to check the newspaper before putting up posts about ice girls because even during the holidays big stuff can happen like Benazir Bhutto being assassinated in part of a larger attack that seems to have killed over a dozen people. As usual when there’s a big breaking story like this abroad, there’s probably not a ton I can usefully say about this in the short term but, clearly, it’s a big deal that seems to bode ill for stability in Pakistan and the world in general.

Sudarsan Raghavan’s lengthy Washington Post article about the conflict between Muqtada al-Sadr and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and, in particular, the way the latter’s fortunes seem to be on the rise, will warm the heart of hawks. Here, after all, is a long newspaper account of American military success:

This year’s U.S. military offensive and dramatic shifts in tactics by both Sunni and Shiite groups are redrawing the balance of power across Iraq. With less violence between Sunnis and Shiites, festering struggles within each community may come to define the nature of the conflict. In the Shiite-dominated south, Sadr’s main Shiite rivals are taking advantage of the surge in U.S. troops, as well as Sadr’s imposition of a freeze on operations by his Mahdi Army militia, to make political gains.

What one wonders, however, is if this is good news, what’s good about it? Hakim’s group is the one that’s willing to work with Americans whereas Sadr’s is the group that’s trying to kick us out. But it’s not as if the Supreme Council are a bunch of nice liberal democrats. What’s more, the extent of their “pro-American” sentiments seems to extend precisely as far as we’re willing to help them acquire power — it’s not a case of deep resonances of values and interests.

Here’s a telling bit from The Washington Post‘s account of yesterday’s bombings in Iraq: “U.S. military commanders have said that major military efforts in and around Baghdad have pushed fighters to the areas north of the capital, often to rural or mountainous hideouts, where there are fewer troops pursuing them.”

Two morals from this story. One is that aside from the “surge” — the temporary increase in the overall number of American forces in Iraq — we’ve seen a surge-within-the-surge, an increase in the Baghdad-centricity of our deployments. The other is that outside of this surged areas, there haven’t been any security gains. There’s no change, in short, in the nationwide dynamic.

So what happens when we start de-surging?

Well, things will just get worse again. After all, when the goal of the surge was outlines as creating space and time for national political reconciliation, that wasn’t something Bush and Petraeus just pulled out of their asses. A temporary increase in force levels aimed at creating a temporary increase in security doesn’t, after all, sound like much of a strategy. So they said that the temporary increase in troops would lead to a temporary increase in security which would lead to political reconciliation which, in turn, would lead to sustainable security gains. But it hasn’t happened. So when we start desurging, we’re just going to find that nothing’s changed and nothing’s been accomplished.

U.S. Army photo by Spc. Angelica Golindano