Roll Call reports today that “anti-war Democrats have been largely mum on President Barack Obama’s recently unveiled policy for Afghanistan — partly because leading liberals don’t yet know where they stand.”

But Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), the first Muslim member of Congress, is clear about his position on the issue. Yesterday, Thinkprogress interviewed Ellison and asked where he stands on President Obama’s plan to send 17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. Afghans have “seen a lot of foreign powers come to their country — whether it’s the Soviets, the Brits, and now the Americans — and I think they want to see their country finally have peace,” Ellison replied. Ellison told ThinkProgress that he is “skeptical” of the troop increase:

I am skeptical of the troop escalation in Afghanistan. I have my doubts about whether that’s what’s needed. But if troop escalations is what’s going to happen, and if it may in fact be the right thing, the real question is, what are they going to be doing? If they’re just going to be taking it to the “enemy,” I am confident that it will be a failed effort. And I don’t say that with any relish. … The best course of action, I think, is to have an increase in civilian efforts to improve the lot of the average Afghan, with a clear goal to move things into the Afghans as fast as possible.

“We should be trying to exit Afghanistan, too,” he emphasized. “I don’t think we should have any long term plans there either.” Ellison said the U.S. should work to develop agriculture and provide basic security in the area. Watch it:

Ellison was also critical of Obama’s policy of launching “Predator strikes” — or bombing suspected terrorists through remote-piloted aircraft — in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The attacks regularly inadvertendly kill civilians and are deeply unpopular among the public. Ellison said the strikes inflame anti-American sentiment:

I think Predator strikes have not contributed positively. We’ve just heard so many bad things about them. They must really be killing the American image in the mind of the average Afghan. … I think that you need a human being to go see whether or not the strike is actually targeted at a true hostile enemy, rather than a wedding party — which has happened all too often.

“So really, it’s like you cut one head off, and three pop up,” Ellison said of the Predator strikes’ effect on terrorism.

Our guest blogger is Peter Juul, research associate at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Increasing long-term economic and development aid to Pakistan is a key component of the combined Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy President Obama announced last week. Aid would “focus on long-term capacity building, on agricultural sector job creation, education and training, and on infrastructure requirements,” funded by $7.5 billion over five years as proposed by Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Richard Lugar (R-IN). This shift in focus and resource allocation represents a dramatic shift in the United States’ traditional relations with Pakistan, aimed at establishing a long-term partnership with a democratic Pakistan rather than a transactional security relationship with military dictators. The United States has repeatedly cozied up to authoritarian Pakistani generals like Zia ul-Haq and Pervez Musharraf to serve U.S. security interests, only to find itself shocked –- shocked -– that these generals play double games by dealing with militants and developing nuclear weapons.

Congress must be wary of repeating this pattern as it considers President Obama’s request to pass the proposed Kerry-Lugar legislation. With Pakistan fitfully democratizing while facing a growing militancy problem, the United States once again will appear like it is bailing on Pakistan once the generals have supposedly served its interests if the Kerry-Lugar proposal fails. Still, Congresspersons like Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) have expressed quite legitimate skepticism over the aid package endorsed by President Obama, stating he did not “have a lot of confidence in Pakistan being a solution to the problems in Afghanistan… I don’t think [aid is] effective unless the recipient of the support sees where the threat is to them.”

While Levin’s reservations are reasonable, especially given the Pakistani government’s repeated double games with and capitulations to militants, they remain couched in a transactional view of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship. “If I thought we could buy stability, I would buy it,” Levin explained, “I have no reluctance in purchasing stability if it’s effective.” But the point of the Obama strategy is to move away from a purely transactional relationship largely with the Pakistani military and toward a long-term partnership with the Pakistani population. Performance conditions should be placed on military aid, but economic and development assistance should not be viewed through the lens of the historically transactional relationship between the United States and Pakistan.

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Writing at Foreign Policy’s Shadow Government, former Bush administration speechwriter Christian Brose has some fun with yesterday’s Foreign Policy Initiative inaugural event on Afghanistan:

All that you suspect is true. Bill Kristol, wearing a Viking helmet and a bone through his nose, exhorted the participants to invade Chad, just because. He may have listed other countries, but he was speaking in tongues and war whoops half the time, and my Neo-con-to-English translation kept dropping out. Bob Kagan followed, bare-chested (as usual), in full war paint, banging the Mayflower china with a combat boot, shouting that America needed to put 10 million men under arms to extend its hegemony (benevolent, of course) into the Arctic, shouting something about the road to Moscow leading through the North Pole.

I saw this with my own eyes, people.

If only. It would have been a lot more exciting, that’s for sure. As it was, the conference was a pretty staid affair. Some might even call it a love-fest.

Actually, according to my notes, Bob Kagan did, in fact, call the event “a bipartisan love-fest.” As I wrote yesterday, that was really the point of the whole exercise — to re-introduce neoconservative ideas into the foreign policy conversation by filing off all of its rough edges and revolutionary claims in a slick bipartisan package.

Brose takes the familiar tack of broadly accusing the neocons’ critics of conspiracy-mongering. I don’t think I’ve ever promulgated a conspiracy theory of neoconservatism — I recognize that their faction, like most political factions, has both a private and a public aspect. (In specific reference, though, to the little sub-group of neocons that gathered around Ahmad Chalabi in the 1990′s and conspired — or, if you prefer, “strategized in private” — to install him as the new U.S.-and-Israel-friendly leader of Iraq, I think the term “cabal” is clearly appropriate.)

Brose claims that “the neo-cons are really championing tendencies in U.S. foreign policy that run much deeper in American life than the pockets of their advocacy shops.” I don’t completely disagree with this. I think there has historically been a military interventionist streak in U.S. foreign policy, though neoconservatism clearly represents an amped-up, stereoidal version of this. Where I would break with Brose is that I think this is something we need to more carefully guard against, rather than more vigorously indulge. Read more