Tom: All I'm reading these days are books about Vietnam -- I even just found one more on the My Lai massacre -- so I thought I would ask Michael O'Hanlon, the defense guru over at Brookings, to pinch hit and fill us in on what books have impressed him lately.

By Michael O'Hanlon
Best Defense guest book reviewer

At the risk of promoting colleagues and friends, I'd like to make a plug for two excellent and short books about Pakistan that have come out this year. In contrast to the longer fine histories of this general part of the world -- by the likes of Steve Coll, Seth Jones, Peter Bergen, Lawrence Wright -- these books are thematic histories. They are cogent and concise. Yet they are reader friendly as well, not expecting you already to have a degree in South Asia studies before picking them up.

The first book, Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America, and the Future of the Global Jihad, is by Brookings' Bruce Riedel. In 144 pages of text, Riedel lucidly provides an overview of the last 30 years of Pakistan's internal politics, its relationship with the United States, as well as the various insurgent and terrorist groups with which it has had close association. The book is informed by his own experiences over most of this period as an intelligence analyst for the U.S. government. As usual with Bruce, it is brilliant, and quite sobering -- yet hardly without hope.

Riedel is well aware of the differences between the United States and Pakistan. He considers this difference of opinion inevitable, even natural between two different states, especially since so much of Pakistan's recent past has been informed by extremist agendas. (Riedel's main chapters are titled Zia's jihad, Omar's jihad, Osama's jihad, and global jihad, and the penultimate chapter examines the foreboding if unlikely prospect of a jihadist Pakistani state.) Riedel is sensitive to regional sensibilities on issues like Kashmir and nuclear weapons, where he expects no easy answers in dealings with Islamabad or anyone else in South Asia. But he does call emphatically for Pakistan to clamp down on Afghan Taliban sanctuaries on its soil as well as on the anti-India group Lashkar-e-Taiba. His case for doing so is not just the usual American position that these groups are dangerous for Americans, and Indians, but also his compelling argument that terrorists "don't stay in their lanes," meaning that cooperation occurs across different groups and it is not realistic for Pakistan to protect and promote the Afghan Taliban and LeT while hoping that groups like the Pakistani Taliban will be contained. Riedel's knowledge of specifics on these points is so solid and difficult to challenge that one hopes the book will be well read in Pakistan as well as other places.

The Schaffers' new book, How Pakistan Negotiates with the United States: Riding the Roller Coaster, is equally good, and at 182 pages of text, almost equally concise. It is a fascinating account of how Pakistanis have historically used a mix of charm, military polish, occasional deception, guilt trips, pleas of national weakness, knowledge of Afghanistan, and strategically advantageous geography right next to Afghanistan to induce the United States to do more for them. It is hardly a broadside against Islamabad or an apology for U.S. behavior, however. The Schaffers explain how Pakistan's core strategic interests are in fact substantially different from those of the United States -- specifically in regard to the rivalry with India, and how Pakistanis interpret that rivalry for what they must do in Afghanistan. They explain how Pakistan has also come to mistrust the United States, and how Pakistanis often expect that after their third "marriage" to Washington after 9/11, their third "divorce" from Washington is just a matter of time (the first two being in the mid-1960s and the 1990s).

The books are fascinating. They are fairly easy reads. And taken individually or even more so when taken together, they point the way towards some new policy ideas. I for one would be more likely, as a result of these books and some recent conversations in Kabul, to encourage Afghanistan to ask New Delhi to shut down the Indian consulates in Jalalabad and Kandahar. This is not because India is doing anything wrong in either place, but because Pakistan's phobias on India matters are so deep-rooted and real that Islamabad will probably not rein in the Afghan Taliban until such measures are taken. Regardless of where one comes out on specific policy ideas, the U.S.-Pakistan relationship is so crucial to U.S. national security interests that these books should both be bestsellers.

Is there ever an appropriate time and a morally supportable reason for a government sit down and bargain with people who have blood on their hands? That's the important but messy question addressed by Mitchell Reiss in his new book, Negotiating With Evil: When to Talk to Terrorists. Reiss, a veteran U.S. diplomat, comes to some conclusions that I think are correct but may make many Americans uneasy.

His bottom line: "Terrorists are evil and they may be part of the solution." (243) People who have actually had to think through that conflicting proposition seem to agree with him. Anyone worth talking to, advises a CIA clandestine official, is complicit. The CIA man's chilling bottom line: "[P]eople without blood on their hands… don't matter." (244) (I would make that the quote of the day but it is too damn depressing.)

A British intelligence official finds a gentler way to put it -- all that good education pays off! Moral compromise, he advises Reiss, "is the price you have to pay" to stop the killing. (244)

Fans of the Anbar Awakening will enjoy his chapter in Iraq. That title, the "awakening," reminds me of "The Great Awakening," that most American of events, but also one of my favorite book titles, Sleepers Joining Hands. (Oddly, I've never gotten around to reading the book, I think for fear of losing my love of its title.)

If you saw the news item the other day that China, in a huff over some oceanic turf claims, was threatening to cut off the export of certain rare minerals to Japan, I bet you shrugged and turned the page.

But Business Week offers up the intelligence that U.S. smart bombs also rely on neodymium, an essential part of magnets on the fins that guide smart bombs. Guess who dominates that market? "The Pentagon has been incredibly negligent," Peter Leitner, a former trade adviser at the Defense Department, reassuringly tells BW. "There are plenty of early warning signs that China will use its leverage over these materials as a weapon."

Interested now? Good. My CNAS colleagues Christine Parthemore and Will Rogers run a blog titled "Natural Security" that specializes in issues like this. Minerals, energy and the political effects of climate change -- it's a growth market.

Here my CNAS colleague Kristin Lord, who knows more about public diplomacy than I ever will, points out something that hasn't been noticed about the Obama administration's new National Security Strategy document.

By Kristin Lord
Best Defense bureau chief, public diplomacy operations

The Obama Administration wants you to help implement its new National Security Strategy.

That is a little-noted but forceful undercurrent of the new strategy, which calls for the United States to "take advantage of the unparalleled connections that America's Government, private sector and citizens have around the globe." These connections, the document observes, will not only help America to address specific challenges such as cyber security and pandemic disease, they are a powerful and "cost-effective way of projecting a positive vision of American leadership." "Time and again," the national security strategy observes, "we have seen that the best ambassadors for American values and interests are the American people -- our businesses, nongovernmental organizations, scientists, athletes, artists, military service members, and students." Indeed, the National Security Strategy calls explicitly for engagement with the private sector and civil society no fewer than 27 separate times and devotes five complete paragraphs to the topic.

Read on

When I was in Tampa last week it was for a meeting on the Anbar Awakening sponsored by CNAS and the College of William & Mary, with the support of Lt. Gen. John Allen of Centcom. It was a great meeting, but most of it was off the record, or at least "not for attribution." (There's a difference.) The meeting was part of a larger research project being conducted by Dr. Mitchell Reiss on why and how states negotiate with terrorist and insurgent groups. It's an interesting project, so I asked him for a summary.

By Ambassador Mitchell B. Reiss

Best Defense chief diplomatic correspondent 

Governments typically come into office swearing they will never talk to their enemies, yet within a matter of months or years often find themselves sitting across a table from the very people they had previously vilified. For example, Vice President Cheney remarked that "We don't negotiate with evil. We defeat it." Yet the Bush Administration talked with both Iran and North Korea, even after the President had labeled them as part of an "axis of evil." 

Talking with terrorist or insurgent groups poses even greater challenges, especially for democratic societies. Governments need to explore whether these groups have limited grievances that might be addressed through a political process or whether they harbor maximalist, millennial, nihilist or apocalyptic goals that cannot be. The risk of miscalculation is high -- governments, and lives, depend on these determinations. 

Read on

Now he says it: Sir Jeremy Greenstock believes the American invasion of Iraq was of "questionable legitimacy."  

As a British naval historian friend I know once noted, the time when the British government could have helped -- and perhaps stopped the war -- was back in the winter of 2002-2003. Real friends speak up when a friend is making a big mistake. Instead, Tony Blair may have destroyed the "special relationship" by supporting the invasion when he should have opposed it. My friend said he believes Blair should be confined right now in the Tower of London.

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I think we all tend to criticize too much and praise too little, especially with public officials. So I was impressed today to see proven provider John McCreary, who has forgotten more about intelligence than I will ever know, commend Hillary Clinton for her sharp comments in Pakistan yesterday:

"The US secretary of state questioned Pakistan's commitment to the fight against al-Qaida, saying she found it hard to believe that no-one in the Pakistan government knows where senior figures are hiding.

"I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn't get them if they really wanted to," she told a group of newspaper editors during a meeting in the city of Lahore on Thursday.

Bravo for Secretary Clinton.  Either the Pakistani security services contain senior officers who know where bin Laden is and are lying or they are incompetent and ought to be dismissed. There are no other explanations for Pakistan having become the headquarters for al Qaida and the base area for international Islamic terrorism.

‘Nuff said.

AAMIR QURESHI/AFP/Getty Images

Michele Flournoy, the no. 2 power at the Pentagon, lays down the law in the new issue of Proceedings, along with the shadowy but powerful Shawn Brimley. Wanna know where the QDR is going? Read this and learn, little grasshoppers. And listen up: China and India are where it's at.

Pretty near the top they quote Alfred T. Mahan, which seasoned Pentagoners know is a sign that the Navy is getting teed up to get hit long. (This is like when Gorby would quote Lenin, or Marc Antony would praise Julius Caesar.)

Yeah, they want the State Department to get its act together-but who doesn't?:

The task for the United States is to respond to these challenges with a whole-of-government approach that advances our interests while legitimizing our power in the eyes of others."     

They also want to the Pentagon to help allies keep the global commons free:

Helping to build the capacity of our partners and allies and working toward a common agenda on these increasingly complex issues should be a critical pillar of America's national security and defense strategy."

Okay, sounds good. But this is my question: If the global commons (sea, air, space, cyberspace) really is gonna be contested, why does anyone think conventional aircraft carriers and short-legged fighter aircraft are the answer? I think it is time to commission the UCAV carrier the USS Obama, whose hull and aircraft would both be stealthy. With perhaps a crew of fewer than 500 sailors. (Most controllers of aircraft could fly them from Virginia.)   

You listening, Navy? Your professional magazine has run an article by two of the Pentagon's top civilian thinkers telling you where they think you need to go. You might want to think on this. You too, Air Force.   

CSIS/Flickr

NightWatch passes along this classic bit of diplo-babble, from a spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry:

At present, the situation on the Korean peninsula is rather complicated with an increasing number of uncertain factors."

I think this observation could be applied to just about anything, not just the Korean peninsula. Kind of like the classic British universal retort, attributed to Stephen Potter, of "Yes, but not in the south."