In the hot new issue of Foreign Policy, Vali Nasr, now dean at Johns Hopkins SAIS, but formerly at the State Department, offers a scathing portrayal of President Obama's national security team. The villain of the piece appears as "the White House," which is referred to 63 times, most of them negative. Readers of this blog will not be surprised by Nasr's conclusion that "the president had a truly disturbing habit of funneling major foreign-policy decisions through a small cabal of relatively inexperienced White House advisors whose turf was strictly politics."

Every administration has turf fights, but this article makes me thinks Obama's have been memorably bad. Other examples:

• "At times it appeared the White House was more interested in bringing Holbrooke down than getting the policy right."

• The White House "jealously guarded all foreign policymaking."

• "Turf battles are a staple of every administration, but the Obama White House has been particularly ravenous."

• "Had it not been for Clinton's tenacity and the respect she commanded, the State Department would have had no influence on policymaking whatsoever. The White House had taken over most policy areas: Iran and the Arab-Israeli issue were for all practical purposes managed from the White House."

Emma Sky, who has written for this blog on occasion, recently issued a sharp paper at CNAS that blasts the handling of Iraq by both the Bush and Obama administrations. She reports that Iraqis believe that the United States has lost Iraq to Iran, and that Iraqis now travel to Tehran to ask permission to oust Maliki. She concludes that, "America could learn that money can't buy love, that relationships are key, that strategic patience is needed, that allies should not be ignored and that a regional approach is needed as well as a bilateral one."

CNAS, a full-service outfit, also offered this blueprint on how to fix things.

By Steve Donnelly

Best Defense Libyan wars and Fox flak-catcher correspondent

In 2011, Ambassador Robert Ford boldly engaged his new assignment in Syria, brazenly and very publicly meeting with opposition leaders on the brink of armed rebellion against the al-Assad Regime.

Three times in as many months he had been surrounded by mobs of pro-government protesters, pelted with eggs, and attacked in embassy cars on the streets of Damascus. No phalanx of Blackwater. No body armor and helmet. No impenetrable motorcade of up-armored SUVs.

Was he nuts? What was he doing there?

Foreign Policy's Josh Rogin got the answer from the horse's mouth for a September 29, 2011 article:

"When an ambassador makes a statement in a country that's critical of that country's government, when that government visits an opposition or a site where a protest is taking place, the statement is much more powerful -- and the impact and the attention it gets is much more powerful if it's an ambassador rather than a low-level diplomat," Ford told The Cable in an interview last week.

Ultimately, the Syrian pressure cooker was nearing boil, and Ford had to pull out.

Three years before, Ryan Crocker, himself a survivor of the 1983 Beirut Embassy bombing, whose residence had been attacked in 1998 when he was Ambassador to Syria, and one of the first diplomats on the ground in Kabul after the Taliban's departure in 2002, took up his post in Baghdad, not before or after conflict but in the midst of it, and charged with the dangerous and difficult task of US conflict stabilization and transition out of that historically conflict-ridden country.

With Special Representative Sérgio Vieira de Mello killed along with 20 of his staff in the massive 2003 Canal Hotel bombing attack on the UN's Baghdad office, Crocker was, no doubt, the next prime trophy for Iraqi bad guys, but even if almost suffocated at times by Blackwater, and US military and diplomatic security, he stayed on and directed the civilian side of the US Surge.

The unusual aspect of Crocker's task in Iraq was not just to knowingly put his own life on the line, as many prominent diplomats have done in this region with inevitable results, but to institutional that role within the State Department ranks by managing the deployment of hundreds of Crocker-inspired diplomats out into the dangerous Iraqi landscape to support the civilian transition through the Provincial Reconstruction Teams, or PRTs that walked into Sadr City in 2008 behind the US crackdown after hundreds of mortars fell on Embassy Baghdad for more than a month, and regularly met in provincial capital buildings that were themselves routine targets for massive truck bombs, and firefights.

Surprisingly few of Crocker's PRTs were killed in Iraq, primarily due to the robust US military presence there. But that is seldom the case in most unstable areas where US engagement is essential. From 1968 to 1979, a US Ambassador was killed in office on the average of one every two years, so its is not just about "our times."

Does that explain the professional tradition that Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was following as he settled in for a restless night in the Benghazi compound after an important day of carrying the US flag into an unstable and emerging democracy? Risky business. Important work. Speaks for itself.

Ten Libyan guards, after all, were killed along with three other US civilians, before, finally, the US diplomatic survivors in Benghazi reached the marginal safety of the larger CIA compound a few blocks away, with help from Libyans.

In June 2012, the Center for New American Security (CNAS) held its annual conference at the snazzy Willard Hotel in Washington, DC ,for the national security elite to discuss waging wars in the face of budget cuts. No one, however, was lamenting any shortages of battleships, packhorses or the plumes for parade helmets. The masthead for the CNAS Conference said it all: "Rethinking U.S. Security: Navigating a World in Transition." As strongman dictators fall, things just get chaotic, especially in landscape characterized by non-state actors and factions with scores to settle with each other, transnational terror networks with scores to settle with us, riots trigger by Facebook, and cyber-attacks that can destroy a power plant grid by attacking the operating software. Much more complicated than the days of Gavrillo Princip and Professor Moriarty, and little to do with negotiating arms treaties in Helsinki.

The same hawks who cheered Crocker and his PRTs in Iraq, and Ford in Syria, including Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain, know why US diplomats take these risks, especially in these fractured areas, underscoring Tom Ricks' accurate observation of Fox News's political "hyping" of Benghazi as a "wing of the Republican Party."

The oft said, "It's complicated," explains the chaos of Benghazi. We may never know anything more than that those whose lives were lost bravely put them on the line for what they believed to be important enough to do so. What don't you understand about that?

Stephen Donnelly is former senior planning advisor on Iraqi reconstruction for the Department of State.

Remember my ruminating a couple of weeks ago about whether our strategic culture was shaped in part by the Old Testament?

Turns out someone who actually knows what he is talking about when he discusses the Bible is thinking about the strategic implications of the situation of Israel described in that book. In the new issue of The American Interest, former Pentagon comptroller Dov Zakheim finds parallels between Israel's current strategic situation and that described in the Bible. He predicts that:

"Israel could indeed find itself in a general situation paralleling that of its Biblical predecessors: without a geographically remote ally, and in a region no longer tightly tethered to and constrained by an extrinsic great power rivalry. Like its Biblical predecessors, Israel may be forced to confront its place in shifting local power balances among states that might be at times friendly and at other times hostile. It may also have to weigh alliances with and against powers more geographically proximate: Turkey, Iran, India, perhaps Pakistan (if it survives as a state) and even China."

Zakheim also is interesting in his discussion of the politics of the prophets: "The Prophets were consummate realists: Isaiah preached independent neutrality when it was appropriate; Jeremiah preached submission to the superpower when the external ‘correlation of forces' had changed."

The lesson for Israel he finds in the words of the prophets is this: "Realism in foreign policy, moderation in religious policy, openness in economic policy and equality in social policy may be the best path for the Jewish state as it confronts its uncertain future."

It seems to me, reading Pericles' funeral oration (431 BC), that it clearly provided the inspiration for Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

Pericles begins by dismissing his own speechmaking ability: "[I]t is hard to speak properly upon a subject where it is even difficult to convince your hearers that you are speaking the truth." That reminded me of Lincoln's "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here."

Pericles then dwells on what we might call "Athenian exceptionalism": "Our constitution does not copy the laws of neighboring states; we are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves." A bit later, he adds, "In short, I would say that as a city we are the school of Hellas." This brought to mind Lincoln's beginning, "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."

Most striking of all, both speeches conclude by challenging the living to live up to the standard set by the fallen. "So dies these men as became Athenians," says Pericles. "You, their survivors, must determine to have as unaltering a resolution in the field." I think Lincoln expresses that thought better: "It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

(After writing this I did some quick Googling and saw that the comparison between the two speeches is apparently a major theme of Garry Wills' book on the Gettysburg Address. So clearly I am not the first to come across this.) I knew that Lincoln was into Shakespeare and the King James Bible, but I hadn't realized he also absorbed the Greeks.

By Steve Inskeep

Best Defense guest columnist

A few years ago, two friends took me out for a boat ride in the waters off Karachi.  We worked our way around a coastal peninsula, all of which was controlled by a single real estate developer. That developer was the Pakistani army.

A row of McMansions lined the water. Several upscale apartment towers clustered together, near a club that advertised "six-star" facilities, and a golf course equipped with stadium lights so that players could avoid the heat of the day and play in the evening in the ocean breeze. And most of the land was still awaiting development.

This stretch of prime real estate, roughly the size of midtown Manhattan, was just one of many sections of property throughout the city to be developed by the local Defence Housing Authority. It's so closely linked with the army that the commander of V Corps, which is headquartered in Karachi, is also the president of the housing authority. This would be the rough equivalent of, say, placing the current commander of the U.S. Army troops at Fort Hood, Texas in charge of downtown development in Houston.

That peninsula illustrates the way that Pakistan's army has taken many of the country's prime economic opportunities for itself. Military involvement in economic activity started in understandable ways -- for example, soldiers had a chance to obtain plots of land upon retirement, following a practice with precedents back to ancient Roman times -- but has grown until the military operates factories and construction companies as well as developing real estate in partnership with multinational corporations. When the army, in the face of protests, allowed free elections and surrendered control of the president's office in 2008, it held onto its economic power, just as it maintained its grip on foreign policy.

The military has, in other words, kept many privileges that it would be unlikely to have in a fully democratic state. And when I try to understand the disturbing news from Pakistan in recent months, the army's privileges come to mind.

The army, one of the world's largest with well over half a million troops, maintains its pre-eminence less through violence than through public opinion. It remains the nation's most trusted institution, and also influences a great deal of the media coverage that Pakistanis consume. But this past spring, after the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden, the army's prestige was tarnished. The army faced rare public criticism -- if not for somehow allowing bin Laden to hide near a military academy, then at least for allowing U.S. Navy Seals to fly in and out undetected. Nawaz Sharif, a former prime minister who was the army's darling long ago, repeatedly criticized the army and demanded inquiries.  Some of the pressure even came from within the army itself: Najam Sethi, a distinguished Pakistani journalist, spoke of unrest among junior army officers.

Read on

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