This may be the most significant national security news of the day, even bigger than the Japanese meltdowns, but you won't see it in the Early Bird or most other defense-related news discussions.

News vaults over the horizon that China has surpassed the United States in manufacturing volume, ending a 110-year long run by the Americans. My initial thought was to remember that I read a few years ago that Great Britain effectively lost World War I when it was overtaken in goods production in the late 19th century by both Germany and the United States. (I am travelling and so can't look at my World War I shelf to see where I read that -- I want to say Corelli Barnett's The Swordbearers, but that doesn't seem right.) 

I asked my CNAS colleague Abe Denmark, who is both very smart and is in China right now, what to think of this, and he wasn't as worried. I hope to have more from him on this tomorrow.

Meanwhile, in other Asia-as-number-one news, I see that India has become the world's largest weapons importer, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

My CNAS colleague Amanda Pfabe wondered what was on the mind of former CIA director Michael Hayden. This is what she found.

Personally, I wish the general worried a bit more about the damage done to America by the government's embrace of torture as a policy under President Bush.

By Amanda Pfabe
Best Defense All American roving correspondent

Retired Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA, spoke the other day at Johns Hopkins University's Rethinking Seminar about six security concerns that would keep him up at night were he still in the government. All six, he said, have a degree of imminence to them:

No. 1: Proliferation (specifically concerning Iran)
Hayden noted that answering questions pertaining to Iranian nuclear capabilities is easier to do than articulating how the Iranian government makes decisions. No one seems to know who or what influences policy. The confusion and mixed messages coming from Tehran surrounding the detention of the three American hikers, two of whom are still being held in Iran, in 2009 underscores the fact that Iran is a fully functioning society with a fully dysfunctional government.  

His scary bottom line: Iran's quest to obtain nuclear weapons is a means to deterring the United States. Attempts to affect their nuclear capability, such as Stuxnet, will simply make them more committed to that quest.

No. 2: China
Hayden was quick to explain that China is not necessarily an enemy, as there are "logical non-heroic policies available to both sides" that can prevent conflicts. However, China's recent international behavior, such as the Chinese fishing boat's collision with Japanese coast guard vessels, can be described as triumphal and akin to that of a teenager whose strength has outstripped his judgment, experience, and wisdom. Several structural problems, including its uneven distribution of wealth, gender imbalance, and environmental disasters, promise to cause growing pains for China as it continues its ascent. Moreover, the legitimacy of the Communist Party governance is based on an unsustainable ten percent GDP growth per year. 

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Good for him. This strikes me as the right move strategically. China will be miffed, but that is OK. The message is sent that we will work with our rivals but support our allies. "It is my firm belief," the president said, "that the relationship between the United States and India -- bound by our shared interests and values -- will be one of the defining partnerships of the 21st century."

Also, it shows that while the U.S. is trying to bolster the rotten regime in Pakistan, we understand where our long-term interests lie. He should get some credit for not being an idiot about on this.

Now, let's see if the Krauthammers of the world give him credit when it is due, even by their harsh lights.

Globally speaking, it will be interesting to see how the United Nations changes if China, Japan and India all have permanent seats at the adults' table. It also probably is time to kick out France and Britain and instead give the EU one seat, which would make the permanent members:

• United States
• Russia
• China
• India
• Japan
• EU

That means 3.5 members of the council would be Asian.

Counterterrorism without counterinsurgency is alluring -- it seems cheaper and easier -- but it is usually pretty meaningless and in fact can be very counterproductive. People who advocate just doing counterterror generally don't understand that. This is one of the best explanations I've read of why the short, easy way just doesn't work, from a friend who can't be identified, but who is in a position to understand this.

If you work at the White House, please read this slowly.

By Mr. XYZ
Best Defense terrorism columnist

To avoid killing the wrong people, you need intelligence. Good intelligence demands you have very close contact with, and cooperation from, the very constituency the Terrorists are seeking to mobilize. These folks won't cooperate unless they have security of person and property AND believe you won't abandon them after the next presidential election. That means that you can't CT without COIN.

Oh you can try. Clinton made a sport of it -- firing several hundred million dollars worth of cruise missiles into the deserts of North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. Predictably, fire weapons and fire weapons alone not only did not compel the enemy to surrender, it caused them to multiply.

No serious student of strategic aerial bombardment I know of still believes that bombing a civilian population -- short of nuclear weapons -- will do anything more (or less) than awaken a sleeping giant -- Pearl Harbor and 9/11 are perfect examples, but so too are the largely failed terror-bombing campaigns of the Luftwaffe of Britain (1940-41 and ‘44-45) and the British reply to Germany (1942-1945).

The reason terror bombing does not work, is it causes predictable outrage in the survivors. Even if you use precision weapons -- no, especially if you use precision weapons -- killing anyone in my family will make of me an implacable enemy. I say this because if you use precision weapons you purportedly have the ability to avoid killing the wrong people and yet you killed one of mine. Hence, you MEANT to kill my relative. And now, I will have to return the favor -- especially if I am from a Shame Culture.

Used alone, navies and air forces cannot, therefore, win against insurgents. Why? Because they are fire weapons -- and fire weapons alone can never compel the enemy to surrender. The enemy may choose to surrender -- as happened in Serbia in 1999 and Japan in 1945, but the decision is left to the enemy. True decision in war comes from shock forces -- Marines/ infantry. Once shock forces go into action the enemy must repel the attack or leave. If they can't leave or defeat the attack they must surrender.

If you're going to employ shock forces, you are now going to be in and among the population. If you are going to have a population that is at least neutral, if not supporting you, then you will need to understand their language, culture, and aspirations, and help to provide for their needs. You must also be prepared for a long and costly war, in both money and casualties.

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My gut feeling is that U.S. officials are beginning to give up on getting serious anti-Taliban help from the government of Pakistan. My guess is that there won't be any official change stated, but more actions that Pakistani officials haven't been consulted about. Also, if the ISI really is interfering with peace talks with the Taliban, I'd expect to see a rollup of ISI agents in Afghanistan. This would be done quietly, if possible, so the public signs would be reactions such as the kidnapping of Indian officials in Afghanistan, or bombing the Indian embassy again.

My speculation isn't based on any leaks or anything, just a reading of a series of recent newspaper articles.

Shorting Pakistan is kind of a no-brainer: In the long one, which is the better ally to have, India or Pakistan?

India's home secretary says flatly that the Pakistani government controlled and ran the Mumbai attacks that killed 166 people in November 2008.

So does this mean the two countries are at war?

If the Taliban took over Afghanistan, would al Qaeda again have a safe haven? I think so. The time to drive a wedge betwixt the two was back in 2002-2003, after the American invasion, when both groups had fled Afghanistan in disarray, and were licking their wounds and reproaching each other as they hid in Pakistani frontier villages.

That thought is provoked by an article in today's New York Times and by a  series of interesting interviews with Taliban members recently carried by Newsweek. After the U.S. arrived, notes one Talibaner interviewed: 

The Arabs were disappointed the Taliban hadn't stood and fought. They told me they had wanted to fight to the death. They were clearly not as distressed as the Afghans. This was understandable. The Arabs felt they had lost a battle. But the Afghans were much more devastated-they had lost a country."

The groups began rebuilding, the same Talibani recalls, by using raids and even funerals as recruiting and fund-raising tools. After one cross-border raid against an American outpost, he recalled:

We carried the stiff and bloodied bodies of our martyrs back to Wana. Thousands of locals attended their funerals. ... As the news traveled, a lot of former Taliban began returning to Wana to join us.

Another Taliban member says they benefited from American violence and the abuses of the Kabul government:

The Afghan Taliban were weak and disorganized. But slowly the situation began to change. American operations that harassed villagers, bombings that killed civilians, and Karzai's corrupt police were alienating villagers and turning them in our favor. Soon we didn't have to hide so much on our raids. We came openly. When they saw us, villagers started preparing green tea and food for us. The tables were turning. Karzai's police and officials mostly hid in their district compounds like prisoners.

As the old John Hiatt song laments, this is the way we make a broken heart. Or rather, this is the way we allowed a medieval bunch of Afghan hillbillies to re-group while we distracted ourselves with an unnecessary war in Iraq.

Meanwhile, someone tried to blow up the Indian Embassy in Kabul today. I wonder who doesn't like Indian influence in the Afghan capital?

SAEED KHAN/AFP/Getty Images

I wouldn't be surprised to see India conduct air strikes sometime in the next few months against suspected terrorist camps in Pakistan, especially if Pakistani officials continue to play ostrich on the Mumbai/Bombay attacks.

Indian officials certainly are talking like born-again hawks. "Surgical strikes are definitely feasible," warns Gen. Deepak Kapoor, the chief of the Indian army.

(Hat tip to Nightwatch for flagging this.)

John Moore/Getty Images