For a security conference focused on the U.S. in Asia, it is amazing how little Taiwan is mentioned. I can remember when it dominated discussions of the American relationship with China. I think this is a sign of progress.

Longtime grasshoppers know I am a big fan of the commentary of David Ignatius. So, no surprise, I think he is right in his comments on how Pakistan has blown it over the last decade:

Pakistan is losing the best chance in its history to gain political control over all of its territory -- including the warlike tribal areas along the frontier.

Pakistan has squandered the opportunity presented by having a large U.S.-led army just over the border in Afghanistan. Rather than work with the United States to stabilize a lawless sanctuary full of warlords and terrorists, the Pakistanis decided to play games with these outlaw groups. As a result, Pakistan and its neighbors will be less secure, probably for decades. . . . The Pakistanis lost a chance over the past decade to build and secure their country. It won't come back again in this form. That's a small problem for the United States and its allies, but a big problem for Pakistan.

It is striking to me how little President Obama says about the war in Afghanistan.

The situation reminds me a bit of Iraq late in President Bush's term. Bush had no credibility on the issue, so had to rely on General Petraeus to become the face and voice of the war. It wasn't fair to Petraeus, maybe, but someone had to do it, and Petraeus did, most notably in the September 2007 Senate hearings that effectively quashed congressional sentiment for a quick withdrawal.

But that isn't the problem now. I think Obama has a good deal of credibility on foreign policy and national security issues, perhaps more than any Democratic president since FDR (although the extraordinary narrowness of the backgrounds of Obama's White House national security team continues to worry me -- basically they are Hill rats and political hacks). Maybe there just isn't that much to say about the war. But I think there is.

If the Petraeus parallel held, either General Mattis (the Centcom commander) or General Allen (the commander in Afghanistan) would step in. But Mattis apparently has been muzzled by President Obama, and Allen still seems to be getting accustomed to the white-hot glare of global publicity. I actually think the gag on Mattis is a mistake -- the American people like straight talk, even if it doesn't play well in Washington.

By Robert L. Goldich

Best Defense bureau for Celtic secessionism

Remember when the main character in the movie Braveheart, loosely, really loosely, based on the Scottish chieftain and military leader William Wallace, shouted "Freedom!" at the top of his lungs? Although the real Wallace defeated the English in 1297 at Stirling Bridge, he was captured in 1305 and hanged (but not until he was dead), drawn (four horses pulling his body apart in different directions) and quartered (just what it sounds like) for "treason" by the English.

It probably won't come to that in the early 21^st Century. But a more formidable successor to Mel Gibson exists in the person of Alex Salmond, the current First Minister of Scotland, leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) and its majority in the Scottish Parliament. Just about everybody in the United Kingdom seems to agree, whether they like him and his policies or not, that Mr. Salmond is an extraordinarily astute, charismatic, and dynamic political leader. He is currently engaged in a high-stakes interaction with the British Government and its political leadership to have a referendum, sometime in the next couple of years, on whether or not Scotland should leave the United Kingdom and become an independent country.

Well. As with all such disputes, it arises for domestic reasons which need not concern the United States and those responsible for, and interested in, U.S. foreign and national security policy. We may not be able to affect the process overtly, and doing so would almost certainly be counterproductive. But that doesn't mean that some very important questions need to be asked about what the implications of Scottish independence would be for US national defense. Let's start with general issues.

First, Scotland has been a part of the United Kingdom since 1707, when the "Act of Union" was enacted by Parliament. That alone means something. What would it say to American policymakers if our closest ally, one with whom we have been linked in peace and war since we entered World War I in 1917, suddenly broke apart after over 300 years of political unity? What would it say about the internal cohesion of whatever rump UK remained after Scotland left? Would Wales -- which, arguably, has much more linguistic and cultural differentiation from England than Scotland -- be next? Would moves for Northern Ireland's independence from the UK, and union with the Republic of Ireland, be re-energized, with possible attendant violence? Or, more broadly, would a disintegrating United Kingdom be considered as reliable a partner?

There are some more pointed questions that American policymakers might start thinking about. Mr. Salmond has on occasion stated that he favors having the UK retain control over foreign and defense policy, but this scarcely squares with his also stated desire to eventually have all nuclear weapons -- that is, British ones -- out of Scotland, and his stated support for establishment of a "Scottish defense force" that would include the Scottish regiments of the British Army. (As a fair chunk of the enlisted soldiers, and most of the officers, of Scottish regiments, aren't Scottish, this might not work out too well, but I digress.)

What would be the foreign policy of an independent Scotland, as it appears that Mr. Salmond in fact wants to have his own defense policy? Would it join NATO? How much, if at all, would it cooperate with the armed forces of a truncated United Kingdom? With the armed forces of other Western democracies, including, but not limited to, those of the United States? Would it cooperate with the British intelligence services in the maintenance of internal security against terrorism in the British Isles? Would it cooperate with other countries' intelligence services, including those of the United States? Would it look more leniently on the presence of embassies and diplomatic representatives, and their activities, from anti-American and anti-Western states such as North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela? Mr. Salmond and his Scottish Nationalist Party, and the dominant political culture in Scotland, is quite far to the Left, for a variety of internal reasons that don't matter here. This doesn't augur well for a positive answer to any of these questions. It suggests that we have to consider that, a la the Republic of Ireland, Scotland might well be aggressively neutral, and avoid involvement all kinds of Euro-Atlantic collective security agreements that have been so important in maintaining European stability since 1945.

Finally, what would Scottish independence, and what it implies about the long-term political stability of the UK, say to American economic interests? To Americans, Great Britain is not, say, velvet-divorced Czechoslovakia, and certainly not Doonesbury's Brzrkrstan. It is viewed as a bedrock of political stability that underlies a willingness to invest in a country. It could scarcely be considered such if Scotland left it. Moreover, Mr. Salmond has made all kinds of statements about the need for an independent Scotland's economic policy to shift sharply to the Left, not something guaranteed to invite foreign investment.

The people of the current United Kingdom will ultimately decide, one way or another, actively or passively, about Scottish independence. But that doesn't mean that Americans don't have a strategic stake in it. Scottish independence may or may not be a good idea for Great Britain as it is currently constituted. But there are good reasons for us to think that it might not be too good for us.

Colin Gray concludes his 30th maxim, about the persistence of thuggishness in world politics, with this quotation: "Nice guys finish last." He attributes this to "Popular American saying."

This is one of the rare lapses in his book, and a bit ironic given his emphasis on the need for cultural sensitivity in making and implementing strategy. In this case, he gets the words right but the attribution wrong, and if you know your baseball history, that's significant. The crack about "nice guys finishing last" is not a folk saying broadly popular with Americans, it was an riposte made by Leo Durocher, a brawling baseball manager with a distinctly dark view of the world -- and of how to play baseball: "Win any way you can as long as you can get away with it." So I would say that the comment isn't so much reflective of American views -- which tend to be more optimistic, law-abiding and meliorist -- as of the hard-bitten minority that believes that to get along in the world, you have to kick, bite and gouge every inch of the way. Or, as Durocher once confessed, "If I were playing third base and my mother was rounding third with the run that was going to beat us, I would trip her."

By Peter Bacon
Best Defense Academy of Frenemy-American Relations

At SAIS the other day, the Kettering Foundation and the Institute for American Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) held a high-powered conference on the future of U.S.-China relations, featuring pretty much all the big names in the China racket. If you weren't selected to be one of the illuminati, here is what you missed:

--Professor David Lampton of SAIS summed up the conference's assessment of Sino-American relationship as "not in the best of times, but not in the worst of times." Both Professor Lampton and Rear Admiral Eric McVadon both identified believe that the relationship has evolved over the past decades from a one-dimensional, anti-Soviet Cold War partnership to a "three-legged stool," of security, economic, and culture relations. Elites within both countries bolstered this relationship: Tao Wenzhao, a senior fellow at CASS, argued that the recent meetings between elites such as Hu Jintao and President Obama, and between Joe Biden and Hu's putative successor Xi Jinping augured well for future Sino-American relations. Indeed, Wenzhao remarked that one Chinese official observed that "Mr. Jinping [had] never spent so much time with a foreign guest" as he did with Biden. The conference's keynote speaker, former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, similarly identified the Hu-Obama communiqué issued during the two leaders' meeting as "a real blueprint of strategic objectives shared and 34 tangible paragraphs elaborating on them and tasks ahead for the relationship."

--The panelists overall still felt quite uneasy about the future of the Sino-American relationship. Stephen Orlins, President of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, memorably remarked on his experience on Chinese television when he was asked by a Chinese audience member "why every U.S. policy was designed to oppose China's rise." Tellingly, Orlins continued, "everyone in the audience [stood] up and [started] to applaud." Brzezinski, similarly, wondered whether the anti-China rhetoric from the field of Republican candidates could engender "a more Manichean vision of the world" within the American government. Panelists on public perceptions of the United States and China confirmed this: Yuan Zheng, a Senior Fellow from CASS, found in studies from 2008 to 2010 that "ordinary Chinese have mixed feelings towards the US, just as [ordinary Americans] with China." Indeed, he continued, "56 percent of those Chinese surveyed felt that American policy was two-sided, geared towards 'cooperation and containment.'" Andrew Kohut, President of the Pew Research Center, also pointed out that 58 percent of Americans felt that the United States needed to get tougher with China on trade, while 56 percent of Americans simultaneously felt that the United States and China needed to build better relations.

--Panelists and speakers at the conference argued that these ambivalent tensions necessitated a global condominium between America and China, or, in the words of Brzezinski, "to act towards each other as though we were part of a G-2 without proclaiming ourselves to be a G-2." This "basic generalization" of Brzezinski followed on statements made by other speakers such as David Lampton and Tom Fingar of Stanford University who both argued that without Sino-American cooperation and leadership, problems of international economic management, collective security, or climate change would not be dealt with. Fingar further argued that each power needed to pursue this cooperative partnership even if we had not reached a state of mutual trust between the two powers. The "very real, very now" nature of issues such as climate change and its impact on national security and ever-changing threats to global security necessitated a partnership even as publics and elites remained distrustful of each other.

Joby Warrick, who used to sit next to me at the Washington Post, has a new book out on the guy who killed a bunch of CIA operatives in Afghanistan in December 2009. Here is a short interview I did with him about The Triple Agent.

Best Defense: There have been a ton of books on intelligence and al Qaeda over the last several years. What makes yours different? Why should a hard-working stiff (or one of the many readers of this blog currently deployed to Afghanistan) pay to download it?

Joby Warrick: Triple Agent is a different kind of read because it is, at its core, a pure narrative, the story of an intelligence operation that unfolds over the course of a year and then goes badly wrong. There's a lot of "news" in the book, including an account of drone warfare that is as detailed, in my humble opinion, as any in the open-source arena. But the reader is pulled along by a story that is populated by unforgettable -- but very real -- characters and races to its tragic climax. For those who closely follow CT, this review by the Brookings Institute's Ben Wittes wonderfully distills what the book seeks to achieve: a penetrating and informative reconstruction of a flawed intelligence operation that, to use Ben's words, "bristles with the energy of a thriller."

BD: Did your research make you more or less pessimistic about the Afghan war?

JW: I became less pessimistic about the prospects for defeating "core" al-Qaeda in the Af-Pak region. The CIA's drone campaign is extraordinarily effective, and the agency is getting progressively better at targeting senior leaders and disrupting their networks. On the other hand, my view of the war itself has not changed substantially. After spending time in the east and meeting with ordinary Afghans there, it's hard to imagine how a future Afghan government will retain control of provinces such as Khost or Paktia once U.S. forces are gone.

BD: What has been the unofficial reaction of CIA types to the book?

JW: I've had wonderful response from individual CIA officers, including some who served at Khost and were present on the day of the bombing. Many said they appreciated the book's straight-ahead approach in telling the story, and the fact that, while pointing out fatal mistakes that led to the bombing, the book is respectful of ordinary men and women who served at Khost and worked under extraordinarily challenging circumstances.

BD: How do you think the CIA should change?

JW: After the bombing, the CIA owned up to what then-director Leon Panetta described as "systemic" failures that contributed to the great loss of life on Dec. 30, 2009. A key failure was an insufficient focus on counterintelligence, which is an even tougher challenge at a time when the intelligence agencies and operatives are strained by multiple rotations and a decade of warfare. There also were mistakes that uniquely reflect the circumstances and individuals at Khost. The CIA has implemented numerous reforms, but a challenge for the agency is how to ensure proper attention and follow-through, given the relative lack of transparency and oversight.

BD: What is the one question you'd like to answer about the book that nobody has asked you?

JW: Some of the events in the book have never been described elsewhere, and I've been surprised that few reviewers or interviewers have asked about them. One favorite: a description in the book of a dirty-bomb threat that emanated from Pakistan mid-2009 and raised alarms at the highest levels of the U.S. government. Information gleaned through SIGINT intercepts suggested strongly that the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) had acquired "nuclear" material-presumably radioactive sources useable in a dirty bomb--and were trying to decide what to do with it. Concerns over a possible dirty-bomb attack directly factored into the decision to take out TTP leader Baitullah Mehsud, who was killed in a drone strike on Aug. 5 of that year. No radioactive material was subsequently found, and to this day, no one knows what happened to it, or indeed, whether it ever existed.

Jakub Grygiel is one of the more interesting strategic thinkers around. In the new (Fall 2011) issue of Orbis he has a good piece that looks at why certain decentralized parts of the Roman Empire were better able to counter the barbarian invasions than were others.

The lesson of his inquiry:

The policy of decentralizing security provision by, for instance, building greater capabilities for local police forces, may be the most effective way of responding to such a security environment. Signs already abound that this is exactly what is already happening in the United States, a country that because of a deep tradition of self-reliance and federalism may be well positioned to adapt to the possibility of non-state, small, localized, threats. Other countries, in particular in Europe, where the drive to build a centralized state that arrogates to itself most aspects of social life has been historically longer and more relentless, may face greater challenges.

In my nearly two decades of covering the defense establishment, I never really looked at the Army Corps of Engineers. It is like a separate entity.

I regretted that neglect when I read a story in this morning's Washington Post about a scheme involving two Corps program managers and people at a private company that prosecutors are calling "one of the most brazen bribery and corruption schemes in the history of federal contracting." The Post continues: "they bought millions of dollars worth of BMWs, Rolex and Cartier watches, flat-screen televisions, first-class airline tickets and investment properties across the globe."

The story ended on this dismaying note: "Press officers of the Corps of Engineers did not return phone calls or e-mails seeking comment." The Corps needs to make dealing with this scandal priority no. 1 -- especially in a budget environment where any entity that is not clearly contributing greatly faces the prospect of being eliminated.

Justice William Douglas once suggested that every federal agency should have a sunset provision -- that is, it ceases to exist after, say, 10 years, unless the Congress renewed it. I think it may be time to re-visit that thought.   

Meanwhile, in other legal proceedings, a Coast Guard chief warrant officer was convicted of, among other things, malingering. I can't remember seeing that charged before.

I wonder which step Mullen is on?

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said to the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday that Pakistan's intelligence agency was in the background of the recent attack on our embassy, as well as a bunch of other assaults. But he seems happy to keep on chatting with them.

He also said a bunch of other stuff, like about where the fight is. My interpretation is that we have moved to a strictly transactional relationship. We will continue to deal with them but will call them out on occasion.

Just treat this as a guest column.

With ISI support, Haqqani operatives plan and conducted that truck bomb attack, as well as the assault on our embassy. We also have credible intelligence that they were behind the June 28th attack on the Inter- Continental Hotel in Kabul and a host of other smaller but effective operations.

In choosing to use violent extremism as an instrument of policy, the government of Pakistan, and most especially the Pakistani army and ISI, jeopardizes not only the prospect of our strategic partnership but Pakistan's opportunity to be a respected nation with legitimate regional influence. They may believe that by using these proxies, they are hedging their bets or redressing what they feel is an imbalance in regional power. But in reality, they have already lost that bet. By exporting violence, they've eroded their internal security and their position in the region. They have undermined their international credibility and threatened their economic well-being. Only a decision to break with this policy can pave the road to a positive future for Pakistan.

... As you know, I've expended enormous energy on this relationship. I've met with General Kayani more than two dozen times, including a two and a half hour meeting last weekend in Spain ... Some may argue I've wasted my time, that Pakistan is no closer to us than before, and may now have drifted even further away. I disagree. Military cooperation again is warming. Information flow between us and across the border is quickening. Transparent -- transparency is returning slowly.

... I actually believe that the ISI has got to fundamentally shift its strategic focus. They're -- they are the ones who implement as -- I would argue as a part of government policy the support of extremists. It's not just Haqqani because we've also had our challenges with LET, which is an organization they put in place. So in many ways, it's the proxy piece here. The support of terrorism is part of their national strategy to protect their own vital interests because of where they live. And that's got to fundamentally shift.

... it's very clear the toughest fight is going to be in the east, and the Haqqani network is embedded in Pakistan essentially across from hosts Paktia and Paktika, which, as General Petraeus said, is sort of the "jet stream to Kabul." And they want to own that. That's really their goal ... So I think the risk there is very high. Over the course of the next couple of years I think the biggest fight is going to be in the east, enabled certainly by us, but also Afghan security forces and coalition forces, more than anyplace else. The south I'm not going to say is not problematic, but we're in a much better place in Kandahar and Helmand than we were a couple years ago. It's going to be the east, I think, that in the end answers this from a security standpoint. And Haqqani is at the heart of that.

David Ignatius, for my money the best foreign policy columnist working today, makes a good argument that President Obama has been very successful in foreign policy. "There have been a lot of bumps and bruises, especially in the global economy. But if you step back from the daily squawk box, some trends are clear: Alliances are stronger, the United States is (somewhat) less bogged down in foreign wars, Iran is weaker, the Arab world is less hostile and al-Qaeda is on the run."

The new issue of Daedalus is about the U.S. military. It has an all-star lineup, but unfortunately most of it is not online. (I was involved in an early discussion of what subjects the issue should cover, and am pleased to see the issue's contents overcome the Boston-New York provincialism I sensed in that long-ago session.)

I was particularly struck by this assertion by retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich, who now teaches at Boston University, and has a great ear for BS:

'We the People' need to understand: it's not longer our army; it hasn't been for years; it's theirs and they intend to keep it. The American military belongs to Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright, to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, to Hilary Clinton and Robert Gates. Civilian leaders will continue to employ the military as they see fit. If Americans do not like the way the army is used, they should reclaim it, resuscitating the tradition of the citizen-soldier and reasserting the connection between citizenship and military service. … [A]s long at the tradition of the citizen-soldier remains moribund, reversing the militarization of U.S. foreign policy will be a pipe dream.

(Pp. 11-12, Daedalus, Summer 2011)

By Richard Fontaine
Best Defense directorate of long-term grand strategy

Secretary of State Clinton's swing through India points again to the tremendous potential of an Indo-American strategic partnership over the long term. But it also demonstrates how tough some of the challenges will remain over the next couple of years. 

Secretary Clinton is in India at the helm of a large, high-level government delegation for the second annual Strategic Dialogue. The first round, held in Washington last year, started to pull the bilateral relationship out of its previous doldrums and set the stage for President Obama's successful visit to India last fall. This round is aimed at sustaining last year's progress and implementing the many commitments both sides took on.

That's tough to do. Many of the big policy changes on the American side have already been made -- the United States has supported Indian access to civilian nuclear technology, a change that required amending domestic law and international agreements; it modified its export controls so that India has greater access to American technology; it now supports India's membership in the four international nonproliferation regimes; and the president endorsed Indian permanent membership on the UN Security Council. There is always more to do, to be sure, but these are serious moves.

On the Indian side, most of the expected policy changes are stuck, largely due to domestic politics. The civil nuclear deal is not operational because of a flawed liability law. Key defense agreements remain incomplete. India has granted little in the way of market access, despite repeated American hectoring. And the United States bemoaned the fact that the two American companies bidding on a major fighter jet program were knocked out of the competition.

Read on

By Matthew Irvine
Best Defense bureau of keeping your eye on the ball

The Obama administration rolled out the unclassified version of its long-awaited counterterrorism strategy document on Wednesday.

Put simply, this is a war plan against al Qaeda. The document is al Qaeda-centric to the point of being al Qaeda-obsessed. What is striking about the strategy is not so much what it says about al Qaeda or its repeated mentions of killing Osama bin Laden (5 of them), but what it left out about counterterrorism more broadly:

Terrorists who aren't AQ: The document mentions "other terrorist concerns requiring focus and attention" such as Hamas, Hizballah, the FARC, and Lashkar-e-Taiba. However, the document does not address these groups in a substantive way.

State-sponsors of terror: While recognizing that some states (Iran and Syria) support terrorist organizations, the strategy does not spell out what this means for broader foreign policy towards these countries. Pakistan is notably absent from this list despite its established ties to the Haqqani Network, Afghan Taliban, and Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Mexico: The growing violence in Mexico did not make the cut in the new strategy. With more than 35,000 dead over the last five years, including numerous government officials, kidnappings, and car bombings, Mexico is emerging as a principal security question for folks on both sides of the border.

The Internet: Cyberterrorism and the increasingly active use of the internet as a virtual safe haven got only lip-service in the unclassified version of the White House report. As Spencer Ackerman at DangerRoom points out, this is not an adequate treatment of what is a growing problem. Domestic Terrorism: Despite DHS calling attention in 2009 to the resurgence in right wing extremism, the new CT strategy does not address this very distinct threat. You don't have to go too far back in time to see the Unabomber, Tim McVeigh, the rise of right-wing militias as a pre-eminent counterterrorism concern.

Pakistan: The President's counterterrorism advisor John Brennan argued on Wednesday that "there's no alternative to us or to the Pakistanis to ensuring that we continue engaging with them." I'm left asking: What happens if the United States and Pakistan don't make up? The United States and Pakistan suffered a bitter divorce in the 1990s. What's to stop that from happening again?

Lastly, what comes next? Brennan also declared "al Qaeda is in its decline," but went on to warn of an adapting enemy and AQ network that will pose a persistent threat. The 9/11 Commission cited a failure of imagination as one of the primary faults in U.S. counterterrorism thinking ten years ago. After reading the 2011 CT strategy, (and the 2003 and 2007 documents) I am left asking the question: What comes next? What are we missing? What are we failing to imagine?