zenpundit.com

HERE COME THE AYATOLLAHS

I’ve been very lazy regarding my new blogroll additions, which I will properly introduce soon. This post by the wide-ranging, Blogospheric entity, Praktike at chez Nadezhda cannot wait. It’s a good primer on Shiite hierarchy and more importantly, he’s right about Najaf.

A STUDY IN CONTRASTS

“Well, you have to understand that “It’s the economy, stupid,” was more than just a campaign statement. It reflected what the president wanted to focus on — not only economic issues — but domestic issues. He really cared about domestic issues. He was involved with domestic issues. As head of the Governors’ Conference, he’d worked on education issues. That was where his energy and his compassion came from.

Foreign policy was not something he had done an awful lot with, and so foreign policy became almost a learning process for the president. It was a way to make sure we are doing the right things, but keeping it in place so that, in the end, it wouldn’t blow up what he was trying to do domestically for this country. I think that, after a while, this president began to learn what foreign policy was all about. And he became much more effective in dealing with foreign policy issues as a result, but it took a while. In the interim, he relied a great deal on what the vice president said. He relied a great deal on the advisers that he had dealing with foreign policy. . . . I don’t know that he ever properly defined what the role of the United States is in this post-Cold War era, where are our national interests, when should we intervene, when shouldn’t we intervene, when should we use power, when shouldn’t we use power? There’s been no sense that that’s ever come together. Yet, at the same time, even though it’s been oftentimes responding to a crisis out there, you have to say that the president’s done a pretty good job in responding to those crises. If peace is the determinative of whether or not your foreign policy has been successful, we have peace. “

Former Chief of Staff, Leon Panetta on Bill Clinton.

Correlation is not causation…as we have since found out.

I’d agree that Mr. Clinton was markedly better at Foreign policy in 1999 or 2000 than in 1993 or 1994. I’d even allocute to the fact that Bill Clinton’s record on international economic policy was a bright spot, underappreciated by liberals and conservatives alike.

However it would have been a good deal better if Clinton’s foreign policy principals had included at least one person with an interest and drive for strategic planning. Having everyone viewing the national security, foreign policy and intelligence communities as a kind of international fire brigade to push the annoying crisis du jour in Otherwhereistan off of the front page of the Times so the president could concentrate on “important” issues like school uniforms did not serve the country well.

READING BETWEEN THE LINES AT THE CIA – THE INTERNAL SHAKE-UP ISN’T WHAT YOU THINK

Many of you probably caught the widely reported story of the internal shake-up at the CIA under new DCI Porter Goss. The ongoing spin as the story broke has attributed the resignations of former acting DCI and current DDCI John McLaughlin and other top career civil servants at the CIA to Bush administration retribution for politically motivated leaking.

To an extent this is not only true but eminently justifiable because senior CIA officials were leaking to influence a presidential election and immediately began attempting to sabotage their new DCI’s team by selective leaks from their FBI raw files ( other candidates as leakers include the FBI itself or members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, if they have received the files. Draw your own conclusions as to means and motives). Say what you like about the Bush administration but it’s a bad precedent to let the top officials of the nation’s premier intelligence service get away with trying to manipulate the democratic process. These folks have to go regardless of their position on intel reform or Iraq.

The underlying conflict at the CIA isn’t simply partisan politics but a ferocious debate over the nature of the agency itself. Senior CIA administration, who were among those excoriated by veteran analyst Micheal Scheuer in Imperial Hubris and veteran field agent Robert Baer in See No Evil, like the status quo of liason intel collection work where the CIA is taking what friendly intelligence services have to offer. Certainly the information is not accepted uncritically but it leaves the United States, blind, dependent and subject to foreign manipulation.

Cross-checks against our own HUMINT sources are generally unavailable because the CIA got out of the HUMINT business in “difficult” areas during the Clinton-Deutch-Tenet era. From the senior CIA official perspective, developing your own sources is politically risky while errors from say the Mossad or BND or Indian intelligence can be fobbed off when Congressmen begin asking pointed questions. Liason work, which can have value on its own merits, is much preferred for CYA reasons. Same thing for promoting ” Current Intelligence” analytical production ( news) over reports garnered primarily from espionage.

Porter Goss is an advocate of the CIA doing it’s own field work, taking risks, engaging in clandestine action, including paramilitary operations, strategic influence, deep cover penetration to procure strategic intelligence needed for in-depth analysis. Some agency veterans, who lived through the era of the Church and Pike Committees, Iran-Contra and a series of bad Oliver Stone movies, are recoiling in horror. Having been burned more than once by unscrupulous politicians as the winds shifted, their prime directive is to avoid any career-ending gaffe that could end up on the front pages of the New York Times.

To an extent they are right. Today’s hero who nails a top level al Qaida killer with a predator missile may be tomorrow’s scapegoat or criminal defendent if ” the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” regains the ascendancy. It’s easy to forget how sharply the pendulum has swung since 9/11. As recently as 1999, moderate historian Douglas Brinkley* wrote of that the intelligence community’s covert operations were viewed with ” thorough disgust” by the American public due to spy scandals.

Nevertheless, an agency that faces Islamist terrorists can find the courage to face down snide questions from a leftist Congressional staffer fresh from his last semester’s diversity workshop at Princeton. It can also find the nerve to deliver bad news to policy makers ( ” intelligence consumers” in CIA lingo). In fact, it might be a good idea to delineate where intelligence analysis ends and policy making begins. A recent CIA roundtable indicates that at best, the lines are very blurry on both sides of the divide. This lack of clarity is the fault of the administration and Congress, not the CIA or it’s analysts but the confusion is evident- as is the unwillingness of political appointees to accept non-linear ( probalistic, multi-tiered) estimates that are a far better reflection of reality. The report is worth the time to read.

The CIA needs reform – current intelligence production should be separated from strategic intelligence and only the results coallated in NIE or some other format; clandestine operations in all its facets must become more robust while analysis needs an infusion of resources and acceptance of alternative analytical methodologies. The political branches need to accept that to ask the CIA or the IC to make predictions or engage in covert-operations runs the risk of error or failure. When these things fail and the CIA has done what it has been asked under the limitations that the law directs, then the blame for the failure lies with Congress or the administration.

The shifting of blame to ” faceless bureaucrats” for two generations has demoralized the men and women of the CIA, a service that is critical to American security. It has made them risk-averse, it has made them conventional and it has made them into lawyers out of self-preservation.

What it hasn’t done is make the rest of us one iota safer.

UPDATE: Earlier, I mistakenly identified the historian Douglas Brinkley as the historian Alan Brinkley. I have corrected the error and offer my apologies to both gentlemen. Mea culpa.

THE UNBOUNDED CONFIDENCE OF THE ELITE IN THE UNITED NATIONS

What is it in the track record of the UN and it’s peacekeeping operations that inspires an almost religious faith on the part of members of our bipartisan foreign policy elite ? An article in American Diplomacy by Wiliam E. Howard III analyzes America’s position in the war on terror through the prism of Israel and the Palestinians and counsels across the board capitulation.

“STEPS TOWARD A SOLUTION IN THE MIDDLE EAST



Our national policies in the Middle East are not in accord with our national interests. They are failing us. What is good for Israel is proving to be a disaster for America. Once we see the necessity for a political solution, the United States should seriously consider the following path:

• First, we should announce to the world that we intend to balance our Middle East policy. This will initially be viewed with skepticism by other countries because we have stated we already have one. So, further steps are needed to convince the world that we have seriously changed our policy.



• The US should request that the United Nations take the lead in turning over the leadership in Iraq to the Iraqis by implementing steps proposed by the UN and agreed upon by the majority of the UN membership. At first this will require substituting UN troops in place of U.S. and coalition troops to keep order. Based on the Iraqi reactions to date, it might be best if the coalition troops totally withdraw and leave the field to troops within other UN, and possibly NATO nations.



• At virtually the same time, the US should make the same request, with similar provisos, to the UN regarding Afghanistan.



• The United States should urge the United Nations to convene as neutral a group as possible, with a charge to the group to convene and advise the UN on new borders for two nation-states, Israel and Palestine, perhaps by using, as a starting point, the borders just prior to the ’67 Arab-Israeli war.



• America should volunteer to help the UN to police those borders, and the United States should use its international influence to guarantee the borders of both countries through the United Nations. Such a guarantee will be absolutely necessary because of Israel’s contention that the Palestinians want to drive the Israelis into the sea and because of the Palestinian’s fear that Israel will not honor their new country’s boundaries



Dr. Howard should provide some evidence that the UN is held in the same sort of breathless awe by Afghan tribal warlords, Hamas and Iraqi insurgents as it is by Western PhD’s who get invitations to seminars at the Council of Foreign Relations and the Kennedy School of Government. What is also amazing is the tone of contempt the article has for both the ability of national peoples to rule themselves or for America to intervene effectively anywhere juxtaposed with the breezy presumption of competence of the UN to accomplish what the United States cannot.

My reading of UN intervention throughout history is one of failure and disaster unless one of two conditions or both are met:

a) An armistice has already been hammered out and freely agreed to by the warring principals because the agreement is in the interest of both parties and each party is in control of it’s armed combatants.

b) The UN is a fig leaf for the robust warfighting capability of the United States as in the Korean and Gulf wars.

For those who doubt me I suggest they look up the 1960’s intervention by the UN in the Congo and in Bosnia, Rwanda and Cambodia in the 1990’s. UN peacekeepers lack the military capability to be anything but bystanders and are usually shackled by rules of engagement by the UN Secretary-General that make them ineffective even at their own self-defense. And this force will be policing Afghanistan and Iraq ?

No, Dr. Howard is proposing that it will still be American troops under the rules of a UN command so we can continue to provide young men as targets with legally restricted ability to return fire.

We need a new elite in this country. Ours has lost the will to survive.

BIN LADEN IN HIBERNATION ? DEBKA FILE POINTS TO THE LITTLE PAMIR REGION

Buried in an election week report on the Bin Laden video on the Debka File are tantalizing leaks from recon reports as to bin Laden’s whereabouts in the mountainous Central Asian borderlands:

“Bin Laden was actually spotted in the flesh just a few days ago – according to DEBKAfile’s counter terror sources. Between October 17 and October 19, an Indian air force reconnaissance plane picked him up in the Tibet-Laddakh region close to the North-Eastern corner of Pakistan bordering India and China. Additional surveillance aircraft were called in and identified the al Qaeda leader on the move with a 10-vehicle convoy of black Japanese minivans. Four of the vehicles turned up again on October 22 heading east towards the Chinese border. Our sources maintain that the rumored sightings of bin Laden on the Lingzi Thang Plain on the Tibetan border in June may have been true then but are now outdated. In any case, he was not at the time in Pakistani Waziristan or the Afghan-Pakistani border.

The agents hunting the al Qaeda leader are working on the premise that he has decided to wait out the winter months in one of two regions: Hunza province in the Northern Frontier tip of Indian Kashmir or Little Pamir, where fanatical Tajik tribes have never allowed any Kabul government – whether Taliban or led by Karzai – to secure a foothold.

Little Pamir is wedged between Tajikistan where Russian special forces taking part in the bin Laden dragnet are deployed and China.

Before launching the Sept.11 attacks, bin Laden and his deputy Ayman Zawahiri, prepared snug havens in the caverns that riddle the towering 5,000-8,000-meter mountain peaks.

In the 1970s, the Russians converted the Little Pamir cave warren into subterranean silos for nuclear missiles pointing towards China. But even the Russians found the cold and harsh conditions unendurable and by the mid-1980s the bases were abandoned.

Sunday, October 24, a senior FBI agent, briefed first in Pakistan, flew from Islamabad to New Delhi to meet Indian security bosses and examine the aerial shots of the bin Laden convoy.

Our intelligence sources report that, after the American agent studied the data and questioned the Indian intelligence officers who saw the terrorist chief leave his minivan several times, he relayed Washington’s request for the Indian government to put its security forces in the North Western region on red alert and round up troops for combing operations in the region before the snowfall.

New Delhi complied the next day and also stepped up its vigilance on the Kagil-Leh Highway and along the Tibetan border.”