Update: Apparently the show isn’t really a manhunt, but it displays Roger and members of this NBC-assembled team planning an operation to confront war criminals and get them to answer for their actions. Not having seen the show, it sounds kind of like an Inside Edition for the age of terrorism, and not like a freelance, televised police action. But who knows! Monday, July 20, 10 p.m., NBC…

Matt Duss has a good post about how American conservatives, unable to cope with the potential loss of a demagogic Iranian leader who provides a pretext for continued hostility, are suddenly discovering the progressive argument of the past several years that Iran’s president has meager authority to set foreign policy. While I neglected to blog it yesterday, at the Center for a New American Security conference, Nicholas Burns, the Bush administration’s undersecretary of state for political affairs, told conservative op-ed writers they were making a mistake by discounting the potential for change in Iran.  President Obama “effectively has put Ahmadinejad on [the] defensive prior to this election because of our ability now to open up the vista for the possibility of negotiations,” Burns said. Gen. David Petraeus followed up shortly afterward with a more subtle remark, saying that Iranian foreign adventurism had acted as a recruiting tool for Arab forces in the Middle East to bandwagon with the United States in order to counter potential Iranian hegemony.

It would be a mistake to interpret whatever happens in the Iranian election as a referendum on the United States, because it’s primarily domestic concerns like high unemployment that are driving people out into the streets for Moussavi, as would make sense. What’s more, Moussavi is an old-guard figure who embraces the consensus Iranian position about developing nuclear energy. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said earlier this week that Iran had a right under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to enrich uranium for peaceful nuclear energy. That’s a shade further than President Obama has gone, though he said in his Cairo speech that “any nation — including Iran — should have the right to access peaceful nuclear power if it complies with its responsibilities under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.” But it appeared to reflect a recognition that while the election of Moussavi won’t resolve the nuclear dispute between Iran and the United States, negotiations didn’t have to proceed from absolute positions.

The Obama administration has been more circumspect, not wanting to get in the way of an election that might remove Ahmadinejad and also not wanting to say anything that would foreclose any options if it still has to deal with him. Laura Rozen has a good post on that:

“We are committed to direct diplomacy with whatever government emerges,” a U.S. official said Wednesday on condition of anonymity. The administration is “being tight-lipped on this one,” he acknowledged, noting that some planned interviews on the issue had been shut down out of apparent sensitivity to concerns that Iranian hard-liners could portray them as evidence of U.S. meddling, a sensitive issue in Iran.

Well, mostly. In one diplomatic blunder, Dennis Ross, the non-special-envoy to Iran, co-published a book yesterday that floats the prospect of an attack on Iran:

The authors included a nuanced, 30-page chapter that lays out options for dealing with Iran, which has so far not responded to President Barack Obama’s overtures for better relations, with elections there coming up on Friday.

“Tougher policies — either militarily or meaningful containment — will be easier to sell internationally and domestically if we have diplomatically tried to resolve our differences with Iran in a serious and credible fashion,” they wrote.

The book was scheduled to be published before Ross went into the administration. But he couldn’t have asked for a publication delay?

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The bill, however, continues to authorize military funding for Pakistan, and keeps accountability requirements on the use of those funds which Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy (a co-founder of CNAS) has criticized as “too inflexible.” From a statement from Berman’s office:

H.R. 1886 authorizes military assistance to help Pakistan disrupt and defeat al Qaeda and insurgent elements, and requires that the vast majority of such assistance be focused on critical counterinsurgency and counterterrorism efforts. In addition, the bill requires that all military assistance flow through the democratically elected Government of Pakistan. Finally, the legislation includes accountability measures for military assistance, including a requirement that the Government of Pakistan has demonstrated a sustained commitment to combating terrorist groups and has made progress towards that end.

“We fully appreciate the urgency of the situation in Pakistan, and the need for appropriate flexibility,” Berman said. “We are simply asking Pakistan to follow through with the commitments it has already made. And in the process, we lay down an important marker that Congress will no longer provide a ‘blank check.’”

Is his primary audience there the Pakistanis or the White House?

“It’s hard to separate out energy and climate change and how it connects to water and land and biodiversity and other issues,” Burke says. There are, of course, national security implications for resource use: “consumption and consequences,” even if this stuff doesn’t makes it into the President’s Daily Brief. The National Intelligence Council’s 2025 project predicts scarcity, creating “conflict on a geostrategic level,” alongside increased natural disasters as the result of climate change.

Look at the demand for materials from increased cellphone use (400 million more Indians and 670 million more Chinese people have cellphones than did in 2000): tantalum, indium, titanium dioxide, and other rare-earth elements. A ton of them are located in China, Burke says, placing the Chinese in a very commanding geostrategic position. Congo has the tantalum, also known as coltan, and it’s deeply unstable. “And we don’t know a whole lot about the global supply chain and how vulnerable it is.”

Climate change. More “cyclonic storms of intensity” like Hurricane Katrina. “It may drive conflict. It may drive migration. It will certainly drive disaster relief.” The species that die out take with them “the ecosystem we depend on. How that’s going to affect our security is an issue we have to explore.”

Burke links natural security to Afghanistan. Eighty percent of Afghanistan is agriculture-dependent. The wars, for 30 years, have degraded Afghanistan’s bio-infrastructure, “and the land is barren right now,” and such privation will render difficult any plan from the Obama administration to alleviate the stresses on the Afghan people. Restoring its natural resources is “critical to restoring security.”

“These are security issues right now,” Burke says, “and they’re bound to get worse as climate change proceeds. … We can either deal with it now and build in resilience or deal with it later and it’ll be much more difficult.”

What does McHale believe? Her first speech in office is delivered to CNAS’ conference, and it’s about public diplomacy’s place within the national security pantheon. (CNAS’s Kristin Lord notes that no undersecretary for public diplomacy has ever delivered an inaugural speech to a national-security audience.)

McHale calls “innovative” public diplomacy “part of smart power” — as makes sense for one of Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton’s deputies — and gives the standard line about technology enabling more thorough opportunities for distributing American messages. She quotes Defense Secretary Bob Gates on the need for credible messages, as judged by foreign publics. She also mentions al-Qaeda’s use of “old and new” media to spread its propaganda. “This is not a propaganda contest, this is a relationship race,” McHale says, “and we need to get back into the game.” I don’t really know what that means.

“Move beyond messaging,” McHale urges. “Listen more, lecture less … We need to explain our positions and policies up front.” She urges increased cultural and educational exchange programs. She’s happy that State Department officials texted and blogged the Obama Cairo speech around the world and hosted speech-watches and visited mosques “putting a local face” on the speech. “Local voices and local aspirations must drive these vessels.”

While she’s saying all this, a bunch of Tweetpeople note across my feed that this is a speech full of jargon and little substance. Instant “relationship building,” as McHale says. Those relationships will “counter extremists,” she says. Not the extremists who dislike the speech …

OK, she mentions the Pentagon’s role in public diplomacy. Says the Defense Department’s involvement has “bolstered” State’s understanding, and tells a story about Defense-State partnership on Nigerian anti-HIV/AIDS work. “We cannot build a civilian capacity [for public diplomacy] … without adequate resources, and at the State Department we just don’t have one.” But it’s not just money: “a strong emphasis on achieving real results” will mark her tenure, putting public diplomacy and “sound research” into policy debates. McHale wants to launch pilot programs to see what works. “The bottom line is results matter,” she says.

On Afghanistan and Pakistan: enhanced public diplomacy is “a key component” of the new strategy. “We will have to tailor our approach… valley by valley, village by village.” New strategy from McHale will support “democratic institutions and civil society.” Part of the task is to reassure Afghans and Pakistans that the U.S. has their interests in mind. She talks about “cell phone penetration” in both countries, and talks about texting as a mechanism to help persons displaced by the Swat fighting.

But there’s nothing about, for instance, U.S. efforts to counter the Pakistani or Afghan Taliban’s wide ranging radio broadcasts, as Amb. Richard Holbrooke has called an imperative — either through jamming their frequencies or by confronting their messages. Maybe that’s not strictly a function of her job, but it’s conspicuous that in a speech ostensibly about national security that no such practical public-communications about the war issues arose.

She gave a lot of public praise for the Defense Department, counterinsurgency and Petraeus. But the text of her speech was pretty orthogonal to their concerns. McHale’s appearance here appears to be an act of diplomacy of her own.

Two things he said are worth emphasizing. First, “There’s not going to be a civilian surge” in Afghanistan — a point Gen. David Petraeus made earlier — since there aren’t enough deployable and available regional-expert U.S. civilians for such a thing, so instead it makes sense to focus on placing civilian advisers in the ministries. Relatedly, Exum wonders whether the Obama administration is really going to devote sufficient resources to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Fick reiterated a point made by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the new commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, in his confirmation hearings: a potent measurement of success is going to be the reduction of civilian casualties, both those caused by the Taliban and those caused by U.S. and NATO troops. “Killing noncombatant civilians fundamentally undermines” U.S. goals, Fick said. Retired Lt. Gen. David Barno offered some caution about that, saying that the “military opponents of the coalition” are trying to “take the air strikes off the table” by emphasizing the civilian casualties caused by the air strikes. That may strike COINdinistas as a good but problematic point.

More thorough criticism comes from Boston University Professor Andrew Bacevich, perhaps the most salient academic critic of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars out there. He first mentioned the Kennedy administration’s lessons-learned effort after the Bay of Pigs, which resulted in reaffirming all the faulty assumptions that led to the disaster, thereby contributing to the near-miss apocalypse of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then Bacevich said it’s “wrong” that Afghanistan is a critical security interest of the United States and that counterinsurgency can help. Why’d 9/11 succeed? “Federal, state and local agencies responsible for domestic security fell down on the job,” Bacevich said. Preventing the next 9/11 “does not require the semi-permanent occupation” of Afghanistan and other countries. Why not “fix Mexico” first? “Anyone who came to a gathering like this and proposed to send 60,000 troops to Mexico” and spend billions to “fix the endemic corruption… would be laughed out of the room.”

Bacevich then urged a “minimalist” approach. He disputed that the United States ought to be in “a global counterinsurgency campaign.” We “don’t need to undertake such a grandiose effort, and we can’t afford such a grandiose effort” while still ensuring that al-Qaeda “poses no more than a modest threat to U.S. national security.”

Here’s Army Col. Christopher Cavoli, who’s about to command an infantry brigade in Afghanistan, with some minor criticisms. “I don’t have real big problems” with much of Fick and Exum’s report. But Cavoli pointed out that Afghans’ “definition of security might be different than ours.” You need “a pretext” — “a political event or a material benefit” — for a U.S. or NATO unit to just show up and start population-protection operations. In other words, you’ve got to bring the Pashtun villages something if they’re going to accept nearby foreign forces. “There’s a level of external direction and control to ensure that what happens… is consistent,” Cavoli said. “Who is going to benefit and in what order from this counterinsurgency” is a “big question,” since a peaceful area that doesn’t receive as many resources from the U.S. as a violent one is going to raise questions among the populace about their incentives for continued cooperation. “That makes it difficult for me to see how [Fick and Exum's proposals] will generate momentum,” Cavoli said.

He’s “fairly optimistic” about the future of Iraq. “The price has been high and will continue to be high,” Sumaida’ie said, “but a) the outcome matters, to us and to you and the region, and b) the alternative is too awful to contemplate.” He means a failed state. He’s not so concerned about “how much attention” the Obama administration gives to Iraq but “the quality of attention” it gives. Very diplomatic. He praises America’s ability to learn from its mistakes in Iraq.

Structurally, Iraq has “issues that cannot be easily wished away.” You think? So “for this reason Americans should continue to be engaged. They have learned at every level … from writers and journalists to leaders and military officers.” The United States is “wiser” in Iraq now, knows Iraq more than in 2003, which seems like faint praise. “Now it’s time to shift from the SOFA, the Status of Forces Agreement, to the Strategic Framework Agreement,” the U.S.-Iraq document that establishes a long-term post-occupation relationship.

American influence is not dwindling. “Maybe military,” he says. But “Iraqis are now used to dealing with Americans.” Iraqi police and soldiers are dressed more like Americans than the Saddam era. “McDonald’s has not opened up yet,” Sumaida’ie said, to laughs. “It’s the soft power that now should be exercised, rather than the hard power,” he continues. “But there is a reluctance … America should be much more forceful, much more engaged.”

Managing the disengagement of U.S. troops “will be extremely important. We have to get that right, though we got the engagement wrong.” Clearly he’s not convinced that the Obama administration has already gotten it right. “Maybe I’m putting more weight than most people do, but it’s crucial … There are issues that can only be resolved with the help of our American friends.”

I’m reminded of Hamid Karzai’s 2003 congressional testimony pleading for the United States not to neglect Afghanistan as it invaded Iraq.

“The real rumor yesterday is whether our forces were reading Miranda rights to detainees and the answer to that is no,” Petraeus said today.

The Weekly Standard piece, published on the magazine’s Website yesterday, claimed that “the Obama Justice Department has quietly ordered FBI agents to read Miranda rights to high value detainees captured and held at U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan, according a senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee.”

The Republican in question was Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan, who told the Standard:

The administration has decided to change the focus to law enforcement. Here’s the problem. You have foreign fighters who are targeting US troops today – foreign fighters who go to another country to kill Americans. We capture them…and they’re reading them their rights – Mirandizing these foreign fighters.

Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) then jumped into the fray:

When they mirandize a suspect, the first thing they do is warn them that they have the ‘right to remain silent.’ It would seem the last thing we want is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or any other al-Qaeda terrorist to remain silent. Our focus should be on preventing the next attack, not giving radical jihadists a new tactic to resist interrogation–lawyering up.

I’m not sure where Rogers and co. got their information, but it seems safe to assume that Petraeus would be in the know here, and his denial is unambiguous.

Calls for strengthening the State Department and USAID, as “the challenges we face… require whole-of-government approaches, not just military approaches.”

Big idea: Counterterrorism “requires a counterinsurgency approach,” not just a narrow focus on finding, capturing and killing terrorists, “and that is counterintuitive.”

9:06. And out comes the PowerPoint. Petraeus is briefing on CENTCOM’s jobs. “Enable Partners” is his listing for Iraq and Afghanistan, with “Defeat Extremist Networks” placed over the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. “Defeat Extremist Networks” is also over Yemen. Says his job is like spinning plates; Radiohead on his iPod? Unproven.

9:09. Iraq progress assessment is like Petraeus’ greatest hits: “substantial progress” since the surge, but “still fragile and reversible,” though less so since the provincial elections. Afghanistan is “in contrast”: security situation “deteriorated in specific areas in particular, in the east and the south, the areas of the so-called Pashtun insurgency.” Puts his laser pointer over the words “requires well-resourced, comprehensive counterinsurgency approach.” Pakistan: “no question” that the Pakistanis understand the “existential threat.” Praises the Pakistani military for its operations in and around the Swat Valley against the Taliban. “It’s obvious there is a clear recognition not just to clear the miscreants … there is also a recognition of the need to hold those areas and then to rebuild them… That recognition is there.” What the U.S. is trying to do is provide “logistical assistance,” support the displaced-persons camp.

9:15. The history of the surge and its lessons. More than new forces, but COIN strategy, plus-up of Iraqi security forces and signal of U.S. committment. “They are the big ideas that were the underpinning, the intellectual underpinning” of the surge: “to security the people, to protect the population, and, I would add, to be seen to be securing them.” Important to recall in Afghanistan: “We must be partners there, good neighbors, as opposed to be dominating, or wanting to take over.” He means also in terms of Afghan perceptions. But you don’t live among the Afghan people. You’re “going to provide a consistent security presence by being near the village,” and concerned about civilian casualties. So a short commute to the fight, as the COINdinistas say?

9:19. Understand local circumstances to determine who is an irreconcilable element, and then “pursue them… tenaciously” and “relentlessly.” Just in case anyone thought COIN was bloodless, though I’m not sure whoever thought that. “Reintegrate” is a better term in Afghanistan, and that requires “a phenomenal understanding of who’s who, [and] how systems work.” And “you have to be first with the truth,” which requires “very flat approval structures” in order to get strategic communications focused and fast.

9:25. Petraeus has one of those unreadable pinwheels on a slide to explain the lines of operation and as they related to the enemies in Iraq. It makes sense if you’re as smart as he is. Me, I think it might make a cool tattoo.

9:27. Maj. Gen. Doug Stone is in Afghanistan. He was a silent hero of the surge, as he practiced COIN and reconciliation efforts in Iraq jails at Camp Bucca. “Knocked the recidivism rates in Iraq way, way down.” Now the U.S. is working on creating special extremist holding cells in Bagram.

9:30. “If you’re protecting the population, this somewhat macabe statistic, violent civilian deaths” is important, because its the test of security for the population. CNAS’ latest Afghanistan paper talks about that as an appropriate metric for assessing the success of U.S. efforts in Afghanistan.

9:33. Now onto Afghanistan. Brings out the month-by-month charts of violence from 2004 to 2009. “Last week was the highest level of security incidents in … post-liberation history.” Around 400. “Some of this will go up” because of raised tempo of U.S. and NATO operations.

9:36. “For the first time you see the people rising up against” the Pakistani Taliban.

9:37. U.S. forces going to around 68,000 by the fall. First is Task Force Spartan southwest of Kabul. Flowing in is the combat aviation brigade based around Kandahar. “We will double the number of airframes… but we will increase by five or sixfold the available helicopters for operations.” Big big concern for commanders in Afghanistan. Marine Expeditionary Brigade coming into the south. Going to be a new Stryker brigade into the southeast as well. “Recall where the Pashtun insurgency is, that has to be the focus.” A brigade from the 101st Airborne will serve as advisors.

9:39. The new goal for Afghanistan army and police size, tentatively: 230,800 by 2012. “Recall the ratio that typically needs to exist” for counterinsurgency operations in the 2006 Army/Marine Corps field manual and “a back of the envelope” calculation makes it clear that the current 171,000 Afghan soldiers and police are insufficient. A final total is still under review.

9:43. “Proud to be able to help” the Pakistani military “in indirect ways.” Yesterday the U.S. delivered “4 MI-17 helicopters” to Pakistan, which he calls “the most rapid security assistance” operation in military history.

9:44. Pushes back subtly against idea that U.S. military operations are too COIN-heavy. You need “full spectrum operations” always, a mixture of “offense, defense and support and stability operations.” Our “troops can still fight.” It’s kind of crazy (though not really surprising, I suppose) that the people who primarily doubt this are U.S. Army officers.

9:47. Recounts the battle of Sadr City in the spring of 2007, and points out how much intelligence, reconnaissance and survaillance support the U.S. brigade commander had during the operation. Lessons here for Afghanistan. “This is how we fight, when we can, with the assets we have… shifting assets for Afghanistan while still maintaining what we have in Iraq.” (Calls the “responsible drawdown strategy” in Iraq on track, by the way.) This is also why Gen. McChrystal made a point of saying he wanted these assets very badly for the Afghanistan war.

9:54. I think Haider Mullick, a very smart observer of Pakistani military and political issues, is the audience member who proposes to Petraeus setting up a joint U.S.-Pakistani military lessons-learned process. Petraeus calls it “a great idea” and says he’ll “pursue it.”

9:55. A Fox News reporter asks about a Weekly Standard report that detainees were getting read Miranda rights. Petraeus says he has “No concerns at all. This is the FBI doing what the FBI does. … The real rumor yesterday is whether our forces were reading Miranda rights to detainees and the answer to that is no.” Sorry, Steve Hayes.

10:01. “A sustained civilian increase would be a better description” of increased U.S. civilian efforts than “civilian surge.” Not just “State and AID but other agencies as well.” Petraeus says its “on track.” And Petraeus is out.

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