Clinton’s comparison signaled to some that the U.S. wants to step up its involvement in Mexico, fighting the country’s drug cartels like it did in Colombia. But Mexican politicians aren’t so sure the comparison between the two fights is accurate, The Christian Science Monitor reported today:

Mexico’s security spokesman Alejandro Poire acknowledged that there are “some similarities” to Colombia. But Mr. Poire also said “there’s a big difference between what Colombia faced back then and what we are facing right now,” Euronews reported. He added that America’s demand for illegal drugs is the root cause of Mexico’s problems. He also pointed to US guns trafficked to Mexican drug cartels as a serious concern. [...]

Among Mexican officials, there are serious concerns that Clinton’s remarks may be trying to lay the foundation for a US intervention in Mexico not unlike Plan Colombia. Under that anti-drug program, the US sent military forces to work with the Colombian army to break up drug cartels. The program has cost the US $7 billion and is widely controversial in Latin America.

“Whoever thinks Colombia is a cure-all, and if the United States thinks it is necessary to apply the same model to us they applied to  Colombia, they are mistaken,” Mexican Senator Ricardo Monreal was quoted saying in the Guardian. He added that US assistance to Colombia had not brought an end to the drug trade there.

The Mexican politicians are right: Colombia still has a problem with the drug trade. But experts argue Colombia can be used as a guide for how to combat the drug trade by stemming the flow of money to drug lords.

In an interview last month, Bob Killebrew, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, called Colombia’s fight against the drug trade “the only success story in the Western Hemisphere right now.” He says the Colombian model, though imperfect, should be exported to other countries to show how to stop drug cartels by cutting off their resources and taking out leaders.

All this goes to show that as CNAS becomes more than just the Counterinsurgency Think Tank, its influence reaches beyond that particular are of expertise as well.

Ronald Neumann, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, told me he worries about the timeline’s impact on Afghans:

Afghans will be worried about the “18 months” and will think this means we’re getting out. However, President couldn’t say much less to Americans; indefinite stay would be too much to sustain. However, he was not clear about what 18 months means. What I have heard from State/DOD/WH briefing today was that goals were condition based. if/if President sticks to the line that this is a goal, not a time line, that changes will be rigorously conditions based and not an automatic trip wire, and that we will move to “overwatch”, not out until Afghans can handle the problem then we can reassure Afghans over time. There are no words that will solve the problem, only actions will have meaning to Afghans. If we keep talking only about how we’re getting out in 18 months Afghans will look to how they survive rather than put their support into serving.

Haidar Mullick, a fellow at the U.S. Joint Special Operations University who recently returned from a tour of India and Pakistan, emailed to say he thinks Obama’s approach to Afghanistan is insufficient and his approach to Pakistan is faulty at best:

President Obama’s new Afghanistan strategy is “disrupt now defeat later,” a clever counterterrorism and counterinsurgency hybrid devoid of costly nation-building — enough to weaken Taliban and al-Qaeda in the next 18 months but not enough to stop their return in the next five years, keeping Afghanistan in a precarious cycle of state failure, civil war and regional proxy wars. The message is clear: America will disrupt and dismantle Al Qaeda and worry about defeating it at a more opportune time — perhaps after Obama’s reelection and when the economy recovers. On balance it hopes to deter bleeding but ignores long-term infection.

Obama’s Pakistan strategy makes me even less optimistic and perplexed. Noting that the real threat comes from nuclear-armed Pakistan vulnerability to al-Qaeda, President Obama still falls short of a comprehensive regional policy. For example, there was little mention of sustaining Pakistan’s gains against the Taliban and augmenting its capacity in combination with Pakistani and Indian ‘influence-sharing’ in Afghanistan. Overall it promises partnership sans strategic guidance.

But the counterinsurgency luminaries at the Center for a New American Security, generally speaking, are happy. Nathaniel Fick, the young CEO of the influential think tank, said in a statement that he hopes Obama won’t fall in love with his own strategy:

The President has chosen the best of his bad options in Afghanistan by clarifying U.S. objectives there, bolstering international commitment to the mission, and signaling American resolve. What is most important over the next year is altering the perceived trajectory and momentum of the war–in the eyes of Americans, our allies, the enemy, and most of all, the Afghan people. Balancing resolve with flexibility is key: the U.S. has many interests around the world, and so must avoid succumbing to strategic distraction. If the President and his advisors can avoid falling in love with their plan — remaining realists focused on U.S. interests and what’s achievable — then executing this strategy well offers the best chance of stability in Afghanistan and South Asia.

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.