Scott Fenstermaker, a lawyer defending one of the men, told The Associated Press that they won’t deny their role, but will use the opportunity to “explain what happened and why they did it,” and they will provide “their assessment of foreign policy.” Fenstermaker reportedly met with his client, Ammar al Baluchi, a nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), at the Guantanamo Bay prison last week. Baluchi told him the men had discussed the trial among themselves.

Critics of the trial have complained, among other things, that KSM — who has boasted that he was the lead planner behind the 9/11 attacks, as well as many others — will use the opportunity to grandstand and spread terrorist propaganda. The alternative, however, would be to not allow them to speak at their own trial, which would hardly showcase the American principles of open government and fair trials that the attorney general presumably wants to highlight.

Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd told the AP on Sunday that he’s not worried that the men will dominate the trial or be able to use it as a vehicle to win new recruits. “We have full confidence in the ability of the courts and in particular the federal judge who may preside over the trial to ensure that the proceeding is conducted appropriately and with minimal disruption, as federal courts have done in the past,” he said.

The Southern District of New York, where the Justice Department wants to hold the trial, is the most experienced of all U.S. federal courts in handling major international terrorism cases.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton (WDCpix)

Over the last several days, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has quietly begun institutionalizing the Obama administration’s pledge to rebalance civilian and military elements of national security. Her speech to the Council on Foreign Relations Wednesday afternoon is her most visible attempt yet to make a case for transforming the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development’s place in the national-security pantheon in order to suit U.S. foreign policy goals.

Clinton’s speech, delivered to an audience of foreign-policy elites, didn’t announce any new policy or change of course. She made a case for administration priorities like multilateral reductions in nuclear arms and proliferation, engagement with adversarial nations like Iran, midwifing a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and promoting global human rights. Like most post-Cold War secretaries of state, she called America’s global leadership an enduring fact of the geopolitical landscape, and cast responsible U.S. foreign policy as shepherding a “global architecture” whereby states have “clear incentives to cooperate and live up to their responsibilities, as well as strong disincentives to sit on the sidelines or sow discord and division.”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

But the speech itself was less a policy address than a platform to explain how changes that Clinton has recently initiated to prepare the State Department and USAID to shoulder more of a national security burden match the administration’s objectives. On Friday and again on Monday, Clinton held townhall meetings with foreign-service officers and development workers to unveil a new project, called the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review. Modeled on one of the Pentagon’s most prominent reports, Clinton’s announced effort is designed to match the department’s missions with its resources and identify shortfalls in capacity, and will presumably recommend necessary institutional changes.

The study, led by Deputy Secretary Jack Lew and Policy Planning Director Anne-Marie Slaughter, will also address internal reform issues on core department and USAID tasks. It will “explore how to effectively design, fund, and implement development and foreign assistance as part of a broader foreign policy,” Clinton said, chiding U.S. foreign-aid money for insufficiently “contribut[ing] to genuine and lasting progress.”

For years, the State Department has lacked even the basis for understanding how underresourced it is. In October, a report by the American Academy of Diplomacy, a diplomatic advocacy group, assessed that the Secretary of State “lacks the tools — people, competencies, authorities, programs and funding — to execute the President’s foreign policies.” State did not even compile documents or reports designed to link resources to foreign-policy missions. The result was “the ‘militarization of diplomacy’ is noticeably expanding,” the study found.

The QDDR is “an intelligent measure” to begin reversing the trend, said retired Amb. Ronald Neumann. Clinton’s “focus on resources is important and has been too often neglected by secretariess of state who focused only on policy,” said Neumann, a former ambassador to Algeria, Bahrain and Afghanistan. “She understood she’s not going to manage effectively with a busted institution.”

One of the Obama administration’s earliest steps to bolster State Department capacity was to increase the State Department’s operating budget by $2 billion, mandating the hiring of over 700 new Foreign Service staff to meet worldwide shortages of diplomats, and to increase the foreign aid budget by nearly 10 percent to $51.7 billion. In an rare move, Defense Secretary Robert Gates lobbied Congress in favor of giving the State Department more money, on the grounds that an under-resourced department created a burden on the military to fill gaps in diplomatic positions. Similarly, prominent military leaders like Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. troops in the Middle East and South Asia, have frequently advocated a “whole-of-government approach” to complex security problems like the Afghanistan war and related instability in Pakistan, urging robust diplomatic and development resources to be used to supplement military measures. Clinton used the phrase twice in her speech.

A core goal for Clinton will be “to ensure that our civilian and military efforts operate in a coordinated and complementary fashion where we are engaged in conflict,” she said. In places like Afghanistan, the department has pledged to bolster its civilian diplomatic and developments, but few diplomats have made the journey so far to dangerous regions like Helmand Province, where 4000 Marines are battling the Taliban to provide security and governance for Afghan civilians.

The QDDR will require the State Department and USAID “to think hard about whatever we want to achieve” and to “demonstrate results,” Clinton said. That process will position the civilian elements of foreign affairs to more effectively manage and reform global institutions. “We’ll use our power to convene, our ability to connect countries around the world, and sound foreign policy strategies to create partnerships aimed at solving problems,” Clinton vowed in her speech, saying that the U.S. needed to “create opportunities for non-state actors and individuals to contribute to solutions.”

Clinton’s focus on institutional reform is a welcome change, Neumann said, contributing to her emergence as a strong secretary of state. “Overall, it’s very hard to say she’s put a foot wrong anywhere in any significant way,” he said.

An Iranian with knowledge of the overture, however, told The Washington Times that the letter was sent between May 4 and May 10 and laid out the prospect of “cooperation in regional and bilateral relations” and a resolution of the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program.

The letter apparently had nothing to do with the election itself. Over the past several months, stories have come out about how the Obama administration was trying to find ways to negotiate directly with Khamanei, who holds the real power over Iranian foreign policy, and circumvent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Apparently they found a way, as Khamanei obliquely referenced in his Friday sermon: “They write a letter to us to express their respect for the Islamic Republic and for re-establishment of ties, and on the other hand they make these remarks. Which one of these remarks are we supposed to believe?”

Those “remarks” were Obama’s comments about the regime’s obligations to respect human rights.

–

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This Washington Post story about the Washington debate over Iran is revealing for two reasons. First, the administration doesn’t seem to be phased by Manichean, inwardly focused arguments through analogy about why President Obama needs to intercede, rhetorically, into the Iranian opposition’s uprising. “We’re trying to promote a foreign policy that advances our interests, not that makes us feel good about ourselves,” a senior administration official told the paper’s Scott Wilson. Second, a different quote in the piece indicates the administration doesn’t want to step in the way of a phenomenon that might mean a whole lot of good things for those interests: “There is something particularly authentic about those who are carrying out these demonstrations … The more you keep this in Iranian terms, the better the chances of change.”

That matches background conversations I’ve had with administration people as well, and they typically cash this issue out in terms of the nuclear question. Just check out State Department spokesman Ian Kelly’s minuet with the press yesterday. As with all administration statements on Iran since June 12, Kelly preserves administration options on future-scope negotiations with the Iranians on their nuclear program. Even if the opposition triumphs — and I don’t think we even know what that means — it’s still unclear what that will mean for the nuclear question. Mir Hussein Moussavi’s public statemens indicate a willingness to pursue nuclear energy without weaponization,  but who knows what domestic constraints he would be under even if he miraculously becomes president under a system giving the presidency greater foreign policy authority. Still, the nuclear question is the one that really does concern the administration. I think it’s fair to say that administration officials consider a nuclear-armed Iran to be high on its list of foreign-policy disasters.

But what about Iran’s other effects? On the entire Middle East?

And here comes the irresponsible speculation. In 2004, Jordanian King Abdullah came to Washington and warned about a Shiite “Crescent” of Iranian influence spreading across the Middle East. As he saw it, Iran’s inroads into war-torn Iraq had helped ignite a spark of sectarian conflict that benefited Iranian interests and facilitated the expansion of Iranian power in the region. Hezbollah received increased weaponry and funding that aided it in provoking and then battling Israel in the 2006 war. Hamas received weaponry and funding that aided it in taking over Gaza in 2007 and then provoking and battling Israel, much less well, in this past winter’s war. Shiite political parties all types of in Iraq received funding and in some cases weaponry, as Iran opted for a bet-on-all-horses approach to the country’s politics. Syria expanded its bandwagoning relationship with Iran. The rhetoric from Iran  grew increasingly bellicose — a contributing factor was being surrounded by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan — and in 2007 Iran briefly took British sailors captive.

There’s so much we don’t know about the Iranian opposition. We don’t know what it would mean for it to take power. We don’t know what constraints on its ability to influence foreign policy would be. We don’t know what its desires for regional and global foreign policy are. We don’t know how its various factions define Iranian interests, or how those definitions conflict with each other. We don’t know what its relationships with the security apparatus would be. We don’t know what its relationship with the millions of Ahmadinejad supporters would be.

But it’s crazy to think that the rise to power of the opposition, as miraculous as that looks on June 23, wouldn’t have some effect on Iranian power in the Middle East. Various Iranian clients would have to reassess their considerations of the strengths of their ties to the regime. Some would have to ask if they’d have the same sort of client-proxy relationship they currently enjoy. Others — Hamas, probably — would wonder whether they’d have a continued relationship with a vastly changed Iran. U.S. partner regimes in the region, consequently, would ask whether Iran remains the threatening, hegemony-seeking entity that they’ve perceived for years.

Again, it’s way, way, way too early to really have an evidentiary basis for any of this. The opposition, of course, still hasn’t won yet, and things are looking bleak and tense. Hussein Ibish may be right that this is “a revolutionary situation,” and so much can happen in revolutions, as deposed revolutionary Iranian President Abolhassan Bani Sadr can attest. And the Obama administration does not see the Middle East as a canvas in the way that some Bush administration officials did. But the understandable calculus of keeping its focus on what posture is best for addressing the nuclear question shouldn’t obscure the likelihood that if the opposition wins, a significant amount of Middle Eastern politics and diplomacy will change. The direction of that change is unpredictable, but the prospect of its occurrance is fairly strong.

Let’s demand that foreign journalists in Iran be free to report on events, not confined to their bureaus or have their press credentials revoked. Let’s put some of our new cyber-warfare capabilities to the test, quietly and covertly of course, to disrupt Tehran’s ability to shut off the flow of information to Iranians and between them. Let’s start trying to rally and unify the community of nations — the democratic ones, if nothing else — to start speaking with one voice: to condemn the violence against peaceful Iranians, to call on Iran’s government to address allegations of voter fraud, and to state that supportive nations will continue to support Iran’s dissidents in this internal Iranian matter as long as they feel that justice has not been done. Let’s start defining some broad international expectations for Iran’s government — how it should and should not treat its people. The only person in the world who can orchestrate this kind of diplomatic effort to build international consensus in support of Iran’s dissidents is the President of the United States, and it’s high time that he start.

About those bolded parts. I see where Chris is coming from and I like the sentiment. Where I’d tweak this is to say that the United States. does better here to set the international agenda on terms that favor the substantive concerns of the Iranian opposition — insisting on respect for human life and dignity; insisting on fair, open, internationally-monitored elections — rather than explicit support for that opposition. (Since they haven’t asked and we don’t wish to be either presumptuous or counterproductive.)

Similarly, we don’t merely wish to set expectations of the Iranian government for how it ought to treat its people. We should wish to set universal expectations for how every government, including our own, ought to treat its people. Singling out Iran will probably complicate the opposition’s efforts, dividing it internally (”Well, you know, screw Ahmedinejad, but those Americans want to disrespect Iran? These colors don’t run!”) and limiting its ability to attract adherents (”You want me to side with you when you’re the ones giving the Americans the pretext they’ve been dying for to persecute us?”) If we insist on a universal standard, it’ll do the work we want in the Iranian case anyway. And it’s, you know, principled.

I suspect Chris knows all this and, as I say, our differences here are minor ones of calibration.

Update: To be clear,  I don’t think the U.S. ought to use its “new cyber-warfare capabilities,” since that’s a provocative act that gets out ahead of the opposition, but I took Chris to mean that some of the freelance guys doing that, whom Noah wrote about at Danger Room, ought to do such things.

As reports of political violence in Iran intensified after Friday’s fiercely disputed election, the Obama administration insisted that it would not interfere with the struggle for power between regime-backed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the thousands of demonstrators who contend the election was stolen. Administration officials, on and off the record, said that President Obama would offer support for human rights in Iran generally and would not back away from his diplomatic outreach to the longtime U.S. adversary, regardless of the ultimate outcome of the election.

The stance began to attract criticism on Sunday, with some politicians arguing that the United States needed to come out firmly on the side of protesters who have been victimized by regime-backed violence and had their communications with the outside world restricted. But the administration’s position has the support of Iranian human rights groups, which fear the clerical regime will exploit any perception of U.S. interference to slander the opposition as American puppets — a caustic charge in a nation with a deep memory of U.S. interference in its politics.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Since the Iranian government certified the election returns on Saturday, in which Ahmadinejad was said to have won 62 percent of the vote to opposition figure Mir Hossein Moussavi’s 30 percent, the Obama administration released two public statements, neither of which expressed judgment nor condemnation of an election widely believed to have been rigged. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs praised the “vigorous debate and enthusiasm that this election generated, particularly among young Iranians” and pledged that the administration would monitor “reports of irregularities.” On NBC’s “Meet The Press” the next day, Vice President Joe Biden went further, saying there was “some real doubt” about Ahmadinejad’s alleged victory, but added that the international community needed to conduct “analysis” before reaching any conclusions.

A senior Obama administration official who did not want to be identified or quoted explained that the president was deeply conscious of appearing not to favor any side in the election. Officials had ruled out calling for a recount or a revote out of a concern for undermining the Iranian opposition. The official said it was important to have a policy toward Iran that advanced the administration’s desire for liberalization and human rights in Iran, not one that merely vented American outrage at Ahmadinejad.

If and when Obama speaks about the violence in Iran over the coming days, the official predicted, he will emphasize the need for respecting human rights in Iran and for Iranians to reach their own solution. Potential multilateral efforts at calling attention to electoral improprieties and the resulting violence were said to be on the radar of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice. No administration official mentioned recognizing the legitimacy of Ahmadinejad’s proclaimed victory at this point as a policy option under consideration, in keeping with Biden’s call for further “analysis” about the true election result, despite the fact that the European Union’s presidency, currently held by the Czech Republic, recognized Ahmadinejad as the victor despite noting “irregularities” in the vote.

But in no case will the administration back away from its long-expressed desire to directly engage Iran diplomatically. “Talks with Iran are not a reward for good behavior,” Biden said. The senior administration official noted that regardless of the ultimate outcome of the election, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — who, in an unusual move, endorsed the election outcome immediately, instead of waiting the customary three days for the vote to become clear — sets foreign policy for Iran, not the president. At the same time, the official said, the administration would not have endless patience for unreciprocated outreach.

That position began to come under criticism on Sunday. The post-election violence “certainly makes such a dialogue much more difficult,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) on CNN, “but frankly I’ve always been skeptical of any kind of dialogue with the hardline leaders of Iran.” Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), issued a statement urging Obama and others to “speak out, loudly and clearly, about what is happening in Iran right now and unambiguously express their solidarity with the brave Iranians who went to the polls in the hope of change and who are now looking to the outside world for strength and support.”

But some Iranian human rights activists backed Obama’s cautious approach. “I think it’s wise for the U.S. government to keep its distance,” said Hadi Ghaemi, a New York-based spokesman for the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, which wants the international community not to legitimize the Iranian regime’s claim that Ahmadinejad won the election. While the Obama administration ought to express support for the Iranian opposition’s safety and for human rights in Iran as the regime clamps down on dissent, any expression of political support for the protesters would only “instigate the cry that the reformers are somehow driven and directed by the United States, whether under [former President George W. Bush] or under Obama, and there’s no reason to give that unfounded allegation” any chance to spread.

Trita Parsi, the founder of the National Iranian American Council who has played a leading role in the American press over the weekend in denouncing Ahmadinejad and defending the protesters, said that Obama was taking care not to subvert the Iranian opposition. “The framing that Ahmadinejad is presenting is one in which essentially the whole [opposition] is a Western media conspiracy,” he said. “If the administration is saying things or doing things before Moussavi and the opposition figures out what the plan is, then that’s a real problem, because then it seems like it’s between Ahmadinejad and the west and not Ahmadinejad and the opposition. So the administration is doing exactly the right thing. They’re not rushing in and they’re not playing favorites. They might prefer the democratic process to be respected, but that’s different than [supporting a] specific faction.”

Parsi took issue with Lieberman’s statement and those of others who have urged the United States to back the opposition. “They’re saying ‘Support Moussavi.’ Well, did you talk to Moussavi to learn if this is helpful? A lot of people seem to have the propensity of knowing what the Iranian people want or what specific people want but [don't] contact them. And in past it’s been detrimental” to Iranian opposition figures, Parsi said. If such American politicians have “not learned from that, it’s sad.”

Ghaemi said that a proper response from the international community ought to come from United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who he said ought to denounce the theft of the election and the resulting regime-instigated violence. “We should not have the U.S. lead,” he said.

That approach might garner support from the Arab world. Hussein Ibish, a senior fellow with the American Task Force on Palestine, said that the Arab states of the Middle East were “largely disappointed by these announced results,” since antipathy to Ahmadinejad’s inflammatory rhetoric runs high in the region and Iran’s Arab neighbors do not relish the prospect of an Iranian regime reckless enough to steal an election. But he said that much like the rest of the world, Arab capitols ought not to interfere with the process. “A perception of external pressure on internal Iranian affairs is bound to be counterproductive and strengthen the hand of the religious far-right,” Ibish said. “Defensive nationalist sentiment has been a hallmark of Ahmadinejad’s appeal to Iranians, as it usually is with demagogues around the world.”

This weekend has seen the worst sustained internal political violence in Tehran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The regime has managed to shut down most forms of communication with the outside world, including most e-mail access, SMS and Facebook. Yet as of Sunday night Iranians are still managing to access Twitter, and the accounts they tweet detail an opposition using the symbols of the 1979 revolution against the regime that governs in its name. An opposition Twitter account called StopAhmadi reported, “sadatabad, tehran. violent street battles between Basij [pro-regime paramilitary forces] and people. cars on fire.” Another Iranian Twitter user, PersianKiwi, announced, “4am and people still on streets and rooftops shouting ‘death to the dictator’.” Change_for_iran, a self-described student, described a skirmish with pro-regime forces: “bastards just attacked us for no reason, I lost count of how much tear gas they launched at us!”

But however much sympathetic Americans might wish the Obama administration to express more forthright support for the embattled protesters, analysts believe that doing so would ultimately set back their struggle. It was important, Parsi said, for any non-Iranian organization wishing to show solidarity with the opposition to ensure that “anything they do is two steps behind the opposition and not two steps ahead.” The current struggle, he said, is “not a battle in the slightest to be fought by any in the international community or any entity. Iranians have tremendous pride in doing this themselves.”

“The only way to avoid that is to see the election of your worst enemy,” said Kagan. “Finally, we’ve achieved that in El Salvador.”

Both hammered home the point of the panel, that, in Kagan’s words, “the stronger we can build a consensus to commitment to Afghanistan,” the easier it will be to keep if and when support for the war falters. Nagl suggested that it would take a decade to bring real stability to the region.

[UPDATE: This post originally quoted Nagl as saying "I'll never get tired of the phrase 'Global War on Terror.'" This was incorrect: Nagl had said he wanted a new phrase to replace "GWOT," and was endorsing the concept, not the phrase.]

Two West Wing stars, Martin Sheen and Brad Whitford, happened to be walking through the hotel as attendees rolled in. That got a few people at the registration table whispering, but not quite as much as the arrival, right before the panel, of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. He slowly made his way into the room, talking with well-wishers, getting updates on how their families were doing.

Sen. John McCain (WDCpix)

During his first 45 days in office, President Obama has made several sharp departures from the foreign policies of the Bush administration that were shaped in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. Obama has announced a timetable for staggered withdrawal from Iraq. He has ordered 17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and engaged in a wide-ranging review of U.S. war aims. And he has begun exploring direct negotiations with the Iranian government.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

And the response from the conservative movement and the Republican Party — which turned or sought to turn every election after 9/11 into a referendum on foreign policy and national security — has largely been either silence or agreement.

To some degree, conservatives say, the still-nascent Obama administration’s foreign policy needs time to develop before a critique can emerge. And when the administration enacts policies that the Republican party finds agreeable, as with the troop increase in Afghanistan, it would make little sense to attack. But that leads to a broader problem that leading conservatives identify: in the wake of the Bush administration, the question of what exactly Republican foreign policy is remains unsettled. Several GOP decisionmakers say bluntly that they are unsure who the leading foreign-policy figures on the right are anymore.

For the Republican Party, which has so long prided itself on its perceived dominance over questions of America’s role abroad, to be without clear foreign-policy leaders is a striking development. Preeminent among the GOP old-guard foreign-policy establishment is Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who structured his 2008 presidential campaign around the argument that Obama was dangerously ignorant of geopolitics. Yet McCain gave a speech to the American Enterprise Institute on Feb. 25 that applauded Obama’s troop increase and urged a greater infusion of civilian resources, a direction that Obama administration officials have already indicated they’ll embrace when the new Afghanistan strategy is released next month. More surprisingly, after warning on the campaign trail that withdrawing from Iraq along a fixed timeline risked squandering the security gains made by the surge, McCain’s spokeswoman told The New York Times that the senator was “supportive of the plan.”

While significant portions of the conservative movement regard McCain as an apostate, he is perhaps the most prominent Republican to make any foreign policy speech at all since Obama’s election, indicating a leadership vacuum on the right over the issue. “You’ve got an interesting intellectual leveling now,” said Christian Brose, a policy advisor and chief speechwriter for former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who now edits and writes on Foreign Policy magazine’s “Shadow Government” blog, which seeks to provide a conservative critique of the administration’s foreign policy. “The folks who were in power and running things lost. Now you have a more level intellectual [playing] field, a less hierarchical environment that’s hungry for new thinking about policy and ready for an open debate on the question of first principles.”

To some in the neoconservative camp, that hunger indicates a defeat. “Right now the democratic forces have cratered,” said Mario Loyola, who in January left a staff position directing foreign policy for the Senate Republican Policy Committee. “The whole Bush, ‘we need democracy abroad to be safe at home’ [argument] has cratered among conservatives. So it’s the fall of the neocons on foreign policy, clearly.” Last month, Richard Perle, a former arms-control official in the Reagan administration and neoconservative eminence, gave a talk at the Nixon Center denying that he was a neoconservative or that there was any such thing as neoconservative foreign policy.

With Iraq, some on the right have explained the broader lack of criticism of Obama’s withdrawal strategy by considering the approach coterminous with Bush’s policies. “We think we won the argument — we won the war to defeat the insurgents,” Loyola continued. “The plan we had in 2005 worked: build up the Iraqi security forces, picture a long term alliance [with the Iraqis]” against an “Iranian enemy.” The opposition on the right was to a “congressionally mandated timetable,” he said, not to timetables for withdrawal themselves. Grover Norquist, the influential head of Americans for Tax Reform, said that aides to George W. Bush told him privately that a withdrawal strategy “was always their plan.”

In March 2007, however, then-Vice President Dick Cheney said a timeline would allow “the enemy to watch the clock and wait us out,” and that withdrawing from Iraq would reward terrorism. “If terrorists conclude attacks will change the behavior of a nation, they will attack the nation again and again,” he argued at a forum of the America Israel Public Affairs Committee. In July 2008, George W. Bush said that he continued to oppose “an artificial timetable for withdrawal” in an agreement on the U.S. troop presence with the Iraqi government and said the Obama campaign’s promise to withdraw from Iraq would amount to “giv[ing] up in the struggle against this enemy.” Months later, the Iraqi government forced the Bush administration to sign an accord that guaranteed a full troop withdrawal by December 2011.

On Afghanistan, there is an ideological struggle about what war strategy should be — but it’s confined to the left. A coalition of progressive activists called Get Afghanistan Right has argued against the buildup of U.S. troops, while an alternative progressive coalition convened by the National Security Network has supported it. Both are trying to influence the Obama administration’s strategy review. Yet most observers on the right who have spoken on the subject have tended to support the administration’s troop increase. At a Feb. 18 AEI forum on Afghanistan, neoconservative defense analysts Fred Kagan and Tom Donnelly blessed the administration’s troop decision while also urging the need for a concurrent increase from across the civilian agencies of the U.S. government, a point also made by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy during her confirmation hearing in January. Matt Duss, a research associate at the liberal Center for American Progress, observed “the far more vigorous debate over the future of the US intervention in Afghanistan — and about American national security in general — is now taking place on the left.”

Ideological positions on Afghanistan have yet to congeal on the right. Added Loyola, “There is not an ideological alignment,” saying that when it comes to crafting an effective strategy in Afghanistan, “the difficulty is overwhelming.” Brose believed that there nevertheless were certain baseline positions on Afghanistan that conservatives embraced. “The emerging consensus is, we need a counterinsurgency strategy, and the only way to pursue counterterrorism effectively is to protect the population, with a robust effort for assisting the [Afghan] government as it develops,” Brose said.

Norquist said that for the right, the greater and more immediate concern was the economy, as the Obama administration seeks a broad expansion of the government’s role, an idea anathema to conservatives. Foreign policy is “not an issue that moves attention and votes,” he said. “Right now you can light yourself on fire and give a foreign policy speech and Fox News will not cover you.”

Still, there is no shortage of conservative criticism of Obama on discrete security-related questions, as opposed to broader questions of foreign policy. Obama’s plan to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility has aroused significant conservative objections. “The thought of sending these terrorists to the United States where they could possibly be released is a great mistake,” said Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), the ranking member on the Homeland Security Committee’s intelligence subcommittee, after visiting Guantanamo last month. Last month, Cheney alleged that the Obama administration was “more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States.”

Loyola, who will soon head to Mexico to report on a piece for National Review, said that he hoped the GOP would reject what he called “Alamo Conservatives” who believe it necessary to fight the Obama administration on everything. But he said it would be necessary for an inter-movement struggle to take place in order to reestablish what it is the conservative movement and the Republican Party believes. “It’s not that we have no leaders, we have no consensus of ideas either,” he said. “The collapse of ideology and leadership on foreign policy on the Republican side is mesmerizing. There’s no consensus on anything.”

Some members of the old-guard neoconservative movement are attempting to reforge that consensus. National Journal reported in January that neoconservative luminaries like Weekly Standard publisher William Kristol, the Kagan brothers and a former spokesman for the U.S. occupation authority in Iraq, Dan Senor, were exploring the establishment of a new conservative foreign-policy think tank-cum-messaging institution. Calls to Senor’s office in New York were not returned.

Brose hopes his blog can step into the space vacated by the collapse of the Republican foreign-policy consensus. Its contributors are mostly veterans of the Bush administration at mid-tier positions, making them experienced enough to understand the challenges of governing but young enough to have been charged with implementing policy rather than making it. Brose said he wants to “pull in responsible people from the center-right to the right, who look at foreign policy from a reality-based perspective.” His writers are “more than willing to stand up and applaud when the Obama administration does good things, or lend support and cover on an issue by issue basis. But as the administration’s foreign policy starts to take shape more, we’ll also continue to engage in criticism and sketch out alternatives. We’ll call it as we see it.”

If that “reality-based” effort doesn’t succeed, he said, “then the right could end up in a pretty bad place.”

American forces and Afghan police patrol the border with Pakistan. (U.S. Army photo)

With a much-anticipated reassessment of U.S. strategy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan coming from the White House by April, a host of senior officials from Afghanistan and Pakistan are arriving in Washington Monday to lend their perspectives to the Obama administration and Congress.

Numerous top security and development officials from Kabul and Islamabad are slated to meet with the Obama administration, leading congressional figures and each other during a week’s worth of events. Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi and Army chief of staff Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, two of the most powerful figures in Pakistan, arrived on Sunday. So did Afghanistan’s defense minister, Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak, who was joined in the afternoon by Foreign Minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta and his top adviser Davood Moradian; Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak; Interior Minister Mohammad Hanif Atmar; intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh; local-governance chief Jelani Popal; and U.N. ambassador Zahir Tanin.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

The White House review of what officials are referring to as “Af-Pak” — underscoring how Obama administration officials believe the extremist threat facing the two countries to be inextricable — is intended to be a “comprehensive” reassessment, as Press Secretary Robert Gibbs put it on Monday, of what American goals ought to be in a war that has lasted seven and a half years with little end in sight. The goal is to yield a new blend of diplomatic, developmental and military approaches for the two countries to “root out those safe havens” for Al Qaeda and Taliban militants in the tribal areas of Pakistan supported by Taliban advances in Afghanistan, as Obama described the goals “that would ultimately make our mission successful” in his Feb. 9 press conference. In background conversations, Obama aides explain that the president wishes the review to distinguish between achievable and unachievable goals, a point of departure from the Bush administration’s stated desire for an Afghan democracy and a Pakistan run by a pro-U.S. strongman.

Representatives of the foreign governments expressed relief that their capitals’ perspectives would be included in the review. “The Afghan government is extremely pleased that the Obama administration is seeking Afghanistan’s consultation and advice during the strategic review process,” said an official with the Afghanistan embassy in Washington who did not wish to speak for attribution. “For the international effort in Afghanistan to succeed, we need to approach the country’s challenges as partners, and this is the first step in that process. We also look forward to forging ahead with a new coordinated and comprehensive regional strategy to overcome the joint challenges that Afghanistan and Pakistan face.”

The Afghanistan war and its spillage into Pakistan is one of the most pressing national-security dilemmas the Obama administration is confronting. In Afghanistan, declining domestic popularity for President Hamid Karzai, the clear favorite of the Bush administration, has created a chilly relationship between Karzai and Obama. The first phone call between the two leaders took place on Feb. 18, nearly a month after Obama took office and long after Obama had spoken with leaders from China, Pakistan, Australia, the U.K., South Africa, Turkey and even the figurehead king of Spain. In Pakistan, after a weeks-long battle that left over 1,500 dead and hundreds of thousands displaced, the Taliban has taken control of the Swat Valley, a few hours’ drive from the capital city of Islamabad. A declared ceasefire pursued with great fanfare last week by the government of Asif Ali Zardari didn’t stop the Taliban from taking a government official hostage briefly on Sunday.

The Afghan and Pakistani officials will run the gamut of official Washington. Tuesday will feature a meeting between the two foreign ministers at an area hotel. The Afghanistan delegation will have lunch at the White House on Wednesday and afterward offer its input to the strategy review, which is chaired by former CIA official Bruce Reidel, Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy and Amb. Richard Holbrooke, the administration’s special envoy to “Af-Pak.” Retired Marine Gen. Jim Jones, Obama’s national security adviser, is slated to attend, according to an itinerary of the trip provided by the Afghan embassy in Washington.

While a spokesman for the Pakistani embassy in Washington, Nadeem Kiani, said that the details for Foreign Minister Qureshi’s White House meeting were still being arranged, Qureshi would meet with Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on Tuesday afternoon, and would proceed to the State Department for a meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Army Chief of Staff Kayani will meet with “military officials” and Secretary of Defense Bob Gates as well, Kiani said, but Kiani did not have specifics about that itinerary. Kayani also has a meeting scheduled with Kerry for Wednesday afternoon, according to Frederick Jones, a spokesman for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“Sen. Kerry will be looking to hear answers to the many questions he’s raised about the future direction of the country and how we can work together cooperatively to make our policies successful,” Jones said. At a Senate roundtable on Afghanistan on Feb. 5, Kerry noted, “Governance is a huge issue on the minds of people who, a year and two ago, were 100 percent with us and supportive but who today, because of the failure of governance, not because of the Taliban necessarily, not because of an alternative ideology, are questioning our presence.” Jones added that Kerry looked forward to hearing from both delegations “about how we can work with them to solve the intractable difficulties” in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Both delegations will attend a dinner on Wednesday night at the State Department, previewing a Thursday meeting between both delegations and Clinton. In between, the delegations will meet with the leadership of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the House intelligence and armed services committee and other congressional dignitaries of both parties; as well as members of the press. The Center for a New American Security, a Democratic-aligned think tank whose experts now staff the Obama Pentagon and State Departments, will host a press conference with Wardak, the Afghan defense minister, on Thursday.

One former U.S. senior official who worked on Afghanistan and Pakistan issues, who requested anonymity, expected the Swat conversation to be uncomfortable. “A cabinet minister is very unlikely to have the go-ahead to back away from a decision taken by the government… that would be displeasing to the U.S.” The official added that although it’s unclear how much influence the delegations will ultimately hold over Obama’s strategy review “it’s very valuable to ask the folks with whom we’re doing business” about the state of U.S. policy toward their countries.

A report released Monday from the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan research arm of Congress, found that the U.S. had “not met its national security goals to destroy terrorist threats and close the safe haven” for Al Qaeda in the tribal areas of Pakistan. A statement from the office of Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) said the GAO report indicated that “the strategy in place over the past seven years must be rethought if we are to improve our security.”