The selection of two outsiders — Petraeus has no experience in the realm of pure intelligence work, while Panetta hasn’t had military experience, other than tangentially in his two years as CIA director, since his discharge from the Army in 1966 — to fill the posts may seem an odd choice. The two men’s backgrounds, however, may provide clues as to why each was chosen for the job.

Petraeus’s popularity, spanning both party lines and the civilian-military divide (at least among members of the public who know who he is), is sure to be an asset in the position, as it has been in his capacity as the head of military operations in Afghanistan. More pointedly, Wired’s Spencer Ackerman theorizes that Petraeus’s endorsement of unmanned drone strikes and special operations raids like those undertaken in Afghanistan and Pakistan hews closely to the Obama administration’s preferred methods of using the CIA in counterterror efforts, with drone strikes and shadow operations.

Panetta, meanwhile, got the CIA post to begin with in part because of his success steering President Bill Clinton’s Office of Management and Budget through the fat years of the mid-‘90s. Panetta later became Clinton’s chief of staff. His experience with budgets — he also headed up the House Budget Committee for years prior to leaving the world of elected office for Clintonian pastures — could be a sign that the administration is looking for a numbers man to justify bloated defense spending. Until the administration officially confirms its picks, however, it won’t be forthcoming with explanations for its choices.

The news hasn’t inspired a uniformly optimistic reaction from intelligence or defense insiders. Ackerman reports in Wired that Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the left-leaning National Security Network, contends that Panetta, at least, will be entering a no-win situation once he takes over the Defense Department:

“He’ll never live up to what building wants or has come to expect,” Hurlburt says of Panetta. “Gates tried to prepare them that this is coming, and cushion the building for what’s coming, but that’s not tenable. It’s an unenviable task.”

The response from the right has been similarly lukewarm:

[H]e’s generating cautious, first-blush optimism from defense watchers, even among the administration’s political opponents. “Safe choice,” says James Jay Carafano of the conservative Heritage Foundation, which has accused Gates and Obama of cutting defense too deeply. With both Petraeus and Panetta, “no one is going to question whether they are qualified.” Even Gates’ predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, no fan of Obama, tweeted that Panetta and Petraeus are “outstanding leaders.”

Ackerman does not mention, however, that Rumsfeld’s tweet on Panetta and Petraeus was qualified by a followup:

…5 DCIs 5 US ambs & 7 mil cdrs in Afg over 7 yrs: No matter how capable the individual, musical chairs makes it impossible to find footing

Rumsfeld’s un-self-conscious criticism of the U.S.’s handling of the war in Afghanistan comes despite his role as the U.S. Defense secretary during the initial invasion, as well as the invasion of Iraq.

Directly contributing to the ongoing efforts of Hamkari security operations in Kandahar City and nearby districts, the five-day operation saw heavy fighting with one period of non-stop, close-quarter combat lasting the entire day and resulting in the death of a significant number of insurgents.  Through this operation, the combined force dealt a major blow to more than 100 insurgents and their commanders. After days of intense operations, the combined force succeeded in taking all key positions in the region and forcing remaining insurgents to flee the area.

It’s unclear what a “major blow” this actually is. And it doesn’t appear that the force intends to hold the Shah Wali Kot area: “Afghan leaders from the combined force then met with members of the local community to plan ways the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan could assist them in keeping out the Taliban.” Apparently no civilians were injured. If so, that gives a sense of how secure the insurgents felt operating away from civilian cover.

While the timetable of the operation means that this wasn’t a retaliation for the assassination yesterday of a Kandahar district governor, the announcement of the operation occurs in its shadow. And it underscores the intensity of the fight in and around Kandahar that Gen. David Petraeus and Michele Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, will resume testifying about in a few minutes before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Members of the Pakistani military (ispr.gov.pk)

Very little is clear about the forthcoming Pakistani military push into Waziristan, the rugged, mountainous tribal home base of the Pakistani Taliban and, most likely, Osama bin Laden. When it will begin; what its objectives are; how it will achieve them; and why it will succeed when a 2006 military assault ended in a disastrous ceasefire on the militants’ terms.

That lack of clarity extends to key questions for the U.S. in Pakistan and its associated war in Afghanistan. Will the push drive insurgents across the border? What will it mean for targeting al-Qaeda in Pakistan?

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

The Obama administration, already involved in what the White House describes as a comprehensive review of strategy for the region, is now looking for the answers. One emerging assumption is that the Pakistani campaign will be protracted, and hardly a replay of this spring’s surprising Pakistani victory in the Swat Valley.

“The Pakistanis have been advertising their upcoming offensive for a while now,” said a U.S. counterterrorism official who insisted on anonymity while discussing sensitive planning issues. “So the terrorists know it’s on the way. They’ve had time to prepare.”

Beginning last week, Pakistani extremists unleashed a wave of violence across the country in anticipation of the offensive, even managing to storm the military staff’s Rawalpindi headquarters far from the tribal areas. On Thursday, another series of coordinated attacks rocked Lahore, the cultural capital of Pakistan. Since October 5, an estimated 150 Pakistanis have died as a result. “The message is to the Pakistani government and it is that news of the Taliban’s demise is greatly exaggerated,” said a former U.S. intelligence official with experience in Pakistan. “They have nothing to lose, they are willing to fight to the death, and they can take that fight to the Pakistani military’s front yard.” At a forum last week at the Council on Foreign Relations with Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, the Pakistani ambassador to Washington, Husain Haqqani, good-naturedly brushed off a reporter’s attempt to discuss the campaign.

The army’s invasion, the former intelligence official speculated, may be accelerated by the insurgent attacks. Reuters reported on Wednesday that the army was moving an estimated 28,000 troops into position, and some residents of Waziristan quoted by the news service said they saw “soldiers and tanks” approaching. The local government in South Waziristan said Wednesday that up to 90,000 residents have fled the area in preparation for the attack.

Fighting in Waziristan carries implications for two aspects of the Obama administration’s strategy, both of which impact the current White House review. First is whether the arrival of a significant Pakistani ground force will facilitate increased intelligence collection about high-level Taliban or al-Qaeda targets. At present, the Obama administration is considering the contention, advocated by Vice President Biden and the intelligence community, that the CIA’s drone strikes against al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan more directly support the goal of destroying the terrorist organization than does a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan. The return of Pakistani ground troops into Waziristan, coupled with the intelligence community’s increased focus on the region, might provide an opportunity to facilitate more intense and accurate drone strikes in addition to Pakistani battlefield assaults.

But that is hardly certain. “If the Pakistani military pushes hard into Waziristan, and we’re talking about some very, very rugged terrain here, they might force individual al-Qaeda figures to move,” said the U.S. counterterrorism official. “That, in turn, can make them more vulnerable. It is, at least potentially, a better collection environment. You can’t make hard and fast predictions, though. You just have to be ready to take advantage of any opportunities that might arise, because they won’t last long.”

The second concern for the administration is whether the insurgents will target the Pakistani army in Waziristan or send significant numbers of fighters across the porous border into Afghanistan. “If it looks like they can give their attackers a bloody nose, they’ll stand” and fight, said Thomas Houlahan, director of the military assessment program at the Virginia-based Center for Security and Science think tank. “But if they realize their unit will get overrun, those guys will melt away. They’ll go to a part of the tribal areas where the army isn’t, or they go into Afghanistan and come back later.”

That, in turn, raises questions about the demands the Pakistani campaign will create for a U.S. military effort in Afghanistan that is already considered underresourced by its commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, at a time when President Obama is considering a request for tens of thousands more troops. McChrystal’s spokesman, Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis, said that operations against insurgents in either Pakistan or Afghanistan have “obvious implications for the pro-government forces of both countries,” but declined to address any question about how McChrystal might respond to any potential influx of Taliban fighters fleeing the Pakistani military.

Still, Sholtis said, communications channels remain open with the Pakistanis. “General McChrystal and General Kayani meet regularly in person to discuss a range of issues, including a meeting last week in Pakistan,” Sholtis said, referring to the Pakistani Army’s chief of staff.

Representatives for Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia, who also deals regularly with Kayani, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Haider Mullick, a senior fellow at the U.S. Joint Special Operations University, expressed cautious optimism that the Pakistani military would be able to fight the Taliban in the mountainous, rural terrain of Waziristan. The military has assets it did not have in its failed 2006 campaign, he said, including “popular support, high morale, better intel, better [intelligence] cooperation on drones, more precision weapons, two divisions of Army and Frontier Corps combined and at least 1000 special forces, [and] ten gunships.”

But, Mullick said, the effort might still “not make the cut unless at least 2 more divisions move in, more locals are evacuated and there is more ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence]-CIA NATO-Pak military cooperation.” While the army had learned some lessons in counterinsurgency — something Petraeus vouched for in April congressional testimony — it would still need to “spread a strong net, kill the irreconcilables, limit collateral damage, protect civilians who stay behind and leave behind something to work with, [like] basic social and economic infrastructures.”

Houlahan said a key indicator of Pakistani resolve will be whether it uses infantry units from the regular army for the assault. “If it’s primarily a Frontier Corps affair, then it’s clearly not serious in my view. The Frontier Corps is essentially up-armored tribal police,” he said, citing what he said was a Pakistani military tendency to “flatten entire villages with artillery and avoid sending in infantry. … They’ve relied too much on airpower, and have been hesitant to send these units in and force a climactic battle.”

Doug Ollivant (Photo courtesy Doug Ollivant)

In the spring of 2006, with sectarian violence in Baghdad claiming hundreds of lives every week, an officer with the First Cavalry Division submitted an essay to a counterinsurgency writing competition on how the U.S. military needed to adapt for a confusing war. Drawing on the writings of the obscure midcentury French counterinsurgent David Galula, the officer issued a series of observations at odds with the military strategy on display in the country. “For the local people to feel secure and provide intelligence, they must have 24-hour access to the counterinsurgent force,” advised Lt. Col. Doug Ollivant, the division’s chief of plans, in an influential paper called “Producing Victory,” published in “Military Review” that summer. Ollivant, like many in the military’s growing community of counterinsurgency theorist-practitioners, had already experienced the Iraq war from its most dangerous places: Najaf, Baghdad, and Fallujah.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

One of the paper’s most attentive readers was Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. Army’s chief counterinsurgency scholar. In advance of deploying for Iraq in January 2007 to take command of a faltering war, Petraeus emailed Ollivant and asked him if his essay’s premises still applied; Ollivant said that for the most part they did.

The conversation would be a prologue to several tense and historic months. Ollivant’s division had returned to Baghdad the previous November. As planning chief — and a member of Petraeus’ brain trust — he would have a key role in shaping the battle for Baghdad, the major theater of the counterinsurgency fight in 2007 commonly referred to as the troop surge. Ollivant’s emphasis on a constant security presence to protect an at-risk population from an insurgency, shared by the officers around Petraeus, was diametrically opposed to the previous strategy, which emphasized protecting U.S. troops above Iraqi civilians. Now it is counterinsurgent conventional wisdom and is being adapted for the Afghanistan war.

What came next was perhaps less expected. The following year, Ollivant left Iraq for the White House, where he became a director for Iraq at the National Security Council in March 2008. Working for Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the Bush administration’s so-called War Czar, Ollivant’s next big planning job involved herding the vast national-security bureaucracy to sustain the reduction in violence that the surge contributed to achieving. He said he was “still not certain” why Lute hired him, but suspects Petraeus or Gen. Peter Chiarelli, Ollivant’s former division commander who now serves as the Army’s vice chief of staff, had something to do with it.

When President Obama asked Lute to stay on through the change in administrations, Ollivant, an Oregon native who joined the Army to help pay for college, stayed as well — for a time. Ollivant left the White House on June 16, and on July 1, Lute presided over a ceremony at the White House in honor of Ollivant’s retirement from the Army. As an example of the new generation of Iraq- and Afghanistan-experienced military leaders, Ollivant’s service is both unique and yet still familiar to soldiers and Marines who have had to act as warfighters, diplomats and development workers rolled into one, improvising and recasting strategy in the absence of clear guidance from their superior officers and from Washington. But when Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki visits Obama at the White House on Wednesday, Ollivant, for the first time in five years, will be an observer.

The transition may be difficult. “There’s a part of me that would really like to put Iraq behind me,” Ollivant said in a recent interview at a Dupont Circle Starbucks, his first on-the-record talk since leaving the administration. “I feel strangely connected to it. I’ve been working Iraq for five years now, since I went there in the summer of 2004. That’s hard to put behind you.”

As someone who played a significant role in both calming Iraq and in managing the conditions for ultimate U.S. withdrawal, it should come as little surprise when Ollivant — a youthful 20-year Army veteran who can be intense in one breath before breaking into a smile during the next — says he’s “pretty sanguine about the situation in Iraq” and thinks the Obama administration, and the country at large, should turn its attention to cementing a post-withdrawal alliance.

Violence will continue in Iraq, particularly around major political events like next year’s national elections, but that violence will be driven by specific, localized grievances, Ollivant said, not a rekindling of the sectarian violence that engulfed Iraq before the surge. “The Sunni-Shiite civil war is over, and the Sunni-Shiite civil war is over because the Sunnis lost,” he said. There is no more confusion between the “relative strengths of the parties,” a confusion that contributed to the civil war. Even in the volatile north of the country, where Kurds and Arabs have laid claim to many of the same oil-rich areas, Ollivant sees the dispute as more amenable to negotiations than open war: “Everyone knows what the relative strengths are. Everyone knows what the other side wants.” The last quarterly report by the Pentagon on Iraq, issued in March, found practically no deaths resulting ethno-sectarian violence in Iraq in early 2009, compared to between 600 and 1200 in Baghdad alone at the time Ollivant published “Producing Victory.”

What the various political actors in Iraq want from the United States is a different story. Maliki declared the departure of U.S. troops from Iraqi cities and towns — the first milestone in last year’s U.S.-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement leading to final troop withdrawals in 2011 — a national holiday. Yet despite potent anti-occupation politics in Iraq, some Iraqi legislators and generals have expressed unease about the pace of U.S. withdrawal, with former national security adviser Qassim Daoud calling for U.S. troops to stay until at least 2020 or 2025. When Vice President Joseph Biden traveled to Iraq earlier this month to press Iraqi leaders on political compromise, the chief spokesman for the Maliki government, Ali al-Dabbagh, replied, “national reconciliation is an Iraqi issue and involvement of a non-Iraqi party won’t make it more successful.”

Antipathy to political pressure from the United States cuts across Iraqi political boundaries. “The same Iraqi political figures who say ‘stay out of our business, let us run our own country’ are almost certainly the same ones who a few months ago said, ‘Why don’t we have an ambassador yet, have you forgotten us?’” Ollivant said. “And those are both legitimate points for the Iraqis to raise.”

Ollivant said his interactions with Iraqi leaders over the past year have revolved around their desire to deepen a sustainable relationship after U.S. troops depart — particularly a commercial relationship. “They want more American companies, particularly in the oil sector,” he said. Oil revenue still accounts for the vast majority of the Iraqi budget, despite U.S. and international pressure to diversify, and a variety of schemes have emerged in the Iraqi legislature and in the autonomous Kurdish provinces to entice foreign oil companies. Yet a weak legal system and lingering perceptions of poor security have hindered American willingness to invest. Ollivant called it an issue worth high-level attention.

“It wouldn’t hurt to have a major figure stating to American companies that it would be a patriotic act to continue the American rebuilding project in Iraq as a civilian effort, led by corporate America rather than the military,” he said. That advice may personally benefit Ollivant, who said he’s currently working as “an independent business and defense consultant, with a focus on Iraq and various ‘small war’ contingencies,” yet Maliki is anticipated to make a similar plea for commercial ties in his discussions with the administration.

Similarly, the future of the U.S. military and diplomatic commitments to Iraq will broaden and normalize. “We’ll continue to hear them ask for diplomatic assistance and assistance at the U.N.,” he said. Militarily, Ollivant said the Obama administration is “serious about getting out of Iraq as soon as prudently possible,” and so post-2011 military ties to Iraq will look like “the same types of ties we have to many other countries in the region,” with U.S. military or security companies continuing to provide advice and training to Iraqi security forces and “selling American equipment, which means a continuing supply of American spare parts.”

The Obama administration has met its share of skepticism on Iraq. In this spring, Republican senators criticized Obama for nominating Christopher Hill, a respected diplomat without experience in the Arab world, as his ambassador to Baghdad. Kori Schake, a State Department veteran and foreign policy adviser to Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) presidential campaign, has written that Obama’s commitment to withdrawal risks “pull[ing] the plug on a war we’re winning to concentrate on a war we cannot win” in Afghanistan. Reidar Visser, a prominent analyst of Iraqi politics based in Norway, observed that Biden’s focus on sectarianism at a time when Iraqis are beginning to form cross-sectarian political coalitions “suggest that while Iraq itself may be maturing, U.S. policy in Iraq is not.” There is widespread agreement that the Obama administration has spent less time on Iraq than on the war in Afghanistan. Ollivant’s former boss, Lt. Gen. Lute, had his portfolio expanded at the NSC, but Iraq policy is no longer part of it.

Having worked for the Bush administration, Ollivant doesn’t dispute that Obama doesn’t share Bush’s “laser-like” focus on Iraq during his administration’s final year in office, a focus that emerged partially out of concern for Bush’s legacy. But Ollivant stresses that the policy options for the United States have narrowed after Bush signed the Status of Forces Agreement guaranteeing a date for U.S. withdrawal, something the Iraqis compelled the administration to sign in an unexpected policy reversal. The so-called SOFA “narrowed the political discourse in this country” on Iraq,” Ollivant said. “The Bush administration’s final position ended up close enough to the Obama campaign’s rhetoric that you really have the two sides coming together at a place of common ground.”

Not all observers are as sanguine as Ollivant. “Iraq certainly seems to be an afterthought at the moment,” said Michael Wahid Hanna, a Middle East expert at the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. “All of a sudden I find myself writing about the need to think about how we do still retain some levers of influence in the country. This is a transition and it is an awkward period where new sorts of relations are being sorted out, the military interaction receiving the lion’s share of the attention.” Without a sharpening of administration focus, Hanna said he feared that “rest of the [Obama administration's] agenda for the region will never survive if Iraq backslides into broader violence.”

Ollivant drew a distinction between the continued, diminished levels of violence in Iraq and the strategic threat of a renewed sectarian upheaval. “There’s a huge difference between a Sunni leader being assassinated because he’s leading a political movement and is a threat to an established power base or a rival power base or an up-and-coming power base and a Sunni leader being assassinated because he’s a Sunni,” he said. That distinction is what prevented widespread conflagrations when, in the spring, Iraqi security forces in Baghdad arrested several leaders of the mostly-Sunni auxiliary militia known as the Sons of Iraq or the Awakening on various criminal charges. “It’s still an unstable country,” Ollivant said, “but I think we have to distinguish between political violence and sectarian violence.”

He didn’t always know that such a distinction would be meaningful in Iraq. His first Iraq tour, as operations chief for the 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment, overlapped with much of the first sustained period of crisis during the war — June 2004 to February 2005 — and took him to some of the war’s toughest fighting: the Shiite graveyards of Najaf, the Marine-led invasion of Fallujah and the restive Shiite neighborhood of Khadimiya in Baghdad. Like many officers with Iraq experience during the war’s deteriorating fortunes, Ollivant and “Producing Victory’s” co-author, Lt. Eric Chewning, studied counterinsurgency theory and wrote their paper “almost as catharsis.” In Baghdad during the surge, Ollivant would wake early and work until “11, midnight, 1 a.m.,” swallowing Ambien so his thoughts would let him sleep.

“My confidence in the strategy waxed and waned over time,” he said when asked if he thought the surge would succeed in reducing violence in Iraq.

Asked what his proudest moment of service was, Ollivant equivocated. “I had three very very different experiences in Iraq,” he said. “I’m glad I smelled cordite in Iraq. I’m glad I was at [Multinational Division-Baghdad] when we did the surge and I was part of putting that together. And I was immensely proud and honored to have worked at the White House for two administrations.”

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.