“It is critical Obama develops a channel to Karzai where hard messages can go both ways,” said Bruce O. Riedel, who helped the administration formulate its initial Afghan policy. “It is time-consuming, but we can’t hope to succeed without a political channel that works.”

Mrs. Clinton “combines the hard-headed strength, the political clout and the human understanding to do it right,” said Mr. Riedel, who is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Poor Richard Holbrooke! First it was Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) who overshadowed the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan by brokering Karzai’s acquiescence to the (ultimately ill-faded) runoff election. And now his boss is doing a job that was supposed to fall under his portfolio. And to think Holbrooke came into office picking off sections of the Iran brief as well.

But the Obama administration doesn’t close a door without opening a window. Here’s the everyone-in-his-or-her-right-place line:

The American ambassador, Karl W. Eikenberry, has a workable relationship with Mr. Karzai, officials said. But the two have also had their ups and downs, and anyway, some American officials say the White House needs an interlocutor at a higher level than an ambassador, or even a special envoy, like Mr. Holbrooke.

But if Eikenberry is the interlocutor for the day-to-day and Clinton is the interlocutor for the biggest crises, then Holbrooke’s interlocutory role is rather less than clear, and now Karzai knows that if he doesn’t like what Holbrooke tells him, he gets a second bite at the apple with Clinton. Perhaps Holbrooke’s more durable role in the administration is to coordinate the interagency team that he’s assembled to get diplomacy, development work, intelligence, communications and finance for Afghanistan and Pakistan all rowing in the same direction. But wait! If Stuart Bowen’s proposal for a new U.S. Office of Contingency Operations goes forward — and a formalized proposal for it is coming very soon — Holbrooke will lose that role as well. So where would that leave Holbrooke, the premiere diplomat of his generation?

It’s one poll, but it’s only the latest to portray Palin as an unpopular — forget “divisive” — figure whose weakness with the general electorate has no bearing with her popularity among Republicans. And it cuts against the surreal arguments that Palin is in a good position to rebuild an image that was positive for, at most, about four weeks in 2008. Clinton’s 42 percent “definitely not” number was the kind of thing that encouraged Democrats like Barack Obama and John Edwards into the race against her. Palin’s 53 percent is just brutal.

Rajiv Shah and USAID (Department of Agriculture, USAID)

After nearly 11 months of allowing the top U.S. foreign-development bureau go without permanent leadership, the Obama administration decided Tuesday afternoon on the unconventional choice of Rajiv Shah, a 36-year old undersecretary of the Department of Agriculture and medical doctor with extensive experience in food security and public heath, to lead the U.S. Agency for International Development. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who will be Shah’s boss if the Senate confirms him, gushed. “He has a record of delivering results in both the private and public sectors, forging partnerships around the world, especially in Africa and Asia, and developing innovative solutions in global health, agriculture, and financial services for the poor,” she said in a statement heralding Shah’s nomination.

But some USAID program managers and contractors, the people whom Obama tapped Shah to oversee as USAID’s next administrator, aren’t happy. In a series of emails forwarded to The Washington Independent on condition of anonymity by a USAID contractor concerned about the Shah nomination, those within the agency who focus on its core mission of helping impoverished countries improve their governance and foster economic growth wondered whether Shah’s background makes him the best fit person to lead the troubled development agency.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

In another of the emails, another USAID contractor who works on development and governance said that unless Shah can transcend his background, it will signal “that other areas are less important.”

Shah was not the Obama administration’s first choice to head USAID. That was Paul Farmer, the founder of the global public-health organization Partners In Health and well-respected figure in the development community. But for reasons that remain shrouded in mystery, Farmer did not make it through the administration’s vetting process. At a visit to USAID’s headquarters in July, Clinton cryptically called the laborious vetting a “nightmare” and “frustrating beyond words.”

As a result, read another email, “the lead on this story was the need to propose a candidate who would easily be confirmed by the Senate,” according to its author, another USAID contractor. “The vetting process may be depriving the Agency of the seasoned professional, senior leadership it needs during this crisis.”

USAID faces no shortage of problems. Despite a requested boost in funding from the Obama administration, the agency had a budget of barely $1.25 billion this past fiscal year, compared to over a half-trillion for the Pentagon. It remains without a planning bureau, which the Bush administration folded into the State Department. And the organization is largely reliant on contractors to supplement its relatively small staff in fulfilling its diverse mandate of development, public-health, governance and agricultural programs: it had 1,759 employees in 2006, compared to millions employed by the Pentagon. “AID is never going to have the depth of knowledge on health, education, agriculture, microenterprise,” said George Ingram, a former senior USAID official, rattling off some of the tasks of the agency, “or the number of people required to carry them out.” Additionally, an emerging proposal to create an office for managing U.S. civilian tasks in war zones may cut into bureaucratic territory that USAID sees as its own.

But Shah himself has his own series of credentials. A fairly recent Agriculture Department hire, Shah manages a staff of more than 10,000 and a budget of over $2 billion. (The Obama administration’s funding request, currently before Congress, would give USAID about $1.7 billion next year.) Before arriving at the department to work on food security, he directed agricultural-development research for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the leading private development organizations that have emerged in recent years to reshape the international development landscape. Partnering with those non-governmental organizations is a driving focus of the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, according to Anne-Marie Slaughter, the State Department director of policy planning.

One public-health expert who contracts with USAID, and who declined to speak on the record with TWI, said that Shah’s rapid ascent “tends to confirm” a rumor going around USAID circles that “Hillary Clinton was holding up the confirmation process because she wanted a USAID administrator she could control.” But the expert added that Shah’s credentials and experience made him “probably the best compromise we’re going to get.”

A different USAID contract employee worried that development and governance issues would be “pushed aside” in countries where the U.S. “has few strategic interests and there are overwhelming economic and public health issues to contend with.” The employee, in an email interview with TWI, anticipated “less governance work in the Papua New Guineas of the world” under Shah.

Ingram, now the co-chair of the Modernize Foreign Assistance Network, a nonpartisan group urging foreign-assistance reform, considered the early criticism of Shah to be premature and unfair. “The guy brings expertise in health [and] agriculture, but that does not neccarily tell us how he’d lead the agency,” he said. “I can see why people are saying that, but they’re making presumptions that may or may not be correct.”

One private development organization, the International Center for Research on Women, hailed Shah’s nomination. Shah “brings to USAID the powerful voice and vision required to elevate development’s role in U.S. foreign policy,” the center’s president, Geeta Rao Gupta, said in a statement. “He will provide the leadership and insight crucial for the agency at this pivotal time in its history.”

Another USAID contractor, in an email forwarded to TWI, had a mixed reaction. The contractor said it was “exciting to see a relatively young, brilliant man take the reigns and perhaps steer [government] aid in a revised direction” and praised the nominee’s management experience. But the contractor, reflecting a sentiment expressed in several of the emails, said Shah’s nomination was “yet another (or maybe a stronger) indication that Obama is shifting from nation building/good governance to heath care and food security initiatives. This may not bode well for D&G,” a shorthand for development and governance.

A statement released yesterday from Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the leaders of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that will vet Shah, praised the Obama administration for belatedly producing a USAID nominee but did not pledge any support for Shah. Kerry expressed his concern about the vacancy, saying a new administrator would “bring significant momentum to foreign aid reform,” and pledged a “thorough nomination process.” Lugar looked forward to a discussion with Shah of the ways “to improve and support the development mission that benefits our long-term security as we proceed with the confirmation process.”

That was Ingram’s main concern for Shah’s confirmation hearings as well. Ingram said he had heard largely positive things about Shah from emails with his friends in the development community, and hoped Kerry and Lugar would “ask questions on revitalizing AID” with a “bipartisan recognition that the dramatic reduction in staffing in AID over the last 20 years has been a mistake.”

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Flickr: Daniella Zalcman)

Provocations from Iran accelerated this week, as the ruling Iranian ayatollah gave a speech that suggested Iran would reject a nuclear-fuel deal reached in Vienna last week, while his regime violently suppressed a new round of anti-regime demonstrations across several cities. Yet a group of former diplomats convened by a leading pro-opposition Iranian-American organization urged the Obama administration not to abandon diplomacy.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

Leaders of both countries issued heated rhetoric. President Obama, in a statement issued late Tuesday night, referred to the Vienna offer and said, “It is time for the Iranian government to decide whether it wants to focus on the past, or whether it will make the choices that will open the door to greater opportunity, prosperity, and justice for its people.” While not responding directly to Obama, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, Iran’s supreme leader, derided American outreach in a speech commemorating the 30th anniversary of the revolutionary siege of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. “Whenever they smile at the officials of the Islamic revolution, when we carefully look at the situation, we notice that they are hiding a dagger behind their back,” Khamanei said, deriding diplomacy with the U.S. as “naive and perverted.”

Yet at a forum in the Dirksen Senate Office Building convened on Wednesday by the National Iranian-American Council — an Iranian-American education and advocacy group that gained new precedence after denouncing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election in June as illegitimate — a few retired diplomats urged Obama to give diplomacy more time to work, even if it meant retracting Clinton’s refusal to amend the Vienna offer. “Political isolation is something the Iranians are very much concerned about,” said Thomas Pickering, who served as undersecretary of state in the Clinton administration, arguing that continued diplomacy gave the U.S. the leverage of presenting Iran with a united coalition.

If Iran, in its formal response to the Vienna offer, rejects the idea of either Russia or France enriching uranium for it, “there are ways to get around that,” said Greg Thielmann, a former top nuclear intelligence official at the State Department.

There are several bills moving through the Congress to place new economic sanctions on Iran, including one sponsored in the House by Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) and another in the Senate from Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.). But retired Amb. John Limbert, one of the U.S. diplomats held hostage at the embassy in 1979 and 1980, pronounced himself “very skeptical” of sanctioning Iran. “It’s easy to talk about smart sanctions,” he said, “but I don’t know if I’ve ever seen one.” Instead, Limbert contended, sanctions would most likely “create shortages and artificial, wonderful opportunities for hoarding” that benefit “those with the best connections to the regime” at the expense of the population. Thielmann agreed, saying sanctions risked “strengthening the regime, when it’s meant to do the opposite.”

The clash between the regime and the Iranian population was on display today in Iran, as demonstrators in Tehran, Shiraz, Rasht, and Tabriz defied a regime order not to use the anniversary of the embassy seizure to protest the regime. Police and regime militiamen beat demonstrators and fired tear gas canisters to disrupt the gatherings. It is unknown whether anyone was killed in the clashes. But at the White House, press secretary Robert Gibbs said he “hope[s] greatly that violence will not spread.”

Trita Parsi, the head of the National-Iranian American Council, reiterated his support for the demonstrators. “The demonstrations and the reaction of the government shows the aspirations of the Iranian people for fairness, human rights and democracy has not been crushed,” Parsi told TWI. “It shows the opposition’s timeline is correct: this is not a hundred-meter sprint, but a marathon” to achieve Iranian democracy.

Yet in recent days, articles in The Weekly Standard and The Atlantic have accused Parsi of loyalty to the very Iranian regime he has opposed. The Standard’s online editor, Michael Goldfarb, called Parsi “the Iranian regime’s man in Washington,” while Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic blogged last week that Parsi “does a lot of leg-work for the Iranian regime.” When asked by Mother Jones to provide evidence for the accusation, Goldberg clarified that while he “assume[d]” Parsi didn’t “take Iranian government money or Iranian government instruction,” Parsi “does argue quite vociferously against sanctions, and he does tend to present, at least in my reading, a fairly benevolent understanding of Iran’s rulers and their motivations.”

Parsi described his opposition to sanctions and opposition to Ahmadinejad as two halves of the same coin. His organization “strongly stands for human rights, but also opposes war and sanctions for that reason, and favors diplomacy,” he said. He denied taking money from the Iranian regime, saying, “Our records are open and our tax returns are on our Website, and the only people who have made [such allegations] are people with a diametrically opposite political view.”

Parsi continued, “You can debate us on the merits of your policy prescriptions, or you can attack, smear and character assassinate us. Unfortunately, due to the weakness of their position, they’ve chosen the latter. That’s what’s motivating these attacks.”

At Parsi’s Hill forum, Limbert, the former U.S. diplomat held hostage by Iranian revolutionaries, said that the Obama administration had no choice but to negotiate with Iran and should not be too distracted by Ahmadinejad’s character. “I don’t buy the argument that you legitimize Ahmadinejad [through negotiation, since] Iran is more than Ahmadinejad, and he will not be there forever,” Limbert said. “What’s the alternative? To continue what we’ve done for 30 years? That has not had any results.”

Update: This story originally referred to the National Iranian-American Council as a lobby group, when in fact it is an education and advocacy association.

“In 2008, we held our presidential election on Sept. 15,” Clinton said. “When the Bush administration decided not to help Lehman Bros … McCain’s chances of winning an election went from 1-in-4 to 1-in-50. The election ended Sept. 15.”

Debating whether the government should have let Lehman fail is a worthy pursuit, and one best debated by economists and policymakers still probing the near-collapse of the country’s financial system. For Clinton, however, it’s a different matter. Blaming Lehman keeps Clinton from giving any credit to Obama for winning on the merits of his campaign. It helps take the focus even further away from Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful primary campaign, and Bill Clinton’s own role in stirring up controversies that detracted from her effort.

Coming from a more neutral observer, these kind of comments about Lehman might be worth pondering further. Coming from Clinton, they sound more like self-serving revisionist history.

U.S. Supreme Court of the United States (WDCpix)

The Supreme Court on Tuesday Wednesday will hear arguments in a case that could reverse major gains made in recent decades to reduce the influence of corporate money on federal elections.

At first blush, Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission appears to present relatively narrow, technical questions about the definition of terms under the federal campaign finance law. But after hearing oral argument in the case last Spring, the Supreme Court decided that rather than simply rule on the immediate questions before it, it wanted the lawyers to argue more broadly whether the court should go further and, reversing previous precedents, invalidate corporate campaign restrictions on the grounds that they infringe upon corporations’ rights to free speech.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

In a highly unusual move, the court asked the lawyers to re-brief and re-argue the case, focusing on this critical constitutional question. The court has convened a special session, a month earlier than usual, to hear those arguments. If a majority of the court agrees to reverse those precedents, experts say the court could open federal campaigns to a flood of corporate funding, radically altering American politics and the nature of electoral democracy for the foreseeable future.

The case also highlights the importance of Supreme Court appointments. Although the court’s newest justice, Sonia Sotomayor, is expected to rule with the more liberal wing of the court to uphold existing campaign finance restrictions, the replacement of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor by Justice Samuel Alito by George W. Bush appears to be the reason the court is even considering such a radical shift.

On its face, the case is about whether Citizens United, a conservative nonprofit group that receives corporate funding, could pay $1.2 million to fund distribution of its anti-Hillary Clinton documentary as a “video on-demand” during the month before the presidential primary.

The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, otherwise known as McCain-Feingold, bars corporations and labor unions from using their treasury funds to pay for “electioneering” on broadcast, cable or satellite transmissions for 30 days before a presidential primary and 60 days before the general election.

“Hillary: The Movie” is a 90-minute documentary in which conservative critics interviewed on camera alternately call Clinton “deceitful,” “cunning,” “ruthless,” a “congenital liar,” and “not qualified as commander in chief.” Citizens United, represented by former Bush administration solicitor general Theodore Olson, argues that its film is not “electioneering” because it doesn’t advocate for or against any particular candidate, it just presents facts and some individuals’ opinions about Hillary Clinton. Alternatively, Citizens United is arguing that the McCain-Feingold law is unconstitutional.

But the court has already ruled otherwise. In 2003, In McConnell v. FEC, the court ruled on a challenge to the McCain-Feingold Act brought by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), among others. The justices voted 5-4 to uphold the law. Normally, that would answer the question and put an end to the broader constitutional argument.

Since 2003, however, the composition of the court has changed. Justice O’Connor, who provided the critical fifth vote in favor of the law, has been replaced by Justice Samuel Alito, who’s made clear his skepticism of campaign finance restrictions. (Three of his colleagues — Justices Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas — have previously signed minority opinions advocating striking down campaign finance restrictions.) Chief Justice Roberts has also expressed concern about the campaign finance laws.

As a result, instead of deciding the case, the court announced in June that it would convene a special session to consider specifically whether it should reverse McConnell and another ruling from 1990, Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, which upheld a state’s right to limit direct corporate spending in elections. And the cases all build upon a long history of case law defining corporations and their role.

“This line of cases goes back to 1907,” says Monica Youn, a lawyer and specialist in campaign finance reform at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, which submitted an amicus brief in the case. “Since 1907 the United States has recognized that corporations have certain rights, but they’re not citizens, they don’t vote, so those rights can be limited.”

The right at issue is the First Amendment right of free speech. Conservatives who oppose campaign finance regulation argue that corporations have the same right to free speech – and to political speech – as anybody else does.

The federal government, which is defending the regulation, hasn’t exactly helped matters. At the first oral argument of this case in March, the government’s lawyer, responding to a question from Justice Alito, suggested that, following the same principles, Congress could ban corporate funding of a book favoring a particular candidate. (McCain-Feingold doesn’t apply to books, newspapers or the Internet. The Washington Independent has signed onto an amicus brief submitted by the Brennan Center clarifying that the campaign restrictions at issue in this case do not restrict Web publications.) “That’s pretty incredible,” Alito replied.

Conservatives have since pounced on the idea to argue that supporters of campaign finance would support government book banning.

Similar concerns appear to have prompted the court to revisit its earlier decisions on the issue, surprising legal experts as well as participants in the case.

“This was a real left-field move by the Supreme Court,” said Youn.

Most experts agree it does not bode well for the law. Rick Hasen, a professor at Loyola Law School who writes Election Law Blog has written: “If Roberts or Alito were ready to go the narrow route again in Citizens United . . . there would have been no reason to set the case for reargument explicitly asking the parties to brief the constitutional question, and certainly no reason to rush the case to September so it can be decided before the 2010 election season goes into full swing.”

Doug Kendall, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, noted on Huffington Post that the last time the court interrupted its summer vacation to hear a special argument was in one of the cases it now may overturn, McConnell v. FEC. “Before McConnell, the Court hadn’t returned to DC for a pre-Term summer session since 1974, when in United States v. Nixon it ordered President Richard M. Nixon to surrender his secret Watergate tapes.”

Ironically, Ted Olson, now representing Citizens United, will be trying to convince the court to overrule a case he defended as solicitor general six years earlier. (Olson defended the campaign finance law in McConnell.)

The case will also be a statement about how “activist” the current Supreme Court is. The Supreme Court normally avoids reaching constitutional questions if they’re not necessary to the case, and rules consistently with its earlier opinions. This case could easily be handled that way, said Hasen. “Here it’s very easy to avoid the constitutional question. The fact that the court asked for argument, suggests some justices are interested in not following that usual principle of avoidance.”

Ironically, it’s usually conservatives who criticize liberal judges as “activist” for their willingness to overrule precedent or read constitutional rights expansively. (Jeff Sessions, for example, warned that Sonia Sotomayor would be vulnerable to “the siren call of judicial activism.”) Here, it would be the conservative wing of the court reversing precedent to create unprecedented First Amendment rights for for-profit corporations.

The consequences of that sort of activism could be serious, writes Kendall. “Citizens United will help answer a profoundly important question about whether there is in fact a meaningful difference of opinion among the conservative justices on the question of what justifies overturning prior rulings of the Supreme Court. The answer to this question will go a long way toward determining whether the Court’s shift to the right will be gradual or sharp in the coming years.”

As for campaign finance rules in particular, if the court overrules the two court precedents involved here, it would likely invite a slew of challenges to other campaign finance restrictions on First Amendment grounds.

“If the court reverses Austin, then that, combined with a number of other cases that will come down the pipeline in the next three years, will lead to much more corporate money generally in election process,” predicted Hasen. “It will have big influence on who gets elected and the kind of legislation that gets passed.”

Mohamed is one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Jeppesen Dataplan, the Boeing subsidiary that allegedly helped the CIA conduct “extraordinary renditions” of terror suspects to foreign countries to be tortured. As I reported back in June, the Obama Justice Department has asked the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to re-hear the case after the court ordered that it can continue, despite the administration’s assertion of the “state secrets privilege.”

Most recently, the Chronicle notes, a British government lawyer told the U.K. High Court of Justice last month “that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had threatened to limit U.S. intelligence-sharing with Great Britain if the court disclosed details of Mohamed’s treatment in Guantanamo.”

A transcript of the British court’s July 29 hearing reveals that Lord Justice John Thomas rejected that argument, saying there was “nothing in the paragraphs (about the U.S. government’s treatment of Mohamed) that could conceivably identify anything that is of a national security interest.”

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.

The overarching foreign policy theme of the speech: responsible American international leadership requires bolstering existing architectures of global governance and building new ones, including to non-state actors, for multilateral approaches to security, prosperity and peace.

Since my piece is going to focus on more of the structural changes Clinton is proposing to diplomacy and development, I thought I’d throw that policy stuff on the blog. More soon.

Gen. David Petraeus (WDCpix)

A program that the Obama administration calls crucial to Pakistan’s fight against the Taliban is being criticized at the State Department and on Capitol Hill for overly militarizing the problem.

The dispute represents an early rift with some progressive members of Congress over discrepancies between the administration’s broad foreign policy goals and its approach to immediate challenges. One of the central aspects of the administration’s approach to the crisis in Pakistan is a new creation called the Pakistani Counterinsurgency Capabilities Fund, a $400 million annual program to give the Pakistani military equipment and training for counterinsurgency missions that it had shown little competency in waging. During April testimony, Michele Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, called it “absolutely critical to the success” of the Obama administration’s strategy in Pakistan. Both the House and the Senate showed themselves receptive to the proposal, adding the so-called PCCF to the war supplemental that passed the House on May 14 and the Senate on May 21.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

At the administration’s behest, both versions of the supplemental placed the PCCF under the jurisdiction of the Defense Department, despite the State Department’s control over the government-to-government Foreign Military Sales program that typically governs aid to foreign militaries. That move has struck some on Capitol Hill — and in the State Department — as retrenchment on a core Obama administration priority: its pledge to rebalance a foreign-policy apparatus it sees as overly militarized. What’s more, an article of faith among counterinsurgency theorist/practitioners holds that its hybrid style of warfare is “80 percent political and only 20 percent military,” which further raises questions about the Obama administration’s decision to place the fund in the military’s hands.

There is no opposition to the creation of the PCCF, or the general concept that Pakistan’s military ought to receive U.S. assistance in combating a vicious insurgency that has expanded its reach over the country over the past year — a combustible mix that makes the nuclear-armed country “one of the most difficult foreign policy challenges we face,” as Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, put it at a May 12 hearing. But members of the House Foreing Affairs Committee and the State Department’s legislative-affairs and private international law bureaus contend that the fund ought to be placed under the auspices of the State Department.

Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), the chairman of the committee, added an additional $700 million for the PCCF in the House’s version of a sprawling Pakistan aid bill — which cleared the committee on May 20 — but changed the custody of the program. “This provision lays down an important marker that providing security assistance to other countries is a matter of foreign policy and should remain a core responsibility of the Secretary of State,” Berman said when the committee approved the bill, known as the PEACE Act.

Committee spokeswoman Lynne Weil explained, “Chairman Berman wants to see a greater involvement of civilian authority in foreign affairs because in recent years the balance between civilian and military involvement has been tipped away from development and diplomacy. He would like to ensure that diplomacy and development have a greater role in foreign affairs.”

The Obama administration came into office agreeing that such a broad reorientation of foreign policy was necessary. “The Pentagon would like to turn functionality over to civilian resources, but the resources are not there,” an Obama aide told The New York Times during the transition last year. “We’re looking to have a State Department that has what it needs.” Accordingly, Defense Secretary Robert Gates called Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) in March to lobby for an increase in the State Department’s foreign aid budget. “I have never before in my 22 years on the budget committee had the secretary of defense call me to support the budget for the State Department,” Conrad remarked at the time. On May 20, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “The State Department will be taking back authorities and resources to do the work that we should be leading on” from the Defense Department.

But as Taliban militants have frustrated the Pakistani military over the past year, most in the Obama administration consider the PCCF to be a justified exception to the rule. The Defense Department’s policy office; the office of State Department special envoy Amb. Richard Holbrooke; and U.S. Central Command argue that in order to build a productive and durable relationship with the Pakistani military, the fund ought to be placed in the hands of Gen. David Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, which has responsiblity for military activities in Pakistan.

U.S. Central Command spokespeople declined to comment on PCCF before its final approval by Congress and President Obama. But a Defense Department official who declined to speak for attribution explained, “We need the [Pakistani] military to have a COIN capability, and therefore, the only way to build a military COIN capability [is] through mil-to-mil stuff.” The State Department’s Foreign Military Sales program allows foreign militaries to purchase U.S. military equipment on an a la carte basis, but not as part of the broader package that administration officials believe is necessary for Petraeus to push the Pakistani military to wholeheartedly embrace counterinsurgency principles. Part of that package is additional U.S. training in counterinsurgency — which several Pakistani officers have resisted.

“Except for very specialised weapons and equipment, high technology, no generalized foreign training is required,” Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kiyani, the chief of staff of the Pakistani Army, was quoted as saying on May 17. But two days before Kiyani issued that quote, The Wall Street Journal reported that up to 50 U.S. Special Forces would deployed to Pakistan to train the Frontier Corps forces who fight the Taliban in the tribal areas, the first increase of the training mission above the 70 Special Forces currently in Pakistan training the Frontier Corps.

Administration officials view the PCCF as a way for Petraeus to propose more help to the Pakistani military while pressing for additional Pakistani acceptance of U.S. training. “So Petraeus says, ‘I can offer you this, what do you say,’” the Pentagon official summarized. “‘The package includes this kind of equipment, this kind of training, this kind of advising. That’s what I’m offering. If you don’t like it, we can revisit it later. But I’m not going to separate out this stuff, and this training’s included.’” Additionally, the State Department’s Foreign Military Sales Program does not include police forces, which Petraeus and other counterinsurgency experts believe must be supported with training and equipment if the Pakistani government is to keep territory out of the control of the Taliban.

The administration officials who support placing the PCCF in the Defense Department do not deny that expanded U.S. aid for Pakistani civilian governance and development is a necessary component of defeating the Taliban. They support the passage of a bill introduced May 4 by Sens. Kerry and Richard Lugar (R.-Ind.) that provides $7.5 billion in economic and governance aid to Pakistan, and believe that it supplements the PCCF’s narrower focus on bolstering the Pakistani military’s counterinsurgency capabilities. “With Kerry-Lugar and PCCF, we’re in very good shape,” the Pentagon official said.

At least one compromise may be on the horizon. According to Kirsten Brost, spokeswoman for the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.), who chairs the panel, offered an amendment to the war supplemental that places the PCCF in the hands of the Secretary of Defense for the next fiscal year — after which it would transfer to the Secretary of State. The House, Senate and White House will have to work that out in this week’s conference committee.