"Accepting A Legitimate Islamism"

In "Nixon goes to China" spirit, the editors of the National Interest, published by the former Nixon Center, promote Middle East realpolitik:

Without ceding any ground to al-Qaeda or other militant groups, the United States will either have to deal constructively with organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood, or it will find itself increasingly marginalized and irrelevant in the region.

Uzbekistanism

Dov Zakeim, writing in the former Nixon Center's National Interest, warns that if the U.S. leaves Afghanistan too hastily a dangerous civil war might commence between India's and Pakistan's proxies. He writes:

It was precisely such an alignment of forces that led to the Taliban’s triumph in the late 1990s, followed by its sponsorship of al-Qaeda and the trauma of 9/11.

Indeed, [Afghan] President Karzai’s seemingly erratic relations with the United States can best be understood in terms of his concern about the future cohesion of his country once American forces depart. Should anything remotely like this civil-war scenario manifest itself again, America’s decade-long war will have been for naught.

The difference between then and now is that any president would make clear through words and action that the hint of renewed Taliban-al-Qaeda collaboration, or any threat to the homeland emanating from Afghanistan, would be intolerable. As for the regional interests Zakheim mentions, especially the possibility that Pakistan itself, a nuclear power, could fracture, they're obviously important. But before Sept. 11, none would've justified U.S. and NATO intervention in Afghanistan.

To some extent the U.S. deserves to be held accountable for whatever it's done to alter the regional landscape, including by raising hopes in some circles that, having stayed ten years, we might stay 20. But the Obama administration's critics should remember that there was no mystery about the limited and highly focused motive for our intervention. The American people supported the war because the Afghan government was a Sept. 11 conspirator, not because we were concerned about Pakistan, Uzbekistan, or Tajikistan. The president will always be responsible for making sure it doesn't happen again. Polls and common sense make clear he or she will have to do so without having troops on the ground.

Come Home, America

As the AP's Anne Gearan reports, President Obama said yesterday that public support for the Afghanistan war is waning "because we've been there ten years, and people get weary." She continues:

Just as he patterned his troop "surge" in Afghanistan on a successful military strategy in Iraq, now Obama is patterning his withdrawal from Afghanistan on the Iraq template as well.

The flaw in the pattern is that while George W. Bush's Iraq surge is viewed as a success, the increased U.S. commitment that Obama announced in late 2009 isn't. Gearan:

By the time the U.S. forces switched to the advisory role in Iraq, the back of the Sunni insurgency had been broken. The same cannot be said for the Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan, which causes most of the U.S. casualties and functions as the main enemy even if Obama's preferred opponent is the al-Qaida terror network the Taliban once harbored.

As a candidate, Obama didn't see the vital U.S. interest in Iraq, and he naturally opposed the Bush surge. In Afghanistan, he did see one, so he surged. A for effort? Only if you agree, as I didn't, that the best solution was more troops for stabilization and nation-building instead of using intelligence, special forces, and other covert means to keep Afghanistan from becoming a laboratory for terrorism again. If we had known Sept. 11 was in the offing, the U.S. almost certainly could have neutralized the Taliban and al-Qaeda just based on what we saw from afar. We'll now be a hundred times more vigilant, and especially so Obama, since he knows that any attack emanating from Afghanistan would be blamed on his decision to withdraw.

Friends also tell me that a continued U.S. presence contributes to Pakistan's stability and security. And yet according to the Institute for the Study of War, our policy has been undermined by national security-conscious Pakistani officials who support our enemy the Taliban because they also happen to be Pakistan's anti-India proxies. Who need to be caught in the middle of that chess game?

An Afternoon In America

The 9/11 Memorial in lower Manhattan is in the middle of a construction site. You need reservations to visit; details here. Beyond the fences and security, it's spacious and quiet. Hallowed ground. People walk slowly and speak quietly. "It doesn't feel like New York," said my stepdaughter, Meaghan, who lives here. Friendly, otherwise inconspicuous volunteers step forward to offer tissues to those who are moved to tears or to assist with photography.

Sunken fountains ringed with the names of the fallen mark the footprints of the World Trade Center towers. The spaces will be encircled by the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower and several other skyscrapers, each designed differently and spaced at odd intervals, like American irregulars standing guard. Their grandeur and diversity (and, one hopes, low occupancy rates) will affront the murderers.

One of their victims, Lisa Frost, an alumna of St. John's Episcopal School, had been graduated from Boston University in the spring of 2001. She was aboard United flight 175, which the terrorists flew into the south tower. Her name is on panel S-3. My wife Kathy found the name of William Wik, who married her high school friend Kathy Norton. William escaped from the south tower but died after reentering to help others get out. His name is on S-60.

I don't know if this little girl and her family were visiting the name of a family member or friend. The carved names invite touch. Sometimes, depending on how the wind blows around the plaza, the marble is dampened by mist from the thundering fountains.

The small temporary visitor center (a Sept. 11 museum will open later, in a building that looks like one of the towers knocked on its side) displays only two relatively small photos of the towers on fire. The first has the U.S. flag in the foreground. The spare text says the attacks were the work of the "radical Islamist terrorist network al-Qaeda."

Wednesday was a cold, breezy day, and the flag over the memorial snapped smartly. The largest single contributor to the 9/11 Memorial is the Starr Foundation, controlled by Hank Greenberg, the former chairman and CEO of American International Group and the largest beneficiary of the former Nixon Center.

The spire of St. Paul's Chapel, where volunteers and clergy assisted rescue and recovery workers after the attacks, and the Freedom Tower, which looks like it's about two-thirds finished. St. Paul's is an institution of Trinity Episcopal Church, nearby at Wall St. and Broadway.

Near the memorial a passerby was having a spirited and friendly conversation with an Occupy Wall St. protestor. Someone had sent pizza for the demonstrators. Vigorous debate, openness of heart and mind, generosity of spirit. How American.

Pauline Faultline

In the middle of the first century, within about 20 years of the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the great apostle Paul of Tarsus wrote these words to a community of Christians living in Rome [Rom. 12:14-21, NRSV]:

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord." No, "if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads." Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

I remember how overcome by evil I felt that morning, and those weeks, and all those months. Almost all of us remember. The smoke and fire. The faces of the missing, lost, and fallen. The anxiety about what might come next. Many people felt a parchedness of the spirit, even the temptation to perceive God’s silence, indifference, or absence.

Then there was the rage. Do you remember feeling the rage?

Imagine St. Paul coming to town in the weeks after Sept. 11, preaching his bold sermons about blessing those who persecute us. A considerable number would have stood up in church and assured Paul that that vengeance wouldn’t be God’s anywhere near as soon as it would be ours.

If we feel more secure on this anniversary than we did five years ago or nine years ago, it’s because of the methodical, bloody work undertaken by United States military and intelligence services against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. They haven’t eliminated the threat, but they’ve reduced it.

We may not call this vengeance. We may call it a just and proportionate response to the evil our enemies have done.

Yet I will tell you – I’m not proud, but it’s true -- that my heart leaped with satisfaction at the news, which came not long after the joy of Easter, that Osama bin Laden had been killed by an American who pulled the trigger in that compound in Abbottabad and shouted, “For God and country.”

We pause to thank all the men and women who protect us – those who by their diligence and valor have purchased the blessing we enjoy this afternoon of remembering and reflecting in freedom and in relative security.

Yet we Christians still have to contend with St. Paul. Pacifism may be your witness. Perhaps it should be mine, but it isn’t.

But how do the faithful do violence?

Can we love and kill our enemies at the same time?

Are we too prone to mistaking our neighbor for our enemy?

What risks do we run by insisting that we are wise and holy enough ever to extend the arm of God’s own justice?

In Rome during the Emperor Claudius’s time, when Paul wrote his letter, observant Jews were arguing with Christians. Jewish Christians were arguing with non-Jewish Christians. Rome was persecuting both Jews and Christians.

Can you imagine what it was like back in the day -- the fear and mutual suspicion, the scapegoating and the name-calling?

As a matter of fact, you probably can – if you remember the aftermath of Sept. 11.

If we are to achieve justice without vengeance – if we are to act as God would have us act so far as it depends on us – then the call of the gospel is to a relentless discipline of humility and forgiveness. Angry and hurt as we may be, whether in our national life or our daily lives, these virtues are supposed be our default settings.

Paul went so far as to imagine an improbable Roman paradise in which Jews, Christians, and pagans set aside their enmity for the sake of their humanity – a paradise he understood would be populated one proud, reluctant soul at a time.

Today, Paul might well promote harmony among Jews, Christians, Muslims, and all believers – even harmony between Democrats and Republicans.

My wife, Kathy, and I have attorney friends named Harry Waizer and Karen Walsh. Harry grew up in Brooklyn as an orthodox Jew. Karen grew up Roman Catholic in Westchester County. Many of their family members boycotted their wedding. Their Jewish and Catholic mothers shunned one another.

Harry worked for Cantor Fitzgerald in the World Trade Center and was burned by jet fuel over most of his body after the terrorists attacked. He was in a coma for weeks. Doctors gave him a 5% chance, but he beat those odds, and he’s back at work.

A few weeks ago, Karen told us about the night in late September 2001 when she arrived at the hospital after a long day of working and caring for their children. Walking down the darkened hall toward Harry’s room, she saw two small figures walking ahead, hand in hand.

If you knew instinctively that the two figures were Harry and Karen’s mothers, then you already have a profound understanding of the glory of which humanity is capable, the fellowship, joy, and peace to which we are all called by our Creator.

Karen said that she worried that if Harry had awakened as his two mothers leaned over him, their worried faces looming side by side, he would have assumed that he was dead.

Harry didn’t have to wait that long. Neither do we.

I made these remarks at an interfaith service at St. John's Episcopal Church and School in Rancho Santa Margarita on the afternoon of Sunday, Sept. 11.

Al-Qaeda Tabula Rasa

CBS News:

An overwhelming number of Afghan men living in the region that is a major front in the U.S.-led war on the Taliban don't know anything about the terrorist attacks that brought international soldiers to Afghanistan, according to a report from an international policy think tank...

Death To Al-Qaeda?

If all goes well -- and that's mighty big if; it's still the bottom of the second inning, and the law of unintended consequences is on deck -- the Middle East revolutions could mean freedom from tyranny for Arab peoples and freedom from fear for us. This New York Times analysis quotes Paul Pillar, who blogs at the Nixon Center's "National Interest":

[F]or Al Qaeda — and perhaps no less for the American policies that have been built around the threat it poses — the democratic revolutions that have gripped the world’s attention present a crossroads. Will the terrorist network shrivel slowly to irrelevance? Or will it find a way to exploit the chaos produced by political upheaval and the disappointment that will inevitably follow hopes now raised so high?

For many specialists on terrorism and the Middle East, though not all, the past few weeks have the makings of an epochal disaster for Al Qaeda, making the jihadists look like ineffectual bystanders to history while offering young Muslims an appealing alternative to terrorism.

“So far — and I emphasize so far — the score card looks pretty terrible for Al Qaeda,” said Paul R. Pillar, who studied terrorism and the Middle East for nearly three decades at the C.I.A. and is now at Georgetown University. “Democracy is bad news for terrorists. The more peaceful channels people have to express grievances and pursue their goals, the less likely they are to turn to violence.”

Their Moment, Not Ours

Hands off the Arab revolutions, including Libya, Andrew Sullivan says to U.S. busybodies:

We in the West...are proud of and attached to our liberties because we and our forefathers grasped them for themselves. This mix of patriotism and liberty is vital and necessary. To have freedom imposed is to create chaos and resentment. To have the people grasp it for themselves is to expand the horizons of a stable democracy. There will be failures and successes....We should do all we can to assist if asked. But this is their moment, not ours, their countries, not ours, and it is time to let go of the neurotic need to control the entire world and to force it into our own ideological templates. It is time to watch and listen and engage and support. It is not time to intervene.

Good advice, until our interests are threatened, such as by al-Qaeda finding a safe haven somewhere in Libya or Egypt threatening to abrogate its peace treaty with Israel. Resisting the impulse to meddle may improve our position with the new regimes, but it doesn't guarantee that they'll be friendly. It's also an incredible stretch to talk about stable democracies when there still aren't any Arab democracies at all, including in Egypt and Tunisia.

More Than A U's Worth Of Difference

When the Soviet Union and China had their falling out in the 1960s, canny anti-communists such as Richard Nixon understood the potential advantages for the U.S. Those who insist that al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood are indistinguishable miss an analogous opportunity. But as this analysis by Daniel Byman suggests, it's never easy for Nixon to go to China:

If the Brotherhood joins in a transitional [Egyptian] government and does not fall prey to its more radical tendencies regarding Israel and Islamicizing Egyptian society (something U.S. policy should strive to accomplish), then the hardliners within its ranks will criticize it for selling out, offering al-Qaeda a means to woo them. But should the Brotherhood lose out in a power struggle or fall prey to repression from the army or a new regime, there will be a new generation of embittered young Islamists who may find al-Qaeda's more radical message more convincing than calls for renewed participation in a system that cheated them.

Islamist Egypt

The murder of 21 Christians in Egypt in an al-Qaeda-style operation exposes a frightening political reality, Michael Slackman writes:

“If [President Hosni] Mubarak disappears tomorrow, you will have the Islamists as the strongest political force in the country,” said Mohammed Salmawy, head of the Arab Writers Union. “The political parties, even lumped together, do not have the power to take over, and you have the army, which will not allow the country to go into chaos. Worse yet, you might have military Islamic rule because there is no reason to suppose the army is any different than society.”

Killing Christians Wherever They Can Find Them

Al-Qaeda's campaign of religious cleansing in Iraq.

In The Beginning, There Was Evil

Paul Pillar is a former high-ranking CIA analyst who believes "the more that religion is infused into public life, the more that mankind suffers." Newly provoked by the State of Kentucky's financial support for a Bible-based theme park and the latest trendsetting comments by Sarah Palin, Pillar, blogging at "The National Interest," writes:

Religious beliefs inherently contain the seeds of intolerance, and thus of conflict and extremism, in ways that most secular belief systems do not. If one believes one's dogma comes from divine will and providence, it can less readily be compromised in good conscience than beliefs of more mundane origin. And those on the other side of a conflict can be seen not just as in opposition but as evil.

Religious belief, because it deals with the unknown and unknowable, must quite literally be a matter of faith. And questions of faith, because they cannot be resolved through public debate, appropriately dwell in the realm of the personal and the private. Once injected into the public realm and more specifically into matters of state, then they become one more form of the tyranny over the mind of man against which the deist Thomas Jefferson swore eternal hostility upon the altar of God.

Well, except for the secular belief systems of communism and National Socialism, which mass-produced intolerance and extremism in a magnitude of which al-Qaeda and the Taliban can only dream. Closer to home, just this week, the secular left seems pretty intolerant of President Obama's idea that rich people should be allowed to keep a little more of their own money so they can goose the economy for the next two years. Their rage is palpable, and while I don't hear them saying those who disagree with them are necessarily evil, I sometimes hear them coming pretty close.

It seems to me that intolerance and extremism are inescapable expressions of human nature, the natural byproducts of pain, fear, pride, or, usually, some mixture of the three. Far from being the root cause of these inclinations, faith practice at its best helps people notice and control them. If instead religion reinforces or encourages what is worst about people, it means that religious leaders and institutions aren't doing their jobs. They've let their own pride and certitude (or fear and pain) prevent them from appreciating the awe and humility with which any sane person approaches the altar of the Almighty.

Around the world, there are all too many such religionists. That religion must do better is an axiom that many of its practitioners readily accept. But the idea that humanity is safe when it ignores the Creator's judgement perished in the death camps and gulag, in Cambodia and Rwanda. Of course that prideful idea has perished many times in the many thousands of years of human history that preceded all those modern savageries, but the idea keeps being resurrected. Even when people betray God by wreaking havoc and pretending it's for his glory instead of their own, there's a certain deviousness involved in saying that the crime was committed by God or even by religion, when the blame really belongs to the human creature acting as it has since before anyone could even mouth God's name.

Bin Laden Alone

Peter Bergen argues that al-Qaeda is being strangled by its own fanaticism:

[T]he jihadist militants are incapable of turning themselves into a genuine mass political movement because their ideology prevents them from making the kind of real-world compromises that would allow them to engage in normal politics. Indeed, rather than cut deals with new friends, bin Laden has kept adding to his list of enemies, including any Muslim who doesn't precisely share his ultra-fundamentalist worldview. The enemies list grows and grows. Al-Qaeda has said it is opposed to all Middle Eastern regimes; the Shia; most Western countries; Jews and Christians; the governments of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Russia; most news organizations; most humanitarian organizations; and the United Nations. This is no way to increase market share.

No More Afghanistans

Robert Wright argues that Afghanistan is worse than Vietnam because our involvement actually manufactures new enemies, whereas non-interventionist tactics in combating terrorism would have resulted in al-Qaeda just fading away:

Al Qaeda’s ideology offers nothing that many of the world’s Muslims actually want — except, perhaps, when they feel threatened by the West, a feeling that isn’t exactly dulled by the presence of American troops in Muslim countries.

Their Cultural Loss Is Our Pain

Journalist ("The New Yorker") and screenwriter ("The Siege") Lawrence Wright won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for his book about al-Qaeda. When Terry Gross asked him the other day on her NPR program, "Fresh Air," what inspires men to be terrorists, he mentioned political repression, cultural and civic stagnation, and especially the medieval oppression of women:

[I]f you're going to try to pin down a single word about what is it that characterizes the drive into this kind of radical reaction, I think a word might be despair. Because there are many different rivers that lead into despair, you know, there's poverty. There's political repression. There's gender apartheid. You know, there's a sense of a cultural loss. There's religious fanaticism. All of these elements are present in many different Muslim countries in varying degree.

And, you know, the world is full of poor countries that don't produce terrorists. And the world is full of repressive governments that don't have violent insurgencies. But when you start mixing all these different elements together then you get a very combustible combination, and I think that's what you see in so many of these countries....

[E]ach of these countries is entirely different entities, so the mixture is different. In Saudi Arabia, you have practically no civil society at all. You know, there's nothing between the government and the mosque. It's just, you know, it's a very, very diminished sense of what you're - what's available for you to do in life. And certainly, the gender apartheid is a real problem.

You know, these young men are not socialized. They haven't grown up learning how to please girls, which is a lot of what civilization is, in my opinion. And this absence of contact with females is just a profoundly negative influence on the development of young male minds, in my opinion.

30,000 More Troops To Afghanistan

Writing at the "Daily Beast," veteran foreign affairs watcher Leslie Gelb says he has the inside track on the Afghanistan moves President Obama will announce on Tuesday. Gen. Stanley McCrystal will get at least 30,000 more U.S. troops with an option for 10,000 more in a year if Obama is satisfied with our progress. Our goal will shift from destroying to "dismantling and degrading" al-Qaeda, with a diplomatic component of working more closely with all the nations in the region so that terrorists will have nowhere to hide and rebuild.

Gelb likes what he hears, though he has one big concern:

It’s unclear at the moment just how tough Obama will be with Pakistan. In effect, Islamabad has provided a safe haven for Afghan Taliban for more than a decade as a hedge against Indian encroachments into Afghanistan. As a result, Pakistan urges the United States to stay and fight in Afghanistan to keep the Indians out, but provides succor to the Taliban to hedge against an American withdrawal. So, the Pakistanis want us to stay in Afghanistan and help the Taliban to kill our troops. It’s hard to see how Obama’s new strategy can work unless Pakistan’s leaders are brought to see for themselves the terrible consequences (the strengthening of the Pakistani Taliban extremists) of pursuing this duplicitous course.

"Come Home, America" Watch, Day 30

Afghanistan doves have argued that the threat to fundamental U.S. interests there is de minimis because the country's al-Qaeda cohort has shrunk to almost nothing. Au contraire, writes Peter Berger. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are now essentially one in the same:

Afghanistan and the areas of Pakistan that border it have always been the epicenter of the war on jihadist terrorism--and, at least for the foreseeable future, they will continue to be. Though it may be tempting to think otherwise, we cannot defeat Al Qaeda without securing Afghanistan.

Responds Matthew Yglesias:

To my mind, Bergen’s account of the situation largely begged the question—he says we’re fighting the Taliban because the Taliban is working so closely with al-Qaeda, but arguably the Taliban is working closely with al-Qaeda largely because we’re fighting them.

In general in these foreign occupation scenarios it’s difficult to disentangle cause and effect. If 70,000 Taliban fighters showed up in the United States for any purpose whatsoever, I take it that Americans would all band together to fight them off. But our unity of purpose and anti-Taliban resolve in the face of foreign invasion wouldn’t tell you very much about our post-invasion behavior.

"Come Home, America" Watch, Day 27

Michael Crowley wonders how candidate Obama's good war in Afghanistan became President Obama's big problem. Three second-tier reasons, he says: Afghanistan's corrupt election, poor leadership at the NSC, and Obama's fears of having his domestic agenda hobbled by another Vietnam. And then one big reason:

[U]ltimately, the real answer is that this is just a hard question. Obama will have to base his decision on a rough blend of hypotheses and guesstimates -- from whether a future "Talibanistan" would shelter al Qaeda to the threat al Qaeda currently poses to American security to what the different options mean for the stability of Pakistan. In war time is always of the urgency, but nothing is more urgent than making the best decision possible.

Afghanistan: It's About The Safe-Haven

Pondering our challenge and President Obama's decision in Afghanistan, a blogger is blessed to have a world-class expert as conversation partner. I wrote:

What has changed about our ability to discern terrorist preparations from afar other than (one assumes) our pre-Sept. 11 tentativeness about acting on what we learn?

He replied:

[H]ere's my response to the gravanem of your question: It's about the safe-haven. You like what we're getting out of the tribal areas? Multiply that by twenty-fold.

Your speculative counter-factual is worth pondering, but there won't be a satisfactory answer. You could answer, "yes, if Clinton had acted," we might have prevented 9/11. Not, however, that there is anything we could have done that would have comprehensively eliminated all real and nascent terror camps in Afghanistan. But a focused and devastating strike against Al-Qa'ida may have resulted in preventing their strategic target shift from the "near enemy" (Saudi, Egypt, Jordan) to the choice they were concocting, the "far enemy" (the U.S., the perceived backer of the "near enemy"). Certainly a sustained campaign against Al-Qa'ida could have had a deterrent effect. This is Clinton's most spectacular foreign policy failure.

However, I recommend you read, sometime, Omar Nasiri's Inside the Jihad, a breathtaking (and well-written) account of that cat's experiences in the late 1990s terror camps of Afghanistan, before AQ took organizational control. If you are sympathetic to the notion that AQ has morphed into a franchise-holder, more than a tightly-controlled global organization (along the lines of Marc Sageman's Leaderless Jihad analysis -- nb: truth in argument, Sagemen supports the small-footprint model), than you have to recognize that chasing AQ will not be the only game in town, and the most undermining factor for our ongoing CT fight is safe-haven.

If we could get the Taliban, AQ and the other terrorist groups to sign a credible agreement that they will no longer go after us (Taliban would likely sign), then we could abandon Afghanistan, despite the moral hazard (which, as is pretty clear by now, I find repellent). But, lacking that, ignoring the safe-haven problem is, in many ways, similar to Clinton's greatest failure. Except now we have less of an excuse.

"Come Home, America" Watch, Day 26

Robert A. Pape writes about Afghanistan in the New York Times. If this proposition is true, then we should begin to bring our troops home:

[T]he United States does not need to station large ground forces in Afghanistan to keep it from being a significant safe haven for Al Qaeda or any other anti-American terrorists. This can be achieved by a strategy that relies on over-the-horizon air, naval and rapidly deployable ground forces, combined with training and equipping local groups to oppose the Taliban. No matter what happens in Afghanistan, the United States is going to maintain a strong air and naval presence in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean for many years, and these forces are well suited to attacking terrorist leaders and camps in conjunction with local militias — just as they did against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in 2001.