FPI Afternoon Roundup

FPI Afternoon Roundup

FPI is pleased to offer the Afternoon Roundup, a daily compendium of essential foreign policy news and analysis, to FPI Overnight Brief subscribers. The Afternoon Roundup will be sent each day Monday through Friday in the late afternoon. If you prefer to receive only the Overnight Brief and wish to unsubscribe from the Afternoon Roundup, click on the “Manage your subscription” link at the bottom of this email. To sign up for our Press List and other mailings from FPI, please visit our website.

FPI Event: U.S. Missile Defense in a Proliferating World: Threats and Challenges in the New Missile Age

Please join the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), and Young Professionals in Foreign Policy (YPFP) on Tuesday, December 8th from 6:00-8:00 PM at FDD for a screening of the documentary "33 Minutes: Protecting America in the New Missile Age" and a discussion about missile defense. Featured guests include James Carafano of The Heritage Foundation, Cliff May of FDD, and Jamie Fly of FPI. A reception with drinks and refreshments preceding the event will begin at 6:00, and the screening will begin at 6:30. FDD is located at 1726 M Street NW, Suite 700. For more information, visit our website . Please RSVP to Rachel Hoff at rhoff@foreignpolicyi.org.

Afghanistan

Frederick W. Kagan and Kimberly Kagan write: “Buried in the unfortunate rhetoric of timelines and exit strategies is a critical fact that gives reason to support the ongoing effort in Afghanistan: The president intends to give Gen. Stanley McChrystal 100,000 U.S. troops to use at his discretion for 18 months to pursue a counterinsurgency strategy. McChrystal and his team are the most clear-eyed and determined command group the United States has had in Afghanistan in years. They feel the urgency of the mission. ….the task of securing Afghanistan is critical, and with the extra forces there is a reasonable prospect of success.” – American Enterprise Institute

Michael O'Hanlon and Bruce Riedel write: “Now that President Obama has announced his plan to ‘finish the job’ in Afghanistan, how long might it be until we know if the new plan is working? The White House has talked about a sustained new level of effort for up to three years, but will it really take that long to know whether we have altered the momentum of the conflict? In fact, by the middle of 2011 or so, we should know a great deal. Miracles are not likely, but major change should be visible. The simplest way to understand this is in the plan for improving Afghan security forces. While progress in the economy is clearly needed too, the first order of business is security.” – USA Today

Robert Kagan argues: “It seems to me that Obama deserves even more credit for courage than Bush did, for he has risked much more. By the time Bush decided to support the surge in Iraq in early 2007, his presidency was over and discredited, brought down in large part by his own disastrous decision not to send the right number of troops in 2003, 2004, 2005 or 2006. Obama has had to make this decision with most of his presidency still ahead of him. Bush had nothing to lose. Obama could lose everything…. Perhaps this same deep American refusal to accept losing gracefully will also check the foreign policy establishment’s rush to embrace American decline….Perhaps they know that many Americans would not applaud them for their sophistication. Let’s hope the man in the Oval Office knows it, too.” – Washington Post

Pervez Musharraf writes: “My recent trip to the United States has been an enriching experience, during which I had a very healthy discourse with the American public and an opportunity to understand their concerns about the war in Afghanistan. One question I was asked almost everywhere I went was, ‘How can we stop losing?’ The answer is a political surge, in conjunction with the additional troops requested by Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Quitting is not an option.” – Wall Street Journal

“Hedayat Amin Arsala, a former vice-president and senior minister, welcomed the promise of 30,000 more soldiers and Marines but said Mr Obama should have offered Afghans a stronger pledge of US determination. ‘It is good that he has sent a clear message to al-Qaeda and the Taliban that the US is not getting up and leaving,’ he said. ‘I would have preferred for the president to say a little more to give more confidence to the people of Afghanistan.’” – Financial Times

Andrew Ferguson argues: “[Obama’s] blah-blah platitudes were important strategically -- maybe essential, if his policy is to succeed. Obama’s critics to his right should remember the president’s critics to his left. The poor gentle souls must be gobsmacked. Obama is the first Democratic president in forty years to call for a significant deployment of American troops in the national security interest of his country….This is a historical moment, and one we should be grateful for. It’s worth an extra twenty minutes of presidential gassing off. It’s even worth a lot of guff about beginning to pull the troops out by a date certain, no matter what. (I’ll believe it when I see it.) If this is what he needs to mollify his political supporters, let him talk and talk and talk.” – Weekly Standard

David Ignatius writes: “Obama has made the right decision: The only viable ‘exit strategy’ from Afghanistan is one that starts … by adding 30,000 more U.S. troops to secure the major population centers, so that control can be transferred to the Afghan army and police. This transfer process, starting in July 2011, is the heart of his strategy. Military commanders appear comfortable with Obama's decision, although they wish it hadn't taken so long. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is said to be especially pleased that Obama decided to rush the additional troops to Afghanistan in just six months, sooner than Gen. Stanley McChrystal had requested.” – Washington Post

Obama Administration

“Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the nation’s top military officer laid out a muscular defense of President Obama’s decision to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan on Capitol Hill on Wednesday morning…. Mr. McCain called the quick build-up and draw-down 'logically incoherent' and pressed both Mr. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen… about whether the president would withdraw them unconditionally. The answer…was that the administration would review the situation in Afghanistan in December 2010 to then 'evaluate,' as Mr. Gates put it, whether it would be possible for Mr. Obama to begin withdrawals in the summer of 2011.” – New York Times

“President Barack Obama's new strategy for the flagging Afghan war is largely the handiwork of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who developed the idea of sending U.S. reinforcements and then helped persuade administration officials to support it.… The result is that Mr. Gates, a Bush administration holdover, will be more closely identified with the outcome of the Afghan war than he ever was with the Iraq war, whose strategy was largely set by then-President George W. Bush and his military advisers before Mr. Gates took the helm of the Pentagon in December 2006. If the new strategy is unable to turn the tide in Afghanistan, Mr. Gates will likely be blamed for developing a losing strategy.” – Wall Street Journal

Pakistan

“President Obama focused his speech on Afghanistan. He left much unsaid about Pakistan, where the main terrorists he is targeting are located, but where he can send no troops. Mr. Obama could not be very specific about his Pakistan strategy, his advisers conceded on Monday evening. American operations there are classified, most run by the Central Intelligence Agency. Any overt American presence would only fuel anti-Americanism…. Yet quietly, Mr. Obama has authorized an expansion of the war in Pakistan as well — if only he can get a weak, divided, suspicious Pakistani government to agree to the terms.” – New York Times

Iran

Michael Gerson writes: “Iran has entered a final stage of irrevocable choices about its nuclear program. It has backed out of a deal that would have sent most of its uranium stockpile abroad to be processed for peaceful purposes. Following a censure of Iran by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced plans to construct 10 additional nuclear enrichment sites. So, have President Obama's diplomats failed? Not really, because the current crisis has little to do with their skill, or lack of it. It is being caused by internal dynamics in Iran that seem immune to the rational offers and counteroffers of diplomacy.” – Washington Post

“The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, announced Wednesday that his nation would move to produce uranium of much higher enrichment levels, comments almost certain to heighten tensions over Iran’s nuclear ambitions. “Iran will produce fuel enriched to a level of 20 percent,” Mr. Ahmadinejad told cheering crowds in the central city of Isfahan, according to the government-run broadcaster PressTV. Iran said that it would use the uranium for a reactor in Tehran used to produce isotopes for medical use.” – New York Times

“A leading Iranian prosecutor says a doctor who blew the whistle on the torture of jailed opposition protesters in Iran died of poisoning from an overdose of an anti-hypertension drug in his salad. Tehran's public prosecutor, Abbas Dowlatabadi, says investigators are trying to determine whether his death was suicide or murder, according to the state news agency IRNA.” – The Guardian

Israel

“Iran's leaders continue to reject compromises over their nuclear program and are rebuffing the IAEA. The West is likely to respond with tighter sanctions, but that is unlikely to satisfy Israel, which has attack plans already drawn up. The results probably pleased Israeli Prime Benjamin Netanyahu, because they reflected the way he thinks. Although the premier is not yet prepared to deploy Israeli fighter jets to conduct targeted air strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, the military has plans at the ready.” – Der Spiegel

Lebanon

“Lebanon's new government Wednesday endorsed Hezbollah's right to keep its weapons, the latest sign that the Iran-backed group has no intention of meeting a United Nations resolution calling for it to disarm.” – Haaretz

China

Björn Conrad and Stephan Mergenthaler write: “Consider this: battalions of People’s Liberation Army soldiers in the world’s major hot spots — Afghanistan, Sudan, Lebanon; People’s Armed Police officers patrolling the streets of Gaza; Chinese gunboats securing the Strait of Hormuz ….All of these scenarios are realistic translations of the demands for China to assume greater global responsibility that are so persistently made by European leaders.…For all the rhetoric of engaging China and global burden-sharing, however, Europe’s China angst — its fear of losing influence by granting real responsibility to China — regularly turns such bilateral encounters into wasted opportunities for taking on global responsibilities.” – New York Times

Russia

“Moscow sees the basic points of the U.S. new strategy on Afghanistan outlined by President Barack Obama in his address to the nation on Tuesday night as being positive, the Russian Foreign Ministry said. ‘We presume that the Afghan people, president and government, relying on battle-worthy armed forces and healthy economy, should finally meet the challenges which the country is facing,’ the ministry said in a statement.” – RIA Novosti

Latin America

“The U.S., which once considered Latin America its own backyard, is having an increasingly tough time calling the shots in a region where countries like Brazil and China are vying for influence, and where even tiny Honduras stands up to the ‘Colossus to the North.’ While the U.S. remains the dominant player in Latin America, its clout is curtailed by several factors, including Brazil's rise as a regional power, the influence of a clique of anti-American nations led by oil-rich Venezuela, and the growing muscle of China, which sees Latin American resources as key to its own economic growth.” – Wall Street Journal

Thailand

“Narathiwat and Jolo are at the centre of two of the world’s least-known Islamic insurgencies. In southern Thailand, shadowy guerrillas have fought a low-level war with the Thai security forces in the provinces surrounding Narathiwat that has killed more than 3,700 people in the past six years. In the large island of Mindanao, of which Jolo is a part, two jungle armies continue to hold out in a civil war that has lasted since the 1970s. Neither burns with the fury of an Afghanistan or Iraq, but each in its way is a sinister conflict with potential for dangerous escalation. Even if their effect on the world outside South-East Asia is, for the time being, limited, they exercise a drag on what should be one of the world’s dynamic regions.” – Times of London

Africa

“Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Congo, Sudan. In a bleak partnership, civil war and natural resources, like oil or diamonds, go together in Africa. As Uganda's oil discoveries at last offer an unimagined vision of future prosperity, Ugandans should be thinking hard about what has gone wrong in the past. It was the economist Paul Collier who first identified what he called the ‘resource curse’. His analysis of the common factors of civil wars around the world first exposed the economic underpinnings of them and has led to a new understanding of how what looks like a boon can become the trigger for disaster.” – The Guardian

Ideas

Editorial: “Imagine if President Obama went to Oslo next week to receive his Nobel Peace Prize and was arrested for purported war crimes committed by U.S. forces in Afghanistan. This bit of historical irony would be possible under an argument being made by Luis Moreno-Ocampo, chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court in The Hague.… He said a preliminary examination already is under way regarding possible American culpability in crimes against humanity. The Obama administration has thus far been largely sympathetic to the global court and its mission.… We wonder if the United States would continue to support the court with the president in handcuffs.” – Washington Times

Announcements

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Events

Afghanistan: The Results of the Strategic Review
House Armed Services Committee
December 3

Sudan: A Review of the Administration’s New Policy and A Situation Update
House Committee on Foreign Affairs
December 3


Challenges to Democracy in Latin America: The Case of Venezuela
Hudson Institute
December 3

U.S. Missile Defense in a Proliferating World: Threats and Challenges in the New Missile Age
Young Professionals in Foreign Policy
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies
The Foreign Policy Initiative
December 8

The Changing Strategic Gravity of Al-Qaeda
Jamestown Foundation
December 9

"Dr. Strangelove" Speaks to Today's Strategists: A Book Discussion of The Essential Herman Kahn Hudson Institute
December 14

ENDS

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