Again with the Doing Stuff

Nate Silver has a good post over at FiveThirtyEight that looks at slight boosts Democrats received after passing the House and Senate versions of Healthcare reform last year. Polling disclaimers aside, I think this goes to a point I was trying to make a couple weeks ago in the comments in a debate with Colin (here and here). It was my contention that Democrats will pay a political price in the autumn for Healthcare reform regardless of whether they pass a bill or not. I further argued that, on balance, getting something done was of greater political value than not getting anything done.

Getting It Right

Right now, in Afghanistan, in a joint US-Afghan operation is getting underway. In the wee hours of the morning, US Marines, paired with Afghan soldiers, began deploying into Marja, the Taliban’s main haven in Afghanistan. For weeks, NATO forces have been encircling Marja and broadcasting their intent to root out the Taliban there. As the New York Times notes, “The assault came as a surprise to no one.”

More surprising is the care and forethought put into the COIN strategy backing the assault on Marja. NATO is going in heavy with already identified “quick-impact” development projects—small projects designed to have an immediate, positive effect on the local populace like building wells—an Afghan civil administration ready to take control once the Taliban have been ousted, and NATO reconstruction teams ready with funding for longer-term reconstruction projects. While these might seem obvious components of a strategy designed not just to capture ground but to win sway over a skeptical population, they represent a sea-change after eight years of mishandling.

Still, it is imprudent to be overly optimistic. The duration of Taliban control of Marja (3 years) and repeated failures on the part of NATO to stick around will make it difficult to convince the denizens of Marja that NATO will be there for the long haul—the cautious Afghan may worry that cooperating with a transitory NATO force will earn them a label as a collaborator, inviting Taliban reprisals later.

Moreover, the Taliban have apparently dug-in in anticipation of the NATO operation. While there are reports that many Taliban fighters have fled, those that remain may have the capacity to render Marja a hornet’s nest, causing house-to-house fighting, incurring high civilian casualties ala the US assault on Fallujah in November 2004—descriptions of the staging of this operation bear an eerie similarity to that devastating attack. High civilian casualties, of course, will alienate the very people that NATO must win over in order to have modicum of success in Afghanistan.

Those concerns notwithstanding, it is heartening to hear the Marines and NATO use language that indicates a sincere responsiveness to the tenets of counterinsurgency. So long as those words translate into COIN-compliant kinetic activity, there may be hope for the eight-year NATO endeavor.

Green Movement Still Alive

Despite arrests and sabotage to the information infrastructure, it looks like anti-regime protests have broken out in Tehran, Shiraz, Isfahan, and Mashad. As always, it's difficult to tell from videos and images the scale of the protests, but from what I've seen so far they look large but not as large as the Ashura protests.

IranNews is live blogging, as is Tehran Bureau, and Andrew Sullivan is aggregating.

31 Years of Islamic Revolution

Tomorrow is the 31st anniversary of Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Ten days after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeine returned from exile to Iran, the Iranian army mutinied and the Shah’s regime ended.

Tomorrow, like every major anniversary, event, or Shiite holiday since June 12, Iran was expected to be consumed with anti-regime protests. In anticipation of protests, though, the Iranian regime has been busy rounding up dissidents to prevent the 31st anniversary of the Revolution from becoming yet another bruise to the Islamic Republic. Previous rounds of arrests, trials, and executions did not prevent last year’s Ashura from being marked with the largest and most violent protests to date. Since then, two potential days of protest passed without noticeable incident. However, tomorrow may mark a turning point—without major action in the street, it might be reasonable to declare the Green Movement dead.

UPDATE: The folks at IranNews think tomorrow will be bloody.

Wait One Minute

Every now and again, I stumble onto an article or opinion piece that stops me in my proverbial tracks. Marc Thiessen’s piece in Foreign Policy is one such item.

I think somewhere underlying Thiessen’s article is a deep skepticism of the drone campaign. He’s not alone. Jane Mayer put together a wonderful piece in the New Yorker last fall that did a good job of discussing the use of drones in Pakistan and their severe limitations. Notably, Mayer highlighted the high numbers of non-targeted individuals killed for each targeted individual eliminated. Setting aside human rights concerns, I question the efficacy of the drone campaign in light of our broader regional goals. I particularly wonder about the drone campaign encouraging otherwise neutral individuals to take up arms against the Pakistani state or the United States.

Thiessen, though, uses the drone campaign to accuse the President of endangering the United States by depriving the US of “vital intelligence” and of “shying away from the hard decisions needed to protect the United States.”

This is nonsense. Of course it is a truism that dead men tell no tales. But for Thiessen’s thesis to be true, the United States would have to have available to it a capability to capture and question the people targeted by the drones. Now, despite the hypocritical critiques offered by some, the problem with this premise is not the questioning, it’s the capturing.

The vast majority of the individuals being blown up are in the lawless FATA region of Pakistan. Many of the targets are affiliated not with Al-Qaeda or the Afghan Taliban but with the Pakistani Taliban. Whatever the arrangement the United States government currently has with Pakistan, it is clear that Pakistan does not want US soldiers on its territory—judging by the vitriolic reactions last week, American trainers are not even welcome.

Though Thiessen would have you believe that the Obama administration has put the United States in danger by eliminating a proposed CIA program to kill terrorists because it had an ethereal capture component, this is merely a straw man. This capability never existed. The Bush administration proposed these teams in 2002 and never managed to make them operational—in fact, I have questioned what this says about the US paramilitary operations previously. The last time the United States had a capability that resembles what Thiessen puts forward was, according to Steve Coll, under the Clinton administration, when the US put teams in the field to kill Osama bin Laden. Even then, though, the kill order was never given and the teams were never utilized. Thiessen thus presents a false choice between the use of drones, and a non-existent capture ability.

While I think there are legitimate questions to be raised about the use of drones and our strategic objectives, Thiessen’s piece represent an incredible contortion of the Obama-is-Soft-on-Terrorism narrative.

Lucy and the Football

After a day or so of wide-ranging praise for the Lecturer-in-Chief following his performance at the GOP retreat on Friday, the theme driving the news cycle has become one of “engagement.” Headlines like, “Obama Engages,” or “Obama Continues Policy Outreach to GOP” have proliferated. But this is not new.

In fact, Obama’s first year is the story of relentless, futile attempts at bipartisanship. The President has repeatedly reached across the aisle and allowed Republican influence on bills only to see the GOP vote in unison against that bill. The effect of these efforts has been that the President not only ends up with watered-down bill (see, e.g., the Stimulus Package) but he ends up simultaneously throwing away political capital and angering his base. It has been, quite simply, a year of Lucy and the Football.

Yet, there seems to be something different here. Since the State of the Union, and including last week’s Q and A session with the GOP, the President has aggressively communicated his efforts at bipartisanship. Rather than being victimized by his constant, quixotic attempts to invite Republicans into the tent only to have them burn the tent down, he’s put the GOP on its heels. He has made it clear, vocally and repeatedly over the last week, that the door is open to the Republicans, that they can come in, but they’re going to have to compromise. He is doing his very best to convert the Grand Old Party into the Grand Obstructionist Party. For this, I applaud the President.

Rather than castigating himself on the altar of bipartisanship, the President is going to make the Republican Party pay the price, politically, for their nihilism. The President should keep up his vocal, aggressive challenge to the GOP that they participate in government. Good on ye, Mr. President.

Now, go pass Healthcare.

The Facts and Gen. Hayden

The Washington Post published a report this evening that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Christmas Day underwear bomber, is cooperating with investigators and providing intelligence about his training and his contacts. It seems clear that the unnamed Administration sources released this information to rebut "Soft on Terrorism" attacks on President Obama and Gen. Hayden's Op-Ed in the Washington Post that, just two days ago, argued that Mirandizing the underwear bomber placed US national security in jeopardy.