Declaring that "the buck stops with me," President Obama announced a set of new directives in response to the foiled bombing of Northwest Flight 253 by the now-infamous "underpants bomber." The list of presidential orders is mostly unexceptionable, and may even make a repeat performance less likely. Of course, if al Qaeda is even remotely strategic, trying an exact repeat of this attempt would be silly. Instead, they'll study the new procedures, look for holes in them, and try some new variation. The good news is that air travel will still be incredibly safe, and no sensible person should alter their normal travel plans because they are worried about the "terrorist threat."

What's missing from Obama's list of new initiatives is any sense that U.S. foreign policy might need some rethinking too. There are several dimensions to the terrorism problem, only one of which are the various measures we take to "harden the target" here at home. Why? Because bombing airliners and other acts of terrorism are just tactics; they aren't al Qaeda's real raison d'être. Their goal, as veteran foreign affairs correspondent William Pfaff recently reminded us, is trying to topple various Arab governments that al Qaeda regards as corrupt and beholden to us and establish some unified Islamic caliphate. As Pfaff notes, this is a fanciful objective, but still one that can cause us a certain amount of trouble and grief. And if they can get us to act in ways that undermine those governments (even when we think we are trying to help them), then their objectives are advanced and ours are hindered.

So one key dimension of the problem is to not act in ways that inspire more people to want to undertake such actions, or at the very least to be aware that some of our policies might have that effect and that we should not continue them unless we are damn sure that the benefits outweigh the costs. And what's troubling is the extent to which the Obama administration appears to be continuing many of the same activities that have inspired anti-American extremism and undermined the governments that do seem to like us, without much consideration about the balance of costs and benefits that this may involve.

To continue with this gloomy theme: the underpants bomber ultimately failed, but al Qaeda did conduct a successful suicide bomb attack in Khost that killed eight people, including several of the CIA's top al Qaeda experts. The perpetrator of that attack was a Jordanian doctor, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, who had been recruited by the CIA (via Jordanian intelligence) to infiltrate al Qaeda. After providing us with some useful information (as any double-agent must to gain credibility), he was allowed to meet with a large number of CIA analysts, leading to the fateful attack on December 30.

In terms of the actual effort to defeat al Qaeda, that event might even be more significant than the Flight 253 affair, because it suggests that some of our top analysts were out-thought by the very organization they were trying to penetrate and destroy. It has also shed new light on the close connections between the CIA and Jordanian intelligence, which is hardly something that King Abdullah's regime needs right now. So while it's important to learn why an obvious suspect got a visa and boarded a plane to the United States, it may be even more important to figure out how some of our best counter-terrorism operatives got gulled so successfully.

One more thing. I noted yesterday that al-Balawi's brother told reporters that the doctor had been radicalized by the Israeli assault on Gaza last year. Today, Newsweek released an interview with the double-agent's wife, which makes it clear that she shares his opposition to U.S. policy in the region but traces his changing views to an earlier event. According to Newsweek:

Al-Balawi 'started to change,' says his wife, after the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. By 2004, she says, he began to talk to her about his strong belief in the need for violent jihad against Western occupiers of Muslim lands."

My point is not to rehash the whole debate over the invasion of Iraq (although to be honest, I don't think there's much debate to be had over the folly of that particular decision). My point is simply to reiterate that any serious effort to deal with our terrorism problem has to be multi-faceted, and has to include explicit consideration of the things we do that may encourage violent, anti-American movements. Only a complete head-in-the-sand approach to the issue would deny the connection between various aspects of U.S. foreign and military policy (military interventions, targeted assassinations, unconditional support for Israel, cozy relations with Arab dictatorships, etc.) and the fact that groups like al Qaeda keep finding people like al-Balawi to recruit to their cause. 

By itself, that mere fact does not mean that U.S. foreign policy is wrong. As I said a few days ago, one could make a case that our policy is mostly right, and that these problems are just the price we have to pay for them. But instead of having a serious debate on this question, we mostly ignore the possibility that our own actions might be making the problem worse, or we accuse anyone who does raise it of trying to "blame America first." 

President Obama's briefing yesterday wasn't the place for that discussion, but I'd like to think that somebody in his administration is still asking the question. Since that infamous (and increasingly inconsequential) Cairo speech, however, there's not much evidence of that.

I spent some time over the holidays thinking about the underwear bomber, the hyperventilating that occurred after his botched attack, and the various inconveniences and costs we will incur as the authorities scramble to "do something." Add to that the likelihood that we will now get more heavily bogged down in Yemen, in another fruitless effort to remake a country that few, if any, Americans understand very well.

My first thought is to wonder whether Osama bin Laden and his buddies are really proud of Mr. Abdulmutullab. This latest attempt will cause the United States to spend a lot of time and money to make sure nobody sneaks another crude device through in their shorts, but does it really help al Qaeda's image to have their latest hero become famous for his underpants? Yes, I know that real lives were at risk, and I'm not making light of an attempt at mass murder. But in the battle for hearts and minds, having an enemy known as the "underwear bomber" is a pretty good propaganda coup. Score one for our side.

Second, most of the commentary about the attack focused on the breakdown in security procedures and possible intelligence failures, but for me the real issue is to ask why groups like al Qaeda want to attack us in the first place. With a few exceptions, this is a question that rarely gets much scrutiny anymore; pundits just assume "terrorists" are inherently evil and that’s why they do evil things. (And some American extremists recommend that suspects like the Gitmo detainees be summarily executed without trial. I kid you not). But we really do need to spend some time asking why terrorists are targeting us, and whether we could alleviate (though not eliminate) the problem by adjusting some aspects of U.S. foreign policy.

In particular, I'm struck by the inability of most Americans to connect the continued risk of global terrorism with America's highly interventionist global policy. One can have a serious debate about whether that policy is the right one or not; my point is that we are kidding ourselves if we think we can behave this way and remain immune from any adverse consequences. As a society, we seem to believe that we can send thousands of troops to invade other countries, send Reapers and Predators to fire missiles at people we think might -- repeat, might -- be terrorists, and underwrite the oppressive policies of a host of "friendly" governments, yet never pay any significant price for it back here at home. We are a nation of swaggering sheep: eager to impose our will on others yet terrified that doing so might inconvenience us, let alone put U.S. civilians in real danger.

I'm not for one minute justifying what groups like al Qaeda do; my point is that we shouldn't be surprised by it. When a very powerful country spends a lot of time interfering in other’s affairs, and sometimes backing obvious injustices like the Gaza War, then it ought to expect some people to be very angry about it. And because there’s no such thing as a perfect defense, sometimes those angry people will hit back. They won’t do as much to us as we’ve done to them because they’re a lot weaker, but occasionally they will draw blood.    

Yet Americans still find this surprising, and demand more and more extreme measures to "protect" us. We are like a heavy smoker who gets upset when they get diagnosed with emphysema, or a glutton who thinks it is "unfair" when he winds up with diabetes and high blood pressure. Face it, folks: if you want to be the world's dominant power, and you want to spend a lot of time telling millions of people how they should live, who their leaders should be, what weapons they are allowed to have, and what sorts of political beliefs are considered "legitimate," etc., and to back that agenda up with a lot of military force, then some amount of blowback is the price of doing business.  

Instead, Americans are shocked when someone like the underwear bomber appears, and politicians and "homeland security experts" immediately leap to the airwaves to dissect the latest Threat to Our Sacred Way of Life. Meanwhile, other "brave Americans" protest plans to move suspected terrorists from Gitmo to maximum security prisons, as if a set of incarcerated, heavily guarded, and disoriented prisoners pose a grave threat to their local communities. And just yesterday, the United States and several allies announced they were going to close their embassies in Yemen, citing the risk of terrorist attack. I can understand the desire to protect U.S. diplomats, but what does it say about our resolve, our staying power, and our recognition that world politics is a rough business and sometimes entails costs and risks? 

A quick follow-up to my previous post on the illusion of achieving perfect security against terrorist attack: Today's NY Times has an op-ed by Clark Kent Ervin, a former State Department official who know heads the Aspen Institute's Homeland Security program. Ervin makes a number of good points in his piece, but his wrap-up reveals a curious lack of understanding of the basic problem. He writes:

Perhaps the biggest lesson for airline security from the recent incident is that we must overcome our tendency to be reactive. We always seem to be at least one step behind the terrorists. They find one security gap -- carrying explosives onto a plane in their shoes, for instance -- and we close that one, and then wait for them to exploit another. Why not identify all the vulnerabilities and then address each one before terrorists strike again?"

Sorry, Mr. Ervin, but it is impossible to "identify all the vulnerabilities and address each one" beforehand. That is like asking a football coach to identify all the different ways the other team might try to score, and "address each one." The problem is that the other side can think and plan and innovate too, and develop creative new ways to deal with any security measure we might dream up. In any competitive, strategic interaction, there's rarely if ever a "last move" and one is sometimes forced to be reactive because the other side takes the initiative in ways we simply didn't think of. The best we can do is try to make it very hard for terrorists to attack us, which can both protect us directly and force them to take more elaborate measures that in turn makes it easier to find them beforehand. 

But it is a little worrisome to read that a knowledgeable official with lots of experience still thinks it is possible to achieve some sort of perfect defense.

I'm crashing to finish a conference paper on why "wars of choice" last so long (and how to end them), so blogging will be fairly light this week. In the meantime, you might want to take a look at the CSPAN broadcast of a conference on Capitol Hill last week on Afghanistan policy, sponsored by the RAND Corporation's Center for Middle East Public Policy. Most of the speakers were thoughtful and worth a listen, although I was struck by how even the advocates of "staying the course" did not seem very confident of success. The "outside the box" perspective (in other words, disengagement) was represented by Chris Preble of CATO and yours truly. If you're interested in what we had to say, my presentation begins at about 2:35.00 into the broadcast, and Chris is right after me.

There is grim news from Baghdad: A twin suicide truck bombing of two Iraqi ministries has left over 130 dead and wounded more than 500. It is the largest such attack in all of 2009 and a reminder, unfortunately, that the oft-heralded "surge" was not the success that its architects and advocates like to claim. 

As my FP colleague Tom Ricks noted in his book The Gamble, the "surge" was a partial tactical success that succeeded in bringing casualty levels down. (I say partial, because we still do not know how much of that success was due to the surge itself, and how much was due to changing circumstances within Iraq, most notably the ethnic separation created by earlier violence and the realignment of some key Sunni groups who were repelled by the wanton violence perpetrated by Al Qaeda in Iraq.) 

The larger strategic objective of the surge was political reconciliation among the main contending groups within Iraq. There have been a few encouraging signs in recent months, but yesterday's bombing is another brutal indication that that goal remains unmet. Among other things, this means that pro-war pundits who invoke the purported "success" of the surge in Iraq in order to justify major troop increases in Afghanistan are not to be trusted, especially when they are the same geniuses who helped get us into Iraq in the first place.

Barack Obama inherited two losing wars from his incompetent predecessor.  If he's not careful, he'll still be fighting (and losing) both of them when his first term ends. And neither will be "Bush's war" at that point; Obama will own them both by then. 

SABAH ARAR/AFP/Getty Images

Am I the only person who sees a parallel between the furor over the Scottish decision to release convicted Libyan intelligence officer Abdel Basset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, and the heated debate over whether to investigate possible criminal misconduct during the Bush administration "torture regime?"

With respect to the former, many people are upset by the decision to release al-Megrahi -- who has terminal prostate cancer and only a few months to live -- because they do not think an act of mercy was warranted in his case. Fair enough; reasonable people can legitimately disagree about whether the dying man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing deserves any form of clemency. But the real anger stems from the suspicion that al-Megrahi's release was part of some larger deal, and that British officials traded the release for commercial or political advantages. In other words, opponents of the decision to release him are incensed because they believe government officials let broader political or business considerations interfere with an important issue of criminal justice.

Yet those who oppose an open-ended investigation into what the Bush administration did -- which might eventually lead to the prosecution of top officials -- are doing the same thing for which British officials are being criticized: they are saying that politics should outweigh the requirements of law and justice. In essence, they are saying that broader political considerations should trump the normal operations of the criminal justice system. Yet I suspect most of the people making this argument would be outraged if it turned out that the British government decided to release al Megrahi in part to cultivate Libyan business or secure other political advantages.  

For a country that claims to revere the "rule of law," this really isn't a hard issue conceptually. Attorney General Holder's task is to determine whether laws may have been broken, and whether an investigation of the alleged wrongdoing is warranted. Once that investigation has been conducted, he then has decide if he has a strong enough case to warrant prosecution. If he thinks he does, the case goes forward, and defendants get their day in court. Politics isn't supposed to have anything to do with this process (though a sensible prosecutor would probably be especially reluctant to bring a weak case against prominent senior officials). Finally, if any defendants are found guilty, the president could then step in and issue a pardon, if he felt that doing so was in the best interests of the nation.

Note that it is still possible to criticize and debate every aspect of this process, but not by invoking partisanship, political expediency, or the need to "look forward rather than backward." People can disagree about whether there is enough evidence of wrongdoing to warrant further investigation (though I think the recent revelations make it hard to make the case that there is simply no basis for a further investigation). If AG Holder decides to indict anyone, or if he declines to do so, people will undoubtedly disagree about what he should have done so based on the available evidence. And if the cases go to trial we can argue about them too. If the defendants are acquitted, people will say the case should never have been brought; if convicted, some will claim they were railroaded. If people are convicted and the president pardons them, no doubt there would be heated discussions about whether this was appropriate or not.

But the key point is that if you genuinely believe in the rule of law, you can't invoke political expediency as a guide to whether possible crimes should be investigated and prosecuted. And the fact that the Attorney-General has decided to go forward should be seen as very positive sign, because it shows that he is willing to fulfill his constitutional responsibilities even if it is politically inconvenient for the president who appointed him. I have no doubt that the president would prefer to "look forward," because an investigation and/or prosecution will drive both the CIA and the right-wing media types crazy and because he's got enough alligators to wrestle with already. But he also promised us that he would end the politicization of the Department of Justice that his predecessor practiced, and Holder's decision, however inconvenient for Obama, is a reassuring sign that there is still life in the U.S. Constitution.

Am I being -- shall we say, unrealistic -- to stress the rule of law as opposed to the naked exercise of political power? Hardly. Realists have a rather dim view of human nature, which is why we like legitimate, well-ordered governments in which laws and checks and balances exist to keep human frailties in check. The Founding Fathers had a lot of realist instincts, so they constructed a variety of essentially liberal institutions to try to address and contain our worst instincts. Domestic politics in a well-ordered society is a lot nicer than life in the international system, which conspicuously lacks strong institutions and where the rule of law is weak. And that's why we ought to defend the rule of law in this case (and others), and try hard to keep politics out of the discussion.

Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

Contrary to what I suggested last week, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates took the bait that Pyongyang dangled last week. In a direct response to North Korea's nuclear test, Gates told the delegates at the "Shangri La Dialogue" (a major Asian security conference held in Singapore) that “we will not stand idly by as North Korea builds the capability to wreak destruction on any target in the region -- or on us."

Strong words, but they will ring hollow if the United States and its various Asian allies (and China) do not actually do anything, and I’m betting they won't. Gates warned that North Korea could "continue as a destitute, international pariah, or chart a new course," but it's been clear for quite awhile now that pariah status doesn't bother the government in Pyongyang. And because none of North Korea's neighbors want to deal with the consequences, there isn't much support for the kind of pressure that might cause the North Korean regime to collapse. Unfortunately, that’s also the only kind of pressure that might make it change course.
   
Gates was on firmer ground when he warned North Korea that the United States would consider any transfer of nuclear materials to other countries or terrorist groups a "grave threat" to the United States and its allies. Even here, however, a bit more discrimination was in order. We obviously don't want North Korea giving nuclear know-how or nuclear material to other countries, but it's not clear we would do anything to them if we discovered that they were. After all, as Georgetown's Matthew Kroenig has documented, giving nuclear assistance to another country is hardly an unprecedented act. Russia assisted China's nascent nuclear program when they were allies, France gave key support to Israel's nuclear program, and China helped Pakistan's nuclear program as well. Pakistan's A.Q. Khan network subsequently spread nuclear technology in several directions, and North Korea appears to have provided nuclear assistance to Syria. The key point: in none of these cases was it seen as grounds for war.

But giving nuclear technology to a terrorist group is another matter entirely, and we need to make it clear to Pyongyang that this is an act that would lead us to discard our normal reservations and remove them from power once and for all. Not only do we want to deter North Korea from ever trying something like this, but we also want to establish and reinforce a clear precedent for other nuclear powers. Regime survival seems to be the paramount concern of Kim Jong Il and his associates, and they must be under no illusions about what nuclear transfer to terrorists would mean for their own futures. This scenario should be the topic of some serious contingency planning by the U.S. military, as well as some serious discussions among the other interested parties, beginning with the other members of the Six Party talks (Russia, China, Japan, and South Korea).  None of these states have an interest in nuclear leakage to terrorists, so it should not be that hard to get them to agree that giving nuclear materials to terrorists would be clear and immediate casus belli.

ROSLAN RAHMAN/AFP/Getty Images

Is there anything more absurd than the U.S. Congress's decision to deny funds to close Guantanamo, on the grounds that this might result in detainees being held on American soil? Excuse me, but isn't this taking the "not-in-my-backyard" principle to absurd lengths? We're not talking about letting a suspected terrorist walk around free in your hometown while he awaits trial; we talking about putting them in jail while they are tried (and by a military tribunal). If convicted, they'd end up in prison (along with over 200,000 other federal prisoners already incarcerated and the more than 3,000 convicted murderers now on death row). If acquitted, they could still be deported.  

This episode betrays a certain schizophrenia about America's role as a world power. On the one hand, the foreign policy elite continually tells Americans that the United States is the "leader of the free world," and that they have a long list of global responsibilities. As a result, the United States spends a lot of money on its national security apparatus, tells lots of countries how to run their own affairs, maintain an extensive array of military bases, and send its armed forces into harm’s way in various faraway lands. Indeed, William Pfaff is not far off in saying that the United States has become "addicted to war."

But on the other hand, U.S politicians somehow believe that all this overseas activity shouldn't have any impact here at home, apart from making us stand in long security lines at the airport. So President Bush didn't raise taxes to pay for the war on terror or the war in Iraq, and now Congress doesn't think the American people would tolerate having a couple of hundred suspected terrorists in prison somewhere in the United States.  

Frankly, if Americans are that skittish and self-absorbed, the country has no business exercising any sort of "global leadership" and the various Congresspersons who voted to deny the funds should immediately demand the abrogation of all existing alliances, the termination of all military activities overseas, and a return to a strict policy of isolationism. I don't think that's a good idea, by the way, but at least our Congressional representatives would be being consistent.

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

If you read today's New York Times story on Obama's meetings with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, you got more evidence that the Obama team still hasn't figured out what its overall strategy is. This is not a good sign, particularly when President Obama keeps upping the rhetorical stakes.

Obama did what most Presidents do with weak and faltering clients: he tried to buck them up by reiterating how much we care about their situation.  He declared that "no matter what happens, we will not be deterred," and reiterated that "our strategy (which he didn’t spell out) reflects a fundamental truth. The security of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the United States are linked." Secretary of State Hillary Clinton chimed in too, describing the meetings as part of the "confidence-building that is necessary for this relationship to turn into tangible cooperation."

But the rest of the article suggests that little "confidence" is warranted. Zardari's meeting with the House Foreign Affairs Committee seems to have reinforced Congressional skepticism, with chairman Howard Berman (D-CA) complaining that Zardari "did not present a coherent strategy for the defeat of the insurgency." 

As for the White House, having pushed the Pakistanis to do more against Taliban and Al Qaeda insurgents in the western provinces, senior administration officials admit that "they’re fundamentally not organized, trained or equipped for what they’ve been asked to do....They'll displace the Taliban for awhile. But there will also be a lot of displaced person and a lot of collateral damage. And then they won't be able to sustain those effects or extend the gains geographically."

Yet according to the Times, "none of this was said publicly on Wednesday,” because U.S. officials (including the president) "sought to strike an optimistic tone." 

Excuse me, but haven't we learned that refusing to acknowledge unpleasant realities in public tends to get us into trouble, whether one is talking about toxic loans, GM's long slide towards bankruptcy, or the Bush administration’s head-in-the-sand approach to the Iraqi insurgency? Isn't plain talk better than happy talk? The unpleasant reality is that our entire approach to Central Asia is still filled with unanswered questions and unresolved contradictions, yet we continue to wade deeper into a potentially open-ended commitment.

If President Obama keeps acting like the head cheerleader for this war, he'll find himself trapped by his own rhetoric and unable to cut our losses if it starts to go south. Of course, if you're the leader of a weak and corrupt government that is dependent on continued American largesse, that may be just what you're hoping for.

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

On the torture memos: I’m not a lawyer, but I think I understand the political calculations that led Obama to say that his administration would not be prosecuting individuals for their role in this loathsome episode. He understood that this could reach very far up in the Bush administration, and that beginning a legal process would be divisive and cost him some swing votes he thinks he’ll need on other issues. So the principals in the Bush administration torture regime may end up with a free pass, at least in terms of criminal prosecution. But I have three thoughts:

First, a lot of countries (including the United States) have expended considerable diplomatic effort to hold people like Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic or Liberia’s Charles Taylor accountable for their crimes. Apparently Obama feels that this principle can be jettisoned when it might be politically expedient to do so. At a minimum, we ought to remember this incident the next time we get upset that some other country is declining to prosecute a former leader, turning a blind eye to some other ruler's depredations (think Robert Mugabe), or cutting a deal with some warlord or terrorist leader.  Maybe they were making pragmatic calculations too, and we holier-than-thou Americans ought to be a bit less judgmental. 

Second, does our failure to prosecute open the door to other efforts to do so? A number of states (France, Canada, Belgium, Spain, etc.) have incorporated a principle of “universal jurisdiction” into their own domestic legal systems, when dealing with genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity (including torture). This principle can be invoked when the home country of the alleged perpetrator is "unwilling or unable to prosecute"  Earlier reports suggesting that Spanish officials were going to indict six former Bush administration officials eventually led Spain's attorney general to say that U.S. courts would be the proper venue, but Obama has now made it clear that this isn't going to happen. I don’t know what the practical implications might be, but if I were Dick Cheney or David Addington, I wouldn’t be planning a summer vacation in Spain.

Third, for those of you who think that power is of declining relevance in world politics and that normative and legal standards are becoming increasingly important, I'd just point out that the various officials who sanctioned these abuses would be in a lot more trouble if they came from a  weak and vulnerable state, as opposed to a global power like the United States. Not only does power corrupt, but it allows people who sanction torture to get away with it, albeit at some considerable cost to America's image and reputation. Those reputational costs will be borne by all Americans, who ought to be furious at the crimes that were committed in their name.

Does the threat of international terrorism -- specifically al Qaeda -- justify a costly, long-term engagement in Afghanistan and Pakistan? President Obama and his advisors think so, but I'm still not convinced. I certainly understand that we have a terrorism problem; I just don't believe that it is serious enough to warrant the level and type of effort the administration is proposing. And if the results of the recent NATO summit are any indication, our NATO allies seem skeptical, too.

Just how serious is the threat? According to the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, there were 14,499 terrorist attacks worldwide in 2007 (the most recent year for which it has data). All told, these attacks killed 22,684 people and injured about 44,310. This sounds serious (and it is obviously not something to trivialize), but over half of all terrorist attacks (and two-thirds of all those killed, wounded or kidnapped) occurred in the context of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and thus are not a good indicator of al Qaeda's ability to threaten the American homeland or key U.S. allies. To keep these numbers in perspective, bear in mind that over a million people die in traffic accidents worldwide each year, with many more injured. Yet no one is proposing that we allocate additional billions to try to eliminate all highway fatalities.

Even more significant for the issue at hand, the number of private U.S. citizens killed by terrorists in 2007 was nineteen, with zero injured and seventeen kidnapped. All of these deaths or kidnappings occurred either in Afghanistan or Iraq. As John Mueller has argued, if al Qaeda is as dangerous as U.S. officials maintain, why haven't there been more attacks on the United States over the past eight years? In America, the danger of drowning in a bathtub is greater than the risk of dying in a terrorist attack.  And that would be true even if the United State were to suffer one 9/11-scale attack every ten years. Given these numbers, does it really make sense to double down in Central Asia?

In short, my concern is that we are allowing an exaggerated fear of al Qaeda to distort our foreign policy priorities. Having underestimated the danger from al Qaeda before 9/11, have we now swung too far the other way? I am not arguing for a Pollyanna-like complacency or suggesting that we simply ignore the threat that groups like al Qaeda still pose. Rather, I'm arguing that the threat is not as great as the administration -- and most Americans, truth be told -- seem to think, and that the actual danger does not warrant escalating U.S. involvement in Central Asia.  

I can think of at least three counter-arguments to my position.

First, one could argue that there have been no attacks on the United States since 2001 because we've put al Qaeda on the defensive, and that going after them in Pakistan’s frontier provinces will deny them a "safe haven" and further reduce their ability to stage another 9/11 (or worse).  This line of argument sounds persuasive, but it falls apart on closer examination. For starters, it is not clear that al Qaeda requires a safe haven to do damage, especially since the original organization has metastasized into smaller groups of sympathizers (such as the group that bombed the Madrid railway station in 2004).  

Equally important, the United States is not going to mount a large scale invasion of Pakistan, which is what would be necessary to completely eliminate al Qaeda from that region. And there is little reason to think that the Pakistani military will do the job for us any time soon. Furthermore, U.S. military strikes in Pakistan -- even limited ones -- tend to undermine the Pakistani government and increase the risk that Pakistan will become a failed state. As James Traub noted in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine:

Pakistan feels as if its falling apart. . .[and] American policy has arguably made the situation even worse, for the Predator-drone attacks along the border, though effective, drive the Taliban eastward, deeper into Pakistan.  And the strategy has been only reinforcing hostility to the United States among ordinary Pakistanis."

Fortunately, there are ways to deny al Qaeda a safe haven (or operational base) that do not require a large U.S. ground presence in Afghanistan and do not require us to conduct extensive military operations in Pakistan. In addition to improved homeland security and more effective counter-terrorist efforts (e.g., cutting off financing, monitoring communications, sharing intelligence, etc.), the United States can launch preemptive attacks against suspected terrorist targets in Afghanistan, using Predators, cruise missiles, or in some cases, Special Forces. If we remain vigilant, al Qaeda will not get the "free pass" that it enjoyed before 9/11. This will not eliminate the threat, but it can reduce its potency.

Second, one could argue that while the risk from conventional terrorism is manageable, the real danger is nuclear or WMD terrorism and that this threat justifies upping the ante in Afghanistan and Pakistan, even if the commitment is costly and open-ended. Nuclear terrorism is a worrisome prospect, but doubling down in Central Asia isn't the best response to that problem. Pakistan is the key here and our primary goal should be making sure that its nuclear arsenal remains under reliable control. The best way to do that is to try to prevent Pakistan from becoming a failed state. As emphasized above, using the U.S. military to go after al Qaeda in Pakistan's tribal areas is likely to destabilize Pakistan, thus increasing the chances that nuclear materials will fall into the hands of terrorists.  

Third, one might concede that the actual danger from terrorism is slight, but the political consequences of terrorist attacks are disproportionate to their actual impact. In this view, comparing the risk of terrorism to highway fatalities, or to the danger of being struck by lightning, ignores the psychological and political effects of successful terrorist operations, and rational politicians have to take the latter into account. There is no question that this is the situation we now face in the United States, but it does not have to be that way. Indeed, it is mainly the result of failed political leadership over the past eight years. If our leaders react to every terrorist incident as if it's a monumental disaster, and if they hype the terrorist threat for political advantage -- as George Bush and Dick Cheney did -- the public will surely respond by demanding that we throw more resources at the problem than is prudent. Getting the opponent to react in foolish and self-defeating ways is one of the primary goals of most terror campaigns, of course, because these blunders can help the terrorists win victories that they could not achieve otherwise. We did more damage to ourselves when we invaded Iraq than Osama bin Laden accomplished on 9/11, and an open-ended commitment in Central Asia could easily compound that error.

What we need, in fact, is a political elite (and a responsible media) that will help Americans keep the terrorism problem in perspective. Terrorism is a tactic that various groups have used throughout history, and it will remain with us for the foreseeable future. Dramatic incidents like the recent Mumbai attacks are going to happen again, no matter how hard we try to prevent them, and that includes the possibility of attacks on American soil. But if we can keep suicidal extremists from obtaining nuclear weapons, they will not be able to threaten our way of life in any meaningful way.

None of this is to say that we should ignore al Qaeda or any other terrorist group that is bent on attacking the United States, or that we should not sometimes act assertively to protect Americans at home and abroad. But the threat from al Qaeda does not justify increasing our military presence in Afghanistan, and certainly does not justify major military operations in Pakistan.

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Historians a century from now will probably still be trying to explain how the United States got itself bogged down in southwest Asia, engaged in a fruitless effort to construct stable and more-or-less democratic orders there. They may understand the process, perhaps, but they will still wonder why the United States failed to learn from the costly and painful experience of great powers like Great Britain and the Soviet Union that came to grief there.

We learned yesterday that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spent part of her weekend making phone calls to Pakistani President Asif Zardari and opposition leader Nawaz Sharif, in an effort to head off a looming showdown. The immediate crisis seems to have been defused when Zardari backed down and reappointed the former chief justice to the country's Supreme Court, but there is no reason to be optimistic over the longer term. In other words, the top American diplomat has been busy trying to manage the internal politics of a country of some 178 million people that is riddled with corruption and conflict, even though Americans have scant understanding of Pakistan's internal dynamics, little credibility with its key groups, an abysmal public image there, and few, if any, levers to pull. It is hard to think of another job for which the U.S. foreign policy establishment is less well-suited, yet we now find ourselves trying to do social engineering in Pakistan.

And if I'm reading the tea leaves right, we are probably going to get in deeper in the months ahead.

How did we get into this mess? Answer: one step at a time. Revisiting the origins of this sorry situation reminds us that great powers usually walk into debacles with their eyes wide open. Wide open, but still blind.

Mind you, I'm no expert on the politics of southwest Asia, and I don't consider myself an authority on U.S. policy there. So feel free to take the following summary with a few grains of salt. But with that caveat in mind, here's my reconstruction of the steps that led us to where we are today, and the main lesson we ought to draw from them.

Step 1 was the U.S. decision to back the Afghan mujahidin following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. This step made sense at the time, given the U.S. goal of containing and eventually toppling the Soviet regime. However, the policy also involved pouring lots of money into Pakistan, which fueled corruption. Washington also turned a mostly blind eye towards Pakistan's nuclear program, because its cooperation was essential to the war against the Soviet occupation. Saudi Arabia backed the American effort with money and people (with our encouragement), and used this opportunity to fund religious schools and spread Wahhabi doctrines. As a result, the Afghan war became the crucible in which al Qaeda and other forms of jihadi terrorism were forged.

Step 2 was the policy of "dual containment," first enunciated by Martin Indyk (who was then a special assistant to President Bill Clinton) in a speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (which Indyk helped found) in 1993. This policy committed the United States to containing both Iraq and Iran, even though both countries were hostile to one another, and it required the United States to keep significant air and ground forces in Saudi Arabia. According to both Kenneth Pollock and Trita Parsi, "dual containment" was mostly intended to reassure Israel about a possible threat from Iran, thereby facilitating Israeli concessions during the Oslo peace process. Unfortunately, not only did we mismanage the peace process, but the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia became one of Osama bin Laden's main grievances and helped inspire his decision to go after American forces in the region and to attack the U.S. homeland on September 11, 2001.  

Step 3 was the decision to invade Afghanistan and topple the Taliban in the wake of al Qaeda's attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  We obviously could not permit our homeland to be attacked with impunity and we certainly had ample reason to track down Bin Laden and his henchmen and bring them all to justice. But the Bush administration muffed the job. The Bush administration also committed the United States to the construction of a new Afghani political order, a challenging task which it clearly was not up to, and which maybe no U.S. administration could have accomplished.

Step 4 was the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq in March 2003, which reduced the resources and attention devoted to Afghanistan, allowed Bin Laden to remain at large, and enabled the Taliban to reemerge as a major actor. At the same time, our post-9/11 embrace of President Pervez Musharraf’s dictatorial regime made us increasingly complicit in Pakistan’s internal affairs, at a moment when its political system was beginning to unravel again.

Lastly, Step 5: The apparent tactical success of the "surge" in Iraq and the 2008 Presidential election combined to put southwest Asia back on the front burner. The idea that "the surge worked" convinced many people that a similar approach would work in Afghanistan, even though the surge has failed to produce the all-important political reconciliation essential to genuine success in Iraq, and even though the circumstances in Afghanistan are fundamentally different from Iraq. Barack Obama, of course, took a hawkish line on Afghanistan during the campaign, mainly because doing so enabled him to criticize the Bush administration's handling of Iraq while still appearing strong on national security. Unfortunately, it also committed the new president to a foolish course of action.

The lesson is clear: we have gradually waded into the southwest Asian "Big Muddy" not as the result of a coherent strategic plan, but rather through a set of reactive and essentially tactical decisions extending back several decades. Apart from the invasion of Iraq, which was an obvious blunder, each of these other decisions might be defensible on its own. Taken together, however, they add up to a costly strategic misstep. And things could get much worse if we are not careful.

What we need to do at this critical juncture is to stop, take a deep breath, and ask the bedrock question that underpins any grand strategy: what are our vital interests in this part of the world? As I've suggested before, our interests in southwest Asia are minimal, and they are not likely to be furthered by a large-scale and protracted U.S. military presence. Specifically, we don't want terrorists using this territory to organize attacks on U.S. soil, and we want whoever is governing Pakistan to keep its small nuclear arsenal under lock and key. As Leslie Gelb convincingly argued in a recent op-ed, achieving those two goals does not require extensive social engineering in either country. Wading deeper into Afghanistan and Pakistan is a fool's errand, and one that Obama will one day regret.

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President Obama has decided to increase the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan by roughly 17,000 troops over the next few months. The increase will begin with an initial deployment of 8,000 Marines in the next few weeks, to be followed by subsequent deployments of an Army brigade of 4,000 troops and about 5,000 support troops next summer.

This is a fateful decision. Yes, I know; he promised that he would do this during the campaign, but ignoring campaign promises is a time-honored tradition and I can't help feeling like this was one issue where a rethink was called for. Instead of being just another one of George Bush's mishandled legacies, Afghanistan will now become Obama's war. If increasing U.S. forces doesn't work, he will face pressure to do still more, and he will incur the political costs of any subsequent failure.

As other commentators have noted, what's missing in the announcement is a clear statement of U.S. strategy. To begin with, as William Pfaff notes here, it is not clear what our present goal is. Are we trying to bolster President Karzai, and do we still hope to build a stable democracy there? Is our real objective to defeat the Taliban once-and-for-all and eradicate poppy growing while we're at it? Is the objective the long-term delegitimation of the central Asian strains of Islamic extremism, and the encouragement of more moderate forms of Islamic observance? Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has already told Congress that we are not trying to create "some kind of Central Asian Valhalla" (which is both realistic and smart), but that still leaves a lot of other possibilities open.

In fact, we have only one vital national interest in Afghanistan: to prevent Afghan territory from being used as a safe haven for groups plotting attacks on American soil or on Americans abroad, as al Qaeda did prior to September 11. It might be nice to achieve some other goals too (such as economic development, better conditions for women, greater political participation, etc.), but these goals are neither vital to U.S. national security nor central to the future of freedom in the United States or elsewhere. Deep down, we don't (or shouldn't) care very much who governs in Afghanistan, provided they don't let anti-American bad guys use their territory to attack us. As I recall, President Bush was even willing to let the Taliban stay in power in 2001 if they had been willing to hand us Osama and his henchmen.

Second, it is not clear what the additional troops are going to do once they get there. In Iraq, we faced a mostly urban-based insurgency, and the so-called "surge" focused primarily on stabilizing Baghdad. By contrast, the Taliban is a rural movement, and an additional 17,000 troops (or even 30,000), won't be enough to provide reliable protection for the Afghan people. And as Juan Cole and Rory Stewart have warned, using U.S. and NATO troops to eradicate opium poppies or to engage in other forms of social engineering is likely to provoke a local backlash and make the Taliban even more popular.

Going forward, here are some critical things to watch:

1. Do the United States and its allies devote more resources to training the Afghan national army, and do these efforts succeed? If so, then we ought to follow the Iraq model and turn the country back to the Afghans as quickly as we can.

2. Is Obama able to persuade our NATO allies to increase their own efforts there, or will they mostly free-ride on Uncle Sam? (And watch out for token deployments intended to signal that the rest of NATO is with us on this one, but that have no real effect on the ground).

3. Can Obama (or more precisely, Richard Holbrooke) get Pakistan to do more to deny safe havens in Pakistan's frontier areas? If not, more U.S. troops on one side of the border won't have much effect. Does the recent ceasefire in the Swat Valley generate a backlash against the extremists who are imposing Shariah (as my FP colleague Thomas Ricks hopes), or do these groups continue to extend their sway? 

4. President Karzai is increasingly seen as the weak leader of one of the most corrupt regimes in the world. Was this new commitment of U.S. troops linked to specific changes in Karzai's policies, or did we just do this on our own? My understanding is that the surge in Iraq also involved pressuring Prime Minister Maliki to crack down on both Shiite and Sunni militias (rather than just the latter), a decision that helped reduce violence and may even have enhanced his own legitimacy somewhat. Before we decided to up the ante in Afghanistan, did we get some a clear commitment to reform from Karzai, and do we think he has to backbone to pull it off? If not, we're in trouble. Do the names Ngo Dinh Diem or Nguyen van Thieu ring any bells?

Given Central Asia's potential to become the bottomless pit of American foreign and military policy, I hope Obama's decision pays off. But it's hard to have much confidence at this stage, until we know what the objective is and why he thinks adding more troops is going to get us there.

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