Why a US "Surge" Won't Work in Afghanistan

Speaking at the Royal Institute of International Affairs last Wednesday, Rory Stewart offered an incisive examination of the difficulties with a military-first approach to Afghanistan. The following extract is taken from The Times of London:

The situation in Afghanistan is somewhat aggravating and a little surreal. We have been there now for seven years - but I don't know if the British Government knows why. Do we have a policy? Or are we simply waiting to discover what the Obama Administration wishes to do and go along with it?

This year the US is expected to spend more than $50 billion on military and civilian aid. We are talking big sums but we don't have a clear account of what we are doing.

When the US invaded in 2001, its objective was to ensure that al-Qaeda could never again build training camps in Afghanistan. That was achieved with relative ease and with a limited number of special forces and intelligence operatives.

By 2002 we were beginning to talk about development. We launched national solidarity programmes, gave money to villages. But over the next two years it became fashionable in policymaking circles in Britain and the US to say that there was no point in focusing on Afghanistan as an arena for counter-terrorism or a recipient of charity - we should be building a state.

This was when Britain and Nato decided to deploy more troops. Britain has increased the numbers in Helmand province from 250 to 5,000. The belief then was that they were there to help state-building, not to fight the Taleban, which was why John Reid, the Defence Secretary, said to much mockery that he “hoped that the British troops would return without a shot fired”. There was little sign then of any overt Taleban presence, and it was relatively safe for Westerners to travel through Helmand.

I sat down in Kabul with a senior member of the British Embassy and the Number 2 of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan in 2005 and asked: “Why are you deploying British troops to Helmand?”

They said: “To improve economic development, to improve governance and eliminate corruption, to improve road security and, in particular, to deal with the narcotics problem.”

I said: “You'll provoke an insurgency”. They replied: “No, you're traumatised by Iraq. Opinion polls show that in Helmand British and American troops are very popular.” I asked: “What type of timeframe are you looking at to see improvements?” They said six months.

I had just come from Iraq, where I had been an administrator of a province in the south and I said: “This is nonsense; will you write on a piece of paper that these are the kinds of improvements you're going to see, and if you don't see them, will you agree not to say: ‘We didn't have enough troops or enough helicopters' or ‘We are where we are, it is too humiliating to withdraw'. Will you accept that if these improvements don't come in six months the policy was wrong?” They agreed.

From that moment on, I have become increasingly frustrated. A Taleban insurgency has exploded but policymakers will not acknowledge that their original objectives have not been achieved. Instead, they blame implementation, the type of helicopters or previous commanders. Now policymakers have moved on from development, state-building and counter-insurgency to “preserving the credibility of Nato” and regional stability: “We are in Afghanistan to hold Pakistan together.”

Enter General Petraeus and his surge of 17,000 troops. There is good evidence that by deploying a further 30,000 troops “King David” turned the situation around in Iraq. I was in Baghdad this month, and walked streets I would not have been able to walk three years ago. I was not wearing a helmet, nobody was shooting or throwing rocks at me. So can General Petraeus conclude that by deploying more troops to Afghanistan he will be able to pull off the same thing?

There are two different accounts of what he hopes to do by deploying more troops in Afghanistan. One is straight from the counter-insurgency manual: clear/hold/build. Clear out the Taleban, secure populated areas and allow the forces of sustainable economic development to flourish, good governance to come and the Afghan police and security services to back us so we can go home.

The more cynical explanation is that the surge is an attempt to whack the Taleban round the head because they will not negotiate unless they are hurting. This is, broadly speaking, what Henry Kissinger believed of the Vietcong in 1968. The US increased troop numbers to drive them to the table to make concessions.
Neither approach will work. The Afghan groups do not resemble the Vietcong or the Sunni tribal groups in Iraq. The Shia-run Government in Baghdad could cut a deal with the Sunni groups because they are both relatively powerful and coherent factions backed by mass politics. Go to any southern Iraqi town and you will find a man in a buttoned-up shirt without a tie who says: “I am the head of this party” and who can mobilise thousands.

Go to a town in Afghanistan and ask who is in charge and you find six or seven figures with varying sorts of power - perhaps a tribal chief, maybe the police chief or sub-district commander. They do not have mass movements behind them. When we talk about driving the Taleban to the table, we forget that these groups are more insubstantial and fragmented than we acknowledge. The Kabul Government lacks political depth or legitimacy; the Taleban is elusive.

But I'm not a radical pessimist. Being realistic about our limitations does not mean that Britain must accept the status of a third-rate power. We can achieve many things in Afghanistan that are worthwhile for us and for the Afghans. We have made serious progress in education, health and rural development; Afghans are asking for simple things such as roads, electricity and irrigation and we have the skills to provide them. We should focus on the progressive, pro-Western centre and north, rather than pouring almost all our resources into the insurgency zones of the south and the east where schools are often destroyed as soon as they are built.

We need a much lighter military footprint. We cannot afford to keep 80,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan for a decade. US and European voters won't support it, it is an extravagant distraction from more important strategic priorities, including Pakistan and as long as we are seen as an occupying power, there will be Afghans who want to fight us.

We should plan now to reduce the size of our military commitment and decide what we can do with fewer troops. This does not mean abandoning Afghanistan entirely. The US and its allies should use special forces and intelligence operatives to ensure that al-Qaeda never again finds Afghanistan a safe and comfortable environment in which to establish training camps. Even a few thousand international troops and US air support would be a serious deterrent to civil war. But most importantly we must continue to provide generous long-term financial support to the Afghan Government and its military.

Policymakers are now more cautious about Afghanistan and say that their only objective is stability.
But even this is implausible. Pakistan is 20 years ahead of Afghanistan on almost every indicator and is yet to achieve the kind of stability we dream of in Afghanistan. Instead, we must think in terms of containing and managing a difficult, poor and unstable country without sinking too much into this difficult task. We must husband our resources for the many other crises already erupting - from the British banking sector to Pakistan.

There are many small simple things we can do to help Afghan society. All require us to forge a long-term engagement with the country. But such a policy is only possible if we reduce our investment in money and troops and develop a lighter, more affordable and ultimately more sustainable relationship with Afghanistan.

The Bush-Cheney Legacy and Iraq

On Sunday former Vice President Dick Cheney continued his mission both to denigrate the Obama Administration as unworthy and unsafe and to re-write history with an extended interview on CNN. After answering a damning indictment of the Bush economic record with the cure-all, "Eight months after we arrived, we had 9/11," Cheney turned to Iraq: "We've accomplished nearly everything we set out to do."

Juan Cole sets out those accomplishments:

*An estimated 4 million Iraqis, out of 27 million, have been displaced from their homes, that is, made homeless. Some 2.7 million are internally displaced inside Iraq. A couple hundred thousand are cooling their heels in Jordan. And perhaps a million are quickly running out of money and often living in squalid conditions in Syria. Cheney's war has left about 15% of Iraqis homeless inside the country or abroad. That would be like 45 million American thrown out of their homes.

It is controversial how many Iraqis died as a result of the 2003 invasion and its aftermath. But it seems to me that a million extra dead, beyond what you would have expected from a year 2000 baseline, is entirely plausible. The toll is certainly in the hundreds of thousands. Cheney did not kill them all. The Lancet study suggested that the US was directly responsible for a third of all violent deaths since 2003. That would be as much as 300,000 that we killed. The rest, we only set in train their deaths by our invasion.

Baghdad has been turned from a mixed city, about half of its population Shiite and the other half Sunni in 2003, into a Shiite city where the Sunni population may be as little as ten to fifteen percent. From a Sunni point of view, Cheney's war has resulted in a Shiite (and Iranian) take-over of the Iraqi capital, long a symbol of pan-Arabism and anti-imperialism.

In the Iraqi elections, Shiite fundamentalist parties closely allied with Iran came to power. The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, the leading party in parliament, was formed by Iraqi expatriates at the behest of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1982 in Tehran. The Islamic Mission (Da'wa) Party is the oldest ideological Shiite party working for an Islamic state. It helped form Hizbullah in Beirut in the early 1980s. It has supplied both prime ministers elected since 2005. Fundamentalist Shiites shaped the constitution, which forbids the civil legislature to pass legislation that contravenes Islamic law. Dissidents have accused the new Iraqi government of being an Iranian puppet.

Arab-Kurdish violence is spiking in the north, endangering the Obama withdrawal plan and, indeed, the whole of Iraq, not to mention Syria, Turkey and Iran.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi women have been widowed by the war and its effects, leaving most without a means of support. Iraqi widows often lack access to clean water and electricity.

$32 billion were wasted on Iraq reconstruction, and most of it cannot even be traced. I repeat, Cheney gave away $32 bn. to anonymous cronies in such a way that we can't even be sure who stole it, exactly. And you are angry at AIG about $400 mn. in bonuses! We are talking about $32 billion given out in brown paper bags.

Political power is being fragmented in Iraq with big spikes in the murder rate in some provinces that may reflect faction-fighting and vendettas in which the Iraqi military is loathe to get involved.

The Iraqi economy is devastated, and the new government's bureaucracy and infighting have made it difficult to attract investors.

The Bush-Cheney invasion helped further destabilize the Eastern Mediterranean, setting in play Kurdish nationalism and terrifying Turkey.

Cheney avoids mentioning all the human suffering he has caused, on a cosmic scale, and focuses on procedural matters like elections (which he confuses with democracy-- given 2000 in this country, you can understand why). Or he lies, as when he says that Iran's influence in Iraq has been blocked. Another lie is that there was that the US was fighting "al-Qaeda" in Iraq as opposed to just Iraqis. He and Bush even claim that they made Iraqi womens' lives better.

The real question is whether anyone will have the gumption to put Cheney on trial for treason and crimes against humanity.

Breaking: New 'Bin Laden' Tape Broadcast

Al-Jazeera has broadcast a new tape purportedly recorded by Osama bin Laden. In it the speaker calls Israel's recent incursion into Gaza a "holocaust" and attacks as "hypocrites" Arab leaders who were allegedly complicity in Israel's offensive:

"It has become clear that some Arab leaders were complicit with the crusade of the Zionist alliance against our people. These are the leaders that America calls moderate"

According to al-Jazeera 'Bin Laden' also "called for support for the mujahidin in Iraq and said that his network of fighters would "go to Jordan from the sea to the river to liberate Palestine".

Text: Charles Freeman's Speech on the Middle East and Israel (October 2006)

Related Post: How Israel Limits US Foreign Policy - The Not-so-Curious Case of Charles Freeman
Related Post: Charles Freeman’s Letter Withdrawing His Nomination
Related Post: Coming Next in the Intelligence-Policy Battle - Iran’s Uranium

This morning we evaluated the significance of the withdrawal of Charles Freeman's nomination to head the National Intelligence Council, including the place of Israel in US foreign policy.

Those scouring the Internet to document Freeman's alleged anti-Israel position have focused on a speech he gave in October 2006 to a conference on co-operation between the US and the Gulf Cooperation Council. To ensure the full context for Freeman's remark, we reprint the speech in full below. This, however, is the key extract:

Finally, let me allude briefly to the issue of Israel, a country that has yet to be accepted as part of the Middle East and whose inability to find peace with the Palestinians and other Arabs is the driving factor in the region's radicalization and anti-Americanism.

The talented European settlers who formed the state of Israel endowed it with substantial intellectual and technological superiority over any other society in the Middle East. The dynamism of Israel's immigrant culture and the generous help of the Jewish Diaspora rapidly gave Israel a standard of living equivalent to that of European countries. For fifty years Israel has enjoyed military superiority in its region. Demonstrably, Israel excels at war; sadly, it has shown no talent for peace.

For almost forty years, Israel has had land beyond its previously established borders to trade for peace. It has been unable to make this exchange except when a deal was crafted for it by the United States, imposed on it by American pressure, and sustained at American taxpayer expense. For the past half decade Israel has enjoyed carte blanche from the United States to experiment with any policy it favored to stabilize its relations with the Palestinians and its other Arab neighbors, including most recently its efforts to bomb Lebanon into peaceful coexistence with it and to smother Palestinian democracy in its cradle.

The suspension of the independent exercise of American judgment about what best serves our interests as well as those of Israelis and Arabs has caused the Arabs to lose confidence in the United States as a peace partner. To their credit, they have therefore stepped forward with their own plan for a comprehensive peace. By sad contrast, the American decision to let Israel call the shots in the Middle East has revealed how frightened Israelis now are of their Arab neighbors and how reluctant this fear has made them to risk respectful coexistence with the other peoples of their region. The results of the experiment are in: left to its own devices, the Israeli establishment will make decisions that harm Israelis, threaten all associated with them, and enrage those who are not.

Tragically, despite all the advantages and opportunities Israel has had over the fifty-nine years of its existence, it has failed to achieve concord and reconciliation with anyone in its region, still less to gain their admiration or affection. Instead, with each decade, Israel's behavior has deviated farther from the humane ideals of its founders and the high ethical standards of the religion that most of its inhabitants profess. Israel and the Palestinians, in particular, are caught up in an endless cycle of reprisal and retaliation that guarantees the perpetuation of conflict in which levels of mutual atrocities continue to escalate. As a result, each generation of Israelis and Palestinians has accumulated new reasons to loathe the behavior of the other, and each generation of Arabs has detested Israel with more passion than its predecessor. This is not how peace is made. Here, too, a break with the past and a change in course are clearly in order.

The framework proposed by Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah at Beirut in 2002 offers Israel an opportunity to accomplish both. It has the support of all Arab governments. It would exchange Arab acceptance of Israel and a secure place for the Jewish state in the region for Israeli recognition of Palestinians as human beings with equal weight in the eyes of God, entitled to the same rights of democratic self-determination and domestic tranquility within secure borders that Israelis wish to enjoy. The proposal proceeds from self-interest. It recognizes how much the Arabs would gain from normal relations with Israel if the necessary conditions for mutual respect and reconciliation could be created.

Despite the fact that such a peace is so obviously also in Israel's vital and moral interests, history and the Israeli response to date both strongly suggest that without some tough love from Americans, including especially Israel's American coreligionists, Israel will not risk the uncertainties of peace. Instead, it will persist in the belief, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that it can gain safety through the officially sanctioned assassination of potential opponents, the terrorization of Arab civilians, and the cluster bombing of neighbors rather than negotiation with them. These policies have not worked; they will not work. But unless they are changed, the Arab peace plan will exceed its shelf life, and Arabs will revert to their previous views that Israel is an ethnomaniacal society with which it is impossible for others to coexist and that peace can be achieved only by Israel's eventual annihilation, much as the Crusader kingdoms that once occupied Palestine were eventually destroyed.

Americans need to be clear about the consequences of continuing our current counterproductive approaches to security in the Middle East. We have paid heavily and often in treasure in the past for our unflinching support and unstinting subsidies of Israel's approach to managing its relations with the Arabs. Five years ago we began to pay with the blood of our citizens here at home. We are now paying with the lives of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines on battlefields in several regions of the realm of Islam, with more said by our government's neoconservative mentors to be in prospect. Our policies in Afghanistan and Iraq are adding to the threats to our security and well-being, not reducing them. They have added and are adding to our difficulties and those of allies and partners, including Israel. They are not advancing the resolution of these problems or making anyone more secure. They degrade our moral standing and diminish our value as an ally. They delight our enemies and dismay our friends.

In the interest of all, it is therefore time for a change of course.

“American-GCC Relations: An Assessment of Reforms, Elections, Challenges and the Prospects for Regional Peace and Stability”
Charles Freeman
31 October 2006

It is an honor once again to make the concluding remarks at the annual US-Arab Policymakers Conference. I do so, of course, as an individual and as an American concerned with the implications of events in the Gulf region, not on behalf of any organization or group with which I am affiliated. Speaking only for oneself enables one to call it like it is. I shall.

The Gulf Cooperation Council began in a time of crisis 25 years ago. Since then the GCC has passed through many stressful strategic environments. It was, after all, formed to cope with the challenges that caused Americans first to declare the Gulf a region of vital interest to the United States - the Islamic revolution in Iran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war. The GCC was also, of course, created to provide a means of dealing with the sudden rise in US interest and military activity in the Gulf in the wake of these events, the oil boom, and the Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel.

The GCC functioned as a coherent alliance during the US-led war to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation that followed the end of the Iran-Iraq war. Its members separately provided essential staging areas and support bases for the US invasion and occupation of Iraq a dozen years later. Some have since deepened their reliance on the United States, while others have hedged their previous dependency.

Now the GCC member states may be facing their greatest challenge: the changes brought about by the progressive collapse of American policies in the region, including US efforts to transform Iraq, to block Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons, and to achieve security for Israel by persuading it to respect the right of Palestinians to democratic self-determination in a secure homeland.

The US military have developed the useful concept of "consequence management." The idea is to set aside for later study the questions of why and how widespread devastation followed the use of weapons of mass destruction or a large-scale natural disaster, and instead to acknowledge the damage while focusing on actions to mitigate it and prevent it from worsening. It is time to apply consequence management to the mounting wreckage of our policies in the Middle East.

Only true believers in the neo-conservative dream can now fail to recognize that it has wrought a deepening nightmare in Iraq. The shattered Iraqi state has been succeeded (outside Kurdish areas) by near-universal resistance to the foreign occupation that supplanted it. The aggravation of secular and ethnic divisions by ill-conceived constitutional bargaining and elections has created a new political culture in Iraq in which theocratic feudalism, militia-building, and terrorist violence are the principal modes of self-expression.

The attempt to cure the resulting anarchy by building a strong army and police force for the Iraqi central government misses the point. The Baghdad government is itself a key participant in all of the pathologies of contemporary Iraq. In practice, it is more a vengeful tyranny of the majority in a temporary marriage of convenience with Kurdish separatists than a government of all the people. It is hard to disprove the thesis that it seeks a monopoly on the use of force only to consolidate either a Shiite version of Saddam's dictatorship or an Iraqi version of the Iranian theocracy. The sad fact is that, to many Iraqis, these outcomes now seem to offer the most realistic hope for renewed domestic tranquility in their country.

All but a small minority of Iraqi Arabs now reject the legitimacy of any continuing US military presence on Iraqi soil. On the one hand, the occupation has become the indispensable prop of the current order in Iraq, such as it is; on the other, the prolongation of the occupation is the main reason Iraqis wage an insurgent war against that order. The occupation thus supplies its own opposition; its continuation feeds the violence that makes its eventual curtailment inevitable.

The unpopularity of the occupation continues to provide a rewarding opening for outside agitators. Al Qa`ida now openly acknowledges a major stake in the US staying in Iraq for as long as possible. Our military presence is not just a potent motivator of anti-Americanism and a source of volunteers for terrorism, it has put us in the position of providing instructors to "Jihad U," the graduate school we have inadvertently created in Iraq for terrorists with global reach - an advanced curriculum, where failure is punished by death at our hands, but course completion is rewarded by a chance to take part in future terrorist operations in Europe, Asia, and North America. The costs of the occupation must be measured in much more than the hundreds of billions of dollars we continue to spend on it.

No one can predict how US forces will withdraw from Iraq, but no one now doubts that their departure is only a matter of time. While some wish to soldier on, few see any prospect that the United States will leave behind an Iraq at peace with itself, a united Iraq capable of playing a constructive role in regional affairs, or a strong Iraq willing and able to balance Iran as it once did. The United States invaded Iraq against the counsel of our allies and friends, drunk with our own self-importance, convinced by our own delusions, apparently invincible in our ignorance, and utterly unprepared for the quasi-colonial mission we assumed. Contemporary Iraq is a monument to American martial prowess and civil ineptitude.

It now seems likely our withdrawal will be undertaken for domestic American political reasons, again without much attention to Iraqi and regional realities. But withdrawal risks escalating the conflict inside Iraq, infecting other parts of the region with Iraq's sectarian strife, and providing an early graduation ceremony for terrorists bent on applying elsewhere what they have learned in Iraq. Unless diplomacy has first crafted a regional context that limits the damage, a politically-dictated withdrawal will crown our incompetence with disgrace and devaluation as a security partner. What kind of country is it that invades another, trashes it, sets it on fire, and then walks away to let inhabitants and neighbors alike die in the flames or perish of smoke inhalation? Who will wish to associate themselves with such a country, still less entrust their security to cooperation with it?

We did not consult the GCC countries or others in the region about the strategy or tactics of our invasion of Iraq. We would do well to seek their advice, counsel, and support - and they would do well to insist on our consulting them - as we make our next moves, whether these are within Iraq or away from it. Techniques of asymmetric warfare pioneered in Iraq now find their way within weeks to Afghanistan and elsewhere. The targeting of GCC rulers and oil and gas facilities by terrorists with connections to the mayhem in Iraq underscores our common interest in countering spillover from the jihadi intervention in that country. Similarly, the well-founded concern that areas in the Gulf with mixed Sunna and Sh`ia populations might suffer contagion from the religious struggles in Iraq emphasizes the imperative of containing them.

These are closely connected and clearly anticipatable problems that affect many countries in the region. They must not be left to be addressed ad hoc and at the last minute.

Then, there are the problems presented by Iranian ambitions, not just for nuclear weaponry but for preponderant influence in the Gulf. These go well beyond the issues of whether bombing Iran would not provoke it to attempt regime change in the countries from whose bases the attack had been launched, or simply confirm it and others in their judgment that the only effective protection against preemptive attack by the United States is the possession of a nuclear deterrent.

Assuming, as we must, in light of the results similar US policies toward north Korea have produced, that Iran will eventually acquire a nuclear deterrent, how do the GCC countries plan to deal with Iran as a nuclear power? Will each respond separately or will the response be collective? Will there be piecemeal appeasement or defiant reaffirmations of sovereign independence? If a nuclear umbrella or deterrent to the nuclear threat from Iran is deemed necessary, will this be collectively managed or will each country seek its own protection? In either context, what role, if any, do the Gulf Arabs desire for the United States or other nuclear powers? Is the role they envisage for us one that Americans can or will undertake?

Then, too, having destroyed Iraq's utility in balancing Iran, we and the GCC have yet to concert a strategy for a new and sustainable balance of power. Such a balance cannot be sustained if, as was the case in Saudi Arabia, the American military presence becomes not an asset to national security but its principal liability, thanks to the provocation it offers to political extremists. How do we propose to manage the contradiction between our desire to assure the stability of the Gulf and the fact that our presence in it is inherently destabilizing? If we are to avoid a strategic debacle, we cannot leave Iraq without agreeing on answers to these questions with our Gulf Arab partners.

Iran is emerging as yet another proof that diplomacy-free foreign policy does not work. Neither do lack of planning or the refusal to talk to interested allies and adversaries. It's not hard to anticipate the questions that will arise from the probable future course of events in Iran itself and in Iranian relationships with Iraq and other countries in the region. These too must not be left to tactical responses, improvised on the spot in the absence of strategy, sprung with no warning upon those whose cooperation or forbearance is essential to enable them to succeed.

Finally, let me allude briefly to the issue of Israel, a country that has yet to be accepted as part of the Middle East and whose inability to find peace with the Palestinians and other Arabs is the driving factor in the region's radicalization and anti-Americanism.

The talented European settlers who formed the state of Israel endowed it with substantial intellectual and technological superiority over any other society in the Middle East. The dynamism of Israel's immigrant culture and the generous help of the Jewish Diaspora rapidly gave Israel a standard of living equivalent to that of European countries. For fifty years Israel has enjoyed military superiority in its region. Demonstrably, Israel excels at war; sadly, it has shown no talent for peace.

For almost forty years, Israel has had land beyond its previously established borders to trade for peace. It has been unable to make this exchange except when a deal was crafted for it by the United States, imposed on it by American pressure, and sustained at American taxpayer expense. For the past half decade Israel has enjoyed carte blanche from the United States to experiment with any policy it favored to stabilize its relations with the Palestinians and its other Arab neighbors, including most recently its efforts to bomb Lebanon into peaceful coexistence with it and to smother Palestinian democracy in its cradle.

The suspension of the independent exercise of American judgment about what best serves our interests as well as those of Israelis and Arabs has caused the Arabs to lose confidence in the United States as a peace partner. To their credit, they have therefore stepped forward with their own plan for a comprehensive peace. By sad contrast, the American decision to let Israel call the shots in the Middle East has revealed how frightened Israelis now are of their Arab neighbors and how reluctant this fear has made them to risk respectful coexistence with the other peoples of their region. The results of the experiment are in: left to its own devices, the Israeli establishment will make decisions that harm Israelis, threaten all associated with them, and enrage those who are not.

Tragically, despite all the advantages and opportunities Israel has had over the fifty-nine years of its existence, it has failed to achieve concord and reconciliation with anyone in its region, still less to gain their admiration or affection. Instead, with each decade, Israel's behavior has deviated farther from the humane ideals of its founders and the high ethical standards of the religion that most of its inhabitants profess. Israel and the Palestinians, in particular, are caught up in an endless cycle of reprisal and retaliation that guarantees the perpetuation of conflict in which levels of mutual atrocities continue to escalate. As a result, each generation of Israelis and Palestinians has accumulated new reasons to loathe the behavior of the other, and each generation of Arabs has detested Israel with more passion than its predecessor. This is not how peace is made. Here, too, a break with the past and a change in course are clearly in order.

The framework proposed by Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah at Beirut in 2002 offers Israel an opportunity to accomplish both. It has the support of all Arab governments. It would exchange Arab acceptance of Israel and a secure place for the Jewish state in the region for Israeli recognition of Palestinians as human beings with equal weight in the eyes of God, entitled to the same rights of democratic self-determination and domestic tranquility within secure borders that Israelis wish to enjoy. The proposal proceeds from self-interest. It recognizes how much the Arabs would gain from normal relations with Israel if the necessary conditions for mutual respect and reconciliation could be created.

Despite the fact that such a peace is so obviously also in Israel's vital and moral interests, history and the Israeli response to date both strongly suggest that without some tough love from Americans, including especially Israel's American coreligionists, Israel will not risk the uncertainties of peace. Instead, it will persist in the belief, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that it can gain safety through the officially sanctioned assassination of potential opponents, the terrorization of Arab civilians, and the cluster bombing of neighbors rather than negotiation with them. These policies have not worked; they will not work. But unless they are changed, the Arab peace plan will exceed its shelf life, and Arabs will revert to their previous views that Israel is an ethnomaniacal society with which it is impossible for others to coexist and that peace can be achieved only by Israel's eventual annihilation, much as the Crusader kingdoms that once occupied Palestine were eventually destroyed.

Americans need to be clear about the consequences of continuing our current counterproductive approaches to security in the Middle East. We have paid heavily and often in treasure in the past for our unflinching support and unstinting subsidies of Israel's approach to managing its relations with the Arabs. Five years ago we began to pay with the blood of our citizens here at home. We are now paying with the lives of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines on battlefields in several regions of the realm of Islam, with more said by our government's neoconservative mentors to be in prospect. Our policies in Afghanistan and Iraq are adding to the threats to our security and well-being, not reducing them. They have added and are adding to our difficulties and those of allies and partners, including Israel. They are not advancing the resolution of these problems or making anyone more secure. They degrade our moral standing and diminish our value as an ally. They delight our enemies and dismay our friends.

In the interest of all, it is therefore time for a change of course. But, as Seneca remarked almost 2,000 years ago, "If a man does not know to what port he is steering, no wind is favorable." It is past time that we agreed on our destination and devised a strategy for reaching it. As events belatedly force us to come up with a workable approach to consequence management and lay a course to take us beyond it, Americans will need the advice of our partners in the GCC and others in the region.

If we pay no attention to the opinions and interests of these partners, we should not be surprised to discover that we have forfeited their friendship and cooperation. Without both, we cannot hope to manage and overcome the consequences of the series of policy disasters we have contrived or to devise new and effective policies. And we here, like our friends in the region and elsewhere, will all pay again for this failure, and pay heavily. We must not allow that to come to pass.

Transcript: President Obama's Interview with New York Times

Related Post: Mr Obama’s War - Playing for Time in Afghanistan

The text of President Obama's 35-minute interview with The New York Times aboard Air Force One on Saturday:

Q. You said it’s going to take a long time to get out of this economic crisis. Can you assure the American people that the economy will be growing by the summer, the fall or the end of the year?

A. I don’t think that anybody has that kind of crystal ball. We are going through a wrenching process of de-leveraging in the financial sectors – not just here in the United States, but all around the world – that have profound consequences for Main Street. What started off as problems with the banks, led to a contraction of lending, which led in turn to both declining demand on the part of consumers, but also declining demand on the part of business. So it is going to take some time to work itself through.

Our job is to do a couple of key things. Number one, to put in place key investments that will cushion the blow. Our recovery plan had provisions for unemployment insurance, for food stamps, what we just saw today, grants and assistance to states so layoffs aren’t compounded. The second thing we’ve got to do is we’re going to have to strengthen the financial system. We’ve taken some significant steps already to do that – just for example this week, opening up a trillion-dollar credit line. But there’s going to be more work to be done there because there are some banks that are still limping along and we’ve got to strengthen their capital bases and get them lending again.

We’ve got to be able to distinguish in the marketplace between those banks that have real problems and those banks that are actually on pretty solid footing. We’ve still got the auto situation that we’re going to have to address. And finally, we’ve got to make the investments for long-term economic growth around energy, education and health care. I’m not trying to filibuster, it was a big question.

Our belief and expectation is that we will get all the pillars in place for recovery this year. Those are the things we have control over and we have confidence that working with Congress we can get the pillars of recovery in place. How long it will take before recovery actually translates into stronger job markets and so forth is going to depend on a whole range of factors, including our ability to get other countries to coordinate and take similar actions because part of what you’re seeing now is weaknesses in Europe that are actually greater than some of the weaknesses here, bouncing back and having an impact on our markets.

Q. Can you envision allowing a major institution to fail? Can you say with certainty that you won’t need to ask Congress for any more money beyond the $250 billion placeholder in your budget.

A. I am absolutely committed to making sure that our financial system is stable. And so I think people can be assured that we’ll do whatever is required to keep that from happening. For example, that would mean preventing institutions that could cause systemic risks to the system being just left on their own. We’re going to make sure that the financial system is stabilized and in terms of the resources that are involved. We think the $250 billion placeholder is a pretty good estimate. We have no reason to revise that estimate that’s in the budget. One of the benefits I think of this budget was we tried to surface as honestly and as forthrightly as possible, all the costs of this crisis, all the costs of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, all the potential costs of things like fixing the AMT, which historically have been left off the budget. Something that I don’t think people recognize is that had we used the same gimmicks that had been used previously, we could have driven down our budget projections over the next 10 years, down to point where debt was only 1.3 or 1.5 percent of G.D.P. We could have made ourselves look really good, but I felt very strongly that part of what got us in trouble in the first place, both in the private sector and the public sector, was a failure to do honest accounting about what risks are out there, about what costs are out there and factoring those in, and that’s something that we’ve tried to change.

Q. Have you figured out how you would draw the lines against endless rescues?

A. Part of the function of the stress test that is being conducted by Treasury right now is to make a determination using some worst-case scenario – what that would mean for a bank’s balance sheet. And I think that what you should see emerging there is an awful lot of banks that are in decent shape considering the circumstances. They’ve been managed well. They didn’t take undue risks. Obviously, they’re being hit like every business is being hit by the recession, but they can recover, and if they do need help, it’s going to be short-term help. There may be a handful of institutions that have more serious problems. And what we want to do is to cauterize the wound.

Q. And they’ll have to fail, the ones that had more serious problems?

A. No, no, no, no. But what we’ll have to do is, we’ll probably have to take more significant action to deal with those institutions.

But the point is that our commitment is to make sure that any actions we take to maintain stability in the system, begin to loosen up credit and lending once again so that businesses and consumers can borrow. And if they can, then you’re going to start seeing businesses invest once again and you’re going to see people hired once again, but it’s going to take some time.

Q. The first six weeks have given people a glimpse of your spending priorities. Are you a socialist as some people have suggested?

A. You know, let’s take a look at the budget – the answer would be no.

Q. Is there anything wrong with saying yes?

A. Let’s just take a look at what we’ve done. We’ve essentially said that, number one, we’re going to reduce non-defense discretionary spending to the lowest levels in decades. So that part of the budget that doesn’t include entitlements and doesn’t include defense – that we have the most control over – we’re actually setting on a downward trajectory in terms of percentage of G.D.P. So we’re making more tough choices in terms of eliminating programs and cutting back on spending than any administration has done in a very long time. We’re making some very tough choices.

What we have done is in a couple of critical areas that we have put off action for a very long time, decided that now is the time to ask. One is on health care. As you heard in the health care summit yesterday, there is uniform belief that the status quo is broken and if we don’t do anything, we will be in a much worse place, both fiscally as well as in terms of what’s happening to families and businesses than if we did something.

The second area is on energy, which we’ve been talking about for decades. Now, in each of those cases, what we’ve said is, on our watch, we’re going to solve problems that have weakened this economy for a generation. And it’s going to be hard and it’s going to require some costs. But if you look on the revenue side what we’re proposing, what we’re looking at is essentially to go back to the tax rates that existed during the 1990s when, as I recall, rich people were doing very well. In fact everybody was doing very well. We have proposed a cap and trade system, which could create some additional costs, but the vast majority of that we want to give back in the form of tax breaks to the 95 percent of working families.

So if you look at our budget, what you have is a very disciplined, fiscally responsible budget, along with an effort to deal with some very serious problems that have been put off for a very long time. And that I think is exactly what I proposed during the campaign. We are following through on every commitment that we’ve made, and that’s what I think is ultimately going to get our economy back on track.

Q. So to people who suggested that you are more liberal than you suggested on the campaign, you say, what?

A. I think it would be hard to argue, Jeff. We have delivered on every promise that we’ve made so far. We said that we would end the war in Iraq and we’ve put forward a responsible plan.

Q. In terms of spending.

A. Oh, in terms of spending. Well, if you look at spending, what we said during the campaign was, is that we were going to raise taxes on the top five percent. That’s what our budget does. We said that we’d give a tax cut to 95 percent of working Americans. That’s exactly what we have done. That’s the right thing to do. It provides relief to families that basically saw no growth in wages and incomes over the last decade. It asks for a little bit more for people like myself who benefited greatly over the last decade and took a disproportionate share of a growing economy. I actually don’t think that anybody who examines our budget can come away with the conclusion that somehow this is a – that this is in any way different than what we proposed during the campaign.

But more to the point, it is what’s needed in order to put this economy on a more stable footing. One of the problems that we’ve had is that we have put off big problems again and again and again and again. And as I’ve said in my speech to the joint session of Congress, at some point there is a day of reckoning. Well, that day of reckoning has come.

What I’m refusing to do and what I’ve instructed my staff that we will not do is to try to kick the can down the road, to try to paper over problems, try to use gimmicks on budgets, try to pretend that health care is not an issue, to continue with a situation where we are exporting – importing – more and more oil from the middle east, continuing with a situation in which average working families are seeing their wages flat line. At some point, we’ve got to take on these problems.

Q. Is there one word name for your philosophy? If you’re not a socialist, are you a liberal? Are you progressive? One word?

A. No, I’m not going to engage in that.

Q. Mr. President, we need to turn it to foreign policy. I know we have a review going on right now about Afghanistan policy, but right now can you tell us, are we winning in Afghanistan?

A. No. I think that we are – we are doing an extraordinary job, or let me say it this way: Our troops are doing an extraordinary job in a very difficult situation. But you’ve seen conditions deteriorate over the last couple of years. The Taliban is bolder than it was. I think the – in the southern regions of the country, you’re seeing them attack in ways that we have not seen previously. The national government still has not gained the confidence of the Afghan people. And so its going to be critical for us to not only, get through these national elections to stabilize the security situation, but we’ve got to recast our policy so that our military, diplomatic and development goals are all aligned to ensure that al Qaeda and extremists that would do us harm don’t have the kinds of safe havens that allow them to operate.

At the heart of a new Afghanistan policy is going to be a smarter Pakistan policy. As long as you’ve got safe havens in these border regions that the Pakistani government can’t control or reach, in effective ways, we’re going to continue to see vulnerability on the afghan side of the border. And so it’s very important for us to reach out to the Pakistani government, and work with them more effectively.

Q. Do you see a time when you might be willing to reach out to more moderate elements of the Taliban, to try to peel them away, towards reconciliation?

A. I don’t want to pre-judge the review that’s currently taking place. If you talk to General Petraeus, I think he would argue that part of the success in Iraq involved reaching out to people that we would consider to be Islamic fundamentalists, but who were willing to work with us because they had been completely alienated by the tactics of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

There may be some comparable opportunities in Afghanistan and the Pakistani region. But the situation in Afghanistan is, if anything, more complex. You have a less governed region, a history of fierce independence among tribes. Those tribes are multiple and sometimes operate at cross purposes, so figuring all that out is going to be a much more of a challenge.

Q. In a post-9/11 world, when it comes to employing American power in that world, including at home and abroad, and the balance between securities and civil liberties, what do you think now that you’ve been in office, that President Bush, if anything, got right, in figuring out that balance?

A. I think that I would distinguish between some of the steps that were taken immediately after 9/11 and where we were by the time I took office. I think the C.I.A., for example, and some of the controversial programs that have been a focus of a lot of attention, took steps to correct certain policies and procedures after those first couple of years. I think that Admiral Hayden and Mike McConnell at D.N.I. were capable public servants who really had America’s security interests in mind when they acted, and I think were mindful of American values and ideals.

Q. Are we closer to that balance right now?

A. I think we’ve still got work to do in dealing with those initial steps. Guantanamo being Exhibit A. As a consequence of a series of early decisions, we now have people in Guantanamo who have not been tried, have not had an opportunity to answer charges, many of whom are dangerous, some of whom are very difficult to try, will be – some of whom will be difficult to try because of the manner in which evidence was obtained.

So there’s a clean-up operation that has to take place, and that’s complicated. As I said when I announced my decision to close Guantanamo, for us to have tried to have done that in less than a year would have been completely unrealistic. And even doing it within a year is requiring an enormous amount of attention and focus on the part of our ...

Q. Is it within the realm of possibility that some of these Guantanamo detainees might have actually been released into the United States, the Uighurs, or somebody like that?

A. I don’t want to, again, prejudge the reviews. We are being very deliberate, very careful to make sure that we get this right. There are still going to be some balancing – there is still going to be some balancing that has to be done and some competing interests that are going to have to be addressed. But what I’m confident about is moving forward we can create a national security operation and set of procedures that keep us safe and secure and are also true to our traditions. That I’m increasingly confident of.

Q. Leon Panetta has said that we’re going to continue renditions, provided we’re not sending people to countries that torture. Why continue them at all?

A. Well, I think that you’re giving a slightly more definitive response than Director Panetta provided, but what I’ll say is this: We are now conducting a review of the rendition policy, there could be situations, and I emphasize – could be – because we haven’t made a determination yet, where let’s say we have a well-known Al Qaeda operative, that doesn’t surface very often, appears in a third country, with whom we don’t have an extradition relationship, or would not be willing to prosecute him, but we think is a very dangerous person. I think we will have to think about how do we deal with that scenario in a way that comports with international law and abides by my very clear edict that we don’t torture, and that we ultimately provide anybody that we’re detaining an opportunity through habeas corpus. to answer to charges.

How all that sorts itself out is extremely complicated because it’s not just domestic law its also international law, our relationship with various other entities. And so, again, it will take this year to be able to get all of these procedures in place and on the right footing.

Q: Turning to other matters, when it comes to race relations, do you agree that we’re a nation of cowards?

A: I think it’s fair to say that if I had been advising my attorney general, we would have used different language. I think the point that he was making is that we’re oftentimes uncomfortable with talking about race until there’s some sort of racial flare-up or conflict, and that we could probably be more constructive in facing up to the painful legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and discrimination.

But what I would add to that is the fact that we’ve made enormous progress and we shouldn’t lose sight of that. And I’m not somebody who believes that constantly talking about race somehow solves racial tensions. I think what solves racial tensions is fixing the economy, putting people to work, making sure that people have heath care, ensuring that every kid is learning out here. I think if we do that, then we’ll probably have more fruitful conversations.

Q: Speaking of the economy, what advice would you give ordinary Americans who are struggling through these times? You’ve asked people for their patience. What should people do now?

A: Well, obviously, you’ve got 300 million Americans so I don’t think you can generalize across the board. I think that people would feel confident that every time we’ve had an economic challenge like the one that we’re having – although this is one of the bigger ones – that we’ve gotten through it, that the pillars of recovery will be in place this year.

Q: What should the unemployed in particular ...

A: Well, hold on a second. There are still groceries to be bought and kids to send to school and cars in need of repair and young families that need to find homes. And so what I would say to people is, obviously, be prudent. I think that ordinary families should have learned from the last few years and recent history that if something sounds too good to be true – whether it’s stock market returns or appreciating housing prices – that sometimes they are too good to be true, and that what we should be looking for is steady growth, steady accumulations of savings, steady and prudent investing. And that I think is what you’re going to see emerging after we’ve gotten through the worst of this crisis.

What I don’t think people should do is suddenly stuff money in their mattresses and pull back completely from spending. I don’t think that people should be fearful about our future. I don’t think that people should suddenly mistrust all of our financial institutions because the overwhelming majority of them actually have managed things reasonably well. But I think that coming out of this crisis what you’re going to see is, you know, a return to the fundamentals – hard work, investing for reasonable returns over time, saving steadily for your kids’ college education and for your retirement. All of us, thinking about our purchases and making sure that we’re taking care of the necessities before we go after the luxuries. And I think that’s true not only for individual families but I think that’s going to be true for government as well. And if we take those steps, if we return to the fundamentals, if we go back to that ad that used to run, where they say, you know, ‘we earn money the old fashioned way’ -- or what is it?

(Cross talk)

A: ‘We make money the old fashioned way, we earn it.’ If we go back to that philosophy and we finally tackle some problems we’ve been putting off, like health care, like energy, like education, then I think we’re going to come out of this stronger.

Q: Sir, we’re landing here, but what are you reading these days? What kind of newspapers do you read, do you read the clips, do you read actual papers, do you watch television?

A: Other than The New York Times?

Q: Other than The New York Times. Do you read Web sites? What Web sites do you look at?

A: I read most of the big national papers.

Q. Do you read them in clips or do you read them in the paper?

A. No, I read the paper. I like the feel of a newspaper. I read most of the weekly newsmagazines. I may not read them from cover to cover but I’ll thumb through them. You know, I spend most of my time these days reading a lot of briefings.

Q: And television? Do you watch? Web sites?

A: I don’t watch much television, I confess.

Q: And Web sites?

Q: No blogs?

A: I rarely read blogs.

Q: No reality shows with your girls?

A: No. They watch them, but I don’t join them. I watch basketball. That’s what I watch.

Q: Have you gotten a new appreciation at all, or maybe a little sympathy for what your predecessors went through in terms of a president can’t control all the events?

A: Oh, absolutely. Look, I actually appreciated that before I took office. I always felt that a president is accountable for making the best decisions, but that there are going to be a lot of unexpected twists and turns along the way. And as I said recently, this is still a human enterprise and these are big, tough, complicated problems. Somebody noted to me that by the time something reaches my desk, that means it’s really hard. Because if it were easy, somebody else would have made the decision and somebody else would have solved it. So typically, if something’s in my folder, it means that you’ve got some very big, difficult, sticky, contradictory issues to be wrestled with.

Q: Has anybody said to you, No, sir, you can’t do that? Has there been a moment in these last six weeks where you tried to do something and somebody said, Sorry, sir, it doesn’t work that way?

A: Well, I mean, I think what we were talking about earlier in terms of Guantanamo. People didn’t have to tell me, No you can’t do that. It was simply, Well, sir, here are the challenges that we face in terms of making a decision about that. In the entire banking sector – we spend every day, myself, Rahm Emanuel, Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, Christina Romer, every single day, we will spend at least an hour of my time just talking through how we are approaching the financial markets.

And part of the reason we don’t spend a lot of time looking at blogs is because if you haven’t looked at it very carefully then you may be under the impression that somehow there’s a clean answer one way or another – well, you just nationalize all the banks, or you just leave them alone and they’ll be fine, or this or that or the other. The truth is this is a very complex set of problems and bad decisions can result in huge taxpayer expenditures and poor results.

And so what I expect from my team is to constantly be guided by evidence, facts, talking through all the best arguments, drawing from all the best perspectives, and then talking the best course of action possible given the fact that there are some big uncertainties and that sometimes what people may want may actually be contradictory. So, for example, lately, people have been concerned – understandably – about the decline in the market. Well, the reason the market’s declining is because the economy’s declining and it’s generating a lot of bad news, not surprisingly. And so what I’m focused on is fixing the underlying economy. That’s ultimately what’s going to fix the markets, but in the interim you’ve got some folks who would love to see us artificially prop up the market by just putting in more taxpayer money which in the short term could make bank balance sheets look better, you know, make creditors and bondholders and shareholders of these financial institutions feel better and you could get a little blip. But we’d be in the exact same spot as we were six, eight, 10 months from now. So what I’ve got to do is make sure that we’re focused on the underlying economy and if we do that right, if we do that well, and I’m confident that we will, then after some very tough times, and after a lot of hardship on the part of some of the people that I hear from every day who’ve lost their jobs or don’t have health insurance or what have you, that we’re going to get this economy moving again. And I think over the long term we’re going to be much better off.

Q. Are you sleeping sir or is it hard to sleep?

A. Ohhhhh, I always sleep because when I’m not sleeping I’m working.

Q. You never feel burdened by it, though? You’ve come into – there are so many problems that the country faces. Do you feel the weight of that now as president?

A. As I said feel as if I’ve got a great team and we are making the best decisions under the circumstances. Do I wish that I had the luxury of maybe dealing with one monumental problem at a time during the course of the year? Of course and in fact, you know, you’ve been hearing sort of our opposition lately saying, ‘Well, he’s trying to do this and that and the other, and he shouldn’t – ‘Look, I wish I had the luxury of just dealing with a modest recession or just dealing with health care or just dealing with energy or just dealing with Iraq or just dealing with Afghanistan. I don’t have that luxury and I don’t think the American people do either. We’ve got to use this moment to solve some big problems once and for all so that the next generation is not saddled with even worse problems than we have right now. All right? Thanks.

******

At 2:30 p.m., President Obama called The New York Times, saying he wanted to clarify a point from the interview. Here is a transcript of that brief call:

President Obama: Just one thing I was thinking about as I was getting on the copter. It was hard for me to believe that you were entirely serious about that socialist question. I did think it might be useful to point out that it wasn’t under me that we started buying a bunch of shares of banks. It wasn’t on my watch. And it wasn’t on my watch that we passed a massive new entitlement – the prescription drug plan without a source of funding. And so I think it’s important just to note when you start hearing folks through these words around that we’ve actually been operating in a way that has been entirely consistent with free-market principles and that some of the same folks who are throwing the word socialist around can’t say the same.

Q. So who’s watch are we talking about here?

A. Well, I just think it’s clear by the time we got here, there already had been an enormous infusion of taxpayer money into the financial system. And the thing I constantly try to emphasize to people if that coming in, the market was doing fine, nobody would be happier than me to stay out of it. I have more than enough to do without having to worry the financial system. The fact that we’ve had to take these extraordinary measures and intervene is not an indication of my ideological preference, but an indication of the degree to which lax regulation and extravagant risk taking has precipitated a crisis.

I think that covers it.