It wasn’t obvious from his demeanor in the press conference at Fort Hood last night, but November 5, 2009, was probably the worst day of Lieut. General Robert Cone’s life. A commander takes every death personally, but senseless deaths of this kind hit especially hard. Administrative duties are the way ahead on this tragedy: tend to the wounded and families, honor the dead, clean up, investigate, assess. Cone will be glad of such preoccupations in the days to come.

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As the tale of the “New Karine A” develops, one alarm bell it sets off concerns the ease with which the arms transshipment was brought off in plain sight. The ship the Israelis caught with the arms was M/V Francop, a freighter operated by Cyprus-based United Feeder Services. The crew onboard didn’t know what they were carrying, and didn’t carry it from Iran anyway: they picked their cargo up in Damietta, Egypt. The Israelis had tracked Francop from Beirut to Damietta and knew the cargo was loaded there. That means the arms themselves were shipped from Iran to Egypt by other means. Sounds like a story we’ve heard before about Port Sudan and overland convoys to Gaza, right?

Not really. The port of Damietta is neither a remote spot in the desert nor a sleepy Sudanese port. It’s one of Egypt’s premier seaports, located on the Mediterranean near the entrance to the Suez Canal. Damietta has some distinctive claims to fame: it’s in a heavily promoted Egyptian free-trade zone and is operated by DIPCO, an international consortium of private maritime-service companies whose pathbreaking development project at Damietta serves as a model for a global trend toward the private development and operation of ports.

Private administration of customs and cargo verification, the functions that might detect arms shipments, is not unusual. But under these conditions, transshipments of cargo through free-trade zones — shipments offloaded only to await further transportation to another country — are especially likely to receive a hand wave. The port operator’s priority is to tally containers and assess fees, not to break open containers and inspect their contents. Damietta’s convenient location in the eastern Mediterranean means that transshipments represent a large majority of its container traffic. Most of what stops there is merely waiting onward transportation and interests neither Egypt nor the port-services operator.

A big shipment from Iran, meanwhile, would raise no eyebrows in Damietta. Iran’s state shipping line, IRISL, was one of the first shipping companies to contract with DIPCO for services in Damietta, and two of IRISL’s subsidiaries make regular stops there. Containers bearing the IRISL logo are routinely present.

It would be hard to dream up a set of circumstances more conducive to perfunctory supervision of cargo. But these same circumstances represent a cash cow for Egypt. Private companies optimizing the profitability of port operations are a moneymaker, not only for growing economies but also for the Middle Eastern nations in which many of the companies (like DIPCO’s leader, Kuwait & Gulf Lines Ltd.) are based. The beneficiaries of this trend will kick hard against any inefficiency introduced by the administration of UN sanctions. Ultimately, intermediate transshipment ports aren’t going to represent effective pressure points for arms interdiction. The most effective pressure point would, as usual, be Iran itself, and that reality demands not so much administrative meticulousness as political will.

You’ll want to cue up an old vinyl LP of the Red Army Chorus for this one. Russia, as CONTENTIONS regulars know, held its largest military exercise since the collapse of the Soviet Union this August and September. The maneuvers spanned Russia from the Barents Sea to the Far East, but the most politically significant aspect of this exercise by the combined forces was its intimidating footprint in Eastern Europe.

The European maneuvers, held on the shores of the Baltic Sea (“Ladoga-2009”) and in Belarus (“Zapad-2009”), have been summarized in the last week by independent media observers. For the peoples of the NATO alliance, the view these reports provide of the Russians’ concept and intentions is the opposite of reassuring. Indeed, public opinion might well conclude that Russia’s big exercises in Eastern Europe had something to do with Obama’s decision to scrap the ground-based interceptor site in Poland. It would at least deem Obama’s announcement to be ill-timed, from the standpoint of NATO integrity in the face of Russian challenges.

The first Russian troops arrived in Belarus for Zapad-2009 on September 9, sparking protests from nationalists who favor better ties with the West. Russia moved just under 26,000 total troops into Belarus and Western Russia, avoiding the threshold at which the Conventional Forces Europe treaty would oblige Moscow to invite NATO observers. The number was persuasive to Belarus, however. Minsk had, as recently as June, been resisting inclusion in Moscow’s regional collectives, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). But a month of fraternal amity from the Russian army has put them in a better frame of mind in Minsk, and on October 2 President Lukashenko declared a positive passion for joining the CSTO, a consummation realized today. We can only speculate as to the effect of Obama’s September 17 shift regarding missile-defense policy on Lukashenko’s calculations during that crucial period.

Russian activity on the border of Poland, meanwhile, sent a trenchant political message. Ladoga-2009’s notional pretext for the use of armed forces was an uprising of ethnic Poles in Belarus who, in conjunction with Lithuanian terrorists, were attacking Kaliningrad. The absurd improbability of this was matched by the operational overkill, reflected in Russian media releases, of incorporating air-delivered nuclear weapons and the strategic rocket forces in the fight to retake Russian territory. The battle for Kaliningrad also entailed an amphibious reinforcement operation and the repulsion of a NATO-like force by the 76th air-assault division.

Of course, Dmitry Medvedev says these exercises were “defensive.” Such exercises, as the Wehrmacht of the 1930s would have told us, always are. But it would have been hard for Obama to time his missile-defense announcement any worse. Belarus’s feeble resistance to Russian domination looks to be all but extinguished. Next time, Russia may well take a leaf out of Germany’s 1936 playbook: deploy as many troops as possible for these maneuvers and simply ignore any CFE obligations.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union favored certain methods: sponsoring Marxist insurrections, training guerrillas, and arming terrorists. Revolutionary Iran remains an ambitious student of these practices. Its regional outreach now extends well beyond Lebanon and Gaza, and the anti-Semitic character of Iran’s proxy campaign is impossible to miss.

In Yemen, as reported last week, Iran has been caught red-handed supplying arms to Shia rebels in the northwest. A Wall Street Journal item from the weekend also reminds us that the dwindling Jewish population of Yemen has borne much of the brunt of this proxy alliance. Over the past year, a small, centuries-old Jewish community has found itself under escalating attack. Following an explicitly anti-Semitic murder in December 2008, the nation’s Jews have been fleeing, family by family, to Israel and the U.S.

Yemen is one of only two countries on the Arabian Peninsula that still — for now — host Jewish communities with identifiable synagogues. The other is Bahrain, which has only a few dozen Jews but has been a regional leader in protecting their rights and encouraging them to remain in the country of their birth. The emir even sent his sole Jewish parliamentarian to Washington in 2008 as Bahrain’s ambassador. Following President Obama’s June 2009 appeal for Arab nations to make diplomatic overtures to Israel, Bahrain’s crown prince took the lead in exhorting the region’s Arabs on that head.

But Bahrain is a Shia majority nation and is under the perennial threat of proxy subversion by Iran, which made its first attempt at a Bahraini revolution in 1981. In February 2009, an Iranian official set off alarm bells with his comment that Bahrain is Iran’s “14th province,” prompting Bahrain to withdraw from natural-gas talks with its northern neighbor. But politics in the Sunni-ruled emirate dictate walking a narrow line, and in June Manama closed down a newspaper that was critical of the Iranian regime after its disputed election. In October, Bahrain signaled its willingness to resume the natural-gas talks. And last week its lower house of parliament, which has substantial Shia representation, voted to prohibit all contact by Bahrainis with Israel.

Within days of the Bahraini vote, an al-Shabaab militant across the region in Somalia was issuing that group’s first known threats to attack Israel. This should be no surprise; al-Shabaab is an al-Qaeda-linked group but has a long association with Iran through its parentage in the Islamic Courts Union, which seized control of southern Somalia in 2006. That was also the year Iran reportedly sponsored 700 Somali jihadists operating in Lebanon.

Bear in mind that this is what revolutionary Iran does without nuclear weapons. For now, a tougher and more reassuring posture by the U.S. could bolster the confidence regional leaders need to oppose these proxy threats. But an Iran with the bomb will have a shield behind which to act even more aggressively through its proxies. Every sign says that’s exactly what it will do.

John Noonan at the Weekly Standard and Max Boot fear that the compromise option Obama is considering for Afghanistan portends a bad decision. Regrettably, mainstream media reporting is unlikely to help Americans understand why. New York Times reporters faithfully reproduce the terms used by administration officials: adopting some elements from McChrystal’s plan and some from the Biden strategy of terrorist-hunting, with a lower number of additional troops presumably justified by the decision not to adopt the entire McChrystal plan. Noonan refers to it as “splitting the baby.”

These essentially methodological terms obscure the real issue, however, which is that truncating McChrystal’s plan inherently changes the objective. If Obama indeed chooses the compromise option outlined in the Times, he will not be telling McChrystal to approach the same objective in a different way. He will be telling McChrystal not to approach it at all.

Max has ably developed the essentials of the McChrystal proposal to secure areas of the Afghan countryside against the Taliban by immunizing the population against insurgent tactics through a multipronged approach, and by focusing on key terrain: transportation routes, the Helmand valley agricultural area, and selected positions in western and eastern Afghanistan that the Taliban cannot be allowed to hold. McChrystal’s plan also, of course, envisions protecting key cities and continuing to train Afghan forces. But it’s the emphasis on securing the countryside—which otherwise will be ruled and used by the Taliban—that demands the bulk of the 40,000 troops.

With only 10,000-20,000 additional troops, the countryside cannot be secured. Obama’s advisers have propounded this issue in honest terms: The Biden group avowedly sees no value in securing the Afghan countryside against the Taliban. There are vague references instead to concluding deals with “moderate” Taliban—a concept that in practice would amount to favoring some Taliban against their tribal enemies.

Given NATO’s numbers and superior armament, a handful of cities could probably be protected for some time under these conditions, although commerce and development would suffer. But a trained Afghan force, once security were turned over to it, would face the Taliban’s holding the majority of Afghan territory after just one or two years of the Obama administration’s compromise option. This option is not a strategy for leaving Afghanistan secure. It would inevitably be seen in the region as a strategy for American convenience and would complete the rollback from Bush’s transformative approach to one of retaining fortified bases from which to conduct homicidal raids against terrorists — while Central Asia is left to descend into chaos. Local rebellion against such a policy seems all but guaranteed.

The compromise option carries a fundamentally different objective from the one McChrystal’s plan seeks to achieve. The objective is the essential issue, not the methodology. This is a baby that cannot be split; it can only be thrown out with the bath water.

The Obama administration’s foreign policy of being all things to all people now faces a new roadblock: a warning from UN special investigator Philip Alston that our drone attacks on terrorists may amount to “extrajudicial executions,” and that they require, at the very least, better explanation to the UN. (H/t: Hot Air)

What the military calls a “quick-look analysis” highlights two points immediately. First, if we take this concern seriously—if we set the standard for the world in cooperation with the UN—doing so will almost certainly render the Biden strategy for standoff terrorist-hunting in Central Asia impossible to execute.

Second, we have now been elected to the UN Human Rights Council, the body that would take up a report from the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Arbitrary, or Summary Executions. From this position, and given Obama’s ostentatious and categorical commitments to multilateral cooperation and national humility, stonewalling the Alston report would only amplify an appearance of hypocrisy, cynicism, and superpower arrogance.

These are the questions Mr. Alston proposes to have answered:

“I would like to know the legal basis upon which the United States is operating, in other words… who is running the program, what accountability mechanisms are in place in relation to that,” Alston said.

“Secondly, what precautions the United States is taking to ensure that these weapons are used strictly for purposes consistent with international humanitarian law.

“Third, what sort of review mechanism is there to evaluate when these weapons have been used? Those are the issues I’d like to see addressed,” the UN official said.

The question we need to ask is what precedent it would set to allow the UN to interrogate us according to a putatively supranational agenda on these matters. It’s obvious that mere compliance with the interrogation process would cede to the UN a theoretical veto over our methods of national defense. Nations that have relied on the U.S. to affirm the principles of national sovereignty will be watching very closely how we handle this; some, like France, are likely to urge Obama to weather the charge of hypocrisy and arrogance rather than submit to a UN veto.

No stars had to align to bring this conflict of commitments to a head. Obama set himself up for it with his own policies.

Iranian ships loaded with weapons keep turning up in the darnedest places. The latest report is that Yemeni authorities on Monday seized an Iranian ship in their waters trying to deliver anti-armor rounds to Yemen’s Shia Zaidi rebels. Especially noteworthy is that the ship was seized on Yemen’s Red Sea coast. Yemenis say the ship is not the first to pull into the Eritrean port of Asmara and then cross the Red Sea to deliver weapons to the Zaidi insurgents. The Yemeni press, in fact, reports that Iran is training Zaidi rebels in Eritrea. Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh insisted earlier this year that the Zaidi (or al-Houthi) rebels are being trained by Hezbollah.

Iran’s 2008 basing agreement with Eritrea has received minimal attention in the West, in part because there is little new information on any developments related to it. Radio France International reported in May that Iranian warships and a submarine had been observed in Asmara along with a unit of Iran’s Pasdaran, the Revolutionary Guard’s paramilitary force. If a submarine were actually present, it would have been one of Iran’s mini-submarines, small one- or two-man submersibles with a very restricted range of operations. Iran has long cultivated a mini-submarine threat to shipping in restricted waters. As for the warships, Iran is using Asmara for the replenishment of its antipiracy patrol ships.

Israel, of course, has expressed concern over this Iranian Red Sea presence, and analysts have connected it with the overland arms route for Hamas, interdicted in a dramatic air raid over Sudan in February. Somalia watchers continue to warn that Iranian arms are flowing to al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda-affiliated insurgency in southern Somalia, through Eritrea. Riyadh is now increasingly concerned about Iran’s support to the Yemeni rebels, whose stronghold in western Yemen is on the poorly guarded border with Saudi Arabia. The rebels claimed last week that they came under attack from Saudi forces when operating near the border, a credible claim given the level of Saudi disquiet.

The evidence is relentless: arming regional insurgents and terrorists is what Iran commits its limited resources to. Arranging forward logistics for the effort in a strategically positioned port is a measure of that commitment. The same commitment is to be expected to threats like holding global shipping at risk and deploying ballistic missiles to the Red Sea coast. We are already seeing the regional initiatives Iran will feel even freer to mount once it has nuclear weapons. It is a fatal error to suppose that we will feel just as free, under those conditions, to oppose them.

One thing Jennifer’s summary suggests is that all the saga needed was a spoofable name for Iran’s lately revealed uranium-enrichment site near Qom. And here it is: Fordo. In Iran, the name commemorates a town’s war dead. In the West, of course, it not only sounds like Tolkien’s Frodo but is the name of a minor character in the Star Wars series, something you know if you have a lot of nephews who like Star Wars and Legos. Some allusive levity is not inappropriate as a response to the international community’s solemn effort at the Fordo site. President Obama’s guns have already been spiked regarding this site, and now, with the UN inspection, we’re just putting administrative checks in the block.

The salient point about the site near Qom was that it was undeclared. According to the intelligence Obama himself cited, it was not, as of the end of September, thought to be even close to operational yet. With Iran having now declared it a nuclear-related site, an IAEA inspection that reveals it to be a nuclear-related site, but not yet an operational one, will confirm nothing Iran has not already had to face up to. In a political sense, the inspection process mainly gives Iran a cheap opportunity to appear truthful, if belatedly so.

Indeed, the intelligence estimate that no enrichment has yet started at Fordo means there is not even a basis for supposing that it has been deceptively scrubbed for the inspection. We are in agreement with Iran on what we expect to find there; confirming our expectations is meaningless to building an actionable case against Tehran’s nuclear program. In that sense, the value of the dramatic Qom announcement expired as soon as it was made.

What’s next after the inspection is reported out? With the site declared and inspected, there is no new basis for insisting that it or other nuclear facilities be closed. Fordo’s size — too small to enrich uranium on the scale needed for a peaceful reactor — was mainly a talking point when it was still undeclared, and therefore suspicious. There exists no enforcement standard for demanding closure of the site, as long as Iran will accept IAEA inspections. Nothing prevents Iran from enriching uranium in multiple smaller facilities if it chooses to; the enforcement issues are verifiable declaration and openness to inspection.

The status of the Fordo site became an issue we could not leverage to our advantage as soon as Iran declared it and agreed to permit inspections. Iran, on the other hand, can leverage the official process to establish documentary bona fides — and can then very likely use the site to enrich uranium under an IAEA inspection regime. Fordo is a sideshow; the negotiations over foreign processing of Iran’s existing stock of low-enriched uranium are the center ring. We either make progress in those negotiations, or not at all.

The good news is that the multinational anti-piracy force continues to push Somali pirates eastward into the open waters of the Indian Ocean. Unfortunately, that’s also the bad news. Piracy is harder to patrol and prevent in the open ocean — and it’s also harder to punish.

Suppression of Somali piracy has been largely successful in the Gulf of Aden. But with the end of the summer monsoon season, Somali pirates have gotten back to work in the Indian Ocean, attacking at least eight ships in the last month. On Monday a Chinese coaling freighter was seized nearly 700 miles east of Somalia, further from the coast than any previous hijacking. The seizure occurred, in fact, closer to the Seychelles than to Africa, a circumstance that carries its own set of challenges. The geographic shift of piracy patterns is likely to increase the already significant difficulty of prosecuting pirates: the Seychelles informed France this month that, with its minimal penal infrastructure and a surfeit of already captured pirates, it had no capacity to accept more.

But a pirate could do worse than get detained in the Seychelles. A lively incident in September highlighted what we might call “vulnerabilities” in the arrangements for regional prosecution of pirates. Reconstruction of the garbled event indicates that on September 6, a charter aircraft with 23 pirates aboard flew from the Seychelles to the African continent, apparently landing at Nairobi. The pirates transferred to smaller aircraft and proceeded to a remote airstrip in Somali Puntland, where they were to be exchanged for three Seychellian hostages held by a pirate organization.

Kenyan authorities asserted during this period that the same pirates were being held incommunicado at the Nairobi airport. The government of Puntland, in an official statement, disagreed; and the Seychelles announced on September 13 that its three hostages had been freed. Most press reporting agrees that the 23 pirates disappeared into the Puntland bush. Kenyan journalists, meanwhile, report that piracy is making money for a lot of Kenyans; they speculate, with their Somali counterparts, that the release of pirates from the Seychelles was brokered in Kenya.

Kenya, of course, is the world’s hope for pirate prosecutions, which are not going so well in Europe (e.g., Spain and the Netherlands). The pirates lost to the Puntland caper represent more than 10 percent of the 212 who have been sent to various nations for prosecution. While the soap opera continues, the pirates are growing bolder. The pirates who seized M/V De Xin Hai, the coaling freighter, issued an uncharacteristic warning to China that the crewmen would be killed if any attempt were made to rescue them. Between the pirates and their pursuers, a key difference may be whose threats are actually credible.

Joe Biden and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk agreed to a new missile-defense deal on Tuesday, touted as the improved replacement for the missile-defense plan scrapped by Obama last month. The new plan will put a land-based version of the Navy’s SM-3 — the missile used by its Aegis missile-defense ships — in Poland by 2015. The land-based version of the SM-3 is still in development, but readying it for deployment should be feasible on the administration’s time line. So presto: a missile defense for Europe. We’re back on track, right?

Well, no. We’re not on the same track. The Bush plan for silo-based interceptors in Poland would, along with the defense capability for Europe, have given North America a midcourse intercept defense against long-range ICBMs launched from the east. The SM-3 doesn’t reach the altitude for midcourse intercept of an ICBM (although it might be developed to by the end of the next decade). With the scrapping of the silos in Poland, there is a gap for the eastern approach to North America in our missile-defense concept.

This is why Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has awarded the new plan a benign, if provisional, approval. Obama’s plan does not envision defending America against ICBMs coming from our east, at least until the end of the next decade. Our silo-based interceptors in Alaska and California remain the only deployed elements of a national missile defense. Secretary Gates pointed out, after Obama’s September announcement, that under the new plan, the SM-3 would be further developed to intercept ICBMs, and R&D would continue on the silo-based interceptors. But of course those measures could have been pursued along with a deployment of silo-based interceptors in Poland, which under Bush had been scheduled to begin in 2013.

This modern missile-defense issue is analogous in some ways to the Pershing-II-missile issue of 30 years ago. Like Obama, Jimmy Carter held off deploying a system the Russians objected to, while affirming America’s vigorous intention to develop the capability and someday deploy it. The Russians of 30 years ago were unimpressed with those long-range intentions; what they found informative was Carter’s unwillingness to confront them with an actual deployment. Today’s Russians assuredly find Obama’s missile-defense approach equally informative. They will object to a future ICBM-intercept capability when it emerges — what matters to them today is that Obama has been unwilling to risk their anger by deploying the current one. The means exist for it, but we continue to have no plan in execution for a dedicated missile defense of the U.S. East Coast.

There is little question any longer that we are trying the appeasement approach with Russia. Reassuring another nation that we have absolutely no intention of doing something that might conceivably be in our interest? That’s what appeasement is. When the assurances relate to rumors that have no apparent basis in reality — when we are earnestly promising not to do things we have merely been accused of, as opposed to renouncing those we actually planned — there is an additional aspect of manipulated abjectness that can be considered, shall we say, troubling.

Russian media outlets, citing a Georgian news item, have been advancing the theory that the U.S. plans to establish military bases in Georgia. This theory does not appear to have any basis in fact. Yet a seemingly stray comment from a retired Russian general, cited in an AP report today, picks up the Georgia theme:

Russian retired Gen. Viktor Yesin, the former chief of staff of the Russian military’s Strategic Missile Forces, said Russia’s reaction to [Obama’s] new missile-defense plan will likely be calm unless the U.S. takes what he called provocative moves.

He said Moscow would certainly be angered if the U.S. were to send navy ships with interceptor missiles to the Black Sea or put a missile-defense radar in Georgia.

Assistant Secretary of Defense Alexander Vershbow, visiting Georgia yesterday, was at pains to put these fears to rest. The U.S., he says, is not looking at any non-NATO nations for missile-defense installations — is in fact in consultations with Russia on missile defense — and has no plans for military bases in Georgia.

Diplomacy 101 would tell us not to let the media themes of others maneuver us into giving categorical assurances. Handing such assurances out for free is reactionary and hazardous under almost any circumstances. Beyond what the map informs us about Georgia’s interesting location, which we now cannot leverage without exhibiting bad faith, Vershbow’s uncareful formulation sends random and prejudicial signals about our broader missile-defense policy, our concept of NATO defense, and our posture on the Caucasus and Georgia’s NATO aspirations.

However the Obama administration sees this, what the Russians see is that we would rather reassure them, on their terms, than retain the latitude to affirm U.S. and NATO interests on our terms. Regardless of motive, that posture is one of appeasement. It is past time for the Obama administration to figure that out.

How about when it was not actually solicited by Israel? Most of the media have reported the Stewart Nozette case responsibly enough. The FBI arrested him yesterday in a sting operation in which an FBI agent impersonated a member of Mossad and asked Nozette to sell American secrets. Nozette, a sometime scientist for the U.S. government, has had high-level clearances in the past. Israel’s spy agency was selected for the impersonation in part because Nozette was a contractor for Israel Aerospace Industries and would find that approach credible. Nozette had reportedly also told a colleague that he would sell secrets to Israel or another unnamed country in certain circumstances. The FBI affirmed on Monday that Israel had not broken any U.S. laws. Indeed, the suspicious overseas trip taken by Nozette in January, which set the FBI’s operation in motion, was not to Israel but to another unnamed country.

So why is Marc Ambinder looking for clues about what information the Israelis might have been targeting? It is not apparent that the Israelis were targeting anything. This was a sting operation, not the interdiction of espionage solicited by a foreign government. The FBI affidavit alleges no act of targeting Nozette or his information by a foreign spy agency. Nozette’s own behavior was what alerted the FBI to his potential susceptibility. Anyone who has had clearances has secrets to sell, but nothing in this episode indicates that the Israelis were looking for the particular ones Nozette has.

Nozette will probably deserve whatever he gets. But let’s wait until espionage involves actual evidence of initiation by a foreign government — as with Cuban spies in the State Department, Chinese spies in an NSA facility in Hawaii, and cyber-espionage by Russia and China against the U.S. power grid — before attributing interests to that government in a specific incident.

Smart power spends an awful lot of its time struggling up the hills graded for it by stupid power. The latest eruption of the latter is today’s insurgent bombing in southeastern Iran, which targeted a large contingent of senior Revolutionary Guard officers who were meeting in the region. The bombing appears to have been undertaken for the simplest of insurgent reasons: a vengeful general-purpose attack on representatives of the central government. It was carried out by Baluchi insurgents, a group known as Jundallah, whose grievances are related to ethnic tribalism and the regional narcotics trade as much as to sectarian differences (the Baluchis are Sunni). But its effect on the situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and on the conditions under which the Obama team makes its decisions on strategy and troop levels, could be enduring.

Ahmadinejad has naturally sworn vengeance for the attack, amid Iranian allegations that the U.S. and U.K. are behind it. Just as important, though, the bombing has raised Iran’s stake in the outcome of our Afghanistan policy. Besides reeling from popular unrest after the June election, the Tehran regime faces the prospect of a succession crisis on the Guardian Council. It cannot tolerate destabilization from a spillover of the Taliban guerrillas fleeing Pakistan’s internal crackdown. That spillover, probably seen as both a problem and an opportunity, is what brought the Revolutionary Guard’s leadership to the southeastern region this weekend for a strategy meeting.

Iran and Pakistan, after mutual finger-pointing, may well find their solution in a common stance on the Taliban problem. The insurgents fleeing Pakistan will have to go somewhere, and the longer we wait to strengthen our posture, the more likely that somewhere is to be Afghanistan. Iran would have no qualms, in fact, about facilitating at least some Taliban movement into Afghanistan, particularly if Pakistan were to make its western border inhospitable to Jundallah guerrillas. The incentive for Tehran and Islamabad to work together and funnel the Taliban into Afghanistan grows with each insurgent attack on their territory.

The U.S., of course, didn’t have to leave Pakistan to launch its current military push with a single-minded approach and no containment of the consequences. Neither do we have to wait for Iran and Pakistan to shape conditions in Afghanistan for us, in the pursuit of their own interests. But momentum is building for alternatives to our strategic leadership. Truly smart power would recognize that if we do not get a decision made and start shaping this situation ourselves, it will begin dictating terms to us very soon.

If the 2007 Iran NIE were a radioactive element, its half-life might extend well beyond the life spans of men and nations. A Wall Street Journal piece from Saturday reveals that its toxic emissions persist: intelligence officials are now “considering whether to rewrite” it. The piece notes, however, that it would be hard to get it rewritten before President Obama’s “informal” December deadline to Iran. Until the NIE is rewritten, its freighted conclusion affords Obama the official latitude to ignore the most threatening implications of any specific development in Iran’s nuclear program, and concentrate on the process—diplomacy, negotiations, deadlines, headlines—rather than its outcome. On paper, it all looks internally coherent.

But how much longer can we wait on this stately process? Iran has been under UN sanctions since 2006. Since the NIE was written, in the summer of 2007, the number of Iran’s operational centrifuges has increased from just under 2,000 to more than 4,500. Iran’s stock of low-enriched uranium (LEU) has increased from 70 kg in late 2007 to more than 1,300 kg by July 2009. The nuclear weapon “break-out” threshold was passed in February 2009; by February 2010 there will be enough LEU for a second weapon. Iran’s weaponization effort through 2003, known to and dismissed by the NIE’s authors as “suspended,” focused on a payload suitable for the existing Shahab-3 missile that can reach Israel. In May 2009 Iran successfully launched a longer-range Sajjil missile that could reach Europe, with a nuclear warhead, by 2015.

Technically, the 2007 NIE did not ignore the uranium enrichment and missile development aspects of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. It did not even change the 2005 NIE’s projection of when Iran might achieve a usable nuclear weapon. What it did was unprofessionally showcase a single conclusion about a four-year-old development in the weaponization aspect of Iran’s nuclear program, with the apparent purpose of prejudicing the political debate over preemptive action. It also—again unprofessionally—detoured into policy recommendation with its segment on applying international pressure to Iran.

The community’s current foot-dragging comes off not as judicious but as a ploy to time any revised assessment, yet again, for political impact. The consequences of this practice have unfolded at a relentless pace since 2007. Something Americans need to evaluate critically is the very nature of our thinking about preemption and intelligence. Aren’t the developments the intelligence community has acknowledged to date enough of a pretext for a tougher stance with Iran, up to and including preemption? That decision belongs to our political leaders, after all. It was never intelligence’s call to make.

It’s no coincidence that the same week the U.S. and Russia sit down for our first conference on missile-defense cooperation, Nikolai Patrushev, the head of Russia’s national-security council, tells Russian media that the Kremlin will retain the option for “first use” of nuclear weapons in its national-security strategy.

This might seem, on its face, a bit bellicose. But the nature of the statement is not particularly informative; it’s the timing that’s calculated for effect. Little actual change in Russian policy is detectable: Russia disavowed the Soviet-era “no first use” pledge back in 1993 and has had the option of first use embedded in its 1997 and 2000 national-security concepts. The change in policy — if it is a change at all — appears to be a marginal shift toward using nuclear weapons on vaguer and less narrowly defined pretexts.

The timing of the statement is the real story. One valid perspective is that, with Obama having relinquished the sites in Eastern Europe and agreed to missile-defense talks on Moscow’s terms, the Russians see this as the time to drive home their longstanding point that a strategic nuclear balance is the way to maintain stability — as opposed to Reagan’s concept of obviating nuclear advantage through effective defenses.

A more historical perspective emerges if we consider when Soviet Russia made the “no first strike” pledge — 1982 — and what happened the following year. Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983, and his guiding principle prevailed in U.S. policy until last month, when Obama backed down unconditionally from the vision of a comprehensive global missile shield. Recent Russian statements confirm that the Kremlin’s chagrin over SDI has not receded: it regards the ability to hold the U.S. and our allies at risk with nuclear weapons as an indispensable element of Russia’s security. Obama is on the threshold of requiting one of the Russians’ longest-held aspirations, who would be very pleased to get the political debate in the West back on the footing of the “throw weight” years in the 1960s and 1970s. The more we talked about Soviet first use back then, the more we constrained ourselves in both strategic negotiations and regional competition.

History, in fact, brings us full circle, because the Soviets’ 1982 pledge was nothing but an “informational” ploy, designed to influence our behavior. Their actual intention to make first use of nukes never wavered, as post-Soviet historians have revealed. The Russians no doubt now believe that their 1982 gambit went badly for them. This week’s first-use announcement is a gambit to recover what Putin sees as their losses from a misguided move 27 years ago.

History offers other perspectives, too. As with Britain, France, and Germany’s remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, it’s our declared security concept that is giving way in 2009.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post suggest that this year’s Nobel Peace Prize should have gone to Iran’s imprisoned and battered reform protesters (specifically, said the Post, to Neda Agha-Soltan) instead of to Barack Obama. Both op-eds focus on the encouragement such an award would have been for the cause of political reform in Iran; the Journal also speculates that a Nobel might have made a difference to the fate of the three Iranian dissidents sentenced to death over the weekend for their participation in the post-election protests.

Iran’s reformers have unquestionably exemplified courage in their fight against a regime that, since the June 12 election, has demonstrated the depraved cruelty of Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and other Marxist paradises of the last century. The death sentences handed down for political dissent cap months of reporting on the brutal torture, rape, and even beating deaths of imprisoned protesters. Iranians mounting the Qods (Jerusalem) Day protests on September 18 were already aware of the horrific fates of protesters like those outlined here, here, here, here, and here. Yet as the regime cracks down, the Web is alive with the sound of optimism about the mood in Iran and the prospects for reform, as in the chat-forum comments here and this Frontline piece from Tehran. In a like spirit, former president Mohammad Khatami, a political moderate now publicly aligned with besieged reform leaders Mousavi and Kourabi, posted a defiant declaration on his website after the death sentences were announced, assuring Iranians that the reform movement would not die.

In the face of this bravery, our Nobel-winning president has gone beyond his original hands-off posture on Iran’s internal business, and even beyond his administration’s affirmation in early August that Ahmadinejad is Iran’s “elected president.” Now Obama’s USAID organization has decided to cut off funding for the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. The IHRDC, whose principal current project is documenting abuse of reform protesters since the June election, was first funded under Bush five years ago and has extensively documented the brutality of the Islamic revolutionary regime, including its assassination campaign against dissidents abroad and the 1988 massacre of political prisoners.

The CATO Institute’s Ted Galen Carpenter interprets this USAID decision as a “relatively minor concession” by the Obama administration to establish “Washington’s goodwill” in talks with Iran. The State Department has declined to give a reason for the funding cut-off. We should expect none, of course. A Nobel Peace Prize means never having to explain your lack of interest in human rights.

Critics of President Obama’s Nobel award are wrong when they say he hasn’t done anything yet. If you think the world would be safer with Russia having an effective veto over NATO’s missile defenses, you will agree Obama has already accomplished a lot.

There is more to be done, however. Russian delight over Obama’s decision to scrap the missile-defense sites in Europe is fading quickly. As many predicted, Moscow dislikes the sea-based missile-defense concept as much as it did the ground-based interceptors. One problem with a sea-based missile defense is that Aegis warships have to be deployed to set it up. Defending Europe against missiles launched from Iran dictates deploying warships in the Eastern Mediterranean, Black Sea, or Baltic Sea, areas Russia is notoriously sensitive about.

But the other problem is the same one the Russians raised with the sites in Europe. Wherever we propose to put Aegis ships, Moscow will suspect that they can intercept missiles launched from Russia and will accuse the U.S. of “targeting Russia” with our missile defenses. This is exactly what Russia’s envoy to NATO is now doing, mere weeks after Obama’s policy concession. Indeed, Moscow now evinces an eye-opening air of entitlement to explanations on this head.

NATO, meanwhile, is renewing its search for greater cooperation with Russia on missile defense, with implications for the tactical ground-based systems assumed to be options in the Obama plan. Technological disparities between NATO and Russia make meaningful integration doubtful in the short run. This could give more prominence to technologically awkward, politically driven “solutions,” such as NATO accepting a role for Russia’s premier S-400 air defense system in its southern European defenses. Russia is already in negotiations with both Turkey and Greece over the S-400 and thus has an existing interest that is in direct competition with the U.S. Patriot. If Turkey and Greece host upgraded tactical missile-defense systems for NATO, those systems may not be ours.

A NATO missile-defense system over which Russia can exercise an inside veto is a Nobel-worthy experiment indeed. One thing we can say is that few cowboys would take a chance on it.

Even Nobel Peace Prize winners have to read the full instructions (“RTFI”). Blogger Omri Ceren noted yesterday that the new Obama policy posture on the Taliban looks, inevitably, like a stenographer’s copy of the dictation from the Taliban earlier in the week. The Taliban announce they are not enemies of the West; Obama announces the Taliban are not the enemy we need to fight. Instead of securing Afghanistan against them, says Obama, we must get down to the business of disrupting, dismantling, and defeating al-Qaeda.

But Obama and his advisers have missed a crucial line of the instructions. To avoid the Taliban’s enmity, Western forces have to leave Afghanistan. The Taliban have been very clear on this for some time. They warned Obama to leave Afghanistan the day of his inauguration. They warned the West to leave Afghanistan in September 2008 and in May 2007. Prior to this week’s affirmation of non-enmity, the Taliban warned us to leave on September 19.

Some grudging conciliation has been evident in the typical Taliban warning, like this one from Mullah Omar in 2008:

If you demonstrate an intention of withdrawing your forces, we once again will demonstrate our principles by giving you the right of safe passage, in order to show that we never harm anyone maliciously.

So the language of October 7 — “We did not have any agenda to harm other countries including Europe, nor we have such agenda today” — is also nothing new. Certainly it implies no new context for the accompanying demand that “the American rulers and their allies of the coalition . . . put an end to the game of occupying Afghanistan,” or the warning that the Taliban “have an unwavering determination and have braced for a prolonged war.”

The emerging Obama policy is destined to run afoul of these instructions from the Taliban. Fighting, in Obama’s formulation, “only to keep the Taliban from retaking control of Afghanistan’s central government and from offering Al Qaeda a sanctuary,” has to entail keeping Western forces in Afghanistan. This, given the unflagging consistency of the Taliban’s posture, will be an insurmountable show stopper for light-footprint al-Qaeda-hunting. Moreover, even if Obama can make headway with the approach of co-opting some Taliban factions in order to retain a U.S. position in Afghanistan, the moral hazards and unintended consequences incident to that strategy are breathtaking. If the American people don’t rebel against such cynical opportunism from jihadists, the Russians will.

I would say the world’s newest Nobel laureate has his work cut out for him, but the fact is, he’s cutting it out himself. The burden, we cannot forget, will be borne by our troops.

While the Obama administration performs an administrative signal check (“Give me that definition of ‘COIN’ again?”), Iran and NATO are moving ahead to shape the president’s decision criteria. CBS News aired a segment on Wednesday about Iran’s increasing support to the Taliban in western Afghanistan, support that includes an especially lethal type of armor-piercing explosive device. (H/t: Hot Air) An important feature of this development is that it extends Taliban effectiveness beyond the traditional stronghold of Kandahar, on the Pakistani border, and into Afghanistan’s westernmost provinces. In combination with the non-Taliban Islamist insurgents in eastern Afghanistan, the Iran-Taliban connection creates a growing menace to NATO forces from east, south, and now west of Kabul. The problem of interdicting Taliban supplies is also extended to include both Pakistan and Iran.

As Afghan insurgents gain territorial influence, NATO logistics are increasingly reliant on airlift through Central Asia. Russia played a diplomatic game with the availability of Kyrgyzstan’s Manas air base in February and could do so again at any time. Nevertheless, NATO is pressing Russia this week for greater involvement in Afghanistan, to include not only a higher volume of traffic through Kyrgyzstan but also Russian participation in the training of Afghan security forces. The NATO appeal, made by Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, can hardly avoid appearing as a desperate move by Europe, with Washington hunkered down trying to agree on its staffing terms.

President Obama has a difficult problem in Afghanistan and a tough decision to make. In key ways, his situation mirrors Bush’s in 2006: deteriorating conditions in theater, the military commander recommending a strategy change, coalition partners off devising their own plans. The magnitude of what he is facing should not be minimized, and General McChrystal has asked for a major policy commitment that certainly merits the most careful consideration.

But the situation in the “war of necessity” is changing by the day, if not by the hour. The attack on a joint U.S.-Afghan outpost in Nuristan last weekend was a combat attack, with hundreds of armed fighters using grenades and rockets against a military outpost. It was a disquieting harbinger of a shift in guerrilla tactics, from improvised roadside bombs to military-style attacks on NATO forces in garrison. Both in Afghanistan and elsewhere, American indecision motivates all the players in this drama to improvise for their own purposes in the interim. Policy is never made in a vacuum, and the longer we wait, the less latitude we will have.

An “information theme” appears to be emerging from the Obama administration this week: that our operations against al-Qaeda have made real progress, that our counterterrorism intelligence is performing well, and that the numbers of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan are small and dwindling. Robert Haddick at Small Wars Journal picked up on this theme yesterday. Citing complementary articles in the New York Times and the Washington Post, he discerned an administration narrative according to which the combination of preventive intelligence and stand-off strikes against al-Qaeda operatives is protecting America from terrorist attacks.

Today an AP story flogs the theme further, featuring the additional point that fewer than 100 of al-Qaeda’s “core fighters” remain in Afghanistan, and adding James Jones’s point from his CNN appearance on Sunday that the Taliban aren’t likely to regain control there. Meanwhile, Obama visited the national Counterterrorism Intelligence Center on Tuesday and praised national intelligence for its role in successes against al-Qaeda, “especially in recent months and days.” Factored into these successes, as Haddick points out, are both the breakup of the Najibullah Zazi terrorist plot and the continuing series of “surgical strikes” on terrorists overseas.

That the administration appears to be building its case for an Afghanistan policy shift obliquely, through the synchronized emission of talking points, is one story. Another is the neutrality — or should we say passivity — of the mainstream media as its vehicle. We would imagine such cooperation in vain if a campaign to shape the public narrative had been orchestrated by the Bush administration. But none of the hostile skepticism routinely applied by the media to Bush’s comparatively straightforward policy statements is detectable here.

This is the more remarkable because valid concerns about shifting to a Bidenesque, standoff, counterterrorism posture loom so large. General McChrystal thinks Afghanistan is vulnerable to recapture by Islamist warlords. Failing to secure the country could make the NATO posture untenable in the short run and allow warlords to regain control of it in the long run, thus ceding to Islamists of various stripes a safe haven again. Henry Kissinger, in a very worthwhile essay this week, outlines a larger context. Afghanistan is a key to our relations with its neighbors — Russia, China, India, Iran — and working with them represents an indispensable opportunity. But the equities these nations have in Afghan stability also limit our latitude to act narrowly, by focusing solely on an al-Qaeda manhunt.

No hint of such caveats is marring the accurate transmission of the new Obama administration’s themes. It’s downright refreshing to see the mainstream media assume a “straight reporting” posture and not try to reframe the sitting administration’s message with prejudicial adjectives and allusions. The outcome looks oddly shallow and tendentious, however — less like a judicious assessment from the administration and more like an obvious ploy.

As Jennifer points out, James Jones isn’t helping. The flap over the McChrystal speech has overshadowed comments Jones made on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday show, in which he gave a brief assessment that was, as we say in the military, “180-out” from McChrystal’s. The Washington Post quotes this excerpt from the Jones interview:

“I think the end is much more complex than just about adding X number of troops,” Jones said on CNN. . . . “But I don’t foresee the return of the Taliban, and I want to be very clear that Afghanistan is not in imminent danger of falling.”

Jones explains that he and McChrystal are not really in disagreement, because McChrystal’s more pessimistic predictions are “hypothetical” — a characterization that implies there is such a thing as a non-hypothetical prediction. What appears clear, other than that Jones and McChrystal are working from different hypotheses, is that the administration perceives a need for obfuscation.

If Obama himself were emitting clear signals about what he is committed to in Afghanistan, this kind of fundamental opposition among his advisers would be effectively muted. The republic has survived such disagreements many times. But Obama has ordered a wholesale reconsideration of his policy for the second time in six months, without stating an intelligible purpose for it or making a clear case for what prompted it. In the face of his public silence, the Obama policy on Afghanistan has to be deduced from older pronouncements, the elliptical and contradictory statements of his officials, and meeting notes, like this passage reported by WaPo:

One question at the core of the [administration’s] debate is whether the military benefit of sending additional U.S. combat forces to Afghanistan would outweigh the propaganda victory such a deployment would give the Taliban, which appeals to the public with messages of resistance to the foreign occupation.

It was clear during the Bush years that absurd propositions like this one — that the Taliban would have us right where they want us if we sent more troops — got only the consideration they deserved. There was a constant posture, an irreducible policy commitment, by which to predict the fate of such debating points. Obama’s signals, however, are Delphic in their ambiguity, and each signal from his subordinates and their deliberations are correspondingly more significant. What we may be seeing soon is the “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?” signal McChrystal was warned about — coming, in this case, from our NATO allies and the American people.

When he visited Moscow in August, Binyamin Netanyahu is reported to have handed over a list of Russian scientists who, according to Israeli intelligence, are working on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The implications of this about Russia’s credibility as a partner in suppressing that program are obvious. But since neither Moscow nor Washington actually needed Bibi to point this information out, his visit was more likely a diplomatic confrontation than an advisory exchange.

Russia’s hand has been all over Iran’s nuclear program for years, from refurbishing the Bushehr reactor and supplying Iran with low-enriched uranium to Russian scientists providing blueprints for the plutonium reactor at Arak. Russia’s overt involvement has naturally created suspicion about covert involvement. So has a steady pattern of other developments.

Most of the global incidents of nuclear smuggling since the first major outbreak in 1994 map back in one way or another to Russia. Since 2003, meanwhile, Iran has been the main potential customer. Smuggling of dual-use technology and even fissile material continued through the mid-2000s, and has not been confined to the machinations of Pakistanis. British and German criminal cases opened in 2007 revealed networks that involved not just Russian-originated material, but smuggling routes into Iran through Russia.

The U.S. sought to interdict Russia’s nuclear sales to Iran back in the mid-1990s, and launched programs under Clinton and Bush to reduce Russia’s uranium stockpiles and find work for Russian scientists. However, Congress concluded in 2008 that we were, in effect, paying for the participation of Russian scientists in Iran’s nuclear program. This policy inconsistency was spotlighted in October 2008 by the IAEA revelation that one of its “Western intelligence documents” detailed a Russian scientist’s participation in nuclear warhead tests in Iran. In the wake of the Russia-Georgia war, the IAEA disclosure prompted Bush to suspend activities under the “Megatons to Megawatts” program.

We have predicated policy for years on Russian involvement in multiple ways—some nefarious—in Iran’s nuclear program. Even if we accept the theory that some of these activities are not approved by the Kremlin, Moscow’s failure to control them cannot possibly be cast in a positive light. Neither complicity nor ineptitude argues for Russian utility as a negotiating partner. Amenability in Moscow to “partnership” parses best as a means of stringing both Iran and the West along. It may be that we can’t dispense with Russian partnership in dealing with Iran; but we could at least resume the Clinton-Bush policy of buying it with cash, rather than paying for it with concessions on our deterrence posture and security. Cash was a better measure of what it has been worth.

There’s defying parody, and then there’s declaring war on it and bringing reinforcements. Richard Wolffe is in full war-on-parody mode at the Daily Beast today as he riffs on “Why Israel Hates Obama.” It’s not, he assures us, because Obama has surrounded himself with self-hating Jews. Even if Bibi had said that to Haaretz—and he didn’t—Wolffe has the hard evidence to the contrary.

As he points out, the president is definitely not “surrounded by Jewish aides who want to sabotage their own identity. Far from it. David Axelrod openly reveres the old Jewish deli in Chicago known as Manny’s.” That’s a lot, of course, but there’s also a clincher: “He has a sign in his West Wing office saying Barack Obama in Hebrew script.”

Although it’s hard to top that for identity affirmation, Wolffe may be looking in the wrong place for the evidence against Obama actually being adduced by Israelis, who showed only 4 percent confidence that Obama is pro-Israel in the last Jerusalem Post poll. The fault lies not in Obama’s aides, but in himself. It was Obama who demanded a “settlement freeze” in May as a condition to moving the peace process forward. It was Obama who declared, in his speech to the Muslim Arab world in June, that “the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements,” and Obama, again, who reiterated that position to the UN last week.

As Netanyahu has repeatedly pointed out, this stance assumes an a priori position on something that remains to be negotiated. It’s certainly the opposite of an even-handed approach by a mediator. We do not have information on any Obama-themed Hebrew décor that may be in Bibi’s office, but it’s possible that that’s not the best measure of fealty to either Jewish identity or the survival of Israel.

The EU this week accepted the final report of its international commission on the Russia-Georgia war of August 2008. Russia is claiming full vindication, although the report actually blames Russian provocations for inciting Georgia’s actions. The headline rubric is “Report blames both sides.” In the end, this is all just paperwork. Georgia is, for all intents and purposes, on life support.

Russia’s patronage of the breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia continues to condition the nature of their “independence” from Georgia. Passports and customs between Russia and the provinces were dispensed with months ago. Russia is establishing military bases in both provinces and retains, by Western estimates, some 6,000 to 10,000 troops in them. Dmitri Medvedev visits frequently. EU monitors, performing an increasingly irrelevant job, find their movements restricted: they have been unable for at least six months to verify the cross-accusations of Russia and Georgia about border provocations.

This month Russia begins allowing Abkhazia to switch from Georgia’s international telephone dialing code to Russia’s. The change comes 10 days after Russia dispatched patrol boats to prevent Georgia from enforcing sovereignty over its territorial waters off Abkhazia. In late August, Russia opened a new natural-gas pipeline into South Ossetia, making the province independent of gas routed through Georgia. More ominously for Georgian gas revenues, Russia got agreement from Turkey in August to host Gazprom’s new “South Stream” pipeline from the Caspian gas fields, which will bypass both Georgia and Ukraine.

The focus of the U.S. in our relations with Georgia is unswerving: we are preparing Georgian troops for a role in Afghanistan. Our posture with Moscow is too eagerly accommodating to give Tbilisi much realistic hope for intervention from Washington. As Mikheil Saakashvili moves in a dense crowd of Georgian political rivals with suspected funding ties to Russia, his government—and the waning independence of the Georgian republic—might consult the VA’s end-of-life planning manual and contemplate such questions as “What makes your life worth living?” and “How would you like to spend your last days?” Russia’s hegemonic policy doesn’t have to kill you outright, after all. It only has to make it impossible for you to keep living.

The Obama administration came into office promising to use “all the elements of national power” (or, in the bumper-sticker version, “smart power”). Why use military force—unilaterally—if diplomacy and economic power and multilateral action can do the trick?

The campaign in Afghanistan, already a multilateral action for the record books, is now framing that question in stark and concrete terms. One reason the Obama administration may have been caught so flat-footed by the troop request from General McChrystal is that the multilateralism of our approach to the Afghan problem has rarely, if ever, been surpassed. Afghanistan has been both NATO-ized and Asianized: it is the major preoccupation of the NATO alliance today, representing the largest overseas deployment of almost every NATO contributor; but it is also the main overseas military commitment of Japan (now under reconsideration), as well as a regional issue with its own standing working group under the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) led by Russia- and China. The SCO, in fact, held a summit conference devoted to Afghanistan in March, attended by U.S. and other NATO representatives, and has treated Afghanistan as one of its main issues in the last five years. (See a good summary of the SCO and Afghanistan here.)

For at least two of those years, pundits and politicians have been making the case that more cooperation between NATO and Russia is the key to success in Afghanistan. Russia is now embedded in the humanitarian effort there and has assumed a de facto patronage of Hamid Karzai’s government. India has become a major commercial investor in Afghanistan, although China is holding back because of the ongoing danger. Pakistan has roused itself to a significant effort against the Taliban in its northwest territories. Even Iran has been welcomed to the fold of multilateral diplomacy on Afghan issues.

America’s top officials in Afghanistan, fully aware of all these dynamics, have forwarded a plan to implement President Obama’s new strategy—one that incorporates and relies on these multilateral, diplomatic, and economic factors. In the process, they determined that if we are to “defeat, dismantle, and disrupt al Qaeda,” it is essential to deny the Taliban any territory by immunizing the population against the Taliban’s guerrilla tactics. But the means to do that cannot be found in cooperation with Russia, commercial investment by India, or the discussion points of SCO working groups. The means for immunizing the Afghan population against the Taliban is boots on the ground.

If Albert Brooks scripted a send-up of self-important “smart power” multilateralism, it would look like the effort in Afghanistan. And in Brooks’s hands, of course, the inevitable comeuppance would be handled with painful honesty. All the multilateralism in Afghanistan—a pragmatic holding strategy for Bush, an ideological sine qua non for Obama—cannot achieve what a unified, military-centered offensive can. If Obama’s objective remains defeating, dismantling, and disrupting al Qaeda, he can achieve it only through the military-centered option.

Our European NATO allies remain unwilling to make more than token additions to their troop strength in Afghanistan. The SCO nations have consistently declined to make military contributions in Afghanistan. If there is to be a military-centered initiative to drive back the Taliban, it will have to undertaken by the U.S. In this most multilateral of operations, the way ahead comes down to an American decision, as it has since 1945.