From the NYT: Bush Decides to Keep Guantánamo Open

Here are the key section:

Despite his stated desire to close the American prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, President Bush has decided not to do so, and never considered proposals drafted in the State Department and the Pentagon that outlined options for transferring the detainees elsewhere, according to senior administration officials.

Mr. Bush’s top advisers held a series of meetings at the White House this summer after a Supreme Court ruling in June cast doubt on the future of the American detention center. But Mr. Bush adopted the view of his most hawkish advisers that closing Guantánamo would involve too many legal and political risks to be acceptable, now or any time soon, the officials said.

…

Mr. Cheney and his chief of staff, David S. Addington, have made it clear in the internal discussions this year that keeping Guantánamo open under a new president would validate the administration’s decisions dealing with terrorists, the officials said.

…

So, to clarify what seems to have happened: President Bush didn’t bother to consider plans drafted by the State Department or Defense Department to close Guantanamo. Since he didn’t consider the plans, he concluded that the political and legal risks were unacceptable. But how can he know that the risks are unacceptable is the plans were not even considered at a high level?

In short, it seems like Cheney’s office blocked consideration of alternative plans simply in order to keep making the argument that the risks are too high, and that the reason for doing so was to try to get the next administration to somehow validate the decision, even though both Obama and McCain (and almost everyone else both in the U.S. and abroad) agree that the prison should be closed.

Brilliant. Don’t let anyone brief you about an alternative plan and then claim that no acceptable alternative plan exists. Policymaking at its finest.

That judgment is apparently one of the conclusions of a new National Intelligence Estimate about Pakistan, according the McClatchy (New intelligence report says Pakistan is ‘on the edge’).

The NIE will apparently highlight several trends:

• “The estimate says that the Islamist insurgency based in the Federally Administered Tribal Area bordering Afghanistan, the suspected safe haven of Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, is intensifying.”
• “Anti-U.S. and anti-government sentiments have grown recently, stoked by stepped-up cross-border U.S. missile strikes and at least one commando raid on suspected terrorist targets in the FATA that reportedly have resulted in civilian deaths.”
• “The government is also facing an accelerating economic crisis that includes food and energy shortages, escalating fuel costs, a sinking currency and a massive flight of foreign capital accelerated by the escalating insurgency, the NIE warns.”

This is all very bad news. Unfortunately, when confronted by bad news, our response is immediately to try to find solutions. In this case, the United States needs to take a step back and imagine a plausible, long-term relationship with Pakistan and work backwards from there. At a minimum, we should be able to answer three questions:

1. What would U.S. policy be if the current civilian government were to collapse and be supplanted by another military coup?
2. Which countries are our best allies to help manage the situation in Pakistan? In particular, what sort U.S.-Indian cooperation would be possible to contain the risks from Pakistani instability?
3. How would the U.S. respond to a major terrorist attack launched from Pakistani soil?

I suspect that getting clarity on those three issues would do more to inform U.S. policy than a purely reactive response to the current crisis.

Update: From today’s Washington Post: In Scramble for Cash, Pakistan Turns to China

Bernard Finel and I published an op-ed today in Newsday examining the National Security consequences of the current economic crisis–and of national debt, in particular.  Take a look and let us know what you think.

National security: U.S. must put economics first

BY JAMES M. LUDES AND BERNARD I. FINEL

October 10, 2008–The financial crisis and how we respond to it will have a lasting impact on America’s national security.While congressional action on the bailout may inject needed cash into America’s credit markets, the $700 billion needed to finance the plan - in addition to hundreds of billions to make good on the debt owed by Bear Stearns, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae and AIG - require the United States to assume massive new debts.All told, this crisis may cost the United States more than $1.5 trillion - a staggering, if necessary, sum. And with the federal budget already in deficit, every single penny of this will be financed by adding to the national debt.Yet too little attention has been paid to who is financing that debt and what it means for the national security of our country. . . .

Click here to read the entire op-ed.

ASP Adjunct Fellow Janne Nolan has a provocative series of recommendations for the next administration on the ConnectUS blog here.

You heard it here, first.  Literally.  

The voice of ASP could be heard in Friday’s presidential debate on three key issues:

•  Accountability.
• Are We Winning?
• Iraq: Lessons Learned.

Let’s take these one by one. 

Accountability

In his opening statement, Senator McCain hearkened back to General Dwight Eisenhower drafting remarks on the eve of D-Day in the event the invasion had failed.  He cited the personal accountability Eisenhower demonstrated and rightly praised Ike for understanding that responsibility comes when things go right and when things go wrong.  Much has been made about Senator McCain being mistaken about the details of the scene he described.  But they ignore the broader lesson McCain was invoking–a lesson he got right, and a lesson I described almost four months ago in “D-Day + 64 Years:”

By D-Day, Eisenhower had done everything he could to make sure that the men under his command had everything they needed to succeed.  If they failed on the beaches, then he had failed them. 

I care less about whether or not Senator McCain was mistaken about General Eisenhower’s offer to resign.  The point is that accountability is a rare and precious commodity in public service.  We should demand it of our public servants–and they should hold themselves to it as General Eisenhower was ready to do.

Are We Winning?

In the discussion of the “war on terror,” Senator Obama seemed to make repeated references to the work done by my colleague Bernard Finel in the “Are We Winning” series.

OBAMA: “This is a time when bin Laden was still out, and now they’ve reconstituted themselves. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates himself acknowledges the war on terrorism started in Afghanistan and it needs to end there.”

OBAMA: “And the point that I originally made is that we took our eye off Afghanistan, we took our eye off the folks who perpetrated 9/11, they are still sending out videotapes….”

OBAMA: “The other thing that we have to focus on, though, is Al Qaida. They are now operating in 60 countries. We can’t simply be focused on Iraq. We have to go to the root cause, and that is in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That’s going to be critical. We are going to need more cooperation with our allies.”

OBAMA: “And one last point I want to make. It is important for us to understand that the way we are perceived in the world is going to make a difference, in terms of our capacity to get cooperation and root out terrorism.”

The “Are We Winning?” reports have focused, at length, on the threat emanating from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, how Iraq became a strategic distraction from the fight against al Qaeda, how the geographic dispersal of al Qaeda and its affiliates requires America’s friends and allies to make meaningful contributions to the fight; and how the decline in America’s moral authority has damaged our cause.

Iraq: Lessons Learned

One year ago, ASP began an initiative to distill early lessons from America’s experience in Iraq.  Our series of online essays, Iraq: Lessons Learned, provided answers from leading experts on one question: What single lesson should America learn from its experience in Iraq?

In the debate last Friday, Jim Lehrer, the moderator, put it this way:

LEHRER: All right. Let’s go another subject. Lead question, two minutes to you, senator McCain. Much has been said about the lessons of Vietnam. What do you see as the lessons of Iraq?

In our series, contributors broke into two camps: those who believe the invasion of Iraq was a good idea executed poorly and those who believe it was a bad idea from the start.  Interestingly, Senator McCain and Senator Obama split into the same camps:

MCCAIN: I think the lessons of Iraq are very clear that you cannot have a failed strategy that will then cause you to nearly lose a conflict. . . .

OBAMA: Well, this is an area where Senator McCain and I have a fundamental difference because I think the first question is whether we should have gone into the war in the first place. . . .

You can watch their entire exchange here.

• Commentary: Strategic Realism and Georgia
• Conflicting Interests in Colombian Justice
• Taliban Launches Attacks in Afghanistan
• Pakistan’s Uncertain Future
• American Reflections on the End of Musharraf’s Rule

The Center for American Progress has a new version available of its measure of elite opinion of the issue of global terrorism, The Terrorism Index.  Among the many interesting findings are:

• A significantly less pessimistic view of the “war on terror,” with 21% of the experts now saying the U.S. is “winning” compared with only 6% last year.  More generally, the percentage of experts saying that the world is becoming safer for the United States has increased from 2% to 15%.  These are still very pessimistic assessments, but the change is dramatic.
•  Basically, Iraq completely fell of the table in terms of expert concern, with zero experts believing that Iraq is the “single greatest threat” to U.S. security (down from 10% last year) or that Iraq is likely to become the next al Qaeda stronghold (down from 22%).   The rapidity of this change is a bit unsettling and suggests a strong “echo chamber” effect within elite opinion.
• On the other hand, concern over Pakistan increased dramatically, with 51% of their respondents seeing it as the most likely future AQ stronghold.
• There was also very strong support for drawing down forces in Iraq and refocusing them on Afghanistan.
• 65% (!) of respondents were “unsure” about whether the United States should take military action to kill senior AQ leaders in Pakistan even if the Pakistani government refuses to give permission.  This is really extraordinary.  This is unquestionably one of the biggest foreign policy dilemmas the United States faces today and nearly two-thirds of experts are unable or unwilling to make a judgment one way or the other.

As always, this annual study is an interesting experiment, though what it really demonstrates is open for debate.  Foreign policy experts ultimately form a small community — even across party lines — and it is likely that a certain degree of groupthink causes expert opinion to lag behind developments initially and then overshoot the significance of developments when change does occur.

• Commentary: Al Qaeda on its 20th Birthday
• Georgia Conflict Highlights Potential of Cyberattacks
• DIA Gets News Counterintelligence Arm
• New Spy Regulations Would Make Domestic Surveillance Easier

• Bush Administration Recalls Cold War, Questions Moscow’s Aggression
• Unprecedented Reliance on Private Contractors in War
• First Arab Head of State Visits Baghdad
• Exit of Georgian Troops from Iraq Opens Border to Iran
• North Korea to Remain on List of State Sponsors of Terrorism

• Gates Says Fighting Terrorism Military’s Priority for Decades to Come
• CIA Confronts Pakistani Intelligence Over Militant Links
• Al Qaeda in Iraq Leader Believed to be in Afghanistan
• Rand Report Faults “WOT”, Emphasizes role of Law Enforcement over Military
• Bush Order Overhaul of Intelligence Aparatus