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Since Inauguration Day 2009, a firestorm of scorn has scorched the op-ed pages of the nation’s dailies extolling the evils of partisanship in Washington, D.C. as typified by “black hat” Republicans and their stubborn refusals at “compromise.”

For the most incurable of all cynics – the columnists and editorial board members for whom an irrational fear of gridlock has become greater than the fear of the problems that lopsided legislation may create – a ray of hope shone down on Saturday when President Obama signed a one-year extension of key provisions of the Patriot Act that were set to expire at midnight Sunday.

The extension was the bipartisan product of the Senate Judiciary Committee led by ranking Republican Sen. Jeff Session (R-AL) and committee chair Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT).

The capabilities of the act that were saved by the extension are court-approved roving wiretaps to allow the surveillance of multiple phones, the ability to seize records and property from suspected terrorists, and so-called “lone wolf” surveillance of non-U.S. citizens who may be planning terrorism but have not been connected to a known terrorist organization.

Sessions was instrumental in pushing through the measure to preserve the most crucial elements of America’s keystone counterterrorism surveillance law. Leahy was successful in holding out against the push for a full four-year reauthorization that has been fervently sought by Sessions and Sens. Kit Bond (R-MO) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT).

The Senate Judiciary Committee quickly and quietly voted Wednesday to move the agreement to the Senate floor where it was swiftly passed by voice vote. On Thursday, the House voted overwhelmingly (315-97) to send the agreement to the president and by Saturday afternoon Obama’s signature had been executed.

Breaking a logjam that had been in place since negotiations broke down last October – centered on the Democrats’ wish to place new restraints on government surveillance authority – required moving the discussion back to ground zero and prioritizing national security concerns ahead of political gamesmanship.

For terrorists it means – at least for the next year – continuing to divert scarce time and energy to the work of evasion, steps that in many cases make planning major operations unfeasible. Every minute that a terrorist cell is forced to spend finding new communication pathways or hiding from the electronic watchtowers of the U.S. intelligence network is a minute not devoted to planning or carrying out an attack.

For Republicans, the victory of rescuing the most vital portions of the act from legislative euthanasia also may translate to ballot box. As Democrats, in effect, concede the battle of ideas around the right of the government to conduct necessary snooping actions it also turns up the volume on the election year refrain that only the GOP is seriously focused on counterterrorism.

The Democratic retreat from a previously staunch and idealistic crusade to end the government’s ability to – in the words of so many on the left – “spy on Americans,” solidified speculation that the realities of national security brought home by the tragic massacre at Fort Hood and the near-disaster of the failed Christmas Day mid-air bombing attempt have trumped political gamesmanship.

Don’t strain your eyes searching for coverage on bellwether editorial pages in the New York Times and Washington Post, however. Not a drop of precious news ink was wasted in praise (or scorn) of the bipartisan moment.

Is there a general lesson to be learned from the underreported Patriot Act extension? If so, it is almost certainly that bipartisanship is only possible when legislators build a compromise by getting behind only those actions that do not make the present situation worse. Sessions said, when the last temporary extension agreement was reached in lieu of a reauthorization bill last December, that the litmus test for all legislation dealing with national security was that it “First do no harm.”

Perhaps if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Harry Reid were to have implemented Sessions’ protocol from the beginning of the 2009 session the fortunes of the Democrats and the nation as a whole would be in far better shape.

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On Tuesday, top U.S. intelligence officials flanked Dennis C. Blair, the national intelligence director, as he delivered his threat assessment to an open session of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Whether the appearance of heads of the FBI, CIA, and Defense Intelligence Agency was at the White House’s urging or Blair’s own desire to share the pain, the entourage was useful in handling a barrage of questions emerging from Blair’s announcement that Al Qaeda has placed a high priority on making an attack on U.S. soil within the next three to six months.

The group also reported to the committee that success in the drone war that has targeted high-value enemy targets in Afghanistan has caused Al Qaeda to place greater prominence on its operations is Yemen and Somalia. The Christmas Day bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and alleged Fort Hood attacker, Maj. Nidal Hasan, have each been linked to Al Qaeda-affiliated individuals inside of Yemen.

CIA director Leon Panetta affirmed Blair’s grim appraisal of Al Qaeda’s intentions, adding that the terrorist syndicate had adapted its tactics “in ways that oftentimes make it hard to detect.”

As the sole purpose of intelligence is to protect American citizens and interests at home and abroad, any committee hearing about intelligence is implicitly one about security. Intelligence gathering locates a threat, defines its mode, and hands the information off to whatever forces are capable of interdiction. Because the White House policy in handling captured Al Qaeda or other terrorists now defaults to referring to a civilian procedure in which our enemies are not dealt with as combatants but as suspects with Constitutional protections, it was inevitable that questions of how intelligence will be gathered from Miranda-shielded defendants would be raised by members of the Intelligence Committee.

Even Blair — already on the hot seat for missteps and the lack of disclosure about who ultimately made the decision to read Abdulmutallab his rights after only an hour of interrogation — left the door open for the position of starting each case with the presumption of civilian prosecution, particularly if a terrorist detainment is rapidly attended to by a specially trained interrogation team.

“What I’m interested in is getting the intelligence out so that we can do a better job against the groups that send these people,” Blair said. “[T]he degree to which we back them up … quickly with an intelligence team which can help them with their requirements, I think that’s the key thing from my point of view.”

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) hammered the issue of civilian treatment of terrorist further, suggesting that not only was there a solid rationale and precedent for avoiding civil prosecution entirely. Sen. Hatch exposed the fallacy in the current belief among the assembled intelligence chiefs that the U.S. policy of non-civilian detention, symbolized by the detainment center at Guantanamo Bay, had been a powerful tool for Al Qaeda to use in its recruiting.

Sen. Hatch reminded the committee and the intelligence heads that prior to September 11 Al Qaeda used the civilian imprisonment and trial of the blind sheikh, Omar Abdel-Rahmann, for his involvement in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, in their recruiting script. The “fair” treatment of the blind sheikh did nothing to either weaken Al Qaeda of prevent the deaths of almost 3,000 Americans. It was a point that Director Blair and the other agency chiefs did not have to answer. Sen. Diane Feinstein pulled rank and shuffled the hearing past Sen. Hatch’s difficult argument.

If Hatch’s common sense and logic fail to seep into the “smartest administration in history” at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, perhaps the efforts Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) — ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee — to learn more about how the executive branch is instructing its agents to make a decision to quickly escalate a case to advanced interrogation prior to the irreversible reading of rights, an option the intelligence director himself appeared to favor placing in the hands of enforcement and intelligence officers in the field.

Since December 9, Sen. Sessions and fellow Republican senators have sent a series of five letters to President Obama and members of his staff requesting further justification for their policy stance, urging for a reversal of the decision to try the Christmas Day bomber as a civilian, among other key items. One letter in particular was addressed to Attorney General Eric Holder asking for details about the response to the Christmas Day bombing attempt and requesting that he testify before the judiciary committee. To date, not one of the letters has received any sort of response. Sen. Sessions described his experience of throwing paper at the White House black hole on Fox News’ On The Record with Greta Van Susteren, a dialogue worth watching.

Although the apparent revisiting by the White House in its previously definitive call to hold civilian trials of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other high-value detainees in New York City may be an indication that reality has begun to take up residence in the Oval Office, the efforts of Sen. Hatch and Sen. Sessions should still be supported.

The White House’s current ad hoc policy is unreliable and defaulting to handling organized enemies of the United States as though they were just like gangsters running booze or drugs across the border is reckless. Al Qaeda, and its many-tentacled network of splinter groups, is an non-uniformed, decentralized army that wages war for a common purpose against the United States and is our enemy. In the words of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, “War is the remedy our enemy has chosen and I say let us give them all they want.”

If KSM had been captured under different circumstances, and during the Obama presidency, would U.S. interrogators have had the same opportunity to interrogate him in ways that yielded information that absolutely saved American lives and prevented attacks that had made it off the drawing board and into pre-attack staging phases? That question need never be answered if the Obama administration reverses itself and elects to treat terrorists as what they are – soldiers fighting a war against us and as such deserving of basic standards of fairness but not Constitutional protections.

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Related Articles

• Hot Air | Video: No civilian trials for enemy combatants, says… Ron Paul’s son?
• Media Lizzy & Friends | Facts Are Facts: Terror Trials Straw Men
• Michelle Malkin | Video: The confession of KSM

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When Vice President Biden spoke about the certainty that his new boss would be tested on the world stage only two weeks before Barack Obama’s 2008 election, it may have been the one subject on which Biden has ever shown both prescience and coherence. Speaking to a small group of Democrat donors in Seattle on October 19, 2008, the master of gaffes donned his serious hat to offer those in attendance an audience to his oracle vision of the near future. Only audio from the speech became public so there is no way of knowing if Biden darkened the room and cast a flashlight beam eerily across his face, but it was clear by his words that Biden was not spinning a yarn about snipe hunts or hook-handed escaped mental patients.

“Mark my words,” Biden said. “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking.”

Common interpretation of the prediction was that Biden had divined that a single foe would challenge President Obama, as Biden put it, “to test the mettle of this guy.” Nine months of history clarify that Biden must have actually been using the word “world” in a pluralistic sense, meaning that Obama’s challenges would come from all points on the globe. Venezuela, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Europe (East and West), even the combined organization of the International Olympic Committee have seemed eager to gauge the ability of the American president to assert American power. But the one test that Obama claimed to have mastered prior to pursuing the presidency — one that he committed to putting quickly behind him upon taking office — was that of securing victory in Afghanistan. Tragically, of all the trials he has failed thus far, it has been the one he professed to have studied up for that has the greatest implications for national security.

The months since President Obama’s inauguration have not been a honeymoon as much as they have been a hangover, with Obama weaved to and fro in his avoidance of choosing a stable and productive strategy for our war in Central Asia. The world has watched the president fumble for his car keys with a sense of dread, knowing he has no idea where he will be headed once he finally starts up the engine and drives off. Is this the challenge of which Biden spoke, the world daring Obama to resolutely set the course?

Obama can be credited with making some decisions, chief among them escalating the use of drone attacks that have inflicted a high ratio of civilian casualties and may be seen by our enemies and the local population as a cowardly and disrespectful form of warfare, and replacing Bush’s Afghanistan commander Gen. David McKiernan with his own man in the field, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. But, in the broad analysis, what might have only been the President’s “lost weekend” has become a nine-month bender that burns at America’s gut like an ulcer. As an absence of American strategy continues to cost America the lives of its sons and daughters, the ghosts of Vietnam still lurk in the Oval Office. They are specters that the President cannot ignore.

On the road to the presidency, Obama made his proposals for the realignment of American military resources to focus on what he correctly identified as the “central front” in the war on terror, the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. David Axelrod costumed this approach by skillfully loading Obama’s foreign policy speeches with a fusion of anti-war code and ‘big stick’ diplomatic lingo, recreating the candidate as a barely plausible lovechild of John Kerry and John Wayne. Incredulously, the rhetorical cocktail appealed to an electorate weary of war but intolerant of defeat. The keystone for the positioning of Obama as reluctant hawk, Afghanistan was cast as a Vietnam in the making, a meme that eased into the American subconscious due to it being arguably true.

Although there are many parallels that can be drawn between the American war in Vietnam and our engagement in Afghanistan, it is a single distinction between the two conflicts that should encourage President Obama to heed the advice of his current Afghanistan commander for increase in troop levels. Even in the low point of our withdrawal US military planners had no fear that communist Vietnam might sense American weakness and pursue a larger war against the leader of the free world. Thoughts on this precise question do not exist in the memoirs of President Ford, but I feel safe in making an in absentia inference that Bill Ayers’ Weather Underground Organization and the Black Panthers were considered greater threats to Americans at home than the communist Vietnamese.

When the US withdrawal was complete, and the last helicopter had evacuated Ambassador Martin from the US Embassy in Saigon, although returning soldiers faced an emotional assault from an ungrateful nation there would not be cells of Viet Cong sleeper agents who, emboldened by U.S. withdrawal, would begin attacking Americans on our own soil. North Vietnamese Army units were not training young men, embittered by the death and destruction experienced in their homeland, to seek out Americans wherever they might be across the globe and spill their blood in the name of Ho Chi Minh’s ideology. No similar feeling of security will exist in the case of US withdrawal from Afghanistan should we fail to achieve victory, victory that must be measured against overall objectives as yet undefined, a larger issue that must be resolved in advance of the increase in troops requested by Gen. McChrystal.

Will Obama’s legacy reflection his indecision on this day, Veteran’s Day, his choice to kick the can down the road and avoid a critical decision to commit additional troops to achieve a superiority of force in-theater? In another visitation of cosmic irony on our Karmic Target-in-Chief, Sen. McCain’s proclamation that the US would need to be in Iraq for 100 years may become the reality for our commitment in Afghanistan if the President’s delay allows a crucial window of victory to close. The other possible outcome of his executive ambivalence would be withdrawal after failing achieve any benchmarks of victory, a result that would invite the drawing of far more unstructured battle lines on the streets of Los Angeles, New York, or even cities like Seattle.

Deliberation and overthinking of politics permitted victory in Vietnam to slip away from Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, forcing President Nixon to pursue a schizophrenic strategy that ended up costing thousands of additional American lives and countless thousands more Vietnamese casualties. Obama must shake off his executive paralysis to ensure that Afghanistan does not become the first front lost in the critical war on Islamic terror.

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There are many ways to take time on Veteran’s Day to honor the sacrifices made by American men and women of all colors, creeds, and ethnic backgrounds. In so many ways, the individuals who have given so much of themselves, in some cases making the ultimate sacrifice, represent what is unique about America’s contribution to the humanity. When men and women don the uniform to place themselves between the evildoers of the world and innocent people in foreign lands whose misfortune began only with being born between the wrong lines on a map, this symbolizes the ultimate gift America bestows upon any who wish to accept it.

For those in the Greater Seattle area looking for ways to get more in touch with the meaning of Veteran’s Day, there are several options.

Visit the newly unveiled Medal of Honor memorial on the beautiful Seattle campus of the University of Washington. The memorial honors the eight UW alumni who have received the highest military honor that can be bestowed upon an individual and was formally dedicated in a ceremony Wednesday morning that was attended by Rep. Dave Reichert and at which fellow UW alum and Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli spoke.

The memorial is installed in the roundabout where Memorial Way (the road entering the campus through the northern gate) lands in front of Parrington Hall. Lining Memorial Way are 58 sycamore trees planted to honor UW faculty and students who died in World War I, making a visit to this place a way to remember our local sacrifices.

Make a donation to the USO. Although the popular impression of the USO is of an entertainment organization, brining smiles to the troops, their work extends beyond that very worthwhile service.

Watch television. Local public broadcaster KCTS 9 is offering a full slate of prime-time programming to commemorate this important day. The line-up begins at 7:00 p.m. with a musical tribute to American veterans featuring Michael Feinstein and Irish tenor Ronan Tynan in front of the powerful United States Air Force Band, and accompanied by the Singing Sergeants chorus. At 8:00 p.m. is Secrets of the Dead, a program that tells the story of a US air crew in World War II who are forced to bailout over Japanese-occupied Borneo and how are taken in by an indigenous tribe who assist them in evading capture. Two more Veteran’s Day-themed programs will keep you busy until bedtime.

Remember those who may have been forgotten. Since 1927, the Evergreen-Washelli cemetery (11111 Aurora Ave. North, Seattle, WA) has had a goal of creating “The Arlington of the West” in its Veteran’s Memorial Cemetery. Although the caretakers do a fantastic job of placing flags on the thousands of graves of fallen soldiers and their spouses, there is always room for carnations placed in honor on the resting places of many unattended souls. The site also features a number of historical artifacts, including a pair of cannonade from the USS Constitution that became famous as “Old Ironsides” during the War of 1812.

First and foremost, take the time if you see a man or woman in uniform to thank them for their service. The work they do should never be taken for granted.

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According to an AKI wire story (via Hotair.com) circulated Wednesday, Al Qaeda is no longer satisfied focusing its jihadist chaos at the predominantly Judeo-Christian West. The newest target: the People’s Republic of China. From the AKI report:

A leading Al-Qaeda militant on Wednesday called on Muslims worldwide to defend Uighurs in China’s restive northwestern region of Xinjiang. He told Uighurs to prepare for a holy war or Jihad and urged a “vast media campaign” to raise awareness of their fate at the hands of “oppressive” China.

In the video posted to jihadist websites, Abu Yahya al-Libi appeared to launch a frontal assault against China.

…

[Al-Libi] accused China of using “satanic ways” to oppress Muslims in the province and replace them with other ethnicities while “looting their wealth and undermining their culture and religion.”

In truth, this could be a godsend for the White House during a period when their apparent lack of foreign policy and defense experience seems to be translating sadly into a staggering increased in American casualties abroad. Aside from the deaths in the combat zone of Afghanistan, the deaths of two special forces soldiers in the Philippines last week when an improvised explosive device (IED) exploded near their Humvee, could be a sign that the terrorist community was beginning a campaign to test President Obama’s ability to act as wartime commander. With its deliberate provocation of communist China, al Qaeda invites a larger battle with an enemy that has a brutal track record of dealing with asymmetrical opponents like the battered global terrorist network, and may effectively lighten the load on the US and its allies in the war on terror.

There are, however, larger issues to consider. The Muslim separatist movement in western China has historically received support from sympathetic groups in Afghanistan, elements of which now call the Swat region of Pakistan home. This is the area of heaviest American military activity in Pakistan and the air raids by US-led coalition and CIA units have destabilized the existing Pakistani regime’s hold on power. Should al Qaeda begin staging and supporting domestic acts of terror inside China, and the Chinese begin to view Pakistan or Afghanistan as a legitimate venue for conducting military operations, the necessary cooperation between Pakistan and China would be, to say the least, alarming to the Indian national security apparatus.

What all of this should mean for US military planners and officials in the Obama administration is that the clock is ticking to stabilize Afghanistan.

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by Bryan Myrick

When Bruce Bawer’s first book, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West From Within, began to hit bookstores in 2006, among dozens of books that dissected the apparatus of Islamic terror and analyzed in fine detail its many evil acts, the book was one title  that suggested a greater threat was posed by global Islam, greater even than the triumvirate of jihadist violence against Western democracies—September 11, 2001 in the U.S., the March 11, 2004 train bombings in Madrid, and the July 7, 2005 subway bombings in London that claimed a combined 3,221 innocent lives.

In a climate of rising anti-war sentiment, and in which liberals cheerfully inserted Abu Ghraib references into the most unlikely places, While Europe Slept shed light on the growing influence of Sharia—the set of laws that the world Islamic community believes must be upheld above all others. The book argued that the acquiescence of the West to tolerate extreme cultural behavior, even when it ran counter to the West’s laws and values, represented a more serious danger to free societies already weakened by the inverse control allowed fringe minorities through the dysfunctional social lens of runaway political correctness.

Having lived in Europe for several years by the time While Europe Slept was written, Bawer’s observations about the nature of Europe’s capitulation to intimidation by Islamic pressure groups had the ring of credibility. As a gay man (understandably more alert to the ultra-extreme positions in Sharia on homosexuality) the rampant hooliganism of Muslim youth in Europe directed at gay men, in countries where acceptance among the native people was the norm, was described in the chilling context that can only come from someone who themselves are in the crosshairs of evil-intentioned intolerants. His accounts of religio-political assassinations of those European voices willing to suggest that Muslims must integrate into European society (while, for some leaders, it seemed easier to accommodate practices that were in complete conflict with the core value of individual freedom) further illustrated that the knee-jerk response of the ‘enlightened’ class was simply to whitewash atrocious behavior with the broad brushes of multiculturalism and political correctness. By offering anecdotes of the treatment of the wives and daughters of Muslim men in Europe, and the way that the European government and system bent to avoid punishing acts that would only be legal under strict Sharia law—beatings, rape, and honor killings, to name but a few of the horrors—readers are given the best set of arguments for why the West should be afraid of radical Islam.

In Bawer’s latest offering, Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom, the enemy seems to be not only radical Islam, but the values inherent in Islam itself, a belief system that Bawer sees as being intrinsically resistant to the kind of moderation that has occurred in all other major surviving religions. Because of Islam’s core beliefs, it is antithetical to Western democracies in which freedom of the individual is a core principle. Bawer’s interpretation of Islam—a word which he translates as submission—and its designs for the West, is one in which the freedom to coexist is not in the ultimate plan of Islamists, radical or not. America, in particular, with our radical attachment to freedoms of speech and religion, has always been the natural antithesis of global Islam, a religion that has submission as its central value. For Bawer, as long as the world’s democracies hold these freedoms dear, they will always be at war with Islam in some way, but leveraging the plurality of opinions in a society like America has been the strategy of global Islamists for decades. It was a sobering and well-made argument that began to weigh larger on my mind with each paragraph.

Even a casual observer unequipped with Bawer’s ground-level experience and sharp research skills can see that despite the statements from pro-Muslim groups to the effect that most of the world’s Muslims are not radical and do not support violence as a means of following through on the commands of their faith, Islam is not a religion that is steered by its moderate elements. In the clash of cultures, one firm and unflinching and its beliefs and the functionally ambivalent due to its ‘higher’ stage of enlightenment, the more intransigent among them will survive, as history shows us. Bawer assembles convincing evidence that this is occurring not only in Europe, but also in America, where the politically correct climates of the mainstream media and academia have helped to create an “Orwellian world” in which “bravery is cowardice, bullying is victimhood, and standing up for freedom in the face of religious totalitarians is a demonstration of racism.”

The contents of Surrender have importance in a time in which U.S. leadership has set a tone of appeasement with the Muslim world (President Obama’s Cairo speech), suggesting that the Muslim religion is “misunderstood” by Americans. If President Obama is right in painting a picture of two Islams—one portrayed as America’s friend and ally, and the other as deluded madmen wanting to drink in the blood of all infidels—Bawer’s entire worldview is shattered. But if we observe that our “friends” in Iraq and Afghanistan seem to inflict the same kinds of oppression on their people, how does it not become impossible to distinguish between Obama’s imagined factions of Islam? The government of Afghani president and U.S. ally Hamid Karzai has had its power protected by the might of a U.S.-led coalition only to pass a law allowing husbands of a certain sect to starve their wives for withholding sex. In Iraq, liberated by the shedding of American blood, Human Rights Watch reported today that hundreds of gay men have been tortured and executed in recent months as Iraqi clerics continue to publicly embrace Sharia’s intolerance of what it deems unclean behavior.

Because Surrender unravels the twisted skein of pro-Muslim misinformation campaigns, shoddy journalism, and the multicultural worldview of our institutes of higher learning, Bawer gives us a tool for wiping clean the lens through which we must view the events surrounding us. With momentous decisions looming for U.S. foreign policymakers on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Surrender is a lifeline to an alternate way of thinking that can illuminate your discussions with elected officials and friends. It is highly recommended as an addition to your personal library.

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Are civilian casualties slowly closing the door on U.S. opportunities for a crucial victory in the war against Islamic terror?

As officials continue to sift through remains at the site of last week’s suspected U.S. drone attack in southern Pakistan – the target of which was Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud – a senior U.S. official felt confident enough Monday afternoon to declare firm belief that Mehsud was killed in the nighttime attack. The official’s certainty closed the confirmation gap that remained after Obama’s national security adviser, Gen. Jim Jones, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” this Sunday that he placed the probability of mission success in the “90 percent category.”

What was the critical element that gave ordinarily hyperskeptical intelligence officials the green light to conclude that Mehsud had been eliminated? Mehsud was known by CIA analysts to suffer from leg pain as a result of diabetes. A man fitting his description entered the home of Mehsud’s father-in-law, then adjourned to the roof to avoid the searing heat and began to have his legs massaged. The strike – preauthorized by President Obama, according to the senior U.S. official – was initiated based on this intelligence.

A tear should not be shed in sorrow for the death of a man who is believed to have been instrumental in the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, coordinated attacks against US-led coalition forces in Afghanistan, and gave aid and refuge to all manner of evildoers seeking to harm U.S. interests around the world. Mehsud’s death was rightly celebrated as a tactical victory in the current struggle to stabilize the central Asian region and the broader war on terror, and champagne corks were most assuredly hitting the ceiling from Kandahar to Langley. But, as military historians will hasten to note, chalking up scores of tactical successes is no substitute for a broader strategy to win the war and the peace when fighting against an enemy that refuses to surrender. When the calm night sky around Mehsud erupted in a rush of sound and fire, and the person tending to his aching limbs suffered the Taliban warlord’s fate alongside him, the American cause to win the peace in the war against radical Islamists took one more step opposite the direction of overall victory.

The earliest reports of the strike to kill Mehsud also cited sources claiming that women and children also perished in the strike, stories that have too frequently become a routine feature of wires from the drone war. Stories have continued to flow from Afghanistan and Pakistan about the high rates of civilian casualties in attacks from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) – also known as drones.

Modern warfare invariably places civilian populations in the arena of combat—this is a grim reality that only the nihilistic Left have not learned to stomach in order to act in preservation of our security in the face of very real threats. And yet, the increasing numbers of poppies growing over the corporeal remains of what our cleansed consciousness refers to as ‘collateral damage’ have the potential to inspire a new wave of anti-U.S. hatred. The high rate of casualties arising from drone attacks and the potential Vietnamization of the Afghanistan war that could result from their use is something I wrote about recently.

But perhaps there is something about waging war-by-wire that verges on cowardice, a lack of honor to take lives only when risking one’s own that compounds the suffering of innocent villagers who, polling suggests, more likely than not support coalition efforts to rid their lands of chaotic elements. America’s strength, its great contribution to the world, has been the willingness on the part of its citizens to sacrifice all in order to give those who desire freedom a fighting chance to experience it. This has been our gift to the world; it is the thing that the purveyors of hate—the Islamists—fear the most.

The escalation authorized by President Obama in the tactical use of drone strikes threatens to exacerbate deteriorating battlefield conditions in a war that is vital to America’s future security. With victory a hair’s breadth away from falling into the abyss of history, the waning support of Afghans for the coalition presence will be the deciding factor should American fortunes fade. In the long view, it may be Obama’s preference to remove American troops from harm’s way – a political decision, not one that seems advised by a rational strategy for winning the peace – that costs America most dearly.

After the file is closed on Mehsud, and a flock of drones has been tasked to acquire and destroy his replacement, a question will haunt policy analysts: Can tactical UAV air raids that eliminate enemy leadership but inflict casualties on the civilian population ever complement a strategy for preserving America’s long-term security? If American troops, bolstered by fresh boots on the ground this fall and winter, succeed in regaining territory lost to insurgents, will the drone attacks simply quell support for occupation or fuel greater resistance to their presence?

If the ultimate victory in Afghanistan is to be won in the hearts and minds of the Afghans themselves, to borrow a phrase from the Vietnam lexicon, establishing goodwill among the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan toward the United States is paramount, as is cementing and understanding that we will be a partner in stabilizing the present and future central Asian region, so long as they also refuse to support the forces that would seek to harm the United States or its interests. To achieve that objective they must be made to see our enemy as theirs as well, an outcome unlikely when coalition forces are blamed – sometimes fairly, sometimes not – for bringing destruction and death to their homelands.

Unfortunately, the rational conclusion from observing the course of the Afghanistan War since Obama has taken office is chilling. The escalation of the drone war at Obama’s order, and the resulting civilian casualties, indicate not only that the Obama administration may have cast aside all interest in redefining the Afghanistan mission in terms of broadly and narrowly defined American national security interests.

The war in Afghanistan is one worth winning, but the objectives have become muddy since US-led coalition forces invaded more than a half decade ago.  The drone war is just one symbol of mission creep that threatens to eliminate all chances to stabilize the region and make gains in the war against Islamofascism. In this new way of war, the sheer might of American military superiority, if carelessly used, could produce stunning tactical victories, followed by crushing strategic defeat. What is needed is the vision among our leaders to define our mission beyond what is taking place on the field of battle, beyond decimating or eradicating the opiate economy of the region, beyond crushing the Taliban.

Just as an oncological surgeon measures their success in the operating room based on two criteria – the complete removal of the cancerous growth and the lack of damage to the healthy surrounding tissue – the same can be said of our strategy in central Asia.  If the US-led coalition fails to remove the malignancies represented by Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other radical jihadists, no amount of money poured into hospitals, schools, and paved roadways will stop a future 9/11 from being conceived in that part of the world.  In fact, it was the scant infrastructure and bureaucracy left established by Soviet occupiers that made Afghanistan into something of a turnkey operation when the Taliban swept into power.  Third World nation – just add autocratic religious extremist leadership.  Extending the cancer metaphor further, if the tactics used to remove our enemies damage and destroy the portions of the civilian population in the process it will be impossible to convince the Afghans and Pakistanis that they share a common aim of peace with us, thus enhancing the likelihood that anti-democratic Islamist movements can leverage fear of US attacks from the air into popular support.

Obama is doing an excellent job of protecting his approval numbers by avoiding the negative publicity that casualties resulting from a hypothetical manned, eyes-on-target, raid would have caused. Afghanistan is now President Obama’s war, just as Vietnam will always be President Lyndon Johnson’s war in the opinion of many. As Johnson expanded the conflict handed him by Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, Obama inherits Afghanistan from President George W. Bush with plans to restore a path to victory by landing more boots on the ground.

Will Obama avoid Johnson’s mistake in Vietnam, his confusion of the ability to achieve tactical victories through superior force with the more subtle requirements of accomplishing the broader and more subtle objectives on the way to the ultimate goal—American security? For the sake of those who seek freedom in Afghanistan, for the men and women standing on the first front in the war against those who seek our ultimate destruction, and for the prospect that we might never again mourn victims of acts of terror on our soil, I hope so. With all of my will, I sincerely hope so.

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There was only a twinkle of presidential ambition in the eye of then-Senator Barack Obama when in the fall of 2002 the young Illinois politico stood before a large crowd in Chicago to speak his mind about war. The push to go to war in Iraq was his immediate concern (one shared later by his fellow Democrats when it became politically smart to adopt an anti-war stand), but by calling the planned action “a dumb war; a rash war; a war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics,” Obama plainly spoke about where he saw the dividing line between righteous and unrighteous armed conflict.

The simple redundancy of his Chicago speech were resistant to quick retort – a feature of his rhetorical style that critics still grapple with today – but really it was nothing more than a repacking of the more moderate anti-war voices who had dissented with regard to another foreign war thirty years deep in the nation’s memory hole. Obama’s Chicago speech was the highlight of his curriculum vitae as the sport of exploiting imperfections in the Bush administration’s war strategy became one of the great political spectacles of our time. It was therefore predictable that when his lust for the White House placed him on the campaign trail in 2007, his anti-war stance became both his foreign policy credential and his wartime agenda.

It was only natural that the conflict in Afghanistan would become Obama’s cause célèbre on the campaign trail; were he to have focused energy on parroting the party line about Iraq his voice would have been just one more baritone in harmony with the Mormon Tabernacle choir-sized field of Democrat presidential hopefuls. Plus, the American cause in Iraq had brightened and an end was in sight, but not so with Afghanistan.  The political realities quite simply yelled out for him to focus his neo-liberal energies on the armchair quarterbacking of a war that by even the most hawkish accounts was going poorly. By staking out that war for himself, Obama was able to come across as fresh and insightful.

August 12, in New Hampshire, the junior senator sat the kids in Nashua down for another episode of Father Obama’s treatise-in-installments on the art of war. Once again, his statement was a masterpiece of rhetorical alchemy; two parts blue dog concern for America’s power and might, and one part bleeding heart passion for ending the grimmest and most certain outcome of all war – death.

“We’ve got to get the job done [in Afghanistan]. And that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.”

At that moment in the dusk of a Nashua summer evening, voters heard everything they would ever need to know about how a future President Obama would use the US military. Wars of the Obama era would always be rational, dispassionate, principled, apolitical, and would never utilize tactics that would include air-raiding villages or killing civilians.

It is shocking and disappointing then that, by Obama’s own definition, Afghanistan is now Obama’s ‘dumb war’.

Like so much about this president’s first term, when fanciful speeches must give way to action the reality of his choices must cause many an Obama supporter to reach for the Xanax. The war in Afghanistan that Obama confidently bragged to voters that he make winnable, has devolved into a series of drone attacks and air raids on villages, in which the numbers of civilian dead are reported by many observers to far exceed the body count of high-value Taliban and Al Qaeda targets.

On January 23, 2009, when the mess on the Mall in Washington, D.C., was still being mopped up from the Inaugurasm, US drone aircraft (including the well-known Predator drone, redesigned to carry a load-out of high-powered ordnance) conducted strikes on targets in Pakistan from bases in Afghanistan. Although reports indicated that fifteen were killed in the attacks, the Times of London reported that sources indicated three children were among the dead.

Since Inauguration Day, Afghanistan under Obama’s command has become every bit the dumb war he defined before his election, dumber because of his continued use of drone aircraft (also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs), a campaign begun under Bush and which has typically caused high death tolls among civilians coinciding with the achievements of killing Al Qaeda and Taliban command elements.

The January 23 raids were notable only because they were the first to have been ordered by President Obama; subsequent have been even more deadly for civilians caught in the combat zone.  Unfortunately, the civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Pakistan have been a concern for the Obama administration only in so much as they conflict with the desired image of Obama as a new breed of benevolent warrior. It is politics – specifically the enhancement of Obama’s military resume – that appears to guide his war strategy, not reason or principle.

These tactics are precisely those that were condemned by Obama the candidate when used by his predecessor.  They have inflamed Pakistani and Afghani government officials who have warned that the probable effect of raining down munitions on villagers will be to give Taliban and Al Qaeda forces a useful tool to convince those same civilians that they fight against a common enemy – the US-led coalition. But the real ignorance of Obama’s war policies is not in the use of counterproductive tactics, it is the failure to employ tactics that support a clear strategy for long-term victory, a feat that has eluded the great empires of the British and the Soviets in our own time.

In a war that has now become a counterinsurgency, maintaining support from the local population is a crucial element of success, an observation that has been put before the Obama administration and the US Congress by many foreign policy advisors including David Kilcullen, a counter-insurgency expert and former advisor to General David Petraeus during the critical surge campaign in Iraq.

According to Kilcullen, the small proportion of civilian casualties in the January 23 attacks underrepresents the typical amount of collateral damage in drone attacks. Kilcullen claims figures that show an alarmingly high ratio of civilian casualties to combatants. His opinion had been a widely-discussed thorn in the side of Obama’s Afghanistan team since Kilcullen’s interview in early February of this year with The Financial Times. In the interview, Kilcullen asserted that since 2006 the attacks made by drone aircraft have taken 700 civilian lives while only eliminating 14 of Al Qaeda’s middle and lower-rung leaders in Pakistan territory.

“That’s a hit rate of two percent on 98 percent collateral. It’s not moral,” Kilcullen said.

Kilcullen also stated that the drone strikes “have a negative strategic effect in that they incite Punjabi militancy, which is the biggest problem in Pakistan right now.”

That is the policyspeak equivalent of the idea that excessive loss of civilian life as a result of American military operations gives insurgents significant tools to rally support from the population being bombed. It is a sentiment that is remarkably in tune with the one President Obama made in New Hampshire in the summer of 2007. In fact, Kilcullen’s critique is really just a diplomatic way of saying that Obama is engaging in dumb war. Those are my words, of course, but Kilcullen has repeated his own assessment before congressional committees, as well as penning an op-ed in The New York Times with Andrew McDonald Exum.

But the drone attacks are only a cluster of data points to suggest that Obama’s Afghanistan policy is failing his own standard of rationality; they do not support a strategy to affect a positive outcome in line with the long-term goals of regional stability and US security. The tactical accomplishments from one day of bombing in which a handful of Taliban are dispatched to sit with Allah are small in comparison with the often quieter strategic victories that will be needed to win the war, stabilize the region, and inoculate Afghanistan and Pakistan from the diseases of the drug trade and radical Islamism in the form of the Taliban.

Even if the US should manage to avoid harming a single civilian from this day forward (an impossible goal) would President Obama be waging smart war?  I would share in Kilcullen’s joy that drone fighters might go back in their shipping crates, but that small tactical shift would only offer opportunities to rebuild positive relations in Afghanistan’s rougher provinces.  And yet, believing that there are easy roads to building friendships with the Afghani people is another example of President Obama’s naiveté. Too many cheering crowds and fainting audience members may have gone to his head; the cult of Obama’s personality does not extend to Central Asia and there always seems to be enough in common among the ethnically and tribally divided Afghanis to bind them in fierce and unflinching opposition to outsiders.

Winston Churchill, long before World War II would prove his mettle as a historic national leader, a 23-year-old Winston Churchill spent several weeks in 1897 as a journalist chronicling his observations of the “frontier war” between British forces and Pashtun rebels in the Swat Valley, the region of Pakistan that has been a mote in the eye of American-led coalition forces fighting to win a war in neighboring Afghanistan. This excerpt from “The Story of Malakaland Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War” offers Churchill’s description of a territory as impossible to pacify as any that the British Empire had ever confronted.

The inhabitants of these wild but wealthy valleys are of many tribes, but of similar character and condition. … Except at the times of sowing and of harvest, a continual state of feud and strife prevails throughout the land.  Tribe wars with tribe.  The people of one valley fight with those of the next.  To the quarrels of communities are added the combats of individuals.  Khan assails khan, each supported by his retainers.  Every tribesman has a blood feud with his neighbor.  Every man’s hand is against the other, and all against the stranger. [Emphasis mine.]

Although those words were committed to posterity in 1898, even present-day writers capture a similar sense of Afghanistan as a place that seems to exist a state of nature such as the one envisioned by Rousseau, a place where self-interest and bonds of fellowship guide events. In the words of Stephen Tanner, author of “Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the War Against the Taliban”, an excerpt of which was published at the National Review Online:

Left to their own devices, Afghans engage in internecine battles, or simply enjoy freedom — not the kind enforceable by a Magna Carta, Bill of Rights, or Communist Manifesto, but of more ancient derivation — unbothered by government at all.

It would seem then that the question is not what tactics should be used, but what our ultimate goal should be? If voices of those who have studied the complexities of Afghanistan like Tanner are correct, a strategy similar to the one in Iraq will be disastrous for our efforts in Afghanistan if it attempts to impose a government on people who have not developed a want for one. The disaster could only be made worse by pursuing military objectives in ways that alienate the Afghanis or their Pakistani neighbors. The authors of a Center of Strategic and International Studies’ report published in May of this year, suggests “the war in Afghanistan is as much a war of perceptions as it is a war for control of territory. No one who was in government at the time of Vietnam can avoid a grim feeling of déjà vu.”

And yet, with the so many heralds sounding the alarm, President Obama, advised chiefly by his special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, the former ambassador to the United Nations under President Clinton, very little evidence has emerged to suggest that US strategy has grasped the nature of true victory in Afghanistan. Complete victory can only be achieved when the people of Afghanistan perceive the United States as an ally, in word and deed. Some version of that goodwill may have existed after US-financed covert operations helped Afghani insurgents expel the Soviets, but the US withdrew once its immediate interests were resolved and left a power vacuum in which groups like the Taliban and Al Qaeda grew strong and the perception of the US as fickle and untrustworthy were allowed to fester.

The report yesterday that the US bombed 300 tons of poppy seeds in southern Afghanistan is therefore one more sign of the shortsightedness of American war planners. Although the drug trade fills the coffers of America’s enemies, it also puts food on the table of many Afghani families who may have no better option.

Do President Obama and Mr. Holbrooke believe that the opium farmers in the Helmand province – now one of the wealthiest and most dangerous in the country – are going to perceive actions to damage the drug trade as directed at the Taliban and Al Qaeda, but not at themselves, when their livelihood is threatened? We should not be so silly to think that way if we still believe ourselves to be a superpower. If, as some experts suggest, the economic incentives driving the drug trade has been manufactured – the need of Afghani farmers for guaranteed income is met by insurgents who offer cash in advance for planting opium instead of other crops – the entire scenario of our engagement seems to require tactics of rescue – not attack – in which the Afghani people are valuable assets in the struggle to rid their own nation of an evil influence.

As troop levels increase (scheduled to reach 68,000 by the end of the year) the opportunities for victory increase but what they do while there is more important than the number of boots striking the tarmac in Kandahar. President Obama must puts aside ego and politics and reclaim the purpose with which we initially went into Afghanistan, when it was perceived by most to be a smart war intelligently fought. The greatest achievement of Obama’s term in office might be recognizing his own hypocrisy before Afghanistan becomes a full-blown modern-day Vietnam. That’s right, President Obama; LBJ was also too proud to admit he was fighting a dumb war too.

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This article first appeared under Bryan Myrick’s byline at RedCounty.com.

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Did President Obama and Secretary Gates activate missile defense last week based on faulty intelligence or no intelligence?

So after nearly a full week listening to a tantalizing parade of defense experts discuss the ifs and maybes stemming from Japanese news reports that claimed North Korea was preparing to launch a Taepodong-2 long-range missile in the direction of the U.S. state of Hawaii, U.S. officials are now calling the whole mess a false alarm.  Well, sort of.

As reported by CNN.com Wednesday afternoon, unnamed U.S. officials are now claiming that the intelligence community does not believe that the Kim Jong Il and crew are or were preparing to take such provocative action:

The U.S. intelligence community does not believe North Korea intends to launch a long-range missile in the near future, a U.S. intelligence official told CNN, despite reports in Japanese media citing intelligence that the North Korean regime intends to fire a missile toward Hawaii on July 4.

Shortly after that report, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he was deploying defensive measures around Hawaii.

But a recent warning to mariners issued by North Korea suggests the country only intends short- and medium-range missile tests, according to one U.S. intelligence official.

That’s all well and good, and thank you very much, but what about the billions of dollars in high-tech missile defense hardware that was hustled into the seas around the 50th state?  Surely we have to assume that Defense Secretary Robert Gates would not have spent resources that are currently as precious as platinum to provide a deterrent to something that hadn’t been vetted by at least two out of three among Defense Intelligence, the CIA, or the NSA.

Only two assessments can be thus made of the White House reaction to what has now been unofficially called by official sources as a rumor.  Either the White House and the Pentagon were given faulty intelligence on which the decision to waste an incredible amount of money was based, or the decision was based only on a news report in the Japanese media combined with a dash of wild-eyed speculation around the Oval Office.  Take your pick, Barry.

The Pentagon is circling the wagons around Secretary Gates, but don’t expect the mainstream media to point a finger at his boss.  Attacking presidents who make appear to make decisions about using the military based on flawed or nonexistent intelligence is a play the press corps reserves for Republican commanders-in-chief fighting a war against Islamic terror.

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Yesterday’s headline in The Daily Telegraph – “North Korea ‘preparing to launch missile towards Hawaii’” - reinvigorated fears many have had about the Obama administration’s rush to abandon the path of progress defense contractors have been on in establishing a capable defense against missile attack. The U.S. press picked up the ball on the story adding information about America’s preemptive response, the decision to have the military move missile defense assets into the region. Not exactly a deterrent to what was designed from the start by Kim Il Jong and Co. to expend a missile, but certainly better than the “speak softly and speak softly” diplomatic method-acting that has characterized the White House-led lacklash to North Korea’s crescendo of aggression.

From Friday’s Wall Street Journal online edition:

The U.S. is moving ground-to-air missile defenses to Hawaii as tensions escalate between Washington and Pyongyang over North Korea’s recent moves to restart its nuclear-weapon program and resume test-firing long-range missiles.

…

Mr. Gates told reporters that the U.S. is positioning a sophisticated floating radar array in the ocean around Hawaii to track an incoming missile. The U.S. is also deploying missile-defense weapons to Hawaii that would theoretically be capable of shooting down a North Korean missile, should such an order be given, he said.

When President Obama’s Secretary of Defense, Robert M. Gates, announced the Pentagon budget in May, the drastic reductions in the military’s spending on missile defense was one of the items that leapt immediately to my attention. Without considering irritants in the global solution on restricting proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (North Korea, Iran), or nations that appear to be interesting in building missile-ready infrastructure and building “swinging door” nuclear energy programs (Venezuela and Cuba), the world still contains several nations in possession of superpower-sized nuclear arsenals. The end of the Cold War, and a period of relative calm in relations between the U.S. and the governments of Russia and China, should not be misinterpreted to give comfort that we live in a world without enemies capable of inflicting Armageddon should a cascading sequence of events lead to such catastrophic circumstances.

Of course this will get President Obama’s attention, with it being his home state and all, but will U.S. interests be put front and center in a way that this administration, and those preceding it, have failed to do? North Korea is following its well-worn track of nuclear brinksmanship as they have in the past, always in an effort to extract funds, or negotiate exceptions to sanctions, in exchange for promises to halt their nuclear program. The result has been predictable. Concessions from the U.S. and its allies are used to expand the North Korean nuclear program, thereby giving the North Koreans an ever-increasing advantage in the future negotiations, which will ensue at whatever point in time coincides with the next big weapons advancement. Furthermore, sanctions may have had the reverse effect in the North Korean case, creating a monetary incentive for them to attempt to find markets for their technology to bring in much-needed cash.

The North Korean strategy of nuclear blackmail and making disingenuous agreements may have an endgame. Now that North Korean nuclear weapons technology has achieved very limited capabilities in both its launch platforms and the bombs themselves, the game of cat and mouse may not have to end as swiftly for the North Koreans; both the potential for surprises and the fallout from appeasement have raised the stakes exponentially. Which launch will they use to test the complete launch-to-detonation cycle of one of a weapon? Even if a settlement is reached in this international crisis, there is no way to guarantee that a nation willing to subject its citizens to unbelievable poverty under the sanctions that remain the only tool of enforcement short of a military response.

This time around, because American national security experts must err on the side of assuming that North Korea may have the capability to put the jelly in the doughnut, so to speak, and arm their missile with a warhead. Though this is unlikely at this time – their technology appears to be years away from accomplishing that feat – if we continue along this zig-zag course of false progress, the day will eventually come when nuclear bombardment from North Korea will be a reality affecting all Pacific Rim nations.

Final thought: My understanding is that the knock on North Korea’s missiles is that they have very unreliable guidance systems. Even if they’re intending to fire a shot over the bow of the last remaining free-world superpower (which is they really plan to conduct the test), who says they’re going to hit what they’re aiming at? My guess is that things are going to be very tense in the 50^th state for the next couple of weeks.

Final, final thought: Isn’t it wonderful that the United States couldn’t even consider a military response at this time? Even if we were able to secure a miracle détente agreement with China and Russia to permit policing action against a rogue state, we would not be able to finance such a venture. After decades of runaway government spending, combined with the unprecedented fiscal irresponsibility of the Obama administration (and he’s not done yet, folks), we are now one step away from becoming paupers unable to even pay the cost of our own security.

Update:

A very detailed rundown on the hardware being moved into place can be found here on Wired’s Danger Room blog.  The post sheds a little doubt on whether the technology can be render Hawaii 100 percent missile-resistant.

Joint Chiefs vice chairman General James Cartwright said he was “90-plus percent” sure the U.S. could intercept a Nork missile, in the unlikely event it overflew U.S. territory.

Aloha.

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