Although most of the Obama administration appears in lock step, there are hints of opposition. In an interview with the National Journal, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said of Iran, “I just think that it’s premature to be deciding that the economic and diplomatic approach is inadequate.”  Martin Dempsey’s remark subtly contradicts the administration, and echoes comments from Admiral Fallon in 2007, when he said of Iran, “”This constant drumbeat of conflict…is not helpful and not useful. I expect that there will be no war, and that is what we ought to be working for.”

Fallon’s utterance caused such a “perception of policy differences” with the executive branch that Fallon retired early. The situation today is somewhat different; few in the Obama administration are itching for another war in the Middle East, but the White House is as worried about Israeli recklessness as about Iranian recalcitrance. Militant war talk from Washington worries Iran and calms Israel: exactly what the White House wants.

Any White House ire at Dempsey will be about appearance, not substance.  Israeli hawks are scanning the news flow for clues about whether Israel can count on the US or whether it must act on its own. They will worry that Dempsey’s remarks could bring about exactly the kind of confrontation he — and they — would like to prevent.

The Taliban in Afghanistan are being directly assisted by Pakistani security services, according to a secret Nato report seen by the BBC.

The leaked report, derived from thousands of interrogations, claims the Taliban remain defiant and have wide support among the Afghan people…

The report alleges that Pakistan knows the locations of senior Taliban leaders…

It notes: “Pakistan’s manipulation of the Taliban senior leadership continues unabatedly”.

It says that Pakistan is aware of the locations of senior Taliban leaders.

“Senior Taliban representatives, such as Nasiruddin Haqqani, maintain residences in the immediate vicinity of ISI headquarters in Islamabad,” it said.

It quotes a senior al-Qaeda detainee as saying: “Pakistan knows everything. They control everything. I can’t [expletive] on a tree in Kunar without them watching.”

The report details what American diplomats and Afghanistan watchers have suspected for some time. American officials have jumped to play down the report, correctly pointing out that this information should not be taken at face value. Indeed, spokesmen from NATO and the International Security Assistance Force have been “unusually” concerned with rebutting the findings of the report. Lt. Col. Jimmie E. Cummings of ISAF told the press that ”this document aggregates the comments of Taliban detainees in a captive environment without considering the validity of or motivation behind their reflections…Any conclusions drawn from this would be questionable at best.”

The press campaign suggests American and NATO officials are trying to maintain a constructive relationship with Islamabad. As the FT notes, “the Times quoted the report as saying that ‘despite widespread open-source reports to the contrary’ there is little evidence from detainees that Pakistan provides funding or weapons.”

Via Meadia supports the idea of negotiating our way out of Afghanistan rather than cutting and running or, alternatively, settling down in that country forever.  We have long feared that by telegraphing our intentions to begin drawing down troops and setting a hoped for withdrawal date, we were deeply and perhaps fatally undercutting the whole basis of our military campaign. It might have been better either to cut and run in 2009 or to double down and say nothing about withdrawal; the current course looks like the worst of all choices. We (and the Afghans) bear the full costs in life and treasure of a longer war, and we end up with the Taliban running the country much as we would have done had we withdrawn in 2009. We have also strengthened those in Pakistan who advocate a course of waiting the Americans out — with the kind of results we are learning about from the BBC.

It’s bad news that the Iraqis need the help, though hardly a surprise. The good news is that the Obama administration continues to work with Iraq on these sensitive issues. Iraqi politicians may have felt they needed the drama of showing the last US troops out the front door before inviting them back in through the kitchen.  Having demonstrated its sovereignty, and seen that the US is serious and will in fact leave when asked, Iraq’s government may now be ready and able to work out the kind of agreement it needs.

Again, from AP:

“The secretary believes that the Iraqi people have a genuine opportunity to create a future of greater security for themselves, and that senseless acts of violence will not deter them from pursuing that goal,” [Pentagon spokesman] Little said. “The United States remains committed to a strong security relationship with Iraq.”

U.S. officials have said they aim to establish broad defense ties to Iraq, similar to American relationships with other nations in the Gulf, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain.

In Tehran, this will be more bad news. Pressure mounting on Syria, US forces potentially coming back into Iraq, China playing footsie with the Gulf states while snubbing Iran: the pressure to come to an agreement on the nuclear program is beginning to add up.

The other place where the news of these talks is bad news: Howard Dean’s “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.”  The man the party left did so much to install in the White House, the man it hoped would lead a Reagan style Great Realignment that would install a liberal ascendancy in Washington for the next twenty years, is carrying out a foreign policy increasingly indistinguishable from the second term of George Bush. Guantanamo remains open while the US pursues a long term security relationship with democratic Iraq, preparing an indefinite extension of its military presence.

Scattered reports of torture in Libyan jails and unrest in Libyan towns are beginning to coalesce into a picture of the exciting new reality created by last year’s humanitarian war-to-protect.  If Amnesty International knows what it is talking about, Libyans are being “tortured to death” by the people we saved from Gaddafi and installed in power. Surprisingly, the Wilsonian hawks who gave us this inspiring policy haven’t yet sent a new barrage of airstrikes to stop the new round of brutality and bloodshed.

Meanwhile for Russia, the “lessons of Libya” are clear.  Russia’s abstention on the Libya resolution at the UN Security Council extended a mantle of legitimacy over the Libyan bombs; this is now seen as a strategic mistake that must not be repeated over Syria.  Russian oil companies have been heavily punished by the new Libyan government which instead rewarded its western backers with fat contracts. Russian arms deliveries to Syria and diplomatic support to the embattled government in Damascus — along with closer alignment with Iran — have been facilitated by Russia’s intense reaction to the Libyan misadventure.

In Russia, the belief that the West cynically uses internal instability as an excuse to replace unfriendly regimes with compliant puppets (often no more “democratic” or “humane” than the previous thugs) has become dogma, and this western propensity is now seen as a national security threat to Russia and the friendly regimes on its frontiers.

Libya didn’t cause this perception, but it has strengthened it, and considerably strengthened Russia’s determination to resist: this week, the Kremlin announced its intention to veto any Security Council resolution calling for Bashar al-Assad to step down.

The NGO activists and groups the humanitarian hawks represent and hope to bolster have also been set back by the war.  The perception that the US and the Europeans promote instability and protest in hostile countries and then use those protestors and the resulting instability to advance their interests has been strengthened by Libya and its aftermath. The Egyptian crackdown on NGOs and the current refusal to allow US citizens connected to them to leave is yet another sign that the NGO world of civic activism is going to face more determined government push back around the world. Without advancing the cause of world freedom in any significant way, the Libyan intervention was a wake up call to the forces of darkness, and led them to conclude that while President Obama may be a kinder and gentler face, the Obama administration is no less committed to a project of ideological transformation than the Bush administration was in its first term.

As predicted, the Libyan intervention has strengthened Assad and ensured a longer period of delay and hesitation before any possible intervention in Syria.  The tortures taking place in Libyan jails today and the blood flowing in Syrian streets cannot be separated from the humanitarian bombs about which the “duty to protect” crowd rejoiced so naively last spring.

Meanwhile, many analysts agree that the war in Libya, brilliant and strategic though it appeared to the White House at the time, may be making our options regarding Iran more limited. The west made a deal with Gaddafi: stop your nuclear program and we will treat you with respect.  He kept his end of the bargain and we dispatched him to his eternal reward.  What assurances can we now give the mullahs that would induce them to believe that they will be safe without nukes?

This makes it less likely that President Obama’s approach to Iran, infinitely more important for the future of US foreign policy than anything that has happened or could happen in Libya, will succeed.  There is no pledge Obama could give the mullahs that can offer them the same protection that a bomb would give them; the “duty to protect” crowd does not believe it needs to honor any sort of pre-existing pledge to a leader it decides is “bad,” while reserving the right to strike anyone, anywhere, anytime, should a moral mood befall us. For Iran, the lesson of Libya is that the West will tell you anything to get you to give up the quest for nuclear weapons, but none of the beautiful pledges can be trusted.  At the first sign of weakness, they will intervene to overthrow you.

Thank goodness the Bush crowd and those awful neocons are gone.

To be fair to the White House, and to the neocons for that matter, American foreign policy is hard.  We are doomed to play two incompatible roles in the world.  On the one hand, we are a status quo power that wants to keep the world stably operating within a set of legal norms and practical arrangements. We want treaties to be honored, boundaries respected, and disagreements to be settled in peace.

But at the same time, we are an even more revolutionary country today than we were in 1776.  The political ideas that form us, and the economic system which makes us strong, are fundamentally at war with the political, economic and even religious ideas that hold sway in much of the world.

There is no perfectly harmonious way to balance the two sides of America’s presence in the world.  There is no glitch-free path down which our foreign policy can smoothly glide to untroubled success.  Contradictions, mishaps, mixed signals and unintended consequences are an inevitable and irreducible element of American foreign policy even when planned and executed at the highest level, and even a great foreign policy president and secretary of state will have a bumpy ride.

Critics of an administration’s foreign policy often judge its success or failure by the bumpiness of the ride.  That’s a mistake. Franklin Roosevelt’s foreign policy in his second term was pretty smooth, but only because the US sat passively as Nazi Germany, Fascist Japan and Stalin’s USSR cooked up the most dangerous global challenge we have ever faced. Given the state of US public opinion at the time (humanitarian legalists and crackpot isolationists were stinking up the place with bad ideas) there might not have been much FDR could do, but a bumpier foreign policy would have been better for the country.

It should also be remembered that on the whole, even taking misadventures like Vietnam, Iraq and — in its small and low-rent way — Libya, into account, Washington’s failures to act have been much worse for the world (and the US) than even the most misguided steps we have taken.  There is reason to argue that in American foreign policy the tie should go to the runner: in a closely balanced situation there is usually a good case for doing something than sitting passively by.

So rather than judging the pilot on the bumpiness of the flight, we should ask some other questions about American foreign policy.  One would be the issue of importance: are we putting the most effort and attention behind the most important issues? If we are having trouble, does our distress at least come because we are wrestling with the most important issues of the day?

Here, I think, Libya fails.  From any point of view (humanitarian, political, strategic), Syria was more important than Libya in the spring of 2011.  It is more important than Libya now.  Tripoli was a diversion from Damascus rather than a road to it; whatever our policy was going to be, we should have put more weight on Syria and less on Libya.

Second, there is a question of strategic coherence: can the results we intend be achieved by the initiatives we propose? Here too the Libyan war falls short. This was proposed as a humanitarian war: a war to protect.  Such a war must succeed in political terms: its success will be judged on political rather than strategic grounds.  Are Libyans better off than they were before Gaddafi fell? Are they safer? Is the country more stable, more cohesive, less oppressive?

Perhaps it will be.  I certainly hope so.  But this is a goal that we have no way to achieve. It is not in our power to give a good government to the people of Libya. It is not in our power to ensure that the successor to Gaddifi, when and if one emerges, will be better for the Libyans than was the Great Loon. Yet thanks to the circumstances of the war and to the rationale we proposed at the time, our success in Libya will inevitably be judged by an outcome over which we have limited influence and no control.

We can get lucky in Libya if things work out to some kind of acceptable outcome — and I hope we will.  But we cannot make our luck: the intervention has made us more vulnerable — not less — to outcomes we have little ability to shape.

A third question would relate to possible gains: what do we get if we win?  Do we preserve our existence as a nation in a war of self defense? Do we advance important political or economic interests? Do we nip an emerging threat in the bud? Do we weaken a strategic enemy? Do we advance an important principle of international order and law? Do we prevent a great evil?

Clearly, the Libyan intervention was primarily shaped in response to the last two questions.  It was billed as a war to prevent a slaughter and as a war to advance the concept of the duty to protect. It may have achieved the first objective, though by the time all the killing is finished it will be hard to calculate whether more people died in the war to overthrow Gaddafi, the battles to succeed him, and in the prisons of the new regime than might have died if Gaddafi had crushed Benghazi all those months ago.

Far from securing the second objective — advancing the doctrine of the duty to protect — the net effect of the war in Libya is to weaken the hold of that idea both in the US and abroad.  This isn’t because we failed in the mission. We failed by succeeding in Libya.

We failed on two fronts.  In the first place, we failed because victory took so long to achieve, and that victory has been so dismal and unsatisfying (all that blood in the streets, all those tortured to death in the cells) that it tends to reduce enthusiasm for new ventures of this kind.  The next group of humanitarian hawks trying to sell a liberal president on a war of good intentions will have a harder time making the sale than this group did.  Far from anchoring a principle in US foreign policy, the Libyan war provides intellectual ammunition for critics of the idea and puts new weapons into the hands of political opponents of such ventures.

Secondly, success in Libya has given new strength to the international opponents of the “duty to protect” idea.  The Security Council is less likely to bless further such ventures now.  Russia and China will oppose new ventures of this kind with more vigor — and with more support from other countries, including some democratic ones.  In world politics today, the duty to protect looks less like an objective principle of law and more like a mask for western interests than it did before the Libyan war.

The war in Libya stopped a probable slaughter.  It overthrew a horrible man and liberated a nation from one of the world’s more destructive dictatorships.  It reinforced the world’s sense of America’s great military might — though the hesitating manner in which we fought reassured many of our opponents that we are less likely to use that power in decisive ways than we were ten years ago.

But it did not — and, really, could not — advance significant US strategic, economic or political interests. It did not and could not make the world a safer place.  It weakened our hand in dealing with both Syria and Iran.  And it provided new ammunition to those, at home and abroad, who want to resist the kind of order-building the war was intended to promote. It was a well-intentioned war, but not a good one.

Libya is not the first or the costliest mistake the US has ever made.  And it is very far from a total disaster.  Gaddafi is gone. Yet we spent money and political capital for a net-negative result and must now deal with much more serious and urgent problems made worse by the “success” of the Libya venture.

An agreement with Manila would come close on the heels of two other upcoming moves: American Marines soon to be stationed in Australia and several U.S. warships moving to Changi Naval Base in Singapore.

Asian nations are learning that the United States is prepared to offer a real balance against China’s new assertiveness in the region. In the Philippine case, this dovetails nicely with the country’s interests—especially with respect to the disputed Spratly and Paracel islands, geographically closer to the Philippines than China. Manila has occasionally stationed troops on the islands, and it operates a number of offshore oil fields in waters claimed by China. Having American ships docked in its ports, if not also American boots on Philippine soil, will no doubt be a confidence booster for Manila in these and other disputes.

Emad Hosseini, spokesman for parliament’s energy committee, said that if Iran encountered any problem selling its oil, it would store it. “If we don’t export our oil to Europe, our oil will be saved and storage of oil will not harm us but we will have rich storage of oil,”…adding Iran retained its threat to shut the Gulf to shipping. “Closing the Strait of Hormuz is one of the country’s strategies against the West’s threats, especially an oil embargo”…

Let’s get this straight, Iran would be so happy to store its unsold oil, that it will retaliate by closing the Straits of Hormuz? However, the fine print of the EU declaration contains good news for Iran. The Reuters article continues:

The embargo will not kick in completely until July 1 because the bloc’s foreign ministers who agreed the ban at a meeting in Brussels were anxious not to penalize the ailing economies of Greece, Italy and others to whom Iran is a major oil supplier….The strategy will be reviewed in May to see if it should proceed.

It’s quite possible that May will lead to a further postponement; Greece and Italy are very unlikely to to have turned any economic corners by then and there will be voices in many countries urging the EU to keep the price of oil down.  Loudly announcing an embargo and then quietly postponing its date from one month to another would not be out of keeping with Europe’s approach to a number of serious problems closer to home.

Sixty years ago, in the throes of the Korean War, Beijing could scarcely have been further from the water. Today, however, China’s shipyards are humming and the PLA Navy (PLAN) is sustaining operations half a world away in the Gulf of Aden.

The authors highlight 12 key Chinese maritime developments to look for in the next year, and readers will recognize in them many of the key China-related issues that we have been tracking here on the blog. From the highly uncertain future of China’s economic “growth miracle” to its increasingly sophisticated technological capabilities; from its growing assertiveness in protecting its access to Middle Eastern petroleum to its expanding contributions to humanitarian and international policing initiatives; and from its tensions with its regional neighbors to its new relationships with countries around the globe, perhaps no organization in China is more representative of the opportunities, dangers, and uncertainties of China’s rise than the PLA Navy.

The PLAN has the potential to play either a stabilizing or destabilizing role in the geopolitics of the 21st century. Either way, current and aspiring geostrategists should be tracking its development closely. These 12 trends are a good place to start.

Iran’s morality police are cracking down on the sale of Barbie dolls to protect the public from what they see as pernicious western culture eroding Islamic values, shopkeepers said on Monday.

As the West imposes the toughest ever sanctions on Iran and tensions rise over its nuclear program, inside the country the Barbie ban is part of what the government calls a “soft war” against decadent cultural influences.

Stories like these, amusing as they are, also remind us of the very serious fact that, as Reuters puts it, Iran’s theocratic rulers have “fought a running battle to purge pervasive western culture from the country since its Islamic revolution overthrew a western-backed king in 1979, enforcing Islamic dress codes, banning Western music and foreign satellite television.”

When so-called foreign policy realists argue that we could mollify the mullahcracy simply by removing troops from the Middle East, or lessening sanctions, or slashing aid to Israel–whatever the merits of these individual proposals–they completely elide this crucial cultural consideration.

In the final analysis, Iran does not resent the West merely because of our policies in the region, as realists would have it, or because of our ideologies, as neoconservatives would have it, but rather due to a complex combination of the two. It is precisely this enigmatic intermingling of the cultural and the political that makes Iran policy-making so fraught with difficulty. Contrary to what many pundits will tell you, there are no simple solutions to our problems in the country.

In any case, hostility between Iran and the west is vital to some powerful political interests in Iran. Some westerners say that we should drop our hostility as a way of weakening these radical elements; nice idea, but if the west seeks to ratchet the tension down, these forces are likely to respond by staging provocations that will heighten the confrontation again.

Right now, Iran’s position is deteriorating while the US and its partners are gaining strength, a resurgent Sunni world has put Shiite influence on the defensive and the confrontation in Syria has knocked Iran back on its heels. Only in Iraq, where early US withdrawal has eased Iran’s quest for power, can Tehran find any glimmers of hope. Banning Barbie won’t help Iran deal with a run of geopolitical setbacks, but it testifies to a continuing radicalism in the ruling establishment that bodes poorly for those of us still hoping for a diplomatic deal.

Candidate Obama made the global elimination of nuclear weapons a big campaign issue: in 2008, he promised to “lead a global effort to secure all nuclear weapons materials at vulnerable sites within four years.” He has done well on a number of fronts: The new START treaty with Russia mandates that both Washington and Moscow cooperate on reducing nuclear stockpiles and combating the spread of nuclear material and know-how. As a result of the Nuclear Security Summit, convened by Obama early in his presidency, various former Soviet states have made progress on removing nuclear weapons material from their soil.

Yet the big nuclear question—Iran—is more pressing than ever. Obama has made it clear that a military option is still on the table. Israel has similarly not backed down. To what effect? Iran, despite sanctions and increasing political isolation, is barreling ahead with its nuclear weapons ambitions, according to the IAEA. The mullahs’ getting a bomb would cast a shroud over all Obama’s proliferation accomplishments to date, and the US is closer to having to make a fateful choice between war with Iran or accepting an Iranian bomb than it was in 2008.

Would that Iran were the only nuclear-fueled headache for Washington. Pakistan keeps U.S. officials up at nights too. Its military leadership is constantly afraid that the United States will confiscate its nuclear weapons. The US, in turn, is afraid that militants or rogue elements within Pakistan’s armed forces will somehow get their hands on them. As Jeffrey Goldberg and Marc Ambinder describe in a recent Atlantic article, this state of affairs prompts Pakistan’s nuclear watchmen to do extremely risky things to protect their stockpiles:

Nuclear-weapons components are sometimes moved by helicopter and sometimes moved over roads. And instead of moving nuclear material in armored, well-defended convoys, the SPD prefers to move material by subterfuge, in civilian-style vehicles without noticeable defenses, in the regular flow of traffic. According to both Pakistani and American sources, vans with a modest security profile are sometimes the preferred conveyance. And according to a senior U.S. intelligence official, the Pakistanis have begun using this low-security method to transfer not merely the “de-mated” component nuclear parts but “mated” nuclear weapons. Western nuclear experts have feared that Pakistan is building small, “tactical” nuclear weapons for quick deployment on the battlefield. In fact, not only is Pakistan building these devices, it is also now moving them over roads.

A non-democratic, anti-American country whose leaders have close ties with terrorists and a habit of defying international authorities on the sale of nuclear materials: this is our worst proliferation nightmare and it is angry and it is real. The Obama administration has been no more successful than its predecessor in dealing with a problem that gets worse over time.

Proliferation is about more than just weapons of mass destruction. Small arms and small conflicts can be almost as devastating over the long haul. For one, small arms and explosives are more available and more prevalent in conflict areas than ever before. Worse, they’re durable, able to last through the ages. Functioning WWI-era Lee-Enfield rifles have been uncovered in Taliban weapons caches in Afghanistan. Properly maintained, these weapons are just as deadly as they were in 1915.

The NATO intervention in Libya sparked fears about the security of Qaddafi’s weapons stockpiles. The Great Loon certainly did have a serious arsenal, including chemical weapons. Much of that has been secured, but, worryingly, weapons like portable surface-to-air missile launchers and rocket launchers have gone missing. While in many cases these pose no serious threat to a modern fighter jet, they could easily bring down a passenger airliner. Not surprisingly, al-Qaeda and their comrades in arms swarmed to the mayhem of post-Qaddafi Libya, on the lookout for all sorts of bargains and freebees. Keeping Qaddafi’s stockpiles under lock and key in the now-chaotic Libya will be costly. Since toppling the Great Loon, Libya’s tribes and factions are starting to turn on each other. If the violence spirals out of control, no one will have to go far to find guns and ammo.

Proliferation is just as frightening an issue today as it was in January 2010. Via Meadia doesn’t think that will change anytime soon. The dream of nuclear disarmament is just that: a dream. On the proliferation issue, expect to whimper as we keep hearing more bangs.

“In the letter, Obama called for direct talks with Iran,” the semiofficial Fars news agency quoted [Ali] Motahari [an Iranian lawmaker] as saying Wednesday. “The letter also said that closing the Strait of Hormuz is (Washington’s) red line.” [...]

Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast confirmed that Tehran received the letter and was considering a possible response.

President Obama has often made clear that “all options are on the table” when it comes to Iran’s nuclear push. Some have even suggested he could have tried harder to negotiate. He appears to now be giving it one last try, if reports on the secret letter to Tehran are confirmed.

Iran also recently suggested that nuclear talks will resume soon.

Talks make sense, though not indefinitely extended ones. The surprising show of European and Arab unity with the US may (or may not) be changing hearts and minds in Tehran. Testing Iran’s intentions is worth doing; getting bogged down in endless talks about talks while Tehran steams ahead with its nuclear program and spews propaganda and fake peace proposals is not.