Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Tuesday briefed a half-dozen key Arab states on U.S.-led efforts to stem Iran’s nuclear program but achieved no new consensus on how to prevent Iran from developing the technology for a nuclear weapon.
Strategy at any level can be defined as the assimilation of ends (interests) ways (policies/methods), and means (resources). Developmet of a grand strategy should also align strategies at the strategic (long-term), operational (mid-term) and tactical (short-term) levels. Next challenge is deployment which requires a common framework among the key stakeholders. The fact that the topic is even addressed indicates the need for a strategy for developing strategy.
Wanted: A New Grand Strategy, By Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, Nov 29, 2008,
Grand strategy sounds like an abstract concept—something academics discuss—and one that bears little relationship to urgent, jarring events on the ground. But in the absence of strategy, any administration will be driven by the news, reacting rather than leading. For a superpower that has global interests and is forced to respond to virtually every problem, it’s all too easy for the urgent to drive out the important.
Strategy begins by looking at the world and identifying America’s interests, the threats to them and the resources available to be deployed. By relating all these, one can develop a set of foreign policies that will advance America’s interests and ideals. When the unexpected happens, one can respond in ways that are aligned with these broader objectives. One uses the urgent to pursue the important. Or, to put it another way: never let a crisis go to waste.
Israel Warns U.S. Of Iranian Nuke Attack, (USA Today)…Unattributed, December 18, 2008, Pg. 7
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned that if Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, it could try to attack the United States.
Barak, who spoke Wednesday at a conference of the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, said the world should press Iran to stop it from building nuclear weapons.
“If it built even a primitive nuclear weapon like the type that destroyed Hiroshima, Iran would not hesitate to load it on a ship, arm it with a detonator operated by GPS and sail it into a vital port on the east coast of North America,” he said.
Indicating the possibility of a military strike, Barak said, “We recommend to the world not to take any option off the table, and we mean what we say.”
BRIAN WILLIAMS: On our last trip to Afghanistan, we heard it often from the soldiers on the ground. They didn’t like what it was called, the “Other War,” or even worse the “Forgotten War.” They’re in a tough fight there. President Obama will inherit it. He has vowed to pump more soldiers in. He’ll have help in improving the situation there from the point man on the ground in that war, Gen. John Nicholson, a man with one of the toughest jobs in the U.S. military.
Our own Jim Maceda spent some time with Nicholson in Kandahar Province.
JIM MACEDA: He rolls through town like a new sheriff getting used to the neighborhood, but this is the very heart of Taliban country.
REPORTER: So have you had suicide bomber attacks recently in Kandahar City?
MACEDA: Gen. John Nicholson is the first and only U.S. general in Southern Afghanistan and his orders are as clear as they are daunting: start winning the war.
BRIG. GEN. JOHN NICHOLSON [U.S. Army]: We are now going to be able to secure the vast majority of the population in the south and deliver the basic services through the government that they were unable to do this point.
MACEDA: He’s already expanding bases with a 15,000-20,000 additional U.S. troops expected in the coming year, effectively doubling NATO’s punch in the crucial south.
NICHOLSON: We will see more U.S. forces and more U.S. investment in Southern Afghanistan, which will be a game changer.
This will be the first of many visits here –
MACEDA: As much nation-builder as warrior, Nicholson’s day is a whirlwind of meetings with USAID officials, visiting lawmakers, and Afghan leaders. The boss still surprises his longtime military assistant.
MAJ. FRED TANNER [U.S. Army]: His ability – whoever he’s engaging with to be able to think at their level, you know, whether that be a congressman or be a company commander.
MACEDA: But the 51-year-old West Point grad with two Masters Degrees knows how tough victory will be. In 2006, we embedded with then Col. Nicholson and his brigade in Eastern Afghanistan coming under ambush, trying to flush out the Taliban from the Pakistan border. The Taliban was relentless. By the end of that tour, his unit had lost 45 men and 350 wounded – the highest U.S. toll in the war.
NICHOLSON: For me, there’s a moral obligation to my soldiers who’ve sacrificed so much here to come back and deliver on what they started.
MACEDA: And there’s something else.
NICHOLSON: I believe I was spared on 9/11 to do my duty here in Afghanistan.
MACEDA: The plane that struck the Pentagon on 9/11 destroyed his office, killing his closest colleagues. Nicholson should have been there, but instead was moving into a house that day with his family.
NICHOLSON: I’m grateful to have that purpose.
MACEDA: But with Taliban attacks and government corruption on the rise, Nicholson says he’s no Mr. Fixit.
NICHOLSON: You know, Mr. Fixit would imply that I had all the answers, but I certainly don’t.
MACEDA: What he does have is a mission to turn around a war he can’t walk away from.
Jim Maceda, NBC News, Kandahar.
It’s easy to get depressed reading the news out of Afghanistan. The insurgents are getting stronger, the United States is sending another 20,000 troops there — and yet even Defense Secretary Bob Gates admits that American soldiers aren’t a long-term solution. So what to do?
In sorting out these policy dilemmas, it helps to talk to Afghans such as Saad and Jahid Mohseni, who are struggling with these problems every day.
The Mohsenis’ story reminds me that Afghans are like anyone else. They want a normal life, with a decent income, a safe place to raise their kids and good shows to watch on TV. Creating a secure environment may require 20,000 more U.S. troops, but the real breakthrough would be an Afghan government that protects its people rather than allowing criminal gangs to terrorize them.
FUKUOKA, Japan — North Korea on Saturday threatened to slow the disablement of its main nuclear plant after Washington said energy aid to the nation had been suspended because of failed talks on verifying the North’s operations.
China, Japan and South Korea expressed regret that the North had failed to agree to specific steps on verifying its nuclear activities at multilateral talks in Beijing last week.
U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said all five countries negotiating with North Korea – Japan, Russia, China, the United States and South Korea – had agreed that future fuel shipments would not go forward until there was progress on a so-called verification protocol with Pyongyang.
…the Predator crews at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada “are at least as fatigued as crews deployed to Iraq,” if not more so, according to a series of reports by Air Force Lt. Col. Anthony P. Tvaryanas.
… remote pilots do not receive the kind of cues from their sense of touch and place that pilots who are actually in their planes get automatically. That makes flying drones physically confusing and mentally exhausting.
Poor planning, waste and deception led to $200 billion failure, report says
An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.
Among the overarching conclusions of the history is that five years after embarking on its largest foreign reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War II, the United States government has in place neither the policies and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake such a program on anything approaching this scale.
James Glanz reported from Baghdad, and T. Christian Miller, of the nonprofit investigative Web site ProPublica, reported from Washington.
A bevy of foreign policy experts are pressing Barack Obama to move quickly on his promise to “engage in aggressive personal diplomacy” with Iran. He’d be better off first taking a long, deep breath and allowing Iran’s economic crisis to take its toll on the mullahs before getting down to serious business.
The political landscape has shifted dramatically in Iran in the last few months, handing the United States policy options it hasn’t had since the 1979 revolution. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s populist expenditure policies, coupled with the unprecedented collapse of the oil market, have driven Iran into an economic tailspin. The result is that Iran is more vulnerable to focused economic sanctions than it has been in 30 years.
Iran’s record of economic failure since the revolution is astonishing. Average real per-capita income is lower and income distribution is more unequal. Oil production has dropped 30% and yet dependence on oil revenues is higher. The unemployment rate is hovering around 25%, and this year inflation may top 30%.
…The war in Afghanistan — the war that President-elect Barack Obama pledged to fight and win — has become an aimless absurdity. It began with a specific target. Afghanistan was where Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda lived, harbored by the Islamic extremist Taliban government. But the enemy escaped into Pakistan, and for the past seven years, Afghanistan has been a slow bleed against an array of mostly indigenous narco-jihadi-tribal guerrilla forces that we continue to call the “Taliban.”
In his initial statements, Obama has seemed more sophisticated about Afghanistan than Bush. In an interview with me in late October, Obama said Afghanistan should be seen as part of a regional problem, and he suggested that he might dispatch a special envoy, perhaps Bill Clinton, to work on the Indo-Afghan-Pakistani dilemma. Clinton seems a less likely prospect since his wife was named Secretary of State. The current speculation is that Richard Holbrooke may be selected for the job, which would be a very good idea.
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