Foreign Policy

There are days when tracking the Obama Administration’s bank-rescue plans seems to require a graduate degree in Kremlinology. As was true of those Cold War analyses of who stood where on the May Day reviewing stand, there is a sense at Treasury these days that runes and signs lie embedded in the most ordinary scenes. In public, Bernanke and Geithner continue to say that nationalization—or temporary receivership, the gentler euphemism—is not required and is not in their plans. Yet there are persistent indications of a hidden, whispered narrative of personal rivalry, debate, and unfinished decision-making within the Adminsitration about how to rescue the banks, and in what sequence...

Foreign Policy, which is now edited by my friend Susan Glasser, has gussied up its Web site with some smart, newsy blogs—its transparent ambition is to become the Politico of the national-security set. (Full disclosure: When the New America Foundation moves its offices in D.C., next week, Foreign Policy will become our tenants, but I hasten to add, in the spirit of nonprofit-dom, that we are billing them at cost.) Anyway, it is only today that I am catching up with a post from earlier this week on their Passport blog entitled, enticingly, “Osama bin Laden’s current location.”...

The lucid survey of American bank insolvency in the Times this morning only helps to emphasize how poorly the Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner did earlier this week when he issued the outline of his forthcoming “Financial Stability Plan.”

There are many sources of uncertainty and confusion in the seven-page Fact Sheet put out the Treasury Department, which is all we really have to go by. Perhaps the most vexing issue involves what role the government will eventually play in removing from the balance sheets of large banks the toxic-debt instruments tied to housing mortgages—“‘legacy’ assets,” as the Fact Sheet refers to them, that have created huge paper losses at many banks...

There is a lot of bad news in the poll of Afghan public opinion released yesterday by ABC News, the BBC, and ARD. More of those surveyed now regard the United States unfavorably (fifty-two per cent) than favorably (forty-seven per cent). In 2005, the favorability rating of the U.S. was eighty-three per cent.

Only eighteen per cent of Afghans think the U.S. decision to send more troops to the country is a good idea; forty-four per cent want fewer troops. This skepticism seems to be associated with a broad belief that U.S. military action has not and will not improve the security of Afghan civilians. The Taliban remain unpopular—more unpopular than the United States—but the gap is closing, and larger numbers of Afghans now see the Taliban as “more moderate” than in the past...

In this fiscal year, the Defense Department’s budget, once operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are accounted for, will reach about $700 billion. The State Department’s budget is less than $40 billion. One of the more discouraging examples of how this imbalance misshapes American foreign policy lies in Africa.

On October 1st of last year, the Defense Department formally inaugurated Africa Command, the latest of the “joint” military commands that divide the world into six regions and assign a war fighting and liaison authority to each one. (Central Command has the Middle East and Central Asia; Southern Command has Latin America; Northern Command has the United States and environs; European Command and Pacific Command split most of the rest of the world.) Africa Command has been troubled from the start; its mission was never well defined, and its launch left African governments and populations with the impression that the United States intended to militarize its policies on the continent, perhaps to contain China or compete with her in search of raw materials...

The C.I.A is again demonstrating its capacity to be its own worst enemy. The attached search warrant, filed in federal court in D.C. in October, describes the narrative of a sexual-assault investigation involving Andrew Warren, the agency’s station chief in Algiers, Algeria, where an Al Qaeda affiliate operates and where U.S.  relations with the host government and population are vital but rocky. The document reads depressingly like a treatment for an Abu Ghraib-inspired sequel involving American power, the Arab world, sexual violence, and digital photography. As the text shows, there appear to be layers of this story yet to be revealed—none of them likely to help President Obama’s outreach campaign in the Muslim world. The document refers, for example, to multiple women photographed by Warren, the alleged assailant, whom it describes as a convert to Islam...

In the foreseeable future, it seems, there will be two kinds of nonprofit newspapers—those which are deliberately so and those which are reluctantly so. Ever since I left the Washington Post, in 2005—after twenty years there that included a stint in management—and particularly since I joined the nonprofit world at the New America Foundation and started learning about the management and fund-raising issues at tax-exempt organizations, I have been mulling over this idea: that only by turning the Post into a nonprofit trust and raising a university-size endowment to support the newsroom could the paper retain the vitality it requires to serve as a successful watchdog over our constitutional system. Now David Swensen, the chief investment officer at Yale, and Michael Schmidt, a financial analyst, have come forward with a similar argument...

One of my colleagues here in Think Tanksville pointed out the other day that President Obama used the phrase “hard-earned peace” in his Inaugural Address to describe his goals in Afghanistan. It is not hard to imagine the marginalia that produced this slightly odd language. “To Speechwriting: No more ‘victories,’ please.”

Also, “peace” has a pleasing relationship with “stability,” which is emerging as the realist, scaled-down, but nonetheless daunting goal in Afghanistan among many foreign-policy types who, for one reason or another, believe that the United States ought to trim its ambitions in that country to match our resources and abilities...

Which Canadian civil servant chose the site for the government’s Washington Embassy at 5th and Pennsylvania, and commissioned the architect who designed the sixth-floor roof terrace overlooking the Supreme Court and the west facade of the Capitol? Information welcome, but I hope he or she has been duly honored with maple-leaf clusters and other such national awards. Slightly disconcerting to be surrounded by red-coated Mounties while staring out at the Inauguration stand, but it is hard to imagine a better vista. And, of course, since this is technically sovereign Canada, everyone is very polite, very hopeful, and modestly earnest—and the cheese is excellent. There’s a tailgate party downstairs. The parade will soon muster just below the terrace wall. Quite a day in both republics. One young woman did give George W. Bush the finger as his helicopter flew over. The snipers on the adjoining rooftops took no action, however.

As for the speech, I find it hard to absorb such work in real time. Obviously, there were some sections of magnificent language and control—the distillation of past sacrifices, the “better history” and prosperity riffs among them...

As all of Washington-- and indeed, the United States, if not the world-- awaits with anticipation President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration next week, a glimmering of possibility regarding a more prominent role for asset-building strategies was evident in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's confirmation hearing yesterday.  Giving a nod to toward social development, microfinance, and bottom-up empowerment as key elements of a foreign policy strategy, we can't help but suggest how an asset-building framework would enhance the impact of such strategies.