The National Interest Online

Andrew J. Bacevich, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), 304 pp., $25.00.

Voltaire remarked of Frederick the Great’s Prussia that “where some states have an army, the Prussian Army has a state!” The same can easily be said of Pakistan. The destruction of the army would mean the destruction of the country. Yet this is something that the Pakistani Taliban and their allies can never achieve.

Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation notes that while China is investing heavily in its infrastructure, Obama is touting a freeze, ...

The discussion section of the Valdai Club took place this year in Yakutia (or in the indigenous language, Sakha) in eastern Siberia, mainly in cruise ships on the river Lena. This was fascinating, but I must confess that there were moments when I found myself repeating Dr. Samuel Johnson's remark about the Giant's Causeway: "Worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see." Going to see Yakutia involves a six-hour flight and a six-hour time difference from Moscow, with the result that I fell fast asleep during several of the sessions.

Over the last several days, two pieces attacking the realist approach to Russia were published in prominent media outlets in the United States and Russia. One, co-authored by Lev Gudkov of the Levada Center, Igor Klyamkin, vice president of the Liberal Mission Foundation, Georgy Satarov, president of the Russian NGO the Indem Foundation and Lilia Shevtsova, a senior associate at the Carnegie Moscow Center was was featured on the editorial page of the Washington Post.

On the late afternoon of Wednesday April 29, I went to interview a local leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami party in Karachi, and spent a couple of hours at their headquarters. From there, I went on to Zeinab market to look for presents for my family, and spent another couple of hours haggling over textiles and looking for a new suitcase. Then back to my hotel, where I had a shower and a bite to eat, called my wife, and contemplated going out for a drink with some friends (yes, Karachi is officially dry, but you wouldn’t always know it).

I hope with all my heart that most of what I am going to write in this article will prove mistaken. President Obama’s appointment of George Mitchell as special envoy for the Middle East peace process, and of Richard Holbrooke as special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan (and de facto American broker for the Kashmir issue), are both in themselves very positive moves. The Bush administration’s neglect of these two conflicts was among its more disgraceful foreign-policy omissions.

The most important questions concerning the terrorist attacks in Mumbai are also obvious ones, yet are not asked nearly often enough by Western analysts. They are: What goals did the terrorists hope to achieve by these attacks? And how to what degree did they achieve them? Regrettably, the terrorists so far seem to have achieved at least a qualified success.

In domestic policy, president-elect Obama faces the need for urgent and radical action, above all of course concerning the economy, but also on health coverage and financing social security. In foreign policy, matters are rather different. There, what he does not do will be just as important as what he does. After the hyper-activism of the Bush presidency, there is an urgent need for a long period of caution and restraint.

If anyone doubts the increasing importance of finance as a tool of foreign policy, one need look no further than Iceland, a NATO member, which this past week announced that it is in negotiations for a 4 billion euro bailout from Russia. Iceland's prime minister was blunt: "We have not received the kind of support that we were requesting from our friends, so in a situation like that one has to look for new friends."