New Pakistani Leaders Tell Americans There’s ‘a New Sheriff in Town’

By SALMAN MASOOD

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The top State Department officials responsible for the alliance with Pakistan met leaders of the new government on Tuesday, and received what amounted to a public dressing-down from one of them, as well as the first direct indication that the United States relationship with Pakistan would have to change.

On the day that the new prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gillani, was sworn in, Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte and the assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs, Richard A. Boucher, also met with the Pakistani president, Pervez Musharraf, whom they had embraced as their partner in the campaign against terrorism over the past seven years but whose power is quickly ebbing.

The leader of the second biggest party in the new Parliament, Nawaz Sharif, said after meeting the two American diplomats that it was unacceptable that Pakistan had become a “killing field.”

“If America wants to see itself clean of terrorists, we also want that our villages and towns should not be bombed,” he said at a news conference here. Mr. Sharif, a former prime minister, added he was unable to give Mr. Negroponte “a commitment” on fighting terrorism.

The statements by Mr. Sharif, and the cool body language in the televised portions of his encounter with Mr. Negroponte, were just part of the sea change in Pakistan’s domestic politics that is likely to impose new limits on how Washington fights militants within Pakistan’s borders.

That fight, which has recently included American airstrikes in the lawless tribal areas where the Taliban and Al Qaeda have made sanctuaries, has become widely unpopular, particularly in the last few months as a surge in suicide bombings here has been viewed as retaliation for the American attacks.

Asif Ali Zardari, the leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party, also met with the Americans but did not speak to reporters afterward. Husain Haqqani, an adviser who attended the meeting with him, said, though, that the American officials had been given notice that the old ways were over.

“If I can use an American expression, there is a new sheriff in town,” Mr. Haqqani said. “Americans have realized that they have perhaps talked with one man for too long.”

Neither Mr. Negroponte nor Mr. Boucher spoke publicly about the meetings, but the Pakistanis said the Americans expressed willingness to work with the new government.

Mr. Sharif and Mr. Zardari boycotted the swearing-in of Mr. Gillani as prime minister by Mr. Musharraf at the presidential palace, another sign of their determination to sideline Mr. Musharraf.

Distancing himself from Mr. Musharraf, Mr. Gillani, moments after taking the oath of office, said, “We have to give supremacy to the Parliament so that we can jointly take the country out of these crises.”

He later received a call from President Bush offering congratulations. According to Mr. Gillani’s office, Mr. Gillani told Mr. Bush that “Pakistan would continue to fight terrorism in all its forms” but that a “comprehensive approach” was required, “combining a political approach with development programs.”

The new chief of staff of the Pakistan Army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, also seemed to eager to show he was his own man, relieving two generals on Monday who had been close to Mr. Musharraf.

The timing of the American visit was harshly criticized in the Pakistan media for creating the appearance that the United States was trying to dictate policy to a government not even hours old. The two American diplomats met Mr. Sharif as Mr. Musharraf administered the oath of office to Mr. Gillani.

“I don’t think it is a good idea for them to be here on this particular day,” said Zaffar Abbas, the editor of the English-language newspaper Dawn. “Here are the Americans, right here in Islamabad, meeting with senior politicians in the new government, trying to dictate terms.”

An editorial on Tuesday in The News, one of Pakistan’s most-read English dailies, was headlined “Hands Off Please, Uncle Sam.” The Americans should understand, the editorial said, that the newly elected Parliament was now their proper partner, not Mr. Musharraf.

An aide to Mr. Sharif, Ahsan Iqbal, said Mr. Sharif told Mr. Negroponte that the strategy of the partnership against terrorism needed to be reassessed. “Nobody supports terrorism, but there are different ways to counter it,” Mr. Iqbal said.

“Mr. Sharif asked Mr. Negroponte if he thought that using the military was the only solution,” Mr. Iqbal said. “Mr. Negroponte agreed that there are other dimensions that can be adopted.”

Some of those questioning the American visit noted that Pakistan had been an ally of the United States since its independence 60 years ago. Still, they added, many Pakistanis now resented that the campaign against terrorism dominated the relationship.

Washington should learn from the outcomes of the election last month in which Mr. Musharraf’s party was trounced and an alliance of religious parties in the North-West Frontier Province, adjacent to the tribal areas, was also defeated, said Javangir Tareen, the leader of a faction of the Pakistan Muslim League, who was a member of Mr. Musharraf’s early cabinet.

“The people have spoken and rejected the religious parties, and at the same time they have rejected the people who will automatically nod to the United States,” Mr. Tareen said.

An independent analyst on the Pakistani military, Shuja Nawaz, who lives in Washington, said Pakistani officials had told him they discouraged the American diplomats from coming this week.

But the Pakistanis were told that Mr. Negroponte was on a trip that included other already arranged stops and that Tuesday was the only possible day for him. Mr. Nawaz called the visit “ham-handed,” and said it could be seen as Washington wanting to keep acting as the “political godfather behind Musharraf.”

The American Embassy in Islamabad said that the two diplomats would stay in Pakistan until Thursday, and that they would meet other officials on Wednesday, though the embassy declined to identify them.

The changes in the military hierarchy by General Kayani seemed intended to display his independence from Mr. Musharraf, who appointed him chief of the military in December. General Kayani reassigned two of the most important corps commanders, the 11 powerful generals in charge of regional posts: Lt. Gen. Shafaat Ullah Shah, the corps commander of Lahore, Pakistan’s second biggest city; and Lt. Gen. Sajjad Akram, the corps commander at Mangla on the Indian border.

13 Iraqis Killed by Shells Fired at the Green Zone

By ERICA GOODE

BAGHDAD — As many as 20 mortar shells were fired Sunday at the heavily fortified Green Zone, one of the fiercest and most sustained attacks on the area in the last year.

The shelling sent thick plumes of dark gray smoke over central Baghdad and ignited a spectacular fire on the banks of the Tigris River. It ushered in a day of violence that claimed the lives of four American soldiers and at least 58 lraqis around the country.

American military officials said the soldiers were killed by a homemade bomb about 10 p.m. as they patrolled southern Baghdad in a vehicle, pushing the number of American service members killed in Iraq closer to 4,000. Another soldier was wounded in the attack.

The intensity of the violence added to the sense that insurgent and sectarian attacks had been on the rise in recent weeks.

Bush administration officials have said repeatedly that an increase in troop levels has reduced violence to the point that political and sectarian reconciliation is becoming a reality. The administration has withdrawn some of the reinforcements and is assessing the effect of that reduction before withdrawing additional troops, a decision expected in the next week.

Recent statistics compiled by the Pentagon suggest that after dropping significantly last fall, the number of daily attacks remained static from November through January, the last month for which official figures were available. And the relative calm has been pierced by a flare-up of violence in recent weeks.

No Americans were killed in the shelling on Sunday, officials said, but mortar shells that fell short of their target killed 13 Iraqis in neighborhoods east of the Green Zone. The first attack, about 6 a.m., sent thunderous booms echoing across the city, shaking buildings and rattling windows.

Although the source of the attacks could not be determined conclusively, two witnesses said the early-morning rounds were fired across the river from the Shiite-dominated Baladiyat neighborhood by militia men who the witnesses believed belonged to the Mahdi Army of the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

American military officials have in the past blamed Shiite militia factions or “special groups” backed by Iran for such attacks. The factions are thought to be splinter groups of the Mahdi Army.

Last month, Mr. Sadr announced the extension of a cease-fire begun last year and said that he would not tolerate any violations. But in recent weeks, there have been clashes between Mahdi fighters and multinational forces in Kut, southeast of the capital, and Diyala Province, to the north.

The attack on Sunday morning sent early risers in the Green Zone running for shelter. Sirens went off, and loudspeakers blared: “Duck and cover! Duck and cover!”

Barrages of mortar fire continued through the day at four- to five-hour intervals, including a series of intense blasts just before 8:30 p.m. In that assault, one round landed just outside the Green Zone wall on the west bank of the Tigris, igniting a large brush fire. For hours afterward, the city was oddly silent, the helicopters that are a constant presence here nowhere in sight.

Philip T. Reeker, a spokesman for the American Embassy, said that the mortar attacks “caused no deaths or major injuries” within the Green Zone. He said that for security reasons, American officials do not release the details of such attacks.

But Iraq’s Interior Ministry said that some shells landed in residential neighborhoods, in one case crashing into a family’s house, killing a mother, a father and three children. Another landed in the Kamalia neighborhood of eastern Baghdad, killing five people and wounding eight others.

A third fell in Bab al-Sharji, where one person was killed and five wounded.

In the upscale Karada neighborhood, a mortar shell killed two people and wounded seven; another landed near the house of Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi. The vice president was uninjured.

Not all of the violence in the capital on Sunday was directed at the Green Zone. In the Shuala neighborhood in western Baghdad, a bomb in a parked car exploded, killing six and wounding at least 10. The explosion tore through the neighborhood’s main street, lined with houses and shops.

“We were having our lunch inside the restaurant when we heard a big sound of an explosion that broke the front glass of the shop,” said Abbas Qasim, 38, the owner of a store on the street.

“I almost suffocated while I was eating, and when I got out I saw four cars burning,” he said. “One of them was a van carrying students who had just gotten back from the university. I rushed to help them with some local people, but five of them were already dead and riddled with shrapnel.”

Ali Mahmoud, 45, who lives on the street, said the explosion was the first in the neighborhood in two years.

“The American warplanes were shelling most of the area all last night because of the Madhi Army,” he said. It dominates the neighborhood, he said.

Attackers also struck in the Zafaraniya neighborhood, in southern Baghdad, where gunmen in three cars opened fire on pedestrians, killing seven and wounding 16.

In northern Iraq, a suicide bomber in a truck smashed through a barrier of armored vehicles in front of an Iraqi Army garrison in the Haramat neighborhood of Mosul. The bomb killed 12 soldiers and wounded 42 other soldiers and civilians.

About 100 miles southeast of Mosul, in the Hamrin Mountains, a roadside bomb exploded, killing four soldiers in an Iraqi Army convoy, including a lieutenant. Dr. Jawdat Abdul Waq Mahmoud, of the general hospital in Touz, said that the soldiers were from the Third Battalion, Second Brigade.

American forces on Sunday reported killing “12 terrorists” who had attacked ground troops east of Baquba. In a statement, the military said that American troops had ordered the occupants of a building to come outside.

“Some complied but others remained inside,” the statement said. “Coalition forces entered the building and were fired upon by several armed men.”

The statement said that assault weapons, grenades and “military-style assault vests” were found in the building.

A security official in Diyala who was informed of the fighting said that it had broken out between American forces and members of a family in a house in the village of Nahar Sabah. American warplanes then reportedly shelled the house, belonging to Khudhaier al-Salem, a prominent figure in the region. The official said 13 people, most of them members of the family, were killed and nine wounded, including neighbors.

Two children in Baquba, a 10-year-old and an 8-year-old, also died Sunday. They were playing in a street when a homemade bomb hidden under some garbage detonated, killing them instantly. When the authorities reached the scene, the security official said, all they found were pieces of the children’s bodies.

Reporting was contributed by Hoshan Hussein, Qais Mizher, Ahmed Fadam and Mudhafer al-Husaini from Baghdad and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Mosul and Diyala.

U.S. Cuts Off Visas in Minsk in a Dispute With Belarus

By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

MOSCOW — The United States Embassy in Minsk has temporarily stopped issuing visas to citizens of Belarus in response to pressure by the government there to reduce its personnel. Tensions between the countries have intensified in recent weeks in response to sanctions that the United States has imposed on Belarus, its top state-owned businesses and senior officials.

Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, the country’s authoritarian president, has preserved Belarus as a museum-quality relic of the Soviet Union. As retaliation for vocal criticism from the United States of the government’s shoddy human rights practices, Belarus has recently moved to squeeze the American Embassy in Minsk.

The State Department said Thursday that the situation on the ground had forced the embassy to temporarily suspend its visa services. It said officials were reviewing the government’s request to greatly reduce its staff of 30 to 40 people.

The Belarus government also pressured Karen B. Stewart, the United States ambassador, to return to Washington last week.

On Thursday, Andrei Popov, a spokesman for the Belarus Foreign Ministry, said dialogue with the United States would resume after “the removal in full of sanctions against Belarussian subjects,” the official BelaPAN news agency reported.

The United States imposed sanctions against Mr. Lukashenko and other members of his government after the police arrested dozens of protesters at opposition demonstrations following presidential elections in March 2006. Last November, the Treasury Department froze the assets of the state energy and chemical company, Belneftekhim.

Washington has also demanded the release of imprisoned opposition figures. Belarus recently freed five people the United States considered political prisoners, but continues to hold Aleksandr V. Kozulin, a former presidential candidate.

Mr. Lukashenko told the Austrian Press Agency on Thursday that deteriorating relations with the West could force Belarus deeper into Russia’s orbit, BelaPAN reported. “Considering the massive pressure by the West on Belarus, I think that in the near future our relations with Russia will become closer,” he said.

Meanwhile, a New York-based lawyer and American citizen appears to be in custody in Minsk along with his assistant after their arrest on March 12 shortly after they arrived in the capital. The reason for the arrest of the lawyer, Emanuel Zeltser, remains unclear. A spokeswoman from the American Embassy in Moscow said the State Department could not comment on the case.

U.S. may sign Guantanamo accord with Algeria: agency

Reuters
Wednesday, February 27, 2008; 12:29 PM

ALGIERS (Reuters) - The United States may soon sign an agreement with Algeria on the possible return home of Algerian prisoners from the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, the official Algerian APS news agency reported on Wednesday.

Visiting Assistant U.S. Secretary of State David Welch told Algerian reporters that Washington hoped "to conclude soon an accord with Algeria" on the issue, APS reported.

Algerian newspapers have said there are believed to be between 17 and 25 Algerians held at the facility on Cuba.

U.S. President George W. Bush has said he would like to close the camp, which holds about 275 detainees and he calls a necessary tool in the war on terrorism.

Human rights groups and foreign governments have said holding suspects for years without trial violates basic international legal standards.

"The question is to know if we have prisoners who ought to be prosecuted," APS quoted Welch as saying. "Even if that is not the case, that does not mean that they are not dangerous.

"We want to send prisoners back to their countries of origin, but we must assure ourselves that they do not represent a danger, because we have seen examples of prisoners returning to their countries and who were later released."

U.S. officials say some governments will not take custody of their citizens held at Guantanamo, others would not treat their citizens humanely and still others are not willing to provide security guarantees Washington believes are necessary.

Algerian President Bouteflika offered an amnesty for Islamist rebels in 2006 as part of a reconciliation policy aimed at ending years of violence in the north African country.

As part of the reconciliation drive he authorized the release from jail of more than 2,000 former members of an Islamist armed rebellion that aims to overthrow the government.

Algerian newspapers say some of the released former fighters rejoined the rebellion after they were freed and have taken part in attacks on government targets in recent months.

(Reporting by Hamid Ould Ahmed; Writing by William Maclean, editing by Robert Woodward)

US: Afghan Opium Crop Hurts Democracy

By ANNE GEARAN
The Associated Press
Friday, February 29, 2008; 11:25 AM

WASHINGTON -- Record illegal drug production in Afghanistan supplies the Taliban insurgency with money and arms and the U.S.-backed government must take direct, prompt action against poppy growers, a State Department report said Friday.

Afghan farmers grew more poppies for opium in 2007 than ever before, the second year in a row of record production in the nation the United States invaded after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. The drug trade deters progress toward a stable, economically independent democracy, the report said.

"The counterinsurgency nexus is both real and growing," said Assistant Secretary David Johnson, the State Department's top drug enforcement officer.

The International Narcotics Control Strategy Report says the largest and best-known insurgent group _ the hard-line Taliban _ benefits with money and weapons while offering protection to growers and traffickers.

"Eliminating narcotics cultivation and trafficking in Afghanistan will require a long-term national and international commitment," the State Department said in the report, which added: "The Afghan government must take decisive action against poppy cultivation soon to turn back the drug threat before its further growth and consolidation make it even more difficult to defeat."

The report noted that Afghan President Hamid Karzai considered limited aerial spraying to eradicate opium poppies last year, but opted not to do it. Such action would have been extremely dangerous and highly unpopular.

Afghanistan grew 93 percent of the world's opium poppy last year, according to United Nations figures cited in Friday's report. The haul, worth an estimated $4 billion on the illegal world market, represented more than a third of Afghanistan's combined total gross domestic product, or GDP, of $11.5 billion.

Production was up 34 percent above 2006 levels and was nearly double the total for 2005.

Land under cultivation for poppies increased 17 percent in 2007 and good weather helped increase production on land already under cultivation, the report said.

Johnson welcomed some projections that say Afghan drug production will fall in 2008.

The report measures foreign drug production and efforts to fight it. The report does not examine drug production, interdiction or eradication in the United States.

U.S. Struggles to Find Envoy, Hindering Effort to Stabilize Afghanistan

By Michael Abramowitz and Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, February 26, 2008; A13

The White House has been pushing since early fall to install a powerful new foreign envoy to oversee international reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan. Last month it looked as though it had finally found its man: After a meeting in Kuwait, Hamid Karzai indicated he was ready to accept prominent British politician Paddy Ashdown for the assignment.

Less than two weeks later, the appointment collapsed after Karzai changed his mind -- the latest sign of tensions between the courtly Afghan president and the Western powers that have been seeking for nearly seven years to stabilize a country that was the breeding ground for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

U.S. officials have done little to disguise their displeasure with the recent turn of events, which has not only left them without a candidate but also imperiled their strategy of giving a single international envoy a robust mandate for Afghanistan. Over weeks of negotiations, the job has been whittled down from a statesman of stature who would influence decisions by NATO, the European Union and the United Nations to a more traditional role as envoy of the U.N. secretary general, according to officials familiar with the discussions.

"There's no ready, obvious replacement," said one senior U.S. official who is not authorized to speak publicly. "We thought [Ashdown] was best qualified, given his credentials and his experience and his ability to command attention, especially in European capitals."

Talking with reporters last week, Richard Boucher, assistant secretary of state for South Asia, disputed the suggestion that the rejection of Ashdown meant that Karzai was obstructing progress.

"That is our partner and that's who we will work with, because that's who the people of Afghanistan chose," he said. "I think it's very clear that from our discussions with the Afghan government, even since Paddy Ashdown felt he had to withdraw his candidacy, that they, too, want to see better coordination, want to see strong international coordination."

U.S. and U.N. officials said they are still looking for an envoy. Among those said to be under consideration are Kai Eide, a senior Norwegian official with experience in the U.N. bureaucracy; Jan Kubis, the Slovak foreign minister; Hikmat Chetin, a senior Turkish diplomat with experience in Afghanistan; and Joschka Fischer, a former German foreign minister. President Bush discussed the search recently with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who will make the final appointment.

Still, Bush administration officials acknowledge that the episode has highlighted the inability of the United States and its allies to organize civilian reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan, the focus of recent criticism by diplomats and a flurry of new reports.

Since the Taliban fell in 2001, the international community has provided about $15 billion to rebuild Afghanistan. But U.S. officials and outside experts say that there has been little coordination among the dozens of countries and international organizations helping to build roads and bridges, create a new police and justice system, and deal with narcotics production.

"There is a very clear need for a joining of the international military strategy with the international civilian strategy," said Undersecretary of State R. Nicholas Burns, who helped recruit Ashdown. "Countries that are extending assistance to Afghanistan are not extending assistance in a central, organized way right now."

The troubles with reconstruction are a companion to the more publicized military difficulties NATO is having in Afghanistan, where U.S. officials -- most prominently Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates -- have complained that some allies are unwilling to participate in the most violent fight against the Taliban. But many officials regard the civilian effort as perhaps even more critical to controlling Afghanistan's insurgency.

Asked recently to assess U.S. progress, a top U.S. official handling Afghanistan said: "Tactically on the security front, I would say we are winning."

"The challenge with Afghanistan is that's not good enough," added the official, who insisted on anonymity to speak more freely. "And it is on some of the other dimensions of the mission where we are not doing as well as we need to be. And mostly those have to do with the non-military . . . having to do with governance, economic development, reconstruction."

Norway first suggested a super-envoy in the fall of 2006, but it was not until last summer, as reports mounted of problems in Afghanistan, that U.S. officials began warming to the idea.

U.S. officials focused on Ashdown, a former leader of the Liberal Democrats in Britain who impressed them with his service as the U.N. high representative in Bosnia from 2002 to 2006. The British quickly agreed.

But early on, U.N., U.S. and Afghan officials argued about how powerful the job should be. Sources said Zalmay Khalilzad, who is the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and is close to Karzai, detected reservations among Afghan senior officials -- but those reservations appeared to dissipate after the Afghan president met with Ashdown in Kuwait in January.

Ban then met with Ashdown in Madrid to seal the deal. But when Karzai returned to Kabul, he received criticism from members of his cabinet, while the media portrayed Ashdown as a potential pro-consul, akin to past British colonial rulers. Karzai, meanwhile, believed that Ashdown had planted newspaper stories in Britain suggesting that Karzai was a weak Pashtun leader atop a Tajik government, a remark Karzai viewed as "fanning ethnic tensions," said a senior U.S. official.

Said T. Jawad, Afghanistan's ambassador to the United States, suggested that there were worries about the powerful role Ashdown had played in the Balkans. "Based on his past experience in the Balkans, the Afghan cabinet and other officials raised some concerns," Jawad said. "President Karzai decided his role wouldn't be constructive."

By the time Karzai met with Ban and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in late January, the Afghan leader had soured on the choice. Ban had gone into the meeting expecting to announce Ashdown's appointment; instead, Ashdown soon issued a statement withdrawing from consideration.

It was not the first time in recent months that Karzai has clashed with his Western patrons. He has battled the United States over opium-reduction strategies, and in December he expelled two senior European officials for holding unauthorized talks with the Taliban.

Some analysts saw the Bush administration's inability to secure Ashdown's appointment as a serious setback. "The rejection of Ashdown by Karzai undermines the ability of the Afghan government to be moving more forcefully in the right direction," said Mark Schneider, senior vice president of the International Crisis Group, which has been critical of the reconstruction efforts. "When Karzai said he didn't want it, the U.S. didn't stick to its guns."

Senior administration officials say that there is no major rift and that Karzai, who has a monthly videoconference with Bush, is entitled to veto power over a position that could vastly influence his country.

Seth Jones, an Afghanistan expert with the Rand Corp., said Karzai, who is up for reelection next year, is reluctant to be identified too closely with the United States. "I don't think over the long term it's a significant blow," he said. But the failure to install Ashdown, he added, shows Karzai's sensitivity "to not be seen as being pushed around by the international community."

5 Witnesses Insist Iraqis Didn't Fire On Guards

State Dept. to Study System for Security

By Sudarsan Raghavan and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, September 29, 2007; A01

BAGHDAD, Sept 28 -- Five eyewitnesses to a Sept. 16 shooting incident in Baghdad involving the private security firm Blackwater USA insisted that company guards fired without provocation, forcing civilians and Iraqi police to run for cover, and that the Iraqi officers did not return fire.

The eyewitnesses and a senior Iraqi police official close to an investigation of the incident contradicted initial accounts provided by the company and the State Department, which employs Blackwater to protect U.S. diplomats. At least 11 Iraqis died in the shootings, which have focused attention on the actions of largely unregulated security companies operating in Iraq.

"The Iraqi security forces had the right to shoot at them when they saw the [Blackwater] convoy shooting at the people, but they did not shoot at the convoy," said Ahmed Ali Jassim, 19, a maintenance worker who saw the incident. "When they see Iraqis getting shot like that, their blood would be boiling. But no one crossed the limits."

The latest eyewitness accounts emerged as the State Department announced the creation of a high-level panel to assess whether appropriate rules are in place for the three private firms that protect U.S. diplomats and other civilian officials, whether the companies -- including the largest, Blackwater -- are following those rules, and whether the system should be altered or scrapped altogether.

Named by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the panel will travel to Baghdad on Saturday to begin a comprehensive review of the State Department's multibillion-dollar private security operation in Iraq, according to Patrick E. Kennedy, the department's senior management official and head of the panel. The inquiry would remain separate from probes into the Sept. 16 incident, including a joint Iraq-U.S. committee composed of U.S. military and State Department personnel and Iraqi officials.

An ABC News report Friday quoted what it said were sworn statements from Blackwater employees, four of whom said they fired on a white sedan that failed to slow down despite hand and arm signals and water bottles they threw as it approached their convoy.

"I turned and engaged the car with approximately 20 to 30 rounds from my M4 rifle. After I no longer felt the threat to my life, I turned back to cover my sector," wrote one guard, according to ABC.

The guards also reported taking fire from gunmen dressed as civilians and Iraqi police officers from a tree line, a red bus and a dirt mound. One guard reported firing on a man who exited another white sedan with what the guard believed was a detonating device.

"Fearing for my life and the lives of my team members, I fired several well aimed rounds center mass at the threat," he wrote, according to ABC.

Another guard wrote that he fired in response to shots fired from Iraqis dressed as civilians. "I fired one shot from my SR-25 at the closest threat," wrote the guard, referring to a semiautomatic sniper rifle. "He went down and did not fire anymore."

The ABC report showed a photo of what Blackwater said was an armored vehicle that had been hit by at least five rounds during the incident.

The report also showed the fiery images of what Blackwater guards said was a car bomb attack before the incident. The car bomb detonated outside a financial compound where a U.S. official under Blackwater's protection was attending a meeting. The compound is about a mile from the site of the shootings, which did not occur until nearly 30 minutes after the bombing.

The eyewitnesses -- three traffic policemen and two maintenance workers who were interviewed separately -- offered a dramatically different account of the events in Nisoor Square.

Traffic police officer Sarhan Thiab said that shortly after noon he saw two Blackwater convoys, minutes apart, come through the traffic circle. Following procedure, he and other traffic officers ordered cars to stop entering the circle to allow the convoys to pass.

Fifteen minutes later, a third Blackwater convoy of four gray REVA armored vehicles arrived. Unlike the two previous convoys, this one swerved left and rolled into the circle against the flow of traffic, the eyewitnesses said. Such a move made it more difficult for the traffic policemen to slow down vehicles that were driving directly into the convoy.

The Blackwater guards threw water bottles in the circle to halt traffic, Thiab said. He and another officer, Ali Khalaf, walked into two intersections to stop traffic heading toward the convoy, which had stopped in a semicircle.

Suddenly, guards fired on a white sedan that did not slow down quickly enough, the witnesses said. The car kept moving forward, but not in a threatening way, said Khalaf, who has given his account to U.S. and Iraqi investigators.

"The car went on rolling slowly. But they kept on shooting," said Khalaf, who ran for cover. Thiab and other witnesses said that they heard loud booms and that the vehicle burst into flames, killing the female passenger.

In seconds, there was shooting in all directions, eyewitnesses said. People were fleeing their cars and running for cover. Afterward, dead and wounded were found in almost every direction, police said.

Eyewitnesses also disputed the Blackwater guards' account that civilians were firing from a red bus. Hussam Abdul Rahman, 25, another traffic policeman who was near the bus, said passengers were kicking out the windows in a desperate attempt to escape the firing.

"There were many on this bus. They were hardly able to walk and they were screaming," Khalaf said.

The senior Iraqi police official also rejected Blackwater's account of being ambushed by gunmen. Nisoor Square, he said, sits in front of the National Police headquarters. There were checkpoints, Iraqi army and police, nearby in nearly every direction, making it hard for gunmen to take positions to ambush the convoy.

The police guards in the square, he added, would not shoot without orders. The square is a common route for dozens of heavily armored U.S. military and embassy convoys. Anyone planning an attack would use heavy weapons such as rocket-propelled grenades -- not guns, the official said. "To attack body-armored vehicles with bullets? No one can believe this," the police official said.

Both the State Department and the Defense Department have maintained they have no choice but to contract out security and other functions in an era of downsized government and increased international danger. "As long as the security threats continue at the level they are now, we're going to have to figure out a way" to protect civilians operating in Iraq, Afghanistan and other hot spots, Kennedy said. "How that is done is the purpose of the review."

Kennedy's team includes retired NATO commander Gen. George A. Joulwan; J. Stapleton Roy, a former senior diplomat who is now vice chairman of Kissinger Associates; and Eric Boswell, a senior official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The Defense Department this week sent its own five-man team to Iraq for a parallel review of contractor security operations.

State Dept. Agents Say Jobs Were Threatened

Investigators in IG Office Were Told Not to Cooperate With Probe of Their Boss, House Panel Alleges

By Glenn Kessler and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, September 29, 2007; A02

Two career investigators in the office of State Department Inspector General Howard J. Krongard have charged that they were threatened with firing if they cooperated with a congressional probe of Krongard and his office.

Told by Terry P. Heide, Krongard's congressional liaison, that he should not agree to a request for a "voluntary" interview by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Special Agent Ron Militana said he was then advised that reprisals could be taken against him. "Howard can fire you," he said Heide told him. "It would affect your ability to get another job."

Militana said in a telephone interview yesterday that he took that comment and others as direct threats. He and Assistant Special Agent in Charge Brian Rubendall, another career investigator who was also present at the Sept. 25 meeting with Heide and an IG lawyer, are among at least four IG investigators who have sought protection under the Whistleblower Protection Act. They also include the assistant inspector general for investigations and his deputy, who recently resigned after charging Krongard with impeding their work.

In recent weeks, the agents relayed their concerns about Krongard to Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the oversight panel. Waxman has said he is investigating allegations that Krongard has repeatedly thwarted investigations into alleged contracting fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan, including construction of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and weapons smuggling allegations against Blackwater USA, a private security firm working under government contract in Iraq. The committee has scheduled a hearing on Oct. 16.

Waxman first revealed the details of the meeting in which Militana and Rubendall said they were threatened in a letter he sent yesterday to Krongard and posted on the committee's Web site. "I am appalled by these reports," Waxman wrote. "As an Inspector General, you hold a position of special trust within the federal government. Your office is supposed to be an example of how to protect whistleblowers, not an example of how to persecute them."

He said that the agents originally were cooperating anonymously but that they had decided to go public after the reprisal threats.

Krongard's office issued a statement yesterday saying that "the Office of the Inspector General has cooperated with and will continue to cooperate with the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's investigation. Furthermore, the OIG will continue to make any OIG employee available to speak with the committee, if they choose."

Heide, the IG congressional liaison, confirmed in an interview that she had called the meeting with Militana and Rubendall, along with John M. Smith of the IG's legal counsel's office. But "the conversation was not as reported," she said. Waxman "selected certain statements out of context to make a particular case that does not exist. I categorically deny that I was telling them they would be retaliated against."

She said that the agents apparently "did not mention all the parts where I told them they were to tell the truth, they were to fully cooperate, that the Office of the IG and the IG himself was fully cooperating."

No one from the committee had contacted her before the letter was posted online. Waxman, Heide said tearfully, "has hurt somebody. I mean, this is my career." Her job, she said, "is simply to provide information. That's what I was doing."

J. Keith Ausbrook, minority counsel for the committee, also took exception to Waxman's tactics, saying that committee Republicans were "deeply concerned" with the letter. "It seems to us to be an example of shooting first and asking questions later," he said. Ausbrook emphasized that "we don't want to minimize" the seriousness of the alleged threats. "We are concerned about this as well. But we are also concerned about the way the majority has proceeded to deal with it."

The Senate confirmed President Bush's nomination of Krongard, who had no previous State Department experience, in May 2005. He previously worked for an international law firm and had been general counsel for Deloitte & Touche in the mid-1990s. His brother, A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard, served as the No. 3 CIA official under then-Director George J. Tenet.

Howard Krongard's office, charged with oversight of State Department contracts and operations, has competed with the congressionally appointed Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR). He was closely involved in unsuccessful administration efforts to shut down SIGIR's operations when its funding and mandate ran out last year, according to a source closely involved in internal administration discussions of the matter who declined to speak on the record.

State Department contracts in Iraq became a target for Waxman when he became chairman of the oversight committee in January. Krongard's operations have been the subject of several hearings. In a 13-page letter to Krongard on Sept. 18, Waxman charged that the inspector general had "interfered with ongoing investigations to protect the State Department and the White House from political embarrassment."

The letter, which Waxman said was based on allegations by seven current and former members of Krongard's staff, alleged that Krongard had refused to send investigators to Iraq and Afghanistan to investigate $3 billion worth of State Department contracts and had impeded a Justice Department probe into the construction of the embassy in Baghdad. It also included an internal e-mail that indicated Krongard had intervened to stop his office from cooperating with a Justice Department investigation into alleged arms smuggling by Blackwater. In a North Carolina case, two Blackwater employees have pleaded guilty to weapons charges and are cooperating with Justice officials.

Petraeus: Iran Trying to Bolster Influence in Iraq

By William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 12, 2007; 1:10 PM

Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, accused Iran today of seeking to "create a Hezbollah-like force" in Iraq to exert Tehran's influence there, but denied that he was preparing the ground for a U.S. attack on Iran.

In a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington after two days of testimony on Capitol Hill, Petraeus and Ryan C. Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, defended their assessments of incremental progress in Iraq and again warned that the way forward will be difficult.

"It will be a long, hard grind," Crocker said. "Right now, I think that grind is making progress."

Asked whether his testimony about Iran could be viewed as part of a campaign to build toward an attack, Petraeus said: "I'm not blaming Iran for all that's gone wrong in Iraq." But he said Iran has contributed to sophisticated attacks in Iraq that otherwise would not be possible, including strikes with armor-piercing "explosively formed projectiles" and 240mm rockets.

"The evidence is very, very clear," Petraeus said. He cited documents discovered during the capture in March of Qais Khazali, a Shiite Muslim militant with ties to the Quds Force of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the arrest of a deputy commander of Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese Shiite group supported by Iran. Petraeus said the evidence links Iran to an attack in Karbala in January that resulted in the deaths of five U.S. soldiers.

Under interrogation, Khazali was asked if he could have carried out that attack without Iranian support, Petraeus said in the news conference. "He literally throws up his hands and laughs and says, 'Of course not,' " the general said.

Khazali and other captives have told U.S. investigators about funding, training, weapons and ammunition they had received from Iran, he said.

A videotape of the Khazali interrogation was shown to Iraqi leaders, "several of whom then went to Iran and made their case, quite forcefully, about their concern of Iranian involvement," Petraeus said.

In response to another question, Petraeus said he and Crocker agree that "you can't win in Iraq . . . just in Iraq." Rather, success requires "greater involvement with respect to some of the neighboring countries, some of the source countries for foreign fighters," he said. "And it certainly involves Iran."

He said Iraqi leaders "have developed much greater concern about Iran's activities, about the activities of the Quds Force with respect to the militia extremists that, in many respects, appear to be trying to create a Hezbollah-like force that they could use to gain influence in Iraq."

Petraeus said that he has the authority he needs to conduct operations inside Iraq and that his concern about Iran "doesn't mean that it's something for which I should have the authority to pursue, any more than we should have that with respect to Syria or elsewhere."

In written testimony submitted to Congress, Petraeus said U.S. forces had captured "the deputy commander of Lebanese Hezbollah Department 2800, the organization created to support the training, arming, funding, and, in some cases, direction of the militia extremists by the Iranian Republican Guard Corps' Quds Force." He also cited the recent discovery of Iranian-backed forces called the "Special Groups" in Iraq.

"These elements have assassinated and kidnapped Iraqi governmental leaders, killed and wounded our soldiers with advanced explosive devices provided by Iran, and indiscriminately rocketed civilians in the International Zone and elsewhere," Petraeus testified.

"It is increasingly apparent to both Coalition and Iraqi leaders that Iran, through the use of the Quds Force, seeks to turn the Iraqi Special Groups into a Hezbollah-like force to serve its interests and fight a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq."

In a separate development, U.S. officials said Washington would press for new, tougher U.N. sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program when diplomats from six nations meet next week. The gathering of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, plus Germany, is set for Sept. 21 in Washington. Two participants -- Russia and China -- have been reluctant to go along with tougher sanctions than those adopted in two Security Council resolutions, and contentious negotiations are expected.

During today's news conference, Petraeus said al-Qaeda's affiliate in Iraq has been driven from some former strongholds but continues to pose a major threat.

"We believe that al-Qaeda-Iraq is off balance," he said, although it "certainly remains very dangerous." He said he calls the group "the wolf closest to the sled" because it "has carried out the most horrific attacks in Iraq," notably those that have sparked the greatest "ethno-sectarian violence."

The general said al-Qaeda in Iraq now is "much more on the run than they have been at any time that I can recall since they really established themselves in Iraq," having been largely driven out of Anbar province and Baqubah. He indicated that the group still operates in Diyala province and several Baghdad neighborhoods and is trying to open "new fronts" in northern Iraq.

Asked if he expects "tens of thousands" of U.S. forces to remain in Iraq for at least the next five years, Petraeus said, "I wouldn't hazard a guess on that. It's very, very difficult to project out much farther beyond the horizon at this point in time, even just to mid-July of next year."

According to recommendations Petraeus made public Monday, that is when about 30,000 troops should be withdrawn, bringing the U.S. military presence down to about 130,000 -- the level before a "surge" of reinforcements ordered earlier this year by President Bush.

Crocker said the two days of congressional testimony showed that there are "deep divisions" and "a lot of frustration" among lawmakers--feelings he said are shared by U.S. officials serving in Iraq. But he said he came away "somewhat encouraged" that amid the frustration, lawmakers showed "willingness to listen to our explanations" and asked a number of "thoughtful and probing questions."

As long as Iraq is moving on an "upward" trajectory, Crocker said, "we need to demonstrate some strategic patience, some resolve and commitment, because this will be a long process. There are no shortcuts. There is no switch to flip."

Rice to Press Mideast Peace Discussions

The Associated Press
Friday, September 28, 2007; 2:19 PM

WASHINGTON -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will visit the Middle East next week to press Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts amid doubts from some Arab states about the usefulness of an international meeting she plans to host in the fall, the State Department said Wednesday.

Rice will make stops in Israel and the Palestinian territories on Sept. 19 and 20 to urge Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President Mahmoud Abbas to build on recent positive steps and lay the groundwork for the upcoming meeting that President Bush announced in July, spokesman Sean McCormack said.

Her visit will follow an agreement reached between the two sides this week to set up senior negotiating teams with an eye toward reaching a general outline of a peace deal in time for the conference, which has yet to be scheduled but is expected in November.

"She's going to talk to each side ... about how we can help move that process forward," McCormack said. He would not rule out the possibility that Rice would bring Olmert and Abbas together for a three-way meeting.

The brief trip comes as the United States is trying to build support for the international meeting but has met resistance from traditional Arab allies concerned that it might not produce much.

Egypt and Jordan, which both have peace deals with Israel, along with Saudi Arabia have said they are not interested in attending the session unless it has a chance of achieving concrete results.

McCormack said Rice would be consulting with those three countries, along with other potential participants following her trip next week and that Washington agreed the meeting should not be just a show.

"Nobody wants to see just a photo op, we couldn't agree more," he said.

North Korea agrees to declare, disable nuclear programs by end of year

From the Associated Press

9:07 AM PDT, September 2, 2007

GENEVA — North Korea has agreed to declare and disable all its nuclear facilities by the end of this year, the chief U.S. negotiator said today.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill said two days of talks between the United States and North Korea in Geneva had been "very good and very substantive" and would help improve chances of a successful meeting later this month with Japan, Russia, South Korea and China in six-nation talks aimed at ending the North's nuclear weapons program and improving relations between North Korea and other countries.

"One thing that we agreed on is that the DPRK will provide a full declaration of all of their nuclear programs and will disable their nuclear programs by the end of this year, 2007," Hill told reporters, using the initials for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Hill said the declaration will also include uranium enrichment programs, which the United States fears could be used to make nuclear weapons.

Kim Gye Gwan, the head of the North Korean delegation, did not comment immediately to reporters outside the North Korean mission.

Hill said earlier Sunday that improving U.S. relations with North Korea will depend on other progress in the talks, saying it "is a relationship that we will continue to try to build step by step with the understanding that we're not going to have a normalized relationship until we have a denuclearized North Korea."

"To the extent that we can move quickly to denuclearization, we can move quickly to normalization," he added.

Hill said both sides also discussed what needs to be done for North Korea to be removed from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.

He said they also had a good discussion of what North Korea wants to achieve and how it can improve relations with Japan.

He said he expected the next full session of the six-nation talks would be held in mid-September and that it would produce a "more detailed implementation plan for 'disablement"' of North Korea's nuclear facilities.

The meeting in Geneva was part of a flurry of "working group" sessions called for in February's six-nation accord in which North Korea agreed to disable its plutonium-producing nuclear reactor and declare and eventually dismantle all its nuclear activities.

In exchange, the economically struggling North will receive oil and other aid. The U.S., as part of the agreement, promised to begin the process of removing the country from the terrorism list and work toward full diplomatic relations.

North Korea has already received 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil from Seoul in return for the shutdown of its plutonium reactor in July. The energy-starved country will eventually get further energy or other aid equivalent to 950,000 tons of heavy fuel oil in return for irreversibly disabling the reactor and ending all its nuclear programs, but has yet to set a date by when it will disable its nuclear facilities.

Another point of disagreement has been over allegations that North Korea has a second, undeclared nuclear weapons program using enriched uranium. North Korea said recently it was willing to discuss the issue, although it did not acknowledge having such a program.

Years of tension and deadlock over North Korea's nuclear program -- which peaked with the country's nuclear test last October -- have started to ease in recent months as the talks have made progress.

As Her Star Wanes, Rice Tries to Reshape Legacy

By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON, Aug. 31 — On May 25, Stanford University’s student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, devoted the bulk of its front page to the university’s former provost, who is on leave while she serves out her term as secretary of state. “Condi Eyes Return,” read the headline, “but in What Role?”

Within hours, the letters to the editor started coming in. “Condoleezza Rice serves an administration that has trashed the basic values of academia: reason, science, expertise, and honesty. Stanford should not welcome her back,” wrote Don Ornstein, identified by the newspaper as an emeritus professor of mathematics in a letter published May 31.

Online comments on the newspaper’s Web site were even harsher, a veritable stream of vitriol. One of the milder posts came from Jon Wu, who did not give an affiliation: “Please go away, Rice. We don’t want someone who is responsible for the slaughter of an entire nation teaching at our school.”

There was a time when, perhaps more than Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama, Condoleezza Rice seemed to have the best shot at becoming the first woman or the first African-American to be president. But that was before she sounded public alarms based on faulty intelligence to justify the Iraq war, telling CNN, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” It was before a former top Bush administration colleague, David Kay, charged with finding unconventional weapons after the Iraq invasion, referred to Ms. Rice in Bob Woodward’s “State of Denial” as “probably the worst national security adviser since the office was created.”

And it was before furious Lebanese hung a huge banner depicting Ms. Rice’s face, with blood dripping from her lips, from a bridge in central Beirut.

Today, Ms. Rice, 52, continues to have far more star appeal than any other of Mr. Bush’s top advisers. Just last month, GQ magazine ranked her the most powerful person in Washington. Forbes has twice ranked her as the world’s most powerful woman, and Time has listed her as one of the world’s most influential people four times.

But a lot of her gloss has diminished under the steady drumbeat of exposés and tell-all books about the unraveling of the Bush administration and specifically about her inability, as national security adviser, to effectively arbitrate the running turf war between Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld over Iraq policy, a war which she, and President Bush, allowed Mr. Rumsfeld to win.

Now Ms. Rice is working hard to reshape her legacy in her remaining 16 months in office. She is cooperating with a range of authors who have lined up to write books about her: “The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy,” by The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, comes out next week, while “Condoleezza Rice: An American Life,” by The New York Times’s Elisabeth Bumiller is due out in December. “Twice as Good: Condoleezza Rice and Her Path to Power,” by Marcus Mabry, now an editor at The Times, came out in May.

Although both the Kessler and the Bumiller books are expected to be critical of Ms. Rice on many points, State Department officials say that it is unusual for a sitting secretary of state to cooperate with so many biographies. But then again, few of her predecessors had multiple authors jostling to write books about them.

Looking Beyond Iraq

Beyond trying to influence the historical record, Ms. Rice is trying hard to rewrite her legacy to include something more than Iraq. Her colleagues and friends say that she has accepted that Iraq is a stain that she probably cannot remove before she leaves office. So she has thrown herself into shoring up the rest of her legacy, zeroing in in recent months on Arab-Israeli peace, as a possible source of redemption.

In Washington and around the world, many now believe that Ms. Rice, after two and a half years on the job, is a far better secretary of state than she was national security adviser. As President Bush’s top diplomat, she has lowered tensions somewhat between America and its allies, after four years of a go-it-alone diplomacy that had chilled trans-Atlantic relations. Despite criticism from conservatives within the administration, she has allowed her North Korea aide, Christopher R. Hill, enough space to negotiate a truce that led to the North’s shutdown of its main nuclear reactor in July.

She has cobbled together a six-nation diplomatic effort to rein in Tehran’s nuclear ambitions which, although unsuccessful so far, has managed for more than a year to hold together on a series of United Nations sanctions against Iran. And perhaps most important, she has used those sanctions, along with tough rhetoric, to tamp down the national-security hawks in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office who have argued for greater consideration of military strikes against Iran.

But none of that has been enough to erase the view that as national security adviser she largely served as a rubber stamp for a series of foreign policy blunders, during a period that critics say will ultimately weigh most heavily on her legacy. “It turned out to be a very disastrous four years in my view,” said Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Mr. Powell’s chief of staff at the State Department while Ms. Rice was national security adviser.

Richard L. Armitage, Mr. Powell’s deputy secretary of state, said he became so frustrated that he once went to the White House and complained privately to Ms. Rice that he felt like he was getting on a “gerbil wheel” every morning “and nothing would be resolved, and we’d get off at night, and the next morning we would get back on and do it all over again.”

But Mr. Armitage said his view of Ms. Rice had since mellowed. “I’ve become more conscious of the fact that the president got the national security adviser he wanted,” he said in an interview this week. “It just wasn’t the national security adviser that I wanted.”

Ms. Rice is rarely, if ever, self-reflective. But in an interview with The New York Times this month, she acknowledged, ever so obliquely, that her first four years working for the Bush administration were not her best.

“I don’t know; if that’s the assessment, you know, I’ll accept people’s assessment,” she said, her demeanor resigned. “The national security adviser is a great job, because you’re very close to the president; you’re working with him, but it’s also a very difficult job because everything is by remote control. You do not own any of the assets.”

She was sitting in the anteroom of her office on the State Department’s seventh floor, in the chair where she usually sits for news media interviews, occasionally falling back on her usual talking points, except this time, those talking points were interspersed with grumbling that she was being asked for personal reflection, something she does not like to do, preferring instead to work through times of personal turmoil on the piano, with Brahms.

In fact, her friends say that she rarely questions whether she is right or wrong, instead choosing to believe in a particular truth with absolute certainty until she doesn’t believe it anymore, at which point she moves on. “Now you’ve got me trying to psycho-analyze myself,” she complained.

She looked around the stately reception room. On the walls were paintings she hung when she arrived of her favorite predecessors as secretary of state: Thomas Jefferson, George C. Marshall, and Dean Acheson.

“I told Steve Hadley once, I frankly prefer being coordinated than coordinating,” she said, referring to the current national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley. National security advisers, she said, end up spending their time thinking: “Let me see if I can get Secretary X to do Y, and Secretary Y to do X, and let’s see if we can get both to do it.” She gave a nod. “I prefer line responsibility,” she said, echoing perhaps the biggest complaint about her time at the National Security Council, that she was more follower than leader.

Act II, New Mission

From her office in Foggy Bottom, Ms. Rice now has more distance — about a mile — from Mr. Bush than she did when she worked at the White House as part of a bureaucracy that exists solely to serve the president. While still beholden to the president, she sits at the top of a permanent bureaucracy with its own, different tradition and sense of mission.

In her tenure at State, there has been a re-emergence of the more pragmatic thinker who once wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine that the president of the United States must remember that the American military “is not a civilian police force.”

“It is not a political referee,” she wrote. “And it is most certainly not designed to build a civilian society.”

These days, her line responsibility has come with some of its own problems. Officials at the Pentagon have complained that Ms. Rice has not coughed up the promised number of diplomats to staff reconstruction teams in Iraqi provinces. Ms. Rice has also come under fire for her abandonment of her onetime passion: the administration’s stated quest for democracy in the Muslim world.

In the Palestinian territories, she engineered a political boycott of the militant Islamist group Hamas after it won legislative elections, which she had pushed for, in 2006. In Pakistan, while continuing to express support for elections, she has scrambled for ways to keep Gen. Pervez Musharraf, a military dictator who took power in a 1999 coup, in office. And she made little mention of democracy during a visit to Egypt and Saudi Arabia in July, and did not meet with any political dissidents, citing time pressures and a full schedule.

“It just burns me up that poor Ayman Nour is rotting in jail, and what is she doing about that?” said Max Boot, a security analyst who has generally supported President Bush, referring to the Egyptian dissident who ran against President Hosni Mubarak and was subsequently thrown in jail. “Nothing as far as I can tell.”

“Rice was one of the most passionate defenders of democracy, but it’s been overtaken by this State Department agenda of getting along with dictators,” said Mr. Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of “War Made New.”

These days, the flood of Condi-versus-Hillary-for-president spoofs on the Internet have died down. Her approval ratings, while still higher than those of the rest of the administration and Mr. Bush himself, have dipped, to about 47 percent in July from 54 percent in April 2005. And few people are talking about “Rice for president” anymore.

Ms. Rice herself steadfastly maintains that she has no interest in being on a presidential ticket, and says her intent is to return to Stanford when her term is over. But a return to Stanford holds its own problems.

“As a scholar, she’ll be fine,” said Stanford’s president, John L. Hennessy, who succeeded Ms. Rice as provost in 1999. But, he added: “Clearly, there are people who are unhappy about what she’s done as secretary of state. Some would say she should not be allowed back. But that is not a legitimate position.”

She has threatened to write her own memoir, although friends say that it is doubtful that she would produce the sort of finger-pointing manuscript that George J. Tenet and other former administration officials have delivered lately.

Swinging High

This year, she has made four trips to Israel and the Palestinian territories, and is heading back again next month. She has shuttled back and forth between Ramallah, Jerusalem and Amman in search of what she calls a “political horizon” for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. She has engineered six meetings this year between the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.

Her goals now appear to be focused on a face-to-face high-level meeting between Israeli officials and their Saudi counterparts, in what could eventually bring about the type of rapprochement not seen since President Carter brokered the Camp David accord between Sadat and Begin in 1978.

“I think if we could get to a place where there’s a real, reasonable chance of Arab-Israeli reconciliation as well as Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation, that would be a huge step forward,” Ms. Rice said. “I think it’s possible.”

But many of her predecessors in the past have thought this possible, only to leave office frustrated.

“Her strategy is to just keep knocking on this door, without a strategy, making it up as she goes along in an effort to put something together,” said Aaron David Miller, a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center who was a senior adviser for Arab-Israeli relations at the State Department under the last three presidents. “This determination is now tied to not just the perception of the national interest, but her own personal interest too.”

Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution who advised the American occupation authority in Baghdad in 2004, said it is possible, though unlikely, that Ms. Rice could change the historical record in her remaining time in office. “If she pulls a rabbit out of her hat on the Israeli-Palestinian question, and some kind of political compromise in Iraq, it could partially salvage her legacy,” Mr. Diamond said. But, he added, “If we keep going on the trajectory that is now evident, I think even her tenure as secretary of state is also going to be, frankly, pretty damned.”

For the record, Ms. Rice said that she was not fixated on her legacy. On the morning of the Times interview, she had just returned to the State Department from a private tour of the National Archives, which she said she had always wanted to see. A morning with the Emancipation Proclamation, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution, she said, gave her a different perspective on legacy.

“People are still trying to resolve those legacies,” she said. “I’m not going to worry about my legacy.”

She said the recent visit to Camp David by President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan gave her some solace, as a reminder that American policies have helped spread democracy and moderation in unlikely places. “I watched the president standing in front of an American and Afghan flag, and I thought, the American president can now stand in front of an American and Iraqi flag, an American and Lebanese flag, and American and Palestinian flag,” she said. “I think in six years to have helped to foster those changes, even if they’re incomplete, even if they’re tough, even if there’s still work to be done — just think about those pictures.”

“Those are pretty dramatic changes,” she said.

She said that she is looking forward to getting back into the classroom at Stanford, where she hopes to interact with students, to challenge them, to hear them out and perhaps to teach them a thing or two about what it’s like to be in the driver’s seat when a national-security crisis explodes.

“I would do a simulation with students, where they are given a problem, some hot spot in the world,” she said. “And over a week they’d have to be the national security adviser solving those problems.”

“All of a sudden,” she said, “it doesn’t look so easy.”

U.S. Pares Other Diplomacy to Focus on Iraq, Rest of Mideast

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 22, 2007; A04

President Bush and his top Cabinet secretaries are scaling back their personal diplomacy around the world to focus more intently on Iraq and the rest of the Middle East as the administration concentrates its energy on top priorities for the president's last 18 months in office.

In the past two weeks, Bush canceled a summit with Southeast Asian leaders in Singapore, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice scrapped a trip to Africa and decided to skip a meeting in the Philippines, and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates put off a swing through Latin America. The domestic debate over Iraq, which may culminate with a September progress report on the war, has made such travel untenable at the moment, officials said.

The decisions underscore how much Iraq and the turmoil in the Middle East have come to consume Bush's presidency and threaten his ability to forge a lasting legacy. The canceled trips have fueled discontent in regions that have long felt snubbed by Bush, and U.S. diplomats and scholars warn of lasting damage. But as Bush's tenure wanes and Americans' patience with the Iraq war runs short, many specialists in Washington are saying the president must put aside secondary objectives.

"An almost-exclusive concentration on Iraq is almost overdue," said James Dobbins, a longtime diplomat who served as Bush's special envoy to Afghanistan and now is a national security analyst at the Rand Corp. "We can't possibly stabilize Iraq unless we decide it's the most important thing we're doing."

Carlos Pascual, former director of reconstruction and stabilization in Bush's State Department, said failure in Iraq would be so devastating to U.S. standing that devoting more energy there is worth temporarily neglecting other regions.

"They have no choice," said Pascual, now vice president and director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution. "They either surrender this to the fates to be and see how it plays out, or they put all hands on deck and say, 'We're going to make a strategic effort to get this under control.' "

Still, other specialists said the administration's shifting attention demonstrates the debilitating costs that the Iraq war has already imposed on the capacity of the United States to manage its role as the world's lone superpower. While the Bush team has waged war in Iraq, China has expanded its global influence, Russia has been reborn as an increasingly authoritarian and antagonistic power, and anti-Americanism has spread in Latin America.

"There have been substantial public diplomacy resources that have been diverted to Iraq and, I would assume as well, personnel," said Peter DeShazo, former deputy assistant secretary of state under Bush and now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Maintaining relations, he said, requires constant diplomatic investment. "You stop making these investments for a period of time, and the effect may not be immediate, but eventually it will be felt."

The string of canceled high-level trips has drawn peeved reviews in different regions. Bush decided not to stop in Singapore for a summit with leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in September, although he will attend the annual meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Australia.

The offense to ASEAN leaders was compounded by Rice's decision not to attend a meeting of its foreign ministers in Manila next month, the second time she has skipped it in three years. The Nation, a Thai newspaper, editorialized about Bush's "audacity" in backing out of the meeting, saying it caused "huge disappointment in most ASEAN capitals."

Surin Pitsuwan, a former Thai foreign minister who is likely to become ASEAN secretary general, said Bush's cancellation "sends a wrong signal to the region," the Reuters news agency reported. "We are getting an indication that we are being marginalized."

Still, other regional leaders expressed understanding. "The U.S. now has a central task, and that is to make sure the situation in the Middle East doesn't get out of control," Singapore Foreign Minister George Yeo told Channel NewsAsia, noting that Rice called to explain. "They cannot afford to pull out of Iraq in a chaotic way, and Congress is in a fretful mood, so it is absolutely important that she concentrates on that issue."

Rice also scrubbed a trip to Ghana and to Congo, where she would have been the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit in a decade. Instead, she addressed the African Growth and Opportunity Act Forum in Accra via video link. "As you know, now is an especially challenging time in the Middle East and in Iraq, in particular," she said. "And the president has asked me to be in Washington this week."

Bush moved last week to revive the Middle East peace process, and he sent Rice to Lisbon to meet with European, Russian and U.N. officials to rally support for a conference this fall bringing together Israeli, Palestinian and other Arab leaders. Rice also plans to go with Gates to the Middle East soon to try to convince Arab leaders that it is in their interest to support the besieged Iraqi government, if only to keep a bulwark against Iran.

Gates, too, has cleared his immediate schedule of other foreign travel to focus on the Middle East; he already postponed a trip to El Salvador, Colombia, Peru and Chile to help prepare the White House's interim report on Iraq and to lobby Congress to back Bush's strategy for the war.

"The number one priority for the United States is defeating terrorists around the world, and part and parcel of that is succeeding in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that does take up a considerable amount of senior officials' time," said Gordon Johndroe, National Security Council spokesman.

Some travel will be rescheduled, officials noted. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Rice plans to make a longer Africa trip. "Certainly, she is very committed to Africa and the future of Africa and the U.S.-Africa relationship," he told reporters last week.

The next two months are crucial for Bush as he battles congressional efforts to pull troops from Iraq. The ASEAN summit comes in the days before the critical report by Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, scheduled for Sept. 15.

Still, Bush decided he cannot miss the APEC summit, also in early September, hosted by his close ally, Australian Prime Minister John Howard. Besides an overnight trip to Ottawa next month, Bush has no other plans to travel abroad for the rest of the year.

Bush has still found time in Washington to attend to other regions, hosting a White House meeting of Caribbean leaders last month and later attending the Conference of the Americas in Northern Virginia. And his administration has scored notable success with North Korea recently, coaxing Pyongyang into shuttering its nuclear reactor.

Other nations will forgive U.S. inattention for the moment, predicted Richard Holwill, a former deputy assistant secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan. "I think the world is fairly realistic, fairly grown up about these things," he said. "I would be very surprised if there were ill feelings based on that. There's enough reason to have ill feelings based on other things."

Envoy Urges Visas For Iraqis Aiding U.S.

Targets of Violence Are Seeking Refuge

By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 22, 2007; A01

The American ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan C. Crocker, has asked the Bush administration to take the unusual step of granting immigrant visas to all Iraqis employed by the U.S. government in Iraq because of growing concern that they will quit and flee the country if they cannot be assured eventual safe passage to the United States.

Crocker's request comes as the administration is struggling to respond to the flood of Iraqis who have sought refuge in neighboring countries since sectarian fighting escalated early last year. The United States has admitted 133 Iraqi refugees since October, despite predicting that it would process 7,000 by the end of September.

"Our [Iraqi staff members] work under extremely difficult conditions, and are targets for violence including murder and kidnapping," Crocker wrote Undersecretary of State Henrietta H. Fore. "Unless they know that there is some hope of an [immigrant visa] in the future, many will continue to seek asylum, leaving our Mission lacking in one of our most valuable assets."

Crocker's two-page cable dramatizes how Iraq's instability and a rapidly increasing refugee population are stoking new pressures to help those who are threatened or displaced. As public sentiment grows for a partial or full American withdrawal, U.S. Embassy officials are facing demands from their own employees to secure a reliable exit route, and the administration as a whole is facing pressure from aid groups, lawmakers and diplomats to do more for those upended by the war.

With Iraqi immigration to the United States stuck at a trickle, however, it appears that humanitarian concerns have been trumped so far by fears that terrorists may infiltrate through refugee channels. Bureaucratic delays at the departments of State and Homeland Security have also bogged down the processing of immigration requests by Iraqis fleeing violence.

Skeptics contend another reason the administration has been slow to resettle Iraqis in large numbers is that doing so could be seen as admitting that its efforts to secure Iraq have failed. The intense pressure for visas "reflects the fact that the situation is pretty dire," said Roberta Cohen, principal adviser to the U.N. secretary general's representative on internally displaced persons.

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees says that about 2 million Iraqis have been displaced inside the country so far, and that an estimated 2.2 million others have fled to Syria, Jordan and other neighbors, where they threaten to overwhelm schools and housing, destabilize host governments and provide a recruiting ground for radical unrest. Each month, an additional 60,000 Iraqis flee their homes, the U.N. agency said.

Overall estimates of the number of Iraqis who may be targeted as collaborators because of their work for U.S., coalition or foreign reconstruction groups are as high as 110,000. The U.N. refugee agency has estimated that 20,000 Iraqi refugees need permanent resettlement.

In the cable he sent July 9, Crocker highlighted the plight of Iraqis who have assumed great risk by helping the United States. Since June 2004, at least nine U.S. Embassy employees have been killed -- including a married couple last month. But Iraqi employees other than interpreters and translators generally cannot obtain U.S. immigrant visas, and until a recent expansion that took the annual quota to 500 from 50, interpreter-translator applicants faced a nine-year backlog.

As a result, Crocker said, the embassy is referring two workers per week to a U.S. asylum program. Outside analysts and former officials say the number of Iraqi staffers at the embassy has fallen by about half from 200 last year, while rough estimates place the number of Iraqi employees of the U.S. government in the low thousands.

A 43-year-old former engineer for the U.S. Embassy who gave his name as Abu Ali said Iraqis working with Americans at any level must trust no one, use fake names, conceal their travel and telephone use, and withhold their employment even from family members. Despite such extreme precautions, he said they are viewed as traitors by some countrymen and are still mistrusted by the U.S. government.

"We have no good end or finish for us," said Ali, who quit the embassy in June and moved to Dubai with his four children.

Kirk W. Johnson, who served as regional reconstruction coordinator in Fallujah in 2005 for the U.S. Agency for International Development, said the damage to the United States' standing in the Muslim world will be long-lasting if the country's immigration officials are unable to tell friend from foe in Iraq -- between terrorists and those who have sacrificed the most to work and fight alongside Americans.

"If we screw this group of people, we're never going to make another friend in the Middle East as long as I'm alive," said Johnson, who is advocating the resettlement of Iraqis who have worked for coalition forces. "The people in the Middle East are watching what happens to this group."

The State Department declined to comment on Friday about Crocker's proposals or his cable, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post. But Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said last week that he would like Iraqis who worked for the United States or who have been vouched for by American authorities to be processed "as quickly as we can, because I think we have a responsibility there."

Kenneth H. Bacon, president of Refugees International, who has urged broader U.S. resettlement efforts, said that "the U.S. does have an obligation to be fair to the people who have served it, whether in Iraq or elsewhere. That's what Ryan Crocker wants to be able to promise." Bacon was among several refugee experts who said that Iraqi employees seeking immigrant visas have already shown their trustworthiness by exposing themselves to brutal attacks over their work in the Green Zone and elsewhere.

But such Iraqis are only a small part of a broader refugee problem that Washington confronts as a result of the war. In recent months, the U.N. refugee agency has referred 8,000 Iraqi refugee applications to the U.S. government. About 1,500 of them have been interviewed, and about 1,000 "conditionally approved" pending security checks and travel arrangements, a DHS official said. The State Department expects 4,000 more interviews to be completed by October.

But State and DHS are unlikely to admit more than 2,000 Iraqi refugees by October, U.S. officials said. Since 2003, the year of the U.S. invasion, the United States has admitted 825 Iraqi refugees, many of them backlogged applicants from the time when Saddam Hussein was in power. By comparison, the United States has accepted 3,498 Iranians in the past nine months.

Smaller countries have also done more. Sweden received 9,065 Iraqi asylum applications in 2006, approving them at a rate of 80 percent, although it recently announced tighter restrictions.

By past standards, the U.S. response also has been meager. Washington admitted nearly 140,000 Vietnamese refugees in eight months in 1975, although only after the U.S. defeat in South Vietnam became clear.

A DHS official blamed the State Department for paperwork delays. Assistant Secretary of State Ellen R. Sauerbrey said officials are speeding up processing and anticipate "a significantly larger number" of admissions. "The people who are in the pipeline will be admitted by next year or, hopefully, the end of the calendar year," she said.

But DHS has opposed boosting the U.S. intake of Iraqis. In a June 26 memo to Congress, the department opposed a legislative proposal to allow applications by Christians and other Iraqi religious minorities, saying it would "vastly increase" the number of refugees. "No vetting process is perfect, and even a strong vetting process can be strained by rapid growth or high volumes," the memo stated.

U.S. officials declined to discuss details about security checks for Iraqis, but said that, under special rules, applicants are subjected to interviews, fingerprinting and examination of their family histories. The information is checked against military, FBI, State and Homeland Security databases.

But DHS rules sometimes pose problems peculiar to the Iraqi conflict: Those who pay ransom to free relatives kidnapped by insurgents, for example, are sometimes viewed as providing material support to terrorists.

Homeland Security officials say they have worked hard to adjust their policies, but Chertoff said in the interview that Washington will not compromise on screening quality. "What we can't afford to do and what would be devastating for the program would be if we were to start to allow people in who actually were a threat," he said.

Years ago, Chertoff added, Europe had more relaxed asylum standards, and it "wound up admitting a bunch of people who are now the radical extremists who are fomenting homegrown terrorism."

Congress is nonetheless stepping up pressure on the administration to do more, with Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) and Sens. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) introducing separate legislation to expand U.S. refugee and immigrant visa programs for Iraqis, including for those threatened because they helped coalition or reconstruction efforts.

"The Administration has ignored this crisis for far too long, and its response is inadequate," Kennedy said in a written statement. "We can't solve this problem alone, but America has an obligation to provide leadership and resettle greater numbers of Iraqis who are targeted by the assassin's bullet because they assisted us in the war."

New Paradigms for 21st Century Conflict

David J. Kilcullen
CONTENTS About This Issue Terrorism and Children A Form of Psychological Warfare Collective Identity: Hatred Bred in the Bone Women as Victims and Victimizers Terrorism: A Brief History From Profiles to Pathways: The Road to Recruitment Mass-Media Theater A Case Study: The Mythology of Martyrdom in Iraq New Paradigms for 21st Century Conflict A Strategic Assessment of Progress Against the Terrorist Threat Video Feature Terrorism: A War Without Borders Bibliography Internet Resources Download Adobe Acrobat (PDF) version		The multinational force monitoring the ceasefire following the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah is an example of recent cooperation among the international community to address the new types of conflict that have arisen in the 21st century. Here, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon thanks the men and women from the 30 countries participating in this effort. ©AP Images/Hussein Malla David J. Kilcullen, PhD, a former Australian Army lieutenant colonel, is currently senior counterinsurgency adviser to the commanding general, Multi-National Force - Iraq. He previously served as chief strategist in the U.S. Department of State's Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism and as the Pentagon's special adviser for irregular warfare and counterterrorism on the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review. He regularly contributes to the Small War Journal Blog. This paper, like his postings, solely reflects his personal views. Despite our rather rosy hindsight view of World War II, there was considerable dissent at the time about the war's aims, conduct, and strategy. But virtually no one disagreed that it was indeed a war or that the Axis powers were the enemy/aggressors. Contrast this with the war on terrorism. Some dispute the notion that the conflict can be defined as a war; others question the reality of the threat. Far-left critics blame American industrial interests, while a lunatic fringe sees September 11, 2001, as a massive self-inflicted conspiracy. More seriously, people disagree about the enemy. Is al-Qaida a real threat or a creature of Western paranoia and overreaction? Is it even a real organization? Is al-Qaida a mass movement or simply a philosophy, a state of mind? Is the enemy all terrorism? Is it extremism? Or is Islam itself in some way a threat? Is this primarily a military, political, or civilizational problem? What would "victory" look like? These fundamentals are disputed, as those of previous conflicts (except possibly the Cold War) were not. In truth, the al-Qaida threat is all too real. But ambiguity arises because this conflict breaks existing paradigms—including notions of "warfare," "diplomacy," "intelligence," and even "terrorism." How, for example, do we wage war on nonstate actors who hide in states with which we are at peace? How do we work with allies whose territory provides safe haven for nonstate opponents? How do we defeat enemies who exploit the tools of globalization and open societies, without destroying the very things we seek to protect? A New Paradigm British General Rupert Smith argues that war—defined as industrial, interstate warfare between armies, where the clash of arms decides the outcome—no longer exists, that we are instead in an era of "war amongst the people," where the utility of military forces depends on their ability to adapt to complex political contexts and engage nonstate opponents under the critical gaze of global public opinion.1 Certainly, in complex, multisided, irregular conflicts such as Iraq, conventional warfare has failed to produce decisive outcomes. We have instead adopted policing, nation-building, and counterinsurgency approaches—and developed new interagency tools "on the fly." Similarly, we traditionally conduct state-based diplomacy through engagement with elites of other societies: governments, intelligentsia, and business leaders, among others. The theory is that problems can be resolved when elites agree, cooler heads prevail, and governments negotiate and then enforce agreements. Notions of sovereignty, the nation-state, treaty regimes, and international institutions all build on this paradigm. Yet the enemy organizes at the nonelite level, exploiting discontent and alienation across numerous countries, to aggregate the effects of multiple grassroots actors into a mass movement with global reach. How do elite models of diplomacy address that challenge? This is not a new problem—various programs were established in U.S. embassies in the Cold War to engage with nongovernmental elements of civil societies at risk from Communist subversion. But many such programs lapsed after 1992, and problems of religious extremism or political violence require subtly different approaches. Likewise, traditional intelligence services are not primarily designed to find out what is happening but to acquire secrets from other nation-states. They are well-adapted to state-based targets but less suited to nonstate actors—where the problem is to acquire information that is unclassified but located in denied, hostile, or inaccessible physical or human terrain. Even against state actors, traditional intelligence cannot tell us what is happening, only what other governments believe is happening. Why, for example, did Western intelligence miss the imminent fall of the Soviet Union in 1992? In part, because we were reading the Soviet leaders' mail—and they themselves failed to understand the depth of grassroots disillusionment with Communism.2 Why did most countries (including those that opposed the Iraq war) believe in 2002 that Saddam Hussein's regime had weapons of mass destruction? Because they were intercepting the regime's communications, and many senior Iraqi regime members believed Iraq had them.3 Long-standing trends underpin this environment. Drivers include globalization and the backlash against it, the rise of nonstate actors with capabilities comparable to some nation-states, U.S. conventional military superiority that forces all opponents to avoid its strengths and migrate toward unconventional approaches, and a global information environment based on the Internet and satellite communications. All these trends would endure even if al-Qaida disappeared tomorrow, and until we demonstrate an ability to defeat this type of threat, any smart adversary will adopt a similar approach. Far from being a one-off challenge, we may look back on al-Qaida as the harbinger of a new era of conflict. Adapting to the New Environment Thus, as former U.S. Counterterrorism Ambassador Hank Crumpton observed, we seem to be on the threshold of a new era of warfare, one that demands an adaptive response. Like dinosaurs The names of U.S. government agencies engaged in the fight against terrorism are displayed during a hearing on federal reorganization to combat terrorism in June 2002. ©AP Images/Kenneth outcompeted by smaller, weaker, but more adaptive mammals, in this new era, nation-states are more powerful but less agile and flexible than nonstate opponents. As in all conflict, success will depend on our ability to adapt, evolve new responses, and get ahead of a rapidly changing threat environment. The enemy adapts with great speed. Consider al-Qaida's evolution since the mid-1990s. Early attacks (the East African embassy bombings, the USS Cole, and 9/11 itself) were "expeditionary": Al-Qaida formed a team in Country A, prepared it in Country B, and clandestinely infiltrated it into Country C to attack a target. In response, we improved transportation security, infrastructure protection, and immigration controls. In turn, terrorists developed a "guerrilla" approach where, instead of building a team remotely and inserting it secretly to attack, they grew the team close to the target using nationals of the host country. The Madrid and London bombings, and attacks in Casablanca, Istanbul, and Jeddah, followed this pattern, as did the foiled London airline plot of summer 2006. These attacks are often described as "home grown," yet they were inspired, exploited, and to some extent directed by al-Qaida. For example, Mohammed Siddeque Khan, leader of the July 7, 2005, London attack, flew to Pakistan and probably met al-Qaida representatives for guidance and training well before the bombing.4 But the new approach temporarily invalidated our countermeasures—instead of smuggling 19 people in, the terrorists brought one man out—side-stepping our new security procedures. The terrorists had adapted to our new approach by evolving new techniques of their own. We are now, of course, alert to this "guerrilla" method, as the failure of the August 2006 plots in the United Kingdom and other recent potential attacks showed. But terrorists are undoubtedly already developing new adaptive measures. In counterterrorism, methods that work are almost by definition already obsolete: Our opponents evolve as soon as we master their current approach. There is no "silver bullet." Similar to malaria, terrorism constantly morphs into new mutations that require a continuously updated battery of responses. Five Practical Steps In responding to this counterintuitive form of warfare, the United States has done two basic things so far. First, we improved existing institutions (through processes like intelligence reform, creation of the Department of Homeland Security, and additional capacity for "irregular"—that is, nontraditional—warfare within the Department of Defense). Second, we have begun developing new paradigms to fit the new reality. These are yet to fully emerge, though some—such as the idea of treating the conflict as a very large-scale counterinsurgency problem, requiring primarily nonmilitary responses coupled with measures to protect at-risk populations from enemy influence—have gained traction.5 But in a sense, policy makers today are a little like the "Chateau Generals" of the First World War—confronting a form of conflict that invalidates received wisdom, just as the generals faced the "riddle of the trenches" in 1914-1918. Like them, we face a conflict environment transformed by new technological and social conditions, for which existing organizations and concepts are ill-suited. Like them, we have "work-arounds," but have yet to develop the breakthrough concepts, technologies, and organizations—equivalent to blitzkrieg in the 1930s—that would solve the riddle of this new threat environment. There is no easy answer (if there were, we would have found it by now), but it is possible to suggest a way forward. This involves three conceptual steps to develop new models and, simultaneously, two organizational steps to create a capability for this form of conflict. This is not meant to be prescriptive, but is simply one possible approach. And the ideas put forward are not particularly original—rather, this proposal musters existing ideas and integrates them into a policy approach. 1. Develop a new lexicon: Professor Michael Vlahos has pointed out that the language we use to describe the new threats actively hinders innovative thought.6 Our terms draw on negative formulations; they say what the environment is not, rather than what it is. These terms include descriptors like unconventional, nonstate, nontraditional, unorthodox, and irregular. Terminology undoubtedly influences our ability to think clearly. One reason why planners in Iraq may have treated "major combat operations" (Phase III) as decisive, not realizing that in this case the post-conflict phase would actually be critical, is that Phase III is decisive by definition. Its full doctrinal name is "Phase III—Decisive Operations." To think clearly about new threats, we need a new lexicon based on the actual, observed characteristics of real enemies who: Integrate terrorism, subversion, humanitarian work, and insurgency to support propaganda designed to manipulate the perceptions of local and global audiences Aggregate the effects of a very large number of grassroots actors, scattered across many countries, into a mass movement greater than the sum of its parts, with dispersed leadership and planning functions that deny us detectable targets Exploit the speed and ubiquity of modern communications media to mobilize supporters and sympathizers, at speeds far greater than governments can muster Exploit deep-seated belief systems founded in religious, ethnic, tribal, or cultural identity, to create extremely lethal, nonrational reactions among social groups Exploit safe havens such as ungoverned or undergoverned areas (in physical or cyber space); ideological, religious, or cultural blind spots; or legal loopholes Use high-profile symbolic attacks that provoke nation-states into overreactions that damage their long-term interests Mount numerous, cheap, small-scale challenges to exhaust us by provoking expensive containment, prevention, and response efforts in dozens of remote areas These features of the new environment could generate a lexicon to better describe the threat. Since the new threats are not state-based, the basis for our approach should not be international relations (the study of how nation-states interact in elite state-based frameworks) but anthropology (the study of social roles, groups, status, institutions, and relations within human population groups, in nonelite, nonstate-based frameworks). 2. Get the grand strategy right: If this confrontation is based on long-standing trends, it follows that it may be a protracted, generational, or multigenerational struggle. This means we need both a "long view" and a "broad view"7 that consider how best to interweave all strands of national power, including the private sector and the wider community. Thus we need a grand strategy that can be sustained by the American people, successive U.S. administrations, key allies, and partners worldwide. Formulating such a long-term grand strategy would involve four crucial judgments: Deciding whether our interests are best served by intervening in and trying to mitigate the process of political and religious ferment in the Muslim world, or by seeking instead to contain any spillover of violence or unrest into Western communities. This choice is akin to that between "rollback" and "containment" in the Cold War and is a key element in framing a long-term response. Deciding how to allocate resources among military and nonmilitary elements of national power. Our present spending and effort are predominantly military; by contrast, a "global counterinsurgency" approach would suggest that about 80 percent of effort should go toward political, diplomatic, development, intelligence, and informational activity, and about 20 percent to military activity. Whether this is appropriate depends on our judgment about intervention versus containment. Deciding how much to spend (in resources and lives) on this problem. This will require a risk judgment taking into account the likelihood and consequences of future terrorist attacks. Such a judgment must also consider how much can be spent on security without imposing an unsustainable cost burden on our societies. Deciding how to prioritize effort geographically. At present most effort goes to Iraq, a much smaller portion to Afghanistan, and less again to all other areas. Partly this is because our spending is predominantly military and because we have chosen to intervene in the heart of the Muslim world. Different choices on the military/nonmilitary and intervention/containment judgments might produce significantly different regional priorities over time. Clearly, the specifics of any administration's strategy would vary in response to a developing situation. Indeed, such agility is critical. But achieving a sustainable consensus, nationally and internationally, on the four grand judgments listed above, would provide a long-term basis for policy across successive administrations. 3. Remedy the imbalance in government capability: At present, the U.S. defense budget accounts for approximately half of total global defense spending, while the U.S. armed forces LambertIn a warehouse on the outskirts of the Jordanian capital of Amman, workers store blankets donated by the U.S. Agency for International Development for distribution in Iraq. ©AP Images/Lefteris Pitarakis employ about 1.68 million uniformed members.8 By comparison, the State Department employs about 6,000 foreign service officers, while the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has about 2,000.9 In other words, the Department of Defense is about 210 times larger than USAID and State combined—there are substantially more people employed as musicians in Defense bands than in the entire foreign service.10 This is not to criticize Defense—armed services are labor- and capital-intensive and are always larger than diplomatic or aid agencies. But considering the importance, in this form of conflict, of development, diplomacy, and information (the U.S. Information Agency was abolished in 1999 and the State Department figures given include its successor bureau), a clear imbalance exists between military and nonmilitary elements of capacity. This distorts policy and is unusual by global standards. For example, Australia's military is approximately nine times larger than its diplomatic and aid agencies combined: The military arm is larger, but not 210 times larger, than the other elements of national power. To its credit, the Department of Defense recognizes the problems inherent in such an imbalance, and said so in the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review.11 And the Bush administration has programs in train to increase nonmilitary capacity. But to succeed over the long haul, we need a sustained commitment to build nonmilitary elements of national power. So-called soft powers, such as private-sector economic strength, national reputation, and cultural confidence, are crucial, because military power alone cannot compensate for their loss. These three conceptual steps will take time (which is, incidentally, a good reason to start on them). But in the interim, two organizational steps could prepare the way: 4. Identify the new "strategic services": A leading role in the war on terrorism has fallen to Special Operations Forces (SOF) because of their direct action capabilities against targets in remote or denied areas. Meanwhile, Max Boot12 has argued that we again need something like the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) of World War II, which included analysis, intelligence, anthropology, special operations, information, psychological operations, and technology capabilities. Adjectives matter: Special Forces versus Strategic Services. SOF are special. They are defined by internal comparison to the rest of the military—SOF undertake tasks "beyond the capabilities" of general-purpose forces. By contrast, OSS was strategic. It was defined against an external environment and undertook tasks of strategic importance, rapidly acquiring and divesting capabilities as needed. SOF are almost entirely military; OSS was an interagency body with a sizeable civilian component, and almost all its military personnel were emergency war enlistees (talented civilians with strategically relevant skills, enlisted for the duration of the war).13 SOF trace their origin to OSS; yet whereas today's SOF are elite military forces with highly specialized capabilities optimized for seven standard missions,14 OSS was a mixed civil-military organization that took whatever mission the environment demanded, building capabilities as needed. Soldiers from many nations, including these Indonesian commandos who are applauding their colleagues during an anti-terror exercise conducted outside Jakarta in 2006, have joined in the international fight against terrorism.© AP Images/Irwin Fedriansyiah Identifying which capabilities are strategic services today would be a key step in prioritizing interagency efforts. Capabilities for dealing with nonelite, grassroots threats include cultural and ethnographic intelligence, social systems analysis, information operations (see below), early-entry or high-threat humanitarian and governance teams, field negotiation and mediation teams, biometric reconnaissance, and a variety of other strategically relevant capabilities. The relevance of these capabilities changes over time—some that are strategically relevant now would cease to be, while others would emerge. The key is the creation of an interagency capability to rapidly acquire and apply techniques and technologies in a fast-changing situation. 5. Develop a capacity for strategic information warfare: Al-Qaida is highly skilled at exploiting multiple, diverse actions by individuals and groups, by framing them in a propaganda narrative to manipulate local and global audiences. Al-Qaida maintains a network that collects information about the debate in the West and feeds this, along with an assessment of the effectiveness of al-Qaida's propaganda, to its leaders. They use physical operations (bombings, insurgent activity, beheadings) as supporting material for an integrated "armed propaganda" campaign. The "information" side of al-Qaida's operation is primary; the physical is merely the tool to achieve a propaganda result. The Taliban, GSPC (previously, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, now known as al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb), and some other al-Qaida-aligned groups, as well as Hezbollah, adopt similar approaches. Contrast this with our approach: We typically design physical operations first, then craft supporting information operations to explain our actions. This is the reverse of al-Qaida's approach. For all our professionalism, compared to the enemy's, our public information is an afterthought. In military terms, for al-Qaida the "main effort" is information; for us, information is a "supporting effort." As noted, there are 1.68 million people in the U.S. military, and what they do speaks louder than what our public information professionals (who number in the hundreds) say. Thus, to combat extremist propaganda, we need a capacity for strategic information warfare—an integrating function that draws together all components of what we say and what we do to send strategic messages that support our overall policy. At present, the military has a well-developed information operations doctrine, but other agencies do not, and they are often rightly wary of military methods. Militarizing information A U.S. national guardsman works with an Iraqi police officer at the Major Crime Unit in western Baghdad. ©AP Images/David Guttenfelder operations would be a severe mistake that would confuse a part (military operations) with the whole (U.S. national strategy) and so undermine our overall policy. Lacking a whole-of-government doctrine and the capability to fight strategic information warfare limits our effectiveness and creates message dissonance, in which different elements of the U.S. government send out different messages or work to differing information agendas. We need an interagency effort, with leadership from the very top in the executive and legislative branches of government, to create capabilities, organizations, and doctrine for a national-level strategic information campaign. Building such a capability is perhaps the most important of our many capability challenges in this new era of information-driven conflict. Tentative Conclusions These notions—a new lexicon, grand strategy, balanced capability, strategic services, and strategic information warfare—are merely speculative ideas that suggest what might emerge from a comprehensive effort to find new paradigms for this new era of conflict. Different ideas may well emerge from such an effort, and, in any case, rapid changes in the environment due to enemy adaptation will demand constant innovation. But it is crystal clear that our traditional paradigms of industrial interstate war, elite-based diplomacy, and state-focused intelligence can no longer explain the environment or provide conceptual keys to overcome today's threats. The Cold War is a limited analogy for today's conflict: There are many differences between today's threats and those of the Cold War era. Yet in at least one dimension, that of time, the enduring trends that drive the current confrontation may mean that the conflict will indeed resemble the Cold War, which lasted in one form or another for the 75 years between the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991. Many of its consequences—especially the "legacy conflicts" arising from the Soviet-Afghan War—are with us still. Even if this confrontation lasts only half as long as the Cold War, we are at the beginning of a very long road indeed, whether we choose to recognize it or not. The new threats, which invalidate received wisdom on so many issues, may indicate that we are on the brink of a new era of conflict. Finding new, breakthrough ideas to understand and defeat these threats may prove to be the most important challenge we face. The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government. Endnotes (1)See Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), especially pp. 3-28 and 269-335. (2)See Gerald K. Haines and Robert E. Leggett, Watching the Bear: Essays on CIA's Analysis of the Soviet Union (Washington, D.C.: Central Intelligence Agency, Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2003), especially chapters VI and VII. (3) See Kevin M. Woods et. al, Iraqi Perspectives Project: A View of Operation Iraqi Freedom from Saddam's Senior Leadership (Joint Forces Command, Joint Center for Operational Analysis), p. 92. (4)Intelligence and Security Committee, Report Into the London Terrorist Attacks on 7 July 2005 (London: The Stationery Office, May 2006), p. 12. (5)See David Kilcullen, "Countering Global Insurgency," Small Wars Journal (November 2004) and available at http://www.smallwarsjournal.com/documents/kilcullen.pdf ; Williamson Murray (ed.), Strategic Challenges for Counterinsurgency and the Global War on Terrorism (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2006); and Bruce Hoffman, "From War on Terror to Global Counterinsurgency," Current History (December 2006): pp. 423-429. (6)Professor Michael Vlahos, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, personal communication, December 2006. (7) I am indebted to Mr. Steve Eames for this conceptual formulation. (8) Compiled from figures in International Institute for Strategic Studies, Military Balance 2007, pp. 15-50. (9) Compiled from U.S. State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development, Congressional Budget Justification 2007, table 9. (10)The U.S. Army alone employs well over 5,000 band musicians, according to a March 2007 job advertisement; see http://bands.army.mil/jobs/default.asp. (11)Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review Report (2 February 2006): pp. 83-91. (12) See Max Boot, Congressional Testimony Before the House Armed Services Committee, 29 June 2006, at http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/congress/2006_hr/060629-boot.pdf. (13) See Central Intelligence Agency, The Office of Strategic Services: America's First Intelligence Agency at https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/oss/index.htm. (14)The seven standard SOF missions are Direct Action (DA), Special Reconnaissance (SR), Unconventional Warfare (UW), Foreign Internal Defence (FID), Counter-Terrorism (CT), Psychological Operations (PSYOP), and Civil Affairs (CA).