After eight years, US-led forces must show progress in Afghanistan by next year to avoid perceptions that the conflict has become unwinnable, the US Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, has said in a sharp critique of the war effort.

Mr Gates said victory was a “long-term prospect” under any scenario and the US would not win the war in a year’s time. But US forces must begin to turn the situation around in a year, he said, or face the likely loss of public support.

Mr Gates said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times published yesterday:

“After the Iraq experience, nobody is prepared to have a long slog where it is not apparent we are making headway,”

“The troops are tired, the American people are pretty tired.”

Deep public unhappiness with the war in Iraq helped sink George Bush’s public approval ratings, making him the most unpopular president in recent history in some surveys.

While not predicting a parallel fate for the Obama Administration, Mr Gates stressed the need for progress in Afghanistan.

Mr Gates has spoken in the past about the public’s fatigue with war. In the interview, he went further by offering a more specific time-frame for needed progress as well as the consequences of failing to meet it. Mr Gates has overseen an overhaul in the Administration’s Afghanistan strategy in recent months, sending 21,000 additional troops and choosing a new commander to lead the international effort.

“This is where we are really getting back into the fight,”

The strategy switch came after rebel attacks rose dramatically last year and casualties suffered by US and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation troops surpassed record levels.

President Barack Obama said last week that he hoped to “transition to a different phase” after the Afghan presidential election on August 20.

Mr Gates said Americans would have the patience to continue the war in Afghanistan only if the new military approach began to lift the conflict out of deadlock.

“If we can show progress, and we are headed in the right direction, and we are not in a stalemate where we are taking significant casualties, then you can put more time on the Washington clock,”

With a new strategy in place, General Stanley McChrystal, now the top commander in Afghanistan, and General David Petraeus, head of US forces in the Middle East, are due to provide their assessment of the effort in Afghanistan early next month.

Mr Gates said the commanders were free to provide an honest assessment, but also cautioned that additional troops might not be approved.

“I did not want either of them to feel constrained in making their recommendations,”

“That is not to say we will accept all of their recommendations.”

The war in Afghanistan is officially a NATO mission. Mr Gates said the alliance was facing the challenge of rising casualties just as the overall coalition war effort was beginning to function better. British forces have had 15 soldiers killed in action in Afghanistan this month, and Canada has lost five service members.

“There has been an extraordinary amount of political courage as some of our partners have taken some really devastating casualties,”

“The British have had a rough couple of weeks.”

Technorati Tags: Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, george bush, pentagon, Robert Gates

The global financial crisis has created an unlikely property boom in Kabul, where four-bedroom houses now cost up to $500,000.

As prices across the world collapse, parts of the Afghan capital, Kabul has seen values rise by 75 per cent in the past year, according to estate agents.

A plummeting Dubai property market has forced the wealthy Afghan elite to pull their investments out of the Gulf and plough the money back into Kabul.

Prices have been further buoyed by demand for city center property and land from aid agencies, international contractors and new embassies. Because the economy is largely reliant on aid or donations and the tiny formal banking system is reluctant to lend, Afghanistan has so far been largely untouched by the credit crisis and ensuing downturn, according to ministers and business leaders.

Those Afghans who have amassed large sums from reconstruction contracts, corruption or the opium trade have invested in Dubai’s booming markets in the past five years. But Dubai property is estimated to have fallen 25 per cent in value since its September peak and billions of dollars of development there is on hold or canceled.

“Most Afghans who have invested in Dubai are now turning their faith back to Kabul,” said Torialai Bahadery, director of Property Consulting Afghanistan.

“We have been hearing that people are losing millions of dollars in Dubai.”

“In addition there’s very easy money for selected people. They make good money out of contracts and they prefer to invest it here rather than Dubai.”

“Drug dealers want to make their money clean by investing in property. It used to be when they had money they had ways of taking it out, but because of the global crisis, they don’t want to take it out.”

Technorati Tags: Afghanistan, Kabul, property boom

In his first major military move, US President Barack Obama has approved the deployment of 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan, saying they were needed “to stabilise a deteriorating situation”.

“There is no more solemn duty as president than the decision to deploy our armed forces into harm’s way,” Obama said in a statement.

“I do it today mindful that the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan demands urgent attention and swift action.”

Obama said the deployment orders were in response to a months-old request by the US commander in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, who had asked for 30,000 more troops.

“To meet urgent security needs,” Obama said he had approved a request by Defence Secretary Robert Gates to deploy a Marine Expeditionary Brigade in the northern spring, and an Army Stryker Brigade and support forces later this summer.

The White House said some 17,000 troops would be deployed to Afghanistan ahead of the Afghan elections scheduled for August 20, significantly building up the 38,000 US force already on the ground battling a growing insurgency.

Asked about possible future troop deployment orders, a senior administration official told Agence France-Presse they were unlikely to come before an ongoing comprehensive review of US strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan was completed.

“The thinking is that this was necessary at this time because of the expected increase of fighting in the spring and the upcoming elections,” the official said.

“The strategy needs to be complete to determine whether additional troops would be necessary,” the official added, saying the objective was for the review to be completed before a NATO summit in April.

The US-backed government in Kabul has come under intense pressure as the insurgency led by Taliban and al-Qadea Islamic militants has gained strength and spread from the east and south into parts of the west and areas around the capital, Kabul.

As the security situation in Iraq has improved, the US has increasingly shifted its focus to the insurgency in Afghanistan and reduced the number of its troops in Iraq.

Last year saw the deadliest Taliban violence, including suicide attacks, assassinations of government officials and ambushes on Afghan and international troops.

“The Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, and Al-Qaeda supports the insurgency and threatens America from its safe haven along the Pakistani border,” Obama warned.

“This increase is necessary to stabilise a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, which has not received the strategic attention, direction and resources it urgently requires.”

The Pentagon said Gates had ordered the deployment of two additional combat units totalling more than 12,000 troops, with Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman indicating they would be deployed in the violence-plagued south.

Another 5,000-some support troops would receive deployment orders at a later date “to support these combat forces”.

Under the orders, some 8000 Marines from the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade will deploy to Afghanistan in late spring 2009, and about 4,000 soldiers from the 5th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division would deploy in mid-summer 2009, the Pentagon said.

Obama indicated that the units being sent to Afghanistan had initially been earmarked for Iraq, saying the drawdown of US forces there “allows us the flexibility to increase our presence in Afghanistan”.

He said the deployment decision would not predetermine the outcome of the review but instead “further enable our team to put together a comprehensive strategy that will employ all elements of our national power to fulfill achievable goals in Afghanistan”.

Obama ordered the review amid growing alarm about mounting Islamic extremism in the region seven years after the United States launched its “war on terror” and ousted Afghanistan’s Taliban regime.

It was unclear how the additional troops would be used, amid warnings that there is no military solution to Afghanistan’s growing problems.

Senator John McCain, Obama’s rival for the presidency in last year’s election, welcomed the move but expressed hope that it was

“just the first step in a new comprehensive approach to Afghanistan”.

“A major change in course is long overdue,”

US intelligence has warned that endemic corruption in Afghanistan and the government’s inability to deliver services and protect the population has eroded its legitimacy.

Technorati Tags: Afghanistan, barack obama, Defence Secretary Robert Gates, General David McKiernan, john mccain, NATO summit

On his third day in office, President Barack Obama has focused on the Middle East, calling on Israel to open its borders with Gaza to allow humanitarian aid and commerce.

And he has appointed one of America’s most talented negotiators to broker lasting peace in the troubled region.

Mr Obama also announced plans to close the contentious detention centre at Guantanamo Bay within 12 months and to ban “enhanced interrogation” used by the CIA in the past, branding it torture and contrary to American values.

The announcements signal – particularly to the Arab world – that the new administration will pursue vigorous diplomatic engagement and is prepared to realise America’s faults when it comes to meeting international obligations. The changes mark a return to what Mr Obama terms “core values”.

The new Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, arrived at her department to rousing applause and told staff she would welcome debate and ideas.

“The President is committed to making diplomacy and development the partners in our foreign policy, along with defence. And we must be smarter about how we exercise our power,”

The most tangible evidence of the new approach was in statements on Gaza from Mr Obama, who offered an even-handed assessment of the conflict.

Under the former president George Bush, the US strongly supported the Israeli actions in Gaza and blamed Hamas for bringing suffering on its own people. The US was also a reluctant supporter of ceasefire talks.

But Mr Obama said:

“Just as the terror of rocket fire aimed at innocent Israelis is intolerable, so too is a future without hope for the Palestinians.”

“I was deeply concerned by the loss of Palestinian and Israeli life in recent days, and by the substantial suffering and humanitarian needs in Gaza. Our hearts go out to Palestinian civilians who are in need of immediate food, clean water and basic medical care, and who’ve faced suffocating poverty for far too long.”

“Now we must extend a hand of opportunity to those who seek peace. As part of a lasting ceasefire, Gaza’s border crossings should be open to allow the flow of aid and commerce, with an appropriate monitoring regime with the international and Palestinian Authority participating.”

Mr Obama said the US would “actively and aggressively” seek a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

“The outline for a durable ceasefire is clear: Hamas must end its rocket fire; Israel will complete the withdrawal of its forces from Gaza; the US and our partners will support a credible anti-smuggling and interdiction regime, so that Hamas cannot re-arm,”

Technorati Tags: barack obama, gaza, Guantanamo Bay, hillary clinton, Microsoft, Middle East

Keeping Americans safe from further terrorist attacks on home soil was the greatest achievement of his presidency, the 43rd President of the US, George Bush, told the nation as he bade farewell in a final address at the White House.

In his 13-minute speech – in which he spoke robustly for his national security record and barely touched on the two wars he leaves behind – he was forceful in defending his Administration, humble about leading the nation, and gracious to his successor, Barack Obama, who will be sworn in on Tuesday.

Mr Bush sought to characterise his eight years in office as a struggle between two dramatically different systems – one led by fanatics with an oppressive ideology and the other based on the “conviction that freedom is a universal gift from God”.

As for the critics who have said he will be remembered as one of America’s worst presidents, and his disastrous approval ratings, he said: “Like all who have held this office before me, I have experienced setbacks.

“There are things I would do differently if given the chance. Yet

I have always acted with the best interests of our country in mind.”

He asked the American people to acknowledge that he was willing take the tough decisions, even if they did not agree with those decisions.

Much of the speech, delivered yesterday Sydney time, dwelled on his fight against terrorism after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the impact they had had on him and the nation.

“As the years passed,” he said,

“most Americans were able to return to life much as it had been before 9/11. But I never did. Every morning I received a briefing on the threats to our nation. And I vowed to do everything in my power to keep us safe.”

He said setting up a Department of Homeland Security, reforming intelligence services and increasing the monitoring of terrorists’ movements. And he had “taken the fight to the terrorists”.

Afghanistan, he said, had changed from a nation where the Taliban had harboured al-Qaeda and stoned women in the streets to a young democracy that was “fighting terror and encouraging young girls to go to school”.

Iraq had gone from a brutal dictatorship and enemy of the US to a democracy and ally.
He said:

“There is legitimate debate about many of these decisions but there is little debate about the results,”

“America has gone more than seven years without another terrorist attack on our soil.”

Of other criticisms of his time in office – his handling of Hurricane Katrina, the rising numbers of Americans without health insurance, the contentious exercise of executive power and incursions into civil liberties – Mr Bush made only glancing references or said nothing. Of the economy, he said:

“When challenges to our prosperity emerged, we rose to meet them. Facing the prospect of a financial collapse, we took decisive measures to safeguard our economy.”

He acknowledged Americans faced a tough time but said “it would be far worse if we had not acted”. He gave no indication that he saw his Administration as culpable for the housing bubble and crisis that followed.

Mr Bush also named as achievements his work in Africa fighting AIDS, the No Child Left Behind Act, which he said had raised standards in schools, a pharmaceutical benefits scheme for seniors, and lower taxes.

He acknowledged the historic nature of Mr Obama’s election:

“Standing on the steps of the Capitol will be a man whose story reflects the enduring promise of our land.”

httpvh://au.youtube.com/watch?v=TnHhKX-gG20&fmt=22

Technorati Tags: bush, farewell, final address, george w. bush, speech

We like our failed presidents to be Shakespearean, or at least large enough to inspire Oscar-worthy performances from magnificent tragedians. So here, too, George Bush has let us down. He is not a memorable villain so much as a sometimes affable second banana whom Will Ferrell can nail without breaking a sweat. He is smaller than life.

The last NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll on Bush’s presidency found that 79 per cent of Americans will not miss him. He is being forgotten already, even if he’s not yet gone. You start to pity him until you remember how vast the wreckage is, stretching from the Middle East to Wall Street to Main Street and even into the heavens, which have been a safe haven for toxins under his passive stewardship.

The one indisputable ability of his White House was to create and sell propaganda both to the public and the press. Now that bag of tricks is also empty. In what was intended as a farewell victory lap to show off Iraq’s improved post-surge security, Bush was reduced to ducking shoes.

Iraq burned, New Orleans flooded, and Bush remained oblivious to each and every pratfall on his watch. Americans essentially stopped listening to him after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, but he still doesn’t grasp the finality of their defection.

Bush is equally blind to the collapse of his propaganda machinery. Almost poignantly, he keeps trying to hawk his goods in these final days. Though no one is listening, he has given more exit interviews than either Clinton or Reagan. Along with old cronies like Karl Rove, he has embarked on a Bush “legacy project”, as Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard described it on CNN.

To this end, Rove has repeated a stunt he first fed to the press two years ago: claiming that he and Bush have an annual book-reading contest, with Bush chalking up as many as 95 books a year, by authors as high-falutin’ as Camus. This hagiographic portrait of Bush the Egghead might be easier to buy were the former national security official Richard Clarke not quoted in the new Vanity Fair saying that both Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, had instructed him early on to keep his memos short as the President is “not a big reader”.

Another, far more elaborate example of legacy spin is on the White House website: a booklet recounting “highlights” of the administration’s “accomplishments and results”. With big type, much white space and child-like trivia boxes titled “Did You Know?”, its 52 pages are the literary correlative to “Mission Accomplished”.

Bush kept America safe (provided his presidency began September 12, 2001). He gave it record economic growth (provided his presidency ended December 2007). He vanquished the leading al-Qaeda terrorists (if you don’t count bin Laden and al-Zawahri). He gave Afghanistan a thriving “market economy” (if you count its skyrocketing opium trade) and a “democratically elected president” (of one of the world’s most corrupt governments). He supported elections in Pakistan (after propping up Pervez Musharraf past the point of no return). He “led the world in providing food aid and natural disaster relief” (if you leave out emergency chief Michael “Brownie” Brown and Katrina).

But the brazenness of Bush’s alternative-reality history is itself revealing. The audacity of its hype helps clear up the mystery of how someone so slight could inflict so much damage. So do his many exit interviews.

The man who emerges is a narcissist with no self-awareness whatsoever. It’s that arrogance that allowed him to tune out even the most calamitous of realities, freeing him to compound them without missing a step. The President who famously couldn’t name a single mistake of his presidency at a press conference in 2004 still can’t.

He can, however, blame everyone else. Asked if he feels any responsibility for the economic meltdown, Bush says: “People will realise a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall Street took place over a decade or so before I arrived.” Asked if the 2008 election was a repudiation of his administration, he says: “It was a repudiation of Republicans.”

“The attacks of September 11 came out of nowhere,” he said in another interview, as if he hadn’t ignored frantic intelligence warnings that summer of an al-Qaeda attack. But it was an “intelligence failure”, not his relentless invocation of patently fictitious “mushroom clouds”, that sped us into Iraq.

The crowning personality tic revealed by Bush’s final propaganda push is his bottomless capacity for self-pity. “I was a wartime president, and war is very exhausting,” he told C-Span. “The president ends up carrying a lot of people’s grief in his soul.”

With this level of self-regard, it’s no wonder that Bush could remain undeterred as he drove the country off a cliff. Bush failed because, in the end, it was all about him.

The New York Times

Technorati Tags: economic crisis, george w. bush, hurricane Katrina disaster, Iraq war, Middle East

US vice-president Dick Cheney says he doesn’t know if the al-Qaeda terror leader Osama bin Laden is still alive – but thinks he is.

Asked if the elusive bin Laden was alive, Cheney said in an interview on Sunday: “I don’t know and I’m guessing he is.”

“We’ve had certain pieces of evidence become available from time to time, there’ll be a photograph released or something that allows the intelligence community to judge that he is still alive,” Cheney told Fox News on Sunday.

CIA Director Michael Hayden said in a speech on November 13 that bin Laden remains deeply isolated and has been forced to devote much of his energy to his own security.

Hayden suggested that bin Laden is hiding somewhere in the remote Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, where he said al-Qaeda has regrouped.

President George W Bush indicated on December 9 that bin Laden is still alive, but said the al-Qaeda mastermind and chief deputy Ayman Zawahiri will eventually get their due.

Bin Laden, the world’s most wanted man, has claimed responsibility for the September 11 attacks against New York and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people and prompted the US-led invasion of Afghanistan.

Despite a massive manhunt and a $US25 million bounty on his head, he has evaded capture and has regularly taunted the United States and its allies through warnings issued via video and audio, mainly on the Internet.

AFP

Technorati Tags: Dick Cheney, Osama Bin Laden

Former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top administration officials are responsible for abuse of detainees in US custody, a bipartisan Senate report says.

“Rumsfeld’s authorisation of aggressive interrogation techniques for use at Guantanamo Bay was a direct cause of detainee abuse there” and “influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques … in Afghanistan and Iraq,” the report released on Thursday concluded.

It said Rumsfeld authorised harsh interrogation techniques on December 2, 2002 at the US prison facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, although he ruled them out a month later.

“The message from top officials was clear; it was acceptable to use degrading and abusive techniques against detainees,” said Democratic Senator Carl Levin, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee that produced the report.

“Attempts by senior officials to pass the buck to low-ranking soldiers while avoiding any responsibility for abuses are unconscionable.”

The committee focused much of its nearly two-year investigation on the Defence Department’s use of controversial interrogation techniques, including stress positions, forced nudity, sleep deprivation and waterboarding, or simulated drowning.

“Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies and compromised our moral authority,” said the report, most of which remained classified.

The coercive techniques first originated from a memo President George Bush signed on February 7, 2002, that declared the Geneva Convention’s norms for humane treatment of prisoners did not apply to al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees, according to the report.

Top administration officials, including then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, participated in meetings on the harsh interrogation techniques, the report said.

The Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE) training techniques, designed to teach US troops how to resist enemy interrogations, were the template for detainee interrogation.

The report, approved unanimously by voice vote last month in the committee, found it “particularly troubling” for senior officials to have approved the use of techniques “modelled, in part, on tactics used by the Communist Chinese to elicit false confessions from US military personnel.”

The adoption of SERE techniques was “inexcusable,” said Senator John McCain of Arizona, a ranking Republican on the committee and a former prisoner of war in Vietnam.

“These policies are wrong and must never be repeated.”

McCain lost the US presidential election last month to Barack Obama, who has vowed to close the Us “war on terror” prison in Guantanamo Bay.

AFP

Technorati Tags: abuse report, Bush Administration, Donald Rumsfeld

Approaching the November 4 US presidential election, Joe Biden confided that America’s enemies would quickly test an elected Barack Obama.
“Mark my words,”

Obama’s running mate warned all too presciently,

“it will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy.”

“Watch. We’re going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”

Almost on cue, terrorists last week snuck into Mumbai and temporarily crippled India’s largest city, targeting Americans, Israelis and Britons. One consequence is the heightened focus on the quality of Obama’s national security team, particularly his choice of secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Announcing her appointment this week, Obama gave Clinton a “to do” list that was a depressing reminder of Bush administration failures on the global stage:

• Two unfinished wars, old conflicts such as the Middle East no closer to resolution
• Newly assertive powers such as Iran putting pressure on the system

• Proliferation of nuclear bombs.

The president-elect then introduced Clinton as a tough campaign opponent of “extraordinary intelligence” and “a remarkable work ethic“. She will need both.

Steve Clemons, a director at the New America Foundation, says:

“Clinton will be playing on a three-level chess board. There’s the international economic crisis which will have foreign policy ramifications; there’s the 21st century issues of global justice such as refugees, poverty and genocide; and there’s the big strategic threats – the US has to have some new strategic plan other than walling itself off from those nations it doesn’t like or using its military power.”

Clemons says the former first lady’s first task will be in getting a

“quick makeover, to show she can work at multiple levels and that she can work in shades of grey”.

In campaign combat for the Democratic nomination, Obama and Clinton offered headline-grabbing policies short on detail. Clinton was particularly strident, threatening to “totally obliterate” Iran if it used nuclear weapons against Israel.
She was admonished by Obama:

“It’s important that we use language that sends a signal to the world community that we’re shifting from the sort of cowboy diplomacy, or lack of diplomacy, that we’ve seen out of George Bush. And this kind of language is not helpful.”

He now has faith that Clinton has the deftness necessary for America’s second most important job.
Her first challenge will be making sure the immediate does not overwhelm the important.
Until Mumbai, her talks with India and Pakistan probably would have been dominated by issues of Islamic extremism, the hunt for Osama bin Laden in the tribal regions on the border with Afghanistan, aid aimed at winning over the next generation of potential jihadists, and nuclear non-proliferation.

“sent tremors down the San Andreas fault of the region by inflaming relations between two nuclear-armed countries”

“This is going to take up a lot of Condi’s [current secretary of state Condoleeza Rice's] time and the new administration’s time.” And it won’t end there. “Different terrorist groups will be contriving challenges.” Even allies such as Israel might seek to test Obama. “These things do not travel in straight lines,” Clemons says.

“The challenge will be trying to achieve longer term outcomes instead of being caught being reactive to every situation.”

Iraq and Afghanistan:

The new team’s first and largest challenge will be the exit from Iraq and the adequate resourcing of Afghanistan – Obama’s “central front in the war on terrorism”. Their effectiveness is likely to be measured by success in Afghanistan, and experts argue that could be more elusive than in Iraq. “Afghanistan may be the ‘good war’, but it is also the harder war,” David Kilcullen, a former Australian army officer who until recently was Rice’s senior adviser on counterinsurgency issues, told The New York Times this week.

Most military experts warn that suppressing violence in Afghanistan – which had more insurgent attacks than Iraq between August and October – will not be as straightforward as it was in Iraq. The Afghan insurgency is rural, not concentrated in cities as in Iraq; the terrain is forbidding, tribal loyalties dispersed, warlords rich from narcotics and the Taliban and al-Qaeda receive relatively easy sanction in neighbouring Pakistan.

The Afghan army is tiny compared to population, Afghan police are ineffectual and there is little history of effective central government. In Iraq, centralised government was the norm. Building up a local force to step in when US and NATO forces have secured an area is therefore much more difficult.

Hamid Karzai’s weak government faces an election next year, making it difficult to replicate the “bottom up” strategy in Iraq, where tribal leaders were convinced to put down their arms and work with government, often in exchange for payments. In Afghanistan they wait for the government to fall.

Much of the responsibility for the redeployment of resources will fall to the Defence secretary Robert Gates but inevitably Clinton will be deeply involved, particularly in managing the relationship with Pakistan. She must extract greater Pakistani cooperation in removing terrorists’ safe havens or confront an even more difficult relationship should Obama make good his threat of unilateral action on Pakistani soil. Rising tension between India and Pakistan complicates the picture.

Middle East and Iran:

The Bush administration’s preoccupation with Iraq distracted it from the much larger problems of the Middle East, which have festered over the past eight years and become more complex thanks to Iran’s push for nuclear weapons. The Brookings Institute’s Martin Indyk says Obama must reprioritise and reorient US policy toward the Middle East: “For the past six years that policy has been dominated by Iraq. This need not, and should not be the case.”

Indyk says the priority should be curtailing Iran’s nuclear program and promoting peace between Israel, its Arab neighbours and Iran.

Others question whether US containment of Iran will work. Scholars such as Vali Nasr from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy argue the solution lies in a far more sophisticated understanding of the Arab stakeholders, and their inclusion in an American-sponsored regional security structure. Others talk of the need for a “grand bargain”, where the various causes of Middle East friction – disputed territory between Israel and Palestine, issues with Lebanon and Syria, a nuclear Iran, relations with Hezbollah and Hammas – are all on the table.

Restarting a serious effort toward Middle East peace is almost certain to fall mostly to Clinton, although the National Security Adviser, the former NATO commander General Jim Jones, is also likely to play an important role.

Clinton must judge how and at what level she engages with Iran, as Obama says he wants to do. The near-success in the six-party talks with North Korea have given the idea of diplomatic engagement with Iran more street cred. But it demands a rethink in how to deal with Iran, which could unnerve Israel. The North Korea talks made progress because threats of further sanctions and military intervention were matched with serious offers of assistance for the beleaguered nation including delisting of its American-imposed status as an “axis of evil” state. Iran may need more credible carrots and sticks, too.

Russian relations:

Nuclear proliferation:

An early issue for negotiation with the Russians, it was cited frequently by Obama as an area of priority.

The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty deals with weapons reduction by the two former nuclear superpowers and is due to expire in a year. Without renewal, the regime of verification goes out the window, says Matthew Bunn, of the Kennedy school of government at Harvard. “The issue for the incoming administration is whether to extend the treaty for a year, or try and push through a really good follow-on treaty. That, of course, is inextricably linked to the missile defence issue.”

Broader non-proliferation issues have gathered urgency as a result of Bush’s intrangience on treaty issues: the nuclear non-proliferation treaty expires in 2010 and is in desperate need of overhaul. Much work is to be done on securing nuclear materials around the world and Iran’s and North Korea’s nuclear ambitions remain.

Poverty, refugees and Darfur:

Obama spent the past year promising to tackle the tragedy in Darfur and direct American moral authority against poverty, AIDS and genocide. Invariably, these pledges drew huge cheers from supporters who saw his emphasis on these big picture issues as one of the main reasons for preferring him over Clinton.

Now, delivering on the promise falls to Clinton and Susan Rice – Obama’s nominee as UN Ambassador, and a former undersecretary on African affairs at the US State Department.

The stakes are high for this security team – politically as well as the risks each area of tension could unleash. Obama has raised expectations of his ability to put America on a different course; now he must deliver.

Clemons suggests he will be better off if his national security team operates outside the limelight. “They need to manufacture Nixon goes to China-type moments for Obama,” he says.

But can that really be Hillary Rodham Clinton’s modus operandi? We shall find out soon enough.

China:

China demands American attention for other reasons, not least American financial dependence on Chinese borrowings to help it through the financial crisis. How America engages with China on regulation of international financing and climate change will help set the tone of the future relationship, as will Clinton’s and Obama’s handling of it.

“The US cannot thwart China’s rise,”

John Ikenberry, professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, says.

“But it can help ensure that China’s power is exercised within the rules and institutions that the United States and its partners have crafted over the last century.”

But it takes two to tango and Putin’s Russia, enriched by booming oil revenues, is flexing its muscles again.

Technorati Tags: Afghanistan, China, darfur, hillary clinton, iran, Midlle East, mumbai, Nuclear Proliferation, Russia

Al-Qaeda number two Ayman Zawahiri ridiculed US president-elect Barack Obama as a “house negro” and warned him against sending more troops to Afghanistan, in an internet audio message released on Wednesday.

Zawahiri insulted Obama and other black Americans who have held high office in the US administration with the term used by the late Muslim black militant leader Malcolm X for slaves serving their white masters.

“It is true about you and people like you … what Malcolm X said about the house negroes,” he said, naming former secretary of state Colin Powell and the current secretary, Condoleezza Rice.

An English transcript of the speech in Arabic purportedly by the al-Qaeda number two was provided by al-Qaeda’s media arm As-Sahab.

The tape features an old speech by Malcolm X in which he used the two terms, referring to house slaves who were considered more docile and on better terms with their masters than the slaves out in the field.

Obama’s transition team declined to comment on the tape, in which Zawahiri accuses the president-elect of siding with Israel.

But US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the insult exposed the anti-democratic values of al-Qaeda.

“It’s just, you know, more despicable comments from a terrorist,” McCormack told reporters.

“And if anybody needed … more of a contrast between what … the West and the United States stand for, in terms of democracy and what these terrorists stand for, I don’t think you need to go any further than those comments.”

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino described Zawahiri’s verbal broadside against Obama as “pathetic comments by al-Qaeda terrorists.”

On the political front, Zawahiri said: “What you have announced before … that you will withdraw troops from Iraq [and send them] to Afghanistan is a policy that is doomed to failure …

“If you still want to be stubborn about America’s failure in Afghanistan, then remember the fate of Bush and Pervez Musharraf, and the fate of the Soviets and British before them.”

In the message made available by SITE Intelligence Group in the United States, Zawahiri warned Obama of a “heavy legacy of failure” awaiting him in office.

“Beware that the [stray] dogs of Afghanistan have savoured the taste of your soldiers’ flesh, so do send them in thousands,” said the closest aide to al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.

Technorati Tags: Al-Qaeda, Ayman Zawahiri, barack obama