Debate over Syria intervention takes shape

Posted By Josh Rogin Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - 1:06 PM

Top administration officials, leading lawmakers, and GOP presidential candidates have all weighed in on Sen. John McCain's proposal to launch U.S.-led airstrikes to halt the violence in Syria, but there is still no consensus on the costs and benefits of entangling the U.S. military in another armed conflict.

"Just as was the case with Libya, there is a broad consensus among regional leaders and organizations on the preferred outcome in Syria: Assad and his cronies must go. There is not, however, a consensus about how this goal could be achieved," Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) said at Wednesday's Senate Armed Services Committee hearing with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey.

Levin didn't say whether he was for or against a U.S.-led military intervention in Syria, but he warned of the risks and talked about the possible impact on the region.

McCain was more clear, repeating his call for foreign air power to be used against the forces of President Bashar al-Assad, and calling for the immediate arming of the Syrian opposition -- hopefully with international cooperation from Arab partners and European allies.

"It is understandable that the administration is reluctant to move beyond diplomacy and sanctions. Unfortunately, this policy is increasingly disconnected from the dire conditions on the ground in Syria, which has become a full state of armed conflict," McCain said.

He urged Panetta to remember his time as White House chief of staff during the NATO intervention in Bosnia and quoted President Bill Clinton as saying at the time, "There are times and places where our leadership can mean the difference between peace and war and where we can defend our fundamental values as a people and serve our most basic strategic interests. There are still times when America and America alone can and should make the difference for peace."

McCain also quoted CENTCOM chief Gen. James Mattis, who testified Tuesday that "Assad is clearly achieving what he wants to achieve" that his military campaign is "gaining physical momentum on the battlefield." Mattis also noted that Assad's downfall would be "the biggest strategic setback for Iran in 25 years."

In his testimony, Panetta clearly ruled out any unilateral military action by the United States in Syria, but he left the door wide open to a multilateral mission inside Syria at some later date. Yesterday, President Barack Obama said that no option in Syria has been taken off the table.

"We are reviewing all possible additional steps that can be taken with our international partners to support the efforts to protect the Syrian people, to end the violence, and ensure regional stability, including potential military options, if necessary," Panetta said. "Currently, the administration is focusing on diplomatic and political approaches rather than military intervention."

"We need to have a clear legal basis for any action that we take. For us to act unilaterally would be a mistake," Panetta said. "Can it happen today? Can it happen now? No. It's gonna take some work; it's going to take some time. But when we do it, we'll do it right. We will not do it in a way that will make the situation worse. That's what we have to be careful of."

Dempsey said the Pentagon has planned for several possible military actions in Syria, including delivering humanitarian relief, imposing a no-fly zone, conducting maritime interdiction, establishing humanitarian corridors, and executing limited air strikes. He said the planning was at a "commander's estimate level of detail," and that there had been briefing to the National Security Council staff but not the president directly.

"As you know, we're extraordinarily capable and we can do just about anything we're asked to do," Dempsey said. "The ability to do a single raid-like strike would be accessible to us. The ability to do a longer-term sustained campaign would be challenging, and would have to be made in the context of other commitments around the globe."

Dempsey also confirmed elements of The Cable's Tuesday story on Syria, including the fact that Russia continues to arm the Syrian regime, including with advanced air defense systems.

Panetta said he believed that NATO should start debating the issue of a military intervention in Syria. That discussion so far has not begun in Brussels, according to NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen. Panetta also said the Pentagon will not begin planning for a Syria intervention in detail until directed to do so by the president.

"I don't think there's any question that we're experiencing mass atrocities there," Panetta added.

Yesterday, several top Republican politicians declined to go along with McCain's call for airstrikes on Syria now, including House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).

In a short interview Tuesday, McCain said that didn't bother him one bit.

"I couldn't care less," McCain said. "I know the difference between right and wrong. I know that people are being slaughtered as we speak."

"I refer back to Bosnia and Kosovo. Under President Clinton, we acted although there were Republicans strongly opposed to that. I think it turned out well."

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who joined McCain's call for airstrikes along with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), told The Cable Tuesday that he preferred a multilateral military intervention in Syria over a unilateral strike.

"The Arab League is the right vehicle," said Graham. "If they request air support I'm willing to be part of the team. But I want the Arab League and the international community to be deeply involved and I want it to be to stop the slaughter."

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Berman unveils his foreign aid reform bill

Posted By Josh Rogin Thursday, September 8, 2011 - 2:43 PM

House Foreign Affairs Committee ranking member Howard Berman (D-CA) unveiled a huge bill today aimed at reforming the way the United States conducts and oversees foreign assistance around the world.

His bill, called the "Global Partnership Act," would be the first wholesale reform of the foreign assistance program since the last foreign assistance act was passed in 1961.

"A bill that was passed at the height of the Cold War has in many places lost its focus and in many ways lost its relevance," Berman said in an interview with The Cable. "Everybody knows that the foreign assistance act is in desperate need of reform. We also know that the public confidence, the congressional confidence in the foreign assistance program is not high."

Some of the key reforms in the 813-page bill include: a new comprehensive system for evaluating and monitoring the success of foreign assistance programs, a rule that would peg USAID operating expenses to a percentage of program funds in order to limit dependence on contractors, and a requirement that comprehensive country strategies are developed with Congress's participation and funded on a multi-year basis.

Berman said the bill seeks to avoid congressional micromanagement of foreign assistance, but still provides Congress with a larger role in setting out the priorities for foreign assistance and monitoring their success.

In some ways, the bill adds implementation strategies for the broad goals set forth in the State Department's Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review released last December. But it also goes beyond the QDDR by speaking directly to Congress's role in the process (which the QDDR doesn't cover) and mandating stricter oversight.

For example, the bill would expand the jurisdiction of USAID's Office of the Inspector General, would institute expanded on-the-ground monitoring of projects, and would create independent advisory panels.

Berman said that his staff has been working on this bill for over two and a half years. However, the path forward for the bill is not clear, because Berman doesn't control the House Foreign Affairs Committee and his party doesn't control the House agenda.

"Look, I think there's a compelling case to make this a priority," Berman said, noting that the GOP always talks about the need to reform foreign aid but issues proposals cutting it, not reforming it. He said that he hopes his bill will be a starting point for a larger discussion over foreign aid reform with the GOP and the Senate.

"This is just the opening salvo," he said. "I can't give you a timeline for translating this into a moving piece of legislation."

You can find an executive summary of the bill here, summaries of each title here, and the full text of the bill here.

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Top GOP senators underwhelmed by Obama's AfPak metrics

Posted By Josh Rogin Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - 6:14 PM

Senior Republican senators were wholly unimpressed by the Afghanistan-Pakistan metrics that top Obama officials gave them this morning (and were obtained by The Cable). The defense-minded and influential lawmakers are calling for more details about the White House's thinking while they press their case for a sustained U.S. commitment there.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in an interview with The Cable that the draft document of objectives and "metrics" was vague, contained several immeasurable aspirations, and left important questions unanswered.

"It's just not the level of detail that we had hoped for," said McCain. "We need more substance ... we're going to have to pressure them to give us some more."

For example, the document lists as one Afghanistan metric "support from allies." "It's like that old joke ‘How's your wife?" McCain quipped. "Compared to what?"

McCain is also concerned that there's daylight in the thinking between President Obama and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen, because Obama is undecided on troops numbers and Mullen seems to be advocating for an increase.

"Nothing new," Senate Armed Services Committee member Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said about this morning's closed briefing in the Capitol with several senior administration officials, adding that he was more informed by yesterday's testimony by Mullen.

Graham said he has several outstanding questions for the Obama team about how they plan to deal with specific issues in Afghanistan, including the plan to balance formal justice and tribal justice, the game plan to provide security for judges, and the level of troops needed.

"They have objectives, but they don't have the concrete goals and measurements that I think politicians [in the U.S.] are going to want," said Graham. "I want to focus on corruption," he added, noting that details of how to deal with that are not in the document.

Fellow committee member Jeff Sessions (R-AL) said that metrics aren't really useful anyway and are more for congressmen to say they've gotten something and then they're largely ignored. Such was the case with the 2007 benchmarks for Iraq that were followed for a while but eventually set aside.

"As soon as metrics are passed you forget them, nobody ever goes back and counts them all up," he said, adding that the only real measures of progress are the effectiveness of the Taliban and al Qaeda, the strength of the Afghan central government, and whether there's peace in the wider South Asia region.

Sessions, like many senior GOP members, generally supports increased troops, if that's what the commanders on the ground want, but "it's a bitter pill to swallow," he said.

He called on the administration to provide Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and Gen. David Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, to testify directly to lawmakers in open session.

Photo by JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images

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The Obama administration's draft metrics on "evaluating progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan"

Posted By Josh Rogin Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - 3:58 PM

The Obama administration delivered its metrics for the future of Afghanistan and Pakistan to senators in a closed briefing on Capitol Hill today, and The Cable has the document.

The three-page paper, which is marked DRAFT but is unclassified, lays out the Obama team's priorities and also represents its response to congressional calls for more details on how the administration intends to measure progress in the region.

The draft document focuses on three main objectives: disrupting terrorist networks in Afghanistan and especially Pakistan, working to stabilize Pakistan, and working to achieve a host of political and civic goals in Afghanistan. Each objective has a list of metrics beneath it, although many of these are more goals than concrete milestones that could be measured in any factual way.

The metrics span just about every conceivable issue, including progress towards Pakistan's civilian government and judicial system becoming stable, to support for human rights, to public perceptions of security, to volume and value of narcotics.

Top administration officials met in the basement of the new Capitol Visitor Center Wednesday morning to introduce the document to senators and discuss the way forward, in the wake of growing unease among senior Democrats about doubling down on the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan and set upon the backdrop of waning public support for the war.

Senate Armed Service Committee chairman Carl Levin (D-MI), gave The Cable a readout of the briefing.

Their message is that we'll have access to Gen. Stanley McChrystal's assessment today or tomorrow, he said, noting that it would be classified. But the metrics themselves are not classified.

Any request for new troops, which has still been decided, will be coming in the next one to two weeks, Levin guessed.

Levin also downplayed comments yesterday by Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen, who testified that more troops would probably be needed to properly resource the counter insurgency effort in Afghanistan.

The troop numbers are only one piece of a much larger set of policy adjustments, Levin said, including more trainers, more equipment, and more support for Afghan forces.

"The media has been focusing on [troop numbers] like it's the public option or something," said Levin. "It's going to be a much more comprehensive recommendation."

That recommendation will have to be vetted through the military chain of command and then make its way through the civilian leadership before the president makes the final decision, Levin added.

He lamented that the administration is not moving on parts of the request that everybody knows are coming and could be begun now, such as pressing NATO for more trainers and shifting equipment from Iraq.

"What's going on now?" asked Levin. "What I'm interested in is getting these known actions going. I'm not just going to sit around waiting for a decision by the president."

Briefing the senators was Michèle Flournoy, under secretary of defense for policy, Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the NSC's war czar from the Bush administration, Richard Holbrooke advisor Paul Jones, Vice Adm. James Winnefeld from the Joint Staff, and South Asia analyst Peter Lavoy representing the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The overarching goal of U.S. policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan is "to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qa'ida in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future," the draft metrics document says.

But Fred Kagan, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who has advised General McChrystal but was not speaking on his behalf, said in a talk last week that the Obama administration had made a mistake early on in putting too much rhetorical emphasis on al Qaeda. "The reason to be in Afghanistan is not to be fighting al Qaeda in Afghanistan," he said. "This is a two-front war on both sides of the Durand Line."

Speaking in The Hague last Friday, General McChrystal told reporters, "I do not see indications of a large al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan now." But he added that al Qaeda commanders do retain their contacts with insurgents in the country.

This post has been updated.

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