Strengthening Diplomatic Security Not the Same as Strengthening Diplomacy Posted by David Shorr

Having looked closely at the State Department budget, Walter Pincus sees a heavy tilt toward diplomatic security -- wryly noting "the security of our diplomats has become almost as important as the diplomacy they practice." This is a very important point. Aside from the problem of physically walling off our emissaries from the very people we want them to engage, there are important resource trade-offs. Speaking as a big proponent of bigger budgets for diplomacy and development, this is not what I had in mind.

In fact, a year ago when a colleague and I wrote a policy proposal in this area, we emphasized precisely how progress should be measured: 

• Substantial investment in strengthening the State Department and USAID, to bolster their overstretched headquarters bureaus and overseas missions.
• Significant growth in their work forces.
• Steady balancing of the relative increases in defense and international affairs spending seen in recent years.

To paraphrase Pincus, the key thing was exactly to have more people "practicing diplomacy." One of the things I like about the recent bipartisan letters to President Obama from Senators and House members is the way they link these budgets to the overall international challenges our country faces. In that spirit, the resources need to be viewed as investments in the basic infrastructure of foreign policy (here's a report that specifies how to do so).

Which brings me to a related issue that I view with a slight touch of ambivalence. Gordon Adams reports the positive news that Congress is augmenting the State Department's budget and authorities to respond more flexibly to crises (and not have to get its money from the Defense Department). This is great, just as long as Congress understands the overall job of strengthening the civilian agencies is far from done. So the next time Walter Pincus follows the money for the DoS / USAID budget, I hope he sees it much more evenly spread.

With Allies Like These . . . Pt. 2 Posted by Michael Cohen

Today comes additional word that efforts by the US to get the Pakistani government to crack down on Afghan Taliban safe havens in Pakistan are not going smoothly:

Demands by the United States for Pakistan to crack down on the strongest Taliban warrior in Afghanistan, Siraj Haqqani, whose fighters pose the biggest threat to American forces, have been rebuffed by the Pakistani military, according to Pakistani military officials and diplomats.

The Obama administration wants Pakistan to turn on Mr. Haqqani, a longtime asset of Pakistan’s spy agency who uses the tribal area of North Waziristan as his sanctuary. But, the officials said, Pakistan views the entreaties as contrary to its interests in Afghanistan beyond the timetable of President Obama’s surge, which envisions drawing down American forces beginning in mid-2011.

The demands have been accompanied by strong suggestions that if the Pakistanis cannot take care of the problem, including dismantling the Taliban leadership based in Quetta, Pakistan, then the Americans will by resorting to broader and more frequent drone strikes in Pakistan.

But the Pakistanis have greeted the refrain with official public silence and private anger, illustrating the widening gulf between the allies over the Afghan war.

I'm not sure why any of this should be a surprise - long after we decide to leave Afghanistan, Pakistan will of course still be waging a cold war with India, will still see Afghanistan as an element of its strategic depth and will likely continue to view the Afghan Taliban as a strategic asset. Short of staying in Afghanistan forever there doesn't seem to be a lot we can do to change the Pakistanis minds on this (and even then I'm not so sure).

In the context of our current counter-insurgency strategy this is a rather damning strategic reality. Perhaps the US military believes they can control enough of the population in Afghanistan or improve governance so dramatically that the safe havens in Pakistan will become irrelevant. I'm not sure what the historical analogy would be for this belief. Indeed I'm hard pressed to think of a single example of a successful counterinsurgency fight where the insurgents sanctuary/safe haven went unmolested. And even in places like Algeria, where the FLN's safe haven was neutralized the French still lost the fight.

The notion that we can win a counter-insurgency fight in Afghanistan without taking the Taliban's Pakistan safe havens out of commission seems dubious at best. Working off a compressed time frame - and in concert with an incompetent and corrupt host government - it seems near impossible.

Afghanistan Withdawal Timeline Watch - UPDATED Posted by Michael Cohen

So remember when President Obama said we could have 30,000 American troops in Afghanistan by the by "the first part of 2010 -- the fastest pace possible -- so that they can target the insurgency and secure key population centers." Well not so fast:

The military may not finish its surge of 30,000 American troops to Afghanistan until nearly a year from now, a senior U.S. commander said Monday — a slower pace than President Barack Obama has described. The White House insisted it was sticking with a goal of completing the buildup by late summer.

The reinforcements begin arriving next week, and the bulk of the troops are scheduled to be in Afghanistan by the end of summer. But it will probably be nine to 11 months before all the troops are in place, Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez said. Military officials had been hinting in recent weeks that the escalation might take slightly longer than the summer goal, suggesting the administration's announcement of such a rapid escalation might not be entirely firm.

FWIW, late summer is not the first part of 2010, but I quibble. I think we can expect a lot more of these types of stories - you know the ones where the hopes of policymakers comes face-to-face with the difficult logistical and political realities of trying to wage a counter-insurgency in Afghanistan. Now granted it is possible that the US can get 30,000 troops into Afghanistan by the summer, but combine this news with the furious backtracking done by Administration officials in the days after the President's speech about that June 2011 withdrawal timeline and I think we have a pretty clear sense of what direction this policy is going . . . or perhaps I should say which direction American troops won't be heading any time soon: home.

UPDATE: 

And now this follow-up from David Ignatius:

I asked Lt Gen. David Rodriquez, the No. 2 US commander here, in a briefing tonight how long the deployment of the extra 30,000 would take. He answered that "it will happen between nine and eleven months," starting in January 2010. Which means that some troops might not arrive until November 2010.

The next month after that, December 2010, is when Obama plans to assess how well the troops are doing -- so he can decide how many to pull out when the withdrawal begins in July 2011. That doesn't give him much time to make good decisions.

Am I the only person who worries that "fuzzy math" is being used here?

Actually David, you're not the only person. And this little factoid in Ignatius's post makes me a wonder a bit more about how the President, with a straight face, said that US troops would be in Afghanistan by the first part of 2010:

U.S. McChrystal's original finishing point for adding 40,000 troop was March 2011. Now it has been "rushed" to November 2010 for 30,000 troops.

If November 2010 is rushed, why was the president talking about the first part of 2010?

At the time there were several elements of the president's speech at West Point that struck me as not completely accurate - the conflation of Pakistan Taliban with Afghan Taliban was perhaps the most obvious example, but there was also the threat inflation in respect to al Qaeda and the misleading notion that Af/Pak is the "epicenter of the violent extremism practiced by al-Qaida" when in fact Afghanistan has lacked an al-Qaida presence since 2002. But now we see that Obama may have been exaggerating how quickly the military could get US troops into the country - a not insignificant fact considering that in the speech he also announced an 18-month timeline for beginning to turn over security responsibility to the Afghan government.

With Allies Like These . . . Posted by Michael Cohen

There has been a lot of talk in recent weeks about the importance of political reconciliation with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Turns out the Afghan government has not gotten the memo:

Lured to quit the insurgency by the government's promise of a job, land for his family and an end to the misery of fighting, Mohammed illustrated the hope of the top U.S. commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, for ultimately bringing about an end to the eight-year-old war.

Yet Mohammed's experience offers a cautionary tale: Four months after he gave himself up, the Afghan government has reneged on all its commitments, leaving him unemployed and his family of 10 with nowhere to live. Hunted by the Taliban and fearful of the U.S. military, he spends much of his time in hiding. "I'm stuck," he said one day last week, huddled beneath a tattered blanket to ward off the winter chill. "I don't know what to do. I don't know where to go."

These words are followed by the obligatory quote from US and ISAF officials about the "significant investments" and energy that is going to be committed to solving this problem (further evidence by the way that we're definitely NOT doing nation building in Afghanistan - nothing to see here, move along).

While in fairness budgetary woes have slowed the program's effectiveness, a effort like this will rely on the initiative of the Afghan government and there has been precious little of that to date. Once again we're relying on unreliable allies to make our strategy in Afghanistan work - and as I noted last week even if we do everything right the unreliability of our supposed Allies could sink the whole thing.

This brings me to Pakistan where apparently the idea of expanding the drone war to the Quetta Shura is meeting plenty of resistance:

Five administration officials tell NEWSWEEK that the president has sided with political and diplomatic advisers who argue that widening the scope of the drone attacks would be risky and unwise. Obama is concerned that firing missiles into urban areas like Quetta, where intelligence reports suggest that Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and other high-level militants have sometimes taken shelter, would greatly increase the risk of civilian casualties. It would also draw protests from Pakistani politicians and military leaders, who have been largely quiet about the drone attacks as long as they've been confined to the country's out-of-sight border region. The White House has been encouraged by Pakistan's own recent military efforts to root out militants along the Afghan border, and it does not want to jeopardize that cooperation.

Sigh. I'm willing to wager here that Pakistani protests rather than concern over creating "accidental guerrillas" is driving this policy. But, if you're not going to get the Pakistani government to crack down on the Quetta Shura it's going to make it pretty hard to encourage those reconciliation efforts that are likely ill-fated as well.

I don't mean to sound overly pessimistic, but the limitations of our allies in this fight should be concerning - and suggest that the ambitions of our efforts in Afghanistan (like believing we can pacify Helmand province) may need to be pared back.

Retrospective Justifications for Controversial Wars Posted by Shadi Hamid

Blair's recent statement that he believes the Iraq war would have been justified even in the absence of WMDs reminds me of the difficulty I've always had with the word "justified." I think it's undoubtebly true that Iraq - and the Middle East - is better off now than it was under Saddam and than it would have been had Saddam not been removed from power. But this is not the same thing as "justified." This, of course, leads us to into difficult terrain regarding consequentialism and how we judge doing the wrong thing for the right reasons - or the right thing for the wrong ones - or, worse, the wrong things for the wrong reasons which lead, somehow, to producing the right outcomes.

For me, the relevant questions regarding Iraq were always the most difficult to answer:

1. Were we against the war because of its consequences, or despite them?
2. Is what makes such wars immoral the fact that they are pre-emptive, or, rather, is it that preemption, as an empirical matter, fails more often than it succeeds?

These are, I suppose, questions of a philosophical nature. Then there are the counterfactuals.

1. What if Iraq had succeeded?

And then there are questions of how we will come to view past events through the prism of present ones:

1. What if Iraq succeeds? 

How will we make such retrospective judgments and justifications, particularly as Iraq in 5 or 10 years may very well turn out to be the most democratic country in the Arab world (yes, I know, that's not saying much but it's still something).

Michael Gerson Mostly Right About Nobel Speech Posted by David Shorr

In his WaPo column, Michael Gerson grasped many of the important points of President Obama's speech in Oslo. The one problem -- shared by much of he coverage and commentary -- is the notion that this was somehow a new Barack Obama we've never seen before. In fact, there's a pretty good glimpse of this same person in his October 2002 speech against the Iraq War. I guess many of our pundit friends can't resist the he's-just-made-his-biggest-decision narrative. And for conservatives there's a political impulse to separate President Obama from real liberals by arguing that now that the president has been mugged by the realities of the office, he's become, well, more like them. To my ears, though, this sounded just like the same guy who campaigned last year.

Otherwise, I share Gerson's view that the articulation of the US role and perspective in the Nobel speech was noteworthy and interesting. For instance, I would endorse Gerson's selection of one passage of the speech as well as his interpretation:

In fact, Obama made a number of veiled jabs at American allies and partners who talk a good diplomatic game but do little to apply the pressure that makes diplomacy work. “We must develop alternatives to violence that are tough enough to change behavior – for if we want a lasting peace, then the words of the international community must mean something.”

I can think of better words than jab, but yes, this is a key dynamic at work in Obama's foreign policy and is associated with the distinct American perspective. An essential part of interdependence and living in a shared world is common norms and standards and shared responsibility for upholding them. The longstanding pattern is for the United States to take this responsibility most seriously, while other nations expect diplomacy somehow to produce solutions through some imagined power to elicit goodwill. This is not a sustainable pattern; the vision of a more peaceful and prosperous world will not be well served by any world leaders who only want to work with the President Obama they hoped for and expected, rather than the real one.

Obviously the speech also contained deeper philosophical points regarding war and peace (likewise conistent with candidate Obama's message), but that is the subject of another post.

UPDATE: Since Robert Kagan doubled-down today on the Obama-shifts-rightward theme, what I said about conservatives using Obama for validation goes doubly for Bob.

One More Thing . . . About the Marine Offensive In Helmand Posted by Michael Cohen

I'm curious about something. If the new US focus in Afghanistan is to protect the population why are sending 1,000 Marines into Helmand Province to occupy a ghost town?

Hundreds of US Marines and Afghan soldiers descended on a nearly empty city in southern Afghanistan on Friday to cut off supply routes for Taliban fighters who have taken refuge in the area. The troops want to starve out the insurgents holed up around Now Zad, which was once a vibrant city of 30,000 but now is a virtual ghost town because years of fighting.

This combined with all the tough talk from the Administration about cracking down on Afghan Taliban safe havens in Pakistan makes me think that in the short term our focus in Afghanistan will be a bit more enemy centric and a bit less population centric. Good (ish). If we're really going to make a fight of this then regaining the military initiative against the Taliban seems to be an essential first step - and squeezing the Taliban from both sides seems like a smart approach.

Of course there are two problems here. One, we have no guarantees that the Pakistanis will actually allow us to to take the fight to the Quetta Shura or will even do it themselves. Second, we have no Afghan Army to help us hold the gains made in Helmand, a point confirmed by Admiral Mullen.

Mullen, pressed by Levin, conceded that there may be some cases where the United States has to hold areas after clearing them, at least until Afghan National Army capabilities rise. Mullen’s estimate: there will be 170,00 Afghan troops available by July 2011. Gates said the goal by December 2010 is 130,000 soldiers.

170,000 Afghan troops available by July 2011? And I want to play shortstop for the Boston Red Sox. Color me skeptical. This gets to the proverbial fly in the ointment of this whole Afghan strategy. Even if we do everything right over the next 18 months, if the Pakistanis, the Afghans and yes, the Taliban, don't do their part the whole thing either isn't going to work or it's not going to be sustainable.

UPDATE: Gregg Carlstrom makes another interesting point about the reports he is seeing out of Afghanistan that coercion and violence by ISAF forces is on the rise:

None of this stuff -- killing civilians, detaining elders, focusing on the drug trade and "Taliban strongholds" -- comports with Gen. Stanley McChrystal's stated mission of population-centric counterinsurgency.

What? I am shocked; shocked I tell you to hear anyone suggest that population centric counter-insurgency is occasionally coercive and violent. I'm sure news of this will send the folks who wrote FM 3-24 back to the drawing board.

Rounding Up the Week: McChrystal, Pakistan and a Defense of Woodrow Wilson Posted by Michael Cohen

It's hard to know what to believe and what to dismiss in Mark Perry's less than generous take on General McChrystal's role in the Afghan review process, but it does dovetail pretty closely with a couple of AMCW posts back from the summer and fall. In particular, this graf:

"From the minute that McChrystal showed up in Kabul, he drove the debate," a White House official confirms. "You'll notice - from May on it was no longer a question of whether we should follow a military strategy or deploy additional troops. It was always, 'should we do 20,000 or 30,000 or 40,000, or even 80,000'? We weren't searching for the right strategy; we were searching for the right number."

Hmm, that sounds familiar. There is also this about McChrystal's comment in an October speech in London that VP Biden's more modest CT strategy wouldn't work:

McChrystal described Biden's skepticism as "short-sighted" - an embarrassing and bald abrogation of Gates' oft-stated rule that military officers should keep their mouths shut when it comes to disagreeing with elected civilian officials. The result did not change the military equation, but it had a huge psychological impact: "Stan really doesn't quite get Washington," a colleague says, "and he was a little bit embarrassed. He took a huge gulp. Before London he was on transmit, after that he wasn't."

Take that Bill Galston! Anyway, read the whole thing here

Over at the Plank, Michael Crowley makes a pretty smart point in response to Nate Fick's op-ed in NYT arguing that, the US must persuade "Pakistan that militant groups within its borders pose as great a threat to Islamabad as they do to Kabul."

Why wouldn't Pakistan have at least as clear an idea of who poses a real threat to Islamabad as we do? Indeed, chances are they have a better grasp of this question than do policymakers in Washington. . . I sometimes wonder whether we're trying to convince Pakistan of something we want them to believe is true --but which in fact is not true enough to make them pursue the policies we're advocating in our own interests.

My what a novel concept; namely that Pakistan has actual agency in its foreign policy decision-making no matter how much pressure the US puts on the Pakistani government to crack down on the Quetta Shura.

Finally, I find myself in the odd position of defending Woodrow Wilson against Matt Yglesias's charge that "he doesn’t seem to me to have been much of a president" and that he doesn't deserve to be highly ranked among the nation's great presidents. Now granted Wilson was a terrible racist, stubborn as a mule, idealistic to a fault and he really screwed the pooch on that whole League of Nations thing. Also, he did seem to have some issues with civil liberties, but then so did this guy.

But there is something odd about progressives dumping on a guy who created the FTC, passed the first graduated income tax, the Clayton Anti-Trust act and established the Federal Reserve. Wilson passed all sorts of labor laws including the Child Labor Law and the 40-hour work week, lowered tariffs and from US foreign policy standpoint spearheaded the United Nations and the gradual acceptance of self-determination as an international right (even if as Matt suggests his implementation was  a bit off).  But above all he created the very idea of an activist, reformist presidency and laid the groundwork, legislatively, for the progressive welfare state that would come to dominate 20th century America. The whole idea of using government in a pro-active way to ameliorate the cruelties of an unfettered free market was born, legislatively, during Wilson's presidency.

I am surely not going to defend Wilson's racism that was not necessarily of the era, but actually worse; or his screw-ups on foreign policy, and one could certainly make the argument that his progressive agenda wasn't as heartfelt as say this guy's, but considering the generally mediocre quality of most American presidents, top ten seems about right. After all he probably deserves a higher ranking than this guy.

UPDATE: Matt has responded with this snarky observation, "Michael Cohen thinks Woodrow Wilson’s white supremacy was a small price to pay for stepped-up labor market regulation." That would be funny if I actually wrote that.

But arguing that Woodrow Wilson should be judged largely by his virulent racism is sort of like arguing that FDR should be judged for interning Japanese civilians, packing the Supreme Court and basically dragging his feet on civil rights in return for Southern acquiescence to his legislative agenda.  Now granted FDR was a better president and certainly a better man than old Woodrow Wilson so it's not a completely apt comparison, but still.

It's hard to defend a president like Wilson (and you know I'm deep down the the rabbit hole on a Friday evening when that's what I'm doing) and it's pretty hard to fathom the notion that someone with as retrograde views as he had on race could be considered a progressive champion, but as another often highly ranked president once said, facts are stubborn things. Progressives who dismiss Wilson simply because of his racism are not really giving his presidency its due or fully assessing his impact on American politics - and progressivism - properly. And Wilson's impact was about more than just labor market regulation.

FWIW, this also gets to another pet peeve of mine - presidents jsut aren't that good. We've only had two or three great ones - Lincoln, FDR and Washington. A handful of good to pretty good ones - Ike, Teddy, Jefferson, LBJ. A couple of overrated ones - Truman, Reagan and JFK. A lot of mediocre and lousy ones.  And a few horrible ones - W, Buchanan, Johnson and Harding. And even the good to great ones have some knocks against them. Conversely even Nixon had some pretty positive aspects to his presidency . . . but then again there was that whole invasion of Cambodia/defiling the Constitution thing. Even Abraham Lincoln was rumored to have sold poisoned milk to children.

So against that motley collection, Wilson's not all that bad.

Why Afghan Women Matter Posted by Patrick Barry

Harmonizing America's ideals with its interests has become a rhetorical touchstone for President Obama.  He expounded on that idea in Oslo this morning, rejecting a 'false choice' between realism and idealism. But he also did so after announcing a new strategy for Afghanistan, characterized by supporters and detractors alike as heavy on pragmatism, but light on moral obligations. There remains quite a bit of ambiguity as to how far the President is willing to go to see that both imperatives are served

One aspect of the Afghanistan conflict that will test the President's charge to bring realism and idealism into greater accord, is women's rights. Women's rights went unmentioned in the President's speech at West Point. It received almost no attention during the Capitol Hill hearings that followed.  On a rhetorical level, it's more or less absent from the strategy.  This is a significant shift from the course taken by the last administration.  Bush placed heavy emphasis on America's responsibility to Afghan women, even going so far as to use their plight to legitimize the war.  Not so with the Obama administration.

It's commonly assumed that the reason for this shift springs from an understanding that whatever moral obligations the U.S. has to the women of Afghanistan, advancing their cause is not easily situated within a more pragmatic, interests-based approach. The Bush team would have had a tough time delivering on its promises to Afghan women, even had they given Afghanistan greater attention and more resources.  It's clear that the Obama administration has been more careful with its commitments, understanding that actions matter more than rhetorical flourishes, (a point evidenced  by the significant increase in assistance for women's causes in the 2009-2010 budget) In addition, as Christine Fair remarked in testimony before the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, it's hard to reconcile a particular focus on women's rights in a context when the rights of all Afghans are violated on a daily basis.  Others have echoed this point in the aftermath of Obama's West Point speech.  But while it would appear that such arguments leave nothing but a moral case for attending to the concerns of Afghan women, that's actually not so.  In fact, it seems to me that this is an instance where America's moral obligations and its pragmatic interests are closely interwoven.

One reason for this has to do with the promises made by the last administration.  Why is that you say? The U.S. goes back on its promises all the time when necessity demands it, especially when those promises were probably unrealistic in the first place. The problem with taking that view is that it's inconsistent with our acknowledgment of the role perceptions play in driving conflict. As counterinsurgents so often argue, when it comes to winning over the population, opinion matters.  I would imagine that completely abandoning an issue that had once been a strong point of emphasis would attract attention, with possible negative consequences for Afghan perceptions of American efforts. That decision shouldn't be made lightly.

Another argument for maintaining focus on the conditions of Afghan women is that their security acts as a barometer for overall security in the country. Human Rights Watch makes this case in their new report, which observes that violence done to women in Afghanistan has a multiplier effect where one act against a single woman can intimidate dozens, contributing to a climate of fear.  In a similar way, though an Afghan schoolgirl's gender informs the vulnerability she experiences on the three-hour trip to class each morning, her vulnerability is also tied to the systemic insecurity that all Afghans encounter.  If U.S. interests do in fact rest on protecting the Afghan people, then focusing on women's safety would seem central to that pursuit. 

Finally, understanding the obstacles faced by women in Afghanistan provides insights into the factors that could potentially drive instability in the county in the long-term.  Corruption and warlordism. An inefficient judiciary. Incompetent community policing.  These challenges often weigh heaviest on Afghan women. If Afghanistan does slide further into instability following an American withdrawal, in part, it will be because those corrosive dynamics were never sufficiently understood, because deficiencies were never corrected.  If what the President says is true - that the choice between interests and principles is a false one -  in the case of Afghan women, it's time our policy reflected that. 

It’s Time for Mitchell 2.0 and the American Plan Posted by Joel Rubin

With much fanfare, Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu has unilaterally declared that Israel will temporarily freeze Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank, but notably, not in East Jerusalem, for 10 months.  This gesture reminds me of the temporary truces that groups like Hamas make when they unilaterally declare that they’ll do the right thing, such as enacting a truce, but only for a limited time.

Netanyahu’s gesture was probably the final Israeli response this year to American efforts, led by Special Envoy George Mitchell, to bring about a true settlement freeze in order to advance President Obama’s goal of restarting peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.  Let’s call this Mitchell version 1.0.  Unfortunately, this effort has run its course without achieving the goal of restarting peace talks, let alone achieving peace.

So where do President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and Mitchell go from here?

This is a moment of deep reflection for advocates of the peace process.  The Obama administration has pressed Netanyahu hard.  He has bent slightly.  The Obama administration has pressed the Palestinians and the Arab states as well.  They have tamped down on violence and incitement and uttered nice words, but have not taken the plunge that Obama has asked for.

So now it’s time for the Mitchell team to get creative.  Interestingly, one attempt to test the creative waters may have recently been offered by Secretary Clinton.  On November 25th, included within her otherwise unremarkable response to Netanyahu’s settlements announcement, Clinton said that she supported “… an independent and viable (Palestinian) state based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps..."

This subtle, yet public American pronouncement that there should be land swaps in order to create a two state solution was a new twist and should not be overlooked.

More interestingly, the response to this Clinton trial balloon – silence by the parties – should raise eyebrows.  Clinton had gone further publicly than any other American official has gone in defining what a solution should begin to look like, and there was no significant negative fallout.

This should give the administration the confidence to turn it up a notch.  It’s now time for Mitchell version 2.0.

Mitchell 2.0 should be based upon the premise that, as Israeli and Palestinian leaders have often proclaimed, it is in both Israel’s interest to see a peaceful end to the conflict that leads to internationally recognized and secure borders for the Jewish state, and in the Palestinians’ interest to have their own internationally-recognized state.  Mitchell 2.0 should also be grounded in the idea that it is in America’s national security interest to improve our relationship with both the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Mitchell 2.0 must therefore be built upon the successes of Mitchell 1.0, which effectively demonstrated to all the parties that the United States is serious about ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and that it will engage in this process in a sustained manner.

At its core, Mitchell 2.0 should be about changing American tactics in order to create new movement in the peace process.

What Mitchell 1.0 made clear was that despite the fact that all of the parties talk about ending the conflict, they need a different American approach to effectively negotiate a deal.  While Mitchell 1.0 was effective at changing the political dynamics regarding the conflict, it needs to go further.

Mitchell 2.0 should therefore be about putting an American peace plan on the table in order to resolve the conflict. 

This is where Clinton’s trial balloon about “land swaps” comes in.  Her language was taken from the “Clinton Parameters” that developed during the late 2000 negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians under American auspices.  These parameters called for a two state solution that, amongst multiple issues, called for land swaps between Israel and Palestine so that roughly 95% of the equivalent territory of the West Bank (plus Gaza), including the swapped land, would become Palestine.

Revolutionary at the time, these parameters are now generally accepted both by experts and by multiple Israeli and Palestinian leaders as the way to achieve a two state solution to the conflict. 

It is now time for clarity about the endgame.  If this is where Clinton is heading, by putting an American plan on the table that lays out the parameters for a two state solution, then Mitchell will be empowered to advocate for what has largely been understood as the most realistic and practical solution for many years. 

Our country’s relationship with the Arab world needs to turn a new page, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict stands out as unfinished business that must be resolved. 
It is therefore time to unleash Mitchell version 2.0 to achieve this goal.  It is time for the American plan.

This column was originally published in the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle here.