Center for a New American Security

In an essay on the alleged crimes at Penn State, Iraq War veteran Thomas L. Day does the best job of anyone summing up why I am so frustrated with the generation that precedes my own:

A leader must emerge from Happy Valley to tie our community together again, and it won’t come from our parents’ generation.

 

They have failed us, over and over and over again.

 

I speak not specifically of our parents -- I have two loving ones -- but of the public leaders our parents’ generation has produced. With the demise of my own community’s two most revered leaders, Sandusky and Joe Paterno, I have decided to continue to respect my elders, but to politely tell them, “Out of my way.”

 

They have had their time to lead. Time’s up. I’m tired of waiting for them to live up to obligations.

 

Think of the world our parents’ generation inherited. They inherited a country of boundless economic prosperity and the highest admiration overseas, produced by the hands of their mothers and fathers. They were safe. For most, they were endowed opportunities to succeed, to prosper, and build on their parents’ work.

 

For those of us in our 20s and early 30s, this is not the world we are inheriting.

 

We looked to Washington to lead us after September 11th. I remember telling my college roommates, in a spate of emotion, that I was thinking of enlisting in the military in the days after the attacks. I expected legions of us -- at the orders of our leader -- to do the same. But nobody asked us. Instead we were told to go shopping.

Read the whole thing. Then go read Mark Bowden's wonderful -- and wonderfully balanced -- take on the attack at Wanat. It includes this brilliant passage:

The lieutenant’s battle was over. His bravery had little impact on the course of the fight. He could not rescue the men on Topside, and those who survived would have done so anyway. As it is with all soldiers who die heroically in battle, his final act would define him emphatically, completely, and forever. In those loud and terrifying minutes he had chosen to leave a place of relative safety, braving intense fire, and had run and scrambled uphill toward the most perilous point of the fight. A man does such a thing out of loyalty so consuming that it entirely crowds out consideration of self. In essence, Jon Brostrom had cast off his own life the instant he started running uphill, and only fate would determine if it would be given back to him when the shooting stopped. He died in the heat of that effort, living fully his best idea of himself.

I have rarely read a better tribute to a fallen officer.

A few weeks back, I was asked by the U.S. embassies in Helsinki and Oslo to visit each city to lead a series of informal roundtable discussions and particpate in formal think tank events on a variety of issues touching on both the anniversary of the September 11th attacks and the lessons learned -- or not learned -- over the past decade. As I wrote earlier, I jumped at the chance to visit each city because I think interacting with our allies is really important, and I am honored to help out the State Department with their public engagement activities abroad.

To begin, I was really impressed with the foreign service officers and other diplomatic staff working for the United States abroad. Without fail, our foreign service officers are smart, funny, and great ambassadors to the rest of the world. Second, I was just as impressed by the many scholars, journalists and other people with whom I interacted. The purpose of this post is to highlight some of the really smart people I met with and the work they are doing.

31 August 2011

What better way to begin a visit to Helsinki than with a drink with Finnish journalist Jari Lindholm? Jari has done some great reporting from Afghanistan to Libya and introduced me to the fine folks expertly mixing drinks at the American Bar in the Hotel Torni. I read about as much Finnish as I read Mandarin Chinese, but Jari gave me a copy of his most recent reporting from Misurata for Suomen Kuvalehti, and his pictures alone -- including one two-page color photograph of Tripoli Street during a lull in the fighting -- were stunning.

1 September 2011

I led a series of informal roundtable discussions on Thursday with the Finnish Min. of Defense among others but started out the day the Finnish Institute for International Affairs leading a conversation about post-conflict reconstruction and stabilization in Libya with Timo Behr. Timo and I used to live in the exact same building in Washington, DC but had never met until five minutes before the event began. I began my presentation talking about the challenges the United States has had in responding to post-conflict stablization operations and shared some lessons we have learned in Iraq and Afghanistan. I then, echoing both Mona el-Ghobashy and especially Lisa Anderson, talked about how the challenges of Libya will be harder and different than the challenges facing Egypt and Tunisia. The question and answer session that followed was a good one, with question ranging from the Saudi-Syrian relationship to issues relating to R2P.

2 September 2011

I led another series of informal roundtables on Friday, including one at the Min. of Foreign Affairs with their very experienced and knowledgable team working on Afghanistan. I ended the day with a more formal presentation to the Atlantic Council of Finland. I spoke about the ways in which the conflicts in both Afghanistan and Libya has revealed strengths and weaknesses in the trans-Atlantic alliance and in NATO. I then spoke about the economic pressures that will lead to cuts in the U.S. defense budget and what that means for the alliance. The question and answer session included some really good questions, including several from Leif Blomqvist, the former Finnish ambassador to NATO.

3 September 2011

I arrived in a rainy Oslo on Saturday and started off with a tour of the city by famed Norwegian tour guide and sometime scholar of jihadist movements Thomas Hegghammer. (But seriously, you all need to read the man's book.) I visited the Viking ship museum and also the Arctic exploration museum and then dined Chez Hegghammer, which is a gastronomically satisfying but intellectually humbling experience considering Thomas isn't even the smartest scholar in his own house. 

5 September 2011

After spending Sunday going to church and drinking lots of coffee in Oslo's many and excellent coffee shops, I paid a visit to the Norwegian Institute for International Affairs, where Hans-Inge Langø introduced me to some of the great scholars working there. We had an informal roundtable discussion on, primarily, the Arab Spring and security sector reform. I ended the evening with beers with some scholars working on Afghanistan. (Allow me to recommend the Havrestout from Nøgne Ø.)

6 September 2011

The embassy in Oslo scheduled two formal events for me on Tuesday. The first event was a talk at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment on issues related to the transition in Afghanistan. This event was particularly fun for me because it allowed me to pick the brains of people like Thomas and Anne Stenersen, possibly the world's leading expert in the relations between al-Qaeda and the insurgent groups active in Afghanistan. A formal presentation evolved into a broader conversation that began at nine in the morning and lasted through lunch. I then visited the Norwegian Defense Command and Staff College, where I delivered a formal lecture to the students there on the development of U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine and operations. I began with an exploration of theories of military transformation and then talked about the ways in which the U.S. military has learned -- or, again, has not learned -- in both Iraq and Afghanistan. I concluded with a few remarks about the future of both insurgencies and counterinsurgency and then opened things up to the students, many of whom had spent time in Afghanistan and wanted to talk about the transition.

Overall, I had a great visit to both Helsinki and Oslo and am grateful to the State Department for both inviting me to visit and coordinating the logistics upon my arrival. Now ...

Coffee and Food

The best place to get an espresso in Helsinki is, hands down, Kaffecentralen. The best meal I had, meanwhile -- and I think Finnish food is underrated and quite excellent -- was the Helsinki Menu at Grotesk. Oslo, for its part, has some of the best espresso bars in the world. Try Fuglen while you're there, and I myself also had a good cappucino at Stockfleths. The best espresso, though, is to be found at Tim Wendelboe. I was myself seriously impressed. I saved up my per diem in Oslo, finally, for a really good meal on my last night. And I'm here to tell you that the 10-course menu at Maaemo was pretty much the most incredible dining experience of my life. Just stunning, stunning food.

Micah Zenko has a piece up on Foreign Policy's website about gender (im)balance in think tanks. His data (which I assume he took from our website, here) demonstrates that only 18% of our policy-related staff is female and that just 31% of our overall staff is female.

There are lies, though, damn lies, and then statistics. In this case (and I can only speak for myself, obviously), CNAS does not seem like such a male-dominated place if you actually work here. This is because our staff includes a lot of non-resident and part-time staff who are rarely here. If you subtract part-time staff like Tom Ricks and Bob Kaplan (sorry, guys) who are rarely here and non-resident staff like David Asher and Nancy Berglass (who are almost never here), the numbers are different: CNAS actually has just as many female full-time staff (50%, or 11) as we do male full-time staff. (And two more females are about to join the full-time staff in the next week, putting men in the overall minority.) Among our research staff, we do have a big gender imbalance: 11 men to just three women. (With another on the way, making the percentage either 21% or 27%, depending on how charitable you want to be.) That having been said, our director of research is Kristin Lord, and her deputy is Nora Bensahel. So to the degree that we are hierarchical, women are in real positions of authority when it comes to shaping our research agenda.

Ready?

1. This nonsense about adding new medals to recognize service in Iraq and Afghanistan is just as ridiculous as people have been saying, and for even more reasons. The way the U.S. military has divided up the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan into arbitrary phases is unnecessary and confusing. Ask a soldier if they have served in either country, and they will likely say, "Yes, two deployments to Iraq and three to Afghanistan" or something similar. They do not say, "Well, let's see, I had one deployment as part of the Liberation, one as part of the Transition, one deployment that overlapped between the Surge and Iraqi Sovereignty ... and then I deployed to Afghanistan as part of the Consolidation." That's silly. Just award one medal for service in each combat theater, and if you want to keep score beyond that, well, that's why God invented service stripes and valor awards.

2. I have mixed feelings about the news that the White House will now issue condolence letters to the families of soldiers who have committed suicide. First off, I care a lot less about condolence letters than I do about investing in psychological screening and counseling to reduce the number of suicides in the first place. Second, not all suicides are the result of combat stress. (One study demonstrated that "79 percent of army suicides occurred within the first three years of service, whether soldiers were deployed or not.") I have known soldiers who have died in Afghanistan in helicopter accidents and soldiers who have died in stateside helicopter crashes. Although neither crash was directly caused by enemy action, the families of the former received condolence letters. The families of the latter did not. If you're going to start writing letters to the families of all soldiers who commit suicide (where indirect cause of death cannot be clearly determined), should you not also start writing condolence letters to the families of all servicemen who die while serving on active duty? And what about the soldier who returns home from war, horrified by what he has seen, gets really drunk and dies (and maybe kills a few others) while driving under the influence? Does that guy's family get a letter? I mean, where do you draw the line between those who receive condolence letters and those who do not? My man Yochi Dreazen gets deeper into these questions in this National Journal article.

3. Speaking of PTSD, if a U.S. soldier wrote a difficult, painful-to-read, searingly honest essay on his or her struggle with PTSD, no one would tell that soldier that he or she does not have the right to write such an essay because they failed to also consider the effect of the war on innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. People would just accept that everyone has the right to share his or her own personal narrative, and that when people are brave enough to open up about their personal experiences, we should all give them the space to do so. Which is just one of the reasons why the outrage over Mac McLelland's essay annoys me.

First off, let me apologize for the lack of spam moderation in the comments while I was away. I checked the blog a few days ago and was appalled. So please accept my apologies -- except for all of you who are enjoying a bargain basement NFL replica jersey you bought through the comments thread on this blog.

Second, some of you know I waged a long but ultimately successful insurgency to get CNAS to change its coffee machine, which could credibly claim until earlier this year to be the worst in Washington. And since this blog's readership is in part populated by highly caffeinated graduate students, let me report back from the United Kingdom and Italy on the State of Coffee abroad:

The 1942 Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain note that British people cannot make a proper pot of coffee and that Americans cannot make a proper pot of tea and that we should consider it an even trade. But the Australians and New Zealanders who live in London are turning the old rules on their head. In Italy, I probably had seven cappuccinos and a dozen or so espressos. They were all very good -- especially the espressos. But as unbelievable as this might sound, the best cups of coffee I had in Europe were in London at Grind in Putney, where we stayed with some South African friends. The cappuccino was very good, but the flat white was simply amazing. If I still lived in Walthamstow, I would travel all the way to the SW15 for this coffee.

In terms of food, meanwhile, my top three eating experiences (apart from the two wedding receptions and some tasty homemade sandwiches in the Alps) were:

1. Lunch at Peck in Milan. (The maître d'hôtel steered me toward a steak tartare that was not on the menu but blew my mind.)
2. Dinner at a cozy pizzeria, Da Martino, in Champoluc in the Italian Alps. (Again, the owner-waiter took tremendous care of us and paired our pizza with a lightly sparkling Barbera.)
3. Lunch at The Market Tavern in Mayfair. (Eating alongside Londonstani, I paired my rather fancy "bangers and mash" with a murky cider that was really great.)

Update: Speaking of coffee...

Today is the 67th anniversary of "Goddammit, Rangers, Lead the Way." If you are able, and especially if you are a youngish man thinking of trying your hand at Rangering, watch the first 25 minutes or so of Saving Private Ryan today. All of the rest of you should at least raise a glass for the Boys of Pointe-du-Hoc and all the other men who fought that day in Normandy. (And boy, think whatever you wish of Ronald Reagan, but the "Boys of Pointe-du-Hoc" speech is incredible.)

***

As far as yesterday's fighting in the (occupied) Golan is considered, let me just say this, speaking as someone whose own research on the fighting in southern Lebanon is highly critical of the Israeli Defense Force and who has never been hesitant to criticize anyone's military forces (including my own) when they deserve it: You can have whatever opinions you wish to have about Israeli policy or the plight of the Palestinians, but if the IDF units did in fact employ escalation of force as is currently being described, starting with non-lethal means and then proceeding to lethal force, you can't ask any more of them tactically and operationally. That will infuriate some of you unable to divorce consideration of tactics and operations from the strategies and policies they serve, but there it is.

(Considering both Israel's leaders and Syria's leaders might want Bashar al-Asad to stick around for a while longer, a friend in Beirut only half-jokingly suggested yesterday's events were staged on both sides to take the attention off the crimes of the al-Asad regime against its own people.)

***

I'll be traveling internationally for the next few days and will likely not be blogging very much, if at all. On the flights, though, here's what I'll be reading:

1. The manuscript for Daveed Gartenstein-Ross's new book.

2. Kissinger's On China. People who actually know a lot about China and know better books about China might make fun of me for this, but I know next to nothing about China and figured it might be a good time to learn something.

3. Bob Kaplan's forthcoming essay for the National Interest on John Stuart Mill and the Arab Spring. (Bob was kind enough to slip me a copy last week at the CNAS conference.)

***

Speaking of the annual CNAS conference, if you did not attend, you can still watch a stellar conversation about Afghanistan and Pakistan moderated by Rajiv Chandrasekaran and featuring LTG (Ret.) Dave Barno, Amb. Anne Patterson, Steve Coll and Bing West on C-SPAN online. The five discuss, among other things, this report (.pdf) I co-authored.

You can also watch, here, the panel on internet freedom and the Arabic-speaking world for which I served as the jester. Shadi Hamid and Richard Fontaine were both excellent, and Colin Kahl, as the panel went on and as he veered off the script, just starting owning it. Highly entertaining.

Apparently my blog had a regular reader in Abbottabad. Anyone want to take a guess as to which nut-job Abu Muqawama commenter was really Osama bin Laden?

Update: Solved! It was, as a reader pointed out, probably one of the spooks across the street.

I had grown used to spending my days digesting casualty reports from the Arabic-speaking world -- 14 killed in Homs, 36 killed in and around Damascus, etc. Today, by contrast, I am digesting the growing list of the dead in and around my hometown. Say a prayer for the people of the South today, and especially for folks in and around my hometown of Chattanooga. Thanks.

1. Do drones make it too easy for U.S. policy makers to go to war?

2. Why do some of the strongest U.S. supporters of Israel pair their animosity toward Iran with a soft spot for Saudi Arabia? I understand the enemy-of-my-enemy thing, but what of the way in which oil money has underwritten the spread of radical, violent strands of Islamic fundamentalism?

3a. What should the Obama Administration do about Syria? How should current U.S. policy change in light of the brutal crack-down we're seeing?

3b. How is Syria different than Libya?

Happy Easter, everyone. I want to share a quick Easter message as well as a reminder that tomorrow is ANZAC Day. First, ANZAC Day:

Since I moved back to Washington, DC in January 2009, it has been a privilege to attend the sunrise service held on ANZAC Day each year. I should not have to remind U.S. readers that Australia and New Zealand have been America's most loyal allies, fighting alongside the United States in every major conflict since the First World War, including Vietnam. There is perhaps no better way to honor the ANZUS Pact and our Aussie and Kiwi friends than by attending the wonderful sunrise service held each year. So if you are in Washington and did not manage to make it to mass this morning, I'll see you tomorrow by the Korean Veterans War Memorial at 5:30. (21 Australian soldiers died in the Iraq War, in case you are wondering, while 23 Australians and two New Zealanders have been killed in Afghanistan.)

On ABC's This Week this morning, meanwhile, Christiane Amanpour had a special Easter edition in which she interviewed folks like Franklin Graham, who <sigh> seemed to question both the president's faith and place of birth while inevitably calling for more civility in public discourse, and Al Sharpton, who was ... well, Al Sharpton. Wedged in between those two gentlemen, though, was an interview with one of my favorite pastors, Tim Keller of New York's Redeemer Presbyterian Church. There is some great stuff in here, and, from 4:37 on, some stuff that will make those of use who blog and tweet take a harder look at our words and how we use them to either enrich or degrade the public discourse.