The Committee goes into room 222 of the Russell building today at 2:30 p.m. EST to mark up the fiscal 2011 defense authorization bill. Until members emerge at 9 p.m., it’s a black box of information for determining the contours of the half-trillion-dollar-plus piece of legislation, including the fate of Sen. Joe Lieberman’s (I-Conn.) amendment to repeal the military’s ban on open gay service.

There’s going to be a rally/press conference on the Hill at 11 a.m. with six veterans, five of whom were either discharged or chose not to re-enlist because of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” urging senators and congressmembers to vote for repeal. Veterans are going to deliver 20,000 pro-repeal postcards to Congress — focusing mostly on the Senate. Specifically, the coalition – comprised of groups like Servicemembers United, the Human Rights Campaign and the Servicemembers Legal Defense Fund — continues to target six states represented by undecided or wavering legislators: West Virginia, Virginia, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Indiana and Florida. Already, its released polling in those states that show scrapping “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” has wide support.

In advance of a complementary House floor vote later this week, the coalition sent an email alert yesterday asking 750,000 people around the country to email their members of congress in support of repeal. It’s going to send another one today asking them to phone member offices. The idea is to escalate pressure, capping off a build-up of several months that’s brought veterans affected by “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” — and those who just believe overturning it is the right thing to d0 — to key states and districts.

That effort got the White House to acquiesce to the strategy on Monday, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates to reluctantly accept the legislative push on Tuesday. But it’s not won over every member of Congress it’s targeted. Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) saw 77 percent of Massachusetts voters backing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repeal, but the new senator — a lieutenant colonel in his state’s National Guard — said yesterday that he’s voting against Lieberman’s amendment. So is Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), a Marine veteran of Vietnam and a former Navy secretary, even after the coalition sent a letter from Virginia servicewomen urging him to support repeal. Both claim that Gates’ original plan — to hold off legislative efforts at repeal until a Pentagon working group on its implementation issues guidance to him in December — ought to proceed. Over in the House last night, the chairman of the armed services committee, Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), made the exact same argument as his grounds for opposition.

The coalition believes that the Senate committee still has a significant number of undecideds, soft-yes and soft-no votes. (For what it’s worth, I’m not going to give my own whip count, because I don’t believe that’s journalistically responsible in a fluid situation like this one.) But it’s also used to setbacks, even though the legislative compromise provides perhaps the best shot for repealing the law since its enactment in 1993, and that speaks to the resilience of the activists who have pushed the White House, Congress and the Pentagon this far already.

“This is one of the best opportunities for repeal that has come around,” said Michael Cole of the Human Rights Campaign. “The fact that you have congressional leaders supporting it, the president supporting it and Secretary Gates and Adm. Mullen saying it will do what they want in respecting the working group, the stars have aligned for putting repeal closer to reality than ever.” If the votes are there.

Gates said the changes, endorsed by Joint Chiefs of Staff and vetted by the Pentagon’s top lawyer, would add “a greater measure of common sense and common decency” for service members negatively impacted by the law. The Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, an advocacy organization for gay and lesbian service members, considered Gates’ changes a “major step toward the end of the law,” according to spokesman Kevin Nix.

Starting today, only a general officer in an accused service member’s chain of command can discharge someone for a violation of the ban, and only an officer with the rank of commander or lieutenant colonel or higher can conduct a fact-finding inquiry to recommend a discharge. The standards of evidence provided to those inquiries will become far less burdensome on the accused, with what Gates called “special scrutiny on third parties who may be motivated to harm the service member.” Entire categories of evidence will no longer be admissible, including testimony from clergy members, physicians, abuse counselors, security-clearance review personnel and mental-health personnel — a move that also significantly improves troops’ quality of life.

“A good friend of mine just left the Navy as a Navy doctor,” said Christopher Anders, a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposes “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Anders said that while his friend never turned in service members for violating the ban, the gay ban “was an obstacle to medical care,” as some personnel opted not to pursue certain medical care out of fear that treatment might be used against them in a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” hearing.

Seated beside Adm. Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who forcefully endorsed repealing the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law, Gates said at a press conference this morning that the new procedural changes apply to all ongoing investigations related to the ban on open gay military service. Gates clarified that he would not endorse any changes to the law until he sees the results of a review led by Pentagon general counsel Jeh Johnson and Army Gen. Carter Ham due by the end of the year. But Gates also clarified that the Johnson/Ham review “is about how you implement” a repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and “not about ’should we do it.’”

While recent polls show repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is broadly popular among both civilians and Iraq and Afghanistan military veterans, there has been some opposition to the looming repeal from senior levels of the military. The commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. James Conway, favored keeping the gay ban in testimony last month. Army Lt. Gen. Benjamin Mixon wrote a letter to “Stars & Stripes” earlier this month urging advocates of the gay ban to “write your elected officials and chain of command and express your views.”

That letter earned Mixon a rebuke from both Gates and Mullen this morning. “That letter was not an appropriate letter,” Gates said. Mullen reminded Mixon that “as a three-star leader in command, he has great influence,” and “all of us in uniform are obliged to follow the leadership of the president,” who urged an end to the gay servicemember ban in his State of the Union address in January.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) introduced a bill earlier this month to repeal the ban. A statement from Lieberman and his co-sponsors reacting to Gates’ changes in implementing the ban is expected later today.

While Anders hailed Gates’ changes, he noted that the defense secretary did not exercise all his authority to relieve some of the onerous provisions of the ban. Gates did not endorse a recent ruling of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that said the military must prove servicemember discharges under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” are vital to unit cohesion or combat readiness. Nor did Gates reverse a policy that cuts troops’ separation pay in half if the cause of their discharge from the military is a violation of the gay ban. Gates also clarified at his press conference that the changes are not retroactive, and so service members who were kicked out of the military for violating the ban will not be able to appeal their cases under the new rules.

Still, Anders said, Gates’ changes “are really important steps forward, obviously.”

Nix said that the Servicemembers Legal Defense Fund’s attorneys are reviewing the changes to determine what they mean for their clients, but that they dealt a serious blow to the ban.

“At the end of the day, what happened today is an important signal to Congress that repeal needs to happen this year,” Nix said. “What the secretary’s recommendations should tell Congress is this thing is on its way to an end, and Congress’s responsibility is to get rid of the law once and for all.”

Blackwater guards in Iraq in 2003 (ALI HAIDER/EPA/KEYSTONE Press)

By March 24, the private security corporation formerly known as Blackwater — last seen in Afghanistan shooting civilians and stealing weapons intended for the Afghan police — may win a new Defense Department contract to train the Afghan police. And nearly no one in the government wants to own up to how it could happen.

Interviews over the past week with numerous Pentagon officials and military officers in Washington and Kabul have presented a portrait of a contracting process in which it is remarkably difficult to deny a contract to a security company involved in numerous civilian deaths and possible fraud. Although it is not certain that Blackwater, now known as Xe Services, will receive a contract that could be worth as much as a billion dollars, the fact that the company is still eligible for the bid — while no one involved in the process wishes to claim responsibility for the potential award — highlights a confusing, unaccountable and systemic problem in how the government delivers security contracts.

Last year, at the request of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commanding general of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, the Defense Department took control of a contract for training Afghan policemen from the State Department’s Bureau of Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs — an office that the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction signaled out as exercising weak oversight. According to four senior military officers with the NATO military command responsible for training Afghan security forces, known as CSTC-A, the command “identified a requirement” for a contractor to perform “tasks we specified” for training the police, said Brig. Gen. Gary Patton, the director of programs for CSTC-A. But all four officers said they had no further involvement with how the contract will be awarded.

That decision belongs to an obscure Army office called CNTPO. Short for the Counter-Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office, CNTPO is a subdivision of the Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command. No one interviewed for this article could explain why CNTPO is responsible for overseeing a contract that has a tenuous connection to counter-narcoterrorism. Patton explained that CSTC-A’s advice to CNTPO on the contract is limited to designing the shape of the contract’s requirements, including what he described as a focus on “training the trainer” of Afghan forces and “more counterinsurgency in the program instruction, more counterinsurgency lessons, operating conditions and the like brought into the program instruction.” CNTPO had prior relationships with five security companies that it allowed to bid on the Afghan police training contract: Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, NG, ARINC — and Blackwater.

It doesn’t appear like CNTPO is a particularly well-known organization inside the Pentagon. Several of Patton’s colleagues at CSTC-A described it as being based in Huntsville, Ala., but several attempts to contact the office over the past week were unsuccessful.

In mid-December, DynCorp, another private security contractor that held the police-training contract back when the State Department controlled it, filed an objectionwith the Government Accountability Office over the decision to move the acquisition authority for the contract to CNTPO from State. The GAO has until March 24 to adjudicate the dispute. Several sources throughout the Pentagon and Congress expect CNTPO to award the contract almost immediately afterward if GAO rules that the office is indeed allowed to award it. CSTC-A officers said they did not know which company CNTPO believes ought to hold the contract.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) has expressed frustration that Blackwater is eligible for another government contract. In late February, an investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee, which Levin chairs, uncovered that Blackwater created a shell company called Paravant in 2008 to help it win a sub-contract with the Army for training Afghan soldiers. While holding that contract, employees of Paravant who were never authorized to carry weapons simply took hundreds of rifles and pistols intended for Afghan police use from a U.S. military weapons depot near Kabul, even signing for those guns using the name of a “South Park” cartoon character.

Levin wrote to Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Feb. 25 to request that Pentagon officials “consider the deficiencies in Blackwater’s performance under the weapons training contract before a decision is made to award the police training work to Blackwater.” In a separate letter, Levin requested Attorney General Eric Holder investigate Blackwater for contract fraud. Justice Department officials would not comment for the record, but told TWI that Holder is considering Levin’s request.

Any action from Holder would represent perhaps the only chance to stop Blackwater from receiving any additional government contracts. Several CSTC-A officers and Pentagon officials said that good-government contract rules prevent them from banning Blackwater. Specifically, an obscure contracting rule known as Federal Acquisition Regulation 9.406-2 prevents an acquisition official for banning a company from being awarded a contract unless the company has been formally “debarred” from eligibility — something that has never happened in Blackwater’s case. However, several criteria for debarment appear to apply to Blackwater, including “commission of fraud,” “theft,” “falsification or destruction of records, making false statements,” “a history of failure to perform, or of unsatisfactory performance of, one or more contracts,” and “violations of the Drug-Free Workplace Act of 1988.”

Asked what message it would send to the Afghans if a company whose employees have shot Afghan civilians and stolen weapons meant for the Afghan police wins a contract to train Afghan policeman, Patton said we was “not going to address hypotheticals.” He added, “I’ve got faith in the system, and we’re going to let the system play out and go from there.”

Photo by Keary O.

Employees of the CIA-connected private security corporation Blackwater diverted hundreds of weapons, including more than 500 AK-47 assault rifles, from a U.S. weapons bunker in Afghanistan intended to equip Afghan policemen, according to an investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee. On at least one occasion, an individual claiming to work for the company evidently signed for a weapons shipment using the name of a “South Park” cartoon character. And Blackwater has yet to return hundreds of the guns to the military.

A Blackwater subsidiary known as Paravant that until recently operated in Afghanistan acquired the weapons for its employees’ “personal use,” according to committee staffers, as did other non-Paravant employees of Blackwater. Yet contractors in Afghanistan are not permitted to operate weapons without explicit permission from U.S. Central Command, something Blackwater never obtained. A November 2008 email from a Paravant vice president named Brian McCracken, obtained by the committee, nevertheless reads: “We have not received formal permission from the Army to carry weapons yet but I will take my chances.”

As a result of Blackwater’s disregard for U.S. military restrictions on contractor firearms, four employees of Paravant — which held a subcontract from defense giant Raytheon to train Afghan soldiers — under the influence of alcohol opened fire on a car carrying four Afghan civilians on May 5, 2009, wounding two. That incident, occurring less than two years after Blackwater guards killed 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, prompted the committee’s investigation.

“In the fight against the Taliban, the perception that the Afghans have of us is critical,” Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the committee, told reporters Tuesday afternoon. “It’s clear to me that if we’re going to win that struggle, we need to know that contractor personnel are adequately screened, they’re adequately supervised and they’re adequately held accountable.” Levin will hold a hearing on Blackwater’s Afghanistan contracts Wednesday morning.

The committee’s investigation points to the contrary. Blackwater personnel appear to have gone to exceptional lengths to obtain weapons from U.S. military weapons storehouses intended for use by the Afghan police. According to the committee, at the behest of the company’s Afghanistan country manager, Ricky Chambers, Blackwater on at least two occasions acquired hundreds of rifles and pistols from a U.S. military facility near Kabul called 22 Bunkers by the military and Pol-e Charki by the Afghans. Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of all U.S. military forces in the Middle East and South Asia, wrote to the committee to explain that “there is no current or past written policy, order, directive, or instruction that allows U.S. Military contractors or subcontractors in Afghanistan to use weapons stored at 22 Bunkers.”

On one of those occasions, in September 2008, Chief Warrant Officer Greg Sailer, who worked at 22 Bunkers and is a friend of a Blackwater officer working in Afghanistan, signed over more than 200 AK-47s to an individual identified as “Eric Cartman” or possibly “Carjman” from Blackwater’s Counter Narcotics Training Unit. A Blackwater lawyer told committee staff that no one by those names has ever been employed by the company. Eric Cartman is the name of an obnoxious character from Comedy Central’s popular “South Park” cartoon.

Blackwater personnel invoked their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination when approached by the committee to explain the weapons acquisitions from 22 Bunkers, according to committee staff. Sailer, who is still deployed to Afghanistan, told the committee that he thought Blackwater was signing for the weapons to train Afghan police, a task it has never conducted.

Not all of the guns received from Blackwater have been returned to the Afghan government — and, according to committee staff, many only began to be returned after staff approached the company for an explanation. “It was represented to us that all the weapons had been returned” to 22 Bunkers, Levin said. “That is not true. Hundreds of them were not returned.” Asked if that meant Blackwater lied to Congress, Levin replied, “They misrepresented the facts, and I’d like to leave it at that.”

Raytheon did not renew Paravant’s contract for training the Afghan army, which expired in September. Blackwater still holds a contract with the State Department worth millions of dollars to protect diplomats in Afghanistan. While that contract expires this year, Politico reported on Tuesday that Blackwater, now renamed Xe Services, might acquire a new multimillion-dollar contract from the Defense Department to train Afghan police — the same police force that Blackwater’s weapons diversions from 22 Bunkers deprived of hundreds of pistols and rifles.

This is not the first time Blackwater has faced allegations of diverted weapons. In 2007, company employees came under federal investigation for improperly shipping hundreds of weapons to Iraq, some of which are believed to have been sold on the black market and acquired by a Kurdish terrorist group. A Blackwater statement at the time said allegations that the company was “in any way associated or complicit in unlawful arms activities are baseless.” The New York Times reported in November that the company is negotiating with regulators over “hundreds of millions of dollars in fines” associated with the illicit weapons shipments.

In January, Blackwater’s founder, Erik Prince, confirmed to Vanity Fair that his 12-year-old company — which has earned more than a billion dollars through government contracts in the past decade — was involved in a nascent terrorist assassination program run by the CIA, among other CIA activities. “I’m paying for all sorts of intelligence activities to support American national security, out of my own pocket,” Prince told the magazine. Additionally, The Nation recently reported that Blackwater assists the Joint Special Operations Command with the terrorist manhunt in Afghanistan and Pakistan, including with the operations of JSOC’s armed unmanned drones.

Levin said his inquiry had uncovered “inadequate oversight by the Army over this contract.” The Florida-based Army office supposedly overseeing the contract did not even have a contracting officer representative in Afghanistan when the Paravant employees shot at Afghan civilians on May 5, 2009. Yet as early as December 2008, concerned Raytheon personnel informed that Army office that Paravant personnel were carrying unapproved weapons. An officer in Afghanistan responsible for training Afghan soldiers told the committee, “We should have had better control.”

Additionally, Blackwater personnel in Afghanistan, including those involved in both the May shooting and an earlier improper weapons discharge from December 2008, have been cited for, among other infractions, drug and alcohol abuse and, in one case, an “extensive criminal history.”

Wednesday’s hearing is expected to receive testimony from current and former Blackwater/Paravant officers, including Brian C. McCracken, the former Paravant vice president who now serves as Raytheon’s chief Afghanistan program officer; Fred Roitz, a Blackwater vice president; and John Walker, a former Paravant program officer.

President Barack Obama (WDCpix)

The National Counterterrorist Center is in for a brutal week. Its director, Michael Leiter, faces a battery of Capitol Hill hearings next week on what President Obama has described as a systemic intelligence failure ahead of the failed terrorist attack on Northwest Airlines Flight 253. But if lawmakers look beyond the immediate circumstances of how would-be bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was allowed to board a Detroit-bound jet despite a number of warning signs, there is evidence that NCTC has a host of structural problems, raising questions about its contributions to the effort against al-Qaeda.

According to interviews with several veteran NCTC analysts, the five-year-old center, meant to be a hub for pulling together terrorism information from across the 16-agency U.S. intelligence community to better anticipate future attacks, has a cumbersome bureaucratic structure and a questionable set of institutional values. Only half of NCTC’s roughly 300 analysts focus directly on al-Qaeda — with some analyzing terror groups that do not threaten the United States, like the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka or the Hamas radicals of the Gaza Strip. Analysts are valued by the volume of writing they produce for policymakers, not the impact that analysis has on counterterrorism operations. Analysts entering NCTC from the partner agencies are assigned to areas where NCTC has vacancies, regardless of their particular specialties. And the managers who preside over analysts seeking to connect the dots — as Obama chastised the intelligence community for falling short on the Christmas would-be attack — are often inexperienced in intelligence analysis themselves.

“What counts over all in terms of promotion, recognition, etc., is the number of papers published,” one NCTC veteran said about the center’s standards for success. “It’s a numbers game.” Another added, “Publishing is the goal, not the effect of your paper.” All NCTC veterans interviewed for this piece spoke only on condition of anonymity due to their ongoing involvement in the intelligence community. Their goal in speaking out, they said, is to strengthen U.S. counterterrorism efforts by shining a light on aspects of the center’s apparent malaise.

Steve Aftergood has heard these criticisms before, particularly about agencies that value publication above impact. “That’s kind of the default mode for an intelligence bureaucracy,” said Aftergood, an intelligence-policy analyst with the Federation of American Scientists. “It’s the characteristic decline of bureaucracies. Unless there’s someone on the inside pushing them to perform, they’re going to settle into a pattern of comfortable compliance.”

It was that pattern, in part, that the NCTC was created to fix. Worried about the compartmentalization of crucial fragmentary clues about terror attacks, the 9/11 Commission in 2004 recommended creating the NCTC to serve as “a center for joint operational planning and joint intelligence,” with its analytic component tasked with developing “net assessments (comparing enemy capabilities and intentions against U.S. defenses and countermeasures)” and to “provide warning” of imminent attacks. A major intelligence reform bill passed by Congress in December 2004 formally created the center and placed it on a campus in northern Virginia under the authority of the new head of the intelligence community, the Director of National Intelligence. Its budget is classified, and its operations have attracted very little press coverage.

As a result, very few on the outside know much about the organization or its structure. The 300 analysts of NCTC’s Directorate of Intelligence are organized into five groups, each of which is run by a chief and a deputy. Each group compiles analysis from across the intelligence community on one of five topics: al-Qaeda’s overseas operations; al-Qaeda’s efforts targeting the U.S. homeland; weapons of mass destruction; an International Terror Group division looking at non al-Qaeda terror groups and their impact on various nations; and the capabilities, both known and developing, of all other terrorist groups. The two al-Qaeda-centric groups are the largest, with 75 analysts each. Each group contains a varying number of smaller branches, from which most of the specific analytic work originates. The Middle East Branch — composed of eight or nine analysts that look at al-Qaeda’s operations in the Middle East, as first reported last week by The Washington Independent — falls under the al-Qaeda Overseas Group.

U.S. intelligence officials told The Independent last week that NCTC is able to surge analytic capabilities to the branches as necessary in a crisis. Two NCTC sources told The Independent this week that it is far easier to surge capabilities within Groups than it is to bring analysts across them. Surprisingly, the non-al Qaeda-focused groups “are not permitted to [study] al-Qaeda,” one said. The roughly 150 other NCTC analysts focus from areas like weapons of mass destruction, weapons that al-Qaeda has shown greater interest than capability in acquiring, to country analysis in places of marginal al-Qaeda interest at best, like Australia. Analysts — those who have worked on al-Qaeda and on other threats — describe themselves as “drinking from a firehose” of information shared with NCTC by the partner intelligence agencies.

Analytic studies produced by NCTC rarely result in the killing or capturing of specific terrorists. By the time a counterterrorist operation gets “closer to that stage,” according to an NCTC veteran, the intelligence community or the military has “mobilized already. It’s never [the result of] something a single analyst puts together.” Instead, analysts’ merit is measured by the number of studies they produce for policymakers — chiefly, the president. “The customer is POTUS, that’s the only one [NCTC is] concerned about,” the veteran said. “Impact” on counterterrorist operations “is secondary.”

In response to a detailed list of questions for this article, Carl Kropf, a spokesman for NCTC, told The Independent: “Our Directorate of Intelligence staff is comprised of regional experts, technical subject matter experts, and persons possessing in-depth understanding of terrorism, terrorist network operations and their affiliations, a capability that is unequaled in the U.S. Government.” While Kropf said that he could not disclose information about the NCTC’s organizational structure or operating practices, he added, “The majority of the NCTC staff is comprised of intelligence analysts and officers from multiple departments and agencies who operate in an atmosphere and environment that promotes collaboration and initiative, and one that recognizes and rewards outstanding performance.”

The agency that has played perhaps the most important role in shaping NCTC has been the CIA, the country’s largest and most prestigious intelligence service. Senior CIA officials occupy most of the NCTC’s Group Chief positions. All incoming NCTC analysts must take a weeks-long remedial course that principally teaches students how to write analytic product according to CIA style. CIA provides its analysts at NCTC with on-site management to ensure their CIA career development during their tours at the center. And it often brings junior analysts or recruits straight out of college to NCTC, where they can relatively quickly become managers or even Branch chiefs. Some experienced intelligence professionals find the track frustrating. “You can’t hire kids out of Georgetown,” one said. “You need people with 25 years in the [CIA] or 25 years in Army intel to say ‘This [information] is bullshit; this is the good stuff.’” Some speculate — cynically, perhaps — that CIA’s career track allows the agency to keep its most experienced analysts for itself.

CIA denies the charge. “The CIA has sent–and continues to send–seasoned and senior officers to NCTC,” said CIA spokesman George Little in an email. “That’s as it should be. The partnership between the two organizations is vital.”

Once inside NCTC for the typical two-year rotation, analysts are not necessarily assigned to their core specialties. If NCTC has a particular vacancy, “you could be analyst of the Russian or Baltic militaries, and you’re thrown into al-Qaeda,” said an NCTC veteran. While the intelligence community did not have a corps of al-Qaeda specialists before 9/11 to jump into senior positions afterward — the CIA created an Osama bin Laden Unit in 1997 within its Counterterrorist Center and staffed it with a handful of employees — it remains the case, said the NCTC veteran, that “suddenly you can be a senior manager” for a branch.

Branch leaders are responsible for green-lighting analytic products and sharpening analytic focus, much as editors do for writers. Several NCTC analysts described their branch leaders as saying — sometimes for good reason — “Let’s sit on it awhile until we have more information” and “We don’t want to go to POTUS with something we’re not sure about.” While several analysts describe that role as providing important pushback and preventing faulty intelligence analysis from reaching senior administration officials, one questioned whether that focus prevented analysts from piecing together information connecting Abdulmutallab to terrorism before the Christmas attempt. “That never would have been published, because it would have been too speculative” for the president to read, the analyst said — even though President Obama said on Jan. 5 that the intelligence community “failed to connect those dots, which would have placed the suspect on the no-fly list.”Information compiled and reviewed by an interagency process helmed by NCTC contributes significantly to the process that leads to someone’s inclusion on the no-fly list.

No NCTC veteran interviewed for this piece placed any blame on Leiter, who has run NCTC since 2007. Several described him as dedicated and competent, though they questioned whether the bureaucratic structure of the center is optimized to confront the threat of terrorism. The Federation of American Scientist’s Aftergood, however, said that NCTC needed “an agency head who is capable of leading & motivating his analysts to get out of their own rut.”

iAftergood did not have a fixed judgment on Leiter, who won crucial political support last week from White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. But he said that he would gain a “better sense of what Leiter’s capabilities and intentions are” during the NCTC leader’s congressional testimony next week.

“The most useful [structural] changes could be identified by NCTC leadership itself — if it’s willing to go out on a limb of self-criticism,” Aftergood said. “If it’s in a defensive crouch, then the hearings are not going to be worth much, except as a confirmation that this is not a healthy organization.”

President Barack Obama (WDCpix)

The enhanced screening of airline passengers from the Muslim world in the aftermath of the failed terrorist attack on Northwest Airlines flight 253 has set off a shockwave of disappointment from supporters of President Obama and surprise from security experts. Few believe, based on experience, that de facto profiling is an effective anti-terrorism tactic. But they do view it as playing into al-Qaeda propaganda that the United States is at war with Islam — propaganda that Obama has attempted to publicly refute.

“The marginal returns in terms of increased security from most new measures to check travelers eight years after 9/11 are likely to be less than their costs in terms of inconvenience, privacy and the fears of innocent Muslims,” said Philip Heymann, a former deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration who consulted with the Department of Justice and intelligence agencies on efforts to reform interrogations for the Obama team.

Throughout his presidential campaign and first year in office, Obama took pains to emphasize that his perspective on counterterrorism did not imply a hostility to Islam — a credible case, given his childhood experience in Indonesia and the baseless rumors that he is actually a Muslim. In recent interviews, Obama aides have said the president considers his Cairo speech to be one of the highlights of his tenure. “America is not — and never will be — at war with Islam,” he told an audience at al-Azhar University in June.

But amid persistent political criticism of Obama’s approach to counterterrorism two weeks after the failed attack, the Department of Homeland Security announced last week that citizens of 14 nations flying to the U.S. will face additional scrutiny on an indefinite basis, including full-body pat-downs and increasing inspection of their carry-on luggage. Only one of those nations, Cuba, is neither a Muslim nation nor one with a substantial Muslim population. Several of those nations, including Afghanistan and Pakistan, have been the subject of extensive efforts by the Obama administration to convince their citizens that the U.S. aims to help them.

The rules presume that citizens of these nations pose the greatest risk of attempting a terrorist attack aboard a plane. But the December 2001 attempt to detonate American Airlines flight 63 came from Richard Reid, a British citizen of Jamaican heritage. Similarly, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who was indicted last week for the attempt on Northwest flight 253, was a Nigerian evidently radicalized in Britain. Nigeria has not been on any U.S. watchlist for terror before the issuance of the new Department of Homeland Security rules.

As a result, Bush administration officials Michael Chertoff and Mike Hayden publicly oppose profiling. Abdulmutallab “would not have automatically fit a profile if you were standing next to him in the visa line at Dulles,” Hadyen, a former CIA and NSA director, said on ‘Meet The Press’ on Jan. 3. “One of the things al-Qaeda’s done is deliberately tried to recruit people who don’t fit the stereotype, who are Western in background or appearance,” Chertoff, a former secretary of Homeland Security, said on the same program.

In his remarks Thursday after receiving preliminary reviews about the attack, Obama assured the public that his administration would “not succumb to a siege mentality that sacrifices the open society and liberties and values that we cherish as Americans,” adding “that is exactly what our adversaries want, and so long as I amPresident, we will never hand them that victory.” He did not acknowledge any tension between his comments and his administration’s new profiling rules.

But Kalsoom Lakhani, a Pakistani citizen who graduated from American schools and directs a Pakistan-based philanthropic organization, said the new rules make her “nervous to travel.” She pointed to an August poll from Pew finding that Pakistan was an exception to Obama’s global popularity, with only 9 percent of Pakistanis considering the United States to be their partner.

Just two weeks before Abdulmutallab’s failed attack, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton claimed “solidarity with the people of Pakistan” at a gala thrown in New York by a new outreach group, the American Pakistan Foundation. “I believe that you are helping to lay the foundation for a new era of partnership not only between our countries, but between our people,” she continued, themes that her special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, has sounded throughout 2009. Yet Pakistanis attempting to visit the U.S. will now face the mixed signal of being singled out for added scrutiny at airports. (In Cairo, Obama pledged, “we will match promising Muslim students with internships in America.”)

Lakhani questioned whether the administration’s profiling would have negative implications for Muslims living in America as ell. “If Muslim-Americans like [Fort Hood shooter] Nidal Hassn and the five Americans arrested in Pakistan are turning to radical Islam, is that symptomatic of Muslim-Americans feeling out of place and marginalized in America?” she said in an email. “Do we exacerbate that problem by the way we react to these incidents (CNN’s ‘Homegrown Terror’ special for example), acting as if they are a stain on the entire Muslim community or Islam rather than the crimes of individuals who are radicalized on the fringe?”

Mike German, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, added, “If you employ racist policies, it shouldn’t be surprising if that engenders hostility rather than cooperation.”

German, now a legal counsel to the ACLU, said he regretted Obama’s apparent capitulation to a political climate that still features collective suspicion of Muslims. “Our politicians aren’t grown up about it,” he said. “I have tremendous confidence in the intelligence of the American people when they’re given correct information about terrorism.”

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee about the war in Afghanistan on Dec. 2. (Oscar Matatquin/ZUMA Press)

It sounded like a throwaway line in President Obama’s West Point address about the Afghanistan war. “It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak,” the president said, tying his troop increase in Afghanistan to direct threats to U.S. national security. “In the last few months alone, we have apprehended extremists within our borders who were sent here from the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan to commit new acts of terror.”

That was all Obama said about the relationship between al-Qaeda’s senior leadership in the Pakistani tribal areas and potential domestic terror attacks. But at a Congressional hearing shortly afterward, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton cited those same recent arrests in the United States to argue for the wisdom of the administration’s strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The extremist “syndicate” headed by al-Qaeda and located in the Waziristan region of Pakistan has an “unmatched” capability to export terrorist activities to “Yemen, Somalia, or, indeed, Denver.” That was a reference to Najibullah Zazi, a 24-year old Afghan-American whom authorities charged in September for conspiring with members of al-Qaeda to pull off a terrorist attack.

Zazi’s case is part of a recent and rapid upswing of announced arrests of American Muslims suspected of involvement with extremism, including in Chicago and Minneapolis, where young Muslims have been accused of aiding anti-Indian terror groups and al-Qaeda-linked Somali militants. Dramatically, last week, Pakistani authorities arrested five young Virginians whom they claim were seeking to liaise with al-Qaeda in the tribal areas. Those arrests prompted stories this weekend in The Washington Post and The New York Times asking whether American Muslims’ resistance to extremismhas frayed in recent years.

But current and former counterterrorism officials and al-Qaeda experts warn that while the Pakistani tribal areas represent the center of international Islamic terrorist extremism, its connections to recent domestic terror threats are more ambiguous than the administration has recently portrayed. And they add that the recent arrests indicate a silver lining: intelligence and law enforcement are increasingly equipped to intercept domestic terror threats, particularly if they have some tie to al-Qaeda in Pakistan, raising questions about how potent a threat al-Qaeda remains.

Al-Qaeda’s senior leadership, according to senior U.S. intelligence officials who have testified before Congress this year, is under significant threat in the Pakistani tribal areas. Pakistan’s Army has reinvaded those areas and forcibly confronted its allies in the Pakistani Taliban, constricting al-Qaeda’s freedom of action. The CIA and the military’s Joint Special Operations Command have harassed al-Qaeda and its allies for the past two years, primarily through missiles fired from unmanned aerial vehicles. Most recently, a strike Tuesday may have killed al-Qaeda’s chief liaison to its affiliate in Yemen.

If so, the targeting will have highlighted a revealing fact about al-Qaeda eight years after 9/11: boxed into the tribal areas, the organization seeks less to pull off major terrorist attacks than to inspire and in some cases fund them. It has inspired a multiplicity of extremist websites, allowing people worldwide — including in the U.S. — access to its propaganda. And it also seeks to establish a presence in Muslim countries like Yemen and Somalia, often by offering financial or training support to existing extremist groups outside Pakistan. While those two approaches offer al-Qaeda a continued lease on life, analysts say they also dilute al-Qaeda’s brand and raise questions about the actual degree of danger it still poses.

“The tendency to lump all threats in to one big bin” ultimately “hurts the policy and strategy decision process,” said one U.S. counterterrorism official who requested anonymity because he was not cleared to talk to the media. Instead, “We need to better understand the motivation, goals, and links — where they exist– of the disparate groups from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb to [the Somali group] al-Shabab and criminal networks in [the Horn of Africa] to Pakistani opposition/terrorist groups and to the various Taliban in Afghanistan.”

Indeed, Marc Sageman, a former CIA official and terrorism researcher affiliated with several universities and think tanks, testified in October to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the number of successful al-Qaeda attacks in the past 15 years was significantly smaller than the number of successful attacks carried out by al-Qaeda-affiliated or al-Qaeda-inspired organizations. Furthermore, only 22 percent of attacks by terrorist groups with worldviews similar to al-Qaeda’s over the past five years actually tied back to al-Qaeda itself, according to Sageman’s research. In an interview, Sageman said that Clinton’s testimony “an oversimplification to the point that the truth is unrecognizable.”

The Obama administration is mischaracterizing the terrorist threat to get the public to back escalating the Afghanistan war, Sageman said. “Secretary Clinton’s distortions are typical of a politician,” he said, “who distorts reality to muster support for a policy.”

But al-Qaeda’s message is finding at least some appeal, however marginal, among American Muslims in their teens and 20s, more than it did to their older brothers, cousins or fathers. “Those people were 10 years old when 9/11 happened” and have since “felt like they grew up under a cloud of suspicion because of their religion.” said a former counterterrorism official who declined to speak for the record. Those individuals — whom the ex-official clarified were “a few bad apples” among millions of law-abiding American Muslims — “saw issues like torture, Guantanamo, and Iraq and decided to react because they lacked an understanding of history, and view things instead from a conspiratorial view and are open to being radicalized.” By contrast, the older generation — the families of the five Virginians — were encouraged to go to the FBI with their worries about their children’s travel to Pakistan after the prompting of a major American Muslim lobby group, the Council on American Islamic Relations.

Like in the United Kingdom, the ex-official said, where in 2005 homegrown radicals like Mohammed Sidique Khan perpetrated the July 7 London bombings with direct aid from al-Qaeda, the recent American Muslim arrests show some youths “felt discriminated against and tried to find their roots somewhere else, and they went back to the Pashtun tribes.”

But their ability to pull off terrorist attacks after making contact with al-Qaeda may not be as great as the administration as the Obama administration portrayed. Of all the recent arrests, only one, a Chicagoan named David Coleman Headley, had any involvement in a successful attack, the mass killings in Mumbai last November, an attack not believed to be connected to al-Qaeda. Neither did the only successful case of post-9/11 violence by a radicalized American Muslim: the shootings at Ft. Hood last month by Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan. In the other cases, from Zazi to the Virginians arrested in Pakistan, intelligence and law enforcement were able to monitor and then arrest suspicious individuals before any attacks occurred.

“Zazi is interesting in this respect,” said Leah Farrall, a former senior al-Qaeda analyst with the Australian Federal Police. Farrall said she would watch Zazi’s forthcoming trial for clues to how al-Qaeda actually reaches out to Muslims in America. “Did he meet an Afghan gatekeeper or an al-Qaeda linked gate keeper? Whatever the case, he either met them in the U.S. or online. These things are crucial to understanding the threat posed.”

All that points to a poor prognosis for al-Qaeda, even if younger American Muslims are somewhat more prone to radicalization, according to the former counterterrorism official.

“Al-Qaeda’s are capabilities basically almost nothing these days,” the ex-official said. “Sure, they’ve got a couple good operatives, and maybe will try to pull something big to make themselves relevant again … If we make them appear relevant — they’re at war with the greatest country on earth — then guess what? They’re gonna be big.” Instead, the ex-official continued, “if we treat them as insignificant, small, pathetic men with nothing to do with Islam, they’ll lose their relevance.”

(Sharkpixs/ZUMA Press)

In a decision that may define his presidency, Barack Obama on Tuesday night announced the deployment of 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan by next summer in the hopes of bringing a deteriorating war in its ninth year to an acceptable conclusion, calling that goal vital to “the common security of the world.”

“We will pursue a military strategy that will break the Taliban’s momentum and increase Afghanistan’s capacity over the next 18 months,” Obama told Army cadets at the U.S. military academy at West Point, pledging to “refuse to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, our or interests.” U.S. troop levels will rise to an all-time high of about 98,000.

Obama recommitted to the ultimate goal, first set by his administration in March, of disrupting, dismantling and defeating al-Qaeda in its Pakistani tribal safehaven and preventing either its return to Afghanistan or a takeover in Pakistan. But for the first time in the war’s history, Obama announced a date — July 2011 — when U.S. forces in Afghanistan will begin handing over security responsibilities to Afghan soldiers and policemen currently under American and allied tutelage, a step toward what he described as a long-term political and economic relationship with Pakistan and Afghanistan after U.S. troops ultimately depart.

That date, Obama emphasized, heralds only the beginning of the end of the war: the pace of the handover and its ultimate conclusion will be determined not by a fixed timetable but “conditions on the ground,” according to the president, and it is unclear when or how rapidly substantial withdrawals of U.S. troops will occur after July 2011. That means the U.S. force total in Afghanistan will remain at approximately 98,000 for at least another year after all the new troops arrive in Afghanistan in summer 2010, and possibly longer. Senior administration officials have begun using the term “extended surge” to describe the troop increase — distinguishing it from the 2007 troop surge in Iraq, which ended after the tours of additional brigades concluded in 2008; and also avoiding the politically troublesome term “escalation.”

The revamped strategy and new troop increase — the second Obama has ordered in the first year of his presidency — comes after Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Obama’s commander in Afghanistan, issued a dire assessment in late August that time was running out to reverse gains that the Taliban-led insurgent syndicate has made over several years. “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible,” McChrystal wrote. Obama’s new troop deployment, which administration officials said was occurring as rapidly as possible, will fully arrive in Afghanistan right at the tail end of McChystal’s prediction, raising questions about what remains achievable. McChrystal will arrive on Capitol Hill early next week to testify before Congress about the war.

After receiving McChrystal’s assessment and subsequent requests for additional forces, Obama convened a series of ten meetings with his national-security team, as well as consultations with foreign allies and outside experts. In his West Point speech, Obama substantially embraced McChrystal’s military focus on providing security for Afghan civilians. That approach, McChrystal argued and Obama endorsed, is meant to drain the insurgency’s base of support and to allow for governance and development assistance from the Afghan government, with the support of the international community, to arrive. Still, senior administration officials said on Tuesday that they anticipated another review of Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy by late 2010 to determine if the strategy is succeeding, or if another adjustment is necessary.

‘Immediate Impact’ on Afghan Lives

Senior administration officials elaborated that U.S. troops would primarily focus on southern or eastern Afghanistan — the heart of both Pashtun Afghanistan and the largely Pashtun insurgency on the porous border with the Pakistani tribal areas sheltering al-Qaeda’s senior leadership — while NATO partner nations, which currently contribute more than 30,000 troops, would bolster the north and west of Afghanistan, where security has recently deteriorated. On Friday in Brussels, NATO will hold a conference of allied foreign ministers that the administration expects to become a venue for securing several thousand new troops from partner nations.

Civilian aid to Afghanistan will be restructured, Obama indicated in the speech. In particular, the United States will emphasize agricultural development instead of big reconstruction projects to revitalize the nation’s agriculture-based economy, Obama said, to make an “immediate impact in the lives of the Afghan people.”

A senior administration official explained that the adjustment was partially inspired after recent and relatively inexpensive U.S. military projects in Afghanistan to improve or repair irrigation canals proved “extremely popular” with the locals. Those “immediate impact” development projects would be expanded, the official said, and would benefit legal “agricultural output, as opposed to poppy,” which finances the insurgency and fuels Afghan governmental corruption.
Confronting that corruption was another major theme of the new strategy. President Hamid Karzai fell out of favor with the Obama administration owing to concerns about his government’s corruption and lack of competent performance. But Karzai was reelected this year, even after an Afghan electoral commission invalidated hundreds of thousands of his ballots as fradulent or tainted. Obama said that the U.S. had high expectations for the Afghan president, stressing the days of a “blank check” to Karzai were over, and portraying the timetable for handing over security to Afghans as a response to a call in Karzai’s recent inaugural address for additional responsibility.

“Going forward, we will be clear about what we expect from those who receive our assistance,” Obama said. “We will support Afghan ministries, governors, and local leaders that combat corruption and deliver for the people. We expect those who are ineffective or corrupt to be held accountable.”

Yet at the same time, administration officials said that in addition to working with the Karzai government, it would aim its military and development assistance down to Afghanistan’s provinces and districts, where Karzai’s influence is relatively tenuous. That was one of the rationales for setting the July 2011 date for beginning the transfer of authority, something administration officials referred to as a “strategic inflection point.” One explained that the date would put pressure on all parties — the U.S., NATO, the Afghan government, the Afghan security forces, and the international community — to “do more sooner.”

Additionally, administration officials and NATO allies are in discussion to determine if a mechanism can be created to bring greater coherence to the efforts of Afghan, U.S., allied and other civilian assistance to the Afghan people for development and governance — a sort of civilian counterpart to McChrystal’s command of all U.S. and NATO forces. The idea is not new, but the Obama administration has given it renewed emphasis, said a senior European diplomat, although the precise structure of that mechanism has yet to be determined. “This has been discussed entirely within the context of the strategic theme of turning responsibility over to the Afghans,” the diplomat said.

Security for Civilians: Counterinsurgency Redux

But the administration still believes that the most important thing it must do in 2010 is provide security for the Afghan civilian population. One senior administration official said that Afghan interlocutors were telling Obama’s team, “Give us security and the rest will come.”

How that security will be achieved went largely unexplained in Obama’s speech, but has been spelled out extensively by McChrystal. McChrystal has called the attitudes of Afghan civilians “strategically decisive” in the war, and as such he has ended offensive U.S. and NATO airstrikes, which caused extensive civilian casualties; prevented U.S. troops from returning fire into areas with dense civilian populations; and even changed the rules for U.S. convoy movements to make Afghan roads more accessible to Afghan civilians. Administration officials explained that U.S. troops would primarily operate by securing key population-heavy areas in southern and eastern Afghanistan, but would also use select force to disrupt the Taliban outside of those areas and prevent al-Qaeda from moving into them — something strongly advocated by current and former leadership of the Joint Special Operations Command who remain close allies of McChrystal.

In a statement released by McChrystal shortly before the speech, the general praised the strategy review and said that he now had the necessary resources to reverse the Taliban’s momentum. “The Afghanistan-Pakistan review led by the President has provided me with a clear military mission and the resources to accomplish our task,” McChrystal said. “The clarity, commitment and resolve outlined in the President’s address are critical steps toward bringing security to Afghanistan and eliminating terrorist safe havens that threaten regional and global security.”

Unanswered Questions Remain

But administration officials were vague as to why they were certain a total of 98,000 U.S. troops and the 900 U.S. civilian advisers — who will be in Afghanistan by January — would turn the tide. Key Obama advisers believe the trouble with the Afghanistan war has been persistent under-resourcing.

Nor have they predicted with confidence when Afghan soldiers and policemen will be prepared to take over the country. Administration officials said that they would annually revisit target goals of Afghan security forces’ development, taking into account overall performance, recruitment and retention. One senior official said the U.S. was not interested in setting an “arbitrary end strength number at this time,” tamping down speculation that the administration sought to reach a goal of 400,000 Afghan soldiers and police in the next few years. And finally, it remains unclear if U.S. forces will ultimately withdraw from Afghanistan while some safe haven exists for al-Qaeda in Pakistan. 

Keeping congressional support for a controversial war now certain to last past the 2010 midterm elections, and most likely Obama’s first term in office, will be “a challenge” for the administration, said Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Penn.), a retired Navy admiral who is running for a seat in the Senate next year and who supports the troop increases. The war is unpopular, particularly within Democratic and progressive circles, constituencies the Democrats in Congress need to retain their majorities. Traditional Obama allies like the netroots giant MoveOn and the progressive veterans group VoteVets announced opposition to the strategy on Tuesday. And a just-released estimate by Todd Harrison, an analyst at the Center on Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, claims that Obama’s “extended surge” will  “increase costs by approximately $30 billion per year,” and speculated that a supplemental appropriation — something the administration has pledged not to seek — may be necessary in fiscal 2010.

Still, Sestak believed that Obama could retain congressional and national support. “People believe in him,” the congressman said, adding that Obama’s “non-political” approach to decisionmaking in the war would earn him popular support.

Obama’s weeks of deliberation on Afghanistan have come under significant conservative criticism. Although Dick Cheney, the former vice president, presided in part over the deterioration of the Afghanistan war before handing it off to Obama, he has said Obama was “dithering” on the war and described the administration as weak. Undeterred, the administration has said the result of the process would be a clear strategy and stronger national consensus. And senior officials said that the administration would launch another overall review of the strategy in late 2010, even ahead of the “strategic inflection point” on July 2011.

‘A Time Of Great Trial’

“I do not make this decision lightly,” Obama told the cadets. “I make this decision because I am convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of the violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda. It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak. This is no idle danger; no hypothetical threat.” Yet he declined to say, as he did over the summer, that Afghanistan was a “necessary war,” preferring to say that “our cause is just.”

Obama said that while this was a “time of great trial,” he was confident that “our cause is just, our resolve unwavering. We will go forward with the confidence that right makes might, and with the commitment to forge an America that is safer, a world that is more secure, and a future that represents not the deepest of fears but the highest of hopes.”

Paktika Province, Afghanistan (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Micah E. Clare)

As President Obama and his advisers debate strategy for the Afghanistan war and its related crisis in Pakistan, a factor that so far has not intruded on their discussions is emerging: the antiwar movement is showing signs of strength.

In Congress and around the country, a segment of the progressive movement that helped elect Obama is coalescing around a critique of the eight-year war. That cohort, of unknown size as yet, is skeptical of an open-ended commitment; willing to provide Obama with friendly criticism; unwilling to accede to a second escalation of U.S. troops under the new administration; and searching for an exit strategy. Powerful progressive groups and members of Congress that quietly accepted Obama’s infusion of 21,000 new troops for Afghanistan this spring, however uncomfortably, are finding their footing to oppose the current one, even if they are not yet demanding fixed dates for troop withdrawals. It is unclear what effect they will ultimately have on the debate, but, buoyed by polls demonstrating the war’s unpopularity, they complicate Obama’s decisionmaking.

Progressives are “asking ourselves what we’ve not accomplished in last eight years that we could possibly accomplish over the next eighty,” said Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), a favorite of liberals and an opponent of the Afghanistan war, “and more and more, the answer is: nothing.”

That hope is frustrated by the present debate. For the past two weeks, cabinet-level officials and military commanders have met with the president at the White House to consider whether to continue with an expansive military-led effort in Afghanistan aimed at weakening al-Qaeda’s insurgent allies through bolstering the Afghan government or whether to focus the mission around harassing al-Qaeda directly in its tribal Pakistan safehaven. While officials have stated to reporters that all assumptions are subject to examination, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in a joint appearance with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday, said withdrawing troops from Afghanistan is not under consideration. That means the baseline resource commitment under discussion is 68,000 U.S. troops, the highest troop deployment America has ever sent to the beleaguered central-Asian country.

Grayson is hardly the only Afghanistan skeptic in Congress, even varieties of congressional skepticism are still inchoate within the Democratic caucus. After a meeting at the White House on Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)rolled her eyes when her Senate counterpart, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), pledged support for Obama’s ultimate decision. “Whether we agree with it, [and] vote for it, remains to be seen,” she said. Two days later, Rep. David Obey (D-Wisc.), the chief House appropriator, called a counterinsurgency strategy “futile” and expressed doubt that the U.S. could reverse Taliban advances at acceptable cost.

In the Senate, Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.) has called for a “flexible timetable” for withdrawal. While the influential Armed Services Committee chairman, Carl Levin (D-Mich.), remains a supporter of the war, he has balked at a call for a second troop increase this year, preferring to accelerate the training of Afghan security forces instead. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, also remains a cautious supporter of the war, although he has backed away from what he once called a “global counterinsurgency” by holding a series of recent hearings in which he raised probing questions about the prospects for successful counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.

Late last month, the antiwar movement received an infusion of support from a pillar of the new progressive online infrastructure: MoveOn.org, the progressive netroots organization with over 5 million members, and a staunch ally of Obama’s. Despite staying largely out of the spring debate on escalation, MoveOn, which ardently opposed the Iraq war, began emailing supporters to urge the president to adopt a “clear exit strategy” for Afghanistan, and on Sept. 29, sent out a request to its members to host country-wide screenings for filmmaker Robert Greenwald’s antiwar documentary “Rethink Afghanistan.”

Ilyse Hogue, MoveOn’s director of political advocacy and communications, explained that the organization’s membership, so far, wanted “to understand what the plan is” in Afghanistan. “Escalation with no exit strategy is all too familiar to them” from the Iraq debate, Hogue said, as are policy prescriptions “ramrodded from hawks outside and inside” an administration. The overall decline in public support for the Afghanistan war is reflective of MoveOn’s supporters, Hogue added. Recent polls have found that only 47 percent of the country thinks the war is worth fighting, and up to 70 percent of Democrats oppose it.

Escalation in Afghanistan comes as an anomaly to many Democrats. Obama on Friday received an unexpected Nobel Peace Prize, yet he campaigned for the presidency on a platform of recommitting to the Afghanistan war and increased troop levels by almost half within weeks of taking office. “One of the reasons [progressives] supported his campaign is because they believe in his multilateral approach to foreign policy issues,” Hogue said, including an increased reliance on diplomacy and a “clear plan on the ground” for the war.

Accordingly, the Obama administration’s Afghanistan critics are reluctant ones. Hogue said the progressive pressure on him was “to support Obama” by ensuring that the drift over the war doesn’t overtake his broader agenda and so he can explain to the country “how he’s going to achieve goals, what we’ll achieve, and how we’re going to get out.” MoveOn’s supporters, like many Democrats, are not yet at the point of demanding a concrete date for withdrawal, preferring at this point to insist Obama articulate a plausible plan for Afghanistan that includes an exit strategy.

Similarly, Greenwald said he was encouraged by Obama’s Afghanistan strategy review, particularly as it, reportedly, begins to distinguish between al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies while setting the goals for the war. “Why would you occupy a country for 100 [al-Qaeda] evildoers? It just doesn’t make sense to me if security is primarily the issue for our country” in Afghanistan, the filmmaker said shortly after premiering his film in Washington D.C. last week. While Greenwald said he would like the review to be “tougher, smarter and broader,” he said he hoped it would address the “implicit assumption” that “sending more troops will help our country.”

Greenwald, who has worked with MoveOn on previous anti-Iraq war and Fox News-hounding projects during the Bush years, said it was “great to have the most effective, efficient, smartest and biggest online group working with us and using the film.” His documentary — much of which was shot in Afghanistan — had reached about 600 screenings in people’s homes and from student groups and unions in its first three weeks of full release, after being available in installments for months on his website and primarily not yet available in theaters.

The next steps, Greenwald said, would be to target screenings to progressive members of congress’ districts and “invite congressmen and -women and staffers to come to the screening.” At the screenings, he hopes to present members or their staffs with concrete figures about how the costs of the war, an estimated $228 billion over eight years, has impacted specific districts in terms of measurements like lost jobs.

It will not be easy to predict how the emerging antiwar movement impacts the president’s decisions, particularly as much of the overlapping progressive infrastructure views the healthcare reform fight as its primary effort — and there the Obama administration is a crucial ally. While MoveOn can “walk and chew gum at the same time,” Hogue said “I’m not going to lie to you, we’re in the middle of a huge health care fight” and MoveOn had placed “enormous resources into that.”

Yet Grayson and another beloved progressive member of Congress, Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.), attended Greenwald’s Washington premiere last Tuesday and spoke at a panel afterwards. “The war itself is destructive, not constructive,” Grayson said at the panel.

In an interview just after Obama’s Nobel Prize was announced, Grayson combined support for Obama with opposition to the war Obama may decide to escalate. “Logically,” he said, “if you win the Nobel Peace Prize then you’re a man of peace. I think ultimately the commander-in-chief will make up his mind to end the war and bring our troops home. I hope it happens sooner rather later but I think it’s inevitable. I don’t think we’ll be in Afghanistan in the year 2089.”

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton (Photo by WDCpix)

WASHINGTON — As President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton near an announcement of a top State Department official to promote the United States’s image abroad, some veterans of the public diplomacy field wonder if the administration views job as a national-security position or a public-relations one.

Public-diplomacy specialists inside and outside the Obama administration expect that in the coming days, Clinton will unveil her friend and political supporter Judith McHale, a former chief executive at the Discovery Channel, as the next undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. If so, McHale will land in the center of a wide-ranging debate about what her job ought to be. Most of the decade-old office’s post-9/11 chiefs — advertising phenom Charlotte Beers, former State Dept. spokeswoman Margaret Tutweiler, and Bush imagemaker Karen Hughes — sought to refurbish America’s overseas “brand,” in advertiser parlance, putting a nonthreatening face on often unpopular U.S. policies. “We’re going to have to communicate the intangible assets of the United States–things like our belief system and our values,” Beers explained to an interviewer in 2001.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

The most recently departed undersecretary, the libertarian publisher and economist James Glassman — known for his now-debunked financial analysis “Dow 36,000” — took the office in a much different direction. “In the war of ideas,” Glassman recalled in a phone interview, “it’s often more effective to destroy [U.S. adversaries'] brand than build up ours.” During his brief tenure as undersecretary in 2008, Glassman acted as a public-diplomacy “convener,” partnering with foreign organizations who opposed what he called “violent extremism,” rather than traveling to foreign countries to give cheery talks about America’s lofty values. Additionally, Glassman emphasized the organizational aspects of the office, which President Bush tasked in April 2006 to head the government’s strategic communications efforts, bringing together public diplomacy experts from the CIA, the Treasury Dept. and the military. Glassman’s efforts earned plaudits even from progressive public-diplomacy specialists; Newsweek magazine last month wrote that Obama should retain him.

Public diplomacy experts wonder whether the Obama administration will continue Glassman’s efforts, reverse them or pursue a different strategy entirely. “Ripping down others’ brands has not typically been, historically, at the center of the public diplomacy agenda,” said Michael Doran, who recently stepped down as the senior-most public-diplomacy official at the Pentagon. “We need to tear down Al Qaeda’s brand and build up the brands of our friends whose interests coincide with ours.”

Some fret that the fact that there is no undersecretary a month after Clinton’s confirmation-hearing emphasis on “smart power” — a term designed to encompass a range of foreign-policy tools, of which public diplomacy has long been considered key — indicates a diminished role for public diplomacy. Nor is the structure of the new administration’s public diplomacy efforts settled: while McHale has yet to be announced, the strategic-communications specialist at the National Security Council, Denis McDonough, is close to the president, prompting speculation that public diplomacy might be increasingly concentrated in the White House. (Neither the White House nor State Department would comment on McHale and McDonough.)

“Around the world, people think President Obama is magic,” said Douglas Wilson, a three-decade veteran of public diplomacy jobs at the now-defunct U.S. Information Agency and the Pentagon, whom Obama passed over for the undersecretaryship after vetting him. “The great danger here is to think that view will hold and that President Obama’s magic is the same thing as a solid, comprehensive public diplomacy strategy. It’s the equivalent of cheap energy — meaning we don’t have to pay attention to a comprehensive energy policy because gas for the moment is cheap.”

Public diplomacy occupies an unconventional space in the State Department. Traditional diplomacy is the process of two governments discussing issues with each other, while public diplomacy involves outreach from a government to foreign populations, through cultural exchanges, media engagements, academic grants and other efforts. Underscoring the divide, public diplomacy used to be the province of a Cold War-era organization, the U.S. Information Agency, which Congress and the Clinton administration disbanded in 1999, folding the public-diplomacy portfolio into the newly-created undersecretary’s office, known in department bureaucratese as “R.” Its budget last year was $859 million out of a departmental budget of around $11 billion. Larry Wohlers, the executive assistant to the undersecretary — who runs R’s affairs while there is no undersecretary — said about 1,050 department officials work on public diplomacy around the world, bolstered by local national staff in foreign countries. Spokesman Gordon Duguid said that while there had been a “surge in hiring” across the department, “we’re not there yet” in terms of a sufficient public-diplomacy workforce.

The post-9/11 rise in global anti-Americanism posed the biggest challenge for “R” since its inception. Beers, Tutweiler and Hughes took the view that America was merely misunderstood, and making the case for the worthiness of American values would provide a path back to global esteem. Critics from across the political spectrum criticized that approach — a 2005 report from the conservative Heritage Foundation said R’s efforts were “in disarray,” while former Clinton administration official William Galston wrote in 2008 that the “results have been meager” — largely because they glossed over foreign disagreements with controversial U.S. policies, such as the occupation of Iraq.

In 2005, Hughes took a much-publicized “listening tour” of the Muslim world and was greeted with widespread resentment over both U.S. policies, which she chose to address by issuing blandishments like how a love of children was “something I have in common with the Turkish people.” The subsequent criticism of Hughes didn’t stop George W. Bush from designating her office as the lead for all government-wide foreign communications efforts in April 2006 — although several former colleagues of Hughes said she did a poor job convening so-called “strategic communications” professionals from around the bureaucracy. Hughes “didn’t want to touch [the Defense Department] and CIA,” said Doran, the recently-departed Pentagon public diplomacy official.

Glassman took office in mid-2008 and drastically changed his predecessors’ course, viewing public diplomacy as a component of a national-security strategy rather than an image-centric endeavor. “We in R [had] the same goals as the State Dept. and the rest of the national security apparatus,” Glassman said. “Simply making people like us is not the only way” to use public diplomacy to promote U.S. security interests, and “it’s not even the easiest way.” Glassman set to work reorienting the office to telling negative stories about extremist enemies of the U.S., rather than feel-good stories about America. During a visit to the U.S. military’s Special Operations Command, Glassman became amused by a giant, convoluted map outlining extremist and anti-American activities worldwide and hung it on the wall of R’s suite of offices on the seventh floor of the State Dept., where Hughes had hung pictures of herself hugging children during her foreign travels. (Glassman said he put the map up “for fun,” but Doran said its placement “still sent a message.”)

Furthermore, in the summer, Glassman created an interagency public-diplomacy council of about a half-dozen officials from the Pentagon — including Doran — the CIA, the Treasury Dept. and other agencies called the Global Strategic Engagement Center, or GSEC, in order to bring coherence to government strategic communications on “a day to day basis.” The GSEC’s chief is a nearly-30 year department veteran, Peter Kovach, who said he hopes to expand the GSEC’s membership as more government agencies focus on public diplomacy. “We advise, structure meetings, and bring people to the table,” Kovach explained, emphasizing that the GSEC’s role is “not deciding” policy but “coordinating and deconflicting” it.

Tarnishing the brand of U.S. enemies meant that Glassman “introduced an ideological element” to the undersecretaryship, Kovach said. Glassman turned R’s efforts to finding and supporting organizations whose work complicated or discredited the narratives deployed by anti-American radical groups. A nongovernmental organization called the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy got technical advice and “very little money” to publicize its work reforming Pakistani religious schools by introducing tolerance lessons to their curriculum, Glassman said. A European NGO effort, Sisters Against Violent Extremism, that focused on the rights of Muslim women, also received technical and financial help from R in publicizing its message. In December, R helped sponsor a global youth summit in New York against violence, known as the Alliance of Youth Movements, along with social-networking organizations like Facebook and HowCast.

“In all these things, we felt we as Americans most of time are not the best and most credible actors,” Glassman said. Instead, “we’re getting behind other people who are doing good things.”

Marc Lynch, a political science professor at George Washington University who studies public diplomacy and the Arab world, praised Glassman’s “forceful advocacy of the ’strategic communications’ approach, which tied public diplomacy very tightly to the national security concept and practice, as opposed to the more traditional long-term relationship building and engagement approaches.” But Lynch criticized Glassman for “basically capitulat[ing]” to the “vast imbalance of resources” for public diplomacy between the State Dept. and the much-better-funded Pentagon.

What comes after Glassman isn’t clear. White House officials did not return inquiries for comment about public diplomacy and the new undersecretary, but most public diplomacy experts inside and outside the government believe the position is McHale’s to lose. While her background as a television executive does not suggest a national security focus, neither did Glassman’s background as a libertarian magazine publisher and financial analyst. Lynch recently criticized the prospective appointment of McHale on his blog for Foreign Policy magazine’s website, writing that appointing someone without a public diplomacy background to the R position could “undermine Obama’s promise and cripple America’s ability to revamp its engagement with the world at exactly the time that it is needed most.” Yet some State Dept. officials who did not want to speak for attribution said that there was nothing in McHale’s background that would support such a sweeping conclusion, either.

Furthermore, it is unclear whether the Obama administration will retain the Bush administration’s structure, with State at the helm of U.S. public diplomacy efforts — nor do experts agree as to what structure is best. GSEC chief Kovach argued that since the State Dept. is in charge of U.S. foreign policy overall, “we are the logical place to host” public diplomacy efforts. Lynch favored moving the coordination of public diplomacy efforts into the White House. “The virtue of a White House coordinator is that it can impose balance between the approaches, and really give the public diplomacy portfolio a seat at the policy table — not to sell lousy policies after the fact, but to factor in regional attitudes and expectations and possible communications strategies in the policy-making process,” Lynch said, noting that Denis McDonough at the White House is “close to the president and really understands this stuff.”

Others believe that structure is less important than a clear vision for public diplomacy. Doran said that “the failed model isn’t the State R-in-the-lead model, the failed model is the public relations/communicator view of what R is and what public diplomacy is.” Wilson, the former U.S. Information Agency and Pentagon public-diplomacy official whom the Obama team vetted for the R job, agreed. “It’s a great mistake to think of public diplomacy in terms of branding, marketing or advertising,” Wilson said. To that end, he and dozens of other diplomats, military officers and private citizens convened at the White Oak plantation in Florida two weeks ago for a weekend summit on public diplomacy . “At White Oak, the [watchwords were] authenticity, credibility and trust,” he said. “The question we need to address is how can you get opinion leaders and [foreign] publics to give us the benefit of the doubt.” Wilson plans to present the Obama administration with the summit’s recommendations this week.

For his part, Glassman said that he shared his views on public diplomacy with Wendy Sherman, a longtime Clinton confidante and former senior State Dept. official during the transition. “I said that the number-one point I’d make is that the R job is a national-security job, it’s not a PR job,” Glassman said. “Some people might say that someone coming into this job with a media background might bode ill.” He paused in a phone interview and remembered, “Though I came in with that background, as well.”