NPR: Iran arrests U.S. freelance journalist Roxana Saberi.

Ron Kampeas: US pulls out of Durban II.

Abu Muqawama takes his counterinsurgency blog to CNAS.

FP contributor Marc Lynch: "While most American eyes today will be on President Obama's anticipated speech on withdrawal from Iraq (about which I'm more optimistic today than I was yesterday, but a bit less than on Wednesday!), the most important news out of the Middle East today may be the announcement in Cairo that Fatah and Hamas have agreed in principle on the formation of a national unity government by the end of March. That should give Hillary Clinton and George Mitchell much to talk about during the secretary's upcoming visit."

Good Pro Publica/Marcus Stern wrap up of the Foggo case.

Worth reading: FP's book discussion of Tom Ricks' The Gamble.

Politico's Josh Gerstein: NSC gets a face-lift.

And here's the Presidential Policy Directive 1 (.pdf). Which concludes: "This document is the first in a series of Presidential Policy Directives that, along with Presidential Study Directives, shall replace National Security Presidential Directives as instruments for communicating presidential decisions about national security policies of the United States. This Directive shall supersede all other existing presidential guidance on the organization of the National Security Council system. ..." No more NSPDs.

Spencer Ackerman reports on new Pentagon appointments and some more hold-overs, including under secretary of defense for intelligence Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper and assistant secretary of defense for low intensity conflict Mike Vickers.

Chas Freeman is in as chairman of the NIC, Politico's Ben Smith reports. Here's the notification to Congress (.pdf).

Update: ODNI news release here.

JTA reports: "According to one senior Jewish leader with ties to the administration of President Obama, the White House was sensitive to criticism of the pick. On the other hand, the Jewish leader said, Obama was reluctant to appear to show political interference by blocking Blair's choice."

More from Wash Times' Jon Ward.

Foggo sentenced to 3 years. AP:

A former high-ranking CIA official has been sentenced to more than three years in prison for a fraud scheme in which he steered procurement contracts to an old friend.

The 37-month sentence for Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, who held the CIA's No. 3 rank from 2004 to 2006, matched prosecutors' recommendations. He pleaded guilty to a single count of fraud.

Defense lawyers had argued for probation and cited Foggo's good deeds over two decades with the CIA, many of which remain classified.

Prosecutors said Foggo received tens of thousands of dollars worth of lavish gifts and vacations in exchange for helping his old friend, contractor Brent Wilkes, obtain no-bid contracts.

They also say Foggo forced the CIA to hire his mistress for a six-figure job for which she was unqualified.

Update: Good pieces from the archives by Harper's Ken Silverstein, Jason Vest and Newsweek's Mark Hosenball on the case.

Go read David Ignatius on Iran policy. "The administration official who oversees the Iran file is William Burns, the undersecretary of state for political affairs. Although Dennis Ross will take a broad strategic look at the region in his new post of State Department adviser, senior officials stress that Burns is the address for Iran policy."

Porter Goss's Dusty Foggo problem. If you were director of CIA, and your top two operations officers quit, do you think you might possibly inquire about why? The top two CIA ops officers Steve Kappes and Michael Sulick quit in November 2004, two months after Goss became director, over a fight related to Goss's appointing of Dusty Foggo to be CIA number 3. (Goss's staffer Patrick Murray had demanded that deputy director of operations Kappes fire his deputy Sulick because Sulick was standing up in defense of associate deputy director of counterintelligence Mary Margaret who said it would be a mistake for Goss to hire Foggo as ExDir because of a history of troubling behavior in his file. Murray had threatened Mary Margaret that if anything from Foggo's file leaked, they would blame her. Instead of firing Sulick, Kappes and Sulick both quit.) In other words, Goss found out pretty soon after he arrived at Langley that there was a problem concerning what was in Foggo's file. But he didn't do anything about it. Not then, and not until the spring of 2006 when the Feds were about to raid Foggo's office and he and Foggo were both canned. You don't have to be an intelligence specialist to figure that out.

WSJ's Siobhan Gorman: CIA signals continuity with Bush era.

Foreign Policy: Why the diplomats are having a hard time explaining Dennis Ross's job:

When Dennis Ross's job title as "special advisor on the Gulf and Southwest Asia" was finally announced in an after-hours State Department press release Monday evening, it wasn't exactly the high-profile rollout that U.S. special envoys Richard Holbrooke and George Mitchell, presented side-by-side with President Obama, Vice President Biden, and Secretary of State Clinton, had previously received.

Indeed, the three-paragraph State Department press release on Ross's job was so vague on specifics that State Department spokesman Robert Wood soon found himself besieged by questions about what tasks and indeed what countries exactly were included in Ross's portfolio.

"Is it Iran? And if it's not Iran -- if it's Iran, why is it not written in the statement?" one journalist asked Wood Tuesday. [...]

"Let me be clear," Wood added. "He's not an envoy. He will not be negotiating. He'll be working on regional issues. He will not be -- in terms of negotiating, will not be involved in the peace process. But again, he is going to be advising the secretary on long-term strategic issues across the region."

On Wednesday, Wood provided more clarity on the list of countries that fall into Ross's portfolio -- Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Yemen, apparently -- but it was hard to escape the impression that State is diplomatically flummoxed about how to describe Ross's job.

Sources suggested a variety of explanations. Some had to do with the fact that the U.S. government is currently in the midst of an intensive policy review on Iran, which is not expected to be ready until early March. (March 10, one source said). Therefore, to describe Ross now as an "envoy" on or to Iran would be premature, they said, since the policy hasn't yet been articulated. Ross might gain the "envoy" title after the policy review is complete, another source suggested.

Other sources suggested the U.S. government was sensitive to Iran's perception that Ross, a former senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is a pro-Israel hawk whose writings on U.S. policy toward Iran have suggested a high degree of continuity with the Bush administration's approach of carrots and sticks. ...

The head of the NIC is, in some respect, the analyst-in-chief of the U.S. government. He or she must have a great mind, must reject cant, must have a nose for political agendas (and the willingness to filter them out... including first and foremost his own biases), and must be genuinely intellectually daring, willing to explore unpopular or unlikely ideas to consider their implications. ... Few people would be better for these tasks than Chas Freeman. Part of the reason he is so controversial is that he has zero fear of speaking what he perceives to be truth to power. You can't cow him and you can't find someone with a more relentlessly questioning worldview. His job will be to help present the president and top policymakers with informed analysis by which they can make their choices. His intellectual honesty and his appreciation for what is necessary in a functioning policy process is such that he will not stack the deck for any one position. ...

DOJ:

A former employee of the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank) has been indicted on corruption and tax violations arising from her alleged receipt of a $100,000 bribe while working at the Ex-Im Bank, Acting Assistant Attorney General Rita M. Glavin of the Criminal Division and Acting U.S. Attorney Dana J. Boente for the Eastern District of Virginia announced today.

Maureen Njideka Edu, a/k/a Maureen N. Scurry, 42, of Potomac, Md., was indicted by a federal grand jury in Washington on Feb. 20, 2009, for conspiring to solicit and accept bribes and to deprive the United States and the Ex-Im Bank of her honest services, as well as substantive counts of bribery, honest services wire fraud and filing a false tax return. The indictment, which was unsealed today following Edu’s arrest, also seeks the forfeiture of $100,000 from Edu.

According to the indictment, Edu worked for the Ex-Im Bank from May 2000 to October 2004 as a business development specialist covering Africa and focused on sub-Saharan Africa, which included the West African nation of Nigeria. During the course of her work, according to the indictment, Edu was introduced to Nigerian businessmen who were seeking to buy certain products and services from a Kentucky-based technology company in a deal worth approximately $44 million. The Nigerian businessmen were seeking financial support from the Ex-Im Bank to support the business deal. The indictment alleges that the Nigerian businessmen agreed to pay Edu a bribe of $173,500, with an initial installment of $100,000, in return for her promise to perform official acts to assist the Nigerian businessmen and their company in obtaining loan guarantees and other financial support from the Ex-Im Bank.

Worth reading: Paul Starr in The New Republic, on why everyone should care about the death of newspapers. Have been reading the late Katharine Graham's excellent Pulitzer prize winning memoir that extensively covers her family's decades running the Washington Post, and there's a lot more financial turmoil going back several decades in the newspaper business than I had realized.

Foggo sentencing docs. Via ProPublica. Quite a read. Everything I reported going back to November 2005 on a CIA water contract, black contracts, air cover contracts, etc. checks out. Go read Jane Doe #2 here. And the declaration of JC, Joel Combs, Brent Wilkes' nephew. Foggo planned to run for Duke Cunningham's congressional seat. Porter Goss, in his declaration, says "members of my senior staff suggested Mr. Foggo as a possible candidate for the position of Executive Director. I did not suggest him or seek him out." (Which staff?) And the interview with one of Dusty's girlfriends he helped get a $100,000 job at the CIA, ER. (The government sentencing docs heap scorn on Foggo's plea for sentencing leniency, on Foggo's claimed grounds that his being jailed would be a hardship for his family. Foggo, family man? Not exactly).

A former US intelligence source thought that Brent "nine fingers" Bassett was the Goss staffer who recommended the hire of Foggo as ExDir.

He said that Goss lied in his testimony, that he was not aware about the problems with Foggo when he hired him for executive director. He said that a major fight had broken out between Goss staffer Patrick Murray and then associate deputy director of operations Michael Sulick about the Foggo hiring. "Murray told ADDO/Counterintelligence Mary Margaret that if Dusty's background got out to the press, they would know who to come looking for. Mary Margaret tried to warn them that Dusty Foggo had a problematic counterintelligence file. Sulick defended Mary Margaret. Goss told [deputy director of operations Steve] Kappes he had to fire Sulick." After that, Kappes and Sulick quit. "Goss bears major responsibility here," the former intelligence official says. It was finally the "White House that demanded that Goss fire Dusty and he refused." So they both got fired. More.

Foggo is due to be sentenced Thursday.

AP:

The United States plans to withdraw most of its troops from Iraq by August 2010, 19 months after President Barack Obama's inauguration, according to administration officials. The withdrawal plan would fulfill one of Obama's central campaign pledges, albeit a little more slowly than he promised. He said he would withdraw troops within 16 months, roughly one brigade a month from the time of his inauguration.

The officials said they expect Obama to make the announcement this week. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the plan has not been made public.

The U.S. military will leave behind a residual force, between 30,000 and 50,000 troops, to continue advising and training Iraqi security forces, the two officials said. Also staying beyond the 19 months will be intelligence and surveillance specialists and their equipment, including unmanned aircraft, they said. ...

Slate's Fred Kaplan reports on the F-22 fight.

Dinner at the Pakistani embassy, and Afghan defense minstry document reveals desire for greater control over international military operations in its country.

AP: Syrian-born arms dealer Monzer al Kassar, the prince of Marbella, sentenced to 30 years.

Orly Halpern in the Globe and Mail:

Two retired generals, two former models, a sheik, a homosexual, a young Arab woman, and a former member of a Jewish terrorist organization are among the 31 new faces that will be sworn into Israel's 18th parliament Tuesday.

“It will be stormier than previous Knessets,” said Shahar Ilan, Knesset correspondent for Israel's daily Haaretz. “More young people, less professors and more radical right-wingers means more rough clashes with the Arab MKs [members of the Knesset].”

No government has yet been formed because Likud Party chairman Benjamin Netanyahu has not convinced Kadima chairwoman Tzipi Livni to join his right-wing coalition. If Ms. Livni sticks to her guns, Israel is headed for a hard right-wing government with a large opposition and a narrow government.

Israeli parliamentary sessions are already infamous for yelling and name-calling, particularly between its right-wing and its Arab members.

It is not uncommon for Knesset members to be escorted out of the plenary hall by guards. And that is more likely in this Knesset, which has a majority of right-wing MKs.

One of the most controversial new members is Michael Ben-Ari of the National Union Party. Mr. Ben-Ari, 44, a settler from Karnei Shomron, calls himself “the disciple and successor of Rabbi Meir Kahane,” the man who founded the Kach movement, which is labelled a terrorist organization by Israel, Canada, and the United States. Mr. Ben-Ari espouses the transfer of Arabs and the construction of a Jewish holy temple on the grounds of the Temple Mount, Islam's third holiest site. ...

Then there is Nitzan Horovitz, a 43-year-old journalist and the only openly gay Knesset member. He is likely to face homophobic MKs, such as Eli Yishai, chairman of the Shas party, who recently said that homosexuality is a psychological disorder.

Back on the other side of the political spectrum is Anastasia Michaeli, 33, former Miss St. Petersburg and a pregnant mother of seven children. Ms. Michaeli, moved to Israel from Russia after marrying an Israeli and converting to Judaism. She has expressed support for traditional male-female roles and has said that when her husband travels abroad, she recommends that he have sex with other women. She will be the first MK to give birth while in office. The former model will be taking a seat as a member of ultra-nationalist Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu party, which calls for Israel's Arab citizens to take an oath of loyalty to the Jewish state or have their citizenship revoked. ...

Roger Cohen on the Jews of Isfahan.

Dennis Ross's title announced.

Foreign Policy: The ambassadors.

AFP: Iraq invites France to build nuclear reactor. huh?

MJ Rosenberg analyzes opposition to the Chas Freeman appointment to chair the NIC.

Politico's Ben Smith on Lieberman meets Lieberman. Smith: "The rise of Avigdor Liebermam -- and his likely role in an Netanyahu goverment -- poses a major challenge for Israel's American allies. He's been criticized as a racist domestically for insisting that Arab citizens take a loyalty oath or be deported, and his role could do damage to a key pro-Israel talking point: That it's the region's only pluralistic democracy. (Though, of course, the coalition's leaders won't share his views on that point.)"

Check out Foreign Policy's new book club blog, In other words, moderated by Rebecca Frankel. This week, it's discussing Tom Ricks' The Gamble.

"How we got here." Check out my pal Jeb Sharp's new series taking a historical look at foreign affairs issues, "how we got here," at the public radio show, BBC/PRI's The World. This week’s episode "looks back at the Cambodian genocide of the 1970’s with The World’s Mary Kay Magistad and anthropologist and genocide expert Susan Cook. And we remember Alison Des Forges of Human Rights Watch." Subscribe on iTunes, via RSS, or you can listen here. Sharp's foreign policy blog is here, with interesting takes on controversy among historians at the State Department, US-funded radio in Darfur, and her superb series on post-conflict challenges in the Balkans, Cambodia, and Africa, how wars end.

FP: Afghan and Pakistani delegations arrive in Washington.

Politico's Ben Smith excerpts interesting CNN report on Dennis Ross's job.

Andrew Marshall, Director of the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, Henry Rowen, 2005 WMD Commissioner & former JFK/LBJ Defense official, Richard Perle, AEI & former Reagan Pentagon official, and Stephen J. Lukasik, former DARPA director, discuss a new book, Nuclear Heuristics: Selected Writings of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter (2009), by Robert Zarate and Henry Sokolski. Hudson Institute, Monday, Feb 23. 10am to noon.

Jackie Shire at Foreign Policy: "There are plenty of reasons to pay close attention to Iran's nuclear progress, but the new International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report showing that the country has accumulated 1010 kg of low-enriched uranium is not at the top of my list. [...] While legitimate cause for worry, these headlines obscure other equally important developments. One is that although Iran has installed upwards of 5,400 centrifuges, it continues to operate just under 4,000 of them, bringing into operation only one additional cascade of centrifuges since November. Is Iran suddenly more attuned to the optics of its nuclear program? Hard to say, especially given that it continues to stonewall the IAEA on access to a heavy water reactor under construction at Arak, and refuses to even discuss a set of documents that allegedly show research into nuclear warhead design. ...."

Sam Quinones in the March/April Foreign Policy: "State of war: Mexico’s hillbilly drug smugglers have morphed into a raging insurgency. Violence claimed more lives there last year alone than all the Americans killed in the war in Iraq. And there’s no end in sight."

ISIS analysis of February 19th IAEA Iran report (.pdf): "The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released February 19, 2009 its latest report on the implementation of NPT safeguards in Iran and the status of Iran’s compliance with Security Council Resolutions 1737, 1747 and 1803. The report includes three important findings. The first is that while Iran has dramatically increased its installation of centrifuges (now numbering more than 5,400) it has not increased the number of centrifuges enriching uranium, which is holding steady at just under 4,000. The second is that Iran has accumulated a total of 1,010 kg of low enriched uranium in the form of uranium hexafluoride (UF6). The third concerns Iran’s manufacture of uranium fuel rods for the Arak heavy water reactor and its continued refusal to allow IAEA inspection of the reactor under construction..."

Ha'aretz: Avigdor Lieberman's firm suspected of doing business with PA officials. "In 2001, ... Lieberman compared Yasser Arafat to Osama bin Laden and said 'you don't talk to them ... you send planes.'"

Ha'aretz: Kerry, Ellison and Baird to Gaza. It was a late addition to Kerry's Middle East itinerary.

HP: Helicopters and fraud.

Marc Lynch in the National: "The conversation. Barack Obama has vowed to restore America's stature in the Arab world. The task is an enormous one, ...and will demand a reinvention of public diplomacy – grounded in new foundations that seek engagement rather than victory. ... Undermining al Qa’eda and combating extremism are important. But they should only be one small part of America’s engagement with the Arab world. There is a vast majority of politically aware Arabs and Muslims whose fury at American policy has nothing to do with Islamic extremism. The new public diplomacy must reach out to that mainstream, with words and deeds alike." My own feeling is it's mostly the policies, not really the state of art of the marketing campaign that really matter.

Wash Times: Ex envoy's Libya ties get Bechtel hired.

CQ's Jeff Stein: Former CIA Baghdad officer complains about management, publication review board.

Foreign Policy: Chas Freeman to chair NIC.

Observations on Holbrooke interview with PBS' Newshour from blogger centrist vector:

Mr. Holbrooke committed news in the interview with Ms. Woodruff, announcing that Pakistan and Afghanistan would each send a delegation of senior officials to Washington next week, the week of 23 February, as part of their participation in the AfPak strategy review, giving “input and getting ideas from us.”

Ms. Woodruff segued into concerns held by some Pakistani officials about Indian involvement in Afghanistan, asking Mr. Holbrooke if a “regional competition” was involved. Mr. Holbrooke replied:

This is an interesting point. I went to New Delhi (after going to Pakistan and Afghanistan) where we were welcomed and we had very excellent consultations. And the Indians are also sending senior officials to Washington -- but not next week, a couple of weeks down the road.

Mr. Holbrooke inflected the passage “– but not next week...” as if it were a sudden afterthought to committing accidental news, clarifying that the Indian delegation’s visit would not be concurrent with the Pak and Afghan teams. The offset in schedules during this “reverse shuttle diplomacy” helps preserve the veneer that India is outside the AfPak mandate. (The Special Representative did not expressly state the Indian delegation would participate in the AfPak strategy review in the same manner as their regional counterparts, but the interview context implies suitable involvement.) ...

Former CIA #3 Dusty Foggo faces sentencing for fraud, tomorrow.

New USIP study based on trips to Syria, Saudi Arabia (.pdf).

McClatchy: "The head of the Drug Enforcement Administration spent more than $123,000 to charter a private jet to fly to Bogota, Colombia, last fall instead of taking one of the agency's 106 planes. The DEA paid a contractor an additional $5,380 to arrange Acting Administrator Michele Leonhart's trip last Oct. 28-30 with an outside company. ... William Brown, the special agent in charge of the DEA's aviation division, said he'd asked DEA contractor L-3 Communications to arrange the flight because the plane that ordinarily would've flown the administrator was grounded for scheduled maintenance. He said he didn't question the cost at the time."

From Foreign Policy: More on U.S. intelligence efforts to defuse India-Pakistan tensions:

The CIA played a back-channel role in serving as an arbiter and vehicle for intelligence sharing in order to ease tensions between India and Pakistan after the Mumbai attacks, the Washington Post reports today. [...]

Former U.S. intelligence sources concerned about the potential for the situation to escalate had brought the channel to the attention of The Cable a few weeks ago. A few days before Christmas, they said, the United States sent then Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell and veteran CIA analyst Charlie Allen, who at the time was a top DHS intelligence official, to India. Allen and McConnell were there to talk about Mumbai. Both have since retired and could not be immediately reached.

Also on the trip to India, another U.S. government official said on condition of anonymity, was Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center. "It was a quick in and out trip," the US official said, of the previously undisclosed visit of the three intelligence officials to India. "They got in on a Sunday [Dec. 21], and were out on Tuesday morning," Dec. 23. McConnell had previously visited India last June, the official said.

But the former intelligence officers said the person the United States should be sending to defuse a potential India-Pakistani conflict is Defense Secretary Robert Gates. "The only guy in this administration they are likely to listen to is Gates," one former U.S. intelligence official said. "He's done this twice before." Gates, who was then deputy national security advisor for the first President Bush, was sent to "talk the Indians and Pakistanis out of war" in both 1988 and 1990, the former official, who had been involved in drafting the talking points for Gates at the time, said.

The former official said the message Gates told India is, "If you go to war with Pakistan, you'll win. But your industrial infrastructure will be destroyed." And the message Gates told Pakistan is, "If you go to war with India, you'll lose. And at the end, you will not have a country." [...]

"The Indians are almost certainly going to do something before [their] elections," said AEI military analyst Thomas Donnelly. "They will strike camps in Pakistan. They are really pissed about the incompetence of the response to the [Mumbai] attacks. .... It doesn't look like the Pakistanis are willing to or even can do anything that will satisfy the Indians. I would really be surprised if something doesn't happen, unless that changes. They got an election coming up in March or April. It will be an interesting test for the United States." ...

And public diplomacy agonistes: fear over the direction of "R." More from Spencer Ackerman and Marc Lynch on this.

Abrams' exit interview. Steve Clemons notes an interesting recent Jerusalem Post interview with former senior Bush NSC official Elliot Abrams. Because of a couple moderate statesmen-type sources who think highly of Abrams and who described him to me as a fairly pragmatic figure in Bush's second term NSC, I have never really bought the recent liberal conventional wisdom about Abrams as some sort of sinister hawk bogeyman, so perhaps I don't find the interview as Steve puts it into context very surprising. And for various reasons, I never thought Bush would pardon Libby either. Among other reasons, the record shows that Bush had been pretty stingy with pardons while Texas governor, even when it would have been politically opportune for him to do so. Secondly, were Libby pardoned, it would preclude him from being able to take the fifth should he ever be asked by a Congressional committee to testify about the role of Cheney and the President in the Plame matter. Now, unpardoned, he can still plead the fifth to avoid doing so, which may be in the former president's interest. Third, having interviewed people such as David Wurmser who previously worked in Cheney's office who supported a harder line on issues such as US government policy to Iran and North Korea, I had been pretty exposed to their sense that Condi Rice had been driving a more moderate US government policy to those countries and elsewhere in recent years. A view Abrams expresses in the interview. But still some interesting glimpses here, and Steve puts it in nuanced context, including the interviewer's familial relationship to the interviewee.

NYT: Holbrooke reaches out to Iran in Afghan visit. This notable too: "Mr. Karzai, once a favorite of the American government, has said in recent days that Mr. Obama has not spoken to him since the inauguration, a disclosure widely seen to reflect the Afghan leader’s diminished stature in Washington. Last week Mr. Obama said the Afghan government 'seems very detached from what’s going on in the surrounding community.'”

Abu Muqawama outlines the winners and losers in Tom Ricks' The Gamble.

Burris press conference. Brutal.

Great FT weekend read, about historian and writer on Afghanistan, Nancy Hatch Dupree.

Her unrivalled knowledge of Afghanistan has been sought by everyone from the United Nations, which commissioned her to investigate the cultural damage inflicted on the country, to Osama bin Laden, who once approached her for help in acquiring import certificates to bring heavy digging equipment from Pakistan. He was 'very shy and polite', she recalls, but she was puzzled why he thought she could help with such 'outlandish requests'. [...]

Fearing Pakistani bureaucrats would find some way to keep her precious collection in Peshawar, the archive was finally moved piecemeal in 2003, smuggled out by Dupree’s devoted staff in hidden sacks of documents amid the cargoes trundling through the Khyber Pass. A new $2m library is being built on Kabul University’s leafy campus to house it, with the money and land provided by powerful friends, some of them dating back to the 1960s and the five o’clock follies.

She hopes her collection will do something to prevent the hordes of aid workers and development experts who descended on Afghanistan after 2001 repeating old mistakes and perpetually drawing up the same tired strategies. But in the past seven years there has been a flood of reports written on Afghanistan and, she concedes, “they just write the same thing over and over again – just regurgitating it. That’s why their strategies are so humdrum. They are based on work that doesn’t have much basis in fact, or in the realities of Afghan culture, because the people don’t go out and talk to Afghans.” [...]

Too often, she says, foreigners compound this mistake by believing they can fix Afghanistan’s problems with cash. “For the US particularly, money is the remedy to everything. Throw money at it and have instant implementation of massive projects and then turn away and don’t pay any attention to the follow-up. That is not sustainable and it won’t work. But they are doing it in Pakistan now, in the Fata [Federally Administered Tribal Areas on the frontier where the Taliban and al-Qaeda leaderships are based] – and what are they doing? They are creating friction because everyone is trying to get hold of their money. But it’s hard to dissuade these people.” ...

At 82, she has recently had to move from the house in Peshawar where she has lived with a large collection of cats for the past 15 years, after her landlady pushed up her rent. She rarely ventures out from her new abode after a rash of kidnappings and killings of foreigners in Peshawar, including an attempt to shoot the top US diplomat in the city. Absurdly, it would be safer for her to live full-time in Kabul, but she says Peshawar is the only place where she is left alone for long enough to “get on with my writing”.

But for all the difficulties and dangers, she isn’t leaving. “I think there’s a future for these people and I think maybe I can help. That’s why I stay here. A lot of people call it the Afghan virus. You get it and it’s like malaria: you think you are free of it and you go away, and suddenly you’re back.”

Newsweek: "An internal Justice Department report on the conduct of senior lawyers who approved waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics is causing anxiety among former Bush administration officials. H. Marshall Jarrett, chief of the department's ethics watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), confirmed last year he was investigating whether the legal advice in crucial interrogation memos "was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys." According to two knowledgeable sources who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters, a draft of the report was submitted in the final weeks of the Bush administration. It sharply criticized the legal work of two former top officials—Jay Bybee and John Yoo—as well as that of Steven Bradbury, who was chief of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the time the report was submitted, the sources said. (Bybee, Yoo and Bradbury did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)" More from the NYT.

NYT: Inquiry on graft in Iraq focuses on US officers.

Politico's Ben Smith: "Obama’s approval rating remains well above 60% in tracking polls. A range of state pollsters said they’d seen no diminution in the president’s sky-high approval ratings, and no improvement in congressional Republicans’ dismal numbers. ... A CBS News poll released February 5, for instance, found 81% of Americans said Obama is reaching out to congressional Republicans, while just 41 percent said the congressional Republicans were looking for bipartisanship."

LAT: "Feinstein comment on U.S. drones likely to embarrass Pakistan.The Predator planes that launch missile strikes against militants are based in Pakistan, the senator says. That suggests a much deeper relationship with the U.S. than Islamabad would like to admit."

Philadelphia Daily News Inquirer: Court action suggests Weldon could walk. (Or perhaps something else is going on. Have they flipped Weldon?)

Staffer F. Re: Judd Gregg dropping out, a contact suggests this connection to the Abramoff probe and staffer "F" in the Abramoff indictment are more decisive explainer:

A former top staff member to Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), who is President Obama's choice to be commerce secretary, has come under the scrutiny of federal prosecutors investigating the Jack Abramoff gifts-for-favors scandal, according to public records and sources.

Kevin Koonce, 37, who served as Gregg's legislative director and counsel for two years until 2004, is referenced, though not by name, in a plea deal outlined in court papers filed last week, according to people familiar with the circumstances of the events described in the documents.

In the filing, Koonce is "Staffer F," said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the matter is still under investigation, and is described as allegedly accepting more than $10,000 in tickets, meals and drinks in exchange for official actions by the Senate office that were favorable to Abramoff's lobbying clients. ...

Plouffed. More.

From Foreign Policy: Sen. Kerry shakes things up at SFRC:

Kerry has hired Douglas Frantz, the former Los Angeles Times managing editor, to lead the committee's investigative wing. The committee won't specify what Frantz, who recently coauthored a book on Pakistani nuclear proliferator A.Q. Khan, plans to investigate. But sources note that he's currently in Vienna, the seat of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Sources tell The Cable that the pro-Israel lobby group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has encouraged Kerry and other members to probe Iran's alleged sanctions busting, and how the country might bypass international sanctions to supply its nuclear program.

JTA's Ron Kampeas: Rep. Gary Ackerman slams settlements, Israeli attitudes.

Ackerman's statement below the jump:

“Gaza After the War: What Can Be Built on the Wreckage?” Rep. Gary L. Ackerman, Chairman House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia February 12, 2009 ------------ I’d like to start with a quote: “Today, the subcommittee had hoped to examine those realistic and productive measures that the parties, directly and indirectly involved with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might have taken to restore a sense of hope and maybe even make some material progress towards peace. But in light of the [what’s occurred]... I’m not sure what’s left to discuss. “Over the past six years there have been many plans and many envoys. And contrary to popular opinion, there hasn’t been a deficit of attention, merely a deficit of performance. Commitments made to the United States, or between the parties, have often been honored only in the breach. The timing was never right. What was promised was not delivered. There was always a provocation, an incident, an upcoming election, a crisis, an attack. And so it is again today.” Strike “what’s occurred” and insert “Gaza conflict” and these sentences, which I read at this Subcommittee’s first hearing in 2007, are, to my dismay, equally applicable today. It only looks like we’re going in circles. In fact, we’re spiraling downward. I don’t know where the bottom is, but I know its there and I know it’s getting closer every day. It will hit with shattering force when, through malice and terror, through shallow calculation and venal self-interest, through short-sightedness and through political cowardice, the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is finally rendered impossible. The downward pressure comes from terrorism and the march of settlements and outposts, from the firing of rockets and the perpetration of settler pogroms. It comes in daily images of destruction and the constant reiteration that “they only understand the language of force.” It comes in the form of a political party that’s always just a few months away from reform and in the form of governing coalitions whose chief purpose is avoiding new elections. It comes in the form of promises that bloodshed is what God desires and declarations that dirt and stones mean more than human life. It comes from tunnels in Gaza and from digging in Jerusalem as well. There is no moral equivalence between these acts but they part of the same destructive dynamic. Since the end of the Clinton Administration, the basic outlines of a peace agreement have been clear. And in fact, in its waning days, the government of Ehud Olmert–like other departing Israeli governments–further closed the gaps and added even more detail. Except now there are three sides. And one of these sides is looking for an outcome very different than the other two. Hamas is the odd-man out. I don’t know what to do about that. I don’t know how you make peace with half of a want-to-be country. I don’t know how you sign an agreement with an entity whose legal, political and administrative bona fides are all in question. Which brings us to Gaza, where so many of the contradictions in this conflict come into focus. Start with Hamas, a terrorist organization, an entity beyond the pale. They are the enemy and no one can talk to them until they accept the Quartet’s conditions of recognizing Israel, repudiating violence, and accepting the PLO’s agreements with Israel. Except that for years, Israel has been talking to Hamas through Egypt, and directly to the Hamas prisoners in Israeli jails. And when the IDF was in Gaza in force, with reserves building up outside, the Israelis announced that the destruction of Hamas was absolutely not their goal. Hamas is a deadly, vicious, implacable enemy, but somehow, one that had to be left in place. For their part, the Fatah-led PA blasted Israel for the violence while quietly hoping that the IDF would cripple Hamas and pave the way for the PA’s return to Gaza. Likewise, the PA has continuously denounced Hamas for the 2007 coup in Gaza and then intermittently engaged in direct talks to form a unity government with it. And even Hamas itself–the great paragon of ideological purity–insists in Arabic that its goal is the complete liberation of Palestine, which is to say, the elimination of the State of Israel, while in English it declares that Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders would be sufficient for a long-term, but not permanent, peace. The one real bright spot in all the chaos is the work of the U.S. Security Coordinator, Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton, who without fanfare, and with very little money, has helped stand up a force of several hundred competent and disciplined Palestinian security forces. Trained in Jordan, and deployed successfully to major cities in the West Bank, these mostly young Palestinians have restored law and order in Jenin and Nablus, and are finally starting to put some authority back into the Palestinian Authority, which for years has been leaking the stuff like a bucket with no bottom. I think we’ve learned from our own awful experience in Iraq that between politics and security, security has to come first. So what can be made of the new and growing security dynamic in the West Bank, remains to be seen. A lot will depend on whether Israel–in a break from years of habit–can recognize its own self-interest in the success of this Palestinian enterprise. And even if that happens–and I think we really must try hard to help that process along–how developments in the West Bank can be used to reestablish a connection with Gaza is far from clear. And it is in Gaza that the United States, Israel, the PA and the Arab states have to start coming up with answers. There are pressing humanitarian needs and a reconstruction vacuum that will surely be filled by someone, either for good or ill. Hamas is still in charge there, and, depending on what polls you read and which people you speak to, is either badly damaged or fully in command. The war either alienated them from the public or powerfully reinforced their leadership. Hamas has either suffered a severe blow or has benefitted immensely from merely surviving the Israeli onslaught. The fact that so basic a question can still be in doubt should make all of us a little more circumspect in our assertions and little less confident in our understanding of this conflict. Fortunately, we have with us today a panel with real expertise in the politics of Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Egypt, to help us understand where the interests of these parties lie, and what equities they most need to protect in coming to grips with the future of Gaza. It is our job to start answering these same questions for ourselves. What is it that we want? How can we achieve it? What has worked and what do we have to do differently? What assumptions have we made that haven’t been borne out in fact? We can start today by learning from our distinguished witnesses.

Journalist Aram Roston on Manas:

A potential logistical setback for the efforts in Afghanistan can perhaps be traced back to a tangled Bush-era alliance that enriched the family of a dictator in Central Asia. The issue is the US air base in Kyrgyzstan. The Manas base, dubbed the Ganci base by the US, is like the Fedex hub through which the US military flies materiel and people to Afghanistan from all around the world.

The mountain nation of Kyrgyzstan has threatened to shut the US base, although it is now softening its rhetoric.

The Kyrgyz decision to close the base has been blamed mainly on Russian influence, but at the heart of the disagreement is actually money, as the Kyrgyz government has repeatedly made clear. The impoverished Kyrgyz government, which took over after the toppling of President Askar Akaev in 2005, has been complaining since 2006 about the base deal.

When I was at NBC News in 2006, we reported on allegations that American military officials steered more than $100 million in sub-contracts to the Akaev family, while Akaev was in office. ...

Foreign Policy: Conflicts over conflicts of interest:

In recent days, as former Raytheon lobbyist William J. Lynn was successfully overcoming objections to his Senate confirmation to be deputy secretary of defense, civil society groups in Washington were expressing concern that some of their activists were being unfairly barred from appointments in the Obama administration without a waiver.

Among those affected, they say, is Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. Sources affiliated with human rights and democracy promotion NGOs in Washington said Malinowski, a former Clinton-era NSC official, was a strong candidate for an administration position, including to head the State Department's Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Bureau, but that because he had registered as a lobbyist in order to advocate for Human Rights Watch, he would need a waiver to be offered one.

"Malinowski should be a shoe-in for DRL but since he ‘lobbied' for HRW he appears to be out of the running," said one Washington pro-democracy activist on condition of anonymity. "Seems to be a silly application of a rule that's supposed to apply to big money influence peddlers, not those trying to help human rights activists." [...]

The problem, sources in the civil society community say, is that the blanket ban doesn't distinguish between industry and public interest advocates. What's more, sources who have worked in government and in the lobbying world add, the ban punishes those who have complied with the rules to register under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, which they say is vaguely defined and poorly enforced. Meantime, they say, it gives a pass to those whose activities could be construed as lobbying, but who haven't formally registered. Nor does it effectively avoid the real culprit, those who would use government positions to financially benefit themselves, former or future employers, or industry.

"The way they give the waiver is capricious," says a former Hill Democratic staffer. "Some people who registered to lobby for perfectly good organizations -- such as for public hospitals -- are not allowed to work in the administration, while super lobbyists who simply didn't register are allowed to skip away."

The Atlantic Council's Shuja Nawaz: Is Islamabad next?

MJ Rosenberg on Israel's elections. His group, the Israel Policy Forum, which supports a two state solution, has a new blog.

Wired's Noah Shachtman: who will be the next Darpa chief?

The Left Coaster's eRiposte on US gov Afghanistan-Pakistan policy reviews. More from Spencer Ackerman.

WP:

A senior Department of Homeland Security official in charge of weapons of mass destruction intelligence programs set off alarms Friday in downtown Washington after potentially violating security protocols by receiving white powder and a dead fish in the mail at home and bringing the package to work, sources said.

The FBI is investigating the incident, and Maureen McCarthy, a career official in the department's intelligence and analysis directorate, continues to work, DHS spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said.

NYT: Senate approves Stimulus.

Marc Lynch on watching al Jazeera on the Israeli elections.

Christian Brose on Larijani in Munich.

Philip Zelikow on the real winner of Iraq's elections:

...1. Maliki did well, but not as well as the U.S. press makes it seem. His party's best numbers, in Baghdad, were 38%. In general his party has about 10-20% support.

2. The big winner was fragmentation. From a familiar set of party blocs we have been following for years, the political landscape is morphing into a fresh variety of factions and leaders. The United Iraqi Alliance bloc is disintegrating. The Sunni parties are more powerful, but they are much more fractured. Again, today, they could not agree on a new speaker for Iraq's parliament.

3. There was a spectacular loser: ISCI (formerly SCIRI). This was the dominant Shi'a party, the most powerful in Iraq. It appears to be irretrievably shattered. In Baghdad in 2005 it won 54.9 percent of the vote; it now won 5.4 percent. In Basra ISCI had 48.7 percent in 2005, now it won 11.6 percent. ISCI is tarred as a religious party, linked to Iran (highly unpopular), with a more rural, less educated base. The big cities are voting for Iraqi nationalism and centralism.

4. Incidentally, this means that Maliki's old party, Dawa, is molting its old shell and becoming the new "state of law" party, standing for nationalism, central power, and modern services. If this evokes memories of other Arab national socialist movements of the past ... yup.

5. Iran is another loser. Though the Iranians have a large and highly diversified portfolio of investments in Iraqi politics (and not just money), the results for ISCI send a message. Iran is especially interested in the future of Basra, not just Baghdad. So the Basra results are especially interesting for Iran. Maliki -- credited with cleaning out the plague of Iran-sponsored militias there -- did especially well there. The current provincial leaders, separatist and corrupt, are being shown the door.

6. Al Qaeda lost too. Sunni Arab nationalists who hate America may think they can find enough autonomy or common cause with the new Iraq that is taking shape. Violent insurgencies and criminal groups may focus even more on power struggles closer to home.

7. And the Kurds may turn out to be the biggest losers of all. Their old political strategy of allying with ISCI for an agenda of regional autonomy no longer seems viable. The regional agenda may look better in coming months, but ISCI looks like a broken partner. The Kurds' other major patron, the United States government, has diminishing political influence. ...

Just out from Foreign Policy: James L. Jones and the committee to run the world:

National security experts interviewed said a more powerful and integrative NSC makes sense given the more complex security challenges the United States confronts. But some said the reason such lines of authority have been blurred and crossed in the past and the NSC has been a relatively weak institution are equally complex, having to do with the style and preferences of the president, the personal and professional relationships among players that bypass sanctioned inter-agency lines, and the fact that in the U.S. government, power and influence reside largely in the departments and agencies, with large number of personnel and resources and connections to their Congressional committees. [...]

Sources said that differences between on-paper and in-practice lines of authority had also emerged in recently publicized stories about appointment selections, including that of former Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, who said Jones offered him and then rescinded the Iraq ambassador job. They described a "hidden hand" and "black box" of White House decision-making that suggested other forces prevailing in the process. ...

ABC: FBI raids defense lobbying firm connected to Murtha. The PMA group, "founded by former Murtha aide Paul Magliochetti ...is the second company with close ties to Murtha to be raided by federal agents recently."

Reuters: "Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has requested to interview a U.S. diplomat and be given access to documents he says prove he was offered immunity to war crimes charges at the U.N. Yugoslavia tribunal. Court documents showed on Monday Karadzic is seeking access to U.S. government documents he says detail promises about his arrest or prosecution made by former U.S. peace envoy Richard Holbrooke during meetings held in July 1996 with the then Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade."

NYT's Scott Shane: "Army officials have suspended most research involving dangerous germs at the biodefense laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., which the F.B.I. has linked to the anthrax attacks of 2001, after discovering that some pathogens stored there were not listed in a laboratory database."

Wired's Noah Shachtman: Darpa chief Tony Tether departs.

SFRC's Puneet Talwar to NSC.

Out from Foreign Policy: The back story to the Kyrgyz base closure threats:

A source involved with the negotiations for the Kyrgyz side told The Cable that the Obama administration was inheriting the brewing Kyrgyz base crisis, which he said had been neglected for years by the Bush administration.

"The U.S. government could have avoided this if they would have been receptive to Kyrgyz complaints," said the source. "When the new government came into power [in Bishkek] and the [payoff] scheme was uncovered, they approached the Americans and asked them to compensate it for the losses. But the Americans were reluctant to acknowledge that there was anything wrong." ...

The source said the Kyrgyz ambassador to Washington had held a meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the issue last week. He suggested that several options were being considered, that would be "face saving" for all parties involved. Among them, perhaps, that the United States could announce that it would plan to depart the base after a certain number of years. Presumably some form of payment is also being considered. (Sources said the Kyrgyz had previously been requesting $150 million per year for use of the base, but the cost for staying was expected to go up.)

And Azerbaijani reporters denied access to Plouffe speech to pro-government front group in Baku today. Among them the reporter for the US government-funded Radio Liberty who broke the story Friday of Obama's campaign manager's visit to Azerbaijan.

Newsweek's Mahiar Bazari and Christopher Dickey: America's old Iran hands on how and whether to talk to Tehran.

Given the generally non-hardliner credentials and deep Iran experience/expertise of those interviewed, notable that their recommendations are so modest.

Tom Ricks in the Post: The dissenter who changed the war:

...If Petraeus, now the head of U.S. Central Command, was the public face of the troop buildup, he was only its adoptive parent. It was Odierno, since September the U.S. commander in Iraq, who was the surge's true father.

In arguing for an increase in U.S. forces in Iraq, Odierno went up against the collective powers at the top of the military establishment. As late as December 2006, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was privately telling his colleagues that he didn't see that 160,000 U.S. troops in Iraq could do anything that 140,000 weren't doing. The month before, Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, then head of Central Command, told a Senate hearing that he and every general he had asked opposed sending more U.S. forces to Iraq. "I do not believe that more American troops right now is the solution to the problem," Abizaid emphasized.

This account of the military's internal struggle over the direction of the Iraq war is based on dozens of interviews with Odierno, Petraeus and other U.S. officials conducted in 2007 and 2008. In many cases, the interviews were embargoed for use until 2009.

Odierno's role has not been previously reported, and he remains a controversial figure because of his first tour in Iraq, when the tactics he employed violated many of the counterinsurgency principles he would later embrace. ...

Sunday VP pool report by Politico's David Cloud, Russia/Georgia:

The VP held separate bilateral meetings Sunday morning with President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia followed by Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov. The pool was brought at the top of the meeting with Saakashvili. VP was asked whether still supported Georgia's eventual entry into NATO. "I'm in favor of Georgia's continued independence and autonomy. That's a decision for Georgia to make." No other questions were taken.

Nearly an hour later, the pool was again summoned at the beginning of the VP's meeting with Ivanov. Asked his response to VP's comments on missile defense a day earlier, Ivanov replied: "Very positive." In what way? "Restaring the button," Ivnov replied, apparently referring to Biden's call to "reset the button" in U.S.-Russia relations in his speech to the Munich Security Conference on Saturday. Deputy Secretary of State Jim Steinberg was also present for the meeting. Whereupon the pool was ushered from the room.

WP: AQ Khan freed from house arrest. "Jeffrey G. Lewis, director of the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative at the New America Foundation, said Khan's ability to essentially walk away from nuclear-smuggling charges 'makes a mockery of our efforts to stop the spread' of nuclear weapons. 'In a spy novel, these guys would meet their fates at the murderous hands of spy agencies or each other,' he said. 'In real life, the guys in the Khan network do a little house arrest or maybe some pretrial detention.'"

WP's Karen DeYoung: Obama's NSC Will Get New Power. "Jones, a retired Marine general, made it clear that he will run the process and be the primary conduit of national security advice to Obama, eliminating the 'back channels' that at times in the Bush administration allowed Cabinet secretaries and the vice president's office to unilaterally influence and make policy out of view of the others."

NYT: Biden Signals U.S. Is Open to Deal With Russia on Missiles. "Some Western diplomats had expected Mr. Biden to announce a strategic review of the planned missile defense system as a way to defuse tensions between Washington and Moscow. Although Mr. Biden did not go that far, he did leave room in both the speech — and an interview afterward — for unspecified changes in the plan put forward by the Bush administration. ... Foreign policy experts said that the Obama administration was most likely averse to making any outright concessions on the antimissile system just days after the Kyrgyz announcement, fearing it could be interpreted as a sign of weakness. ... The Russian reaction to Saturday’s speech was quick, and favorable. ... Mr. Biden’s remarks came a day after Deputy Prime Minister Sergei B. Ivanov told the same group that Moscow would not deploy missiles on the Polish border if the United States reviewed its missile defense plan."

Veep Pool report from Munich security conference by Politico's David Cloud:

Highlights of VP's address to the Munich Security Conference: As Biden walked on stage, the jam-packed hall broke into spontaneous applause. (Transcript of address to be released by White House.) The yellow-painted hall is relatively small, with three tiers of balconies. The crow was probably 300-400 or so. Among those in the crowd was General David Petraeus, in a suit scribbling notes while VP spoke. Also in the crowd Henry Kissinger, National Security Adviser Jones, French President Sarkozy, German Chancellor Merkel. Ali Laridjani, the speaker of the Iranian parliament is attending the conference, but it could not be determined if he was in the conference hall during Biden's 25-minute speech. The speech was not interrupted by applause while the VP was speaking but got a warm response when it was over. The VP took no questions and went almost immediately into a meeting with Ukraine Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg sat next to Biden. As the pool was ushered in, the VP was already in mid-sentence. "It does," he said. Not clear what he was talking about. Tymoshenko said, apparently referring to Ukraine's relationship with the US and the West: "I do believe that we will continue our strategic cooperation, which we've had for many years now, and I believe it will get even stronger." At that point the pool was ushered out. A little after 3 pm, the VP went into a meeting with French President Sarkozy. The crush of reporters and hangers-on was so great that your pooler only made it to the threshold of the room before the pool was ushered out. No audible words were spoken by any of the principals.

I come to Europe on behalf of a new administration, and an administration that's determined to set a new tone not only in Washington, but in America's relations around the world. That new tone is rooted in a strong bipartisanship to meet these common challenges. And we recognize that these challenges, the need to meet them, is not an opportunity -- not a luxury, but it's an absolute necessity. While every new beginning is a moment of hope, this moment -- for America and the countries represented in this room -- it is fraught with some considerable concern and peril.

In this moment, our obligation to our fellow citizens is to -- in our view -- put aside the petty and political notion that -- to reject the zero sum mentalities and rigid ideologies, and to listen to and learn from one another, and to work together for a common prosperity and security of all of us assembled in this room. That's what, in our view, this moment demands. And that's what this new administration is determined to do.

For 45 years, this conference has brought together Americans and Europeans -- and, in recent years, leaders from beyond the Transatlantic community -- to think through matters of our physical security. But this year, more than ever before, we know that our physical security and our economic security are indivisible. We are all confronting a serious threat to our economic security that could further spread instability and erode the progress we've made in improving the lives of all our citizens.

In the United States -- like many of you -- we're taking aggressive action to stabilize our financial systems, to jumpstart our economy, and, hopefully, lay a new foundation for growth in the 21st century. Working with the Congress, we'll make strategic investments that create and save we believe 3 to 4 million jobs, and in the process, boost our competitiveness in the long run.

Our plan includes doubling the production of alternative energy over the next three years; computerizing our citizens' medical records to drive down cost; equipping tens of thousands of our schools and colleges with 21st century classrooms, laboratories and libraries; expanding the broadband across America; and investing once again in science, research, technology -- all the things that spur innovation. We're looking -- we're also working to stabilize our financial institutions by injecting considerable amounts of capital, purchasing some assets and guaranteeing others. These remedies are going to have an impact, as you all know, far beyond our shores, just as the measures all of you are taking will be felt beyond your borders, as well.

And because of that, to the greatest extent possible, we're going to have to cooperate to make sure that our actions are complementary, and to do our utmost to combat this global crisis. The United States is trying to do its part. And President Obama looks forward to taking our message to the G20 meeting in London in April.

And even as we grapple with an economic crisis, we're also -- have to contend with a war in Afghanistan now in its eighth year, and a war in Iraq well into its sixth year. And we have to recognize, as mentioned by both the Chancellor and President Sarkozy earlier today, that there are other forces that are shaping this new century: The spread of weapons of mass destruction and dangerous diseases, endemic disease; a growing gap between the rich and poor; ethnic animosity in failed states; and a rapidly warming planet and uncertain supplies of energy, food, water. The challenges to freedom and security from radical fundamentalism must be added to that list, as well.

In meeting these challenges, the United States will be guided by this principle –- and the principle is: There is no conflict between our security and our ideals. We believe they are mutually reinforcing.

The force of arms won our independence, and throughout our history the force of arms has protected our freedom. That will not change. But the very moment we declared our war of independence, at that moment we laid out to the world the values behind our revolution and the conviction that our policies must be informed, as we said at the time, by a "decent respect for the opinions of mankind."

Our Founders understood then, and the United States believes now, that the example of our power must be matched by the power of our example. And that is why our administration rejects a false choice between our safety and our ideals. America will vigorously defend our security and our values, and in doing so we believe we’ll all be more secure.

As hard as we try, I know -- I know -- that we’re likely to fall short of our ideals in the future, just as we have in the past. But I commit to you, this administration will strive every day -- every day -- to honor the values that animate American democracy and, I might add, that bind us to all of you in this room.

America will not torture. We will uphold the rights of those who we bring to justice. And we will close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.

But tough choices lie ahead. As we seek a lasting framework for our common struggle against extremism, we’ll have to work cooperatively with nations around the world -- and we’ll need your help. We’ll need your help. For example, we will ask others to take responsibility for some of those now in Guantanamo, as we determine to close it. Our security is shared. And so, too, I respectfully suggest, is our responsibility to defend it.

That’s the basis upon which we want to build a new approach to the challenges of this century. America will do more, but America will -- that’s the good news. The bad news is America will ask for more from our partners, as well.

Here’s what we’ll do, and what we hope our partners will consider. First, we’ll work in a partnership whenever we can, and alone only when we must. The threats we face have no respect for borders. No single country, no matter how powerful, can best meet these threats alone. We believe international alliances and organizations do not diminish America's power -- we believe they help advance our collective security, economic interests and our values.

So we’ll engage. We’ll listen. We’ll consult. America needs the world, just as I believe the world needs America. But we say to our friends that the alliances, treaties and international organizations we build must be credible and they must be effective. That requires a common commitment not only to listen and live by the rules, but to enforce the rules when they are, in fact, clearly violated.

Such a bargain is the bargain we seek. Such a bargain can be at the heart of our collective efforts to convince Iran, for example, to forego the development of nuclear weapons. The Iranian people are a great people; the Persian civilization is a great civilization. But Iran has acted in ways that are not conducive to peace in the region or to the prosperity of its own people. Its illicit nuclear program is but one of those manifestations.

Our administration is reviewing our policy toward Iran, but this much is clear: We will be willing to talk. We’ll be willing to talk to Iran and to offer a very clear choice: Continue down the current course and there will be continued pressure and isolation; abandon the illicit nuclear program and your support for terrorism, and there will be meaningful incentives.

Second, we’ll strive to act preventively, not preemptively, to avoid whenever possible, or wherever possible the choice of last resort between the risks of war and the dangers of inaction. We’ll draw upon all the elements of our power -- military and diplomatic, intelligence and law enforcement, economic and cultural -- to stop crises from occurring before they are in front of us. In short, we're going to attempt to recapture the totality of America's strength, starting with diplomacy.

On his second full day in office, President Obama, went to our State Department, where he stressed the centrality of diplomacy in our national security. The commitment can be seen in his appointments, starting with the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. It can be seen in the President's decision to name two of America's most tenacious diplomats -- Senator George Mitchell and Ambassador Richard Holbrooke -- to contend with two of the world's most urgent and vexing and complex challenges: the need for a secure, just, and lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians, and the imperative of stopping the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan from providing a haven for terrorists.

In both these efforts, America seeks your partnership.

Senator Mitchell just completed his first trip to the Middle East. Above all, he went to listen. In the near term, we must consolidate the cease-fire in Gaza by working with Egypt and others to stop smuggling, and developing an international relief and reconstruction effort that strengthens the Palestinian Authority, and not Hamas. Neither of these goals can be accomplished without close collaboration among the United States, Europe, and our Arab partners.

Then, we must lay the foundation for a broader peacemaking effort. In the past -- well, look at it this way -- it's long time passed for us to secure a just, two-state solution. We will work to achieve it. And we'll work to defeat extremists who perpetuate the conflict. And in building on positive elements of the Arab Peace Initiative put forward by Saudi Arabia, we'll work toward a broader regional peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors, and we'll responsibly draw down our forces that are in Iraq in the process.

The United States will continue to work for a stable Afghanistan that's not a haven for terrorists. We look forward -- we look forward to sharing that commitment with the government and the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and with all of our allies and partners, because a deteriorating situation in the region poses a security threat not just to the United States, but I would suggest somewhat presumptuously, to every one of you assembled in this room.

President Obama has ordered a strategic review of our policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan to make sure that our goals are clear, and that they are achievable. As we undertake that review, we seek ideas and input from you and all of our partners. And we genuinely seek those ideas. I've already had bilateral meetings. I'll have the opportunity to meet with the President of France and others this afternoon. I had an opportunity to meet with the Chancellor this morning. We are sincere in seeking your counsel.

As we undertake this review, there's a lot at stake. The result must be a comprehensive strategy for which we all take responsibility -- that brings together our civilian and military resources, that prevents terrorists a safe haven, that helps the Afghan people develop the capacity to secure their own future. But no strategy for Afghanistan, in my humble opinion, can succeed without Pakistan. We must all strengthen our cooperation with the people and government of Pakistan, help them stabilize their Tribal Areas, promote economic development and opportunity throughout their country. In the case of my government, we feel it's urgent to move from a relationship that was transactional to one that is based upon a long-term relationship.

Thirdly, America will extend a hand to those who, as the President said, will unclench their fist. The United States of America does not believe, our administration does not believe, in a clash of civilizations; there is nothing inevitable about that. We do see a shared struggle against extremism -- and we'll do everything in our collective power to help the forces of tolerance prevail.

In the Muslim world, a small -- and I believe a very small -- number of violent extremists are beyond the call of reason. We will, and we must, defeat them. But hundreds of millions of hearts and minds in the Muslim world share the values we hold dearly. We must reach them. President Obama has made clear that he will seek a new way forward based on mutual interest and mutual respect. It was not an accident that he gave his very first interview as President of the United States to Al Arabiya. That was not an accident.

To meet the challenges of this new century, defense and diplomacy are necessary. But quite frankly, ladies and gentlemen, they are not sufficient. We also need to wield development and democracy, two of the most powerful weapons in our collective arsenals. Poor societies and dysfunctional states, as you know as well as I do, can become breeding grounds for extremism, conflict and disease. Non-democratic nations frustrate the rightful aspirations of their citizens and fuel resentment.

Our administration has set an ambitious goal to increase foreign assistance, to cut extreme poverty in half by 2015, to help eliminate the global educational deficit, and to cancel the debt of the world's poorest countries; to launch a new Green Revolution that produces sustainable supplies of food, and to advance democracy not through the imposition of force from the outside, but by working with moderates in government and civil society to build those institutions that will protect that freedom -– quite frankly, the only thing that will guarantee that freedom.

We also are determined to build a sustainable future for our planet. We are prepared to once again begin to lead by example. America will act aggressively against climate change and in pursuit of energy security with like-minded nations.

Our administration's economic stimulus package, for example, includes long-term investments in renewable energy. And we believe that’s merely a down payment. The President has directed our Environmental Protection Agency to review how we regulate emissions, start a process to raise fuel efficiency, appoint a climate envoy -- and all in his first week in office, to demonstrate his commitment.

As America renews our emphasis on diplomacy, development and democracy, and preserving our planet, we will ask our allies to rethink some of their own approaches -- including their willingness to use force when all else fails.

When it comes to radical groups that use terror as a tool, radical states who harbor extremists, undermine peace and seek or spread weapons of mass destruction, and regimes that systematically kill or ethnically cleanse their own people, we must stand united and use every means at our disposal to end the threat that they pose.

None of us can deny or escape the new threats of the 21st century. Nor can we escape the responsibility to meet them.

And we are not unmindful in the United States how difficult it is to communicate these notions to our public who don’t want to hear much of what needs to be said.

Two months from now, the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization will gather to celebrate the 60th year of this Alliance. This Alliance has been the cornerstone of our common security since the end of World War II. It has anchored the United States in Europe and helped forge a Europe whole and free. Together we made a pact, a pact to safeguard the freedom of our people founded on the principles and the documents referring to democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law. We made a commitment to cooperate, to consult, to act with resolve when the principles we defended are challenged.

There is much to celebrate. But we there’s much more to be done. We must recommit our shared security and renew NATO, so that its success in the 20th century is matched in the 21st century.

NATO's core purpose remains the collective defense of its members. But faced with new threats, new realities, we need a new resolve to meet them and new capabilities to succeed. Our Alliance must be better equipped to help stop the spread of the world's most dangerous weapons, to tackle terrorism and cyber-security, to expand the writ of energy security, and to act in and out of area more effectively. We continue to develop -- we will continue to develop missile defense to counter the growing Iranian capability, provided the technology is proven and it is cost-effective. We'll do so in consultation with you, our NATO allies, and with Russia.

As we embark on this renewal project -- as we like to think of it -- the United States, like other allies, would warmly welcome, and we do warmly welcome, the decision by France to fully cooperate in NATO structures. That's the main reason the President got our speech. (Laughter.) You were supposed to say nicer things about me when you got the speech, Mr. President. (Laugher.) That's a joke. (Laughter.)

In a recent discussion with President Sarkozy, President Obama underscored his strong support for France's full participation in NATO, should France wish it. France is a founding member of NATO and a major contributor to its operation. We would expect France's new responsibilities to reflect the significance of its contributions throughout NATO's history, and to strengthen the European role within the Alliance.

We also support the further strengthening of European defense, an increased role for the European Union in preserving peace and security, a fundamentally stronger NATO-EU partnership, and a deeper cooperation with countries outside the Alliance who share our common goals and principles.

The United States rejects the notion that NATO's gain is Russia's loss, or that Russia's strength is NATO's weakness. The last few years have seen a dangerous drift in relations between Russia and the members of our Alliance. It is time -- to paraphrase President Obama -- it's time to press the reset button and to revisit the many areas where we can and should be working together with Russia.

Our Russian colleagues long ago warned about the rising threat of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Today, NATO and Russia can, and should, cooperate to defeat this common enemy. We can and should cooperate to secure loose nuclear weapons and materials to prevent their spread, to renew the verification procedures in the START Treaty, and then go beyond existing treaties to negotiate deeper cuts in both our arsenals. The United States and Russia have a special obligation to lead the international effort to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world.

We will not agree with Russia on everything. For example, the United States will not -- will not recognize Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states. We will not recognize any nation having a sphere of influence. It will remain our view that sovereign states have the right to make their own decisions and choose their own alliances. But the United States and Russia can disagree and still work together where our interests coincide. And they coincide in many places.

This conference started in the shadow of the Cold War. Now it takes place in a new century with new threats. As one great poet, an Irish poet, once wrote about another circumstance, he said: "All is changed, changed utterly: a terrible beauty has been born." Well, all changed, changed utterly. And we must change, too, while remaining true to the principles upon which this Alliance was founded. And we must have the common courage and commitment of those who came before us to work together, to build together, to stand together. In sharing ideals and searching for partners in a more complex world, America and Europeans still look to one another before they look to anyone else. Our partnership has benefitted us all. It's time -- it's time to renew it. And President Obama and I look forward to doing just that.

Thank you for your indulgence. (Applause.)

Newsweek's Mark Hosenball: Why you shouldn't worry (too much) about Iran's rocket launch.

Panetta's muscle. The Hill intel reporters who got strong-armed and witnessed this are not exactly overly aggressive or threatening. A press huddle after a public Congressional hearing? By the Hill press veterans who cover this stuff every day? That is not exactly jumping the White House fence. Who was this guy? Private security, colleagues disturbed by the incident suggest. But hired and employed by whom? More amateur hour?

NYT: Fallujah's western tourist. Really:

Asked if he thought Iraq was ready for tourists, Mr. Yacoub said, “No.” When he was asked if he believed Falluja was safe for tourists, his emphatic “no” was echoed by staff members and guests standing within earshot.

But there was no stopping Mr. Marchio. For an extra $40, the hotel gave him a tour of Baghdad sights, driving him along the riverfront, where he could photograph a statue of Scheherazade, the narrator of “The Thousand and One Nights,” and see children playing in a riverside garden. He proceeded to the artificial lake near Baghdad University and then to the square named after Baghdad’s founder, Abu Jaafar al-Mansur, on the west bank of the Tigris.

He went on to Zawra’a Park, a family spot with a small zoo and rides. He finished his day in the affluent but bomb-scarred shopping district of Karada, where his guide for the day, Ramez Fa’eq, 23, said, “When it became dark, he got afraid and wanted to return home to the hotel.”

The next morning he set out for Falluja despite the hotel staff’s efforts to dissuade him, insisting on taking a public bus to the city, 40 miles west of Baghdad.

Within hours, the hotel staff received a call from the Falluja police. “I wasn’t surprised when they called,” Mr. Yacoub said. The police told him that they had found Mr. Marchio in a minibus next to a woman who sold fresh milk, yogurt and cream door to door. “They were very worried about him,” Mr. Yacoub said.

For the eager Mr. Marchio, that was the end of his bella viaggio in Iraq. ...

Hussein Ibish writes on the "Obama administration and the unavoidable issue of Palestine."

Tom Ricks: "Over the last six months, 11 of al Qaeda's top leaders living along the Afghan-Pakistani border have been killed by drone airstrikes. During that same time, security in southern and eastern Afghanistan deteriorated. ..."

Good CJR piece by Kathy Gilsinan on the new Foreign Policy shop.

Foreign Policy: Zinni appointment fracas: what went wrong?

A day after retired Gen. Anthony Zinni publicly voiced his frustration at the handling of what he thought was an impending appointment to become the next U.S. ambassador to Iraq, several Democratic insiders close to the Obama foreign-policy team told The Cable that they consider the Zinni affair a case study in a troubled hiring system.

"The appointment process is a disaster," said a Washington Democratic foreign-policy hand. Zinni's experience "is a reminder of how fragile the [new setup] is. There should be a level of anxiety that a senior public servant shouldn't be treated this way." ...

But what really happened to Zinni remains something of a mystery. ...

There may indeed have been good reasons for the Obama administration not to have nominate Zinni. Sources outside of the administration suggested among them: the fact that it had reportedly chosen another general, Karl Eikenberry, to serve as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, and worries about the optics of putting too military a face on American foreign policy; pressure from the Foreign Service to give the prominent diplomatic post to someone from their ranks; and possible concern, given how several recent cabinet nominations have run into trouble, about Zinni's previous role as a top executive with defense contractor Dyncorp, which does hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business in Iraq.

But if those concerns influenced the administration's decision, it is not effectively making such a case. [...]

In its brief comments on the matter, the Obama White House has sought to control damage from Zinni's frank comments and smooth over any bruised feelings. ...

But it has offered very few explanations for its appointments process -- seeking, it seems, to keep the national security decision-making process a mysterious black box. ...

Obama's senior aides defend the foreign policy transition, which they point out is taking place amid two wars and a climate of crisis. Obama has filled top jobs with unprecedented speed. The transition occurred without—as had been feared—any foreign attempt to take advantage of an interregnum. The actual choices to fill the most senior positions—Secretaries Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton, National Security Advisor James Jones, Special Envoys George Mitchell and Richard Holbrooke—are large figures who have drawn loud bipartisan acclaim, and Obama sent an envoy to the Middle East with unexpected speed, and is deep into consideration of a new policy in Afghanistan.

Yet on the lower levels of the transition, many among the army of Democratic foreign policy hands who labored for Obama's campaign say they have heard little since election day. Lawrence Korb, a top Reagan Defense Department official and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who headed Obama's defense policy team during the campaign, sent his aides a memo soon after the election.

"I said, 'These are the people who really work and they should be involved in the transition and the administration,'" he recalled. "I never heard anything and neither did they."

"I don't know who's doing what, who's in charge," Korb said.

When the vice president, the secretary of state and the national security adviser all say you have been tapped to be the next United States ambassador to Iraq, odds are it’s a done deal, right?

Apparently not in the Obama administration.

Having read your excellent article and the comments following, one significant point has been missed by the comment makers. Jones and Zinni are Marines, we are a special breed of the same cloth and that relationship is one that every Marine on every battlefield has created. As such it rests solely on the Back of Gen Jones to have had the "Marine" courtesy to let Zinni know of the changes that were occuring. Because a change of heart had occurred is not the issue. What set Zinni off was Jones' silence. Not acceptable among Marines, good news or Bad, Marines take care of their fellow Marines.

Reuters: US diplomat killed in Ethiopian capital.

Spencer Ackerman: A Guide to Panetta’s Confirmation Hearing.

Portfolio's Gary Weiss: "A bombshell is buried in Harry Markopolos' prepared testimony to a House panel today: he contacted the Wall Street Journal on the Bernie Madoff fraud three years ago, and the newspaper did nothing." Update: Steiger doesn't remember any such tip.

David Ignatius: "Whom should President Obama appoint as his emissary to Iran, to take on what may be the most important diplomatic mission in decades? ... My nominees are Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, former national security advisers for Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, respectively. They would elevate the Iran mission, connecting it to the tradition of bipartisan strategic thinking that shaped America's role in the modern world. ... The two former national security advisers talked hopefully about engaging Tehran. But they are hardly of the gee-whiz school of foreign policy. ... The advantage of sending these two distinguished senior statesmen is that they would make it harder for the Iranians to play political games. ..." Via SmallWarsJournal.

Madoff's victims.

Murray Waas at TPM: Feds Probe Domenici for Obstruction of Justice In Iglesias Firing.

Gen. Zinni unloads to me:

"Jones had called me before the inauguration and asked if I would be willing to serve as ambassador to Iraq or in one of the envoy jobs, on the Middle East peace process," Zinni told Foreign Policy. "I said yes."

"Then two weeks ago, Jones called," Zinni continued, "and said, ‘We talked to the secretary of state, and everybody would like to offer you the Iraq job. I said yes.

"The president called and congratulated me," Zinni said.

Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked for a meeting last Monday night, Zinni said. He said he went to the meeting in her office at the State Department, where Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg and Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Williams Burns were also in attendance.

"She thanks me, asked me my views on Iraq," Zinni recalled. "She said to Burns and Steinberg, ‘We've got to move quickly, Crocker is leaving, we've got to get someone in there and get the paperwork done and hearings... Lots to do to get ready to go."

Zinni said he expected a call from Burns the next day. Not hearing from him, he called him.

"To make a long story short, I kept getting blown off all week," Zinni said. "Meantime, I was rushing to put my personal things in order," to get ready to go.

"Finally, nobody was telling me anything," Zinni said. "I called Jones Monday several times. I finally got through late in evening. I asked Jones, ‘What's going on?' And Jones said, ‘We decided on Chris Hill.'"

"I said, ‘Really,'" Zinni recalled. "That was news to me."

Jones asked him if he would like to be ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Zinni said. "I said, ‘You can stick that with whatever other offers," Zinni recalled, saying he had used more colorful language with Jones. Asked Jones's response and if he was apologetic, Zinni said, "Jones was not too concerned. He laughed about it."

The Washington Times' Barbara Slavin broke the story.

AP: Former Gregg staffer caught in Abramoff ethics probe.

Reuters:

Two senior British judges accused the United States on Wednesday of threatening to end intelligence cooperation with Britain if they published evidence about the alleged torture of a Guantanamo detainee.

Britons could face increased danger if the judges defied the U.S. authorities and released full details in the case of Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian-born British resident who is held in Guantanamo Bay, they said.

Lawyers for British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said the threat had existed for some time and was still in place under President Barack Obama's administration, according to a ruling from High Court judges Lord Justice Thomas and Lord Justice Lloyd Jones.

They quoted the lawyers as saying the U.S. government, by reviewing intelligence cooperation, "could inflict on the citizens of the United Kingdom a very considerable increase in the dangers they face at a time when a serious terrorist threat still pertains."

Mohamed, arrested in Pakistan in April 2002, was accused of training at al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, joining a squad of al Qaeda bomb-makers in Pakistan and plotting to set off a radioactive bomb in the United States. ...

Abu Muqawama on six degrees of Roman Martinez.

More details on HRC's upcoming Asia trip:

A little tickler not reported yet is that [Clinton] will be here 19 February," a Beijing hand tells Foreign Policy. "A day before China's foreign minister Yang Jiachi had been expecting to travel to Washington. Washington hadn't replied to the Chinese request so there were some raised eyebrows here."

Clinton will be on a "Seoul-Tokyo-Beijing and maybe Jakarta inaugural romp," the source added.

The State Department said Tuesday that it didn't have the details yet on Clinton's reported itinerary. An administration source suggested details on the trip would emerge in the next 24 hours. The Chinese embassy was closed for the Chinese New Year's holiday and couldn't be reached. ...

Sec. State Clinton's Asia trip main policy outcome is likely to be whether she can establish herself, and State, as the manager of US-China relations. ....

White House meeting tomorrow (Wed.) set to discuss how to handle the US-China SED, previously run by Treasury...stay tuned.

As so often before, N. Korea seems not content to let the Obama Administration organize itself and think things through on dealing with Pyongyang.

Whether what smells like a coming missile test represents a strategic threat, or just another exclamation point, depends on what missile, aimed where, how far...and why.

Regardless, Obama is being forced to focus on how to bridge the disconnects between US, China, ROK and Japan principal "security" concerns. Everyone worries about nukes, but what really scares China and the ROK is instability on the ground.

So the US must bridge the gap between the "policy" of no NK nuke acceptable, and a "strategy" with a realistic chance to achieve that. IT MAY NOT BE POSSIBLE. ...

Just out from ForeignPolicy: Dinner with Secretary Clinton: Afghanistan on the menu:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will host selected South Asia hands at a dinner tonight (Tuesday) on the topic of Afghanistan at the Secretary's official dining room on the eighth floor of Foggy Bottom, The Cable has learned. About 10 people were invited to the dinner, said one person informed about it (but not going), on condition of anonymity. "Some widely known experts, others less well-known but more likely to have jobs in the new team," a source said. ...

Pro Publica's Eric Umansky: AG Holder Suggests Secret Memos May Be Released. The news outlet compiled more secret memos than previously known here.

Politico:

The Pentagon’s top military officers are recommending to President Barack Obama that he shift U.S. strategy in Afghanistan — to focus on ensuring regional stability and eliminating Taliban and al-Qaida safe havens in Pakistan, rather than on achieving lasting democracy and a thriving Afghan economy, officials said.

The recommendations to narrow U.S. goals are contained in a classified report by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that is likely to be shown soon to Obama as part of a review of Afghanistan strategy announced by the new administration.

Journalist Jason Vest in World Politics Review: "The Recent Past and Future of Intelligence Politicization."

From Foreign Policy:

Gary Samore, the former Clinton NSC nonproliferation hand who has been tapped by the Obama White House to serve as the new U.S. government-wide coordinator on the prevention of WMD terrorism and proliferation, has told The Cable that he attended one meeting of a high-level, track-two dialogue on Iran's nuclear program that was conducted on an unofficial basis in Europe this past year.

As The Cable reported Thursday, the track-two meetings between former U.S. officials, including Samore and former Defense Secretary William J. Perry, and current Iranian officials, including Iranian ambassador to the IAEA Ali Asghar Soltanieh, were convened by the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, and were comprised of four meetings over the past year in Europe, three in The Hague and one in Vienna.

"Just to set the record straight, I now remember that I did attend one of the Pugwash meetings with Iran, I think it was last year in The Hague," Samore said. "As I understand the ground rules, we're not supposed to disclose who was there or what was said."

In the absence of normal diplomatic relations, unofficial meetings between Iranian and U.S. figures, often conducted with a degree of secrecy, can take on a sense of magnified, even distorted importance. Public reports on the Pugwash meetings appear to have led Iranian officials to deny that "back channel" official dialogue with the Untied States was underway. ...

WP:

Gunmen in southern Pakistan kidnapped an American United Nations official and fatally shot his driver Monday, the latest in a recent series of high-profile kidnappings and targeted hits on foreigners.

Pakistani police in the southern city of Quetta said an unknown number of gunmen ambushed the car of John Solecki, the chief of the U.N. refugee office in the province of Baluchistan, around 8:30 a.m., soon after he left home for his office. The car's driver, Hashim Raza, was killed almost instantly after the gunmen opened fire on the vehicle, said Khalid Masood, a senior police official in Quetta.

It was unclear early Monday whether Solecki was wounded in the incident.

Few details were immediately available about Solecki, but Pakistani authorities said he is an American citizen who has worked in Quetta for about two years at the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

Newsweek on CIA Algeria station chief accused of rapes.

Mike Allen:

...--The line to greet the President at the head table at the Capital Hilton was a breach of Alfalfa protocol, but was the latest reflection of the new President’s star power. Even Fred Malek, the McCain’s campaign’s national finance chairman, joined the queue. The well-wishers KEPT BUMPING THE CHAIR OF SENATOR McCAIN, who was on the floor, two seats away from the head table. ...

--Chief Justice Roberts absolved himself of the botched oath-giving by offering to swear in Alfalfa’s new president, then doing so WITH GIANT CUE CARDS.

--From excerpts of the President’s remarks released by the White House: “This dinner began almost one hundred years ago as a way to celebrate the birthday of General Robert E. Lee. If he were here with us tonight, the General would be 202 years old -- and very confused. … Now, this hasn’t been reported yet, but it was actually Rahm’s idea to do the swearing-in ceremony again. Of course, for Rahm, EVERY day is a swearing-in ceremony. But don't believe what you read. Rahm Emanuel is a real sweetheart. No, it's true. Every week the guy takes a little time away to give back to the community. Just last week he was at a local school, teaching profanity to poor children.”

--The President’s great unreleased lines: “I’m a casual admirer of Abraham Lincoln. … [He should have seen] my inaugural: He never drew crowds like that. … [To Senator Lieberman] No hard feelings because of the election. My door is always open. Feel free to drop by ANY SATURDAY AFTERNOON. … [To Gov. Palin] I never expected you to be PALLING AROUND with THIS crowd. I want to congratulate you on your Golden Globe for ‘30 Rock.’ …. [To Vernon Jordan] Just because a guy can give great speeches doesn’t mean he’s going to be a great president. … I see Chief Justice Roberts is here to administer my daily oath of office. … [On the similarity between Cheney and Biden] Dick Cheney is a man of few words. Joe Biden is also vice president. … [On the delay in getting a dog] The labradoodle we picked has some problems with back taxes. … [On ‘a better way for our time’ than blaming each other and passing the buck] I ask you to summon that spirit once more, and make future generations proud of what we did WHEN WE WERE TESTED BY HISTORY.” ...

--Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), the new Alfalfa president: “ ....If our president didn't know then, he sure does now: Joe Biden is the reason Amtrak invented the quiet car." ...