Lost in the Desert - By James Traub

In recent days, I've been talking to officials in the Obama administration about what they think they're doing in Egypt. Even as Obama hesitates to thrust the United States into the rolling cauldron that is Syria, critics accuse him of coddling a dictator in Cairo. Congressional Republicans like Marco Rubio accuse the administration of cutting a $250 million blank check to Mohammed Morsy's authoritarian, Islamist regime. Analysts with no axe to grind, like Michael Walid Hanna of the Century Foundation or Peter Juul of the Center for American Progress, make the more nuanced argument that the administration has rewarded Morsy for his compliance on American national security goals, just as his predecessors did with Hosni Mubarak.

Is that fair? Obama does, after all, deserve credit for openly accepting the Egyptian people's choice of an Islamist government after long years when Washington viewed any partnership with Islamists as beyond the pale. But it is also true that the administration has under-reacted as Morsy made himself immune from judicial oversight, rammed through an illiberal constitution, and showed contempt for his opponents. And while it's impossible to prove, Morsy may well have felt that this strategic silence gave him carte blanche to continue down his path of majoritarian autocracy. Obama has not wanted to rock Morsy's very fragile boat. One figure who left the administration after the first term conceded that "We are not raising our voice," and added, that "there hasn't been enough attention to supporting those who are on the other side."

Let's stipulate that Obama has erred on the side of caution with Egypt. That is his nature, after all, and it's a lot better than the alternative, which we tried with that Bush guy. Obama's overall pattern in the Arab Spring has been doing the right thing, but a little late. So what now? What do administration officials think about Morsy, and how do they believe that they can influence his behavior? The short answer is that they think that Morsy and his circle are in way over his heads, and worry much more about their incompetence than their intolerance. "This is a bunch of guys who have been in jail for 40 years," said one figure. "They don't know what they're doing, they're paranoid, and they're making a huge number of mistakes. But there's no alternative to pushing them forward on the democratic path." Morsy, in short, is the wrong man for the moment, but also the only man. He must be nudged; and he can be nudged.

The administration's view of the opposition is like almost everyone's view of the opposition -- it's feckless, lazy, and disorganized, happier sulking in Cairo than campaigning in the countryside. When Secretary of State John Kerry visited Cairo last week, he spoke to leading figures, including Mohammed ElBaradei and Amr Moussa, and urged them not to boycott the upcoming parliamentary election, as they are currently planning to do. Morsy's plummeting popularity should allow his opponents to make serious gains -- though many of those gains may go to Salafists rather than secularists. The only good news here is that the elections now seem likely to be postponed for three to four months, which would give the opposition time to reconsider a very bad decision.

Finally, the Obama administration seems to feel more comfortable with the Egyptian army than with any other current institution. After all, the reasoning goes, the army deposed Mubarak and delivered power to an elected leader, whom it has since helped sustain. "They have been resolute in working with the Israelis, they work well on the border," says the official mentioned above. The administration has no interest in seeking to either cut or seriously reprogram military assistance, as many critics have suggested -- and Kerry said nothing about it in Cairo.

Obama, in short, is less worried about authoritarian regression than he is about Egypt falling apart. Egypt's treasury has only three months of foreign exchange left, with no more money coming from Qatar or elsewhere. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is offering a $4.8 billion loan, which is Cairo's only chance to stave off bankruptcy. And other institutions which might supply additional financing, including the World Bank and the Africa Development Bank, will not act until Egypt signs an accord with the IMF. The IMF, however, is demanding that Egypt make some reforms which are politically excruciating -- above all, cutting subsidies which keep down the price of energy and food. Morsy's answer is that Washington should tell the IMF to just give Egypt money.

Iraq Roundtable Participants

Gen. John Allen, U.S. Marine Corps, was the commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan from July 2011 to February 2013. From 2006 to 2008, he served as the deputy commanding general in al-Anbar Province, where he played a key role in the so-called "Sunni Awakening."

Rajiv Chandrasekaran, senior correspondent and associate editor at the Washington Post, was Baghdad bureau chief in 2003 and 2004. He is the author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone and Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan.

Chris Chivvis is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation. He has served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy, where he worked on Eurasian security issues and NATO-Russia cooperation.

Eliot Cohen is the Robert E. Osgood professor of strategic studies and director of the Strategic Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Service. He was a member of the Defense Policy Board and served as counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Amb. James Dobbins is director of the RAND International Security and Defense Policy Center. A veteran diplomat, in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, he was named the Bush administration's representative to the Afghan opposition with the task of assembling a successor to the Taliban regime.

Peter Feaver is professor of political science and public policy at Duke University -- and a Foreign Policy blogger. He was special advisor for strategic planning and institutional reform on the National Security Council staff from 2005 to 2007.

Doug Feith is director of the Center for National Security Strategies at the Hudson Institute. He served as undersecretary of defense for policy from 2001 to 2005.

Susan Glasser is editor in chief of Foreign Policy. She spent four years as co-chief of the Washington Post's Moscow bureau and covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for the Post in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 before returning to Washington, where she edited the Post's weekly Outlook section and led its national news coverage.

Michael Gordon is a national security correspondent for the New York Times. He is the co-author, with Bernard Trainor, of two books about the Iraq war: Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq and The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama.

Steve Hadley is senior adviser for international affairs at the United States Institute for Peace. He served as President George W. Bush's deputy national security adviser from 2001 to 2005 and as his national security adviser from 2005 to 2009.

Greg Jaffe is a Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post. He is the co-author, with David Cloud, of The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army.

Col. Peter Mansoor (ret.) is the Raymond E. Mason Jr. chair in military history at Ohio State University. The author of Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq, Mansoor served as executive officer to Gen. David Petraeus when he commanded multinational forces in Iraq. 

Philip Mudd is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation. Mudd managed Iraq analysis at the CIA from 1999 to 2001, he served as the CIA member of the small diplomatic team that helped piece together a new government for Afghanistan, and he was the first-ever deputy director of the FBI's national security branch.

Lt. Col. John Nagl (ret.) is the Minerva Research Fellow at the U.S. Naval Academy. An operations officer in a tank battalion during Operation Iraqi Freedom, he helped author the revision of the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, with Gen. David Petraeus, in 2006.

Paul Pillar is a professor at Georgetown University's Center for Peace and Security Studies. A 28-year veteran analyst at the CIA, during which time he focused on counterterrorism and the Middle East, he retired in 2005 as the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia.

Kenneth Pollack is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy. He previously worked for the CIA and National Security Council, focusing on the Middle East.

Amb. Charlie Ries is vice president, international at the RAND Corporation. A career diplomat, he served as coordinator for economic transition in Iraq at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad  from 2007-2008.

David Rothkopf is CEO and editor-at-large of Foreign Policy. He is the author of Power, Inc.: The Epic Rivalry Between Big Business and Government and the Reckoning that Lies Ahead and Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power. He also serves as president and CEO of Garten Rothkopf, an international advisory firm.

David Sanger is chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times and the author of two books: Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power and The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power.

Kalev Sepp is senior lecturer at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. A former deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations capabilities, he participated in congressionally appointed 2006 Iraq Study Group.

Walt Slocombe is senior counsel for the law firm Caplin & Drysdale. He was the undersecretary of defense for policy from 1994 to 2001, and in 2003 he became a senior advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Preserve the Reserves - By Christopher Holshek

As the end of the draft in 1972 ushered in the era of the professional force we know today, the military instituted another key reform that transformed America's ability to wage war, at least on a large scale. Still smarting from the failure of the nation's body politic to do what had been done in every major war prior to Vietnam -- namely, to call up the militia -- a group of Army generals, among them Creighton Abrams, John Vessey, and Edward C. Meyer, introduced the Total Force Policy.

More than just a way to manage another postwar demobilization, the Abrams Doctrine, as it was also known, transformed the Reserve and National Guard from being shelters to avoid service into integral parts of the nation's war machine. The policy made it strategically and operationally impracticable to engage in serious conflict without calling up America's part-time troops.

By placing the majority of the Army's combat support capabilities in the Reserve component, where they largely remain today, the policy ensured that Congress, as well as the president, would be involved in deciding matters of war and peace. This made it harder to engage in a major war without the support of the American people. And by weaving citizen-soldiers back into the fabric of the military, the military would be woven back into the fabric of the country, thus maintaining a healthy, democratic civil-military relationship.

It appears we have reached a similarly pivotal decision point in our civil-military history.

The winding down of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is forcing the United States to realign and rebalance foreign policy and national security commitments in ways that are more cost-effective. Overwhelming fiscal pressures are mounting to the point where even defense spending is no longer sacrosanct. Politicians are realizing, as Foreign Policy's Gordon Adams has put it, that "it is high time to start thinking about how to manage a serious drawdown instead of pretending it will not happen." Columnist David Brooks noted that the President Obama may have appointed Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense chiefly to "supervise the beginning of this generation-long process of defense cutbacks."

Yet these constraints present strategic opportunities more than national dilemmas. Among them is the opportunity to exploit improvements in the Reserves over the past dozen or so years to provide a relatively ready force that can be drawn upon for missions across the "full spectrum" of peace and conflict -- small- as well as large-scale -- at about one-third the price.

The most recent report of the Reserve Forces Policy Board (RFPB) concluded that while Reserve component forces comprise 39 percent of the total force, they account for 16 percent of the costs. It calculated that an Active component service member costs taxpayers $384,000 compared to $123,000 for his counterpart in the Reserves, which would translate into about $2.6 billion in savings for every 10,000 positions shifted from full-time to part-time.

According to Chief of the Army Reserve Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Talley, the Army Reserve "comprises almost 20 percent of the Total Army and for just 6 percent of the Army budget...with the lowest ratio of full-time support to headquarters per capita (less than one percent), and the lowest ratio of full-time support to end-strength (13.1 percent) in the Department of Defense."

"The RFPB did not suggest changes to the Active Component or Reserve Component end strength, nor did it comment on balance and mix," noted Robert Feidler of the Reserve Officer Association. "But the implications of its report are obvious. If the Active Component does suffer substantial personnel cuts, the logical place to locate the resources -- which may be critical but are used only sporadically -- is the Reserve Component."

From Back-Ups to Bench Players

While reservists may cost one-third the money, they are hardly one-third the soldiers. Today's Reserve component force of over one million troops is not your daddy's Cadillac, taken out and driven only on weekends. Despite chronic underinvestment in some areas, the gaps in professionalism and performance have narrowed to the point where reservists in the field are hardly distinguishable from their active-duty counterparts. This owes mainly to a decade of intense operations in combat zones. At various times, 30-40 percent of deployed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have been mobilized citizen-soldiers. Since 9/11, more than 860,000 Reserve personnel have served active tours of duty.

Now, more than simply providing strategic depth during big wars, the Reserves have grown to fill a variety of roles. The Pentagon's 2008 Integrated Security Posture Statement concluded that the Reserve component is best suited for steady state engagement, stability operations, homeland defense, and humanitarian assistance missions -- as well as major combat operations. Rather than just back-ups, they have become bench players who can do things others can't.

The Reserves are ideal for the security cooperation missions that will increasingly be part of America's efforts to maintain global leadership and influence. In places like Africa, where the United States is venturing further, security has long been community-based -- more a function of socioeconomic development. The latest National Security Strategy looks to "tap the ingenuity outside government through strategic partnerships with the private sector, nongovernmental organizations, foundations, and community-based civil society organizations." And there is no national entity that better utilizes non-government resources than the Reserves.

Phasing Out - By Tom Z. Collina

On March 12, Pentagon policy chief Jim Miller gave a speech on the Obama administration's plans for missile defense in Europe, saying that the first three phases of the system are on track. But, significantly, he did not mention the fourth phase, intended to defend against Iranian ICBMs, which do not yet exist. Then, in response to a question, Miller said, "We are continuing to look very hard at" whether to move forward with phase four or to pursue other options, given budget setbacks and technical issues.

This is welcome news. Until now, the administration has insisted that it would deploy all four phases of what is formally called the European Phased Adaptive Approach; in December 2010, in order to secure approval of the New START treaty, President Obama explicitly promised the Senate he would proceed with the full plan, assuming the Iranian missile threat continued to develop and the interceptor technology proved effective against it. But the United States does not need phase four, and it has become a significant roadblock to Obama's plans to seek another round of nuclear arms reductions with Russia. It is time to shift gears.

In his State of the Union address, President Obama announced that he would renew efforts to seek a second round of nuclear arms reduction talks with Russia, reportedly aiming to cut U.S. strategic forces by about one-third. According to diplomatic sources, Russia wants the United States to cancel phase four in Europe as a condition for arms reduction talks to proceed because it fears that the final phase of the missile defense system could threaten its nuclear deterrent.

The United States should not cancel phase four to appease Russia. The simpler reason is that the United States does not need phase four. Not only does the interceptor missile in question, the SM-3 IIB, have major unresolved technical issues, but the United States has other options to defend itself against future Iranian long-range missiles, should they appear, that are less objectionable to Russia. For example, Washington has an existing, albeit limited, missile defense system in Alaska and California, and Republicans in Congress are calling for a new missile defense deployment site on the East Coast.

Each phase of the administration's European missile defense plan comes with more capable interceptor missiles to keep pace with an evolving Iranian missile program. Phase one, with SM-3 IA short-range interceptors based on U.S. Navy ships and a radar in Turkey, is already deployed in the Mediterranean. Phases two and three, with more-advanced SM-3 interceptors based in Romania (2015) and Poland (2018), are planned to handle medium- and intermediate-range missile threats to Europe.

Phase four, however, is in a different league. The SM-3 IIB interceptor, planned for Poland, is intended to defend the United States -- not Europe -- from an Iranian long-range missile threat that does not yet exist, and is progressing more slowly than many had feared. The SM-3 IIB is planned to be bigger and faster than its predecessors, a SM-3 missile on steroids. But it's already behind schedule. Originally planned for 2020, phase four has been pushed back to 2022 at the earliest due to budget cutbacks imposed by Congress. It exists only on paper, and no ones knows how big it will be, how fast it will go, or where, ultimately, it will be based.

Xi Pivots to Moscow - By John Garnaut

BEIJING ' In January 1979, shortly after he rose to power as paramount leader of China, Deng Xiaoping visited the United States. While there, he defined the direction he would take the country, donning a cowboy hat and symbolically steering away from the Soviet Union-which he never visited as China's ruler-and toward the markets of the West.

But Xi Jinping, who completed his formal leadership ascension by being crowned president on Thursday (he was appointed chairman of the Communist Party and head of the military in November), is heading first to Moscow.

Will Xi's late March trip to Vladimir Putin's Russia -- a bastion of authoritarian state capitalism -- symbolically define China's path ahead, like Deng's U.S. tour?

It's too early to say, but he's certainly taking care to make it a success.

Xi has been brushing up on his rudimentary Russian, which he learned at Beijing's most exclusive school, No. 101, when it was reserved for the children of high ranking leaders. He has even been rehearsing Russian poetry to impress his hosts, according to one of his close associates.

And he has sought the assistance of his female friend Li Xiaolin, a princeling -- the term used for the children of high-ranking officials -- who heads a ministry-level back-channel diplomatic organization called the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, according to the close associate. Li's father, Li Xiannian, worked closely with Xi's father, Xi Zhongxun, when both men were vice premiers in the 1950s. Li's husband Gen. Liu Yazhou is an important confidante of Xi's.

One of Li's aides has been seconded to the economic planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission, from where she had been shuttling between Beijing and Moscow to prepare a huge new oil and gas supply deal to sweeten Xi's arrival.

Whether Russia can open an energy artery to China will depend, essentially, on price. For years, the two countries have been negotiating deals that would double China's imports of Russian oil, making it less dependent on the Persian Gulf and East Africa. The two countries are also planning a huge new joint investment fund, with Li's aide penciled in to be vice chair, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Whether or not the deals come through, Xi's use of Li shows how networks of the red aristocracy enable him to work around the Communist Party's sometimes sclerotic bureaucracy.

Morning Brief: Netanyahu reaches agreement to form coalition government

Israel: Following weeks of negotiations, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reached a coalition agreement with two first-time politicians to set up a government that will contain a mix of secular and nationalist groups but not any ultra-orthodox political parties, which is only the third time since 1977 that such a party will not be included in the governing coalition.

While Netanyahu has made waves in recent weeks for his bellicose statements on the Iranian nuclear program, his new government likely portends a returned focus to domestic political issues. Yair Lapid, one of the political newcomers with whom Netanyahu brokered the agreement, campaigned on a platform that centered on reintegrating the country's ultra-orthodox population into Israeli political life, which currently exempts them from military rule and provides generous subsidies in order for ultra-orthodox men to continue religious study. Lapid will serve as finance minister in the new government, a role which will grant him wide control over the country's budget and places him in a key position to deliver on his promise to end subsidies to the ultra-orthodox.

Given the government's composition, it also appears unlikely that Netanyahu will be able to restart peace talks with the Palestinians. His other major coalition partner, Naftali Bennet, a nationalist who campaigned on a hard-line platform on Jewish settlements, will lead the economy of ministry and trade, and his party will control the Construction and Housing Ministry, which is a key post in the settlement question and one that carries an outsized role in laying the groundwork for talks to restart. Tzipi Livni, a veteran of Ehud Olmert's government, will serve as minister of justice and will head up peace talks with the Palestinians should they resume.

With control over 68 of the 120 seats in the Knesset, Netanyahu's coalition is a fragile one, cementing what was largely seen as a humbling election result for a man who had sought to consolidate power in elections earlier this year. "This coalition is a humiliating defeat for Netanyahu," Eytan Gilboa, an Israeli political scientist, told the Washington Post. "He wanted a very different coalition but couldn't break up the Lapid-Bennett axis. He has a narrow-based government, and at any point Lapid, Bennett, or both, could bring it down."

U.S./Finance: A new report from the U.S. Senate alleges that J.P. Morgan ignored internal risk controls and tampered with documents filed to regulators as the bank racked up staggering losses -- estimated at about $6 billion -- centered around the investment activity of one trader in its London office, a man better known as the "London whale." 

Learning Curve - By James Dobbins

The war in Iraq is regarded by most Americans as a costly mistake. This does not mean the experience was without value. Indeed, one can profit from mistakes even more than successes in terms of improved performance. Ten years on, it is worth asking whether we as a nation have done so.

Last year, at the direction of Gen. Martin Dempsey, the Joint Staff issued a short but fairly candid compendium of lessons from the Iraq and Afghan wars. Entitled "Decade of War," this paper acknowledged that the United States had failed to understand the environments in which it was operating, employed conventional tactics to fight unconventional wars, and was unable to effectively communicate with local populations. The report contends that these problems were largely overcome in the last five years, but admits that this adaptation took longer than it should have.

This otherwise commendable examination of past failures omits two of the most important. Invading Iraq on the basis of bad information was not exclusively or even primarily a military error, but much of the U.S. intelligence apparatus resides in the Defense Department and is commanded by military officers. Yet only the tiny State Department intelligence unit demurred from the judgment that Saddam had active WMD programs and indeed weapons, neither of which turned out to be true.

Second, this Joint Staff compendium does not examine the fatal mismatch between the scale of initial American commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan and the scope of its ambitions. Some now argue that initial American objectives were too ambitious, while others insist that the commitment of military manpower and economic assistance was inadequate. But virtually everyone agrees that the Bush administration should have either scaled down the former or upped the latter. In the end, of course, it did both.

Civilian agencies -- to include State, USAID, Treasury, and the CIA -- have not produced a lessons-learned compendium comparable to that issued at Gen. Dempsey's direction. This is unfortunate, for while the Joint Staff paper does cite failures on the civil side, we lack any comparable analysis of such failures from the responsible agencies.

The lesson most Americans seem to have drawn from Iraq is "never fight a land war in Asia." This advice was first given by Douglas MacArthur to President Kennedy in 1961. It was reiterated two years ago by then Secretary of Defense Bob Gates. Another version of this lesson is contained in the Obama administration's official defense guidance, which directs that the United States no longer size its military for large-scale stability operations.

While negative lessons are legitimate and useful, they don't lead to improved performance, since one does not hone skills one does not intend to use. The post-Vietnam "never again" attitude led to a severe atrophy of the U.S. military's counterinsurgency skills and it is quite possible that the U.S. military will go through a similar phase of unlearning over the next several years.

Obviously, the United States should in the future avoid invading large hostile Asian states on the basis of bad information against the advice of major allies and over the objections of most regional governments. History suggests, however, that the more general injunction against land wars in Asia may enjoy a short half-life, as may the determination to steer clear of large-scale stability operations. Kennedy escalated the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam in the years following MacArthur's warning. George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan only a year after promising, in a presidential election debate with Al Gore, not to engage U.S. forces in any more nation-building endeavors -- and he then directed the occupation of Iraq only 18 months later.

The current national aversion to future such engagements is clearly limiting American involvement in Syria's still escalating civil war, much as the hangover from President Clinton's Somalia debacle in 1992 helped delay American intervention in the Bosnia civil war until 1995, by which time that conflict had claimed over 100,000 victims. This is a threshold the Syrian conflict seems likely to cross sometime this year.

More important even than identifying lessons to be learned is adopting enduring remedial measures. "Decade of War" is right to argue that most of the early failures it identifies have been corrected. But many of those fixes have been of a provisional nature, altering institutional behavior and structures in ways not likely or even intended to endure once the immediate need for reform diminishes. As the war in Iraq recedes and that in Afghanistan winds down, there will be a tendency for all our national security agencies to return to business as usual. Should this be allowed to happen, the nation will have missed an opportunity to profit from some very costly mistakes.

The Geopolitics of 'Girls' - By Daniel W. Drezner

This is the Golden Age for television shows that offer commentary, directly or allegorically, on world politics. Shows like AMC's The Walking Dead and NBC's Revolution examine how humans react to a Hobbesian system in which trust is a scarce commodity. Showtime's Homeland and FX's crackerjack The Americans explore the corrosive effects of espionage and counterintelligence during the War on Terror and Cold War respectively. HBO's Game of Thrones combines a dollop of magic with the realpolitik of 17th-century Europe. I'm here to tell you: Forget all those shows. The true TV connoisseur appreciates that the most insightful television show about world politics airing right now is, obviously, Girls.

I'll wait until you finish your peals of laughter. Ready? OK, sure, at first glance it might seem as though Lena Dunham's dry comedy is merely about the trials and tribulations of aimless millenials congregating in the hipper enclaves of Brooklyn. Heck, the biggest online debate in its second season was about whether someone as hot as Patrick Wilson would really go for someone as unconventional as Dunham (the correct answer, by the way, is yes). But anyone who has heard Dunham speak about the show knows that she's quite savvy about her characters' flaws and foibles. The central journey in Girls is how immature people fumble their way toward maturity. The parallels to world politics here are surprisingly strong -- after all, sovereign states are a relatively recent phenomenon in human history, so national polities also possess some immaturity.

While "national culture" is a shopworn concept in international relations, it is inescapable that most of the major characters in Girls evoke distinct national tropes. Start with the protagonist: Dunham's Hannah Horvath, a struggling young writer who clearly represents the United States in all her fading hegemony. She borrows from others in order to afford her current lifestyle. Hannah manages to insert herself into every situation, making it all about her -- a process that evokes myriad U.S. military interventions. Like many an American president abroad, Hannah often leaps before she looks, convinced that the experience will be enriching. Of all the characters on the show, she is naked the most often, revealing a transparency that parallels the American political system. Finally, despite all of her flaws, Hannah clearly possesses both talent and charm, which allows her to get away with such egregious behavior for sustained periods of time -- until it finally catches up with her. Tell me I haven't just described the United States as viewed by the rest of the world.

If Hannah is America, her female friends represent other major players in the Western alliance system. Jemima Kirke's Jessa, who, on a whim, marries a banker she despises, is France -- self-absorbed, flighty, with a taste for the grand gesture that doesn't quite work out. As the junior member of the quartet, Zosia Mamet's Shoshanna, the youngest of the four friends, embodies Canada -- seemingly polite, but bubbling over with passive-aggressive insecurities. As for Hannah's ostensible best friend, Allison Williams' Marnie, she exemplifies Germany. There is much to admire in Marnie -- her undeniable beauty, her self-assuredness, and her unwillingness to go into debt. Unfortunately, however, Marnie expects everyone else to behave the same way she does -- and is truly flummoxed when others seem to prosper using a different recipe for success. Because she's so attractive, however, many of the characters still try to emulate or win her approval, to the point of self-flagellation. In this way Charlie, Marnie's on-again, off-again paramour, represents the rest of the European Union and all EU aspirants -- and Charlie suffers just as much as they do. The estrangement between Marnie and Hannah crystallizes the fraying transatlantic partnership better than any earnest think tank white paper on the subject.

If the female characters on Girls represent the West, the two most important male characters come from the BRICs. Ray is a coffee-shop manager, the oldest member of the group, and far and away the most cynical and angry character on the show. He scorns just about everything that every other character says or does, but seems unable to make much of himself. Ray is Russia personified. In contrast, Adam -- Hannah's former beau -- is China. He's a force to be reckoned with, but it's not entirely clear whether he's socialized into how the rest of Brooklyn society behaves. One could posit that Hannah's relationship with Adam represents the promise and peril of the "responsible stakeholder" concept. On the one hand, Hannah seems to use her "soft power" to entice Adam into liking her a lot more than he originally thought -- in other words, getting him to want what she wants. He begins to socialize with Hannah's circle of friends. At the same time, Hannah is unsure just how much she wants to engage Adam, reflecting America's ambivalence in its relationship with China. At the end of the first season, she is quite uneasy about moving in together. The result is an Adam that, much like China, is angry and frustrated at his treatment by others -- which in turn leads to bellicose behavior, which in turn leads Hannah to call the cops and try to contain his behavior. The breakdown in the relationship between Hannah and Adam is yet another example of the security dilemma destroying lives.

With the finale of Season Two this Sunday, we will get some further insight into Dunham's geopolitical worldview when a number of dramatic arcs could find resolution -- or not. If Hannah and Marnie reconcile, then Dunham is clearly urging the United States and European Union to patch up their petty differences, negotiate that transatlantic trade deal, and show the rest of the world a West reunited. If Adam and Hannah reconcile, then Girls is suggesting, akin to A. Iain Johnston's work, that China can be socialized into international norms. If, however, Hannah's obsessive-compulsive behavior requires her to commit herself to a psychiatric facility, then Dunham will have delivered a most Spenglerian pronouncement: The United States is doomed to cycles of self-defeating behavior on the world stage.

Pakistan's Wildcard - By Daniel Markey

On March 17, Tahir-ul-Qadri -- the Pakistani cleric who led popular demonstrations that brought Islamabad to a standstill for four days in January -- plans to announce his intentions for the upcoming national elections at another major rally in Rawalpindi. Most American observers have written Qadri off as a flash in the Pakistani pan. They may need to think again. Qadri can still shake up Pakistani politics. In the near term, he remains a wildcard, disruptive in ways that might even tip the balance of power in Pakistan's next government. Over the long run, however, Qadri has the potential to play a far more constructive role in Pakistan's political development. Either way, Washington would do well to pay him closer attention.

It is possible that Qadri will decide to send his party, the Pakistan Awami Tehreek, into the fray of national elections in May. Building a Pakistani party machine with credible, popular candidates is the work of years, not weeks, so there is a very good chance he wouldn't win any seats. Even so, Qadri-backed politicians might steal just enough votes to spoil the plans of the front-running party of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif (PML-N) and shift the makeup of Islamabad's next ruling coalition.

Qadri might play an even more significant and constructive role over the long run by choosing not to contest elections. As an outside voice favoring reform, religious moderation, and better governance, Qadri would offer a glimmer of hope for a future in which Pakistani opposition figures hold their nation's leaders accountable to the nation's constitution and laws. That would represent a genuine, farsighted contribution to the maturation of democracy in Pakistan, the best hope for long-term economic development and stability of the sort that would render Pakistan a far less dangerous and fragile state.

Qadri, a former law professor and acclaimed Islamic scholar, stormed out of his unlikely home base in Toronto, Canada, this past December after having disappeared from the scene for eight years. The media portrayed his out-of-the-blue return to Pakistan and rapid ascendance as mysterious. Who had backed Qadri's massive media blitz? Rumor swirled. Some said it was Washington, again out to influence Pakistani politics. Others saw the hand of the Pakistani military looking to derail the electoral process.

Contrary to many press reports that depicted him as a detached Islamic scholar with little in the way of a political background, Qadri has a decades-long history of dealing with all of Pakistan's top leaders since the 1980s, from Generals Zia and Musharraf to Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. Today, Qadri's politics are motivated by deep disillusionment with all of them, military and civilian alike. Such sentiments place him squarely in the mainstream of Pakistani public opinion.

Qadri's movement has found is greatest strength -- and probably most of the cash that fed his impressive media machine -- in the well of popular disgust with Pakistan's status quo of corruption, power outages, and terrible violence. Among Pakistanis there is little stomach for another round of military rule, and none for political intrusion by outside forces like the United States. But everyone, including Pakistan's most powerful civilian and military leaders, admits the state needs to do a far better job at governing. Qadri, like the reform-minded cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, taps into this sentiment.

Kenya's Most Wanted - By Suzanne Nossel

The victory of indicted war criminal Uhuru Kenyatta in Kenya's presidential election poses a familiar dilemma for the West: how to weigh support for human rights against economic and security interests in a part of the world marked by terrorist threats, simmering regional conflicts, and increasing economic and trade opportunities. But Kenyatta's victory also raises a potentially thornier conundrum: whether actively opposing his assumption of power will indeed advance the cause of international justice at all.

Last week's Kenyan elections were a messy affair. There are allegations of fraud in the electoral register and the country's electronic counting system crashed, leading Raila Odinga, the runner-up, to challenge the result. But the current outcome seems likely to hold. If it does, Kenyatta -- the son of the legendary Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta -- will soon begin a five-year term.

The contentious outcome echoes the country's last vote, in 2007, when Odinga lost narrowly to a different opponent. Back then, Odinga also disputed the result and -- saying he did not trust the courts -- urged his followers to take to the streets. Two months of unrest ensued, including boycotts, ethnic clashes and more than 1,000 deaths. During this upheaval, according to an indictment issued by the International Criminal Court, Kenyatta and others engaged in the wholesale displacement, torture, persecution, and ever murder of ordinary Kenyans. Kenyatta stands accused of directing leaders of a Kenyan criminal syndicate to attack perceived opposition supporters. He has vehemently denied committing any crime, vowing to cooperate with the court and mount a robust defense.

The indictment was a landmark for the ICC. Most of the court's cases targeted abuses by militias during armed conflicts. This time, in what observers called a warning shot for African and other global leaders accustomed to using violence to defend their rule, the court went after top national leaders who had used brutal repression to maintain political power. The case was also noteworthy because it was undertaken by the ICC prosecutor himself without a request from either the U.N. Security Council or the Kenyan government. After the indictment was issued, the Kenyan parliament passed by a wide margin a non-binding protest motion calling to withdraw the country from participation in the ICC.

Fast forward five years to this year's contested Kenyan election. This time the country's constitution had been strengthened with a bill of rights; the courts have been cleaned up. Those improvements seem to have helped avert violence thus far. But while lives may be spared this time around, the stakes in this election are still high for Kenya, Western governments, and the ICC. The United States and Kenya have cooperated in fighting terrorism ever since the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi. Under the Obama administration, economic and security cooperation and the sharing of intelligence have intensified, particularly on Somalia, home to the al Qaeda-linked militant group al-Shabab. Nairobi is a prime media hub for the continent and is the locus for the United Nations' vital peacekeeping and humanitarian programs throughout Africa. The United States and Europe are aware that if Kenya pivots away from them, it will likely be in the direction of China, which is already heavily invested in Kenyan oil, mining, transportation, and infrastructure projects.

Despite, or perhaps because of, their close relationships with Nairobi, the United States and Europe have not hid their distaste for a Kenyatta victory. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Johnnie Carson warned Kenyans before the vote that "decisions have consequences" and Britain has announced that its diplomats would have only "essential contacts" with Kenyatta. The impetus to treat Kenyatta as a pariah is motivated not just by recoil at his alleged actions, but by the practical notion that to deter them, the international community must make war crimes out of bounds not just legally but also politically, diplomatically, and socially. If the ICC hopes to avert abuses and isolate war criminals, it must ensure that indicted leaders can't simply go on with business as usual. This is why there has been so much pressure on governments to shun and isolate Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, who has been indicted and subject to an arrest warrant by the ICC for five counts of crimes against humanity.

How the Muslim Brotherhood Hijacked Syria's Revolution - By Hassan Hassan

No one in Syria expected the anti-regime uprising to last this long or be this deadly, but after around 70,000 dead, 1 million refugees, and two years of unrest, there is still no end in sight. While President Bashar al-Assad's brutal response is mostly to blame, the opposition's chronic failure to form a viable front against the regime has also allowed the conflict to drag on. And there's one anti-Assad group that is largely responsible for this dismal state of affairs: Syria's Muslim Brotherhood.

Throughout the Syrian uprising, I have had discussions with opposition figures, activists, and foreign diplomats about how the Brotherhood has built influence within the emerging opposition forces. It has been a dizzying rise for the Islamist movement. It was massacred out of existence in the 1980s after the Baathist regime put down a Brotherhood-led uprising in Hama. Since then, membership in the Brotherhood has been an offense punishable by death in Syria, and the group saw its presence on the ground wither to almost nothing. But since the uprising erupted on March 15, 2011, the Brotherhood has moved adroitly to seize the reins of power of the opposition's political and military factions.

According to a figure present at the first conference to organize Syria's political opposition, held in Antalya, Turkey, in May 2011, the Brotherhood was initially hesitant to join an anti-Assad political body. The group had officially suspended its opposition to the Baathist regime in the wake of the Israeli onslaught on Gaza in 2009, and it pulled out of an alliance with Abdul Halim Khaddam, a former Syrian vice president who defected in 2005.

The Brotherhood nonetheless sent members to participate in the conference, including Molhem Droubi, who became a member of the conference's executive bureau. Meanwhile, it took steps to form fighting groups inside Syria, recruiting potential fighters and calling on its relatively meager contacts on the ground in Homs, Hama, Idlib, and Aleppo.

As the idea of a unified opposition group to lead the popular revolt gained momentum, the Brotherhood became more involved. A month after the meeting in Antalya, it organized a conference in Brussels, attended by 200 people, mostly Islamists -- one of the first obvious fractures in the unity of the opposition. The Brotherhood subsequently organized several conferences that formed opposition groups to serve as fronts for the movement, allowing it to beef up its presence in political bodies.

After the conference in Brussels, at least three groups were formed "to support the Syrian revolution." The organizations continued to hatch, and a few months after the first conference they were present in opposition bodies that later formed the core of the Syrian National Council (SNC), an umbrella group that ostensibly represented all anti-Assad forces. The council set aside seats for both the Brotherhood and members of the Damascus Declaration, a group of Syrian reformists established in 2005 -- but the Brotherhood already had a significant presence within the Damascus Declaration group.

The Case for Just-in-Time Immigration - By Hilda Ochoa-Brillembourg

It is often said that government could learn a thing or two from the private sector, but what if the very same management innovations that powered the recent surge in global productivity could be leveraged to solve America's immigration problem? It sounds far-fetched, but "just-in-time" production strategy -- which matches supply and demand for manufacturing components, thereby reducing wasteful imbalances -- is crying out to be applied to immigration policy. We have the technology and the data to do it -- all we need is the will.

Despite persistent unemployment problems, the United States faces significant labor shortages, particularly in the manufacturing and technology sectors. Large employers like Siemens, Apple, Microsoft, and LinkedIn, for example, have struggled to fill thousands of job openings because of the lack of suitable candidates. Meanwhile, current immigration policies permit too few skilled worker visas and dictate long waiting periods for skilled H-1B visa holders to obtain green cards. Current green card quotas, moreover, are woefully insufficient to meet labor demands in many sectors. Fortunately, there's an easy fix for this mismatch between supply and demand for human capital: dynamic "just-in-time" labor and immigration policies that let in immigrants as they are needed.

American success in the postwar period was built on the free flow of trade and capital -- and human capital was an essential part of the story. From 1970 onward, roughly 10 million college-educated women chose to work professionally instead of becoming full-time wives and mothers. Between 1970 and 1990, 17 million immigrants came to the United States, and made profound contributions to construction, agriculture, manufacturing, technology, and the service sector. They also changed the lives of a generation of working mothers. The availability of legal, reasonably priced childcare allowed women to manage their familial obligations while competing in the global work force. The advent of the dual-income family, in turn, provided a formidable boost to our consumption-driven economy for the next four decades.

Today, human capital flows are seriously obstructed by political gridlock in Washington. At the same time, the Baby Boomer generation is graying, retiring, and increasingly relying on the social welfare programs to which it contributed -- but not enough given the longer life expectancy of its members. In a blink of an eye, it seems, the Boomers have gone from the locomotive to the caboose.

The key to solving this demographic challenge is a sustained and selective immigration policy. Based on data collected by the PEW Research Center and the Department of Labor-Bureau of Labor Statistics, the United States needs roughly 50 million new immigrants over the next 20 years in order to meet our demographic and balance-sheet demands. That's about 2.5 million immigrants per year, compared to the roughly 2 million (one million legally and one million, give or take, illegally) who have arrived in the United States every year for the last two decades. It's not much of an increase -- 500,000 people per year -- but it's enough to make a positive difference in our fiscal deficits, consumption, savings, and investment needs, and to take care of the household and other employment demands of an aging population.

To meet these needs, the United States should adopt four policies that balance supply and demand for human capital -- bringing the U.S. immigration system more in line with just-in-time principles. First, the government should make it easier for foreign students who graduate from U.S. colleges and graduate schools to obtain work visas, as Mayor Bloomberg and others have suggested. The United States trained them, so it should have the option of keeping them.

Pulp Non-Fiction - By Michael Peck

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Smaller Is Smarter - By John Arquilla

There is an emerging consensus, in Congress and around the country, that government spending must decline, but there is just as strong a sentiment that there are far more artful ways to achieve this than by across-the-board cuts. In the case of domestic entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, this growing awareness has sparked some bold thinking about reforms, particularly among Republicans in Congress. In the defense sector, however, there is far less evidence of a willingness to contemplate innovative ideas. But if there were, a world of intriguing possibilities would open up.

Unfortunately, the bipartisan reaction to sequestration as it bears upon military matters has been to try to figure out ways to wriggle free of its constraints, perhaps even to avoid any spending reductions over the next 10 years, much less drawdowns amounting to an additional $500 billion on top of currently planned cuts. If this sentiment prevails, a signal disservice will have been rendered to the military and the American people, because the failure to insist on defense spending reductions will continue to allow the military to forgo making tough and much needed choices about future directions. Strategic affairs are in great flux, due to factors ranging from radical technological change to the rise of a series of wars between nations and networks. A failure to transform the military now will only increase perils -- even if spending cuts are avoided.

The challenge before us is to embrace budgetary constraints as empowering rather than crippling. And there are many good examples of professional militaries that seized such opportunities, extending far back in history. In the 6th century of the Common Era, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian sought to restore territorial holdings in the West that had been lost as Rome declined and fell -- yet he had only the slenderest of financial resources with which to carry out this goal. However, he picked skillful generals, Belisarius and Narses, who made the most of what little they had as they pioneered the development of new types of military formations. The great strategist Liddell Hart saw in the heavy cavalry troops that were created, in part to make up for a critical lack of legionary infantry, a clear foreshadowing of modern armored warfare. And so, with always outnumbered forces, Belisarius and Narses reconquered and held Italy, Africa, and southern Spain for the Empire.

A more modern example of success-under-constraint is the post-World War I army of Germany's Weimar Republic. In this case, treaty restrictions and the parlous state of the economy kept the active-duty force quite small -- limited to 100,000 soldiers. Their commander, General Hans von Seeckt, used this in two important ways. First, he emphasized the profound importance of understanding the operational implications of key maturing technologies: tanks, planes, and radio. His focus on mobile maneuvers led to the rise of blitzkrieg. Second, force-size limits led him to rethink the active-reserve mix, and to nurture the notion of cycling through large numbers of young men on short active-duty periods, then moving them into vigorous reserve programs -- sometimes under the guise of labor organizations. Thus Germany eventually had a very large trained manpower pool upon which to draw, allowing the army to expand rapidly and effectively when war came.

To some extent, the U.S. military during the decade after Vietnam followed a similar pattern of development. Active-duty forces were reduced by 40 percent, from 3.5 to 2.1 million. Defense spending declined sharply as well, falling from $344 billion in 1972, at the end of the war, to just $295 billion by 1979 -- over a 14 percent drop before factoring in the effects of inflation. Yet in the face of these challenges, the smaller active army became more professionalized and a new doctrine began to form, Air-Land Battle, which was formally introduced in 1982 and focused on the importance of the swift movement of information and the striking power of precision-guided munitions. Like the German Reichswehr, the post-Vietnam U.S. military found its way ahead despite considerable constraints. Even the spending increases under Ronald Reagan were relatively short-lived as, by the time the elder President Bush submitted his final budget for FY 1993, the actual spending level was only $15 billion more than at the end of the Vietnam War. In inflation-adjusted dollars, this was quite a reduction.

The Iraq War That Might Have Been - By Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor

In October 2003, a team of Pentagon intelligence analysts identified a promising twist in a war that seemed to be going terribly wrong: Sunni tribal leaders in Iraq's hostile Anbar province had come forward with offers to help secure western Iraq.

"Leaders of these tribes -- many of whom still occupy key positions of local authority -- appear to be increasingly willing to cooperate with the Coalition in order restore or maintain their influence in post-Saddam Iraq," noted the memo, which was approved by Ronald L. Burgess, Jr., the major general who served as the director for intelligence on the Joint Staff and would later rise to run the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The classified memorandum was duly forwarded to American civilian and military officials in Baghdad. But the suggestion largely fell on deaf ears. It would take three more years before Sunni tribes would help turn the war around in the "Anbar Awakening."

In our years of research on the Iraq war, we have uncovered a number of similarly hidden forks in the road -- lost opportunities that might have dramatically shortened the Americans' ordeal in Iraq or decisions whose full significance was not apparent until years later. Many are chronicled in internal government documents, thousands of pages that we reviewed in the course of our reporting -- in effect, amounting to a secret Iraq archive that sheds new light on the nearly nine-year-long war.

These memoranda, 23 of which are being published today in the new ebook edition of Endgame, our history of the conflict, cover the whole long arc of the war.

The documents, many of which are being published for the first time, include the dawning awareness that the United States had stumbled into an intervention that would be more taxing and prolonged than it had anticipated -- a point driven home in a blunt 2004 cable from John Negroponte, the first American ambassador in post-Saddam Baghdad, warning President George W. Bush that the United States was "in a deep hole with the Iraqi people" and needed at least five years to get the country on its feet. (Bush's response: "We don't have that much time.")

And they cover the full range of adversaries as threats appeared to multiply. A briefing for Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy defense secretary, outlined three options for carrying out "Operation Stuart," a 2004 contingency plan to capture Muqtada al-Sadr, the fiery anti-American cleric. The operation was never executed as the Americans pondered the risks. ("Accidentally killing Sadr during an arrest attempt would make him an anti-American nationalist icon and Islamist martyr" was one of the potential "unintended consequences," the briefing noted.)

The United States, the documents show, gained critical insight into al Qaeda in Iraq after U.S. troops stopped a vehicle near Taji on Dec. 19, 2006. The hard drive and thumb drive that were found contained al Qaeda reports, which became known as the Taji DOCEX (for "document exploitation"). The al Qaeda material helped shaped the U.S. military understanding of how al Qaeda operated in Baghdad and the surrounding rural "belts."

Another adversary that was chronicled in the reports was the Jaysh al-Mahdi, Sadr's Shia militia, which infiltrated the Interior, Health, and Transportation ministries, colonizing the very instruments of the state.

Through a combination of political appointments and thuggish militia tactics, the Mahdi Army, also known as JAM, had infiltrated the Baghdad International Airport (BIAP), the nation's main gateway to the world, even securing positions as sky marshals. "By controlling BIAP, JAM has the ability to smuggle weapons, money, and people under the protection of official cover," noted a June 2007intelligence assessment. The infiltration had occurred under the nose of the American military's largest headquarters at Camp Victory. The airport was eventually purged of Sadrist influence in a classified operation dubbed Silver Sabre.

Iran's activities also figures heavily in the classified annals of the war. One set of classified reports chronicles the messages that Qasim Suleimani, the commander of Iran's Quds Force, sent through Iraqi intermediaries to Gen. David Petraeus, the top American commander in Baghdad.

Suleimani's message was that that he, not Iranian President Mahmoud Admadinejad, was the "sole decision-maker on Iranian activities in Iraq," Petraeus told the Pentagon. And Suleimani had an offer for the Americans: The Shiite militiant groups Iran was supporting in Iraq would reduce their attacks if the Americans would release Qais Khazali, a Shiite militant leader who was linked to a botched kidnapping that led to the death of American troops. Petraeus turned the offer down.

Here is how the documents illuminate four pivotal episodes that might have turned out differently -- along with, perhaps, the war itself.

North Korean Pastoral - By Roger Shepherd

The Baekdu Daegan mountain range twists its way more than 1,000 miles down the length of the Korean Peninsula, from the sacred peak of Baekdusan on the North Korea-China border to Jirisan in central South Korea. Today, it is choked off by landmines and barbed wire at the demilitarized zone, but once, it was considered the "spine of the nation" -- a source of spiritual energy and strength for the Korean people.

At least 75 percent of the Korean Peninsula is covered by mountains, and long before the country was divided -- first by Cold War politics and then by a war -- Koreans shared a reverence for the power of these peaks. Mountains are prominent in Korean art and literature. Koreans practicing animism once paid homage to mountain spirits to ensure them safe passage on their journeys. Today, the lyrics of both countries' national anthems still sing the praises of Baekdusan, or Great White Mountain, the sacred peak said to be the place of ancestral origin for the Korean people.

Over the past two years, New Zealand native Roger Shepherd was granted rare permission to spend more than two months in the mountains of North Korea as part of his efforts to document the Baekdu Daegan as one ridge, north and south. Shepherd has made three trips to the country, during which he covered more than 6,000 miles and visited more than two dozen mountain peaks.

"These days we see Korea as divided," Shepherd says. The Baekdu Daegan system, he tells FP, helps remind us that geographically, Korea is still one entity with a shared history and a shared culture as mountain people. "I hope my work can reinvigorate that mindset." These are the revealing photographs from his time in the country known to most of the world as "one of the most closed and secretive nations on earth."

Above, farmers catch a lift across the Saepo-gun plateau below the Baekdu Daegan ridge in Kangwondo, DPRK.

Morning Brief: Kenyatta scores narrow victory in disputed Kenya election

Top news: Uhuru Kenyatta, indicted by the International Criminal Court for bankrolling election-related violence in 2007, won a narrow victory in Kenya's presidential election, securing 50.07 percent of the vote election authorities announced Saturday. Clearing the 50 percent mark with about 8,000 votes of over 12 million cast, Kenyatta, who is the son of Kenya's first president, will avoid a run-off, though his challenger, Raila Odinga, vowed to challenge the results.

Odinga maintained that the election was marred by fraud, refused to concede defeat, and said that he would challenge the election results before the Kenyan supreme court, saying Saturday that "democracy is on trial." With a mere 8,000 votes separating Odinga from a one-on-one rematch with Kenyatta, the stakes in the coming legal battle will be high, which is likely to focus on the many problems that bedeviled the country's election, including problems with the initial tally, overloaded servers, and a scrapped national ID system.

Should Kenyatta hold on to power, his ascension to the presidency is likely to create a difficult diplomatic situation for the West, which will have to balance the interests of maintaining relations with a key African ally and their commitments to the ICC. In a message Saturday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry congratulated Kenyans for voting peacefully but pointedly omitted Kenyatta's name.

Afghanistan/U.S.: Afghan President Hamid Karzai accused the United States of being in collusion with the Taliban to maintain a military presence in the country, remarks that coincided with newly minted Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel's visit to the country. 

A Tale of Two Chávezes - By Peter Wilson

CARACAS ' Hundreds of thousands of citizens, and more than a score of world leaders, gathered Friday, March 8, in the Venezuelan capital to bid farewell to fallen President Hugo Chávez.

People openly wept as the president was eulogized, with many saying that Chávez would live forever in people's memories. Ana Rodriguez and Nora Albas say they will remember El Comandante as long as they live.

Their reasons, however, are quite different.

Albas, 32, is the wife of a farmer in the central state of Aragua. She's an admitted rojo rojito (reddest of the red), or a super-Chavista. Thanks to various government loans, Albas and her husband have been able to expand their small 6-acre farm, which is mostly planted in tomatoes and peppers.

The couple said that they have received various farm tools for free and have access to discounted fertilizers and seeds when they are available. Her consejo comunal, or government commune, also paved the lane leading to their farm. She admits that she doesn't understand that much about socialism, but says it is far superior to the capitalism that preceded it.

"Chávez has made a huge difference in our lives," said Albas, who looks younger than her age. "Thanks to El Comandante, we have much more now than we did before. Our children have more of a future. And now I have a voice in what happens."

Such optimism isn't shared by Rodriguez, a 30-year-old doctor in the central industrial city of Maracay. She claims that Chávez, who died March 5 after a two-year bout with cancer, has destroyed the country, both politically and economically.

"My family owned a farm in Guárico [a central agricultural state] for years. We weren't rich but we had a comfortable life -- but we worked for it. Seven years ago, the government expropriated our farm," she said. "My father gave his life to it, and now he has nothing. They haven't given us any re-compensation at all. My father used to spend all of his time there. Now his day consists of sitting in front of the computer and playing hearts online."

Her one brother had to emigrate, thanks to Chávez's policies, Rodriguez said.

"He is a petroleum engineer, and when Chávez nationalized oil operations here, he lost his job at the U.S. company that employed him. He's bright and hardworking, but he couldn't work for Petróleos de Venezuela [PDVSA, the state oil company] because he signed the recall petition against Chávez in 2004. If you signed the petition, you're automatically blacklisted from all government jobs."

More than 2.7 million people signed the petition, or roughly 10 percent of the population. Many subsequently lost their jobs in the resulting witch hunt to root out Chávez's critics.

"I work in a state hospital and I love my work, but crime is horrible," said Rodriguez. "We've had gang members come into the emergency room, hoping to kill people they had shot and had been taken to us. I can't leave the hospital at night because we have so much crime. And people just assume I have money as I am a doctor."

The two women's stories hint at what may be El Comandante's ultimate gift to his country: extreme polarization. Before Chávez was elected in 1998, Venezuelans were politically apathetic. That's no longer the case.

Wanted: PhDs Who Can Win a Bar Fight - By Maj. Fernando Luján

Looming budget cuts, ground forces worn down by years of repeated deployments, and a range of ever evolving security challenges from Mali to Libya and Yemen are quickly making "light footprint" military interventions a central part of American strategy. Instead of "nation building" with large, traditional military formations, civilian policymakers are increasingly opting for a discrete combination of air power, special operators, intelligence agents, indigenous armed groups, and contractors, often leveraging relationships with allies and enabling partner militaries to take more active roles.

Despite the relative appeal of these less costly forms of military intervention, the light footprint is no panacea. Like any policy option, the strategy has risks, costs and benefits that make it ideally suited for certain security challenges and disastrous for others. Moreover, recent media coverage of drone strikes and SEAL raids may also distort public perceptions, creating a bin Laden effect -- the notion of military action as sterile, instantaneous, and pinprick accurate. Yet nighttime raids are only the proverbial tip of the iceberg: the most visible part of a deeper, longer-term strategy that takes many years to develop, cannot be grown after a crisis, and relies heavily on human intelligence networks, the training of local security forces, and close collaboration with diplomats and development workers.  For these smaller-scale interventions to be an effective instrument of national policy, civilian and military leaders at all levels should make a concerted effort to understand not only their strategic uses and limitations, but also the ways the current defense bureaucracy can undermine their success.

The most critical resource requirement in smaller interventions is human capital: talented, adaptable professionals who are not only fluent in language, culture, politics, and interpersonal relationships, but also willing to deploy for long periods and operate with little guidance. Smaller-scale missions mean less redundancy, less room for error, and more responsibility for every person in the field. In the words of Lt. Gen. Charlie Cleveland, the commander of U.S. Army Special Operations Command: "To succeed in these missions, we need people who can wade into uncertainty, learn the key players, and figure out the best way to influence outcomes." This means that in the face of looming budget cuts, the Pentagon's biggest national security challenge may not be dealing with a rival power or preserving force structure, but instead solving an intractable human resources problem -- how to retool outdated institutions to select, train, assign, and retain the most talented people to address today's security problems overseas.

Two of my own operational assignments may help illustrate how light-footprint missions can succeed or fail depending on the people who are assigned to accomplish them. I served in the 7th Special Forces Group and the Department of Defense AFPAK Hands program -- organizations with very different missions but built for the same fundamental task of influencing foreign partners and building security capacity with a handful of U.S. personnel. These contrasting vignettes should serve as a vivid example of two different organizational philosophies and the institutional challenges that must be overcome if the United States is to master a smaller, more indirect, lower-profile approach to warfare.

The 7th Special Forces Group

The ethic that defines Special Forces training is probably best described as "select hard, manage easy." Operators enjoy tremendous autonomy in the field, but they must earn it first. Before reporting to an operational unit, every Special Forces officer and soldier is required to undergo a rigorous screening and selection process, followed by a two-year qualification course that includes instruction on infantry tactics, specialized technical skills such as weapons or communications, guerrilla warfare, survival, and foreign language training.

Undertaking these intense experiences just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, I was surprised by two things. First, there was a strong connection between our training and real-world Special Forces missions -- operators who had just fought on horseback with the Northern Alliance would return to speak to the class, and their feedback would be immediately incorporated into realistic, immersive exercises. Second, a large portion of the course was focused on the intellectual and social attributes of the students -- creativity, oral and written communication, judgment, cultural respect, and interpersonal skills -- rather than sheer athletic prowess. Peers who aced every physical challenge would suddenly be dropped when the instructors observed them unable to plan a mission alone without further guidance or incapable of building rapport with role players during a cross-cultural scenario. Sensing our confusion after a particularly tough cut sent a dozen students home, one instructor quoted a line from our World War II predecessors, the Office of Strategic Services: "The OSS, when selecting officers to parachute into occupied France, described the ideal candidate as a Ph.D. that can win a bar fight. We don't just want an officer that can carry a hundred-pound rucksack on his back. We need someone who can think and improvise."

Round One Goes to the Budget Hawks - By Christopher Preble

"The budget hawks have defeated the defense hawks." So read one analyst's verdict last Friday on the news that, despite months of dire warnings from the Obama administration and the Pentagon's allies on Capitol Hill, automatic budget cuts to the U.S. Defense Department would go into effect after all. Bill Kristol, the influential editor of the Weekly Standard, was despondent, writing, "the Republican party has, at first reluctantly, then enthusiastically, joined the president on the road to irresponsibility." But have fiscal scolds really vanquished their neoconservative rivals within the GOP?

Let's roll the tape back to October 2011, when House Armed Services Committee chairman Howard P. "Buck" McKeon had a simple message for the "supercommittee" tasked with reducing the nation's massive deficit: "not a penny more" from the Pentagon. It was an evocative line in the sand because it contributed to the impression that base Pentagon outlays had already been cut (they hadn't) and that any cuts would imperil U.S. national security (they wouldn't).

But the battle lines were drawn long before the passage of the Budget Control Act (BCA), the legislation that enacted what's become known in Washington as "sequestration." In October 2010, the heads of two conservative think tanks, the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), joined forces with Kristol's Foreign Policy Initiative to create the Defending Defense project. With a joint op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Kristol, Heritage's Ed Feulner and AEI's Arthur Brooks hoped to fend off Pentagon spending cuts by declaiming that such cuts would threaten global prosperity, open the floodgates for tyrants and miscreants, and undermine the fragile gains which, they claimed, had been achieved in Iraq and Afghanistan. As for the concern that excessive spending on America's wars was adding to the fiscal burdens on current and future generations, the three inveighed, somewhat lamely, that "defense spending has increased at a much lower rate than domestic spending in recent years and is not the cause of soaring deficits." 

A coalition of conservative and libertarian organizations fired back in a joint letter to House and Senate leaders after the GOP's sweeping victories in the mid-term elections. "Leadership on spending requires commitment that aims to permanently change the bias toward profligacy, not simply stem the tide in the short-term," the letter stated. "True fiscal stewards cannot eschew real spending reform by protecting pet projects in the federal budget. Any such Department of Defense favoritism would signal that the new Congress is not serious about fiscal responsibility and not ready to lead."

As one of the country's most prominent budget hawks, Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) President Grover Norquist, explained at the time: "Voters in the November elections went to the polls to express their concern about one thing only -- explosive government spending. If Members of Congress don't take the mandate to stem government growth seriously by keeping spending cuts on the table for all areas of the federal budget, they will not be asked to stick around to continue to spend taxpayers' money for long."

The open question heading into the fight was whether Republican members of Congress feared their own constituents more than they did the neoconservatives. Contrary to the conventional wisdom in Washington, pro-spending hawks don't always win. "For all the kicking and screaming," explains Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center, "it is easier -- even for Republicans -- to cut defense spending than to cut non-defense spending." As an example, de Rugy points to the 1990s, when Republicans held the majority in both houses of Congress  and Pentagon spending declined while overall federal spending continued to grow (albeit at a slower rate than before).

It's Not You, It's Me - By Jeffrey Lewis

When Deputy Secretary of Defense Ash Carter took the podium on March 1 to discuss the initial impact of sequestration, he said something very interesting. The Defense Department, Carter explained, would, at least for now, "strictly protect" two missions: The first, understandably enough, involves ongoing operations in Afghanistan. The second floored me. Given the remit for my column, you can probably guess what it is. Carter indicated that, for now, nuclear deterrence will be sequestered from sequestration.

It will not surprise you that I think this is an unwise policy decision, at least if protecting the nuclear mission requires further cuts elsewhere. As an indicator of how the Obama administration thinks about nuclear weapons, it is even worse. The very notion that nuclear deterrence should be exempt from sequestration helps illustrate the incredibly convoluted and confused thinking that underpins the U.S. approach to nuclear weapons.

Carter gave two examples of the sort of cuts that sequestration will entail, both relating to the operations and maintenance of U.S. military forces: The Navy will begin deferring maintenance on the fleet, and the Air Force will defer training, reducing the number of hours pilots get in the air. Why protect the U.S. strategic deterrent from such reductions? What's so fricking special about nuclear weapons, anyway?

Part of the answer goes back to Albert Wohlstetter, who, in the 1950s, articulated the notion that for deterrence to succeed, the United States would have to pay very close attention to the details -- that deterrence is fragile. So, over the years, U.S. policymakers have asserted that deterrence hangs by the slender threat of miscellanea such as missile throw-weight.

Why would deterrence depend on such things? We have tended to think about deterrence as a calculation -- imagine Leonid Brezhnev awaking each morning to subtract the costs of invading Western Europe from the benefits, cursing his luck, and then lighting a cigarette. The notion that deterrence requires spending time with the inner mental life of dictators great and small has derailed countless conferences, spawned terrible policy ideas, and generally kept Jerry Post on retainer.

But policymakers don't actually think that way. Wohlstetter was no fool. His Delicate Balance of Terror is predicated not on any particular model of Soviet behavior, but on its absence -- as well as on the absence of any sort of certainty that might make the balance of terror "automatic." His approach was quintessentially one of what we might call self-assurance -- the notion that policymakers can use rational examination of objective factors to choose policies, forces, and postures that optimize, but do not ensure, a very delicate balance of terror. In practice, this meant more, more, more. Bigger numbers, lots of forces on alert, plenty of diversity in the stockpile. It is an interesting question why, if we do not know what deters the Soviets, we would choose to cover all our bases rather than just concluding that the entire enterprise is bankrupt. Suffice it to say, you don't end up as secretary of defense if you pick the blue pill.

Why Is This Man Smiling? - By Mark D. Wallace and Kristen Silverberg

Last week in Almaty, Kazakhstan, Iran discussed its nuclear program with representatives from the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany -- the so-called P5+1. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has no doubt been smiling ever since, and not just because the unproductive talks bought Iran yet more time to advance its nuclear program. Khamenei is likely smiling because in the longstanding game of diplomacy, economic warfare, and clandestine operations between the Iran and the West, Iran won the week.

Iran's primary victory out of Kazakhstan was in obtaining an offer from the P5+1 to ease the economic sanctions that have been battering the Iranian economy as an interim step, rather than as a part of a comprehensive deal. Widely referred to as "sanctions relief," the Almaty proposal was leaked before talks even began, and described by the P5+1 as a "confidence-building step."

"Sanctions relief" can indeed be seen as a confidence-builder, but not in the way its proponents intended. In reality, the Kazakhstan offer simply allowed Iranian officials to effectively convey competence and the hope of improved economic conditions to their own people, just as the June 2013 presidential election approaches. At a time when Iran has suffered from worsening economic conditions including hyperinflation and an 80 percent currency devaluation, this is exactly what the regime was hoping to achieve.

To be sure, the upcoming election will be illegitimate and result in Khamenei's hand-picked candidate assuming power. But even with that ultimate result determined, the regime is taking every step possible to ensure that the election proceeds smoothly and is not a repeat of 2009 -- when hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets in protest -- particularly given the lessons of the nearby Arab uprisings.

In January, Khamenei made rare public comments demanding that Iranians honor the results of this year's election, stating that "[a]ll people should be careful that their remarks do not serve this desire of the enemy." That followed numerous statements by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and others blaming Western sanctions for the deterioration of the Iranian economy. The ayatollah and his cronies are taking great pains to fight the narrative that their own incompetence, both in domestic policy and foreign policy, is responsible for the nation's current economic troubles.

Unintentionally, the P5+1 played right in this propaganda effort with its offer of "sanctions relief." While nothing was accomplished in Kazakhstan diplomatically, Tehran held up the P5+1's offer as evidence that sanctions would soon be eased. Subsequently, the Iranian rial, which was recently trading at an all-time (semi-official) low of 40,000 to one dollar, rose in value to 33,000 to 1. Regime officials spoke effusively of the meeting, with spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast stating that "[a] positive atmosphere was created in the talks," and that "if this atmosphere prevails, an acceptable outcome for both parties may be reached."

A First Draft of the Third War - By Micah Zenko

Since 11:47 on Wednesday morning, the beginning of a Senate filibuster to delay a vote on John Brennan's nomination to head the CIA, "Rand Paul," "drones," and "John Brennan" have intermittently been trending on Twitter. This attention-grabbing focus on targeted killings -- which will last only until Paul runs out of steam -- is representative of the sporadic attention that the controversial tactic has received from policymakers and the public.

With each supposed revelation -- the "kill list," "signature strikes," "disposition matrix," and the leaking of a Department of Justice white paper providing the legal justification for killing American citizens -- there is a frenzy of interest in drone strikes. Analysts (myself included) are repeatedly asked, "Where is this all heading in five or ten years?" In other words: What additional lethal missions will U.S. armed drones execute, and where will they occur? What other states will seek to develop this military capability?

But, in general, there is relative indifference to the history of America's Third War -- the 10-year campaign of over 400 targeted killings in non-battlefield settings that have killed an estimated 3,500 to 4,700 people. And that is puzzling, particularly since they have become a defining feature of post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy.

Over the past few months, many stakeholders in and out of government have offered recommendations about how the Obama administration should change, limit, end, or enhance its targeted killing policies. However, there have been no calls for an official government study into the history and evolution of non-battlefield targeted killings. This is essential, since reforms must first be informed by an accurate accounting of how the policies were originally conceived, how they were implemented and altered based on updated information, whether they succeeded or failed at achieving their objectives, and what their intended and unintended effects have been.

If President Obama believes what he said in his State of the Union address -- "It is not sufficient for citizens to just take my word for it that we are doing the right thing" -- then he should authorize a comprehensive historical review into targeted killings, ideally by an independent commission. This review would later be declassified -- with input from the original classification authorities -- to the greatest extent possible without revealing classified information regarding the sources and methods of such operations. This would include protecting those foreign liaison relationships that facilitate U.S. military or intelligence access to denied areas.

The president and his senior officials have repeatedly asserted that drones are "surgical," "discriminate," and "precise," and that there is a very careful and deliberate interagency process ("not a bunch of folks in a room somewhere just making decisions"). If that is true, then the Obama administration must believe it has a positive targeted killings story to share with the public. This would be preferable to the surreptitious custom of rebutting criticisms of targeted killings via anonymous officials, or selectively disavowing attacks that were initially thought to be drone strikes, as the New York Times reported on Monday.

Such an action would not be unprecedented. In May 2009, President Obama declassified Office of Legal Counsel memoranda justifying torture "because the existence of that approach to interrogation was already widely known, the Bush administration had acknowledged its existence." Today, targeted killings via U.S. drone strikes are openly debated, and Obama himself explicitly acknowledged the practice of targeted killings in Pakistan over 13 months ago. The principle and excuse of deniability no longer applies and is an unacceptable defense for the limitless secrecy surrounding the targeted killings program.

There are publicly available or partially declassified U.S. government reports on similarly controversial topics, including the CIA's 2004 report on detention and interrogation, the Pentagon's 2005 review of detention and interrogation, and the director of national intelligence's 2012 report on Guantanamo detainees. There have also been major reports, like the 9/11 Commission Report and the congressional joint inquiry into the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as well as the U.S. military's highly critical assessments of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Finally, there was the Senate Foreign Relations Committee report on Afghanistan's narco-war, which revealed that U.S. military forces "put drug traffickers with proven links to the insurgency on a kill list, called the joint integrated prioritized target list."

If the White House is unable or unwilling to conduct a similar study on drones, then Congress should build upon its recent efforts at oversight by initiating a full and complete accounting of non-battlefield targeted killings. This could be done through a joint inquiry or within the committees on governmental affairs, foreign relations, armed services, or intelligence. It would include staff investigations, closed hearings with administration officials, and public hearings with outside experts and former officials. One recent example is the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's 6,000-page report on CIA torture, which may be released in whole or in part "after receiving executive branch comments," according to Senator Dianne Feinstein. Given that Congress (justifiably) investigated America's role in the torture of an estimated 136 victims, it is surely worth investigating the targeted killings program, which has killed over 3,000 suspected terrorists, militants, and civilians -- and counting.

The first component of reform is drawing upon the experiences and lessons of the past. Without an official history of targeted killings, future U.S. government officials and employees will only be influenced by the immediate scope of their responsibilities, and citizens will absorb each new headline without a broader context or awareness. An executive or congressional historical report of targeted killings should receive bipartisan support, since the program has actually spanned three administrations -- even Bill Clinton maintained a kill list of "fewer than ten" suspected al Qaeda members. However, virtually all policymakers and citizens have forgotten that and are similarly unaware of the deep and opaque history of the Third War, because their focus is forever on the present and the future.

Why Being So Right Feels So Bad - By Peter Van Buren

I was right. When they print the next edition of my book, I'm going to change the title from We Meant Well to I Told You So.

I spent a year in Iraq as a U.S. Foreign Service officer, leading two of the then-vaunted Provincial Reconstruction Teams. We were charged with nothing less than winning the war for America by rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure, creating a functioning democracy and stable economy, and thus ensuring Iraq would be an ally of the United States in the war on terror. As it became more and more apparent to me over the course of my time in Iraq that we were accomplishing none of those goals (while simultaneously wasting incredible amounts of money), I was compelled to tell the American people what I saw. It would be both a lesson for history and a warning about similar efforts already under way in Afghanistan. I wrote a book and lost my career of 24 years at the State Department as a result.

When, in 2010, I sent the first draft of We Meant Well, about the waste, fraud, mismanagement, and utter stupidity surrounding the Iraq reconstruction efforts, to my editor, I remember her saying, "You know the book itself won't come out for close to a year, and if things turn around in Iraq in the meantime, that will make you look wrong." I told her not to worry.

When the book did come out in September 2011, most of the interviewers I met with threw in skeptical comments: "Well, maybe it will work out like in Japan," they said, or "It's too early to tell." When I met with staffers from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2012, they said, "We'd like to believe you, but everything that State tells us contradicts your thesis that the money spent was just a big waste." Foreign Policy felt the need to run an angry rebuttal ("The greatest assets in many respects were our 'clients,' the Iraqi ministers, provincial officials, and local residents who were active and engaged at every level") to an excerpt from my book.

Well, now it's official. Although it took 10 years for the report to come out, according to the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), "$60 billion in American taxpayer funds later, Iraq is still so unstable and broken that even its leaders question whether U.S. efforts to rebuild the war-torn nation were worth the cost."

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said "that $55 billion could have brought great change in Iraq," but the positive effects of those funds were too often "lost."

Iraqi parliament speaker Osama al-Nujaifi, the country's top Sunni official, told auditors that the rebuilding efforts did not "achieve the purpose for which it was launched. Rather, it had unfavorable outcomes in general."

There "was usually a Plan A but never a Plan B," said Kurdish official Qubad Talabani, son of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.

Shiite, Sunni, Kurd. Trust me, about the only thing everybody agrees on is the United States spent a bundle of money. According to the Associated Press, to date the United States has spent more than $60 billion in reconstruction grants on Iraq. That works out to about $15 million a day. Overall, including all military and diplomatic costs and other aid, the United States has spent at least $767 billion since the U.S.-led invasion began. Some funds are still being spent on ongoing projects.

I hate to say I told you so -- but I told you so. SIGIR, if you're out there, perhaps it would have been better to agree to meet with me back in 2009. I could have saved you some time and money. SIGIR, like everything else associated with the Iraq reconstruction, was expensive. The inspectors cost taxpayers $16 million this year, a bargain compared with the $30 million a year they used up during the war era itself. 

Inside the Black Box - By Marc Ambinder

For China, U.S. government secrecy has been a boon. Cyber-warfare directed against American companies is reducing the gross domestic product by as much as $100 billion per year, according to a recent National Intelligence Estimate. Because companies are generally reluctant to admit they've been breached and because the National Security Agency, which works with these companies to assess Chinese cyber techniques, is surrounded by a cocoon of secrecy, China has been able to operate with impunity. 

That soon will change. 

In the coming weeks, the NSA, working with a Department of Homeland Security joint task force and the FBI, will release to select American telecommunication companies a wealth of information about China's cyber-espionage program, according to a U.S. intelligence official and two government consultants who work on cyber projects. Included: sophisticated tools that China uses, countermeasures developed by the NSA, and unique signature-detection software that previously had been used only to protect government networks. 

Press reports have indicated that the Obama administration plans to give certain companies a list of domain names China is known to use for network exploitation. But the coming effort is of an entirely different scope. These are American state secrets.

Very little that China does escapes the notice of the NSA, and virtually every technique it uses has been tracked and reverse-engineered. For years, and in secret, the NSA has also used the cover of some American companies -- with their permission -- to poke and prod at the hackers, leading them to respond in ways that reveal patterns and allow the United States to figure out, or "attribute," the precise origin of attacks. The NSA has even designed creative ways to allow subsequent attacks but prevent them from doing any damage. Watching these provoked exploits in real time lets the agency learn how China works.

Now, though, the cumulative effect of Chinese economic warfare -- American companies' proprietary secrets are essentially an open book to them -- has changed the secrecy calculus. An American official who has been read into the classified program -- conducted by cyber-warfare technicians from the Air Force's 315th Network Warfare Squadron and the CIA's secret Technology Management Office -- said that China has become the "Curtis LeMay" of the post-Cold War era: "It is not abiding by the rules of statecraft anymore, and that must change." 

"The Cold War enforced norms, and the Soviets and the U.S. didn't go outside a set of boundaries. But China is going outside those boundaries now. Homeostasis is being upset," the official said.

In essence, the NSA will give American companies the ability to fight back. The idea is two-fold. One: Behavior modification by exposing Chinese tactics, which, in theory, would embarrass the Chinese. Two: This will force China will develop new hacking avenues, but this will take time, giving U.S. companies the chance to catch up.

The NSA could do even more than this. It has some pretty nifty tools to use in terms of protecting cyberspace. In theory, it could probe devices at critical Internet hubs and inspect the patterns of data packets coming into the United States for signs of coordinated attacks. The recently declassified Comprehensive National Cyberspace Initiative describes the government's plan, informally known as Einstein 3, to address the threats to government data that run through private computer networks -- an admission that the NSA will have to perform deep packet inspection on private networks at some point. But, currently, the NSA only does this for a select group of companies that work with the Department of Defense. It is legally prohibited from setting up filters around all of the traffic entry points. 

Government agencies, however, are a different matter. To protect the feds, the NSA provides the Department of Homeland Security with the equipment and personnel to do to the packet inspection. DHS (using NSA personnel) analyzes the patterns, sanitizes the data, and sends the information back to Fort Meade, where the NSA can figure out how to respond to threats discovered. DHS's jurisdiction does not include the military and U.S. intelligence agencies. That's the NSA's province.