Waiting for the Rain - By Peter Chilson

OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso ' The town of Bandiagara, population 12,000, sits on a plateau of smooth sandstone bluffs, grass, acacia, and palm trees that ends at an astonishing complex of cliffs so high and abrupt that any of them on a dusty day can surprise a traveler as if a piece of the globe has suddenly broken away. Bandiagara's dirt homes, shellacked with mud stucco, bear the red tinge of this land's iron-rich soil, farmed for centuries by the Dogon people and roamed by Fulani and Tuareg herders. Homes stand along wide dirt streets useful for driving cattle and sheep to market, and at dawn and dusk buildings glow under a dusty sun. A few miles east of town, the cliffs drop 1,600 feet, grooving sharply in and out of the plateau along a 100-mile front, running from the south to the northeast like the edge of a saw. For over a thousand years, the cliffs have been a natural hideaway for one tribe or another, most recently the Dogon, a few hundred of whom came here 700 years ago to flee the Mali Empire's embrace of Islam.

This history means more now that Bandiagara -- once popular with European and American trekkers -- is settling into a new role as border post and garrison town facing al Qaeda-affiliated jihadi groups spread across Mali's vast Saharan north. France and its allies, namely the United States, call northern Mali a jihadi "safe haven" that threatens the West. As a result, a U.N.-supported multinational African attack on northern Mali is moving closer to reality. U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney repeatedly cited Mali in his October foreign-policy debate with President Barack Obama. But the jihadi takeover in the north, now six months old, carries a touch of bitter irony in Bandiagara as history's tide washes back across this town that 160 years ago was capital of the Toucouleur Empire. Founded by El Hadj Umar Tall and ruled by the code of sharia, a strict interpretation of Islam, he reportedly killed more than 100,000 people across inland West Africa during a reign that lasted more than four decades. French force of arms and tribal uprisings brought it down in 1893.

Yet Mali was not yet a campaign issue on May 8 when I drove into Bandiagara in late afternoon with Isaac Sagara, a Dogon friend who grew up in a Christian family in a village just below the plateau. Isaac was guiding me on a trip along the edge of Mali's northern zone, a strange new borderland that no one has quite figured out how to draw on a map. Some news agency maps show Mali cut in half along a razor-straight line that runs from west to east, while others show a wavier division, with the new border sloping off to the northeast roughly parallel to the Bandiagara cliffs. In any case, Mali, shaped like a top-heavy hourglass, is today divided at the narrow middle. Bandiagara sits square on the border between what remains of Mali's tattered government in the south and jihadi control in the north.

Isaac, at the wheel of our aging Land Cruiser, hummed and smacked his lips through a mouthful of mango. I think the tune was "Amazing Grace," but he lost the melody in the chewing. He liked "Rock of Ages" and French hymns that I didn't know, never breaking into words, just the outlines of song. He carried plastic bags of peanuts and dates in his pockets and put mangoes on the dashboard. He told stories about guiding tourists across the Dogon cliff country and about people he met in the international aid business, like the American Peace Corps volunteers in a Dogon village who obsessed about building a hot tub out of clay. Once, working a rural health project, he was stranded in a village cut off by monsoon rains during a cholera outbreak. "Terrible," he told me. "A dozen people died." Then he'd pluck a mango off the dashboard, bite into it, and peel back the skin with his teeth, all with one hand on the wheel and another hymn spraying from his lips.

I'd been in Bandiagara a dozen times over the past 25 years. Here and across Mali, soldiers have always kept a low profile, in my experience. My tensest encounter in this town had been to fend off a pesky cliff "guide" who kept shouting "hakuna matata," the Swahili words for "no problem" immortalized in Disney's The Lion King. Mali, even under the army dictatorship that endured nearly three decades until 1991, has never embraced military culture like other African countries. Mali's army, in the words of a Western diplomat I met in Bamako, the Malian capital, "was never a military of soldiers. Most are farmers putting in the time for a paycheck."

That army, stressed by the growing Tuareg rebellion in the north, took back control this year in a March coup, ending 21 years of democracy. Since the coup, however, the army, true to the diplomat's words, has ruled without the curfews and endless checkpoints that define other African military governments. In the streets of Bandiagara and Bamako, soldiers generally keep to themselves, though there is evidence that the army command structure is in decay. In October, on a remote road near the border with Mauritania, Malian soldiers shot to death 16 unarmed Muslim clerics traveling from Mauritania to Bamako for a conference. The attack was apparently unprovoked.

But in May, Bandiagara looked like a military camp, expecting an invasion at any moment. Isaac drove slowly across the town square, where an armored vehicle with a cannon and crew of soldiers occupied the concrete center island protected by sandbags. As we turned down another road, Isaac slowed the car and fixed his eyes on a large gun mounted in the back of a parked pickup truck. A soldier was standing behind the gun at the ready. "Now that is very serious," he said, shaking his head with a broad smile and both hands on the wheel. "We aren't used to seeing the army out in the open like this." His mood lightened as if the sight encouraged him. Later he said, "I can tell you that by December, Mali's nightmare will be over. Our soldiers will retake the north."

"Really?" I said, squinting, trying to keep the doubt out of my voice.

"I'm certain of it."

Isaac's hope for action is not baseless, though it likely won't happen in December. On Nov. 11, leaders of the Economic Community of West African States settled on a military plan to retake northern Mali with 3,300 soldiers, mainly from Nigeria, Niger, and Burkina Faso. The plan awaits U.N. Security Council approval, which means action against the jihadists is a real possibility. The U.N. decision is still months away.

The French have committed aid similar to what they (with help from Britain and the United States) gave the rebels who killed Libyan strongman Muammar al-Qaddafi last year: arms and intelligence support, including surveillance drones. France, which once ruled 2 million square miles of West Africa, including Mali, helped end Qaddafi's rule, inadvertently releasing a flood of arms from his looted arsenals into the hands of hundreds of battle-hardened Malian Tuareg mercenaries he trained for his armies. In January, these men launched a war for an independent Saharan state they call Azawad, taking Mali's north and splitting the country in two. In March, riding the Tuareg wave, three jihadi groups -- al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Ansar Dine, and the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa -- arrived in force. By June they'd chased the Tuareg nationalist rebellion underground and its leaders into exile. This is the situation Mali, including Bandiagara, face today.

For days I'd been gently pressing Isaac on what the jihadists in the north might mean for him and his parents, who lived in a village a few hours' drive east of Bandiagara, off the plateau. But he kept changing the subject. Now, as we drove through Bandiagara, where everywhere we were reminded of war, I decided to be blunt: "You know, they're talking about sharia law in Timbuktu and across the north," I said. "Doesn't that worry you?"

Isaac never got cross, but he looked at me as if I'd accused him of something. "Of course we're worried," he said.

Mubarak with a Beard? - By Michael Wahid Hanna

Reflecting on the lessons of the Arab uprisings in November 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was adamant that traditional U.S. policies in the region were no longer tenable. "[A]s the fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt made clear," she said "the enduring cooperation we seek will be difficult to sustain without democratic legitimacy and public consent." But such revelations necessitate drastic changes, and in the face of unanticipated events and crises, it's all too easy for the familiar policies of the past to re-emerge. As Egypt descends again into turmoil over the country's fraught constitution-writing process, it appears that the United States is once again embracing the past and eschewing the lessons it learned the hard way during the uprising.

In a move that bears the hallmark of U.S. policy in the Mubarak era, the United States has largely reduced its relationship with Egypt to the maintenance of the peace treaty with Israel and withheld serious judgment of the Muslim Brotherhood-led government, even as it actively undermines the country's already troubled democratic transition.

The most severe political crisis to strike Egypt since the fall of Mubarak was sparked by President Mohamed Morsy's Nov. 22 constitutional decree, which granted the executive absolute authority and immunized his decisions from judicial review for the remainder of the transitional period. Morsy defended the move as an attempt to protect the constituent assembly -- tasked with drafting Egypt's new constitution -- from potential judicial dissolution, but his unilateral steps provoked outrage among opposition forces who again took to the streets.

The crisis deepened when the president directed the assembly to ram through a governing document in a chaotic, all-night session that made a mockery of deliberative constitutional process and design. If approved in a hastily called referendum, that slipshod document will bound Egypt's political future and institutionalize its crisis. With a significant portion of the country's judges declaring a strike in response to Morsy's declaration and dueling protesters mobilizing on opposing sides, Egypt's flawed transition now risks tipping into outright civil strife and prolonged instability.

Morsy's actions presented the United States with a difficult choice: Should it challenge an elected Egyptian president just as the two countries have begun to reconstruct bilateral ties? This choice was complicated further by the close cooperation and pragmatism displayed by Morsy and his government in securing a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel in the Gaza Strip last month. These efforts won the Egyptian president newfound confidence in Washington, and administration officials were quick to shower him with praise.

But rather than using his burnished reputation as a regional leader to forge a more consensual and stable transition back home, Morsy capitalized on the favorable international political climate by making an untenable and unjustifiable power grab that has plunged Egypt into crisis and exacerbated existing divisions.

Morsy's moves were particularly damaging to the United States since he made his initial announcement the day after meeting with Clinton to finalize details of the Gaza ceasefire. The timing raised the unfounded specter among already suspicious Egyptians that the Brotherhood had cleared their undemocratic power play with the now-grateful Americans.

The Obama administration's response has only reinforced those fears -- though it does not justify the more baroque conspiracy theories about a secret U.S.-Muslim Brotherhood pact. Following Morsy's decree, the State Department released a tepid statement referencing "concerns" in the international community. The statement urged calm and encouraged "all parties to work together," calling for "all Egyptians to resolve their differences over these important issues peacefully and through democratic dialogue." The decision not to deliver a White House statement further indicated that the Obama administration wished to downplay the significance of Morsy's moves.

But the administration's conservative response was woefully short-sighted and reflected old modes of thinking that were ostensibly discarded in the wake of the Arab uprisings.

Obama Can't Get No Respect - By Aaron David Miller

The late Rodney Dangerfield (formerly Jacob Cohen of Deer Park, New York) made a successful career out of getting no respect. "Last week I told my wife we needed a home improvement loan; she gave me  $1000 to move out," was the comic's sort of gag.

These days President Obama might consider taking his own no respect routine on the road. Last week he was playing a pretty convincing Rodney Dangerfield.

In as many days, two American allies, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu, delivered back-to-back snubs to the President. Abbas rebuffed U.S. efforts to prevent the Palestine Liberation Organization from pushing for non-member observer state status at the United Nations, and Bibi plowed ahead (literally) with plans for new settlements in East Jerusalem -- including the radioactive E-1 project, which would effectively cut the West Bank in half by separating Ramallah and Bethlehem from Jerusalem. Last week's string of no's should hardly have come as a surprise to anyone following the course of Obama's foreign and domestic policy during his first term.

Over the last four years, the nadas have come fast and furious -- from friends and foes alike. Iraq's Nuri al-Maliki said no to a status of forces agreement, the Iranian mullahs said no to stopping enrichment, Putin said no to any U.N. Security Council resolution on Syria, and Pakistan continues to support the Taliban and oppose American goals in Afghanistan. The one no that actually helped Obama -- but hurt the country -- was the Republican "Just Say No" platform to every facet of the White House's agenda, which  cost the GOP big-time at the polls.

Nor is there much prospect that the no's are going to end anytime soon. From wrangling with Republicans on the edge of the fiscal cliff to wrestling with the Russians,  Chinese, and the Iranian mullahs, Barack Obama seems trapped between his "Yes We Can" hopes and the "No You Won't" realities. 

But is anyone really surprised? It's a cruel and unforgiving world out there and America doesn't control it. Indeed, in my favorite part of the world -- the angry, broken and dysfunctional Middle East -- we have even less influence these days.  Our old friends (dependable autocrats like Hosni Mubarak, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and Ali Abdullah Saleh) have gone the way of the dodo. And the new rising Islamists (Mohamed Morsi, Hamas, and even the Turks) don't care much for our policies.

It's no wonder that the most successful aspects of Obama's foreign policy are those areas where the United States acts unilaterally and doesn't have to depend on the naysayers (see: The withdrawal from Iraq and soon Afghanistan, and the drone war). Obama abroad can we summed up in one phrase: no spectacular successes and no spectacular failures. Anything more in the win column will depend on a cast of characters (Putin, Abbas, Morsi, the mullahs, Netanyahu) who have little interest in giving in to American persuasion or pressure.

But saying no to America is a more complex business than you might imagine. There are different ways of saying no, and the reasons behind the rejections are often more nuanced than they appear at first glance. However they are delivered, they still come out as negatives, of course, -- never a great thing for a great power's street cred. Here's a definitely politically incorrect guide to the art of rejection.

There's a New Caliph in Town - By Evan Hill

CAIRO - For the first time in Egypt's post-revolutionary political scene, the Muslim Brotherhood's ascendancy is under serious threat. But as a diverse array of political players challenges the Islamist movement's efforts to centralize power, the Brothers are showing no sign of backing down.

The trouble began last week, when President Mohamed Morsy issued a package of sovereign decrees that sacked the nation's prosecutor general, appointed a new one with a mandate to re-open cases against deposed autocrat Hosni Mubarak and his inner circle, and -- most importantly -- declared both his own decisions and the assembly drafting the country's new constitution immune from judicial oversight. As scholar Nathan Brown put it, Morsy's edict amounted to a declaration that he was "all powerful ... just for a little while."

Unsurprisingly, Egypt's opposition wasn't about to sit back and let Morsy decide when he would allow rival political voices a seat at the table. Public reaction was swift and fierce: In less than 24 hours, protesters flooded Tahrir Square. In cities across the country, offices of Morsy's Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) -- the Brotherhood's political wing --were attacked and burned. One teenager died in the ensuing clashes. The group is poised to hold its own rally on Saturday, which it says will be a "million-man march" in support of the president's decision and efforts to "cleans[e] the country of former regime cronies."

Morsy is no Mubarak with a beard, his advisors insist. He has merely acted to pre-empt a plot by Mubarak regime holdovers and opposition politicians that would have seen the country's high court dissolve the constitutional assembly and annul the president's election victory -- a judicial coup that would throw the country into chaos, they say.

Pressed for evidence of the plot during a prerecorded television interview aired on Nov. 29, Morsy declined to provide any. He warned of "enemies" outside the country and said he had obtained knowledge about a plot, even though it had yet to turn into "proper evidence." "When I have this information and I feel my country is under threat, I have to make difficult decisions," he said.

The decrees, their fallout, and the Brotherhood's reaction are emblematic of the group's views of the Egyptian political scene five months after winning the presidency and nearly two years after the revolution opened the path for their political dominance.

Victories at the polls have buoyed the group's confidence -- some would say arrogance -- and solidified its pre-existing conception of Egypt's non-Islamist opposition as tiny and irrelevant -- a constituency that can if necessary be outvoted and outmanned on the streets to push through the Brotherhood's agenda. For the Brotherhood, the prospect of losing its political majority seems so unlikely that the possibility has not even entered into its strategic calculations.

"Should we show you our might?" said Hazem Kheir Eddin, an FJP political adviser who writes for its media outlets, when pressed about the Brotherhood's margin of victory in the recent elections. "If you can mobilize half a million men, we can mobilize 20 million men."

Spyocrats - By Nada Bakos

The firestorm surrounding the story that U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice told on Sunday morning talk shows five days after the attack on the American diplomatic facility in Benghazi has drawn wildly different reactions around Washington. Bad data? Innocent mistake? Political deception? From the president's staunch defense of Rice to John McCain's repeated attacks, different people see different things. But, as a former CIA analyst, I've taken a separate lesson from the episode: The office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), created to facilitate interagency analysis and operations, has become a serious bureaucratic obstacle.

For a long time, the CIA ruled the intelligence cycle of collection, aggregation, analysis, and dissemination. But in 2004, the 9/11 Commission recommended the United States unify the intelligence community. Thus, the DNI was born. Today, according to its website, the DNI "serves as the head of the Intelligence Community, overseeing and directing the implementation of the National Intelligence Program and acting as the principal advisor to the President, the National Security Council, and the Homeland Security Council for intelligence matters related to national security." But, however noble and sensible the intent, the DNI has done very little to remedy the coordination issues -- and Benghazi is a perfect example.

On September 16, Rice went on Meet the Press and stated, "Our current assessment is that what happened in Benghazi was, in fact, initially a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired hours before in Cairo, almost a copycat of the demonstrations against our facility in Cairo, which were prompted, of course, by the [Innocence of Muslims] video." Rice has since publicly stated that there was an error in the intelligence she was given -- there was not a protest at the facility in Benghazi. But the initial set of talking points from the CIA is said to have indicated that the attackers had links to al Qaeda. So why did she not mention that? A U.S. intelligence official has said, "The information about individuals linked to al Qaeda was derived from classified sources, and could not be corroborated at the unclassified level; the links were tenuous and therefore it made sense to be cautious before naming perpetrators." So was Rice just being prudent? It's possible, though her performance was clumsy at best.

I have no access to classified information from the CIA or DNI on Benghazi, but here's what might have happened. On the eve of the attack, the analysts at the CIA are reading reports from regional embassies, watching news reports, and poring over cables from assets as the ridiculous anti-Islam YouTube video sparks protests across the region. As the attack in Benghazi ensues, they scramble to assess the situation and draft products for the various consumers -- the most sensitive pieces go to select people at the White House, Pentagon, Office of the DNI, and National Security Council. If time allows, an alternative product is scrubbed of the most sensitive information for release across various parts of the U.S. government. In other words, the CIA may (or may not) have disseminated two different sets of talking points: one highly classified to protect sources and methods, and a second for broader dissemination.

Although the CIA's role has changed in recent years, informing and warning the senior ranks of the U.S. government on tactical issues is supposed to be its purview, because over the course of decades, the agency has established processes to create, coordinate, and disseminate the right intelligence to the right audience. This is not to say that the CIA has always been correct in its assessments -- the very nature of analysis, particularly on breaking events, all but guarantees some degree of error -- but it has an established way of producing analytic products. 

Alas, one of the responsibilities of the DNI is to "ensure the most accurate analysis of intelligence is derived from all sources to support national security needs" (my emphasis), and the intelligence community, for better or worse, is not a public affairs dynamo: it is made up of 16 agencies. It's likely that the DNI passed the document to other intel agencies, which all added views from their own analysts, and created another set of talking points to be disseminated. These talking points could easily have emphasized the role of the video in Benghazi -- not all analysts from differing agencies have access to the same information. In the case of the DNI, collective intelligence analysis can be just as flawed as independent analysis: a consensus view can reveal differences of opinion within the intelligence community, but it also can result in the loss of nuance or, worse, become a convenient excuse for adopting a safe position.

Heroes of Retreat, Revisited - By Christian Caryl

What makes a hero? I've found myself thinking about that a lot lately. Humans seem to have a great hunger for heroes; demand always exceeds the supply. Which is logical enough, when you consider that heroes, by their very definition, are supposed to be exceptional. What's that great line from The Incredibles again? "When everyone's super, no one will be."

Every age complains about its lack of heroes, but once you start looking, it turns out that they are indeed around. Right now, netizens are enthusing over a chance photo that shows a New York City cop making a present of new boots to a homeless man. That the photo went viral almost instantly attests to our need to latch on to people who seem to embody the highest values. (Or just take a look at CNN's popular Heroes program, a celebration of ordinary people who do good deeds.)

Heroes come in different forms. Just take a look at Burma. Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of that country's pro-democracy movement, would clearly qualify as a hero in just about anyone's book. She sacrificed a happy life with her own family to the cause of attaining freedom for her people. She has stared down armed soldiers and endured lonely decades of detention. Now, after so many years of struggle, she seems to have been vindicated. The same military government that she opposed for so many years has suddenly changed heart, opening up the once-isolated country to the outside world and awakening hope among its own citizens.

Yet consider the other Burmese politician that FP named to its 2012 list of 100 Global Thinkers, a group whose achievements we're celebrating this week. Burmese President Thein Sein is not really the kind of person you'd choose as a natural hero. For almost his entire adult life he embodied the very system that Aung San Suu Kyi fought. He spent four decades in the Burmese military, which has run the country since 1962, mostly with unstinting brutality. Thein Sein played a big role in the regime. From 2007 to 2011, he served as prime minister; it was only in 2010, soon before he become president, that he hung up his uniform. It was soon after that he launched the reforms that have led to the release of hundreds of political prisoners and allowed Aung San Suu Kyi to get herself elected to a seat in parliament.

Thein Sein is not a colorful or charismatic personality. He may be the same age as Aung San Suu Kyi, but he comes off -- perhaps by virtue of his long years of service in a tyrannical regime -- as far older and grayer than she. He reads his speeches in a monotone. Given his past, it's doubtful that he will ever have any sort of real rapport with his people. And it would be hard to blame them for it, given the horrors that the Burmese military has visited upon the country's citizenry over the years. (He hasn't been directly implicated in any abuses himself, but he was such a part of the regime that he was also targeted by United States sanctions intended to discipline the Burmese regime. His name was taken off the sanctions list only on September 20 of this year.)

In other words, no one should expect Hollywood to come up with a stirring biopic based on the life of the Burmese president. We like our heroes to have triumphantly linear biographies, tales of ascent against the odds -- and that means that the scriptwriters are out of luck when it comes to someone like Thein Sein. This is a man who achieved all the power that an authoritarian system has to offer -- and then embarked on a course designed to undermine that very power. His friends will accordingly despise him as a traitor, while his foes dismiss him as an opportunist.

The Ties That Bind - By Thomas R. Nides and Abdul Hafeez Shaikh

The U.S.-Pakistan relationship has weathered more than its fair share of crises over the years. The experience has taught each of us -- and our respective governments -- that we have much work to do. Over the last few months, we have made real progress on issues critical to the interests of both of our countries. And we are meeting this week in Washington to carry forward this effort, focusing especially on expanding our economic relations. It is clear to us that trade, investment, and private sector growth are the future of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship.

The United States remains the largest and most open economy to trade and investment in the world, and Pakistan is a large and emerging market with a growing class of entrepreneurs. Two-way trade between Pakistan and the United States totaled nearly $5 billion in 2011, spurred in part by the preferential access many Pakistani products enjoy under the U.S. Generalized System of Preferences Program, which provides preferential market access to 128 countries and territories, including Pakistan. The United States purchases nearly 20 percent of Pakistan's total exports -- more than any other country in the world. Major U.S. companies such as Citicorp, Proctor & Gamble, Boeing, Pepsico, and Coca-Cola are already operating large and growing ventures in Pakistan.

U.S. development assistance has broadened our economic ties. The United States' commitment to supporting Pakistan's development is enshrined in the Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act of 2009, popularly known as "Kerry-Lugar-Berman," and focuses on areas critical to economic growth -- from energy to infrastructure, health to education. U.S. assistance is helping alleviate severe electricity shortages in Pakistan, adding a total of 900 MW to Pakistan's grid by the end of next year. U.S. assistance has built more than 400 miles of roads since 2009 in Pakistan's underdeveloped border regions, generating more business activity. Pakistan benefits from one of the largest U.S. government-sponsored people-to-people exchange programs in the world, with programs, scholarships, and university partnerships enabling thousands of Pakistani students to study in or visit the United States. This is making a difference in the lives of many Pakistanis.

Building on this solid foundation, we believe our two governments can do more to expand sustainable economic ties. First, we have restarted a series of working groups to discuss a broad range of bilateral issues, including law enforcement, defense cooperation, economics and finance, and energy. These groups are designed to expand government-to-government discussions in the areas of our shared interests.