Here is the latest edition of my column at Foreign Policy:

Topics include:

1) Great news -- Karzai is acting crazy,

2) The yin and yang of the Nuclear Posture Review.

Great news -- Karzai is acting crazy

In last week's column, I discussed an anti-American outburst Afghan President Hamid Karzai recently delivered to lunch guests at his palace. After a phone call to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to smooth things over, Karzai almost immediately opened fire again, renewing his complaints about Western interference in Afghanistan's affairs. This tirade concluded with a threat to join the Taliban if foreign interference did not stop. The colorful Peter Galbraith, the former deputy U.N. envoy to Afghanistan (who was fired from that position for his open quarrels with Karzai and his boss) questioned Karzai's "mental stability" and hinted Karzai might be under the influence of drugs. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley dismissed Galbraith's claim and again attempted to get relations with Karzai back on track. But we should not be surprised by another eruption from the Afghan president.

U.S. officials should be pleased that Karzai is rebranding himself as an anti-Western nationalist. Successful counterinsurgency requires a local partner who is legitimate and credible with the indigenous population. If Karzai has concluded that this attempt at rebranding is necessary to increase his legitimacy, especially among Pashtuns, the U.S. government should not object.

Obviously a rebranded Karzai is insufficient for success. The numerous shortcomings of Karzai and the central government in Kabul will not be repaired by this ploy. More troubling is the collateral damage Karzai's attempt at rebranding could inflict. The president's new hostility could damage the morale of U.S. soldiers, who will wonder why they should risk their lives for an erratic America-basher. Karzai's revised marketing strategy could also spoil U.S. political support for the military campaign and boost the Taliban's recruiting.

But there is more to Karzai's rebranding than boosting the current counterinsurgency campaign. He also has to start making plans for how to get by in a post-American Afghanistan. Although Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have both pledged an enduring U.S. commitment to Afghanistan and stated that the U.S. withdrawal, scheduled to begin in July 2011, will be gradual and "conditions-based," Karzai needs to take such promises lightly. More imminent is the Obama team's December 2010 re-evaluation of its strategy, after which Obama could scrap the current plan, should he conclude the assumptions and expectations from last year's exhaustive policy review are not being met.

Rather than merely waiting to be the victim of Obama's timetable, and already knowing that the United States is on its way out, Karzai may have decided to seize the initiative for himself and establish his own timetable for a transition to whatever will come after the United States and NATO withdraw. Establishing himself as independent from the United States will be essential if he is to attract a new great-power patron.

If Karzai's anti-Western shift accelerates this process, U.S. officials again should not despair. Obama's decision last December to multiply the commitment of American prestige left no path for a graceful escape. Karzai's calculated outbursts could open up that means of escape, which Obama should be grateful to have.

The yin and yang of the Nuclear Posture Review

The authors of the U.S. government's latest Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) are attempting to deliver two messages. The first message attempts to show that the U.S. government is making some significant changes to its nuclear weapons doctrine and force structure, changes that bring the world closer to being free of nuclear weapons. The second message asserts that the United States is doing no such thing at all and in fact will remain a fully modernized and supreme nuclear power. The first message is intended for the distrusting leaders of nonaligned developing countries attending next month's conference to review the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The second message is aimed at nervous U.S. allies that rely on the U.S. nuclear umbrella for their defense and skeptical American senators who must ratify the various nuclear treaties that Obama will soon send their way. Unfortunately for Obama, these two messages are likely to get crossed in transit.

The administration is correct to conclude that nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism are (for now at least) the top security threats. Effective action against these threats requires enthusiastic international cooperation. The president's team has concluded that to get that cooperation, it needs to demonstrate that the United States is serious about nuclear arms control (thus the New START Treaty) and about moving "toward a world without nuclear weapons" (as explained in the last chapter of the NPR).

The NPR attempts to provide incentives for nonaligned developing countries to abstain from their own nuclear weapons programs. Obama has changed the United States's nuclear declaratory policy, with a new promise not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear countries that are in compliance with the NPT. Meanwhile, to reassure allies and skeptical senators about the United States' continued protective role in the world, the NPR boasts about America's overwhelming and expanding conventional military dominance, its plans to modernize its nuclear bomber and ballistic missile submarine force, and the money the country will shower on its nuclear laboratories to guarantee the reliability and extend the life span of the country's nuclear warheads.

What might the leader of a nonaligned developing country make of the NPR? Many undoubtedly will receive the second message, namely that nothing has changed. And the new declaratory policy won't mean much to them because it can change at any moment.

What these leaders likely have noticed is that nuclear breakout countries such as India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea suffered no enduring penalties for breaking out, are more secure from outside attack, and have been lavished with foreign aid and attention from the great powers.

Thus we should not be surprised if next month's NPT review conference breaks down in acrimony, as happened at the last review in 2005. Obama and his team are striving mightily to avoid such a repeat and are certainly doing more and taking more risks than George W. Bush's administration did in 2005. Yet it remains to be seen whether Obama's careful precursor steps and structured incentives will offset what many developing countries will see as Western meddling in their sovereignty and even a U.S. plot to extend its military hegemony. Obama is right to give his strategy a try -- if it fails, it will be important to know what doesn't work.

Defending the All-volunteer Force: A Rejoinder to Lt. Col. Paul Yingling - Dr. Curtis Gilroy, Armed Forces Journal.

In his article, "The Founders' Wisdom," in the January issue of Armed Forces Journal, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling argues that the "U.S. should ... abandon the all-volunteer military and return to our historic reliance on citizen soldiers and conscription to wage protracted war." He offers several reasons in support of his argument. First, a conscripted force of citizen soldiers would ensure that the burdens of war are felt equally in every community in America. Second, a conscripted force would provide the means to expand the Army to the sufficient size to meet its commitments. Third, such a force would enable the military to be more discriminating than a volunteer military in selecting those with the skills and attributes most required to fight today's wars. Finally, he believes a conscripted force would be less expensive. I respectfully disagree and will address each point in turn in four sections that follow.

Regardless of one's opinion of the management and progress of the war on terrorism, and contrary to the view of Yingling, the all-volunteer force has been an amazing success. The U.S. is fighting a protracted war with a volunteer military, and has sustained combat operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan for more than eight years while continuing to meet ongoing obligations around the globe. Even when unemployment rates were near-record lows in 2007, straining recruiting, the military still had tens of thousands of young men and women on waiting lists to join. In fiscal 2009, all four services, both the active and reserve components, met or exceeded their numerical recruiting goals, as well as their recruit quality standards in terms of education and aptitude. Retention also remained high - in many cases, one's tour of duty in a combat zone actually increased the likelihood of staying in the military...

More at Armed Forces Journal.

Whose Burden? - Lt. Col Paul Yingling, Armed Forces Journal.

While I appreciate Curtis Gilroy's spirited defense of the all-volunteer force, his article misrepresents or avoids many of my arguments. In the interest of fostering a more candid dialogue, I would like to pose the following questions:

The Defense Department supports its claim that the armed forces represent American society by grouping into the "top quintile" both middle-income families and multibillionaires. The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans owns 38 percent of our country's wealth and wields a commensurate degree of political influence. However, DoD does not track the degree to which these most-privileged Americans serve in our armed forces. Why not?

Gilroy claims that "the services have been very successful in quickly adjusting end strength to changing requirements and wartime needs." Why is the Army unable to meet its goal of providing two years of dwell time between yearlong deployments?

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have dramatically increased the demands on "strategic corporals" - junior enlisted personnel who make tactical decisions with strategic consequences. Between 2001 and 2007, the percentage of high school graduates enlisting in the Army dropped from 90 percent to 79 percent. Given the increased demands of the battlefield, shouldn't DoD have raised enlistment standards between 2001 and 2007? If not, why not? ...

More at Armed Forces Journal.

Curing Afghanistan - Lieutenant General William B. Caldwell IV and Captain (USN) Mark R. Hagerott, Foreign Policy.

The battle for Marja in southern Afghanistan and the coming campaign in Kandahar are important, but victory on these battlefields will not win the war, though they will help set the conditions for success. It will take a comprehensive, holistic effort to bring stability to Afghanistan.

Drawing on our experience as institution builders, and after spending six months on the ground in Afghanistan, we would like to offer a different way to think about diagnosing this country's ills -- and finding the appropriate cures. In the course of our duties, we have helped build the Afghan army, police, air corps, educational institutions, military hospitals, logistics, and the bureaucracies of defense and interior. Rather than describing Afghanistan with the language of war and battles, we have come to think of the country as an ailing patient -- in many ways analogous to a weakened person under attack by an aggressive infection.

To extend this analogy further, to rebuild the country's long-term health, Afghan and coalition leaders must address the ailment at three levels: curing the body, mind, and spirit of the nation. This means rebuilding the body of physical infrastructure and physical security; restoring the mind of governmental and educational institutions; and reinvigorating the spirit of civil leadership and traditional, tolerant Islam...

Much more at Foreign Policy.

And also at Foreign Policy:

The New Rules of War - John Arquilla

The visionary who first saw the age of "netwar" coming warns that the U.S. military is getting it wrong all over again. Here's his plan to make conflict cheaper, smaller, and smarter.

Planet War - Kayvan Farzaneh, Andrew Swift and Peter Williams

From the bloody civil wars in Africa to the rag-tag insurgiences in Southeast Asia, 33 conflicts are raging around the world today, and it's often innocent civilians who suffer the most.

Africa's Forever Wars - Jeffrey Gettleman

Why the continent's conflicts never end.

In Praise of Aerial Bombing - Edward Luttwak

Why terror from the skies still works.

Let Europe Be Europe - Andrew J. Bacevich

Why the United States must withdraw from NATO.

Think Again: China's Military - Drew Thompson

It's not time to panic. Yet.

The Shooting War - Foreign Policy

An exclusive collection of work by the world's most acclaimed conflict photographers.

Why Hamid Karzai Makes a Bad Partner for the U.S. - Peter W. Galbraith, Washington Post opinion.

President Obama will soon have 100,000 troops fighting a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan. Their success depends on having a credible Afghan partner. Unfortunately, Obama's partner is Hamid Karzai.

In the eight years since the Bush administration helped install Karzai as president after the fall of the Taliban, he has run a government so ineffective that Afghans deride him as being no more than the mayor of Kabul and so corrupt that his country ranks 179th on Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index, just ahead of last-place Somalia, which has no government at all.

Afghanistan held a presidential election last August just as Obama was ramping up U.S. support for the war. Although funded by the United States and other Western countries and supported by the United Nations, the elections were massively fraudulent. Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission (IEC) - which, despite its name, is appointed by and answers to Karzai - oversaw massive vote-rigging in which at least one-third of Karzai's tally, more than 1 million votes, was fake. A separate, independently appointed Electoral Complaints Commission eventually tossed out enough Karzai votes to force a second round of balloting, but the IEC ensured that the voting procedures were even more prone to fraud than those applied to the first round. Karzai's main opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, rightly chose not to participate in the second round...

Much more at The Washington Post.

The US Army/USMC Counterinsurgency Center is pleased to host Associate Professor Daryl Youngman, Kansas State University, for a COIN Center Webcast from 1000 CST, (1100 EST), (1500 ZULU) on Thursday, 15 April 2010. Assoc. Prof. Youngman's briefing The Utility of Academic Partnerships in COIN Training will focus on the benefits of utilizing university cultural assets in COIN training.

Those interested in attending may view the meeting on-line here and participate via Defense Connect Online (DCO) as a guest. Remote attendees will be able to ask questions and view the slides through the software.

Also, a reminder that registration for the Spring COIN Symposium, 11-13 May 2010, hosted at Fort Leavenworth, KS, is open at this link. The theme of the symposium is - Counterinsurgency Operations in Afghanistan: An Azimuth Check. The agenda can be found here and guest speaker biographies here. Lodging information can be found here.

The Central Intelligence Agency now has legal permission to kill Anwar al-Aulaqi, a United States citizen. An article from today's Washington Post explains:

Because he is a U.S. citizen, adding Aulaqi to the CIA list required special approval from the White House, officials said. The move means that Aulaqi would be considered a legitimate target not only for a military strike carried out by U.S. and Yemeni forces, but also for lethal CIA operations.

(I'm confused by the phrase "special approval from the White House." Being a building and an inanimate object, I did not know that the White House was capable of giving out approvals. I will assume this means that President Obama gave this approval -- why couldn't the author say this?)

In a recent "This Week at War" column, I asked the following questions about America's use of killer drones:

Specifically, if it is legal for the CIA to employ Predator drones in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, what about remote reaches of Asia, Africa, Latin America, or the high seas? Can the United States shoot at any sorts of criminal suspects and not just al Qaeda suspects or their allies? What if the target is a U.S. citizen? Why is it legal for drones with missiles to do what an overseas FBI agent with a pistol cannot? Does any suspect deemed "too difficult to apprehend" become legally eligible for a Hellfire missile instead?

Speaking for the U.S. government, Harold Koh, recently a law school dean and now legal adviser to the U.S. State Department, explained why states, including the United States, have very broad authorities to kill people they conclude are threats. Summarizing his conclusions on this issue (see the "Use of Force" section of his speech), Koh says the U.S. government's legal authority to shoot missiles at people comes from 1) the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) against al Qaeda personnel and their supporters that Congress passed in late September 2001, and 2) a state's inherent right of self-defense, which authorizes lethal force against all other belligerents anywhere at any time.

What makes someone a belligerent? According to Koh, it is someone who is part of a group that is in armed conflict with a state. Any limitations on the state's employment of firepower? According to Koh, the state's use of force must aim at military objectives and the incidental damage of the attack must not be excessive in relation to the military objective.

Applying Koh's reasoning, it seems as if it the U.S. government could legally answer "yes" to all of the questions I posed above, as long as the government could show the person was part of a group that was in some way hostile to the U.S. Koh sums it up this way:

Some have argued that the use of lethal force against specific individuals fails to provide adequate process and thus constitutes unlawful extrajudicial killing. But a state that is engaged in an armed conflict or in legitimate self-defense is not required to provide targets with legal process before the state may use lethal force.

Still, some nagging questions remain:

1) Does this authority only apply outside U.S. territory or could it apply inside the U.S.?

2) Any limitation on "the White House's" discretion to define what constitutes a hostile group and who is associated with such a group?

3) What happens when (not if) other states, NGOs, and international bodies disagree with the U.S. government's legal reasoning? Will future former Obama administration officials risk arrest for war crimes when they travel outside the U.S., a risk that presumably hangs over the heads of some former Bush administration officials?

How to Save Afghanistan From Karzai - Bing West, New York Times opinion.

... The coalition is pursuing a political-military strategy based on three tasks. First, "clear" the guerrillas from populated areas. Second, "hold" the areas with Afghan forces. Third, "build" responsible governance and development to gain the loyalty of the population for the government in Kabul. To accomplish this, the coalition military has deployed reconstruction teams to 25 provinces. We may call this a counterinsurgency program, but it's really nation-building.

The problem with building a new and better Afghanistan is that, above the local level, President Karzai has long held the levers of political power by controlling provincial finances and leadership appointments, including those of police chiefs. Regardless of the coalition's success at the district level, an obdurate and erratic Mr. Karzai is an obstacle to progress...

More at The New York Times.

Video of Iraqi Journalists' Killings: Is WikiLeaks a Security Threat? - Peter Grier, Christian Science Monitor.

A 2008 report by the U.S. Army suggests that WikiLeaks, which on Tuesday published a video that shows U.S. forces apparently killing two Iraqi journalists, could be a threat to national security. The website has released sensitive information in the past, the report notes.

The U.S. military has been warily watching for several years the group that released on Monday a graphic video showing a US helicopter apparently killing two Iraqi journalists from Reuters in a Baghdad suburb in 2007.

WikiLeaks.org, the organization in question, is a small nonprofit dedicated to publishing classified information from around the world. In 2008, a classified report from the Army Counterintelligence Center judged that WikiLeaks "represents a potential force protection, counterintelligence, operational security (OPSEC) and information security (INFOSEC) threat to the U.S. Army." ...

More at The Christian Science Monitor and:

Leaked Video Shows U.S. Attack in Iraq that Allegedly Killed Journalists - VOA

Video Shows U.S. Killing of Reuters Employees - New York Times

Leaked Footage Shows Iraq Journalists Killed by U.S. Gunships - The Times

Military Shooting of Reuters Men Online - The Australian

Calls for Inquiry into Attack on Iraqi Civilians - Daily Telegraph

Iraqi Journalists Want Probe of Taped U.S. Shooting - Associated Press

Iraq Video Brings Notice to a Web Site - New York Times

'Collateral Murder' in Baghdad Anything But - Weekly Standard

N.Y. Times, Weekly Standard Join in a Falsehood - Salon

Why "COIN for Aviators" is so Important - Wings Over Iraq

U.S. Army Killings in Iraq: Collateral Murder? - Captain's Journal

The Wikileaks Video - Blackfive

Discuss at Small Wars Council - SWC discussion thread

The Azimuth is the official training bulletin of the Army National Guard (ARNG). It is prepared and published by the Battle Command Training Center at Fort Leavenworth. April's edition is devoted to counterinsurgency and can be found here; it's a very large pdf file so be patient.

From the ARNG Training Chief, Colonel Robert A, Moore:

The Army National Guard Training Division (NGB-ART) is pleased to link The Azimuth "training message" with that of the U.S. Army / USMC Counterinsurgency (COIN) Center, U.S. Army Combined Arms Center (CAC) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas to communicate new and emerging information in the conduct of COIN.

As we enter our ninth year of being at war, we are still fully engaged in an operational environment characterized by population centricity, religious and tribal fundamentalism, and zealots of political power...a COIN environment. We are often over-tasked and under-resourced, deployed into harm's way when only a few months separate when we were last there, and challenged to be trained when sufficient training time is not available...yet we still prevail. Army National Guard (ARNG) units have performed, and continue to perform, magnificently, both in this environment and support at home to civil authorities and response to domestic emergencies. Still, the myriad tasks are arduous and delicately balanced against available resources. Our current environment is what it is, and we must embrace it with ingenuity, eagerness, and professional resolve.

The Best Defense interview: Petraeus on not running for president, pirates, President Obama & 'The Blind Side'.

... Americans are, I think, up to speed on the situations in Afghanistan and Iraq and, to a lesser degree perhaps, with respect to Iran. Areas that I think have been less noticed include: Pakistani operations to combat the Pakistani Taliban (though, to be fair, they have received more attention recently); efforts by the United States and countries in the region to help Yemen deal with AQAP and a variety of political, economic, and social challenges; efforts to establish the Regional Security Architecture in the CENTCOM AOR; initiatives by U.S. forces, together with NATO, EU, and other partners to combat piracy; and the regional effort to counter Al Qaeda and other trans-national extremists...

My dinner with Gen. George Casey: girding for a long war, and more.

... He indicated he believes that President Obama is going to be a war president, like it or not. "We believe this is a long-term ideological struggle," that "this enemy is not going to quit," and that existing global trends are "like to exacerbate" the situation. "We are in for a decade or more of persistent conflict."

He thinks future warfare will resemble the fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon in 2006, in which "a non-state actor has the instruments of state power." That means, he said, that the organizing principle for training and educating the force must be "versatility." ...