FPI Overnight Brief: August 6, 2009

The AP reports that “Defense Secretary Robert Gates, asking that ‘a few other ideas’ be taken into account, has extended the deadline for an assessment of how to turn around the war in Afghanistan, an official said Wednesday. The report had been expected next week and now may come in late August or early September, Defense Department spokesman Geoff Morrell said. Officials said last week that a draft of the assessment called for changes in the way troops operate and that after the report was finished commanders were likely to ask for more U.S. forces.”

Stephen Sestanovich writes in the Washington Post: “The administration has a good story to tell about the Russian-American relationship it is trying to build. Can it say as much about what it is doing to bolster Russia's neighbors? It's silly to suggest that Russia's weak banking system or declining population or any of its other internal problems might keep it from pummeling Georgia again if the opportunity arose. Yet there are forces at work of a very different kind that favor U.S. interests. Almost all the states of the former Soviet Union are already working with Western governments, and with each other, to increase their independence from Moscow. When Kyrgyzstan lets the United States keep using its air base to reach Afghanistan despite Russian bribes; when Uzbekistan refuses to join a rapid-reaction military force that Russia wants to create; when Turkmenistan invites American and European companies to help break Gazprom's grip on its energy exports; when the president of Armenia invites the president of Georgia (who is still denounced by Moscow as a genocidal murderer) to receive an award -- all in the space of a few months, it's clear that the geopolitical tide is moving in the right direction.”

Stephen Yates and Christian Whiton, an FPI Policy Advisor, write in the Wall Street Journal that “Mr. Clinton’s visit has continued the pattern of rewarding Pyongyang for bad behavior. Instead, the U.S. and its allies should counter the growing threat by recalibrating strategic defense and deterrence in the region by creating a formal planning group... America’s possession of nuclear weapons is often taken as an ample deterrent in and of itself. Select allies are assured that they stand beneath a U.S. nuclear umbrella. But this counts for little if the relevant systems, training and authorities to use force in practice are not established in advance of a crisis. The situation today is similar to that of the early 1960s, when some European allies doubted the will and ability of the U.S. to retaliate rapidly in reaction to a Soviet attack—and thus to deter such an attack in the first place. Because deterrence lacked specificity and credibility, NATO established the Nuclear Planning Group… A similar defensive step is necessary today… America and its allies need a Nuclear and Strategic Planning Group for East Asia, starting with Japan and then including other democratic countries.”

The New York Times reports that “With his adversaries boycotting the ceremony and a vast deployment of police officers standing guard outside, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was sworn into office on Wednesday for a second term as president, almost two months after an election that divided the nation and set off Iran’s deepest crisis since the Islamic Revolution 30 years ago. There were scattered protests in the streets around the Parliament building in Tehran, where the ceremony took place. But with thousands of riot police officers and Basij militia members patrolling the capital, the million-strong rally called for by the opposition failed to materialize. The inauguration ceremony itself exposed deep rifts in Iran’s ruling elite. Many seats were empty, with most of Parliament’s reform faction boycotting the event, according to Parlamaan News, a reformist Web site. Several reformists who did attend walked out as the president began his speech. Leading opposition figures, including the presidential candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi and the former presidents Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami, also stayed away.”

The Washington Post reports that “Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton began a major trip to Africa on Wednesday by publicly urging Kenya, a strategic U.S. ally, to move faster to resolve tensions lingering from a disputed 2007 election that precipitated the country's worst crisis since it gained independence. Clinton went further in a meeting with Kenyan leaders, urging them to fire the attorney general and the police chief, who have been accused of ignoring dozens of killings carried out by police death squads, according to a senior U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the meeting was private. Clinton also raised the possibility of banning some Kenyan officials from traveling to the United States if the government does not move more quickly to prosecute those responsible for post-election ethnic violence that left 1,300 people dead. The organizers are widely suspected to include senior officials and cabinet ministers, many of whom have family members in the United States.”