In a speech to the U.N. General Assembly last September Barack Obama suggested that his administration's notoriously weak defense of human rights around the world would be invigorated. "We will call out those who suppress ideas and serve as a voice for those who are voiceless," he said. He went on to urge other democracies: "Don't stand idly by, don't be silent, when dissidents elsewhere are imprisoned and protestors are beaten."
Just over two months later, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited Bahrain, an important Persian Gulf ally that hosts the U.S. Fifth Fleet. The emirate was in the midst of a major crackdown on its opposition. Two dozen dissidents, including intellectuals, clerics and a prominent blogger, had been rounded up, charged under anti-terrorism laws and allegedly tortured. A human rights group that had received U.S. funding was taken over by the government. Human Rights Watch had concluded that "what we are seeing in Bahrain these days is a return to full-blown authoritarianism."
Clinton's response? Extravagant and virtually unqualified praise for Bahrain's ruling al-Khalifa family. "I am very impressed by the progress that Bahrain is making on all fronts - economically, politically, socially," she declared as she opened a town hall meeting. Her paeans to Bahrain's "commitment to democracy" continued until a member of parliament managed to gain access to the microphone and asked for a response to the fact that "many people are arrested, lawyers and human rights activists."
Clinton's condescending reply was a pure apology for the regime. "It's easy to be focused internally and see the glass as half empty. I see the glass as half full," she said. "Yes, I mean people are arrested and people should have due process . . . but on the other hand the election was widely validated. . . . So you have to look at the entire picture."
So much for a fresh start on human rights. Clinton's Bahrain visit reflected what seems to be an intractable piece of the Obama administration's character: a deeply ingrained resistance to the notion that the United States should publicly shame authoritarian regimes or stand up for the dissidents they persecute.
After Egypt's terrible elections in November, in which ballot boxes were blatantly stuffed and the opposition brutally suppressed, the administration's commentary was limited to bland statements issued by "the office of the press secretary" at State and the spokesman of the National Security Council. Three weeks earlier, at a widely watched joint press conference in Washington with Egypt's foreign minister, Clinton made no mention of the elections, the crackdown or anything else related to human rights.
In Latin America, friends of the United States marvel at its passivity as Hugo Chavez and Daniel Ortega systematically crush civil society organizations and independent media. "I don't see a clear policy," Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez - a good example of the sort of dissident Obama promised to defend - told me.
When the administration touts its record it often focuses on the declarations it has engineered by multilateral forums, such as the U.N. Human Rights Council. The ideology behind this is that the United States is better off working through such bodies than acting on its own. The problem is that, in practice, this is not true. Set aside for the moment the fact that the U.N. council is dominated by human rights abusers who devote most of the agenda to condemnations of Israel. Who has heard what the council said about, say, the recent events in Belarus? The obvious answer: far fewer people than would have noticed if the same critique came from Obama or Clinton.
Back to Bahrain for a moment. The "entire picture" Clinton referred to is that virtually no one, outside the Bahraini royal family and the State Department, shared her judgment that the parliamentary election was "free and fair." The dissidents are still on trial; their defense lawyers resigned en masse last month because of the court's refusal to consider any of their motions.
Obama Begins Rebuilding Academic Ties to Indonesia
Oscar Siagian, redux, for The Chronicle
Students between classes at the State U. of Jakarta.
By Karin Fischer
President Obama has postponed travel to Indonesia, his childhood home, three times since taking office, the latest visit sidelined in June by the giant oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
But a "comprehensive partnership" to deepen relations between the two countries is steaming ahead, one that has as a critical tenet the expansion of higher-education ties. At the recent G-20 summit meeting in Toronto, Mr. Obama announced that the United States would spend $165-million over the next five years on programs to help strengthen higher education in Indonesia through educational exchanges and university partnerships. The two countries will also hold a higher-education summit next summer.
American officials say that improving educational opportunity is crucial to the economic growth and political stability of a key ally. "We can't change the rainfall," says Cameron R. Hume, the U.S. ambassador to Indonesia, referring to the climate challenge facing the archipelago. "But we can change people. We can improve opportunity for a generation of young people."
Although Indonesia's government has in recent years sharply increased the amount it spends on education, even amending the country's Constitution to require that at least 20 percent of the federal budget be allocated in that area, the outlay simply isn't sufficient to meet the demands of a country of 240 million people and growing, international-education experts say. As a consequence, Indonesia's college-going rate, 17 percent, lags behind that of its Southeast Asian neighbors, like Malaysia and Thailand, and far behind that of developed countries, like South Korea and the United States.
"It's not enough if we go it alone," says Boediono, the Indonesian vice president. "We don't have enough capacity."
The two governments hope to increase the number of Indonesians studying at American colleges and to link higher-education institutions in both countries.
Ilza Mayuni, a lecturer in education at the State U. of Jakarta, traveled to Ohio State U. last fall on a research grant from the Indonesian government.
Oscar Siagian, redux, for The Chronicle
Ilza Mayuni, a lecturer in education at the State U. of Jakarta, traveled to Ohio State U. last fall on a research grant from the Indonesian government.
Cameron Hume, U.S. ambassador to Indonesia: "We can improve opportunity for a generation of young people."
Oscar Siagian, redux, for The Chronicle
Cameron Hume, U.S. ambassador to Indonesia: "We can improve opportunity for a generation of young people."
But such work is demanding: Infrastructure constraints could hinder many Indonesian universities from getting involved in partnerships in the first place. And few American institutions have long-term experience in Indonesia, in part because the U.S. State Department warned against traveling to the country for much of the last decade after a string of terrorist bombings.
"It's a harder sell," says Allan E. Goodman, president of the Institute of International Education, a nonprofit organization involved in international exchanges, "when 60 percent of Americans can't even find Indonesia on a map."
But Mr. Goodman, who has led two recent delegations of U.S. college leaders to Indonesia, argues that the country has much to offer American academics and students, as a unique laboratory to study issues as varied as politics (it's the world's largest Muslim-majority democracy) and seismology (the island nation is hit by some three earthquakes a day). What's more, bringing Indonesian students to American institutions could broaden U.S. knowledge of the world's fourth-most-populous country.
"Just like we care about India and China, we should care about Indonesia," Mr. Goodman says. "The future depends on a lot more Indonesians understanding the United States and a lot more Americans understanding Indonesia."
Playing Catch-Up
In the 60 years since Indonesia became an independent nation, it has been "playing catch-up," says Terance W. Bigalke, director of education programs at the East-West Center, an education and research organization focused on the Asia- Pacific region.
Few Indonesians at that time held college degrees, and the country's efforts to improve its educational offerings have largely failed to keep pace with its swelling population, he says. The government borrowed heavily from the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and other sources in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s to finance investments in educational programs, school and college construction, and teacher training. But issues of educational quality and access remain among the biggest impediments to further democratization and economic expansion, argues Mr. Bigalke, a specialist in Indonesian history. "It's a major obstacle," he says.
Today, Indonesia is home to half of all higher-education institutions in Southeast Asia, many of them private colleges started to meet rapidly growing demand. Outside of a handful of top-tier national and provincial institutions, though, most would not meet Western standards. No Indonesian university is included in Shanghai Jiao Tong University's ranking of the world's top 500 research institutions. A mere 8,000 Indonesians hold doctoral degrees.
Educational advancement was also slowed by a confluence of events beginning in the late 1990s, including the Asian financial crisis and severe political instability. Many universities and aid organizations pulled out of Indonesia. Those that stayed recall a period of upheaval. David K. Linnan, a law professor at the University of South Carolina whose work has focused on financial-market reform, says that before leaving his office at the downtown Jakarta campus of the University of Indonesia he would "check the political Web sites for protest news, the way you would check talk radio for the traffic report."
In the past several years, however, the situation has calmed. The State Department travel ban was lifted in 2008. A more-stable Indonesian government has refocused on education as central to economic advancement, committing to education-financing requirements, calling for higher standards for teachers and professors, and pressing for universal education through the ninth grade.
To illustrate the problem, Mr. Suprayitno grabs a sheet of paper and sketches a misshapen pyramid, bulbous at the bottom and quickly narrowing, a mere sliver at its tip. That, he says, is his country's educational-attainment picture, with the poorest Indonesians disproportionately crowded at the bottom.
"We are moving slowly. We are not stagnating," Mr. Suprayitno says. But, he adds, Indonesia could move far faster with partners to help it improve quality and expand access.
Cultivating Capacity
A focus on Indonesia's homegrown capacity undergirds the effort announced by Mr. Obama and his counterpart, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the Indonesian president.
The two countries want to support collaborations that center on improving curriculum, research, teacher quality, and assessment capabilities at Indonesian universities, says Alina Romanowski, deputy assistant secretary of state for academic programs at the department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.
Already, there are a number of partnerships in place that nurture Indonesian talent. Georgia State University, for example, between 2001 and 2003 offered a master's degree in economic policy to two groups of 55 Indonesian civil servants and university lecturers, handpicked from the ranks of the federal Ministry of Finance, provincial governments, and higher-education institutions.
In the partnership's current, second iteration, Georgia State, through the international-studies program at its Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, has worked with Gadjah Mada University, a top-ranked institution in Yogyakarta, on Java, to develop a dual-degree program to better prepare fiscal-policy experts in the finance ministry. The first group of 20 students has already started at Gadjah Mada, says Paul Benson, assistant director of the international-studies program, and will arrive in Atlanta next fall.
One year of the course is supported by the Indonesian government, the other through a $3-million grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Jorge Martinez-Vazquez, the international-studies program's director, says the dual degree was created because of a "vacuum in human capital in the ranks" of finance-ministry personnel. "It's kind of a virtuous cycle building onto itself," Mr. Martinez-Vazquez says, noting that graduates of the previous program have gone back to teach at Indonesian universities or to play increasingly important roles in government there.
Ohio State University, meanwhile, is working to establish a dual-degree program of its own in teacher education, in conjunction with Indiana University at Bloomington, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and 12 Indonesian partner institutions. Improving teacher quality has been a major push by the Indonesian government—all of the country's 2.7-million teachers now must be certified, while a new law requires that faculty members who teach undergraduates have at least a master's degree and that those who teach at the master's level hold doctorates.
"You have to work from the ground up to build capacity," says Sue Dechow, director of research support and international development at Ohio State's College of Education and Human Ecology. She points out that when she first began working in Indonesia 23 years ago, just three of the 31 teacher-training institutions with which she collaborated had graduate programs.
Other American colleges are seeking to start or expand partnerships with Indonesian institutions. The University of South Carolina, for example, has submitted proposals to USAID for projects on climate-change research and to train the Indonesian judiciary. Highline Community College wants to adapt a professional-development program it created for Egyptian college administrators for leaders of Indonesian polytechnics.
Northern Illinois University hopes to take a joint engineering program with Hasanuddin University, in South Sulawesi, and offer it by Webcast to other institutions.
But the number of institutions able to develop such projects is likely to be limited. Northern Illinois—which has offered Indonesian languages for 40 years and whose faculty members wrote one of the first textbooks on Indonesia—has the experience to form substantive partnerships in Indonesia that few other American colleges can replicate, concedes James T. Collins, director of the university's Center for Southeast Asian Studies.
"Because we have had this longstanding commitment, we can go more places," Mr. Collins says. "We don't have to first catch a potential partner's eye."
And Mr. Hume, the American ambassador, notes that many Indonesian universities simply lack the research culture of their U.S. counterparts. That can hinder research collaborations.
Upping Exchanges
For Ilza Mayuni, a lecturer at the State University of Jakarta, the opportunity to spend four months last fall doing research at Ohio State was one of the key benefits of a "recharging" grant from the Indonesian government. Ms. Mayuni, whose work focuses on teacher preparation, used the time to immerse herself in Ohio State's library, engage with American colleagues one on one, and observe new teaching methods at Columbus-area elementary schools. She plans to write a book on teacher education.
"I feel really lucky," Ms. Mayuni says, adding that, because of the experience, "I think I will teach differently."
The Indonesian government has recently begun to offer small stipends for overseas study to midcareer faculty members like Ms. Mayuni as well as short-term "sandwich" grants to doctoral students to do research abroad.
The American government is likewise ramping up its exchange programs focusing on Indonesia. For one, it is greatly increasing the number of Indonesian students served through a scholarship program that provides foreign students practical training at American community colleges, from about 10 students a year to 50.
The State Department is also expanding the Fulbright Program in Indonesia, including financing a new program focused specifically on encouraging scholarship in critical areas in science and technology. The Indonesian Fulbright program will become one of the largest in the world, Ms. Romanowski says.
Officials from both countries say enhancing student and faculty exchanges will be a critical piece of the bilateral higher-education strategy. Such partnerships "build bridges," Ms. Romanowski says, imagining the linkages that could grow out of a graduate-student exchange. "Who knows what will happen 25 years from now when they are publishing articles together or doing research together?"
Indeed, many experts point to the American education received by earlier generations of Indonesians—some 40 percent of current government ministers studied in the United States—as one reason for the ties between the two countries.
Over the past decade, however, the number of Indonesian students attending college in the United States has dropped precipitously; just 7,500 students from that country studied in the United States during the 2008-9 academic year, down from 13,280 in 1997-8, according to the Institute of International Education. (The partnership hopes to double those numbers within five years.)
The drop-off can be attributed in part to the financial crisis, which sapped the bank accounts of middle-class Indonesians, and in part to concerns after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that Indonesian students would not be able to get visas to study in the United States. Mr. Hume says the embassy in Jakarta has worked to allay worries that the United States is "a hostile place for a child named Muhammad." Student-visa approval rates, he points out, are 86 percent.
Geoff Moody, director of international recruitment at Green River Community College, in Washington state, says American colleges should understand that the decline in Indonesian enrollments "doesn't necessarily have to do with something we're doing wrong. It has to do with what other countries and schools are doing right."
Countries like Australia, Malaysia, and Singapore, Mr. Moody points out, have eaten into the American market in Indonesia, offering destinations that are closer to home and frequently cheaper. Those countries are also more aggressive about recruiting students, he says.
His institution, which draws about 10 percent of its international student body from Indonesia, has managed to maintain its enrollment levels through attentive recruitment and by offering value to cost-conscious Indonesian parents—almost all of Green River's Indonesian students transfer to well-regarded four-year colleges.
Still, with little available scholarship money, only a select few Indonesians can afford Green River's $16,950 annual price tag.
Signaling Readiness
But if the number of Indonesians studying in the United States has bottomed out, the number of Americans studying in Indonesia is woefully low, just 75 in 2007-8. By contrast, 13,165 students from the United States enrolled in Chinese colleges the same year.
There's broad consensus that any partnership must work in both directions, bringing Indonesian students and scholars to the United States and sending Americans to the island nation. Indonesia is an ideal place to conduct research on some of the world's most pressing issues, Ms. Romanowski notes, such as climate change and food security.
At a recent networking event for international-education administrators from U.S. colleges and foreign embassy personnel, in Washington, Indonesian officials signaled their readiness to collaborate with American institutions. They chatted up visitors and invited every educator who passed by their table to fill out a multiquestion survey about the types of partnerships they sought.
"The message we're getting is that they're ready to work together," said Rachel Herman, director of the English-language center and intensive English program at the University of Central Missouri. "We're ready, too."
By Laura Blumenfeld Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, July 4, 2010; A01
Headlights approach on an empty road. A government agent steps out of an armored SUV, carrying a locked, black satchel.
"Here's the bag," the agent says, to the intelligence official. "Here's the key."
The key turns, and out slides a brown leather binder, gold-stamped TOP SECRET. The President's Daily Brief, perhaps the most secret book on Earth.
The PDB handoff happens in the dead of every night. The book distills the nation's greatest threats, intelligence trends and concerns, and is written by a team at CIA headquarters.
"This is the one for the president," the intelligence official says, moving inside a secure building, opening the binder.
As dawn draws near, intelligence briefers distribute more than a dozen locked copies to Washington's nocturnals, a group of top officials charged by the president with guarding the nation's safety: CIA Director Leon Panetta, national security adviser James L. Jones, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., National Counterterrorism Center Director Michael Leiter, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller, among others.
With two wars, multiple crises abroad and the threat of growing terrorist activity at home, these national security officials do not sleep in peace. For them, the night is a public vigil. It is also a time of private reckoning with their own tensions and doubts. They read the highest classification of intelligence. They pursue the details of plots that realize the nation's vague, yet primal, fears.
It is all here, inside the brown leather binder. Black typeface on white paper, marked by red tabs and yellow highlighter, an accumulation of the dangers hidden in the dark. Compiling them is an all-night process, and it begins every day at sundown.
8:40 p.m.
On board special air mission
Andrews Air Force Base
There is no sun. The day fades from gray to black. It's raining, and the motorcades are late.
"Are they coming soon?" the aircraft commander radios from the cockpit. Jet fumes seep into the government C-40, which was supposed to take off for Islamabad 10 minutes ago.
Leon Panetta boards first, drenched, wearing work boots. "Where do you want me?" he asks, looking around the cramped cabin. He flies to the Middle East so often, he says, "my body is probably somewhere over Ireland."
Tonight the CIA director will bunk with the national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, at the back of a C-40, sharing a chair, a small couch and a lavatory stocked with Tylenol. The men will fly 16 hours and then drive into midnight meetings about terrorist networks in Pakistan. "The pressure is on," Panetta says. "We can't afford to sleep. It's like the nighthawk that has to keep circling."
The CIA is engaged in some of the most aggressive actions in the agency's history. Panetta is required to sign off on operations two or three nights a week.
"When I was [White House] chief of staff, Bill Clinton used to call in the middle of the night" to talk, Panetta says. "But in this job, when I get a call, it's a decision about life and death."
"Dr. Panetta!" Jones calls out as he strides onto the plane. He holds up his phone. "I'm trying to get in touch with my Russian counterpart."
Panetta nods, sympathetic. "I have a call with Dianne Feinstein."
The crew urges them into their seats. Jones sets his watch to Pakistani time. Panetta keeps his synched with his home state, California. "What we do -- doesn't get done in regular time," Jones says. The White House situation room wakes him two to three nights a week. "We operate on a different clock."
A Panetta aide prepares 200 pages of background material, which maps the terrorist landscape in Pakistan. Jones calls his son, concerned about his pregnant daughter-in-law who's having complications: "I'm leaving. Let me know about Beth."
The plane lifts off, bumping and lurching through black clouds. The air ahead is rough. No one expects a good night.
10:52 p.m.
The Intercontinental Hotel, a hallway
Kansas City
"Good night!" says Robert Gates, on his way down the hall to his suite, stopping by Room 718, where Air Force sergeants are testing secure lines.
To prepare for a one-night hotel stay in Kansas City, Mo., advance team members paid a $125 fee to clear the furniture out of Room 718. Then they filled it with 15 cases of communications equipment. They put a satellite dish on the balcony. They replaced the bed with a tent for reading secret cables, to shield it in case of concealed spy cameras. When a maid knocked to ask whether she could straighten the pillows, one guy blinked: "Well, you could try."
The defense secretary must be reachable at all hours. He transmits orders from the White House to the Pentagon in an era when troops operate in every time zone. If North Korea tests a nuclear weapon or Iran tests a new missile, Gates needs to know now. "I don't feel like I'm ever really off," he said earlier. "I have security and communications people in the basement of my house. They come up and rap on the basement door."
Next to his bedroom at home, he confers in a soundproof, vault-lock space. He calls it "The Batcave."
Gates smiles. He radiates control: Individual white hairs lie combed into place; a crack in his lips is smoothed repeatedly with ChapStick. But even this confident Cabinet secretary -- the slightly feared Republican whose status others covet by day -- slips, at night, into the shadows of doubt.
At home, at a military compound in Washington, he'll change into jeans and a baseball cap and take a walk after 11 p.m. He'll count the number of surveillance cameras watching him and look out into the dark and reflect on the "persistent threat. You know, and you wonder, what more can you be doing? What have we missed?"
"The actual physical threat to Americans today from abroad, in reality, is worse than it was in the Cold War. All you have to do is look at these repeated attempts to set off bombs in populated places. I think if you asked any of us what keeps us awake at night, it's the idea of a terrorist with a weapon of mass destruction."
And once Gates is awake and walking beneath the hundred-year oaks, "the one thing that weighs on me most is knowing that our kids are out there getting wounded and getting killed, getting attacked." His voice falters. "And I sent them."
Wherever he is, whether the Batcave or Kansas City, he is followed by killed-in-action reports. They arrive by secure e-mail, slide into the room by a secure fax.
11:45 p.m.
Janet Napolitano's guestroom
"This old fax keeps jamming," Janet Napolitano says, sticking her hand into the secure fax. Crumpled paper. "Oh, Lord."
The secretary for homeland security can't go to bed until she reviews a secret fax. She asks an aide to have it re-sent. She puts up water for black tea.
"This time of night is the fourth act," says Napolitano, an opera fan. She rode home an hour ago in a motorcade accompanied by flashing lights and Mozart's "Cosi fan tutte." "There is the normal workday -- Act 1 -- with all the hearings on the Hill, banquets and news shows. But the real drama is behind the scenes, at very odd hours."
Recently Homeland Security has been trying to intensify efforts against home-grown extremism, pushing Napolitano's own home life to the extreme. Although Napolitano lives by herself, tonight her apartment all but sings with characters and action. A Secret Service agent hulks outside. The kitchen answering machine bleats messages from her chief of staff. Rand Beers, the counterterrorism coordinator, rings her bedside phone as she's stepping toward her gray slippers.
"No suspects or targets?" Napolitano asks Beers. "We'll talk to the undersecretary for intelligence about that."
She hangs up. Nighttime calls about terrorism investigations are "not unusual in the weird, sick world I inhabit." At 2 a.m., she has been called about adjusting outbound rules at airports to catch a fleeing suspect and about emergency communications with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. On a trip to Asia, a senior Napolitano staffer set her BlackBerry alarm to ring every hour, all night, so the staffer could check e-mail alerts.
To fall asleep, "to calm down my brain," Napolitano reads on the couch. "A lot of times I'm reading, and I'll wake up and the book is on my face." She lifts the 1,184-page "Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years." "I don't want to read this one before bed. If it falls on my face, I'll break my nose."
A shriek pierces the air -- the tea kettle boiling: "Let me get that, before the Secret Service comes in." The secure fax whirrs -- the secret memo: "Ah, bueno. Here it is. It's hot."
Napolitano reads the hot document. Drinks her hot tea.
12:01 a.m.
Eric Holder's kitchen
"Iced tea for me!" Eric Holder says. He jokingly cracks the door of his liquor cabinet. If Napolitano's nights are operatic, the attorney general's are notably calm.
At 11 p.m., Holder turned off the lights in his son's room where he's sleeping. He removed the iPod earbuds from his sleeping teenage daughter. His wife, a gynecologist who for years was jangled awake -- "I could do her calls by now, 'How far apart are your contractions? Okay, you're 5 centimeters' " -- is also in bed upstairs.
Holder now sits down at the kitchen table. He spreads legal papers across the round, granite surface and puts his legs up. At his Justice Department office, he plays Tupac and Jay-Z. Not here. He keeps it so quiet, he notices when the refrigerator motor clicks off.
All day, voices bombard Holder, advocating discordant legal remedies for terrorism. "So much of national security has been politicized," he says. "There's a lot of noise."
Only at night can he contemplate: "What's best for the case? What's best for the nation?" Here, he makes his most difficult, controversial decisions. At 1 a.m., eating Chips Ahoys, Holder determined that 9/11 detainees should stand trial in New York and that terrorist suspects should be tried in federal court. The conflicting demands filled him with tension: "That tension to be independent, yet part of the administration."
Of all the nighthawks, Holder occupies the loneliest perch. He is the president's friend, yet as the government's chief law enforcer, he has to stand aloof. White House aides roll their eyes behind his back; Hill critics roll their eyes to his face. His predecessors understand: "There's an AG's club. Former Republican AGs call and say, 'Hang in there!' "
Holder does, one midnight at a time. He turns off the lights around the house, even in the kitchen, except for the bulb above the round table. Sitting alone, in a cone of light, he listens. "I need a place and time to step away from the opinions and other voices, and almost -- "
The house is silent. " -- hear my own voice."
12:35 a.m.
White House Situation Room
The night duty officer can't hear his own voice. A White House maid is vacuuming. "Can you wrap it up?" He plugs a finger in his ear and presses his mouth to the classified, yellow phone: "This is the Situation Room. We are going to try to connect Gen. Jones with his Russian counterpart."
"Yes, sir," replies a communications officer at the end of the line, cruising with Jones on the C-40 toward Pakistan.
The national security adviser is 37,000 feet over the Atlantic, bunking with Leon Panetta. Jones has changed out of charcoal pinstripes into a Georgetown sweat shirt. He checked an e-mail update about his pregnant daughter-in-law. "No baby yet," his son said. There are complications, and Jones is concerned.
Before he can sleep, Jones also needs to talk to Kremlin foreign policy adviser Sergei Prikhodko, to help negotiate a tougher stance on Iran's nuclear program. The Situation Room officer who handles secure calls for the West Wing is trying to locate Prikhodko, who's traveling in Kiev.
Jones stands by. He is a 6-foot-4, heavily decorated Marine and a light sleeper. He heard about his own son's birth in a monsoon on a hilltop near Cambodia, over the battalion radio at 1 a.m. As supreme allied commander in Europe, he learned that when darkness falls, opportunities rise.
Even as a boy, Jones was not afraid of the dark. He was afraid of Russia. His parents would talk soberly about the iron curtain. The image "terrified me as a child. Millions of people in prison, behind a so-called curtain."
Now a presidential envoy, Jones finds himself on many nights dialing Moscow, capital of his boyhood bogeymen. If the cold war of Jones's youth seemed scary, "this world has me more concerned. The threats we face are asymmetric and more complex." So he calls, at all hours, old adversaries to connect against the new threat.
It is 12:53 a.m., almost 8 a.m. in Kiev. The White House night officer reports, "Prikhodko's secretary said it might be an hour, or an hour and a half, to reach him." The officer mutters: "Our guys are up and working at 6 a.m."
On board the C-40, the CIA director takes a pillow and lies on the couch. Jones covers himself with a thin blanket and dozes in a chair.
At the White House, they dial the Russian's cellphone again. It rings 12 times. Another officer stands: "Got to go to the 1 a.m. Threat SVTC."
1 a.m.
National Counterterrorism CenterOps Center conference room
Virginia
The 1 a.m. Threat SVTC organizer says, "One minute to kickoff."
The secure video teleconference, convened by the National Counterterrorism Center, marks the apex of Washington's night watch. Feeds from 16 watch-floors blip onto a large screen. Dimly lit faces of men and women at the State Department, Coast Guard, NORTHCOM and others, cover a wall.
"Good morning, everyone," the organizer says, pressing a button on the microphone. "We're gonna brief three items." The FBI and NSA present terrorism reports.
Many nights an item prompts a call to wake the NCTC director, Michael Leiter, 41, the junior member of the nighthawks. He displays a copy of the Declaration of Independence next to a deck of baseball-style cards of high-value terrorist targets: "I keep the ones who are dead on top. It's a little macabre, but that's the world we live in." When the NCTC calls in the middle of the night, he is often half-awake.
"Bed is the worst place for me," Leiter says one evening, nodding toward his blue comforter, under the blades of his bedroom ceiling fan. "The mind keeps running."
The NCTC, created after 9/11 to integrate intelligence, produces a daily threat matrix, which averages 15 or more wide-ranging terrorist threats against American interests, outside Iraq and Afghanistan. In a 12-hour shift, analysts sift through 4,000 reports. "I can't shut that off; what else might be going on?"
Of all the jobs, counterterrorism intelligence seems the most likely to induce nightmares. Days before he resigned in May, Leiter's boss, director of national intelligence and retired Navy Adm. Dennis C. Blair, talked about his dream he first had years before as head of the Pacific Command and was now having again: "I'm running the ship aground. I'm sitting out on the bridge and I see it coming -- but I can't keep it from happening. I see a crumpled bow of the ship and sailors dying."
Leiter, a Bush appointee, also has had anxiety dreams ever since Christmas, when his agency failed to detect a man who tried to blow up a Detroit-bound plane: "I'm getting called. Someone says there's been another attack. Oh, my God -- "
Then he wakes up. And he reaches for a pad in the dark and scribbles ideas. "I terrify my staff at 7:15 a.m. and say, I was having trouble sleeping last night and I thought of something."
Leiter's nighttime tension is haunting, yet oddly creative: "My brain keeps working while I'm sleeping." New ideas churn, the ceiling fan turns and the blades chop at black air.
3:42 a.m.
Mike Mullen's front yard
No sound, no movement, except rotor blades chopping black air, as a helicopter buzzes over Adm. Mike Mullen's brick Colonial. Minutes later, a light blinks on in his second-floor window. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is starting his day.
Mullen opens his front door at 4:03 a.m. in shorts and sneakers, his eyes still slitty, his voice a note deep. "Let's go," he says to his security detail.
Mullen drives to the Navy Yard gym, where he gulps a protein shake and bench-presses 255 pounds. Big Dave, his trainer, barks: "The baddest chairman ever!"
The admiral understands that to be baddest, he has to get ahead -- every day -- of the day. Fight the current war; anticipate the next one. Where will the next terrorist attack originate? "Yemen is a great worry. Somalia is a failed state. But we have to try to pay attention to the rest of the world, too. We don't anticipate well where stuff comes from in these wars. Our ability to predict is pretty lousy."
As senior military adviser to the president, Mullen steeps his predawn routine in anticipation. He drives to the gym through a night fog, scans headlines, reads e-mails from commanders, clips four stars to his collar and packs his seven briefcases of paperwork, all before 6:30 a.m.
Yet for all his talk about anticipating the future, Mullen is the nighthawk who is drawn deeply to the past. A Bible sits on his kitchen microwave. He buttons his dress service khakis, while reading the ancient wisdom of the Proverbs.
The enemy America's fighting, he says, "killed 3,000. But they would like to kill 30,000, or 300,000. They're still out there, trying. It's not their religion. It's not Islam. It's an evil that doesn't believe in anything we believe in. They don't value civilization. They have no limits in what they'll do to kill us. "
A Jerusalem, olive-wood cross swings from his rear-view mirror. His headlights shine on the empty road.
Dead of Night
Undisclosed location
Headlights approach on the empty road. A government agent steps out of an SUV, carrying a locked, black satchel. An intelligence aide approaches him.
"Good morning."
"Good night."
The two silhouettes merge for a moment. "In this city, people have no idea what's going on," the intelligence aide says, nodding toward buildings with darkened windows.
The agent drives away, after handing off the brown leather binder, gold-stamped "TOP SECRET." The President's Daily Brief.
Briefers fan out across the city, distributing locked copies, modified for each department.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's briefer rolls her satchel in on wheels. FBI Director Robert Mueller gets briefed, he says, "365 days a year, even on Christmas, even on vacation." Napolitano scours her book over one of her four morning cups of coffee. Holder unzips his while riding in the motorcade to his office: "If you read it, you're left with the reality of how many organizations are trying to harm our people. . . . I'm not in a good mood when I get to work. You don't get used to it. You just don't." He taps his window: "It's armored."
At the White House, outside the Oval Office, a briefer arrives to deliver the president's report. Rahm Emanuel is there, as is counterterrorism adviser John Brennan. National security adviser James Jones joins them. Since Jones returned from Pakistan, Russia agreed to toughen Iran sanctions. Jones's daughter-in-law gave birth to a boy.
"The baby was 10 weeks premature," the general says quietly. His grandson is being kept at the hospital under round-the-clock watch.
The president walks out. "All right," says Obama, eating a handful of cherries between meetings. "Come on, guys. Let's go."
Nine men file into the Oval Office, under the wings of an American eagle carved into the ceiling. Obama and Vice President Biden sit in the middle. Jones sits on a side couch. They all are holding the gold-lettered brown binders, the book of threats, written in the hours of darkness.
Morning light from the Rose Garden pours in from the east and the south. A mahogany grandfather clock ticks loudly. Jones takes a deep breath, runs his finger to the edge of the binder.
The room is bright. The president crosses his legs and looks at his men. What happened in the night?
Researchers Alice Crites and Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.
In firing General Stanley McChrystal for talking cocky mess-hall trash about his civilian superiors in the company of aides and a writer for Rolling Stone, President Obama reasserted the principle of civilian control of the military. In getting General David Petraeus, the most talented officer of his generation, to accept McChrystal’s command, the President deftly solved his crisis of generalship, which threatened to undermine the mission in Afghanistan. The three-day personnel problem ended as well as the White House could have wanted, but, because it’s a symptom of the larger problem of the war, the McChrystal uproar is going to resonate long after sniping about the old soldier—and about Vice-President “Bite Me”—has faded away.
Every aspect of the war—which is approaching its tenth year, having just superseded Vietnam as the longest in American history—is going badly. Team McChrystal’s casual insubordination reflected a war effort working against itself. McChrystal and Karl Eikenberry, the American Ambassador in Kabul, disliked each other and fought over strategy through cables and leaks. (Eikenberry didn’t think that the addition of tens of thousands of troops could succeed.) Obama allowed the division to fester, giving President Hamid Karzai an opening in which to play American officials off against one another: McChrystal was Karzai’s newest friend, Eikenberry his latest enemy. Richard Holbrooke, the Administration’s special representative for the region, lost Karzai’s confidence a while ago, and it’s not clear that he still has Obama’s. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates remain closely allied with each other, their subordinates, and the White House, but wars are won or lost in the field, not at headquarters.
Last year, in this magazine, Holbrooke described what often happens in government: “People sit in a room, they don’t air their real differences, a false and sloppy consensus papers over those underlying differences, and they go back to their offices and continue to work at cross-purposes, even actively undermining each other.” This is becoming a picture of U.S. policymaking in Afghanistan. Jonathan Alter’s new book, “The Promise,” recounts how, last fall, the military, with a series of leaks, tried to box in the President and force him to send more troops. In return, Obama summoned Petraeus and Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and, sounding like a prosecutor conducting a cross-examination, got them to sign off on a plan to start withdrawing troops in July of 2011, though their opposition to a time line was well known. Then notes from that meeting were leaked, almost certainly by the White House, to corner the military. The time line now means different things to different people, and a cloud of uncertainty hangs over the strategy’s future. The foreign-affairs analyst Leslie Gelb wrote last week that some military officers “truly don’t know where the President stands.”
After replacing McChrystal with Petraeus, Obama scolded his advisers for their bickering. But disarray among top personnel is almost always a sign of a larger incoherence. American goals in Afghanistan remain vague, the means inadequate, the timetable foreshortened. We are nation-building without admitting it, and conducting counterinsurgency on our own clock, not the Afghans’.
The Army’s field manual on counterinsurgency was co-authored by General Petraeus himself, who applied the doctrine with much success in Iraq. But counterinsurgency isn’t a static mold into which the military can pour any war and wait for it to set. When Petraeus took command of the war in Iraq, in 2007, he had already served two tours there—he knew the country as well as any American officer. Afghanistan is less familiar terrain for him; the society is less urban and more fractured than Iraq’s; and there is no sign in Afghan political dynamics of anything like the Sunni awakening that stopped the momentum of the Iraqi insurgency.
With allies like Canada and Holland heading for the exits, American troops are dying in larger numbers than at any point of the war—on bad days, ten or more. The number of Afghan civilian deaths remains high, despite the tightened constraints of McChrystal’s rules of engagement. The military key to counterinsurgency is protection of the population, but the difficulty in securing Marja and the delay of a promised campaign in Kandahar suggest that the majority of Afghan Pashtuns no longer want to be protected by foreign forces. The political goal of counterinsurgency is to strengthen the tie between civilians and their government, but the Afghan state is a shell hollowed out by corruption, and at its center is the erratic figure of President Karzai. Since last fall, when he stole reëlection, Karzai has accused Western governments and media of trying to bring him down, fired the two most competent members of his cabinet, and reportedly threatened to join the Taliban and voiced a suspicion that the Americans were behind an attack on a peace conference he recently hosted in Kabul. In the face of his wild performance, the current American approach is to tiptoe around him, as if he would start behaving better if he could just be settled down. Meanwhile, aid efforts are in a bind: working with the government nourishes corruption; circumventing it further undermines its legitimacy.
No one, however, has been able to come up with an alternative to the current strategy that doesn’t carry great risks. If there were a low-cost way to contain the interconnected groups of extremists in the Hindu Kush—with drones and Special Forces, as Vice-President Biden, among others, has urged—the President would have pursued it. If a return to power of the Taliban, which may well be the outcome of a U.S. withdrawal, did not pose a threat to international security, Obama would have already abandoned Karzai to his fate. But anyone who believes that a re-Talibanized Afghanistan would be a low priority should read the kidnapping narratives of two American journalists, Jere Van Dyk and David Rohde, who were held by the Taliban, along with the autobiography of the former Taliban official known as Mullah Zaeef. Together, these accounts show that the years since 2001 have radicalized the insurgents and imbued them with Al Qaeda’s global agenda. Tactically and ideologically, it’s more and more difficult to distinguish local insurgents from foreign jihadists.
American policy is drifting toward a review, scheduled for December, and Obama is trapped—not by his generals but by the war. It takes great political courage to face such a situation honestly, but if in a year’s time the war looks much the way it does now, or worse, Obama will have to force the public to deal with the likely reality: Americans leaving, however slowly; Afghanistan slipping into ethnic civil war, with many more Afghan deaths; Pakistan backing the Pashtun side; Al Qaeda seizing the chance to expand its safe haven. These consequences would require a dramatically different U.S. strategy, and a wise Administration would unify itself around the need to think one through before next summer.
Behind the Lines for Monday, June 14, 2010 — 3 P.M.
By David C. Morrison, Special to Congressional Quarterly
Cradle of terrorism: "While New York has long been militant Islamist terror's No. 1 target, it has also increasingly become the main U.S. source of the challenge" . . . The road to hell: U.S. humanitarian aid to Gaza Palestinians "could be one of the most serious breaches of U.S. terror law that we've seen since 9/11" . . . This week's alert: A booming market in counterfeit botox "could put a deadly biological weapons agent in the wrong hands." These and other stories lead today's homeland security coverage.
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“While New York has long been militant Islamist terror’s No. 1 target, it has also increasingly become the main U.S. source of the challenge,’” Judith Miller judges in a FOX News take on a Big Apple seemingly ridden with homegrown terrorists — and see her City Journal essay on “New Yorkistan.” A Swedish woman says one of two would-be New Jersey jihadists was on his way to Egypt to marry her and study Arabic, not kill Americans, The Bergen County Record’s Nick Clunn recounts. “Feel like a loser? Never cool at school? Not much luck with women? Become a jihadist!” New York Daily News columnist Michael Daly leads in re: the evolution of these two latest would-be terrorists. The FBI launched a “secret, tightly run operation of military precision” targeting the pair back in October 2006, a Newark Star-Ledger team backgrounds.
Homies: DHS’s Coast Guard on Friday “issued a request from vendors, scientists, government laboratories and nonprofits for ideas on how to stop, contain and clean up” the disastrous Gulf oil spill, Government Executive’s Robert Brodsky reports — as the Los Angeles Times’ Richard Simon sees the Coasties also ordering BP to plug the damned leak already. FBI deputy John Pistole impressed Senate Commerce solons in the first of two confirmation hearings in his bid to fill the long-vacant TSA chief’s chair, Homeland Security Today’s Mickey McCarter handicaps. Salon’s Alex Pareene, meanwhile, slags Mark Krikorian’s halfhearted retraction of a mistaken National Review posting saying the allegedly euphemism happy Obama administration would be revamping ICE into the “Homeland Security Investigations” agency.
Bugs ‘n bombs: According to Scientific American, a booming market in counterfeit botox for cosmetics treatments “could put a deadly biological weapons agent in the wrong hands,” The New York Times passes along. “Why do we get so exercised when nearly 3,000 Americans die on 9/11, but remain relatively indifferent to the nearly 40,000 Americans who die every year in traffic accidents?” a Foreign Policy posting ponders. “Seventy years ago, Japan’s bio-attacks killed hundreds of thousands. The effects linger today,” City Journal, once more, spotlights. Across the pond, two Liverpool streets were cordoned off for four hours after a passerby found a shoebox-sized package with “anthrax” written on the side, the Echo informs — while AFP has Canadian authorities late last week ruling out terrorism in a mysterious massive purchase of explosive ammonium nitrate fertilizer.
Border wars: Arizona’s hard-hitting immigration law is driving Hispanics out of the state weeks before the measure goes into effect, The Christian Science Monitor leads. The state’s governor is responding to calls for more cell phone towers in border stretches where a rancher was recently murdered by an illegal border crosser, Tucson’s KGUN 9 News notes. Border experts complain that current U.S. policy inadequately deters drug trafficking while pushing would-be immigrants into the arms of criminals, The McAllen (Texas) Monitor mentions — as The Yuma (Ariz.) Sun adjures that “proper staffing and security measures at our ports of entry, including those here in our area, are critical.”
Taking a new look: “In an attempt to convince an anxious populace that his legislative agenda is working and that everything is going to be all right, President Obama embarked on a 50-state, 30,000-town tour Monday during which he plans to gaze assuredly into the eyes of each American citizen, one at a time,” The Onion reports. “ ‘I know a lot of people out there are nervous. They’re worried about unemployment, the oil spill in the Gulf, and whether or not I am making the right choices in Washington,’ Obama said during a rally at Rockland District High School. ‘To those Americans, I offer you this inspiring, confident gaze.’ Obama then stepped down from his podium, walked into the 2,000-person audience, and peered comfortingly into each person’s eyes. After taking 45 minutes to methodically work his way from the front row all the way to the balcony, and punctuating each look with a gentle pat on the shoulder, Obama returned to the stage, collected himself, and addressed the silent group before him. ‘There,’ he said. ‘All better.’”
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