The Whos down in Whoville might almost be jealous of Portici - a town of some 60,000 residents near Naples, Italy - whose mayor, Vincenzo Cuomo declared that Christmas decorations would be banned in public this year.

And why would Whoville necessarily be jealous of this decidedly anti-festive decree?  Because at least the good mayor has a reason to justify his actions: In Whoville, the Grinch stole Christmas out of spite; in Portici, Mayor Cuomo’s policy is at least trying to break a mafia funding scheme.

The crackdown on tinsel, Mr. Cuomo says, is the latest front in his battle against the Camorra, the Naples-based mob known for its brutality and economic savvy.

When the Christmas season comes around — and holiday shopping picks up — the town sees a spike in payments of the pizzo, or protection money. The “pizzo di Natale,” as Christmas-time payments are called, is commonly carried out through the forced sale of overpriced decorations — from Advent calendars to poinsettias — by the Camorra to shopkeepers.

So far, so good, though the mafia aren’t usually ones for taking such aggressive attempts to curb their power lightly.  Two months ago, the mayor received a bullet from an AK-47 in the mail.  Bill O’Reilly:  Eat your heart out - this is a very different, yet very real War on Christmas whose consequences, even localized to a medium-sized town in southern Italy, are far more important that your invented culture war.

It seems almost elementary that the governments of Pakistan and the United States both have a vested interest in extending Islamabad’s authority over the whole of its country, a point David Ignatius makes today:

Here’s the cold, hard truth: U.S. success in Afghanistan depends on Pakistan gaining sovereignty over the tribal belt. If the insurgents can continue to maintain their havens in North Waziristan and other tribal areas, then President Obama’s surge of troops in Afghanistan will fail. It’s that simple.

It’s not that simple, but extending the Pakistani government’s writ is certainly a core element to any hope of securing Afghanistan.  A safe base of operation across the border in Pakistan would allow al Qaeda’s senior leadership room to incubate in hopes of re-spreading its wings in a larger Taliban-protected region.

But just a handful of pages away in your trusty Washington Post illuminates just how difficult that challenge will be:

Pakistan’s Supreme Court nullified on Wednesday a controversial deal that had given President Asif Ali Zardari and thousands of other government officials amnesty from prosecution on corruption charges, a decision likely to further weaken Zardari’s shaky hold on power.

The ruling could open the door to additional legal challenges against Zardari. Although he still has immunity from prosecution under the constitution, opponents plan to contest that by arguing that Zardari is technically ineligible for the presidency. …

But Zardari’s ability to make decisions about the level of Pakistani cooperation with the United States has been compromised by his struggle to simply hold on to his job — a task likely to be made more difficult by the court ruling.

There are essentially three legs of power in the Pakistani government — the military and intelligence services are the largest center of gravity, followed by the courts and then the civilian leadership.   Rivalries between all three are intense to say the least, a dissection of which could occupy an entire encyclopedic volume, never mind the rest of this short blog post.  And even though the military isn’t mentioned in the WaPo’s article, it almost goes without saying that the generals would be fine if Zardari fell from power.

The point is that as long as these communities’ main focus is a struggle for power, the White House will never get them to pay primary attention to internal security.  And even if you could, each power-base has reasons (some better than others) to turn a blind eye to the Taliban lodged in Pakistan’s hinterland.

The situation isn’t hopeless… yet.  Despite long-standing suspicions of civilian President Zardari’s corruption (hey, the guy wasn’t called “Mr. 10 Percent” for nothing), he is the legitimately elected leader and was allowed to return to Pakistan - with his late-wife Benazir Bhutto - in an amnesty deal reached with ex-President Pervez Musharraf.  Therefore, the US should stand by Pakistan’s nascent democracy and support Zaradari, without making him look like an American puppet.

Then the US government should work on aligning the military under Pakistan’s civilian leadership.  Congress tried this by conditioning aid on just such a goal in October.  Guess what?  It didn’t go over so well with Pakistan’s generals.  Back to the drawing board.

Crossposted at The Progressive Fix.

David Brooks, oh how you are a dying breed: The rational, thoughtful conservative who holds true to his core values while having the humility to actually grant the other guy a point.

He also may have a man-crush on the president.  That’s why it is perhaps not so surprising that Brooks’ most recent column follows up on a point I made a few days ago:  That Barack Obama’s foreign policy is grounded in thoroughly progressive values.  Here’s an excerpt:

In 2002, Obama spoke against the Iraq war, but from the vantage point of a cold war liberal. He said he was not against war per se, just this one, and he was booed by the crowd. In 2007, he spoke about the way Niebuhr formed his thinking: “I take away the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction.”

His speeches at West Point and Oslo this year are pitch-perfect explications of the liberal internationalist approach. Other Democrats talk tough in a secular way, but Obama’s speeches were thoroughly theological. He talked about the “core struggle of human nature” between love and evil.

More than usual, he talked about the high ideals of the human rights activists and America’s history as a vehicle for democracy, prosperity and human rights. He talked about America’s “strategic interest in binding ourselves to certain rules of conduct.” Most of all, he talked about the paradox at the core of cold war liberalism, of the need to balance “two seemingly irreconcilable truths” — that war is both folly and necessary.

Brooks used the term “liberal internationalism” to describe Obama’s approach.  Your friends here at the PPI have a different version of the phrase, preferring “progressive internationalism”.  Though some of this manifesto is dated to a time when Iraq was clearly beginning to unravel, here’s what the PPI said back in 2003 before I drew my paycheck from around these parts:

Progressive internationalism stresses the responsibilities that come with our enormous power: to use force with restraint but not to hesitate to use it when necessary, to show what the Declaration of Independence called “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind,” to exercise leadership primarily through persuasion rather than coercion, to reduce human suffering where we can, and to create alliances and international institutions committed to upholding a decent world order.

The Obama administration has taken a lot of heat for supposedly being “too realist” in its approach to foreign policy.  Certainly there’s evidence to support that claim:  Brooks says the White House “misjudged the emotional moment when Iranians were marching in Tehran” or there was the uncomfortable incident when Hillary Clinton side-stepped the issue of human rights in China because they “couldn’t interfere with the global economic crisis” (which she recently tried to rectify in a speech at Georgetown). True enough, at least for now.

However, when books are written on the Obama administration’s foreign policy, I’d bet the driving mind-set will be one that identifies and resolves discrete national security interests, underpinned by keen attention to America’s values.  Closing Guantanamo is perhaps the best example thus far.

A cleaned-up version of this post is over at the ProgressiveFix.com

Three cheers for Dick Durbin, the senior senator from Illinois.

Rather than offering shrill, partisan talking points at the prospect of closing the Guantanamo prison - equal parts Islamic extremist recruiting tool as well as human rights stain on our national psyche - Senator Durbin has consistently offered pragmatic progressive voice that is steadfast in his resolve to close Gitmo and ensure the security of the country.  The result is today’s announcement that the administration will likely open the detention facility in Thompson, Illinois as the destination for many of Guantanamo’s detainees.

When conservatives were doing their best Chicken Little impersonation about the alleged perils of bringing hardened terrorists to American soil, Durbin rebuffed Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich, calmly telling NBC’s David Gregory on Meet the Press that:

Continuing Guantanamo, unfortunately, makes our troops less safe.  The bottom line as I see it is Guantanamo should close in an orderly way. … The fact is that closing Guantanamo, that announcement by the president, as well as abandoning torture techniques and so-called enhanced interrogation, finally said to the rest of the world that it’s a new day.  Join us in a new approach to keeping this world and America safe.  I think it was a break from the past we desperately needed.

[W]hen we checked with the director of FBI, Mr. Mueller, he said there’s no question that supermax facilities, not a single escape, we limit the communication of these detainees and prisoners, and we can continue to do that. …

I’d be OK with them in a supermax facility, because we’ve never had an escape from one.  And as I said, we have over 340 convicted terrorists now being held safely in our prisons.  I just don’t hear anyone suggesting releasing them or sending them to another country.  That isn’t part of the prospect that we have before us. …

With this stance, Durbin shows how rational solutions can stand with both American values and security: closing Guantanamo is a moral and security imperative, and the idea that America’s safety is threatened when terrorists are in supermax facilities is nothing more than political scare tactics.

And as a result, it looks like job-starved Illinois will be rewarded in the process.  The state will retro-fit the empty Thompson prison to meet the new security standards, and then have to staff the facility full time once open.  Thompson sits in Carroll County, IL, where unemployment rests at 11.1 percent; a refurbished facility could bring as many as 3,000 jobs.

And though this is anecdotal evidence, I asked Mike Satlak - my college buddy, Oswego, IL resident (120 miles from Thompson), and in the interest of full disclosure, Dick Durbin fan - about the prospect of moving prisoners to rural Illinois.  “I’m not scared at all of any security threat, and Thompson could really use the jobs.”

Word hit the street over the weekend that senior CIA officials have been pushing the Obama administration to expand unmanned aerial drone attacks against targets in Pakistan.  In the spies’ cross hairs are top Taliban commanders based in Quetta, a large regional city.

If counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations aren’t your cup of tea, you may have missed the ever-expanding role that unmanned drones have played in Pakistan.  While it’s true that President Obama has signed off on the program’s expanded use to now include more of Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, the issue of targeting Quetta - a major population center - seems to have given the White House some pause.

A former senior CIA official said he and others were repeatedly rebuffed when proposing operations in Baluchistan or pushing Pakistan to target the Taliban in Quetta. “It wasn’t easy to talk about,” the official said. “The conversations didn’t last a long time.”

That sounds about right - attacking Quetta is a bridge too far in the drone war.  Here’s why:

Many question whether we should have an unmanned drone program in the first place.  There are strong and reasoned arguments from intelligent analysts who believe the costs of a drone program outweigh its benefits.  The strongest argument offered against the program is that by unintentionally causing civilian casualties with off-target or ill-timed strikes, the program agitates and alienates the population that the counter-insurgents are supposed to be protecting.

After this story first broke, I agree with that basic premise, but said that drone attacks should be “extraordinarily limited, not stopped” because they were a “valuable tool in certain rare circumstances.”  Further, I developed a five-part criteria as a guideline to determine when those might be.  My forth criterion says that it’s “unrealistic to say that drone won’t fire on population centers because then the targets would just hide in plain sight.  However, the US must carefully weigh the chance of civilian casualties and seek to avoid them - by using smaller missiles, modifying times of the strikes, etc. - at all costs.”

However, Quetta is a city of 850,000 people, and it is difficult to imagine that innocent civilians could be reasonably avoided in any single strike - no matter how good the intelligence is.  Therefore, the administration is right to endorse the general practice, but to oppose its application in this specific instance.

Stephen Hadley, George Bush’s former National Security Advisor, has set forth some rather appalling revisionist history in this morning’s Washington Post.  Though he supports Obama’s surge, he effectively tries to wash his hands of any culpability of the entire Afghanistan mess.  Sorry Mr. Hadley, but that just won’t fly.

Hadley believes that everything was going just swimmingly until mid-2006, when those darned Pakistanis went and screwed the whole thing up:

As to security, the U.N. Security Council authorized an international military force in December 2001, put it under NATO command in August 2003 and expanded its writ to all of Afghanistan in October 2003. Afghan army and police forces were being recruited, trained and equipped. Most of the country was free of violence.

But in 2006, the situation deteriorated. Suicide bombings and attacks using improvised explosive devices spiked. Corruption and poppy production grew dramatically, and the central government failed to establish an effective presence in the provinces. The planned Afghan security force was simply too small to handle the escalating violence.

In September 2006, Afghanistan’s neighbor Pakistan embarked on a series of well-intentioned but ill-fated deals intended to entice local tribes to support the government in Kabul. The tribes were supposed to expel al-Qaeda and end Taliban attacks in exchange for economic assistance and the withdrawal of Pakistani troops. Instead, these badly executed agreements strengthened the terrorist havens.

Then, Hadley explains, Bush’s buddy Pervez Musharraf went and had himself a little constitutional crisis, which really put the well-meaning and allegedly competent Bush administration behind the 8-ball:

Then Pakistan plunged into an 18-month political crisis, beginning in March 2007 when President Pervez Musharraf fired the country’s chief justice and ending with Musharraf’s resignation in August 2008. Consumed by political chaos, Pakistan could only watch as al-Qaeda terrorists and their Taliban allies launched attacks not only in Afghanistan but also in Pakistan — including the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

Some argue that America could not respond to the deteriorating situation because its attention and its troops were all focused on Iraq. Yet despite troop demands for Iraq, President George W. Bush and our coalition allies launched a “quiet surge” in Afghanistan to meet the new challenge.

See?  Isn’t it amazing how well the Bush administration handled everything and we just never knew about it?

Spare me.  What Hadley chooses to selectively ignore is his administration’s failure to capitalize on Afghanistan’s relative calm in the 2001-2006 timeframe.  True, the initial Afghaninstan war plan was successfully executed, and violence was significantly down (compared to, say 2009 levels) across the country.

But instead of literally building on that initial military success by focusing on enduring security, infrastructure, and civil service capacities, Hadley shares direct responsibility for diverting America’s attention to a war of choice in Iraq launched under thin pretexts.  In the process, billions of dollars and countless man-hours at the Pentagon, State Department, and White House (inclinding Mr. Hadley’s NSC) that should have been spent stabilized Afghanistan in 2003, were shifted westward.

The 10,000 additional troops that Hadley crows about later in the article are an embarrassingly weak and tardy prescription for an aggressive viral problem that was getting out of hand.

Too little, too late, Mr. Hadley.  You should be ashamed.

I was struck by the unexpected tone of President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech — instead of spending the entire address laying out a vision to achieve world peace, he instead spend the first half addressing the odd position in which he finds himself: receiving this prize while serving as Commander-in-Chief of a nation involved in two wars.

In the process, he laid out the most compelling ideological foundation for a progressive view on national security I have heard him ever give:

We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations – acting individually or in concert – will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.

I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King said in this same ceremony years ago – “Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.” As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life’s work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there is nothing weak –nothing passive – nothing naïve – in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism – it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

I raise this point because in many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter the cause. At times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America, the world’s sole military superpower.

Yet the world must remember that it was not simply international institutions – not just treaties and declarations – that brought stability to a post-World War II world. Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest – because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples’ children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.

This is where progressives should stand on national security:  we must acknowledge that there is evil in the world and show a resolve to make tough choices when America’s vital national security interests are at stake.  Our preference is to not use force, but when all other options have been exhausted and our security remains directly threatened, force may be the last resort.

Though we would prefer that