When you break down the cost of fighting the war in Afghanistan by US spending per American soldier on the ground, turns out it’s more than twice as expensive as the Iraq war. That’s what Todd Harrison at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments discovered. For this episode of the American Influence podcast, I talked with Harrison about some numbers, including the 30 billion dollar figure that Barack Obama used in his much-awaited speech on Afghanistan early this month.

The story of the Kajakai dam project offers the long view of US involvement in Afghanistan. It’s actually a relic of the Cold War, an American effort to blunt Soviet influence in the region. But in recent years, the dam has also been a huge reconstruction priority for the US and its allies. Problem is, the dam is located in Helmand province, where the Taliban insurgency is raging. And the road to the dam has been too dangerous to continue work there.

Finally, the podcast wraps up with a great interview with Scott Horton. He’s an international and human rights law expert in New York. Horton’s been following the story of CIA “black sites” closely – and writing about it at his blog, here. (Some great background reading on the issue in this post.) I talked with Horton about those two secret CIA detention facilities in Lithuania, just confirmed by an investigation there.

That’s all for now. Write me with ideas, comments, suggestions: theworldpolitics at gmail.com.

Happy holidays everybody, and thanks for listening!

Matthew Bell

J Street calls itself a pro-peace, pro-Israel lobby group that’s trying to change the dynamic of Middle East politics in Washington. One thing that sets it apart from other liberal advocacy organizations is that J Street isn’t just a PR effort. The group is raising money to support candidates running for office in the US who share its views on US policy in the Middle East.

Among the group’s outspoken critics is Isi Leibler – columnist at the conservative Jerusalem Post. I talked with Leibler from his home in Jerusalem about why he thinks J Street is bad for Israel.

MJ Rosenberg is a veteran US liberal activist on Middle East affairs. Rosenberg thinks J Street’s time has come. He told me the group is helping give voice to views long stifled by mainstream pro-Israel groups and their supporters.

But Yossi Shain says that’s rubbish. Shain is an Israeli expert in Jewish diaspora affairs, and he splits his time between Georgetown and Tel Aviv University. Shain welcomes the arrival of J Street and doesn’t doubt their sincere desire to help the state of Israel. But he told me the idea that bigger, more established pro-Israel groups such as AIPAC have stifled debate about US policy in the Middle East is a canard.

Finally on the J Street story, I talked with executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami about his connections to Israel, what he’s trying to do, and why he thinks the group has generated such controversy.

Next, US-supported Palestinian security forces. The American element of the program is led by three star Army general, Keith Dayton. His effort has been held up as a rare example of real progress on the ground in the West Bank. But some Palestinians are still asking questions about these security forces. My report from the West Bank wraps up this episode of the podcast.

Pakistan’s foreign minister spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations last week and Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi assured the audience that his government takes the threat from extremist and militant groups seriously. He said:

We, as a democratically elected government, have very clearly defined our goals. We do not differentiate between sort of, you know, the good — you know, the good terrorist and the bad terrorists. Terrorists are terrorists.

Qureshi was asked about the extremist groups that have historically been focused on Kashmir and India, including the group said to be responsible for the attack in Mumbai last year, Lashkar-e-Taiba. He said they are no friends of Pakistan.

Christine Fair has serious doubts, however, about Pakistan’s willingness and ability to crack down on insurgent groups. She gives a blunt assessment of what she calls a “partial war on terrorism” by Pakistan’s military. Fair is worth listening to ahead of what looks like it’s going to be another riveting Frontline documentary on the war in Afghanistan and how insurgent groups based in Pakistan are a huge part of the problem.

The bulk of this episode of the podcast however is an interview I did with Akiva Eldar, columnist for the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz and author of the book, Lords of the Land. Eldar was kind enough to put up with me, my digital recorder and my questions at his home in Netanya, Israel. I started off by asking him if saw the recent Obama-Netanyahu-Abbas summit in New York as just a photo-op. Eldar said it might be worse than that. It might have been a real setback.

Thanks for listening folks, and keep the feedback coming. Email me at theworldpolitics at gmail dot com.

Clinton’s speech Friday at the Brookings Institution was a whirlwind tour of the huge foreign policy challenges facing the Obama administration right now.  Iran is just one of them.

This episode of the podcast opens with some excerpts from Clinton’s speech on missile defense, Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Clinton spoke at length about the president’s decision to reconfigure US missile defense capabilities around the world. And she aimed not only at critics of the administration, but at US allies whose feathers might be ruffled over the move.  Robert Kaplan has a great piece on missile defense that describes the change in policy as “a remarkably shrewd bit of politics and statesmanship.”

Friday was also “Quds Day” in Tehran. The Iranian president led a rally to denounce Israel (and deny the Holocaust, yet again), but those plans were disrupted by the emergence of opposition protesters. The BBC’s Jim Muir writes:

It made the country look unstable, and the president’s authority challenged from within, as he was preparing to travel to New York to address the United Nations General Assembly next week.

It’s interesting that Sec. Clinton never really got into the administration’s efforts to re-start peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. But when she got a question on the subject, Clinton gave the most forceful response of her whole presentation.

The podcast wraps up with two interviews I did on the anniversary of September 11, 2001. As a candidate, Barack Obama promised to reverse course on some of the signature policies of the Bush administration forged in response to September 11th. So, has President Obama succeeded in transforming US foreign policy? That’s the broad question I put to Marc Lynch – Middle East expert at Georgetown; and Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Please send ideas, tips, criticism to theworldpolitics at gmail.com. And thanks for listening!

The latest episode of the podcast gets into the difficult choices facing president Barack Obama in Afghanistan. After eight years of war, the US military is now thinking about starting all over in Afghanistan by implementing the kind of counterinsurgency strategy that helped avert complete disaster in Iraq. At the top of the agenda is defeating the Al Qaeda terrorist network and its Taliban allies. But would that necessarily require transforming a nation that has suffered more than a generation of war, turmoil and complete economic stagnation? And can the US afford to do what it would take to even help this country give itself a decent shot at success?

For Andrew Bacevich of Boston University, the answer to that last question is a simple one. No. Bacevich is an ex-Army officer who’s become a leading voice against doubling down in Afghanistan. He says it’s high time for Mr. Obama to start lowering expectations for the US and its partners in that country.

In many ways, Rory Stewart is on the same page as Bacevich. He’s a British scholar who’s spent a lot time in Afghanistan and other parts of Central Asia and the Middle East. Stewart says the US and its allies owe it to the Afghan people to be more honest about what they can really accomplish there, which is likely to be something far less ambitious than even the kind of tenuous nation-building that’s taken place in Iraq since 2003.

Military analyst Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution and Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations argue that the US cannot afford to let Afghanistan go back to being a safe-haven for the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Send me an email to thworldpolitics [at] gmail [dot] com.

And thanks for listening!

Some great voices in this episode of the podcast.

Paul Pillar of Georgetown University was at the CIA for 28 years before retiring in 2005. He was an expert on South Asia and counter-terrorism at the agency. Pillar told me there’s good reason for frustration at the CIA over all this.

I also talked with former CIA officer Robert Baer. Much of his career was spent in the Middle East. Baer told me he could have tortured detainees a number of times over the years. But he never did. He said that’s not because he was categorically against it on moral grounds in all cases. But he said it’s simply because torture doesn’t work. It doesn’t produce solid intelligence. Baer wants President Obama to take the preliminary investigation into CIA abuse and kick it up a notch.

Mark Bowden has written fantastic stuff for The Atlantic on the issue of interrogations. He told me this would be a simple matter if it was always true that non-coercive methods of interrogations worked best in all cases. But it’s not that simple, Bowden said. However, he’s also very supportive of the way the Obama administration has broken with the past.

David Cole is the author of The Torture Memos. Cole said failing to hold those responsible for breaking laws on torture would allow future American presidents to repeat the mistakes of the Bush administration. But he added that this could be achieved without going down the road of full-blown criminal investigation.

There are, of course, differences of opinion on the question of how far up the chain of command the Obama administration should go with any investigation or inquiry. I talked about this with Stephen Walt of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, Robert Jervis of Columbia, and David Kennedy at Stanford.

Episode 20 of the podcast includes an interview with Prof. Sung-Yoon Lee about the apparent transition in leadership that’s going on in North Korea. He’s skeptical about many details in recent reports about Kim Jong-un. The bottom line, Lee says, is that North Korea’s economy may be a mess, the country may be the most isolated nation on earth, but its system of government is probably stable enough to make it through a post-Kim Jong-il transition intact.

The rest of the podcast focuses on the case of Laura Ling and Euna Lee. As I write this post, the two American women await trial in Pyongyang for entering North Korea illegally and with “hostile intent.” Here’s the latest from Reuters. I spoke with Chuck Downs of the Washington-based group, Human Rights in North Korea; former US ambassador to South Korea, Donald Gregg; and a former US Navy officer, Edward Murphy. In 1968, he was held – along with 81 of his fellow crewmembers on the USS Pueblo – in a North Korean prison for more than 11 months after their ship was captured by the DPRK.

Email me here: theworldpolitics@gmail.com