Third and Final Debate on October 22nd - Foreign Policy

Polling update !

This New Poll Is A Pretty Big Disaster For Obama

Brett LoGiurato | Oct. 22, 2012, 2:44 PM | 12,457 | 81

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AP

Republican nominee Mitt Romney leads President Barack Obama by 3 points in a new Monmouth University poll, which also shows how much Romney has changed his fortunes since the first presidential debate. 

Romney leads 48-45 overall in the poll, a boost from a one-point advantage in a poll taken right after the first debate. Among likely voters, Romney has swung the race 6 points from a month ago.

Here's a quick look at some of the internal vitals that have changed since September:

• On foreign policy, Romney trailed Obama in September by 9 points. He has closed that gap to just a single point today, as the candidates prepare to debate foreign policy.
• Romney now leads on economy by 6 points with likely voters. He has swung that issue 9 points in the past month, as Obama had taken the lead in September.Romney has expanded his net favorability rating to a positive 10-point spread, up from just 1 in September. Obama's positive and negative favorability ratings are even at 45 percent. This had previously been a big advantage for the president. 
• In September, Obama led by 8 on which candidate would best "protect" Social Security and Medicare for future generations. Now, Romney leads 48-45 — an 11-point swing.

• Romney now has a huge advantage on which candidate would best handle the federal budget deficit. He leads by 9 points in that area.

Here's a breakdown of each issue in chart form:

as noted prevously , Obama needs the third debate far more than Romney.....



The third and final Presidential Debate is set for Monday , will be exclusively foreign policy and comes as the trend in polling appears to be moving Romney's way ( a beter sense will be gained by checking the numbers this weekend as we see more numbers / polls reflecting the second Presidential Debate. Here are some things that have caught my eye as we wait for this looming Debate. ) Prior to hitting foreign policy points , consider the following :

A) DNC running out of cash while GOP banking major contributions.... And why does the Obama campaign need to borrow 15 million from Bank of America- didn't they raise a billion ?

http://freebeacon.com/obama-campaign-borrows-15m-from-bank-of-america/

Obama For America took out a $15 million loan from Bank of America last month, according to the campaign’s October monthly FEC report. The loan was incurred on September 4 and is due November 14, eight days after the election. OFA received an interest rate of 2.5% plus the current Libor rate.

*  *  * 

It is unclear why the first $1 billion campaign needed an extra $15 million for the final two months of the campaign.

and.....

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1012/82644.html?hp=l4

The Democratic National Committee was unable to keep up with the Republican National Committee’s fundraising again in September, despite taking out $10.5 million in loans.

The DNC raised $20.3 million in September, including the loans, and only $3.7 million of its total fundraising came from individuals and political action committees. The rest came from transfers and offsetting operating expenditures.

As of Sept. 30, the DNC reported having $4.6 million in the bank and $20.5 million in total debt – almost double the $11.8 million it owed at the end of August. The committee owes about $5.5 million of its total debt to creditors for services such as direct mail consulting, polling expenses and event consulting.

The RNC by comparison announced it raised $48.4 million in September and had a whopping $82.6 million in its reserves.

“While we continue to put money into our ground game and fully fund our absentee ballot, early vote and Election Day GOTV efforts in all our battleground states, our historic cash on hand figure also allows us to continue funding our independent expenditure committee, run highly effective hybrid ads and assist in electing Republicans across the country at all levels,” said RNC Chairman Reince Priebus.

B)  Dems losing steam - not just due to debates but perhaps due to the ack of campaign ad buy power ???

http://www.dickmorris.com/here-come-the-other-states/#more-10007

While all national attention is focused — indeed riveted — on the seven to nine swing or battleground states, a major shift is taking place in the rest of the country: Voters are turning off Obama and onto Romney.

In the forty states where the Obama campaign has not spread toxic negative ads against Romney, the Republican is gaining by leaps and bounds and will likely carry a bunch of “non-swing” normally blue states. Specifically, Romney is now three points ahead in Pennsylvania, one point behind in Michigan, and only two points behind in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Together, these four states have a cache of 56 electoral votes and are the tail that may wag the dog on November 6th.

While Romney looks to be solidly ahead in Florida, Virginia, Iowa and Colorado, the race in Nevada, Ohio, and New Hampshire continues to be nip and tuck with the two candidates tied or within a point of one another.

Enter the Romney flank attack, circling around these battleground states to attack the soft underbelly of undefended Democratic states.

Indeed, the situation is so fluid in the Democratic states that there is increasing evidence that several blue bastions states are borderline in play with Obama under 50% of the vote. In New Jersey, Neighborhood Research has Obama up by only 48-41. In Oregon, Survey USA has the president leading by only 49-42.

With the undecided vote likely to go overwhelmingly against the president, we may see some strange states turning red on Election Day.

While I still believe, Romney will carry Ohio, New Hampshire, and Nevada; he may do even better in Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Won’t that be a kick?

C) if A and B are correct , Obama needs Debate number three bigtime , more so than Romney ....he has to overcome not just momentum but also a  significant cash disadvantage

1 )  Obama's foreign policy as a general statement - note the commentary of a former Administrative Advisor  ( note this is State Department blowback - she seems to be a Clintonite based on her prior service at State when Harold Koh was  Assistant Secretary of State and she was a Senior Adviser to Koh  ) death dealing to the White House and its foreign policy across the  board - timed just before Monday night ! Honestly , this body blow covers the gamut to the extent that the follow on points really highlight the global picture painted here.....

     http://hotair.com/archives/2012/10/19/former-obama-advisor-our-foreign-policy-is-a-mess-especially-in-the-middle-east/

Former Obama advisor: Our foreign policy is a mess — especially in the Middle East

POSTED AT 12:01 PM ON OCTOBER 19, 2012 BY ED MORRISSEY

With the last of the three presidential debates taking place in just three days, and with Barack Obama on his heels in polling after the first two, one would expect Obama allies to come out of the woodwork to sing his praises on foreign policy, the topic of Monday night’s forum.  After all, Democrats — including Obama himself — bragged six weeks ago at the Democratic convention that Obama would bury Mitt Romney in this arena.

Instead, former Obama administration Defense undersecretary and State Department adviser Rosa Brooks writes at Foreign Policy that her former boss’ team on foreign policy desperately needs an intervention, and that Obama needs to finally get involved by doing more than giving a few speeches:

Despite some successes large and small, Obama’s foreign policy has disappointed many who initially supported him. The Middle East initiatives heralded in his 2009 Cairo speech fizzled or never got started at all, and the Middle East today is more volatile than ever. The administration’s response to the escalating violence in Syria has consisted mostly of anxious thumb-twiddling. The Israelis and the Palestinians are both furious at us. In Afghanistan, Obama lost faith in his own strategy: he never fought to fully resource it, and now we’re searching for a way to leave without condemning the Afghans to endless civil war. In Pakistan, years of throwing money in the military’s direction have bought little cooperation and less love.

The Russians want to reset the reset, neither the Chinese nor anyone else can figure out what, if anything, the “pivot to Asia” really means, and Latin America and Africa continue to be mostly ignored, along with global issues such as climate change. Meanwhile, the administration’s expanding drone campaign suggests a counterterrorism strategy that has completely lost its bearings – we no longer seem very clear on who we need to kill or why.

Could Obama have done better?

In foreign policy as in life, stuff happens — including bad stuff no one could have predicted. Nonetheless, to a significant extent, President Obama is the author of his own lackluster foreign policy. He was a visionary candidate, but as president, he has presided over an exceptionally dysfunctional and un-visionary national security architecture — one that appears to drift from crisis to crisis, with little ability to look beyond the next few weeks. His national security staff is squabbling and demoralized, and though senior White House officials are good at making policy announcements, mechanisms to actually implement policies are sadly inadequate.

It doesn’t have to be this way. If Obama wants to fix his broken foreign policy machine, he can do it — but conversations with numerous insiders, as well as my own government experiences, suggest that he needs to focus on strategy, structure, process, management, and personnel as much as on new policy initiatives.

Not sexy, I know. But just as a start-up company needs more than an entrepreneurial founder with a couple of good ideas and a nifty PowerPoint presentation, the United States needs more than speeches and high-minded aspirations.

Brooks offers a devastating set of suggestions to improve the situation, each one an indictment of Obama’s foreign-policy management over the last four years:

1. Get a strategy.
2. Get some decent managers.
3. Get people who actually know something.
4. Get out of the bubble.
5. Get a backbone.

Er … shouldn’t those have been Day One tasks?  If a President still has these five tasks on his to-do list on foreign policy almost four years into his term, it’s safe to say that he’s not interested — or competent — enough to accomplish them.

By the way, Brooks hammers Obama on point 3 for letting cronyism conquer over talent and experience:

President Obama promised to ensure transparency and competence in government, but too often, nepotism trumps merit. Young and untried campaign aides are handed vital substantive portfolios (I could name names, but will charitably refrain, unless you buy me a drink), while those with deep expertise often find themselves sidelined.

Cronyism also reigns supreme when it comes to determining who should attend White House meetings: increasingly, insiders say, meetings called by top NSS officials involve by-name requests for attendance, with no substitutions or “plus ones” permitted. As a result, dissenting voices are shut out, along with the voices of specialists who could provide valuable information and insights. The result? Shallow discussions and poor decisions.

Well, what did voters honestly expect when they elected a Chicago machine politician with no executive experience?  I’m actually serious about that question.  This was one of the big problems with giving a man his first executive experience as President of the United States.  This is why it’s better to elect governors, military commanders, or people with extensive private-sector executive experience; they have already lived through the lessons of poor hiring decisions and are a lot smarter about it by the time they’re running the most powerful country in the world.  This is just another outcome of having someone in far over his head, and Americans have no one but themselves to blame for it.

Of course, they can correct that failure in about 18 days.  And if Mitt Romney isn’t committing Brooks’ damning indictment to memory for Monday’s debate in order to close the deal on the election, I’ll eat my hat.

2) Libya blowback continue - this time from the Intel Community - CIA

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/10/19/cia-linked-benghazi-attack-to-militants-in-first-24-hours/

CIA linked Benghazi attack to “militants” in first 24 hours

POSTED AT 10:01 AM ON OCTOBER 19, 2012 BY ED MORRISSEY

Earlier this morning, McClatchy asked why the Obama administration changed its story on the Benghazi terrorist attack after three days from an initial, vague reference to terrorist attacks to a demonstrably false narrative about a “spontaneous demonstration” that never took place, and a YouTube video that had been on line for two months.  That question got more pressing this morning, as the Associated Press reports that the CIA linked the attack to “militants” in eastern Libya:

 The CIA station chief in Libya reported to Washington within 24 hours of last month’s deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate that there was evidence it was carried out by militants, not a spontaneous mob upset about an American-made video ridiculing Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, U.S. officials have told The Associated Press.

It is unclear who, if anyone, saw the cable outside the CIA at that point and how high up in the agency the information went. The Obama administration maintained publicly for a week that the attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans was a result of the mobs that staged less-deadly protests across the Muslim world around the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks on the U.S.

If you haven’t already done so, be sure to read all of McClatchy’s report on the shifting narratives from the Obama administration.  The CIA report would generally align with most of the messaging from the White House in the first two days.  It’s not until the 14th that the Obama administration went all-in on the YouTube-video blameshifting that continued for more than a week.

The AP wonders whether anyone read the CIA cable with this information.  Let’s parse that out for just a moment.  We suffered the death of a US Ambassador and three other Americans in the sacking of a consulate in a key area of the world.  Wouldn’t one of the first items to check be information from the CIA’s station in the area?  Given the fact that this came from the station chief and not just some lower-level scuttlebutt, either we can assume it got read immediately, or that the people running the show in Washington DC are so incompetent that it’s a wonder we have any diplomatic missions left at all.

The leak of this information is very interesting indeed, too.  The defense from Barack Obama himself at the last presidential debate, as well as Susan Rice in the Wall Street Journal, is that the “spontaneous demonstration” story is what they were hearing from the intel community.  This makes it very clear that their excuses are false, at least in large part, let alone the fact that State watched the attack unfold in real time and has video of the event, a fact revealed at the House Oversight Committee hearings last week.  Unlike Hillary Clinton, the intel community apparently has no intention of being scapegoated for the White House’s cover story.  That’s a big, big problem for Barack Obama and his righteous indignation.

Update: We’ve heard that intel had linked this to “militants” before; Eli Lake, Fox News, and Yahoo’s Olivier Knox all had good reporting on this in September.  This is, though, the most specific reporting yet, and the first reporting of which I’m aware that the CIA station chief cabled Washington with that information himself.  It’s one thing to claim that some intel data may have gotten lost in “the fog of war,” but it’s hard to explain how no one would have known about intel of that significance.  Even if the national security people didn’t have it on their desks, they should have been consulting with the CIA station chief in Libya on a constant basis.

3) Libya blowback once again  - outrage from the family of one victims and dead men do tell tales.....

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/10/19/stevens-warned-state-dept-on-day-he-died-about-deterioriating-security-in-benghazi/

Stevens warned State Dep’t on day he died about deterioriating security in Benghazi

POSTED AT 5:21 PM ON OCTOBER 19, 2012 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

Not just on the day he died, mind you. Multiple times before, too. I’m near the point now where I want to abandon the whole “pre-planned attack versus spontaneous protest” line of inquiry just because it’s steering us away from the more important topic of State’s negligence on his security. Besides, we already know, more or less, why Carney and Rice pushed the “spontaneous protest” theory. Ask Saxby Chambliss:

“Talking points distributed by the administration [in the immediate aftermath] are nearly identical to intelligence assessments within hours of the attack, except in one important way: the intelligence judgment that the attackers had ties to al-Qa’ida was excluded from the public points,” [Saxby] Chambliss said in a statement on Friday.

“The administration omitted the known links to al-Qa’ida at almost every opportunity … Whether this was an intentional effort by the administration to downplay the role of terrorist groups, especially al-Qa’ida, is one of the many issues the Senate Intelligence Committee must examine,” Chambliss said.

The guy who got Bin Laden and knocked out Qaddafi didn’t need a storyline in the middle of a campaign about AQ affiliates killing the American ambassador in the heart of the “new Libya.” That’s straightforward, and that’s almost certainly why the “spontaneous protest” theory got traction initially. (“Al Qaeda is on the run” used to be part of Obama’s standard stump speech, in fact. That line has been quietly dropped lately.) What’s not straightforward is why State refused to boost Stevens’s security despite countless warnings about the danger, some from the man himself. It’s inexplicable. It’s not a budget issue, either: Charlene Lamb testified to that before the House. She also testified that State had “the correct number of assets in Benghazi,” which literally no one but her seems to believe is true. So, once again: Why didn’t Stevens have more security? What were they waiting for before making a decision to either send him a more professional force or end the American presence in Benghazi? Was that politicized too, i.e. State didn’t want abandon the consulate over security fears because that would have made for some bad headlines about conditions inside the “new Libya”?

On Sept. 11 — the day Stevens and three other Americans were killed — the ambassador signed a three-page cable, labeled “sensitive,” in which he noted “growing problems with security” in Benghazi and “growing frustration” on the part of local residents with Libyan police and security forces. These forces the ambassador characterized as “too weak to keep the country secure.”…

Roughly a month earlier, Stevens had signed a two-page cable, also labeled “sensitive,” that he entitled “The Guns of August: Security in Eastern Libya.” Writing on Aug. 8, the ambassador noted that in just a few months’ time, “Benghazi has moved from trepidation to euphoria and back as a series of violent incidents has dominated the political landscape.” He added, “The individual incidents have been organized,” a function of “the security vacuum that a diverse group of independent actors are exploiting for their own purposes.”

“Islamist extremists are able to attack the Red Cross with relative impunity,” Stevens cabled. “What we have seen are not random crimes of opportunity, but rather targeted and discriminate attacks.” His final comment on the two-page document was: “Attackers are unlikely to be deterred until authorities are at least as capable.”…

“Islamic extremism appears to be on the rise in eastern Libya,” the ambassador wrote [on June 25], adding that “the Al-Qaeda flag has been spotted several times flying over government buildings and training facilities …”

Libyan guards at the consulate also thought security was too thin to meet the challenge from local mujahedeen, but were reportedly told by the Americans they spoke to that everything was cool and that no one would dare approach the consulate — even though, as noted above, even the Red Cross wasn’t spared from attack. (That may have been part of a jihadi strategy to push all western outfits out of the city.) I’d sure like to know which Americans said that; based on his increasingly dire reports to the State Department, it doesn’t sound like Stevens was one of them.

I’ll leave you with this. Funny how Susan Rice is capable of detecting a terrorist attack right away in some cases. Is she sure that Beirut bombing this morning wasn’t a reaction to the Mohammed movie?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2220241/Barack-Obama-Benghazi-attack-Mother-diplomat-criticises-Presidents-optimal-comment.html

'My son is NOT very optimal... he is very dead': Mother of U.S. diplomat killed in Libya attack slams 'insensitive' Obama's comment about security fiasco

• President told Jon Stewart, 'If four Americans get killed, it's not optimal'
• Remarks sparked massive backlash from conservatives on social media
• Mother of slain diplomat Sean Smith says Obama was 'disrespectful'

The mother of an American diplomat killed during a terrorist raid on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi has hit out at Barack Obama for describing the attack as 'not optimal', saying: 'My son is not very optimal - he is also very dead.'

During an interview shown on Comedy Central, Obama responded to a question about his administration's confused communication after the assault by saying: 'If four Americans get killed, it’s not optimal.'

Speaking exclusively to MailOnline today, Pat Smith, whose son Sean died in the raid, said: 'It was a disrespectful thing to say and I don't think it's right. 

'How can you say somebody being killed is not very optimal? I don't think the President has the right idea of the English language.'

Speaking from her home in San Diego, Mrs Smith, 72, continued: 'It's insensitive to say my son is not very optimal - he is also very dead. I've not been "optimal" since he died and the past few weeks have been pure hell. 

'I am still waiting for the truth to come out and I still want to know the truth. I'm finally starting to get some answers but I won't give up.

'There's a lot of stupid things that have been said about my son and what happened and this is another one of them.'

Obama was speaking to Jon Stewart of The Daily Show for a programme that was broadcast last night. Stewart, a liberal whose young audience is full of potential voters prized by the Obama campaign, asked the president about his handling of the aftermath of the Benghazi attack.

But Obama's response sparked outrage among Republican commentators including the website Breitbart and prompted a vicious backlash from the Twitter community.

Ambassador Chris Stevens, diplomat Sean Smith and security men and former U.S. Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods were killed by terrorists on the 11th anniversary of 9/11 - an attack that the White House initially blamed on a spontaneous protest about an anti-Islam movie made in California.

Mrs Smith has previously attacked the Obama administration for keeping her in the dark over how her only child died.

She told Anderson Cooper last week that top officials had told her 'outright lies', adding: 'Everyone of them, all the big shots over there told me - they promised me, they promised me that they would tell me what happened.

'I told them, please don't give me any baloney that comes through with this political stuff.

'I don't want political stuff. You can keep your political, just tell me the truth - what happened. And I still don't know.'

*  *  * 

4)  Beirut gets drawn deeper into the morass of Syria - look for what both Candidates have to say on the way forward regarding syria and what that means regionally.....

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/10/19/a_Beirut_horror_story

A Beirut horror story

Posted By David Kenner  Friday, October 19, 2012 - 1:00 PM   Share

From the outside looking in, Beirut sometimes appears to be an endless horror story. A car bomb here, an assassination there, even a Showtime series that depicts it as a war-wracked city where militias runs amok over the trendiest of neighborhoods. This portrayal has always been an exaggeration -- but today, it became a little closer to the truth.

This afternoon, a car bomb ripped through Beirut's Sassine Square, a main commercial center in Ashrafieh, a predominantly Christian neighborhood. Brig. Gen. Wissam al-Hassan, the head of the Internal Security Forces' Information Branch, has been reportedly killed in the blast.

In Lebanon, each security branch is a fiefdom of a different political party. Hassan wasn't just a non-partisan official, but widely recognized as the central ally of former Prime Minister Saad Hariri's Future Movement, the country's most important Sunni party. As FP contributor Elias Muhanna writes, Hassan had "long been the target of...ire" from Lebanon's pro-Assad political alliance. Hassan had been riding high: His branch had just arrested Michel Samaha, one of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's staunchest allies in Beirut, on charges of plotting attacks against Christian areas on orders of the Syrian regime.

For Hariri and his anti-Assad allies, then, this looks like payback: They struck a blow against one of Assad's men, so the Syrian regime took revenge by killing the man who orchestrated the arrest. The backlash is already brewing: Lebanese press outlets have reported scattered clashes andblocked roads in areas of Beirut and the northern city of Tripoli that are typically flashpoints for violence. 

Lebanon has muddled through the Syrian revolt under what Prime Minister Najib Miqati calls "disassociation" -- it would neither offer its support to the Assad regime, or the rebels trying to topple it. "What is happening in Syria is very unfortunate, but at the same time we cannot take the country to something similar," former Interior Minister Ziad Baroud, a supporter of the policy, told me a few weeks ago in Beirut. "We had our share -- for years. And we know what civil war is about."

That carefully constructed façade has always shown a few cracks: Hezbollah fighters are widely suspected to be fighting in Syria on behalf of Assad, while Hariri ally Okab Saqr is reportedly working from Turkey to funnel weapons to the anti-Assad rebels.

But now, the entire effort to keep Lebanon out of Syria's war could come crashing down. And if that happens, Beirut could turn into something all too similar to what you see on the movie screen.

5) Afghanistan policy - still clear as mud but who can deny we need to be working our way out the door in 2013 , not figuring out ways to further entangle ourselves in Karzai's web ? ? 

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/10/18/if_you_love_afghanistan_let_it_go

Afghanistan's Gray

 Future

It's Hamid Karzai's country now, and not everything is black and white.

BY HASEEB HUMAYOON | OCTOBER 18, 2012

In 


















projecting Afghanistan's future, it's misleading to hold a mirror to its troubled past. Many pundits assume Afghanistan will disintegrate upon the last combat soldier's departure in 2014 -- that Afghans themselves are devoid of the will to construct, better suited to blowing it all up. The future of the country, though, is neither black nor white. The truth is that Afghanistan has been transformed since 2001, rendering responsible politics a chance to define its outlook.

Alarmists about Afghanistan's future paint two likely scenarios: civil war, or the forceful return of the Taliban. Neither of these scenarios ring true. Even more importantly, they are predicted on perverse detachment from the realities on the ground, and colored by a view where external factors determine Afghanistan's course. More essential than what Washington or Brussels decides is whether Afghan politicians will manage to preserve and advance political stability through the constitutional order or not. And fundamentally, the person with the most influence over the extension and legitimacy of the system -- or the irresponsible undermining of it -- is President Hamid Karzai.

Powers amassed in the office of the presidency since 2004 have transformed Karzai from being a conciliator among different contentious factions (that saw him as harmless back in 2001) to a Machiavellian manipulator of his political competitors and international supporters. Karzai's public clashes with the U.S. Embassy during the Bush administration and his pronounced detachment from the Obama White House have made clear the diminished U.S. political leverage in Afghanistan. Indeed, the Afghan president has increasingly turned to local strongmen as a source of power, thereby embedding the chaotic mix of patronage and populism as the essence of politics in Afghanistan. In Afghan politics, real power is the prize, but no single major person or group in the country -- other than the nihilistic Taliban and former civil-war fighter Gulbudin Hekmatyar -- is pursuing it with overt force and violence. And that's a step in the right direction.

Absent parties and durable groupings, Afghan politics can seem chaotic and unpredictable. Yet the past eight years of the constitutional order offers evidence that when conflicts arise, politics moderate. In the heat of the 2009 presidential elections, Atta Mohammad Noor -- a powerful supporter of Abdullah Abdullah, the leading opposition candidate -- entered into an ugly public conflict with Hanif Atmar, then the minister of interior and a Karzai loyalist. Tensions heightened, and concerns about violent clashes between Noor and the government were real. The framework governing politics in the country, and the conduct of politicians were as yet untested -- any clash was expected to be hard to contain. Yet, just as the tension reached a simmer, so did the pursuit of a negotiated end to the brawl. Politics prevailed over the resort to force. Noor remained unapologetic for his support of the opposition, but the government recognized his right to stay within the system and yet not necessarily pledge full loyalty to the person heading it.

In the 2010 parliamentary elections, the regional and provincial strongmen who had once opted to be above the law or outside the frames of democratic institutions actually canvassed for seats. Now, they have a multitude of reasons to invest in the constitutional order: from access to power and prestige, to immunity and business. They are seeking all these perks through civilian platforms, as opposed to the sheer force or numbers of their guns and guys. The encouraging factor is that if the nascent constitutional order has grown to offer all these perks to strongmen, it should someday be able to regulate them too.

Challenges to order, nonetheless, abound. Semi-organized militias and paramilitary outfits have increased in the past two years -- under different labels such as the Afghan Local Police, Critical Infrastructure Police, and other ambiguous formations outside the standard law and order institutions. Similarly, some local officials have extended official and unofficial support to the mobilization of armed groups in some districts of provinces such as Kunduz and Baghlan. With a radius of influence limited to districts, their return to the scene, much contrary to arguments flashed out most recently in a New Yorker article by Dexter Filkins and echoed by other commentators, is not a sure sign of any looming civil war.

Civil wars do not erupt out of clashes at the provincial or district levels, but rather when the settlement for control or share of power at the center fails to offer the needed flexibility or satisfaction to most parties concerned. The much-dreaded 1992-1996 civil war in Afghanistan was not a product of any district level clashes. In fact, the trigger and sustainer of the war was violent scuffle over leadership and key posts in the central government, of course with the meddling regional forces -- in particular, Iran and Pakistan -- through the allegiances of their proxies developed in the 1980s.

But the dominant feature of the post-2001 government has been its flexibility -- even ingenuity -- in ensuring everyone gets a piece of the pie. Even those who are very overtly opposed to the leadership of the country either have a direct share of the system, or they have immediate family members or group loyalists in high government positions. For example, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum is vocally anti-Karzai, but continues to enjoy a generous salary as the ceremonial chief of staff to the supreme commander of the Armed Forces. Former Vice President Ahmad Zia Masood is mobilizing as opposition to Karzai, yet his brother-in-law Salahudin Rabbani chairs the government's High Peace Council. Such is the settlement that even loyalists of the insurgent leader Gulbudin Hekmatyar also enjoy a major portion of power in Kabul and provinces. They may be using the violent capabilities of Hekmatyar as a bargaining tool, but they are unlikely to surrender all the privileges they currently enjoy to go to war with other factions.

Afghanistan's politics of patronage -- where access to influence and key resources are doled out -- also works against the eruption of an all out civil war. This is how those at the center keep their networks at the periphery happy: either through government appointments, official sanctioning of revenue streams, or simply by sending a share of their own extorts out. And those in the periphery do the reverse. Often, they send shares of their extracts and extorts to patrons at the regional or central hubs. In the long term, these dynamics are highly undesirable for accountable and responsive governance, but the liquidity of these patronage networks at least insure that interests get negotiated and clashes get averted. Of course, the downside is that the Afghanistan of today does not work fairly for all of society. Patronage may not help the public, but it is working for most of the political class.

This is not to say that Afghanistan is fully stable, but given the checks and balances applied by the constitutional order and patronage politics on potentially warring factions, only external pressures can really be seen as threatening its stability and endurance. The Taliban are certainly the main threat, but they increasingly do not pose an existential challenge to the extension or stability of the constitutional order, for they have failed to offer a responsive alternative to the public, and the perception of their cohesiveness is also diminishing.

* * *

Pundits and politicians argue that with the drawdown of foreign forces in 2014, the Taliban will be unstoppable. Their frame of reference for this pessimism is the Taliban's awe-inspiring march across the country in the 1990s, when within three years of their formation they had around 90 percent of the country in their control. The political and economic landscape of Afghanistan today makes the Taliban's cruise across the country simply fantastical. In 1996, the Taliban won control of Jalalabad -- the supply route to Kabul, and the commercial and population center of eastern Afghanistan -- by bribing the local forces in the region in cash (reportedly at the cost of $10 million), and a promise of safe passage. With the wealth and power that local actors around the country have amassed these days, though, the price for any such deal down the line has gone up exponentially. It is hard to imagine the current strategic actors in just the Jalalabad region striking any financial deal -- unless the Taliban offer hundreds of millions of dollars, which is unrealistic given the economic strife of their principal paymasters in Pakistan.

When the Taliban first emerged on the political and military stage in the 1990s, they were an untested group, offering an exit from the chaos of commander rule. In the past 10 years, however, by resorting to brutal terrorist attacks and violently countering any efforts at development, the group has exhausted any public space it once had. Consider this: the Taliban have now operated twice longer as an insurgency than as a government. Their brand is now associated with the brutality of beheadings. This year, popular uprisings against them in the rural and urban areas of the country are a spreading reality. Urban Afghans have long seen that the Taliban represents regress, but rural Afghans increasingly recognize it too.

Battlefield realities further undermine any possibility of the Taliban's forceful return. The insurgency has suffered massively over the past two years, in particular the ranks of its mid-level commanders. A targeted campaign by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to kill and capture field commanders has weakened their capability and also sown mistrust among the leadership and field operations.

For years, the Taliban thrived on projecting a cohesive and committed image of their leadership -- the inner circle around Mullah Omar. But 10 years on the run has ruptured the group's leadership and invited desperate reactions by their patrons in Pakistan's military establishment. In February 2010, the Taliban's No. 2 and veteran figure Mullah Abdul Ghani Beradar was put behind bars in Pakistan, on charges of seeking a political deal with the Afghan government without the consent of Islamabad. Mullah Obaidullah Akhund, former defense minister of the Taliban, died in 2008 -- arrested by Pakistan in 2006 upon U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's trip to the region. Mullah Agha Jan Muhtasim, another senior figure, has all but defected to the Afghan government (he's currently on government- sponsored treatment in Turkey for wounds he suffered in his hideout in Pakistan). Members of the Haqqani family have been targeted by drone strikes, and other influential figures of the early inner circle of the group -- such as Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Usmani and Mullah Dadullah -- have perished on the battlefield. Returning to power would be a challenging feat for a group that's finding it increasingly difficult to ensure the survival or loyalty of its core.

In short, projecting that there will be a full return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan is as lazy as the alarms about civil war. At best, the Taliban have turned into a terrorist outfit that enjoys a foreign sanctuary but is finding it hard to win any decisive battle or territory within Afghanistan. This is not to say that the Taliban and other insurgent groups are not strategic factors in defining Afghanistan's trajectory any longer. They still have the support of power elements in Pakistan, and a narrative that's exploitive of the weaknesses of the post-2001 constitutional order: dependency on foreign forces, corruption, and absence of justice.

The road ahead, however, is not so much about what particular card the Taliban pull, or spectacular attack they manage to organize. But rather whether the constitutional order in Afghanistan overcomes the greatest test to its viability and endurance on the tenth anniversary of its establishment: the 2014 elections. Whether the elections are a course correction and return a sense of justice to the political narrative of building a new Afghanistan depends largely on the choices of President Karzai in the less than 18 months leading up to the 2014 transfer of power.

* * *

For the first time in Afghanistan's history, an elected leader is set to finish his allotted time in office. For any new democracy, the major test is not so much on whether the initial elections are flaw and fraud free -- but whether future elections emerge as the only game in town for access to power. Afghanistan's 2009 presidential elections were marred with questionable conducts, despite a weak opposition to Karzai, which assured him victory. The field for 2014, however, is far more open -- which should inject energy into the political space, if Karzai doesn't manipulate the process.

The drawback is that Afghanistan's 2004 constitution conglomerates an unusual number of authorities and expectations into the office of the president. It was built this way to survive a fractured political space, with an all-powerful head of state meant to unify and centralize. It has delivered on both accounts, but now President Karzai holds the keys to ensuring stability and advance of the constitutional order, or undoing its gradually acquired legitimacy.

When talking of the looming transfer of power, Karzai has indicated that he sees his role as the selector of a deserving successor. Most recently, when asked by Time magazine on who might replace him, he responded saying: "I am busy working on this question, this is one of my jobs, one of my perhaps most important responsibilities." He has talked of finding the right person, as opposed to setting the fair conditions for the right person to emerge. But in doing so, Karzai is misreading a script he helped write: Afghanistan is a democracy where the public elects successors, not the sitting president. And having intentionally avoided organizing the political space into parties or blocs, he is not the leader of any party to steer toward a particular candidate.

The confusion in Karzai's approach to the transfer of power in 2014 is the biggest risk to political stability. In Afghan elections, access to state machinery in elections is decisive. Karzai's choice to select a successor and then opt for electioneering is dangerous because it undermines any chance of a level playing field, and erodes the possibility of energetic political campaigns ahead of 2014. Both the splintered opposition and the establishment, comprised of multiple blocs of ambitious politicians, are watching what Karzai chooses to do, or whom he chooses to endorse.

Given his immense powers, Karzai can choose to fiddle with political competition by continuing the intrigue around who is going to be his chosen successor in the 2014 race. Some even speculate that perhaps motivated by concerns about personal and family security -- not to mention impunity for associates accused of abuse and corruption -- President Karzai may tweak or undo democratic processes. Up until now, he has vehemently denied considering anything but stepping down in 2014. The reality is that allowing an irresponsible transfer of power with questionable legitimacy will further political instability, and thus undo the very cause of security and impunity that may steer the sinister option forward.

* * *

A more audacious option exists. Karzai's should decide to stay above it all, emerging as the overseer of an election among two powerful tickets, neither of which he endorses. Such an approach will be truly in line with his desired image of a man above factional interests or group loyalties. He helped create patronage networks that now filter violent scuffle over power, and the networks close to him may tempt him to play the decider. But it is time to inject doses of predictability in Afghan politics, and Karzai is powerfully placed to direct the future course of Afghan politics towards representative, responsive agendas and groupings.

If Karzai chooses to set a competitive stage and assume the role of a neutral statesman, it's likely that constructive politics will come of it. Potential candidates will have to appeal to and mobilize a population that is extremely young (nearly 70 percent of Afghans are under 25) and has come of age in a period of relative stability. The emerging generation of Afghans is a product of a more connected and open society -- free of ideological fragmentations, and influenced by the social and political openings of the past 10 years. Steering the political space to respond to this constituency is the only way of suffocating the Taliban's operating space and returning Afghanistan to a constructive course.

For many years, President Hamid Karzai personified the break from the harsh past -- and for a while emerged as an icon of the national will to leave Afghanistan's difficult past behind. Yet increasingly, he has strayed toward a confusing and a self-defeating path of courting extremists who don't owe their power to him -- thereby disillusioning many who had invested hopes in him, and voted for him in overwhelming numbers in 2004. The choice to return to the role of senior statesman steering the country to modernization will redeem him.

The irony of the past decade is how Karzai, a man once perceived to have limited influence in the country, has metamorphosed -- through sheer tactical genius and the space offered by a weak opposition -- into the single most decisive actor in determining whether Afghanistan will become politically stable, or the constitutional order will go obsolete. The bigwigs at the NATO planning tables or in the power corridors of Washington may think their decisions determine Afghanistan's future, but the ball is squarely in Karzai's court.

6)  Death dealing does not equal foreign policy or strength - if the CIA doesn't get this , does the White House ? Where do our Candidates come down on endles Drone Wars ? 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2220828/US-drone-attacks-CIA-chiefs-face-arrest-horrific-evidence-bloody-video-game-sorties.html

CIA chiefs face arrest over horrific evidence of bloody 'video-game' sorties by drone pilots

By DAVID ROSE

PUBLISHED: 18:30 EST, 20 October 2012 | UPDATED: 04:57 EST, 21 October 2012

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The Mail on Sunday today reveals shocking new evidence of the full horrific impact of US drone attacks in Pakistan.

A damning dossier assembled from exhaustive research into  the strikes’ targets sets out in heartbreaking detail the deaths of teachers, students and Pakistani policemen. It also describes how bereaved relatives are forced to gather their loved ones’ dismembered body parts in the aftermath of strikes.

The dossier has been assembled by human rights lawyer Shahzad Akbar, who works for Pakistan’s Foundation for Fundamental Rights and the British human rights charity Reprieve.

Filed in two separate court cases, it is set to trigger a formal murder investigation by police into the roles of two US officials said to have ordered the strikes. They are Jonathan Banks, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Islamabad station, and John A. Rizzo, the CIA’s former chief lawyer. Mr Akbar and his staff have already gathered further testimony which has yet to be filed.

*  *  * 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/20/wasserman-schultz-kill-list

The remarkable, unfathomable ignorance of Debbie Wasserman Schultz

The Chair of the Democratic National Committee is completely unaware of one of the biggest stories of the Obama years

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• • Glenn Greenwald
  • guardian.co.uk, Friday 19 October 2012 20.38 EDT
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On 29 May 2012, the New York Times published a remarkable 6,000-word story on its front page about what it termed President Obama's "kill list". It detailed the president's personal role in deciding which individuals will end up being targeted for assassination by the CIA based on Obama's secret, unchecked decree that they are "terrorists" and deserve to die.

Based on interviews with "three dozen of his current and former advisers", the Times' Jo Becker and Scott Shane provided extraordinary detail about Obama's actions, including how he "por[es] over terrorist suspects' biographies on what one official calls the macabre 'baseball cards'" and how he "insist[s] on approving every new name on an expanding 'kill list'". At a weekly White House meeting dubbed "Terror Tuesdays", Obama then decides who will die without a whiff of due process, transparency or oversight. It was this process that resulted in the death of US citizen Anwar Awlaki in Yemen, and then two weeks later, the killing of his 16-year-old American son, Abdulrahman, by drone.

The Times "kill list" story made a huge impact and was widely discussedand condemned by media figures, politicians, analysts, andcommentators. Among other outlets, the New York Times itself harshly editorialized against Obama's program in an editorial entitled "Too Much Power For a President", denouncing the revelations as "very troubling" and argued: "No one in that position should be able to unilaterally order the killing of American citizens or foreigners located far from a battlefield - depriving Americans of their due-process rights - without the consent of someone outside his political inner circle."

That Obama has a "kill list" has been known since January, 2010, and has been widely reported and discussed in every major American newspaper since April 2010. A major controversy over chronic White House leaks often featured complaints about this article (New York Times, 5 June 2012: "Senators to Open Inquiry Into 'Kill List' and Iran Security Leaks"). The Attorney General, Eric Holder, gave a major speech defending it.

But Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Democratic Congresswoman from Florida and the Chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, does not know about any of this. She has never heard of any of it. She has managed to remain completely ignorant about the fact that President Obama has asserted and exercised the power to secretly place human beings, including US citizens, on his "kill list" and then order the CIA to extinguish their lives.

Just marvel at this stunning, completely inexcusable two-minute display of wholesale ignorance by this elected official and DNC chair. Here she is after the second presidential debate being asked by Luke Rudkowski of We Are Change about the "kill list" and whether Romney should be trusted with this power. She doesn't defend the "kill list". She doesn't criticize it. She makes clear that she has never heard of it and then contemptuously treats Rudkowski like he is some sort of frivolous joke for thinking that it is real:

Anyone who observes politics closely has a very low bar of expectations. It's almost inevitable to become cynical - even jaded - about just how inept and inane top Washington officials are. Still, even processing this through those lowly standards, I just find this staggering. Staggering and repellent. This is an elected official in Congress, the body that the Constitution designed to impose checks on the president's abuses of power, and she does not have the foggiest idea what is happening in the White House, and obviously does not care in the slightest, because the person doing it is part of the party she leads.

One expects corrupt partisan loyalty from people like Wasserman Schultz, eager to excuse anything and everything a Democratic president does. That's a total abdication of her duty as a member of Congress, but that's par for the course. But one does not expect this level of ignorance, the ability to stay entirely unaware of one of the most extremist powers a president has claimed in US history, trumpeted on the front-page of the New York Times and virtually everywhere else.

and......

CIA Seeks White House Backing for More Drones

Petraeus Pushes for Bigger Drone Fleet

by Jason Ditz, October 18, 2012

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With an eye on launching more strikes in more nations, the CIA is pushing for White House approval to acquire yet more attack drones to add to their inventory, saying that they need to be able to expand quickly into Northern Africa without pulling drones out of Pakistan.

The effort reflects the CIA’s growing efforts to revamp itself as an “assassination agency” and leave the espionage business to somebody else. The only resistance in the US government seems to be from the Pentagon, who wants to keep the corner on the market of killing people.

Officials seem to be citing the Benghazi Consulate attack as justification now for the drones, but of course the CIA’s push for more drones began long before last month’s attack.

Having CIA drones looming over major Libyan cities is a grim prospect, particularly with their checkered history of killing civilians in their attacks in Yemen and Pakistan, where thousands have been killed but only a few dozen have ever been conclusively named.

7) What about China - will we have a discussion about China this time , that has any depth ? Consider the position of Mitt , what China has done lately - what may the Candidates state on Monday ? 

http://soberlook.com/2012/10/beijing-decapitates-romneys-tough-anti.html?utm_source=BP_recent

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2012

Beijing neutralizes Romney's tough anti-China rhetoric by strengtheneing the yuan

Below are some campaign quotes from Mitt Romney on China. He has labeled China an oppressor of human rights, a flagrant violator of intellectual property rights, an aggressive promoter of cyber espionage, and worst of all for China, a currency manipulator.

1. "We face another continuing challenge in a rising China. China is attentive to the interests of its government – but it too often disregards the rights of its people. It is selective in the freedoms it allows; and, as with its one-child policy, it can be ruthless in crushing the freedoms it denies. In conducting trade with America, it permits flagrant patent and copyright violations … forestalls American businesses from competing in its market … and manipulates its currency to obtain unfair advantage. It is in our mutual interest for China to be a partner for a stable and secure world, and we welcome its participation in trade. But the cheating must finally be brought to a stop. President Obama hasn’t done it and won’t do it. I will.”

2. “My own view on the relationship with China is this, which is that China is stealing our intellectual property, our patents, our designs, our know-how, our brand names. They’re hacking into our computers, stealing information from not only corporate computers but from government computers. And they’re manipulating their currency. And if I’m president of the United States, I’m not going to continue to talk about how important China is and how we have to get along. And I believe those things. They’re very important. And we do have to get along. But I’m also going to tell the Chinese it’s time to stop. You have to play by the rules. I will not let you kill American jobs any longer.”

Beijing clearly understands that at least some of this language is just campaign rhetoric. But the nation simply can not afford to take a chance. The formal label of  "currency manipulator" carries with it the imposition of tariffs. And tariffs on Chinese goods, unlikely even under Romney as president, would launch an unprecedented trade war that could devastate China's already slowing economy. Beijing has to nip this in the bud and to lessen one of Romney's key campaign issues - in some ways weakening the candidacy. The best way of avoiding being called a currency manipulator of course is to strengthen the yuan. And that's exactly what China has been doing in the last couple of months.

CNY per one dollar

CNBC: - Harsh words from Republican candidate Mitt Romney about branding China a currency manipulator if he’s elected president next month is politics, but the rhetoric may well encourage Beijing to keep nudging its currency higher in the weeks ahead to avoid being at the center of the U.S. election debate, analysts say.

Clearly the ECB-propped stabilization of the crisis in the Eurozone also allowed Beijing to strengthen the currency, but the aggressive appreciation in recent weeks is to a great extent due to the US election. China needs President Obama to be reelected, and this currency adjustment certainly gives him additional ammunition in the campaign.

CNBC: - “There’s no doubt that the more aggressive stance taken by Romney will raise eyebrows in Beijing,” said Mitul Kotecha, head of global currency research at Credit Agricole in Hong Kong. “The strengthening in the yuan is not all related to the election but it is not a coincidence that the U.S. election is looming and the yuan’s fixing is higher.”