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A Foreign-Policy Repair Manual Six priorities for President Obama.

By Fred KaplanPosted Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2008, at 12:53 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

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Rethink Afghanistan. When Gen. Dan McNeil recently ended his tour as commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, he said his successor would need 400,000 troops (including those of the Afghan National Army) to stabilize the country. That just isn't going to happen. The two or three brigades that we'll probably soon be redeploying to southern Afghanistan will help commanders perform certain tactical missions without relying too much on air power—i.e., without unavoidably killing civilians and thus alienating the people we're trying to win over. But they won't be enough to "win" the war. The real threat is not the Taliban fighters in Afghanistan; it's the sanctuary and replenishing ground that they have in neighboring Pakistan—and the possibility of chaos or the rise of radical Islamists there. The 1,200-mile-long border cannot be fully secured. Nor can we keep bombing the Taliban across the border without alienating the Pakistani people and weakening their new government. The only way to defeat the Taliban is to make it worth the Pakistanis' while to help—to make them calculate that clamping down is both feasible and in their security interests. So train the Pakistani (as well as the Afghan) army; increase economic aid; and embark on intensive diplomacy to relax tensions between Pakistan and India, so that Pakistan's leaders don't see fighting the Taliban as a diversion from their main threat.

Normalize relations with Russia. This may sound cold, but Russia is too important—on energy, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, peace in the Middle East, nearly everything—for our relations to get warped in a new Cold War over the integrity of South Ossetia. Moscow's aggression should not be blithely tolerated, but it's absurd to respond by, say, admitting Georgia into NATO. First, members are required to have recognized borders, which Georgia lacks. Second, do you—do any Americans—really want to go to war for Tbilisi? (This is what security alliances are all about.) Impose economic and diplomatic pressure. But also assure the Russians that we have no intention of further NATO expansion. Tell them we will proceed to deploy missile defenses in the Czech Republic and Poland if the system works (a nudge-and-wink signal that we probably will not proceed after all). This is not "appeasement," since we have—or should have—no interest in behaving otherwise. Resume strategic arms talks, and demand in return that Moscow reaffirm the Reagan-era treaty limiting conventional forces in Europe, which Vladimir Putin has been threatening to abrogate. Putin has been riding high these past few years on the vast revenues brought in by high oil prices; the recent plunge and the crash of his stock market might make him more pliant. In short, the time is ripe for a policy of applying pressure where our differences matter and giving way where they don't.

Cut and shift the military budget. Here's a new mantra: What's important is not how much we spend but what we buy. The Pentagon's budget is locked almost entirely in the patterns set by the Cold War struggle with Soviet communism. In a way, Bush did us all a favor by placing "emergency war funds" in budget supplementals—not just money for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but also for what the Pentagon calls "the longer war on terrorism." The supplemental for fiscal year 2009 amounted to $172 billion ($70 billion in new funding and $102 billion left over from FY 2008). This means that the baseline military budget for this year—amounting to $541 billion—has little if anything to do with any of these ongoing wars. Of that sum, $125 billion goes for personnel costs and is therefore untouchable. But this leaves $416 billion on the table—a huge sum of money that should not be regarded as holy. Do we really need another new submarine or aircraft carrier, another wing of F-22 or F-35 "stealth" fighter planes, or a new high-tech "future combat system"? That's where much of that $416 billion is going. It's time for a radical reassessment of the military budget—the first since the end of the Cold War. Put someone like Robert Gates in charge. (He has the forward vision and the universal legitimacy.) In any event, take it out of the Pentagon, where it will be mired in parochial interests and interservice rivalries and back-rubbing. (Isn't it odd that the Army, Navy, and Air Force have been evenly splitting the military budget, within a percentage point or two, every year for the last four decades? Is that the result of national-security needs—or bureaucratic politics?) We don't have the money to perpetuate this charade.

Refine intelligence. Presidents respond to events, many of them unseen; therefore, they require good intelligence. More to the point, they need to know what their intelligence reports really say. The "intelligence community" consists of 16 agencies; sometimes, one or more of them file dissenting footnotes to major points of a report. By the time the report gets boiled down to "executive summaries" and passed up the chain of command, the footnotes get excised. Demand that they be put back in. If they have implications for policy, have them debated before the National Security Council. Pay attention to the source of the dissent. For instance, the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate concluded that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program. It might have been useful for the NSC to know that one of the two dissents to that view was written by the intelligence branch of the Energy Department—which runs the U.S. nuclear-weapons program. The NIE also asserted that Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicles could deliver biological weapons. The president should at least have been told that the intelligence branch of the U.S. Air Force—which presumably knows something about the subject—disputed this finding. Commission a study of all NIEs of the past decade—specifically of patterns revealing which agencies have been most consistently right and wrong on what topics. The one with the best records should be made the lead agency on all future NIEs on the subject. Those with the worst records should be cleaned out. Otherwise, you'll be gazing at the world through tinted glasses.