[Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His most recent book, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, is just out in paperback.]

In a recent column, the Washington Post's Richard Cohen wrote,"What Henry Luce called 'the American Century' is over." Cohen is right. All that remains is to drive a stake through the heart of Luce's pernicious creation, lest it come back to life. This promises to take some doing.

When the Time-Life publisher coined his famous phrase, his intent was to prod his fellow citizens into action. Appearing in the February 7, 1941 issue of Life, his essay,"The American Century," hit the newsstands at a moment when the world was in the throes of a vast crisis. A war in Europe had gone disastrously awry. A second almost equally dangerous conflict was unfolding in the Far East. Aggressors were on the march.

With the fate of democracy hanging in the balance, Americans diddled. Luce urged them to get off the dime. More than that, he summoned them to"accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world... to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit."

Read today, Luce's essay, with its strange mix of chauvinism, religiosity, and bombast ("We must now undertake to be the Good Samaritan to the entire world..."), does not stand up well. Yet the phrase"American Century" stuck and has enjoyed a remarkable run. It stands in relation to the contemporary era much as"Victorian Age" does to the nineteenth century. In one pithy phrase, it captures (or at least seems to capture) the essence of some defining truth: America as alpha and omega, source of salvation and sustenance, vanguard of history, guiding spirit and inspiration for all humankind.

In its classic formulation, the central theme of the American Century has been one of righteousness overcoming evil. The United States (above all the U.S. military) made that triumph possible. When, having been given a final nudge on December 7, 1941, Americans finally accepted their duty to lead, they saved the world from successive diabolical totalitarianisms. In doing so, the U.S. not only preserved the possibility of human freedom but modeled what freedom ought to look like.

Thank You, Comrades

So goes the preferred narrative of the American Century, as recounted by its celebrants.

The problems with this account are two-fold. First, it claims for the United States excessive credit. Second, it excludes, ignores, or trivializes matters at odds with the triumphal story-line.

The net effect is to perpetuate an array of illusions that, whatever their value in prior decades, have long since outlived their usefulness. In short, the persistence of this self-congratulatory account deprives Americans of self-awareness, hindering our efforts to navigate the treacherous waters in which the country finds itself at present. Bluntly, we are perpetuating a mythic version of the past that never even approximated reality and today has become downright malignant. Although Richard Cohen may be right in declaring the American Century over, the American people -- and especially the American political class -- still remain in its thrall.

Constructing a past usable to the present requires a willingness to include much that the American Century leaves out.

For example, to the extent that the demolition of totalitarianism deserves to be seen as a prominent theme of contemporary history (and it does), the primary credit for that achievement surely belongs to the Soviet Union. When it came to defeating the Third Reich, the Soviets bore by far the preponderant burden, sustaining 65% of all Allied deaths in World War II.

By comparison, the United States suffered 2% of those losses, for which any American whose father or grandfather served in and survived that war should be saying: Thank you, Comrade Stalin.

For the United States to claim credit for destroying the Wehrmacht is the equivalent of Toyota claiming credit for inventing the automobile. We entered the game late and then shrewdly scooped up more than our fair share of the winnings. The true"Greatest Generation" is the one that willingly expended millions of their fellow Russians while killing millions of German soldiers.

Hard on the heels of World War II came the Cold War, during which erstwhile allies became rivals. Once again, after a decades-long struggle, the United States came out on top.

Yet in determining that outcome, the brilliance of American statesmen was far less important than the ineptitude of those who presided over the Kremlin. Ham-handed Soviet leaders so mismanaged their empire that it eventually imploded, permanently discrediting Marxism-Leninism as a plausible alternative to liberal democratic capitalism. The Soviet dragon managed to slay itself. So thank you, Comrades Malenkov, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, and Gorbachev.

Screwing the Pooch

What flag-wavers tend to leave out of their account of the American Century is not only the contributions of others, but the various missteps perpetrated by the United States -- missteps, it should be noted, that spawned many of the problems bedeviling us today.

The instances of folly and criminality bearing the label"made-in-Washington" may not rank up there with the Armenian genocide, the Bolshevik Revolution, the appeasement of Adolf Hitler, or the Holocaust, but they sure don't qualify as small change. To give them their due is necessarily to render the standard account of the American Century untenable.

Here are several examples, each one familiar, even if its implications for the problems we face today are studiously ignored:

Cuba. In 1898, the United States went to war with Spain for the proclaimed purpose of liberating the so-called Pearl of the Antilles. When that brief war ended, Washington reneged on its promise. If there actually has been an American Century, it begins here, with the U.S. government breaking a solemn commitment, while baldly insisting otherwise. By converting Cuba into a protectorate, the United States set in motion a long train of events leading eventually to the rise of Fidel Castro, the Bay of Pigs, Operation Mongoose, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and even today's Guantanamo Bay prison camp. The line connecting these various developments may not be a straight one, given the many twists and turns along the way, but the dots do connect.

The Bomb. Nuclear weapons imperil our existence. Used on a large scale, they could destroy civilization itself. Even now, the prospect of a lesser power like North Korea or Iran acquiring nukes sends jitters around the world. American presidents -- Barack Obama is only the latest in a long line -- declare the abolition of these weapons to be an imperative. What they are less inclined to acknowledge is the role the United States played in afflicting humankind with this scourge.

The United States invented the bomb. The United States -- alone among members of the nuclear club -- actually employed it as a weapon of war. The U.S. led the way in defining nuclear-strike capacity as the benchmark of power in the postwar world, leaving other powers like the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and China scrambling to catch up. Today, the U.S. still maintains an enormous nuclear arsenal at the ready and adamantly refuses to commit itself to a no-first-use policy, even as it professes its horror at the prospect of some other nation doing as the United States itself has done.

Iran. Extending his hand to Tehran, President Obama has invited those who govern the Islamic republic to"unclench their fists." Yet to a considerable degree, those clenched fists are of our own making. For most Americans, the discovery of Iran dates from the time of the notorious hostage crisis of 1979-1981 when Iranian students occupied the U.S. embassy in Tehran, detained several dozen U.S. diplomats and military officers, and subjected the administration of Jimmy Carter to a 444-day-long lesson in abject humiliation.

For most Iranians, the story of U.S.-Iranian relations begins somewhat earlier. It starts in 1953, when CIA agents collaborated with their British counterparts to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh and return the Shah of Iran to his throne. The plot succeeded. The Shah regained power. The Americans got oil, along with a lucrative market for exporting arms. The people of Iran pretty much got screwed. Freedom and democracy did not prosper. The antagonism that expressed itself in November 1979 with the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran was not entirely without cause.

Afghanistan. President Obama has wasted little time in making the Afghanistan War his own. Like his predecessor he vows to defeat the Taliban. Also like his predecessor he has yet to confront the role played by the United States in creating the Taliban in the first place. Washington once took pride in the success it enjoyed funneling arms and assistance to fundamentalist Afghans waging jihad against foreign occupiers. During the administrations of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, this was considered to represent the very acme of clever statecraft. U.S. support for the Afghan mujahideen caused the Soviets fits. Yet it also fed a cancer that, in time, exacted a most grievous toll on Americans themselves -- and has U.S. forces today bogged down in a seemingly endless war.

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Act of Contrition

Had the United States acted otherwise, would Cuba have evolved into a stable and prosperous democracy, a beacon of hope for the rest of Latin America? Would the world have avoided the blight of nuclear weapons? Would Iran today be an ally of the United States, a beacon of liberalism in the Islamic world, rather than a charter member of the"axis of evil?" Would Afghanistan be a quiet, pastoral land at peace with its neighbors? No one, of course, can say what might have been. All we know for sure is that policies concocted in Washington by reputedly savvy statesmen now look exceedingly ill-advised.

What are we to make of these blunders? The temptation may be to avert our gaze, thereby preserving the reassuring tale of the American Century. We should avoid that temptation and take the opposite course, acknowledging openly, freely, and unabashedly where we have gone wrong. We should carve such acknowledgments into the face of a new monument smack in the middle of the Mall in Washington: We blew it. We screwed the pooch. We caught a case of the stupids. We got it ass-backwards.

Only through the exercise of candor might we avoid replicating such mistakes.

Indeed, we ought to apologize. When it comes to avoiding the repetition of sin, nothing works like abject contrition. We should, therefore, tell the people of Cuba that we are sorry for having made such a hash of U.S.-Cuban relations for so long. President Obama should speak on our behalf in asking the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for forgiveness. He should express our deep collective regret to Iranians and Afghans for what past U.S. interventionism has wrought.

The United States should do these things without any expectations of reciprocity. Regardless of what U.S. officials may say or do, Castro won't fess up to having made his own share of mistakes. The Japanese won't liken Hiroshima to Pearl Harbor and call it a wash. Iran's mullahs and Afghanistan's jihadists won't be offering to a chastened Washington to let bygones be bygones.

No, we apologize to them, but for our own good -- to free ourselves from the accumulated conceits of the American Century and to acknowledge that the United States participated fully in the barbarism, folly, and tragedy that defines our time. For those sins, we must hold ourselves accountable.

To solve our problems requires that we see ourselves as we really are. And that requires shedding, once and for all, the illusions embodied in the American Century.

[Mr. Bainbridge is a professor of law at UCLA.]

As long-time readers know, I oppose the use of torture or other violations of the Geneva Convention in how the US treats war on terror detainees. But I also oppose historical inaccuracies. Balkinization blogger Scott Horton recently claimed that in World War II:

Allied propaganda made clear that torture marked our adversaries, but not us. The Greatest Generation upheld our nation's ideals when it went to war. It understood the value of those ideals as weapons. It won the war. And then it did some real magic. By treating our adversaries as human beings, by showing them dignity and respect, our grandfathers' generation created a new world in the rubble of the Second World War. The nations which were our bitterest adversaries - Germany, Italy and Japan - emerged in the briefest time as our committed friends and allies. A world was born in which America was the dynamic center. And the foundation was laid to win the Cold War as well, after which America would emerge as the world's sole superpower, its direction-giving force.

Anybody who's read anything about how the so-called "Greatest Generation" waged war knows that Horton is wrong or, at least, exaggerating.

Victor Davis Hanson rejects arguments that torture:

...  is entirely foreign to the U.S. military experience, at least from what we know of it even in so-called good wars like World War II. There were American soldiers — sometimes in furor over the loss of comrades, sometimes to obtain critical information — who executed or tortured captured Japanese and German prisoners. Those who did so operated on a de facto "don't ask, don't tell" understanding, occasionally found it effective and were rarely punished by commanding officers.

An HNN analysis by Caleb Miller cites sources documenting that:

There was widespread mistreatment of German prisoners in the spring and summer of 1945. Men were beaten, denied water, forced to live in open camps without shelter, given inadequate food rations and inadequate medical care. Their mail was withheld. In some cases prisoners made a "soup" of water and grass in order to deal with their hunger. Men did die needlessly and inexcusably.

Miller opines:

If rough treatment designed to break an individual's will constitutes torture, then some may conclude that Nazis were tortured when subjected to rougher treatment, Holocaust films and American propaganda in the reeducation process.

Ilse Dorothee Pautsch likewise argues that German POWs captured as the war ended often were:

... stripped of all their possessions, including their paybooks, and herded into fenced compunds, some reminiscent of ‘cages’, without shelter or even sanitation. Such breaches of international law were an excuse for the sufferers to see themselves as victims – of the Americans, the war, and finally of Nazism. It was a way of evading the need to face up to their own responsibility for what had happened.

More generally, a Journal of American History review points out that during WW II, American authorities censored photgraphs to prevent the public from seeing "indications of American atrocities."

And, of course, it was with Greatest Generation generals at the top that US troops and spies used waterboarding and other forms of coercine interrogation in Viet Nam and elsewhere during the Cold War.

There are plenty of good arguments against the use of torture and coercive interrogation. A misleading white wash of the so-called Greatest Generation isn't one of them.

Mistreatment of German and Japanese POWs at the hands of US troops doubtless was far less pervasive and far less brutal than that or Allied POWs at the hands of their Axis captives. But it doesn't mean that that torture marked only our adversaries, but not us. The Americans who fought World War II were the good guys, but we do their memory no disservice when we remind ourselves that they were no angels. They were tough men who fought a horrific war and, from time to time, without niceties.

[David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers and author of three books of political history, has written the "History Lesson" column since 1998.]

On Aug. 11, 1971, John Lindsay, the Republican mayor of New York City, radiating calm and charm after a 10-day camping trip in Colorado and Utah, stepped before a crowd in the ballroom of Gracie Mansion to announce that he was becoming a Democrat. After explaining where he believed his party had gone astray—Vietnam, wiretapping, neglect of urban problems, and subservience to big business led the list—the 49-year-old mayor portrayed the decision as one forced on him by his party's own choices. "I regret that new directions cannot emerge from a Republican Party that has … stifled dissent and … rejected internal reform." Yet he insisted that he would retain the maverick streak that had come to characterize his place in the GOP. "I have no illusions about the Democratic Party," he said, "and I will work as a Democrat without abandoning my personal independence."

Editorialists were quick to note the cynicism behind Lindsay's move. The New York Times carped that it was "obviously triggered by his belief that he could not achieve higher office as a Republican." Lindsay, indeed, went on to run a fruitless campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination the next year. More notable than Lindsay's opportunism was his articulation of grievances shared by growing numbers of liberal Republicans, who felt that their party, under Richard Nixon, had become hostile to their values. A Republican majority may have been emerging, but it had no place for those, like Lindsay, who made civil rights and the arts their pet issues. In the next few years, many more liberal Republicans would leave the party over its stands on race, Vietnam, and abortion.

The stream that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s with that trickle of defections slowed for a time, but it has now reached a watershed. Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter's decision yesterday to change parties reflects, by his own admission, a desire to improve his re-election prospects next year. Some critics are therefore already downplaying its significance, as they did with Lindsay. But because this move comes so late in Specter's career—born in 1930, he has been in politics since the 1960s and in the Senate since 1981—it can't be taken lightly.

Specter's decision fits into a larger pattern. It follows the exit from the GOP of Sens. Jim Jeffords in 2001 and Lincoln Chafee in 2007 (after losing his re-election bid), to say nothing of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg the same year. Noteworthy, too, have been the endorsements of both John Kerry and Barack Obama by surprising numbers of Republicans. And despite Specter's Lindsay-esque avowal of independence—"My change in party affiliation does not mean that I will be a party-line voter any more for the Democrats that I have been for the Republicans. … I will continue my independent voting and follow my conscience on what I think is best for Pennsylvania and America"—his switch will more often than not give the Democrats their magic number of 60 Senate votes (once Minnesota's Al Franken is seated). For this reason, Specter's decision has, understandably, rocked the political world.

Historically, Specter's move is best understood as the signal event in the next stage of what the journalist Ronald Brownstein has called "The Great Sorting Out"—a gradual but massive sorting of voters and elected officials that has brought their partisan affiliation into close alignment with their ideology. In The Second Civil War (2007), Brownstein showed how over the last four decades "conservatives" have increasingly become Republicans and "liberals" increasingly Democratic—turning these once-motley coalitions into relatively uniform ideological vehicles. In 1970, 35 percent of Democrats called themselves liberal and 26 percent called themselves conservative. By 2000, 52 percent were liberal, only 17 percent conservative. The GOP saw a mirror-image change. The mere 9 percent of Republicans who called themselves liberal in 1970 dwindled to 6 percent in 2000; the 63 percent conservative portion grew to 77 percent.

This sorting out has transformed both parties, but for years it was the Democrats' losses that struck observers as the real news. As far back as the 1960s, even as Lindsay and other liberals were bolting the GOP, the Democrats' troubles seemed far graver—as white Southerners, Catholics, and blue-collar workers left the party in droves. This trend became a full-blown crisis in 1980 when Democratic votes helped elect Ronald Reagan and a Republican Congress, making the "Reagan Democrats" the demographic group of the decade. Bill Clinton wooed many of them back into the Democratic fold, but the tide continued to run in the GOP's favor in the 1990s, especially in the South. The changing of parties by national legislators, such as Richard Shelby of Alabama in 1994 and Billy Tauzin of Louisiana in 1995, mattered not because they were so numerous but because these switches vividly embodied a larger trend: steady gains by Republicans throughout the South as moderate-to-conservative Democrats (Sens. Sam Nunn, John Breaux, and Chuck Robb) gave way to staunchly right-wing Republicans (Sens. Saxby Chambliss, George Allen, and David Vitter).

With Specter's switch, it's now the Democrats' turn to reap the gains and the Republicans' turn to agonize about their future. The party is falling on hard times in states such as Oregon and Ohio, once bastions of liberal Republicanism, but even more catastrophically in the Northeast, from New England down through the mid-Atlantic. Besides the loss of Jeffords and Chafee, Republicans have recently seen longtime moderate legislators such as Chris Shays and Nancy Johnson of Connecticut go down to defeat—along with other New Englanders, like John Sununu Jr., who had few liberal leanings but whose constituents' Democratic politics nonetheless kept them tethered to the center. In the House and the Senate, blue has almost completely engulfed the Northeast. Even the statehouses of New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey—which stayed defiantly Republican through much of the 1990s, despite electoral trends—have reverted to Democratic control.

All of this marks a more dramatic change than many people realize. As Ed Kilgore of the Democratic Leadership Council wrote in 2001, after Jim Jeffords' flip, the 38 Republicans in the Senate in 1976 comprised some 17 who were liberals or moderates—including such historic names as Lowell Weicker, Charles Percy, Ed Brooke, Clifford Case, Jacob Javits, Richard Schweiker, and Charles Mathias. That roster doesn't even include such senators as Howard Baker or Bob Dole, who by the 1990s would be routinely labeled moderates. The vice president, moreover, was none other than the quintessential liberal Republican, former New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller.

Although conservatives scored a momentous victory in 1980, the Republican Party's liberal wing survived. Paradoxically, the GOP's majority status allowed moderates and even liberals to remain viable within it—giving some substance to what Specter claimed, with only minor exaggeration, amounted to a "Reagan Big Tent." When you're winning, it's easy to share the electoral wealth. Moderates accommodated themselves to the new environment by pledging fealty on the issues that mattered most to the far right: low taxes, militarism, opposition to abortion. Specter did his share of accommodating—until yesterday, most liberals associate him mainly with his harsh treatment of Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas' confirmation hearings. But the most visible example of this survival instinct was none other than George Bush Sr.—long ago regarded as a classic Yankee Republican. Having run against Reagan from the left in the 1980 presidential primaries, Bush jettisoned his aversion to supply-side economics and his support for reproductive rights and, by his 1988 presidential bid, embraced the fierce cultural politics of patriotism and law and order. His subsequent failure to govern as a hard-right conservative doomed him with the GOP's increasingly monolithic base.

Once conservatives controlled all three branches of government—with Tom DeLay running Congress and George Bush Jr. in the White House—liberal-to-moderate Republicans found themselves in deeper trouble. As Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson argued in Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (2005), the congressional leadership isolated and punished moderates such as Marge Roukema of New Jersey—who, like Specter, was first elected in the 1980 Reagan sweep—by denying her a plum committee chairmanship and funding right-wing primary challenges. Worn down by it all, she retired. Elsewhere, too, groups ranging from the Club for Growth to the National Rifle Association to various Christian organizations actively channeled energy and money into enforcing a doctrinaire ideological purity within the GOP, squeezing out moderates. That some of these challenges met with success, driving the Republican Party further rightward, gave these activists the false impression that voters in the Northeast were hungry for zealotry. They weren't, and soon the conservatives' gains in the region were reversed.

Like John Lindsay's decision almost 40 years ago, Specter's defection highlights the dangers for a party that gambles its viability on the politics of polarization. For a few years after Sept. 11, an upwelling of militant nationalism allowed Republicans to tell themselves—and the country—that the American public was dogmatically conservative in its core beliefs and that liberals amounted to a fringe group confined to a few urban enclaves and the coasts. But even in the dark days of the Bush years, Democrats managed to continue expanding their tent, using Republican purists as foils for their own inclusiveness. Their party now spans a huge and healthy ideological range. The GOP cannot afford to lose more wheel horses like Arlen Specter, lest it become the fringe party, confined to the Deep South and interior West.

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.]

Readers have written me asking what I think of the rash of almost apocalyptic pronouncements on the security situation in Pakistan issuing from the New York Times, The Telegraph, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in recent days.

And Stephen Walt also is asking why there are such varying assessments of Pakistan's security prospects. He suggests that one problem is the difficulty of predicting a revolutionary situation. But Pakistan just had a revolution against the military dictatorship! The polling, the behavior in the voting booth, the history of political geography, aren't these data relevant to the issue? Why does no one instance them?

As I have said before, although the rise of the Pakistani Taliban in the Pushtun areas and in some districts of Punjab is worrisome, the cosmic level of concern being expressed makes no sense to me. Some 55 percent of Pakistanis are Punjabi, and with the exception of some northern hardscrabble areas, I can't see any evidence that the vast majority of them has the slightest interest in Talibanism. Most are religious traditionalists, Sufis, Shiites, Sufi-Shiites, or urban modernists. At the federal level, they mainly voted in February 2008 for the Pakistan People's Party or the Muslim League, neither of them fundamentalist. The issue that excercised them most powerfully recently was the need to reinstate the civilian Supreme Court justices dismissed by a military dictatorship, who preside over a largely secular legal system.

Another major province is Sindh, with nearly 50 mn. of Pakistan's 165 mn. population. It is divided between Urdu-speakers and the largely rural Sindhis who are religious traditionalists, many of the anti-Taliban Barelvi school. They voted overwhelmingly for the centrist, mostly secular Pakistan People's Party in the recent parliamentary elections. Then there are the Urdu-speakers originally from India who mostly live in Karachi and a few other cities. In the past couple of decades the Urdu-speakers have tended to vote for the secular MQM party.

Residents of Sindh and Punjab constitute some 85% of Pakistan's population, and while these provinces have some Muslim extremists, they are a small fringe there.

Pakistan has a professional bureaucracy. It has doubled its literacy rate in the past three decades. Rural electrification has increased enormously. The urban middle class has doubled since 2000. The country has many, many problems, but it is hardly the Somalia some observers seem to imagine.

Opinion polling shows that even before the rounds of violence of the past two years, most Pakistanis rejected Muslim radicalism and violence. The stock of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda plummeted after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

The Pakistani Taliban are largely a phenomenon of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas west of the North-West Frontier Province, and of a few districts within the NWFP itself. These are largely Pushtun ethnically. The NYT's breathless observation that there are Taliban a hundred miles from Islamabad doesn't actually tell us very much, since Islamabad is geographically close to the Pushtun regions without that implying that Pushtuns dominate or could dominate it. It is like saying that Lynchburg, Va., is close to Washington DC and thereby implying that Jerry Falwell's movement is about to take over the latter.

The Pakistani Taliban amount to a few thousand fighters who lack tanks, armored vehicles, and an air force.

The Pakistani military is the world's sixth largest, with 550,000 active duty troops and is well equipped and well-trained. It in the past has acquitted itself well against India, a country ten times Pakistan's size population-wise. It is the backbone of the country, and has excellent command and control, never having suffered an internal mutiny of any significance.

So what is being alleged? That some rural Pushtun tribesmen turned Taliban are about to sweep into Islamabad and overthrow the government of Pakistan? Frankly ridiculous. Wouldn't the government bring some tank formations up from the Indian border and stop them?

Or is it being alleged that the Pakistani army won't fight the Taliban? But then explain the long and destructive Bajaur campaign.

Or is the fear that some junior officers in the army are more or less Taliban and that they might make a coup? But the Pakistani military has typically sought a US alliance after every coup it has made. Who would support Talibanized officers? Not China, not the US, the major patrons of Islamabad.

If that is the fear, in any case, then the US should strengthen the civilian, elected government, which was installed against US wishes by a popular movement during the past two years. The officers should be strictly instructed that they are to stay in their barracks.

What I see is a Washington that is uncomfortable with anything like democracy and civilian rule in Pakistan; which seems not to realize that the Pakistani Taliban are a small, poorly armed fringe of Pushtuns, who are a minority; and I suspect US policy-makers of secretly desiring to find some pretext for removing Pakistan's nuclear capacity.

All the talk about the Pakistani government falling within 6 months, or of a Taliban takeover, flies in the face of everything we know about the character of Pakistani politics and institutions during the past two years.

My guess is that the alarmism is also being promoted from within Pakistan by Pervez Musharraf, who wants to make another military coup; and by civilian politicians in Islamabad, who want to extract more money from the US to fight the Taliban that they are secretly also bribing to attack Afghanistan.

Advice to Obama: Pakistan is being configured for you in ways that benefit some narrow sectional interests. Caveat emptor.

Related Links

Juan Cole: Pakistani Army Takes Capital of Buner, Pushing Back Taliban

[Alan Brinkley is provost and Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia.]

There is no very good reason to judge a new president by his first 100 days. Some of our greatest presidents accomplished little in their first months. Some of our least successful had impressive beginnings. But ever since the New Deal trumpeted the successes of its own first 100 days, it has been common to take note of what subsequent presidents have done in the same period. President Obama is aware of the history. He read books about Roosevelt's first 100 days before he took office, and some members of his team have referred often to what they hoped to accomplish in their first months. So it makes more than usual sense to consider what the new administration has accomplished in this short but significant period--one that has been less frenetic than Franklin Roosevelt's, but in some ways more productive.

Franklin Roosevelt was a dynamo of energy in his first 100 days, and the frenzy of activity that he created was itself important in building confidence and optimism in the face of growing panic. Roosevelt's inaugural address promised "action, and action now." He made liberal use of radio, the first president to have done so, to make sure that Americans were aware of what he was doing. But most of all, he passed legislation--lots of it, and not all of it good.

One of his first bills, the Economy Act, reduced government spending in such areas as veteran benefits and the salaries of federal employees--and it actually exacerbated the nation's greatest problem, deflation. The National Industrial Recovery Act, the most popular legislative achievement of Roosevelt's first 100 days, created a corporatist behemoth that also promoted deflation by artificially increasing prices without increasing incomes. Its failure was visible well before the Supreme Court struck it down in 1935.

But in those early days, Roosevelt did more good than harm. He saved the financial system from collapse, almost certainly the most important event in the first 100 days, and perhaps in the first two years, of the administration. The "banking holiday" he declared immediately after his inauguration, the passage of the Glass-Steagall Act (which created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and whose repeal in 1999 is often blamed for much of our own present crisis), and the birth of the Securities and Exchange Commission (the undermining of which in recent years contributed to the financial collapse)--together, these measures helped the nation's financial institutions to survive, even if they did not immediately flourish. Other New Deal measures in these first months helped create a significant public works program, jobs for the unemployed, relief for people in need, and aid to the staggering farm economy.

The Obama administration didn't push through the sheer number of initiatives of the New Deal's first months--but its achievements are impressive nevertheless, and appear more likely to create a better ratio between good programs and bad ones. Roosevelt's efforts to stimulate economic growth through public works and relief programs were trivial compared to the enormity of Obama's stimulus package (which some critics feel is itself inadequate to the need). His effort to stabilize and strengthen the banks is still a work in progress--and a much more difficult task than the one Roosevelt faced--but it far exceeds in size and expense any such effort in our history. His first budget, not yet through Congress, marks the boldest change in public policy since at least 1980 and offers the first realistic hope of serious health care reform since 1994...

[Joseph Lane is the Hawthorne Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Emory & Henry.]

Based on his recent comments, former Vice President Dick Cheney is fast becoming one of the most important public figures of the post-Cold War history of the United States. It may be somewhat odd that a man who served as chief of staff to one president and was twice elected vice president without ever seeking (and while repeatedly professing no interest in seeking) the presidency would turn out to be a more consequential political figure than many presidents, but I think that this may turn out to be the case.

Guardian of Presidential Power.

Early in the Bush administration, Vice President Cheney liked to speak of the importance of preserving the prerogatives of the presidential office, including the respect due to the President. He was quoted in the Washington Post as saying that one of his primary roles in the Bush administration was as a guardian of the authority of the office: “We never wanted to allow the closeness of our election to in any way diminish the power of the presidency, lead him to make a decision that [President Bush] needed to somehow trim his sails, and be less than a fully authorized, if you will, commander in chief, leader of our government, president of the United States.”

This solicitude for preserving presidential authority was, as some commentators have noted, a consistent theme of Cheney’s entire career from his chafing at congressional “meddling” in the Ford administration to his authoring the minority report of the Iran-Contra Committee, a sweeping indictment of the Boland Amendment and all other attempts to hold the executive accountable to congressional restraint. Dick Cheney believes not only in the theory of the “unified executive” but in the remarkable conceit that the President is alone responsible for governing and defending the American republic as well as the only competent authority for determining what measures are needed to accomplish those charges.

However, even though he has consistently argued that presidents deserve great deference in setting policy and need not broach any second-guessing from those outside the executive mansion, Cheney has eschewed the dignified reserve that George W. Bush has observed since leaving office and emerged as one of the current president’s most vocal critics. He does not just think that Barack Obama is making poor policy decisions; he thinks that Barack Obama’s decisions are crippling the necessary constitutional prerogatives of his office. Love the Presidency. Hate the President.

We should not be too quick to dismiss him as a curmudgeonly retiree who does not appreciate how the “new kid” does his old job. Vice President Cheney’s understanding of American constitutionalism (or the lack thereof) is not only politically potent but theoretically challenging. It may constitute the major ideological antagonist to President Barack Obama’s brand of pragmatic liberal idealism (and no, I don’t think that phrase is an oxymoron). The contest between these philosophies may well define the next era of party politics in America.

The Nature of Republican Schisms.

In order to evaluate the justice of this sweeping thesis, we first have to consider the character of the schisms that are destroying the Republican Party as we once knew it and the unique position that Dick Cheney occupies within the shifting factions of the Republican opposition. A suggestive, and admittedly incomplete, summary will have to do here:

The recent bout of “tea parties” with their categorical denunciations of taxation may be read as a sign that libertarianism is reemerging from the rock where the Christian Right had buried Ron Paul. I suspect that there is less truth to this view than is commonly supposed.

After all, the tea parties are taking place in a rather unique situation – no new taxes or higher taxes have been levied yet (except on cigarettes). The objections really center on two prongs of President Obama’s agenda, neither of which constitutes an objection to government as such – 1) the extension of national government involvement in the economic mechanisms of society and the expenditure of U.S. moneys (taxed or borrowed) to restructure the economy and 2) the prospect (still somewhat remote) of expanded social programs, particularly in the area of health care. These programs are unpopular with the tea party crowd, but generally approved of by the public as a whole. In fact, the tea party strategy concedes that running against the “socialism” of an economic safety net or guaranteed health care is a political loser these days. Its architects have decided to cast themselves as against the new (but so far hypothetical) taxes that may one day be needed to pay for these programs, at least in part because attacking the programs directly does not seem likely to work.

In this regard, it is worth noting that these protestors were strangely silent during the Bush administration, and they offer virtually no objection to what has been, at least until the last six months, the biggest engine of federal government expansion in the eight years since 9/11 (and arguably the last thirty years since Ronald Reagan’s election), namely our commitment to higher levels of intrusive security measures at home and higher levels of military engagement in foreign theaters abroad.

Ron Paul and the true libertarians in the Republican camp have objected vigorously to both, but in this regard, Dick Cheney’s Republicanism stands in very stark contrast to the libertarian strain. Deficit spending is alright, and perhaps even necessary, but only for certain types of priorities, and it may be more than just chance that the priorities that do merit growth of federal spending and government power are those that fall under the purview of the presidency.

Meanwhile, the Christian Right seems peculiarly toothless. Iowa is on the verge of allowing gay marriage, and in Vermont, even Republican state legislators would not join a Republican Governor in opposing it. Dick Cheney himself is on record as favoring gay marriage. That the Christian Right would accept him as a major Republican spokesman itself speaks volumes. Furthermore, expansion of stem cell research has provoked some dissent, but it mostly turns out to be quibbling over the details of the program rather than the black-white moral distinctions that used to really get Republicans animated. The opposition to the overturning of the gag rule may not be gagged, but it has certainly been muted. Rafts of polls show that younger voters simply are much less likely to be interested in policing the boundaries of personal morality, and the future of an electoral strategy grounded in these issues is dimming.

Thus, I would suggest that moral issues are not at present capable of animating a national political party and that the “tea parties” (which are the most obvious sign of life in the Republican camp) may be more about who should run the government (hint, not that taxing Congress) than about whether we should have a government. The Republican party might just be casting itself in Cheney’s image as the party of executive powers and foreign policy focus.

The Cheney Paradigm: Omnipotent President, Submissive Congress and Constitution.

Cheney is a “big government conservative” in almost the mirror image of the way that David Brooks called Barack Obama a “big government conservative” in the New York Times. Brooks claims Obama speaks of growing government to focus on the quotidian concerns of middle-class American families. Cheney wants a “big government” that will leave those concerns to the private sphere (except where surveillance of those activities might enhance national security) and will focus on the security issues that middle-class American families can neither handle for themselves nor adequately comprehend.

Dick Cheney’s big government is based almost wholly within the unified control of the executive branch. It is, in no small measure, grounded upon a Machiavellian understanding of the world in which threats are omnipresent and thus justify, and even require, vigorous and ruthless governments capable of suppressing hostile challenges.

In a February interview with Politico, Cheney said, “The United States needs to be not so much loved as it needs to be respected. Sometimes, that requires us to take actions that generate controversy. I’m not at all sure that that’s what the Obama administration believes.”

If you doubt the Machiavellian tone, compare it to this famous passage from the Prince: “Upon this [account of the dangerous passions of human beings] a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved.”

I think the most stunning element of this justification for executive power is how far it falls from the oft-repeated Republican insistence on “strict construction of the Constitution” and “fidelity to the original intention.” The idea that the circumstances of the modern world necessitate the consolidation of power in an executive capable of being feared (Call it “respect,” because we will bomb you back to the stone age if you diss us!) is to admit that whatever constitutional restrictions the Framers may have placed on executive power (and they did place it second in the arrangement of constitutional powers) are decisively trumped by the necessities of modern world threats. Any notion that the constitution is about dividing powers to ensure accountability is dismissed because accountability is a luxury that we just can’t afford.

Viewed in this regard, Dick Cheney’s recent FOIA requests (for the release of CIA documents that supposedly prove that torture works in securing useful information) constitute one of the most absurdist pieces of political theater imaginable. If he were still in the West Wing, he would tell a FOIA court where to stuff their requests and laugh about it; now he is the one filing them. On the one hand, this runs counter to his understanding of the importance of protecting the prerogatives of the executive branch, but on the other hand, he claims that (just this once) the American people need to be forced to look at just how dangerous the world is and how effective unfettered executive governance can be. By using the mechanisms of law to pull new and frightening threats into the open so that they can be part of the “honest debate” about Bush-era detention and interrogation practices, he is trying to paint a picture of the world in which his Machiavellian understanding of America’s plight is so horrifying that his counter-idealist (and extra-constitutional) vision of the American “republic” may be justified.

Of course, once it is justified (and perhaps a new Republican devotee of the unified executive school is sworn into office in 2013), we will be back to keeping all of this quiet and controlled under the tight hand of a president who listens to Dick Cheney. He is encouraging a certain type of selective openness to re-assert the importance of keeping things closed. He wants Americans to see just enough of what is happening (or at least what has happened) in the dangerous world for them to be open to his philosophy of powerful, and unaccountable, executive governance.

This is truly the counterpoint to what I have called Obama’s pragmatic liberal idealism. Obama is an idealist in that he takes “ideals” and particularly the ideals of liberalism, broadly conceived, quite seriously. People everywhere should be “free” – free of intrusive law enforcement watching their every move, free of foreign militaries patrolling their streets, free from crippling economic dislocations and the insecurity of not being able to afford medical care that they need. But Obama is pragmatic in the sense that he embraces these ideals not only as worthy goals that we should enjoy when we can “afford” them but as the best means to insure our security. His is a hopeful vision that would put its emphasis in reading Machiavelli on another paragraph in which the Florentine warns that while you might find security in being feared, there is only insecurity when you are hated.

Barack Obama’s recent efforts to walk back some of the most aggressive actions of the last administration proceed from the assumption that a nation as powerful as the United States will surely generate hatred if we use our power to the utmost and without a due regard of the opinions of others. For Dick Cheney that hatred is the price of authority and should be willingly paid. For Barack Obama it is acting in ways that incur such hatred that is the source of our insecurity.

The current argument over the historical question about whether or not harsh detention and interrogation policies prevented terror attacks ultimately boils down to very divergent views about this larger philosophical question about the character of the world and the limits of constitutional governance. Where you stand on the philosophical issue likely dictates your reading of the highly ambiguous evidence that is (or may become) available. For this reason, I suspect that if Dick Cheney’s FOIA requests are honored and the incidents that he wishes to publicize are published, few minds will change. Those inclined to see the world in Cheney’s terms will be confirmed in their fears of Obama’s weakness and naivete; those who see the world in Obama’s terms will be unimpressed.

Interestingly, both of these contending schools tend to claim Abraham Lincoln as their founder, each with some justice. Dick Cheney’s broadside defense of executive power in the Iran-Contra dissent repeatedly invokes Lincoln as the source for the broad, extra-constitutional executive authority, like that which he exercised in the early days of the Civil War. For Cheney, Lincoln’s actions are the proof that the president’s powers must be equal to all threats.

Barack Obama has repeatedly styled himself as Abraham Lincoln’s heir, in no small measure because he shares Lincoln’s commitment to following “the better angels of our nature.” If we expect the United States to enjoy the moral power of its commitment to justice and the rights of human beings, an idea that if honestly embraced and practiced might “spread and deepen its influence, and augment the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere,” we must practice that commitment and show the world that we mean it. As we all should have known from the February 2008 “race speech” if not before, Obama’s philosophy is hopeful. If we expect the best of people, we may often find it. The world (and maybe even Congress) may be improved if we demonstrate that we are willing to stand on noble principles and that we expect them to do the same. In this philosophy, the constitution serves as both an inspirational statement of the principles to which we are pledged and salutary check on our first impulses to compromise them whenever the principled stand seems to demand too much of us or offer too little security in a dangerous world.

In Dick Cheney’s philosophy, the world is bleak and dangerous and is not liable to improve. The constitution is therefore at best a guideline; it is to be honored mostly in the breach and never when circumstances call for more drastic actions or more unified control of power than the constitution countenances. “This is why God created John Yoo, to justify what we need when we need it.”

There are very honest policy differences on appropriate levels of taxing and appropriate targets of spending as well as many other issues both foreign and domestic, but in terms of the broad ideological divisions in the parties, we may be witnessing a new alignment that is grounded in disagreements about how urgently we need broad executive power in the modern world. If that proves to be a durable and re-aligning division, Dick Cheney may prove to be the most effective counterpole to Barack Obama’s pragmatic liberal idealism, the rock on which a new, anti-Obama Republican party will be founded. Of course, it must be tough for Dick Cheney to find himself constantly having to cast doubt on the ability of a president to run the government. Strangely enough, the party of presidential government, now out of the executive branch, may conclude that they have to destroy a presidency to save it.

[Mr. Kutler is the author of The Wars of Watergate.]

Since Barack Obama’s inauguration on Jan. 20, the media have cast their reporting under the catchy title of “The First 100 Days.” CNN has designated April 29 as “Report Card Day” for the Obama administration. Even the traditionally staid New York Times has succumbed to the breezy—and terribly inappropriate—comparison to the beginning of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first term, in 1933. Congressional Republicans reportedly are combing Amity Shlaes’ anti-Roosevelt account of the Great Depression, “The Forgotten Man,” to find how Roosevelt “demonized” Wall Street and big business in that period. Finally, not to be outdone, The New Yorker will convene a “summit” for “The Next 100 Days.”

The notion of 100 days to measure any new president is meaningless, a contrived metric for evaluating Obama or anyone else. It is true that FDR’s first 100 days witnessed an almost unprecedented flurry of legislation that began to fundamentally alter the old order. Congress vigorously responded to the president’s call for “bold, persistent experimentation.” Legislation provided relief measures that involved the government as both provider of a “dole” and the “employer of last resort.” Recovery measures took first, sometimes stumbling steps to stimulate the economy. Reform measures such as the Glass-Steagall Act divorced investment banks from commercial banking, and Congress initiated a veritable alphabet soup of agencies to administer the new programs.

But “the first 100 days” hardly captures the history of the New Deal, and certainly isn’t a report card of its achievements. The following years produced landmark legislation that transformed commercial farming, labor-management relations, securities and commodities transactions, and, of course, the Social Security Act, which brought the still-enduring monument of insuring old-age pensions.

Roosevelt’s first 100 days occurred at another time, another place. The Great Depression dramatically gained momentum, spreading to all segments of the country, with one in four workers unemployed and the nation’s banking system teetered on the verge of collapse. Even conservative Republicans knew they could not support Herbert Hoover’s unsuccessful methods.

The New Deal measures did not spring full-blown from FDR’s inauguration and the opening of a new Congress. Reform ideas had been in the air throughout the previous decade—unlike, say, the 1990s—and, most strikingly, they were not partisan, unlike now. In the 1930s, progressive Republicans in Congress, still responsive to the party’s Theodore Roosevelt legacy, regularly supported the administration’s efforts. Sens. Robert La Follette Jr., George W. Norris and Bronson Cutting, among other Republicans, readily voted for the president’s initiatives. Many of the measures had been proposed and debated for years. Since the mid-1920s, Norris had led the fight to convert Muscle Shoals, a federally owned dam in Alabama, into a means of cheap power and flood control for the Tennessee Valley. Congress had considered relief legislation and insuring bank deposits since 1931. Not surprisingly, FDR at first opposed the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. measure, apparently because he saw it as too radical, but when he realized how popular it was across the political spectrum he came around (Patrick Maney, “The Legend of FDR’s First 100 Days in Office”).

Perhaps all this talk of 100 days is meant to establish a deadline for the current mode of criticism. Perhaps after April 29, CNN will bring back Pat Buchanan, Robert Novak and Glenn Beck and give them carte blanche to mug the president. Were the sights and sounds of “Tea Cup Day,” with slogans worthy of a neighborhood barroom brawl, a portent of what will come?

In breathless tones, CNN urges us to watch the unfolding of Barack Obama’s “Report Card” on April 29. What grades will he receive? Certainly the president has leapfrogged over his predecessor in the image he has projected abroad. But two trips, handshake with Hugo Chavez and all, give us only a symbolic snapshot for now. What counts is whether and how he will re-regulate banking and financial operations, restructure the auto industry, stimulate job growth, truly close Guantanamo and determine the lawful status of detainees, improve relations with Cuba, Iran and Venezuela, implement an exit strategy for Iraq and Afghanistan, and redirect and revitalize such institutions as the Pentagon and the CIA.

Obviously, the president can receive only an “incomplete” at the moment. It is the only fair and intelligent grade, despite media hoopla surrounding the first 100 days. The past three months hardly constitute a legacy, just as FDR’s early days are not any measure of his legacy. We judge Roosevelt by his achievements over 12 years, not a mere, fleeting 100 days. For now, we can watch, with hope and a critical eye, the remaining 1,360 days of Obama’s term, if not beyond.

[Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. To catch a recent audio interview in which he discusses the CIA's drone war over Pakistan, click here.]

Almost like clockwork, the reports float up to us from thousands of miles away, as if from another universe. Every couple of days they seem to arrive from Afghan villages that few Americans will ever see without weapon in hand. Every few days, they appear from a world almost beyond our imagining, and always they concern death -- so many lives snuffed out so regularly for more than seven years now. Unfortunately, those news stories are so unimportant in our world that they seldom make it onto, no less off of, the inside pages of our papers. They're so repetitive that, once you've started reading them, you could write them in your sleep from thousands of miles away.

Like obituaries, they follow a simple pattern. Often the news initially arrives buried in summary war reports based on U.S. military (or NATO) announcements of small triumphs -- so many"insurgents," or"terrorists," or"foreign militants," or"anti-Afghan forces" killed in an air strike or a raid on a house or a village. And these days, often remarkably quickly, even in the same piece, come the challenges. Some local official or provincial governor or police chief in the area hit insists that those dead"terrorists" or"militants" were actually so many women, children, old men, innocent civilians, members of a wedding party or a funeral.

In response -- no less part of this formula -- have been the denials issued by American military officials or coalition spokespeople that those killed were anything but insurgents, and the assurances of the accuracy of the intelligence information on which the strike or raid was based. In these years, American spokespeople have generally retreated from their initial claims only step by begrudging step, while doggedly waiting for any hubbub over the killings to die down. If that didn't happen, an"investigation" would be launched (the investigators being, of course, members of the same military that had done the killing) and then prolonged, clearly in hopes that the investigation would outlast coverage of the"incident" and both would be forgotten in a flood of other events.

Forgotten? It's true that we forget these killings easily -- often we don't notice them in the first place -- since they don't seem to impinge on our lives. Perhaps that's one of the benefits of fighting a war on the periphery of empire, halfway across the planet in the backlands of some impoverished country.

One problem, though: the forgetting doesn't work so well in those backlands. When your child, wife or husband, mother or father is killed, you don't forget.

Only this week, our media was filled with ceremonies and remembrances centered around the tenth anniversary of the slaughter at Columbine High School. Twelve kids and a teacher blown away in a mad rampage. Who has forgotten? On the other side of the planet, there are weekly Columbines.

Similarly, every December 7th, we Americans still remember the dead of Pearl Harbor, almost seven decades in the past. We still have ceremonies for, and mourn, the dead of September 11, 2001. We haven't forgotten. We're not likely to forget. Why, when death rains down on our distant battlefields, should they?

Admittedly, there's been a change in the assertion/repeated denial/investigation pattern instituted by American forces. Now, assertion and denial are sometimes followed relatively quickly by acknowledgement, apology, and payment. Now, when the irrefutable meets the unchallengeable, American spokespeople tend to own up to it. Yep, we killed them. Yep, they were women and kids. Nope, they had, as far as we know, nothing to do with terrorism. Yep, it was our fault and we'll pony up for our mistake.

This new tactic is a response to rising Afghan outrage over the repeated killing of civilians in U.S. raids and air strikes. But like the denials and the investigations, this, too, is intended to make everything go away, while our war itself -- those missiles loosed, those doors kicked down in the middle of the night -- just goes on.

Once again, evidently, everyone is supposed to forget (or perhaps simply forgive). It's war, after all. People die. Mistakes are made. As for those dead civilians, New York Times reporter Jane Perlez recently quoted a former Pakistani general on the hundreds of tribespeople killed in the Pakistani borderlands in air strikes by CIA-run drones: they are, he said,"likely hosting Qaeda militants and cannot be deemed entirely innocent."

Exactly. Who in our world is"entirely innocent" anyway?

Apologies Not Accepted

A UN survey tallied up 2,118 civilians killed in Afghanistan in 2008, a significant rise over the previous year's figure, of which 828 were ascribed to American, NATO, and Afghan Army actions rather than to suicide bombers or Taliban guerrillas. (Given the difficulty of counting the dead in wartime, any figures like these are likely to be undercounts.) There are, in other words, constant"incidents" to choose from.

Recently, for instance, there was an attack by a CIA drone in the Pakistani borderlands that Pakistani sources claim may have killed up to eight civilians; or there were the six civilians, including a three-year-old girl and a ten-year-old boy, killed by an American air strike that leveled three houses in Afghanistan's Kunar Province. Sixteen more Afghans, including children as young as one, were wounded in that air attack, based on"multiple intelligence sources" in which, the U.S. military initially claimed, only"enemy fighters" died. (As a recent study of the death-dealing weapons of the Iraq War, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, indicates, air strikes are notoriously good at taking out civilians. Eighty-five percent of the deaths from air strikes in Iraq were, the study estimated, women and children and, of all methods, including suicide and car bombs, air power"killed the most civilians per event.")

But let's consider here just one recent incident that went almost uncovered in the U.S. media. According to an Agence France Presse account, in a raid in the eastern Afghan province of Khost, the U.S. military first reported a small success: four"armed militants" killed.

It took next to no time, however, for those four militants to morph into the family of an Afghan National Army artillery commander named Awal Khan. As it happened, Khan himself was on duty in another province at the time. According to the report, the tally of the slain, some of whom may have gone to the roof of their house to defend themselves against armed men they evidently believed to be robbers or bandits, included: Awal Khan's"schoolteacher wife, a 17-year-old daughter named Nadia, a 15-year-old son, Aimal, and his brother, who worked for a government department. Another daughter was wounded. After the shooting, the pregnant wife of Khan's cousin, who lived next door, went outside her home and was shot five times in the abdomen..."

She survived, but her fetus,"hit by bullets," didn't. Khan's wife worked at a school supported by the international aid organization CARE, which issued a statement strongly condemning the raid and demanding"that international military forces operating in Afghanistan [be] held accountable for their actions and avoid all attacks on innocent civilians in the country."

In accordance with its new policy, the U.S. issued an apology:

"Further inquiries into the Coalition and ANSF operation in Khost earlier today suggest that the people killed and wounded were not enemy combatants as previously reported... Coalition and Afghan forces do not believe that this family was involved with militant activities and that they were defending their home against an unknown threat... 'We deeply regret the tragic loss of life in this precious family. Words alone cannot begin to express our regret and sympathy and we will ensure the surviving family members are properly cared for,' said Brig. Gen. Michael A. Ryan, U.S. Forces-Afghanistan."

A U.S. military spokesman added,"There will undoubtedly be some financial assistance and other types of assistance [to the survivors]."

The grieving husband, father, and brother said,"I want the coalition leaders to expose those behind this and punish them." He added that"the Afghan government should resign if it could not protect its people." (Don't hold your breath on either count.) And Afghan President Hamid Karzai, as he has done many times during past incidents, repeatedly demanded an explanation for the deaths and asked that such raids and air strikes be drastically curtailed.

What Your Safety Is Worth

All of this was little more than a shadow play against which the ongoing war continues to be relentlessly prosecuted. In Afghanistan (and increasingly in Pakistan), civilian deaths are inseparable from this war. Though they may be referred to as" collateral damage," increasingly in all wars, and certainly in counterinsurgency campaigns involving air power, the killing of civilians lies at the heart of the matter, while the killing of soldiers might be thought of as the collateral activity.

Pretending that these"mistakes" will cease or be ameliorated as long as the war is being prosecuted is little short of folly. After all,"mistake" after"mistake" continues to be made. That first Afghan wedding party was obliterated in late December 2001 when an American air strike killed up to 110 Afghan revelers with only two survivors. The fifth one on record was blown away last year. And count on it, there will be a sixth.

By now, we've filled up endless"towers" with dead Afghan civilians. And that's clearly not going to change, apologies or not, especially when U.S. forces are planning to"surge" into the southern and eastern parts of the country later this year, while the CIA's drone war on the Pakistani border expands.

And how exactly do we explain this ever rising pile of civilian dead to ourselves? It's being done, so we've been told, for our safety and security here in the U.S. The previous president regularly claimed that we were fighting over there, whether in Iraq or Afghanistan, to keep Americans safe here; the former vice president has made clear that among the great achievements of the Bush administration was the prevention of a second 9/11; and when, on March 27th, President Obama announced his latest Afghan bailout plan, he, too, played the 9/11 card heavily. As he was reported to have put it recently,"he is not 'naive about how dangerous this world is' and [he] said he wakes up every day and goes to bed every night thinking and worrying 'about how to keep the American people safe.'"

Personally, I always thought that we could have locked our plane doors and gone home long ago. We were never in mortal danger from al-Qaeda in the backlands of Afghanistan, despite the perfervid imagination of the previous administration and the riotous fears of so many Americans. The rag-tag group that attacked us in September 2001 was then capable of committing acts of terror on a spectacular scale (two U.S. embassy buildings in Africa, a destroyer in a Yemeni harbor, and of course those two towers in New York and the Pentagon), but only every couple of years. In other words, al-Qaeda was capable of stunning this country and of killing Americans, but was never a threat to the nation itself.

All this, of course, was compounded by the fact that the Bush administration couldn't have cared less about al-Qaeda at the time. The"Defense Department" imagined its job to be"power projection" abroad, not protecting American shores (or air space), and our 16 intelligence agencies were in chaos.

So those towers came down apocalyptically and it was horrible -- and we couldn't live with it. In response, we invaded a country ("no safe havens for terrorists"), rather than simply going after the group that had acted against us. In the process, the Bush administration went to extreme efforts to fetishize our own safety and security (and while they were at it, in part through the new Department of Homeland Security, they turned"security" into a lucrative endeavor).

Of course, elsewhere people have lived through remarkable paroxysms of violence and terror without the sort of fuss and fear this nation exhibited -- or the money-grubbing and money-making that went with it. If you want to be reminded of just how fetishistic our focus on our own safety was, consider a 2005 news article written for a Florida newspaper,"Weeki Wachee mermaids in terrorists' cross hairs?" It began:

"Who on earth would ever want to harm the Weeki Wachee mermaids? It staggers the imagination. Still, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has named Weeki Wachee Springs as the potential terror target of Hernando County, according to a theme park official.

"The Weeki Wachee staff is teaming up with the Hernando County Sheriff's Office to 'harden the target' by keeping the mermaid theater and the rest of the park safe from a potential terror attack, said marketing and promotion manager John Athanason... Terror-prevention plans for Weeki Wachee may include adding surveillance cameras, installing lights in the parking lot and securing areas in the roadside attraction where there may be 'security breaches,' he said. But Athanason is also realistic. He said Walt Disney World is a bigger attraction and is likely to receive more counterterrorism funds."

This was how, in deepest Florida, distant Utah, or on the Texas border, all places about as likely to be hit by an al-Qaeda attack as by a meteor, Americans were obsessing about keeping everything near and dear to them safe and secure. At the same time, of course, the Bush administration was breaking the bank at the Pentagon and in its Global War on Terror, while preparing the way for an America that would be plunged into startling insecurity.

Let's for a moment assume, however, that our safety really was, and remains, at stake in a war halfway across the planet. If so, let me ask you a question: What's your"safety" really worth? Are you truly willing to trade the lives of Awal Khan's family for a blanket guarantee of your safety -- and not just his family, but all those Afghan one-year olds, all those wedding parties that are -- yes, they really are -- going to be blown away in the years to come for you?

If, in 1979 as the Carter presidency was ending and our Afghan wars were beginning, you had told any group of Americans that we would be ever more disastrously involved in Afghanistan for 30 years, that, even then, no end would be in sight, and that we would twice declare victory (in 1989 after the Soviets withdrew, and again in 2001 when the Afghan capital Kabul was taken from the Taliban) only to discover that disaster followed, they undoubtedly would have thought you mad. Afghanistan? Please. You might as well have said Mars.

Now, three decades later, it's possible to see that every step taken from the earliest support for Afghan jihadis in their anti-Soviet war has only made things worse for us, and ever so much worse for the Afghans. Unless somehow we can think our way out of a strategy guaranteed to kill yet more civilians in expanding areas of South Asia, it will only get worse still.

Maybe it's time to suck it up and put less value on the idea of absolute American safety, since in many ways the Bush administration definition of our safety and security, which did not go into retirement with George and Dick, is now in the process of breaking us. Looked at reasonably, even if Dick Cheney and his minions prevented another 9/11 (and there's no evidence he did), in doing so look what he brought down around our ears. What a bad bargain it's been -- and all in the name of our safety, and ours alone.

Ask yourself these questions in the dead of night: Do we really want stories like Awal Khan's to float up out of the villages of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and who knows where else for the next seven years? Or the next 30 for that matter? Does that seem reasonable? Does that seem right? Is your supposed safety worth that?

The vast diplomatic agenda that the Obama administration has adopted will test its ability to harmonize national priorities such as relations with Iran and North Korea with global and multilateral concerns. President Obama has come into office at a moment of unique opportunity. The economic crisis absorbs the energies of all the major powers; whatever their differences, all need a respite from international confrontation. Overriding challenges such as energy, the environment and proliferation concern them to a considerable degree and in an increasingly parallel way. The possibility of comprehensive solutions is unprecedented.

Obama has launched negotiations on an extraordinary range of subjects. Each has a political as well as a strategic component. Each deals with issues peculiar to itself. Each runs the risk that inherent obstacles could obscure ultimate objectives or that negotiating tactics could warp substance. But the challenges are also closely related. For example, arms control negotiations with Russia will affect Russia's role in the nonproliferation effort with Iran. The strategic dialogue with China will help shape the Korean negotiations. The negotiations will also be affected by perceptions of regional balances -- of the key participants, for Russia, this applies especially to the former Soviet space in Central Asia; for China and the United States, to the political structure of Northeast Asia and the Pacific Rim.

This reality needs to be translated into some operational concept of world order. The administration's approach seems to be pointing toward a sort of concert diplomacy, which existed for some two decades after the Napoleonic Wars, in which groupings of great powers work together to enforce international norms. In that view, American leadership results from the willingness to listen and to provide inspirational affirmations. Common action grows out of shared convictions. Power emerges from a sense of community and is exercised by an allocation of responsibilities related to a country's resources. It is a kind of world order either without a dominating power or in which the potentially dominating power leads through self-restraint.

The economic crisis favors this approach even though there are few examples of sustained operation of such a concert. Typically, members of any grouping reflect an unequal distribution of willingness to run risks, leading to an unequal willingness to allocate efforts on behalf of international order, and hence to the potential veto by the most irresolute. The Obama administration need not choose yet whether to ultimately rely on consensus or equilibrium. But it must fine-tune its national security structure to judge the environment it faces and calibrate its strategy accordingly....