C.M. Sennott's Notebook:

Obama needs to do his homework on Israel-Palestine

In the realms of the Middle East, to hold a snap Israeli-Palestinian summit like this one on the eve of the U.N. General Assembly is the grade-school equivalent to staying up late watching David Letterman and trying to do your homework on the bus.

You can get away with it once or twice, but it will catch up to you.

Next thing you know a war will break out between the two sides and this administration will be saying the dog ate my homework.

President Obama set the Middle East as a top priority during the campaign. He determinedly set himself a part from President George W. Bush who ignored the conflict and watched it spiral out of control. But in the last year, Obama got, well, a bit distracted by the Great Recession and by a war in Afghanistan that is going south.

So it is understandable that he is a bit late to the bargaining table with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas.

But the president is delusional if he thinks that Tuesday's gathering will have any impact. And he is staying up too late watching himself on the “Late Show” if he thinks he can throw the two sides together and proclaim any progress. Pulling them together, as Obama did Tuesday, to reluctantly shake hands with forced smiles is not a step forward, but a step backward.

There are very tough issues to confront in Israel-Palestine — particularly the expansion of Jewish settlements and the still simmering divisions between Palestinian Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank — and they deserve more focused attention.

For this assignment, President Obama gets a C-minus.

Top general's report says more troops or Afghan war is lost, but Obama isn't necessarily buying it

For a first glimpse at the much-anticipated strategic review of the war in Afghanistan by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, check out the Washington Post, the first to obtain and publish the 66-page document on its website. The scoop was the work of none other than Bob Woodward.

But this report ain’t exactly the Pentagon Papers. In fact, it covers pretty much exactly what has been leaking out for weeks about McChrystal’s belief that the U.S. and its allies will lose in Afghanistan without more troops.  

What's perhaps more interesting is that this weekend, during President Obama’s network TV media blitz on health care reform, he was asked about Afghanistan and there was some sense from the president that he is still keeping an open mind about — and a critical eye on — the request for troop increases.

As we commented earlier this month, it's “the best and the brightest all over again" in Afghanistan. And McChrystal is definitely part of that bright, shining, well-intentioned effort by generals to draw America deeper into a war that is unwinnable unless the goals of the conflict are far more clearly defined.

Obama will do well to pay attention to the lessons of history and empires in Afghanistan and the lessons of U.S. involvement in counterinsurgency in Vietnam, unless he wants to go down in history as the next LBJ.

The arrest in Colorado and New York of three men alleged to have been plotting the most ambitious terror strike in the U.S. since Sept. 11, 2001 is more evidence that a steady global pursuit of Al Qeada is underway. Last week, the U.S.-coordinated offensive on Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda-inspired movements targeted Somalia, Yemen and Indonesia. This week, the focus has shifted much closer to home.

US steps up attacks against a fractured Al Qaeda from Indonesia to the Horn of Africa

In case you haven’t noticed, the U.S. is working with governments around the world on an  aggressive and coordinated effort to attack Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda-inspired movements.

Consider the events GlobalPost correspondents reported just this week:

In Indonesia, Peter Gelling provided authoritative coverage of the country’s elite counter-terrorism force killing Noordin Top, the leader of Indonesia’s answer to Al Qaeda.

In Somalia, six U.S. attack helicopters swept over a convoy of the Al Qaeda-inspired Al Shabaab fighters and killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a leader who has long been wanted by the U.S. in connection with the 1998 attack two U.S. embassies in East Africa. GlobalPost correspondent Tristan McConnell reported from Kenya on how the attacks reveal a dramatic shift in US policy to confront Al Qaeda in the failed state of Somalia.

In Yemen, GlobalPost’s Laura Kasinof reported on the air strikes that killed scores of civilians fleeing fighting in northern Yemen where the government forces appear to be succumbing to American pressure to step up the fight against “an increasingly active branch of Al Qaeda in the country,” as she wrote.

The U.S. intelligence community is buzzing about evidence emerging over the summer that Al Qaeda leaders are gathering in Somalia and Yemen and trying to establish a new nexus for operations after Pakistan’s military finally stepped up the pressure on Al Qaeda in the tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan.

CIA director Leon E. Panetta publicly revealed this in briefings over the summer.

And an  early warning about this came from Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who spoke at the Brookings Institute in the late spring, saying, “I am very worried about growing safe havens in both Somalia and Yemen, specifically because we have seen Al Qaeda leadership, some leaders, start to flow to Yemen.”

The concentration of violent jihadist campaigns in Yemen and Somalia illustrate that Al Qaeda is a movement not an organization, and the fact that they are trying to shift bases and being hit even as they do so is a sign that they are greatly weakened and scrambling for cover now eight years after the Sept. 11 attacks.

You gotta be crazy to take on the government in China

BOSTON, Massachusetts — If you are a factory worker demanding back pay or a doctor daring to speak out against illegal medical experiments, you have to be crazy in China. 

In a devastating and well-reported segment on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, contributing correspondent Shannon Van Sant reveals a look inside China's legal system and how local officials are turning to psychiatric hospitals as "a convenient means of silencing troublemakers." 

The piece is based on several months of reporting and aired Tuesday night on PBS. 

The sad kicker is that after being interviewed by Van Sant, several of the victims have been detained again in hospitals against their will. A very powerful piece of reporting.

Mission creep in Afghanistan

BOSTON — Hate to say we told you so, but we did. 

GlobalPost predicted back in August in our special report "Life, Death and the Taliban" that there would be requests by the Pentagon for more troops in Afghanistan.

And Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen delivered the anticipated plea before Congress Tuesday, saying that success in Afghanistan would require more troops and that more time would be needed to "succeed" in Afghanistan.

I would hasten to add that most analysts — from the right and left — watching Afghanistan would be hard pressed to tell you what "success" means in Afghanistan.

There are no metrics, there is no clear mission and this is why so many feel the strategy of increasing troops is so perilous, as I pointed out in a column last week on the eight-year anniversary of 9/11. Leading Democrats, like Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, are going south on the military brass' strategy for a further build up beyond the additional 21,000 troops that President Barack Obama called for in March and which are now flowing into the war zone. The final stage of those deployments will occur in November. That will bring the total of U.S. forces in Afghanistan to 68,000. Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona predictably said more troops are "vitally needed."

The political battle is just being drawn over the war in Afghanistan. And if you thought the fight over health care was tough, brace yourself for a knock-down, drag-out fight over how to go forward in Afghanistan.  It remains the most perilous foreign policy issue for Obama.

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