Staff Bios
Michael O’Hanlon
Michael O’Hanlon specializes in U.S. national security policy. He is senior author of the Iraq Index. A former defense budget analyst who advised members of Congress on military spending, he specializes in Iraq, North Korea, homeland security, the use of military force and other defense issues.
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Taking his time on Afghanistan makes sense for Obama
Published: Oct 27, 2009
Has President Obama dillied and dallied too long in making his decision on whether to send additional forces to Afghanistan? Republicans led by former Vice President Cheney increasingly assert as much.
In fairness to GOP friends, some of the criticism may be politically useful by keeping up the pressure on any administration officials who may wish to hem and haw indefinitely. But such a charge cannot yet be leveled at Obama himself.
The president's patient approach to date this fall, in considering Gen. Stanley McChrystal's request for perhaps 40,000 more U.S. troops, is entirely warranted. The decision is clearly momentous. And only by delaying a decision do we retain leverage...
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Michael O’Hanlon: A good idea for dealing with African pirates
Published: Sep 29, 2009
As the seas of the Indian Ocean, like those of the Atlantic, calm with the end of storm season, we need to worry about another threat that dominated the news at times earlier in the year but has since fallen off our radars: piracy along the African coast.
The impressive operation to rescue the captain of the Mersk Alabama last spring did not end the problem. That operation, culminating in a dramatic SEAL operation of classic vintage that killed the pirates and liberated their hostage, was the right response to the situation. But it was not a model we can or should expect to easily repeat. There is a need for a more preventive strategy.
The stakes are getting higher this fall....
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Japan's change election
Published: Sep 01, 2009
What to make of the huge win by Japan's Democratic Party against the entrenched establishment forces of Japan's long-ruling LDP? It is exciting stuff. But some Americans will worry. Isn't the party, with its previous periods of opposition to refueling ships in the Indian Ocean for the Afghanistan mission, resistance to some current U.S. military basing arrangements, and general contrarian attitudes on foreign policy, a major problem for the United States? After decades of trying to get Japan to "do more" in the international system, isn't this election a setback for Americans hoping for greater help from the Japanese in key challenges around the world?
There are reasons for...
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Obama off to a good start on security issues
Published: Aug 04, 2009
Now that President Barack Obama has reached his half-year milestone, it is a good moment to give an interim report on his foreign policy record. On handling national security matters, he is off to a good start. A quick survey of the world's hot spots shows why.
Start with the NATO allies. Here Obama has improved the tone of trans-Atlantic relations remarkably. This is not by itself a huge deal; after all, President George W. Bush built a substantial NATO coalition for the war in Afghanistan -- and Obama has not been able to broaden or strengthen this coalition. Our allies have recently suffered their 500th combined fatality in Afghanistan; countries such as Britain and Canada are making...
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Iraq's northern problem
Published: Jul 21, 2009
On the whole Iraq goes well. American troops completed their withdrawal from city centers by June 30 as required by U.S.-Iraqi agreement. Iraq remains in a sort of semiviolent peace, to be sure, but civilian casualty rates are 90 percent less than before the surge, and Iraq overall is less violent than countries like Mexico, Colombia, South Africa or Russia.
However, the situation is still fragile. As Ken Pollack of Brookings has been saying, it is all about the politics now -- and those politics are messy and fractious.
The greatest worry now is probably in Iraq's north. This is not the Sunni-Shia problem common previously in Iraq. Rather, it is a Kurdish-Arab problem, with the...
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We might still need more troops in Afghanistan
Published: Jul 07, 2009
Barack Obama has been an impressive president on national security matters, and Afghanistan is a case in point. Within two months of becoming president, aided by Bruce Riedel, David Petraeus and Richard Holbrooke and others, he crafted a new strategy that will soon nearly double the American effort in that country.
However, for all its virtues, the Obama plan may still lowball requirements for the Afghanistan mission to succeed. The administration's decisions in March to increase U.S. troop numbers to 68,000 (making for about 100,000 foreign troops in all), and Afghan army and police to about 215,000 will leave combined coalition forces at only half the levels in Iraq during the surge...
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Obama administration’s sound thinking on missile defense
Published: Jun 09, 2009
A central critique of the Obama administration’s new defense budget proposal is that it underfunds missile defense systems. If true, this would be a serious problem that the Congress should quickly require Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to repair. The threat of ballistic and cruise missiles of all ranges is clearly a major potential danger to our troops under many plausible scenarios.
But this critique is overblown. The Obama administration’s proposed cuts to missile defense are measured and prudent. There is room for debate on specifics, of course. But there is no cause for alarm that we are lowering our guard.
Under the Obama budget, missile defense will remain well...
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Rays of hope in Pakistan, the world’s powder keg
Published: May 12, 2009
So which is it? Is Pakistan just the latest crisis, the newest international hotspot to give newspapers fresh material when readers tire of the financial meltdown and the two wars our own troops are fighting? Or is it, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has argued, on the verge of posing a mortal threat to the entire world?
Surely a country with 100 nuclear weapons, numerous extremist groups linked to al Qaeda and, in all likelihood, Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al- Zawahiri themselves holed up somewhere in its remote regions should put the fear of God into all of us. But there may be a case for somewhat more optimism than is currently prevalent in Washington.
My estimable Brookings...
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