The best commentary on Ukraine’s presidential election outcome I have heard is from a colleague with lots of experience in the country and region: For ten years, Ukraine has been a disappointment to the West; now it is Russia’s turn.

Many commentators think Moscow somehow “won” in Ukraine. Certainly, Russian interests did not lose, but that would have been the case with Tymoshenko. Some tangible Russian goals may be advanced, but in general, the Russian leadership may come to appreciate why there is so much “Ukraine fatigue” in Washington, in Brussels and other European capitals.

First, Ukraine is a mess. It inherited all the problems of other former Soviet states. Its demographics are, amazingly, even worse than Russia’s. Agriculture still suffers the legacy of collectivization; industry remains pretty much the step child of central planning; infrastructure is (how else can one put it?) Soviet. Ukraine is the most energy inefficient economy (BTUs per unit GDP) on Earth. Certainly, there have been many positive changes in the past couple of decades, but like Belarus, Moldova and Russia itself, Ukraine suffers from seven decades of catastrophic bad policies. The political crisis of the past five years since the so-called “Orange Revolution” has seen progress in some important areas (legitimate elections are not small potatoes in that part of the world), but inertia pretty much across the board. Not an exciting time to be young and Ukrainian.

Next, Yanukovich will hardly be a strong leader and will need to compromise all the time just to maintain some kind of coalition in the Rada. Yanukovich pretty much came back from the political dead of four years ago, but he owes many people for his resurrection, and they will want the debts paid, big time. Politics in Kyiv may be more effective than in recent years (how could they be worse?), but this is nothing like the kind of new start and new authority which Putin exercised ten years ago. In any case, Yanukovich is not Putin. He has lost some weight and got a better wardrobe, but he is still nobody’s idea of an inspiring leader. He is smart enough, however, to know he must not be overly and overtly in Moscow’s pocket. He remembers how former President Leonid Kuchma confounded expectations by maintaining a balance between Europe and Russia, and almost certainly will do likewise.

Then, the fact remains that most Ukrainians — even those who speak only Russian — want Ukraine to remain independent of Russia both in name and in fact. Those in Moscow who envision a voluntary anschluss are dreaming. Even the big eastern Ukrainian oligarchs who bankrolled Yanukovich think of themselves as European, and certainly do not want to be junior-league Russian oligarchs. These guys have their luxury properties in Vienna, London and the south of France, and want acceptance of themselves and their country as part of Europe broadly defined, and not as provincial Russia.

Moscow can take gratification on some things.

First, Viktor Yushchenko has exited the political stage. In recent years, the departing Ukrainian president has alienated all but his most stalwart supporters, and provoked rumors that the poison which disfigured his face also damaged his mind. The man has long had something of a messiah complex, but his behavior became not only erratic but profoundly damaging for the most basic interests of his country. In the first round of the presidential election, Yushchenko had traction only in areas which had once been Hapsburg. Indeed, his conduct had come to resemble that of Charles II, the last of the Spanish Hapsburgs. If Yanukovich has anyone to thank for his fairly narrow second-round victory, it is Yushchenko.

Second, NATO membership for Ukraine is a dead issue for years to come, but in reality it already was because the people of the country decisively do not want it. It may very well come to pass that Ukrainian cooperation with NATO within Partnership for Peace may increase, as the question of MAP status is now off the table. Certainly, Ukraine will pursue the best ties it can get with the European Union, enjoying the advantage of WTO membership (still on the horizon for Russia).

Third, a base deal on Sevastopol which meets Russia’s requirements is likely, but the broader question of Crimea remains, and this is a question on which no Ukrainian leader can compromise.

Finally, elections change politicians but not underlying realities. The Ukraine which emerged from the Soviet collapse is the widest country in Europe, both in geography and in political culture. Any government in Kyiv with good sense must balance not only the country’s external west/east orientation but its internal west/central/south/east composition. Ukraine ultimately can never again belong to Russia because Russia has lost its legitimacy as Slavic hegemon. Neither can Ukraine belong to the Europe of the EU because it remains part of the eastern Slavic world with its legacy of Soviet and pre-Soviet history. The proper task of the new Ukrainian leadership is to ameliorate the burdens of its inhabitants rather than to play (or be played) in geo-strategic games. Moscow may find a less adversarial Ukraine is still more liability than asset.

New Delhi has unexpectedly acquiesced in the process of the creating of a new state out of the northwestern region of Andhra Pradesh (Indian states enjoy more prerogatives than American States). Under the terms laid out by Home Minister P. Chidambaram, the state legislature in Andhra will consider a resolution to carve out a separate state encompassing 10 existing districts where the Telangana ethnic group are dominant. The Telengana have been agitating to various degrees for autonomy or independence since their region was joined with fellow Telugu speakers in Andhra and Rayalaseema in 1956, then forming the first Indian province built along linguistic lines.

Though largely dormant (and nonviolent) since Andhra’s creation, the independence push was revived in the 1990s when the BJP (India’s main opposition party today) promised the Telangana a state of their own, a claim the BJP renewed in this year’s general elections. The recent agitation, however, appears to have been set in motion when the president of a Telangana independence party, the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS), announced on November 29th a limitless fast until the ruling Congress party (which governs Delhi and the state legislature in Andhra Pradesh) approved the creation of a separate Telangana state. As of Wednesday, the TRS president was approaching critical condition and dozens of his supporters had committed suicide or died of shock during the 11-day fast. A rally planned for yesterday was expected to bring violence and at a late-night emergency meeting the Congress party leadership decided to fold.

The creation of new states is not exactly a novel enterprise in India. This decade has already seen the creation of three new states: Chattisgarh, Uttarkhand, and Jharkand.

All were carved from out from larger states in central-northeast India, where India’s largest and poorest are clustered. Proponents of the process insist it has not only assuaged specific agitations for autonomy and independence by ethnic or linguistic minorities, but it has dramatically improved governance.  In these poorly-run, large and unwieldy states it is far too common for politically dominant parties tied to caste or ethnicity to practice blatant discriminatory governance, directing attention and resources to favored regions and sub-groups. Nine years on, the creation of the three new states out of Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh is perceived by many to have been a sound decision.

Andhra Pradesh, however, is a unique case. First there is Hyderabad. The city of four million is Andhra’s capital and a regional economic powerhouse and major IT hub. It also sits squarely within the Telangana region. Its fate remains in question and at least one Telegana leader has threatened civil war if Hyderabad is not included in the new state (becoming a Union Territory, ruled by the federal government, is the other plausible alternative). In the breakup of the three states in 2000, no state capital or city of similar significance was allocated to a newly created state.

Second, Andhra Pradesh is the Indian political equivalent of a U.S. swing state. Its loyalties never a given, it has proved decisive in national parliamentary elections and the Congress Party’s large victory there in this years national elections helped propel it to its comfortable majority in the national parliament. The potential political fallout for Congress is already evident: Dozens of state and national legislators (93 by one count) have already resigned or signaled their intention to resign as Congress faces a backlash from Andhra MPs adamantly opposed to its decision.

Perhaps the biggest question about Congress’ decision though, is this: In a country containing thousands upon thousands of ethnic, caste, linguistic, and cultural identities, what kind of precedent will this set? Congress MPs from Rayalaseema are already demanding a separate state of their own as a price for their acquiescence. In West Bengal, meanwhile, the Ghorkas have revived their claim to a separate Ghorkaland. This scenario could well play out across the Indian landscape as the Andhra decision serves an accelerant to the ambitions of a patchwork of discontent intra-state and inter-state groups with shared identities.

You might have missed it, but the past month has opened a new page in Iran’s confrontation with the West.

On November 28th, the Iranian government dramatically upped the stakes in the international standoff over its nuclear program when it approved a plan to build ten new uranium enrichment facilities in the near future. Never mind that the plan is much more rhetoric than reality. (In the six-and-a-half years since Iran’s nuclear program became public, the country has managed to amass less than 10,000 centrifuges. At this rate, gathering the 500,000 units that Iranian officials desire could literally take hundreds of years.) What is important is that Iran has directly repudiated the IAEA’s call, issued two days earlier, for it to cease enrichment work and close its newly-disclosed Qom site. The message could not be any clearer: Iran is not willing to alter its nuclear plans in any substantial way, despite the best diplomatic efforts of the Obama administration or anyone else.

Nor is Iran’s brinksmanship confined to the nuclear front. Just days after Tehran’s defiant nuclear declaration, news broke that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards had detained five British yachtsmen in the Persian Gulf in an incident eerily similar to the Islamic Republic’s March 2007 seizure of 15 British seamen. The British government is now said to be attempting to quietly negotiate their release, and Foreign Secretary David Miliband is taking pains to play down the incident as a minor misunderstanding, notwithstanding all of the evidence to the contrary.

It would be easy - and tempting - to dismiss this pair of provocative incidents simply as miscalculations on the part of the Iranian regime. But a more likely, and much more ominous, interpretation is that the Iranian leadership has grown increasingly confident in its strategic capabilities, and is now actively seeking confrontation with the West. The question, as always, is what the United States and its allies are prepared to do about it.

If the West’s track record so far is any indication, Tehran doesn’t have much to be worried about.

Years from now, historians are likely to look back on November 13th as the day the War on Terror died.

The Obama administration’s decision, announced publicly on Friday, to bring terror mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others to New York to stand trial in federal court for the atrocities of September 11th is flawed on many levels. For one thing, it wipes away years of progress and preparation by the U.S. military in bringing Mohammed and his co-conspirators to justice by way of military tribunal. For another, as former Justice Department official John Yoo writes in the Wall Street Journal, it is a potential “intelligence bonanza” for al-Qaeda, forcing the U.S. government to publicly reveal classified sources and methods used by the intelligence community in order to ensure a conviction. Most significant of all, however, is what it tells us about the Obama administration’s attitudes toward the War on Terror.

In the days after September 11th, the Bush administration correctly recognized that the attacks on Washington and New York carried out by al-Qaeda were tantamount to a declaration of war against the United States. Thereafter, terrorists captured on the battlefield in places like Afghanistan and Iraq were classified as “unlawful combatants” - a military term that explicitly put those foreign radicals outside the purview of U.S. domestic law. The Obama administration’s decision to abandon that framework in favor of a civilian one that provides the 9/11 plotters with the same legal protection U.S. citizens receive puts mass casualty terrorism on the same legal footing as burglary and rape, and serves as the strongest repudiation to date of the idea that we are at actually war with the forces of radical Islam.

All of which should be deeply disheartening to Americans of all political stripes. This summer, the President’s top counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan, told a Washington audience that, unlike his predecessor’s more ambitious plans for a “global” struggle against Islamic extremism, President Obama is focused strictly on a narrow “war with al-Qaeda.” Friday’s decision, however, indicates that the White House now has abandoned even that comparatively modest objective.

Just what part of the word “no” don’t we understand? Over the past month, the Obama administration’s much-anticipated plans for detente with Iran have run up against some harsh realities. The tentative deal struck on October 1st in Geneva, under which Iran agreed to outsource a significant part of its uranium enrichment, has now officially collapsed, with Iran days ago formally rejecting the UN-sponsored plan to send its stockpile to Russia and France.

Official Washington, however, doesn’t seem to have gotten the picture. The Obama White House, having been rebuffed in its diplomatic efforts to defuse the crisis over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, now appears more eager than ever to embark upon more of the same. Reuters reports that the Administration, far from being discouraged, is now “willing to give Iran time to decide whether to accept a U.N. draft deal that is meant to defuse nuclear tensions with world powers.” Washington, in other words, is not taking no for an answer.

All of which is reminiscent of an exchange that took place on an AFPC-sponsored visit to India in early 2007. As part of discussions in New Delhi, the delegation was granted an audience with Indian National Security Advisor MK Narayanan. When asked about India’s approach toward Iran, Narayanan affirmed Delhi’s commitment to “dialogue” to resolve the then-already-acute crisis over Iran’s nuclear program. When pressed about the possibility that negotiations may not resolve the impasse with Tehran, Narayanan answered with conviction: “diplomacy cannot be allowed to fail.”

The message was clear: back then, India didn’t have a “Plan B” for dealing with Iran. Today, it’s the United States that doesn’t.

Greek voters have decisively rejected austerity as a response to the economic crisis, giving the center-left PASOK party a clear mandate to govern with red ink.

The outgoing government of center-right New Democracy (ND) suffered the worst electoral result in the party’s thirty-five year history. The ND defeat was the consequence of over five years in power, a series of scandals, the perceived mismanagement of huge forest fires on the outskirts of Athens this summer, and its program of wage freezes and tax increases to deal with the current recession.

The irony is the government did not need to face the voters at this time, having two more years in office. Outgoing Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis judged he would face pre-term elections early next year in connection with parliamentary election of a new president (if PASOK blocked agreement on a candidate), and that facing the voters now was better than waiting. Many (indeed, most) members of his government and party thought this was a mistake, but Karamanlis persisted. He was wrong — big time. ND got over 45 percent of the vote when it took office in 2004, but only 33.4 percent on Sunday. PASOK got 43.9 percent, by far the widest point spread between the two leading parties ever.

Usually, ND and PASOK vie for results in the low forties. For ND, anything less than 39 percent would have been a clear defeat, but to drop below 34 percent is a true catastrophe. In consequence, Karamanlis and a major advisor who favored early elections are out of the party leadership. ND faces a true crisis of identity and direction, because losing so much of the Greek political center to PASOK is unprecedented.

The electoral totals show how decisively Greece has turned left. The hard-core Communist KKE party won 7.5 percent (down a bit from two years ago) and the Euro-socialist left SYRIZA won 4.6 (also down a bit). The hard-right LAOS party gained a bit to 5.6 percent, benefiting from ND defectors who would not shift to PASOK.

Greece is a country of family businesses and politics. Karamanlis enjoys one of the most respected family names in Greek public affairs, but now he is finished. In contrast, the new prime minister will be PASOK leader George Papandreau, the third generation of his family to be prime minister. Unlike his demagogic and philandering father and grandfather, George is a moderate and European-oriented modern Greek politician (and was American by birth). His challenges now are two-fold.

PASOK was the personal creation and vehicle for the ambitions of Andreas Papandreau, combining a fairly moderate Euro-centric wing with a nationalist wing bent on class struggle. Greek politics are highly polarized, even within parties, so the management of the competing wings of PASOK is the major challenge for its leader. It is fair to say George would never have become party leader were his name not Papandreau. He lacks the ruthless, single-minded qualities of his sire and grandsire, but compensates by not being a prisoner of outmoded Greek political vendettas. Keeping his crew together was hard enough in opposition, but may be more difficult in power, especially given the expectations that the decisive electoral victory should result in sweeping new government spending programs.

That is Papandreau’s other headache. He leads an enthusiastic tax-and-spend party in a country with a narrow and weak tax base. Greece is something like a combination of California’s politics with Michigan’s economy. Without its membership in the European Union, Greece would be a Third World economy. Based overwhelmingly on services like shipping and tourism, Greece is highly vulnerable to the current global slowdown, while its national finances are a mess and a fraud. For example, the Athens Olympics were supposed to cost $2.4 billion, but the accounting has already turned up over $9 billion. The real burden, however, is the range of entitlement programs left over from the years Andreas was in power. To illustrate, a standard retirement package for a white-collar male involves retirement at age 55 with a pension equivalent to 110 percent of final salary. Thus, Greece has government entitlement obligations worthy of a Persian Gulf emirate but an economy comparable to Portugal.

On foreign policy, Papandreau (himself a former foreign minister) will be a good European. He likely will maintain the positive relations with Washington of the outgoing ND government, but with reservations. Some of those reservations are based on policy, as most Greeks dislike almost all U.S. roles in the world, but some will be linked to politics, as George is often described without praise as “the American.” Despite representing the most vaunted family on the Greek political left and having led his party to a crushing national victory, George Papandreau must still — and every day — prove he is a good Greek. Part of that lies in being (at least publicly) in your face to Washington.

Official Washington will welcome the outcome of the German national elections. Chancellor Angela Merkel will head a center-right coalition government rather than the unwieldy right-left “Grand Coalition” of the past four years. One can expect somewhat more coherence in German economic and foreign policies, and certainly the tone of relations with Washington will be positive. However, there is much more to this election than meets the eye at first blush. American expertise about German politics has eroded badly since the end of the Cold War, so Washington may miss some underlying trends that are not so encouraging.

First, the participation rate was the lowest in a German general election since the War. At 72.5 percent, it is down over five percentage point since the 2005 elections. This may not seem at all worrisome by American standards, but in Germany the decline is serious. It reflects an opting out of the democratic political system by increasing numbers, especially of young people. Unlike in our country, where not voting is usually a sign of acquiescence or indifference, in Germany staying away from the polls is often a rejection of Germany’s post-War constitutional system. Obviously, the great majority of Germans are still very much participants, but the trend has been in the wrong direction, and this election is a particularly bad sign.

While Merkel won, she has nothing to crow about as leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Her party actually lost votes from 2005, which then was interpreted as a shocking outcome. Merkel engineered an economic reform platform for the CDU six years ago, which was rejected by the voters four years ago, leading to the Grand Coalition with the SPD. She has since trimmed her economic sails to the left. Now she is returning to power with less than 34 percent support, a humiliation for the leader of Germany’s supposed natural governing party. The CDU lost votes steadily through the campaign to the FDP, its new coalition partner, and will engage in some serious self-examination after the election celebrations.

Catastrophic is the only word for the SPD results, the worst ever at only 23 percent and a loss of eleven percent from 2005. For the once-mighty German Social Democratic Party to attract less than a quarter of the vote in a national election is clearly a popular rejection of the party and its leadership. It says much about the mess of the SPD that its chancellor candidate, Foreign Minister Steinmeier, is an official who has never held elected office in his life. The SPD has been wracked with internal disputes over policies and power for years, but now faces something of an existential crisis as it goes into opposition. Thus far, the SPD has refused to cooperate with the Left Party, which fractured off the left wing of the SPD, but may now decide that its only hope of returning to power will be to shift to the left and wait for the German public to follow suit. The SPD has for decades been torn between a traditional Marxist identity and one coupled to modern European reality. It may now return to its roots and seek to reincorporate the Left Party into a restored center-left coalition. This would cost the SPD many centrist voters, but might suit the party “base” better than the fumbling of recent years.

Both CDU and SPD — the big traditional governing parties of post-War Germany — have lost support in recent years as the electoral system has fragmented. This has made government formation dicey and led to the Grand Coalition. The fact of a CDU/FDP government in power should not obscure the grim fact that the Left Party was a substantial winner in this election, with twelve percent, up nearly 3.5 percent from 2005. Based on a merger of the former left wing of the SPD and the former Party of Democratic Socialism in eastern Germany, the Left Party represents frustrated Marxists, frustrated eastern Germans bitter at the character of German unification, and older voters worried about their pensions. The impact of the Left Party has been pernicious for the cohesion of German politics, giving eastern German voters more weight in determining the future of the German left than they merit, especially as eastern Germany is still far from wedded to democratic and European values and standards. The Left Party will now try to play kingmaker within the opposition, and may succeed.

The big, big winner in this election is the Free Democratic Party (FDP), also known as the Liberals. With fourteen percent (up nearly five percent from 2005), this is the best national election performance ever for the FDP and makes them a junior partner with real heft in the new governing coalition. The FDP has attracted younger white-collar voters turned off by the big parties, but now has the challenge of holding on to these often fickle voters while exercising the responsibilities of governance. The FDP has played its role out of power during the past four years with great skill; playing the role of power-sharer without losing its attraction will be different. For the moment, the FDP is truly on a high. Three-quarters of Germans now live in states with CDU/FDP governments, plus the new national coalition. The party leader, Guido Westerwelle, will be the new public face of Germany as foreign minister, the first openly gay occupant of that office.

The German electorate has shown it trusts a center-right government with management of the economy more than one of the left. However, on social issues and foreign affairs, Germany remains very much tilted to the left. Americans need to understand that a center-right administration in Berlin is about equivalent to a Democratic Party presidency in Washington. Some issues will remain difficult, as they have been between Merkel and both Bush and Obama.

On Afghanistan, the Germans want out. Taking part in the war is widely unpopular in Germany, so Washington should not expect Berlin to contribute to any expansion of the campaign. German troops now do precious little combat, but Merkel has already signaled that a near-term exit strategy is one of her priorities.

Germans tend to blame America for the current economic crisis, but the dirty secret is that German big banks were and are more highly leveraged than their American counterparts a year ago. Most of the toxic debt is still on the banking books in Germany. The government delayed any reckoning due to the election, but now there will be some painful times in Frankfurt. Somehow, the blame will come across the Atlantic.

Merkel has pursued an increasingly nationalist economic path, often violating basic principles of European unity. In the takeover of Opel from GM, the German authorities have simply ignored their cross-border European obligations in order to look after German jobs. Merkel has a recipe for economic recovery: the rest of the world should buy from Germany. That its export-driven economy is as much overtaken by events as are credit default swaps has not yet penetrated CDU thinking. Fortunately, the FDP does not have its head in the sand and will likely take leading positions in the new government on economic and financial issues.

On Russia, Germany has massive equities and interests which Merkel sought to protect in the past and will in the future. Berlin does not approve of much that happens in Moscow and in the Kremlin’s dealings with its neighbors, but the new German government will pursue engagement both from self interest and from the perpetual German tendency to look at Russia and see what they want to see.

By American standards, all German parties are green. Merkel was herself minister for the environment at Kyoto. On global warming, the new German government will be shoulder-to-shoulder with Al Gore.

The German election result has almost nothing to do with the United States or public attitudes toward America. President Obama has greater public approval in Germany than in any other country polled, the result of uniform German rejection of President Bush but also of the unrealistic expectation that Obama is not really an American but somehow a European. Germans, like most Europeans, have not accepted that their part of the world is no longer at the center of U.S. policy nor taken all that seriously in dealing with international issues. Obama’s proposals to reform the IMF and his clear choice to sideline the European-dominated G-8 with the broader G-20 are indicative of Washington’s global perspective in the new century. Germany wants America somehow to reflect its European origins rather than its global identity. Elections in the U.S. and in Germany are good for the atmospherics between us, but do not alter the basics.

The widely-respected analyst Anthony Cordesman has a disturbing op-ed about Afghanistan in the August 31st Washington Post in which he says the U.S. “can easily lose the war” in the next three months due to poor strategy, inadequate resources (men and money), and “micromanagement from Washington or traveling envoys.”

Certainly, the United States shortchanged its military and civilian efforts in Afghanistan for years after our initial victory, giving the new Obama administration a choice among bad options there. The initial Obama decision was to redouble American bets with an increase in combat forces, but Cordesman argues that a significantly greater commitment of both military and civilian resources is needed. He speaks of an increase of combat manpower of from three to eight brigades.  Keep in mind that the U.S. Army, still deeply engaged in Iraq and with obligations around the globe, has a total of thirty-three brigades.

In short, very serious challenges on Afghan policy are in the offing.

However, there is one critical topic which Cordesman did not address, probably due to the length limitations of a newspaper op-ed, as he certainly understands the problem: access to Afghanistan itself. Currently, most of the supplies, reinforcements and other logistics come through Pakistan from the sea. A significant supplement comes from the north, largely by air. The key component is fuel, which an active campaign in a country the size and character of Afghanistan consumes in vast quantities.

The central question is, how reliable are these supply routes?

The southern route, through Pakistan, has been a logistician’s and commander’s nightmare for years, but the nightmare increasingly is a wide-awake matter. Losses along the supply routes from the coast to the Khyber Pass are continuous and severe. Some reports speak of the loss of as many as twenty fuel tanker trucks in a single day. Unlike Iraq, where the U.S. at least controlled the supply routes from Kuwait, we are entirely reliant on Pakistani forces and decisions for the route to Afghanistan. Given the fragility of Pakistani politics, that route could be eroded or even lost at little more than a moment’s notice.

The northern route is now a better alternative after the agreement signed during the Moscow Summit. Indeed, the willingness of the Russian authorities to accommodate large-scale transit of their territory for American supplies is, thus far, the most important achievement of the Obama presidency in relations with Moscow.

Russia does not want the United States to fail in Afghanistan for reasons of its own. However, Moscow will certainly not assist our efforts for free. Russia wants American acquiescence and acknowledgment of Russia’s leading role in its post-Soviet periphery, something the Obama team has thus far publicly rejected.

In addition, it remains to be seen how well transit of large numbers of containers on Russia’s railroads and through its airspace will actually work, for reasons of both Russian policy and infrastructure. Anyone with much travel experience in Russia knows things can bog down even without adverse intent.

How much should our strategy in Afghanistan reflect these realities? At the moment, the strategy is very broad-gauge: with the military component matched by efforts at what, for what of a better term, is called “nation building.” This is very different from our initial purpose in the war: to pursue and destroy al-Qaeda in its Afghan sanctuaries. Over time, “mission creep” has fundamentally altered the Western (not just American) engagement. Our priority must be to support the military campaign, but nation building is a multi-generational commitment. Will the supply lines reliably be at our disposal for such an extended role? American policy should engage our enemies at times and places of our own choosing. An open-ended developmental commitment in a land-locked country with sustenance in the hands of governments in Islamabad and Moscow leaves too many of the choices in their hands, rather than ours.

For those who aren’t regular watchers of Palestinian politics, this week was just like any other. For those who are, however, all eyes have been on the Sixth Fatah General Congress taking place in Bethlehem. The conclave, the first gathering of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s political core since 1989, is being seen by many as a make-or-break moment — an opportunity for the faction to modernize its political positions and bring itself into the political mainstream.

But will it? Although the General Congress is still underway, all signs suggest that the results will leave much to be desired. At issue, as Israeli scholar Pinhas Inbari has outlined, is whether Fatah finally gives up on the muqawama – the “resistance” and armed struggle against the state of Israel that has defined its existence since the PLO was founded in 1964. And the “political program” now being debated by Fatah does no such thing, despite admittedly more dulcet tones about the need for political reconciliation with Israel.

Nor is it likely to. As David Schenker of the Washington Institute points out, recent times have seen a clear trend toward a more uncompromising, exclusionary worldview on the part of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Indeed, as PA president Mahmoud Abbas has — with Western assistance — tightened his once-tenuous grip on power, his political party increasingly has reverted to pre-Oslo type, renewing well-trodden rhetoric denying Israel’s existence and espousing maximalist territorial demands. Or, as Fatah Jerusalem Regional Committee member Kifah Radaydeh put it recently in a television interview, “our goal has never been peace. Peace is a means; the goal is Palestine.”

All of which raises serious problems for the Obama administration. Since this spring, the White House has made shoring up Abbas’ rickety government a major priority. It has channeled millions of dollars in humanitarian and military aid to prop up the Palestinian Authority against its powerful Islamist rival, Hamas. The strategy seems to be working; according to Israeli military assessments, Abbas’ rule is now more or less “stable” — a sea change from just a year ago. But with greater confidence in Ramallah has come a drift away from the political center. So the United States might soon find that its worries about a radical, anti-Israeli Islamist movement in the Palestinian Territories have been compounded by the revival of a radical, anti-Israeli nationalist one.

Much has been written about Russian designs on the territory of Ukraine, especially on the Crimean peninsula (more about that at some future time). But Russia is not the only long term threat to full Ukrainian control over Crimea. Kyiv’s control is also being challenged by a growing assertiveness on the part of at least one ethnic group there.

Here’s why. The forbears of Crimean Tatars ran the Crimean Khanate, a huge territory that included present day Crimea. By the end of World War II, the remaining one million Tatars were forcefully removed from Crimea — primarily into exile in Central Asia.

Following the 1991 collapse of the USSR, the Tatars began to return to their historic homeland. Today their number in Ukraine is estimated at upwards of 250,000. They maintain a governing structure outside the Ukrainian State and local Crimean governments. Their parliament, known as the Mejles, distributes funds from abroad (predominantly Muslim countries) and provides guidance to the Tatar community.

That guidance is strategic in nature. It includes, among other things, strong community pressure for families to have five or six children. As a result the percentage of Tatars in Crimea, currently estimated at more than 10 percent of the population, is sure to grow.

This dynamic is well understood on the ground in Crimea, where Slavs and Tatars alike recognize that, unchecked, the peninsula will eventually regain a Tatar majority. But the effects of this trend are already being felt.

To ensure that they have prime real estate for their expanded numbers, Crimea’s Tatars have collectively engaged in mass squatting. It works like this: because there is no effective mortgage system in Ukraine, people have to pay cash for their homes. And because most citizens cannot do this, the law permits people to lay claim to a piece of property if they have begun to build something on it. As a result, driving through parts of eastern Crimea, one can see hundreds of barely started, uninhabited, small structures filling hundreds of acres of land. It is ugly, and none too popular with the Slavs, but it protects the Tatars’ property rights and eventually will provide homes for their expanded population to live.

Today’s Tatars are optimistic about the creation of a modern-day Crimean khanate, for obvious reasons. Given their birthrate, they believe that time is clearly on their side. Especially if a more powerful Russia does not again regain control of Crimea. They may be right.