Pakistanis expect ties with U.S. to remain tense after Obama win

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Like the rest of the world, Pakistan watched keenly the electrifying finish to the U.S. presidential election that culminated in President Obama’s victory. But for most Pakistanis, the enthusiasm stops there.

Any change in Pakistan’s caustic relationship with the U.S. in the next four years is likely to be viewed through the prism of Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal region -- two war-ravaged places where Washington and Islamabad desperately want lasting stability but disagree sharply about how to achieve it.

Both Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney touted similar Afghanistan-Pakistan game plans that involve commitments to a U.S. troop pullout from Afghanistan by the end of 2014 and a continued reliance on drone missile strikes to cripple Al Qaeda and other Islamic militant groups ensconced in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Pakistanis remain deeply skeptical of Washington’s withdrawal strategy in Afghanistan. They worry the U.S. will maintain a strong presence in Afghanistan long after 2014, principally as a perch from which to ensure extremist groups do not gain access to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons arsenal. And a continuation, at least for now, of the drone campaign — seen by most Pakistanis as a blatant encroachment of their country’s sovereignty — will perpetuate the intense animosity many Pakistanis have for Washington’s policies.

“The perception here is that U.S. policy is not going to undergo a major change, in terms of the Af-Pak region,” said Raza Rumi, an analyst with the Jinnah Institute, an Islamabad think tank. “U.S. troops will withdraw in 2014. ... But the security establishment—the military, intelligence agencies, defense analysts—feels the U.S. won’t disappear from the region. It will be watching Pakistan closely. More importantly, it will keep Pakistan’s nuclear assets under scrutiny.

“So the Pakistani state is slightly edgy as to what the U.S. wants once Afghanistan is over,” Rumi added. “How will the U.S. observe Pakistan, and what steps will it take?”

Deadly Syrian stalemate spurs new diplomacy, little hope

Galvanized by a Syrian death toll that has doubled to 36,000 in little more than a month, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has called for a new rebel hierarchy to direct the fighting against President Bashar Assad and steer Syria back to peaceful ethnic and religious coexistence.

The latest proposal for halting Syria's 19-month-old civil war brings little new strategy to the crisis. Rather, it vents frustration with the international community’s own "divisions, dysfunctionality and powerlessness," as the International Crisis Group recently noted, that have prevented brokering an end to the bloodshed.

Like European leaders before her, Clinton acknowledged this week that the West’s reliance on out-of-touch exiles within the Paris-based Syrian National Council has done more harm than good in the effort to have opposition forces speak with one voice on their plans for a post-Assad future.

Clinton told reporters accompanying her on a trip to North Africa and the Balkans on Wednesday that the Obama administration will be suggesting names and organizations it believes should play prominent roles in a reconfigured rebel alliance that Western diplomats hope to see emerge from Arab League-sponsored talks next week in the Qatari capital, Doha.

But the U.S. push to get the opposition’s act together also exudes desperation. In the two months since a failed rebel campaign to take strategic ground around major cities, fighting has ground down to a bloody impasse, giving neither Assad nor his opponents hope of imminent victory on the battlefields.

The rebels’ summer offensive also exposed the widening role of Islamic extremists who have entered the fight, bringing arms and combat experience to the side of Assad’s fractured opponents. But the Islamic militants’ alignment with Syrians trying to topple Assad also gives weight to the regime’s claims to be fighting off terrorists, not domestic political foes.

Clinton reiterated the West’s insistence that Assad have no role in Syria’s future. That prompted immediate pushback by Russia and China, which have opposed what they call foreign interference in Syrian domestic affairs.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was in Paris for talks with his French counterpart when Clinton announced the Obama administration’s latest initiative. A longtime ally and arms supplier to Syria, Russia has blocked three United Nations Security Council resolutions to censure Assad and, along with China, has rejected Western demands that the Syrian president resign and leave the country.

"If the position of our partners remains the departure of this leader who they do not like, the bloodbath will continue," Lavrov warned.

Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi registered Beijing’s objections by unveiling a "four-point plan" for bringing peace to Syria that reiterates the communist state’s position that the future of Syria be left for Syrians -- including Assad -- to decide.

Beijing has a solid history of blocking international intervention on human rights grounds, apparently fearing China could become a target of such actions because of its harsh treatment of dissent and political opponents.

For some Middle East experts, the solution to Syria’s crisis lies somewhere between the Russian-Chinese "hands-off" policy and the U.S.-led Western view that only regime change will bring about peace.

"This conflict is for Syrians and their neighbors to resolve, with European and Russian involvement. The U.S. should stay one removed," said Ed Husain, senior fellow in Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

He described Clinton’s appeal for a new rebel leadership structure as "laudable, but a year too late."

"She’s driven by a desire to want to help now, but also to ensure a smooth transition in a post-Assad Syria. Sadly, reality on the ground dictates otherwise,” Husain said, alluding to entrenched battles that portend a long standoff.

Growing fears that extremists are gaining clout with the rebels also complicates diplomacy, as Syria’s Shiite, Christian, Kurdish and other minority sects are wary of how they would fare under a Sunni-dominated government allied with fundamentalist jihadis.

Clinton emphasized that extremist forces should be excluded from any new opposition forum that might emerge from Doha.

"It may seem ironic to call for a broad tent and then say 'except for those guys.' But I think the administration and other countries concerned about the future of Syria know that one of the challenges will be to have an analysis of who is who in the opposition,” said Charles Ries, a career U.S. diplomat now heading Rand Corp.’s Center for Middle East Public Policy.

Ries sees the need for "more movement on the ground in Syria" before Assad or the rebels are ready to submit to negotiations on the country’s future.

He is hesitant to declare the civil war a stalemate or the Russian-Chinese position unchangeable in the long run. But with rebels pinned down in the urban areas they hold and warding off attacks by Assad’s superior armed forces, he said, no one seems to think Assad is in the kind of imminent danger of being ousted that would be the catalyst for negotiation and compromise.

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Photo: A Syrian rebel fighter last month defends territory near Aleppo, one of many urban battlegrounds the opponents of President Bashar Assad are now struggling to hold. Credit: Zac Baillie / AFP/Getty Images

U.S., allies marshaling African proxies for fight against terrorism

"A quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing."

That was how British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain saw the Nazi threat against the Czech Sudetenland in 1938, a sentiment freshly evoked among war-weary citizens as the United States and its allies ponder moves to oust Islamic extremists from northern Mali, a country most Americans couldn't find on a map.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and diplomatic counterparts from France have been shopping around a plan to train and equip West African troops to drive out the Al Qaeda-aligned militants who hold sway over a swath of northern Mali the size of Texas. Ultraorthodox Muslims this year hijacked a long-simmering rebellion by ethnic Tuaregs and began imposing an extreme version of Islamic law once in power. In July, they took axes to "idolatrous" cultural treasures in Timbuktu, provoking worldwide horror at the destruction.

Like Afghanistan before 9/11, when Taliban collusion with Al Qaeda made the country a training ground for terrorism, Mali left in the grip of militant Islamists runs the risk of becoming the next launch pad for attacks on the United States and its allies.

U.S. interest in rooting out Ansar Dine and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb from northern Mali has intensified in the seven weeks since a suspected terrorist attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. The Al Qaeda affiliates in Mali are believed to have played at least a supportive role in the Benghazi attack.

"The Benghazi event, with the murder of Chris Stevens, has really precipitated American intervention. It's turned the tables in the region," said Ghislaine Lydon, a history professor at UCLA and expert on precolonial Northwest Africa.

Guantanamo terrorism convictions proving vulnerable on appeal

Salim Hamdan has been home in his native Yemen for nearly four years since completing his sentence at Guantanamo Bay for providing "material support to terrorism" -- six years of domestic service to Osama bin Laden as gardener, bodyguard and driver.

One of only seven Guantanamo captives to be sentenced for alleged war crimes by the Pentagon's military commissions, Hamdan had his conviction vacated this week by a unanimous federal appeals court panel on grounds that the assistance he provided the late Al Qaeda leader in Afghanistan wasn't defined as a war crime until five years after his 2001 capture.

Hamdan is already at liberty and moving on with his life, his pro bono attorney reported Thursday after informing his client by telephone that his appeal was successful. The 40-year-old taxi driver with a fourth-grade education was pleased to be cleansed of the "war criminal" label but doesn't plan to pursue an uphill battle for compensation, said the attorney, Harry Schneider of Seattle.

Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, said the government was still reviewing the ruling and would have no comment.

The ruling will serve as binding precedent in the appeals of other Guantanamo detainees convicted for war crimes ex post facto, Schneider predicted. The next likely beneficiary of the tribunal's overreaching prosecutions, defense attorneys say, could be defiant Al Qaeda propagandist Ali Hamza Bahlul, who is serving a life sentence at the U.S. military prison in southern Cuba.

Within hours of the decision by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Australian convict David Hicks' lawyer announced that he would seek to have his client's guilty plea revoked and conditions of his release to Australia stricken. Attorney Stephen Kenny also said in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Co. that he would pursue compensation for Hicks and an investigation of whether the Canberra government aided and abetted his wrongful imprisonment.

A kangaroo skinner who trained at an Al Qaeda base in Afghanistan before fleeing the October 2001 U.S.-led invasion, Hicks was arrested trying to cross into Pakistan and held at Guantanamo for six years. He was released to his homeland as part of his plea deal, which prohibits him from appealing his case or disclosing details of his experience for monetary gain.

Bahlul, a Yemeni like Hamdan, also was convicted at his uncontested 2008 trial of solicitation of murder in a recruiting video he produced for Al Qaeda. David Glazier, an international law professor at Loyola Law School, said legal scholars began speculating that the solicitation charge might be ruled beyond the commissions' jurisdiction after the same Washington appeals court that threw out material support as a legal charge canceled oral arguments in the Bahlul appeal just before it issued the Hamdan decision.

"There's been some discussion in the blogosphere about whether or not this means the end of conspiracy as well," said Glazier, who was a career Navy surface warfare officer before earning his law degree.

Only one of the seven Guantanamo convictions has involved crimes recognized as a violation of the international law of war: the murder, attempted murder and spying charges against Canadian Omar Ahmed Khadr, who was recently transferred to Canadian custody to serve out the six years left on his term.

Prosecutors at the military commissions have relied on material support and conspiracy to get convictions or plea bargains in the few completed cases, but Glazier argues that those "inchoate offenses" aren't considered war crimes under international law. Only after Congress passed the 2006 Military Commissions Act did the Guantanamo tribunal have jurisdiction to try suspects for those crimes, said the appeals court panel, which is made up entirely of Republican appointees.

J. Wells Dixon, senior attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has provided legal representation to hundreds of the nearly 800 men detained at Guantanamo since 2002, predicted that "conspiracy is the next military commissions charge on the chopping block."

"The Hamdan decision is significant because it is an illustration of the inherent problems in creating a second-rate system of justice that we make up as we go along," he said of the commissions, the original version of which was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2006, prompting a hurried redo, the Military Commissions Act, three months later.

Five "high-value detainees" facing death penalty trials for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks have been in the Guantanamo courtroom this week, bringing pretrial motions and theatrics to the forum.

In the first prosecution on charges widely accepted as war crimes, Army Col. James Pohl, the presiding judge, has been inundated with peripheral considerations, such as whether self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed should be allowed to wear a camouflage hunter's vest in the courtroom to project a warrior image.

Pohl has also had to rule on whether mold and rodent infestation at the defense attorneys work space on the remote base compromises their ability to prepare for trial, and whether any mention of mistreatment during CIA interrogations risks revealing national security secrets.

"Regardless of the underlying conduct and the quality of evidence the government presents at trial, there is no certainty that those convictions will stand" federal civilian court review, Dixon said. "For the Obama administration to continue to pursue military commissions charges is a real gamble."

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Photo: Artist's sketch shows alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, right, speaking with a member of his legal team during a hearing at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Credit: Janet Hamlin

 

Secretary of State Clinton takes responsibility for deadly attack in Libya

 
WASHINGTON -- As criticism mounted on the Obama administration, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton acted Monday to shield the president from blame for the deadly September attack on a U.S. mission in Libya, saying that any fault lies with her as America’s top diplomat.

“I take responsibility,” Clinton told a CNN interviewer during a trip to Peru.

U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed Sept. 11 when dozens of heavily armed men drove up in a convoy and attacked and burned the thinly protected U.S. diplomatic mission and a nearby annex in Benghazi, Libya. 

Two State Department security officers who served in Libya this year told a House oversight hearing last week that they had requested an extension of a 16-member military team at the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, several hundred miles away from Benghazi, but that mid-level State Department officers in Washington had rejected the request.

In addition to the congressional probe, the State Department has convened a formal review of the assault, and the FBI has sent agents to Libya to conduct a criminal investigation.

Gaza militants killed in Israeli airstrike

GAZA CITY -- An Israeli airstrike Saturday killed two Palestinian militants and wounded two civilians, medical officials in the Gaza Strip said.

One of the militants, Hisham Sueidani, 43, was believed to be the highest-ranking member and co-founder of  an extremist Islamist group called Tawhid and Jihad, which professes to draw its inspiration from Al Qaeda, officials said. Sueidani's assistant was also killed in the strike, officials said. The pair were targeted as they rode a motorcycle in northern Gaza.

Medical officials said two bystanders were injured, one a 10-year-old boy.

Israeli officials said the group has been responsible for several attacks against Israel.

In addition to firing rockets into southern Israel, Tawhid and Jihad was blamed for the 2011 kidnapping and slaying of Italian activist Vittorio Arrigoni.

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U.S., allies girding for worst-case scenario with Syria's WMD

During a week that witnessed deadly artillery exchanges between Syria and Turkey and a tense showdown over a plane purportedly ferrying munitions from Russia, the arrival of 150 U.S. troops in Jordan was likely to be viewed as token support for an ally coping with a refugee influx from Syria's civil war.

The deployment, though, may be a response to mounting concerns at the Pentagon and among European and Middle East allies that Syria's stockpile of chemical weapons could fall into the hands of hostile forces if the embattled regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad is eventually toppled.

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta disclosed little about the special-forces mission to Jordan when he confirmed it at a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels on Wednesday. But he noted that the United States has been working closely with Jordan to keep track of Syria's weapons of mass destruction as the 19-month-old rebellion grinds on.

Unlike a decade ago, when bad intelligence on Iraq's alleged chemical and biological weapons spurred a clamor for U.S. military intervention, defense strategists appear to be approaching the suspected stockpiles of mustard and nerve gases in Syria with more collaboration and caution.

The resistance to preemptive action isn't just a consequence of lessons learned in Iraq. Syria is believed to have one of the world's largest chemical weapons arsenals, with commercial satellite surveillance and intelligence reports suggesting as many as 50 production and storage sites as well as missiles that could carry the deadly agents beyond its borders. Jane's Intelligence Review reported in 2009 that Damascus had embarked on a major upgrade of its chemical weapons facilities, transforming its Safir site near Aleppo, now the scene of intense fighting, into a credible deterrent to any threat from nuclear-armed Israel.

The scope of the Syrian chemical weapons program and the international community's failure to craft a cohesive plan to stop the fighting confront Western military strategists with the need to plan for a worst-case scenario rather than act to prevent it, analysts say. That means preparing allies in the region to launch a massive rapid-deployment operation after the Assad regime collapsed but before Al Qaeda-aligned fighters or rogue elements of the Syrian rebels could get their hands on the WMD.

The U.S. special forces sent to Amman are probably training Jordanian troops in containment techniques and checking their equipment and chemical-biological hazard protection and practices, said Steven Bucci, a former Army Green Beret officer and senior Pentagon official who is now a research fellow in defense and domestic  security at the Heritage Foundation.

"They will probably be running them through training procedures for dealing with this stuff to secure it and get it under control or to respond to it if it gets used" in a calamitous last battle, said Bucci. "This is about the best use of our military we could have now, and hopefully we're also helping out the Turks."

Bucci testified to Congress in July that even a limited operation to secure Syria's chemical weapons would require more than 75,000 troops -- and many more if launched amid the civil war now raging.

It is "not a viable option" to commit masses of U.S. ground troops to such an operation, Bucci told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade. Any effective force, he said, would have to involve troops from allied Muslim countries also at risk of attack with Syria's chemical weapons.

That's why, he said in an interview Thursday, it is essential for the United States to coordinate with Syria's neighbors now to prepare a post-Assad operation that can prevent terrorist groups or smugglers from making off with the WMD.

Raymond Zilinskas, director of the chemical and biological weapons program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, points out that assessments of Syria's chemical weapons program are largely unverified. But he, too, says the United States and its allies should be girding for the worst.

"From what I understand, these depots are pretty well guarded by the Syrian regime's forces, and they would probably be the last to give up their guarding duties," Zilinskas said. "But if there is a total collapse, there would of course be a threat of jihadists getting these weapons."

Talk of airstrikes to remove the threat is nonsensical, Zilinskas said. Syria has formidable antiaircraft defenses built with Russian assistance, and the international community lacks crucial information on the precise locations, quantities and containment of the gases to be able to bomb them without risking spreading the deadly substances.

"Sarin is pretty volatile. If all these other problems could be resolved, the sarin would probably be destroyed or would be so volatile that it would disappear quickly," Zilinskas said. "But that's not necessarily the case with mustard gas. It's much less deadly but much more persistent. And if the Syrians turn out to have VX, which is a persistent nerve gas, that could cause real problems. That is the worst-case scenario they have to prepare for."

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Photo, top: A military training facility in Russeifeh, Jordan, where U.S. forces and a handful of British allies began training Jordanian commandos this week to respond in case of an attack with chemical weapons from neighboring Syria. Credit: Mohammad Hannon / Associated Press

Insert: A scene from U.S.-Jordanian military exercises in the Qatrana desert in June. Credit: Jamal Nasrallah /AFP/Getty Images

World of woe, little hope of relief, await U.N. General Assembly

When 120 world leaders and their entourages gather at the United Nations this week, the woes of the world will be onstage in all their tragic detail: a civil war in Syria, the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran, reignited ethnic conflicts in Africa and uphill battles against poverty and global warming.

What is likely to be in short supply at the General Assembly are fresh ideas for resolving the kaleidoscope of crises afflicting the planet. The U.N. Security Council has been hamstrung by internal conflicts among its permanent members in devising effective intervention in the Syrian bloodletting, and a colossal conference on sustainable development hosted by the world body three months ago was widely viewed as unproductive.

The Middle East and its myriad security challenges are expected to dominate the marathon of speeches beginning Tuesday, especially against the backdrop of worldwide Muslim outrage over an amateur video made by U.S.-based Christian zealots depicting the Prophet Muhammad as vile and sadistic.

Violent protests over the 14-minute film clip flared earlier this month after a version of "The Innocence of Muslims" was dubbed into Arabic and posted on YouTube. Conservative Islamists, some backed by Al Qaeda-aligned holy warriors, have attacked U.S. and other Western embassies and businesses across the Islamic crescent spanning the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. In the worst of the violence on Sept. 11, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, was killed along with three other Americans at the consulate in Benghazi. On Friday, the Muslim sabbath, enraged demonstrators clashed with police in Pakistan, killing at least 18 people.

White House says Libya attack was terrorism

WASHINGTON -- The White House is now describing the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi as a “terrorist attack,” a shift in emphasis after days of describing the lethal assault as a spontaneous eruption of anger over an anti-Islamic film made in California.

“It is, I think, self-evident that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack,” White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters Thursday as President Obama traveled to Florida for a campaign event. “Our embassy was attacked violently and the result was four deaths of American officials."

Carney said investigators have “indications of possible involvement” of Al Qaeda in the Magreb, but he said there is no evidence “at this point to suggest that this is a significantly pre-planned attack.”

White House officials have not previously described the attack, which killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, as a terrorist act. The administration, and Obama’s reelection campaign, have been sensitive to allegations that the attack involved a security lapse, or a broader policy failure, in the middle of a presidential race.

When Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) called the incident an “an act of terror” last weekend, a spokeswoman for the Obama campaign suggested the senator was being political.

Carney’s comments echoed testimony from National Counterterrorism Center Director Matthew Olsen, who on Wednesday told the Senate Committee on Homeland Security that those involved in the attack were either local militants or foreigners with possible connections to Al Qaeda.

"I would say they were killed in the course of a terrorist attack,” he said of the four Americans.

The White House initially blamed the video, which ridiculed the prophet Muhammad, for anti-American protests and violence that began in Cairo and spread to 20 countries last week.

Carney has gradually calibrated his remarks to say administration officials were waiting on the results of an FBI investigation and that no possible cause had been ruled out.

On Sunday, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, said the attack apparently began as a “spontaneous reaction” to the news of the Cairo protest.

But later “there were extremist elements that joined and escalated the violence. Whether they were Al Qaeda affiliates, whether they were Libyan-based extremist or Al Qaeda itself, I think, is one of the things we'll have to determine,” Rice said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

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Photo: Libyan President Mohammed Megarif speaks Thursday during a memorial service in Tripoli, Libya, for U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three consulate staff killed in Benghazi on Sept. 11. Credit: Abdel Magid al-Fergany / Associated Press

 

 

 

Mideast violence shows 'Arab Spring' still a work in progress

Anti-American violence sweeping the Muslim world has brought a sobering reminder in the West that the heady revolutions of the "Arab Spring" that removed entrenched dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya have yet to bring democracy and stability to the region.

The United States played an especially important role last year as Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Libya's Moammar Kadafi lost power after decades of autocratic rule. But the leaders who have succeeded them have not yet measured up as reliable Washington allies amid mounting pressures by radical Islamists seeking to stake out a dominant role for their religion.

Muslims angered by a crude anti-Islam video produced in Southern California by a Coptic Christian zealot have poured into the streets of major cities in at least 20 countries. The eruption of unrest and vandalism has been directed against U.S. diplomatic missions, schools and commercial icons such as KFC and McDonald's.

The demonstrations and destruction were instigated by Islamic militants, many linked with Al Qaeda, who are attempting to steer the volatile societies emerging from the Arab Spring toward Islamic law, known as sharia, and their narrative that only violence, not political change, will solve age-old problems of economic disparities and sectarian tensions, several Middle East experts said.

"The Arab Spring is still in motion. It's not over," said Ed Husain, senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, observing that the revolutions have brought both positive and negative changes.

The positives include large numbers of young, liberal-leaning activists struggling for more democratic elections, transparent government, better economic conditions and social equality, Husain said. On the negative side, the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt's new political hierarchy and the rising influence of Islamists in Tunisia and Libya have compromised the rights of women, ethnic minorities and adherents to religions other than Islam, he said.

Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi finds himself caught between "competing constituencies," Husain said. Moderate Egyptians want better relations with the West, while conservative  Islamists are attempting to whip up anti-American fervor by casting the 14-minute online trailer of the obscure movie disparaging the prophet Muhammad as evidence of American disrespect for Islam.

PHOTOS: Protesters attack U.S. embassies, consulate

Kori Schake of Stanford's Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, sees the recent violence as a stumble along the path toward democracy by inexperienced leaders of countries in transition.

"We need to be very careful not to overreact to the incidents of the last couple of days. I think these were incidents that were opportunistically taken advantage of by anti-American forces, and in the case of Libya by jihadists in order to try and discredit the positive path those countries are on," said Schake, a professor of international security studies at West Point and a former National Security Council official under President George W. Bush.

She praised Libya's newly elected leaders for their immediate denunciation of the violence that killed four Americans at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, and the government's concession that it needed help in disarming radical Islamist militias still wreaking havoc in the country.

"We need to be a little patient that countries in transition to democracy can sometimes get it wrong," Schake said of the initial failure by Egypt's Morsi to denounce the Tuesday attack on U.S. missions in Cairo and Benghazi. "We need to weight his score by degree of difficulty. He's new at this. He has no models to follow."

TIMELINE: 'Innocence of Muslims' unrest

Some blame the spate of anti-American violence on Washington's new strategy of redirecting diplomatic energies from the Arab world to the Far East.

"There's a feeling that we've lost our way, that there's not that much support for democratic uprisings in the region now," said Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. "There's a sense that the pivot from the Middle East to Asia is turning our backs on the Middle East, that we're running on auto-pilot there."

The United States needs to get more engaged in the Middle East, especially in Syria, where about 20,000 people have been killed in the conflict stemming from President Bashar Assad's repression of a rebellion now in its 18th month, said Pletka. She advocates tying U.S. aid to Egypt to progress in building democratic institutions and ensuring security for U.S. diplomatic representations and businesses in the most populous country of the Middle East.

What role the United States should play in guiding the transitioning countries toward their revolutionary objectives is a question of balance, others note.

"A big part of our hesitation, the look-before-you-leap attitude, comes from lessons learned after 9/11," said Brian Katulis, an expert on U.S. national security policy in the Middle East at the Center for American Progress.

The United States was too quick to send troops into Iraq after the terrorist attacks, he said, and deeply disappointed in their expectation "that this democratic tsunami was going to wash across the region."

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Photo: Libyan followers of the Ansar al-Sharia militant group chant anti-U.S. slogans Friday in Benghazi, Libya, one of at least 20 cities where Islamists vented anger over a crude video denigrating the prophet Muhammad. Credit: Mohammad Hannon/Associated Press