In my first one-on-one meeting in Kabul with Hamid Karzai as president of Afghanistan, he vacillated. He waffled. The leader of one of the toughest countries to lead in the world was being indecisive. I thought: This is not a good sign.

My acquaintance with Karzai began almost 20 years earlier, in Peshawar, Pakistan. When I first saw Peshawar in November 1986, it was like landing on another planet. Bearded men in turbans, women wearing burqas. Donkey carts, camel caravans, herds of sheep, horse-drawn tongas sharing the road with giant smoke-belching Bedford "jingle trucks," gaily painted, noisy little three-wheeled taxis, and hordes of humanity, much of it armed. Narrow, crooked cobbled streets lined with tiny mud-walled shops selling carpets and lapis jewelry. Roaring engines, honking horns, bleating sheep -- and occasional gunfire or explosions -- provided the sound track. I felt I'd walked into the Star Wars bar on Tatooine.

I had gone to Peshawar to set up a training center for Afghan journalists, and to recruit trainees I visited the headquarters of all seven of the major Afghan resistance groups, from the Hezb-i-Islami faction headed by the fire-breathing, acid-throwing Islamist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, to the moderate Afghan National Liberation Front led by the scholarly professor Sibghatullah Mujaddidi. It was at the latter's offices where I encountered Karzai, the ANLF spokesman. I remember the sense of relief, after dealing with some of the less-friendly factions, to be ushered into a clean, comfortable reception room and be greeted by a fit, smiling young man with a trim beard and an already-balding pate. Although he wore the traditional shalwar kameez and sandals, his outfits always seemed tailored, pressed, and spotless. Among the foreign journalists who drank at the American Club in Peshawar's University Town, Hamid Karzai was the unanimous choice as Best-Dressed Afghan.

The India-educated Karzai, fluent in English, enjoyed mingling with the Western crowd. He would turn up at parties hosted by the director of the American Center or the U.S. consul, drinking tea or soda and chatting easily with wine-swilling guests. He also liked to slip into Peshawar's only luxury hotel, the Intercontinental, for a dip in the swimming pool. I once told a gathering of South Asia analysts that while they may have thought of themselves as Afghan "experts," I was the only person in the room who had seen Hamid Karzai in a Speedo.

After leaving Peshawar at the end of August 1988, I did not see Karzai again for 16 years, until in the aftermath of 9/11 when America jumped into Afghanistan with both boots, driving out the Taliban and their Arab "guest," Osama bin Laden, and Hamid Karzai was named head of the new interim government in Kabul.

In 2004, my long-held desire to visit Afghanistan was made possible by an opportunity to serve for four months as an advisor and journalism trainer in Karzai's press office, and I renewed my old acquaintance with the man who was now the leader of the nation. The following spring I invited him to be the 2005 commencement speaker at Boston University, where I teach, and to my great joy he accepted. By then he had been elected to a five-year term in Afghanistan's first ever national election. Before the ceremony, I asked the president if he wished to go on stage in his signature long green chappan and karakul cap, but no, he wanted academic regalia. I helped Karzai into the scholar's black robe, hood and tasseled cap, and under threatening mid-May Boston skies, the president of Afghanistan was greeted as a rock star by 20,000 graduates and guests. While he was in Boston, I slipped him a brief proposal that we do a book, an autobiographical history that I would ghost-write. A month later his chief of staff called from Kabul and said, "The president wants to do the book. What do we do now?"

I went back to Kabul and spent the next three months meeting with Karzai in the evenings after his official days ended, listening to him tell the story of his life and talk about being the leader of his war-ravaged country.

But when I arrived at the palace for our first meeting, the chief of staff took me aside and said, "He has changed his mind. He doesn't think he should do the book." I was panicky. I had come all this way, and taken months off without pay, for nothing? I was shown into his office still wondering what the hell I would say to turn him around. Two of his advisors were with him.

"They don't think I should do this book," Karzai said. "Why should I?"

"Mr. President," I began. "You are reluctant to produce a book as a sitting president. Well, then, let's not think of it as a book. Let's think of it as a sort of long op-ed piece in which a president makes an impassioned plea to the world to not abandon his country again. Think of it as giving a voice to your people." He pondered this. He looked at the advisers. They shrugged and nodded. I had turned them.

"All right," said Karzai. "Let's do it."

But he would change his mind at least twice more during our sessions, and I would go into my song-and-dance and change it back again.

Over the next three months, I lived in a little guest house and waited for my cellphone to ring and an Afghan voice to tell me, "The president wishes to see you tonight." An old black Soviet Lada would appear in the muddy lane at around 7, and I would be driven to the Arg Palace, the sprawling 19th-century compound where Karzai lives and works.

Sometimes the president and I would meet alone, either in his formal office or in a small study behind it where we would watch the television news, munch on raisins and pistachios, drink coffee (he preferred it to tea) and chit-chat. He was always a booster. "Try these almonds," he would command. "Afghan. The best!" Then I would turn on my recorder and he would talk about his life and his people, giving me the material for the book. Some nights he was relaxed and expansive. Other nights he seemed preoccupied, and he had much to worry about in his country. With the recorder on, he was always careful with his words. He did not want anything to get into print that he had not carefully considered, and if I tried to add contextual material in the drafts I showed him he would bark, "I didn't say that! Take it out." But throughout, he came across as a sort of romantic Afghan nationalist, living on visions of the peaceful Afghanistan of his boyhood and hoping to somehow bring about a return to those days.

 Occasionally we would meet at his residence, and after our session I would be invited to dine with the president at a long table that seated at least 20. Magically, at dinner time a dozen or more men -- it was always men only -- would appear for supper with Karzai. I sat at Karzai's right, and he would spoon food onto my plate. "Try this! A great Afghan dish!" We drank pomegranate juice, which he touted for its antioxidant properties. He was an autocrat of the dinner table. All eyes looked to him to lead the conversation, which was always in Pashto or Dari, neither of which I understood. No one spoke to me except Karzai.

One night I arrived at the residence to find him walking brisk laps around his circular driveway, and he commanded me to join him.

In the course of our meetings, which were often interrupted by unscheduled visits from aides and cabinet ministers and by many phone calls, I developed a picture of Karzai the president, trying to reconcile it with my memory of the genial spokesman I had met in Peshawar. It became clear that President Karzai still had a lot in common with that young man -- an eagerness to please, a dislike of conflict, a willingness to compromise, a need to find consensus.  In this spirit he allowed mujahideen warlords who had committed serious war crimes to join the government, while most rank-and-file Afghans would have preferred to see them locked away in Pol-i-charki prison. And while no one has yet accused him of being personally corrupt, he has tolerated corruption all around him, and he tacitly allowed his supporters to commit massive vote fraud in the August election.

Months after I left Kabul, and the book was ready for printing, Karzai waffled again and refused to allow publication. So I adapted the material I had gathered for a new book about the Afghan leader and his troubled country.

At the start of his second term, Karzai is under immense pressure from the new governments in Washington and London to grasp the nettle and clean house. But since the day in December 2001 when he was named head of the new post-Taliban government and had the support of the vast majority of the Afghan people, he has shied away from the hard decisions that might have set Afghanistan on a more promising course. I'm not sure if he has it in him to do it now.

After two years of debate, referendums, furious revision, and campaigning, the fate of the Lisbon Treaty to reform the European Union has come down to the signature of one man. Unfortunately for advocates of European integration, that man is Czech President Vaclav Klaus.

In his latest bid to scuttle the treaty's adoption, Klaus is insisting that a new, basically meaningless footnote be added, a demand that the the Czech government, which previously endorsed the treaty, is grudgingly supporting, despite the fact the treaty had been approved by the Czech Parliament. If he can delay matters long enough until an anti-Lisbon Conservative government comes to power in Britain, Klaus now has a small but not insignificant chance to sink the treaty altogether, a fitting swan song for the lifelong Euroskeptic.

Although mostly known outside his country for his skeptical views on global warming (environmentalism, in his opinion, is "the most prominent antiliberal, populist ideology of the contemporary world, comparable to communism and Nazism.) Klaus is one of the most important figures in post-communist Czech history, and the Lisbon battle is just the latest in a long series of controversial stances in his career. But lately, this lifelong iconoclast appears more and more as a tragic political figure. He is now totally isolated in Europe, shunned by most EU politicians, who view his obstructions as proof of his, and his country's, lack of democratic credentials.

When Klaus first appeared on the Czech political scene shortly after the fall of communism in November 1989, the public viewed him as a godsend. Compared with both the former communist power elite and the anti-communist dissident leaders who came to power at the end of 1989, he appeared, well, very Western.

He differed from the former dissidents not only in ideology but in appearance. Impeccably dressed and groomed, the well-spoken Klaus had nothing but scorn for those hairy men in old sweaters, many of whom still adhered to slightly utopian ideas of post-totalitarian politics.

Former Czech President Vaclav Havel, the unofficial leader of the dissident movement in the 1980s, has recalled that Klaus was first introduced to pro-democracy leaders of the Civic Forum movement during their negotiations with the communist regime in the late 1980s. The dissidents were desperately searching for an economist familiar with Western free market theories. Klaus, who had studied at the University of Chicago as a disciple of Milton Friedman, fit the bill. He was hardly a dissident, having worked for years as a clerk for the Czechoslovak Central Bank -- but he certainly appeared to be competent.

Klaus became the first non-communist minister of finance in the government of "national reconciliation" that was created as a result of round-table talks with the communists in December 1989. He was later reappointed to the same position when the Civic Forum overwhelmingly won the first free elections in June 1990.

By then, however, his disputes with political theories voiced by some dissidents were growing increasingly vocal. Although some former dissident leaders believed that a broadly based civil movement, such as the Civic Forum, could continue governing and represent an alternative to political parties, Klaus wanted to follow political formulas used in the West. As a result, he began to use his increasing popularity to push the Civic Forum to transform into a regular political party.

In 1991, he and his followers broke from the Civic Forum to create a new conservative political party called the Civic Democratic Party. Klaus, who had already begun to be known both at home and abroad as an economic reformer, thus became also the most prominent political reformer in Czechoslovakia, taking this label away from Havel, the other Vaclav.

But 1991 was also the year when it started to be apparent that there were significant differences between Klaus' rhetoric and his policies. Klaus presented himself as a classic neoliberal, but in reality he tried to keep the state in control of many areas of the economy and had little taste for the controversial "shock therapy" privatization tactics used in neighboring Poland.

He defended a policy of what could be called "economic nationalism," keeping the most important Czech companies in Czech hands, and he resisted the privatization of banks. The privatization schemes that were carried out under Klaus' watch were plagued by corruption and lack of transparency.

Klaus also played a key role in the breakup of Czechoslovakia. In 1992, his Civic Democrats won elections in what is now the Czech Republic. In Slovakia, by contrast, leftist and nationalist parties dominated. Sensing the writing on the wall, Klaus began advocating the dissolution of the country.

Although this effort was strongly resisted by President Havel and other former dissidents, Klaus' actions were, in retrospect, quite rational. The Czechoslovakian government was already paralyzed by growing Slovak demands for autonomy, but after Slovak nationalist parties were swept into power in 1992, it became obvious that the state could no longer function.

The fact that Klaus was able to force the volatile Slovak nationalist leader Vladimir Meciar to sit down with him and organize a civilized, nonviolent division of Czechoslovakia into two independent states is today viewed as a major achievement.

It was shortly after this that Klaus' distrust of the European project came to the forefront. Although, as prime minister of the independent Czech Republic, Klaus had submitted the Czech Republic's application for membership in the European Union in 1995, he was always less then enthusiastic about the EU, which he saw as an over regulated socialist enterprise. By the time a successor left-wing Czech government completed the process of accession in 2002, Klaus had already positioned himself as a Euroskeptic.

After losing power in 1997, Klaus had decided to give his Civic Democrats a different image. Reformist policies were to a large extent replaced by an emphasis on nationalism, Euroskepticism, and populism. Klaus' change in tone did boost his popularity to some extent, but was not successful enough to bring him back as the prime minister.

But Klaus accomplished a major political coup in 2003 when he was elected to succeed Havel as the country's president. Ironically, the Czech Republic's most prominent right-winger could never have pulled it off without securing the support of the unreformed Communist Party.

The Czech presidency is traditionally a mostly ceremonial position, and the limits of the office have often proved frustrating for the proactive Klaus. During his first term, he repeatedly tested the limits of his constitutional powers by refusing, for example, to name judges recommended to him by the Ministry of Justice or by refusing to sign international treaties that had been recommended to him for ratification by the parliament. He also vetoed many bills approved by the Parliament, often simply because he disagreed with them ideologically.

This was a departure from Havel's relatively light touch and was certainly not appreciated by the leftist government. Klaus also found himself on a collision course with the pro-EU forces in Parliament when he criticized various reforms the Czech Republic had adopted to meet EU membership criteria.

To maintain high visibility as Czech president, despite his lack of executive powers, Klaus has repeatedly chosen highly controversial topics to call attention to himself. He criticized, for example, the influence of civil society as a new ideology, which he calls "NGO-ism." He also protested what he deems a new, potentially totalitarian ideology, which he calls "human-rightism." And he has fought repeated wars with the judiciary, describing its influence in modern democratic societies as a "tyranny of judges."

Klaus also became one of the chief opponents of the conventional wisdom on global warming, claiming, for example, that "icebergs melt only in the films of Al Gore," whom he describes as "the arch-priest" of the new totalitarian ideology of environmentalism. In the past few years, he spent more of his intellectual energy and travel time fighting the proponents of global-warming theories than speaking on relevant issues in Czech politics.

Klaus' dislike of the European Union is the one issue that has remained dominant throughout his years in power, and it has only grown more extreme over time. Although he once felt that realistically, the Czechs have no alternative to EU membership, he now claims that the EU is more dangerous to Czech security than is Russia.

He is also a staunch opponent of the common European currency and he does not mind using offensive language and exaggerations to support his views.  In 1999 he declared that "efforts to introduce the euro are to a large extent driven by EU bureaucrats who eat breakfast in Venice, lunch in Paris, and dine in Copenhagen, and do not like changing money three times a day."

His opposition to further European integration stems not only from his nationalism, which is rooted in romantic 19th-century ideas of national identity, but also from his libertarian and conservative beliefs. In Klaus's world, the EU is an increasingly over-regulated, socialist organization that artificially suffocates the national identities of its members.

The Lisbon fight is Klaus' highest profile anti-European battle yet. and the president has made numerous efforts to sabotage the approval of the treaty in the Czech Republic. Last year he made an emotional appeal to the Constitutional Court to reject the treaty because it is supposedly incompatible with the Czech Constitution.

The Constitutional Court in the end ruled the opposite, and subsequently both houses of the Czech Parliament recommended the treaty to Klaus for ratification. Now that Ireland has finally approved the treaty in its second referendum, and Klaus' closest ally in the European Union, Polish President Lech Kaczynski, ratified the treaty in Poland, the completion of the ratification process in the entire EU depends on Klaus' signature.

To at least delay the ratification, he now wants the EU -- after the ratification process has been finished in 26 other EU countries and despite the approval of the treaty by the Czech Parliament -- to guarantee to the Czech Republic that the European Charter of Rights, which is part of the Lisbon Treaty, will not apply to the Czech Republic and cannot, therefore, be used by Sudeten Germans, 3 million of whom were expelled from Czechoslovakia after World War II, to reclaim their property confiscated by the Czechoslovak state.

This is a transparent ploy. All legal studies show that there is no such danger, because the charter cannot be applied retroactively. The EU may try to accommodate Klaus's demand, but more likely he is on a collision course not only with the EU, but also with the Czech government and major political parties, who increasingly view his behavior as violating his constitutional duties.

A man who was once viewed by many Czechs as a guarantee that Western democratic procedures would prevail in the Czech Republic is now seen as defying these very procedures for the sake of his own increasingly extremist beliefs. It's a sad end for a remarkable political career.

Of all the leaders arriving at the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh today -- the third such meeting of finance and other government ministers to discuss the crisis and recovery since the crash of Lehman Brothers a year ago -- French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been among the most headline-stealing. He has called for strict compensation limits for the banking executives who precipitated the crisis and has said he will ask for sanctions on countries that do not comply. The famously energetic French leader has even threatened to walk out of the summit if his demands aren't met.

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Early word out of Pittsburgh indicates that his brash style isn't necessarily going to get him what he wants -- but luckily, he's got a secret weapon. One of his cabinet officials has been making the press rounds with him, playing good cop to his bad cop in copious interviews in print and on television. That is Christine Lagarde, France's enigmatic finance minister and the former chair of the international law firm Baker & McKenzie. She has emerged in the past year as a major political player regarding the recession, and as a foil for Sarkozy. When he shouts, she coos. When he rages, she deploys wit. And when he bellows, she demurs.

That coolly philosophic attitude -- underpinned by a deep knowledge of labor law, corporations, and international management -- has made Lagarde one of Europe's most valuable economic negotiators. If Sarkozy doesn't get what he wants in the final communiqué, Lagarde, his more sensible half, just might.

Christine Lagarde was born to academic parents in Paris on New Year's Day in 1956. Her father, who died when she was a teenager, was a professor of English, literature, and ancient Greek, and her mother was a grammar-school teacher. To this day, Lagarde frequently quotes philosophy, and she nearly entered legal academia herself. She excelled in her youth at school and athletics, growing to 6 feet tall and winning a bronze medal in the French national synchronized swimming competition at age 15.

After finishing high school, she spent a formative year on an American Field Service exchange program at the swank Holton-Arms girls' school in Bethesda, Md., just outside Washington. It was 1974, at the height of the Watergate crisis. Lagarde interned on Capitol Hill as an office assistant for William Cohen, a Republican congressman from Maine who later served as defense secretary in Bill Clinton's cabinet. She grew close with her American host family, and enamored of the country, which she says is more "positive" than France. She also garnered a skill which would prove useful later in life: perfect command of English.

But she returned home to study political science at Institut d'Etudes Politiques, d'Aix. Initially, she considered becoming part of the civil service, but was rejected (one of the few failures Lagarde admits) from the highly selective program and decided to become a lawyer instead, focusing on employment law.

Despite her high marks at graduation, she was roundly rejected at French law firms, so sexist was the legal culture in Paris. Then, she interviewed at Baker & McKenzie, a large Chicago-based firm with a clientele of major international corporations like Coca-Cola. The Paris office had a female partner, Monique Nion, who became Lagarde's mentor. "There was a feeling of 'I went through hell, my dear, and by God, so will you,'" she told Investor's Business Daily. (Her office did not respond to a request for an interview.)

From the Paris office, Lagarde quickly ascended through the firm's ranks by managing major antitrust and labor cases, including ones with mass redundancies. She made partner in 1987 and then became the head of the firm in Western Europe, shuttling between Brussels, Milan, Madrid, London, and other cities. The firm still had an old-boy culture, which Lagarde undercut by outworking her colleagues and maintaining a cutting wit, one colleague recalls. "She was a very smart, very talented even-hand."

In 1999, she became the company's first ever female chairman (she dislikes the terms "chairwoman" and "chairperson"), moving to Chicago with the mission of streamlining and centralizing the diffuse practice. Derided as "McFirm" by its competitors, Baker & McKenzie had become massive and inefficient, earning far less per partner than firms like Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. In her five years at the helm, she increased revenue by half, to more than $1 billion annually, and integrated the company's 68 offices. She also radically transformed partner compensation, despite serious opposition (pay cuts were "like taking your lunch," the colleague says), making the system more results-based and fairer.

Early one morning in 2004, Lagarde received a call from Paris. Then-Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin was on the phone, asking her to come back to France and join the government. She left her $1 million job to become a junior trade minister in President Jacques Chirac's cabinet and has spent the past five years ascending the ranks into France's political elite. In the trade bureau and as agriculture minister, a post she held briefly in 2007, she earned a reputation as a good soldier for Chirac, who advocated for economic dirigisme, or state controls. She won particular plaudits for her advocacy of certain trade protections for farmers -- antithetical to her current positions though that may have been.

When Sarkozy became president in May 2007, Lagarde became finance minister, a position Sarkozy himself had once held. Despite their wildly different rhetorical styles, they shared an economic vision for France: free markets, less regulation, and globalization. The country had languished in lean times even before the financial crisis hit. It had high unemployment and ran a deficit, largely due to its strict labor laws. Lagarde and Sarkozy developed a $15 billion series of tax cuts and employment-law alterations. They ended the 35-hour work week, making overtime tax-free. They capped the maximum income tax at 50, rather than 60, percent. They eased restrictions on entrepreneurs. Lagarde also slashed the ranks of her own massive department in the process of cutting 50,000 jobs from the famously bloated French civil service. To make up for easing taxes on the wealthy, she increased the non-progressive value-added tax. The motto for Sarkozy's economic plan was, "Work more, earn more."

To sell the unpopular changes, Lagarde turned to philosophy. In an address to the National Assembly, she said, "There is hardly an ideology that we haven't turned into a theory. We have in our libraries enough to talk about for centuries to come. This is why I would like to tell you: Enough thinking, already. Roll up your sleeves." She also took aim at France's intellectuals and socialists, like Bernard-Henri Lévy and Ségolène Royal. "They want to bring people down to solidarity," she has said. "They regard work as alienation in the old Marxist understanding."

Such pronouncements, coming as part of what critics see as her affection for the "Anglo-Saxon" model of capitalism, have earned her an unflattering nickname: "The American." Her asceticism -- apparently something the French associate with those across the pond -- probably also contributed. Lagarde is a non-drinking, non-smoking, yoga-performing, lap-swimming, health-obsessed vegetarian. (She has given up synchronized swimming, saying, "Legs up in the pool is not the expected behavior of the minister of economy.") Most famously, she has said that she keeps her "work-life balance" -- a term she readily mocks -- of caring for her two sons (who have always lived in Paris and are now in their early 20s) and juggling a punishing schedule by sleeping just five hours a night.

Since the crisis, however, Lagarde has done almost everything in opposition to the Americans. She has become a strong voice for international financial reforms: beefing up the powers of the G-20 Financial Stability Board, levying penalties on tax havens, regulating investment vehicles like hedge funds, raising capital requirements, and, most contentiously, imposing restrictions on bankers' pay (a measure U.S. President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown oppose) -- something she has plenty of experience with from her time at Baker & McKenzie.

She has done all of this in her characteristically calm-spoken, sensible way, though she has toughened up her rhetoric in the face of U.S. and banker intransigence. She said it would be "absolutely outrageous and extraordinary if leaders of other countries did not understand the necessity to change the system and not go back to business as usual." But because of her relative pro-capitalism (compared with, say, the Italians) and her relative calm (compared with Sarkozy), she has become a key figure in the frantic backroom negotiations occurring before the announcement of the G-20 agreements.

But has anything come from them? In the negotiations, which have been ongoing for a year, Lagarde has suggested alternatives to Sarkozy's pay caps, such as targeted taxes and regulating what percentage of profits can be paid in bonuses. Reportedly, the French have not won fixed caps on executive pay in the final communiqué, but the document makes concessions to the country's requests for more international cooperation and capital requirements. (The European Commission may impose executive pay standards instead.) This small victory is all due to Lagarde, the sensible voice who allows Sarkozy to be outrageous. Indeed, it's "The American's" insistence that ensured France had a real voice at the table.

In April 1991, in the fallout of the Gulf War, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein brutally suppressed Kurds and Shiites who were answering U.S. President George H.W. Bush's call to overthrow him. With America standing by, Saddam used his Army helicopters to ensure the perpetuation of his bloody rule.

Although many in the United States protested, one observer forcefully supported the White House's decision not to intervene at that moment. "There is good reason -- perhaps even right reason -- for the administration's position," he wrote. "It has to do with our definition of the American national interest in the Gulf. This definition does not imply a general resistance to 'aggression.' ... And this definition surely never implied a commitment to bring the blessings of democracy to the Arab world. ... [No military] alternative is attractive, since each could end up committing us to govern Iraq. And no civilized person in his right mind wants to govern Iraq."

The observer was Irving Kristol, the so-called "godfather" of neoconservatism. But if that doesn't sound like neoconservatism, it's because, well, it isn't. Kristol's pronouncement was, in fact, plain realpolitik, as far as possible from the pro-intervention hawkishness that characterizes neoconservatism today. This doesn't mean Kristol, who died Sept. 18 at 89, wasn't a neoconservative. Rather, it shows how much Kristol's neoconservatism -- the movement he invented, or at least successfully branded and marketed -- differed from its descendents today.

In fact, the original strand of neoconservatism didn't pay any attention to foreign policy. Its earliest members were veterans of the anti-communist struggles who had reacted negatively to the leftward evolution of American liberalism in the 1960s. They were sociologists and political scientists who criticized the failures and unintended consequences of President Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" programs, especially the war on poverty. They also bemoaned the excesses of what Lionel Trilling called the "adversary culture" -- in their view, individualistic, hedonistic, and relativistic -- that had taken hold of the baby-boom generation on college campuses. Although these critics were not unconditional supporters of the free market and still belonged to the liberal camp, they did point out the limits of the welfare state and the naiveté of the boundless egalitarian dreams of the New Left.

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These thinkers found outlets in prestigious journals like Commentary and The Public Interest, founded in 1965 by Kristol and Daniel Bell (and financed by Warren Demian Manshel, who helped launch Foreign Policy a few years later). Intellectuals like Nathan Glazer, Seymour Martin Lipset, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, James Q. Wilson, and a few others took to the pages of these journals to offer a more prudent course for American liberalism. They were criticized for being too "timid and acquiescent" by their former allies on the left, among them Michael Harrington, who dubbed them "neoconservatives" to ostracize them from liberalism.

Although some rejected the label, Kristol embraced it. He started constructing a school of thought, both by fostering a network of like-minded intellectuals (particularly around the American Enterprise Institute) and by codifying what neoconservatism meant. This latter mission proved challenging, as neoconservatism often seemed more like an attitude than a doctrine. Kristol himself always described it in vague terms, as a "tendency" or a "persuasion." Even some intellectuals branded as part of the movement were skeptical that it existed. "Whenever I read about neoconservatism," Bell once quipped, "I think, 'That isn't neoconservatism; it's just Irving.'" Regardless of what it was, neoconservatism started to achieve a significant impact on American public life, questioning the liberal take on social issues and advancing innovative policy ideas like school vouchers and the Laffer Curve.

If the first generation of neoconservatives was composed of New York intellectuals interested in domestic issues, the second was formed by Washington Democratic operatives interested in foreign policy. This strand gave most of its DNA to latter-day neocons -- and Kristol played only a tangential role.

The second wave of neoconservatives came in reaction to the nomination of George McGovern as the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate. Cold War liberals deemed McGovern too far to the left, particularly in foreign policy. He suggested deep cuts in the defense budget, a hasty retreat from Vietnam, and a neo-isolationist grand strategy. New neocons coalesced around organizations like the Coalition for a Democratic Majority and the Committee on the Present Danger, journals like Norman Podhoretz's Commentary (the enigmatic Podhoretz being the only adherent to neoconservatism in all its stages), and figures like Democratic Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson -- hence their alternative label, the "Scoop Jackson Democrats."

These thinkers, like the original neoconservatives, had moved from left to right. Many of them, even if members of the Democratic Party, ended up working in the Reagan administration. Others joined the American Enterprise Institute and wrote for Commentary and the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. Moreover, some original neoconservatives, like Moynihan, became Scoop Jackson Democrats. Thus, the labels became interchangeable and the two movements seemed to merge.

But this elided significant differences between them. On domestic issues, Scoop Jackson Democrats remained traditional liberals. In the 1970s, while Jackson was advocating universal health care and even the control of prices and salaries in times of crisis, Kristol was promoting supply-side economics and consulting for business associations and conservative foundations. On foreign-policy issues, Scoop Jackson Democrats emphasized human rights and democracy promotion, while Kristol was a classical realist. They agreed, however, on the necessity of a hawkish foreign and defense policy against the Soviet empire.

These differences became most visible at the end of the Cold War. Now that the "evil empire" had fallen, what was America to do? Was the defense and promotion of democracy and human rights the reason for fighting the Soviets -- or was it the other way round, just a useful tool in this fight? Kristol, who had always taken the second view, logically advocated restraint and pragmatism for post-Cold War America and had these words for some of his "fellow" neoconservatives:

The only innovative trend in our foreign-policy thinking at the moment derives from a relatively small group, consisting of both liberals and conservatives, who believe there is an "American mission" actively to promote democracy all over the world. This is a superficially attractive idea, but it takes only a few moments of thought to realize how empty of substance (and how full of presumption!) it is. In the entire history of the U.S., we have successfully "exported" our democratic institutions to only two nations -- Japan and Germany, after war and an occupation. We have failed to establish a viable democracy in the Philippines, or in Panama, or anywhere in Central America.

Although a few other neoconservatives followed Kristol's realist line (Glazer and, to some extent, Jeane Kirkpatrick), for most of the others the idea of retrenching and playing a more modest international role disturbingly looked like the realpolitik that had led to détente and other distasteful policies. The vast majority of Scoop Jackson Democrats advocated a more assertive and interventionist posture and continued to favor at least a dose of democracy promotion (most notably Joshua Muravchik, Ben Wattenberg, Carl Gershman, Michael Ledeen, Elliott Abrams, Podhoretz, and others). Their legacy would prevail.

Thus, the neocons -- the third wave -- were born in the mid-1990s. Their immediate predecessors, more so than the original neoconservatives, provided inspiration. But they developed their ideas in a new context where America had much more relative power. And this time, they were firmly planted on the Republican side of the spectrum.

Kristol's son, Bill, played a leading role, along with Robert Kagan, in this resurrection through two initiatives he launched -- the Weekly Standard magazine and the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a small advocacy think tank. Bill Kristol and Kagan initially rejected the "neoconservative" appellation, preferring "neo-Reaganism." But the kinship with the second age, that of the Scoop Jackson Democrats, was undeniable, and there was a strong resemblance in terms of organizational forms and influence on public opinion. Hence the neoconservative label stuck.

The main beliefs of the neocons -- originated in a 1996 Foreign Affairs article by Kagan and Bill Kristol, reiterated by PNAC, and promulgated more recently by the Foreign Policy Initiative -- are well-known. American power is a force for good; the United States should shape the world, lest it be shaped by inimical interests; it should do so unilaterally if necessary; the danger is to do too little, not too much; the expansion of democracy advances U.S. interests.

But what was Irving Kristol's view on these principles and on their application? Toward the end of his life, the elder Kristol tried to triangulate between his position and that of most neocons, arguing in 2003 that there exists "no set of neoconservative beliefs concerning foreign policy, only a set of attitudes" (including patriotism and the rejection of world government), and minimizing democracy promotion. But at this point, the movement's center of gravity was clearly more interventionist and confident of the ability to enact (democratic) change through the application of American power than Kristol could countenance. He kept silent on the 2003 invasion of Iraq, while the Scoop Jackson Democrats and third-wave neocons cheered.

Thus, ironically, when most people repeat the line about Kristol being "the godfather of neoconservatism," they assume he was a neocon in the modern sense. But this ignores his realist foreign policy -- while also obscuring the impressive intellectual and political legacy he leaves behind him on domestic issues.

Among the many kinds of political animals found in Washington, few are as widely admired as the Gray Man. Quietly competent, somewhat bland, respected by Republicans and Democrats alike, and most comfortable working tactfully behind the scenes, the Gray Man is a dying breed in today's American politics. He is often spotted in a beige trench coat or gold-buttoned navy blazer in his native environment, the Senate committee hearing or the long seminar at Brookings. Unlike his flashier cousins, such as the Red-Blooded Partisan or the Silver-Tongued Orator, the Gray Man eschews the media spotlight -- in fact, he speaks in public as little as possible. In a Fox News era, he is unapologetically a C-SPAN kind of guy, to the eternal gratitude of those in politics who are counting on him to get the real work done while others blather endlessly.

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Modern-day specimens of the breed include Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Sen. Richard Lugar, but the unquestioned Alpha is George Mitchell. Since retiring as the Democratic Senate majority leader in 1995, Mitchell, 76, has patiently worked to resolve numerous seemingly intractable conflicts, including Northern Ireland and the steroids scandal in baseball, winning plaudits for his tenacity and evenhandedness while remaining curiously anonymous to most of the American public. Now, as President Barack Obama's special envoy to the Middle East, Mitchell finds himself back in the spotlight -- or as close as he ever gets to it, anyway -- ahead of this week's United Nations General Assembly session, which could serve as a venue for relaunching the troubled peace process. Obama's plan to meet with Israeli and Palestinian leaders in New York is a start. The looming question, given the particularly difficult circumstances that prevail in the Middle East, is whether even this most distinguished of Gray Men is capable of brokering a broader breakthrough.

A former Army intelligence officer and federal judge of Lebanese descent, Mitchell is fond of telling people, "There's no such thing as a conflict that cannot be ended." Indeed, he seems to take genuine pleasure in addressing the planet's most arcane, contentious debates. Prior to being drafted by Obama in January, he was participating in a bipartisan panel of elder statesmen including his old Republican Senate colleague, Bob Dole. When the panel presented its recommendations on U.S. health-care reform this summer, Dole joked, "George left early because he thought solving Mideast peace would be easier." The audience laughed, but those who knew Mitchell wondered if he had, in fact, departed in search of a bigger challenge -- the holy grail of negotiators.

During his numerous trips to the Middle East this year, Mitchell has largely employed the same techniques as he did early on in Northern Ireland. There, he began by meeting individual parties in the conflict and, essentially, letting them vent for as long as they liked. In his memoir Making Peace, Mitchell recalled his first encounter with the Rev. Ian Paisley, in which the unionist minister, evidently displeased by the appointment of an envoy with some Irish roots, refused to even sit down. Paisley limited his responses to Mitchell's polite queries to a loud, grating: "No. No. No. No."

"I was accustomed to rough-and-tumble political debate," Mitchell later wrote, "but I'd never experienced anything like this." By most accounts, his initial closed-door meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and others have been much more polite, but only incrementally more productive.

Mitchell listened attentively while in Belfast, betraying no sign of fatigue or frustration, allowing his patrons to exhaust themselves with invective until they were finally ready to be led -- by the nose, if necessary -- toward compromise. Among Protestants and Catholics alike, Mitchell slowly built personal relationships with the same attention to detail that made him such an effective majority leader in the Senate, where getting bills passed means not only understanding the political stakes for all the major players, but also the seemingly tiny details that can impact the timing of a vote, such as who has to be back in their home district for their kid's soccer game.

"He is a man of serious intent and serious purpose," Mark Durkan, a key player on the Irish nationalist negotiating team, told the BBC in 1999. Mitchell was patient when necessary -- he famously described the Northern Ireland peace process as "700 days of failure and one day of success" -- but he was also unafraid to set tough deadlines. The famed 1998 "Good Friday accord" was concluded after a 36-hour sprint of negotiations that ended, Mitchell wrote, with a final phone call from unionist leader David Trimble and "tears welling in my eyes." Also worth noting: For all its fanfare, that agreement was basically a place holder, one that wasn't fully secure until final peace accords were signed in 2007. Mitchell's professed willingness to focus on what's possible under given circumstances -- even if that means an incomplete deal that doesn't fully please anyone -- seemingly fits well with the ethos of compromise that characterizes the Obama administration (see Health Care, Fall 2009).

One enduring truth about mediation is that all sides usually know, deep in their hearts, what a final agreement will look like. The role of the mediator, then, is to help create the political and personal circumstances necessary for such an agreement to take root. That certainly seems to be the case in the Middle East, where many observers think that a peace deal will inevitably involve an independent Palestinian state, Arab recognition of Israel's right to exist, a freeze and partial dismantlement of Israeli settlements, and some kind of special status for Jerusalem. The broad outlines of an end-state solution were equally apparent from the start in Northern Ireland. Mitchell was the man who was able to convince the leaders to put years of mistrust aside and accept the inevitable.

So what made the difference? What led to the breakthrough? In a 2007 interview with the Guardian, Mitchell zeroed in on the popular mood that prevailed among all sides of the public debate in Northern Ireland during the 1990s: "The two messages [political leaders] were getting, and really they're still getting from their constituents, are: 'Look, we want this settled. We don't want this conflict to continue.'"

Unfortunately, that kind of popular groundswell, that feeling of inevitability, is precisely what seems to be missing in the Middle East in late 2009. The Israeli public is focused on the looming threat from Iran's nuclear program, and in February it elected a leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who long resisted the idea of a Palestinian state. The Palestinians, meanwhile, are preoccupied with their internal split between Fatah and Hamas, which in turn makes a united negotiating front impossible. Polls show that neither Palestinians nor Israelis have much faith in Obama's ability to broker a deal. Meanwhile, it is highly debatable whether, if Obama were to list his most urgent policy priorities, Middle East peace would make the top five. "The chances of meaningful success are slim to none," said Aaron David Miller, a Middle East analyst at the Woodrow Wilson International Center who has advised six U.S. secretaries of state on the peace process. Of Mitchell, he says: "I admire the man. I offer my condolences on the mandate."

In the short term, the bar for success is relatively low -- it would essentially constitute Mitchell shepherding Israelis and Palestinians back to the table for meaningful negotiations for the first time since December. (This week's sit-down doesn't count, Abbas' spokesman has insisted.)

However, given the present climate, creating a real sense of urgency might require a more forceful, vocal, even inflammatory kind of leadership than a Gray Man is able to provide. There is a time for table-pounders, too; maybe this is one of them. "George is not the kind of guy who will slam his notebook shut and say -- 'I'm leaving,'" Miller says. James Baker, the brash Texan who was secretary of state and Middle East point man under former President George H.W. Bush, did precisely that -- three separate times, and to great effect, Miller says.

The danger is that, precisely because of his tact and reserve, Mitchell could be endlessly strung along by parties who don't fear him -- or his notoriously cool boss, Obama. After eight months of talks with little tangible result, that concern is already percolating in much of the Arab press. The Syrian newspaper Tishrin noted in an editorial this week that "after five visits to the region, Mitchell is still touring" while "the peace process is completely stuck." Meanwhile, Lebanon's Al-Safir worried that "between every Mitchell visit, more Palestinian land is being lost and more Israeli settlements are being built."

For his part, Mitchell seems acutely aware of the risks, pressing energetically -- and a tad publicly, by his standards -- on his most recent tour for a freeze in Israeli settlement construction and an Arab gesture toward recognizing the Jewish state. And at least one of his former critics thinks he's the right man for the job. "Making peace is a difficult, exhausting and, at times, hugely frustrating process," Gerry Adams, the Irish Republican leader, wrote in the Guardian when Mitchell was appointed to his new position earlier this year. It was precisely Mitchell's personality -- "good-natured, humorous and tolerant," Adams stated -- that allowed him to win over negotiators in Northern Ireland who had become experts at filibustering outside negotiators. "It is this experience," Adams predicted, "that will stand him to good stead as he embarks on his journey to the Middle East." We'll see.

Advocates for NATO may trumpet the transatlantic organization as the world's most powerful military alliance, but in their more reflective moments they're liable to admit that it's also a group prone to crises of identity. Indeed, it's no accident that in searching for a new leader, NATO members decided to forgo tapping a military expert and settled instead on Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a politician with a talent for steering fragile political groups through treacherous waters -- and one who has had his own crises of identity along the way.

Rasmussen, who assumed office as secretary-general on Aug. 1, served as Denmark's prime minister for the past eight years, and his lasting that long was itself an achievement. The success of his political career has been largely due to the ideological flexibility with which he has pursued it. Rasmussen, who grew up in modest circumstances in the Danish countryside, fancies himself a down-to-earth pragmatist, whereas his critics see a shameless opportunist.

The points of contention are many. Rasmussen first earned considerable attention on Denmark's public stage for a polemic he published in the early 1990s harshly criticizing the country's social welfare policies. By the time he was a candidate for prime minister in 2001, he had reconciled himself to the basic shape of the welfare state and was running instead on a tough law-and-order platform. After that election, to form a functioning coalition, he had his free market Venstre party forge a working relationship with the country's right-wing populist Conservative People's Party, a potential partnership that had previously been taboo. But after taking office, when one of his political priorities was at stake -- introducing the euro as Danish currency -- he didn't hesitate to drum up votes on the other side of the political spectrum, among the leftist Socialist People's Party. Opportunist or not, he certainly knows how to cut a deal when the situation demands it.

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A few of his pet projects as prime minister will serve as background for his new position at NATO. Rasmussen strongly thought that Denmark, despite its specially designed "opt-out" from EU foreign-policy decision-making, needed to lead an active foreign policy. For Rasmussen, isolationism is a strategic mistake. In office, he was eager to prove himself a strong ally of the United States during the Bush administration's war on terrorism, arranging to send troops to both Afghanistan and Iraq. He didn't shirk the international stage when Islamic countries agitated against cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad that had been published in a Danish newspaper. He also made good-faith efforts to ease Copenhagen's sometimes strained ties with Europe.

Rasmussen's experience negotiating between warring sides should serve him well at NATO, though his difficulties will radically increase: Instead of a handful of political parties, Rasmussen is now responsible for mediating between 27 independent countries, each with its own understanding of its national security interests. And the stakes that Rasmussen faces are higher than they ever were in Copenhagen. Tensions between member states aren't just expressed in the boardrooms of Brussels -- their effects are felt on the battlefields of Kabul, Kunduz, and Kandahar.

Of course, the infighting that Rasmussen inherits is nothing new. Ever since NATO officially started its mission in Afghanistan six years ago, member states have been saying that they're disappointed with the results. "Sometimes it seems the only thing they can agree on is that someone else is to blame," one NATO official, who wished to remain anonymous, told me. The Europeans say the United States made everything more difficult with its invasion of Iraq and its propensity for killing and injuring Afghan civilians. America's refrain is that the Europeans have neither sent enough troops to put up a serious fight, nor loosened the rules of engagement sufficiently for those few troops who are on the ground.

This is the breach Rasmussen is going to have to step into, and it's not clear how he might go about healing it. With fully half of U.S. troops in Afghanistan fighting outside the umbrella of NATO's mission -- instead, they're under the auspices of U.S.-led Operation Enduring Freedom -- NATO has little leverage to use against Washington. It's a point underscored by the fact that the Barack Obama administration hardly solicited the advice of its allies for its strategic review.

As for persuading European member states to increase their commitment to the war, Rasmussen shouldn't get his hopes up. Some U.S. allies feel that they've already done more than their fair share: The Netherlands and Canada have suffered disproportionate casualties in Afghanistan's dangerous southern provinces and have declared they're unwilling to renew their stays.

Other countries -- most prominently Germany, whose troops are stationed in the relatively quiet northern provinces -- argue that they haven't been given enough credit for the political difficulties they bear for continuing to participate in the mission. It's a position for which Rasmussen might have sympathy, having been on the receiving end of criticism in Denmark for sending troops to both Afghanistan and Iraq. "Among experts in Europe, it's an acknowledged fact that Afghanistan could use more troops," said the German Marshall Fund's Constanze Stelzenmüller. "But the public is not on board."

Even if Rasmussen felt inclined to coerce countries like Germany into shouldering an additional burden in Afghanistan, he would lack the wherewithal and clout to do so. Rasmussen's predecessor as secretary-general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, got nowhere with his attempts to berate Berlin. At a 2007 NATO summit, Scheffer lamented, "Not all allies -- including some very important ones -- want to go to the places where the fighting is." German Chancellor Angela Merkel's curt reply made clear that she had little appetite for public bullying.

Rasmussen will no doubt be relying on more personable and discrete methods. Rasmussen received rave reviews for his term as president of the European Union in 2002, a job that requires liberal doses of flattery and deference to be doled out in multiple directions. This is the man, after all, whom Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi once referred to as "the most handsome prime minister in Europe." And in truth, the office of secretary-general demands someone capable of charming an audience. It's a position designed not to resolve the differences among NATO allies, but to work those differences into slightly more manageable form.

Indeed, one forgets how many disagreements have already been artfully papered over during the course of the Afghan war. The long-standing -- and in the American context, little-remarked-upon -- division between NATO's U.N.-approved mission and the independent U.S.-led Operation Enduring Freedom has given ample cover to European governments that want to portray their engagement as a strictly humanitarian endeavor. It has allowed the German government, when describing its presence in Afghanistan to its pacifist public, to avoid using the laden term "war."

That sort of diplomatic ambiguity will be Rasmussen's best friend in the coming years. The best he can hope to achieve may be a continued de facto Americanization of the war, carried out under the imprimatur of the NATO alliance. U.S. troops have, in most instances, proven more efficient than their allies at the intricacies of counterinsurgency and the prosaic protocols of training their Afghan counterparts.

With President Obama sending more troops this year and likely next, U.S. commanders might place a higher emphasis on maintaining full control over their military strategy -- in which case, Rasmussen could seize the opportunity to negotiate with European governments to retreat into the background for a more politically sustainable supporting role. And Europeans might indeed be willing to lend their continued titular support, as long as they're not expected to equally share the sacrifice of blood and treasure.

The same sorts of elisions will likely mark the final product of Rasmussen's other major task, the drafting of NATO's strategic concept for the next 10 years. It's there that he perhaps stands the best chance of dispelling the air of crisis that has hung about the Western military alliance since its very inception. "The member states have very different interests. That's always been the case," said the German Marshall Fund's Stelzenmüller. "At the same time, NATO is also more robust than people give it credit for."

Whether the same can be said of Rasmussen, we'll soon see.

The real winner of Afghanistan's presidential election will not be Hamid Karzai or his main rival, Abdullah Abdullah. It's a man named Mohammad Qasim Fahim. He is Afghanistan's senior-most military commander, with the lifetime rank of marshal, and was Karzai's running mate during the campaign. Whether Karzai or one of his opponents wins, Fahim will hold and exercise extraordinary influence over the country's military and security apparatus -- more so than the elected president.

This means the real loser of Afghanistan's presidential election -- besides the Afghan people -- will be the United States' long-standing ambition to train and equip enough Afghan forces to allow for an eventual withdrawal of the U.S. military. Building up the Afghan military and police is at the heart of Gen. Stanley McChrystal's latest assessment for Washington of what needs to be done in Afghanistan. But McChrystal's forces will be training Afghan soldiers and police to work for Fahim: a human-rights-abusing, drug-trafficking warlord who might also have had a role in al Qaeda's  assassination of his political godfather, Tajik warlord Ahmad Shah Massoud, on Sept. 9, 2001 -- an operation widely viewed in retrospect as a precursor to the terrorist attacks in the United States two days later.

The story of Fahim underscores the implausibility of U.S. President Barack Obama's plans for the "Afghanization" of the conflict -- the shifting of security responsibility to Afghans, the only exit strategy that either the Obama administration or the George W. Bush administration before it has ever put forward. Fahim was born in 1957 to a prominent Tajik military and political family. After completing traditional training in Islamic law and theology in the late 1970s, he joined militia forces commanded by Massoud, the legendary "Lion of Panjshir" who was the pre-eminent mujahedeen commander in northern Afghanistan after the 1979 Soviet invasion.

Some accounts of Fahim's career say that he affiliated with Massoud's forces in the early days of the Afghan jihad and fought against the Red Army during the 1980s. Others say that Fahim actually worked in the intelligence services of the Soviet puppet regime in Kabul, only siding with Massoud after it was clear that Soviet forces were going to withdraw. Fahim's continued close ties to Russia suggest, at minimum, that he is capable of playing many sides of Afghanistan's complex political chessboard.

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Following the Red Army's withdrawal in 1989 and the collapse of the nascent Afghan government in 1992, the new president, Burhanuddin Rabbani, installed Fahim as the head of intelligence. By 1996, internecine struggles among former mujahedeen commanders -- as well as rampant corruption and brutality toward the people living under their purview -- created an opening for the mostly Pashtun Taliban to expand from their base in southern Afghanistan and capture Kabul. Subsequently, Massoud, Fahim, and other non-Pashtun warlords joined together to form the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, usually referred to as the "Northern Alliance."

When I joined the U.S. National Security Council (NSC) staff in late 2001, senior Bush administration officials were already developing an opinion of the Northern Alliance as a cohesive group of heroic and relatively moderate regional commanders who united to combat the rigidly Islamist Taliban. This assessment continues to influence much Western discussion of Afghanistan. It is also, to be blunt, a myth.

The Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara warlords who nominally came together under Massoud's umbrella barely tolerated each other for five years (from 1996 to 2001) and only to resist territorial encroachment by the Taliban. Each warlord had his own individual agenda to consolidate power in particular areas of Afghanistan -- and ultimately those individual agendas trumped the alliance's "shared" goal of fighting the Taliban.

Within the Northern Alliance's command structure, Fahim became Massoud's intelligence and security chief -- a position that Fahim held at the time of 2001 Massoud's assassination. Although CIA analysts later raised the possibility of the warlord's complicity in his patron's death, senior Bush administration officials were never willing to investigate that possibility seriously because they had already decided to make Fahim a critical player in their strategy for "managing" post-Taliban Afghanistan.

Massoud was assassinated two days before the September 11 attacks. Two al Qaeda operatives of Tunisian origin posing as Moroccan-Belgian journalists met with Massoud to "interview" him. A camera was stuffed with explosives, which the operatives detonated, killing Massoud. Four days later, Fahim took over as the effective leader of the Northern Alliance.

In the years following Massoud's death, Belgian and French authorities arrested and tried various individuals for their contributions to the assassination -- such as stealing passports and providing the camera that would later be turned into a bomb. But these European investigations did not address critical questions about how the operation played out on the ground. How did the two al Qaeda operatives get through the security screening normally required to reach Massoud? How did they maintain their cover while spending several days at one of Massoud's compounds before the actual interview? How did they get explosives through various layers of physical screening and bring them into Massoud's presence?

Massoud's assassination has been widely interpreted as an important precursor to the 9/11 attacks. As the 9/11 Commission documented, al Qaeda's killing of Massoud was coordinated with a Taliban offensive to destroy the Northern Alliance once and for all, and both might have been linked to al Qaeda's plans to attack the United States at roughly the same time. The idea was to eliminate Massoud, the Northern Alliance's most capable leader, destroy the Northern Alliance as an effective fighting force, and enable the Taliban to take full control over all of Afghanistan. This would have made it harder for the U.S. military to respond to the 9/11 attacks by using the Northern Alliance to go after al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

But this strategic logic could also take in personally ambitious figures in the Northern Alliance willing to cooperate with al Qaeda to advance their own agendas. We know the Northern Alliance warlord Abdul Rasul Sayyaf facilitated the assassins' entry into Northern Afghanistan. But what of Fahim? It was his job to vet foreign visitors. So how would he explain the fact that two fake journalists from Tunisia, posing as Moroccans, with Belgian passports -- along with their equipment, including the camera that they proposed to use to record their interview with Massoud -- were never physically screened?

U.S. officials dealing with Fahim should have asked him this question. They didn't. After Massoud's death, any potential loose ends that might have led inquiring minds to focus on other Northern Alliance figures were tied up. Although one of Massoud's assassins died when the camera exploded, the other survived and was captured before he could escape from the compound. But the captured assassin was himself shot and killed later that day while allegedly trying to escape, apparently before being interrogated.

Fahim's behavior after Massoud's assassination also should have compounded suspicions about his possible collaboration with al Qaeda and the Taliban. As U.S. intelligence and military officials scrambled in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to establish robust operational channels to the Fahim-led Northern Alliance, he failed to lead his forces into battle against the advancing Taliban, though he had promised to do so. Indeed, in October 2001, as the United States was launching Operation Enduring Freedom, Fahim left for Tajikistan. In the end, the senior Bush administration officials with whom I worked turned a willful blind eye to Fahim's bizarre behavior, ultimately dismissing it as that of a formerly staunch anti-Taliban leader who had just gotten lazy. The CIA continued providing him with millions of dollars in funding, though it soon became clear that he was skimming substantial portions for his personal enrichment.

Following the expulsion of the Taliban from Kabul and other major cities, Fahim became Karzai's defense minister and then also his first vice president. As James Risen recently reported in the New York Times, the Bush administration began receiving intelligence reports in early 2002 describing Fahim's ongoing involvement not only in unsavory human rights practices, but in Afghanistan's resurgent drug trade. But by then, the White House had largely abandoned the goal of creating a genuinely national military and security apparatus for the Karzai government. Instead, it shifted to an exit strategy contingent on turning over security responsibilities to regional warlords, such as Fahim. (My dissatisfaction with this approach prompted me to stop working on Afghanistan policy at the NSC and to focus instead on the Iranian and Persian Gulf parts of my portfolio.)

U.S. law prohibits the provision of military aid to figures known to be involved in narcotics trafficking. How could the Bush administration square this legal constraint with its interest in continuing to funnel assistance to Fahim and others? Then-Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley (who became national security advisor during Bush's second term) ordered that any discussion of the issue be limited to a so-called "restricted deputies committee." The White House said the United States provided support to Afghanistan's Defense Ministry, but never explained that its assistance then trickled to warlords. And, no less than Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, who oversaw military assistance programs in 2002 and 2003 and is now ambassador to Afghanistan, has said on the record that the Bush administration never placed any restrictions on his dealings with Fahim.

Washington's Fahim problem seemed to subside in 2004, when Karzai decided not to have Fahim as his vice-presidential running mate. In recognition of Fahim's "services," though, Karzai bestowed a lifetime military rank of "marshal" on him, thereby acknowledging Fahim's continuing influence over Afghanistan's evolving military institutions. By 2006, Karzai judged that he needed to designate Fahim formally as a "senior advisor." And, when the Obama administration came to office at the beginning of this year publicly questioning the desirability of Karzai's continued service as president, Karzai once again turned to Fahim -- with his control over significant armed cadres and ability to turn out votes in Tajik areas -- to stand as his running mate.

There was a brutal logic to Karzai's choice of partners. Even if the incumbent president does not technically win re-election, Fahim provides Karzai with the armed muscle he would need to challenge the published results. Furthermore, "Marshal" Fahim does and will continue to exercise more influence over Afghanistan's military and security forces than whoever ends up the winner of the presidential election. That reality underscores the flawed logic of the ambition to bolster Afghanistan's military and police forces as an exit strategy. There is no reason to think that Fahim's military, even with U.S. training, would be a reliable bulwark against an al Qaeda resurgence in Afghanistan. That leaves General McChrystal -- and President Obama -- without a strategy for extricating the United States from its deepening Afghan quagmire.

The center-right Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has dominated the Japanese Diet for more than a half-century. It oversaw the economic stagnation of the 1990s, and it revitalized itself in the 2000s only to fall into fractious disarray by 2006. The voting public has finally had enough -- and the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) looks almost certain to take power in the Aug. 30 general election.

The stark shift in political tides is perhaps best described as the LDP's loss, more so than the DPJ's gain. But the opposition party has transformed itself from an inchoate also-ran to a disciplined and united political movement. That change is mostly due to one man: Ichiro Ozawa, the DPJ's recently disgraced and highly powerful former leader. And though he won't be at the head of the party, his role within it is one of the big questions facing the DPJ as it looks toward victory this month.

Ozawa has loomed large in Japanese politics since the end of the Cold War. He took over his father's seat in the Japanese Diet, the country's legislature, in 1969 and became a popular LDP leader in the late 1980s. From early in his career, he was the political godson of Kakuei Tanaka, the legendary leader who refined the LDP's political machine and paved over Japan in the process.

By the early 1990s, Ozawa became disenchanted with the LDP's pork-barrel politics. He started advocating for the "normalization" of Japanese security policy -- a commitment of forces outside Japan, as with Operation Desert Storm. Most of all, he became convinced that the country needed more vigorous democracy, in which parties competed for votes by crafting the best policies. Ozawa gathered a group of loyalists who shared his ideas. Eventually, his faction pulled out of the LDP entirely, toppling its government in 1993 -- the first time since 1955.

Ozawa, though not in the Cabinet, was the key player in the short-lived non-LDP coalition government. (The LDP regained power in 1997.) He supported the fragile coalition from behind the scenes, helping to broker the most important political deals. Additionally, he published Blueprint for a New Japan, a highly influential manifesto, calling for electoral reform and more assertive foreign-affairs and defense policies.

As a fulfillment of his Blueprint, he sought to build a stable and strong opposition party throughout the 1990s. This led to a few misfires. He helped create the New Frontier Party, which contested one general election before dissolving in 1997. Then he supported the Liberal Party, already composed mostly of politicians loyal to him. It briefly joined the LDP in a tumultuous coalition government, but never gained political traction.

Ozawa finally found a viable vehicle when he merged the Liberal Party with the fledging DPJ in 2003. He cajoled the party into the center, forging a consensus position on foreign policy among party members with markedly different ideologies and improving the recruitment of viable candidates for office. He also bulked up the party's agricultural policies to better appeal to longtime LDP supporters in depressed rural areas. During his three years as party leader -- from 2006 until this spring -- the DPJ became disciplined and more focused.

This meteoric political career -- within the leading party and against it -- has garnered Ozawa an outsize and controversial reputation. He has no shortage of enemies from across the political spectrum. Many politicians and commentators deride him for his Machiavellian behavior and secrecy: He rarely explains the reasoning behind his decisions and expects loyalists to trust his lead unquestioningly. Notoriously, in 2007 he entered into negotiations to create a grand coalition government without even consulting many LDP party elders.

Others accuse him of caring more about politics than policy. The implication is that Ozawa is unchanged from his days as Tanaka's young lieutenant, more interested in acquiring power than in figuring out how to use it. The arrest of a political aide on charges of taking illegal contributions from a construction company -- the scandal that led to Ozawa's resignation as party leader -- seemed to confirm the criticism. Ozawa is, above all, polarizing. The intense hatred of his critics is matched by the equally intense loyalty of his longtime allies. And because Ozawa rarely gives interviews and often works behind the scenes, he has preserved an air of inscrutability.

Now, Yukio Hatoyama is the DPJ's leader and the presumptive prime minister. But Ozawa remains kingmaker: the DPJ's chief election strategist with the fealty of a band of party members in the Diet who could ultimately number up to 100. Thus, he and his supporters will be critical to the success or failure of a DPJ government, especially leading up to Japan's upper house elections next summer.

The question now is how to fit this outsize figure into the new government -- a problem similar to the one faced by Democratic Party loyalists in the United States over Bill Clinton's role in the Obama administration. Conventional wisdom holds that the DPJ must find a role for him within the party so that he uses his considerable talents without undermining or overwhelming its leadership during its tenuous fresh tenure -- not an easy balance to find.

One idea -- allegedly favored by Hatoyama -- is for Ozawa to move into the post of party secretary-general. In this role, Ozawa would discipline DPJ backbenchers and prepare the party for the next election -- a task that might perfectly suit his talents. But a Secretary-General Ozawa would surely be tempted to question the Cabinet and influence its policies from the outside. This would undercut one of the DPJ's core principles: streamlined, transparent, accountable government.

Thus, it could also make sense to include Ozawa in the Cabinet -- better that he disagree with a policy from within the government. Hatoyama has a reputation of being a weak leader, with poorly developed policy ideas: The success of his Cabinet will depend on having it staffed with strong ministers. (This contrasts with the government of former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, a charismatic and popular figure.) Ozawa would be best suited at a post crafting political strategy, as a deputy prime minister or minister without portfolio. But having Ozawa in the Cabinet would naturally stir criticism that Hatoyama is the elder leader's puppet.

Despite these criticisms and concerns, it is possible to overstate Ozawa's influence. Unlike the unwieldy coalition that formed a government in 1993, when Ozawa toppled the LDP, the DPJ is more unified -- and there is more to the party than Ozawa. Further, a DPJ government presents Ozawa with the best opportunity for him to implement his long-standing vision of a new Japan. Whether Ozawa ends up as kingmaker or good soldier, then, the ascendancy of the new party bodes well for the Japanese.