David Rohde

Next week in the Mexican resort town of Los Cabos, Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin will meet on the sidelines of the G20 summit. Mitt Romney and his aides say that after 15 months of dithering on Syria, it is time for Obama to confront Putin on an increasingly brutal conflict that has left 10,000 dead.

“President Obama’s ‘reset policy’ toward Russia has clearly failed,” Romney said in a statement this week. “Russia has openly armed and protected a murderous regime in Syria, frustrated international sanctions on Iran and opposed American efforts on a range of issues.”

In an interview on Thursday, Richard Williamson, a senior foreign policy adviser to the Romney campaign, argued that the White House should stop naively hoping the Russian leader will end his support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

“Since when is it the U.S.’s job to sublet its interests to an authoritarian leader in Moscow?” Williamson asked. “What world do they think they live in?”

Election-year hyperbole aside, the Romney camp is right. Moscow is not going to give the U.S. an easy way out of Syria.

From the cold, calculating viewpoint of Vladimir Putin and his inner circle, the Syrian conflict is actually a boon for Russia. For the last year, a former superpower that had lost virtually all of its relevance in the Middle East has been the focus of global attention.

“When you look at it from the Russian point of view, they have actually felt that they have a winning strategy,” Carroll Bogert, a senior official with Human Rights Watch who recently visited Moscow, told me. “They have forced the world to beat a path to their door, that they hold the trump card, that they are the most influential over the Syrian regime.”

And yet, Russian and the American views on Syria could hardly be further apart. In a world where technology should make facts clearer, delusions fester in Moscow. Bogert said some Russian media outlets have reported that the NATO bombing campaign in Libya killed 10,000 civilians. Western journalists and human rights groups put the number at roughly 70.

Some in the Russian foreign policy establishment admit that Assad’s forces are carrying out human rights abuses, but most Russian analysts accept the Assad regime’s claim that it is crushing an al Qaeda-backed Islamic insurgency. Most importantly, it is unclear that Moscow has the influence it claims over Assad. Instead of putting the Kremlin’s perceived power to the test and potentially failing, dragging out the conflict is in Putin’s interest.

Assad, meanwhile, is slowly escalating his attacks and betting that Washington’s tolerance will rise as well. The Syrian leader knows that a major U.S. military intervention is unlikely in an American election year.

“Right now, the regime is testing the U.S. resolve, slowly but surely escalating its violence to see if Washington responds,” said a Damascus-based analyst who asked not to be identified. “It’s been doing this for 15 months and hopes to go all the way. They believe they have much more to do on the scale of horror.”

So far, the Obama administration has adopted a series of easy – and often contradictory – approaches in Syria. It is letting Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar arm the Syrian opposition. At the same time, it claims to support a diplomatic solution.

The result is that the Russians believe the American support for diplomacy is insincere. And the Syrian opposition believes American officials are not seriously backing them. Meanwhile, Islamists are a growing force in the Syrian opposition.

In a telephone interview from Turkey this week, Mahmoud Mosa, a civilian member of the Syrian opposition said U.S. officials had pledged to provide non-lethal aid earlier this spring. Today, he is still waiting.

“They promised me they would provide us with communications and some medical equipment,” he said. “But it has not happened.”

In his meeting with Putin next week, Obama should set a deadline for one final diplomatic push. It is unlikely that it will happen, but the so-called Yemen option – in which Assad departs Syria as Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh left his country – should be tried.

After that, the Obama administration must finally make a hard choice – and take a political risk. It must either turn its back on the horrors the Assad regime metes out against its own people and be hammered by Romney, or use American air power to help Turkey and the Arab League establish safe zones in northern Syria.

The Obama administration must be willing to use force in Syria. The risks of inaction now outweigh the risks of action.

A bloody stalemate has emerged. As the opposition receives more arms, it is slowly gaining control of rural areas but unable to seize cities. Government forces and militia, in turn, have grown more brutal.

Bosnia and other conflicts show that the longer the fighting drags on, the more bitter the postwar divide. More important, as the Sunni-Shia fighting escalates in Syria, it is destabilizing Iraq, Lebanon and other neighboring countries. The risks of a regional conflagration are growing.

If a final attempt at diplomacy fails, American air power should be used to help Turkey and the Arab League create safe havens in northern Syria along the Turkish border. The use of force should be limited. No American ground troops should be sent to Syria. And no American military action should take place without the full support of the Arab League.

The creation of safe havens will save civilian lives and reduce the influence of Islamists in the Syrian opposition. It will show the Syrian elite that the Assad regime is finished. And it will end Putin’s perverse free ride.

PHOTO: Demonstrators hold an illustration depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin, with Russia’s national flag and the Syrian opposition flag, during a protest against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Kafranbel, near Idlib June 12, 2012. REUTERS/Shaam News Network/Handout

PORTLAND, MAINE – Angus King is trying to turn back time in this state. I hope he can do the same across the country.

In a speech Saturday morning, the self-made millionaire-turned-independent politician deftly displayed the qualities that helped him serve as a popular two-term governor here from 1995 to 2003. The 68-year-old hailed Abraham Lincoln, Bill Bellichick, Sam Walton and his teenage son in a 30-minute talk that made the audience at the Maine Historical Society’s annual meeting howl with laughter. King was a self-deprecating, pragmatic and non-partisan everyman, a character type that flinty and fiercely independent Maine voters have sent to Washington for decades.

But as in the rest of the nation, politics in Maine have dramatically changed in recent years. The state’s dynamic new political force is Governor Paul LePage, a take-no-prisoners, Tea Party-backed conservative Republican. Since winning a three-way race for governor with 39 percent of the vote in 2010, LePage has assailed public employee unions, unleashed blistering attacks on his opponents and delighted his conservative Republican base. Like them or not, the Tea Party has out-organized its rivals and gained an outsize voice.

King, a former Democrat who now rejects both Republican and Democratic dogma, is either an anachronism or a sign that some voters are tiring of partisanship. Keep in mind that a record number of Americans – 40 percent – identified themselves as independent in a January Gallup poll; 31 percent identified as Democrats and 27 percent as Republicans.

For now, King is the favorite to win the Senate race. And in one unlikely but possible scenario, he could be the deciding vote in an evenly divided Senate.

A lawyer, businessman and 18-year host of the Maine public television show Maine Watch, King’s long-shot campaign for governor in 1994 was the first time he had ever run for public office. Bitter partisanship between Democrats and Republicans and a green party candidate who drew 6 percent of the vote, helped King eke out a win with 35 percent of the vote. So did the $950,000 that King – whose alternative-energy business boomed at the time – spent on the race.

In office, King supported abortion rights but opposed increasing the minimum wage. He oversaw the largest increase in conservation lands in Maine’s history but opposed regulations supported by environmental groups. And while cutting some taxes, backed a program that gave every seventh- and eighth-grade student in the state a laptop computer.

Re-elected in a landslide in 1998, he supported George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential campaign. (“I thought he was a compassionate conservative,” King told me in an interview after his Historical Society stemwinder) but backed John Kerry in 2004. (“I didn’t like the direction that the Bush administration had taken,” he said, “particularly in starting two wars and tax cuts that weren’t funded.”)

As evidence of his bipartisanship, King’s campaign says the bills he proposed during his eight years in office had 891 Democratic sponsors or co-sponsors and 755 Republican sponsors or co-sponsors. His self-described political philosophy is: “I call ‘em as I see ‘em.”

More than anything, King is an iconoclast. The day after he completed his second term in office, he, his wife and two youngest children set out on a five-month road trip across the United States. King, a self-described environmentalist, piloted a diesel-burning, 40-foot-long RV with a car towed behind for 15,000 miles through 33 states. He also owns a Harley.

Olympia Snowe’s surprise February decision not to seek re-election prompted King to enter the race. Her complaint that partisanship had made it impossible to get anything done in Washington is King’s battle cry.

The independent argues that average Americans are turning less partisan, not more partisan. “I think we’re divided among the people who talk a lot,” he said.

As he campaigns, he says, he hears a clear message from 95 percent of voters. “Why can’t they talk to each other?” he said, paraphrasing voter questions. “What happened to common sense? Why can’t they work together?”

King said he was “neither arrogant enough nor naïve enough” to think he can single-handedly ease Washington’s partisanship. But he believes there is a “nascent moderate caucus” of senators from both parties “who realize that things are not going right.” In a closely divided Senate, that group could be “very influential.”

King will not say which party he will caucus with if elected, but in this year’s presidential election, he is backing Obama. He said Mitt Romney’s failure to support the bailout of the auto industry or the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan, as well as his hawkish foreign policy advisers, worry him.

At the same time, he opposes some of Obama’s signature decisions, including Dodd-Frank financial industry regulations, the troop surge in Afghanistan and the president’s own failure to embrace Simpson-Bowles as a bipartisan compromise. King said he would have supported the 2009 stimulus and Obamacare as imperfect answers to dire problems.

On the economy, King accuses both parties of embracing false “silver bullets.” Liberal calls for increased stimulus spending and conservative calls for tax cuts are not panaceas. He says the government should spend heavily on infrastructure, research and development, and education, but end its role there.

“We need the federal government to provide infrastructure and leadership on issues like education and research,” he said. “But in the long run the federal government cannot be the creator of jobs.”

As both parties become more partisan, according to King, they are driving “whole swaths” of voters to become independents.

“They have essentially purged or otherwise narrowed their bases,” he said. “But by doing that they’ve pushed a lot of people toward the center.”

King is leading in the polls, and Maine political scientists say the race, for now, is his to lose. But with control of the Senate potentially at stake, both national parties – and so-called super PACs – are expected to savage the Maine independent. King, meanwhile, promises not to run a single negative ad.

Ronald Schmidt, a political science professor at the University of Southern Maine, said that the state’s Tea Party-backed governor is creating a new style of politics in Maine. Governor LePage, who is also a deft politician, may be calculating that having a small but highly motivated base may be enough to again defeat a divided opposition. If a centrist like King is going to win Maine’s Senate race, Schmidt said, moderates need to be as motivated as Tea Party members.

“Can the moderate Republicans organize themselves that well?” Schmidt asked. “Can the moderate Democrats?”

This year pundits and the media will rightly focus on the presidential race. But elections like this one are hugely important as well. Whether an Obama or Romney administration takes office in January 2013, it will face a dysfunctional Congress unable to enact desperately needed reforms. Sending moderates like King to Washington and ending our poisonous, take-no-prisoners politics is vital.

This state’s pragmatic, non-partisan tradition – and King – is deeply appealing to me. In November, I hope King still appeals to Maine voters as well.

PHOTO: Angus King’s candidacy announcement at Bowdoin College in March. Courtesy Portland Press Herald.

American officials inspect a field in Helmand, 1960s

Eight years ago, a 72-year-old American aid worker named Charles Grader told me a seemingly fantastical story. In a bleak stretch of Afghan desert that resembled the surface of Mars, several dozen families from states like Montana, Wisconsin and California had lived in suburban tract homes with backyard barbecues. For 30 years during the Cold War, the settlement served as the headquarters of a massive American project designed to wean Afghans from Soviet influence.

American engineers oversaw the largest development program in Afghanistan’s history, constructing two huge earthen dams, 300 miles of irrigation canals and 1,200 miles of gravel roads. All told, the project made 250,000 acres of desert bloom. The town, officially known as “Lashkar Gah,” was the new capital of Helmand province and an ultra-modern world of workshops and offices. Afghans called it “Little America.”

Intrigued, I hitched a ride to the town with Grader a few weeks later. A weathered New England blue blood, Grader was the last American to head the Kabul office of the U.S. Agency for International Development before the 1979 Soviet invasion. In 2004, he was back in Afghanistan working as a contractor, refusing to retire just yet and trying, it seemed, to do good.

From the moment we arrived in Lashkar Gah, I was transfixed by Little America, its history and its meaning. At enormous cost, a sweeping American Cold War effort had temporarily eased the destitution of one corner of Afghanistan but failed to achieve its lofty goals. Surveying the town, I desperately hoped America could do better.

Over the next eight years, an epic tragedy unfolded in Helmand. All told, 858 American and British troops have died in the province since 2001 – nearly twice as many as in any other Afghan province – and the U.S. and British governments have spent billions of dollars in a province twice the size of Maryland with a population of 1 million. Hundreds of foreign contractors arrived to train Afghan police, farmers and government officials as well.

A clear pattern emerged. When massive international efforts were made, real progress emerged. The provincial capital and other large towns in central Helmand grew more secure and thrived economically, and narcotics cultivation dropped by one-third. But in isolated rural areas poverty, corruption and Islamic conservatism defied a scattershot American effort. As American and British forces prepare to withdraw next year, Afghans fear that the gains will crumble.

Over the course of four years, from 2004 to 2008, I visited Helmand roughly every six months. I embedded with American military units but found myself drawn to the American civilian effort again and again. Creating a crude but functioning Afghan economy, government and schools, it seemed, was the key to long-term stability.

In the end, Helmand proved tragic. I met dozens of well-intentioned American and Afghan civilians who found themselves trapped in a system marred by inconsistency, short-term goals and a focus on American – not Afghan – priorities. Speed, visibility and American political needs ruled. Patience, complexity and deference to Afghans were shunned.

Instead of triumphing, many of the Americans I met there ended up dejected, confused and cynical. What happened in Little America – and what it says about America’s place, role and future in the world – haunts me as well.

*  *  *

In June 2004, accompanied by eight Afghan security guards, I drove into Lashkar Gah with Grader and found a bustling town of 100,000 people filled with shops and open-air markets. But the prosperity was illusory. The boom was largely fueled by Helmand’s opium trade, which by then had been spreading across the province for two and a half years since the fall of the Taliban.

In the center of town, the remains of Little America still stood. The one-story suburban tract homes built by Americans during the Cold War were inhabited by Afghan families that had erected walls around them, a sign of differing Afghan and American notions of privacy. Rows of pine trees still lined some streets. And the headquarters of the Helmand Valley Authority – an impressive two-story office building – was in remarkably good shape. In some ways, Lashkar Gah recalled a small town in Texas, which bustled in the morning and grew still in stifling afternoon heat.

The province’s governor, Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, was allegedly enmeshed in the opium trade, residents later told me, and enriching his own tribe at the expense of others. When I asked him, Akhundzada repeatedly denied engaging in trafficking or targeting other tribes. Over time, though, the drug trade and the corruption it spawned would act as a cancer in Helmand, creating dubious fortunes, deep inequality and simmering anger at the government.

In a series of meetings with local officials, Grader promised to create public-works projects that would repair the province’s American-built irrigation system, employ large numbers of farmers and give them an alternative to poppy growing. As we crisscrossed the town that day, he defended the Cold War effort in Helmand. Yes, it had enormous cost overruns and failed to irrigate the acres promised, he said, but it trained thousands of Afghans.

“I feel so good about the education here,” he said after meeting a second Afghan engineer taught by Americans in the 1970s. “USAID trained a lot of people.”

Lanky, with a thick shock of gray hair and a faded all-American look, Grader was a marker of how the American approach to development had changed since the Cold War. No longer a government worker, he was a private contractor paid $130,000 a year by Chemonics International, a for-profit consulting firm based in Washington. From Kabul, he managed a $130 million USAID contract to revitalize agriculture and slow the exploding cultivation of opium poppy, the raw form of heroin, across southern Afghanistan.

Instead of USAID implementing projects itself, the agency doled out government aid money to private contractors like Chemonics, who then hired a cascading series of subcontractors to actually carry out the work. Chemonics was one of dozens of Washington-based contracting firms known as “Beltway bandits” established in response to the privatization of government services by the Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations. The owner of Chemonics at the time, Scott Spangler, worked for USAID during the first Bush administration. During the 1990s, he and his wife contributed $98,000 to political candidates, all Republicans. By 2004, 95 percent of the firm’s $185 million in annual revenue came from USAID.

Afghans loathed foreign contractors, and cited studies showing that 40 percent of foreign aid eventually returned to donor countries in the form of contractor profits. An Afghan engineer who worked for Grader said both Americans and Afghans were corrupt. Americans made their money through high overhead and expense rates, he said. Afghans made their money through old-fashioned kickbacks and bribes.

“For you, it’s white-collar crime,” he told me. “For us, it’s blue-collar crime.”

Perennially clad in brown bucks, khaki pants, and blue Brooks Brothers button-down shirts, Grader was an eclectic Cold War throwback with a renaissance flair. He was the son of a postmaster and a housewife, and his family affectionately dubbed him “The Indiana Jones of Marblehead,” a reference to the community north of Boston the Graders had inhabited since the 1700s.

After graduating from high school, he went to sea as a sailor on a Liberian tanker. Later, he attended the Coast Guard Academy, earned a bachelor’s degree from Boston University, studied at the London School of Economics, received a doctorate in economics from the Fletcher School of Diplomacy and earned an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology .

In a USAID career that spanned the 1960s and 1970s, Grader made his name as an advocate for reducing American staff at USAID missions and increasing local national staff. After retiring from USAID , Grader served as CEO of the world’s largest bauxite mine in Guinea for five years, ran the senior executives program at MIT for a decade and then returned to Afghanistan in 1996 as managing director of Afghan Aid, a British NGO.

A divorced father of two and lifelong vegetarian, Grader lived in a rented house in Kabul and spent his nights cooking cheese soufflés, listening to Italian opera and reading Thucydides. He worried that America was in danger of following the path of ancient Athens, overextending itself and succumbing to Sparta.

Sometimes, Grader overextended in his own life. In 1997, he was nearly captured and killed by the Taliban while working with his Afghan Aid team in northern Afghanistan. In 2003, airport customs officials arrested him in New Delhi after they found British colonial-era rifles from Afghanistan in his suitcase. Falsely accused of smuggling antiquities, he spent five weeks in a fetid Indian jail. When American diplomats came to visit Grader, they found him teaching microeconomics to other inmates.

After spending the night in Lashkar Gah, we made the long journey back to Kabul. During the drive, Grader grew pensive. American society had changed since the Cold War, he told me. Companies were less loyal to workers. Government agencies were more politicized. Expediency was the norm.

“I’m frightened by what we’re seeing,” he told me. “I really feel the integrity is less.”

Later, I learned that Grader was right about USAID. The agency was a shell of its Cold War self. Exaggerated accounts of American aid being poured down “foreign ratholes” prompted Congress to slash its budget. USAID’s worldwide staff had shrunk from a high of 17,000 during the Vietnam War to 3,000 in 2004. Following the 9/11 attacks, the agency’s budget doubled, but it received virtually no additional staff to manage a torrent of spending.

Grader said that when he ran USAID Afghanistan in 1977, 100 Americans managed a $25 million annual budget, monitoring roughly $250,000 each. In 2004, 60 Americans managed roughly $500 million, or $80 million each. Staffers struggled to design, put out to competitive bid, and monitor hurried and sprawling reconstruction projects.

For Grader and other USAID veterans, the post-2001 effort in Helmand was an anemic epilogue to an intrepid American Cold War effort. “Our policy is screwed up, and it’s costing us dearly in time, treasure and goodwill,” he told me, warning that Afghans would quickly tire of foreigners. “It really bugs me how inept our government is operating.”

At the time, I assumed Grader was exaggerating. Like generations before him, he saw youth as feckless and society in decline. Four months later, though, Chemonics fired Grader after only 10 months on the job. Company officials said they could not comment on personnel decisions. Grader said he was forced out after he dared clash with USAID officials about the agency’s programs.

*  *  *

Several months after visiting Little America with Grader, I returned to Helmand to learn more about the contractors leading the U.S. effort. My guide was a 40-year-old ex-U.S. Army paratrooper who asked to be identified by a pseudonym – Bob Williams  – for safety reasons. Williams’s small contracting firm was the subcontractor Grader hired to actually carry out Chemonics’s agricultural development work in Helmand.

An affable businessman with a soft spot for journalists, Williams agreed to give me a tour of his USAID-funded agricultural development projects in northern Helmand, one of the province’s most dangerous areas. I was nervous. Williams relished the excitement.

As we sped across central Helmand’s Dasht-e-Margo, or “Plain of Death,” in a battered Toyota pickup truck, Williams casually chatted with me. Disdainful of the bulletproof vests worn by other contractors, Williams was dressed like a suburban American father on a Sunday afternoon. He wore baggy blue sweatpants, a loose white T-shirt, bright silver Nike sneakers and a baseball cap from “Ritchie Brothers Auctioneers,” a Fort Worth, Texas firm that sold used construction equipment.

The vista outside our windshield was otherworldly. Instead of driving down a road, we followed a worn set of tire tracks across a gravel-strewn desert. The earth seemed eternally flat, with heat waves shimmering on the horizon. There were no trees, plants or other signs of life. Everything was a variant of the color brown.

Behind us, two of Williams’s Afghan employees drove their own pickup truck as backup. So much chalk-like dust seeped into the cab that my ballpoint pen stopped working. After we crossed an asphalt road, Williams made a breathless announcement.

“We’re north of the highway,” he said. “This is bad guys’ land.”

As we continued driving, Williams’s life story emerged. The son of a lawyer and a stenographer, Williams grew up on the East Coast. After serving in the army and graduating from his state university, he married his college girlfriend and moved overseas. Williams was an American adventurer like Grader, but of a different generation.

After the 9/11 attacks, business exploded. By the time I met him in 2004, he had a $4 million operating budget, 50 employees and a dozen American government and United Nations contracts to build roads, repair irrigation canals and teach farming across southern Afghanistan. He specialized in completing projects in areas where other contractors dared not tread. Taking risks, he found, paid handsomely.

“This whole security thing has become a convenient thing for people to hide behind,” he told me. “I’m no braver than anybody else.”

In truth, the agricultural development program Williams implemented for Chemonics and USAID was a shadow of a similar USAID Cold War effort in Helmand. In the 1970s, a dozen Afghan extension agents worked in each district. In 2004, USAID – via Williams – employed only two per district.

In theory, using private contractors should have created competition for USAID contracts. Instead, Taliban attacks in southern Afghanistan prompted many firms to decline to work in the area. With few competitors, Williams garnered windfall profits despite having little experience.

Williams had his critics. Chemonics officials praised his firm’s agricultural work, but called his construction work shoddy. One Chemonics official told me a Thai engineer Williams hired to implement a $700,000 USAID project to construct 19 small irrigation dams was incompetent, did not understand English and submitted an initial design that was “a crappy little drawing.”

Westerners who worked for non-profit groups called Williams a war profiteer and said he hired away their best Afghan engineers.

“We’ve just been reinforcing the predatory practices,” the American director of one non-profit told me, referring to corruption among Afghans. “If [Williams] is doing shoddy work and pockets the money, it absolutely reinforces the way the system works.”

When I later asked Williams about the criticisms, he dismissed them and said he stood by his firm’s work.

As we made our way farther north, I grew increasingly nervous. There were no foreign troops in the area. Following the fall of the Taliban, the only American forces to deploy to Helmand were several dozen Special Forces soldiers. They built a base in the center of the province in 2002, hired several hundred Afghan gunmen to protect them and focused solely on hunting Taliban and Qaeda remnants.

As Williams and I drove, the first of roughly 200 California National Guardsmen were arriving in Helmand to create a “Provincial Reconstruction Team.” In theory, the unit would bring security to Helmand and coordinate construction. In truth, their arrival raised the total number of American forces in the sprawling province to a mere 350, a fraction of the number needed.

In the late afternoon, we arrived at our destination: a camp built by American engineers when they constructed the Kajaki dam in 1953. USAID had awarded Williams a contract to renovate and modernize the camp for workers from Louis Berger, an American engineering conglomerate. Under another USAID contract, Louis Berger would repair the dam’s two turbines, which had received no major maintenance since the 1970s, and install a third turbine. The repairs and expansion, it was hoped, would increase electrical output by 60 to 70 percent.

As we entered the engineering camp, I was astonished. It was as if a replica of a 1950s-era American motel had been built in the mountains of southern Afghanistan. A cluster of small, one-story bungalows provided lodging. A large restaurant served American-style meals. A dilapidated tennis court and swimming pool provided recreation.

“We could fill that baby up,” Williams said, referring to the bone-dry pool. “If we could get this going, damn, it would be nice.”

He was exuberant about the past – and future – American effort in Helmand.

“This must have been so cool,” Williams said. “I just want to make this nice.”

Early the next morning, we made our way to the dam itself. As he drove, Williams sipped Crystal Light iced tea, his favorite drink. For a five-minute drive, 24 Afghan security guards in six pickup trucks accompanied us. They were from another contracting firm, United States Protection and Investigations, a startup security company run by a husband and wife from Houston. Instead of deploying the soldiers to secure contractors, the U.S. hired more contractors.

The dam was an 887-foot-wide, 320-foot-tall wall of earth that held back the swirling waters of the Helmand River. Behind it, an emerald reservoir shimmered brilliantly in the sunlight. During the Cold War, American and Afghan engineers rode paddleboats and picnicked here with their families.

We walked into the dam’s powerhouse and found ourselves in a time capsule. The turbines, office furniture and bathroom fixtures had all been manufactured in the United States and shipped en masse to Helmand. The Golden Gate Switchboard Company of Napa Valley, California built the electrical panel. Westinghouse manufactured the turbines. A Youngstown, Ohio firm produced the gym lockers in the men’s room. The building was a shrine to a bygone era of American manufacturing might.

For the last 20 years, Afghan technicians had jerry-rigged the turbines and somehow kept power flowing. Events since 2001 had puzzled them. Eighteen different groups of American officials, contractors and engineers had visited the dam since then, they told us. Yet the Afghans were still waiting for promised repairs to begin. Williams and I had no answers. We made small talk, praised the Afghans for their work and took a few souvenir photos. After a 30-minute visit, we left as well.

*  *  *

Struggling to contain a raging insurgency in Iraq, U.S. troops handed over security in Helmand to British forces in 2006. When I returned to Helmand in the summer of 2007, 5,000 British troops patrolled the province, a fifteenfold increase over the 350 National Guardsmen the U.S. had deployed.

Poppy growth, though, continued to spread. Six years after the fall of the Taliban, the province produced more narcotics than any country on earth, including Mexico, Colombia and Burma. Poverty, instability and an epic five-year drought made poppy a talisman.

On a blistering August afternoon, I met Williams in his base of operations in Lashkar Gah, a former USAID house. Williams rented out rooms to contractors and journalists for $50 a night. A dozen Filipino construction workers employed by Williams lived in trailers in the backyard a few feet from a patio where Americans held parties and watched Hollywood movies during the Cold War.

A hand-painted mural on the living room wall was a vestige of the house’s former life. It showed Afghan merchants selling their wares in a bazaar  outside Lashkar Gah near Qala-e-Bost, a famed arch built by the Ghaznavid Empire in the 11th century. The artist had signed her name in neat, cursive letters. “Janet Howard,” she wrote, “June 1968.”

When the Taliban took over Lashkar Gah in the 1990s, they considered the mural blasphemous. Under their interpretation of Islam, any portrayal of the human form is forbidden. Using white paint, they blotted out every human figure in the mural.

Blotted-out mural, Lashkar Gah

That afternoon, I joined Williams in the living room as he met the brother and son of a truck driver recently killed by the Taliban. His firm had agreed to pay the man’s family one year of his salary as compensation. With a translator at his side, Williams greeted the Afghans warmly and tried to console them.

“We just want to say that when somebody gets killed on a project, it is a big tragedy for us,” Williams said. “Your brother, your father, he worked with us for some time, so I got to know him personally. He was a hard-working man and always ready for any task.”

Williams praised the driver for several more minutes. Then he asked if there had been any progress in identifying the killers.

“Thank you for your wishes,” the brother replied formally, displaying little emotion. “We have no information about these people.”

“Are the police not interested?” Williams asked.

“The area is not under the control of the police,” the brother explained. “So they cannot do anything.”

“The only thing we want to do – and it’s a small thing – is offer some compensation, which we will do,” Williams said. “ I wish we could do more.”

“We are also deeply hurt by this,” he added. “It also deeply affected our morale.”

The brother sat silently. Williams looked at the son of the dead driver, a wiry young boy who appeared to be 12 years old. “How about the little one,” he asked. “Is he going to school?”

“Yes, he is in the sixth grade,” the brother replied, adding that the boy was the eldest of seven children. “The others are smaller.”

After exchanging more pleasantries, Williams departed and a member of his staff handed the Afghans an envelope. The man and boy politely thanked him and departed.  I later learned that Williams paid the boy $1,500 for the life of his father, the same amount the Afghan government paid the families of civilians killed in American air strikes.

*  *  *

The following day, I met Rory Donohoe, the new USAID representative in Helmand. Donohoe himself, in fact, was an independent contractor. The agency was so short on personnel that it hired contractors to monitor its contractors.

A 29-year-old Californian, Donohoe had an MBA from Georgetown and brimmed with ambition. His age and limited experience reflected a reality of the post-9/11 effort. USAID and other civilian agencies struggled to get seasoned, mid-career professionals to take posts in Afghanistan. Some had children and were unwilling to risk their lives. Others went to Iraq, which was seen as more of a potential career builder.

Tall, with dark hair and a boyish face, Donohoe told me he viewed the free market as the answer to Helmand’s ills. To curb poppy cultivation, he and USAID’s new director of agriculture in Afghanistan, Loren Stoddard, were proposing sweeping new projects that would create markets for the export of legal crops.

One afternoon, Donohoe and Stoddard gave me a tour of Lashkar Gah’s former Soviet airbase. They excitedly described a $3 million plan to clear mines from the base and turn it into an industrial park and airport.

Standing a few feet from rusting Soviet fuel tanks and ambulances, Donohoe told me how pomegranates, a delicacy in Helmand for centuries, would be flown to emerging markets in India and Dubai. Marble would be cut and polished for construction. And a 40-year-old, state-run cotton gin would be privatized and expanded.

“This could be the commercial heart of southern Afghanistan,” Donohoe told me.

A few days later, Donohoe and Stoddard showed me a project to teach Afghan farmers how to grow chili peppers on contract for a company in Dubai. A USAID subcontractor had brought three white Zimbabwean farmers to Helmand to help show Afghan farmers how to grow the peppers. The Zimbabweans had been driven from their farms by supporters of President Robert Mugabe.

“These kinds of partnerships with private companies are what we want here,” Donohoe said. “We’ll let the market drive it.”

Stoddard, a burly 38-year-old former food broker from Provo, Utah, said he had launched a similar project in Guatemala where farmers sold chili peppers to Wal-Mart. From the start, though, security problems plagued the Helmand effort. After local villagers snuck into the chili pepper demonstration farm and stole produce, USAID hired watchmen.

Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, two dozen Afghan men with assault rifles staffed six wooden guard towers that ringed the farm, safeguarding the chili peppers.

”Some people would say that security is so bad that you can’t do anything,” Donohoe told me. ”But we do it.”

Asadullah Wafa, the province’s new Afghan governor, told me that the American reconstruction effort was too small and ”low quality.”

”There is a proverb in Afghanistan,” he said. ”By one flower we cannot mark spring.”

As their presence grew, the British vastly expanded the small American base in Lashkar Gah and built a one-story building that contractors called “The Hilton.” British government civilians lived in a modern dormitory bedecked with photos of Queen Elizabeth, Monet prints and widescreen televisions. Soldiers built volleyball courts, gardens and bars.

“There were too many people who were in Helmand that were not in Helmand,” a British contractor who asked not to be named later told me. “They couldn’t see beyond the walls that protected them.”

British and American civilian officials dismissed the criticism. They said they ventured into remote parts of the province for weeks at a time, were repeatedly attacked by the Taliban and narrowly survived several suicide bombings.

At night, I attended surreal cookouts in fortified Lashkar Gah compounds inhabited by British, Dutch and South African contractors. White Zimbabweans and South Africans grilled boerewors sausage and downed gallons of alcohol. To me, they embodied the mix of sincerity, greed and absurdity that marked the post-2001 effort. Some were desperate for work. Others were desperate for adrenaline.

At times, I felt pity for contractors saddled with Sisyphean tasks. In 2005, DynCorp, the American conglomerate the State Department hired to train Afghan police, sent two retired American deputy sheriffs to train Helmand’s 3,000 police. One was a California native who had trained police in the Balkans. The other hailed from a small town in Wyoming. Before arriving in Helmand, he had never been east of the Mississippi River.

At other times, I was baffled by the schemes USAID approved. In 2005, a USAID administrator brought 11 Bolivian cobblestone road builders to Helmand to teach their craft to local people. Afghans, who had driven on asphalt roads for 30 years, were uninterested.

In general, the most effective foreign organization was the generously funded American military. Marine and army units mounted sprawling efforts to both kill Taliban and create jobs. Highly trained young officers and soldiers were generally impressive.

“The war is good for contractors, for journalists, for generals,” I scribbled in my notebook during one visit, well aware that I too profited professionally from Helmand. “The war is not good for the Afghan people. How do we create ‘The Good War’ again?”

*  *  *

In 2010, “Little America” became the epicenter of the Obama administration’s troop surge. Over 22,000 American marines – 200 times the Americans deployed in 2001 – arrived in the province. Roughly 10,000 British soldiers battled the Taliban as well.

Marjah, an obscure farming area outside Lashkar Gah built by American engineers in the 1960s, became the focus of a sweeping Marine offensive. In 2010, the United States spent nearly $1.3 billion in the district, or $16,250 for each of its 80,000 residents. The vast majority of the funding paid for American military operations.

Following the influx of 30,000 foreign troops, security in Lashkar Gah and half the province improved. The number of Americans assigned to training the Afghan army and police finally reached the levels American commanders had requested for years. The number of USAID officials in Helmand rose from one to 11.

But a wave of Afghan civilian administrators promised by the Karzai government never appeared. Some effective local Afghan rulers emerged, but there were simply too few of them.

Donohoe, the young USAID contractor who oversaw other contractors, became a USAID staffer, stayed in the province for three-and-a-half years and finally left Helmand in October 2010. Contractors complained about him at times, but respected Donohoe for spending so much time in the province. He was the longest-serving USAID field officer in Afghanistan. Most USAID officials – and other civilians – rotated out of remote posts after 12 to 18 months.

In a recent interview, Donohoe defended USAID’s record in Helmand. He said only 1 percent of the agency’s budget went to the cobblestone road and chili pepper project. The agency completed the airport, doubled the electricity supply to Helmand and reduced poppy production by roughly one-third. One of his biggest challenges, he said, was curbing an American tendency to do things themselves instead of relying on Afghans.

Eager to have concrete achievements during their one-year tours, American civilians and soldiers tended to implement projects themselves, Donohoe said. Afghan officials and firms often moved slowly and struggled with quality. By the time he left, he felt there had been a change in philosophy among U.S. officials.

“Everyone agreed that the only way for us to get out was for the Afghans to do things for themselves,” Donohoe said. ”The goal was to build an Afghan government that was capable of meeting the needs of its people.”

During the Cold War project in Helmand, he said, Afghans played a larger role in planning and decision making. And during his time in Helmand, Donohoe found that  the U.S. achieved more when it focused on  a small number of modest goals over a longer period and worked closely with locals. In the end, he argued, Americans had to trust Afghans to do it themselves.

“Helmand is never going to be the Little America that was envisioned,” he said. “But I do think Helmand is going to be O.K.”

If the U.S. continued to support Afghanistan, he added, the country will find its way.

“I think ultimately, the Afghans, they will figure this out,” Donohoe told me. “They know what’s going on better than we do.”

My time in Helmand left me convinced that one of the major symptoms – and causes – of the decay in USAID and other civilian government institutions was the rise of private contractors. At the peak of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, 260,000 contractors worked in both countries, outnumbering the American forces deployed there.

The use of contractors minimized the number of American troops and hid the wars’ human toll. Between 2001 and 2010, 8,550 U.S. soldiers and foreign contractors died in Iraq and Afghanistan. Forty percent of the dead were contractors.

Congressional investigators found that contracting proved more costly than employing government workers, and tales of shoddy work abounded. From 2001 to 2010, federal agencies paid a staggering $206 billion to contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq. An estimated $30 billion was lost to waste, fraud and abuse.

To be sure, many Afghan leaders performed even worse than foreign contractors. Afghan governors appointed by President Hamid Karzai profited from the drug trade in Helmand, seized land and attacked rivals. With no strong institutions, merit system or faith in the future, Afghans took whatever they could whenever they could for their families. Cynicism and graft ran rampant.

The idealistic Americans I came to know in Helmand met different fates. Grader, the cold warrior who served as my first guide in the province, never returned to Afghanistan. In 2010, he died in Marblehead after a brutal, two-year battle with brain cancer. Donohoe works for USAID in Peru. Williams, the contractor who took me to the dam, continues to work in Helmand. The Taliban or drug traffickers have killed seven of his Afghan employees since 2001.

This spring, I met Williams in Washington when he was in town on business. Under the Obama surge, business boomed for him in Afghanistan. In 2011, Williams’s firm had work in 19 provinces. With U.S. forces preparing to leave, the number of provinces where he worked had dwindled to seven. His company would never abandon Afghanistan, he vowed, and would continue to work there even if the Taliban take over.

The expansion of the Kajaki dam that he spoke about so excitedly eight years earlier had still not been completed. In 2008, a five-day military operation involving 2,000 British soldiers successfully moved a third turbine to the dam, and USAID hired a Chinese firm to install it. Yet Taliban attacks blocked the delivery of 900 tons of cement needed to complete the job and the Chinese firm abandoned the effort. Officials from USAID, which has spent $72 million on the stalled project since 2004, said work on the dam continues.

Missteps by contractors continue as well. A South African security guard who worked for the British government shot dead an Afghan colleague in 2009, was convicted of murder and sentenced to 16 years in an Afghan prison.

The Washington Post reported that former employees of Chemonics, which has received over $430 million in USAID contracts since 2003, said their superiors kept their mouths shut about failing programs in order to keep contracts flowing. A spokeswoman for Chemonics said the company is now employee owned and stands by its work in Afghanistan.

Louis Berger, the American engineering firm hired to repair the dam, paid a $70 million fine after a whistleblower exposed systematic overbilling of USAID. The firm did not respond to a request for comment. And the husband and wife that ran the small,Houston-based security firm that escorted us to the dam – USPI – pleaded guilty in 2009 to overbilling USAID for $3 million between 2004 and 2007.

The American military also stumbled. In January, a video of four American Marines urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban appeared on the Internet. Investigators later discovered it had been filmed in northern Helmand.

Williams loathed Karzai and other corrupt Afghans. But he also blamed American officials for failing to mount a serious effort until 2010 and instead relying on Afghan warlords to stabilize the country. In the process, they alienated the Afghan people.

“They see us coming and propping up these crooks,” he said. “We do the same thing over and over.”

Williams said he was ashamed of America’s track record in Afghanistan.

“Our whole culture has changed since 2001,” he told me. “What have we become?”

Looking back, Helmand acted as a mirror. The American military received 95 percent of the $557 billion the U.S. has spent in Afghanistan since 2001 while an understaffed USAID and State Department struggled to devise and carry out complex political and development projects. At the same time, the American public’s demand for quick, inexpensive solutions grew.

The result on the ground was a disjointed, wasteful and superficial effort. Projects became more about Americans impressing their bosses back home than creating lasting results on the ground for Afghans. American idealism – our great asset and flaw – faded. The name Little America took on a new meaning for me. It became a reference to a diminished America that had lost its way.

*  *  *

The author is writing a book calling for a new American approach in the region. “Beyond War: Technology, Economic Growth and American Influence in the New Middle East” will be published in March 2013. Portions of this story were previously reported in the New York Times in 2006 and 2007.

PHOTOS: British Army Lance Corporal Raju Gurung of the 2nd Battalion, the Royal Gurkha Rifles, stops traffic during a patrol outside Patrol Base Chilli near the town of Lashkar Gah in Helmand province, southern Afghanistan, July 14, 2011.  REUTERS/Shamil Zhumatov; A member of the Afghan National Police (ANP) stands guard at his checkpoint outside Lashkar Gah, July 11, 2011. REUTERS/Shamil Zhumatov; REUTERS/David Rohde.

Last week, 41 American companies received awards at a little noticed White House ceremony. Despite the recession, the companies – most of them small and medium-size businesses – have experienced rapid growth and handsome profits in recent years. And they’ve beaten Chinese, Indian and European competitors at their own game.

How? By selling to a burgeoning global middle class expected to grow by 1 billion people – primarily in Asia – over the next decade.

Zippo Manufacturing Co, the maker of the iconic American cigarette lighter, has experienced 1,000 percent sales growth in China over the last 20 years and 900 percent growth in India over the last eight years. While other American companies have shed jobs, the 650-employee, Bradford, Pennsylvania-based company has added 150 jobs in the last three years and experienced a 20 percent increase in sales, most of it overseas.

“It’s tough to compete, but we’re doing it,” said Greg Booth, the company’s president and CEO, referring to cheap lighters manufactured in Asia. “We’re competing in a category that is under incredible pressure.”

DSC Dredge, a small, Louisiana-based builder of dredges, has increased its overseas sales by 1,300 percent over the last 10 years and nearly doubled in size from 80 to 140 employees. Their biggest overseas customers? Nigeria and Bangladesh, countries that Americans think of as impoverished but are experiencing significant economic growth. The firm’s overseas sales have risen from $1.4 million a year in 2002 to over $20 million last year and make up 65 percent of its business. Charles Sinunu, the director of international sales, said the firm just sold three dredges to Russia and sells to 48 countries worldwide.

“It’s become something where it really wasn’t a big deal 10 years ago, and now it’s a huge deal,” he told me. “Right now, we have a record backlog of business and are actively trying to hire additional people.”

And OSIsoft of San Leandro, California has done the seemingly impossible. While other companies have outsourced programming and technical work to India, the $300 million business software firm has grown from 150 to 750 employees in the last six years. Where are its new customers? In 110 countries around the world. Where are nearly all of its employees? Inside the U.S.

“We basically came to the conclusion that the cost of software development outside the U.S. is more expensive,” said Nand Ramchandani, OSIsoft’s director of business development and government affairs. “We just can’t afford to have negative experiences. We’d rather develop that in house.”

A rough pattern emerged in interviews with senior executives of five of the 41 winning firms, which sell everything from vitamins to “waterless urinal technology” to oilseed presses. The rise of middle classes in China, India and other developing nations was not the death knell of the American middle class, they said. Instead, it represents an opportunity for American businesses that are willing to adapt.

“The real war that is being waged every day is an economic war,” said Tom Kallman, a former Air Force F-15 fighter pilot whose New Jersey-based consulting firm, Kallman Worldwide, won an award for helping other U.S. companies export. “America’s strength and future depends as much on a strong economy as it does on laser-guided bombs and jet fighters.”

American politics, though, is not changing fast enough, the business leaders warned. They expressed derision for the partisan politics of both parties in Washington.

“I can’t state this strongly enough,” said an executive at one of the award-winning companies who asked not to be named. “There aren’t words in our language to express it. They are so far off base it’s sad.”

He and other executives said the problems come from the extreme right and left. Last week, a Tea Party-backed bill to close the U.S. Export-Import Bank, which lends money to American firms that export, was defeated in the Senate. Several of the businesspeople said the bank wasn’t perfect but it was an invaluable tool for countering Asian competitors, particularly Chinese companies that receive state support. DSC Dredge’s Sinunu said the Chinese are “eating our lunch” in Africa, which now boasts seven of the world’s 10 fastest-growing economies.

“I think that would be a horrible thing,” Sinunu said, referring to shuttering the bank. “The Ex-Im Bank is one of the very few things that I can shoot from my quiver to be successful. Getting rid of the Ex-Im Bank would be an absolute disaster for American companies that want to do business overseas.”

Executives from the small firms generally praised an initiative by the Obama administration to consolidate the Commerce Department and six trade- and business-related agencies into a single, more effective body and the president’s goal of doubling American exports by 2014. But they said American government export-promotion efforts still pale in comparison with those of China, Korea and many European countries.

The U.S government does not do enough to support American companies when they have designs stolen or counterfeited overseas, they said. The Commerce Department does not have enough staff based overseas to help American businesses, and post-2001 restrictions on granting U.S. visas to foreigners, particularly from predominantly Muslim countries, alienate overseas customers.

The executive who asked not to be named praised Korea’s government for fiscal discipline, creating exceptional education systems and providing vast loan guarantees for Korean companies that are trying to export.

“I think it’s relatively ingenious,” he said, “to take their government money and utilize it to provide really good financing.”

The awards – and the places these companies have found customers – show that the gravest threat to America’s prosperity isn’t the rise of middle classes overseas. It is Washington’s blind adherence to dated ideologies that handicap our innovative small businesses. The world is changing, but Washington is not.

PHOTO: An employee poses with newly released “dragon totem” models of Zippo lighters to celebrate the upcoming Dragon Year in Beijing, January 13, 2012. REUTERS/Soo Hoo Zheyang

This weekend in Chicago, President Obama will gather with more than 60 heads of state to hold NATO’s 25th anniversary summit. He and other leaders will convene as a Western-created system of international justice – enforced in many places by NATO – has grown stronger, and raised expectations of accountability around the world.

This week, Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic finally went on trial in The Hague for war crimes in Bosnia after evading justice for 17 years. Last month, former Liberian President Charles Taylor was convicted of aiding and abetting war crimes by a separate international court. And in a surprising example of the spreading expectation of international justice, protests among the Syrian diaspora have included signs demanding Bashar al-Assad be sent to The Hague.

At the same time, as people around the globe see war criminals brought to justice, they want to see the world’s most powerful armies held accountable as well. Outside the U.S. and Europe, there is a growing sense of a two-tiered system of international justice. The West puts others on trial for war crimes, the argument goes, while exempting its own forces from scrutiny.

“There is a contradiction,” said Richard Dicker, the head of Human Rights Watch’s International Justice Program. “As the reach of justice extends further and as expectations of justice increase, the shortcoming in the uneven landscape – the uneven application of law to all – becomes more stark.”

Some of the perceptions are exaggerated. The U.S. and NATO are not evil incarnate, nor are they perfect. A recent examination by Human Rights Watch, for example, found that the seven-month NATO bombing campaign in Libya killed at least 72 civilians but that the alliance took major steps to try to avoid such casualties. Taylor and Mladic, meanwhile, went out of their way to kill civilians.

The belief that there is a double standard, though, is visceral outside NATO. In conversations with me over the last several years, everyone from Chinese intellectuals to Bosnian Serb civilians to Taliban fighters have passionately believed that the West’s crimes are far worse than those of the people hauled before international tribunals.

Hina Shamsi, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, said America’s actions as it targets suspected terrorists around the world undermine its role in bringing fugitives like Taylor and Mladic to justice.

“The U.S.’s use of drones, targeted killings and indefinite detention is actually destabilizing the international system of law it helped to create,” she said.

One hundred and twenty-one states have signed and ratified the treaty that created the International Criminal Court in 2002 and agreed that their citizens can be tried there for war crimes. The world’s three most militarily powerful nations – the United States, China and Russia – have declined to join the treaty, depriving the new, Hague-based court of binding jurisdiction over their citizens. As a result, in most cases it would take the passage of U.N. Security Council resolution for an American, Chinese or Russian to be tried by the International Criminal Court. Considering the Security Council vetoes that the U.S., Russia, and China enjoy, that will likely never happen.

The system plays out unevenly in other ways. Moscow’s veto protects those close to it, such as Syrian President Assad. China’s veto, for example, protects North Korea’s autocratic regime. And critics of Israel say America’s veto does the same for Israeli transgressions.

“The most powerful states – among whom there are great distinctions in commitment to the rule of law – nonetheless hold themselves at a distance or beyond these international justice standards,” Dicker said, “creating the perception – and the reality – of hypocrisy and a double standard. And that needs to change.”

In some ways, there is a double standard. To be blunt, Taylor and Mladic are comparatively easy pickings. International pariahs with no powerful allies, their arrests and convictions cost U.S. and NATO leaders little political capital.

Still, their presence in the dock is a positive step that creates a sense of justice for victims. Their convictions and the creation of the International Criminal Court may deter future war crimes, and should be hailed.

But at the same time there is a widespread belief that American, NATO and Israeli forces do not face the same level of accountability. And some elements of the so-called war on terror do skirt international law. The Obama administration stopped some of the Bush administration’s worst practices but has embraced others.

The U.S. should join the International Criminal Court, as nearly all of its NATO partners have. It should end over a decade of indefinite detention without trial in Guantanamo Bay. American drone strikes should be carried out by the U.S. military, be publicly announced, and no longer be covert operations run by the CIA. And when reports of drones killing civilians emerge, they should be investigated, with compensation paid to the victims – as the laws of war require.

But American drone strikes in Pakistan are not as indiscriminate as the Russian army’s shelling of Grozny. The profiling of American Muslims by the New York City Police Department was shameful, but it is not as pervasive as the Chinese government’s harassment of Uighirs. I am not justifying the excesses of America, particularly post-9/11. Our offenses are inexcusable, must end and only reinforce our rivals’ conspiracy theories.

An example of how the conduct of war has skirted, distorted and outpaced the laws of war emerged in Idaho this week. After maintaining a yearlong silence, the family of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl – the only American soldier in Taliban captivity – gave a series of interviews to the American news media.

The Bergdahls called on the Obama administration to move ahead with peace talks that could involve the exchange of five Taliban prisoners currently in Guantanamo Bay for their son, who has been held captive in a Taliban safe haven in Pakistan’s tribal areas for nearly three years. Legally, the Taliban detainees are not prisoners of war. Nor is Bergdahl. They both exist in an undefined legal – and political – “war on terror” gray area.

(I’ve talked to the Bergdahls intermittently as they have struggled with what to do. They hoped that my seven-month kidnapping by the Taliban in 2008-2009 might have given me some answers. Unfortunately, I had none for them.)

After the Bergdahls went public, administration officials said they were open to continued negotiations. But it’s clear there’s little chance of a deal during a U.S. presidential election campaign season. Peace negotiations with the Taliban – or a prisoner exchange – will be assailed by Republicans as appeasing terrorists.

I am not arguing that more closely abiding by international law will somehow make militants no longer hate the United States. Some of them can only be countered with lethal force. But closely following the laws of war is in our strategic interest. It undermines those who accuse the U.S. of hypocrisy and helps win the support of those who hold the same ideals.

The best course for the United States – and its NATO allies – is to pledge this weekend in Chicago to more strictly abide by the laws of war they have created.

President Obama and other leaders who ignore the perception of a double standard do so at their peril. The U.S. and NATO should ally themselves with the laws of war. They should not allow those standards to become their enemy.

PHOTO: A man wearing a mask of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad demonstrates against Assad in front of the International Criminal Court (ICC) offices in The Hague, June 7, 2011. REUTERS/Michael Kooren

UPDATE: JPMorgan’s surprise announcement late Thursday of a $2 billion trading loss – and the drop in stocks it sparked – is yet another sign of the need for reform.

The numbers are startling. HSBC, the world’s fifth-largest bank, failed to review thousands of internal anti-money-laundering alerts, according to a Reuters investigation published last week.

The bank did not file legally required “suspicious activity reports” to U.S. law enforcement officials. It hired “gullible, poorly trained, and otherwise incompetent personnel” to run its anti-money-laundering effort. Each year, hundreds of billions of dollars flowed through the bank without being properly monitored.

HSBC is not alone. Last month, U.S. regulators accused Citigroup of having major lapses in its anti-money-laundering systems as well. Under an agreement with the Comptroller of the Currency, the agency that regulates national U.S. banks, Citigroup agreed to improve its monitoring operations, but did not pay a monetary penalty or admit any wrongdoing.

For critics of mega-banks, the reports are the latest sign of big banks’ ability to defy regulation, engage in dubious business practices and face few consequences.

In a British court last month, a former Nigerian governor pleaded guilty to pilfering $79 million from state coffers, funneling it offshore and buying six properties in the U.S. and UK. The banks he used to move the illicit money? HSBC, Citibank, Barclays and Schroders.

“Banks get hauled up by the regulators for failing to follow the law, promise to reform, and yet a few years down the line they’re caught doing the same thing,” said Robert Palmer of the anti-corruption group Global Witness. “I think for this to change we need strong penalties for when the banks get things wrong, and in the worst cases, jail time for individual bankers.”

Four current Federal Reserve presidents, meanwhile, are arguing that the Dodd-Frank reforms have not eliminated the “too big to fail” banks, according to a Bloomberg Businessweek article published last month. Despite measures in the legislation banning further bailouts, traders, analysts and bankers simply don’t buy it.

“Markets have come to believe that what the government did in 2008 and 2009 isn’t a one-time deal,” Kevin Warsh, a former member of the Federal Reserve Bank’s Board of Governors, said in a March television interview with Charlie Rose. They think  “that the government will somehow come to the rescue of these big financial firms.”

The result is a half-dozen massive banks that remain so large that their collapse would cripple the U.S. economy and force another government bailout. As a result, the behemoths function as a de facto oligopoly. The sheer size of the banks – and the theoretical government backing that they enjoy – make it impossible for the country’s roughly 20 regional banks and 7,000 community banks to challenge them.

And the country’s biggest banks are getting bigger.

Five U.S. banks – JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs – held $8.5 trillion in assets at the end of 2011, equal to 56 percent of the country’s economy, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. Five years earlier, before the financial crisis, the biggest banks’ holdings amounted to 43 percent of U.S. output. Today, they are roughly twice as large as they were a decade ago relative to the economy.

The four Federal Reserve presidents – Richard Fisher of Dallas, Esther George of Kansas City, Jeffrey Lacker of Richmond and Charles Plosser of Philadelphia – have expressed concern that such a concentration of assets in the banking industry threatens the financial system.

In a scathing essay published in March in the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas’ 2012 annual report, Harvey Rosenblum, the bank’s head of research, called for the government to break up the country’s largest banks. Rosenblum argued that only smaller banks – not the increased capital requirements, stress tests and other measures in Dodd-Frank – will prevent another crisis.

“A financial system composed of more banks, numerous enough to ensure competition in funding businesses and households but none of them big enough to put the overall economy in jeopardy,” Rosenblum wrote, “will give the United States a better chance of navigating through future financial potholes and precipices.”

The American public, meanwhile, also feels the reforms were not enough. In a Rasmussen poll conducted last month, 48 percent of Americans surveyed said they continue to lack confidence in the stability of the U.S. banking industry. Forty-seven percent said they were somewhat confident in the system.

Who, then, is happy with the state of America’s banks? Apparently, the two men running for president. So far, both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have steered clear of calls from the left and right to break up the big banks.

“I’m not looking to break apart financial institutions,” Romney told the American Enterprise Institute’s James Pethokoukis, in March. “I think what caused the last collapse was a convergence, almost akin to a perfect storm, of many elements in our economy and regulatory structure.”

Obama, meanwhile, argues that the new regulations would force banks into orderly bankruptcy proceedings, not bailouts. But many liberal analysts don’t buy it. They argue that bankers still face too few consequences for bad behavior.

An analysis by researchers at Syracuse University found that under the Obama administration federal financial-fraud prosecutions have dropped to 20-year lows, Peter Boyer and James Schweizer wrote in The Daily Beast last week. Prosecutions are down 39 percent from 2003, when executives at Enron and WorldCom were convicted in high-profile cases.

Today, the number of financial-fraud cases is at one-third the level it was during the Clinton administration. (Obama administration officials argue that the number would be higher if new categories of crimes were counted.)

“Casting Romney as a plutocrat will be easy enough,” Boyer and Schweizer wrote. “But the president’s claim as avenging populist may prove trickier, given his own deeply complicated, even conflicted, relationship with Big Finance.”

The skepticism from the right and left is justified. Our largest banks remain “too big to fail,” defy regulation and have paid too small a price for a financial crisis that decimated the middle class. The U.S.’s big banks should be broken up. Smaller banks will be easier to regulate – and foster more competition.

PHOTO: Protesters move along Tryon Street to Bank of America Stadium after the Bank of America annual shareholders meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina, May 9, 2012. REUTERS/Jason E. Miczek

SARAJEVO – Seventeen years and $17 billion later, Bosnia is at peace today, but it is stillborn.

After an international intervention nearly two decades long, Bosnia offers lessons for American officials as they wrestle with continuing violence in Syria, volatile post-Arab Spring transitions and leaving behind a relatively stable Afghanistan. Stopping the killing here proved easier than expected. But halting corruption, sparking economic growth and curbing poisonous local political dynamics has proved vastly more difficult.

Today, the economy is stalled, with half of business activity generated by state-owned companies and unemployment hovering at 25 percent. The country is divided between a Serb entity whose leader talks openly of secession and a Muslim-Croat federation with worrying rifts of its own. And corruption is endemic among senior government officials on all sides.

There are successes. One, surprisingly, is security. In an outcome few expected, fighting has not erupted here since the 1995 Dayton Peace Accord ended a brutal three-year conflict. Predictions that 20,000 American troops who deployed as peacekeepers would be caught in a “quagmire” proved untrue. U.S. forces departed in 2006 without a single American soldier being killed by hostile fire.

One lesson that emerges here is timing, according to Bosnians, Americans and Europeans. If the world is going to intervene in a conflict, the earlier, they say, the better. Bosnia today shows that the longer the fighting drags on, the more tortuous the postwar peace.

On a daily basis, Muslims, Serbs and Croats interact and exchange polite greetings here, but they live separate lives. Across the country, the 100,000 killed during the war haunt the living. Admonitions to turn the other cheek are well and good, but there is little reconciliation.

Exhaustive but slow-moving international war-crimes trials have created a detailed historical record of the atrocities carried out here. But Serb, Croat and Muslim nationalists all see themselves as victims and reject responsibility for war crimes committed by their own community. Future generations, one hopes, may be more accepting.

The second lesson is that without reliable local allies implementing reforms is virtually impossible. International efforts to promote more moderate political parties have failed here. Nationalist Serb, Croat and Muslim parties have won elections, consolidated power and resisted change. Foreign powers have found that they cannot control local political dynamics. Bosnians call the state of politics today “war by other means,” with nationalists continuing their struggles through words, not bullets.

“It’s difficult for outsiders to rearrange the political chairs inside these countries,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a retired senior American diplomat who worked on the Balkans for the Clinton and Bush administrations. “It’s going to be up to local people to do that.”

Today, only 600 European soldiers keep the peace. Milorad Dodik, the current leader of the Bosnian Serbs, uses veto powers and the convoluted government structure created as a compromise in Dayton to block efforts to strengthen the central government. Repeated Western efforts to update the country’s postwar constitution have failed. Foreign diplomats now hope that the carrot of European Union and NATO membership will turn voters against hardliners.

A third and final lesson focuses on civilian aid. When it comes to postwar reconstruction efforts, less is more. The United States and Europe tried to quickly create virtually every aspect of a new Bosnian state: a new army, police force, economy, infrastructure and education system.

The $1.65 billion American civilian aid effort was too broad and too focused on immediate results, according to Westerners and Bosnians. (Ninety percent of the U.S. money spent here – roughly $15 billion – covered the cost of the American troop deployment.) Foreign aid programs followed a predictable but perverse pattern. Donors demanded quick results. Aid officials, in turn, designed projects that met American political needs in Washington, not Bosnian needs on the ground.

Bosnians who have helped implement foreign aid programs argue that picking a handful of projects, establishing limited goals and consistently funding them for long periods is more effective than a rushed, scattershot approach.

Some initiatives fared well. An integrated national army has been created following a massive American training effort. Some well-staffed American police training and judicial reform programs were effective. The establishment of a new national currency gave the country’s economy initial stability. And one simple step – car license plates with no indication of where the driver resides in the country – greatly increased freedom of movement. In general, the more long-term the aid effort, the more successful it was.

Every nation, conflict and era is different, of course. New, unpredictable events shred pristine theories of international relations. But Bosnia’s story offers the lesson that foreign interventions can stop the killing, but not control the peace.

One Western diplomat pointed out that Dodik, the Serb nationalist, was initially hailed as a moderate by the international community. Today, he is seen by Western diplomats as the single largest impediment to unifying the country.

“Like Karzai in Afghanistan, he started out as a great popular leader,” said the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity, “and things went sour.”

Over the last 20 years, I covered Afghanistan, Iraq and Bosnia. Each society is vastly different, but all three have experienced U.S.-led interventions. Iraq and Afghanistan – and the 6,400 American soldiers who have perished there and the $1.2 trillion spent – rightly cloud American views of intervention today. But not all U.S. efforts abroad have been debacles.

In the end, Bosnia is a partial success. It is not the sweeping failure that American isolationists contend. Nor is it the sweeping success that backers of humanitarian intervention hoped. An imperfect peace, though, is better than the carnage that the people of Bosnia endured.

PHOTO: 11,541 red chairs are pictured along Titova Street in Sarajevo as the city marks the 20th anniversary of the start of the Bosnian war, April 6, 2012. The Balkan country still deeply divided, power shared among Serbs, Croats and Muslims in a single state ruled by ethnic quotas and united by the weakest of central governments. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic

SREBRENICA, BOSNIA — Six months from now, a municipal election will be held in this isolated mining town, the scene of the largest massacre in Europe since World War Two.

The town’s current mayor, a 33 year-old Bosnian Muslim, says the election will hand Bosnian Serbs control of the town and complete the “ethnic cleansing,” or removal, of all Muslims from eastern Bosnia. Serbs say it is democracy, plain and simple.

Seventeen years ago, Serb forces executed 8,100 Muslim men and boys here in the largest single mass killing of the war in Bosnia. The U.S. and its European allies – who had declared the town a U.N. protected “safe area” – stood by as the Serbs rampaged for days in the summer of 1995.

In local elections since then, a special exemption has been granted that allows Muslims who lived here before the war to vote in Srebrenica – even if they no longer reside here. This year, the country’s High Representative – a foreign overseer with sweeping powers – plans to issue no such exemption. In a visit to the town this week, he called for Serb and Muslim politicians to compromise.

“The challenge in Srebrenica goes far beyond the elections,” said Valentin Inzko, an Austrian diplomat who has pressed local officials to take more responsibility since becoming high representative in 2009. “People want a better life, and the key to that is constructive politics and economic development.”

Under the exemption, Muslims have controlled the municipal government, interned the bodies of 5,137 of the victims in a sprawling memorial here and tried to reverse some of the impact of the killings by slowly moving back. Today Srebrenica’s population, which was 75 percent Muslim before the war, is evenly split between Serbs and Muslims.

And that is where the good news ends. Already a glaring symbol of international fecklessness, the town’s sorry state today sets a new standard for Western half-measures gone astonishingly wrong.

The 17-year effort to move Muslims back to this town began with a whimper. Clinton administration officials, eager to avoid American casualties, made little effort in the late 1990s to arrest the Serb nationalists who carried out the executions. Fears of violent clashes blocked large-scale efforts to return Muslims to Srebrenica.

Frustrated, the roughly 30,000 Muslims who had survived the town’s fall scattered across Bosnia and the world. Roughly 20,000 resettled in Muslim-controlled parts of Bosnia. An additional 15,000 fled abroad; an estimated 7,000 arrived in the United States.

Many of them eventually settled in St. Louis, Missouri, a city with a Bosnian community already 80,000 strong, the largest in the United States. Today, roughly 5,000 refugees from Srebrenica live in St. Louis. The Midwestern American city is home to more Bosnian Muslim survivors of the massacre than Srebrenica itself.

One of the Srebrenica refugees who arrived in the U. S. was Camil Durakovic, the town’s current Muslim mayor. After he survived the fall of Srebrenica at the age of 16, his family resettled in Manchester, New Hampshire. After attending a local high school, he graduated from Notre Dame in 2003 and planned to attend graduate school in the U.S.

A 2005 summer trip to Srebrenica convinced him that his home was here. He started working for the town’s mayor. When the mayor passed away earlier this year, Durakovic, a burly man with a boyish face who wore a pin-striped suit and pink shirt in the town hall today, took over.

In an interview in his office on Thursday, he said returns of Muslim families rose from 2002 to 2005, largely as a result of heavy American and European support. In recent years, though, they have slowed. The economy has not helped. Unemployment is 50 percent in Srebrenica, making it a difficult place to settle for Muslims and Serbs alike. Today, 3,500 Bosnian Muslims live in Srebrenica. Because Serb officials decline to pay their pensions and other government benefits, many Bosnian Muslims maintain their official addresses in Muslim-controlled parts of Bosnia.

As a result, even though half the town’s residents are Serbs and half are Muslims, its registered voters are roughly 60 percent Serb. Unless the high representative or national government grants another exemption allowing Muslims who lived in the town before the war to vote, Serb politicians will likely gain control of the local government this fall. With foreign aid and interest in the town dwindling, Durakovic and other survivors predict that Muslims will flee.

“It will be the finalization of the genocide,” Durakovic told me. “Definitely.”

Radomir Pavlovic, the likely Serb candidate for mayor in the October municipal elections, insisted that Muslims had nothing to fear. But he then echoed the divisive statements of the head of his political party, Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik. Initially perceived as a moderate by the West, Dodik has rejected rulings by the International War Crimes Tribunal that genocide occurred in Srebrenica and has systematically thwarted international efforts to unify the country.

Pavlovic, the probable mayoral candidate, expressed views that are widely held among Bosnian Serbs. He said he believed 2,000 – not 8,000 – Muslims died in the executions, blamed “foreign mercenaries” for the killings and expressed sympathy for General Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb commander now on trial in the Hague for carrying out genocide after evading arrest for 16 years.

“Others are more responsible than him and will go unpunished,” Pavlovic told me. “It’s always the pawns that get blamed.”

Denial is nothing new here. After the fall of Srebrenica, Bosnian Serbs insisted that no mass killings had occurred and blocked journalists from investigating them. (Bosnian Serb forces jailed me for 10 days in 1995 after I discovered mass graves near the town while covering the conflict for the Christian Science Monitor.) After the bodies were exhumed, the Bosnian Serbs said too little attention was paid to the Serbs killed by Muslims around Srebrenica. As many as 1,300 Serbs may have died here, as Pavlovic argued, but that number is dwarfed by the 8,100 Muslim dead.

The high representative has until May 9 to grant an exemption for Bosnian Muslim voters here. He should immediately do so. The Dayton Peace Accords mercifully ended the war in 1995, but they created a still-born country with a constitution that makes it easy for corrupt nationalists on all sides to divide the country.

Until desperately needed constitutional reforms are implemented, the Bosnians who lived in Srebrenica before the conflict should be allowed to vote here. Serb nationalists should not gain control of a town that was 75 percent Muslim before the war. Genocide should not be rewarded.

PHOTO: People walk near coffins prepared for a mass burial at the Memorial Center in Potocari, near Srebrenica July 11, 2011. Thousands of grieving Bosnian Muslims buried hundreds of newly identified victims of the notorious Balkan war massacre and expressed hope justice would finally be done with Serb commander Ratko Mladic on trial.  REUTERS/Marko Djurica

Barack Obama is going to save America’s middle class by taxing the rich and fostering an American manufacturing renaissance. Mitt Romney is going to revive it by creating more jobs for women and rewarding successful people instead of punishing them.

Welcome to the so-far deeply disappointing 2012 general election. This week’s middle-class-related broadsides from both campaigns bordered on the comic.

Obama’s promoting of the Buffett Rule in Florida on Tuesday was smart politics, but the measure is unlikely to create jobs or significantly reduce the deficit. Even liberal pundits assailed it as an election-year “gimmick.”

And Obama’s concept of reviving American manufacturing is politically appealing but completely untested. As my colleague Chrystia Freeland noted, it flies in the face of decades of Anglo-American conventional wisdom that state interventions in the economy inevitably fail. Whether Obama is right or wrong will not be known before Election Day.

Romney, meanwhile, used a piece of carefully selected economic data to try to attack a 19-percentage-point advantage Obama enjoys among female voters. On Tuesday, he toured a Delaware company that has a female CEO and said women have suffered 92.3 percent of job losses since Obama took office in January 2009. Within hours, the figure, while technically accurate, was criticized as misleading.

Since the recession began in December 2007, men have lost 3.3 million jobs and women have lost 1.2 million jobs, according to the New York Times Economix blog. The surge in job losses among women is primarily due to cuts in the female-dominated government sector. Those reductions were backed by Republicans, not Democrats.

Both campaigns can – and must – do better. A deeply shaken American middle class is yearning for honest debate and realistic approaches to the country’s economic and fiscal dilemmas.

The far left and far right have gotten louder thanks to Fox, MSNBC and the corporate owners of those media outlets, which profit financially from the division they sow. But I believe Middle America – and the independent voters who will decide the election – will award the White House to the candidate who shows the most pragmatism and political courage.

In truth, there are no simple answers when it comes to helping the middle class or understanding what is happening to it. No official U.S. government definition of the “middle class” exists. Nor does a consensus: Democrats say the middle class is in free fall, while Republicans insist it is doing just fine.

Whatever is occurring, public opinion polls show deep unease in Middle America. An ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted last week found that 76 percent of Americans believe the country is still in recession and 68 percent think it is headed in the wrong direction.

Economists broadly agree that the best way to help the middle class is to create large numbers of high-paying new jobs. It is also crucial to rein in the federal deficit and make Social Security and Medicare – two cornerstones of a middle-class retirement – financially sustainable. The problems are far more complex than Warren Buffett paying less tax than his secretary or conservative diatribes against government regulation.

As Matt Miller correctly pointed out in the Washington Post this week, both parties are ignoring hard truths and hard choices. “The big Republican lie” is that the American government does not need to raise taxes in any form as baby boomers retire and the number of people on Social Security and Medicare doubles. And “the big Democratic lie” is that the country can solve its staggering fiscal problems by raising taxes only on people who make over $250,000 a year.

“More than most political deceptions,” Miller wrote, “these two warp the debate in ways that make pragmatic progress impossible.”

Miller’s solution? A truth-telling third-party candidate. The chances are low, but the stirrings of an independent bid still exist. Independents now make up 34 percent of voters across the country, according to a 2011 poll by the Pew Research Center, compared with 34 percent identifying themselves as Democrats and 28 percent as Republicans. A website, Americans Elect, has collected 2.5 million signatures in an effort to place an as-yet-unchosen independent candidate on the ballot.

I share their disappointment. So far, the two-party system is failing to spark the serious debate we desperately need.

Obama should detail exactly how he would tackle the deficit and create a lean but effective federal government. Romney should stop blaming government for all of America’s evils. Obama should announce specific reforms that will make Social Security and Medicare sustainable. And Romney should propose a reduction in defense spending instead of an increase.

Both candidates should take risks, be less political and get off their talking points. That is a naive sentiment, of course, but the country is divided, adrift and urgently in need of new models.

Romney, beware. Obama, for now, is winning the battle for Middle America.

Asked in last week’s poll which candidate would do a better job “defending the middle class,” Obama had a 10-percentage-point advantage over Romney. Asked which was a bigger problem in America, 52 percent chose “unfairness in the economic system that favors the wealthy” and only 37 percent said “over-regulation of the free market that interferes with growth and prosperity.”

And Obama, beware. He may narrowly win re-election, but avoiding hard truths is no way to gain a mandate. Tactical compromise has not served the White House well for the past four years. Is the Buffett Rule really the legacy Barack Obama wants to leave?

PHOTOS: President Barack Obama speaks about tax fairness and the economy at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida, April 10, 2012. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque  Republican presidential candidate and former Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney (L) walks into a campaign event with business owners Lorri Grayson (C) and Becky Suppe during a campaign event in Wilmington, Delaware, April 10, 2012. REUTERS/Tim Shaffer

TUNIS – Like it or not, this is the year of the Islamist.

Fourteen months after popular uprisings toppled dictators in Tunisia and Egypt, Islamist political parties – religiously conservative groups that oppose the use of violence – have swept interim elections, started rewriting constitutions and become the odds-on favorites to win general elections.

Western hopes that more liberal parties would fare well have been dashed. Secular Arab groups are divided, perceived as elitist or enjoy tepid popular support.

But instead of the political process moving forward, a toxic political dynamic is emerging. Aggressive tactics by hardline Muslims generally known as Salafists are sowing division. Moderate Islamists are moving cautiously, speaking vaguely and trying to hold their diverse political parties together. And some Arab liberals are painting dark conspiracy theories.

Ahmed Ounaies, a pro-Western Tunisian politician who briefly served as foreign minister in the country’s post-revolutionary government, said that he no long trusted Rachid Ghannouchi, the leader of Tunisia’s moderate Islamist party. Echoing other secular Tunisians, he said some purportedly moderate Muslim leaders are, in fact, aligned with hardliners.

“We believe that Mr. Ghannouchi is a Salafist,” Ouanies said in an interview. “He is a real supporter of those groups.”

Months after gaining power, moderate Islamists find themselves walking a political tightrope. They are trying to show their supporters that they are different from the corrupt, pro-Western regimes they replaced. They are trying to persuade Western investors and tourists to trust them, return and help revive flagging economies. And they are trying to counter hardline Salafists who threaten to steal some of their conservative support.

The decision this week by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood to field a candidate in the country’s presidential elections – which begin next month – is one example. The Brotherhood, which had promised not to field a candidate, said it entered to block a hardline Islamist from winning the presidency. Liberals scoffed at the explanation, accused the Brotherhood of seeking dictatorial powers and pulled out of the country’s constitutional assembly.

In Tunisia, Ghannouchi and his Ennahda party are the focus. Tunisians say debates over religion are distracting the country’s new government from its primary problem – a sputtering economy. Secularists accuse Ennhada of being too lenient on hardline Salafists, who enjoy little popular support here. Salafists have the right to protest in the new Tunisia, secularists argue, but should not be allowed to violently attack other groups.

Salafists attacked a television station in October after it aired the animated film “Persepolis,” which featured a portrayal of God. They partially shut down a leading university for two months this winter and attacked a group of secular demonstrators last month.

At the same time, a Tunisian judge jailed a newspaper editor for eight days in February after he published a photograph of a soccer player and his nude girlfriend on the cover of a local tabloid. On Thursday, two young men were sentenced to seven years in jail for posting cartoons of a nude Prophet Muhammand on Facebook.

In a recent interview here, Ghannouchi flatly dismissed supporting hardline Islam. Asked whether Tunisia’s divisions were broadening, he answered carefully.

“I am not pessimistic,” he told me. “There is a chance to reach a compromise.”

A 70-year-old, Sorbonne-educated Islamist intellectual who spent 14 years in various Tunisian prisons and 22 years in exile in London, Ghannouchi reaffirmed his liberal interpretation of Islam and democracy. While Islamic hardliners dismiss democracy as an affront to God’s authority, Ghannouchi fervently embraces it. Democracy and Islam are not only compatible, he argued, but they follow the same traditions.

“The real spokesman of Islam is public opinion, which is the high authority, the highest authority,” he told me. “Legislation, represented by the assembly, the national assembly.”

Ghannouchi says the Prophet Muhammad’s use of Shuras – or councils – to make non-religious decisions shows that democracy has existed in Islam since its birth. Government affairs should be decided by democratic vote, he said, not fatwas from religious autocrats. And he embraced full rights for minorities, international human rights treaties and free-market capitalism.

In an interview in New York, a delegation from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood that was visiting the U.S. to reach out to Americans professed the same views.

“Our number one priority is to build a democratic Egypt,” Khaled Al-Qazzazz, the group’s foreign relations coordinator, told me, “with complete democratic institutions.”

Yet significant numbers of Tunisians, Egyptians and Americans simply do not trust the Islamists. They believe that after gaining power, they will insert Islam into school curriculums, roll back women’s rights and reduce individual freedoms.
The fear is that they will follow the route of Hamas, the Islamist movement that won elections in Gaza and Islamized local institutions after years of relatively secular Fatah rule.

In private, American officials say they hope to create economic and political incentives that make being part of the international system appealing to Islamists. That strategy is the correct one.

Holding office and being responsible for creating prosperous economies, better government services and less corruption will moderate Islamists. If they govern and fail, their popularity will erode. U.S.-backed crackdowns on Islamists will only increase their support.

In interviews, Tunisian and Egyptian Islamists said they did not want American meddling in their political affairs but said they were eager to be part of the world economy. Becoming Hamas-like international pariahs seemed to hold little appeal to them. They too know that a by-product of a globalized economy is that isolation now carries a staggering economic cost.

Asked what U.S. policies would most help Muslim moderates, Ghannouchi said “encourage investment,” “encourage tourism,” and training and educational exchange programs. Asked what U.S. policies most hurt Muslim moderates, he said unilateral U.S. military interventions that fuel anti-Americanism.

On Thursday in Washington, 300 people packed a Carnegie Endowment conference at which Islamists from Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Jordan tried to explain their views and their goals. Americans asked Islamists if their commitment to democracy was real. Islamists asked the same question back. Some exchanges were tense, but an awkward dialogue emerged.

There is the possibility, of course, that the Islamists are sincere. Tunisian and Egyptian Islamists who spent years in exile and in jail may not want to repeat the sins of their persecutors. If Islamists abide by democratic norms, their right to participate in electoral politics should be respected. Believing in God and democracy is possible.

An extraordinary debate about the very nature of Islam is unfolding across the Middle East. In the months and years ahead, it will frighten, confuse and alarm Americans, but it is vital that Washington allow it to play out.

PHOTO: Rachid Ghannouchi, leader of the Ennahda movement, Tunisia’s main Islamist political party, speaks at a news conference in Tunis, February 23, 2012. REUTERS/Zoubeir Souissi