A secret military operation in early 2005 to capture senior members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas was aborted at the last minute after top Bush administration officials decided it was too risky and could jeopardize relations with Pakistan, according to intelligence and military officials.

The target was a meeting of Qaeda leaders that intelligence officials thought included Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy and the man believed to run the terrorist group’s operations.

But the mission was called off after Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, rejected an 11th-hour appeal by Porter J. Goss, then the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, officials said. Members of a Navy Seals unit in parachute gear had already boarded C-130 cargo planes in Afghanistan when the mission was canceled, said a former senior intelligence official involved in the planning.

Rumsfeld called off that raid because he thought too many US lives were at risk. The plan started off life sounding very similar to the one that took out bin Laden – just a small team of Seals.

But as the operation moved up the military chain of command, officials said, various planners bulked up the force’s size to provide security for the Special Operations forces.

”The whole thing turned into the invasion of Pakistan,” said the former senior intelligence official involved in the planning. Still, he said he thought the mission was worth the risk. ”We were frustrated because we wanted to take a shot,” he said.

The aborted raid became politically controversial after a young American senator denounced the decision in August 2007 in an early foreign policy speech:

Let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.

Senator Obama was then on the campaign trail, and facing formidable odds, running 23 points behind Hillary Clinton in the polls. His commitment to “getting off the wrong battlefield in Iraq, and taking the fight to the terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan” didn’t go down well with the other candidates for the Democratic nomination, with Clinton chiding Obama for destabilising President Musharraf’s regime.

In 2008, Senator McCain repeatedly bashed Obama over the issue, using the speech to claim that America would be taking an unnacceptanle risk putting itself under “confused leadership of an inexperienced candidate who once suggested bombing our ally, Pakistan.”

Asked by Larry King whether he would go after bin Laden in Pakistan, McCain replied “I’m not going to go there and here’s why, because Pakistan is a sovereign nation.”

Obama is surely feeling vindicated on two counts today. First, the decision to pursue intelligence that bin Laden was indeed in Pakistan and, second, in not allowing the original plan to mushroom into something too unwieldy as it did in 2005.

Of course, if – say – one helicopter crash had turned into two and the mission had failed, we’d all be busy reaching exactly the opposite conclusion.

The conflict had several immediate results.

Already fraught relations between Moscow and Tbilisi plunged to new depths and diplomatic relations were severed.

Russia and three other countries recognised the independence of the breakaway Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

And relations between Russia and the West – the US and the EU – deteriorated to their worst level since the collapse of the USSR – there was even talk of a new Cold War from western politicians.

The Cold War analogies led some commentators to argue Russian foreign policy had taken a decisive anti-western turn and things could and/or should never be the same again

Two years later, the one thing that seems unlikely to ever be the same again is the shape and size of Georgia. If recognition from Russia was not enough, the recent International Court of Justice opinion that Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence was not against international law, makes it even less probable Tibilsi could regain control of its lost regions.

But otherwise those predictions and talk of a new Cold War couldn’t appear more misplaced.

Russian relations with Georgia remain hostile. Although the border has reopened in places and some business links survive, ties look set to remain frosty as long as Prime Minister Putin and President Saakashvili remain in office, given their dispute now has a personal animus that goes beyond the geo-political.

But when it comes to relations with the western powers, over the past year things have improved significantly.

One of President Obama’s most successful foreign policy initiatives to date has been the ‘reset’ of relations with Russia that has led to a new nuclear arms control agreement, START 2, but Washington appears to have been pushing at an open door. Though the talks over START took a bit longer than expected and the Russians bargained hard, President Medvedev genuinely seemed to want to do a deal.

When it comes to Europe, the Russians were reaching out to their arch rivals, the Poles, even before the tragic air crash in Russia that killed the Polish President and many of the country’s elite in April. Mr Putin, who has a reputation for playing hardball, handled the consequences of the disaster with a sensitivity that surprised many and Poland has reciprocated.

Russia knows Poland is now an important player in the EU and the overtures to Warsaw show Moscow wants to improve relations with the wider EU, damaged in the past few years by disputes from the disruption of gas supplies via Ukraine, to the killing of the former Russian agent, Alexander Litvinienko, in London.

What lies behind this change of policy in Moscow?

The reasons for the change of approach from Russia were outlined in a leaked Foreign Ministry paper in May  and they appear to be highly pragmatic.

The economic crisis came as huge shock to Russia’s leaders as the economy shrank by up to 10%. The fall in global economic activity led to a big fall in the price of oil on which Russia depends for much of its GDP.

The penny seems to have dropped in Moscow  that the oil and gas industry need to be much more efficient and the country needs to diversify away from reliance on the energy sector. So President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin want to modernise the Russian economy, and they have decided they need good relations with the western economies to get access to investment and technology.

Last month, Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, wrote a significant essay in Russia in Global Affairs explaining the policy change in more depth

So is Moscow turning  westwards, rather than to its new partners in the BRIC bloc – China, India and Brazil – when it really needs help?.

Well this change could be a sign that the talk of the shifting balance of power in the world is overblown.

Equally, it could well be a sign that the emergence of new powers, alongside the presence of the traditional western powers, has given all states more options in foreign policy – and a country like Russia, which sees national interest through the lens of realpolitik, can pick its horses for courses in the global arena.

The World Tonight is broadcast at 22.00 UK time on BBC Radio 4 and online

- Focusing on Chinese domestic society, the Economist highlights the growing activism and changing dynamics of the country’s vast labour force, with its associated implications for the global economy. Analysis over at VoxEU, meanwhile, assesses evidence of a potential Chinese property bubble.

- Elsewhere, with David Cameron back from his visit to India, Adrian Hamilton and Geoffrey Wheatcroft offer their views on his approach to international affairs. Kim Sengupta meanwhile remarks that the new Prime Minister “has started his foreign policy journey with a series of very deliberate steps”.

- Finally, Sir John Sulston talks to the New Scientist about the implications of global population change for sustainable development – the subject of a new initiative that he’s leading for The Royal Society.  Prospect Magazine‘s blog, meanwhile, highlights favourable demographic trends in the developing world, while figures this week confirm that the EU’s population has now passed the 500 million mark.

Delivering the annual lecture at The Ditchley Foundation last week, Strobe Talbott suggested that the “promise” of the Obama Presidency – both in the domestic and the international arenas – is now “at risk”. “[W]hatever fate is in store for the current president of the United States”, Talbott argued,

“one thing is for sure.  His success in tackling the major issues of our time will depend on his establishing a degree of common purpose with his partners in national governance at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue and with his partners in global governance around the world.”

- Elsewhere, over at The Cable, Josh Rogin reports on the slow progress of reviews into US development policy – the Presidential Study Directive on Global Development and the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review.  The Economist, meanwhile, highlights Brazil’s growing identity as a significant aid donor.

- Finally, the head of the UK Financial Services Authority, Adair Turner, cautions against the default acceptance of prevailing economic ideology, suggesting that policymakers would do well to draw on a diversity of economic opinion. Joseph Stiglitz, meanwhile, explores the Keynesian prescription for the global economy.

In a pastiche of Kennedy’s man on the moon speech, I imagined President Obama laying down the following gauntlet to the world:

I believe that the world should commit itself to achieving the goal of stopping the inexorable rise in greenhouse gas emissions that is doing so much to put our planet in peril. I don’t believe we should aim to achieve this goal in 2020 or 2030 or 2050 – but right now in 2009, making this year the high water mark for mankind’s global experiment with the global climate.

Obviously this didn’t happen, but – gradually – we’re learning more about has happened to emissions. The figures for US carbon dioxide  for 2009 are now in and the good news is that they fell by an astonishing 9%.

Question is: has the US stimulus been wisely spent on measures that will push the economy onto a lower carbon path as it grows again? The answer is probably not, though there is some reason for hope:

As the economy recovers, the structure of that recovery will be important to the future emissions profile of the United States.  If energy-intensive industries lead the economic recovery, emissions would increase faster than if service industries or light manufacturing play the leading role.   If coal, which was more heavily impacted by the recent economic downturn than other energy sources, rebounds disproportionately, the carbon intensity of the energy supply could rise above the 2009 level.

However, longer-term trends continue to suggest decline in both the amount of energy used per unit of economic output and the carbon intensity of our energy supply, which both work to restrain emissions.

The world is at a major inflection point on its carbon trajectory, but I fear we’re going to blunder through it without realising the opportunity for transformation. As Copenhagen showed, unfortunately, we’re still a long, long way from reframing climate change as a now problem. But it’s still not too late to start working for peak emissions.

- Writing in The American Prospect, Spencer Ackerman reassesses Obama’s foreign policy doctrine, evaluating attempts to achieve progress on the international stage in the face of domestic opposition. Philip Stephens suggests why the current US President is no Jimmy Carter, with the passing of healthcare and success on the nuclear front beginning to overturn an initial “perception of failure”.

- Elsewhere, with the UK election campaign now in full swing, Bloomberg has news of the Queen’s preparations in the event of a hung parliament. Over at the Institute for Government, meanwhile, Peter Riddell suggests how the language of public policy might shift should there be a change in government.

- Finally, the National Post has news (complete with photos!) that Kim Jong-Il has assumed his place at the sartorial avant-garde.

- Kenneth Weisbrode explores the “reinventing diplomacy” debate, suggesting that “while America thinks in terms of networks, the rest of the world is busy connecting circuits.” Writing in The World Today, Christopher Hill assesses the current challenges facing UK foreign policy, the difficult decisions that lie ahead, and where future priorities may lie. “If it is to serve us well over the longer term”, he argues, UK foreign  and security policy “needs a radical overhaul of its underlying outlook”.

- Elsewhere, The Atlantic Monthly‘s Joshua Green offers a wide-ranging profile of US Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner – “a superstar of the bureaucracy” – assessing his influence on President Obama and his central role in shaping the US response to the global financial crisis.

- Finally, discussing European immigration Brigid Grauman highlights the example of Switzerland, suggesting that the rest of Europe would do well to learn the lessons of participatory democracy in promoting integration and fostering multiculturalism. Over at Foreign Policy, meanwhile, Steve Kettmann assesses the recent buffeting taken by the country’s international image, asking if the Swiss stance on neutrality is still feasible in an age of interconnectedness.

The President has clearly been led astray by Gordon Brown… On Twitter, @omairzahid comments: “Quite gloriously captured by the timorous and positively sombre look on the man sitting next to the fireplace.”