“The first opinion which one forms of a prince, and of his capability, is by observing the people he has around him.”

- Machiavelli

Culture is not a piece of baggage that immigrants carry with them; it is not static but undergoes constant modification in a new environment.

- Sau-ling Cynthia Wong

"The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own."

- Aldous Huxley

1. What is Indoctri-tainment?

Democratic governments, social media companies, and civil society organizations all can help combat these campaigns. Much of the relevant technical expertise and knowledge of ongoing operations are in the private sector, and governments must be able to draw on and coordinate with experts there. The United States and other democratic governments must improve their technical capacity and, with it, their ability to detect these campaigns.

Social media companies, for their parts, must improve their ability to protect the accounts and user experiences of dissidents, particularly those not operating in an English-language environment, as well as ordinary users who might be fooled by false information. These companies must increase the people and resources they devote to the region to combat false information and actors who violate their terms of service. They must also be more open with data so independent researchers can better monitor potentially dangerous activity.

This is a pivotal moment. If the United States is able to limit and contain the power of the Haqqanis in the new Taliban state, it would go a long way toward preventing Afghanistan from becoming a breeding ground for terrorism. When designed properly, such an approach could also buttress more moderate—non-Haqqani—factions of the Taliban constellation, which may include, for example, some of the leaders with whom Washington negotiated in 2020. But the United States will need international partners for any such strategy to be successful. Even in minimal form, a multilateral approach among the United States, Russia, China, and other nations toward the Haqqani threat in Afghanistan would do much to limit the expansion of ISIS-Khorasan and al Qaeda into the broader region and potentially stave off a devastating wave of destabilization from the new global terror threat.

There are haunting similarities with the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

In recent years, the Haqqanis have held more U.S. hostages than any other terrorist group.

• MELISSA SKORKA is a Senior Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Changing Character of War Centre.

This crisis reveals a problem in U.S. strategy. European security remains much more unsettled than it appears. The most militarily powerful state on the continent does not see itself as a stakeholder in Europe’s security architecture. There’s little evidence that without the United States, European powers can deter Moscow or lead their way out of a major crisis. The European Union is nonexistent in the conversation, begging for relevance. Yet the United States is materially constrained, seeking to focus on the Indo-Pacific and redress a deteriorating military balance vis-à-vis China. Washington’s dream of making the Russia relationship more predictable via a narrow strategic stability agenda appears to be dissipating. The United States will have to manage China and Russia, at the same time, for the foreseeable future. For U.S. strategy, it was never going to be China only, but it will prove exceedingly difficult to make it China mostly — not as long as Russia gets a vote.

In most circumstances, then, the subversive trilemma significantly limits the value of cyber operations. Their track record in Ukraine confirms this assessment. Of course, actors may occasionally get lucky and manage to achieve strategic goals despite taking exceptional risks. Yet such rare scenarios should not dominate threat assessments and strategy development. In theory, it is possible to juggle three balls while sprinting one hundred meters at competitive pace without dropping a single ball. In practice, few—if any—will be able to achieve this feat.

The US has hit back at the gangs extorting money via hacks. \

For Pakistan, this is a dream come true: For the first time in over 75 years not only are there no Indian advisors in Afghanistan, but there are also now Pakistani advisors in their stead. This alone may be worth the price that Pakistan will continue to pay for its victory in Afghanistan.

The Biden administration is especially interested in any indication that Russia may deploy tactical nuclear weapons to the border, a move that Russian officials have suggested could be an option.

More than 150 U.S. military advisers are in Ukraine, trainers who have for years worked out of the training ground near Lviv, in the country’s west, far from the front lines. The current group includes Special Operations forces, mostly Army Green Berets, as well as National Guard trainers from Florida’s 53rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team.

Military advisers from about a dozen allied countries are also in Ukraine, U.S. officials said. Several NATO countries, including Britain, Canada, Lithuania and Poland, have regularly sent training forces to the country.

In the event of a full-scale Russian invasion, the United States intends to move its military trainers out of the country quickly. But it is possible that some Americans could stay to advise Ukrainian officials in Kyiv, the capital, or provide frontline support, a U.S. official said.

• A politics of “us versus them”;
• Conflict over who belongs as a full member of society;
• Economic inequality;
• And excessive concentration of power in the executive branch

“Every crisis of democracy the United States has had over the course of its history has involved one or some combination of these threats,” he said. “This is the first time that we’ve ever had all four present at once.”

• A politics of “us versus them”;
• Conflict over who belongs as a full member of society;
• Economic inequality;
• And excessive concentration of power in the executive branch