Quotes of the Day:
"Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless, like water. You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend."
- Bruce Lee
"In the depths of Winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."
- Albert Camus
"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
- Frederick Douglass
1. Russia’s choice on Ukraine narrows to war or humiliation
2. Ukraine to the world: keep calm and stop spreading panic
3. Russia, US, Ukraine to square off at UN Security Council
4. F.B.I. Secretly Bought Israeli Spyware and Explored Hacking U.S. Phones
5. Book Ban Efforts Spread Across the U.S.
6. Opinion | My Young Mind Was Disturbed by a Book. It Changed My Life.
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8. How to Solve the Three Problems With Getting Our Afghan Allies Out
9. FDD | Terrorists Benefit from Qatar’s Goodwill and Charity
10. Can America Rebuild Its Power in Asia?
11. Keep NATO’s Door Open to Ukraine
12. Master of Deterrence
13. Iran’s regime executed two men based on anti-gay charges
14. Chinese State Media’s Global Influence(r) Operation
15. Britain warns Russia of sanctions on oligarchs if Ukraine is invaded
16. LET’S TWEET, GRANDMA – Weaponizing the Social to Create Information Security
17. Hackers for Hire: Proxy Warfare in the Cyber Realm
18. Stuck without housing, Afghan evacuees languish inside D.C.-area hotel rooms
19. China’s Real Challenge Is Not Military
20. Cyberattacks increasingly hobble pandemic-weary US schools
21. The Hard-Line Russian Advisers Who Have Putin’s Ear
22. Biden releases new statement on Navy SEAL vet held hostage by Taliban - here it is
23. State Department rebuffs Chinese propaganda on U.S. undermining Olympics
24. Pro-Moscow separatists once marched in this Ukraine border city. Now it’s standing against Russia.
1. Russia’s choice on Ukraine narrows to war or humiliation
Excerpts:
It is thus likely that the Kremlin will make yet another concession to Washington, which will be interpreted by some as yet another Russian stand down.
If Russia continues to make such “gestures of goodwill” and eventually pulls back its military forces now massed along Ukraine’s borders, the United States and wider West will likely view it as another sign of Kremlin weakness, not strength, and could thus encourage Kiev to resolve the Donbass conflict by force.
Such an operation would represent a war or humiliation moment of truth for Putin and the Kremlin.
Russia’s choice on Ukraine narrows to war or humiliation
Perceptions are likely growing in the West that Moscow is dispensing of empty threats and ultimatums on Ukraine
Russia might have a superior army but its political leadership seems increasingly unwilling to confront Western-backed neighboring Ukraine.
Despite warmongering and fearmongering rhetoric echoed in Western media, including reports today that Moscow continues to add troops around Ukraine, the actual situation on the border between the two countries is calm.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, keenly aware of the seriousness of the situation, recently called on the West not to create panic amid a build-up of Russian troops in Belarus and other regions in Western Russia.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov chimed in that there is no compelling reason to believe that Russia is preparing to invade Ukraine imminently. Despite those top-level assurances in Kiev, the West and its media still widely believe that Moscow could launch a large-scale attack on its neighbor at any time.
Although Russian officials openly claim they do not intend to invade Ukraine and call such allegations “complete absurdity“, their words do not seem to hold weight in Western capitals, not least Washington.
When Alexei Zaitsev, deputy director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Information and Press Department, said that Moscow considers war with Ukraine “unthinkable”, few Western media outlets gave the statement much, if any, play. Instead, media reports are laser-focused on Russia’s troop movements near the Ukrainian border.
At this point, Russia does not appear to have enough troops and equipment near the Eastern European country to launch a successful massive invasion. So then why does Moscow continue to amass forces on the border of Ukraine?
Russian troops are mounted on the border of Ukraine. Photo: Twitter / Fars News Agency
Russia, or at least some within the Kremlin, fear that Ukraine could eventually try to restore by force its sovereignty over the breakaway Donbass region. The coal-rich region in Eastern Ukraine has been under the control of pro-Russian forces since 2014, but Kiev has not dared to launch a large-scale military offensive against the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic and Lugansk People’s Republic.
It is entirely possible that Ukraine and West are seeking “security guarantees” that Moscow will not intervene to protect its proxies in case of a Ukrainian offensive. Russia’s units near the Ukrainian border are likely a signal that the Kremlin does not intend to abandon the Donbass. But what if it is just another bluff?
On January 22, Russia announced plans to hold military drills in February just 240 kilometers off Ireland’s coast. Five days later, the Kremlin decided to relocate its naval exercises in the Atlantic outside the Irish exclusive economic zone as a “gesture of goodwill” in order not to “disturb Irish fishermen.”
Western policymakers and strategic planners, however, likely viewed the flip-flop as more bluff than threat.
The West will now undoubtedly continue to pressure Russia, especially since the Kremlin’s “ultimatum” to the United States was apparently an empty threat. London has already signaled that it could target Russian oligarchs’ properties in the UK if Russia attacks Ukraine.
It is very probable that British Foreign Minister Liz Truss, who is expected to visit Russia in February, will openly tell Russian leaders what measures the UK will take if Moscow does not withdraw its troops from the Ukrainian border and resume peace talks.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has recently met with Italian business leaders and is expected to meet soon with the Germans as well. Could it be that they also sent him a message of what economic sanctions the Russian Federation can expect if it launches an attack on Ukraine?
But even if Russia does not invade Ukraine, Washington and its allies could nonetheless impose new punitive restrictions on doing business with Moscow. The US has already said that Crimea-related sanctions will remain in place until Russia returns full control of the peninsula to Ukraine.
In other words, as long as the Donbass conflict remains unresolved and Crimea is not returned to Ukraine, US-Russian relations are unlikely to normalize under a Biden administration. The problem for Moscow is that if it turns a blind eye to a potential Ukrainian offensive in the Donbass, sooner or later Crimea’s status will be on the table.
Russia-backed separatist fighters in Ukraine. There is considerable opacity about the identify, origin, leadership and payment of many of these unflagged troops. Photo: US Mission to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
On the other hand, even a limited Russian intervention in the Donbass will be interpreted in the West as Russian aggression against Ukraine, and oligarchs close to the Kremlin will face crippling new sanctions.
Russia thus cannot easily escape the vicious circle it entered in 2014 when Moscow incorporated Crimea into the Russian Federation and backed the self-proclaimed Donbass republics.
The Kremlin is now trying to ease tensions, given that its “ultimatum” was apparently rejected and Moscow has not taken any concrete steps yet to force the West to provide guarantees that Ukraine will never join NATO.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, recently answering a question about the possible recognition of the self-proclaimed Donbass republics as independent states, pointed out that for Moscow “Ukraine remains indivisible.”
He even said that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky would be welcome in Russia to discuss the normalization of bilateral relations, although in the past Putin refused to meet with the Ukrainian leader. Now, the Kremlin has not ruled out Putin meeting with Zelensky in Beijing during the Winter Olympic Games, which start later this week.
Moscow is also signaling that it will not launch an “asymmetric response” to US military activities in Eastern Europe by establishing military bases in Latin America.
Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, stressed on January 27 that Russia cannot open bases in Cuba and Venezuela as these countries “seek to get out of isolation and restore normal relations with the United States.” He even admitted that the US has significant leverage over Russia in Latin America.
Washington, for its part, continues to press Moscow in the diplomatic sphere. According to the Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov, the State Department raised the question of his departure from Washington if Russia does not issue visas to the guards of the head of the American diplomatic mission in Moscow.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visits a front line in Donbas on June 9, 2021. Zelensky has been incrementally rebuilding partnerships with NATO, leading to Russia’s current heavy forward deployments. Photo: AFP / Ukrainian Presidency / Anadolu Agency
It is thus likely that the Kremlin will make yet another concession to Washington, which will be interpreted by some as yet another Russian stand down.
If Russia continues to make such “gestures of goodwill” and eventually pulls back its military forces now massed along Ukraine’s borders, the United States and wider West will likely view it as another sign of Kremlin weakness, not strength, and could thus encourage Kiev to resolve the Donbass conflict by force.
Such an operation would represent a war or humiliation moment of truth for Putin and the Kremlin.
2. Ukraine to the world: keep calm and stop spreading panic
Sun Tzu: "Never assume your enemy will not attack. Make yourself invincible."
Ukraine to the world: keep calm and stop spreading panic
While it does not rule out further incursions, Kyiv insists Russia is not poised to occupy the country. But anxiety is spreading quickly
Kyiv, jokes one of its residents, is the eye of the hurricane, the calm spot at the centre of the storm. Life in Ukraine’s capital carries on as normal. But fears of impending chaos and destruction are closing in.
For weeks the US has been warning of a massive Russian military build-up along Ukraine’s borders. Hardened by eight years of war since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and orchestration of a separatist war in the Donbas region, many Ukrainians have been either unfazed or incredulous that President Vladimir Putin would go so far as to launch a large-scale invasion. Many still are. But sentiment has shifted in recent days.
“Something has changed,” says Andriy, a 24-year-old HR executive out shopping in a Kyiv mall. “All of my friends feel afraid of this situation with Russia.
“I thought journalists and media were exaggerating the situation. I don’t see panic in the eyes of the people, but in the last few days people are getting more afraid due to the news, news, news.”
There is little sign of panic buying. But Andriy says his friends have started to stock up on pasta and buckwheat. Other Ukrainians are making contingency plans. One western executive says he has packed a grab bag, fuelled up the car and agreed a rendezvous point with his family. They will flee to a safe venue outside the city away from important buildings or facilities and if necessary go there on foot. Others are considering sending family to Lviv, a city far to the west.
Women dine in a cake shop in Kyiv, where life carries on as normal, but fears of impending chaos and destruction are closing in © Sean Gallup/Getty Images
This sense of anxiety was first felt among English-speaking Ukrainians exposed to intensive western media coverage and those with foreign friends and family. Two of Kyiv’s international schools are closing. Andriy says he was unnerved by a message sent to an Israeli friend in Ukraine from the Israeli government about a possible evacuation. But now the concerns, repeatedly relayed by senior US officials, are filtering through to the population more widely.
“This is the first time since 2014 that news about a possible invasion is coming from the west and not Ukraine,” says Alyona Getmanchuk, director of the New Europe Center, a think-tank in Kyiv. Ukrainians are “exhausted” by warnings from their own government and might be more inclined to believe the US president, she suggests.
A decision this week by the US and UK embassies to evacuate diplomatic families and allow non-essential personnel to leave rattled Ukrainians. It also angered the Ukrainian government, which continues to downplay the imminent threat.
“Certainly there is a certain regrouping of Russian Federation military forces around Ukraine, which we are observing constantly,” Oleksiy Danilov, Ukraine’s national security adviser, tells the FT. “Is it critical for us [in terms of number]? No.
“At issue is something else. The aim of the Russian Federation is to destabilise our country from within. They are doing this constantly and professionally.”
Erratic messaging
Speaking on Friday, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, played down the prospects of a full-blown invasion. “We do understand what the risks are,” he said at a press conference, adding that “we do not see a bigger escalation” then last spring when Russia’s military build-up started.
A government tourism body has adopted the slogan: “Keep calm and visit Ukraine’.
Volodymyr Zelensky with US secretary of state Antony Blinken in Kyiv. The Ukrainian president has been criticised for his perceived failure to prepare the public for war © Alex Brandon/AP
The official position being taken by Kyiv exposes a remarkable gulf of perceptions with Washington and begs the question: why is a country that for several years beseeched its western allies to take the Russian menace more seriously now playing it down?
Zelensky’s messaging about the threat to his country has been erratic. After meeting US secretary of state Antony Blinken in Kyiv on January 19, the president released a video in which he seemed to make light of the invasion threat, saying Ukrainians could soon relax over a shashlik (barbecue). Yet the next day he told the Washington Post that Kharkiv, a city in the north-east, “could be occupied”.
While Zelensky’s political critics concur with the prevailing view in Kyiv that Putin is unlikely to launch a full invasion, they have also denounced the president’s failure to prepare the public for war and to beef up defences, for example by mobilising the army reserve.
“He should have said: ‘My fellow Ukrainians, Ukraine is under threat. Russia amassed 100,000 troops across the border. Putin wants to take over Ukraine. We have to stay united. I order Ukrainian military to mobilise. I order Ukrainian military to deploy additional troops,’” says Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who was prime minister from 2014-16.
Zelensky is preoccupied above all with the economic fallout from the ever more dire invasion warnings, say western diplomats, Ukrainian officials and advisers.
Russian soldiers test fire artillery near the border with Ukraine. Some Ukrainian officials and experts take a different view from the US and UK on Russia’s military superiority © Russian Defense Ministry Press Service/AP
Solid economic growth of 3.2 per cent last year, buoyed by high prices for Ukraine’s commodity exports, was a bright spot for Zelensky, who appears an increasingly isolated and unpopular figure. Since his election in 2019, he has made modest progress in tackling graft, is struggling to reform a corrupt judiciary and is locked in a power struggle with some of the country’s powerful oligarchs.
However, the economy has now taken a sharp turn for the worse. Inflation has shot above 10 per cent. The hryvnia has lost 6 per cent of its value against the US dollar in a month. Companies are struggling with surging energy costs. Ukraine filled up its gas storage facilities last year before prices spiralled, but it will need billions of dollars to meet next winter’s needs.
Investors have taken fright. Ukraine is, in effect, locked out of capital markets, although the biggest bond redemptions of the year are not due until September.
“Even if nothing happens, it is a macroeconomic shock,” says Tymofiy Mylovanov, a former economy minister and adviser to the presidential administration. “It will have an impact on mood, morale and allocation of resources.”
Yevgenii Utkin, a Russian-born entrepreneur in Kyiv, says three international transactions involving investments in tech companies he founded or invested in have stalled in the past month. “Now there is no way to sell,” he says.
Yuriy Vitrenko, the head of Naftogaz, Ukraine’s gas company, says ’those who are spreading panic are helping, intentionally or unintentionally, [Vladimir] Putin’ © Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images
The economic damage is part and parcel of Putin’s campaign to destabilise Ukraine, say Zelensky’s allies. Economic hardship could help Moscow turn Ukrainians against their government.
“Those who are spreading panic are helping, intentionally or unintentionally, Mr Putin,” says Yuriy Vitrenko, the head of Naftogaz, Ukraine’s gas company, who has also been tipped as a future prime minister. “We have been living under a constant threat of invasion and I’m not sure this is very different.”
A pressure campaign?
Ukrainian officials and experts also take a different view from their US and UK counterparts on Russia’s military preparedness and they challenge western assumptions about Russia’s military superiority.
Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former defence minister and director of the Centre for Defence Strategies, a think-tank, concedes that a large-scale Russian invasion is possible, including an attempt to take Kyiv.
“They are not ready yet, but they will be in a month. They are ready for smaller-scale [conflict]. They could invade Donbas today,” he says.
Zagorodnyuk, who advises the government, takes issue with the confident predictions of US analysts about Putin’s intentions to invade. “Many people are making a false logical construct,” he says. “They can invade, which is why they will, and that means a full occupation of the country.”
“The Russians don’t have a single plan. They have strategic goals and then they have options to meet them. They try something and then they step back. They are very receptive to the response.”
Many Ukrainians, in or out of government, assert that the Kremlin would not launch a large-scale invasion because they insist Putin must know he will meet stiff resistance.
Ukrainian troops train near Lviv in the west of the country. In 2014, Ukraine had 5,000 combat-ready troops. Now it has a professional army of 250,000 personnel © Pavlo Palamarchuk/AP
In 2014, Ukraine had 5,000 combat-ready troops. Now it says it has a fully professional army of 250,000, as well as an army reserve of hundreds of thousands. Between them there are 200,000 soldiers with combat experience, the government says.
Oleksiy Arestovych, a former military intelligence officer and adviser to the presidential administration, argues that Russia’s vaunted air supremacy is also overstated. Ukraine has a sophisticated if ageing Soviet-era air defence system which will bring down some Russian jets, he says.
Russia only has 200-300 Kalibr cruise missiles and 150 Iskander short-range missiles and their accuracy is “laughable”, Arestovych claims.
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“This illusion has been created that we will have nothing left.”
Ukrainians know Russian aggression comes in many forms on a sliding scale — from cyber attacks and bomb threats to annexation — because they have been on the receiving end since their country became independent in 1991. Analysts and politicians concede that Russia might try to seize chunks of their country. But capturing, let alone occupying, large cities is unlikely because of the military cost, they believe. Kyiv might be the exception, says Zagorodnyuk, given the benefits to Putin of decapitating the government and economy. Taking the port city of Odesa, in the south-west, also has strategic and economic value.
But analysts and government advisers believe Putin’s real intention is to gain influence rather than territory. Despite repeated US reassurances, they still suspect Ukraine will come under intense pressure to compromise with Russia and change the constitution to give permanent autonomy to separatist-held Donbas regions, giving them a veto over future agreements with the EU or Nato — a concession that could provoke a nationalist backlash in Ukraine and endanger the government.
“From the outset they have seen this as a pressure campaign,” says a European diplomat.
A customer inspects goods at a military surplus shop in Kyiv. Ukraine now has hundreds of thousands of reserves ready to supplement its regular army © Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Stressing the need to “not panic”, Danilov says Russia’s top priority in threatening a full-blown invasion is to encourage Europe and the US to pressure Kyiv to capitulate on the Minsk peace agreements, which aimed to end the war in Donbas. Such a compromise would, in turn, “achieve domestic destabilisation of our country” followed by regime change.
Asked if western countries would play along with such a proposal in order to prevent a full-blown war, he adds: “I would not want to even think about this, that they are in cahoots. It’s difficult for me to say.”
Nearly every Ukrainian the Financial Times spoke to said they or people they know are ready to take up arms to defend their country. Many Ukrainian households have weapons — about 1m, according to government estimates. Whether their resolve melts away under a Russian offensive is another matter. But for the moment, thinking about defending the homeland is psychologically reassuring at a time when the country feels it is caught in a wider fight between great powers.
Daniel Bilak, a Canadian-Ukrainian who used to run Ukraine’s inward investment agency, is forming a civil defence unit for three villages outside the capital. It is both a psychological prop for Ukrainians to counter “a sense of helplessness” and a tactic for deterring Russia, he says.
“It has become very important. This is where we play psychological games with the Russians,” he says. “They are not all Spetsnaz [special forces] and battle-hardened. When every village becomes a centre of resistance, that plays into [Putin’s] calculations too.”
3. Russia, US, Ukraine to square off at UN Security Council
Russia, US, Ukraine to square off at UN Security Council
U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said Russia’s actions pose “a clear threat to international peace and security and the U.N. Charter.” Council members “must squarely examine the facts and consider what is at stake for Ukraine, for Russia, for Europe, and for the core obligations and principles of the international order should Russia further invade Ukraine,” she said Thursday in announcing the meeting.
Russia’s deputy U.N. ambassador Dmitry Polyansky responded angrily, tweeting: “I can’t recall another occasion when a SC (Security Council) member proposed to discuss its own baseless allegations and assumptions as a threat to intl (international) order from someone else. Hopefully fellow UNSC members will not support this clear PR stunt shameful for the reputation of UN Security Council.”
Polyansky’s reaction indicated that Russia may start the meeting asking for a procedural vote on whether it should go ahead. To block the meeting, Russia would need support from nine of the 15 members.
A senior official in the Biden administration said the United States is in regular contact with council members and is “confident” that there is “more than sufficient support” to hold the meeting.
“It goes right to the heart of the role of the Security Council itself,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. “This preventive diplomacy is exactly what the council is supposed to be doing, and I think member states understand that.”
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U.S. defense leaders warned Friday that President Vladimir Putin “clearly now has the ability” to have his forces invade Ukraine with “very, very little warning,” but that U.S., NATO and Ukrainian forces stand ready to respond if that happens.
Russia’s massing of an estimated 100,000 troops near the border with Ukraine has brought increasingly strong warnings from the West that Moscow intends to invade. Russia is demanding that NATO promise never to allow Ukraine to join the alliance, and to stop the deployment of NATO weapons near Russian borders and roll back its forces from Eastern Europe. NATO and the U.S. call those demands impossible.
Assuming the meeting goes ahead, the council will first hear a briefing by a senior U.N. official followed by statements from its 15 members including Russia, the United States and European members France, Ireland, United Kingdom and Albania. Under council rules, Ukraine will also speak.
China’s U.N. Ambassador Zhang Jun, whose country has close ties to Russia, indicated Beijing supports Moscow in opposing a council meeting.
“Both sides have shown willingness to continue their negotiations,” he told several reporters on Friday. “Let them settle the differences through dialogue, through negotiations.”
“Russia has said clearly they have no intention to have a war” and the Security Council should “help to deescalate the situation instead of adding fuel to the fire,” Zhang said.
The head of Russia’s Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, on Sunday rejected Western warnings about an invasion.
“At this time, they’re saying that Russia threatens Ukraine — that’s completely ridiculous,” he was quoted as saying by state news agency Tass. “We don’t want war and we don’t need it at all.”
Thomas-Greenfield said of the U.S. and the other council members on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday: “We’re going into the room prepared to listen to them, but we’re not going to be distracted by their propaganda.”
“This is a period when we want to see calm,” said Ireland’s U.N. Ambassador Geraldine Byrne Nason, whose country is serving a two-year term on the council. “We want to see deescalation, diplomacy and dialogue. That’s what we favor in relation to the current set of circumstances.”
4. F.B.I. Secretly Bought Israeli Spyware and Explored Hacking U.S. Phones
Excerpts:
One of those companies, Boldend, told Raytheon, the defense-industry giant, in January 2021, that it could hack WhatsApp, the popular messaging service owned by Facebook, but then lost the capability after a WhatsApp update, according to a presentation obtained by The Times.
The claim was especially notable because, according to one of the slides, a major Boldend investor is Founders Fund — a company run by Peter Thiel, the billionaire who was one of Facebook’s first investors and remains on its board.
The recent American blacklisting of NSO could suffocate the company by denying it access to the American technology it needs to run its operations, including Dell computers and Amazon cloud servers.
The rebuke has infuriated Israeli officials who have denounced the move as an attack not only on a crown jewel of the country’s defense industry but on the country itself.
“The people aiming their arrows against NSO,” said Yigal Unna, director general of the Israel National Cyber Directorate until Jan. 5, “are actually aiming at the blue and white flag hanging behind it.”
F.B.I. Secretly Bought Israeli Spyware and Explored Hacking U.S. Phones
Israel used the NSO Group’s cyberweapon as a tool of diplomacy. The F.B.I. tested it for domestic surveillance. Then everything soured. Here are highlights of a New York Times Magazine investigation.
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The Israeli cyber company NSO Group at one of its branches in the Arava Desert in Sapir, Israel.
By
Jan. 28, 2022, 5:09 a.m. ET
It is widely regarded as the world’s most potent spyware, capable of reliably cracking the encrypted communications of iPhone and Android smartphones.
The software, Pegasus, made by an Israeli company, NSO Group, has been able to track terrorists and drug cartels. It has also been used against human rights activists, journalists and dissidents.
The yearlong investigation, by Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti, also reports that the F.B.I. bought and tested NSO software for years with plans to use it for domestic surveillance until the agency finally decided last year not to deploy the tools.
The Times found that sales of Pegasus played a critical role in securing the support of Arab nations in Israel’s campaign against Iran and negotiating the Abraham Accords, the 2020 diplomatic agreements, signed at a Trump White House ceremony, that normalized relations between Israel and some of its longtime Arab adversaries.
The U.S. sought the cyberweapon for domestic use.
The U.S. had also moved to acquire Pegasus, The Times found. The F.B.I., in a deal never previously reported, bought the spyware in 2019, despite multiple reports that it had been used against activists and political opponents in other countries. It also spent two years discussing whether to deploy a newer product, called Phantom, inside the United States.
The discussions at the Justice Department and the F.B.I. continued until last summer, when the F.B.I. ultimately decided not to use NSO weapons.
But Pegasus equipment is still in a New Jersey building used by the F.B.I. And the company also gave the agency a demonstration of Phantom, which could hack American phone numbers.
A brochure for potential customers, obtained by The Times, says that Phantom allows American law enforcement and spy agencies to “turn your target’s smartphone into an intelligence gold mine.”
The yearlong Times investigation was based on interviews with government officials, leaders of intelligence and law enforcement agencies, cyber experts, business executives and privacy activists in a dozen countries.
It tells the story of NSO’s rise from a start-up operating out of a converted chicken coop on an agricultural cooperative to its blacklisting by the Biden administration in November because of its use by foreign governments to “maliciously target” dissidents, journalists and others.
NSO began with two school friends, Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie, hatching start-ups in Bnai Zion, an agricultural cooperative outside of Tel Aviv, in the mid-2000s.
One of their start-ups, CommuniTake, which offered cellphone tech-support workers the ability to take control of their customers’ devices — with permission — caught the attention of a European intelligence agency, Mr. Hulio said.
NSO was born, and the company eventually developed a way to gain access to phones without the user’s permission — no need to click on a malicious attachment or link. (That the company’s name sounded like the N.S.A. was a mere coincidence).
‘You start to believe your every move is watched.’
After NSO began selling Pegasus globally in 2011, Mexican authorities used it to capture Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the drug lord known as El Chapo. And European investigators used it to smash a child-abuse ring with dozens of suspects in more than 40 countries.
Mexico used the spyware to target journalists and dissidents. Saudi Arabia used it against women’s rights activists and associates of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist who was killed and dismembered by Saudi operatives in 2018.
That year, the C.I.A. bought Pegasus to help Djibouti, an American ally, fight terrorism, despite longstanding concerns about human rights abuses there, including the persecution of journalists and the torture of dissidents.
In the U.A.E., Pegasus was used to hack the phone of an outspoken critic of the government, Ahmed Mansoor.
Mr. Mansoor’s email account was breached, his geolocation was monitored, $140,000 was stolen from his bank account, he was fired from his job and strangers beat him on the street.
“You start to believe your every move is watched,” he said. In 2018, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for posts he made on Facebook and Twitter.
Through a series of new deals licensed by the Israeli Ministry of Defense, Pegasus has been provided to the far-right leaders of Poland, Hungary, India and other countries.
Mr. Netanyahu did not order the Pegasus system to be cut off, even when the Polish government enacted laws that many Jews inside and outside of Israel saw as Holocaust denial, or when Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, at a conference attended by Mr. Netanyahu himself, falsely listed “Jewish perpetrators” among those responsible for the Holocaust.
The blacklisting of NSO infuriated Israeli officials.
American companies have been trying to build their own tools that could hack phones with the ease of NSO’s “zero click” technology.
One of those companies, Boldend, told Raytheon, the defense-industry giant, in January 2021, that it could hack WhatsApp, the popular messaging service owned by Facebook, but then lost the capability after a WhatsApp update, according to a presentation obtained by The Times.
The claim was especially notable because, according to one of the slides, a major Boldend investor is Founders Fund — a company run by Peter Thiel, the billionaire who was one of Facebook’s first investors and remains on its board.
The recent American blacklisting of NSO could suffocate the company by denying it access to the American technology it needs to run its operations, including Dell computers and Amazon cloud servers.
The rebuke has infuriated Israeli officials who have denounced the move as an attack not only on a crown jewel of the country’s defense industry but on the country itself.
“The people aiming their arrows against NSO,” said Yigal Unna, director general of the Israel National Cyber Directorate until Jan. 5, “are actually aiming at the blue and white flag hanging behind it.”
5. Book Ban Efforts Spread Across the U.S.
WTF?
Riddle me this jumpmaster: Has there ever been a "good guy" in history who has supported banning books?
It seems to me only the ignorant, arrogant, and evil ones support banning books. I would hope the good folks in Tennessee, and throughout America, would want to be on the right side of history (and American values!)
Book Ban Efforts Spread Across the U.S.
Challenges to books about sexual and racial identity are nothing new in American schools, but the tactics and politicization are.
Jack Petocz with the protest signs he used at a school board meeting in Flagler County, Fla.Credit...Todd Anderson for The New York Times
Jan. 30, 2022
In Wyoming, a county prosecutor’s office considered charges against library employees for stocking books like “Sex Is a Funny Word” and “This Book Is Gay.”
In Oklahoma, a bill was introduced in the State Senate that would prohibit public school libraries from keeping books on hand that focus on sexual activity, sexual identity or gender identity.
In Tennessee, the McMinn County Board of Education voted to remove the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel “Maus” from an eighth-grade module on the Holocaust because of nudity and curse words.
Parents, activists, school board officials and lawmakers around the country are challenging books at a pace not seen in decades. The American Library Association said in a preliminary report that it received an “unprecedented” 330 reports of book challenges, each of which can include multiple books, last fall.
“It’s a pretty startling phenomenon here in the United States to see book bans back in style, to see efforts to press criminal charges against school librarians,” said Suzanne Nossel, the chief executive of the free-speech organization PEN America, even if efforts to press charges have so far failed.
Such challenges have long been a staple of school board meetings, but it isn’t just their frequency that has changed, according to educators, librarians and free-speech advocates — it is also the tactics behind them and the venues where they play out. Conservative groups in particular, fueled by social media, are now pushing the challenges into statehouses, law enforcement and political races.
“The politicalization of the topic is what's different than what I’ve seen in the past,” said Britten Follett, the chief executive of content at Follett School Solutions, one of the country’s largest providers of books to K-12 schools. “It’s being driven by legislation, it’s being driven by politicians aligning with one side or the other. And in the end, the librarian, teacher or educator is getting caught in the middle.”
Among the most frequent targets are books about race, gender and sexuality, like George M. Johnson’s “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” Jonathan Evison’s “Lawn Boy,” Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer” and Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye.”
“I didn’t know that was something you could do, file a criminal complaint against a book,” said George Johnson, author of the memoir “All Boys Aren’t Blue.”Credit...Bethany Mollenkof for The New York Times
Several books are drawing fire repeatedly in different parts of the country — “All Boys Aren’t Blue” has been targeted for removal in at least 14 states — in part because objections that have surfaced in recent months often originate online. Many parents have seen Google docs or spreadsheets of contentious titles posted on Facebook by local chapters of organizations such as Moms for Liberty. From there, librarians say, parents ask their schools if those books are available to their children.
“If you look at the lists of books being targeted, it’s so broad,” Ms. Nossel said. Some groups, she noted, have essentially weaponized book lists meant to promote more diverse reading material, taking those lists and then pushing for all the included titles to be banned.
The advocacy group No Left Turn in Education maintains lists of books it says are “used to spread radical and racist ideologies to students,” including Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” and Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Those who are demanding certain books be removed insist this is an issue of parental rights and choice, that all parents should be free to direct the upbringing of their own children.
Others say prohibiting these titles altogether violates the rights of other parents and the rights of children who believe access to these books is important. Many school libraries already have mechanisms in place to stop individual students from checking out books of which their parents disapprove.
The author Laurie Halse Anderson, whose young adult books have frequently been challenged, said that pulling titles that deal with difficult subjects can make it harder for students to discuss issues like racism and sexual assault.
“By attacking these books, by attacking the authors, by attacking the subject matter, what they are doing is removing the possibility for conversation,” she said. “You are laying the groundwork for increasing bullying, disrespect, violence and attacks.”
Tiffany Justice, a former school board member in Indian River County, Fla., and a founder of Moms for Liberty, said that parents should not be vilified for asking if a book is appropriate. Some of the books being challenged involve sexual activity, including oral sex and anal sex, she said, and children are not ready for that kind of material.
“There are different stages of development of sexuality in our lives, and when that’s disrupted, it can have horrible long-term effects,” she said.
“The bottom line is if parents are concerned about something, politicians need to pay attention,” Ms. Justice added. “2022 will be a year of the parent at the ballot box.”
Christopher M. Finan, the executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, said he has not seen this level of challenges since the 1980s, when a similarly energized conservative base embraced the issue. This time, however, that energy is colliding with an effort to publish and circulate more diverse books, as well as social media, which can amplify complaints about certain titles.
“Sex Is a Funny Word” is among the books being challenged.Credit...Triangle Square Press, via Associated Press
“It’s this confluence of tensions that have always existed over what’s the proper thing to teach kids,” Mr. Finan said.
“These same issues are really coming alive in a new social environment,” he added, “and it’s a mess. It’s a real mess.”
Book challenges aren’t just coming from the right: “Of Mice and Men” and “To Kill a Mockingbird,” for example, have been challenged over the years for how they address race, and both were among the library association’s 10 most-challenged books in 2020.
In the Mukilteo School District in Washington State, the school board voted to remove “To Kill a Mockingbird” — voted the best book of the past 125 years in a survey of readers conducted by The New York Times Book Review — from the ninth-grade curriculum at the request of staff members. Their objections included arguments that the novel marginalized characters of color, celebrated “white saviorhood” and used racial slurs dozens of times without addressing their derogatory nature.
While the book is no longer a requirement, it remains on the district’s list of approved novels, and teachers can still choose to assign it if they wish.
In other instances, efforts to ban books are more sweeping, as parents and organizations aim to have them removed from libraries, cutting off access for everyone. Perhaps no book has been targeted more vigorously than “The 1619 Project,” a best seller about slavery in America that has drawn wide support among many historians and Black leaders and which arose from the 2019 special issue of The New York Times Magazine. It has been named explicitly in proposed legislation.
What Is the 1619 Project?
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Acknowledging a historic moment. In August 2019, The New York Times Magazine launched the 1619 Project, spearheaded by Nikole Hannah-Jones. The project explored the history of slavery in the United States and was released to coincide with the anniversary of a ship carrying the first enslaved Africans to the English colonies.
Political leaders on the right have seized on the controversies over books. The newly elected governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, rallied his supporters by framing book bans as an issue of parental control and highlighted the issue in a campaign ad featuring a mother who wanted Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” to be removed from her son’s high school curriculum.
In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott demanded that the state’s education agency “investigate any criminal activity in our public schools involving the availability of pornography,” a move that librarians in the state fear could make them targets of criminal complaints. The governor of South Carolina asked the state’s superintendent of education and its law enforcement division to investigate the presence of “obscene and pornographic” materials in its public schools, offering “Gender Queer” as an example.
The mayor of Ridgeland, Miss., recently withheld funding from the Madison County Library System, saying he would not release the money until books with L.G.B.T.Q. themes were removed, according to the library system’s executive director.
George M. Johnson, the author of “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” a memoir about growing up Black and queer, was stunned in November to learn that a school board member in Flagler County, Fla., had filed a complaint with the sheriff’s department against the book. Written for readers aged 14 and older, it includes scenes that depict oral and anal sex and sexual assault.
“I didn’t know that was something you could do, file a criminal complaint against a book,” Johnson said in an interview. The complaint was dismissed by the sheriff’s office, but the book was subsequently removed from school libraries while it was reviewed by a committee.
At a school board meeting where the book was debated, a group of students protested the ban and distributed free copies, while counterprotesters assailed it as pornography and occasionally screamed obscenities and anti-gay slurs, according to a student who organized the protest and posted video footage of the event.
Johnson made a video appearance at the meeting and argued that the memoir contained valuable lessons about consent and that it highlighted difficult issues that teenagers are likely to encounter in their lives.
A district committee reviewed the book and determined it was “appropriate for use” in high school libraries, but the decision was overruled by the county superintendent, who told the school board that “All Boys Aren’t Blue” would be kept out of libraries, while new policies are created to allow parents to have more control over which books their children can access. Several other young adult titles that had been challenged and removed were restored.
Jack Petocz, a 17-year-old student at Flagler Palm Coast High School who organized the protest against the book ban, said that removing books about L.G.B.T.Q. characters and books about racism was discriminatory, and harmful to students who may already feel that they are in the minority and that their experiences are rarely represented in literature.
Jack Petocz with the book “All Boys Aren't Blue” at his home in Florida.Credit...Todd Anderson for The New York Times
“As a gay student myself, those books are so critical for youth, for feeling there are resources for them,” he said, noting that books that portray heterosexual romances are rarely challenged. “I felt it was very discriminatory.”
So far, efforts to bring criminal charges against librarians and educators have largely faltered, as law enforcement officials in Florida, Wyoming and elsewhere have found no basis for criminal investigations. And courts have generally taken the position that libraries should not remove books from circulation.
Nonetheless, librarians say that just the threat of having to defend against charges is enough to get many educators to censor themselves by not stocking the books to begin with. Even just the public spectacle of an accusation can be enough.
“It will certainly have a chilling effect,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s office for intellectual freedom. “You live in a community where you’ve been for 28 years, and all of a sudden you might be charged with the crime of pandering obscenity. And you’d hoped to stay in that community forever.”
She said that aggressively policing books for inappropriate content and banning titles could limit students’ exposure to great literature, including towering canonical works.
“If you focus on five passages, you’ve got obscenity,” Ms. Caldwell-Stone said. “If you broaden your view and read the work as a whole, you’ve got Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved.’”
6. Opinion | My Young Mind Was Disturbed by a Book. It Changed My Life.
A powerful story and worth reading and reflecting on.
This is why you do not ban books. (and why you sometimes need to read some books more than once).
Excerpt:
Banning is an act of fear — the fear of dangerous and contagious ideas. The best, and perhaps most dangerous, books deliver these ideas in something just as troubling and infectious: a good story.
Opinion | My Young Mind Was Disturbed by a Book. It Changed My Life.
Guest Essay
My Young Mind Was Disturbed by a Book. It Changed My Life.
Jan. 29, 2022
Credit...Delcan & Co.
By
Mr. Nguyen is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Sympathizer” and the children’s book “Chicken of the Sea,” written with his then 5-year-old son, Ellison.
When I was 12 or 13 years old, I was not prepared for the racism, the brutality or the sexual assault in Larry Heinemann’s 1974 novel, “Close Quarters.”
Mr. Heinemann, a combat veteran of the war in Vietnam, wrote about a nice, average American man who goes to war and becomes a remorseless killer. In the book’s climax, the protagonist and other nice, average American soldiers gang-rape a Vietnamese prostitute they call Claymore Face.
As a Vietnamese American teenager, it was horrifying for me to realize that this was how some Americans saw Vietnamese people — and therefore me. I returned the book to the library, hating both it and Mr. Heinemann.
Here’s what I didn’t do: I didn’t complain to the library or petition the librarians to take the book off the shelves. Nor did my parents. It didn’t cross my mind that we should ban “Close Quarters” or any of the many other books, movies and TV shows in which racist and sexist depictions of Vietnamese and other Asian people appear.
Instead, years later, I wrote my own novel about the same war, “The Sympathizer.”
While working on it, I reread “Close Quarters.” That’s when I realized I’d misconstrued Mr. Heinemann’s intentions. He wasn’t endorsing what he depicted. He wanted to show that war brutalized soldiers, as well as the civilians caught in their path. The novel was a damning indictment of American warfare and the racist attitudes held by some nice, average Americans that led to slaughter and rape. Mr. Heinemann revealed America’s heart of darkness. He didn’t offer readers the comfort of a way out by editorializing or sentimentalizing or humanizing Vietnamese people, because in the mind of the book’s narrator and his fellow soldiers, the Vietnamese were not human.
In the United States, the battle over books is heating up, with some politicians and parents demanding the removal of certain books from libraries and school curriculums. Just in the last week, we saw reports of a Tennessee school board that voted to ban Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, “Maus,” from classrooms, and a mayor in Mississippi who is withholding $110,000 in funding from his city’s library until it removes books depicting L.G.B.T.Q. people. Those seeking to ban books argue that these stories and ideas can be dangerous to young minds — like mine, I suppose, when I picked up Mr. Heinemann’s novel.
Books can indeed be dangerous. Until “Close Quarters,” I believed stories had the power to save me. That novel taught me that stories also had the power to destroy me. I was driven to become a writer because of the complex power of stories. They are not inert tools of pedagogy. They are mind-changing, world-changing.
But those who seek to ban books are wrong no matter how dangerous books can be. Books are inseparable from ideas, and this is really what is at stake: the struggle over what a child, a reader and a society are allowed to think, to know and to question. A book can open doors and show the possibility of new experiences, even new identities and futures.
Book banning doesn’t fit neatly into the rubrics of left and right politics. Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” has been banned at various points because of Twain’s prolific use of a racial slur, among other things. Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” has been banned before and is being threatened again — in one case after a mother complained that the book gave her son nightmares. To be sure, “Beloved” is an upsetting novel. It depicts infanticide, rape, bestiality, torture and lynching. But coming amid a movement to oppose critical race theory — or rather a caricature of critical race theory — it seems clear that the latest attempts to suppress this masterpiece of American literature are less about its graphic depictions of atrocity than about the book’s insistence that we confront the brutality of slavery.
Here’s the thing: If we oppose banning some books, we should oppose banning any book. If our society isn’t strong enough to withstand the weight of difficult or challenging — and even hateful or problematic — ideas, then something must be fixed in our society. Banning books is a shortcut that sends us to the wrong destination.
As Ray Bradbury depicted in “Fahrenheit 451,” another book often targeted by book banners, book burning is meant to stop people from thinking, which makes them easier to govern, to control and ultimately to lead into war. And once a society acquiesces to burning books, it tends to soon see the need to burn the people who love books.
And loving books is really the point — not reading them to educate oneself or become more conscious or politically active (which can be extra benefits). I could recommend “Fahrenheit 451” because of its edifying political and ethical dimensions or argue that reading this novel is good for you, but that really misses the point. The book gets us to care about politics and ethics by making us care about a man who burns books for a living and who has a life-changing crisis about his awful work. That man and his realization could be any of us.
It’s not only books that depict horror, war or totalitarianism that worry would-be book banners. They sometimes see danger in empathy. This appeared to be the fear that led a Texas school district to cancel the appearance of the graphic novelist Jerry Craft and pull his books temporarily from library shelves last fall. In Mr. Craft’s Newbery Medal-winning book, “New Kid,” and its sequel, Black middle-schoolers navigate social and academic life at a private school where there are very few students of color. “The books don’t come out and say we want white children to feel like oppressors, but that is absolutely what they will do,” the parent who started the petition to cancel Mr. Craft’s event said. (Mr. Craft’s invitation for a virtual visit was rescheduled and his books were reinstated soon after.)
Mr. Craft’s protagonist in “New Kid” is a sweet, shy, comics-loving kid. And it’s his relatability that makes him seem so dangerous to some white parents. The historian and law professor Annette Gordon-Reed argued on Twitter that parents who object to books such as “New Kid” “don’t want their kids to empathize with the black characters. They know their kids will do this instinctively. They don’t want to give them the opportunity to do that.” The historian Kevin Kruse went a step further, tweeting, “If you’re worried your children will read a book and have no choice but to identify with the villains in it, well … maybe that’s something you need to work through on your own.”
Those who ban books seem to want to circumscribe empathy, reserving it for a limited circle closer to the kind of people they perceive themselves to be. Against this narrowing of empathy, I believe in the possibility and necessity of expanding empathy — and the essential role that books such as “New Kid” play in that. If it’s possible to hate and fear those we have never met, then it’s possible to love those we have never met. Both options, hate and love, have political consequences, which is why some seek to expand our access to books and others to limit them.
These dilemmas aren’t just political; they’re also deeply personal and intimate. Now, as a father of a precocious 8-year-old reader, I have to think about what books I bring into our home. My son loves Hergé’s Tintin comic books, which I introduced him to because I loved them as a child. I didn’t notice Hergé’s racist and colonialist attitudes then, from the paternalistic depiction of Tintin’s Chinese friend Chang in “The Blue Lotus” to the Native American warriors wearing headdresses and wielding tomahawks in the 1930s of “Tintin in America.” Even if I had noticed, I had no one with whom I could talk about these books. My son does. We enjoy the adventures of the boy reporter and his fluffy white dog together, but as we read, I point out the books’ racism against most nonwhite characters, and particularly their atrocious depictions of Black Africans. Would it be better that he not see these images, or is it better that he does?
I err on the side of the latter and try to model what I think our libraries and schools should be doing. I make sure he has access to many other stories of the peoples that Hergé misrepresented, and I offer context with our discussions. These are not always easy conversations. And perhaps that’s the real reason some people want to ban books that raise complicated issues: They implicate and discomfort the adults, not the children. By banning books, we also ban difficult dialogues and disagreements, which children are perfectly capable of having and which are crucial to a democracy. I have told him that he was born in the United States because of a complicated history of French colonialism and American warfare that brought his grandparents and parents to this country. Perhaps we will eventually have less war, less racism, less exploitation if our children can learn how to talk about these things.
For these conversations to be robust, children have to be interested enough to want to pick up the book in the first place. Children’s literature is increasingly diverse and many books now raise these issues, but some of them are hopelessly ruined by good intentions. I don’t find piousness and pedagogy interesting in art, and neither do children. Hergé’s work is deeply flawed, and yet riveting narratively and aesthetically. I have forgotten all the well-intentioned, moralistic children’s literature that I have read, but I haven’t forgotten Hergé.
Books should not be consumed as good for us, like the spinach and cabbage my son pushes to the side of his plate. “I like reading short stories,” a reader once said to me. “They’re like potato chips. I can’t stop with one.” That’s the attitude to have. I want readers to crave books as if they were a delicious, unhealthy treat, like the chili-lime chips my son gets after he eats his carrots and cucumbers.
Read “Fahrenheit 451” because its gripping story will keep you up late, even if you have an early morning. Read “Beloved,” “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “Close Quarters” and “The Adventures of Tintin” because they are indelible, sometimes uncomfortable and always compelling.
We should value that magnetic quality. To compete with video games, streaming video and social media, books must be thrilling, addictive, thorny and dangerous. If those qualities sometimes get books banned, it’s worth noting that sometimes banning a book can increase its sales.
I know my parents would have been shocked if they knew the content of the books I was reading: Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint,” for instance, which was banned in Australia from 1969 to 1971. I didn’t pick up this quintessential American novel, or any other, because I thought reading it would be good for me. I was looking for stories that would thrill me and confuse me, as “Portnoy’s Complaint” did. For decades afterward, all I remembered of the novel was how the young Alexander Portnoy masturbated with anything he could get his hands on, including a slab of liver. After consummating his affair with said liver, Alex returned it to the fridge. Blissfully ignorant, the Portnoy family dined on the violated liver later that night. Gross!
Who eats liver for dinner?
As it turns out, my family. Roth’s book was a bridge across cultures for me. Even though Vietnamese refugees differ from Jewish Americans, I recognized some of our obsessions in Roth’s Jewish American world, with its ambitions for upward mobility and assimilation, its pronounced “ethnic” features and its sense of a horrifying history not far behind. I empathized. And I could see some of myself in the erotically obsessed Portnoy — so much so that I paid tribute to Roth by having the narrator of “The Sympathizer” abuse a squid in a masturbatory frenzy and then eat it later with his mother. (“The Sympathizer” has not been banned outright in Vietnam, but I’ve faced enormous hurdles while trying to have it published there. It’s clear to me that this is because of its depiction of the war and its aftermath, not the sexy squid.)
Banning is an act of fear — the fear of dangerous and contagious ideas. The best, and perhaps most dangerous, books deliver these ideas in something just as troubling and infectious: a good story.
So it was with somewhat mixed feelings that I learned some American high school teachers assign “The Sympathizer” as required reading in their classes. For the most part, I’m delighted. But then I worry: I don’t want to be anyone’s homework. I don’t want my book to be broccoli.
I was reassured, however, when a first-year college student approached me at an event to tell me she had read my novel in high school.
“Honestly,” she said, “all I remember is when the sympathizer has sex with a squid.”
Mission accomplished.
Viet Thanh Nguyen is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Sympathizer” and the children’s book “Chicken of the Sea,” written with his then 5-year-old son, Ellison, among other books.
7. US sends Osprey to South China Sea on crashed F-35C jet salvage mission, Chinese think tank says on Twitter
US sends Osprey to South China Sea on crashed F-35C jet salvage mission, Chinese think tank says on Twitter
- Four US Air Force Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft ‘heading to the area’, SCS Probing Initiative says, citing satellite images
- Japanese coastguard issues navigational warning on salvage operations in northern part of South China Sea ‘until further notice’
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Published: 5:14pm, 30 Jan, 2022
The US has sent at least four military aircraft to recover the top-secret components of its crashed F-35C fighter jet in the South China Sea, a Beijing-based think tank said.
“[Salvage work] for the crashed F-35C seems to be beginning” the SCS Probing Initiative (SCSPI) tweeted on Saturday, citing satellite images.
This comes after the US Navy revealed last Monday that an F-35C Lightning II – its most advanced stealth fighter jet – had fallen into the sea after a “landing mishap” on the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier during routine operations.
At least four US Air Force CV-22B Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, believed to have been deployed from American bases in Japan and the Philippines, were spotted “heading to the area where the carrier exercises had taken place”, SCSPI said in its Twitter post.
Earlier on Saturday, the Japanese Coast Guard issued a navigational warning that salvage operations were being carried out in an area in the northern part of the South China Sea “until further notice”.
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This comes days after a photo of an F-35 floating on the water with an open cockpit canopy appeared on Reddit and soon began to be circulated online.
On Friday, the US Navy confirmed that the leaked photo – and a related video shared on Twitter – did show the F-35C hitting the USS Carl Vinson flight deck and floating in the South China.
The F-35 fleet, with three variants including the carrier-based F-35C, represents the most sophisticated military aircraft in the world. Designed to utilise stealth technology and systems integration, it is also America’s most expensive weapons system, with an average price tag of over US$100 million each.
The F-35C is the world’s most sophisticated military aircraft. Photo: Reuters
According to the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, the F-35 fleet is the second largest in the US Air Force inventory after the F-16.
This is the second crash involving a Lockheed Martin-made F-35 jet in just over two months. In November, a British F35B crashed into the Mediterranean following a slow take-off from the Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth.
The US crash also sparked media speculation on whether China, now identified as a major strategic competitor by the Pentagon, would race to recover the jet for access to the stealth technology. But Beijing has rejected such claims.
“We have no interest in their plane,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said on Thursday.
Meanwhile, Chinese military observers said salvage operations might prove difficult because of the complicated underwater conditions in the South China Sea.
The resource-rich South China Sea is criss-crossed by busy shipping lanes and rival territorial claims from China and its Southeast Asian neighbours.
US Navy jets fly over American aircraft carrier in South China Sea
The renewed US focus on the “Indo-Pacific” to counter China’s growing influence has also set up the waterways as a major arena of great power rivalry. Both sides have stepped up their military presence in the strategically important region, and the US has sharply scaled up its “freedom of navigation” operations in international waters there.
Earlier this month, the US Indo-Pacific Command announced that its USS Abraham Lincoln and USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier strike groups had carried out joint operations in the South China Sea on January 23 to “strengthen maritime integrated-at-sea operations and combat readiness”.
Rear Admiral Dan Martin, commander of the strike group led by the USS Carl Vinson, said the operations were part of the US’ commitment to “deterring those who challenge the shared vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific now and into the long-term future”.
Two weeks ago, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) accused the US of “provocative actions” that could lead to “serious consequences”, saying it had tracked the guided-missile destroyer USS Benfold sailing through the disputed Paracel Islands, known as Xisha Islands in China.
The US Navy denied the claims, saying that its warship’s passage was “innocent”, its freedom of navigation operation in accordance with international law, and that such operations would continue.
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Laura Zhou joined the Post's Beijing bureau in 2010. She covers China's diplomatic relations and has reported on topics such as Sino-US relations, China-India disputes, and reactions to the North Korea nuclear crisis, as well as other general news.
8. How to Solve the Three Problems With Getting Our Afghan Allies Out
The three problems. Solutions below.
Problem #1: The SIV and P2 applications cover different people and have a slightly different process, but both share a common requirement: the Afghan has to reside in a different country in order to apply for them
Problem #2: The second problem is directing Afghans to a physical location where they can take refuge and be processed
Problem #3: Which brings us to the third problem: the sheer, unadulterated sloth with which paperwork is being processed.
How to Solve the Three Problems With Getting Our Afghan Allies Out - The Bulwark
It’s been almost half a year since America pulled out of Afghanistan. Many of the Afghans who stood with us during the war are still stranded there. But there is a way to get them out.
I served in Afghanistan from 2011 to 2012. During the fall of Kabul former Afghan defense force colleagues began reaching out to me. They are all family men with children at home. One man has 12- and 14-year-old daughters who are in the prime window to be forcibly married as a reward to a Taliban fighter. He has received several WhatsApp messages designed to lure him out of hiding in the middle of the night. Another is younger than me, with two young children. He was picked up by the Taliban recently and detained, but thankfully released. These and countless other Afghans showed up for duty conscientiously. They supported the ideals of freedom that we espoused and now they and their families live in constant danger precisely because they helped America.
In my efforts to provide assistance, I’ve been stymied. We have programs designed to bring Afghans to safety—you’ve probably heard of both the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) and P2 Refugee program. Both of these programs could be doing a lot of good, if the Biden administration had a senior executive paying attention to problems in the chain. Because these programs need help.
Problem #1: The SIV and P2 applications cover different people and have a slightly different process, but both share a common requirement: the Afghan has to reside in a different country in order to apply for them. Why? Because the United States no longer has an embassy in Afghanistan. Normally, this would be solved by setting up refugee camps in nearby nations where the applicants could wait during the 12 to 14 month process. But no neighboring country will allow more Afghan refugees in.
One solution is to take the Afghans to other countries that will accept refugees, such as Canada, Great Britain, or Germany. Which could work, if you could get people out of the country.
Solution #1: Humanitarian charter flights out of Afghanistan are spotty, expensive, and hard to arrange. I’m not arguing we should eliminate that option. But ideally Afghans could use civilian airports in neighboring countries—except that the land crossings are closed unless you can pay a black marketeer for a forged visa. Which means that the administration should be working with those countries to provide a navigable, repeatable method for Afghans to access civilian airports if they have immigration documents and proof of air tickets.
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Problem #2: The second problem is directing Afghans to a physical location where they can take refuge and be processed. After the U.S. told my Afghan colleagues “you’re on your own for getting out,” I’ve tried to figure out where to physically direct them. I contacted the United Nations High Council on Refugees (UNHCR) office responsible for Afghan refugee issues. The response was laughable. I received a form reply with generalized links on the topic.
Solution #2: if we’re going to take these folks in eventually and we have someone willing to vouch for them and sign an affidavit of support—perhaps akin to the Sponsor Circles—why not bring them to America so they can complete the process here?
The Biden administration recently announced that it was allowing USCIS to grant humanitarian parole for Afghans, and even waiving the fees to apply. But that hasn’t really materialized. There have been 35,000 humanitarian parole requests filed, even of people detained by the Taliban and then released. A total of 140 have been granted and another 470 have been denied.
Get this program functional.
Problem #3: Which brings us to the third problem: the sheer, unadulterated sloth with which paperwork is being processed. I submitted P2 Referrals for Afghan friends in August. I can get no status update on the packets from the State Department, except for “we’ve only gotten to 30 percent to 40 percent of the requests” and that took me sending a letter to a senator. A mere half dozen staff normally process humanitarian parole applications, which typically only hit 2,500 per year. The system is swamped.
Solution #3: Get executive sponsorship and special funding to quickly get new hires or contractors in place to deal with the flood of applications and referrals.
For now, I’m stuck in limbo – a veteran who served honorably, trying to help the people who supported us. I cannot get a status on their referrals.
Even if I got a status, they can’t start the application because they aren’t in a third country.
They can’t get to a third country, because most places won’t accept refugees.
Even if other countries accepted refugees, they can’t get there because they’re denied transit.
And even if I got these men and their families to America, humanitarian parole would be denied.
The Biden administration has failed on this debt of honor.
Yet with small policy changes and resource reallocations, we could fix it—if it was a priority for the administration.
What we need is a working group and a war chest to pressure the Biden administration. That’s what I’m trying to do. I need folks to be the prime movers on the working group, as well as fundraisers. If you’re willing to help, please contact me at [email protected]
So many of the problems in our world are abstract and intractable. This one isn’t. These are real people. They are in real danger because they helped us. And rescuing them doesn’t require anything more than making someone high up in the executive branch make it their priority.
If you’re one of the few Americans with a time horizon of more than five minutes; if you care about the shameful way in which we ended Afghanistan; if you want some way to feel like we’ve done something to make it right, get in touch and help me do it.
9. FDD | Terrorists Benefit from Qatar’s Goodwill and Charity
Conclusion:
While Qatar’s funding of charity and social work is commendable, President Biden should whisper in the ear of Sheikh Tamim to rethink where Qatari money goes. Extensive due diligence is necessary to distinguish between legitimate charities and those that mix social work with radical ideology or even direct support for terrorism. Evidence from the Eid Charity files suggests Doha needs to try harder.
FDD | Terrorists Benefit from Qatar’s Goodwill and Charity
fdd.org · by Hussain Abdul-Hussain Research Fellow · January 30, 2022
On Monday, President Joe Biden will have a busy meeting at the White House with Qatari ruler Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad. Qatar hosts one of the biggest U.S military bases in the Gulf region and has been instrumental in resettling Afghan refugees forced to flee their country last year. While giving credit where credit is due, Biden should not shy away from the sensitive question of whether Doha’s lavish support for foreign Islamist charities winds up putting millions of dollars in the hands of terrorists.
In November, the Middle East Forum uncovered documents showing that Qatar’s Eid Charity has offered 46,000 grants to 391 groups from all corners of earth. The groups were overwhelmingly Islamist, with a considerable number of ultra conservative Salafists among them.
The Eid Charity is a quasi-governmental organization established in 1995 by Muhammad Al Thani, a member of the ruling family and a cabinet minister who named his charity after his late father Eid. On its website, Eid Charity describes Qatar’s state-owned Al-Jazeera TV and Qatar Airlines as “partners.”
Between 2004 and 2019, the foundation spent $770 million, mainly to buy food and clothing for the poor and to sponsor teaching and preaching of Islam, mostly in the austere Wahhabi rite. Eid Charity also funded political organizations, including $2.7 million for the Jerusalem International Charity (JIC), which the Treasury Department sanctioned in 2012 “for being controlled by and acting for or on behalf of Hamas.” The Beirut-based JIC remains active, although it is not clear from the documents whether Doha continues to bankroll the group. The Eid Charity’s last known contribution was in 2019.
Funding for JIC hasn’t even made it friendly to its benefactor. On its website, the group attacked Qatar for allowing 13 Israeli athletes to participate in a 2021 Judo World Masters tournament in Doha. JIC also thrashed the government of Qatar for suppressing “the popular Qatari voice that opposes normalization” with Israel. In 2020, JIC said the Doha government was “maintaining ties with the Zionist occupation.” While JIC is unlikely to change its views, it is hard to understand why Doha would pay millions to a terrorist entity, let alone one that thrashes Qatar.
To be fair, JIC is one of the few explicitly political organizations on the list of recipients of the Eid Charity. Most other organizations active in predominantly Arab countries seem focused on social work. Yet Hamas, Hezbollah, and similar organizations reject the notion that warfare and welfare are separate missions. Rather, they are part of a single struggle against Israel, the United States, and other purported enemies of Islam.
Accordingly, Hamas and Hezbollah routinely leverage the personnel and funding of social welfare organizations for political and military purposes. Of course, open acknowledgements of such activity are rare. Hamas and Hezbollah appreciate the value of letting others believe they distinguish between charity work and armed conflict. Charity organizations also serve as a useful vehicle for spreading radical ideologies and recruiting potential operatives.
Two examples from Gaza show how the organizations that receive Qatari funding promote intolerance or even violence. The Association of Young Muslim Women received a total of $1.3 million from Eid Charity, a sizable amount in the highly impoverished strip. On its Facebook page, the association emphasizes its efforts to prevent drug abuse and domestic violence.
Scrolling down its Facebook page, one discovers that the group offers courses that teach women to “know your enemy.” The courses train women on how to store information, hide it, and stay vigilant against Israeli attempts to steal any information about Gazans.
The Association of Young Muslim Women also warns against “celebrating with Christians on Christian holidays,” a theme that another Gazan organization, the Ibn Baz Charity Association, also promotes aggressively. The latter received $3.5 million in grants from the Eid Foundation.
Ibn Baz was the late Saudi Grand Mufti who favored very strict interpretations of Islam. In a post on its Facebook page, the Ibn Baz Association opposes “tolerance toward peaceful infidels,” meaning Christians. The association says it is okay to interact with infidel Christians, but Muslims should never wish them happy holidays or share with them their worship activity. “We are not ashamed of our Islam,” the post concludes.
While Qatar’s funding of charity and social work is commendable, President Biden should whisper in the ear of Sheikh Tamim to rethink where Qatari money goes. Extensive due diligence is necessary to distinguish between legitimate charities and those that mix social work with radical ideology or even direct support for terrorism. Evidence from the Eid Charity files suggests Doha needs to try harder.
Hussain Abdul-Hussain is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). For more analysis from Hussain, please subscribe HERE. Follow Hussain on Twitter @hahussain. Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Hussain Abdul-Hussain Research Fellow · January 30, 2022
10. Can America Rebuild Its Power in Asia?
Excerpts:
Last, but certainly not least, the administration must articulate its comprehensive China policy—something it has yet to publicly do—in a way that sustains domestic and international support. It has not shared its diagnosis of the China challenge, and it is unclear if the administration has a prescription and an endgame or if it simply aims for steady strategic competition. The White House appears to be inching toward a strategy of competitive coexistence with Beijing, but the content remains inchoate. The administration must explain how it will address the tradeoffs and costs of the contest, especially for the economic sectors where Chinese countermeasures are already hurting U.S. stakeholders. On Taiwan, it is clear that the demands of deterrence are rising, but Washington will have to settle on a clear and consistent approach as Beijing continues testing Taiwanese resilience and U.S. resolve.
Fortunately for Biden, prioritizing the Indo-Pacific has bipartisan backing. Despite intense and angry fighting over the pandemic, education, and even the 2020 election, Capitol Hill is largely unified on the Indo-Pacific. If Biden reaches across the aisle, which he may be forced to do after November, he will have majorities in Congress for more action on trade and defense. At a time when the United States’ domestic politics are in turmoil, U.S. allies and partners in the region would see this bipartisan support as uniquely reassuring, which could prompt them to assume more risk in their initiatives with Washington. That may be essential to Asia’s future. If the United States is going to stay consistently involved in the region, its policies will need to have deep bipartisan and transnational support. It cannot afford to pause its engagement.
Can America Rebuild Its Power in Asia?
Biden Started Strong, But Progress Is Halting
January 31, 2022
Foreign Affairs · by Michael J. Green and Evan S. Medeiros · January 31, 2022
Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s late former leader, used to complain that Americans believed U.S. policy toward Asia could be treated like a video. Washington could press pause as it sorted out problems at home or in other parts of the world, and then hit play when it found the timing convenient. It is easy to see why U.S. policymakers—busy managing the transatlantic alliance, conflicts in the Middle East, and domestic politics—would find this approach tempting. But as Lee noted, it was deeply ineffective. “It does not work like that,” he said. “If the United States wants to substantially affect the strategic evolution of Asia, it cannot come and go.”
To see why this is, consider the Asia policies of the last president. Under Donald Trump, the United States withdrew from the main trade agreement in Asia, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Trump also rattled allies by demanding exorbitant payment increases for U.S. troops while professing his “love” for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Although the United States hardly abandoned Asia, especially as tensions rose with China, the Trump administration left Washington’s closest partners feeling deeply uncertain of U.S. staying power as Beijing sought to reshape the regional order.
Now, President Joe Biden is trying to press play again, and in his first year, he scored some quick wins. Biden took creative steps to reenergize U.S. alliances, including upgrading the Australian-Indian-Japanese-U.S. Quad to a summit, concluding a historic submarine deal among Australia, the United Kingdom, and Washington, and signing a new cost-sharing agreement with South Korea to keep U.S. troops in the country. Biden has sustained a very competitive approach toward Beijing, but the United States is now working more collaboratively and effectively with others to constrain Chinese power. As a result, confidence in U.S. diplomatic engagement is on the rebound in the region.
But despite this renewed diplomatic outreach, Biden has not remedied Trump’s economic disengagement from Asia, nor has he made the investments necessary to maintain the United States’ military advantage. Chinese President Xi Jinping, meanwhile, has expanded his country’s military capabilities, domestic repression, and coercion of neighbors. He has upped China’s bid for Indo-Pacific economic leadership. Beijing even applied in September 2021 to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), the successor to the TPP that the United States once championed.
For these reasons, just hitting play again is not good enough. The Biden administration must not only sustain its current momentum but also broaden its actions in the Indo-Pacific, even as new crises arise in Ukraine and the Middle East. Biden especially needs to do more in the areas of economic statecraft and military deterrence—and to think creatively about how to do both. He must make clearer his approach to China, which has no intention of slowing its drive for regional dominance. The United States’ friends and allies in Asia will strongly support Biden if he acts boldly in the second and third years of his administration, but they will begin to lose their confidence if he does not. Especially after Trump, their patience is limited.
STARTING STRONG
For more than 70 years, the United States has gone through cycles of involvement and retrenchment in Asia. After 1945, the country went from having 100 carriers in the Pacific to just one. Then, in 1950, North Korea attacked South Korea, prompting Washington to build the network of alliances it has today. In 1969, President Richard Nixon announced that he wanted to pull all U.S. ground forces out of continental Southeast Asia, and while running for president in 1976, Jimmy Carter promised to withdraw all U.S. troops from South Korea. But the United States never followed through on the latter promise, and President Ronald Reagan brought the U.S. military roaring back to the region with its maritime strategy, which sought to bottle up the Soviet Union in the Sea of Okhotsk.
After the end of the Cold War, angst about the U.S. commitment persisted. President Bill Clinton was relatively inattentive to Asia at the beginning of his administration but later revitalized the U.S.-Japanese alliance and stabilized U.S.-Chinese ties, notably by negotiating China’s accession to the World Trade Organization. President George W. Bush was preoccupied with counterterrorism and the Middle East after 9/11, but he strengthened defense cooperation with Japan and Australia and opened a new strategic chapter with India to manage growing uncertainty about China. President Barack Obama’s pivot to Asia achieved new levels of strategic engagement with the region in general, and with Southeast Asia in particular, after years of neglect, but it was challenged by caps on military spending imposed under sequestration.
Now it is Biden’s turn. He confronts a more challenging landscape. Asian leaders are still asking whether the U.S. political system, after COVID-19 and Trump, will allow Washington to remain a high-quality partner. And no other post-World War II president faced a powerful Asian adversary like today’s China: large, resourceful, indignant, and determined to claim the central regional position. This challenge is tempered by the fact that most Asian leaders don’t want China to dominate, and Beijing has myriad domestic challenges that constrain its power and tarnish its image. Nevertheless, for Washington, the room for error or complacency is far smaller today than it was for earlier administrations.
No modern president faced an Asian adversary like today’s China.
The White House knows this, and it made moves in 2021 that pleasantly surprised friends in the region. The president appointed officials with well-established reputations for supporting alliances and institutions, and who were willing to respond to Chinese coercion and predation. Biden continued to embrace Japan’s “free and open Indo-Pacific” framework, which calls for preserving trans-Pacific connectivity and the rule of law across the region. He strengthened the Quad and gave it an actionable agenda: health, infrastructure, and climate. The administration reaffirmed its defense commitments to Japan and South Korea—countries which were both chastened by Trump. Its historic Australia-United Kingdom-United States agreement (AUKUS) was perhaps its boldest move, giving nuclear-powered submarines to Australia and increasing overall defense cooperation among the three maritime powers. These actions were all the more credible because they enjoyed broad bipartisan support in Congress.
The Biden administration quickly and effectively increased its coordination with European allies in handling China. Washington and key European capitals jointly responded to Beijing’s crackdowns in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, including with coordinated sanctions. They created the transatlantic Trade and Technology Council, which aims to harmonize controls on technology exports to China, and they aligned their views on Taiwan. Now that France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the European Union have all published Indo-Pacific strategies, the United States and these countries can further advance their cooperation in the region.
Biden’s actions are already paying dividends. A June 2021 Pew Research Center poll found the United States’ favorability ratings were up in countries across the Indo-Pacific, increasing by 15 percentage points in Australia, 18 points in South Korea, and 30 points in Japan compared with the previous year. The Australian Lowy Institute’s 2021 Asia Power Index, which channels survey and other research data through a mathematical formula to assess national power, found the United States had the greatest gains in diplomatic influence in the entire region, rising from a score of 74.9 to 90.4 out of a maximum of 100. When the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) in Singapore asked corporate, academic, and policy elites across Southeast Asia whether they would choose the United States or China if forced to decide, the percentage selecting the United States increased from 53.6 percent in 2020 to 61.5 percent in 2021.
MIXED MESSAGES
But these same polls illustrate that Biden’s gains are limited, if not tenuous. The 2021 ISEAS survey showed respondents believe U.S. economic influence in Southeast Asia has decreased since Biden took office. The survey also found almost half of respondents think China has greater regional political sway than the United States. The Lowy Asia Power Index may have found that the Biden administration restored the United States’ diplomatic influence, but it docked Washington more than ten points (from 61.7 to 51.1) on economic sway. The index also found the U.S. military’s relative lead over China shrank in 2021—and that was before Beijing conducted its alarming hypersonic missile tests.
For the United States, both these challenges will intensify. On the economic front, China is expanding its financial footprint across the Indo-Pacific. U.S. allies such as Australia and Japan have privately pledged to help keep Beijing out of the CPTPP and to hold a place in the trade agreement for Washington. But the Biden administration has said it has no plan to return to the CPTPP, and officials in Canberra and Tokyo warn they cannot hold off China for more than a few years without some positive signals from the United States. Meanwhile, in addition to trying to join the CPTPP, China has also asked to join the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement (DEPA) with Chile, New Zealand, and Singapore—yet another economic group with no U.S. seat at the table.
The Biden administration has promised “the development of an Indo-Pacific economic framework” focused on a patchwork of issues—trade facilitation, digital trade, supply chain resiliency, clean energy, infrastructure, and worker standards. But at best, the United States’ closest Asian partners see the framework as a save-the-date card for what they hope will be the day when Washington decides to join the CPTPP or a comparable agreement. The announcement on January 21 of a new U.S.-Japanese economic dialogue helps, but most Asian policymakers and business leaders view the vagueness of the Indo-Pacific economic framework as indicative of a lack of focus and commitment to deep economic engagement. The relative strength of the U.S. economy continues to drive the region’s investment and trade with the United States, but as things stand, Washington is losing influence over the rules that will govern trade, investment, supply chains, and ultimately, geopolitics in Asia.
The administration has no long-term economic strategy toward Beijing.
The United States’ vague economic policies extend to its goals with Beijing. The Biden administration has rightly sought to limit sensitive technology transfers—particularly of semiconductor- and artificial intelligence-related technology—to China. But the administration has no long-term economic strategy toward Beijing beyond seeking more Chinese agricultural and energy exports under the 2020 Phase One trade deal negotiated by the Trump administration to end the trade war the White House started in 2018. U.S. businesses cannot get a clear answer about whether the administration will promote trade and investment with China in non-sensitive sectors, such as retail and automobiles. (Washington originally championed the TPP to gain leverage in economic negotiations with China, but this tool is now missing.)
U.S. defense policy faces different but equally formidable challenges. The Biden administration has clearly made gains at deterring China by strengthening its alliances, but it has been less purposeful about the types of military capabilities it deploys in Asia—and where it puts them. The Defense Department’s signature Global Posture Review resulted in almost no significant additions to U.S. military forces in the Indo-Pacific beyond what the Trump White House already had planned. The administration and Congress have failed to properly fund the new Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI), legislation that was designed to improve the composition of the military’s funding for much needed capabilities in the Indo-Pacific theater. Although many experts expect Congress to increase defense spending next year, the crisis in Ukraine could drain resources to the continuing detriment of the Indo-Pacific theater.
In the coming weeks, the administration will roll out a series of strategic documents intended to address these issues, including the Indo-Pacific Strategy, the National Security Strategy, the National Defense Strategy, as well as the Nuclear Posture Review. The administration’s attempt to clarify its Asia policies could easily be diluted or complicated by competing priorities, such as Russian and Iranian provocations, climate change, or domestic issues. That would send the wrong signal to allies about the scope and depth of U.S. engagement, especially if these documents are released without concrete plans. The crafters of the Indo-Pacific Strategy will need Biden to focus on the challenge of pacing U.S. security and leadership in the international system.
GET BIG
Biden’s presidency is barely a year old, but the 2022 midterms are already looming. The president must begin planning his second act in Asia. And if he wants to credibly commit to the region, then he should not hesitate to think big and act boldly.
He can start by transforming the Indo-Pacific economic framework into concrete actions. The administration should quickly announce plans to negotiate digital trade agreements (or to join the DEPA) and to conclude more modest regionwide initiatives on supply chain security and decarbonization. The latter actions will signal that Washington is committed to both trade liberalization and broader rulemaking. Japan and Australia, in particular, are eager for greater U.S. cooperation on infrastructure financing to compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative. U.S. allies are eager for Washington to help develop policies that can counter Chinese economic coercion. The United States is hosting the 21-economy Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in 2023, and it should aim to roll out these initiatives in the lead-up.
On defense policy, the administration must take similarly fast and comprehensive steps. It should provide U.S. military commanders in Asia with the capabilities they have requested, including by working across the aisle to secure funding for the PDI at the levels and in the manner requested by Indo-Pacific Command. Washington should also align these resources with Indo-Pacific Command’s vision for dispersing forces, hardening facilities, and building redundancies into the United States’ regional posture, including a more persistent presence within the Philippines. It would be smart for the White House to announce these steps as part of the forthcoming National Defense Strategy. Washington should also turn the AUKUS agreement into more than just a nuclear submarine deal. Ideally, the agreement could become a strategic framework for transforming U.S. naval posture in the region, including by giving U.S. ships greater access to western Australia, expanding U.S.-Australian cooperation to include autonomous undersea vehicles, and eventually adding Japan.
Prioritizing the Indo-Pacific has bipartisan backing.
The Biden administration should also expand these initiatives to include new countries, especially South Korea. To neutralize China’s economic advantage, Washington can encourage Seoul to join its Indo-Pacific economic framework, cooperate on negotiating a digital trade agreement, and fast track an application for CPTPP membership. South Korea is ripe for active cooperation with the Quad and possibly with AUKUS. These moves would set the table for rapprochement with Japan and a new era of trilateral cooperation. The South Korean presidential election in March is the perfect opportunity to make this push.
Last, but certainly not least, the administration must articulate its comprehensive China policy—something it has yet to publicly do—in a way that sustains domestic and international support. It has not shared its diagnosis of the China challenge, and it is unclear if the administration has a prescription and an endgame or if it simply aims for steady strategic competition. The White House appears to be inching toward a strategy of competitive coexistence with Beijing, but the content remains inchoate. The administration must explain how it will address the tradeoffs and costs of the contest, especially for the economic sectors where Chinese countermeasures are already hurting U.S. stakeholders. On Taiwan, it is clear that the demands of deterrence are rising, but Washington will have to settle on a clear and consistent approach as Beijing continues testing Taiwanese resilience and U.S. resolve.
Fortunately for Biden, prioritizing the Indo-Pacific has bipartisan backing. Despite intense and angry fighting over the pandemic, education, and even the 2020 election, Capitol Hill is largely unified on the Indo-Pacific. If Biden reaches across the aisle, which he may be forced to do after November, he will have majorities in Congress for more action on trade and defense. At a time when the United States’ domestic politics are in turmoil, U.S. allies and partners in the region would see this bipartisan support as uniquely reassuring, which could prompt them to assume more risk in their initiatives with Washington. That may be essential to Asia’s future. If the United States is going to stay consistently involved in the region, its policies will need to have deep bipartisan and transnational support. It cannot afford to pause its engagement.
Foreign Affairs · by Michael J. Green and Evan S. Medeiros · January 31, 2022
11. Keep NATO’s Door Open to Ukraine
Conclusion:
Failure to keep NATO’s door open will only encourage Putin to engage in more land grabs on the assumption that he can kill aspiring countries’ chances for membership by engineering territorial disputes. NATO must prove Putin wrong, reaffirming that he has no veto over NATO membership, and that aggression will harden the alliance’s determination to live up to its commitments and make more likely the very thing he purports to fear.
Keep NATO’s Door Open to Ukraine
Washington Shouldn’t Grant Putin the Sphere of Influence He Wants
January 31, 2022
Foreign Affairs · by Eric S. Edelman and David J. Kramer · January 31, 2022
One of the few positive outcomes of recent exchanges among U.S., European, and Russian diplomats has been the firm rejection by the Biden administration and its allies of Kremlin demands that NATO “never, never, ever” admit Ukraine as a member. Acquiescing to such a demand would leave Ukraine and Georgia in a dangerous gray zone, neither with NATO nor with Russia. It would violate NATO’s founding charter, which maintains an open-door policy toward prospective European states; the United Nations’ founding charter; and the Charter for European Security of 1999, which updated the Paris Charter of 1990 and reiterates “the inherent right of each and every participating State to be free to choose or change its security arrangements, including treaties of alliance.” Like the Charter of Paris, the Charter for European Security—which Russia signed and is obligated to observe—declares that no state “can consider any part of the [European] area as its sphere of influence.”
And yet a sphere of influence is exactly what Russian President Vladimir Putin seeks. Some Western analysts seem to be taking his side, arguing that NATO should close its door (as Michael Kimmage recently did in Foreign Affairs) and no longer follow through on the pledge it made in 2008 that Ukraine, along with Georgia, will ultimately become members of the alliance. Ukraine is not going to join any time soon anyway, these analysts argue, so why not make this concession to Putin in the hope it would reduce the possibility of a Russian military attack? After all, they assert, the encroachment of NATO on Russia’s borders over the years has been one of the main sources of friction in relations with Moscow.
These arguments are flawed and should be rejected once and for all. To follow their recommendations would be to reward Putin for his aggression and assign blame for the current state of affairs not to the Russian leader, where it belongs, but to the enlargement of NATO, which has helped stabilize the European continent for more than seven decades. Putin invokes NATO enlargement as a convenient excuse when his real fear is the emergence of successful, democratic, Western-oriented countries along Russia’s borders—especially Ukraine. Indeed, when Russia’s 2014 invasion began, there was not a single U.S. tank in Europe, and no prospect of U.S. or NATO missiles being deployed to Ukraine (even as the Kremlin deployed Iskander missiles to Kaliningrad). To focus on other countries’ interest in joining NATO as the cause of Putin’s aggression gets it backward: Russia’s neighbors feel the need to look to the West, including to NATO, because of Putin’s revanchist aggression.
Above all, it is a mistake to assume Putin would be assuaged by assurances that NATO membership for Ukraine (and Georgia) is off the table. On the contrary, concessions would likely lead him to up the ante, as he would view such pledges as a sign of weakness and could raise the stakes to include no European Union membership either. After all, it was closer ties to the EU, not NATO, that led to Putin’s intervention into Ukraine in 2013 and 2014.
To close NATO’s door would be to reward Putin for his aggression.
The fact that additional countries want to join NATO is a testament to the costs of Putin’s aggression and to the alliance’s success, with its nearly unparalleled record of deterring attacks on its members. It is for those reasons that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has made pursuing NATO membership a staple of his foreign policy, even if an invitation to join is not imminent. Closing the door to NATO, especially now, would demoralize Ukraine, make it more vulnerable to Putin’s designs, and split the alliance.
MISREADING HISTORY
Although the Kremlin was never thrilled with NATO enlargement, it was Putin who really began invoking it as the cause of Russian insecurity, especially in a 2007 speech in Munich. This focus came in the wake of “color revolutions” in Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 2004, and Kyrgyzstan in 2005, which made Putin increasingly nervous about his own grip on power at home. NATO enlargement became a convenient foil, an argument for brushing back Western influence and for justifying his increasingly repressive rule.
NATO enlargement was a demand-driven process. Indeed, Western leaders were initially lukewarm about requests to join from leaders such as the Czech Republic’s Vaclav Havel and Poland’s Lech Walesa. The alliance, which had enlarged beyond its original 1949 membership by taking in Greece and Turkey in 1952 and Spain in 1982, began growing again after the Cold War because countries that previously were subjects under Soviet domination believed membership in the alliance would allow them to become part of a Europe “whole and free.” It was a key step toward joining the economic and security structures of Europe and gaining security against the possibility of a revanchist Russia. (Claims that the United States pledged never to enlarge to the east in the first place have been rejected by both then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and then-Secretary of State James Baker.)
Russia’s first post-Soviet president, Boris Yeltsin, sent mixed signals about NATO’s enlargement eastward and the prospect of Russian membership in the alliance. During a visit to Warsaw in 1993, Yeltsin said he understood Poland's desire to join NATO and said it did not threaten Russian interests. A month later, he sent a letter to President Bill Clinton opposing enlargement but reminding his American counterpart of his expressed interest in membership for Russia.
Russia’s most stable and secure borders are with NATO members.
In 1999, the first wave of post-Cold War enlargement brought the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland into NATO. The people in these countries would sleep better at night with Article 5 security guarantees, especially after Putin, a former KGB officer, replaced Yeltsin in Moscow. Less than a year later, Putin, who was then acting president, broached the possibility that Russia, too, might be interested in joining. "Why not? Why not?" he told BBC interviewer David Frost when asked about Russian membership. "I do not rule out such a possibility ... that Russia's interests will be reckoned with, if it will be an equal partner."
The problem was that Putin wanted Russia to be able to join on Russia’s terms, as an equal, and not have to meet the criteria for new members. Russia was also in the middle of a brutal campaign against the rebellious republic of Chechnya, which reflected a disregard for human rights inconsistent with NATO membership. In the end, the Kremlin never seriously sought membership, and NATO didn’t actively pursue it. Nor did Russia ever make a serious effort to use the NATO-Russia Council, the consultative mechanism that was created in deference to Russian sensibilities and concerns about the enlargement process.
The next wave of enlargement, in 2004, included the three Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), along with Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Russia was unhappy about this development, even though it did not cause Russia’s security situation to deteriorate. In fact, Russia’s most stable and secure borders are those with the Baltic states, which pose absolutely no threat to Moscow—though that didn’t stop Russia from fostering a massive cyberattack against Estonia in 2007.
THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY
In 2008, Ukraine and Georgia requested a membership action plan (MAP) as a step toward eventual membership. German Chancellor Angela Merkel was firmly opposed and worked out a compromise with President George W. Bush in the Bucharest summit declaration, which stated that the two countries would become members without specifying when and how. Five months later, Russian troops invaded Georgia, even though that country had not been offered a MAP. Critics of the Bucharest declaration contend that it provoked Putin into taking measures, in particular occupying parts of Georgia in August 2008, to ensure that the pledge would never come to fruition. In fact, the mistake of Bucharest was that it didn’t go far enough. It both gave Putin an excuse to stir up trouble that might lead to regime change in Georgia—he hated Georgian leader Mikheil Saakashvili and feared Georgia’s growing distance from Moscow—and suggested that Western support for Georgia was hesitant. Moreover, the summit declaration’s convoluted formulation may have suggested to the Kremlin that it had a narrow window to force change in Tbilisi. It is, of course, impossible to prove the counterfactual: that offering a MAP would have deterred Putin from invading his neighbors. But it is clear that Russian hostility toward Georgia and Ukraine and fear of their tilt toward Europe was already highly overdetermined before Bucharest, and unlikely that a vague restatement of NATO’s existing open-door policy made the difference.
For all of Putin’s recent focus on Bucharest, it similarly had little to do with his aggression toward Ukraine in 2014. In fact, there had been little momentum behind the idea of NATO membership for Ukraine. Following elections in 2010, Ukraine’s president at the time, the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych, signed legislation making Ukraine a nonaligned state and disavowed any interest in seeking membership; support among the population was in the low teens. So what prompted Putin’s decision in 2014 to invade Ukraine and illegally annex Crimea? In 2013, Yanukovych was on the verge of signing agreements with the European Union. Putin, concerned that such agreements would reduce Moscow’s influence in Ukraine and deepen connections with the EU, pressured Yanukovych at the last minute into not signing. That, in turn, triggered Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity in late 2013, culminating in Yanukovych fleeing to Moscow a few months later. Putin’s invasion began right after that.
Putin was not driven by NATO but by the fact that Ukrainians had rejected a pro-Russian leader and demanded an end to corruption and a vibrant democracy that would integrate more closely with the Euro-Atlantic community. If Ukrainians succeeded in realizing those goals, Putin worried, Russians might demand the same. So he sought to upend the revolution, starting with Crimea’s annexation and then moving into the Donbas region, where Russian aggression is responsible for more than 14,000 deaths. As Latvian Prime Minister Arturs Krisjanis Karins commented in January, “Moscow is not afraid of NATO forces but Ukrainian democracy.”
Not surprisingly, after Russia’s invasion, support for joining NATO among Ukrainians has jumped to roughly 60 percent. And yet Zelensky’s push for membership commitments from Western leaders has largely fallen on deaf ears. President Joseph Biden has expressed “unwavering support” for Ukraine in its struggle with Moscow, but he has cited problems of corruption as holding back Ukraine’s NATO aspirations. Few observers, including most in Moscow, believe Ukraine’s membership in NATO is likely any time soon. In a January 19 press conference, Biden reinforced that impression: “The likelihood that Ukraine is going to join NATO in the near term is not very likely based on much more work they have to do in terms of democracy and a few other things going on there, and whether or not the major allies in the West would vote to bring Ukraine in right now.” Biden reportedly reiterated his lack of support for NATO membership in a call with Zelensky on January 27.
THE OPEN-DOOR POLICY
In a 7,000-word tirade published on the Kremlin website last July, Putin argued Ukraine was part of Russia and not a real nation. He mentioned NATO twice, but neither reference had anything to do with Ukraine’s possible membership. It is more recently that Russian officials made a major issue of Ukraine’s interest in membership, to the point of demanding legal guarantees that NATO slam its door shut on any new members in Russia’s neighborhood. They likely saw this as another wedge issue they could exploit to sow divisions within Europe, between Europe and the United States, and reportedly even within the Biden administration itself. (The State Department is more reluctant to abandon the traditional open-door policy and negotiate limits on NATO military activities than are parts of the National Security Council.)
Ukraine and Georgia have criteria to satisfy before they would qualify for membership, but both already have contributed more to NATO operations, especially in Afghanistan, than some current members. Both also have, as the victims of Russian military aggression, extensive combat experience with Russian forces and their proxies, which could provide NATO with useful lessons.
Closing the door to NATO for Ukraine and Georgia—while many Russian guns are pointed at Ukraine—would be a terrible mistake, punishing two countries that have already suffered thanks to Putin while rewarding the Russian leader for his aggression. Neither may be joining the alliance imminently, but keeping the possibility alive signals that NATO does not recognize Putin’s claim to a sphere of influence. Rather than pointing out how distant Ukraine’s hopes of joining NATO are, the Biden administration should take a very different approach: reiterate the traditional open-door policy; point out that a democratic Russia would be a potential member; make statements that address Swedish and Finnish concerns about whether the door remains open to them; and insist that Russia live up to its existing international obligations before negotiating any additional confidence-building measures or limitations on conventional forces.
Failure to keep NATO’s door open will only encourage Putin to engage in more land grabs on the assumption that he can kill aspiring countries’ chances for membership by engineering territorial disputes. NATO must prove Putin wrong, reaffirming that he has no veto over NATO membership, and that aggression will harden the alliance’s determination to live up to its commitments and make more likely the very thing he purports to fear.
Foreign Affairs · by Eric S. Edelman and David J. Kramer · January 31, 2022
12. Master of Deterrence
Imbalance of interests.
Conclusion:
The United States can work to strengthen deterrence by reinforcing alliances, posturing forces as tripwires, and identifying multiple options to ratchet up risk. None of those steps, however, can alter an underlying imbalance of interests. The Biden administration’s new defense strategy could benefit most from a thorough analysis of those interests and clear-eyed thinking about where U.S. interests really lie. Deterrence should be more credible if the United States does not try to confront Russia over Ukraine and the Black Sea. Confronting China over Taiwan is a tougher question because of the island’s strategic position. Nevertheless, there should be a sober acceptance that U.S. willingness to confront China would surely be more credible over Japan, South Korea, or the Philippines. A strategy that inadvertently commits the United States to a greater risk of nuclear war than its interests bear benefits no one.
The future that is coming into view differs from the bipolar competition of the Cold War. Even after his death, Powell’s work will continue to offer critical insights as we seek to safely navigate this future. Yet few scholars today can match Powell’s aptitude for combining theory, math, and strategy. As we again confront questions of nuclear and conventional deterrence, in a new and rapidly developing technological context, his guidance will be sorely missed.
Master of Deterrence
What Washington Could Learn From Robert Powell
January 31, 2022
Foreign Affairs · by The American War in Afghanistan: A History · January 31, 2022
In recent months, American policymakers have more than once found themselves contending with a danger that had for decades seemed consigned to the dustbin of Cold War history: the prospect of war with a nuclear-armed adversary. A clash with China over Taiwan has seemed more and more possible as U.S. and Chinese aircraft and vessels increase their presence in the Taiwan Strait. And in the past weeks, the Ukraine crisis has generated a risk of escalation with Russia that has sidelined all other foreign policy issues.
Such challenges, coming in the wake of a years-long refocusing of U.S. defense strategy on competition with China and Russia, have put questions of deterrence back at the heart of U.S. strategic considerations. In the coming weeks and months, the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden is due to roll out its National Security Strategy, National Defense Strategy, and Nuclear Posture Review. Deterrence—especially nuclear deterrence—is likely to be a centerpiece of all three. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin speaks of “integrated deterrence,” which combines the full range of U.S. military capabilities (nuclear, conventional, space, and cyberspace) with diplomatic and economic tools. Other analysts argue that deterrence depends on strong military forces capable of defending against any aggression—“deterrence by denial”—or on imposing costs on an adversary.
As this new generation of analysts and top national security officials grapples with updating deterrence for a time that may be even more challenging than the Cold War (given changes in technology, declining U.S. economic might, and a greater number of nuclear powers), they would do well to consider the work of Robert Powell, who served as Robson Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, until his death in December. An economist by training, Powell was responsible for groundbreaking research on game theory that shed light on aspects of deterrence often overlooked in today’s discourse. Policymakers and academia have yet to combine efforts to the degree that was the case in the Cold War.
Most important, Powell explained how the risk of escalation is a fundamental of deterrence. The unavoidable chance of things sliding out of control can dominate the behavior of nuclear powers in crisis and in war, possibly more so than the balance of military or economic strength. In this situation, Powell noted how the balance of interests—which side places greater value in the stakes at play—matters for which side is better able to deter. The side with greater interests at stake can be more willing to face the risk of escalation. They simply care more. For U.S. policymakers today, that insight underscores the inevitable disadvantage they face in efforts to deter China and Russia from acting on what those countries consider critical interests, such as Taiwan and Ukraine. A hard reality is that the United States might be better off confronting Russia and China closer to home, where the United States has greater national interests at stake, where it is more willing to run the risk of escalation.
GREATER INTERESTS, GREATER RISK TOLERANCE
Although most contemporary military officers and defense and intelligence analysts have been taught the rudiments of game theory, they generally lack knowledge of the more sophisticated methods that since the 1960s can help them make sound strategic decisions while accounting for such factors as dynamic interactions, multiple players, differing risk perceptions, and incomplete information. John Nash, Thomas Schelling, John Harsanyi, Reinhard Selten, and Roger Myerson all received Nobel Prizes for discoveries involving new applications of game theory. Powell was among the first to apply game theory to international relations. His 1990 book, Nuclear Deterrence Theory: The Search for Credibility, explores brinkmanship, cost imposition, counterforce, off-ramps, and the risk of surprise attack—all subjects that remain relevant today. His 1999 book, In the Shadow of Power: States and Strategies in International Politics, formally models fundamental international relations problems, examining diplomatic bargains, balancing domestic and defense spending, and shifts in the distribution of power and military technology. Powell refined the results of these experiments in a series of articles published between 2004 and 2020. In 2015, he produced one of the first formal models capable of integrating the dynamics of a conventional war with the dynamics of nuclear escalation.
Risk and the balance of interests were recurrent themes in Powell’s work. Powell questioned the degree to which conventional military capabilities would remain relevant in a modern war between adversaries with recourse to nuclear weapons. The United States might successfully repel a Chinese assault on Taiwan, for example, yet that would not prevent China from escalating with nuclear strikes.
Powell returned repeatedly to the concept of brinkmanship as defined by the pioneering American game theorist Thomas Schelling. Brinkmanship, Schelling wrote, “is a competition in risk-taking. It involves setting afoot an activity that may get out of hand, initiating a process that carries some risk of unintended disaster.” Powell was impressed by the notion that a war between states with nuclear second-strike capabilities would boil down to a competition in risk-taking. A state that highly values the stakes, he wrote in 2015, has “an incentive to adopt doctrines and deploy forces that make the use of force riskier and thus easier to transform a contest of military strength into a test of resolve.”
Powell’s models focused on determining not relative military strength but which side had the greater stake in the issue at hand. Although a state may be able to bluff an adversary into backing down by feigning a greater stake, the side that genuinely has the greatest stake will likely tolerate more risk and display more endurance. This logic is apparent in the infamous veiled threat contained in Chinese Lieutenant General Xiong Guangkai’s remark to U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense Chas Freeman during the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1996: “Americans care more about Los Angeles than they do about Taiwan.”
The 2018 National Defense Strategy asserted that “the surest way to prevent war is to be prepared to win one.” Powell’s work counsels a very different approach to preventing war. Deterrence, he concluded, is best achieved by credibly signaling that any conflict would carry a higher risk of escalation than the adversary is willing to bear.
The implication is that no new defense strategy can be complete without the risk of escalation front and center as fundamental to deterrence. China and Russia must recognize that the United States is credibly committed to bearing the risk of escalation if they conduct aggression. As part of the Biden administration's ongoing drive to fortify alliances battered by COVID-19 and former U.S. President Donald Trump, the United States could reinforce the message by making it clear that willingness to bear risk applies to U.S. allies, to. Strengthening U.S. alliances raises the risks for Russia and China because alliances cannot be broken without incurring significant domestic and international political costs. A so-called tripwire strategy that positioned U.S. forces in places vulnerable to Chinese or Russian aggression so as to make a clash with the United States inevitable could help demonstrate commitment. Powell stressed that slowly ratcheting up risk via methods such as selective sanctions, discriminatory nonkinetic antisatellite capabilities, and precision conventional strikes, could also be an effective deterrent. This more gradual approach, he argued, was far safer than the sorts of strategies—full-scale blockades, indiscriminate destruction of satellites, or all-out counteroffensives—that effectively forced presidents toward the brink.
THE IMPORTANCE OF SELF-INTERROGATION
Perhaps most important, Powell’s work compels policymakers to thoroughly interrogate American interests and goals to determine whether the United States truly has more at stake than its adversaries. Against a determined adversary, the risk of brinkmanship runs high. Brinkmanship that requires placing long-range strike systems in Ukraine or Taiwan, as Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev did in Cuba, would seem manifestly dangerous. In such cases, the solution is not to jettison brinkmanship and instead build more conventional forces. The solution, Powell would likely counsel, is to scale back policy goals and seek to cement one’s defensive and risk-taking posture for more plausibly vital interests.
The United States can work to strengthen deterrence by reinforcing alliances, posturing forces as tripwires, and identifying multiple options to ratchet up risk. None of those steps, however, can alter an underlying imbalance of interests. The Biden administration’s new defense strategy could benefit most from a thorough analysis of those interests and clear-eyed thinking about where U.S. interests really lie. Deterrence should be more credible if the United States does not try to confront Russia over Ukraine and the Black Sea. Confronting China over Taiwan is a tougher question because of the island’s strategic position. Nevertheless, there should be a sober acceptance that U.S. willingness to confront China would surely be more credible over Japan, South Korea, or the Philippines. A strategy that inadvertently commits the United States to a greater risk of nuclear war than its interests bear benefits no one.
The future that is coming into view differs from the bipolar competition of the Cold War. Even after his death, Powell’s work will continue to offer critical insights as we seek to safely navigate this future. Yet few scholars today can match Powell’s aptitude for combining theory, math, and strategy. As we again confront questions of nuclear and conventional deterrence, in a new and rapidly developing technological context, his guidance will be sorely missed.
Foreign Affairs · by The American War in Afghanistan: A History · January 31, 2022
13. Iran’s regime executed two men based on anti-gay charges
Pure evil.
Iran’s regime executed two men based on anti-gay charges
Iran’s regime frequently uses the charge of sodomy to impose the death penalty on gays and lesbians.
Updated: JANUARY 30, 2022 22:36
The Islamic Republic of Iran continued its lethal homophobic policy, executing on Sunday two men based on its anti-gay Sharia law system.
The two Iranian men, Mehrdad Karimpou and Farid Mohammadi, were killed in the Maragheh prison in northwestern Iran, according to the organization Human Rights Network in Iran. The men were arrested six years ago.
Iran’s regime frequently uses the charge of sodomy to impose the death penalty on gays and lesbians. According to a 2008 British Wikipedia dispatch, Iran’s theocratic state executed between 4,000 and 6,000 gays and lesbians since the country’s 1979 Islamic revolution.
Human Rights Network in Iran said the Iranian regime-controlled media has not reported on the executions of the two men based on the country’s anti-gay law.
“The two Iranian men were executed today after being found guilty of charges related to homosexuality," Iran Human Rights Monitor tweeted. "Human rights websites identified the men as 32-year-old Mehrdad Karimpour & Farid Mohammadi. They were arrested 6 years ago & were in Maragheh prison until their execution.”
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivers a televised speech in Tehran, Iran March 11, 2021. (credit: OFFICIAL KHAMENEI WEBSITE/HANDOUT VIA REUTERS)
The Ayatollah regime in Iran just executed two gay men for the crime of sodomy in Iran. This is Mehrdad Karimpour and Farid Mohammadi who were executed by hanging. Where's the outrage from @StateDept @SecBlinken @glaad & other LGBT groups in U.S. to this horrific crime?! #No2IR pic.twitter.com/vDXypBvO4g
— Karmel Melamed (@KarmelMelamed) January 30, 2022
"The Ayatollah regime in Iran just executed two gay men for the crime of sodomy in Iran," The Iranian-American journalist Karmel Melamed tweeted. He added their pictures and asked, "Where's the outrage from US Secretary of State Antony Bliken, GLAAD [an NGO that promotes LGBTQ acceptance] & other LGBT groups in the US to this horrific crime?!"
Peter Tatchell, an LGBTQ+ and human-rights campaigner, told The Jerusalem Post: "Iran is one of a dozen Muslim-majority countries and regions that enforce Sharia law and impose the death penalty for homosexuality. The execution of these men follows a long-standing regime policy of the state-sanctioned murder of gay men, often on disputed charges after unfair trials that have been condemned by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
The British activist Tatchell said: "The international community must impose Magnitsky sanctions on the regime officials, judges and prison staff who authorized these executions - and on those responsible for the many other human rights cases of abuse in Iran, including the hanging of peaceful Kurdish, Baluch and Ahwazi Arab activists on fake terrorism charges."
Sheina Vojoudi, an Iranian dissident who fled to Germany to escape persecution, told The Jerusalem Post: "The prisons of the Islamic Republic is full of people who have committed no crime and the leaked footage of Evin prison proved that. The Islamic Republic in Iran is based on injustice, to make it more clear I want to remind you of Saeed Toosi, the prominent Quran reciter and teacher who's Ali Khamenei's favorite Quran reciter. He was accused by 19 of his former underage Quran students of sexual molestation and rape but he had the Supreme Leader's protection and his case was ignored by the authorities."
Vojoudi, who has blasted the Iranian regime's anti-LGBTQ policies, added: "Why someone like him who rapes children can continue his career freely but the transgenders and homosexuals must be arrested or executed? There's no justice and humanity in the Islamic Republic. The democratic countries and the free world maybe should start to think about their relations with the Islamic Republic."
The new president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi, declared in an anti-gay tirade in 2014 that same-sex relations are “nothing but savagery.”
In December, the 6G Iranian and Lesbian and Transgender Network reported on its website that an Iranian lesbian named Sarah was arrested in the province of West Azerbaijan while seeking to cross the border into Turkey.
Last year, a leading Iranian regime theater director Ghotbedin Sadeghi delivered a homophobic rant against Iran’s persecuted LGBTQ community in March, prompting outrage from activists over his anti-gay rhetoric.
In 2016, The Jerusalem Post reported Iran’s regime had executed a gay adolescent that year – the first confirmed execution of someone convicted as a juvenile in the Islamic Republic.
14. Chinese State Media’s Global Influence(r) Operation
Chinese State Media’s Global Influence(r) Operation
Log into Facebook or Instagram and you’ll undoubtedly find yourself scrolling through the curated profiles of social media influencers. The most successful ones almost feel like close friends, sharing their latest cookie recipe, posting vacation photos, or ranting about some hot-button political issue. They capture our attention, cultivate our trust, and convince us to buy, feel, do. Brands and businesses are the most evident beneficiaries of this recent marketing strategy, but they’re not the only ones: The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which has long struggled to find messengers that appeal to foreign audiences, has recently tapped into influencers’ remarkable power of persuasion in order to sell us the CCP itself and its controversial policies.
Figure 1 English-language influencer ItsAbby shares photos of her New Year celebrations.
This influencer-focused strategy is deliberate and calculated, as evidenced by Chinese state media (CSM) leadership’s own words. In 2016, Zhu Ling, editor-in-chief of state-owned China Daily emphasized the importance of “borrowing mouths” to speak favorably about China. More recently, in June 2021, the head of China Media Group (CMG) Shen Haixiong made a speech promoting the use of “multilingual internet celebrity studios” to enhance China’s image in key regions. One such “influencer studio” affiliated with the CGTN state television channel has been producing foreign-language content since 2020. In addition, a research paper published in July 2021 by a Xinhua News Agency-sponsored academic journal profiled one Xinhua-affiliated influencer, Xu Zeyu, and advocated for greater use of “personal brands” to spread CCP propaganda.
CSM influencers build personal brands by publishing high-quality content that is produced by a professional company or team but presented as though it was created by the influencers by themselves. In China, this type of content is referred to as Professional User Generated Content (“PUGC” or “专业用户生产内容”). It is seen to be more appealing than either Professional Generated Content (such as studio-produced news segments) or User Generated Content (such as shaky, poorly produced vlogs) because it delivers professional-looking media while maintaining a focus on a single, seemingly genuine social media personality.
Figure 2 A review by French-language influencer J’Y Pense praising her videographer on Facebook from her personal account. Her comment reads: the pictures look extremely good.
A rare glimpse at J’Y Pense’s production team.
The result of J’Y Pense’s team’s efforts from a shoot in Gansu, China.
The purpose of this influencer-focused strategy is twofold: to circumvent attempts by Western social media to identify and limit the reach of CSM (including Facebook and Twitter “Chinese state-controlled media” labels), and to deliver CCP-aligned messaging via more trusted, more appealing messengers. The use of CSM-based “influencer studios” and “borrowed” foreign influencers to create and disseminate PUGC works well for this purpose because it allows the CCP to control content creators’ messages and capture audience attention with eye-catching stories, all while granting the CCP plausible deniability.
To execute this strategy, China has assembled a collection of pro-CCP content creators, including its own state media employees moonlighting as lifestyle influencers, foreigners paid by the CCP to toe the party line, and even members of Chinese ethnic minority groups used in domestic information operations. In total, we have found more than 200 such influencers. Partly owing to their sheer numbers, we have classified them according to their backgrounds, target audiences, and the particularities of their recruitment and management. China’s propaganda influencers fall into three broad categories: “honeypots,” “peers,” and “veiled CSM reporters.” This need for a taxonomy illustrates both the breadth and the ambition of China’s new peer-to-peer propaganda strategy. In a follow-up article, we will describe why this strategy in particular has the potential to succeed.
Figure 3 CCP-aligned influencer taxonomy, objectives, and target audiences.
Agents of influence: A taxonomy
Honeypots are young, attractive lifestyle influencers who are highly interactive with their audiences. Honeypots are divided into two subcategories: majority-Han Chinese lifestyle influencers and ethnic-minority lifestyle influencers. While these two types of influencers differ in their backgrounds and primary target audiences, they share several key characteristics. Nearly all are women, their posts tend to be playful and easily digestible, and regular content seems largely apolitical to the uncritical eye (Figure 4). Honeypots present themselves as everyday Chinese citizens providing their audiences with a more intimate look at their personal lives, travels, and interests. However, this superficial openness conceals these messengers’ true purpose: to normalize the CCP’s worldview and policies, and portray China as a benevolent global power.
Figure 4 A lighthearted post from Arabic-language influencer Ms. V celebrating the first snowfall in Beijing. This type of content is typical for honeypot influencers.
The majority-Han lifestyle influencers within the honeypot category make up the largest share of influencers in our overall sample. While presenting themselves as independent content creators, nearly all of these influencers are employed directly by a CSM outlet (most often China Radio International [CRI], a key pillar in China’s overseas propaganda campaigns). Lifestyle influencers generally target non-Chinese audiences: They speak their target audience’s language at a fluent and sometimes near-native level and have an intimate knowledge of their audience’s culture. In order to appeal to a wide range of viewers, influencers have varied personas. Some focus on technology, while others post mainly about travel, the environment, or business (Figure 5). We have identified lifestyle influencers messaging in as many as 40 languages, from globally influential languages like Arabic, French, and English, to less commonly spoken ones such as Lao, Albanian, and Esperanto. CSM outlets have made it a priority to expand coverage into multiple languages, as reflected by CRI’s broadcast services which are available in as many as 60 languages.
Figure 5 [Left] Profile of Techy Rachel (a.k.a. “Miss Wow”), whose content focuses mainly on Chinese high tech and consumer technology. [Right] Profile of Melody Zhang, a finance blogger whose content focuses on global business and the economy. Our investigation reveals that both of these influencers are affiliated with CGTN, though they do not disclose this on their social media profiles.
By developing an audience around certain target characteristics like language, culture, and interests, influencers are able to tailor their messaging to reflect the CCP’s strategic objectives for a given population. For example, lifestyle influencers whose target audiences live primarily in developing countries often seek to portray China as a potential benefactor and a trustworthy diplomatic ally, while influencers that speak Southeast Asian languages focus on Chinese infrastructure projects in that region (Figure 6). Europe-focused influencers frequently discuss environmental issues and China’s importance as a global trade partner. Arabic-language influencers, by contrast, often present cheerful images of Muslim life in China and downplay the overwhelming evidence of systemic human rights abuses targeting Uyghurs and other Muslim minority groups.
Figure 6 [Left] Arabic-language influencer Ayisha visiting an Islamic restaurant. [Right] Lao-language influencer Song Siao promoting the recently opened China-Laos railway. Content originally appears in respective languages.
A second, related group within the honeypot category are ethnic minority lifestyle influencers. While they bear some resemblance to majority-Han lifestyle influencers, their messaging is more narrowly focused on a single set of narratives. Ethnic minority influencer content is almost exclusively dedicated to highlighting their respective identities and communities. Most of this content is in Mandarin Chinese and is geared toward Chinese mainlanders and members of the Chinese diaspora, though a small amount is directed at English-speaking Western audiences.
This group’s primary messaging goal seems to be to convince their audiences that ethnic minority groups in China are not being oppressed or otherwise mistreated by the CCP. Ethnic minority influencers often refute criticism of the CCP’s treatment of minorities, either by denying human rights abuse accusations, or by using imagery that shows minorities in China going about their daily lives peacefully and happily. Narratives pushed by influencers are often harmonized with narratives appearing in CSM outlets, suggesting possible coordination (Figure 7).
Figure 7 [Left] Uyghur influencer Anni Guli showing mechanized cotton harvesting in Xinjiang in an attempt to refute reports of forced labor. [Right] A China Daily article about mechanized cotton harvesting using very similar imagery.
Despite the overlap in content between ethnic minority influencers and CSM, and in contrast to the majority-Han influencers described above, this latter group of ethnic minority influencers does not appear to be directly employed by CSM outlets. In fact, some claim to be independently motivated. In an interview with CGTN reporter Li Jingjing (discussed below), popular Uyghur influencer Sabira Samat claims she was motivated by “Western media slanders” against Xinjiang and the Uyghur people which led her to create videos to “represent the normal people of Xinjiang.” Despite this, our investigation points to a possible private sector intermediary: 11 of the 14 ethnic minority influencers we have found appear to have ties to a Chinese PR firm that recruits young ethnic minority women to create such content. The use of private firms to recruit and manage CCP-aligned influencers is not limited to ethnic minorities, and may constitute an emerging trend as described below.
Peers comprise the second broad category in the influencer taxonomy. These are influencers who both speak and look like their target audiences, as opposed to majority-Han lifestyle influencers who merely have foreign language capabilities. Many peer influencers are Westerners, hailing from countries including the U.S., the U.K., Canada, and New Zealand. They often describe themselves as “expats” who have found a more hospitable and fascinating environment in China. They act as CCP voiceboxes, taking their viewers on tours of various locations around China while praising developments in technology, society, and even agrarian reforms.
By and large, peer influencers seek to achieve the same goals as majority-Han lifestyle influencers—that is, convincing their audience that the CCP is treating its people well, and that China is a global power whose policies are deserving of admiration. Beyond this broad objective, there is variation in messaging depending on the audience. Western, English-speaking peers often seek to convince their audiences that the image of China has been distorted by Western media. They provide their audience with on-the-ground reports seeking to refute Western allegations about issues like CCP human rights abuses or mistreatment of ethnic minorities. Non-Western peer influencer messages vary by country—for example Argentinian travel blogger “Ceci in China” offers tips and encouragement for those thinking of emigrating to China, while Egyptian influencer Haytham Abdul-Mati focuses on Chinese business and trade with the Arab world.
Some peer influencers have admitted to allowing CSM outlets to use their content, while others have even acknowledged taking payment and direction from CSM outlets. American content creator Matthew Tye (a.k.a. laowhy86) provided strong evidence that several peer influencers were contacted by CSM employees with offers to create content that adheres to specific guidelines in exchange for payment. Influencers accused of CSM cooperation attempt to downplay their actions by likening themselves to American influencers working with tourism agencies to promote travel destinations, but peer influencer content is markedly different given its underlying political nature. The “tourist destinations” that peer influencers promote are often located in less-developed ethnic minority regions, and this content appears to offer “proof” that the CCP’s rural development policies are improving quality of life in the respective regions.
Figure 9 Screenshots from a Jason Lightfoot video titled “Chinese Government Working MIRACLES in Rural Villages” in which Lightfoot discusses Chinese government efforts to relocate laborers from the countryside into major cities.
While some peer influencers collaborate directly with CSM outlets as described above, others are approached in a more roundabout way. In December, an OpenSecrets report revealed that Vippi Media, an American consulting firm, was contracted by the Chinese consulate in New York to recruit American influencers for a massive social media campaign on TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter. The influencers involved in the campaign were to create content focusing on “Beijing’s history, cultural relics, modern life of people, new trends,” and the upcoming 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games, which have become the subject of significant international controversy.
Veiled CSM reporters are the final category in the influencer taxonomy. These influencers are CSM employees who identify as reporters and journalists but are not always forthcoming about their CSM affiliations on Western social media. In a recent report, China Media Project revealed that several of these journalists have even removed previously listed CSM outlet affiliations from their social media profiles.
Figure 10 CGTN reporter Li Jingjing makes no mention of her affiliation to CSM on her social media pages.
These journalists’ personal styles range from presenting news in a straightforward fashion to addressing controversial topics with vitriol. Reporters that fall on the former end of the spectrum adhere rigidly to CSM talking points, sticking primarily to classic news reporting. Many host shows in which they interview public figures or discuss the latest news through a CCP-aligned lens. Like the honeypot influencers, veiled CSM reporters speak a variety of languages, including Thai, Arabic, English, and French. While some include posts about their personal lives and travels, their primary focus is current events. For example, CGTN reporter Wang Guan sometimes intersperses videos of his opera performances and visits to his hometown with posts featuring his journalistic work.
Reporters on the more fiery end of the spectrum are the most direct and provocative in their pro-CCP messaging. Some host American-style political commentary shows, primarily in English, that criticize Western countries and provide snarky rebuttals to Western reporting on China (Figure 10). Through this method, not only are they able to provide direct rebuttals to Western reporting, but they also go on offense, attacking Western democratic systems, accusing them of hypocrisy and human rights abuses. At times, their content veers into the outright conspiratorial and even racist. In 2017 Xinhua reporter Di’er Wang faced backlash after she appeared in a video that featured a Chinese actor wearing a turban and speaking in a mock Indian accent.
Figure 11 Xinhua reporter Di’er Wang suggesting that the U.S. is basing its suspicions about a Wuhan Covid-19 lab leak on the U.S.’s “own secret experience of previous lab leak incidents.”
China analyst at Miburo with a special interest in how Chinese state media uses influencers to soften the CCP's image abroad
Next up: Why this new strategy matters
So why should we care about a couple hundred influencers pumping out CCP propaganda? The simple answer is that these influencers possess powers of persuasion that many other forms of propaganda employed by the CCP have been unable to achieve. In part two of this Substack post, we will analyze how the unique characteristics of these influencers allow their CCP-aligned messaging to reach audiences first, most, from a trusted source, and without rebuttal, making this a particularly effective method of propaganda dissemination.
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15. Britain warns Russia of sanctions on oligarchs if Ukraine is invaded
Britain warns Russia of sanctions on oligarchs if Ukraine is invaded
1/4
A view shows Russian BMP-3 infantry fighting vehicles during drills held by the armed forces of the Southern Military District at the Kadamovsky range in the Rostov region, Russia January 27, 2022. REUTERS/Sergey Pivovarov
- Summary
- Britain warns Russia of possible sanctions over Ukraine
- Russia has massed troops near Ukraine
- UK already has sanctions on some Russian people, entities
- Kremlin says sanctions will backfire and hurt UK companies
- Johnson will tell Putin to "step back from the brink"
LONDON/MOSCOW, Jan 31 (Reuters) - Britain urged Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday to "step back from the brink" over Ukraine, warning that any incursion would trigger sanctions against companies and people with close links to the Kremlin.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the threat of such measures, echoing moves outlined by a senior U.S. official following a Russian troop buildup near Ukraine, would amount to an attack on Russian businesses. read more
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the British warning "very disturbing", and said such statements undermined Britain's investment attractiveness and would backfire by hurting British companies.
"It's not often you see or hear such direct threats to attack business," Peskov said. "An attack by a given country on Russian business implies retaliatory measures, and these measures will be formulated based on our interests if necessary."
Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, London has become the pre-eminent global centre for a vast outflow of money from former Soviet republics.
Opponents of Putin have repeatedly called on the West to get tough on Russian money, though oligarchs and Russian officials continue to flaunt their wealth at Europe's most luxurious destinations.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is due to travel to Ukraine and will also speak to Putin by telephone.
"What I will say to President Putin, as I've said before, is that I think we really all need to step back from the brink, and I think Russia needs to step back from the brink," Johnson told reporters.
LIST OF RUSSIAN ELITES
The United States, the European Union and Britain have warned Putin of tough sanctions if Russia attacks Ukraine after gathering tens of thousands of troops near the border. read more
A senior Biden administration official said Washington and its allies have prepared a list of Russian elites in or near Putin's inner circle for hitting with economic sanctions.
"The individuals we have identified are in or near the inner circles of the Kremlin and play a role in government decision making or are at a minimum complicit in the Kremlin's destabilizing behavior," the official said in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The United States has developed specific sanctions packages for both Russian elites who meet the criteria and their family members, and these efforts are being pursued in coordination with U.S. allies and partners, the official said.
Russia denies planning to attack Ukraine and is demanding security guarantees including a promise by NATO never to let Kyiv join the alliance.
The British government will introduce new legislation this week to broaden the scope of sanctions it can apply to Russia to try to deter aggression towards Ukraine, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said on Sunday. read more
She said London should be able to target "any company of interest to the Kremlin and the regime in Russia" and that "there would be nowhere to hide for Putin's oligarchs".
Visiting Hungary, British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said it was important to defuse the crisis as a war would lead to greater instability, higher fuel prices and migrant flows.
Wallace expressed support for a planned trip to Russia on Tuesday by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban for talks with Putin, adding: "We need to de-escalate this and stand up for the right for sovereignty of Ukraine." read more
On the sanctions list are six people Britain says are close to Putin: businessmen Yuri Kovalchuk, Arkady Rotenberg and Nikolai Shamalov, former KGB officer Sergei Chemezov, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev and Federal Security Service (FSB) chief Alexander Bortnikov.
The sanctions allow Britain to freeze individual assets and ban individual from entering the United Kingdom.
Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge, William James and Dmitry Antonov; editing by Michael Holden and Timothy Heritage
16. LET’S TWEET, GRANDMA – Weaponizing the Social to Create Information Security
382. LET’S TWEET, GRANDMA – Weaponizing the Social to Create Information Security | Mad Scientist Laboratory
by CDR Sean M. Sullivan, JAGC, USN,
[Editor’s Note: Ever since the Reverend Jonathan Swift‘s A Modest Proposal shocked Britain’s 18th century Whig establishment with the suggestion that Irish peasants sell their children as food to help solve that island’s endemic poverty — “A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout” — modern journalistic satire has been used to prick the consciousness of indifferent vested interests into action to address pressing concerns of the day.
Like our adversaries, China and Russia, and indeed, much of the West, the United States has a sizeable aging population. These Boomers (and preceding Silent Generation) have a large claim on the Federal Budget’s mandatory spending (e.g., Social Security and Medicare), squeezing the dollars available for discretionary spending (e.g., Defense). In advocating for “putting ‘Security’ back into “Social Security,’” today’s post by CDR Sean M. Sullivan, JAGC, USN, evokes the Rev. Swift from the other end of the generational spectrum, and proposes employing our budgetarily burdensome Baby Boomers as a digital levée en masse to help the Nation achieve Information Advantage. As a substantial auxiliary force, Boomers can take the fight to the Cognitive Domain as a “cyber militia,” helping us beat back malign foreign influence operations — Read on!]
If You Can’t Eat ‘Em…
It is often said that there are two certainties in life – death and taxes. The reality of today is that while those two certainties remain true, two more are true for Americans: social security is weighed down by a growing elderly population, and the United States is losing influence in the information warfare environment. As these two seemingly unrelated problems both negatively impact U.S. national security, why not look to leverage one problem to help the other?
Thus, since you cannot wish for more world influence and you cannot eat the costly elderly population, the U.S. needs to look at a new social security requirement that leverages national security value from the growing elderly population. This new mandate should dictate that to receive social security benefits, all recipients must post one “positive” American story or image online, once a month. This will both accelerate American interest and involvement in information warfare and will leverage the untapped resource of the Baby Boomer generation as they begin to weigh down the American budget and [indirectly] negatively impact U.S. national security.
More Strategic Debt
By 2035, about 20 percent of the U.S. population will be over 65 years old, and for the first time in history, they will outnumber the 18 years and under population of Americans. Until recently, social security debt ran at a (diminishing) surplus; however, as of 2010, the debt is now at a growing deficit as Baby Boomers age. The U.S. currently already spends $939B on social security (i.e., 4.9% of gross domestic product), with an approximate deficit of $66B. However, by 2035 there will be approximately 79M Americans eligible for social security benefits, which puts the U.S. on the verge of an additional significant debt deficit of $344B. Social security will thus have a 25% shortfall, and the overall debt will be approximately six percent of U.S. gross domestic product. Suggestions to make social security more solvent have made no real progress on a viable solution. This debt will only get worse as the fiscal implications of COVID manifest in coming years.
Countries that mismanage their resources and continue to generate significant debt are strategically limited in either economic influence and/ordefense spending and are apt to fail. Granted the U.S. still outspends its competitors in defense, the practical impact the looming debt will bring to defense spending and economic incentives remains. Therefore, if social security debt is not going to change, then the means to leverage some defense value from social security to offset reductions to existing U.S. defense programs should be examined.
Information Access — “Knowing is Half the Battle”
Within the U.S., 97% percent of the adult population own cell phones, and 77% have access to online content via smartphones. What is of most interest is that of the current 50-64 year old demographic, 83% already have access to the internet via smartphones and 64% are using social media and online sources for information and news. Those numbers continue to grow annually. U.S. society also gets online at an early age, with 95% of current American teenagers already having online access via smartphones. The younger generations are growing up with exposure and access to technology, while older generations are still catching-up.
Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in protest of Tunisian police heavy-handedness ignited the Arab Spring in 2011
It is this growing access to information that has made both American and world audiences so susceptible to influence. Accordingly, states, terrorist groups, and organized crime have taken notice and action. The Arab Spring of 2011 demonstrated the power of influence where information access created an opportunity to influence large populations with regional results. While the internet cannot be blamed for the underlying basis for the uprising, it served to influence and mobilize larger audiences. Thus, if populations can be influenced to take action through social media and messaging, then there is no limit to the ability to shape and control the battlespace heading into, or while in a kinetic conflict; in essence, to conduct war with information.
Information Warfare — The Other Half of Battle
China developed its “50 Cent Army” to spread party approved narratives abroad via social media. / Source: AP Image via Voice of America
Information warfare is the ability to control and use information. It is composed of elements like cyber operations, communications, and influence operations. Information and persuasion are critical weapons in this realm. This warfare is nothing new, and both China and Russia see information as an effective weapons system. As such, they seek to use information to undermine the legitimacy and benefits of American democracy and society to bolster their own. The U.S., nevertheless, still lags in competing in the information realm.
As a result, U.S. opponents are filling the websites and social media in an effort to undermine U.S. standing and to further their state objectives. This has left uninvolved Americans confused and uncertain about what is or is not real news. This also has demonstrated U.S. vulnerability, and thus nations like Russia and China have not only developed information warfare strategies, but have employed “troll farms” to dynamically attack the U.S. online by promoting their messages and images to not only influence Americans, but the rest of the world to form negative perceptions of American ideals.
The New Cold War of Words
This is not the first time that the U.S. has found itself in a war of ideals and in an information fight targeting the perceptions of the American way of life. During the Cold War, both the U.S. and the Soviet Union recognized the need to influence the people of the world, including domestically. The U.S. found it could better influence the world through the controlled distribution of iconic American products and entertainment as a means to undermine the support of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. The U.S. had the advantage due to technology, funding, and gross disparities in standards of living; think blue jeans, rock and roll, David Hasselhoff, and McDonald’s. This advantage has eroded.
The primary U.S. organization tasked with spreading American messages was the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), established in 1953. USIA’s mandate was to inform and influence foreign audiences by operating the Voice of America (VOA) radio stations, disseminating movies and books, and coordinating world speaker tours. USIA then became the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which operated under the original principles of the Voice of America until 2018. The BBG operated until the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) was created in 2018, “to help constituents better understand the work that the Agency and its networks do.” USAGM continued to adhere to the VOA principles and disseminate messages through VOA, and the Radio Free Broadcasting Networks. However, a pure governmental organization approach is not enough. How is that failing? The favorable view of individual Americans is in decline. This is presumably based on information and stories online showing that favorable views are down to 50% from over 60% a few years ago. These views plummeted even more during the Trump administration — especially due to views on how the U.S. handled the COVID-19 pandemic. The reality is that the U.S. is losing.
Using National Sticks and Stones
The U.S. has already fallen behind in how it manages domestic and international perception of American ideals in the information environment. This is occurring by relegating the spread of American idealism to USAGM, vice utilizing a developed information strategy with a whole of nation approach. Further, unlike the U.S., foreign adversaries, in particular, Russia,have been actively involved in executing their information strategy by leveraging both government and their populations to erode American ideals and favor, both within the U.S. and abroad.
Perhaps as a result of the media storm coming out of the 2016 Presidential elections, where the Russian government allegedly attempted to manipulate U.S. voters, the 2017 National Security Strategy of the U.S. recognized that “America’s competitors weaponized information to attack the values and institutions that underpin free societies while shielding themselves from outside information,” while U.S. actions have been “tepid” and “fragmented” and lacking strategic focus. Thus the strategy directs positive action to influence opinions and interests and further directs that the nation seek to advance Americaninfluence through the dissemination of images and messages that evoke and “Champion American Values” such as freedom, equality, prosperity, and liberty. In plain language, there is an imperative to push back against information threats and to take affirmative steps to disseminate American ideals to positively influence the world to again align with the U.S. and build allies and partners to counter Chinese and Russian malign behavior.
Recently, the Biden administration published its own Interim National Security Strategic Guidance. Within this strategy document, the President calls for the U.S. to “demonstrate that democracies can still deliver for our people… to defend our democracy, strengthen it and renew it…building back better our economic foundations….[and]Reclaiming our place in international institutions….[by] Lifting up our values at home and speaking out to defend them around the world….[and by] Revitalizing America’s network of alliances, and the partnerships that have made the world safer for all of our peoples.” An active program that leverages average Americans pushing images and information can meet those objectives.
Although the 2017 National Security Strategy calls for increased messaging and the recent 2021 Interim Strategy speaks to renewed efforts domestically and internationally, both are silent on the “how-to” execute. Therefore, another more reliable solution must be found to fill that void from either an existing government program or from another entity willing to champion that cause. Social security-eligible Americans can fit the bill and fill the tepid void, and more than double the potential traffic to UASGM websites and social media furthering the express strategic objectives.
No Really, You Can’t Eat ‘Em
There are many stereotypes of how people see and treat the elderly American population. Once the free-love-Woodstock-counter-culture-generation, the media now depicts them as living carefree on the fruits of their carefully planned nest eggs while golfing around The Villages retirement community, or as folks free-riding on the backs of the American paycheck. The reality is that nearly nine out of ten Americans over 65 who currently receive social security benefits count on those benefits to provide 90% or more of their retirement income. That does not mean that most eligible recipients do not want to work. The opposite is true. Especially of the coming retired generation, 54% express a desire to continue to work after retirement either for more money or to do something fulfilling or what theylike to do. That generation already possesses the tools to combat information warfare: a phone, access to the internet, time, “American” experiences, and motivation to do more; herein lies the opportunity.
Weaponizing the Elderly
By creating a social security benefit requirement, the U.S. can conscript an agile and online American information militia. In a sense, they can weaponize the American elderly. Through this program, the U.S. will be able tomobilize the colossal social security generation to assist in combating national security threats through the use of strategic online information campaigns that highlight truthful and “positive” American ideals for both American and foreign consumers; something generally akin to posting “#proudAmericans” or “#Americanideals”.
Some might argue that the conscripted beneficiaries will post negative things or be critical of the U.S. — that is precisely the point! Unlike Russia and China, Americans will be exercising Americanism through their free expression, while creating an information campaign not encumbered by over-staffed and out of date information strategies, or lack thereof. Further, each month the U.S. Government could also provide more specific voluntary themes to dynamically adjust messaging to meet specific emerging threats and information at home and abroad to reassure allies and partners. Simply, the U.S. will be able to leverage a population of over 70 million people to advance American influence through the dissemination of ideal images and messages, good and bad, to evoke and “champion American values” in social media. This will provide a means to counter the negative online messages and information being disseminated by American adversaries, as well as enable coordinated action for pushing positive U.S. influence into international opinions and interests.
For those that would counter that adding requirements to social security is a third rail, a program to modify existing benefit requirements in the interest of national security is the best bet for success compared to the current plan of hoping for some great social security compromise. By putting “security” into social security, it becomes more than just a social program. It increases the value from every dollar spent on social security and would inject over 70 million American messages into the world-wide information realm by the actual American people that the world already favors, vice just some U.S. government news agency. The sheer volume to counter negative messages would yield tangible benefits not only to the views of American society and ideals worldwide but presumably domestically as well.
This program, at best, will enable the U.S. to dynamically address information threats as well as offset some future defense costs for information warfare by leveraging the sunk cost and people of social security. At worst, this program will create fierce debates on penalizing the elderly and other potential Constitutional issues, including conscription. In either event, just the suggestion will at least heighten American awareness of the issues of information warfare and social security debt which could lead to new debates, conversations and solutions that demonstrate American ideals of vigorous and free debate, and perhapsinspire some pro-American volunteer participation in the information war. I suppose we could also consider looking to eat the elderly, as Swift suggested, but that isn’t really the point is it?
Conclusion — Heading into the Light
With looming social security debt and foreign influence here to stay, challenges, problems and solutions need to be found differently. In the face of dwindling resources caused by increased social security debt, and now COVID, information and influence programs are likely to continue to suffer in more and more constrained budget environments. There is nothing to step into the breach to stem the tide of debt and influence. Current defense budgets focus too much on tactically influencing the world through “[a] more lethal, resilient, and rapidly innovating Joint Force, combined with a robust constellation of allies and partners, [that] will sustain American influence and ensure favorable balances of power that safeguard the free and open international order,” vice a focus on stated strategy for information and influence operations. This tactical focus will not change the strategic future to U.S. advantage.
The only chance the U.S. has for getting back into the information fight is by mobilizing U.S. interests in information, influence, and the strategic risks of debt. The U.S. must start to empower a focused culture of American participation in the dissemination ofAmerican ideals and national defense in the information environment and perhaps that will lead to modern walls coming crumbling down at the feet of the next Hasselhoff (who would also qualify under this program – here is your next chance Mr. Hasselhoff!) And perhaps just by suggesting a social security-funded weaponized elderly cyber-militia that would offer “a fair, cheap and easy method of making these [elderly] sound and useful members of the common-wealth” — even if this was just to influence and energize Americans to take notice and participate in the information war raging around them and to “Let’s Tweet, Grandma.”
17. Hackers for Hire: Proxy Warfare in the Cyber Realm
Excerpts:
Technical defense measures, meanwhile, are often expensive and complex to implement properly. Ultimately, technical deterrence is only effective if it meaningfully changes the cost-benefit calculus of cyberattackers. So long as they consider it worthwhile to increase their efforts to surpass improved cybersecurity measures, technical deterrence will always fall short.
Sanctions also have their limitations. For one, they do little to elicit behavioral change in the target if there are no clear guidelines as to the conditions under which sanctions will be lifted or eased. The imposition of sanctions is also costly to the retaliating state, since it must forgo trade and other economic relations with the sanctioned state, and this economic pain is exacerbated if the sanctioned state responds with sanctions of its own. Retaliation through covert cyberattacks, meanwhile, could spark a cycle of tit-for-tat attacks that might lead to further escalation.
Given the limitations of these existing methods, there is an urgent need to explore more robust approaches to deterring state-sponsored proxy attacks. Overcoming attribution challenges and improving the efficiency of technical deterrence measures are paramount, as are limiting the negative effects of sanctions. As my research demonstrates, strengthening democratic accountability institutions might also hold promise, although doing so comes with its own set of challenges. What is clear, however, is that there are no silver bullets for countering cyber proxies. Policymakers need to pay more attention to these nonstate actors; understanding their evolving connections with state sponsors will be crucial in crafting an effective response.
Hackers for Hire: Proxy Warfare in the Cyber Realm - Modern War Institute
In February 2018, the cybersecurity firm FireEye published a report detailing the activities of a hacker group called APT37 (also known as Reaper, TEMP.Reaper, ScarCruft, or Group123), which had carried out a series of cyberattacks across Asia. The report assessed “with high confidence” that the group was acting on behalf of the North Korean government. APT37 primarily engages in gathering intelligence on South Korean entities, particularly those affiliated with the government, military, and defense industries. It has also targeted organizations active in helping North Korean defectors and those engaged in reunification efforts on the Korean Peninsula.
This is just one example of a rising trend, as states increasingly turn to “cyber proxies”—hacker groups that carry out cyber operations on behalf of or in concert with nation states. Yet analysts know very little about how these groups operate and the nature of their relations with their state sponsors: the clandestine nature of cyber operations means these proxies have largely gone unnoticed. If the United States is to respond effectively to this emerging risk, it needs a better understanding of their activities.
The Rise of Cyber Proxies
Cyber proxies can be individual hackers hired for a particular operation or organized groups of hackers such as China’s Comment Crew, the Iranian Cyber Army, and the Syrian Electronic Army. There are also nontraditional cyber proxies such as defense contractors and security companies like Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, and Israeli technology firm NSO Group. Offerings from these companies include the sale of software that can break into and degrade or destroy adversary computer systems. Some analysts therefore argue that these companies should also be labeled as cyber proxies, not least because targets on the receiving end of their operations often perceive them as such and respond accordingly.
The increasing use of cyber proxies is especially alarming since it may increase the likelihood of cyberattacks. Although we have not yet seen the full potential of cyberattacks, they are widely perceived as less lethal than conventional weapons, which lowers the threshold for their use. And they are relatively cheap to deploy. The latest system vulnerabilities and sophisticated tools to exploit them are often readily available for sale on the dark web. Hackers are available for hire by the hour. This means even the poorest states can afford to deploy highly sophisticated cyberattacks against rivals. Attackers can also exploit the same vulnerabilities to launch mass attacks against multiple targets simultaneously—a challenging task with conventional weapons outside a full-scale war situation.
The use of cyber proxies for offensive cyber operations only exacerbates the problem. Proxies do not involve the same kind of “boots on the ground” costs the public and media pay close attention to, so elected officials and state agents may be less concerned about the political costs of cyberattacks.
The Strategic Logic of Cyber Proxies
Working with cyber proxies is appealing for states because it enables them to tap into skills, expertise, tools, and capabilities that state agencies may lack or find too expensive to develop in house. Cyber proxies often operate in the gray areas of international politics; they can offer political cover for governments that may not want to be tied to cyber operations that come to light. Proxies also enable states to avoid revealing their in-house capabilities—an important advantage for states that want to maintain strategic ambiguity as norms evolve in the cyber domain.
States employ a variety of models in their relations with their cyber proxies. The United States, for instance, keeps its proxies—defense contractors—relatively close, enabling tight direction and monitoring of their activities in terms of target selection and techniques used. Others, like Iran and Syria, may opt to put more operational distance between them and their proxies, providing material and ideological support in exchange for the proxies’ cooperation in targeting specific political adversaries.
Other states, like Russia, may put even greater distance between them and their proxies, avoiding direct input and giving the proxy carte blanche in terms of targets and techniques. The Russian government is increasingly extending tacit support to various hacker groups, even using the threat of criminal prosecution and bribes to elicit their cooperation, particularly in targeting the United States and its allies. In general, however, the support of the state is mostly passive; in many cases, the only link between the proxy and the state is that the state willingly turns a blind eye to the activities of the proxy despite having the capacity to crack down. This opens the intriguing possibility of hackers being unwitting proxies of the state.
Finally, some states, like China, have used a combination of these approaches to manage their relations with their proxies. Until recently, Chinese proxies operated with more distance. But China has been centralizing its offensive cyber operations, pursuing a systematic program of incorporating private hackers into its intelligence agencies while shifting responsibilities for cyber operations away from the People’s Liberation Army and toward more specialized cyber units at the Ministry of State Security.
While working with proxies offers tangible benefits to states, it also entails significant risks. For instance, states face a “Promethean dilemma” where their proxies could turn their skills, capabilities, and tools against them. This is likely to happen in cases where the relationship between the state and proxy is so loose that the proxy has little incentive to cooperate with and abide by the directives of the state sponsor.
Accountability for Cyber Proxies
Despite the variety of models and risks associated with cyber proxies, my research suggests that one consistent feature of proxies is that they are much less likely to be employed by states with strong domestic accountability mechanisms. Prior research suggests that although most members of the public do not pay much attention to state-level offensive cyber operations, once they are made aware of cyber breaches, they tend to prefer a measured response that limits the potential for escalation. Furthermore, long-term exposure to cyber attacks tends to mitigate the emotional responses associated with them, reinforcing the public’s preference for cyber restraint.
Given the public’s general preference for cyber restraint, it is reasonable to expect that where citizens can hold their elected officials accountable for proxy-executed cyber operations, these officials are less likely to pursue such operations. My research confirms this using newly collected data on over one hundred hacker groups around the world. The effect is particularly strong where vertical accountability mechanisms, such as elections and other democratic processes, are robust. The effect is much weaker, on the other hand, where government officials are mainly held to account through horizontal accountability mechanisms, such as parliamentary and regulatory oversight institutions.
Reining in Cyber Proxies
These insights are important in helping combat cyber proxies. For one, it suggests that pressure from citizens and civil society groups could be useful in curbing the use of proxies where vertical accountability institutions are functional. Attributing cyberattacks to state sponsors (even if the evidence remains fluid) might spur pressure from citizen groups that might limit future attacks. It also suggests that policies that rely on regulatory and other state oversight institutions to keep cyber operations in check will be largely ineffective.
For now, popular responses to cyberattacks include the issuing of condemnatory statements by senior government officials, diplomatic protests (such as expelling diplomats), and legal measures (like the indictment of proxy hackers). These measures work by labeling proxy-executed cyber operations as deviant with the aim of mobilizing domestic and international condemnation of the behavior. By making it clear that the activities of cyber proxies are known and won’t be tolerated, public deterrence measures aim to increase the cost of continued offensive cyber operations. Strong vertical accountability mechanisms can be useful here, helping to increase pressure on state sponsors to limit the use of proxies.
The US government, for instance, has been particularly active in using criminal indictments to stem the tide of proxy-executed cyber operations. Available data shows that the US Department of Justice has unsealed at least twenty-four indictments since 2014, with 195 criminal counts against ninety-three foreign individuals accused of cyber influence operations at the behest of a state sponsor. Iranian, Chinese, Russian, Syrian, and North Korean hackers have been charged with a variety of crimes ranging from malicious destructive hacks to the theft of trade secrets and other intellectual property.
Other approaches include technical deterrence measures such as efforts aimed at strengthening the resilience of computer systems to cyber breaches. Some of these measures are specifically aimed at protecting critical infrastructure such as electric grids, communications, and transportation control systems.
Beyond these measures, states could implement various overt and covert retaliatory actions. These retaliatory attacks could take place in the cyber domain, through targeted sanctions, or with conventional military strikes. Broader economic sanctions could also be a useful deterrent, particularly where the targeted country is heavily dependent on the retaliating state for critical goods and services.
No Silver Bullet
All of these approaches have significant limitations. For one, the need for indictments to be based on publicly releasable evidence is problematic given the attribution challenges involved in establishing the source of cyberattacks. Information collected to establish attribution may not be admissible in court or may divulge sensitive intelligence sources and methods. Incontrovertible evidence regarding the source of an attack may not be available when it is most useful for criminal prosecution purposes. To complicate matters, apprehending individuals living overseas requires the cooperation of law enforcement agencies in those countries, further reducing the likelihood that hackers will ever see a day in court.
Technical defense measures, meanwhile, are often expensive and complex to implement properly. Ultimately, technical deterrence is only effective if it meaningfully changes the cost-benefit calculus of cyberattackers. So long as they consider it worthwhile to increase their efforts to surpass improved cybersecurity measures, technical deterrence will always fall short.
Sanctions also have their limitations. For one, they do little to elicit behavioral change in the target if there are no clear guidelines as to the conditions under which sanctions will be lifted or eased. The imposition of sanctions is also costly to the retaliating state, since it must forgo trade and other economic relations with the sanctioned state, and this economic pain is exacerbated if the sanctioned state responds with sanctions of its own. Retaliation through covert cyberattacks, meanwhile, could spark a cycle of tit-for-tat attacks that might lead to further escalation.
Given the limitations of these existing methods, there is an urgent need to explore more robust approaches to deterring state-sponsored proxy attacks. Overcoming attribution challenges and improving the efficiency of technical deterrence measures are paramount, as are limiting the negative effects of sanctions. As my research demonstrates, strengthening democratic accountability institutions might also hold promise, although doing so comes with its own set of challenges. What is clear, however, is that there are no silver bullets for countering cyber proxies. Policymakers need to pay more attention to these nonstate actors; understanding their evolving connections with state sponsors will be crucial in crafting an effective response.
William Akoto is an assistant professor of international politics at Fordham University.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
18. Stuck without housing, Afghan evacuees languish inside D.C.-area hotel rooms
Stuck without housing, Afghan evacuees languish inside D.C.-area hotel rooms
Scores of Afghan evacuees in the Washington region have been languishing inside cramped hotel rooms, where parents sleep on the floor while their bored children share one bed.
Months after their arrivals, overwhelmed resettlement groups have been unable to find many of the evacuees affordable permanent homes. So while those organizations attend to other newly arrived families, the evacuees are left to their own devices for weeks at a time inside rooms shared by as many as five people, community activists say.
During the day, the families have little to do, because the adults have yet to receive Social Security numbers or federal work authorization documents. The children, lacking a permanent address, are unable to enroll in school.
The problem is particularly acute in Maryland — and may soon grow worse, resettlement groups say, as federal officials plan to send more evacuees to the area.
“We know that securing safe, sanitary affordable housing is a top priority,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, chief executive of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. The organization is one of nine national refugee groups coordinating the resettlement of the more than 76,000 Afghan evacuees who have arrived in the United States as part of the historic airlift out of Afghanistan that began in late summer.
After the Trump administration slashed the U.S. cap on refugees to historic lows, many resettlement groups scaled down their operations. Now, during the largest influx of refugees since the end of the Vietnam War, they have had to quickly work to rebuild their staffs and their relationships with landlords who once were willing to rent to refugees, Vignarajah said.
“It can be difficult to convince a landlord to rent an apartment to a family without guaranteed income, a rental history, landlord reference or a Social Security number,” she said.
As of Thursday, about 4,430 Afghan evacuees have been resettled in Virginia since mid-August, a U.S. State Department spokesperson said. Nearly 1,640 have been placed in Maryland, while none have been resettled in the District.
More families are expected to arrive after U.S. military bases around the country shut down their temporary Afghan housing facilities sometime after mid-February. The Biden administration is also accelerating efforts to resettle additional Afghan evacuees currently being housed outside the United States.
Locally, the housing problem was initially concentrated in Northern Virginia, an early magnet for Afghan evacuees because of the area’s already large Afghan diaspora.
But after state officials there imposed restrictions that limit resettlement to evacuees who have family connections able to assist them with housing, the bulk of housing headaches has shifted to Maryland, which does not have a formal family connection requirement and leaves resettlement agencies with the responsibility of finding homes.
The International Rescue Committee has so far faced the toughest challenges.
About 40 Afghan families under the IRC’s care have been housed since early October at a hotel in Linthicum Heights, just outside Baltimore, because the organization has been unable to place them in permanent housing that they consider to be safe.
Several of those families said the IRC has offered to move them to a high-rise apartment building near Druid Hill Park in northwest Baltimore that — while a short walk from a nearby mosque — has suffered from violent crime, according to community activists.
The families told The Washington Post that they turned down that option after hearing from others placed there without furniture or assistance with food.
The IRC, those families said, informed them that they would have to cover the cost of remaining in the hotel themselves or leave, offering to provide them with federal aid payouts that they could use to find a home on their own.
The evacuees — designated by the federal government as “humanitarian parolees” who are authorized to remain in the United States for two years — are each entitled to receive $2,275 in federal support that is meant to cover housing costs, job training and other expenses over a three-month period.
Niamatullah Armani, a former member of the Afghan National Army’s special forces who has lived at the hotel with his family for nearly three months, said he is unsure of his next steps.
“I am tired of fighting,” Armani, 27, said through an interpreter. “I want to go someplace where I can relax with my family. With a good school.”
Like other evacuees in the hotel, Armani said he had gone weeks without hearing from an IRC caseworker, even though his wife was pregnant when they arrived in Maryland from a military base in Wisconsin with their other two children, Tajala, 2, and Jalwa, 3.
On the night his wife went into labor earlier this month, Armani said he called the caseworker but could not get through. So, he turned to the hotel staff for help, convincing them through another evacuee who knows English to call an ambulance to take his wife to a hospital.
Now, their baby daughter, Nurjala, sleeps in a portable bassinet set on top of a hotel bed nightstand while Armani’s wife and their two children share a queen-size bed. Armani sleeps on the floor.
The IRC did not agree to be interviewed for this article. In a statement, spokesman Stanford Prescott said the organization has doubled its staff in Baltimore during the past three months to try to keep up with an unprecedented demand for services. So far, the IRC has resettled 500 Afghan evacuees in the Baltimore area, Prescott said.
“Our teams are operating under rapid timelines and constrained resources,” he said. “Our highest priority is the well-being of our clients and we strive to serve them with the best services possible.”
State Department officials said they are monitoring the problems in Baltimore. Though it is ideal for evacuees to be placed in a home where they feel comfortable and safe, an agency spokesperson said the affordable housing shortage makes it imperative that they accept what they’re offered if those homes meet federal requirements.
“If families turn down the housing offered or delay in accepting the housing offered to them by resettlement agencies, it is often very difficult to find alternate housing,” the spokesperson said.
Community activists say they are able to help IRC find better homes for the evacuees in neighborhoods in and around Baltimore where they would have community support. But, so far, their offers have been turned down, the activists said.
Zainab Chaudry, Maryland director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said several mosques and community groups in the Baltimore area have reached out to IRC with no success.
“These are reputable advocacy groups who’ve been willing to step up, saying: ‘We can help provide housing. We have resources. We have connections with landlords who we can work with to help find solutions,’” Chaudry said.
“We understand that they’re overwhelmed,” she said. “But the thing that’s egregious is that if IRC did not have the bandwidth to provide these important services, then stonewalling other organizations and mosques and agencies who deal with refugee resettlement is not acceptable.”
Munir Ahmad Sadaqat, a former interpreter for the U.S. Marine Corps in Afghanistan, took his chances with the money the IRC offered and, with the help of local activists, began Friday to move his family out of the Baltimore-area hotel where they’d been living for three months. Their new two-bedroom apartment will be in Ellicott City.
After fleeing the Taliban in August, then bouncing from refugee camp to refugee camp in several countries with very little to eat, Sadaqat said the stress of finding a stable home in the United States has been overwhelming. Every day, he said, his wife and 7-year-old daughter would ask when they could leave their cramped quarters, while he has gone stir-crazy without his federal authorization to look for work. That document, he said, was mistakenly sent to St. Louis.
Meanwhile, Sadaqat has worried about the safety of his mother and other relatives who remain in Afghanistan.
“When I go outside, I just cry,” he said in a sober voice.
His wife and daughter, unaware of what he was saying because they don’t know English, stood at the hotel room’s narrow kitchenette counter to finish their lunch.
“But I cannot show my crying to my family,” Sadaqat confided. “Because they will get more sad.”
19. China’s Real Challenge Is Not Military
Excerpts:
To protect free market values and governance, it will also not be enough for Western businesses to comply with whatever laws home countries may impose from time-to-time restricting business with China. Just as Black Rock’s Larry Fink is urging businesses to exercise greater “social responsibility” about such issues as climate change, ethnicity, and social justice, companies will have to exercise the same social responsibility about doing business with China. The Competitiveness Council of Business Executives for National Security (BENS) has called for Western businesses to take a series of measures including: greater awareness of risks for intellectual property if investing in China; accepting capital from only trusted sources to avoid risk to IP capital and technology; building resilient supply chains not dependent on China; prioritizing trade with partners outside China; and recognizing the risks to brand reputation by investing in an authoritarian society such as China’s.
The bottom line is that free-market enterprise must stop selling rope to the hangman before it is too late.
China’s Real Challenge Is Not Military
Free-market enterprise must stop selling rope to the hangman before it is too late.
Vladimir Lenin is popularly believed to have said that “the capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them.” Whether he actually said it or not, the quote aptly fits the situation with China. Since 2016, Apple alone is reported to have invested $275 billion in China. All the world’s iPhones are Chinese-made. In addition to 10,000 direct employees, Apple’s extended supply chain for the manufacture of products engages more than 1 million Chinese workers.
But now China has gone from a favored investment destination to a dangerous rival. The rug has been pulled out from under the feet of Apple and all those Western investors that have built Chinese operations over decades. The private sector has learned that the long-term consequence of doing business with China produces not only profit, but intellectual property theft and rapidly increasing Chinese Communist Party (CCP) control over their businesses. It is estimated that the United States alone loses from $225 billion to $600 billion annually to Chinese intellectual property (IP) theft.
Investors in China are also in the middle of the growing sanctions crossfire between China and the West. American businesses must comply with U.S. human rights policy under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. The CCP has counter-attacked by orchestrating social media campaigns calling for domestic boycotts against the products of U.S. firms obeying that law. Intel felt forced to apologize to Chinese consumers for publishing a letter on its global website calling for suppliers to refrain from sourcing in Xinjiang, home to Muslim minorities. Walmart, H&M, Nike, even the NBA, have faced similar pressures directed against their Chinese operations over compliance with U.S. human rights laws.
The most ominous emerging challenge for Western business is not, however, CCP inspired consumer boycotts, or even IP theft, but control over data. Former Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger and David Feith have noted that data is “the oil of the 20th century…the indispensable resource that will fuel artificial intelligence algorithms, economic strength and national power.” Through a series of laws, the CCP has asserted legal control over all data in China. Apple and other foreign firms must keep China-sourced data in centers located inside the country with transfer out forbidden. Worst of all, the Chinese government has reserved the legal right to force transfer of such data to state-controlled entities.
The long-term strategic implications are enormous. Data created and aggregated by Western investors in China can fall at any time under CCP ideological control. Data is essential for artificial intelligence to create new cutting-edge technologies. Unlike natural resources and population inside the borders of a nation-state, data is not readily protected by a conventional military. Data is inherently borderless and invisible, stored in Clouds and devices that can potentially be accessed and manipulated from any point in the world. Access to data is essential for democracies and markets to flourish through the free exchange of information. Chinese control of big data enables ideological dominance not only over technological innovation but ultimately over what people can read, think, and believe.
The emergence of the metaverse, a simulated digital environment—a centralized virtual world—accelerates the problem for democracies and markets. The ability to distinguish between what constitutes reality from an invented data metaverse will become increasingly complex and confused. A California marketing firm has already been able to digitally create a singer and style personality, Lil Miquela, who has managed to earn millions annually for its maker. Incredibly, even though not a real person, Miquela was listed by Time in 2018 as one of the world’s twenty-five most influential people on the internet along with Kanye West, Rihanna, and Donald Trump.
Armed with big data, China will have the potential to manipulate, distort and control what constitutes fact and reality anywhere on the internet, making Facebook’s early “fake news” websites and trolls look like primitive concoctions.
The challenge for the preservation of democratic values and freedoms is profound. The CCP could use an array of demagogic Lil Miquela’s to influence and manipulate public opinion on the internet, undermining democratic values and legitimacy. The ultimate test for the West will turn out to be information war—not conventional or even cyberwar. That kind of contest cannot be fought with fighter aircraft, combat ships, and infantry. Democracy could be compromised without a shot fired.
Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution calls on the federal government to protect democracy. In the Federalist Papers, No. 43, James Madison emphasized the federal government’s core responsibility to guarantee republican forms of government for each of the fifty states. As has been seen with such controversies as foreign meddling in U.S. elections, control and manipulation of data can pose existential threats to the democratic process. To protect democracy, the federal government will have to build new kinds of defense that go far beyond a traditional military. Protecting the United States from Chinese (and Russian) data-based subversion will have to be a whole of government effort.
To protect free market values and governance, it will also not be enough for Western businesses to comply with whatever laws home countries may impose from time-to-time restricting business with China. Just as Black Rock’s Larry Fink is urging businesses to exercise greater “social responsibility” about such issues as climate change, ethnicity, and social justice, companies will have to exercise the same social responsibility about doing business with China. The Competitiveness Council of Business Executives for National Security (BENS) has called for Western businesses to take a series of measures including: greater awareness of risks for intellectual property if investing in China; accepting capital from only trusted sources to avoid risk to IP capital and technology; building resilient supply chains not dependent on China; prioritizing trade with partners outside China; and recognizing the risks to brand reputation by investing in an authoritarian society such as China’s.
The bottom line is that free-market enterprise must stop selling rope to the hangman before it is too late.
Joseph Votel, a retired United States Army General, is President and CEO of BENS, and the former Combatant Commander of CENTCOM and Special Operations Command.
Robert Spalding, a retired Air Force Brigadier General, a BENS member, is CEO of Sempre, a frequent writer on national security issues. He is the author of Stealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elite Slept.
Ramon Marks is Vice Chair of BENS and a retired New York international lawyer.
Image: Reuters.
20. Cyberattacks increasingly hobble pandemic-weary US schools
Cyberattacks increasingly hobble pandemic-weary US schools
AP · by CEDAR ATTANASIO · January 31, 2022
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — For teachers at a middle school in New Mexico’s largest city, the first inkling of a widespread tech problem came during an early morning staff call.
On the video, there were shout-outs for a new custodian for his hard work, and the typical announcements from administrators and the union rep. But in the chat, there were hints of a looming crisis. Nobody could open attendance records, and everyone was locked out of class rosters and grades.
Albuquerque administrators later confirmed the outage that blocked access to the district’s student database — which also includes emergency contacts and lists of which adults are authorized to pick up which children — was due to a ransomware attack.
“I didn’t realize how important it was until I couldn’t use it,” said Sarah Hager, a Cleveland Middle School art teacher.
Cyberattacks like the one that canceled classes for two days in Albuquerque’s biggest school district have become a growing threat to U.S. schools, with several high-profile incidents reported since last year. And the coronavirus pandemic has compounded their effects: More money has been demanded, and more schools have had to shut down as they scramble to recover data or even manually wipe all laptops.
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“Pretty much any way that you cut it, incidents have both been growing more frequent and more significant,” said Doug Levin, director of the K12 Security Information Exchange, a Virginia-based nonprofit that helps schools defend against cybersecurity risk.
Precise data is hard to come by since most schools are not required to publicly report cyberattacks. But experts say public school systems — which often have limited budgets for cybersecurity expertise — have become an inviting target for ransomware gangs.
The pandemic also has forced schools to turn increasingly toward virtual learning, making them more dependent on technology and more vulnerable to cyber-extortion. School systems that have had instruction disrupted include those in Baltimore County and Miami-Dade County, along with districts in New Jersey, Wisconsin and elsewhere.
Levin’s group has tracked well over 1,200 cyber security incidents since 2016 at public school districts across the country. They included 209 ransomware attacks, when hackers lock data up and charge to unlock it; 53 “denial of service” attacks, where attackers sabotage or slow a network by faking server requests; 156 “Zoombombing” incidents, where an unauthorized person intrudes on a video call; and more than 110 phishing attacks, where a deceptive message tricks a user to let a hacker into their network.
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Recent attacks also come as schools grapple with multiple other challenges related to the pandemic. Teachers get sick, and there aren’t substitutes to cover them. Where there are strict virus testing protocols, there aren’t always tests or people to give them.
In New York City, an attack this month on third-party software vendor Illuminate Education didn’t result in canceled classes, but teachers across the city couldn’t access grades. Local media reported the outage added to stress for educators already juggling instruction with enforcing COVID-19 protocols and covering for colleagues who were sick or in quarantine.
Albuquerque Superintendent Scott Elder said getting all students and staff online during the pandemic created additional avenues for hackers to access the district’s system. He cited that as a factor in the Jan. 12 ransomware attack that canceled classes for some 75,000 students.
The cancellations — which Elder called “cyber snow days” — gave technicians a five-day window to reset the databases over a holiday weekend.
Elder said there’s no evidence student information was obtained by hackers. He declined to say whether the district paid a ransom but noted there would be a “public process” if it did.
Hager, the art teacher, said the cyberattack increased stress on campus in ways that parents didn’t see.
Fire drills were canceled because fire alarms didn’t work. Intercoms stopped working.
Nurses couldn’t find which kids were where as positive test results came in, Hager said. “So potentially there were students on campus that probably were sick.” It also appears the hack permanently wiped out a few days worth of attendance records and grades.
Edupoint, the vendor for Albuquerque’s student information database, called Synergy, declined to comment.
Many schools choose to keep attacks under wraps or release minimal information to prevent revealing additional weaknesses in their security systems.
“It’s very difficult for the school districts to learn from each other, because they’re really not supposed to talk to each other about it because you might share vulnerabilities,” Elder said.
Last year, the FBI issued a warning about a group called PYSA, or “Protect Your System, Amigo,” saying it was seeing an increase in attacks by the group on schools, colleges and seminaries. Other ransomware gangs include Conti, which last year demanded $40 million from Broward County Public Schools, one of the nation’s largest.
Most are Russian-speaking groups that are based in Eastern Europe and enjoy safe harbor from tolerant governments. Some will post files on the dark web, including highly sensitive information, if they don’t get paid.
While attacks on larger districts garner more headlines, ransomware gangs tended to target smaller school districts in 2021 than in 2020, according to Brett Callow, a threat analyst at the firm Emsisoft. He said that could indicate bigger districts are increasing their spending on cybersecurity while smaller districts, which have less money, remain more vulnerable.
A few days after Christmas, the 1,285-student district of Truth or Consequences, south of Albuquerque, also had its Synergy student information system shut down by a ransomware attack. Officials there compared it to having their house robbed.
“It’s just that feeling of helplessness, of confusion as to why somebody would do something like this because at the end of the day, it’s taking away from our kids. And to me that’s just a disgusting way to try to, to get money,” Superintendent Channell Segura said.
The school didn’t have to cancel classes because the attack happened on break, but the network remains down, including keyless entry locks on school building doors. Teachers are still carrying around the physical keys they had to track down at the start of the year, Segura said.
In October, President Joe Biden signed the K-12 Cybersecurity Act, which calls for the federal cyber security agency to make recommendations about how to help school systems better protect themselves.
New Mexico lawmakers have been slow to expand internet usage in the state, let alone support schools on cyber security. Last week, state representatives introduced a bill that would allocate $45 million to the state education department to build a cybersecurity program by 2027.
Ideas on how to prevent future hacks and recover from existing ones usually require more work from teachers.
In the days following the Albuquerque attack, parents argued on Facebook over why schools couldn’t simply switch to pen and paper for things like attendance and grades.
Hager said she even heard the criticism from her mother, a retired school teacher.
“I said, ‘Mom, you can only take attendance on paper if you have printed out your roster to begin with,’” Hager said.
Teachers could also keep duplicate paper copies of all records — but that would double the clerical work that already bogs them down.
In an era where administrators increasingly require teachers to record everything digitally, Hager says, “these systems should work.”
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Associated Press writers Michael Melia in Hartford, Connecticut, and Alan Suderman in Richmond, Virginia, contributed to this report.
___
Attanasio is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues. Follow Attanasio on Twitter.
AP · by CEDAR ATTANASIO · January 31, 2022
21. The Hard-Line Russian Advisers Who Have Putin’s Ear
I wonder if any of these advisors are on the sanctions list.
Excerpts:
Russian analysts are now left wondering whether Mr. Putin has enough of a pragmatic streak remaining to avoid an open war with Ukraine. Russia’s closure last month of Memorial International, the Moscow human-rights group that long angered Russia’s security establishment for uncovering the crimes of the Soviet secret police, represented a further swing by Mr. Putin toward the views of the siloviki.
But Western sanctions over a Ukraine incursion could have wide-ranging consequences, as shown by the plunge in the Russian stock market amid war fears in recent weeks. And military casualties could bring unpredictable aftereffects in domestic politics and stain Mr. Putin’s legacy.
“If we have war with Ukraine and fratricidal death, then that will be all that he will be remembered for,” Mr. Remchukov, the newspaper editor, said. “He can’t not understand what a sin that would be.”
The Hard-Line Russian Advisers Who Have Putin’s Ear
Three reactionary security officials dedicated to “traditional values” and restoring Soviet glory will figure prominently in the decision whether to invade Ukraine.
A winter market this week in Moscow. Russia says it has no plans to invade Ukraine, but no one on either side of the border really knows what President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia will decide. Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
By
Jan. 30, 2022
MOSCOW — The West is legalizing marriage between people and animals. Ukraine’s leaders are as bad as Hitler, and the country’s nationalists are “nonhumans.”
These are the views found in President Vladimir V. Putin’s inner circle, among the top Russian security officials who are likely to be at the table as their leader decides whether to launch an open war against Ukraine.
In remarks published by the Russian news media in the last year, these powerful men — largely born in the 1950s Soviet Union, as Mr. Putin was — have staked out even more reactionary positions than their president has, a sign of the harder-line turn that the Kremlin is taking as it escalates its fight with perceived enemies at home and abroad.
The rise of the security officials in the president’s orbit traces Mr. Putin’s evolution from a young leader who showed a friendly face to the West in the early 2000s — while surrounding himself with advisers who included prominent liberals — to the man now implicitly threatening to start a major war in Europe.
It is also a story of the Kremlin’s yearslong struggle to craft an ideology to underpin Mr. Putin’s rule: one that increasingly relies on a picture of the West as an enemy, of Ukraine as a threat and of Russia as a bulwark of “traditional values.”
“This is an attempt collectively to form a counter-ideology, since Putin doesn’t have an ideology,” Konstantin Remchukov, a Moscow newspaper editor with Kremlin ties, said of what he called the “conservative-reactionary” worldview of Russia’s security elite. “The key postulate is that everyone is against Russia.”
No one really knows how Mr. Putin makes his decisions or whom he listens to most as he considers his next steps. The Russian president, the Kremlin says, is reviewing written responses the United States and NATO delivered this past week to Moscow on its security demands — including a guarantee that Ukraine never become a member of NATO.
On Friday, the Kremlin said the West’s responses did not address Russia’s biggest security concerns. But Mr. Putin himself has kept silent, avoiding public comment on Ukraine since December, despite on-camera appearances nearly every day.
That leaves the hawks around him to offer clues to his thinking. Some of them first met Mr. Putin working with him in the Soviet K.G.B., and have been accused by Western officials of overseeing the assassinations, influence operations, cyber espionage and brutal warfare that have helped estrange the Kremlin from Europe and the United States.
Sergei Naryshkin, the chief of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, at the Moscow Conference on International Security in 2018.Credit...Yuri Kochetkov/EPA, via Shutterstock
Mr. Putin is known for indulging misleading, anti-Western tropes, but his main national security adviser, Nikolai Patrushev, espouses them with even greater ardor. Mr. Putin paints a picture of enemies bent on falsifying Russia’s glorious past, but his foreign intelligence chief, Sergei Naryshkin, has taken on the fight over history as a special priority.
Understand Russia’s Relationship With the West
The tension between the regions is growing and Russian President Vladimir Putin is increasingly willing to take geopolitical risks and assert his demands.
Mr. Putin has embraced more state involvement in the economy, but his defense minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, has taken that trend to an extreme by pitching a huge state-led effort to build new cities in Siberia.
“Some kind of time machine is taking us back into the worst years of Hitler’s occupation,” Mr. Naryshkin said of Ukraine this month, describing its pro-Western government as a “true dictatorship.” He was opening an exhibit in Moscow titled “Human Rights Abuses in Ukraine.”
Mr. Shoigu last month called Ukrainian nationalists “nonhumans.” Mr. Patrushev has described the “Russophobia” in Ukraine as the outgrowth of a Western propaganda campaign dating to jealous European scribes who besmirched Ivan the Terrible.
“They didn’t like that the Russian Czar didn’t recognize their political and moral leadership,” Mr. Patrushev said of the 16th-century tyrant known for his fearsome secret police.
Now, as Mr. Putin weighs how far to raise the stakes in Ukraine, the question is how much he adopts the conspiratorial mind-set of his hawks. In Moscow, some analysts still see a pragmatic streak in Mr. Putin. He weighs the grievances and paranoia promoted by confidants like Mr. Patrushev, they say, against the more sober input of people like Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, a technocrat charged with keeping the economy running.
“These people are conservative radicals,” said Mr. Remchukov, who ran the 2018 re-election campaign of the mayor of Moscow, Mr. Putin’s former chief of staff. “It may be a conservative center, but Putin is in the center.”
Military drills at Russia’s Kuzminsky range in the southern Rostov region on Wednesday. The Pentagon said last week that Russia has now amassed enough troops near Ukraine’s border to carry out an invasion.Credit...Sergey Pivovarov/Reuters
Many signs, however, point to the “radicals” gaining sway. The most obvious change has been inside Russia, where the poisoning of the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny in 2020 was followed by a far-reaching crackdown last year on activists, the news media and even academics. Western officials said Mr. Navalny was poisoned by the Russian government, but Mr. Naryshkin, the foreign intelligence chief, has described the poisoning as engineered by Western agents seeking a “sacrificial victim” to help bring down Mr. Putin.
As they work to crush dissent, the hard-line security officials are also at the forefront of espousing “traditional values” as Russia’s superior alternative to a morally decaying West. A television channel was recently fined for showing a man with long hair and painted nails — “not corresponding to the image of a man of a traditional sexual orientation.” Two bloggers were sentenced to 10 months in prison for a sexually suggestive photo in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral.
“Father and mother are being renamed parent number one and two,” Mr. Patrushev said in a September interview, describing the West’s “foreign” values. “They want to give children the right to determine their own sex, and in some places they’ve gotten to the point of legalizing marriage with animals.”
Understand the Escalating Tensions Over Ukraine
Card 1 of 5
Ominous warnings. Russia called the strike a destabilizing act that violated the cease-fire agreement, raising fears of a new intervention in Ukraine that could draw the United States and Europe into a new phase of the conflict.
The Kremlin’s position. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has increasingly portrayed NATO’s eastward expansion as an existential threat to his country, said that Moscow’s military buildup was a response to Ukraine’s deepening partnership with the alliance.
Mr. Putin repeated the line about “parent number one and two” in an appearance a month later, but left out the zoophilia.
As Russian troops mass near Ukraine, another element of the security officials’ ideology looms large: the glorification of the Soviet past. Mr. Patrushev said the collapse of the Soviet Union “totally untied the hands of the Western neoliberal elite,” allowing it to impose its nontraditional values upon the world. He and his colleagues cast Russia as a nation destined to regain that status as a bulwark against the West, with Ukraine and other post-Soviet countries belonging to Moscow’s rightful sphere of influence.
“This is one of the darkest currents of Russian nationalism, multiplied by imperialism,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank. The goal for Russia’s security elite, he said, is “the restoration of empire.”
Nikolai Patrushev, left, President Vladimir V. Putin’s top national security adviser, claims some places in the West have legalized marriage between humans and animals.Credit...Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters
Mr. Putin has himself described the collapse of the Soviet Union as a “geopolitical catastrophe.” But he also used to seek out the advice of a range of officials, including those with liberal points of view. Now, those officials have largely been pushed out of government, while the technocrats like Mr. Mishustin almost never speak out on matters beyond their immediate area of responsibility.
That leaves the class of elite security officials known collectively as the “siloviki,” many of whom — like Mr. Patrushev, Mr. Naryshkin and Aleksandr Bortnikov, Russia’s domestic spy chief — worked in the K.G.B. along with Mr. Putin.
Their sway extends well beyond security matters: Mr. Patrushev, an avid volleyball player, heads Russia’s Volleyball Federation, and his son is the minister of agriculture. Mr. Naryshkin oversees the Russian Historical Society, helping to lead the charge in glorifying — and, critics say, whitewashing — Russia’s past. Mr. Shoigu, the defense minister, indulges Mr. Putin’s interest in the outdoors as president of the Russian Geographical Society and takes Mr. Putin on regular vacations into the Siberian woods.
For these officials, analysts say, rising tensions with the West are a good thing, increasing their influence within the ruling elite.
“The spiraling confrontation and sanctions do not scare the siloviki but, on the contrary, open up more opportunities for them,” Tatiana Stanovaya, the founder of a political analysis firm, R. Politik, wrote recently.
Russian analysts are now left wondering whether Mr. Putin has enough of a pragmatic streak remaining to avoid an open war with Ukraine. Russia’s closure last month of Memorial International, the Moscow human-rights group that long angered Russia’s security establishment for uncovering the crimes of the Soviet secret police, represented a further swing by Mr. Putin toward the views of the siloviki.
But Western sanctions over a Ukraine incursion could have wide-ranging consequences, as shown by the plunge in the Russian stock market amid war fears in recent weeks. And military casualties could bring unpredictable aftereffects in domestic politics and stain Mr. Putin’s legacy.
“If we have war with Ukraine and fratricidal death, then that will be all that he will be remembered for,” Mr. Remchukov, the newspaper editor, said. “He can’t not understand what a sin that would be.”
Alina Lobzina, Khava Khasmagomadova and Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.
22. Biden releases new statement on Navy SEAL vet held hostage by Taliban - here it is
Biden releases new statement on Navy SEAL vet held hostage by Taliban - here it is
President Joe Biden released a statement on Sunday marking two years since former Navy SEAL Mark Frerichs went missing and was believed to be captured by the Taliban.
Biden’s full statement is below:
Two years ago tomorrow, U.S. Navy veteran Mark Frerichs was taken hostage in Afghanistan. A civil engineer, he spent a decade helping the people of Afghanistan. He has done nothing wrong. And yet, for two years the Taliban has held him captive.
Mark is a native of Illinois. A son. A brother. And his family has now endured two gut-wrenching years—praying for his safety, wondering where and how he is, aching for his return.
Threatening the safety of Americans or any innocent civilians is always unacceptable, and hostage-taking is an act of particular cruelty and cowardice. The Taliban must immediately release Mark before it can expect any consideration of its aspirations for legitimacy. This is not negotiable.
To Mark, and to all the Americans being held hostage and wrongfully detained overseas, and to all their families and friends who are enduring the nightmare of their absence: know that my administration will continue to work steadfastly until every American being unjustly held against their will comes home.
Frerichs was captured by Taliban-aligned militants on Jan. 31, 2020 in Khost, Afghanistan, according to Newsweek, who first reported the news in February 2020. U.S. officials believe the Haqqani network, which is a group aligned with the Taliban, orchestrated the operation. The CIA once backed the Haqqani network because it fought against Soviet attempts to establish a satellite state in Afghanistan.
Frerichs was working in Afghanistan as a U.S. government contractor at International Logistical Support. Following his disappearance, Navy SEALs raided a village and detained suspected members of the Haqqani network, which is not considered to normally kidnap victims or hold them hostage for ransom.
“The first 96 hours is crucial,” an anonymous senior U.S. government official briefed on the case told the Associated Press in May 2020. “If they’re not recovered in the first few days, it becomes harder every minute after.”
The cold winter weather made it much more difficult for the U.S. military to search the landscape for Frerichs, but once it cleared, they were able to conduct a search for him, although it was ultimately unsuccessful.
Not long after his disappearance, Frerichs’ father, Art, called on then-President Donald Trump’s administration to act to secure his son’s return.
“I just need them to tell their people negotiating with the Taliban that America won’t lift a finger until my son comes home. He’s a veteran. This is America. We don’t leave people behind,” he said in a statement at the time.
Shortly after Frerichs’ disappearance, the Taliban denied involvement.
“We don’t have any information about the missing American,” Taliban political spokesman Sohail Shaheen said at the time. The Taliban notified U.S. officials “formally and informally” that they are not holding Frerichs, a source told the Associated Press at the time.
23. State Department rebuffs Chinese propaganda on U.S. undermining Olympics
State Department rebuffs Chinese propaganda on U.S. undermining Olympics
Chinese government and media assertions that the United States is secretly working to undermine the Beijing Olympic Games are false, the State Department said Sunday.
“We were not and are not coordinating a global campaign regarding participation at the Olympics,” a State Department spokesman told The Washington Times.
“U.S. athletes — and all athletes — are entitled to freely express themselves in line with the spirit and charter of the Olympics,” the spokesman added. “We call on the [the People’s Republic of China] to respect fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of expression.”
The comments followed a report in the Chinese Communist Party-affiliated outlet China Daily that asserted the United States was paying athletes attending the Olympic Games to sabotage the global sporting event.
The report, quoting Chinese sources, stated that the U.S. plan is to “incite” athletes from around the world to voice discontent toward China, participate “passively” in the Games and refuse to take part in the Olympics.
The alleged plan also calls for compensating athletes and protecting their reputations for voicing opposition to human rights abuses and genocide in western China against ethnic Uyghurs.
The plot was said to be the work of unspecified “anti-China forces” in the United States to politicize the Games.
“The plot by anti-China forces to use the athletes as a tool of political manipulation is more than malicious and dirty, and will undoubtedly be cast aside by the international community and athletes from around the world,” the report stated.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman told Reuters that the China Daily report had “exposed the real intention of some Americans to politicize sports and to sabotage and interfere with the Beijing Winter Olympics.”
The spokesman condemned the idea of buying off athletes to cause trouble for China at the Games.
The United States in December ordered U.S. diplomats and officials to boycott what critics have dubbed the “Genocide Games,” set to begin this week in Beijing.
Nine other nations have joined in the diplomatic boycott, which does not prevent athletes from taking part in the Olympics.
Athletes attending the competition have been warned that Chinese authorities could take action against them for voicing criticism of the Chinese Communist Party system.
In China, it is illegal to criticize the party and those who do face lengthy prison terms.
Earlier this month, snowboarder Shaun White, a member of the U.S. Olympic team, posed for a photograph online with Tibetan activists and the Tibetan flag.
The group Students for a Free Tibet stated in an open letter to athletes that those taking part in the Games to meet with them to learn the full extent of human rights abuses in China.
“The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is responsible for some of the worst human rights atrocities of our generation: the genocide of Uyghurs, the coerced separation of an estimated one million Tibetan children from their parents through 21st-century residential schools, and the severe crackdown on democracy and press freedom in Hong Kong,” the letter said.
“These are not just isolated events happening in the news or facts for us to recite; they are the lived experiences facing our loved ones every single day.”
The students asked the athletes to “stand in solidarity with us and our communities — some of the most highly oppressed peoples in the world today.”
“We are asking you to take a stand against the Genocide Games,” the letter said.
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24. Pro-Moscow separatists once marched in this Ukraine border city. Now it’s standing against Russia.
Pro-Moscow separatists once marched in this Ukraine border city. Now it’s standing against Russia.
RUSSIA-UKRAINE BORDER — The helicopter cut through the gray sky, following the path of the razor-wire fence below it. Lt. Col. Uiry Trubachov, of Ukraine’s Border Guard Service, squinted up at the chopper.
“Those are Russians,” he said.
Before Russia’s invasion and annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, the border barriers didn’t exist. Now, they separate Ukraine’s easternmost cities and towns from the buildup of Russian troops on the other side — and what U.S. officials and allies have warned could be the vanguard of an attack on Ukraine.
The observation tower at Ukraine's border with Russia near Kharkiv. (Serhiy Morgunov for The Washington Post)
At Ukraine’s northeastern border crossing near Kharkiv — the country’s predominantly Russian-speaking, second-most populous city, with about 1.5 million people — the fences are controversial. Some who live right at the edge of the boundary resent the obstruction to Russian territory they used to visit often — to pick mushrooms in the nearby forest or see friends in Belgorod, a Russian city about an hour away from the main land crossing.
The language and identity fault lines that weave through Ukraine are especially pronounced here — a region where pro-Russian separatists once raised their flag. Across many parts of Ukraine, Russia tugs with a sense of common bonds and shared history. But Ukrainians have nonetheless chosen a pro-Western path that carries the powerful momentum of the future.
It’s also what makes Kharkiv a rich study in Ukrainians’ views toward Russia as its president, Vladimir Putin, deepens a showdown with NATO over what Moscow perceives as its sphere of influence, which includes Ukraine.
‘Defending Kharkiv’
The Kremlin attempts to exploit the East-West pull in Ukraine with propaganda that accuses the Ukrainian government of oppressing Russian speakers. But many in Kharkiv fiercely objected to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s comments to The Washington Post that the city could be a prime target for Russia.
“Realistically if Russia decides to enhance their escalation, of course they are going to do this on those territories where historically there are people who used to have family links to Russia,” Zelensky said. “Kharkiv, which is under Ukraine government control, could be occupied.”
Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov in his office. (Serhiy Morgunov for The Washington Post)
Kharkiv may not harbor as much resentment of Russia as other parts of Ukraine. But the pro-Russian sentiments from 2014 that threatened to turn the city into another Moscow-backed separatist territory — similar to the Donetsk and Luhansk enclaves in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region — no longer have major sway.
“People here love Ukraine because Ukrainians live here,” said Kharkiv’s mayor, Ihor Terekhov. “Yes, we speak Russian. If you ask me if Kharkiv citizens want Ukraine to be friends with Russia, the answer is definitely yes. But do they want war? Definitely not. Do they want for us to be a piece of Russia? Of course not.”
“We will not be giving away the city of Kharkiv to anyone,” Terekhov added. “We will be standing shoulder to shoulder defending Kharkiv.”
“We have a long history of being ignored by others, feeling abandoned, exchanged for something else, and thank God this is not happening.”— Gamlet Zinkivskyi, artist in Kharkiv
As pro-Russian separatists marched through Kharkiv with Russian flags in early April 2014, Gamlet Zinkivskyi had a front-row seat. His apartment balcony at the time looked onto one of downtown Kharkiv’s main streets. He watched with dismay as demonstrators occupied the regional administration building and declared the sovereignty of a so-called “Kharkiv People’s Republic.”
“That was a moment when I started packing my things and thinking where to go,” said Zinkivskyi, a prominent artist and Kharkiv native. “I knew I couldn’t stay here. If Kharkhiv becomes Russian, that’s it, I’m leaving.”
Unlike the separatist movements in the Donbas region — touching off an ongoing conflict that has claimed nearly 14,000 lives since 2014 — the one in Kharkhiv ultimately fizzled. Kyiv’s forces maintained control of the city. It instead welcomed scores of refugees fleeing the fighting in the new self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics.
The plight of those people — and seeing what ultimately became of the separatist regions — helped shift attitudes in Kharkiv, Zinkivskyi said. Life in those territories is locked in a political limbo with few job opportunities. Many people end up moving to Moscow at their first opportunity. In the city of Donetsk, which has a population of about 900,000 people, a nighttime curfew is in place four days a week.
“Some people used to believe that Donetsk will turn into Donetsk City, with skyscrapers, and New Yorkers dreaming of moving to the Donbas,” Zinkivskyi said. “That didn’t happen, to put it mildly.”
“And those people realized that, hey, they didn’t want the same thing happening in Kharkiv,” he added.
About a 30-minute drive from downtown Kharkiv is what looks like a row of storage containers. It is actually a camp for people who fled the separatist territories. Each block has small apartments — smaller than most college dorm rooms — with shared kitchens and bathrooms.
“We’ve suffered enough. Instead of living in constant negativity, you want some joy.”— Liudmilya Makarova, displaced from Luhansk in 2014
Liudmilya Makarova has been living here with her daughter, who has Down syndrome, and her son since 2015, about a year after they fled the self-proclaimed Luhansk separatist republic. The kids sleep on the bunk beds. Makarova is on a couch that doesn’t have room to unfold into a bed. Colorful drawings line the wall, giving the space a cozy feel despite the cramped quarters. But it was never supposed to feel like home.
“I had no idea it would last so long, with no end of it in sight,” Makarova said.
Her last memories of her home in Luhansk were hiding in the cellar with her children as intense fighting broke out between the rebels and government forces, including airstrikes. She was too afraid to leave the space to cook for them.
“I couldn’t keep watching my children cry,” she said. “I’m recalling that and I’m starting to shake.”
Talk of a fresh attack from Russia is triggering for some of the camp’s residents who already fled war once. Makarova said she keeps away from the news. One of her neighbors, Marina Kirbaba, follows it more closely.
“We’ve been through this before,” Kirbaba said. “I don’t think that — well, then again, who knows what Putin has in his head. I don’t know why he would attack? Why?”
Scanning the border
What used to be an empty field surrounded by thick forest is now split by trenches Ukraine has never had to use. The military built them, with wooden-planked walls, at the eastern edge of the Kharkiv region in 2015 as the separatist conflict in Donbas flared.
Just beside the trenches is an observation tower with cameras that monitors activity near this border around-the-clock.
If the Russians choose to invade Kharkiv, this won’t stop them, said Trubachov, of Ukraine’s Border Guard Service. But it might slow them down enough for Ukraine to call in reinforcements.
“The situation is stable and under control,” Trubachov said. “Directly near the line of state control, we do not observe the movement or gathering of Russian troops — I mean, the territory that we can control by observing.”
When the fencing was installed seven years ago, it, quite literally, walled off a small border village of about 100 retirees. Now a line of trenches run behind their farm plots, followed by the fence. Getting in or out of the village means passing through a border guards’ security checkpoint.
Ukrainians are able to enter Russia at the nearby land border crossing. But people from the village complained that it’s a long walk for them to get to the checkpoint and the crossing process is challenging. It used to just be a 10-minute walk behind their yards.
“The governments can’t agree on anything and people are suffering.”— Olga Mykhailivna, lives on Ukraine-Russia border
One woman started crying because she said she’s been unable to visit her son’s grave, which is in Russia. He died during the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Another lamented that she could buy groceries cheaper across the border in Russia.
“We are not feeling any aggression toward Russians, we are Russians, too,” said 77-year-old Mikhail Fokiev. “Moreover, we have plenty of relatives there.”
But asked what he would do if the Russian military crossed into this region, Fokiev said he would go west, further into Ukraine.
“What else is there to do?” he asked.
About this story
Serhiy Morgunov contributed to this report. Video editing by Erin Patrick O’Connor and Jon Gerberg. Video translations by Lesia Prokopenko.
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
