Quotes of the Day:
"Irregular Warfare is conducted in support of predetermined United States policy and military objectives conducted by, with, and through regular forces, irregular forces, groups, and individuals participating in competition between state and non-state actors short of traditional armed conflict.”
-2017 National Defense Authorization Act
"Political warfare is the use of political means to compel an opponent to do one's will, based on hostile intent. The term political describes the calculated interaction between a government and a target audience to include another state's government, military, and/or general population. Governments use a variety of techniques to coerce certain actions, thereby gaining relative advantage over an opponent."
- Paul A. Smith, On Political War,1989
“The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”
- Garry Kasparov
1. Here’s how the new continuing resolution will frustrate the Pentagon
2. Generals Were Blindsided by the Afghan Army's Big Quit, But Enlisted Troops Saw it Coming
3. China, US in talks on military relations amid strained ties
4. Opinion | Inside the CIA’s desperate effort to rescue its Afghan allies
5. American weakness on China
6. Video and written testimony: FDD's Thomas Joscelyn testifies on Afghanistan
7. FDD | US Should Sanction The New Head And Businesses Of Iran’s Martyrs Foundation
8. FDD | Tehran views the rise of the Taliban with both glee and suspicion
9. The Quad Enters the Ring With China
10. The Taliban's Social Media Presence Is a Clear Danger to America
11. Opinion | Can we please stop obsessing over America’s ‘credibility’?
12. The Age of America First: Washington’s Flawed New Foreign Policy Consensus
13. Al-Qaeda Could Flourish With New Strategy Under Taliban Rule
14. Senator Calls for Massive Investigation into What Went Wrong in Afghanistan
15. The Forever War is Over. Its 2001 Authorization Lives On.
16. Another Win for China’s Hostage Diplomacy
17. U.S. Military Concedes It’s Unready to Fight Terrorism From ‘Over the Horizon’
18. India won’t host NATO strikes into Afghanistan
19. Japan’s defense awakening is not woke enough
1. Here’s how the new continuing resolution will frustrate the Pentagon
Here’s how the new continuing resolution will frustrate the Pentagon
That’s because the short-term budget deal approved by Congress, known as a continuing resolution, freezes billions of dollars in planned Pentagon acquisition programs, as well as some of President Joe Biden’s top priorities to deter China. It could be months before they move ahead.
The continuing resolution runs from the start of the fiscal year, Oct. 1, through Dec. 3, which gives Congress nine more weeks to pass a fiscal 2022 budget plan for the military and the rest of the federal government. However, it also stalls “new-start” programs and production increases, since all budget lines simply continue at the previous year’s level.
Exceptions can be made for “anomalies.” But for now, the continuing resolution means a Pentagon priority — a $5.5 billion boost for the development and testing of cutting-edge technologies that could deter China — is on hold.
“There’s no goodness with a CR,” Rear Adm. John Gumbleton, the deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for budget, said at a public forum in August.
Navy officials say a CR freezes $8 billion for new equipment spending, $2.5 billion in operations and maintenance activities and $2 billion for personnel.
Delays would hit the Air Force’s 16 new-start procurements, which comprise $2.3 billion of its 2022 budget request. Among the efforts on hold would be a $300 million initiative to develop cutting-edge hypersonic weapons, as well as production increases for the F-15′s Eagle Passive Active Warning Survivability System and the Small Diameter Bomb II, among others.
“CRs immediately disrupt major exercises and training events, impede readiness, delay maintenance, impose uncertainty on the workforce, curtail hiring and recruitment actions, and induce inefficient and constrained contracting practices,” Air Force spokesman Capt. Jacob Bailey said. “CRs delay the implementation of new technology development in support of national security priorities.”
“All those capabilities, all those systems on-orbit, plus the ground stations that operate those capabilities and integrate those capabilities ― that all transfers over to the Space Force, beginning 1 October,” Raymond said Monday at a Defense One conference. “If there is a continuing resolution, we have to wait until that is resolved.”
The Navy budget requested $4.6 billion to continue building the first Columbia ballistic missile submarine, but service officials have voiced worries the program could be knocked off track by a CR. On the other hand, the program schedules for the naval aircraft and the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers allow for some leeway, they said.
“I’m always worried about Columbia, although I don’t think it needs money in the first two months. But if we get to a second CR I think we would have to do something there,” said Jay Stefany, the acting assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition.
But while Pentagon officials complain of CR pain, a recent Government Accountability Office report found they have actually found ways to cope with the constraints. GAO’s recent review of several major defense acquisition programs couldn’t find any of the delays and cost overruns that are expected to result from CR-related funding hiccups.
A rendering of the future ballistic missile submarine Columbia, the first of a 12-ship class of SSBNs. (Navy)
For example, the Army raised concerns in 2017 that its new Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle program would be delayed by a CR, but officials adapted by pushing a decision to go into production until after regular spending legislation was enacted for fiscal 2018. (The compressed fiscal year did mean the Army had to buy fewer AMPVs than it planned.)
“When we met with officials from these programs, we learned that while the Selected Acquisition Reports speculated that CRs could have resulted in program delays or cost increases, in actuality, the CRs did not affect the programs,” GAO’s Sept. 14 report reads.
The services often postpone service contract start dates and nonessential purchases or training to later in the fiscal year, though defense officials told GAO it can be hard to manage contracts and buy equipment when they don’t know what level of funding they’ll get.
The CR includes only a few exceptions or “anomalies” for the Pentagon, including $885 million for the Air Force’s program to buy commercial microelectronic equipment, while another would protect a program to develop jam-resistant GPS equipment.
The White House requested those items along with $6.3 billion in emergency funding to resettle Afghan refugees and $895 million to repair Navy and Air Force facilities damaged by natural disasters.
It would be atypical for Congress to include more than a handful of anomalies for DoD. Over the last 10 years, the Pentagon has asked Congress to include funding for as few as 36 anomalies and as many as 154, but it’s received an average of four each year.
Adding anomalies is a balancing act, said Todd Harrison, director of defense budget analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. If the administration got all the anomalies it requested, that would reduce much of the pain a CR causes and give Congress less of an incentive to pass a final appropriations bill for the year.
“The anomalies you normally see proposed by the White House are the programs and activities that are higher priority and more subject to disruption,” Harrison said.
The Defense Department has adapted such that CRs tend to be “just a bit of a bureaucratic headache” ― so long as the stopgap measures don’t go beyond six months, Harrison said. Over the last 60 years, defense has started the fiscal year on a continuing resolution 80 percent of the time.
Will Congress stay deadlocked on the federal budget into February? Harrison said it’s too soon to say, but Congress must first has to address its other high profile impasses, over the country’s borrowing limit and massive packages of spending on infrastructure and other domestic priorities for Democrats.
“The longer they remain stuck on those things, the longer this CR will ultimately be,” Harrison said.
Rachel S. Cohen and Leo Shane III contributed to this report.
Joe Gould is the Congress reporter for Defense News.
Megan Eckstein is the naval warfare reporter at Defense News. She has covered military news since 2009, with a focus on U.S. Navy and Marine Corps operations, acquisition programs, and budgets. She has reported from four geographic fleets and is happiest when she’s filing stories from a ship. Megan is a University of Maryland alumna.
Jen Judson is the land warfare reporter for Defense News. She has covered defense in the Washington area for 10 years. She was previously a reporter at Politico and Inside Defense. She won the National Press Club's best analytical reporting award in 2014 and was named the Defense Media Awards' best young defense journalist in 2018.
2. Generals Were Blindsided by the Afghan Army's Big Quit, But Enlisted Troops Saw it Coming
Listening to the troops at the tip of the spear might be known as getting the ground truth.
Excerpts;
The blame for the complete collapse of Afghan forces rests with the U.S., said retired Army Lt. Col. Jason Dempsey, a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq and a senior adjunct fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
"We're the ones who built a national army in our image" without taking into account the culture and traditions of the Afghans, Dempsey said.
"It was the easy thing and only thing for the [U.S. military] institution to do," he added. The result was that the U.S. ended up "pushing billions of dollars into unrealistic structures" and "contributed to the illegitimacy of the Afghan government and particularly its perceived illegitimacy in the eyes of the [Afghan] people."
"It briefed well in periodic reports to Congress]," Dempsey said, "but was an absolute failure in execution. At end of day, we went along with this design for a national army for a nation that did not exist."
My thoughts:
4. Assessment - must conduct continuous assessment to gain understanding - tactical, operational, and strategic. Assessments are key to developing strategy and campaign plans and anticipating potential conflict. Assessments allow you to challenge assumptions and determine if a rebalance of ways and means with the acceptable, durable, political arrangement is required. Understand the indigenous way of war and adapt to it. Do not force the US way of war upon indigenous forces if it is counter to their history, customs, traditions, and abilities.
Generals Were Blindsided by the Afghan Army's Big Quit, But Enlisted Troops Saw it Coming
The former Marine corporal couldn't believe that two generals and the defense secretary kept saying, over two days of confrontational hearings, that they were "surprised" at the quick collapse of the Afghan army and the Taliban's takeover of Kabul without a fight.
If they had asked any enlisted member among the more than 800,000 U.S. troops who served in Afghanistan over 20 years, the brass would have known that it was a bad bet to count on the Afghan security forces to provide cover and time for the American withdrawal, said Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz.
When it came his turn for questions at a House Armed Services Committee hearing Wednesday, Gallego, an enlisted combat veteran of Iraq, told Army Gen. Mark Milley, Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin that their trust in the Afghan army to hold off the Taliban was misplaced at best, especially after the U.S. withdrew support and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country.
He wanted to know why U.S. intelligence appeared to be clueless on the lack of resistance put up by an army trained and equipped by the U.S. at a cost estimated at $83 billion.
Gallego said that "after speaking to a lot of service members, enlisted service members that have served for decades in and out of Afghanistan -- they were always telling me something extremely different from what I was getting from reports of many of you generals here, that the Afghan army was not ready, that they were not going to be sustainable on their own."
"You know, how did we miss that?" he asked. "How is it that a lot of 18-, 19-year-olds, mid-20-year-old E-5s were predicting this, yet some of our greatest minds, both on the civilian side and the uniformed side, absolutely missed this?"
McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, agreed with Gallego and said one of the lessons learned from the chaotic U.S. withdrawal was that top commanders must do a better job of listening to the concerns in the ranks.
"I think it's a reasonable criticism," McKenzie said. "We'll have to take a look at how we actually remain connected to the people who are down at the advisory level.
"I'm conflicted by that as well, I'll be very candid with you," he told Gallego. "And we will certainly take a look at that because I've heard that same strain myself. It's harder to get the truth as you become more senior. We, perhaps, need to look at ways that's conveyed in a more rapid and effective way. I'll accept that criticism."
The civility of the exchange between Gallego and the generals stood out in a rancorous hearing marked by angry calls from Republicans on the committee for Milley, McKenzie and Austin to resign.
In his testimony Wednesday to the House, and on Tuesday to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Austin, a retired Army general who served in top commands in Afghanistan and Iraq, said, "The fact that the Afghan army we and our partners trained simply melted away -- in many cases without firing a shot -- took us all by surprise. It would be dishonest to claim otherwise."
Way too late, the U.S. military leadership came to the realization that the $83 billion effort to train and equip an Afghan security force capable of supporting and defending a democratic government in Kabul was fundamentally flawed.
Milley said in his testimony Tuesday and Wednesday that trying to build up an Afghan army in the "mirror image" of the U.S. military was destined to fail, but the warning signs were there almost from the start.
U.S. and coalition advisers were attacked repeatedly, either by Afghan troops themselves or by insurgents who infiltrated their ranks, in what came to be known as insider attacks, or "green on blue" incidents.
Then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy pulled French troops out of Afghanistan in 2012 after four French troops were shot and killed in an insider attack in eastern Afghanistan.
Sarkozy said he could not continue the mission when French service members were being targeted by the troops they came to help. France "is at the side of its allies, but we cannot accept that a single one of our soldiers be killed or wounded by our allies," he said. "It is unacceptable; I will not accept it."
At the time, U.S. and coalition commanders became so concerned about the possibility that their Afghan allies might turn on them that they implemented additional vetting procedures and designated some soldiers as "guardian angels" to watch over their troops as they worked with the Afghans.
From 2007 to 2012, insider attacks killed 52 U.S. troops and wounded 48, according to the Brookings Institution's Afghanistan Index, but the number of attacks dropped off significantly as U.S. and coalition forces began withdrawing and reduced their combat role.
Still, the Afghan forces fought and died in staggering numbers despite the constant criticism of their competence. The U.S. estimates that more than 60,000 Afghan military and police were killed.
The blame for the complete collapse of Afghan forces rests with the U.S., said retired Army Lt. Col. Jason Dempsey, a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq and a senior adjunct fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
"We're the ones who built a national army in our image" without taking into account the culture and traditions of the Afghans, Dempsey said.
"It was the easy thing and only thing for the [U.S. military] institution to do," he added. The result was that the U.S. ended up "pushing billions of dollars into unrealistic structures" and "contributed to the illegitimacy of the Afghan government and particularly its perceived illegitimacy in the eyes of the [Afghan] people."
"It briefed well in periodic reports to Congress]," Dempsey said, "but was an absolute failure in execution. At end of day, we went along with this design for a national army for a nation that did not exist."
3. China, US in talks on military relations amid strained ties
Excerpts:
Wu also reiterated China’s opposition to a three-way strategic defense alliance announced by Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. that includes building nuclear-propelled submarines for Australia. Beijing views the arrangement as firmly directed at containing its development.
“China urges the three countries to abandon their Cold War mentality and zero-sum game thinking, revoke the mistaken decision to develop nuclear submarine cooperation,” Wu said.
China, US in talks on military relations amid strained ties
The secure video conference held Tuesday and Wednesday was led by Maj. Gen. Huang Xueping, deputy direct of the People’s Liberation Army’s Office for International Military Cooperation, and U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for China Michael Chase.
Chinese Defense Ministry spokesperson Wu Qian on Thursday said the sides “exchanged in-depth views on relations between the two countries and the two militaries and issues of common concern.”
However, he blamed “continuous provocation and containment” of China by the U.S. for the “considerable difficulties and challenges” between the two militaries.
“China’s sovereignty, dignity and core interests brook no violations,” Wu said at a monthly briefing. “Regarding the relationship between the two armed forces, we welcome communication, welcome cooperation, face differences and oppose coercion.”
In a statement issued in Washington, Department of Defense spokesperson Lt. Col. Martin Meiners said the meeting was “an important component of the Biden-Harris administration’s ongoing effort to responsibly manage the competition between the U.S. and the PRC by maintaining open lines of communication with the PRC.”
During the talks, he said the two sides held “a frank, in-depth, and open discussion on a range of issues.”
“Both sides reaffirmed consensus to keep communication channels open. The U.S. side also made clear our commitment to uphold shared principles with our allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific region,” he said.
RELATED
A host of scenarios could push China and the United States into some kind of conflict.
Relations between China and the U.S. are facing the worst strain in decades over trade, technology, human rights and Chinese military activities in the South China Sea, where Beijing has built airstrips and other infrastructure atop man-made islands.
Military-to-military ties have been characterized by deep mistrust, with the U.S. accusing China of a lack of transparency as it massively upgrades the capabilities of the PLA, the military wing of the ruling Communist Party.
China has been angered by the Navy sending ships to sail close to islands it controls in what Washington calls freedom of navigation operations, along with U.S. support for Taiwan.
President Joe Biden has maintained a tough line on China, but has sought better communication with Beijing. The talks between Huang and Chase are believed to mark the first direct high-level contact between defense officials under the Biden administration.
RELATED
A new Rand report lays out possible threats facing the U.S. from Russia and China.
Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Tuesday he was responding to a “significant degree of intelligence” that China was worried about a U.S. attack. He said that such military-to-military communications are critical to prevent war between great powers that possess nuclear weapons.
China has not commented on the calls.
Wu also reiterated China’s opposition to a three-way strategic defense alliance announced by Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. that includes building nuclear-propelled submarines for Australia. Beijing views the arrangement as firmly directed at containing its development.
“China urges the three countries to abandon their Cold War mentality and zero-sum game thinking, revoke the mistaken decision to develop nuclear submarine cooperation,” Wu said.
4. Opinion | Inside the CIA’s desperate effort to rescue its Afghan allies
I am sure there are many stories still to emerge from the chaotic evacuation.
Opinion | Inside the CIA’s desperate effort to rescue its Afghan allies
The Washington Post · by Opinion by David IgnatiusColumnist Today at 6:41 p.m. EDT · September 30, 2021
Often the spy business is about betrayal. But for the CIA in Afghanistan, even amid the catastrophic U.S. withdrawal in August, the story in recent months has largely been about keeping faith with its local partners. Nearly every one of the agency’s secret allies got out safely, knowledgeable sources said.
The Afghanistan war was a painful failure for the United States, as our military commanders told Congress this week. The CIA’s role bookended that drama, at the dawn and sunset: The agency was first into Afghanistan after 9/11, working with tribal allies to topple the Taliban. And its officers and Afghan agents were among the last out, working undercover to evacuate as many Americans and Afghans as possible.
The CIA made its own terrible mistakes in the war on terror. The worst was torturing al-Qaeda prisoners, but two decades of drone attacks and other counterterrorism operations were corrosive and shocked consciences, at home and abroad. But among former officers, the rescue of so many Afghan allies has generated a quiet buzz of satisfaction. Two former officers who served in Afghanistan told me the agency had rescued more than 20,000 Afghan partners and their families. The agency refused to comment on numbers.
The CIA’s allies remained a cohesive force even as the Afghan military collapsed, the sources said. They provided security at Kabul airport during the evacuation. And they conducted covert missions “outside the wire,” sometimes posing as taxi drivers, to rescue Americans who were stranded or too frightened to make their way to the airport. The knowledgeable source said that through such operations, the CIA team managed to rescue 2,000 U.S. citizens, 4,000 local staff from the U.S Embassy, and 1,500 NGO workers and foreign journalists.
George Tenet, who was CIA director when the war began, described the covert Afghan-American bond in an interview Thursday: “Agency officers who served in Afghanistan knew they had an immense debt to the Afghans who helped us stop al-Qaeda. The United States has not been attacked in 20 years. That’s no accident. When our Afghan partners needed us most, we had a sacred obligation to them and their families. The message is that the agency honors its commitments.”
The CIA’s Afghan partner force was recruited during the earliest days of the war. Initially, the operatives were known as the “Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams,” or CTPT. Hundreds of these recruits would operate from bases in southern and eastern Afghanistan under the command of a handful of CIA officers. They were sometimes known as the “tiger stripes,” because of their uniforms. Eventually, many of the Afghans became part of Afghanistan’s intelligence service, known as the National Directorate of Security (NDS). Critics have charged that the NDS engaged in extra-judicial killings and other abuses.
Extricating the CIA’s allies after 20 years of war was a tricky business. Because they had worked so closely with the United States, they were especially vulnerable to retaliation. Some received threatening phone calls and email messages.
When President Biden decided in April that he would withdraw from Afghanistan, CIA Director William J. Burns made a secret trip to Kabul where he began laying the foundations to evacuate the covert partners. Afghan operatives in remote locations gradually moved toward the capital. By June, volunteers at CIA headquarters in Langley were preparing the paperwork for Special Immigrant Visas and plans for relocation.
As the Taliban advanced this summer, the danger increased. A team in Kandahar was rescued by plane just as the Taliban breached the airport perimeter. Other groups came by road, sneaking with their families toward Kabul.
A gathering point was the CIA’s secret “Eagle Base,” about three miles from the Kabul airport. This had been the agency’s hub during the war; now it was a transit point in the evacuation. Afghans and their families reached the base and then were transported, often by helicopter, to the airport. But their work wasn’t done.
With the fall of Kabul and the Afghan military’s collapse on Aug. 15, the U.S. military needed help securing the airport and conducting rescue operations. They turned in part to the CIA force. After the chaotic disaster on Aug. 16, when desperate Afghans clung to a departing C-17 and fell to their deaths, the CIA partner force helped U.S. troops clear panicked Afghans from the runways and restore order. They also helped secure several secret gates at the airport for covert entry.
Spy stories don’t usually have happy endings, and this one doesn’t really, either. The heroism of the evacuation is a source of pride. But Kabul is controlled today by the Taliban, and many decent Afghans feel like prisoners in their homes. For former CIA officers who served in Afghanistan alongside brave partners, though, this is about closing a circle — one that began and ended with trust.
The Washington Post · by Opinion by David IgnatiusColumnist Today at 6:41 p.m. EDT · September 30, 2021
5. American weakness on China
Excerpts:
Beyond the legal issues, however, the deal signals real weakness from the Biden administration, whatever the full backstory. Unquestionably, the president has the constitutional authority to make this kind of decision. Balancing the responsibility to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” with the presidential direction of foreign policy is a tension inherent in the office. There are clearly circumstances where prosecution should be avoided to prevent harm to larger national interests. But having the authority to take such actions does not guarantee the wisdom of doing so.
Trump showed ignorance of this distinction by suggesting that, in negotiations over a trade deal with China, he might drop charges against Meng. She argued in her extradition proceedings that Trump’s gratuitous comments proved her prosecution was purely political, and hence extradition was improper. Although Meng failed, Trump undercut legitimate complaints against China’s kidnapping of Canada’s citizens and contributed to the perception that Meng’s arrest was itself just another illegitimate hostage-taking.
American weakness on China
The Biden administration’s decision last week to suspend the criminal case against Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou signals dangerous weakness in our China policy. Whether this was the result of an explicit political deal between Washington and Beijing or just a straightforward Justice Department prosecutorial judgment, the immediate perception of a highly questionable concession will not fade quickly. Ironically, if President Joe Biden compromised a legitimate criminal prosecution in a dubious political trade-off, he walked in Donald Trump’s shoes on Huawei, with identical negative consequences.
At the Justice Department’s request, Canada arrested Meng, Huawei’s chief financial officer and its founder’s daughter, in December 2018. U.S. prosecutors sought her extradition to face trial on financial fraud charges, specifically Meng’s concealment of Huawei activities in Iran, contrary to U.S. sanctions. Meng denied the charges and fought extradition while confined to residences she owned in Vancouver. She had already lost one key argument when the Canadian court agreed with prosecutors that her fraudulent activity constituted “double criminality,” both in America and Canada, making extradition likely.
China responded thuggishly to Meng’s arrest, jailing two Canadians living in China on illusory charges. Both were released within hours of the deal’s announcement, thus confirming that Beijing had seized the two as bargaining chips to trade for Meng’s release. Days later, two Americans detained by China because of their father’s alleged crimes were also allowed to return to the United States. China’s resort to hostage-taking is a global wake-up call: If this is how China behaves now, imagine its behavior if its power and influence continue rising.
Washington did not completely cave in to Beijing, extracting a “deferred prosecution agreement” before agreeing to Meng’s release. Under DPAs, defendants must admit unlawful conduct as charged in their indictment, but they don’t actually plead guilty. The charges are dismissed at a later date if the defendant does not engage in further criminal activity. Meng admitted to the facts stated in her indictment, and her DPA requires that she not later deny or contradict those facts, on pain of renewed prosecution. Her charges will be dropped on Dec. 1, 2022, if she fully complies with the DPA.
For Meng, however, a DPA is far superior to a plea bargain, which would have required her to admit guilt and face possible sentencing or probation. With the Justice Department’s extradition request rescinded, Meng immediately left Canada for China. If she now violates the DPA, it is highly unlikely the U.S. will ever again get her in custody for trial, conviction, and punishment. Huawei was also charged corporately on essentially similar grounds as Meng, and that case continues. As one of Huawei’s highest-ranking executives, her factual admissions could damage the company in subsequent proceedings.
Beyond the legal issues, however, the deal signals real weakness from the Biden administration, whatever the full backstory. Unquestionably, the president has the constitutional authority to make this kind of decision. Balancing the responsibility to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” with the presidential direction of foreign policy is a tension inherent in the office. There are clearly circumstances where prosecution should be avoided to prevent harm to larger national interests. But having the authority to take such actions does not guarantee the wisdom of doing so.
Trump showed ignorance of this distinction by suggesting that, in negotiations over a trade deal with China, he might drop charges against Meng. She argued in her extradition proceedings that Trump’s gratuitous comments proved her prosecution was purely political, and hence extradition was improper. Although Meng failed, Trump undercut legitimate complaints against China’s kidnapping of Canada’s citizens and contributed to the perception that Meng’s arrest was itself just another illegitimate hostage-taking.
Beijing’s immediate release of the Canadians reveals its mindset that the whole affair was political, yet another blow to the “rule of law” in China for foreigners. Until we learn the behind-the-scenes U.S. story, the clear lesson Beijing learned is that Trump-style deal-making is still alive and well under Biden. Following lawful processes becomes meaningless for America and its allies when China refuses to reciprocate and then gets away with brutal behavior. Other countries will also very likely see Meng’s DPA as a U.S. concession, thereby undermining subsequent U.S. requests to extradite criminals and other forms of cooperation in criminal investigations and prosecutions.
Even the timing of Meng’s deal was flawed. That very day, Biden hosted the first in-person meeting of leaders of the Asian “Quad” (India, Japan, Australia, and the U.S.) at the White House. While these leaders discussed China’s hegemonic aspirations, Meng was jetting back to China. Xi Jinping thinks he has taken the measure of the weak man in the White House, and that can only be bad news.
John Bolton served as national security adviser to former President Donald Trump between 2018 and 2019. Between 2005 and 2006, he served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
6. Video and written testimony: FDD's Thomas Joscelyn testifies on Afghanistan
Video and written testimony: FDD's Thomas Joscelyn testifies on Afghanistan
fdd.org · by Thomas Joscelyn Senior Fellow and Senior Editor of FDD's Long War Journal · September 30, 2021
Chairman Reed, Ranking Member Inhofe, members of the committee, thank you for inviting me to testify today. My written testimony is focused on the terrorism threats emanating from Afghanistan and how to understand them.
Below, I first offer my general points. I then take a closer look at the Taliban and the so-called Haqqani Network, which is al-Qaeda’s closest ally and an integral part of the Taliban. I look forward to answering your questions.
Al-Qaeda’s senior leadership has praised the Taliban’s “historic victory” in Afghanistan.1 Indeed, the decades-long brotherhood between the Taliban and al-Qaeda remains unbroken. Al-Qaeda fought alongside the Taliban for nearly 20 years to defeat the U.S.-backed government. Al-Qaeda groups across Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia are trumpeting the Taliban’s victory as a boon for the global jihadist cause. Al-Qaeda’s branches, such as Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), Shabaab in Somalia, and groups in Syria, view the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan as a model for their own nascent jihadist states. In fact, key al-Qaeda leaders around the globe began their careers during the reign of the Taliban’s first emirate. And al-Qaeda’s global leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has an unbroken pledge of allegiance to the Taliban’s “Emir of the Faithful,” Haibatullah Akhundzada.
Al-Qaeda retained a significant footprint in Afghanistan throughout the war. At FDD’s Long War Journal, my colleague Bill Roggio and I have documented this footprint for more than a dozen years. Other sources have recently recognized al-Qaeda’s current network inside the country. For example, a team of experts working for the UN Security Council reported earlier this year that al-Qaeda has an active presence in at least 15 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.2 This assessment is broadly consistent with al-Qaeda’s own reporting, via its Arabic newsletter Thabat, as well as with reporting by other sources.3 The U.S. Treasury Department warned in January that al-Qaeda has been “gaining strength in Afghanistan while continuing to operate with the Taliban under the Taliban’s protection.” Al-Qaeda has a “network of mentors and advisers who are embedded with the Taliban, providing advice, guidance, and financial support.”4 Much of al-Qaeda’s focus inside Afghanistan has been on winning the war. Now that the war has been won, al-Qaeda’s personnel in Afghanistan will have the resources to devote to other missions, both throughout the region and globally.
The Islamic State’s Khorasan Province (ISKP, also known as ISIS-K) retains a presence in Afghanistan. Some argue that America should work with the Taliban against ISKP, because the latter remains opposed to the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and is a distinct threat. But the enemy of my enemy is sometimes just my enemy — not a friend. Baked into this argument is a fundamental misunderstanding of the Taliban and its unbroken, decades-long relationship with al-Qaeda. ISKP has battled not only the Taliban, but also al-Qaeda, which remains fundamentally hostile to the United States and its interests and allies.
ISKP continues to pose a threat throughout the region. ISKP’s network extends into Pakistan, where it has conducted a string of attacks. The group has also demonstrated some capability to strike in the Central Asian nations. In July 2018, a team of Islamic State terrorists ran over American and European cyclists in Tajikistan, killing four people.5 ISKP has also recruited members from throughout Central Asia who could potentially return to their home countries to conduct attacks.
ISKP poses some degree of threat outside of Central and South Asia as well. In the summer of 2016, three men allegedly conspired to carry out terrorist attacks in New York City on behalf of the Islamic State.6 American investigators discovered that the trio had at least some contact with ISKP’s jihadists. In April 2020, German authorities broke up a cell of four Tajik nationals who were allegedly preparing to attack U.S. and NATO military facilities.7 Given ISKP’s open hostility to the United States, as demonstrated by the August 26 suicide bombing outside the airport in Kabul, military and intelligence officials will have to continue monitoring the group.
The Taliban’s new regime is, in many ways, just its old regime. Many of the Taliban’s cabinet ministers are veterans of the Taliban’s first Islamic Emirate from 1996 through 2001.8 More than one dozen of them have already been sanctioned by the United Nations, including for their ties to terrorism. All five of the former Guantanamo detainees who were exchanged for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in 2014 now serve the Taliban in senior leadership roles. Four of the five are Taliban cabinet ministers, while the fifth is the governor of Khost province.
Over-the-horizon counterterrorism strikes will be difficult. U.S. officials cite “over-the-horizon” strikes in places such as Somalia, Syria, and Yemen as a model for Afghanistan. But those airstrikes are sporadic and have only a limited effect. It is true that some senior terrorist personnel have been killed in such airstrikes, but many remain in the fight. Afghanistan is also different. It is a landlocked nation. The United States is reportedly still trying to secure basing rights in neighboring countries. Pakistan, which harbored the Taliban’s senior leadership for the past 20 years, could reject American requests to use its airspace. Pakistani officials could also warn terrorists that airstrikes are incoming. The United States had significant blind spots even when thousands of troops were stationed inside the country. And as the August 29 drone strike in Kabul shows, the risks of errant strikes are real.
The Taliban is using the February 29, 2020, Doha Agreement to protect terrorists. After the Department of Defense implied that members of the al-Qaeda-allied Haqqani Network could be targeted in the future, the Taliban responded by arguing that this would be a “violation” of the Doha accord.9 Thus, it is problematic for the U.S. government to argue that the agreement is still binding. The Taliban is using it to impede America’s ability to defend itself, while the Taliban itself has not complied with any of the supposed counterterrorism assurances within it. Part of my written testimony below is devoted to providing an outline of the close working relationship between the Haqqanis and al-Qaeda.
The United States needs to finally reassess its relationship with Pakistan. During the first years of the war, the Pakistani government did provide counterterrorism assistance to the United States by helping to track down some al-Qaeda members on Pakistani soil. And Pakistan allowed the United States to use its airspace for the mission in Afghanistan. Overall, however, Pakistan provided key assistance to the Taliban in its war against the government in Kabul and helped the jihadists win the war against the United States. The Taliban’s sanctuaries inside Pakistan proved to be invaluable, as the group’s key leaders, allied with al-Qaeda, were often allowed to operate with impunity. The Pakistani military and intelligence establishment sits on what I call a “wheel of jihad” — it has sponsored and sheltered the Afghan Taliban, including the Haqqani Network, which is closely allied with al-Qaeda and Tehrik e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). The TTP, in turn, threatens parts of the Pakistani state. No leader in Pakistan has broken this wheel, which will continue to cause problems for Pakistanis for years to come. In fact, leading Pakistani jihadists are emboldened by the Taliban’s victory and undoubtedly want to impose a similar regime inside Pakistan itself.
fdd.org · by Thomas Joscelyn Senior Fellow and Senior Editor of FDD's Long War Journal · September 30, 2021
7. FDD | US Should Sanction The New Head And Businesses Of Iran’s Martyrs Foundation
Excerpts:
The Iranian organization also supports families of Palestinian terrorists through the Palestinian Martyrs Foundation, founded in 1993 as a branch of the Lebanese foundation. The Iranian mothership’s relations with its foreign proxies are quite similar to the Quds Force’s relationship with its foreign proxies — that is, the foundation provides financial, training, and technical support to loyal local elements, who then run the day-to-day operations of the affiliated organizations.
The United States first sanctioned the Iranian foundation and its Lebanese branch in 2007. Over the years, this organization and its front companies managed to raise funds in the United States and transfer it to Hezbollah. In 2020 Treasury designated a network of firms and individuals related to the Lebanese foundation. However, Washington has not sanctioned the Iranian Martyrs Foundation’s business network even though Tehran uses it to finance terrorism by guaranteeing lifelong financial support for jihadists, terrorists, and their families.
That omission warrants correction: Washington should sanction Ghazizadeh and the rest of the foundation’s leadership. The Kowsar Economic Organization, Shahed Company, and their subsidiaries and controlled firms should also not escape punishment.
FDD | US Should Sanction The New Head And Businesses Of Iran’s Martyrs Foundation
fdd.org · by Saeed Ghasseminejad Senior Iran and Financial Economics Advisor · September 30, 2021
Hashemi was appointed earlier this month by President Ebrahim Raisi (Raeesi), putting him for the first time in charge of a financial powerhouse, with millions under its care. Raisi has also handed him a potential political base with a chance to develop closer ties across the military, including the IRGC’s extraterritorial, dark-arts Quds (Qods) Force.
Before serving as the head of the martyrs foundation, Ghazizadeh was the deputy speaker of the Majles, the Islamic Republic’s parliament. He is a former member of the Paidary Front, an ultra-hardline political organization founded by disciples and supporters of Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, a militant cleric even by the Islamic Republic’s standards. Ghazizadeh also ran in Iran’s 2021 presidential elections and came in fourth. He comes from a prominent insider family: a brother and a cousin serve in the Majles and another cousin is a former health minister.
In 1980 then-Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini established the foundation to aid the families of those who had fallen in the revolution. As the Iran-Iraq war began, the foundation added the families of war dead to its portfolio. In 2004 providing service to veterans was added to its responsibilities. Like many other institutions in the Islamic Republic, the foundation’s leadership consists of two primary officials: the supreme leader’s representative and the head of the foundation. Iran’s president appoints the head in consultation with the supreme leader, effectively intertwining the two roles.
Since martyrdom is the cornerstone of Shiism, martyrs, veterans, and their families are of immense political importance. The foundation has been the vehicle for keeping the families of martyrs aligned politically: it rewards regime-supporters with financial benefits and employment and education opportunities. The refractory lose these benefits and more.
While Iran’s national budget provides it with funding, the foundation also has a vast business empire and operates abroad. It thus has prodigious financial resources to advance its agenda. One of the key business entities it controls is Kowsar Economic Organization, which owns 43 firms, some of which are holdings or investing companies, with extensive interests in a wide range of industries. The Shahed Investment Company is another major economic arm of the organization that is publicly traded and heavily involved in the real estate and construction sectors. The foundation also owns Dey Bank, which the United States sanctioned in 2018. These three entities closely work together and have intertwined ownership structures and operations.
The foundation extends services to martyrs and veterans from other countries, too. Last year, the foundation’s chief announced that it covers members of the Fatemiyoun brigades, the Shiite Afghan brigade of the Quds Force, which has been fighting alongside the IRGC in Syria. The Lebanese Hezbollah has its own martyrs foundation, founded in 1982, which is, according to the U.S. Treasury, a branch of Iran’s martyrs foundation. The Iranian foundation and its officials regularly meet with representatives of Hezbollah and provide technical and financial support. Similarly, in Yemen, the Iranian foundation has created a branch to help the Shiite Houthis, according to some reports.
The Iranian organization also supports families of Palestinian terrorists through the Palestinian Martyrs Foundation, founded in 1993 as a branch of the Lebanese foundation. The Iranian mothership’s relations with its foreign proxies are quite similar to the Quds Force’s relationship with its foreign proxies — that is, the foundation provides financial, training, and technical support to loyal local elements, who then run the day-to-day operations of the affiliated organizations.
The United States first sanctioned the Iranian foundation and its Lebanese branch in 2007. Over the years, this organization and its front companies managed to raise funds in the United States and transfer it to Hezbollah. In 2020 Treasury designated a network of firms and individuals related to the Lebanese foundation. However, Washington has not sanctioned the Iranian Martyrs Foundation’s business network even though Tehran uses it to finance terrorism by guaranteeing lifelong financial support for jihadists, terrorists, and their families.
That omission warrants correction: Washington should sanction Ghazizadeh and the rest of the foundation’s leadership. The Kowsar Economic Organization, Shahed Company, and their subsidiaries and controlled firms should also not escape punishment.
Saeed Ghasseminejad is a senior advisor on Iran and financial economics at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). Follow Saeed on Twitter @SGhasseminejad. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, non-partisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Saeed Ghasseminejad Senior Iran and Financial Economics Advisor · September 30, 2021
8. FDD | Tehran views the rise of the Taliban with both glee and suspicion
Conclusion:
The U.S. defeat in Afghanistan at least for now is a boost for Iran’s theocrats. But the Taliban may prove to be an unstable partner. If the two cannot bury the hatchet, they may discover that two militant Islamic regimes may have sufficient theological, cultural, and geopolitical differences to become ardent foes.
FDD | Tehran views the rise of the Taliban with both glee and suspicion
Alireza Nader
Senior Fellow
Navid Mohebbi
National Union for Democracy in Iran
fdd.org · by Alireza Nader Senior Fellow · September 30, 2021
The regime in Iran initially welcomed the triumph of the Taliban over the central government in Kabul, celebrating the humiliation of the U.S., their common foe. While Shiite Iran and the Sunni Taliban hold differing religious ideologies, the two have built strong relations since the Taliban’s initial defeat by U.S. forces in 2001. Anti-Americanism explains this partnership: Both seek to stymie U.S. influence in the Middle East and throughout the Muslim world.
Traditional tensions between the two could, of course, soon reemerge, especially if the Taliban continue to persecute the Persian-speaking Tajiks and the Hazara , the Afghan Shiite minority; interfere with Iran’s access to precious water resources; or allow Afghanistan to become a zone of influence for Pakistan, Turkey, or Qatar, the Islamic Republic’s regional rivals.
Historically, Tehran has had, owing to shifting circumstances, antagonistic and friendly relations with the Taliban. Before the group’s defeat by the U.S. in 2001, the two almost went to war over the Taliban’s killing of Iranian diplomats in 1998 and its brutal treatment of the Hazara.
The Islamic Republic was certainly happy about the Taliban’s fall in 2001, but Tehran’s relationship with the subsequent U.S.-supported Afghan governments was troubled. Kabul’s close cooperation with the West and Tehran’s hostility toward Europe and America meant that Iran and Afghanistan could never develop much trust.
To be sure, Tehran professed friendship but built its own separate network of religious and political influence in Afghanistan, armed and funded Taliban insurgents, and sought to undermine the Afghan government’s control of the Helmand River, which Tehran views as a growing strategic interest given its own severe water shortages. Water shortages have led to widespread protests in Iran and will continue to be a major cause of instability for the clerical regime.
Therefore, securing water from the Helmand River remains a major priority for the Islamic Republic — and Tehran is willing to play hardball to ensure it.
Afghan authorities have accused Iran of bribing Afghan officials to delay the construction of the Helmand River’s Kamal Khan dam, which would impede the flow of water to Iran. A Taliban commander in 2011 claimed that Iran offered him $50,000 to blow up the dam. Many Afghans believe that the Taliban’s repeated attacks on the dam in recent years, resulting in the deaths of security personnel, have been at the order of the regime in Iran.
The Taliban’s renewed persecution of the Tajiks and the Hazara Afghan minority is likely to arouse Tehran’s ire more than anything else, especially if it happens en masse. Last month, Amnesty International reported that the Taliban killed nine ethnic Hazara men in July after it seized control of Afghanistan’s Ghazni province.
Tehran also views Pakistan, Qatar, and Turkey as rivals and will be alarmed by the Taliban’s embrace of them. Pakistan has armed and funded the Taliban and advised it on how it could take power, while Qatar and Turkey have sustained the Taliban’s means of communication with the outside world, including by keeping Kabul’s airport open.
To pressure the Taliban to respect its interests, Tehran may provide funding and arms to the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan, led by Ahmad Massoud, who represents many Tajiks fighting against the Taliban in the Panjshir valley — assuming Massoud can survive long enough to receive Iranian aid. Massoud is the son of the legendary anti-Taliban resistance leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud, who at times received support from the clerical regime.
Tehran can also pressure the Taliban and counter its regional influence through the Fatemiyoun Brigades, a proxy militia consisting of thousands of Afghan Shiite militiamen trained by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, who were battle-tested in Syria and Iraq. Iran could try to send them to Afghanistan to fight against the Taliban.
The U.S. defeat in Afghanistan at least for now is a boost for Iran’s theocrats. But the Taliban may prove to be an unstable partner. If the two cannot bury the hatchet, they may discover that two militant Islamic regimes may have sufficient theological, cultural, and geopolitical differences to become ardent foes.
Alireza Nader (@AlirezaNader) is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Navid Mohebbi (@navidmohebbi) is a policy fellow at the National Union for Democracy in Iran. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Alireza Nader Senior Fellow · September 30, 2021
9. The Quad Enters the Ring With China
Excerpts:
There are still reasons to be skeptical of the Quad. The grouping may be too informal and unstructured to be effective. One of its constituents may decide that cutting a deal with China is preferable to confronting it. Turmoil in the Islamic world, including Mr. Biden’s haphazard withdrawal from Afghanistan, threatens Indian security. And New Delhi still has one foot in Chinese-dominated groupings, including Brics and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
Most important, the fraught U.S. debate on trade has hobbled Washington’s ability to provide a compelling economic alternative to a Beijing-led order. Earlier this month, China announced its bid to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, an 11-member grouping that came together after Mr. Trump withdrew America from the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
So far Mr. Biden hasn’t shown any inclination to rejoin the pact. “It’s like fighting with one arm tied behind our backs,” says Mr. Fontaine. That may be true, but at least the Quad is showing some stomach for a fight.
The Quad Enters the Ring With China
Biden has doubled down on Trump’s commitment to the four largest Indo-Pacific democracies.
By
Sadanand Dhume
Sept. 30, 2021 6:24 pm ET
President Biden meets with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the prime ministers of India, Japan and Australia at the White House, Sept. 24.
Photo: Sarahbeth Maney/Bloomberg News
Can the Quad contain China? Last week the leaders of the four nations that make up the informal grouping—the U.S., Japan, India and Australia—met for the first time in person at the White House. A few years ago, when tiptoeing around Chinese sensibilities was more of a global norm, such a gathering would have been almost unimaginable.
It’s too soon to say whether the Quad will achieve its unstated goal: stopping an authoritarian China from becoming Asia’s undisputed hegemon. But the four nations have signed on to an ambitious strategy, spanning cooperation on vaccines, infrastructure and technology, designed to blunt Beijing’s challenge. Taken together with the new Aukus military pact among the U.S., the U.K., and Australia and a thickening web of bilateral agreements across the region, these initiatives signal clear intent to combat Beijing.
“You have to squint very hard not to see a serious budding partnership between the Indo-Pacific’s four leading democracies,” says Richard Fontaine, chief executive of the Center for a New American Security. “That is the most significant outcome of the summit.”
Quad proponents should feel optimistic. The group is a rare bipartisan point of agreement in Washington. President Trump spearheaded the Quad’s revival in 2017 after it had lain dormant for about 10 years. President Biden has doubled down on his predecessor’s commitment.
Just four years ago, Quad discussions were limited to diplomats talking on the sidelines of other meetings. The group’s foreign ministers met for the first time only two years ago—on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly. Under Mr. Biden, we’ve seen the Quad progress from “friends who chatted at a party to throwing their own party,” says Tanvi Madan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
What about substance? In a joint statement last week, the Quad’s leaders underscored their belief in “rule of law, freedom of navigation and overflight, peaceful resolution of disputes, democratic values, and territorial integrity of states.” Each of these principles rebukes Beijing.
The group also reiterated its intention to supply 1.2 billion doses of Covid-19 vaccine globally, including at least one billion by the end of next year. Biological E., an Indian firm, will manufacture the vaccines, including one licensed from Johnson & Johnson. After suspending vaccine exports earlier this year amid a horrific second wave of Covid, India has agreed to resume them in October. The U.S., Japan and Australia will pay for the production. Australia will use its logistical expertise to deliver them to Southeast Asia.
Many of the Quad’s plans are still unclear. For instance, they didn’t specify what exactly a “green shipping network” entails or how much “high-standards infrastructure” will actually get built in Asia under its auspices. Still, Ms. Madan says she was pleasantly surprised by how much the four countries “have got into the nitty-gritty of issues in order to operationalize cooperation.”
In particular, a commitment to advance “critical and emerging technologies” has both commercial and strategic implications. It’s possible to imagine a future in which Quad cooperation prevents Chinese telecom firms Huawei and ZTE from dominating global 5G networks, preserves the democratic world’s edge in semiconductors, and wards off Chinese domination of emerging technologies such as synthetic biology, genome sequencing and artificial intelligence.
A Quad working group on space holds similar promise. And a new “Quad Fellowship” will fund 100 masters and doctoral students a year—25 from each nation—to study science, technology, engineering and mathematics in the U.S.
The elevation of the dialogue, accompanied by a flurry of practical proposals for cooperation, has quieted arguments that the Quad is nothing more than a talk shop. There now appears to be consensus in all four capitals that they can’t prevent Chinese belligerence by kowtowing to Beijing. “The idea that everything is premised on changing Chinese minds has gone out the window,” says Mr. Fontaine. “I think increasingly in Washington and capitals around the world they see that a policy built on not provoking China hasn’t worked.”
There are still reasons to be skeptical of the Quad. The grouping may be too informal and unstructured to be effective. One of its constituents may decide that cutting a deal with China is preferable to confronting it. Turmoil in the Islamic world, including Mr. Biden’s haphazard withdrawal from Afghanistan, threatens Indian security. And New Delhi still has one foot in Chinese-dominated groupings, including Brics and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
Most important, the fraught U.S. debate on trade has hobbled Washington’s ability to provide a compelling economic alternative to a Beijing-led order. Earlier this month, China announced its bid to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, an 11-member grouping that came together after Mr. Trump withdrew America from the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
So far Mr. Biden hasn’t shown any inclination to rejoin the pact. “It’s like fighting with one arm tied behind our backs,” says Mr. Fontaine. That may be true, but at least the Quad is showing some stomach for a fight.
Copyright ©2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the October 1, 2021, print edition.
10. The Taliban's Social Media Presence Is a Clear Danger to America
Excerpts:
To give you an idea of how different the media landscape was the last time the Taliban was in power, it was fourteen days after September 11th, 2001, that satellite radio began commercial operation. Now, as the Taliban return to power and take over the airwaves, their matured propaganda efforts will find a much greater audience.
Even with TikTok and other Western social media bans on official Taliban accounts, social media enforcement schema are always behind the curve. And what the Taliban advertises is not just their stunning pace of victory, not just their American war spoils, but their country as the new center for pristine Islamic living. Put more simply, we just gave a hostile radical Islamist regime a giant megaphone.
Finally, and most importantly, what’s so dangerous about the scale of Taliban propaganda efforts is what underlies them: the sheer scale of territory and freedom of operation they now have. And so now do global terrorists. What flows from that – as we enter our fourth decade of mass casualty Islamist terrorism – are civilian attacks and many innocent dead.
The Taliban's Social Media Presence Is a Clear Danger to America
As we watch our military leadership testify this week on Afghanistan, a few things are missing. Too often the generals stick to talking points, their calculated answers suggesting a missing appreciation for the scale and gravity of the catastrophe they presided over. Across the room are legislators too often choosing to land political jabs, displaying a missing appreciation for the gravity of their responsibility. That responsibility is to sustain the public pressure necessary to extract answers on how the U.S. will manage the terrorist threat soon to emanate from Afghanistan.
The need to look forward is paramount, and we can inform that look with a brief history lesson of the kind we won’t get in this week’s hearings. A generation ago Bin Laden and al-Qaeda put out VHS tapes. Their affiliate in the Arabian Peninsula published online ‘zines. ISIS made viral videos. Each is a snapshot of the technology at the time, and a reminder that generational struggles take, well, a generation.
Now, as social media companies grapple with responses to Taliban propaganda, there’s a harbinger of something else too. The muezzin call for militant Islam that is about to echo around the world.
Make no mistake, this is a moment equal in significance – and eventual consequence – to the U.S.-Afghan victory over the Russians in Afghanistan in 1989. Here in the West, we believe the Russo-Afghan war was a major driver in the collapse of the Soviet Union. We overfocus on the role of foreign fighters and ruefully use the term blowback to describe our involvement in Afghanistan.
That’s the wrong focus and those are the wrong lessons.
Let’s reject the navel-gazing and instead focus on what followed that war in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Yes, the withdrawal of the Soviets did lead to the growth and encouragement of militant Islamist movements around the world. And foreign fighters with experience in Afghanistan did return home to take part in their own rebellions, found their own terrorist groups, and fight from Bosnia to Algeria to the Philippines.
But what followed as the Taliban came to power was an amplification of Afghanistan’s role as global incubator for Islamic terrorism. The Taliban became a powerful magnet, drawing in militants not just from the Central Asian ‘Stans,’ but Chechens, Indonesians, and Uighurs from China. Al-Qaeda’s role in attracting and training Arabs was key, sure, but it was the Taliban that offered a place to be safe from persecution and to practice with co-religionists. A haven, in other words.
ISIS recreated this dynamic years later, as their propaganda efforts flooded the internet and Westerners and others around the world flocked to their declared caliphate. Men and women were drawn to the territory with the promise of a rare and pure example of Islamic living in practice.
The slickness and sheer volume of ISIS’ propaganda – produced largely within the 40,000 square miles they controlled – will be dwarfed by a radical movement that is also a hostile foreign dictatorship ruling over 37 million people. As the Taliban cement their control over Afghanistan’s major cities and settle into the broadcaster’s seat on TV and radio, they return to their perch as some of the most influential Islamic voices on the planet. And they’ll be doing so in a world of transformed media.
To give you an idea of how different the media landscape was the last time the Taliban was in power, it was fourteen days after September 11th, 2001, that satellite radio began commercial operation. Now, as the Taliban return to power and take over the airwaves, their matured propaganda efforts will find a much greater audience.
Even with TikTok and other Western social media bans on official Taliban accounts, social media enforcement schema are always behind the curve. And what the Taliban advertises is not just their stunning pace of victory, not just their American war spoils, but their country as the new center for pristine Islamic living. Put more simply, we just gave a hostile radical Islamist regime a giant megaphone.
Finally, and most importantly, what’s so dangerous about the scale of Taliban propaganda efforts is what underlies them: the sheer scale of territory and freedom of operation they now have. And so now do global terrorists. What flows from that – as we enter our fourth decade of mass casualty Islamist terrorism – are civilian attacks and many innocent dead.
Now a 1945 Contributing Editor, Jason Killmeyer is a counterterrorism and foreign policy expert specializing in emerging technology applications. For more than ten years, Jason worked in national security, including as Chief of Staff of Global Defense, Security & Justice at Deloitte Consulting LLP. Jason has a Master’s in Middle Eastern Studies with an M.A. thesis on post-invasion Iraqi politics.
11. Opinion | Can we please stop obsessing over America’s ‘credibility’?
Excerpts:
When we obsess over our credibility, we’re convincing ourselves that other countries’ decisions are based more than anything on what they think about us. That flatters our belief that the world revolves around the United States but discourages us from understanding anyone else.
The result, again and again, is disaster, in places like Cuba or Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq, where we’ve continued failed policies or been pulled deeper into quagmires in order to avoid losing that magical credibility that supposedly will do such wonders if only it can be maintained.
The mistakes we made in Afghanistan stretch from the war’s beginning to its end. But it wouldn’t have gone any better had we spent more time worrying about our credibility. So perhaps the lesson is that if we do the right thing, the credibility will take care of itself.
Opinion | Can we please stop obsessing over America’s ‘credibility’?
The Washington Post · by Opinion by Paul WaldmanColumnist Today at 1:07 p.m. EDT · September 30, 2021
In two days of congressional hearings this week, our military leaders talked a lot about America’s “credibility.” Defenders and critics of President Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan seem to agree this is absolutely central to all foreign policy decision-making, and should have been a key factor in determining whether and how to end that war.
Maybe it’s time we stopped worrying so much about credibility.
It’s not that you can’t consider the question thoughtfully. But when politicians and policy-makers obsess over credibility — like ideas about “showing weakness,” admitting mistakes, or allowing dominoes to fall — it threatens to distract us from what matters, push us toward bad decisions, and keep us from understanding the things we should.
In Tuesday’s Senate committee hearing, Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Mark Milley testified that a year ago, he worried that a precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan might damage “U.S. worldwide credibility.” He and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin later had this exchange with Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.):
WICKER: Our credibility has been gravely damaged, has it not, General Milley?
MILLEY: I think that our credibility with allies and partners around the world and with adversaries is being intensely reviewed by them to see which way this is going to go, and I think that damage is one word that could be used, yes.
WICKER: Yes. And Secretary Austin, no question that this sends a disastrous message to China and Russia. What message does it send to our NATO allies and our other allies around the world about not only our credibility, but our national resolve?
AUSTIN: Thanks, Senator. What the world witnessed is United States military evacuating 124,000 people out of a contested environment in 17 days.
WICKER: Well, you testified that that was a great accomplishment, our withdrawal and our evacuation. What about our credibility?
AUSTIN: As I engage my counterparts, I think our credibility remains solid.
You’d think the Pentagon was a large building that houses the Department of Sending Messages and Showing Resolve to Maintain Credibility.
Whenever we start talking about credibility, it’s a good signal that things are about to get very vague and abstract. Precisely what “disastrous message to China and Russia” was supposedly sent by the Afghanistan withdrawal? That if we launch a misconceived nation-building project halfway around the world, 20 years is the absolute limit on how long we’ll keep it up?
And what do we think China and Russia will do with that information that will harm the United States? Is China going to say, “Aha, now is our chance to invade Taiwan — Americans won’t keep their word to defend their ally for more than two decades!”
When you articulate it, it sounds stupid. Which is why people claiming that our credibility is in tatters seldom articulate it.
Let’s be honest: Republicans shaking their fists at Milley and Austin for allegedly compromising American credibility don’t really care about it. It’s a convenient way to attack the administration if you don’t actually want to make the argument that the decision to leave Afghanistan was the wrong one — particularly if you supported that very decision when Donald Trump was the one making it. If you don’t want to say “We should have just stayed there forever,” you can thunder “You’ve destroyed America’s credibility!”
Of course we should want everyone to believe that America can be trusted to keep its word — which is why, for instance, it was damaging when Trump abandoned the Iran nuclear deal. That could make another adversary less likely to enter into an agreement with the U.S., if they worry that the next president would simply walk away from it.
But if you worry too much about credibility, you risk making decisions solely based on maintaining credibility rather than on what is actually in our interests. And you get pushed toward more aggressive and belligerent decisions. We too often assume the foundation of “credibility” is making threats and following through with violent action. Nothing says “credibility" like showing you’re willing to kill a few thousand civilians, right?
Even worse, the obsession with credibility encourages what may be our most dangerous foreign policy tendency: our seemingly limitless ability to dismiss or ignore other people’s and countries’ own incentives, motives, and interests.
Whether it’s something any world hegemon would fall prey to or it’s a uniquely American pathology, it has proven disastrous again and again. We tell ourselves lies about how much we’re adored around the world. We convince ourselves that everyone will appreciate our noble motives even when we’re dropping bombs on their homes. We dismiss the idea that other countries have their own internal politics that determine their decisions. We think learning about what people in the places we meddle in actually want and fear is a waste of our time.
When we obsess over our credibility, we’re convincing ourselves that other countries’ decisions are based more than anything on what they think about us. That flatters our belief that the world revolves around the United States but discourages us from understanding anyone else.
The result, again and again, is disaster, in places like Cuba or Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq, where we’ve continued failed policies or been pulled deeper into quagmires in order to avoid losing that magical credibility that supposedly will do such wonders if only it can be maintained.
The mistakes we made in Afghanistan stretch from the war’s beginning to its end. But it wouldn’t have gone any better had we spent more time worrying about our credibility. So perhaps the lesson is that if we do the right thing, the credibility will take care of itself.
The Washington Post · by Opinion by Paul WaldmanColumnist Today at 1:07 p.m. EDT · September 30, 2021
12. The Age of America First: Washington’s Flawed New Foreign Policy Consensus
Conclusion:
Whatever the failings of this new paradigm, there is no going back; history does not offer do-overs. Nor should Washington return to a foreign policy that, for much of three decades, largely failed both in what it did and in what it did not do.
The starting point for a new internationalism should be a clear recognition that although foreign policy begins at home, it cannot end there. The United States, regardless of its diminished influence and deep domestic divisions, faces a world with both traditional geopolitical threats and new challenges tied to globalization. An American president must seek to fix what ails the United States without neglecting what happens abroad. Greater disarray in the world will make the task to “build back better”—or whatever slogan is chosen for domestic renewal—much more difficult, if not impossible. Biden has acknowledged the “fundamental truth of the 21st century . . . that our own success is bound up with others succeeding as well”; the question is whether he can craft and carry out a foreign policy that reflects it.
The United States also cannot succeed alone. It must work with others, through both formal and informal means, to set international norms and standards and marshal collective action. Such an approach will require the involvement of traditional allies in Europe and Asia, new partners, countries that may need U.S. or international help at home, and nondemocracies. It will require the use of all the instruments of power available to the United States—diplomacy, but also trade, aid, intelligence, and the military. Nor can the United States risk letting unpredictability give it a reputation as unreliable; other states will determine their own actions, especially when it comes to balancing or accommodating China, based in no small part on how dependable and active they believe the United States will be as a partner.
In the absence of a new American internationalism, the likely outcome will be a world that is less free, more violent, and less willing or able to tackle common challenges. It is equal parts ironic and dangerous that at a time when the United States is more affected by global developments than ever before, it is less willing to carry out a foreign policy that attempts to shape them.
The Age of America First
Washington’s Flawed New Foreign Policy Consensus
Donald Trump was supposed to be an aberration—a U.S. president whose foreign policy marked a sharp but temporary break from an internationalism that had defined seven decades of U.S. interactions with the world. He saw little value in alliances and spurned multilateral institutions. He eagerly withdrew from existing international agreements, such as the Paris climate accord and the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and backed away from new ones, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). He coddled autocrats and trained his ire on the United States’ democratic partners.
At first glance, the foreign policy of U.S. President Joe Biden could hardly be more different. He professes to value the United States’ traditional allies in Europe and Asia, celebrates multilateralism, and hails his administration’s commitment to a “rules-based international order.” He treats climate change as a serious threat and arms control as an essential tool. He sees the fight of our time as one between democracy and autocracy, pledging to convene what he is calling the Summit for Democracy to reestablish U.S. leadership in the democratic cause. “America is back,” he proclaimed shortly after taking office.
But the differences, meaningful as they are, obscure a deeper truth: there is far more continuity between the foreign policy of the current president and that of the former president than is typically recognized. Critical elements of this continuity arose even before Trump’s presidency, during the administration of Barack Obama, suggesting a longer-term development—a paradigm shift in the United States’ approach to the world. Beneath the apparent volatility, the outlines of a post–post–Cold War U.S. foreign policy are emerging.
The old foreign policy paradigm grew out of World War II and the Cold War, founded on the recognition that U.S. national security depended on more than just looking out for the country’s own narrowly defined concerns. Protecting and advancing U.S. interests, both domestic and international, required helping shepherd into existence and then sustaining an international system that, however imperfect, would buttress U.S. security and prosperity over the long term. Despite missteps (above all, the misguided attempt to reunify the Korean Peninsula by force and the war in Vietnam), the results largely validated these assumptions. The United States avoided a great-power war with the Soviet Union but still ended the Cold War on immensely favorable terms; U.S. GDP has increased eightfold in real terms and more than 90-fold in nominal terms since the end of World War II.
There is far more continuity between the foreign policy of Joe Biden and that of Donald Trump than is typically recognized.
The new paradigm dismisses the core tenet of that approach: that the United States has a vital stake in a broader global system, one that at times demands undertaking difficult military interventions or putting aside immediate national preferences in favor of principles and arrangements that bring long-term benefits. The new consensus reflects not an across-the-board isolationism—after all, a hawkish approach to China is hardly isolationist—but rather the rejection of that internationalism. Today, notwithstanding Biden’s pledge “to help lead the world toward a more peaceful, prosperous future for all people,” the reality is that Americans want the benefits of international order without doing the hard work of building and maintaining it.
The hold of this emerging nationalist approach to the world is clear, accounting for the continuity across administrations as different as those of Obama, Trump, and Biden. Whether it can produce a foreign policy that advances American security, prosperity, and values is another matter entirely.
THE SQUANDERING
As with any paradigm shift, the one taking place now is possible only because of the failures—both real and perceived—of much of what came in the years before. The Cold War ended 30 years ago, and the United States emerged from that four-decade struggle with a degree of primacy that had few, if any, historical precedents. U.S. power was immense in both absolute and relative terms. It may have been an exaggeration to hail a “unipolar moment,” but not by much.
Historians who look back on these three decades will be rightly critical of a lot that the United States did, and did not do, with its position. There were some important accomplishments: the reunification of Germany within NATO, the disciplined handling of the 1990–91 Gulf War, the U.S.-led military and diplomatic effort to help end the war and slaughter in the former Yugoslavia, the fashioning of new trade agreements, the millions of lives saved thanks to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR.
But these achievements must be weighed against American failures, both of commission and omission. Washington managed little in the way of relationship and institution building, lacking the creativity and ambition that characterized U.S. foreign policy in the wake of World War II. It wasn’t considered much of a stretch when Dean Acheson, who was secretary of state during the Truman administration, titled his memoir Present at the Creation; no recent secretary of state could credibly include the word “creation” in his or her memoir. Despite its unmatched power, the United States did little to address the widening gap between global challenges and the institutions meant to contend with them.
The emerging American approach to the world is woefully inadequate and rife with self-defeating contradictions.
The list of missteps is long. Washington largely failed to adapt to China’s rise. Its decision to enlarge NATO, in violation of Churchill’s dictum “In victory, magnanimity,” fanned Russian hostility without sufficiently modernizing or strengthening the alliance. Africa and Latin America received only intermittent, and even then limited, attention. Above all, the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were failures of both design and execution, resulting in costly overreach, part of a broader U.S. focus on the greater Middle East that defied strategic logic. The George W. Bush and Obama administrations dedicated a high percentage of their foreign policy focus to a region home to only about five percent of the world’s population, no great powers, and economies dependent on the wasting asset of fossil fuels.
The word that comes to mind in assessing U.S. foreign policy after the Cold War is “squander.” The United States missed its best chance to update the system that had successfully waged the Cold War for a new era defined by new challenges and new rivalries. Meanwhile, thanks to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the American public largely soured on what was widely seen as a costly, failed foreign policy. Americans came to blame trade for the disappearance of millions of manufacturing jobs (despite new technologies being the main culprit), and growing inequality, exacerbated by both the 2008 financial crisis and the pandemic, fueled populist suspicion of elites. In the face of looming domestic problems, including decaying infrastructure and faltering public education, foreign involvement came to be viewed as a costly distraction. The stage for a new foreign policy paradigm was set.
EXTREME COMPETITION
The first and most prominent element of continuity between Trump and Biden is the centrality of great-power rivalry—above all, with China. Indeed, U.S. policy toward China has hardly changed since Biden became president: as Matthew Pottinger, a senior official on the National Security Council during the Trump administration who was the lead architect of that administration’s approach to China, rightly noted in these pages, “The Biden administration has largely maintained its predecessor’s policy.” Biden himself has spoken of “extreme competition” with China, and his coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs has proclaimed that “the period that was broadly described as engagement has come to an end.” This new posture reflects the pervasive disillusionment in the American foreign policy establishment with the results of efforts to integrate China into the world economy and the broader international system, along with heightened concern about how Beijing is using its growing strength abroad and engaging in repression at home.
The continuity between the two administrations can be seen in their approaches to Taiwan, the most likely flash point between the United States and China. Far from rescinding a policy introduced in the final weeks of the Trump administration that removed restrictions on official U.S. interactions with Taiwanese officials, the Biden administration has actively implemented it, publicizing high-level meetings between U.S. officials and their Taiwanese counterparts. Just as the Trump administration worked to improve U.S.-Taiwanese ties, the Biden administration has repeatedly stressed its “rock solid” support for Taiwan and has inserted language emphasizing the importance of cross-strait stability into joint statements not just with Asian allies, such as Australia, Japan, and South Korea, but also with global bodies, such as the G-7.
Biden and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at a Quad meeting in Washington, D.C., September 2021
Evelyn Hockstein / Reuters
The continuity goes beyond Taiwan. The Biden administration has kept in place Trump-era tariffs and export controls and is reportedly looking into launching an investigation into China’s large-scale industrial subsidies. It has doubled down on criticism of China’s refusal to allow an independent investigation into the origins of COVID-19 and given credence to the possibility that the new coronavirus leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. Like its predecessor, it has called Beijing’s repression of the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang a “genocide” and denounced its violation of the “one country, two systems” principle in Hong Kong. It has strengthened efforts to upgrade the Quad, a dialogue meant to enhance cooperation among Australia, India, Japan, and the United States, and launched a complementary strategic initiative with Australia and the United Kingdom. It has also continued to use the term “Indo-Pacific,” first brought into common official usage by the Trump administration.
To be sure, there are differences in the Biden administration’s approach in some important areas, including a focus on finding ways to cooperate on climate change, the decision to refrain from echoing the call by Trump’s secretary of state Mike Pompeo for regime change in Beijing, and an effort to build a common stance with allies. Yet the view that China is the United States’ chief competitor and even adversary has become widespread and ingrained, and the similarities in the two administrations’ approaches far outweigh any differences.
Much the same can be said of the administrations’ policies toward the United States’ other great-power competitor. Since Biden took over, U.S. policy toward Russia has changed little in substance. Gone is Trump’s inexplicable admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin. But whatever Trump’s personal regard for Putin, the Trump administration’s posture toward Russia was in fact fairly tough. It introduced new sanctions, closed Russian consulates in the United States, and enhanced and expanded U.S. military support to Ukraine—all of which has continued under Biden. The common view between the two administrations seems to be that U.S. policy toward Russia should mostly consist of damage limitation—preventing tensions, whether in Europe or in cyberspace, from deteriorating into a crisis. Even Biden’s willingness to extend U.S.-Russian arms control pacts and start “strategic stability” talks is mostly about preventing additional erosion, not making further progress. The days of seeking a “reset” with Moscow are long gone.
American Nationalism
Accompanying this focus on great powers is a shared embrace of American nationalism. The Trump administration eagerly adopted the slogan and idea of “America first,” despite the label’s origins in a strand of isolationism tinged with sympathy for Nazi Germany. The Biden administration is less overt in its nationalism, but its mantra of “a foreign policy for the middle class” reflects some similar inclinations.
“America first” tendencies also characterized the Biden administration’s initial response to COVID-19. U.S. exports of vaccines were limited and delayed even as domestic supply far exceeded demand, and there has been only a modest effort to expand manufacturing capacity to allow for greater exports. This domestic focus was shortsighted, as highly contagious variants were able to emerge in other parts of the world before coming to do immense damage in the United States. It also forfeited an opportunity to cultivate goodwill internationally by demonstrating the superiority of American technology and generosity in the face of Chinese and Russian vaccine diplomacy.
U.S. trade policy has been shaped by similar forces, demonstrating further continuity between Trump and Biden. The latter has avoided the hyperbole of the former, who savaged all trade pacts except for the ones his own administration had negotiated. (No matter that the Trump administration’s agreements were mostly updated versions of existing pacts: the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, for example, largely followed the much-denounced North American Free Trade Agreement and, in modernizing certain elements, made generous use of the text of the equally denounced TPP.) But the Biden administration has shown little, if any, interest in strengthening the World Trade Organization, negotiating new trade accords, or joining existing ones, including the successor agreement to the TPP, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, or CPTPP, despite the overwhelming economic and strategic reasons for doing so. Staying outside the agreement leaves the United States on the sidelines of the Indo-Pacific economic order and also means missing opportunities in other areas, such as advancing global climate goals through cross-border carbon taxes or using the deal to provide an economic counterweight to China.
WITHDRAWAL AT ANY COST
Central to the new foreign policy is the desire to pull back from the greater Middle East, the venue of the so-called forever wars that did so much to fuel this paradigm shift in U.S. foreign policy. Afghanistan is the most striking example of this shared impetus. In February 2020, the Trump administration signed an accord with the Taliban that set a May 1, 2021, deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country. The negotiations cut out and undercut the government of Afghanistan, and the agreement itself failed to call for the Taliban to lay down their arms or even to commit to a cease-fire. It was not so much a peace agreement as a pact to facilitate American military withdrawal.
By the time Biden assumed the presidency, the overreach that had once characterized U.S. strategy in Afghanistan was a thing of the past. U.S. troop levels, which had hit 100,000 during the Obama administration, were down to under 3,000, with their role largely limited to training, advising, and supporting Afghan forces. U.S. combat fatalities had plummeted with the end of combat operations in 2014 (years before the U.S.-Taliban accord). The modest U.S. presence provided an anchor for some 7,000 troops from allied countries (and an even larger number of contractors) and a psychological and military backstop for the Afghan government—a sufficient presence, that is, to avert Kabul’s collapse, but not enough to achieve victory or peace. After 20 years, the United States seemed to have found a level of commitment in Afghanistan commensurate with the stakes.
Americans want the benefits of international order without doing the hard work of building and maintaining it.
Yet the Biden administration rejected the options of renegotiating or scrapping the accord. Instead, it honored Trump’s agreement in every way but one: the deadline for a full U.S. military withdrawal was extended by some 100 days, to September 11, 2021 (and then the withdrawal was completed ahead of schedule). Biden rejected tying the removal of U.S. troops to conditions on the ground or to additional Taliban actions. Like Trump before him, he considered the war in Afghanistan a “forever war,” one he was determined to get out of at any cost. And Biden didn’t just implement the Trump policy he had inherited; his administration did so in a Trumpian way, consulting minimally with others and leaving NATO allies to scramble. (Other decisions, including supplanting French sales of submarines to Australia or being slow to lift COVID-related restrictions against European visitors to the United States, have likewise set back transatlantic ties.) Multilateralism and an alliance-first foreign policy in principle gave way to America-first unilateralism in practice.
In the rest of the greater Middle East, the Biden administration has similarly continued the Trump approach of reducing the U.S. footprint. It has resisted any temptation to get more involved in Syria, much less Libya or Yemen; announced it will maintain only a small, noncombat military presence in Iraq; embraced the Abraham Accords while participating only reluctantly in diplomatic efforts to end the fighting between Israel and Hamas; and eschewed launching any new attempt to reach an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.
At first glance, Iran may seem like a glaring exception to the broader similarity. Trump was a fierce critic of the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran (negotiated when Biden was vice president) and unilaterally exited the accord in 2018; by contrast, the Biden administration (which is staffed at the senior level by several officials who had a large hand in negotiating the pact) has made clear its desire to return to the agreement. But restoring the deal has proved easier said than done, as the two governments have been unable to agree on either specific obligations or sequencing. In addition, a new hard-line Iranian government has shown no interest in signing on to the sort of “longer and stronger” pact the Biden administration seeks. As a result, the Biden administration may well face the same choices its predecessor did, with Iran advancing its nuclear and missile capabilities and its influence throughout the region. Even if Iran once again accepts time-limited constraints on its nuclear activities, the United States will still have to decide how to respond to other Iranian provocations.
QUESTIONS OF VALUE
Even on those issues on which Biden’s rhetoric starkly differs from Trump’s, the policy shifts have been more modest than might have been expected. Consider the two presidents’ views on the role of values in foreign policy. Trump was a transactional leader who often seemed to consider democracy a hindrance and tried to establish close personal relationships with many of the world’s dictators. He lavished praise on Putin and exchanged “love letters” with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. He spoke highly of China’s Xi Jinping, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Hungary’s Viktor Orban, while denigrating the leaders of democratic allies, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He even levied tariffs on Canada and the European Union.
Biden, by contrast, has declared that the United States is in “a contest with autocrats,” announced plans to hold his Summit for Democracy, and pledged to prioritize relations with countries that share American values. Yet such commitments, however sincere, have hardly made human rights and democracy promotion a more prominent part of U.S. foreign policy. Well-warranted expressions of outrage have not led to significant changes in behavior by others; the targets of such outrage are generally willing and able to absorb U.S. criticism and increasingly even U.S. sanctions, thanks to the growth of alternative sources of support. Myanmar in the wake of a military coup is a textbook example: the United States sanctioned members of the regime, but Chinese largess and diplomatic support have helped the military weather the sanctions. Washington has offered only a minimal response to incidents such as the Cuban government’s brutal reaction to protests last summer or the assassination of Haiti’s president. Whatever concerns Washington may have about Saudi human rights violations, it’s unlikely that those concerns would prevent cooperation with Riyadh on Iran, Yemen, or Israel if, for example, Saudi Arabia’s leaders showed an interest in joining the Abraham Accords.
Waiting to evacuate from Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, August 2021
Victor Mancillal / Handout / Reuters
Of course, U.S. presidents have always allowed professed commitments to human rights and democracy to be set aside when other interests or priorities have come to the fore. The “free world” of the Cold War was often anything but free. But the broader shift in U.S. foreign policy today, with its stress on both great-power competition and short-term domestic priorities, has made those tradeoffs more frequent and acute. In China’s neighborhood, for example, the Biden administration set aside concerns about human rights violations by Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte in order to make it easier for the U.S. military to operate in his country, and it has worked to bolster ties with Vietnam, another autocracy ruled by a communist party. With Russia, it signed an arms control accord while overlooking the imprisonment of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny. It has largely ignored the rise of Hindu nationalism in India in favor of stronger ties with the country to balance China.
With its poorly executed withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the abandonment of many Afghans most vulnerable to Taliban reprisals, Washington further forfeited the high ground: the United States walked away from a project that, for all its flaws and failings, had done much to improve the lives of millions of Afghans, above all women and girls. And of course, the sad reality of the fragile state of democracy in the United States—particularly in the wake of the January 6 insurrection—has further undercut Washington’s ability to promote democratic values abroad.
None of this is to say that there are not important areas of difference between the Trump administration and the Biden administration on foreign policy—consider climate change, for example: climate denial has given way to new investments in green technology and infrastructure, the regulation of fossil fuel production and use, and participation in the Paris process. But these areas of difference have rarely taken priority when other issues, many of which reflect more continuity, are at stake. Washington has been unwilling to use trade to advance climate goals, sanction Brazil for its destruction of the Amazon, or make meaningful contributions to help poorer countries shift to green energy.
The problem with continuity
In theory, more continuity in U.S. foreign policy should be a good thing. After all, a great power is unlikely to be effective if its foreign policy lurches from administration to administration in a way that unnerves allies, provides openings to adversaries, confuses voters, and makes impossible any long-term commitment to building global norms and institutions. The problem with the emerging American approach to the world is not an absence of domestic political consensus; to the contrary, there is considerable bipartisanship when it comes to foreign policy. The problem is that the consensus is woefully inadequate, above all in its failure to appreciate just how much developments thousands of miles away affect what happens at home.
It is also rife with self-defeating contradictions, especially when it comes to China. Deterring China will require sustained increases in military spending and a greater willingness to use force (since successful deterrence always requires not just the ability but also the perceived will to act). Many Republicans but few Democrats back the former; few in either party seem ready to sign up for the latter. Both parties favor symbolically upgrading U.S.-Taiwanese relations, even though going too far in that direction has the potential to trigger a costly conflict between the United States and China. As much as the United States sees China as an adversary, Washington still needs Beijing’s support if it is to tackle a host of regional and global challenges, from North Korea and Afghanistan to global health. And while the Biden administration has talked much about its support for alliances, U.S. allies are in many cases unprepared to do what the administration believes is necessary to counter China. Indeed, when it comes to both China and Russia, most U.S. allies resist U.S. calls to limit trade and investment ties in sensitive sectors for geopolitical reasons. A posture does not a policy make.
Greater disarray in the world will make it much more difficult to “build back better.”
Competing with China is essential, but it cannot provide the organizing principle for American foreign policy in an era increasingly defined by global challenges, including climate change, pandemic disease, terrorism, proliferation, and online disruption, all of which carry enormous human and economic costs. Imagine that the United States successfully deters China from using aggression against its neighbors, from Taiwan to India and Japan, and in the South China Sea. Better yet, imagine that China even stops stealing U.S. intellectual property and addresses U.S. concerns about its trade practices. Beijing could still frustrate U.S. efforts to tackle global challenges by supporting Iranian and North Korean nuclear ambitions, conducting aggressive cyberattacks, building more coal-fired power plants, and resisting reforms to the World Health Organization and the World Trade Organization.
The contradictions go on. The war in Afghanistan revealed limits to Americans’ support for nation building, but building up the capacity of friends is essential in much of Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East if the governments in those regions are to become better able to meet local security challenges, a prerequisite for their becoming more democratic and for the United States’ shouldering less of the burden. Participation in trade blocs is desirable not just for economic reasons but also to help rein in China’s unfair trade practices and mitigate climate change. Economic nationalism (especially “Buy America” provisions) sets a precedent that, if others follow, will reduce global trade and work against collaborative approaches to developing and fielding new technologies that could make it easier to compete with China. And in the Middle East, for all the focus on limiting U.S. involvement, it is not clear how pulling back squares with U.S. commitments to counter an Iran intent on developing its nuclear and missile capabilities and on expanding its regional influence, both directly and through proxies. Even a successful effort to revive the 2015 nuclear deal would not change this reality, given what the agreement does not address and given the sunset provisions for its nuclear restrictions.
AMERICA ALONE
Whatever the failings of this new paradigm, there is no going back; history does not offer do-overs. Nor should Washington return to a foreign policy that, for much of three decades, largely failed both in what it did and in what it did not do.
The starting point for a new internationalism should be a clear recognition that although foreign policy begins at home, it cannot end there. The United States, regardless of its diminished influence and deep domestic divisions, faces a world with both traditional geopolitical threats and new challenges tied to globalization. An American president must seek to fix what ails the United States without neglecting what happens abroad. Greater disarray in the world will make the task to “build back better”—or whatever slogan is chosen for domestic renewal—much more difficult, if not impossible. Biden has acknowledged the “fundamental truth of the 21st century . . . that our own success is bound up with others succeeding as well”; the question is whether he can craft and carry out a foreign policy that reflects it.
The United States also cannot succeed alone. It must work with others, through both formal and informal means, to set international norms and standards and marshal collective action. Such an approach will require the involvement of traditional allies in Europe and Asia, new partners, countries that may need U.S. or international help at home, and nondemocracies. It will require the use of all the instruments of power available to the United States—diplomacy, but also trade, aid, intelligence, and the military. Nor can the United States risk letting unpredictability give it a reputation as unreliable; other states will determine their own actions, especially when it comes to balancing or accommodating China, based in no small part on how dependable and active they believe the United States will be as a partner.
In the absence of a new American internationalism, the likely outcome will be a world that is less free, more violent, and less willing or able to tackle common challenges. It is equal parts ironic and dangerous that at a time when the United States is more affected by global developments than ever before, it is less willing to carry out a foreign policy that attempts to shape them.
13. Al-Qaeda Could Flourish With New Strategy Under Taliban Rule
Al-Qaeda Could Flourish With New Strategy Under Taliban Rule
Afghanistan’s Taliban militants have promised the world for years that they wouldn’t allow their country to be used as a terrorist base. In an agreement with the United States last year, the Taliban pledged specifically to not allow Al-Qaeda to “threaten the security of the United States and its allies” from Afghan soil.
But U.S. security czars have warned just one month after the Taliban’s seizure of Kabul that a reconstituted Al-Qaeda with aspirations to attack the United States could become a reality within three years.
“I don’t see why it would take so long for Al-Qaeda to reconfigure,” said Michael Semple, a former European Union and United Nations adviser in Afghanistan. “It is unduly optimistic about what hurdles Al-Qaeda might face in taking advantage of the permissive environment that they now face in Afghanistan.”
He pointed to the Taliban’s appointment of Mullah Tajmir Jawad as the deputy head of intelligence as evidence of how seamlessly Al-Qaeda can regain strength in Afghanistan, where its leaders enjoyed safe haven two decades ago while they launched a string of bombings globally against U.S. interests and orchestrated the 9/11 attacks.
Osama bin Laden sits with his adviser and successor Ayman al-Zawahiri for an interview with Pakistan's Dawn newspaper in November 2001.
Jawad is a former commander of the Haqqani network, a deadly military wing of the Taliban. Accused of planning high-profile attacks, he is now tasked with handling some of the country’s most sensitive security issues.
“Until last month he was running a suicide bombers’ training camp -- that’s how favorable an environment [Afghanistan] has become [for Al-Qaeda],” Semple told RFE/RL Gandhara. “The kind of people that Al-Qaeda treats as their peers or supporters are now moving straight out of the suicide-bomber training camps into running the intelligence service.”
Keeping A Lower Profile
Jawad is far from the only Taliban leader accused of facilitating international terrorism. Yet experts are saying that, this time around, Al-Qaeda might seek a lower profile in Afghanistan, instead adopting a hub-and-spoke approach with regional affiliates and franchises across the Muslim world.
Semple, now a professor at Queen's University in Belfast, says the centrality of the Haqqani network within the Taliban government’s security apparatus is a major boost to Al-Qaeda because relations between Haqqani family elders and Al-Qaeda’s Arab leaders predate the organization’s formal founding in the late 1980s.
The extended Haqqani family and its loyalists now constitute a key part of the Taliban-led government. Sirajuddin Haqqani, the son of the late eponymous leader Mawlawi Jalaluddin Haqqani, and Mawlawi’s brother Khalil ur-Rahman Haqqani are both ministers in the Taliban cabinet, with the former heading the Interior Ministry and the latter the Refugee Affairs Ministry. Washington has designated both as global terrorists and still offers rewards of up to $10 million for information leading to their arrest.
“If you are a member of Al-Qaeda trying to make arrangements to keep your leaders and key operatives safe and out of view and avoiding trouble from the local authorities, what more could you dream of than to have your well-wishers take over the Interior Ministry?” Semple said.
He said Al-Qaeda regional affiliates already had a large presence in Afghanistan even before the Taliban takeover last month and foreign militants are now embedded within Taliban units. Many of these were even part of the Al-Qaeda’s shura, or council, in Pakistan’s North Waziristan region before a Pakistani military operation in June 2014 pushed them over the border into Afghanistan.
Fighters from the former Al-Qaeda Syrian affiliate Hayat Tahrir al-Sham fire an anti-aircraft gun mounted on a pickup truck in Syria's southern Idlib Province in August 2019.
“We know about the fighters from the Caucuses, from different parts of the Russian Republic; we know about the Uzbekistanis, we know about the Uyghurs, we know about the Tajikistanis, we know about significant numbers of Turks -- their presence is well-known,” he said.
A Shared History
A June UN report noted that “large numbers of Al-Qaeda fighters and other foreign extremist elements aligned with the Taliban are located in various parts of Afghanistan.” It said the primary arbiter between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda is the Haqqani network. “Ties between the two groups remain close, based on ideological alignment, relationships forged through common struggle and intermarriage.”
Analysts see the alliance between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda as partly rooted in their shared history. Al-Qaeda has pledged allegiance to Taliban leaders since Osama bin Laden first pledged it to Mullah Mohammad Omar in the 1990s. Omar’s successors Mullah Akhatar Muhammad Mansur and Mawlawi Haibatullah Akhundzada received it, too, from their counterparts in Al-Qaeda. While the Taliban follows the conservative Deobandi subsect and most Al-Qaeda leaders and members are puritanical Salafis, both organizations have worked hard to prevent doctrinal differences from fissuring the alliance. The emergence of the Islamic State (IS) militants, an ultra-radical Salafi group, appears to have cemented their alliance in seeking to prevent IS from hijacking jihadist fronts.
Semple said it’s likely that Al-Qaeda’s Arab core leadership will relocate to Afghanistan after sheltering in neighboring Iran and Pakistan during the past two decades. “I would expect more of them shifting to Afghanistan now that the U.S. counterterrorism operation has been so thoroughly disrupted and the Taliban are in control,” he added.
The Taliban, however, is adamant that Al-Qaeda is not present in the country. "We do not see anyone in Afghanistan who has anything to do with Al-Qaeda,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told journalists in Kabul last week. "We are committed to the fact that, from Afghanistan, there will not be any danger to any country."
The Taliban has forcefully opposed the “over the horizon” attacks that U.S. officials hope they can employ against possible terrorist threats from Afghanistan. On September 28, the Taliban accused Washington of violating international laws and their February 2020 Doha agreement by operating drones in Afghan airspace.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley listens to a senator's question during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the conclusion of military operations in Afghanistan and plans for future counterterrorism operations on September 28.
In testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee that same day, General Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared the Taliban a terrorist organization that has not broken ties with Al-Qaeda. "A reconstituted Al-Qaeda or ISIS [Islamic State militants] with aspirations to attack the U.S. is a very real possibility, and those conditions to include activity in ungoverned spaces could present themselves in the next 12-36 months," he said.
The 'Near Enemy'
Earlier in September, David Cohen, deputy director of the CIA, said Washington is “already beginning to see some of the indications of some potential movement of Al-Qaeda to Afghanistan.”
Abdul Sayed, a researcher following Islamic radical groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan, however, said Al-Qaeda has little incentive to make Afghanistan its global base.
“Before 9/11, Al-Qaeda wanted to spread the jihadist movement in the Muslim world by launching terrorist attacks globally,” he told Radio Mashaal. “But in recent years, it focused on supporting and strengthening regional jihadist networks such as returning the Taliban [to power] in Afghanistan or the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan, which it created and strengthened.”
Sayed argued that unlike in the 1990s, when Al-Qaeda’s global jihad created problems for the Taliban and ultimately led to the demise of its regime as a result of the U.S.-led military attacks in retaliation for 9/11, the group will take a new approach. “Al-Qaeda will try to keep a close contact with Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, but it would like to avoid doing anything that could create problems for the Taliban,” he said.
Abdul Basit, a research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, agreed. He predicted that Al-Qaeda is unlikely to pursue any large-scale attacks.
“Al-Qaeda would not like to waste the Taliban’s victory again but might like to use their presence in the country to strengthen their regional affiliates in the subcontinent, Yemen, Somalia, and the Sahil,” he told Radio Mashaal.
Based on the recent statements of its central leadership, Basit said, Al-Qaeda is focused on a new goal.
“They are eager to concentrate on the near enemy, which means they will focus on the government of some Muslim countries instead on attacking the far enemy, which is the United States,” he said.
14. Senator Calls for Massive Investigation into What Went Wrong in Afghanistan
I guess if you were in the business of commissions to investigate failures, business might be good and growing.
Senator Calls for Massive Investigation into What Went Wrong in Afghanistan
Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., on Thursday proposed a bill that would establish a multiyear investigation into the two-decade war in Afghanistan and what went wrong.
"I want to have a real comprehensive look at the 20 years of war. I think the American people are owed that," Duckworth told Military.com in an interview. "Certainly, the service members who served there and those who laid down their lives and their families deserve that."
The U.S. war in Afghanistan cost 2,461 American service members their lives, including 13 troops who were killed during the chaotic exit in the conflict's closing days. And critics say the U.S. has little to show for the more than $2.3 trillion it spent on the conflict.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told lawmakers during a contentious hearing Tuesday that the U.S. lost the war, a damning admission from top brass, but said the defeat and swift fall of Kabul was the result of two decades of poor decisions across multiple administrations.
Key examples he noted were the U.S. shifting focus to Iraq and not killing Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora soon after the 2001 Afghanistan invasion.
"It wasn't lost in the last 20 days or even 20 months. There's a cumulative effect to a series of strategic decisions that go way back," Milley told lawmakers Tuesday.
"Whenever you get some phenomenon like a war that is lost -- and it has been, in the sense of we accomplished our strategic task of protecting America against al-Qaida, but certainly the end state is a whole lot different than what we wanted," he said. "So whenever a phenomenon like that happens, there's an awful lot of causal factors. And we're going to have to figure that out. A lot of lessons learned here."
Duckworth, an Army National Guard veteran who lost both her legs in Iraq, wants the commission to be completely detached from Congress and the four previous White House administrations. No one who had any involvement in the war would be allowed to be a part of the investigation, according to her bill. As an example of those who could serve on the commission, she suggested pre-9/11 defense secretaries.
"I want to make it completely independent of the political process. We aren't appointing anyone that is currently serving in Congress; in fact, no one on the commission could have been in a decision-making position during the war," Duckworth said.
The investigation itself would look at a wide range of issues from the war, including decisions made by the departments of defense and state, and the effectiveness of congressional oversight.
Duckworth expects the investigation to take several years, but wants it to zero in on the U.S. failure to properly prop up a democratic Afghan government, as well as the massive amount of cash that was wasted on botched contracting projects or ended up in the pockets of corrupt Afghan officials.
"I want a deep dive into the corruption of the Afghan government and why we weren't ever able to address this issue," she said.
15. The Forever War is Over. Its 2001 Authorization Lives On.
Just imagine trying to get a new AUMF through this congress.
The Forever War is Over. Its 2001 Authorization Lives On.
Pentagon says “over the horizon” strikes in Afghanistan will be conducted under the AUMF passed two decades ago.
“Over the horizon” strikes against terror groups in Afghanistan will be conducted under the war powers act Congress authorized just days after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, the Pentagon said Thursday.
The Biden administration has said such strikes will help the U.S. prevent terrorist attacks on American soil without the need for U.S. troops on the ground.
But some in Congress question whether the two-decade-old law actually authorizes such strikes. In this week’s hearings, several lawmakers demanded details about how the strikes would be conducted.
“We want to see a plan, and we want to see it today,” Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee told Austin Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley and U.S. Central Command Chief Gen. Frank McKenzie Wednesday.
Pentagon leaders have said that at least one of Afghanistan’s neighbors is allowing U.S. aircraft to fly through its airspace, but none is allowing U.S. troops to operate there.
Even the Air Force assets needed for such strikes remains undecided, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. C.Q. Brown told Defense One on Wednesday. Brown said the Air Force is talking with U.S. Central Command and the air component commander there to determine what’s needed.
“It’s just a matter of what’s asked of us, then we’ll look at our capability to be able to respond and drive down any risk,” Brown said.
But that still leaves a lot of questions, Rep. Andy Kim, D-Ca., said at Wednesday’s hearing.
“Is the airspace over Afghanistan currently considered sovereign airspace? Is it currently legal for the United States to conduct ISR sorties and airstrikes in Afghanistan? Under what authority is that legal?” asked Kim, who served as an advisor to Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. John Allen in Afghanistan.
Responded Austin: “The same authorities we were using before.”
Kim asked if that meant the U.S. was operating under a 2014 defense cooperation agreement signed with the government of Afghanistan.
“No,” the secretary said. “What we are prosecuting now are the authorities that were referred to by Gen. McKenzie earlier when he mentioned he would have to take that into a classified setting.”
The Taliban, who control Afghanistan but have not yet been officially recognized by Washington as the country’s governing body, issued a statement on its official Twitter account saying the U.S. is violating international law by flying drones over Afghanistan.
On Thursday, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said drones are not the only way to hit targets in Afghanistan.
“Over-the-horizon doesn't have to mean unmanned. It doesn't even always have to mean aviation,” Kirby said. “Over the horizon, as the secretary defined it, means that the strike, assets, and the target analysis comes from outside the country in which the operation occurs, and we can do that in a variety of means.”
Asked what authorities Austin was referring to, Kirby said the strikes are being conducted under the 2001 war powers act. “As a matter of domestic law, the president has authorized U.S. forces to strike ISIS-K targets in Afghanistan pursuant to the 2001 AUMF.”
“We have the authorities that we need,” Kirby said.
But continued use of the 2001 AUMF comes as Congress has been looking to rein those war powers in, and regain some of its oversight role into planned strikes before they are carried out.
Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Ca., asked McKenzie how the military will ensure that future strikes are actually targeting terrorists. A drone strike on Aug. 29 killed 10 Afghan civilians, including children and an aid worker employed by a California-based humanitarian non-profit.
McKenzie’ said strike planners will have more time to doublecheck than they did on Aug. 29, when there was an imminent threat of another attack on U.S. personnel at Kabul airport.
“I will note your comments on imminence the next time we have questions on war powers with some of the strikes,” Jacobs said.
16. Another Win for China’s Hostage Diplomacy
Excerpts:
It seems very likely. China has paid a diplomatic price, but foreign concerns always weigh much less than domestic political ones in China, and domestically this is being portrayed as a sign of Chinese power. Any future attempts by Western governments to arrest—or even charge—highly connected Chinese citizens are going to have to take into account the high chance of their own citizens being held hostage in China in return.
On the U.S. side, lawyer McGovern notes, “Decisions to charge individuals with political connections to foreign governments come with a whole range of collateral considerations but our experience with the DOJ is that they will not be cowed or intimidated by the risk of retaliatory prosecutions by foreign governments.”
But that may not be the case with other countries, especially if the U.S. tries to make use of extradition agreements again. The most likely targets aren’t going to be business executives but rather people like Kovrig with ties to government—especially former officials now working in the private or NGO sectors.
Many China analysts, myself included, believed there would be a delay of weeks or months between Meng’s release and the return of the Canadians, to give Beijing plausible deniability. The absence of that shows how little China cares about its reputation. It would rather emphasize its power.
Dan Harris, an experienced China business attorney, said Beijing’s future use of hostage diplomacy depends on the global reaction to this case: “If the world is silent, I think the risks will go up across the board for all types of China hostage-taking, but especially for smaller countries China doesn’t like.”
Another Win for China’s Hostage Diplomacy
A yearslong diplomatic dispute between China and the West has finally ended.
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Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou arrives at the airport in Shenzhen, China, in a screen grab made from a video released on Sept. 25. China Central Television (CCTV)/AFP via Getty Images
A yearslong diplomatic dispute ended Saturday when Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, arrived back in China and Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor arrived back in Calgary, Alberta.
Meng signed a deferred prosecution agreement on Friday with the U.S. Department of Justice, which had asked for her extradition from Canada, and took off for China shortly afterward. Spavor and Kovrig, who had been seized by the Chinese state and held as hostages against Meng’s release, were released into the custody of the Canadian ambassador to China on Friday, after having spent over 1,000 days in prison. Their flight home took off shortly after Meng signed the agreement.
Meng was arrested in Vancouver on Dec. 1, 2018, following U.S. claims that she had committed fraud when representing Huawei’s dealings with Iran. Kovrig and Spavor were detained just a few days later, on Dec. 10. Both were well-known figures in the expatriate community in China; Kovrig, whom I’ve known personally for years, is a former Canadian diplomat and journalist who split his time between China and the West while working for the International Crisis Group, a prominent nongovernmental organization. Spavor ran an investment and tourism group on the border with North Korea.
A yearslong diplomatic dispute ended Saturday when Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, arrived back in China and Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor arrived back in Calgary, Alberta.
Meng signed a deferred prosecution agreement on Friday with the U.S. Department of Justice, which had asked for her extradition from Canada, and took off for China shortly afterward. Spavor and Kovrig, who had been seized by the Chinese state and held as hostages against Meng’s release, were released into the custody of the Canadian ambassador to China on Friday, after having spent over 1,000 days in prison. Their flight home took off shortly after Meng signed the agreement.
Meng was arrested in Vancouver on Dec. 1, 2018, following U.S. claims that she had committed fraud when representing Huawei’s dealings with Iran. Kovrig and Spavor were detained just a few days later, on Dec. 10. Both were well-known figures in the expatriate community in China; Kovrig, whom I’ve known personally for years, is a former Canadian diplomat and journalist who split his time between China and the West while working for the International Crisis Group, a prominent nongovernmental organization. Spavor ran an investment and tourism group on the border with North Korea.
In Canada, the arrest and detention of the “two Michaels,” as they were known, became a national concern. Canadian opinions of China reached record lows. Meng, released on bail, was able to live a luxurious life in Vancouver, British Columbia; Spavor and Kovrig, meanwhile, were held for long periods in solitary confinement, without access to diplomatic or legal support.
Race also played a role in the Canadian public’s response, as Chinese Canadian writer Joanna Chiu pointed out; China has detained numerous Canadian citizens or permanent residents of Chinese descent, such as democracy activist Wang Bingzhang, kidnapped from Vietnam in 2002, without prompting the same degree of outrage from Canadians that Spavor and Kovrig, both white, received.
What drove the decision to seize the Michaels?
Beijing has invested heavily in promoting Huawei and defending it against the U.S. campaign against the firm; as such, it saw the arrest of Meng as a shot across the bow from the United States that had to be answered. (It didn’t help when then-U.S. President Donald Trump said he would intervene in the case if China gave trade concessions.)
Rather than go after Americans, however, Beijing saw Canada as the weak link. Chinese geopolitical thinking often portrays countries such as Canada and Australia as lackeys of the United States—but also as smaller nations that can be intimidated in a way that Washington can’t. That has backfired spectacularly in recent years, as repeated attempts to threaten Canberra have driven it far closer to Washington and produced deals like the recent U.S.-U.K.-Australian defense deal known as AUKUS.
Meng also isn’t just an ordinary Chinese citizen; she’s part of the country’s business and political elite, a class of people who have often maintained dual lives between the West and China—making their money from connections in China while spending it elsewhere. Meng frequently traveled to Canada, where she owned two multimillion-dollar houses in her husband’s name. Her father is Huawei’s billionaire founder, Ren Zhengfei, a former officer in China’s military, and her mother is the daughter of the former deputy governor of Sichuan province. Meng’s arrest by Canadian authorities, then, violated a sense of Chinese Communist Party aristocratic privilege; as far as the party is concerned, the only power the elite should be subject to is the party’s.
It’s also quite likely some Chinese officials believed both Spavor and Kovrig were spies, even if the decision to arrest them was clearly political. Spy paranoia about foreigners is common in China, in part because Chinese civilians abroad are often roped into aiding Chinese intelligence and news agencies such as Xinhua are used as cover for trained spies. These tactics aren’t unique to China, of course—just more routinely used. The two Michaels may thus have been seen as legitimate targets—but spy paranoia is extensive enough that it could apply to just about any foreigner.
Police don’t usually intervene in these affairs, except to act as intermediaries to arrange a deal. That caused a diplomatic crisis with India in late 2011, when two Indian businesspeople were held hostage in the trading town of Yiwu and the Chinese authorities refused to intervene. China also routinely uses exit bans to hold foreigners in the country, especially people of Chinese descent, in both business and personal disputes.
So, after nearly three years, why did the release happen now?
The official Canadian position is that there was no deal, that international politics played no role in the U.S. Department of Justice decision, and that the Chinese government initiated the process of releasing the two imprisoned men after an agreement seemed on the horizon between the department and Meng.
This is possible, but it’s reasonable to be skeptical about this claim; no party involved wants to admit to what may have been a complicated three-way diplomatic arrangement, especially as Republicans in the United States are already attacking President Joe Biden on the issue.
It’s plausible that the Justice Department may have come under pressure from the Biden administration to give Meng a softer deal in order to resolve a critical issue for Canada, a long-term U.S. ally. But the United States had also had some problems making its case for extradition in Canadian courts, so the department may have preferred a partial win to a clear loss, striking the kind of deal prosecutors make all the time.
William McGovern, a lawyer at Kobre & Kim, which specializes in cross-border disputes, and a former prosecutor, noted that “Deferred Prosecution Agreements are used to resolve cases in a variety of circumstances. … Under the reported terms of the agreement, it appears that the charges will be dismissed in 14 months. The agreement resolves the pending extradition and so it would seem there [was] no basis to restrict her return to China.”
But, he noted, it’s quite uncommon for these agreements to be used in “matters against individuals, as opposed to organizations.”
What is China making of this?
The Chinese government and state media are portraying Meng’s return as a victory—with very little mention of the two Canadians. Chinese media has either not mentioned their case or deliberately confused their case with that of Robert Schellenberg, a Canadian convicted on drug charges in China who was given the death penalty after the Meng charges.
The official Chinese position is that Spavor’s and Kovrig’s release was “on medical grounds” and that they had confessed to being spies. (It’s very likely that the two were made to sign confessions before being released. Forced confessions, sometimes broadcast on television, are routinely used against Chinese dissidents.) Most people in China are unaware of their existence; among the more tapped-in sort of online nationalist, however, their release has caused frustration.
China has always portrayed Meng as an innocent victim of foreign injustice, and she received a triumphant reception at the airport in Shenzhen. That message never sold abroad—despite reported attempts to pay protesters in Canada and give the impression of a grassroots movement in support of Meng—but it was very successful at home.
It’s always difficult to try to distinguish genuine public feeling in China from government-massaged propaganda, and the two can’t be cleanly separated. Many ordinary Chinese see the treatment of Chinese overseas as a key bellwether of national power, and they tie their own sense of identity closely to the country’s strength. Online outrage when Chinese tourists are perceived as being ill-treated, for instance, is routine.
Yet at the same time there was always a counternarrative about Meng on the Chinese internet, one that saw her as a spoiled child of privilege and emphasized her overseas wealth—but that’s been systematically censored since the affair began.
How is Huawei going to be affected by the deal?
Domestically, Huawei’s position as a national champion has been strengthened. But the whole affair has been another nail in the coffin for the company’s future in the West. Huawei has always insisted abroad that it’s a private company with no links to the Chinese state—while, like all large Chinese companies, assiduously praising the Chinese Communist Party and the government at home. It puts a lot of money into promoting its image abroad, and some Western commentators have defended it. Yet its murky ownership structure, the massive subsidies it receives from the state, and the potential espionage threat it poses have made foreign governments, especially the United States, increasingly wary.
It became much more difficult to make the case that Huawei had nothing to do with the Chinese state when that same state started a diplomatic crisis on behalf of Huawei. Meng’s statement, made as part of her legal agreement with the Justice Department, could also cause difficulties for the company. While Chinese media has emphasized her lack of an actual guilty plea, the agreement included a statement of facts that admitted wrongdoing—and could be used in future cases against Huawei.
Will this happen again?
It seems very likely. China has paid a diplomatic price, but foreign concerns always weigh much less than domestic political ones in China, and domestically this is being portrayed as a sign of Chinese power. Any future attempts by Western governments to arrest—or even charge—highly connected Chinese citizens are going to have to take into account the high chance of their own citizens being held hostage in China in return.
On the U.S. side, lawyer McGovern notes, “Decisions to charge individuals with political connections to foreign governments come with a whole range of collateral considerations but our experience with the DOJ is that they will not be cowed or intimidated by the risk of retaliatory prosecutions by foreign governments.”
But that may not be the case with other countries, especially if the U.S. tries to make use of extradition agreements again. The most likely targets aren’t going to be business executives but rather people like Kovrig with ties to government—especially former officials now working in the private or NGO sectors.
Many China analysts, myself included, believed there would be a delay of weeks or months between Meng’s release and the return of the Canadians, to give Beijing plausible deniability. The absence of that shows how little China cares about its reputation. It would rather emphasize its power.
Dan Harris, an experienced China business attorney, said Beijing’s future use of hostage diplomacy depends on the global reaction to this case: “If the world is silent, I think the risks will go up across the board for all types of China hostage-taking, but especially for smaller countries China doesn’t like.”
James Palmer is a deputy editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @BeijingPalmer
17. U.S. Military Concedes It’s Unready to Fight Terrorism From ‘Over the Horizon’
Flying blind.
U.S. Military Concedes It’s Unready to Fight Terrorism From ‘Over the Horizon’
Centcom will be flying blind for years in Afghanistan—and likely missing terrorists while killing innocents, experts say.
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Afghan residents and victims' family members gather next to a vehicle that was damaged in a U.S. drone airstrike the day before in Kabul on Aug. 30. WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP via Getty Images
The U.S. military and intelligence community are scrambling to fulfill President Joe Biden’s pledge to fight terrorists from “over the horizon” in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan—but by their own admission, they still don’t know whether they can track or thwart that threat.
What is just as troublesome, experts say, is that U.S. Central Command—which will be saddled with the main counterterrorism task in Afghanistan—has had a mixed record at best over the last 20 years. Even when it had thousands of troops on the ground in Afghanistan, Centcom did a poor job of differentiating terrorists from innocents, according to civilian organizations that closely tracked those efforts, and often it did not even bother to investigate civilian deaths.
The forthcoming challenge in Afghanistan “is unlike anything we’ve seen in any other theater,” said Seth Jones, a counterterrorism expert and former U.S. defense official, who calls the Biden administration’s assertions about currently having over-the-horizon capability “fictitious.”
The U.S. military and intelligence community are scrambling to fulfill President Joe Biden’s pledge to fight terrorists from “over the horizon” in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan—but by their own admission, they still don’t know whether they can track or thwart that threat.
What is just as troublesome, experts say, is that U.S. Central Command—which will be saddled with the main counterterrorism task in Afghanistan—has had a mixed record at best over the last 20 years. Even when it had thousands of troops on the ground in Afghanistan, Centcom did a poor job of differentiating terrorists from innocents, according to civilian organizations that closely tracked those efforts, and often it did not even bother to investigate civilian deaths.
The forthcoming challenge in Afghanistan “is unlike anything we’ve seen in any other theater,” said Seth Jones, a counterterrorism expert and former U.S. defense official, who calls the Biden administration’s assertions about currently having over-the-horizon capability “fictitious.”
“When you compare this with U.S. operations in Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Iraq, even West Africa in the Sahel, this is by far the hardest counterterrorism campaign to operate,” Jones said. He noted that in each of those other places, the United States had nearby bases and some local partners on the ground, such as friendly militias, who provided essential human intelligence to verify signals intelligence and other forms of standoff surveillance. “In every single one of those other countries, we have had partner forces that we could also embed in and could run human intelligence assets out of—who can call in airstrikes and put down beacons and signals for intelligence collection.”
By contrast, in Afghanistan Centcom will face the task of tracking and killing terrorists with little or no human intelligence on the ground—making it more likely that future operations could resemble the Aug. 29 drone strike on an alleged Islamic State operative who turned out to be an innocent aid worker. Nine of his family members died with him, including children. According to a U.S. official familiar with the details of the raid, the United States had no human sources on the ground who could verify the identity of the victim, Zemari Ahmadi.
“It’s important for people to recognize that the civilian harm caused by this strike is not exceptional. Civilian harm is a feature, not a bug, of U.S. airstrikes,” said Annie Shiel of the Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC), a group that assesses civilian casualties. Even in places where Washington has better access to bases and intelligence, such as Yemen and Somalia, “the U.S. has an extremely poor track record of investigating, acknowledging, and responding to civilian casualties,” Shiel said.
Meanwhile, Afghanistan’s soaring mountains and ridges, which provide a superb hiding place for terrorists, have become almost a black hole for U.S. intelligence, with U.S. personnel gone and U.S.-allied Afghans evacuated or in hiding. And at present the United States must conduct long-range strikes from far away in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea, a six-to-eight-hour flight for a drone.
“We have no bases in Afghanistan, no bases in Pakistan, none in Central Asia,” Jones said. The U.S. military has been in discussion with Russia over using bases in Central Asia, but those talks are in early stages and are likely to meet resistance from the Kremlin.
The unreadiness of U.S. counterterrorism efforts was partially revealed in testimony this week by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, and Centcom Commander Gen. Kenneth McKenzie. Milley told a Senate committee on Tuesday that a “reconstituted” al Qaeda and Islamic State inside Afghanistan could threaten U.S. targets “in the next 12-36 months.” But U.S. officials concede that they are not yet able to assess and confront terrorist groups in that landlocked country, lacking bases and partners on the ground.
McKenzie, asked whether the United States could now deny al Qaeda and the Islamic State the ability to use Afghanistan to launch attacks against U.S. targets, responded: “That’s yet to be seen. … We could get to that point, but I do not yet have that level of confidence.”
All of which could create more credibility problems for Biden, who has consistently made claims in recent weeks that his own senior national security officials have contradicted. Announcing the final U.S. withdrawal on Aug. 31, Biden said U.S. forces currently “have what’s called over-the-horizon capabilities, which means we can strike terrorists and targets without American boots on the ground—or very few, if needed.” Biden also said he didn’t recall his top military advisors urging him to keep some troops in Afghanistan, though they testified this week that they had done so. And he pronounced the war in Afghanistan to be “over,” when McKenzie said this week it was not.
But the biggest credibility issue Biden may face is that for more than a decade, since he was vice president under former President Barack Obama, Biden has argued that the United States could successfully prevent terrorists from operating in Afghanistan with only a small, pared-down presence. Now, as president, he will see a test of that policy on his watch.
“I think the president has been dishonest with the American people. He’s misled people when he’s talked about how easy it is to conduct over the horizon,” said Republican Sen. Deb Fischer, who questioned Milley and McKenzie closely on the issue at both the open and classified congressional sessions this week. She added that “we didn’t have a firm answer on bases in Central Asia. The feeling was they wouldn’t be there.”
U.S. officials are rushing to improve relationships with neighboring Pakistan and even the Taliban to develop the over-the-horizon capability that the president has declared is already there.
Senior U.S. officials from Secretary of State Antony Blinken to CIA Director William Burns have held intensive discussions with Pakistan, which often played a double game during the Taliban insurgency against U.S. forces by quietly supporting the militants but which is now concerned about further instability on its borders. This month, Burns flew to Islamabad to meet Pakistan Army chief Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa and Inter-Services Intelligence head Lt. Gen. Faiz Hameed. In late August, Burns also met with Abdul Ghani Baradar, a senior Taliban leader. Those Taliban contacts are ongoing, a U.S. government source familiar with the discussions said.
“We have been in regular touch with Pakistani leadership and have discussed Afghanistan in detail,” a State Department spokesperson said.
But Biden has yet to call his Pakistani counterpart, Prime Minister Imran Khan, who in a blistering Washington Post op-ed this week blamed his predecessors in office for turning Pakistan into a “collaborator” with the failed U.S. effort in Afghanistan, leading to “immense civilian casualties” and further “riling up anti-American” sentiment. As McKenzie noted in his testimony, U.S. drones, missiles, and fighter jets will have to fly over Pakistan to attack terrorists in Afghanistan. U.S. officials say Pakistan, while still refusing to accept U.S. bases within its borders, is continuing to permit overflights and is discussing some degree of intelligence cooperation, although those talks are in early stages.
The biggest concern, perhaps, is that getting reliable intelligence on terrorists will be challenging at best—at least before the next terrorist attack takes Washington by surprise. And rights activists as well as some military experts fear the administration may well end up creating more terrorists than it kills by angering local populations based on faulty intelligence and a lack of partners on the ground. One reason for the Taliban’s military success in toppling the Afghan government and driving out U.S. forces is that the Islamist group provided a source of stability to ordinary Afghans, especially in rural areas, who had come to mistrust the U.S. occupation and the U.S.-supported Afghan government, said Andrea Prasow of Human Rights Watch.
“The Taliban represent a degree of order that the prior 20 years didn’t,” she said. “Many Afghans lost loved ones from U.S. airstrikes or military-related actions.” In 2019, a Human Rights Watch study found that Afghan paramilitary forces supported by the CIA often arbitrarily killed innocent Afghans.
Nor is the monitoring of such strikes what it once was. Human rights activists and the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) have long had a rocky relationship with Centcom. Though UNAMA is, unlike the Americans, still on the ground in Afghanistan (at the Taliban’s request), it has met trouble in the past getting information out of Centcom about civilian casualties.
“With civilian casualties, it’s hard to see how they could adequately investigate when they were already doing inadequate investigations while they had thousands of troops on the ground,” Prasow said. In 2018, Human Rights Watch published a report concluding that the U.S. military never conducted on-site investigations after attacks, relying instead on visual and satellite imagery and unreliable Afghan security force reports.
CIVIC and the Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute also spent two years reviewing more than 220 administrative investigations into civilian harm released by Centcom. Their report found “the military to be highly skeptical of external sources of information—i.e., information from NGOs and the media—even though these sources often had access to information that the Defense Department lacked,” Shiel said in an email. “The military rarely interviews civilian witnesses or visits the site of an attack, whereas external sources often do, at great peril to themselves.”
Chris Woods of U.K.-based Airwars, considered the most reliable tracker of civilian harm from U.S. strikes worldwide, said Centcom has not been as forthright as other U.S. commands involved in the counterterrorism fight, such as Africa Command. Under former President Donald Trump, Washington relaxed rules of engagement for drone strikes that allowed local commanders to authorize them, and while the Biden administration has those policies under review, it has not yet announced new ones.
“Centcom transparency and accountability for civilian harm from strikes deteriorated sharply in the latter half of Trump’s term in office—and we’ve sadly seen no sign of improvement since Biden entered the White House,” Woods said. “We’re still waiting for a coherent administration position on civilian harm mitigation to emerge—and meanwhile the strikes go on.”
Michael Hirsh is a senior correspondent at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @michaelphirsh
18. India won’t host NATO strikes into Afghanistan
Wouldn't aircraft have to fly through either Chinese or Pakistani airspace if they were based in India? I would think that would make using India as a launch base infeasible.
India won’t host NATO strikes into Afghanistan
India will not sacrifice its sovereignty to accommodate the reported itch for war games against the Taliban
If one thing is clear from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s address to the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly, it is that India will defend herself against external threats and the increased dangers of terrorism that may come from Afghanistan through Pakistan and is perfectly capable of acting in its own interests – both on land (Kashmir or Ladakh) and at sea (the Indian Ocean). His address can be taken as further evidence of the new multipolarity that is rapidly reshaping global politics.
India will not sacrifice its sovereignty to accommodate the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s reported itch for war games against the Taliban from Indian territory.
Despite pressure from neocons and Mackinderites (those who believe that Anglo-American maritime power should promote conflict and division among the major Eurasian land powers), it will be nearly impossible to persuade India to grant NATO “over-the-horizon” rights to strike Afghanistan from Indian territory. India can smell a skunk in the garden and will be cautious.
On September 17, Arindam Bagchi, spokesman for India’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, uncharacteristically obfuscated when asked about discussions concerning “over-the-horizon” strikes against Afghanistan: “I would not respond to media reports on this issue.” Bagchi’s caution may indicate back-channel discussions had been taking place.
India understands that just as it was a mistake for the British Empire to launch wars over Afghanistan (in 1838-1942, 1878-1880, and 1919) and in Tibet (1903-1904) from British India, so today it would be an even greater strategic blunder for India to allow NATO to attack Afghanistan from bases in India. Our Mackinderites might welcome such an adventure, but New Delhi would not.
Whatever NATO might offer to India in exchange for setting up drone bases on its territory, India realizes that there will be no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow but rather further regional dislocation and serious trouble with near neighbors.
From all indications, India does not want war, and it certainly does not want another conflict with Pakistan, despite Prime Minister Imran Khan’s aggressive address at the United Nations (which is worth listening to).
While it is true the Taliban are “no friends of India,” as the Taliban leadership declared this month, and Pakistan remains a perennial foe, Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar is too savvy to fall for NATO’s arguments in favor of non-Indian-flagged “over-the-horizon” air strikes against Afghanistan.
Furthermore, India, which provides development assistance to many countries, knows that the Taliban cannot be bought off with offers of oodles of development aid, as confirmed most recently by the hundreds of billions lavished on Afghanistan since 2001 to no apparent avail.
Nor is development assistance likely to seduce the Taliban away from their attachment to radical Islam.
In this connection, Anas Haqqani, a senior Taliban official, coolly dismissed questions regarding the possibility of Afghanistan plunging even deeper into chaos if all aid were to be cut off. Paraphrase: “Don’t you guys get it? Our Islamic principles, whether you like them or not, are more precious to us than bushel baskets full of cash.” Neocons and Mackinderites are no less committed to their theories and ideological hobbyhorses – and India knows it.
Nevertheless, Jaishankar questions whether Taliban leaders will be able to control the myriad terrorist offshoots and renegade fighters operating within Afghanistan’s borders despite their declared intention to do so.
Jaishankar is right to be skeptical. He insists that “the Taliban’s commitment not to allow use of Afghan soil for terrorism in any manner should be implemented.”
Moreover, India has established red lines, which were evident when Modi told the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Dushanbe that “together, we should ensure that the territory of Afghanistan is not used to spread terrorism in any other country. SCO member countries should develop strict and agreed norms on this subject.”
China, Russia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Iran are all in agreement with India.
Modi appreciates the danger of India using its military to nation-build. Others have tried it to their grief. Smart diplomacy works better than geopolitical bullying, even when disguised under a thick overlay of humanitarian concern and ideological democracy promotion.
A bad idea is that much worse when it informs aggressive policies vis-à-vis near neighbors. India will intervene in its neighborhood if and when diplomacy fails and for a clearly defined purpose, as it did in the Bangladesh Independence War (1971) and in the Sri Lanka Civil War (1987–1990).
Western foreign-policy elites need to reassess their thinking. The Wall Street Journal’s Sadanand Dhume, usually a good analyst, erred badly in his 2012 opinion piece “India needs a neocon foreign policy.” Although written some years ago, it can be taken as emblematic of an approach that sounds good to ideological adepts, but bears scant connection to reality.
He called for India to “export” democracy – “It’s time to bring democracy-promotion in from the proverbial cold” – and hand over infrastructure development to the Chinese. “This means leaving infrastructure to the Chinese and focusing instead on the principles of free speech, minority rights and independent institutions such as the judiciary and election commission.”
India’s diplomats have been watching this line of reasoning unfold over the years and have not bought into it.
India’s primary goal in engaging the Taliban has been to persuade them to set up an inclusive government and to make it clear to them that India will not tolerate terror activity emanating from Pakistani soil.
As further evidence that India is serious, the meeting of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation – India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka – that was scheduled for September 25 in New York was canceled because member states could not agree on who should represent Afghanistan. Pakistan insisted it be the Taliban, which was a no-go from the get-go, especially since the Taliban did not represent Afghanistan at the UN General Assembly.
India, like France under Charles de Gaulle, is too savvy to get sucker-punched into surrendering its national sovereignty. To illustrate the point, consider this recent report in the Indian media: “There has been no ceasefire violation along the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir since the reiteration of the agreement between the armies of India and Pakistan in February this year [2021].…
“General Officer Commanding the Army’s Srinagar-based 15 Corps or Chinar Corps, Lt Gen D P Pandey, said there have been some infiltration attempts, but unlike previous years they have not been ‘adequately supported’ by ceasefire violations.…
“‘We are totally prepared for ceasefire violations; if anything happens, we are all set to respond appropriately. But frankly, there has been no instigation from across the border,’ he said.”
Modi and Jaishankar know that India can handle its own affairs. It will not allow NATO-flagged “over-the-horizon” strikes into Afghanistan, even as it exercises diplomatic tact in its public utterances about Afghanistan, the Taliban and Western policy.
19. Japan’s defense awakening is not woke enough
A different use of the word "woke." It is an attention getter in the headline.
Japan’s defense awakening is not woke enough
Japan's ruling class has finally awoken to the threat China poses but Tokyo still needs to back tougher rhetoric with credible action
Japan’s Ministry of Defense (MOD) submitted a record defense budget request this year. What is the significance of this?
An optimist would suggest that at least Japan realizes it needs more money for defense. Beyond that, however, it’s hard to be too positive. The request was in the 2.6% increase range. (And this is before the Ministry of Finance is done with it – and presumably reduces it some.)
Japanese defense budgets have been woefully underfunded for decades. Japanese officials make much of “consecutive annual increases” during the Abe administration and during the Suga administration.
However, those increases have been tiny — and illusory. Japan in fact cut its defense budget every year for the decade before Abe took over. So he was just trying to dig Japanese defense spending out of a hole.
Compared with when Abe took office, Japanese defense spending has not increased very much at all: something like a 15% increase overall. If your investment advisor earned you 15% over a decade, you’d fire him.
How much should Japan be spending? Roughly twice what it is now. So, 10% increases for the next five years. As you can see, a 2% increase doesn’t mean a whole lot when viewed in context. Such is the result of Japan’s pathologic dependence on the Americans for defense.
Misssed recruitment targets
The most notable aspect is that the request does not call for spending what’s needed to make service in the Japan Self Defense Force (JSDF) a respected profession. “Personnel” needs to be the priority. JSDF misses recruitment targets by 20-25% annually.
Members of the Japan Air Self-Defense Force (JASDF) on August 24 leave the Iruma Air Base in Saitma Prefecture for Kabul to evacuate Japanese nationals from Afghanistan in the wake of the Taliban’s retaking control of the country. PHOTO: AFP / Taketo Oishi / The Yomiuri Shimbun
No surprise here. Speaking with just a little hyperbole, jieikan (Japan Self Defense Forces service members) are treated like serfs, are overworked and get little respect. Few Japanese even have any idea about JSDF terms of service. If you don’t get personnel right, there aren’t any magic weapons that you can buy to protect yourself.
As a second priority: The budget should specifically call for funding (and achieving) capability development so JSDF can conduct joint operations (air, sea, ground forces can operate together) and ensure adequate training opportunities and training locations in Japan. The budget request (once again) doesn’t seem to focus on this requirement.
Japan’s third priority should be hardware. But unfortunately, this is what Japanese defense budgets put as first, second, and third priorities. The budget does call for buying F35s and some ships, and also spending on hypersonics, advanced fighter development, cyber and outer-space capabilities.
It checks all the boxes but these are either token expenditures or else just buying shiny objects without serious consideration of what Japan actually needs to defend itself in light of current and future threats — and without then putting it all together into a properly configured force and employed in a coherent way.
Japan’s rhetoric on China, especially its concerns regarding Taiwan, changed notably over the last year. What is the reason for this?
An awakening
In broad terms, Japan’s ruling class has finally awakened to the threat that China poses. Of course, there have been Japanese officials and military officers and others who have long understood the threat. But now it appears that the danger is widely enough recognized that the aforementioned people can speak publicly and loudly.
The Japanese public has recognized the danger for a long time. Nagato-cho (Japan’s Capitol Hill), as usual, took time to figure out what most people already knew.
The change is significant. Anthropologists will tell you that the Japanese preference is to avoid talking about (or thinking about) difficult subjects. So the strong, clear statements we’ve been hearing, from people like Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi, Vice Defense Minister Yasuhide Nakayama, MP Masahisa Sato, Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso and others, do represent something of a sea change.
However, I’ve not seen the evidence that the statements are translating into enough concrete capability improvements or activities needed for Japan to effectively respond to a Taiwan scenario – either by itself or along with the Americans.
Japan’s Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi received a courtesy call from the newly appointed commander of the United States Forces Japan and commander of the Fifth Air Force, Lieutenant General Ricky N. Rupp, on September 9, 2021. Photo: AFP / EyePress News
There doesn’t even appear to be a joint operational plan to coordinate US-Japanese operations – and there certainly is no joint headquarters anywhere where the two nations’ forces will conduct a joint defense of anything.
This is an astonishing failure on the part of leaders – civilian and military – on both sides. So, unfortunately, it’s so far mostly talk – even if it is good talk.
As noted, Japanese defense spending isn’t at all in line with the nation’s requirements for addressing the regional threats to Japan or to make up for decades of underfunding defense.
The JSDF is getting out and about in the region more than ever before, but it lacks resources (manpower and hardware) and capability. Linking up and doing joint training and other engagements with the French, the British, the Australians, and the Indians are a good thing – and would have been thought impossible not so long ago.
But unfortunately, Tokyo seems to think that having “friends” makes up for Japan’s defense shortcomings – and thus Japan need do no more than it already is doing or feels like doing.
One former US official once described the Japanese penchant for Japan “figuring out the minimum it needs to do … and then doing a little less.”
It may be hoped that, one of these days, Japan will get things right – and in its own way it’s trying. But time is running short.
Is an Asia-Pacific arms race brewing? A new Cold War?
An arms race – not really. The Chinese build-up over the last 20-30 years has been the biggest and fastest in history – and despite the fact the PRC faced no enemies. Nowadays, the few countries that have woken up – see Australia and Japan —– are just trying to protect themselves. The Chinese are way ahead of them, unfortunately. Even the Americans are playing catch-up.
The Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) conducts Malabar 21 – an multinational exercise with the Indian Navy, US Navy and Royal Australian Navy – to improve tactical skills and further strengthen the QUAD navies. Photo: AFP / EyePress News
A Cold War? Yes. One can debate the terminology, but I would suggest the PRC has been conducting a multifaceted war on multiple fronts for the last 30 years against the US and every other country in the region.
We may have not wanted to admit it or to call it a war – preferring the term “competition” – but Beijing will tell you it’s been a war to defeat its main enemy – the USA – and to teach the Japanese a lesson (and take back the Ryukyu Islands).
The only thing missing is the shooting. But from Beijing’s perspective, do things right and the war will be over without any fighting – since nobody (including the United States) will be able to resist at any reasonable cost.
Grant Newsham is a retired US Marine officer. He was the first USMC liaison officer to the Japan Self Defense Force and has spent many years in Asia. He conducted research in Taipei in 2019 as a Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs fellow. His research covers improving Taiwan’s defense by helping the Taiwan armed forces break out of 40 years of isolation.
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.
