Quotes of the Day:
"I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph."
- Theodore Roosevelt
"Dissents speak to a future age. It's not simply to say, 'My colleagues are wrong, and I would do it this way.' But the greatest dissents do become court opinions, and gradually over time, their views become the dominant view. So that's the dissenter's hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow."
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg
"In order to establish myself, I help others establish themselves; in order to enlarge myself, I help others to enlarge themselves."
- Confucius
1. Taiwan confirms U.S. military presence, says defending island is vital for democracy
2. Gen. Milley calls Chinese weapon test ‘very concerning’
3. Learning the right lessons from Afghanistan
4. AP: Myanmar military uses systematic torture across country
5. Cultivating Intellectual Capital – Linking Deterrence Practitioner to Academician
6. Blinken says he ordered reviews of State Dept's evacuation efforts out of Afghanistan
7. The Consequential Chairman
8. The Latin American element in China’s CPTPP bid
9. Afghan Refugees Can Be Sponsored by Private Citizens Under New Program
10. The Fall and Rise of Techno-Globalism
11. Requiem for the Afghan “Fabergé Egg” Army: Why Did It Crack So Quickly?
12. The United States Left Afghanistan to Prepare for a War It Will Probably Never Fight
13. Other People’s Wars: The US Military and the Challenge of Learning from Foreign Conflicts
14. Why Hamas fights Israel
15. U.N. urgently needs cash in Afghanistan, but struggles for solution
16. Duckworth touts independent commission to study Afghanistan War
17. Pentagon officials, unable to secure basing near Afghanistan, warn of terrorist threat
18. Biden heads abroad with most of his ambassadorial picks stranded in the Senate, stunting U.S. diplomatic efforts
19. Recent Report on Military Prowess Shows Hostile Intentions On the Rise
20. How China Learned to Harness Israel’s Media and Booming Tech Scene
21. An Open Letter in Defense of Democracy
1. Taiwan confirms U.S. military presence, says defending island is vital for democracy
Excerpts:
Since Tsai took office, Beijing has barred Taiwan from the World Health Organization general assembly, as well as several other U.N. forums, arguing that the issue of representation was resolved in 1971 when the People’s Republic switched seats with the Republic of China, Taiwan’s official name, at the U.N.
Tsai’s remarks come at an unusually fraught period even for the typically tense relationship between Taipei and Beijing. Over China’s National Day holiday this month, the People’s Liberation Army sent a record number of fighter jets and bombers into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, drawing warnings from the United States.
Taiwan confirms U.S. military presence, says defending island is vital for democracy
The Washington Post · by Christian Shepherd and Pei Lin Wu Today at 4:39 a.m. EDT · October 28, 2021
TAIPEI, Taiwan — Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen confirmed that American troops have been training the Taiwanese military, as tensions between Beijing and the self-governing island intensify over China’s fears of Taipei’s evolving relationship with Washington.
Tsai, who has ruled Taiwan as head of the Democratic Progressive Party since 2016, told CNN in an interview published on Thursday that U.S. military personnel were in Taiwan as part of a training program. She declined to give details of the numbers of soldiers involved.
The rare public acknowledgment, which comes after the Wall Street Journal reported that Marines had been in Taiwan for at least a year, drew an angry response from the Chinese state-backed tabloid the Global Times, which accused Tsai of “pushing the mainland to decide to resolve the Taiwan question by force.”
The Chinese Communist Party has claimed Taiwan as part of its sovereign territory since 1949 when the Nationalist Kuomintang retreated to the island, about 100 miles from the coast of southeastern Fujian province. Beijing regularly threatens to take the island by force if Taiwan’s democratically elected government declares legal independence.
Beijing’s mistrust of Tsai, whose party historically supported formal independence, has only grown after she won a second term in a landslide victory last year. Tsai maintains that she supports a continuation of the status quo in Taipei’s relationship with Beijing, reflecting her party’s official position since 1999.
But Chinese officials accuse Tsai of supporting “separatists” and take umbrage at her efforts to raise Taiwan’s international status in response Beijing’s bid to isolate Taipei from multilateral organizations and global diplomacy.
The latest target for Chinese opprobrium is a visit this week by Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Joseph Wu to Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Poland, where he has drawn comparisons between Taiwan’s democratization and the Velvet Revolution of 1989 that ended 40 years of communist rule in Czechoslovakia.
On the same day China’s Foreign Ministry dubbed the Czech invitation of Wu a “malicious and provocative act,” it also scorned Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken’s support for Taiwan’s participation in the United Nations as “irresponsible and erroneous.”
Since Tsai took office, Beijing has barred Taiwan from the World Health Organization general assembly, as well as several other U.N. forums, arguing that the issue of representation was resolved in 1971 when the People’s Republic switched seats with the Republic of China, Taiwan’s official name, at the U.N.
Tsai’s remarks come at an unusually fraught period even for the typically tense relationship between Taipei and Beijing. Over China’s National Day holiday this month, the People’s Liberation Army sent a record number of fighter jets and bombers into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, drawing warnings from the United States.
That same week, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Tsai exchanged dueling speeches laying out their visions for the future of Taiwan. While Xi promised that unification would “definitely be achieved,” Tsai marked Taiwan’s National Day by responding that “nobody can force Taiwan to take the path China has laid out for us.”
In her interview, Tsai framed the question of protecting Taiwan as one of defending democracy. “If we fail, then that means people that believe in these values would doubt whether these are values that they [should] be fighting for,” she told CNN.
By openly emphasizing the strength of Taiwan’s ties with the United States, Tsai hopes to deter Beijing from future military action, said Charles Chong-Han Wu, associate professor at the National Chengchi University’s department of diplomacy. “It sends a signal that Americans are behind supporting us,” he said. “The president saying it out loud makes it more strategic and credible.”
Wu added that Tsai appeared to be taking advantage of an opportunity to deter Beijing after President Biden last week said that the United States would come to Taiwan’s defense if China attacked. “She wants to tell Beijing, ‘Don’t act rashly. America really will help us,’” he said.
Many analysts thought Biden misspoke, because his remarks appeared to be at odds with a policy of “strategic ambiguity” which leaves it unclear whether the United States would intervene in a conflict. The White House later clarified that U.S. policy had not changed. Still, Beijing responded with a warning not to underestimate its resolve, adding that China has “no room for compromise” over Taiwan.
Even without a fundamental shift in the United States’ policy, attention in Washington toward Taiwan’s fate is only likely to grow as China’s influence and military threats escalate, said Freddy Lim, an independent lawmaker in Taiwan’s parliament and singer in heavy metal band Chthonic.
“Twenty years ago, people might have thought that the Taiwan Strait issue was Taiwan’s alone, but now no one thinks that way,” he said. “The international problem faced now is not just military but about the spread of autocracy.”
In the past, when Lim used to go on international tours with his band, no one knew about Taiwan and he would have to explain that Taiwan was “not China, Thailand or Japan.” But recent tensions have drawn a new audience.
Earlier this week, an old clip of Lim swearing at China while onstage in Britain made a brief appearance in a segment about Taiwan on “Last Week Tonight” hosted by comedian John Oliver. Watching the clip, Lim felt a rush. “Ten years later, Taiwan is being taken seriously internationally, it’s a big change,” he said.
The Washington Post · by Christian Shepherd and Pei Lin Wu Today at 4:39 a.m. EDT · October 28, 2021
2. Gen. Milley calls Chinese weapon test ‘very concerning’
Excerpts:
“What we saw was a very significant event of a test of a hypersonic weapon system, and it is very concerning,” Milley said on “The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations” on Bloomberg Television.
“I think I saw in some of the newspapers, they used the term Sputnik moment,” he added. “I don’t know if it’s quite a Sputnik moment, but I think it’s very close to that. So it’s a very significant technological event that occurred, or test that occurred, by the Chinese. And it has all of our attention.”
Gen. Milley calls Chinese weapon test ‘very concerning’
WASHINGTON (AP) — China recently conducted a “very concerning” test of a hypersonic weapon system as part of its aggressive advance in space and military technologies, the top U.S. military officer says.
Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was the first Pentagon official to confirm on the record the nature of a test this year by the Chinese military that the Financial Times had reported was a nuclear-capable hypersonic weapon that was launched into space and orbited the Earth before re-entering the atmosphere and gliding toward its target in China.
Milley said he could not discuss details because aspects involved classified intelligence. He said the United States also is working on hypersonic weapons, whose key features include flight trajectory, speed and maneuverability that make them capable of evading early warning systems that are part of U.S. missile defenses. The U.S. has not conducted a hypersonic weapon test of the sort Milley said China had achieved.
“What we saw was a very significant event of a test of a hypersonic weapon system, and it is very concerning,” Milley said on “The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations” on Bloomberg Television.
“I think I saw in some of the newspapers, they used the term Sputnik moment,” he added. “I don’t know if it’s quite a Sputnik moment, but I think it’s very close to that. So it’s a very significant technological event that occurred, or test that occurred, by the Chinese. And it has all of our attention.”
The launch of a Sputnik satellite by the Soviet Union in 1957 stunned the world and fed U.S. fears that it was falling behind technologically in an accelerating arms race in the early stages of the nuclear age.
RELATED
El Salvador has the potential to be the Soviet Union’s Cuba.
By Christopher J. Hunter
China has disputed Western news reports about its test, saying it was working on technology for a re-useable space vehicle for peaceful purposes.
Some U.S. defense experts say the worry about China’s work on a hypersonic weapon that could deliver a nuclear weapon from space are overblown.
James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wrote in an essay last week that the United States has long been vulnerable to a Chinese nuclear attack.
“While the prospect of a nuclear attack against the United States is terrifying, this is no Sputnik moment — partly because it’s not entirely clear what was tested, but mostly because the threat of a Chinese nuclear attack on the United States isn’t remotely new,” Acton wrote.
In addition to its advances in hypersonic weapons, China has been expanding its network of underground silos that could be used to launch intercontinental-range nuclear missiles, and it has rebuffed U.S. calls to join nuclear arms control talks. The U.S. also has raised concerns about what it calls Chinese efforts to intimidate Taiwan, the self-ruled island that China claims as part of its territory, and to claim disputed islands and other land features in the South China Sea.
Associated Press writer Lolita C. Baldor contributed to this report
3. Learning the right lessons from Afghanistan
Excerpts:
The problem in Afghanistan wasn’t that the U.S. embarked on a campaign of nation building. If only that had been the case. In reality, there was no discernible campaign at all, but instead a patchwork of disjointed efforts across the coalition and various departments and agencies of the U.S. government. An absence of clear objectives, a failure to use leverage to drive towards political reform and an over-reliance on a behemoth but futile military effort created the conditions that allowed the Taliban to flourish. An endless discussion about troop levels distracted policymakers from ensuring that they answered the most important question: “To what end?”
Instead of a clear answer to that question, there was much vague talk about maintaining pressure on the Taliban to give Afghan political leaders breathing space — without anyone noticing that the air in that space was too noxious to support real progress.
U.S. military leadership was not without responsibility for the lack of direction. A succession of commanders, for whom Afghan command was a strong resume builder, implemented plans that failed to add up to a sustained strategy, all the while offering repeated assurances of success.
Learning the right lessons from Afghanistan
The Hill · by Andrew Milburn, Opinion Contributor · October 27, 2021
President Biden’s speech in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Kabul was intended to put the seal on a painful chapter in our nation’s history. In it, the president attributed the debacle in Kabul and the two decades of war that preceded it as an inevitable result of “nation building” — a pithy epithet that seemed to resonate with his audience.
In truth, the United States has had great success at nation building in the not-so-distant past. It was the same nation, after all, that devised the Marshall Plan, ensuring that a Europe devastated in the aftermath of World War II would experience an unprecedented period of peace and prosperity.
More recently, though on a much lesser scale, it was the U.S. that implemented Plan Colombia, which ended a 50-year civil war, led to a drastic drop in illicit drug production and enabled the Colombian government to exercise rule of law throughout the country. The real distinguishing features of both these successful attempts at nation building (though that was not the term used in either case at the time) was that they were both – as their titles suggest – actual plans.
It is important to make this distinction lest policymakers draw the wrong lessons from Afghanistan. A common understanding about what went wrong will – one hopes – help the administration design more coherent policy going ahead.
Sadly, the prospect of reaching such an understanding seems a long way off. Weeks of congressional hearings on the war have ended with no such consensus. Instead of making a determined effort to reveal underlying causes, all questions have followed a partisan narrative, while the answers, in an effort to avoid blame, have dissolved into an unseemly spectacle of mutual finger pointing between the Pentagon and the State Department. “I would try to take the politics out of it,” commented one frustrated representative to The Hill, a suggestion as sensible as it is utterly implausible.
But if this were to happen – if the hearings did come up with a sense-making narrative about what went wrong with U.S. policy in Afghanistan – I imagine that it would look something like this:
The problem in Afghanistan wasn’t that the U.S. embarked on a campaign of nation building. If only that had been the case. In reality, there was no discernible campaign at all, but instead a patchwork of disjointed efforts across the coalition and various departments and agencies of the U.S. government. An absence of clear objectives, a failure to use leverage to drive towards political reform and an over-reliance on a behemoth but futile military effort created the conditions that allowed the Taliban to flourish. An endless discussion about troop levels distracted policymakers from ensuring that they answered the most important question: “To what end?”
Instead of a clear answer to that question, there was much vague talk about maintaining pressure on the Taliban to give Afghan political leaders breathing space — without anyone noticing that the air in that space was too noxious to support real progress.
U.S. military leadership was not without responsibility for the lack of direction. A succession of commanders, for whom Afghan command was a strong resume builder, implemented plans that failed to add up to a sustained strategy, all the while offering repeated assurances of success.
Meanwhile, military units on the ground fought the war in 12-month increments, at the end of which they would invariably congratulate themselves for leaving their part of the country in so much better shape than they had found it. And who could blame them for wanting to derive some meaning from the grinding effort and steady stream of casualties?
But no one appears to have been keeping a close watch on the Taliban — or trying to answer the question of why an organization that should have been feared and disliked by the rural population was instead steadily gaining their support.
By 2017, the two sides in Afghanistan had fought each other to a standstill: The Taliban held the countryside while the government held the cities — a situation that remained fairly stable until a few months ago. From the perspective of the United States, it was a sustainable stalemate, a light footprint at a cost of relatively few casualties.
This wasn’t the situation, however, presented to the American public by two successive presidents who, choosing political expediency over strategic patience, had turned the meaningless phrase “No more Forever Wars” into a campaign slogan. The result was the greatest single loss of American and Afghan life in Afghanistan in over a decade, and perhaps irrevocable damage to America’s standing in the world. Not to mention the intangible but profound sense of loss felt by many Afghan veterans who have seen their former allies deserted, and the cause for which they fought abandoned in such haste.
These were the mistakes of Afghanistan — none of which highlight an inherent flaw with the concept of “nation building,” but provide instead an implicit admonition to the United States to simply be more competent. To take the time to frame foreign policy problems in their wider context, and to design and implement policies with unambiguous objectives, discernible milestones and a clearly defined allocation of effort and resources. To understand the real meaning of terms such as risk and strategic patience. To take an approach that involves all components of national power, not just a massive and directionless military effort; an approach that learns from the lessons of the past, rather than the parochial slogans of the present.
Andrew Milburn, a retired U.S. Marine Corps colonel, is the author of “When the Tempest Gathers.” He is on the adjunct faculty of Joint Special Operations University, where he teaches classes on leadership, planning, ethics, mission command, risk, special operations, irregular warfare and command and control at U.S., Canadian and UK military schools. He is also a director of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, run by the Modern War Institute.
The Hill · by Andrew Milburn, Opinion Contributor · October 27, 2021
4. AP: Myanmar military uses systematic torture across country
Tragic stories.
Excerpts:
Since its takeover of the government in February, the Myanmar military has been torturing detainees across the country in a methodical and systemic way, The Associated Press has found in interviews with 28 people imprisoned and released in recent months. Based also on photographic evidence, sketches and letters, along with testimony from three recently defected military officials, AP’s investigation provides the most comprehensive look since the takeover into a highly secretive detention system that has held more than 9,000 people. The military, known as the Tatmadaw, and police have killed more than 1,200 people since February.
While most of the torture has occurred inside military compounds, the Tatmadaw also has transformed public facilities such as community halls and a royal palace into interrogation centers, prisoners said. The AP identified a dozen interrogation centers in use across Myanmar, in addition to prisons and police lockups, based on interviews and satellite imagery.
The prisoners came from every corner of the country and from various ethnic groups, and ranged from a 16-year-old girl to monks. Some were detained for protesting against the military, others for no discernible reason. Multiple military units and police were involved in the interrogations, their methods of torture similar across Myanmar.
AP: Myanmar military uses systematic torture across country
AP · by VICTORIA MILKO and KRISTEN GELINEAU · October 28, 2021
October 28, 2021 GMT
JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — The soldiers in rural Myanmar twisted the young man’s skin with pliers and kicked him in the chest until he couldn’t breathe. Then they taunted him about his family until his heart ached, too: “Your mom,” they jeered, “cannot save you anymore.”
The young man and his friend, randomly arrested as they rode their bikes home, were subjected to hours of agony inside a town hall transformed by the military into a torture center. As the interrogators’ blows rained down, their relentless questions tumbled through his mind.
“There was no break – it was constant,” he says. “I was thinking only of my mom.”
Since its takeover of the government in February, the Myanmar military has been torturing detainees across the country in a methodical and systemic way, The Associated Press has found in interviews with 28 people imprisoned and released in recent months. Based also on photographic evidence, sketches and letters, along with testimony from three recently defected military officials, AP’s investigation provides the most comprehensive look since the takeover into a highly secretive detention system that has held more than 9,000 people. The military, known as the Tatmadaw, and police have killed more than 1,200 people since February.
While most of the torture has occurred inside military compounds, the Tatmadaw also has transformed public facilities such as community halls and a royal palace into interrogation centers, prisoners said. The AP identified a dozen interrogation centers in use across Myanmar, in addition to prisons and police lockups, based on interviews and satellite imagery.
The prisoners came from every corner of the country and from various ethnic groups, and ranged from a 16-year-old girl to monks. Some were detained for protesting against the military, others for no discernible reason. Multiple military units and police were involved in the interrogations, their methods of torture similar across Myanmar.
The AP is withholding the prisoners’ names, or using partial names, to protect them from retaliation by the military.
Inside the town hall that night, soldiers forced the young man to kneel on sharp rocks, shoved a gun in his mouth and rolled a baton over his shinbones. They slapped him in the face with his own Nike flip flops.
“Tell me! Tell me!” they shouted. “What should I tell you?” he replied helplessly.
He refused to scream. But his friend screamed on his behalf, after realizing it calmed the interrogators.
“I’m going to die,” he told himself, stars exploding before his eyes. “I love you, mom.’”
___
The Myanmar military has a long history of torture, particularly before the country began transitioning toward democracy in 2010. While torture in recent years was most often recorded in ethnic regions, its use has now returned across the country, the AP’s investigation found. The vast majority of torture techniques described by prisoners were similar to those of the past, including deprivation of sleep, food and water; electric shocks; being forced to hop like frogs, and relentless beatings with cement-filled bamboo sticks, batons, fists and the prisoners’ own shoes.
But this time, the torture carried out inside interrogation centers and prisons is the worst it’s ever been in scale and severity, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, which monitors deaths and arrests. Since February, the group says, security forces have killed 1,218 people, including at least 131 detainees tortured to death.
The torture often begins on the street or in the detainees’ homes, and some die even before reaching an interrogation center, says Ko Bo Kyi, AAPP’s joint secretary and a former political prisoner.
“The military tortures detainees, first for revenge, then for information,” he says. “I think in many ways the military has become even more brutal.”
The military has taken steps to hide evidence of its torture. An aide to the highest-ranking army official in western Myanmar’s Chin state told the AP that soldiers covered up the deaths of two tortured prisoners, forcing a military doctor to falsify their autopsy reports.
A former army captain who defected from the Tatmadaw in April confirmed to the AP that the military’s use of torture against detainees has been rampant since its takeover.
“In our country, after being arrested unfairly, there is torture, violence and sexual assaults happening constantly,” says Lin Htet Aung, the former captain. “Even a war captive needs to be treated and taken care of by law. All of that is gone with the coup. … The world must know.”
Lin Htet Aung told the AP that interrogation tactics are part of the military’s training, which involves both theory and role playing. He and another former army captain who recently defected say that the general guidelines from superiors are, simply: We don’t care how you get the information, so long as you get it.
After receiving detailed requests for comment, military officials responded with a one-line email that said: “We have no plans to answer these nonsense questions.”
Last week, in an apparent bid to improve its image, the military announced that more than 1,300 detainees would be freed from prisons and the charges against 4,320 others pending trial would be suspended. But it’s unclear how many have actually been released and how many of those have already been re-arrested.
All but six of the prisoners interviewed by the AP were subjected to abuse, including women and children. Most of those who weren’t abused said their fellow detainees were.
In two cases, the torture was used to extract false confessions. Several prisoners were forced to sign statements pledging obedience to the military before they were released. One woman was made to sign a blank piece of paper.
All prisoners were interviewed separately by the AP. Those who had been held at the same centers gave similar accounts of treatment and conditions, from interrogation methods to the layout of their cells to the exact foods provided — if any.
ADVERTISEMENT
The AP also sent photographs of several torture victims’ injuries to a forensic pathologist with Physicians for Human Rights. The pathologist concluded wounds on three victims were consistent with beatings by sticks or rods.
“You look at some of those injuries where they’re just black and blue from one end to the other,” says forensic pathologist Dr. Lindsey Thomas. “This was not just a swat. This has the appearance of something that was very systematic and forceful.”
Beyond the 28 prisoners, the AP interviewed the sister of a prisoner allegedly tortured to death, family and friends of current prisoners, and lawyers representing detainees. The AP also obtained sketches that prisoners drew of the interiors of prisons and interrogation centers, and letters to family and friends describing grim conditions and abuse.
Photographs taken inside several detention and interrogation facilities confirmed prisoners’ accounts of overcrowding and filth. Most inmates slept on concrete floors, packed together so tightly they could not even bend their knees.
Some became sick from drinking dirty water only available from a shared toilet. Others had to defecate into plastic bags or a communal bucket. Cockroaches swarmed their bodies at night.
There was little to no medical help. One prisoner described his failed attempt to get treatment for his battered 18-year-old cellmate, whose genitals were repeatedly smashed between a brick and an interrogator’s boot.
Not even the young have been spared. One woman was imprisoned alongside a 2-year-old baby. Another woman held in solitary confinement at the notorious Insein prison in Yangon said officials admitted to her that conditions were made as wretched as possible to terrify the public into compliance.
Amid these circumstances, COVID ripped through some facilities, with deadly results.
One woman detained at Insein said the virus killed her cellmate.
“I was infected. The whole dorm was infected. Everyone lost their sense of smell,” she says.
The interrogation centers were even worse than the prisons, with nights a cacophony of weeping and wails of agony
“It was terrifying, my room. There were blood stains and scratches on the wall,” one man recalls. “I could see smudged, bloody handprints and blood-vomit stains in the corner of the room.”
Throughout the interviews, the Tatmadaw’s sense of impunity was clear.
“They would torture us until they got the answers they wanted,” says one 21-year-old. “They always told us, ‘Here at the military interrogation centers, we do not have any laws. We have guns, and we can just kill you and make you disappear if we want to — and no one would know.’”
___
The tortured prisoners were already dead when soldiers began attaching glucose drip lines to their corpses to make it look like they were still alive, a military defector told the AP. It was one of multiple examples the AP found of how the military tries to hide its abuse.
Torture is rife throughout the detention system, says Sgt. Hin Lian Piang, who served as a clerk to the North-Western Regional Deputy Commander before defecting in October.
“They arrest, beat and torture too many,” he says. “They did it to everyone who was arrested.”
In May, Hin Lian Piang witnessed soldiers torture two prisoners to death at a mountaintop interrogation center inside an army base in Chin state. The soldiers beat the two men, hit them with their guns, and kicked them, he says.
After the men were put into jail, one of them died. The major in charge asked the military’s medical doctor to examine the man and determine his cause of death. Meanwhile, the other prisoner began trembling and then died, too.
The soldiers attached the drip lines to the prisoners’ corpses, then sent them to a military hospital in Kalay.
“They forced the Kalay military doctor to write in the chest biopsy report that they died from their own health problems,” Hin Lian Piang says. “Then they cremated the dead bodies straight away.”
Hin Lian Piang says the direct order to cover up the cause of the men’s deaths came from Tactical Operations Commander Col. Saw Tun and Deputy Commander Brig. Gen. Myo Htut Hlaing, the two highest-ranking army officials stationed in Chin state. The AP sent questions about the case to the Tatmadaw but they were not answered.
More from AP's Myanmar investigation:
Several prisoners say their interrogators brutalized only the parts of their bodies that could be hidden by clothes, which Hin Lian Piang calls a common strategy. One prisoner had his ears repeatedly slapped, leaving no scars but inflicting intense pain. Another, Min, says his interrogators placed a rubber pad over his chest and back before beating him with a rod, minimizing bruising.
“They would just make sure to hit you so that only your insides are damaged, or would severely beat you on your back, chest and thighs, where the bruises aren’t visible,” says Min.
The use of rubber pads appears to be a classic example of “stealth torture,” which leaves no physical marks, says Andrew Jefferson, a Myanmar prisons researcher at DIGNITY, the Danish Institute Against Torture.
“It seems to indicate that the torturers actually sort of care about being found out,” Jefferson says. “So few ever get convicted that I don’t really understand why they care.”
The military may be attempting to pre-empt public accounts of its abuses, says Matthew Smith, cofounder of the human rights group Fortify Rights.
“This is a technique that dictatorships have used for a very long time,” he says. “What I believe the authorities are attempting to do is at least inject some level of doubt into the allegations that that survivor or that person or human rights groups or journalists or governments may accuse them of.”
One prisoner, Kyaw, said he was tortured for days and freed only after signing a statement that he had never been tortured at all.
Kyaw’s hell began when the military surrounded his house and detained him for the second time since February for his pro-democracy activism. As the soldiers beat him and hauled him away with five of his friends, his mother wet her pants and fainted.
His usually stoic father began to cry. Kyaw knew what he was thinking: “There goes my son. He’s going to die.”
All the way to the interrogation center in Yangon, soldiers ordered them to keep their heads bowed and beat them with their guns. When Kyaw’s 16-year-old friend became dizzy and lifted his chin, a soldier bashed his head with a gun until he bled.
At the interrogation center, the soldiers handcuffed them, chained them together and put bags over their heads. His first night was a blur of beatings. “Rest well tonight,” one soldier told him.
The next morning, none of the detainees could open their swollen mouths enough to eat their rice. It was the only food Kyaw would receive for four days. He drank from the toilet.
His interrogation began around 11 a.m. and lasted until 2 or 3 a.m. The soldiers poked his thighs with a knife. They zapped him with a taser. They rolled iron rods up and down his legs.
They learned he could not swim, and kicked him into a lake, blinded by the bag on his head and paralyzed by handcuffs that bound his hands behind him. He thrashed and flailed, sinking ever deeper. They eventually yanked him out.
Their questions were monotonous. “Who are you and what are you up to?” they demanded. “I really didn’t do anything,” he replied. “I know nothing.”
Another 100 detainees arrived at the center while he was there, some of their faces so disfigured from beatings they no longer looked human. A few could not walk. One detainee told Kyaw that soldiers had raped his daughter and her sister-in-law in front of him.
On the fourth day, Kyaw’s family called on a friend with military connections to intervene, and the torture stopped. But he was still held for three weeks until the tell-tale swelling in his face went down.
Kyaw was finally released after he paid military officials around a thousand dollars. The officials then made him sign a statement saying that the military had never asked for money or tortured anyone. The statement also warned that if he protested again, he could be imprisoned for up to 40 years.
Kyaw does not know if his friends are still alive. But against his mother’s pleas, he has vowed to continue his activism.
“I told my mother that democracy is something we have to fight for,” he says. “It won’t come to our doorsteps just by itself.”
_____
The soldiers forced the 16-year-old girl to her knees, then ordered her to remove the mask meant to protect her from COVID.
“You are not afraid of death – that’s why you are here,” one soldier sneered. “Don’t pretend like you are scared of the virus.”
Of the prisoners interviewed by the AP, a dozen were women and children, most of whom were abused. While the men faced more severe physical torture, the women were more often psychologically tortured, especially with the threat of rape.
Sixteen-year-old Su remembers kneeling with her hands in the air as a soldier warned, “Get ready for your turn.” She remembers walking between two rows of soldiers while they taunted, “Keep your strength for tomorrow.”
Su pleaded in vain for soldiers to help one of her fellow inmates, a girl even younger than she, whose leg was broken during her arrest. The soldiers refused to let the girl call her family.
Another girl, around 13, cried constantly and fainted at least six times the day they were arrested. Rather than call a doctor, officers sprayed the child with water.
Prison officials warned Su never to speak of what happened inside to people on the outside. “They said, ‘We really are nice to you. Tell the people the good things about us,’” Su says. “What good things?”
Su had never stayed apart from her parents before. Now she was barred from even calling them, and had no idea that both her grandfathers had died.
“As soon as I was released, I had to take sleeping pills for nearly three months,” Su says. “I cried every day.
Inside Shwe Pyi Thar interrogation center in Yangon, the women grew to dread the night, when the soldiers got drunk and came to their cell.
“You all know where you are, right?” the soldiers told them. “We can rape and kill you here.”
The women had good reason to be frightened. The military has long used rape as a weapon of war, particularly in the ethnic regions. During its violent crackdown on the country’s Rohingya Muslim population in 2017, the military methodically raped scores of women and girls.
“Even if they did not rape us physically, I felt like all of us were verbally raped almost every day because we had to listen to their threats every night,” says Cho, an activist detained along with her husband.
Another young woman recalls her four months in a southwest Myanmar prison, and the constant fear of torture and rape.
“I was locked in the cell and they could call me out at any time,” she says.
A teacher, held for eight days at an interrogation center, learned to fear the sound of the cell door.
“Our thoughts ran wild, like: ‘Are they coming to take me? Or are they coming to take her?’” the teacher says. “When we saw them blindfolding someone, we were extremely anxious because that could be me.”
Not every woman was spared from violence. Cho’s cellmate was beaten so severely with a bamboo stick that she could not sit or sleep on her back for five days. And though Cho was not subjected to physical assaults at Shwe Pyi Thar, officers at Insein prison struck her on the back of her neck and forced her into a stress position.
When she objected, they beat her back and shoulders, then banished her to solitary confinement for two weeks.
For another woman, Myat, the beatings began the moment the soldiers burst into her home, smashing the butts of their guns into her chest and shoving a rifle into her mouth. As they arrested her and her friends, she heard one of them say: “Shoot them if they try to run.” She cries while recounting her ordeal.
One 17-year-old boy endured days of beatings, the skin on his head splitting open from the force of the blows. As one interrogator punched him, another stitched his head wound with a sewing needle. They gave him no pain medication, telling him the brutal treatment was all that he was worth. His body was drenched in blood.
After three days, he says, they took him to the jungle and dumped him in a hole in the ground, burying him up to his neck. Then they threatened to kill him with a shovel.
“If they ever tried to arrest me again, I wouldn’t let them,” he says. “I would commit suicide.”
___
Back inside the rural town hall, the young man ached for his mother as his night passed in a haze of pain. The next morning, he and his friend were sent to prison.
His small cell was home to 33 people. Every inch of floor was claimed, so he lay next to the lone squat toilet.
An inmate gently cleaned the blood from the young man’s eyes. When he looked at his friend’s battered face, he began to cry.
After two days, his family paid to get him out of prison. He and his friend were forced to sign statements saying they had participated in a demonstration and would now obey the military’s rules.
At home, his mother took one look at him and wept. For a month afterward, his legs and hands shook constantly. Even today, his right shoulder — stomped on by a soldier — won’t move properly.
He is constantly on edge. Two months after his release, he realized he was being followed by soldiers. When the sun goes down, he stays inside.
“After they caught us, I know their hearts and their minds were not like the people’s, not like us,” he says. “They are monsters.”
___
Gelineau reported from Sydney. Associated Press journalist Sam McNeil in Beijing contributed to this report.
ADVERTISEMENT
AP · by VICTORIA MILKO and KRISTEN GELINEAU · October 28, 2021
5. Cultivating Intellectual Capital – Linking Deterrence Practitioner to Academician
Excepts:
Unfortunately, the number of individuals with extensive experience as academicians and in senior deterrence community positions is not large. If one were to draw a venn diagram of each community, I suspect those with significant experience in both worlds would be relatively small. The late Dr. James Schlesinger, a featured speaker at one of Strategic Command’s past annual deterrence conferences, is a good example of this relatively small group. He taught at the University of Virginia and worked in a national security-oriented NGO, but also served as Secretary of Defense, Director of the CIA, and Secretary of Energy.
Mutual engagement certainly can be fruitful, but it is likely to be easier when both communities appreciate the challenges each side faces in the process. I have had the honor of serving extensively in both communities over the past 43 years. While my experience laboring in both communities is nothing comparable to that of James Schlesinger’s, it has taught me just how different they are, and that a consequence of limited shared experience is limited mutual understanding. If we consciously seek to mitigate the effects of their differences, they need not be an unbeatable barrier to mutually useful engagement. That mitigation, however, will not happen without conscious efforts.
Allow me to illustrate with a real-world example how the interaction of these two different cultures can lead to questionable results. There are many such examples, but I’ll mention just one here. I’ll then offer a few suggestions as to how we might take steps to bridge the gap.
...
Keith B. Payne, Cultivating Intellectual Capital – Linking Deterrence Practitioner to Academician, No. 506, October 26, 2021 – Nipp
Cultivating Intellectual Capital – Linking Deterrence Practitioner to Academician
Dr. Keith B. Payne
Dr. Keith B. Payne is a co-founder of the National Institute for Public Policy, professor emeritus and former Department Head of the Graduate School of Defense and Strategic Studies at Missouri State University, and a former deputy assistant secretary of defense.
I would like to thank General Weidner and Strategic Command for inviting me to participate here today, and General Evans for your kind introduction.
I have long believed that those in government responsible for deterrence and those in academia have much to offer each other. I would like to focus my brief remarks directly on two of our assigned questions in this regard:
First, what might be the challenges to the academic’s collaboration with what I will refer to as the official deterrence community, and how might we overcome those challenges?
And, second, what practical measures would make collaboration with the deterrence community of value to the academic?
I should start by noting that, since the beginning of the nuclear age, there has been considerable de facto collaboration between the deterrence and academic communities. Collaboration in the development of deterrence policy is not new.
For example, since the beginning of the Cold War, the broad outlines of U.S. nuclear deterrence policy have followed from the brilliant work of a very small number of academics, notably including: Bernard Brodie; Alexander George; Colin Gray; Michael Howard; Robert Jervis; Herman Kahn; James Schlesinger; Thomas Schelling; Kenneth Waltz, and Albert Wohlstetter.
More recently, an even smaller number of academics has again led the rethinking of Cold War approaches to deterrence to fit the great changes in the threat environment described earlier today by ADM Richard.
In the other direction, members of the national security community have produced outstanding works used in university courses. For example, I have recommended ADM. J.C. Wylie’s classic text, Military Strategy, A Theory of Power Control and ADM Rich Mies’ published work on deterrence to graduate students.
One could be forgiven for thinking that the engagement of these two communities would require little deconfliction. After all, we work on the same general subject matter and typically speak the same language.
However, let me suggest that it is critical to recognize that these two communities work in very different contexts, have different professional cultures, different modes of operation, different measures of professional merit, different professional languages, different goals, and very different measures of success.
For example, academics ideally educate each new generation of students and push the boundaries of conventional thinking, offering hypotheses for the further accumulation of knowledge. This is a never-settled process, as new ideas are put forward, taken apart, deconstructed, demolished, and occasionally reaffirmed over time. It is, and is meant to be, rough and tumble intellectually. Every nuance is open to question in this remarkably decentralized process. It is an intellectual free-for-all, governed by little more than generally shared norms of process integrity.
Before I became a university department head in 2005, a dean at Harvard explained in this regard that a university department is like a solar system without a sun. There is no final authority that adjudicates among conflicting hypotheses. I soon learned the enduring truth of that observation.
Professional success for the academic in terms of earning tenure often is determined by the level and visibility of one’s participation in this rough and tumble process, measured largely by the number of publications and conference appearances in academically-accepted venues.
The development of U.S. deterrence policy and practice is a wholly different matter altogether. It is not a forum for testing hypotheses and building knowledge, per se. The deterrence community’s goal is much more directed and the process much more structured: it is responsible for the policies and practices needed to deter external threats with available resources. There is a well-defined hierarchy of executive authority that must end discussion by deciding what effectively is the correct policy and practice, i.e., civilian political leaders who may or may not be knowledgeable about the subject are responsible for deciding what the correct answers are. This deterrence community must carry out its task under a bright and often critical public spotlight, but with classified information that typically cannot be shared and in the context of real time constraints. This process is foreign to that of the academy and often is the subject of commentary that is largely ignorant of it in important detail.
Major deterrence policy developments that guide practice happen occasionally, but often only after a contentious process that typically is compelled by shifting external threats and/or national political transitions. Perhaps most importantly, decisions about the direction of deterrence policy and practice carry enormous potential real-world regrets for getting it wrong, while spectacular deterrence success is marked by nothing much appearing to happen.
The academic searching for knowledge and the national security community seeking practical answers should be a natural match. But, it is hard to imagine more different professional contexts. My 43 years of experience in each community tells me that if these differences are not seriously taken into account, collaboration may be limited and mutually frustrating.
There are numerous examples of how the mutual lack of understanding can lead to problematic engagement. An ongoing example revolves around their generally differing perspectives about the foreseeable feasibility of cooperative global nuclear disarmament.
Yale professor Paul Bracken observed about the campaign for nuclear disarmament: “All were on board to oppose nuclear arms… Academics, think tanks and intellectuals quickly jumped on the bandwagon. For a time, it really looked like there was going to be an antinuclear turn in U.S. strategy.”
Yet, the late Oxford Professor Sir Michael Howard—a person with considerable experience in national security and academia—commented on how the different professional contexts can shape views on the subject of nuclear disarmament:
Nobody who has been brought into contact with that inner group of civil and military specialists who are responsible for the security of this country can fail to notice the almost physical pressure exerted on them by that responsibility, affecting their processes of thought (and often their manner of speech) in much the same way as the movements of a man are affected when he tries to walk in water….they share a common skepticism as to the possibility of disarmament, or indeed of the creation of any effective international authority to whom they can turn over any portion of their responsibilities.
Sir Michael then added his observation that, “the impatient onlookers, who have never themselves been plunged into that element, cannot understand why.”
If one has lived and worked inside both communities—if one has dual citizenship so-to-speak—it is easier to truly understand: 1) how different these two communities are; 2) how these differences can impede useful close collaboration; and, 3) perhaps, how to help mitigate them.
Unfortunately, the number of individuals with extensive experience as academicians and in senior deterrence community positions is not large. If one were to draw a venn diagram of each community, I suspect those with significant experience in both worlds would be relatively small. The late Dr. James Schlesinger, a featured speaker at one of Strategic Command’s past annual deterrence conferences, is a good example of this relatively small group. He taught at the University of Virginia and worked in a national security-oriented NGO, but also served as Secretary of Defense, Director of the CIA, and Secretary of Energy.
Mutual engagement certainly can be fruitful, but it is likely to be easier when both communities appreciate the challenges each side faces in the process. I have had the honor of serving extensively in both communities over the past 43 years. While my experience laboring in both communities is nothing comparable to that of James Schlesinger’s, it has taught me just how different they are, and that a consequence of limited shared experience is limited mutual understanding. If we consciously seek to mitigate the effects of their differences, they need not be an unbeatable barrier to mutually useful engagement. That mitigation, however, will not happen without conscious efforts.
Allow me to illustrate with a real-world example how the interaction of these two different cultures can lead to questionable results. There are many such examples, but I’ll mention just one here. I’ll then offer a few suggestions as to how we might take steps to bridge the gap.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a key question the deterrence community faced was: why does Soviet nuclear doctrine appear to be so different from that of the United States? The answer to this question held serious real-world policy implications.
A prominent academic answer to that question was called “Convergence Theory.” It suggested, in short, that Soviet nuclear doctrine was very different because the pertinent Soviet technology lagged that of the United States. But, as that technology gap narrowed, Soviet nuclear doctrine would converge with the balance of terror ideas popular in the United States as these were the only option rational leaders would pursue—hence the name “Convergence Theory.” The heart of this hypothesis was that differences in U.S. and Soviet doctrine were temporary and could be traced to differences in technology—not that rational leaders could otherwise hold fundamentally different views about nuclear weapons. Soviet doctrine would converge with that of the United States when technology permitted as a common rationality had its effect. This convergence theory both reflected and reinforced what has been called mirror-imaging in U.S. deterrence policy—the presumption that all rational thought regarding nuclear doctrine must ultimately follow the course set by that of United States.
Mirror imaging and this related notion of a technologically determined convergence were perfectly coherent possibilities and were offered up as an academic hypothesis open to the usual intellectual back and forth of the academy. Some in authority responsible for U.S. deterrence, however, effectively embraced this hypothesis and adopted it as a settled truth, which in turn led to U.S. government policy positions which were highly resistant to change—after all, it had been declared a truth by those in authority. It led many in the United States to see the U.S. strategic mission as one of tutoring Moscow’s leaders on correct thinking about nuclear weapons.
For example, Paul Warnke, Director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency during the Cold War, famously remarked that “primitive” Soviet nuclear doctrine indicated the need for U.S. tutorials: “This kind of [Soviet] thinking is on a level of abstraction which is unrealistic. It seems to me that instead of talking in these terms, which would indulge what I regard as the primitive aspects of Soviet nuclear doctrine, we ought to be trying to educate them into the real world of strategic nuclear weapons….” This was simply a matter of showing Soviet leaders the way to proper thinking.
Within a decade, however, mirror-imaging and the expectation of convergence were recognized widely as fallacious and contrary to deterrence best practice. The unavoidable facts of Soviet doctrinal and force development made it abundantly clear that Moscow’s thinking was not a reflection of primitive technology and thinking; it was instead a reflection of a deeply-embedded Russian strategic culture far different from that of the United States. This reality was very different than that suggested by mirror imaging and the “Convergence Theory,” and that difference held enormous policy implications. Yet, once embraced by those in authority over the formulation of deterrence policy, mirror imaging and the expectation of doctrinal convergence were highly-resistant to change. Indeed, change came only after major threat developments compelled new thinking.
This case reflected the differences in the professional cultures of the academy and the deterrence policy community. A better understanding of academia and its intentional lack of discipline in the airing of ideas would have suggested greater caution in adopting so readily a particular academic hypothesis as the basis for policy—no matter how reassuring it was.
That said, I don’t know of a better avenue to greater mutual understanding than for academics to have serious professional experience in the deterrence community, and for members of the deterrence community to have equally serious experience in the academy. There are potential steps that can help contribute to this goal.
One example is greater use of an existing program, the 1970 Intergovernmental Personnel Act, or IPA. It is an excellent vehicle that allows university academics to work for a period ranging from weeks to 2 years inside the official deterrence world, including in DoD, without separating from their academic homes. I know from direct personal experience that for the academic this work is a far cry from the scholarly research and writing expedition that many associate with a sabbatical. But it can give the academic invaluable insight into the realities of the deterrence community.
I would be remiss if I did not identify some of the potential challenges that academics, particularly younger faculty members, face when working in close collaboration with the official deterrence community. Addressing these possible challenges could help make collaboration of greater value and more attractive.
One example of these challenges is that working within the deterrence community, even temporarily, can include complications for and restrictions on writing for external publication—which is the traditional route to academic tenure. The associated restrictions might seem a small concern if you are not seeking tenure, but they can be decisive to how a young academic looks on the prospect of working within the official deterrence community. I am not overstating this situation: a brilliant young PhD in the field recently told me that for this very reason they turned down a plumb position in OSD to work in this specific topic area.
In particular, holding a security clearance is a great privilege, and may be necessary to work within the official deterrence community. But for the academic who typically must be free to write for external, academically-recognized publications to earn tenure, it can be a mixed blessing.
In addition, for the academic who chooses to spend serious professional time in a military or other defense-oriented context, the possibility of being viewed by some senior faculty member as part of the so-called military-industrial-complex—rightly or wrongly—may not be an advantage for the younger faculty member who aspires to tenure. As a senior, highly-regarded academic recently observed, “Being known as a [political] conservative is the kiss of death in academia.” Working in or for the defense establishment can type-cast an academic in this regard, whether or not the type-casting bears any resemblance to reality. Those who already enjoy tenure may not be overly concerned about this possibility, but for some younger academics, it can be a real impediment.
To make the academic’s collaboration with the practitioner more valuable, the experience needs to contribute to the academic’s professional success, not add potential challenges. There are many steps that may help the academic in this regard, such as focusing on work that does not require a security clearance and is available for open publication, and working in an institutional context other than DoD (although that may reduce the practical value of the experience). There are other possible steps to consider, but I must conclude my opening remarks here to fit within my allotted time.
Thank you very much for your attention, I look forward to our question and answer session.
This Information Series draws from Dr. Keith B. Payne, Prepared Remarks, United States Strategic Command Deterrence Symposium, September 13, 2021, Panel No. 1
The National Institute for Public Policy’s Information Series is a periodic publication focusing on contemporary strategic issues affecting U.S. foreign and defense policy. It is a forum for promoting critical thinking on the evolving international security environment and how the dynamic geostrategic landscape affects U.S. national security. Contributors are recognized experts in the field of national security. National Institute for Public Policy would like to thank the Sarah Scaife Foundation for its generous support that makes the Information Series possible.
The views in this Information Series are those of the author and should not be construed as official U.S. Government policy, the official policy of the National Institute for Public Policy or any of its sponsors. For additional information about this publication or other publications by the National Institute Press, contact: Editor, National Institute Press, 9302 Lee Highway, Suite 750 |Fairfax, VA 22031 | (703) 293- 9181 |www.nipp.org. For access to previous issues of the National Institute Press Information Series, please visit http://www.nipp.org/national-institutepress/information-series/.
© National Institute Press, 2021
6. Blinken says he ordered reviews of State Dept's evacuation efforts out of Afghanistan
Excerpts:
Blinken did not give details about what precise steps of the evacuation and relocation would be reviewed.
"Now we owe it to ourselves, to our Afghan friends and partners, and to the future State Department employees who might find themselves facing a similar challenge one day to capture all that we learned, to study it, to apply it, to preserve it in a way that it enhances our future planning and helps us prepare better for future contingencies," he said.
Blinken says he ordered reviews of State Dept's evacuation efforts out of Afghanistan
WASHINGTON, Oct 27 (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken confirmed on Wednesday that he has ordered a series of internal reviews of the State Department's planning and execution of the U.S. evacuation of Afghanistan and the relocation efforts, operations that were widely criticized as chaotic.
The United States' two decades-long occupation of Afghanistan culminated in a hastily organized airlift in August in which more than 124,000 civilians including Americans, Afghans and others were evacuated as the Taliban took over. But thousands of other U.S.-allied Afghans at risk of Taliban persecution were left behind.
In a speech unveiling new steps to modernize the State Department, Blinken praised the evacuation operation but also said the agency needs to learn from this experience and do better if a similar scenario presents itself in the future.
"There are many things that now, looking back, we can and should ask, 'Could we have done things differently?' 'Could we have taken that step differently?' 'Should we have tried that idea first?' 'Could we have gotten to that decision more quickly?'," Blinken said in the speech at the Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, Virginia, attended by lawmakers, diplomats and others.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks on the death of former secretary of state Colin Powell in the Treaty Room of the State Department in Washington, D.C., U.S. October 18, 2021. Mandel Ngan/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo
Reuters and other media outlets reported last week that the State Department's inspector general will review the end of the Biden administration's diplomatic operations in Afghanistan, including the emergency evacuation of the U.S. embassy in Kabul.
The department's acting inspector general will also look into its Special Immigrant Visa program, the processing of Afghans for admission as refugees, and their resettlement in the United States.
Blinken did not give details about what precise steps of the evacuation and relocation would be reviewed.
"Now we owe it to ourselves, to our Afghan friends and partners, and to the future State Department employees who might find themselves facing a similar challenge one day to capture all that we learned, to study it, to apply it, to preserve it in a way that it enhances our future planning and helps us prepare better for future contingencies," he said.
Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk in Washington Editing by Matthew Lewis
7. The Consequential Chairman
That is quite a subtitle.
A key point for discussion:
The power that Powell wielded as chairman raises a question that has not been sufficiently answered in the three decades since he retired: Can a senior military leader have the extraordinary political skill that Powell mastered but not overstep by using his acumen to advance the military’s interests over civilian preferences? One answer to this question may be that the country simply hasn’t yet seen the likes of another Powell, so it is hard to be sure.
...
Still, every chairman since Powell has enjoyed more influence within the interagency process than any Cold War chairman experienced because of the toolkit Powell assembled and left to his successors. Although none has matched him in political clout, each has been asked at some point to speak to the moment in a way that Powell frequently did. Aspects of Powell’s record can be criticized, but one critique that cannot be leveled at him is that he did not matter. He mattered as much as any chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff before or since, and today’s generation of military leaders continue to operate if not in his shadow, then at least in his debt.
The Consequential Chairman
How Colin Powell Changed Civil-Military Relations
October 27, 2021
Since Colin Powell passed away earlier this month, obituaries and other considerations of his life have tended to focus on two aspects of his legacy, one generally praised and the other generally criticized. Most commentators have hailed Powell as a pathbreaker in race relations: the first African American to be national security adviser, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and secretary of state. In these roles, Powell inspired countless people at home and around the world.
Most commentators have also noted his role as a reluctant but unfortunately effective salesman for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Despite his misgivings about some aspects of the policy, Powell accepted the consensus of most of the world’s intelligence services about the nature of Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, and he mostly agreed with his colleagues in the George W. Bush administration that they represented a threat to be confronted. When he made the case for this confrontation in a memorable speech before the United Nations, and then subsequently learned that most of the intelligence assessments on which that case rested were faulty, it left what he called “a blot” on his record that even he predicted would end up being “item number one” in his obituary.
Yet few commentators have emphasized a third important aspect of his legacy: his role in setting the tone for post–Cold War civil-military relations in the United States. As with the rest of his legacy, it is a record of considerable consequence: much to be praised and some to be viewed more ambivalently.
AN OFFICER AND AN OPERATOR
Powell headed the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993, and he was the most consequential chairman of the modern era. He was the first to make full use of the power and prestige that the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 had bestowed upon the position. He converted the Joint Staff from a backwater that was largely ignored during the interservice rivalry of Cold War defense policymaking into a dominant player in the national security interagency process. And he relied on the superior staff work that this organization could produce—as well as his own mastery of bureaucratic politics—to eclipse all other military voices and quite a few civilian voices, too. No chairman before or since has had quite the amount of political clout Powell enjoyed at his apex. He was the most popular military officer of his era and might have been the first general since Dwight Eisenhower to win the presidency, had he pursued that office in 1996—as many in the Clinton administration feared he would.
Powell helped the country transition from the Cold War to a more confusing era without committing the mistakes that previous generations made by demobilizing and withdrawing from global commitments too extensively. He also helped lead a decisive military victory over Iraq during the Gulf War of 1990–91, an operation that many look back on wistfully for its restraint and swift execution. As the first and so far only African American to reach the topmost military rank, he personified a renewal of military prestige and inspired the rank and file. He played a critical role in helping rebuild public confidence in the military after the trauma of the Vietnam War and the end of the draft.
Yet he was also a controversial figure who did not hesitate to use his political acumen to greatly enhance the military’s voice in debates over policy—and constrain the choices of civilian leaders. Powell’s efforts at shaping the post–Cold War defense drawdown centered on what he called “the Base Force,” a defense planning construct that was designed deliberately to head off what he knew to be a strong desire among many in Congress and within the Clinton administration to make deep cuts in the Pentagon’s budget. Whatever one might think of Powell’s preferred policy, there is no denying that he sought to hem in his civilian superiors and prevent them from making choices they were tempted to make.
No chairman before or since has had quite the amount of political clout Powell enjoyed at his apex.
Similarly, Powell and the service chiefs during his chairmanship opposed the changes that President Bill Clinton proposed to allow gays and lesbians to serve in the military, resulting in the “don’t ask, don’t tell” compromise that stood from 1993 until its repeal in 2011. During an interview in 2010, Clinton claimed that the DADT policy Powell had “sold” him was very different from what ended up being implemented, making the situation for gays and lesbians in the military “worse than it had been before.” In justifying DADT, both Clinton and Powell cited congressional support for an outright ban on gays, but it is hard not to see Powell’s opposition to them serving openly as a pivotal factor. In 2009, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, stated that the main reason he supported DADT was that Powell strongly recommended it.
Powell was also influential in shaping the debate over the use of force, which became increasingly important as the so-called Vietnam syndrome receded and the end of the Cold War opened the door to more U.S. military engagements. For many scholars of civil-military relations, Powell’s op-ed in The New York Times titled “Why Generals Get Nervous,” published less than four weeks before the 1992 presidential election, remains a textbook example of the ways that a military leader can get caught in the crossfire of a political campaign. In the op-ed, Powell outlined his opposition to Clinton’s proposed uses of the military in Bosnia. He then reiterated his preferred strategy of military restraint in a Foreign Affairs article that ran just prior to Clinton’s inauguration. His opposition once again proved critical in shaping the policies that were eventually adopted, prompting one former Clinton aide to note, “So long as Powell didn’t want to bomb, we weren’t going to bomb.” Powell defended his op-ed on the grounds that it had been cleared by the White House while George H. W. Bush was still president and thus still Powell’s civilian commander in chief. But many civil-military specialists have flagged it as the kind of political engagement that the military should avoid, especially during a contentious partisan campaign.
The ideas he put forward in his Foreign Affairs article, as well as in the 1992 National Military Strategy and later in his autobiography, My American Journey, became known as “the Powell Doctrine.” The doctrine rests primarily on a strict test for determining whether military action is the correct course: it must have a clear political objective, be undertaken only if the national interest is at stake, always be a last resort—and, once initiated, employ decisive force.
Critics argue that these conditions amount to an unrealistic ideal. The real problem with the Powell Doctrine, however, isn’t its impractical checklist but the fact that it was offered by a general as a way to constrain civilian leaders. As we recently argued in these pages, control of the armed forces should not be seen as a binary condition but should be measured in degrees. The Powell Doctrine demonstrates how military judgment—especially when broadcast to the public and not provided to policymakers behind closed doors—can limit and ultimately degrade civilian control.
ONE OF A KIND?
The power that Powell wielded as chairman raises a question that has not been sufficiently answered in the three decades since he retired: Can a senior military leader have the extraordinary political skill that Powell mastered but not overstep by using his acumen to advance the military’s interests over civilian preferences? One answer to this question may be that the country simply hasn’t yet seen the likes of another Powell, so it is hard to be sure.
In many ways, Powell’s military career was an anomaly and one that his successors as chairman did not emulate. Powell spent 19 of his final 24 years in uniform in Washington, D.C. His military career path, which included numerous command tours cut short in order to position him for senior positions inside the Beltway, would be unheard of in today’s U.S. Army, which incentivizes service at the tactical level and in which assignments in Washington are viewed with suspicion. As today’s three- and four-star generals watch the tumult that has marked the chairmanship of General Mark Milley, many may conclude that avoiding politics at all costs remains infinitely preferable to trying to navigate it. In that regard, Powell remains a figure whom many senior officers idolize but whom few appear willing or able to imitate.
Still, every chairman since Powell has enjoyed more influence within the interagency process than any Cold War chairman experienced because of the toolkit Powell assembled and left to his successors. Although none has matched him in political clout, each has been asked at some point to speak to the moment in a way that Powell frequently did. Aspects of Powell’s record can be criticized, but one critique that cannot be leveled at him is that he did not matter. He mattered as much as any chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff before or since, and today’s generation of military leaders continue to operate if not in his shadow, then at least in his debt.
8. The Latin American element in China’s CPTPP bid
Excerpts:
On those bases, Xi could cultivate a closer relationship with Lopez Obrador by building on his anti-US stance and thus gain a valuable ally. Beijing could find friendly ground in a country that shares a 3145-km border with China’s rival in the new cold war that is unfolding nowadays.
If Biden decides to join the CPTPP, Washington would surely do what it could to make Beijing’s accession difficult. One way of doing this would be to press Canada and Mexico to force China to satisfy more and harder-to-meet requirements. Another would be to invoke the USMCA’s Article 32.10.5, the so called ‘poison pill’ clause, and threaten to walk away from the agreement.
Mexico and Canada signed the CPTPP in March 2018 and the USMCA eight months later. If China were accepted to the CPTPP, neither would be signing a new agreement with a ‘non-market’ economy but simply abiding China’s admission into a multi-country trade agreement of which they happen to be members already.
If the ‘poison pill’ were invoked, then Canada or Mexico would have to agree on exiting the USMCA and promptly sign a bilateral pact with the United States. This seems highly unlikely given the strong trade links among these three countries and the deeply entrenched continental supply chains they share.
The Latin American element in China’s CPTPP bid
Author: Juan J Palacios, University of Guadalajara
China’s bid for membership in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) is a multifaceted move. An overlooked aspect of it is the fact that the CPTPP is the first major free trade agreement established on a trans-Pacific scale and that three of its four members on the eastern side of the Pacific happen to be Latin American countries.
China’s application was presented to the CPTPP Commission the same day that the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia announced AUKUS — a security alliance that unabashedly seeks to bring about a new balance of power in the Pacific.
This was also the rationale for the design of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an agreement predicated on former US president Barack Obama’s statement that ‘the United States is a Pacific power and we are here to stay’. In both cases, the underlying purpose was to counter the strides that China was making to gain military and strategic supremacy in the region.
Although it may take years to materialise, accession to the CPTPP would permit Beijing to be part of a regional arrangement that was originally intended to counter its power in the Pacific. It would also open the possibility for China to fill the power vacuum left by the withdrawal of the United States from the TPP in 2017.
Beijing could profit from the closer economic integration the CTPPP is likely to generate among its member countries which, in the absence of Washington, would probably slide towards China’s economic and political sphere. CPTTP membership would simultaneously enable Beijing to deepen its economic and political ties with the pact’s Latin American members and with Latin America at large.
Those ties were significantly strengthened with the creation of the China–CELAC Forum in July 2014. The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) is an intergovernmental mechanism which was established in 2010 for dialogue and cooperation among the 33 nations of Latin America and the Caribbean.
Membership of the CPTPP would widen the possibilities for China to tap into this market of more than 652 million people and a region rich in natural resources with a myriad of greenfield investment opportunities. It would also provide a huge potential to expand trade links and build supply chains led by Chinese companies.
China’s membership would be beneficial for Latin America as well. China is South America’s top export market and the second for Latin America and the Caribbean as a whole. Among China’s top 100 trading partners, 13 are Latin American and Caribbean countries. Chinese exports to these countries topped US$142 billion in 2020 — 5.5 per cent of China’s total exports.
With the exception of Asia’s main trading destinations, China’s exports to Mexico are larger than those to any other East Asian economy, including Australia. Three of China’s top 25 import-originating countries are Latin American — Brazil, Chile and Mexico.
It can then be expected that Latin American members will welcome China’s incorporation into the CPTPP — in principle, the same could occur if Taiwan is accepted, although in this case Latin American governments might be more cautious so as to not compromise their support for China. Besides the likely economic benefits, the presence of China would counter the weight and influence the US would command should the Biden administration decided to join in and thus bring about a more balanced power play within the pact.
The Latin American country that would give China the warmest welcome is Mexico, especially given the openly anti-US stance Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has adopted since Biden took office, Mexico’s membership in the US–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA) notwithstanding. In fact, visible signs of mutual empathy have been sent from both sides. At the 2021 CELAC summit meeting held in Mexico City on September 18, two world leaders were invited as keynote speakers — Chinese President Xi Jinping (the first to speak) and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. Two days before, Xi had sent a warm congratulatory message to Lopez Obrador to mark the 200th anniversary of Mexico’s independence.
On those bases, Xi could cultivate a closer relationship with Lopez Obrador by building on his anti-US stance and thus gain a valuable ally. Beijing could find friendly ground in a country that shares a 3145-km border with China’s rival in the new cold war that is unfolding nowadays.
If Biden decides to join the CPTPP, Washington would surely do what it could to make Beijing’s accession difficult. One way of doing this would be to press Canada and Mexico to force China to satisfy more and harder-to-meet requirements. Another would be to invoke the USMCA’s Article 32.10.5, the so called ‘poison pill’ clause, and threaten to walk away from the agreement.
Mexico and Canada signed the CPTPP in March 2018 and the USMCA eight months later. If China were accepted to the CPTPP, neither would be signing a new agreement with a ‘non-market’ economy but simply abiding China’s admission into a multi-country trade agreement of which they happen to be members already.
If the ‘poison pill’ were invoked, then Canada or Mexico would have to agree on exiting the USMCA and promptly sign a bilateral pact with the United States. This seems highly unlikely given the strong trade links among these three countries and the deeply entrenched continental supply chains they share.
Juan J Palacios is Professor at the Centre for Strategic Development Studies, University of Guadalajara, and a member of the PAFTAD International Steering Committee.
9. Afghan Refugees Can Be Sponsored by Private Citizens Under New Program
A good sign that the heart of America and Americans remains strong:
Excerpt:
“Americans of all walks of life have expressed strong interest in helping to welcome these individuals,” the State Department said.
Afghan Refugees Can Be Sponsored by Private Citizens Under New Program
State Department will screen applicants as huge backlog overwhelms resettlement agencies
WSJ · by Jessica Donati and Michelle Hackman
“Americans of all walks of life have expressed strong interest in helping to welcome these individuals,” the State Department said.
A huge backlog in processing is putting Afghan families in the difficult position of choosing whether to spend months in camps, often sleeping in tents and with limited access to toilets and showers, or depart after completing their paperwork but before being assigned caseworkers, who help with school enrollment, medical appointments and other needs.
Abdul, a former U.S. Embassy employee, decided to move his family into a bedroom at his brother’s apartment in California while waiting for his health, nutrition and other benefits to kick in. He had spent weeks living on military cots at Fort Pickett, Va., with his wife and three children, including a newborn who arrived during their time at the camp.
“We are starting from zero,” he said. “I don’t have in my hand even a dollar.” The Wall Street Journal agreed to identify him only by his first name.
The evacuation came at a time when the refugee resettlement system, run by the State Department but administered by nine nonprofit organizations, had slashed capacity as U.S. admissions of refugees fell to record lows during the Trump administration. These groups were in the process of rebuilding staff and relationships when Afghanistan suddenly collapsed.
Veterans and other advocates for Afghan refugees have expressed a desire to step in to help ease the strain on the resettlement system, but have been frustrated by the lack of information about how to help or what is needed. This is also contributing to fear and stigma about the refugees, according to veterans in rural communities.
Josh Thiel, a former special operations commander in Afghanistan, lives in Indiana where thousands of Afghans are being housed at Camp Atterbury. He tried to set up a group with childhood friends to find apartments for Afghan families, but was unable to learn who needed help and when. He plans to look into the Sponsor Circles Program.
“They have sweated, worked and in some cases bled for the idea of liberty far more than most of us,” he said.
The Biden administration had been planning to launch a private refugee sponsorship program since it took office, and the idea was included in an executive order issued by President Biden in February.
The Community Sponsorship Hub, the nonprofit set up to work with the government, quickly shifted its mission in August as the mass evacuation of Afghan refugees from Kabul was under way.
“By early August, we heard there was a pretty significant gap in the capacity to resettle all the Afghans headed for the U.S.,” said Danielle Grigsby, the group’s director of external affairs. “At the same time, there was an unprecedented outpouring of support from people who wanted to do something tangible.”
As of this week, resettlement organizations have told the administration they have capacity to resettle about 62,000 Afghans, a figure that falls short of the 95,000 the White House has said may need to be resettled in total.
Under normal procedures, refugee resettlement organizations are given $2,275 per person by the State Department to cover initial expenses for 90 days. Under the private sponsorship model, that money would come from donors.
The Afghans enrolled in the private sponsorship program are still eligible for all the other government benefits afforded other refugees, including several months of Medicaid, food assistance and English lessons.
Advocates of a private sponsorship model say it lifts some of the burden from the federal government—private groups sponsoring refugees must raise funds to cover the initial money that goes toward finding refugees homes and paying for other initial expenses.
The criteria to become a sponsor are rigorous. A group of at least five people must submit a detailed plan to the Sponsorship Hub, including which members are responsible for which tasks and how they plan fundraising efforts to cover the $2,275-per-person cost.
Ms. Grigsby acknowledged the stringent criteria might narrow the number of people willing to sponsor refugees, but said her organization has already heard from veterans groups, religious congregations and members of the Vietnamese diaspora—whom the U.S. airlifted from Ho Chi Minh City more than a generation ago—who are all interested in sponsoring Afghan families.
WSJ · by Jessica Donati and Michelle Hackman
10. The Fall and Rise of Techno-Globalism
Excerpts:
Responsible techno-globalism starts at home. The U.S. Congress must pass a comprehensive federal data privacy law to protect Americans from the overreach of technology companies and to demonstrate a commitment to democratic governance in the Internet age. U.S. thinkers and policymakers should take a global view in analyzing the human rights and security implications of surveillance technology produced in both democratic and authoritarian contexts. Officials must seek ways to enjoy the maximum benefits of open scientific exchange and cooperation while protecting important national security interests, for instance by narrowly targeting security-related areas for special scrutiny but actively reaffirming openness in other fields, including for students and researchers with connections to countries of concern such as China.
This urgent domestic work can form a platform for positive international efforts. With a new State Department bureau dedicated to cybersecurity and digital policy issues, the U.S. government should consult and cooperate with other democracies that are experiencing technology-related challenges and social eruptions. It may not always be easy to find consensus. The United States and the European Union, for instance, have long been at loggerheads over data governance, despite their many shared interests and values. But efforts to piece together an international, democratic, rights-respecting coalition on technology governance will fail before they get off the ground if they do not acknowledge—in assessing the challenges and shaping the solutions—that such a project is inherently a global one.
The Fall and Rise of Techno-Globalism
Democracies Should Not Let the Dream of the Open Internet Die
October 28, 2021
Two key words were missing from the statements that followed the inaugural in-person summit in September of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, also known as the Quad, which features Australia, India, Japan, and the United States. The first absent word was predictable: “China.” Although the country’s growing strength is the clear geopolitical impetus for this Indo-Pacific grouping, officials are at pains to portray their efforts as positive and not about containing a rival. The other omitted word, however, was both less obvious and more important. The four governments released a set of joint principles on technology, emphasizing shared values, fair competition, and an “open, accessible, and secure technology ecosystem.” That rhetoric may sound familiar enough from four countries meeting to champion a “free, open, rules-based order.” But for years, each of these governments, almost reflexively, would also have advocated for an even bigger technological vision: a “global” one.
Almost from its inception, idealists saw in the Internet the radical potential to help bridge divides among people. Digital connectivity spread rapidly during the heady post–Cold War period in which globalization surged and democracy, to many, seemed triumphant. Techno-globalism took root as an ideal among diplomats, scholars, and technologists who believed in free and open exchange both as a virtue in and of itself and as a means to spread political and economic freedoms.
The most utopian techno-globalist visions were never realized. Indeed, one reason political leaders embraced a free and open global Internet was to advocate against efforts to wall off parts of the Web: authoritarian governments, especially in China, worked quickly and effectively to erect digital barriers that prevented their citizens from freely accessing the Internet. Even as U.S. diplomats preached openness, the country’s defense and intelligence sectors perceived new risks and used the Internet to advance more parochial national security interests. Today, far short of the leveled playing field many hoped for, access to the Internet and the benefits that flow from it remains highly unequal around the world.
The recent statements and actions at the Quad and beyond suggest that many long-standing supporters of a global Internet now have moved toward a new vision of technological development: a world fractured between competing national or ideological blocs, each relying on its own trusted hardware and software suppliers to defend against malign interference. To abandon the global ideal in favor of clubs of techno-democracies or techno-autocracies, however, is to abandon a crucial recognition of the Internet age—that despite real divides, humanity and its technologies are stubbornly interconnected.
A permanent technological divide is unlikely, costly, and impractical. Moreover, it is undesirable. Without interdependence, rivals will treat each other with less restraint, increasing the likelihood of serious confrontation. The United States already has a special responsibility to think in global terms about the Internet and digital technology; from Facebook to Google, American titans of industry bestride the world. The Internet’s ability to advance human rights may have been hugely exaggerated, but its capacity to do harm has not, and Washington must think and act globally in keeping its technology giants in check.
THE DUSK OF TECHNO-GLOBALISM
Like it or not, the Internet and its associated technologies are global endeavors. Their development—especially in the United States—has depended on human ingenuity, raw materials, and labor sourced from around the world. They have required knowledge sharing, open-source development, and scientific collaboration across borders. Internet technology’s most radical contribution to history—near-instantaneous communications networks that reach a huge portion of humanity—relies upon fiber-optic cables that span borders and traverse the sea floor, a place the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea dubs “the common heritage of mankind.”
For decades, diplomats and intellectuals from the United States and many other countries promoted the ideal of “one internet, one global community, and a common body of knowledge that benefits and unites us all,” as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it in her landmark 2010 Internet freedom speech. The Obama administration’s 2011 International Strategy for Cyberspace warned that “the alternative to global openness and interoperability is a fragmented Internet, where large swaths of the world’s population would be denied access to sophisticated applications and rich content because of a few nations’ political interests.”
A permanent technological divide is unlikely, costly, and impractical.
Until recently, other Quad countries shared the same enthusiasm for this techno-globalist view. Australia’s 2017 international strategy for cyber-engagement is thick with references to a global community, global rule making, and a global online marketplace. Cybersecurity strategies issued by India and Japan in 2013 likewise spoke approvingly of a worldwide Internet community. These governments, in words if not always in deeds, advocated for an open and global technology environment as opposed to the more fenced-off and draconian corners of the Internet in China, Russia, and elsewhere.
A global Internet, however, need not be an ungoverned one. Countries that advanced a techno-globalist vision of the Internet and decried the “cyber-sovereignty” claims of authoritarians still exercised sovereign powers of their own, for instance in restricting child pornography. Some governments in Europe have instituted strong limits on hate speech, such as Germany’s Network Enforcement Act, which requires the swift deletion of illegal speech online. Still, until recently, these countries’ strategies took openness to the world as a starting point and sought to protect against a limited number of specific risks.
The liberal principles of openness, universal human rights, and fair market access still appear in current diplomatic initiatives, such as in the Quad’s statement of principles regarding technology or at the EU-U.S. Trade and Technology Council launched in September. But this rhetoric does not negate a tilt away from techno-globalism. The United States and its allies are increasingly aware of new vulnerabilities emanating from their connections to the world. The Internet’s dangers—such as the potential for cyberattacks and the dissemination of disinformation on a vast scale—have become clearer, inspiring a nationalist turn in several key democratic countries.
RISING BARRIERS
The democratic countries where techno-globalists were once unrestrained in their advocacy of an open Internet now have become preoccupied with technology’s risks. The Internet has allowed hostile state and nonstate actors to traverse borders. Criminal groups have launched ransomware attacks that paralyzed transnational shipping companies and wreaked havoc on global trade. Systemic problems in the digital device market have led to basic security vulnerabilities in everything from connected thermostats to industrial control systems used by power and water utilities. From elections to vaccines, disinformation presents acute domestic and global challenges.
As a result, leaders in India, the United States, and other erstwhile champions of a global Internet have in the last four years sought to impose more control over networks. Mirroring the actions of authoritarian governments, they seek to sever operational and supply chain ties, especially with China and especially in Internet sectors. The perceived threat of infiltration or sabotage is no longer confined to critical infrastructure vendors such as the Chinese firm Huawei but radiates now from other areas, such as social media and the consumer drone industry.
The Internet’s dangers have inspired a nationalist turn in key democratic countries.
Amid this shift, official rhetoric has dropped the “global” in speaking of technology and the Internet. The Trump administration’s 2018 National Cyber Strategy aspired to “promote an open, interoperable, reliable, and secure Internet”—but not necessarily a global one. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s Clean Network initiative called for expelling “untrusted” Chinese applications from U.S. app stores and keeping U.S. data away from Chinese-run cloud systems. The government of Narendra Modi, India’s nationalist prime minister, recently upheld its 2020 ban on dozens of Chinese software applications.
Distrust of the global Internet goes beyond nationalist politicians. A wide range of cybersecurity, data governance, and industrial policy experts identify integration between the United States and China in hardware supply chains and online services as a risk to national security. Questions around the integrity of the 2016 U.S. presidential election sparked broad fears that the Internet could undermine democratic institutions. Many thinkers who recoiled at the Trump administration’s caustic style—for instance, the president’s crude insistence on terms such as the “Wuhan virus” for the novel coronavirus—nevertheless believe China represents a model of digital authoritarianism that must be confronted, or at least isolated. In this darkening light, the global Internet can appear like a naive dream of years past.
Today, many democracies are making messy efforts to build consensus around countering China and other countries identified with digital authoritarianism. The British-led D-10, for example, seeks alternatives to China’s telecommunications firm Huawei in the rollout of 5G technology. In December, the White House will hold a “Summit for Democracy,” which advocates hope will advance a multilateral democratic counterweight to authoritarian technological practices. These efforts are not without merit, but they represent a defensive and reactive response to a deeper problem. At best, these initiatives might allow like-minded countries to regroup and find common ground before turning to face global challenges; just as likely, they could prove to be simply diplomatic busywork as stubborn disagreements persist among democratic governments and interest groups.
SALVAGING THE GLOBAL
A better approach would recognize from the outset that the Internet and the development of technology are invariably global and cannot be easily fractured between competing political blocs. Dividing the Internet at the infrastructure level into two or more independent networks would mean duplicating entire highly complex supply chains, which would be extremely costly, carbon-inefficient, and impractical, if even possible in the first place. Such fissures would also not prevent innovations or indeed threats—including malicious attacks and natural disasters—from crossing political divides.
A stark technological divide is not just unrealistic but also undesirable. Embracing a trend toward politically delineated technological ecosystems will undermine the open ethos that fuels and benefits freer societies—and bolster the top-down, controlling ethos favored by repressive regimes. And if rivals are less interdependent, they have less incentive to refrain from crippling attacks on each other’s critical infrastructures.
A stark technological divide is not just unrealistic but also undesirable.
Only a renewed and pragmatic embrace of techno-globalism will offer comprehensive solutions to the real problems of technological governance. Policymakers must adopt a global vision that avoids the folly of believing that technical systems and industrial supply chains can be totally walled off from countries such as China. They should develop solutions that recognize the value and inevitability of international connection. Moreover, as home to many of the companies and individuals that most influence the experience of the Internet around the world, the United States has a special role it cannot ignore. Firms such as Google and Facebook shape how rights to privacy and free expression are protected—or abused—and their motivations cannot be assumed to be virtuous, nor their stewardship of online communities ethical, simply because they reside in the United States. Cyber-utopians once dreamed of liberation spreading from an Ethernet cable; now Washington must ensure that its companies don’t spread exploitation and insecurity instead.
Responsible techno-globalism starts at home. The U.S. Congress must pass a comprehensive federal data privacy law to protect Americans from the overreach of technology companies and to demonstrate a commitment to democratic governance in the Internet age. U.S. thinkers and policymakers should take a global view in analyzing the human rights and security implications of surveillance technology produced in both democratic and authoritarian contexts. Officials must seek ways to enjoy the maximum benefits of open scientific exchange and cooperation while protecting important national security interests, for instance by narrowly targeting security-related areas for special scrutiny but actively reaffirming openness in other fields, including for students and researchers with connections to countries of concern such as China.
This urgent domestic work can form a platform for positive international efforts. With a new State Department bureau dedicated to cybersecurity and digital policy issues, the U.S. government should consult and cooperate with other democracies that are experiencing technology-related challenges and social eruptions. It may not always be easy to find consensus. The United States and the European Union, for instance, have long been at loggerheads over data governance, despite their many shared interests and values. But efforts to piece together an international, democratic, rights-respecting coalition on technology governance will fail before they get off the ground if they do not acknowledge—in assessing the challenges and shaping the solutions—that such a project is inherently a global one.
11. Requiem for the Afghan “Fabergé Egg” Army: Why Did It Crack So Quickly?
A functional combatant command that would be dedicated to security assistance? An Agency is no longer sufficient (The Defense Security Cooperation Agency)?
Excerpts:
US policymakers, for their part, now have an opportunity to use this crisis to reform how they build partner militaries. From 2001 to 2020, the US government spent over $344 billion in foreign military aid; congressional and military leaders would do well to ask tough questions about security assistance programs.
They should begin by creating a functional combatant command dedicated to security assistance and cooperation with foreign militaries. This would ensure advising is treated as a pillar of influence in an era of strategic competition.
Just as important is developing dedicated advising jobs across the joint force, whereby an individual can rise in the ranks of the advising career field. Rewarding effective advisors, in a job that requires multiple deployments and high levels of linguistic and cultural understanding, should be a career path allowing those who excel to make it to the highest enlisted and officer ranks in the advisor career field.
In certain regions, meanwhile, the United States should institutionalize long-term advise-and-train missions of dedicated military and interagency personnel, with low turnover, ensuring unity of effort, and codifying important interpersonal relationships with host-nation government and military officials.
The next time the United States decides to build a foreign army, success will largely depend on avoiding the issues that afflicted the Afghan military. But in places like Mali and Somalia, armies built by Western forces exhibit many similar tendencies. Without serious reform, the United States will continue building expensive militaries—ones whose viability is only surface deep, contingent on advisors babysitting partner forces indefinitely.
Requiem for the Afghan “Fabergé Egg” Army: Why Did It Crack So Quickly? - Modern War Institute
Over the course of two decades and at a price tag of over $88 billion, the United States and its NATO partners built a modern and well-equipped Afghan military—one that, like a Fabergé egg, boasted a glossy exterior but shattered under stress after US military advisors departed.
Confronted by a smaller, technologically outmatched military, the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) rapidly disintegrated, in most cases avoiding major battles and negotiating their surrenders to Taliban commanders instead of fighting. Within weeks of the US withdrawal, the Taliban had seized the majority of Afghanistan’s provincial capitals with little to no bloodshed.
If the United States ever wants to build a partner military again, it had better learn the lessons of Afghanistan—and overhaul how it plans and implements US security assistance programs.
The Costs of Corruption
In the weeks since the ANDSF collapsed, it has become commonplace to blame corruption. But after interviewing over fifty military advisors since 2017, my research suggests that simply labeling a partner military as corrupt ignores structural and cultural realities, as well as the nuances of patronage politics. For instance, an Ethiopian minister joked with me in 2017 that the “Somalis don’t have a word for corruption,” implying that corruption is normalized into the political logic of any interaction in that society. Afghanistan was no different in 2013, as described by one sociologist. When he asked Americans to define corruption, their answers were typically along the lines of “when you give your cousin a job.” When he went to Afghanistan and asked Afghans the same question, the response was very different: “That’s when you have a job to give and you don’t give it to your cousin.”
In many cases, troops in such settings do not receive the pay or rations promised by their leadership; in response, many exercise their agency and find innovative ways of making up lost pay just to care for their families, as in the case of Afghan military personnel selling their equipment or renting it out to the Taliban. As Mobutu Sese Seko, Congo’s dictator for three decades, said, when explaining why he didn’t pay his soldiers: “You have guns. You don’t need a salary.” In other words, it is difficult to expect a soldier to act professionally in a state that does not treat its own people or army in a professional way.
To obtain jobs and promotions in the ANDSF generally required bribes and personal connections. Even as late as 2020, the ANDSF did not have the basics of personnel systems and the lack of administrative capabilities meant that Afghan personnel received no annual assessment. High performers had no way of moving up the ranks in a meritocratic way because there was no tracking of performance, which merely reinforced the patronage system of the Afghan military. The problem of “ghost troops” in the ANDSF was only finally addressed in 2019 through the use of biometric verification. And the high level of politicization meant the system in general was less focused on military effectiveness and more on patronage. Several Afghan troops I interviewed about how they received promotions and better jobs would respond with the simple hand gesture for money.
The Afghan government, meanwhile, felt threatened by the development of a professional military. When it came to stationing Afghan forces, most were placed in provinces away from their homes and families, as an ad hoc way of coup-proofing against any attempt by Afghan troops to ally with local warlords and militias and turn on Kabul. Moreover, the Afghan leadership in Kabul believed it would be easier to use ANDSF personnel to fight locals with whom they felt no kinship. But this tactic led to high desertion rates of Afghan troops who wanted to be with their families.
What’s more, the average Afghan soldier was not safe at home. An Afghan lieutenant told me that one of his maintenance NCOs had recently quit because the Taliban had made him an “offer” he could not refuse: leave the Afghan army and make twice his military pay maintaining vehicles at the Taliban motor pool, and his family would be allowed to live. Unfortunately, many Afghans did not get this sort of offer. Many US-trained Afghan pilots were assassinated because the Taliban knew it could not mass large forces for conventional assaults without the risk of airstrikes. It should have been no surprise that by 2017, many Afghan military trainees in the United States went AWOL or fled to Canada seeking asylum because they did not feel safe returning to Afghanistan.
Of course, some Afghan units proved highly capable—in particular the Air Force and special operations commando battalions, or kandaks. But over time, the Afghan military became too dependent on these units. Overreliance on the special operations kandaks was becoming obvious by 2016 as the Taliban’s own elite units, known as the Red Group (Sara Khitta), were handily defeating the Afghan army in assaults, including, by 2019, the commandos (even with American airpower at their disposal). The problem with creating a foreign military with an “enclave” of military competence and effectiveness is that it ends up becoming isolated from the politics of the corrupt state—it becomes an appendage of a foreign donor. Thus, while the United States created a highly effective commando force in Afghanistan, none of this translated into the country’s regular security forces, creating an island of competence in a sea of corruption and unprofessionalism.
Unforced Errors?
Corruption wasn’t the only flaw of the Afghan military. The United States and its allies compounded the ANDSF’s problems by imposing an unaffordable, unsustainable model. Congress, for example, planned to supply the Afghan military with 159 UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters instead of providing Mi-17 helicopters, which Afghan pilots and maintainers preferred. In July 2021, the United States and NATO pledged to pay the requisite $4 billion a year to keep Afghan security forces afloat, knowing full well that the government—with just over $2 billion in annual revenues—could not afford to pay the estimated 200,000–350,000 military and security personnel.
When the February 2020 US-Taliban peace deal was signed, the decision required the withdrawal of US and coalition forces from Afghanistan by May 2021. Unfortunately, the biggest oversight was Afghan dependence on contractors. Much of the equipment the United States had supplied, especially aircraft, required foreign contractors to provide most of the logistics and maintenance. But in my interviews with contractors, none of them were willing to work at Afghan bases unless uniformed NATO personnel were protecting them. Additionally, Western advisors would often joke that the fastest way to make money in the Afghan military was by doing logistics: Afghan logisticians would improvise ways to take a cut of any supplies going to a forward operating base. This led Afghan troops to complain they were not getting the weekly protein they had been promised because Afghan logisticians would provide beans instead of meat, or worse, take out a portion of the promised meat and add in dirt so the proper weight was delivered. The problem was so bad in 2020 that any fuels that went through an Afghan intermediary had to be tested for purity to ensure they would not damage military vehicles and aircraft.
Western advisors, meanwhile, often didn’t trust the Afghan troops they were training. Unlike in Iraq, where Iraqi security forces rarely attacked US and coalition advisors, the green-on-blue problem in Afghanistan hobbled US and coalition forces. By 2017, 157 US and coalition personnel and 557 ANDSF members had been killed by insider attacks, driving already risk-averse Western military forces to take extra precautions in their dealings with Afghan troops. For instance, most advisors were assigned “guardian” personnel to act as security overwatch when training the ANDSF. The consequences of this distrust deepened during the COVID-19 pandemic, when virtual advising replaced almost all face-to-face advising. Some advisors admitted to me that they knew their Afghan partners were deviating from rules and procedures and only “behaved” during these video calls.
Better Luck Next Time?
The collapse of the Afghan military should prompt hard questions for scholars and policymakers alike. Current scholarship, for example, argues that a larger security force assistance footprint may facilitate greater partner force effectiveness. Yet two decades of massive presence by US and allied forces in Afghanistan did not translate into a willingness on the part of the Afghan military to fight. Other scholarship, meanwhile, has tied ethnic inequality to higher rates of desertion and weaker battlefield performance. But the ANDSF were more ethnically diverse and inclusive than the all-male, primarily Pashtun Taliban (although initial reports following the group’s takeover of the country suggest that the Taliban won over some minorities in the north). Researchers need to think harder about warfighting cohesiveness and how to train and advise military units in a fragile state with a weak national identity and endemic low morale.
US policymakers, for their part, now have an opportunity to use this crisis to reform how they build partner militaries. From 2001 to 2020, the US government spent over $344 billion in foreign military aid; congressional and military leaders would do well to ask tough questions about security assistance programs.
They should begin by creating a functional combatant command dedicated to security assistance and cooperation with foreign militaries. This would ensure advising is treated as a pillar of influence in an era of strategic competition.
Just as important is developing dedicated advising jobs across the joint force, whereby an individual can rise in the ranks of the advising career field. Rewarding effective advisors, in a job that requires multiple deployments and high levels of linguistic and cultural understanding, should be a career path allowing those who excel to make it to the highest enlisted and officer ranks in the advisor career field.
In certain regions, meanwhile, the United States should institutionalize long-term advise-and-train missions of dedicated military and interagency personnel, with low turnover, ensuring unity of effort, and codifying important interpersonal relationships with host-nation government and military officials.
The next time the United States decides to build a foreign army, success will largely depend on avoiding the issues that afflicted the Afghan military. But in places like Mali and Somalia, armies built by Western forces exhibit many similar tendencies. Without serious reform, the United States will continue building expensive militaries—ones whose viability is only surface deep, contingent on advisors babysitting partner forces indefinitely.
Jahara “FRANKY” Matisek (@JaharaMatisek) is fellows director for the Irregular Warfare Initiative. He is an active duty US Air Force officer and senior pilot serving as associate professor in the Military and Strategic Studies Department, senior fellow for the Homeland Defense Institute at the US Air Force Academy, and a US Department of Defense Minerva-funded researcher studying security assistance programs. This article was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under award number FA9550-20-1-0277.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, Department of the Air Force, or Department of Defense.
12. The United States Left Afghanistan to Prepare for a War It Will Probably Never Fight
This is an excellent new book from Seth Jones.
Excerpts:
Sun Tzu, oft-quoted by Jones, implored his followers to attack weaknesses — to strike where the enemy cannot defend. U.S. adversaries, across the board, have concluded that America’s weaknesses exist in the so-called “gray zone” — the range of activity between “peace” and “war.” And in response, it appears, the United States will continue building its conventional warfighting capabilities, to prepare for a fight that will probably never happen.
Jones’ concluding note, though, is an encouraging one. Russia, China, and Iran will forever be underdogs in global competition with the United States and its allies, because they share governing systems that repress people, and that are fundamentally unattractive. “[T]he principles and objectives that guide US foreign policy,” Jones writes, “should be linked to the country’s democratic values, and US policy should leverage all the instruments of power, such as military, diplomatic, financial, development, intelligence, and ideological.”
America and its allies will always be favorites — as long as they fight the right way.
The United States Left Afghanistan to Prepare for a War It Will Probably Never Fight - War on the Rocks
When the United States prepared to withdraw from Afghanistan during the last days of the Trump administration and first days of Biden’s presidency, the urgency of refocusing on great-power competition was offered as a leading justification. Mark Esper, Trump’s last confirmed secretary of defense, praised troop reductions as helping “free up time, money and manpower,” while Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken later declared, “We have other very important items on our agenda, including the relationship with China, including dealing with everything from climate change to Covid. And that’s where we have to focus our energy and resources.” By the late 2010s, the counter-terrorism interests that had justified wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had without question sunk on America’s list of national security priorities. The “new Cold War” with China, as some have called it, now reigned supreme.
The logic on Afghanistan was linear: Withdrawal from Afghanistan frees up resources, including money and troops, which can be reappropriated to the Pacific theater, to help deter Chinese aggression.
But it was also flawed. The thought process assumes that China (or Russia or Iran) intends to fight the United States and its allies in combat, on a battlefield or at sea, heavyweight military against heavyweight military — and that deployments to Afghanistan and the Indo-Pacific are therefore zero-sum. But the past suggests America’s adversaries do not intend to fight conventional wars. Instead, the future of warfare is irregular, set to be fought on political, covert, psychological, and digital battlefields. And America is critically underprepared — as the Taliban’s takeover in Afghanistan starkly showed.
The United States has often been criticized for strategic mistakes in Afghanistan. But the latest American foreign policy debacle was more accurately down to failures of grand strategy: notably, the notion that Afghanistan, and other so-derided “forever wars,” represent a lost or wasted cause. No, the United States will not “win” the war on terror — it will never “win” a war on terror, because terrorism is a tactic, a means to an end, not the end itself. But the discussion should long ago have shifted from “winning” and “losing” to “managing” and “accepting” such a conflict and commitment. America was not winning in Afghanistan, but it was also not losing.
Should the United States Even Have Left Afghanistan?
The decision to depart Afghanistan, and the ignominious manner in which it played out, have been widely panned by national security experts and politicians. Casualties had plummeted (which, as Richard Haass points out, coincided with an Obama-era decision to end combat operations, not with Trump’s signing of a “peace deal”). The initial mission was being completed successfully — the United States went in to prevent another 9/11, and its presence there contributed to the successful effort to keep the homeland safe from terrorist threats from Afghanistan. And, as a bonus, many Afghan people were enjoying a greater degree of freedom and human rights.
Much of U.S. national security policy today is driven by ensuring sufficient resources for an allegedly coming conflict with China — projected to be over Taiwan or in the South China Sea. But even if America does end up in a conventional war, Afghanistan was beneficial preparation. The war provided an arena to train and conduct real joint operations both between services and with NATO allies. Chinese leaders have publicly discussed their fear of so-called “peace disease” — the fact that China rarely fights wars, and that its soldiers almost uniformly have no real military experience. That is not the case for the United States, and continued engagement for America’s most elite soldiers ensured readiness and fitness should a more serious conflict break out. Presence in Afghanistan also provided forward basing, through installations like Bagram Air Base. And Afghanistan sits in a strategically important location. America’s three leading adversaries blanket Afghanistan from the west (Iran), the north (through former Soviet republics, still heavily influenced by the Kremlin), and the northeast (where China holds a short border).
But more importantly, it provided an arena for the United States to practice the kind of irregular warfare that leading national security scholar Seth G. Jones argues in his latest book, Three Dangerous Men: Russia, China, Iran and the Rise of Irregular Warfare, is likely to define the next generation of competition. In its 20-year Afghan quagmire, the U.S. military repeatedly failed to adapt its enormous capabilities to so-called “low-intensity conflict.” In so doing, it reinforced a crucial message from Vietnam — technological superiority and conventional military power do not always win the day, and the United States is vulnerable to nonstate actors, particularly when domestic energy and morale wane. Refusal to heed that lesson in Afghanistan, and willingness to walk away in defeat, has therefore again highlighted an effective path forward for U.S. adversaries seeking to undermine American influence: inflaming third-world insurgencies which seek to force Western armies into long-term engagements, which they do not seem able to win. The United States should not be surprised to see adversaries return to that playbook repeatedly.
The withdrawal was fundamentally about realigning the military for a conventional confrontation with China. But, as Jones shows, “Chinese military strategy generally aims to avoid a conventional war. China’s goal is to weaken and surpass the United States without fighting.” Withdrawal from Afghanistan to prepare for war with China, then, is further evidence of the American military’s bias towards fighting the war it wants, not the war it likely faces. As one U.S. Army officer wrote after the withdrawal, “If America takes nothing else from its experience there, it should adopt a more realistic outlook on the limits of its massive, conventional military in small, irregular wars.”
Afghanistan’s Future
Afghanistan now is likely to sink back into terrorist sanctuary, with the Taliban providing safe haven for al-Qaeda and affiliated networks. But, as has generally been the case in Afghanistan, its future will be determined in large part by the desires of the next state to intervene. China, Russia, and Iran will all likely see important reasons to engage in Afghanistan — if nothing else, for defensive purposes. When they do, it will more than likely be through irregular means — not tanks and battalions, but information and psychological warfare, intelligence units and covert action, special operations, and economic coercion.
Some, including Jones, have argued that leaving the Afghanistan quagmire for Russia or China to clean up will bog down those countries. But China, in particular, has shown an adeptness at dealing with unsavory actors and situations. Its leaders’ willingness to work with the Taliban — a longstanding challenge for the United States, given that terrorist group’s alliance with al-Qaeda — will help dampen any costs of their engagement in the country. China will also likely aim to infuse Afghanistan with economic investments as part of its Belt and Road Initiative — buying loyalty that it hopes will help allay its counter-terrorism concerns. As one analysis reads, “In Beijing’s view, if China could rebuild and stabilize Afghanistan, the China model would be proved superior and, consequently, China would be proved superior to the United States as a global leader.”
Russia, too, has laid the groundwork for collaborating with the Taliban in Afghanistan — at one point possibly even offering bounties to the Taliban for killing American troops. Moscow has hosted Taliban delegations for peace talks for several years. Russia, of course, sees risks in engaging in Afghanistan. How could it not given the Soviet Union’s own fatal mission there? But those risks will be outweighed by the blow to U.S. credibility and global standing, as Anna Borshchevskaya writes: “As desperate Afghans cling to sides of American airplanes leaving Kabul while Biden told the American public he does not regret his decision, Moscow’s (like Beijing’s) clout can simply grow by default.”
For Iran, perhaps the adversary with the most immediate stake in Afghanistan, U.S. withdrawal presents an enormous propaganda boon: more evidence that the United States cannot survive in the region and ultimately should leave altogether. Afghanistan will likely join the long list of Middle Eastern and Asian countries — already including Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen — where Iran supports and empowers proxy actors in a bid to expand its regional influence.
Each state does have serious national security interests in Afghanistan, chief among them counter-terrorism. Where each side will likely accept relations with the Taliban, rogue terrorist groups like the Islamic State in Afghanistan will be uniformly rejected and pursued. Russia and China both have Muslim enclaves in their countries, which in both countries have sparked jihadist uprisings against the regime. Moscow and Beijing will both carefully watch any safe havens that emerge, to ensure Afghanistan does not become a destination for jihadists from the Caucasus or the largely Uyghur Xinjiang province. Iran, meanwhile, has long warily watched the emergence of Sunni jihadism across its border with Afghanistan (the two nations almost warred in the late 1990s over a Taliban attack). Its “marriage of convenience” with several senior leaders of al-Qaeda throughout the years suggests it will also make peace with the Taliban in exchange for their avoiding Iran in any international terrorist campaigns.
The main drawback to Jones’ argument over the coming predominance of irregular warfare is the classic chicken-or-the-egg question: Which comes first? If the United States did focus on unconventional warfare, might that embolden China, Russia, and Iran to in fact pursue the far more threatening conventional military measures? And will those countries really press forward with their irregular strategies now that the United States is seemingly committing fully to rebuilding its conventional powers? The Afghanistan withdrawal might pose the ultimate test. Should U.S. adversaries embrace America’s withdrawal, and seek to press their own advantages in this critical strategic arena, Jones will be proven right—Afghanistan will become the latest battlefield in their increasingly successful irregular warfare campaigns against the United States. Should they withdraw inward, nervously fencing with the Taliban while focusing on building their own conventional forces to respond to America’s latest moves, he will not.
Flaws in U.S. National Security Strategy
In certain respects, U.S. adversaries’ constant activity has highlighted their own priorities: Russia seeks to undermine U.S. democracy, believing that disharmony in America’s heartland damages Washington’s foreign policy credibility; China unleashes waves of propaganda to defend its conduct in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, seeking to maintain its own credibility and competency on the international stage; and Iran spends inordinate amounts funding proxy groups around the region, seeking to maximize its influence all around the Middle East and South Asia. They all share a desire to undermine the United States without direct military confrontation — which may even lead to collaboration in post-U.S. Afghanistan.
The United States, then, by insisting on continuing to build up its conventional military capabilities, misses the point. It must be willing to fight the enemy where the enemy wishes to fight it. And, as Jones argues, “While conventional warfare—clashes between large military forces—defined twentieth-century power, irregular warfare will increasingly define international politics in the coming decades.” This may include Cold War-style irregular proxy wars, where both sides fight kinetic wars through third parties in third countries. The main counterargument is whether America needs to actively fight in order to better prepare for either irregular or conventional combat, or if it can build its capabilities from afar. But such a mindset would inevitably lead America to step away from its engagements around the world, opening vacuums for adversaries to fill and expand influence and leaving the U.S. without forward basing for responding to national security emergencies.
The most critical flaw in America’s current strategy, however, is its insistence that great-power competition and counter-terrorism are mutually exclusive — they are not. Many of the same irregular warfare initiatives that helped the United States defeat the Soviet Union in the Cold War — and that should now be deployed against China and Russia — also carry counter-terrorism benefits. Public diplomacy and influence operations that promote and celebrate American values do not just counter authoritarian propaganda in third world countries, they undermine the narratives perpetuated by anti-Western extremist groups. Strong international diplomatic and military alliances do not just deter Chinese or Russian aggression, they provide the United States greater reach in its more militaristic counter-terrorism pursuits. Providing economic and governance support to countries around the world does not just align them closer to the United States, it strengthens their capacity to defeat extremism within their own borders. If the United States intends to largely deprioritize counter-terrorism — and, more broadly, irregular warfare — in this “new Cold War,” it will miss out on some of its most effective tools.
Sun Tzu, oft-quoted by Jones, implored his followers to attack weaknesses — to strike where the enemy cannot defend. U.S. adversaries, across the board, have concluded that America’s weaknesses exist in the so-called “gray zone” — the range of activity between “peace” and “war.” And in response, it appears, the United States will continue building its conventional warfighting capabilities, to prepare for a fight that will probably never happen.
Jones’ concluding note, though, is an encouraging one. Russia, China, and Iran will forever be underdogs in global competition with the United States and its allies, because they share governing systems that repress people, and that are fundamentally unattractive. “[T]he principles and objectives that guide US foreign policy,” Jones writes, “should be linked to the country’s democratic values, and US policy should leverage all the instruments of power, such as military, diplomatic, financial, development, intelligence, and ideological.”
America and its allies will always be favorites — as long as they fight the right way.
Jacob Ware is the research associate for counterterrorism at the Council on Foreign Relations, and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, CNN, the Hill, War on the Rocks, and the CTC Sentinel, among other publications.
13. Other People’s Wars: The US Military and the Challenge of Learning from Foreign Conflicts
Excerpts:
Studying foreign conflicts allows the U.S. military to learn about new technologies, their applications, and novel problem sets, facilitating proactive responses to problems before they are encountered in the field.
For example, at the beginning of the 20th century, the U.S. Army was reconsidering the future of the bayonet. Observations from the Russo-Japanese War, where knife fighting was prevalent — especially in night assaults, given the heightened risk of friendly fire — led Army Leaders to determine that the weapon was still relevant, and should be maintained.
Learning from foreign wars can be a challenging endeavor, as it frequently runs counter to deeply-rooted institutional biases. Services’ culture and bureaucratic politics can limit the implementation of lessons learned from other nations’ conflicts. Insufficient access to information can also prevent the Services from fully appreciating the important implications of remote conflicts involving less than peer adversaries.
363. Other People’s Wars: The US Military and the Challenge of Learning from Foreign Conflicts | Mad Scientist Laboratory
[Editor’s Note: Army Mad Scientist is pleased to feature our latest episode of The Convergence podcast, with Brent L. Sterling, Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and author of Other People’s Wars: The US Military and the Challenge of Learning from Foreign Conflicts, discussing how militaries learn (or don’t!) from foreign conflicts, what pitfalls await those trying to learn from historical conflicts, how focusing only on “relevant” observations hampers our creativity in analyzing warfare, and what strategists can do to avoid past mistakes. Enjoy! (Please note that this podcast and several of the embedded links below are best accessed via a non-DoD network due to network priorities for teleworking)]
[If the podcast dashboard is not rendering correctly for you, please click here to listen to the podcast.]
In our interview with Dr. Sterling, we discuss how militaries learn (or don’t!) from foreign conflicts, what pitfalls await those trying to learn from historical conflicts, how focusing only on “relevant” observations hampers our creativity in analyzing warfare, and what strategists can do to avoid past mistakes. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our interview:
In Other People’s Wars, Dr. Sterling provides a longitudinal evaluation spanning the 19th and 20th centuries on what the U.S. military learned from foreign conflicts. Exploring the Crimean, Russo-Japanese, Spanish Civil, and Yom Kippur Wars as use cases, Dr. Sterling identifies how effectively the U.S. assimilated key lessons from each of these conflicts and developed responsive capabilities across doctrine, organization, training and education, materiel, leadership, personnel, facilities, and policy ); drew erroneous conclusions; or failed to act altogether. Importantly, Dr. Sterling compares the success of learning from these wars across the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force.
-
Studying foreign conflicts allows the U.S. military to learn about new technologies, their applications, and novel problem sets, facilitating proactive responses to problems before they are encountered in the field.For example, at the beginning of the 20th century, the U.S. Army was reconsidering the future of the bayonet. Observations from the Russo-Japanese War, where knife fighting was prevalent — especially in night assaults, given the heightened risk of friendly fire — led Army Leaders to determine that the weapon was still relevant, and should be maintained.
-
Learning from foreign wars can be a challenging endeavor, as it frequently runs counter to deeply-rooted institutional biases. Services’ culture and bureaucratic politics can limit the implementation of lessons learned from other nations’ conflicts. Insufficient access to information can also prevent the Services from fully appreciating the important implications of remote conflicts involving less than peer adversaries.
-
The Enemy Gets a Vote –– U.S. Army 37mm M3 AT Gun at Ft. Benning, GA. Continued improvement of German armor, spurred in part by the Condor Legion’s lessons learned during the Spanish Civil War, quickly rendered our primary AT gun ineffective in the Mediterranean and European Theaters of Operation during WWII.
The U.S. military also needs to be mindful that other observers learn from foreign conflicts, too. For example, while the U.S. Army learned of the importance and adopted Anti-Tank (AT) guns from observing combatants during the Spanish Civil War, these weapons were quickly rendered obsolete by what other powers observed in this conflict, largely rendering AT guns ineffective by the advent of WWII. Thus, considering the viewpoint from other observers is critical in preparing for the next war.
- Cooperation with foreign combatants is more important than direct observation when trying to learn from foreign wars. Access to information and contextual perspective can allow for understanding of the conflict without requiring direct U.S. presence.
-
Increased levels of disinformation will make learning and effective decision-making more challenging, especially under the time pressure induced by conflict.
Stay tuned to the Mad Scientist Laboratory for the debut our new The Convergence podcast series entitled “How They Fight.” Our first episode will focus on Russia and feature subject matter experts from CNA, Center for a New American Security, Georgetown University’s Center for Security andEmerging Technology, and the TRADOC G-2 discussing how Russia fights, addressing unmanned and autonomous systems, maneuver warfare, special operations, cyber warfare, information operations, proxy forces, and more!
If you enjoyed this post, check out the following related content:
Insights from the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict in 2020 (Parts 1 and 2)
>>>> REMINDER: Army Mad Scientist Fall / Winter Writing Contest: Crowdsourcing is an effective tool for harvesting ideas, thoughts, and concepts from a wide variety of interested individuals, helping to diversify thought and challenge conventional assumptions. Army Mad Scientist seeks to crowdsource the intellect of the Nation (You!) with our Fall / Winter Writing Contest’s two themes — Back to the Future and Divergence – check out the associated writing prompts in the contest flyer and announcement, then get busy crafting your submissions — entries will be accepted in two formats:
Written essay (no more than 1500 words, please!)
Tweetusing either #MadSciBacktotheFuture or #MadSciDivergence
We will pick a winner from each of these two formats!
Contest Winners will be proclaimed official Mad Scientists and be featured in the Mad Scientist Laboratory. Semi-finalists of merit will also be published!
DEADLINE: All entries are due NLT 11:59 pm Eastern on January 10, 2022!
Any questions? Don’t hesitate to reach out to us — send us an eMail at: madscitradoc@gmail.com
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog post do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Army, Army Cyber Institute, the U.S. Military Academy, Army Futures Command (AFC), or U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC).
14. Why Hamas fights Israel
Excerpts:
Is there a diplomatic solution to Hamas’ conflict with Israel? Mr. Schanzer is doubtful. “Hamas exists to fight Israel,” he concludes. Hamas’ patrons – Qatar and Turkey in addition to the Islamic Republic – “provide funds and assistance for exactly that reason.” He predicts: “War will, unfortunately, come again.”
Might Israelis one day decisively defeat Hamas? It’s possible, but what happens the day after? Most Israelis don’t want the burden of occupying and ruling Gaza. Nor do they want to become the expeditionary force of the PA, which has refused to seriously negotiate with them for years.
Mr. Schanzer concludes that Israelis have no choice but to fight endless wars and endless “wars between wars” against Hamas, against Lebanon-based Hezbollah (which has 150,000 missiles aimed at Israel), and against the Iranian patrons of both. That will change when the lion lies down with the lamb.
Why Hamas fights Israel
A new book sheds light on the wars with Gaza's rulers
OPINION:
In 2005, Israelis conducted a bold experiment. Prevailing wisdom held that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was due to Israel’s “occupation” of two “Palestinian territories.” If that was true, shouldn’t giving Palestinians one of those territories, Gaza, mitigate the conflict?
Negotiations over the other “occupied territory,” the West Bank, could follow, leading to the resolution of the conflict.
Fast forward to last May when Hamas, which rules Gaza, initiated a war with Israel – for the fourth time. Obviously, Israel’s experiment failed.
Equally obvious: Israelis cannot withdraw from the West Bank until they have security guarantees from the Palestinian Authority (PA), which governs that territory. And if that means the Jews of the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem will be denied Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey, so be it.
Will you let me take you on a slightly deeper dive? When Israelis withdrew from Gaza – every soldier, every farmer, every grave – they expected the PA to take control. But Hamas waged and won a civil war against the PA. Since 2007, PA President Mahmoud Abbas has not dared set foot in Gaza.
Turning Gaza into a Mediterranean Singapore was never on Hamas’ to-do list. What has been: digging terrorist tunnels into Israel, sending incendiary balloons to burn Israeli fields and forests, and firing missiles at Israeli villages, towns, and cities. In 2008, 2012, 2014, and again this year, the salvos were large enough to ignite wars.
Israelis try to limit the weapons that Hamas receives. Israel’s enemies call that a “blockade” and pretend it’s the cause – not the result – of Hamas’ terrorism. But food, medicine, and other non-military goods move into Gaza daily from both Israel and Egypt.
Often misunderstood: Although the Israelis gave Gaza to the Palestinians, the Israelis never took Gaza from the Palestinians. The territory was an Ottoman possession until that empire collapsed. It was a British possession until that empire exited. In 1947, the UN proposed the partition of Palestine into two countries: a very small one for Jewish Palestinians, a larger one for Arab Palestinians (who did not yet insist that only they could be called “Palestinians.”)
The Jews agreed. The Arabs did not. In 1948, the Arab states surrounding Palestine launched a war to drive the Jews into the sea.
The Jews fought for their lives and won an independent state in part of their ancient homeland. But Egypt conquered Gaza. And Jordan conquered Judea and Samaria, territories it renamed the West Bank, and from which all Jews were expelled. Neither nation attempted to transform these territories into a Palestinian state.
In 1967, Egypt, Jordan, and other Arab nations launched what became known as the Six-Day War. Its aim was Israel’s extermination. Its failure left Gaza and the West Bank in Israeli hands.
Suppose this brief and factual history is unfamiliar to you. In that case, that’s likely due to the persistent propagation of misinformation and disinformation about Israel – in the media, on campuses, and from such organizations like the UN and Human Rights Watch.
With that in mind, Jonathan Schanzer, my colleague at FDD, has quickly but carefully written the first book on this year’s war. “Gaza Conflict 2021: Hamas, Israel and Eleven Days of War” takes on the task of “explaining that war, with the benefit of hindsight, better than it was explained at the time.”
He examines what really motivated Hamas to attack Israel at this particular juncture and the role of other actors, particularly the Islamic Republic of Iran, which provides Hamas with “financial assistance, as well as training and weapons,” and regards Gaza as part of its expanding empire.
He provides historical context that does not conform with the narratives promulgated by anti-Zionists and antisemites (but I repeat myself).
Mr. Schanzer also tells some good war stories, none better than how, on May 13, the Israeli Defense Forces tweeted a statement indicating that ground troops had invaded Gaza. Western reporters ran with it. The Israeli media, by contrast, sought corroboration.
“Hamas scrambled its commando fighters — many of whom had been trained in Iran — to file into what the Israelis nicknamed the ‘Hamas Metro,’” Mr. Schanzer writes. “The Metro was a labyrinth of tunnels that Hamas had spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars digging. The terrorist group hoped to surprise Israeli troops entering Gaza, with commandos popping up and quickly disappearing back into the Metro’s many openings. Their goal was to kidnap or kill IDF soldiers.”
Israeli ground troops never arrived. Instead, “160 aircraft dropped 450 missiles on 150 targets in northern Gaza during an intense operation. Although the exact number is still debated, the Metro sustained significant damage, and many commando fighters were killed. Israeli tanks, artillery, and infantry units near the Gaza border targeted Hamas rocket teams that emerged to strike Israel.”
Is there a diplomatic solution to Hamas’ conflict with Israel? Mr. Schanzer is doubtful. “Hamas exists to fight Israel,” he concludes. Hamas’ patrons – Qatar and Turkey in addition to the Islamic Republic – “provide funds and assistance for exactly that reason.” He predicts: “War will, unfortunately, come again.”
Might Israelis one day decisively defeat Hamas? It’s possible, but what happens the day after? Most Israelis don’t want the burden of occupying and ruling Gaza. Nor do they want to become the expeditionary force of the PA, which has refused to seriously negotiate with them for years.
Mr. Schanzer concludes that Israelis have no choice but to fight endless wars and endless “wars between wars” against Hamas, against Lebanon-based Hezbollah (which has 150,000 missiles aimed at Israel), and against the Iranian patrons of both. That will change when the lion lies down with the lamb.
• Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and a columnist for the Washington Times.
15. U.N. urgently needs cash in Afghanistan, but struggles for solution
Excerpts:
The United Nations is appealing for countries "to provide humanitarian financial exemptions to allow funds to reach aid organizations in the country," said U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric, without naming names.
U.N. agencies and aid groups are currently using informal money-moving networks - known as hawalas - and small amounts of cash in banks to pay staff salaries and for other smaller scale purchases, Dujarric told Reuters.
"These modalities are not sufficient for the large scale operations requiring cash payments or cash assistance in-country, however," said Dujarric, adding that the United Nations was talking to international financial institutions to find a solution that would expand aid operations.
A key part of U.N. plans to inject money into Afghanistan is by providing cash directly to poor Afghan families.
U.N. urgently needs cash in Afghanistan, but struggles for solution
1/2
Women wearing burqas sit with their children as the beg along a road in Kabul, Afghanistan October 26, 2021.REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra/File Photo
WASHINGTON/NEW YORK, Oct 28 (Reuters) - The United Nations cannot get enough cash into Afghanistan to deliver humanitarian aid to millions of people on the brink of starvation and is struggling to develop options to help stabilize the collapsing economy, U.N. officials said.
Ultimately political solutions are needed, a senior U.N. official told Reuters on condition of anonymity, an apparent reference to sanctions relief and for governments and institutions to free up billions of dollars of Afghan assets held overseas.
In the meantime U.N. agencies are scrambling to find ways to get large amounts of U.S. dollars into Afghanistan to combat a liquidity crisis that has taken hold since the Taliban ousted the Western-backed government in August. The U.N. official shared with Reuters some of the options being suggested.
The delivery of U.S. dollars to Afghanistan has stopped since the Islamist militants seized power and if countries or international financial institutions don't step up then the United Nations might have to fill the gap, said the official.
One suggested option is using Afghanistan International Bank, which could bring in and store money, but there are issues with insurance, the U.N. official said.
The United Nations is also aware that no one option will work and several avenues to get enough cash into Afghanistan are needed, the official said.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called for the International Monetary Fund to agree on waivers or mechanisms to get money into Afghanistan. The IMF has blocked the Taliban from accessing some $440 million in new emergency reserves.
Much of the Afghan central bank's $10 billion in overseas assets have been frozen as well, most of it in the United States. The U.S. Treasury has said there are no plans to release the money.
"We need to work together to make the economy breathe again and to help people survive," Guterres said on Wednesday. "Injecting liquidity into the Afghan economy can be done without violating international laws or compromising principles."
FLYING IN MONEY NOT ON TABLE YET
The United Nations has repeatedly warned that Afghanistan's economy is on the brink of collapse and would likely further fuel a refugee crisis.
When asked about U.N. efforts to get cash into Afghanistan, Mary-Ellen McGroarty, head of the World Food Programme in Afghanistan, told reporters on Tuesday: "The U.N. collective is looking at what potential solutions we could have, but flying in money to the country is not on the table yet."
"What we are using at the moment is the limited liquidity that is in the country," she said. "But the longer this goes on ... we're finding it's becoming more and more difficult."
Some 8.7 million people are "one step away from starvation," said McGroarty, adding: "There is a tsunami of destitution, incredible suffering and hunger spiraling out of control."
The Taliban is facing growing international pressure for an inclusive and representative Afghan government and to uphold human rights, particularly those of women and girls in return for international recognition and freeing up aid and reserves.
Donors and institutions are also seeking to avoid running afoul of U.N. and unilateral sanctions on the Taliban.
The United Nations is appealing for countries "to provide humanitarian financial exemptions to allow funds to reach aid organizations in the country," said U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric, without naming names.
U.N. agencies and aid groups are currently using informal money-moving networks - known as hawalas - and small amounts of cash in banks to pay staff salaries and for other smaller scale purchases, Dujarric told Reuters.
"These modalities are not sufficient for the large scale operations requiring cash payments or cash assistance in-country, however," said Dujarric, adding that the United Nations was talking to international financial institutions to find a solution that would expand aid operations.
A key part of U.N. plans to inject money into Afghanistan is by providing cash directly to poor Afghan families.
Reporting by Jonathan Landay in Washington and Michelle Nichols in New York; Editing by Mary Milliken and Grant McCool
16. Duckworth touts independent commission to study Afghanistan War
Excerpts:
King said during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Afghanistan on Tuesday that he liked Duckworth’s proposal “that we have a nonpartisan commission to … really get to the bottom of it.”
During that hearing, Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of Defense for policy, said the Pentagon is “strongly supportive” of Duckworth’s proposal for an independent commission.
Although Rhode Island Democrat Jack Reed, the Armed Services Committee's chairman, is not a cosponsor, Duckworth thanked him for his support of her bill during the hearing and said she looked forward to passing it as part of the fiscal 2022 defense authorization bill.
The House Armed Services Committee last month adopted an amendment to its version of the authorization bill by Republican Liz Cheney of Wyoming that would create an independent commission.
Duckworth touts independent commission to study Afghanistan War - Roll Call
rollcall.com · by Andrew ClevengerPosted October 27, 2021 at 3:46pm · October 27, 2021
Illinois Democrat Tammy Duckworth on Wednesday touted her Senate bill that would create a nonpartisan commission to examine the longest war in American history so that hard-fought lessons would not go unheeded.
Speaking at an event hosted by the magazine Foreign Policy, Duckworth said her Afghanistan War Commission Act would establish an independent commission “to look at the span of the 20 years of the United States’ involvement in Afghanistan, but also look at the breadth of government, everybody who was there.”
Duckworth said the panel would study not only the history of the military conflict but also the role of the four administrations and the Congresses that oversaw it, as well as other government agencies’ involvement.
“We need to learn what we did wrong, that after 20 years and trillions of dollars in taxpayer money, within a week of us leaving, pulling out of Afghanistan, the country collapsed,” Duckworth said. “We did not truly do any nation building.”
Duckworth, a former Army helicopter pilot who was injured in combat in Iraq in 2004 and had both legs amputated after a rocket-propelled grenade struck her aircraft, said the military successfully accomplished its initial task of incapacitating al-Qaida and removing the Taliban from power in Afghanistan and eventually killing Osama bin Laden. But the rebuilding mission never transitioned to the purview of the State Department, she said.
“I think we kind of looked away,” she said. “The military’s job and expertise is not in nation building, it’s not in teaching and establishing a judiciary, a system of law and order. So they never did any of that.”
Duckworth’s bill has attracted a dozen cosponsors: Democrats Mazie K. Hirono of Hawaii, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Jacky Rosen of Nevada, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Michael Bennet of Colorado, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, Dianne Feinstein of California, Martin Heinrich of New Mexico and Gary Peters of Michigan, plus independent Angus King of Maine.
Pentagon backing
King said during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Afghanistan on Tuesday that he liked Duckworth’s proposal “that we have a nonpartisan commission to … really get to the bottom of it.”
During that hearing, Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of Defense for policy, said the Pentagon is “strongly supportive” of Duckworth’s proposal for an independent commission.
Although Rhode Island Democrat Jack Reed, the Armed Services Committee's chairman, is not a cosponsor, Duckworth thanked him for his support of her bill during the hearing and said she looked forward to passing it as part of the fiscal 2022 defense authorization bill.
The House Armed Services Committee last month adopted an amendment to its version of the authorization bill by Republican Liz Cheney of Wyoming that would create an independent commission.
Duckworth noted that it was important to properly fund the commission and not to rush to produce a finished product.
“If we set too narrow [a] scope, we will fail to understand the root causes of our failures, or worse, we will learn the wrong lessons. If we don't look at the role of all government agencies involved and only look at DOD, we will similarly miss important conclusions,” Duckworth said. “If we simply settle for yet another report without incurring a truly nonpartisan independent body to make forward-looking recommendations, then we won't have done our duty to prevent future generations from repeating past mistakes.”
rollcall.com · by Andrew ClevengerPosted October 27, 2021 at 3:46pm · October 27, 2021
17. Pentagon officials, unable to secure basing near Afghanistan, warn of terrorist threat
Over the horizon CT is hard. You at least need some basing near the horizon.
Pentagon officials, unable to secure basing near Afghanistan, warn of terrorist threat
The United States hasn’t reached any agreements with Central Asian states bordering Afghanistan for bases or other facilities to use in counterterrorism operations there against the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, senior defense officials said Tuesday.
“We have had extensive conversations” and expect to have more, with Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and others, Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, said at a Senate hearing.
U.S. forces “need to build out more capability so we’re not just reliant on facilities we have in the Arabian Gulf,” Kahl said. The closest major U.S. facilities, in Qatar and Bahrain, are more than 1,500 flight miles away.
“We have not secured firm basing agreements” with any of Afghanistan’s direct neighbors, he said. He said U.S. intelligence estimated that the Islamic State-Khorasan, the Afghanistan faction of the terrorist group, could build the capacity to plan and conduct international operations within six months if unchecked.
The Biden administration has expressed confidence that its “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism operations — primarily airstrikes launched from outside Afghanistan — are sufficient to disrupt ISIS-K, as it is widely known, and al-Qaeda and ultimately destroy them.
But the testimony, before the Senate Armed Services Committee, made public growing military and administration concern that without closer bases from which to launch such strikes, the distances involved could undermine that ability.
The hearing was one of a series the committee is holding to examine the 20-year war in Afghanistan, the chaotic U.S. troop exit and evacuation of American, allied and Afghan civilians during the last two weeks of August, and national security plans for the future.
Kahl and Lt. Gen. James J. Mingus, the Joint Staff director for operations, who also testified, expressed support for a bipartisan, independent commission to investigate the past, present and future of U.S. efforts in Afghanistan. The commission has been proposed in a bill sponsored by Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), a committee member.
The acknowledgment of the extent of the threat comes as ISIS-K, which Kahl described as a “mortal enemy” of the Taliban, has ramped up attacks in Afghanistan following the exit of U.S. and NATO forces.
Although for now its operatives appear focused on “creating havoc” within Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, the Islamic State group retains the “intent” to strike the United States and its allies, he said. “The current intelligence assessment” is that ISIS-K could develop the capacity to plan and carry out global attacks from Afghanistan within six to 12 months, he said. The al-Qaeda branch there, which is allied with some elements within the Taliban, could have the same capability within one to two years.
Kahl and Mingus cautioned that those time estimates assume that the United States and its allies cannot successfully disrupt terrorist planning.
The United States maintained air facilities in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan at various times during the Afghanistan war, but those agreements have long since lapsed.
Despite appeals and inducements offered by senior administration officials in recent months, none of the Central Asian states has agreed to allow U.S. operations.
Similar concerns have arisen over U.S. intelligence capabilities in Afghanistan. “Ideally, you would have partners on the ground. That’s not the case in Afghanistan,” Kahl said. Faulty intelligence led to the Aug. 29 U.S. drone strike that killed 10 civilians, including an aid worker and seven children.
American surveillance flights are in operation daily over Afghanistan, he said, and Pakistan, while prohibiting the launch of any aircraft from its territory, continues to allow U.S. overflights. “Pakistan is a challenging actor, but they don’t want Afghanistan to be a safe haven for external terrorist attacks,” Kahl said. “For right now, counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan is pretty good.”
Pakistan is also using a network of informal channels to feed intelligence and technical support to the Taliban to combat the terrorist threat in Afghanistan, The Washington Post reported this week.
While the hearing was called to examine current security in Afghanistan and South and Central Asia, much of the questioning focused on the history of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and the August evacuation.
Republicans sharply criticized President Biden’s decision to completely withdraw all U.S. troops by Aug. 31 and pushed Kahl to acknowledge, as he has in the past, that he would have preferred a “conditions-based” approach that would have left at least 2,500 troops in Afghanistan until the Taliban met certain requirements. “By the time I came in” to office in late April, he said, “the decision had been made. . . . My personal opinion never changed.”
Democrats countered, as they have in the past, that it was former president Donald Trump who signed a February 2020 agreement with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. troops.
Asked whether Biden’s decision to withdraw in compliance with that deal, announced in April, had been reconsidered as the Taliban moved toward a complete takeover in August, Mingus said that “it was deemed that the risk” to both U.S. forces and civilians trying to evacuate “was actually higher had we stayed beyond the 31st.”
Noting that “this is our sixth hearing on Afghanistan” since the withdrawal, Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) said “we had zero hearings that I can recall” on the Trump agreement, which promised full U.S. departure by May 1 this year. “Umbrage and outrage about what happened this summer rings a little hollow to me,” he said.
Under questions from Democrats and Republicans, Kahl said an estimated 5,500 American citizens have left Afghanistan — 240 of them since the departure of U.S. troops.
“In terms of how many American citizens are currently there,” he said, “the Department of State is in contact with 196 American citizens ready to depart, and arrangements are being made via air or ground. Another 243 have been contacted, but are not ready to depart.”
Securing the departure of American citizens, legal permanent residents, and Afghans at risk “is not without challenge,” Kahl said. “But for those properly documented, [the Taliban has] continued to let them out.”
18. Biden heads abroad with most of his ambassadorial picks stranded in the Senate, stunting U.S. diplomatic efforts
Excerpts:
The vacancies are coming into sharper view this week as the president embarks on the second overseas trip of his term, first for the Group of 20 summit in Rome and then to Glasgow, Scotland, for the United Nations climate summit known as COP26.
Among the other 19 members of the G-20, 15 of them do not currently have a U.S. ambassador in place (Indonesia and Russia have U.S. ambassadors who were held over from the Trump administration). Biden has yet to nominate his own pick for Italy, which this year is hosting the annual gathering of leaders from the world’s largest economies, nor for the European Union, United Kingdom, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Brazil and Australia.
The four ambassadors to foreign governments — Mexico, Turkey, New Zealand and Austria — who have been confirmed are either former senators or the widows of former senators, whom Cruz said he would not block as a courtesy. Cindy McCain, the widow of former senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), was also approved Tuesday as the U.S. representative to a United Nations food agency, which gives her the rank as ambassador. And the Senate approved Linda Thomas-Greenfield as United Nations ambassador as part of the Cabinet confirmations earlier this year.
Biden heads abroad with most of his ambassadorial picks stranded in the Senate, stunting U.S. diplomatic efforts
President Biden — who has made renewed international engagement a hallmark of his foreign policy ethos — is headed to a pair of global summits in Europe this week with just a handful of his ambassadors in place, as most of his picks to represent the United States abroad remain mired in messy domestic politics.
To date, only four of Biden’s choices to be a U.S. ambassador to a foreign government have been approved by the Senate — three of them just on Tuesday. That means Biden is lagging considerably behind his immediate predecessor, Donald Trump, who at this point in his presidency had 22 such U.S. ambassadors confirmed, 17 of them by voice vote, according to data compiled by Senate Democratic leadership aides.
The delays stem from threats by some Republican senators, led by Ted Cruz (Tex.), who has been angling for a fight with the Biden administration over matters of national security. That is prolonging the usually routine process of getting ambassadors formally installed, while several high-profile posts are also vacant because the White House has yet to put forward nominees for them.
The vacancies are coming into sharper view this week as the president embarks on the second overseas trip of his term, first for the Group of 20 summit in Rome and then to Glasgow, Scotland, for the United Nations climate summit known as COP26.
Among the other 19 members of the G-20, 15 of them do not currently have a U.S. ambassador in place (Indonesia and Russia have U.S. ambassadors who were held over from the Trump administration). Biden has yet to nominate his own pick for Italy, which this year is hosting the annual gathering of leaders from the world’s largest economies, nor for the European Union, United Kingdom, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Brazil and Australia.
The four ambassadors to foreign governments — Mexico, Turkey, New Zealand and Austria — who have been confirmed are either former senators or the widows of former senators, whom Cruz said he would not block as a courtesy. Cindy McCain, the widow of former senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), was also approved Tuesday as the U.S. representative to a United Nations food agency, which gives her the rank as ambassador. And the Senate approved Linda Thomas-Greenfield as United Nations ambassador as part of the Cabinet confirmations earlier this year.
But as time passes without the Senate processing ambassadors for elsewhere in the globe, allies of the administration are increasingly sounding the alarm about the diplomatic ramifications. Meanwhile, Democratic senators’ usual irritation at Cruz has reached new levels.
“This risks being hyperbolic, but it’s like negotiating with a terrorist,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said of Cruz, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with past and potentially future presidential ambitions. “He is not the secretary of state. The people of this country did not elect him or his party to represent us abroad. And what he’s asking for is to control American foreign policy.”
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) added, “At the end of the day, it’s not my job to make his presidential ambitions happen.”
In some countries, high-ranking government officials will not meet with anyone short of a formal U.S. ambassador, shunning the chargés d’affaires who have taken over in the interim.
U.S. ambassadors can often attract attention from the foreign press and public that chargés cannot — and ultimately, they exert more influence while promoting the U.S. agenda and explaining decisions made back home to foreign leaders. The bipartisan 9/11 Commission has suggested that delays in confirming national security and foreign policy nominees can damage the United States’ ability to respond to attacks.
“Public diplomacy is neutered when you don’t have an ambassador,” said Murphy, a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “When six months or a year goes by without a U.S. ambassador, they infer that it’s a value judgment being placed on the relationship.”
Cruz’s main goal is to force the administration to slap sanctions on the Russia-backed company behind Nord Stream 2, a Russia-to-Germany gas pipeline that critics say could empower Moscow and give it significant leverage in Europe.
The Biden administration waived sanctions over Nord Stream 2 in May. In an interview, Cruz said he was using his leverage to stop Biden from making what he called a “generational geopolitical mistake.”
“This surrender to Putin won’t just impact today or tomorrow or next year, 10 years from now,” Cruz said. “Thirty, 40, 50 years from now, there will be Russian dictators, earning tens of billions of dollars from Nord Stream 2 and using it to fund military aggression against America and our allies and using it to hold Europe subject to energy blackmail.”
Cruz has spoken with Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, and has met privately with Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo in a secure facility at the Capitol to discuss the issue. The senator said he has offered to release some of his holds on nominees if the administration takes steps under a 2017 sanctions law to effectively waive the sanctions but trigger a congressional vote to override the decision. But that could put some Democrats in a politically awkward spot.
Senate Democrats are plotting how best to exert pressure on Cruz to stop his blockade of potentially dozens of critical, foreign policy picks. The Texas senator said in an interview last week that he had holds on seven pending envoys, although since then, more than 30 ambassadors and other State Department picks have advanced to the Senate floor, which means Cruz may be holding up roughly three dozen nominees. Cruz’s office declined to provide specific numbers.
The senator had told The Washington Post last week he would not block people such as former senator Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) to Turkey and former senator Tom Udall (D-N.M.) out of senatorial courtesy. Victoria Reggie Kennedy, also confirmed Tuesday as U.S. ambassador to Austria, is the widow of former senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.).
No one senator can indefinitely block a nominee as long as the person has majority support in the Senate. But Cruz’s holds mean that unless he relents, the Senate will be forced to eat up valuable floor time to confirm nominees that usually sail through unanimously.
The White House blasted the senator for his far-reaching action.
“President Biden is quickly working to restore America’s position on the world stage, and he’s moved swiftly to nominate well-qualified ambassadors who have earned Republican and Democratic support,” White House spokesman Chris Meagher said. “But instead of putting politics aside, Sen. Cruz has led an unprecedented effort of obstruction by blocking dozens of President Biden’s nominees and preventing them from advancing America’s national security interests.”
There has been no indication that Biden administration officials are willing to give in to Cruz’s demands. Nor should they, according to Democratic senators.
“You can hold up the universe,” Menendez said. “But you’re also going to pay the price when something happens in the world and you were the one holding that particular nominee.”
Cruz, unsurprisingly, is unbothered by the criticism.
“One of the things it says is that the Biden administration is really bad at getting their work done and moving their nominees forward,” Cruz said, when asked about the ambassador vacancies. “And Senate Democrats have been quite slow in processing those nominees.”
Meanwhile, Senate Republicans haven’t been eager to intervene to get Cruz to back down, but they haven’t, for the most part, bolstered his efforts either. Some GOP senators are quick to note the benefits of having Senate-confirmed ambassadors to represent U.S. interests abroad.
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), a Foreign Relations Committee member, said he recently met with former interior secretary and Democratic senator Ken Salazar, who was confirmed in August as ambassador to Mexico, to discuss two issues important to the retiring Ohio senator: migration and the proliferation of fentanyl.
“It’s useful to have somebody there who has some stature,” Portman said, adding that Salazar had just met with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador when the two men spoke.
Cruz also does not plan to hold up the nomination of Nicholas Burns to be U.S. ambassador to China, one of the most critical diplomatic relationships, according to a person familiar with the decision.
But those, for now, are likely to be the exceptions. As of Wednesday, Biden had nominated 111 people for State Department jobs, but has only had 24 of them confirmed, according to data provided by a White House official. State picks who have been successfully confirmed under this president have had to wait an average of 108 days from start to finish.
That was almost double the amount of time that State Department nominees under Trump waited to be confirmed — 56 days — at this point in his term, which in turn was longer than the average for presidents Barack Obama (43 days) and George W. Bush (27 days).
“This is such a dangerous moment for American relations with the world,” said Brett Bruen, a former Obama State Department official. “If we don’t have the right people out there representing us, I think we are at risk of losing an extraordinary amount of credibility and influence in the world.”
Bruen also pins some blame on the Biden administration, saying it was slow to get the ambassador application process started for career officials and also that Biden so far has tapped a disproportionate number of political ambassadors for posts abroad, compared to career Foreign Service officers.
“The career people I’m talking to say, ‘What about us?’ ” Bruen said.
If Cruz and other like-minded Republicans don’t cease their blockade, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) has told Democratic senators that they will have to confirm these noncontroversial nominees “the hard way” and work late nights and weekends to process them, according to a person familiar with the majority leader’s thinking.
That moment, the person said, is likely to come soon.
Meanwhile, for dozens of administration nominees in the queue, their lives have been put on hold, with limits on how they can earn a salary and what they can say publicly as they navigate Senate confirmation politics. Their children may not know where they would attend school.
“This is incredibly frustrating. It’s demoralizing,” said one State Department nominee going through the Senate process. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the pending confirmation. “Whatever you think of people and the qualifications, these are people who are willing to serve, and they’re willing to serve in places that are not the most appealing places to be.”
19. Recent Report on Military Prowess Shows Hostile Intentions On the Rise
Gathering threats will form a gathering storm.
Recent Report on Military Prowess Shows Hostile Intentions On the Rise
Unsurprisingly, China and Russia are identified as the only two threats with “formidable” capabilities against the United States, Iran and North Korea, meanwhile, are classified as “gathering” threats.
The Heritage Foundation published the 2022 edition of its annual Index of U.S. Military Strength last week. The major headlines centered on the report’s bleak assessment of the U.S. military services, but the index also featured a comprehensive analysis of the major threats confronting vital U.S. interests. Here are the highlights.
The report evaluated China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and various non-state actors in three categories: behavior, capabilities, and threats to American interests. As with previous editions of the Military Strength Index, Moscow and Beijing continue to loom large in Heritage's threat assessment. Russia, the report contends, “remains the primary threat to American interests in Europe as well as the most pressing threat to the United States.” The report points to Moscow’s “massive pro-Russia propaganda campaigns in Ukraine and other Eastern European countries,” as well as its support for the separatist Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics to Ukraine’s east and recent military buildup near the country’s eastern border, as evidence of the Kremlin’s hostile intent.
China is described in the report as “the most comprehensive threat the U.S. faces.” Beijing “remains ‘aggressive’ in the scope of its provocative behavior and earns the score of ‘formidable’ for its capability because of its continued investment in the modernization and expansion of its military and the particular attention it has paid to its space, cyber, and artificial intelligence capabilities.” The report further cites China’s crescendo of maritime and aerial provocations against Taiwan, military assertiveness in the South China Sea, and probes of the South Korean and Japanese air defense identification zones.
Unsurprisingly, China and Russia are identified as the only two threats with “formidable” capabilities against the United States, Iran and North Korea, meanwhile, are classified as “gathering” threats. Though North Korea has so far not conducted nuclear tests in 2021, Pyongyang’s other missile tests—including the recent launch of what appears to be a hypersonic boost-glide vehicle missile system—continue unabated. Iran is “by far the most significant security challenge to the United States, its allies, and its interests in the greater Middle East,” as evidenced by Tehran’s “open hostility to the United States and Israel, sponsorship of terrorist groups like Hezbollah, history of threatening the commons, and increased activity associated with its nuclear program.” Iran’s challenge lies more in its sweeping use of irregular warfare than the conventional threat posed by its armed forces, according to the report. Lastly, non-state terrorist groups including Al Qaeda and Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham are identified as “capable” threats—albeit on a lesser scale than the other four state actors discussed by Heritage. “Fortunately, Middle East terrorist groups remain the least capable threats facing the U.S., but they cannot be dismissed,” the report concludes.
Mark Episkopos is a national security reporter for the National Interest.
Image: Reuters
20. How China Learned to Harness Israel’s Media and Booming Tech Scene
Excerpts:
That said, there are several potential explanations of why Israeli views on China have improved, each of them with some limitations. First, China has poured a great deal of investment into Israel and has gotten involved on some notable infrastructure projects in the country, such as the red line of the Tel Aviv subway. Between 2004 and 2007, China’s bilateral trade with Israel ballooned to reach over $5 billion, and during this period China also ramped up its strategic messaging in Israel.52 The two countries’ bilateral trade volume kept growing from there, reaching nearly $15 billion in 2019.53 Yet it is important to note that such Chinese investment has not necessarily been positively received in all cases, and occasionally it has spawned negative Israeli reactions that have approached Sinophobia.54
A second factor has been China’s rapid evolution from a regional power to a superpower, a development that has arguably made it a more attractive partner to Israelis. Nevertheless, China’s meteoric ascent has not led to higher favorability ratings elsewhere and has already raised concerns with at least some Israelis. For that reason, it is no given that China’s growing geopolitical clout automatically leads to a boost in the country’s favorability ratings around the world.
Another explanation of how China is making inroads in Israel is the success of its adaptive messaging, including the localized metaphors and allusions this outreach deploys. Chinese leaders have long believed deeply in the utility of this kind of messaging. Laozi, a great Chinese philosopher from the sixth century BCE, advocated the use of “indirect” and “soft” influence rather than outright force as a tool of statecraft.55 He argued that great leaders persuade their people to follow their vision without resorting to force wherever possible.
China’s strategic messaging campaign in Israel and other related forms of public outreach indicate that Chinese actors are committed to cultivating influence in Israel and shaping the views of the Israeli people on important geopolitical matters. The CCP sees this campaign as part of its broader efforts to compete with the United States for influence around the world. It is too early in U.S. President Joe Biden’s tenure to know how the new administration will view and seek to shape these issues, but judging by Biden’s remarks, his approach to China will be no less tough than his predecessor’s, though his methods may sometimes differ.
Bennett and the new Israeli government must make plans for how to deal with these Chinese messaging activities, making clear that the Israeli government does not see China as an enemy but that cooperation with Beijing must be done right. This will require a balancing act because a key element of Israel’s foreign policy will continue to be its cooperation with long-time partners like the United States and other Western countries with which it shares important values such as democracy, freedom of speech, and human rights.
How China Learned to Harness Israel’s Media and Booming Tech Scene
To bolster their influence in Israel, Chinese players have leveraged local Hebrew language media to calibrate their messages for Israeli audiences.
Preface
China Local/Global
China has become a global power, but there is too little debate about how this has happened and what it means. Many argue that China exports its developmental model and imposes it on other countries. But Chinese players also extend their influence by working through local actors and institutions while adapting and assimilating local and traditional forms, norms, and practices.
With a generous multiyear grant from the Ford Foundation, Carnegie has launched an innovative body of research on Chinese engagement strategies in seven regions of the world—Africa, Central Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, the Pacific, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Through a mix of research and strategic convening, this project explores these complex dynamics, including the ways Chinese firms are adapting to local labor laws in Latin America, Chinese banks and funds are exploring traditional Islamic financial and credit products in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, and Chinese actors are helping local workers upgrade their skills in Central Asia. These adaptive Chinese strategies that accommodate and work within local realities are mostly ignored by Western policymakers in particular.
Ultimately, the project aims to significantly broaden understanding and debate about China’s role in the world and to generate innovative policy ideas. These could enable local players to better channel Chinese energies to support their societies and economies; provide lessons for Western engagement around the world, especially in developing countries; help China’s own policy community learn from the diversity of Chinese experience; and potentially reduce frictions.
Evan A. Feigenbaum
Vice President for Studies, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Summary
Israel and China established full diplomatic relations only in 1992, making Israel almost the last Middle Eastern country to do so. Starting in the early 2000s, ties between the two countries began to blossom, mostly because the Chinese government started to view Israel as a global technology hub and began seeking to capitalize on Israel’s innovation capabilities to help meet its own developmental needs and strategic challenges. In addition, as China’s rivalry with Israel’s leading ally, the United States, has heated up, Beijing’s interest in Israel also has gotten stronger. In light of Israel’s status as a major technology hub and a leading U.S. ally, China has sought to deepen its influence in Israel through media engagement and other forms of outreach.
As Chinese actors have pursued technological innovation and greater political influence in Israel, they have employed three basic approaches to court favor in and through Israeli media circles: direct messaging to the Israeli public in local Hebrew-language newspapers, the use of Chinese outlets (especially the Hebrew department of China Radio International) targeted at Israeli audiences, and efforts to leverage prominent public figures friendly toward China to amplify favorable messages delivered on these local Israeli and Chinese platforms.
China’s messaging strategy in Israel has evolved in three stages. Early on, this strategy mainly included recycled talking points from the Chinese Communist Party that do not always translate well overseas. Between 2015 and 2018, this messaging from Chinese actors started to become more direct and tailored for the Israeli people. Since 2018, Chinese engagement has expanded to include a much wider variety of Israeli media outlets, which has meant even more direct access to ordinary Israelis.
Roie Yellinek
Roie Yellinek is an associate researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies and a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute.
This strategy and other elements of China’s diplomatic outreach to Israel seem to be having an impact. According to 2019 polling from the Pew Research Center, Israeli respondents view China more positively than those in any other Western-oriented countries that took part in this survey did. These results are an outgrowth of China’s desire to build influence vis-à-vis Israeli society, especially in terms of Israelis’ views on China. Chinese government officials and other actors see this campaign toward the Israeli people as part of a broader and more important strategic campaign, as Beijing competes with Washington for worldwide influence.
Israel has a clear national interest in carefully examining how and why Beijing deploys such strategic messaging and how Chinese actors have leveraged local conditions, language habits, and consumer preferences to advance their objectives. The new Israeli government under Prime Minister Naftali Bennett must act prudently and keep these Chinese messaging activities in mind as it balances and advances Israel’s foreign policy interests, seeking to underscore that it does not see China as an enemy but that cooperation with Beijing needs to be pursued in the right way.
Introduction
Up until 1992, Israel and Communist-led China had poor relations, including periods of complete diplomatic estrangement and periods of limited and covert engagement. That year, the countries established official diplomatic ties, and a new chapter in their relationship opened. This formal rapprochement began after several years of negotiations and after both sides had opened offices in the other country that functioned as small quasi-embassies.
Since the early 2000s, the China-Israel relationship has blossomed. Economic ties, especially those involving technological innovation (including in areas such as agriculture, communications, and healthcare), have served as the foundation of this increasingly warm relationship. Beijing views Israel as a global technology hub and has sought to capitalize on Israel’s innovation capabilities to help meet its own developmental needs and strategic challenges. In particular, China has sought technological solutions as the country has accelerated its transition from a low-cost manufacturing titan to a high-tech economy with an industrial base that is moving steadily up the value chain. Meanwhile, as China’s rivalry with Israel’s leading ally, the United States, heats up, Chinese messaging strategies in Israel are also designed to maximize Beijing’s political sway in influential Israeli circles.
To tap into local innovation hubs and gain influence in Israel, Chinese policymakers and media commentators have sought to cultivate positive Israeli perceptions of China, its development trajectory, and its potential as a trusted partner. In Israel’s freewheeling media environment, achieving that kind of strategic messaging is no easy feat. Chinese officials and business executives have learned to tailor their messaging (including in Hebrew) to Israeli tastes, preferences, and biases. Significant cultural gaps between China and Israel, resulting from a lack of common history, mindsets, or traditions, have at times made this complex task an uphill struggle.
Chinese actors have used a variety of messaging tools and tactics to court high-tech collaboration and political influence in Israel. In some cases, they are using Israeli media outlets to deliver, tailor, and ultimately amplify Chinese messaging. Meanwhile, Chinese-run media outlets, such as China Radio International (CRI), are learning to adapt their messages to Israeli consumers. In addition, Chinese actors use other forms of soft power—such as Confucius Institutes and other educational and cultural exchange programs—to foster relationships, cultivate influence, and advance the country’s interests.1
China’s Top Priorities in Israel
China’s central interests in Israel are to tap into the Israeli economy’s capacity for innovation and to expand Chinese influence in the country in light of the growing competition between the United States and China. Israel is a standout when it comes to innovation. In the World Economic Forum’s 2020 Global Competitiveness Report, Israel ranked seventh in the world in terms of its citizens’ digital skills.2 Meanwhile, the Global Startup Ecosystem Report 2020: Rankings 2020: Top 30 + Runners-up ranked Tel Aviv and Jerusalem as the world’s sixth-best innovation hub (tied with Los Angeles).3 China, for its part, continues to cultivate its own domestic capacity for innovation. For instance, in 2017 the venture capital company Asgard ranked China second and Israel third as “ ecosystems” that excel at artificial intelligence (AI); that same year, Israel held a market share of around 11 percent for AI internationally.4
Technology-focused collaboration between China and Israel has attracted some high-profile supporters from both sides. In 2016, the first China-Israel Innovation Forum was held in Beijing.5 In a speech at the 2018 Israeli Innovation Summit that then prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu organized, Netanyahu proudly declared that Israel had gone from being a “‘start-up nation’ to an ‘innovation nation.’”6 The former prime minister has even played up the potential for technology and innovation to be avenues for greater collaboration with China, as it seeks to make good on its clear ambitions to go from being the world’s second-largest economy to being the largest.7 On a 2017 visit to China, Netanyahu said, “We are your perfect junior partner for that effort . . . I believe this is a marriage made in heaven.”8 One of China’s main goals for its relationship with Israel is to ensure a steady flow of advanced technology and innovation into China in conjunction with the country’s Going Global strategy and other major Chinese plans.
For their part, Chinese players in both government and industry tend to view Israel’s knack for innovation as reflecting important features of Israeli society, most notably a successful education system and history. Consider the case of Li Ka-shing, a Hong Kong business magnate who donated $130 million in October 2013 to the Technion (the Israel Institute of Technology) based in Haifa; at the announcement ceremony, Li said, “Our responsibility is to invest in education to . . . enable the continuing realisation of human potential, building a society rich in knowledge and securing a sustainable quality of life for all.”9
Beyond technological innovation, China also has sought to bolster Israeli public support for closer ties with Beijing through strategic messaging intended to reinforce Israel’s standing as a pivotal country amid the burgeoning superpower competition between China and the United States. The Chinese government seeks to use Israel as a testing ground for new strategies and practices in its pursuit of greater international influence by observing how other countries (especially a small, strategically significant, and Western-oriented one like Israel) respond to Chinese actions and what international effects such acts have. These efforts at times have been controversial in part because they are seen (for good reason) by some in Israel and the United States as challenging the U.S.-Israel strategic alliance.10
One way this geopolitical contest has played out is through Chinese investment deals and bids for major Israeli infrastructure projects, which have sometimes proven contentious. The case of the new Israeli port in Haifa, which China has invested in, demonstrates this point well.
Another similar instance was a construction project for a large desalination plant in Israel, for which a subsidiary of a Hong Kong based firm called CK Hutchison Holdings Limited was one of the final bidders. When former United States secretary of state Mike Pompeo visited Israel in May 2020, he reportedly conveyed U.S. concerns over these kinds of Chinese economic overtures and the bid for the desalination plant in particular. 11 Not long thereafter the coveted bid was granted to another company instead.12
How China Communicates With the Israeli Public
As Chinese actors pursue technological innovation and greater political influence, they have employed three basic approaches to court favor in Israeli media circles: direct messaging to the Israeli public in local Hebrew-language newspapers, the use of Chinese outlets (especially CRI) targeted at Israeli audiences, and efforts to leverage prominent public figures friendly toward China to amplify favorable messages delivered on these local Israeli and Chinese platforms.
The Evolution of Chinese Messaging in Israel
Initially, Chinese messaging in Israel bore many of the most obvious hallmarks of China’s state-directed and tightly scripted information space. A section of the Chinese embassy’s website known as Embassy News was launched in 2008 to aggregate all the embassy’s media activities in Israeli outlets. Early on, it mainly recycled boilerplate Chinese Communist Party (CCP) talking points that do not always translate well overseas.13 In those early years, for example, the Chinese embassy published articles with titles such as: “Dalai Lama Lies Again,” “CIA Ran Tibet Contras Since 1959,” and “Tibet Myth and Reality.”14 On some controversial subjects, Chinese officials have continued to closely toe the party line in a similar fashion, including the Chinese government’s treatment of Uyghurs and non-Han ethnic minorities in Xinjiang (as they did in propaganda pieces from the late 2000s and early 2010s like “The Facts of Urumqi Riot” and “Ethnic Unity—the Source of Happiness in Xinjiang”).15
That said, in some cases, the Chinese embassy in Israel has become somewhat more sophisticated or localized over time in terms of its media placements and the subject matter of its public diplomacy. Starting in 2010, at least some of the Chinese embassy’s generated content began changing significantly in both its tone and its adaptations to local conditions. This messaging also began presenting content more tailored to the Israeli public, rather than only echoing and recycling typical CCP messaging. The embassy began to concentrate on the activities of embassy officials, highlighting media outreach in Israel, productive diplomatic and business meetings, and community engagement within Israel.
The most meaningful change in the Chinese embassy’s messaging came in September 2015, when then ambassador Zhan Yongxin began to address the Israeli public directly by writing articles in the leading English-language newspaper, the Jerusalem Post.16 In part, these editorials were meant to discourage scrutiny of Chinese activities that were generating tensions in China-Israel relations and putting Israel in an awkward position vis-à-vis the United States. Israeli and U.S. misgivings about and criticisms of China’s economic activities in Israel seem to be part of a broader, Cold War–style struggle between the two superpowers for spheres of influence or global hegemony.17 In addition, U.S. leaders presumably fear the emergence of information leaks, particularly ones related to sensitive cutting-edge technologies.
Such technological concerns have long been a feature of Israel’s relationships with China and the United States. A series of historical disputes between Israel and the United States over weapons sales to China arose in the late 1990s and early 2000s. At this time, Israel reached deals to sell the Phalcon (a special type of early-warning radar system) and Harpy drones to China, but the deals were canceled amid massive U.S. pressure.18 These cancelations became emblematic of the line between what is deemed acceptable and unacceptable in Israel-China relations.
The best example of more recent tensions in Israel involving China and the United States is the Shanghai International Port Group’s successful March 2015 bid to operate the new Israeli port in Haifa for twenty-five years. The country’s ports are highly strategic assets, in part because around 99 percent of Israeli imports come from the sea.19 After the Chinese firm won the bid, opposition to the deal began to emerge after a year and so in both the United States and Israel. As a result, there were extensive discussions about the strategic implications of such deals, including at a joint event organized by Haifa University and the Hudson Institute, a panel featuring speakers concerned about China’s influence in Israel.20 It is important to mention that some of the event participants were U.S. and Israeli national security experts, but Chinese speakers were not part of this discussion.21
For their part, Chinese officials have continued trying to make their case to Israel for the Haifa port deal, while attempting to mollify concerns that the deal would harm U.S.-Israeli relations. Besides helping place numerous articles in Israeli outlets by the Chinese ambassador at the time about the Haifa port, the Chinese embassy also worked with the Jerusalem Post to publish a special edition of a magazine featuring Chinese messaging about the port.22 The magazine included contributions by Zhan and then Israeli president Reuven Rivlin. Despite all the controversy, the project ultimately moved ahead. Despite fears of delays due to the coronavirus pandemic and the extensive discussions of the deal’s implications, the port opened in September 2021 as planned.23
Chinese officials and embassy staff went to great lengths to defuse opposition to the port deal, but they were not alone. Former Israeli transportation minister Israel Katz has been very active in promoting Chinese companies in the Israeli economy. According to one reporter, the minister said in 2018 that he “has actively promoted infrastructure projects between the two countries since taking office eight years ago” and took steps to encourage Chinese firms to bid on projects in Israel.24
All these efforts, especially the Chinese ambassador’s articles, aimed to reassure the Israeli public (and by extension Israeli decisionmakers), while assuaging potential concerns about Chinese reliability, conduct, and strategic behavior. For example, an October 2017 article written by the Chinese ambassador argued that “China’s new era of development is [a] win-win with Israel.”25 He highlighted Israel’s role as a technological hub and the complementarity of the two countries’ economies. He went on to point out Israel’s well-known status as “the Start-Up Nation, strong in creation and innovation” while also boasting about China’s merits, namely “its strong manufacturing capacity and huge market.”26
One potential reason Chinese officials have chosen to communicate in English-language publications could be because these messages are meant to reach not only people in Israel but also readers in the United States and English-speaking diplomats from various countries who live in Israel. In addition, officials and staff at the Chinese embassy in Israel need to report back to the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs about the nature of their work, which is easier to do with English-language newspapers rather than with Hebrew-language ones.
Starting in 2018, Zhan began getting exposure in a much wider variety of Israeli media outlets beyond the Jerusalem Post— including in video interviews with Hebrew news websites like YNet News and others.27 Because Israel’s relationship with China had by this point become a sensitive issue with Washington, Zhan used these opportunities to bolster Beijing’s position by minimizing the potential for conflict with Washington. His key message was this: “China does not want to cause any harm to Israel’s special relationship[s] with other countries.” He also remarked that the relationship between China and Israel is unique because it is part of a long-term friendship between two of the “oldest nations in the world” and that “all the [Chinese infrastructure] projects [in Israel] set a very good example [of] a win-win situation.” In his remarks, Zhan touched on technological innovation as well, saying “ China is a country with a huge market and [a] powerful manufacturing [sector]. Israel is . . . the Start-Up Nation, so if we can work together, we can bring more opportunities to our businesses and people and even [for] the world.”28
Ambassador Du Wei, Zhan’s successor, continued this approach during his tenure from February 2020 until his untimely death in May 2020. Du engaged with Hebrew-language media outlets, and more importantly, he interacted with a range of outlets to reach a wider array of important religious and secular constituencies from across Israel’s political spectrum. For example, he wrote for Makor Rishon, a conservative Hebrew newspaper associated with rightwing religious Zionism, and Yated Ne’eman, a Hebrew paper associated with Israel’s Orthodox Haredi community.29 These interviews signaled to Israeli audiences that Chinese officials were departing from a more traditional, hidebound media strategy and that the Chinese embassy was showing a greater understanding of Israeli society and diversifying its outreach to different segments of the populace.
One recurring feature of Du’s messaging was a rhetorical emphasis on Israel’s status alongside China as a deeply significant historical civilization. As he put it in one interview, “The Jewish people and the Chinese people have both created marvelous civilizations.”30 In doing so, Du seemed to be seeking to convey an implicit contrast between longtime civilizations like China and Israel and countries like the United States with shorter histories.
Chinese officials also have pursued broader engagement with mass-market Hebrew dailies, including the newspaper Haaretz, through which Beijing-based officials have sought to send reassuring messages to the Israeli public about mutually beneficial relations between their countries. Zha Peixin, a long-time Chinese official whose posts include Chinese ambassador to the UK and deputy director of the CCP Central Committee’s Foreign Affairs Office, wrote one such article titled “China Does Not Aspire to World Hegemony.” In it, he repeated the point that Israel and China are heirs of ancient civilizations that have contributed much to humanity.31 He added that China is a responsible country that takes real action on climate change. In doing so, he presumably sought to draw for the Israeli people a clear difference between China as a supposedly responsible and reliable country as opposed to the United States after its withdrawal from the Paris Agreement under former president Donald Trump. As with most Chinese diplomatic messaging toward Israelis, he wished the two countries would sustain a general sense of cooperation particularly with respect to technology.32
CRI Helps China Reach an Israeli Audience
Originally established in 1941, CRI is now the international radio arm of the China Media Group, the national holding company for Chinese state-run media services including CRI, China Central Television, and China National Radio. In 2015, a Reuters investigation identified more than thirty radio stations in fourteen countries that are part of a “global . . . web” of radio broadcasters ultimately controlled by CRI. 33 This fact may help illuminate how Beijing has sought to broaden the reach and messaging strategies of Chinese state media to avoid having them labeled Chinese propaganda. In February 2020, the U.S. government designated CRI and four other Chinese media outlets as “ foreign missions.”34 For Israel and other U.S. partners, this decision sent a signal that the United States considers CRI’s employees to be acting as CCP agents.
Despite CRI’s apparent ties to the CCP, prominent Israeli figures have celebrated the inroads it has made in their country. In late September 2009, CRI launched its first Hebrew-language website, which it billed as “the first and only Hebrew website run by an official entity in China”; the website states that it aims to “offer [Israeli readers] a glimpse into Chinese perspectives on various issues.”35 CRI’s Hebrew-language website also runs a Facebook page in Hebrew.36
In keeping with China’s focus on technology as a major pillar of China-Israel relations, Wang Chen, who was then the director of the State Council Information Office, visited Israel for the launch of CRI’s Hebrew-language website along with Xia Jixuan, CRI’s vice president.37 For Israel’s part, then president Shimon Peres, who helped pioneer Israel’s success in cultivating startups, welcomed the launch of CRI’s Hebrew website.38 Eden Bar-Tal, then director general of the Israeli Ministry of Communications, described the launch as “an important start in the effort to convey the story of modern-day China to the Israeli public.”39
When CRI’s vice president was explicitly asked why the Israeli people should see the new Hebrew-language site as anything more than a propaganda arm of the Chinese government, he deflected. “This is my first time in Israel,” he said, “and my impression is that the country is different from what I saw on CNN.”40 The Israeli people, he sought to imply, should share China’s familiarity with the feeling that global media outlets, especially U.S. ones, do not always portray their country in ways that Israelis consider fair. In claiming this common negative experience with global media coverage, he suggested, Israelis should understand the impulse to build one’s own media outlets to share China’s point of view with the world. CRI’s launch into Hebrew-language media dissemination was met with very limited protests on behalf of Amnesty International.41
Perhaps the most creative Chinese adaptation to a Hebrew-language Israeli audience has been the emergence of a media superstar known as Xi Xiaoqi—or Chinese Itzik—who is one of the CRI Hebrew department’s best-known writers. Xi’s choice of a colloquial, friendly nickname (Yitzhak), which is a popular name in Israel, demonstrates his desire and attempts to address Israelis as kindred spirits.
In a webinar he gave to an Israeli audience in December 2020, he briefly talked about his background. He works for the China Media Group (CRI is one part of the corporation), and he has invested a lot of time in learning about Israeli history, Israeli culture, and the Hebrew language. According to Xi, the Communication University of China opened a new department for Hebrew in 2005, and he chose it as a major with his grandfather’s encouragement. In 2007, he moved to Israel to study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and he has worked for CRI since 2009.42
In his writings and media appearances, Itzik conveys carefully crafted, China-friendly messages in fluent Hebrew with localized social references. He has appeared many times on behalf of CRI on Zinor Layla, an interview-based television program on Israel’s Channel 13 to comment on an array of current affairs and cultural issues including climate change, geopolitics, and the U.S.-Israel alliance.43 In addition, Itzik and other CRI colleagues (including some Israeli employees) have appeared on Kan 11, the Israeli state-affiliated television channel, to present a variety of segments and short videos related to China.44 CRI and Kan 11 have collaborated both by featuring CRI representatives as commentators and producing and distributing jointly made web videos.45 Meanwhile, on the Israeli television network Keshet 12, Itzik has been featured as a pundit speaking on Chinese culture in a series of news videos filmed in China and presented by two of the channel’s news anchors.46
Xi’s Chinese Itzik persona has become something of a fixture in Israel; he even has been the subject of a comprehensive profile story in Makor Rishon.47 The newspaper published that interview without critical commentary, which perhaps suggests just how much resonance such messaging can have when it is offered in a local language and by a person with a high local profile. In this interview, Itzik painted the United States in a negative light as picking quarrels with China and putting undue pressure on its ally Israel.
In the Makor Rishon profile, Itzik was asked point-blank whether his endeavor amounted to disseminating propaganda. He replied by noting that Israelis themselves often struggle with the gap between their own perceptions of Israel and global public perceptions. Through the efforts of figures like Itzik, China is deploying localized outreach to enhance its messaging about China to the Israeli public.48
For some critics in Israel, Itzik has raised concerns about whether Hebrew-language media circles are unquestioningly providing a platform for CCP propaganda simply because Chinese media platforms have been savvy about crafting a compelling character with Hebrew-language aptitude and an understanding of the local environment. These critics worry that many Israeli media outlets are picking up CCP messages verbatim, often without adequate interpretation or analysis.
Chinese Efforts to Win Over Israelis
It is worth asking what impact these Chinese messaging and outreach strategies have had on Israeli views of China. While it is difficult to definitively answer this question, some polling data offer indications of where Israeli public opinion stands. On balance, polling data from the Pew Research Center seem to indicate that many Israelis have positive views of China. Chinese public diplomacy and outreach are one major factor to consider, though there are others. In any case, if public opinion polls are any indication, China seems to have been somewhat successful in its use of strategic messages tailored to the Israeli public.49
According to Pew’s 2019 Global Attitudes Survey, many Israelis view China quite favorably. Among the thirty-four countries surveyed, Israeli respondents viewed China more positively than those of any other country except for Lebanon, Nigeria, and Russia. Specifically, 66 percent of Israeli respondents rated China in a “favorable” light, while a mere 25 percent gave a negative response.50 By comparison, 60 percent of U.S. respondents see China in “unfavorable” terms, while only 26 percent view China positively, though the U. S. polling numbers have shifted considerably in recent years. Survey results showed a jump of more than 10 percent in China’s favorability rating among Israelis since 2018, and the numbers have trended upward in recent years with some fluctuations here and there.
These polling numbers offer other indications that Israelis have warmed to China, with some apparent limits. The share of Israelis who trust Chinese leaders “to do the right thing with regard to world affairs” has grown over time but is still relatively low. In 2007, only 13 percent of Israelis expressed confidence in then Chinese president Hu Jintao, though since current President Xi Jinping has taken the helm, the number of Israelis confident in Chinese leadership has risen somewhat to 24 percent in 2014 and 35 percent in 2019.51 The messaging strategy of Chinese officials toward the Israeli population could very well be one factor that has prompted these numbers to rise.
That said, there are several potential explanations of why Israeli views on China have improved, each of them with some limitations. First, China has poured a great deal of investment into Israel and has gotten involved on some notable infrastructure projects in the country, such as the red line of the Tel Aviv subway. Between 2004 and 2007, China’s bilateral trade with Israel ballooned to reach over $5 billion, and during this period China also ramped up its strategic messaging in Israel.52 The two countries’ bilateral trade volume kept growing from there, reaching nearly $15 billion in 2019.53 Yet it is important to note that such Chinese investment has not necessarily been positively received in all cases, and occasionally it has spawned negative Israeli reactions that have approached Sinophobia.54
A second factor has been China’s rapid evolution from a regional power to a superpower, a development that has arguably made it a more attractive partner to Israelis. Nevertheless, China’s meteoric ascent has not led to higher favorability ratings elsewhere and has already raised concerns with at least some Israelis. For that reason, it is no given that China’s growing geopolitical clout automatically leads to a boost in the country’s favorability ratings around the world.
Another explanation of how China is making inroads in Israel is the success of its adaptive messaging, including the localized metaphors and allusions this outreach deploys. Chinese leaders have long believed deeply in the utility of this kind of messaging. Laozi, a great Chinese philosopher from the sixth century BCE, advocated the use of “indirect” and “soft” influence rather than outright force as a tool of statecraft.55 He argued that great leaders persuade their people to follow their vision without resorting to force wherever possible.
China’s strategic messaging campaign in Israel and other related forms of public outreach indicate that Chinese actors are committed to cultivating influence in Israel and shaping the views of the Israeli people on important geopolitical matters. The CCP sees this campaign as part of its broader efforts to compete with the United States for influence around the world. It is too early in U.S. President Joe Biden’s tenure to know how the new administration will view and seek to shape these issues, but judging by Biden’s remarks, his approach to China will be no less tough than his predecessor’s, though his methods may sometimes differ.
Bennett and the new Israeli government must make plans for how to deal with these Chinese messaging activities, making clear that the Israeli government does not see China as an enemy but that cooperation with Beijing must be done right. This will require a balancing act because a key element of Israel’s foreign policy will continue to be its cooperation with long-time partners like the United States and other Western countries with which it shares important values such as democracy, freedom of speech, and human rights.
About the Author
Roie Yellinek received his PhD from Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. He is an associate researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute, and an adjunct researcher at the Dado Center, which is affiliated with the Israeli Defense Forces. He specializes in studying the growing relationships between China and the countries of the Middle East, especially with regard to Chinese diplomacy and soft power. He has written extensively on Chinese diplomacy in the Middle East and is a frequent commentator in local and international media outlets.
Notes
10 Author interview with an Israeli diplomat who served in China for many years, Tel Aviv, Israel, January 20, 2019.
11 Parts of this section are based on one of the author’s previous publications. See Roie Yellinek, “Pompeo’s Visit to Israel and the Chinese Connection,” Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, June 5, 2020, https://besacenter.org/pompeo-israel-china.
12 Ibid.
14 Chinese Embassy in Israel, “Dalai Lama Lies Again,” Chinese Embassy in Israel (Embassy News), April 2, 2008, http://il.china-embassy.org/eng/sgxw/t420514.htm; Gary Wilson, “CIA Ran Tibet Contras Since 1959,” Chinese Embassy in Israel (Embassy News), April 14, 2008, http://il.china-embassy.org/eng/sgxw/t425132.htm; and “Tibet - Myth and Reality,” Chinese Embassy in Israel (Embassy News), April 16, 2008, http://il.china-embassy.org/eng/sgxw/t425810.htm.
20 Hudson Institute, “Can Israel Become a Maritime Power?,” Hudson Institute, panel discussion in Washington, DC, September 26, 2016, https://www.hudson.org/events/ 1370-can-israel-become-a-maritime-power-92016; and Shaul Chorev and Douglas J. Feith, “Middle East Problems: Isolationism Wouldn’t Protect the U.S. From Them,” Hudson Institute, September 5, 2016, https://www.hudson.org/research/ 12807-middle-east-problems-isolationism-wouldn-t-protect-the-u-s-from-them.
26 Ibid.
27 Chinese Embassy in Israel, “Ambassador Zhan Yongxin’s Exclusive Interview With the Jerusalem Report,” Chinese Embassy in Israel, October 17, 2018, http://il.china-embassy.org/eng/gdxw/t1604841. htm; and Itamar Eichner, Attila Schumpelby, and Alexandra Lukash, “Chinese Ambassador: “We Do Not Want to Harm Israel’s Relations With Other Countries,” Ynet, August 25, 2019, https://www.ynet. co.il/articles/0,7340,L-5573645,00.html.
28 Ibid.
29 Hodaia Carish Hazoni, “Chinese Ambassador to Israel: ‘The World Is Looking for a Scapegoat,’” Makor Rishon, April 16, 2020, https://www.makorrishon.co.il/news/221245; and R. Kolins, “Unfounded Guilt,” Yated Ne’eman, May 5, 2020, 58–59.
30 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
36 CRI, “The Facebook Page of China Radio International,” Facebook,
37 Anat Kam, “Two Chinamen at the Click of a Mouse – Today China Radio International Launched a Hebrew Language Website Tailored to the Israeli Audience,” Walla News, October 19, 2009, https://b.walla.co.il/ item/1592325.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid.
43 “Chinese Itzik’ in an Interview for TV Show Zinor Layla With Guy Lerer,” YouTube, 4:48, posted by “Itzik the Chinese,” May 8, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmKqKHiDgBo; and “ Itzik the Chinese Explains to the Zinor Layla TV Show What Chinese Work Ethic Is,” YouTube, 4:42, posted by “Itzik the Chinese,” September 3, 2013, ht tps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtevihMN5OM&list=UUzeLeX3y1nY3FZ0mVCcfVdw&index=91& ab_channel=%D7%90%D7%99%D7%A6%D7%99%D7%A7%D7%94%D7%A1%D7%99%D7%A0%D7%99%D7%9B%D7%90%D7%9F%D7%91%D7%91%D7%99%D7%99%D7%92%D7%B3%D7%99%D7%A0%D7%92.
46 Danny Kushmaru and Amalya Duek, “Made in China: A Special Journey,” N12, November 17, 2002,
54 See, for example, a summary of the following remarks by Oded Eran at a June 2017 event. Oded Eran, “3rd Annual Israel-China Conference,” Tel Aviv University Institute for National Security Studies, June 29, 2017, https://www.inss.org.il/event/3rd-annual-israel-china-conference; and Nehemia Strassler, “That Is, the Country Is Wiped Out,” Haaretz, May 27, 2014, https://www. haaretz.co.il/opinions/.premium-1.2332071.
55 Joseph S. Nye, The Powers to Lead (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 140.
21. An Open Letter in Defense of Democracy
An Open Letter in Defense of Democracy - The Bulwark
The future of democracy in the United States is in danger.
thebulwark.com · by Todd Gitlin, Jeffrey C. Isaac, and William Kristol · October 27, 2021
[This open letter is being published simultaneously by The Bulwark and the New Republic.]
We are writers, academics, and political activists who have long disagreed about many things.
Some of us are Democrats and others Republicans. Some identify with the left, some with the right, and some with neither. We have disagreed in the past, and we hope to be able to disagree, productively, for years to come. Because we believe in the pluralism that is at the heart of democracy.
But right now we agree on a fundamental point: We need to join together to defend liberal democracy.
Because liberal democracy itself is in serious danger. Liberal democracy depends on free and fair elections, respect for the rights of others, the rule of law, a commitment to truth and tolerance in our public discourse. All of these are now in serious danger.
The primary source of this danger is one of our two major national parties, the Republican Party, which remains under the sway of Donald Trump and Trumpist authoritarianism. Unimpeded by Trump’s defeat in 2020 and unfazed by the January 6 insurrection, Trump and his supporters actively work to exploit anxieties and prejudices, to promote reckless hostility to the truth and to Americans who disagree with them, and to discredit the very practice of free and fair elections in which winners and losers respect the peaceful transfer of power.
So we, who have differed on so much in the past—and who continue to differ on much today—have come together to say:
We vigorously oppose ongoing Republican efforts to change state election laws to limit voter participation.
We vigorously oppose ongoing Republican efforts to empower state legislatures to override duly appointed election officials and interfere with the proper certification of election results, thereby substituting their own political preferences for those expressed by citizens at the polls.
We vigorously oppose the relentless and unending promotion of unprofessional and phony “election audits” that waste public money, jeopardize public electoral data and voting machines, and generate paranoia about the legitimacy of elections.
We urge the Democratic-controlled Congress to pass effective, national legislation to protect the vote and our elections, and if necessary to override the Senate filibuster rule.
And we urge all responsible citizens who care about democracy—public officials, journalists, educators, activists, ordinary citizens—to make the defense of democracy an urgent priority now.
Now is the time for leaders in all walks of life—for citizens of all political backgrounds and persuasions—to come to the aid of the Republic.
Todd Gitlin
Professor of Journalism, Sociology and Communications
Columbia University
Jeffrey C. Isaac
James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science
Indiana University, Bloomington
William Kristol
Editor at Large, The Bulwark
Director, Defending Democracy Together
Cosigners
Affiliations listed for identification purposes only.
Sheri Berman
Professor of Political Science
Barnard College
Max Boot
Senior Fellow
Council on Foreign Relations
James Carroll
Writer
Leo Casey
Assistant to the President
American Federation of Teachers
Mona Charen
Policy Editor
The Bulwark
Noam Chomsky
Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics Emeritus
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Jelani Cobb
Professor of Journalism
Columbia University
Eliot A. Cohen
Robert E. Osgood Professor
Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies
David Cole
National Legal Director
American Civil Liberties Union
Laura K. Field
Senior Fellow
Niskanen Center
Carolyn Forché
University Professor
Georgetown University
Francis Fukuyama
Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow
Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Stanford University
William A. Galston
Senior Fellow
Brookings Institution
Jeffrey C. Goldfarb
Michael E. Gellert Professor Emeritus
New School for Social Research
Hahrie Hahn
Stavros Niarchos Foundation Professor of Political Science
Director, SNF Agora Institute
Johns Hopkins University
Roya Hakakian
Writer
John Judis
Writer
Ira Katznelson
Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History
Columbia University
Michael Kazin
Professor of History
Georgetown University
Randall Kennedy
Michael R. Klein Professor of Law
Harvard University
Steven R. Levitsky
Professor of Government
Harvard University
Robert Jay Lifton, M.D.
Psychiatrist and author
Susie Linfield
Professor of Journalism
New York University
Damon Linker
Senior Correspondent
The Week
Dahlia Lithwick
Senior Editor
Slate
Jane Mansbridge
Charles F. Adams Professor, Emerita
Harvard Kennedy School
Win McCormack
Editor in Chief
The New Republic
John McWhorter
Professor of Linguistics
Columbia University
Deborah Meier
Educator
James Miller
Professor of Politics and Liberal Studies
New School for Social Research
Susan Neiman
Director
Einstein Forum
Nell Irvin Painter
Edwards Professor of American History Emerita
Princeton University
Rick Perlstein
Writer
Katha Pollitt
Writer
Claire Potter
Professor of History
New School for Social Research
Jedediah Purdy
William S. Beinecke Professor of Law
Columbia University
Jonathan Rauch
Senior Fellow
Brookings Institution
Adolph Reed
Emeritus Professor of Political Science
University of Pennsylvania
Kim Lane Scheppele
Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs
Princeton University
Charles Sykes
Founder and Editor at Large
The Bulwark
George Thomas
Burnet C. Wohlford Professor of American Political Institutions
Claremont McKenna College
Michael Tomasky
Editor, The New Republic
Editor, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas
Jeffrey K. Tulis
Professor of Government and Law
University of Texas
Joan Walsh
Writer
The Nation
Michael Walzer
Professor Emeritus of Social Science
Institute for Advanced Study
Dorian T. Warren
President
Community Change
Sean Wilentz
George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History
Princeton University
Benjamin Wittes
Senior Fellow
Brookings Institution
thebulwark.com · by Todd Gitlin, Jeffrey C. Isaac, and William Kristol · October 27, 2021
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.
