Quotes of the Day:
“A thankful heart is not only the greatest virtue, but the parent of all other virtues."
- Marcus Tullius Cicero
"I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."
- Henry David Thoreau
"The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught."
- H. L. Mencken
1. Top U.S. admiral warns about China threat at Halifax forum
2. How the game of Go explains China’s aggression towards India
3. The world is entering a new era of big government
4. The Bad Guys Are Winning
5. Senators Have More Than 900 Ideas To Fix America’s Security
6. Hybrid Warfare in an Age of Wokeness by Srdja Trifkovic
7. The Pandemic’s Next Turn Hinges on Three Unknowns
8. Perspective | Weapons tests in space could shut down ATMs and ground your next flight
9. As Soldiers Abandon Notorious Myanmar Army, a Morale Crisis Looms
10. Thousands of Afghans evacuated during U.S. withdrawal awaiting resettlement
11. Collection of U.S. actions inconsistent with words on China
12. China reduces ties with Lithuania in Taiwan spat
13. FDD | Biden-Xi Summit Only Highlights Fundamental Differences Between U.S. and China
14. Commentary: Placing Terrorism in a Violent Non-State Actor Framework for the Great Power Competition Era
15. Enes Kanter: Move the Olympics for Peng Shuai’s Sake
16. F.B.I. Agents Became C.I.A. Operatives in Secret Overseas Prisons
17. Special forces testing Black Hawk helicopter with side-mounted electric motorcycles
18. These Are the Top 10 War Movies as Picked by an Actual Combat Veteran
19. Videos Said to Be of Peng Shuai Don’t Resolve Questions About Her Safety
1. Top U.S. admiral warns about China threat at Halifax forum
Excerpts:
Aquilino said the U.S. and its allies need to work together more frequently in international waters to build interoperability so they can operate together quickly if needed.
“We need to deliver capabilities sooner and faster,” he said
...
“We are fighting for our values and our ability to be free. Those are the stakes,” Aquilino said.
“The difference between free and open or authoritarian and closed. Which Indo-Pacific would you like to be a part of? It’s clear for the like-minded nations,” he added
Top U.S. admiral warns about China threat at Halifax forum |
November 21, 2021 at 08:05 JST
Adm. John Aquilino, center, commander of the United States Indo-Pacific Command, arrives for a meeting with Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, not shown, at his official residence in Tokyo on Nov. 11. (Pool Photo via AP)
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia--The head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said Saturday the United States and its allies need to operate with a greater sense of urgency amid rising tensions and China’s increasingly assertive military actions.
Adm. John C. Aquilino reaffirmed America’s commitment to achieving a free and open Indo-Pacific region during meetings with allies at the Halifax International Security Forum.
“Look at what the Chinese have said. President Xi (Jinping) has tasked his forces to be at a level of military parity with the United States by 2027. Those are his words,” Aquilino said in a meeting with journalists.
Aquilino said the U.S. and its allies need to work together more frequently in international waters to build interoperability so they can operate together quickly if needed.
“We need to deliver capabilities sooner and faster,” he said
Tensions have heightened as the Chinese military has dispatched an increasing number of fighter jets near the self-ruled island of Taiwan, which Beijing considers part of its territory. China has threatened to use force to unite with it if necessary.
This week Chinese coast guard ships also blocked and sprayed water at two Philippine boats carrying supplies to a disputed South China Sea shoal in a flare-up of long-simmering territorial disputes in the strategic waterway.
China claims virtually the entire South China Sea and has transformed seven shoals into missile-protected island bases to cement its assertions, ratcheting up tensions and alarming rival claimants and Western governments led by the U.S.
President Xi has overseen an assertive foreign policy and expansion of the party’s military wing, the People’s Liberation Army. It has the world’s second-largest military budget after the United States and is developing submarines, stealth aircraft and ballistic missiles that can carry nuclear warheads.
“They are working at a very accelerated pace,” Aquilino said.
The U.S. and its allies have been promoting the goal of a free and open Indo-Pacific to ensure peace, free navigation and rule-based international order in the key international sea lanes, a move also joined by Japan, Australia and India in a framework known as the Quad. The strategic dialogue is seen as a move to counter China’s increasing influence in the region.
Britain and France, as well as some other nations, have also shifted their attention to the region and recently conducted joint military exercises.
China has defended its growing maritime activities, saying it has the right to defend its sovereignty, security and development interests.
“We are fighting for our values and our ability to be free. Those are the stakes,” Aquilino said.
“The difference between free and open or authoritarian and closed. Which Indo-Pacific would you like to be a part of? It’s clear for the like-minded nations,” he added
Aquilino met with the Canadian chief of defense along with Canada's minister of defense on Friday.
In its 13th year, the Halifax International Security Forum attracts defense and security officials from Western democracies. About 300 people gather each year in an intimate setting at Halifax’s Westin hotel.
2. How the game of Go explains China’s aggression towards India
I have never won a game of Go on my computer (and I play a lot). This is probably the same for many of us westerners which is why we think the CHinese must be so good at "strategy." But are they really? And is Go really an indicator?
How the game of Go explains China’s aggression towards India
Bide one’s time, then show strength
Nov 11th 2021
IN THE ANCIENT Chinese game of weiqi, better known in the West as Go, the objective is not to knock out your opponent. Taking turns to add one stone at a time to the board’s 361 spaces, what players firstly seek is to build the largest, strongest structures, and only secondly to weaken and stifle enemy ones. Better players shun contact, preferring to parry threats with counter-threats. Such unresolved challenges multiply, the advantage shifting to whoever poses the sharpest ones. Only when more stones than empty spaces fill the board can resolution of these tactical matters no longer be avoided.
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The contest between China and India has unfolded in similar fashion. The two have lately engaged in sabre-rattling and name-calling. But such tension has been rare during their seven-decade rivalry as modern nations. As in a game of weiqi, so long as India and China were focused on building their own core structures, each largely ignored the other.
Far from their crowded coasts and plains, the Asian giants’ 3,500km-long border region remained an empty section of the board. It contained not people or resources but the world’s coldest, driest deserts and its highest mountains. India and China maintained overlapping claims, and their forces sometimes clashed, as in a brief war in 1962. But they both also judged that there was not enough at stake to fight a big war over. So territorial limits continued to be defined in many areas by a “Line of Actual Control” rather than an internationally recognised boundary. By mutual agreement their border patrols went lightly armed. They mostly avoided contact.
As a democracy bound by rules, India has repeatedly sought to end the ambiguity by negotiating a permanent border. But perhaps because its strategists are steeped in the culture of weiqi, China has repeatedly rebuffed such efforts. For a player building formidable structures across the rest of the board, why foreclose on potential pressure points? Better to leave them open for use in the future, when you have more leverage and your opponent has more reason to fear you.
Under President Xi Jinping, China appears to have decided that this future is now. At several strategic spots along the border in the spring of 2020, Chinese troops marched into long-established patches of no-man’s-land, setting up permanent forward positions. When India sent in soldiers to challenge the intrusions, fisticuffs ensued. One clash left some 20 Indians and at least four Chinese dead. China has since refused any return to the status quo ante. This leaves it in control of lands India regarded as its own and, more seriously, in control of vantage points from which to threaten crucial roads and other Indian infrastructure.
From a weiqi perspective China’s boldness is understandable. In the 1980s its economy was roughly equal to India’s. It is now five times bigger, and churns out ever-more sophisticated weaponry while India relies on imports. China’s infrastructure has expanded towards its peripheries at a speed India has been unable to match.
As seen from Beijing, China’s southern neighbour looks weak in other ways. Its democracy is messy and inefficient. Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, looks like a puffed-up bluffer. And even as China extends strength by tightening its alliance with India’s arch-enemy Pakistan, Mr Modi dithers. In his dream of a Hindu golden age India needs no allies, only weaker satellites or rich friends. Despite fanfare over defence agreements with America or Japan or Australia, these remain largely notional. India’s army has little functional interoperability with any other.
In short, as the board fills up and one player emerges dominant, there should be no surprise for it to push the advantage. But China has not yet won. Even if his opponent is erratic, the global gameboard may prove wider, and India may turn out to have better-placed assets than Mr Xi realises.
Despite Mr Modi’s failings India retains a big reserve of goodwill as a democracy and a decent global citizen; it would gain fast allies if it really tried to win them. India’s core strength may run deeper, too. Its relative smallness is deceptive: the eastern third of China, where 95% of Chinese actually live, is no bigger than India. As China’s economy matures, India’s remains packed with upward potential. Besides, unlike a game of weiqi this contest between two great and ancient nations will never simply stop. It will keep on going long after Mr Xi and Mr Modi finish playing.
This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline "The great board game"
The Economist today
3. The world is entering a new era of big government
I still believe in classical liberalism.
But I am not sure we will ever see a government that is nimble and efficient or impartial.
Excerpts:
The long-term threat of a big state is that such bureaucracy, institutional failure and corruption become routine and widespread, making people poorer and limiting individual freedom. But these dangers are mixed with an opportunity. To understand how, consider why government grows.
...
The state must also seek to be nimble and efficient. Income support for households should be automated where possible as the financial sector becomes more digitised. Much form-filling can be eliminated, as Estonia’s war on paperwork has shown. If there were fewer, better-paid bureaucrats, the public sector could attract more talented staff. And politicians should be willing to start afresh when tackling new problems, rather than relying on lacklustre incumbent departments. The biggest successes of governments during the pandemic have come from internal startups like Operation Warp Speed, which helped bring about America’s development of vaccines.
The state should strive to be impartial. Narrow interests, whether the unions and anointed victim groups favoured by the left, or the right’s chums in business, will always seek to capture it. To resist, bureaucrats do not need relentless cynical, self-serving attacks on their integrity from politicians, but transparency and support for the ethos of public service. Though rising total spending on the old is justified, a full-scale gerontocracy is not. Retirees with deep pockets do not need public handouts. On the contrary, they should bear a heavier burden as taxes shift from wages, towards property, inheritance and consumption.
The prize is enormous. The difference between good government and bad will be measured not just in the rapid transition to net zero and the provision of a sustainable safety-net for the old, but in societies that are fairer and a lot more prosperous. In the 20th century classical liberals ensured that the growth of government accompanied the progress of humanity. The same might yet be true in the 21st.
The world is entering a new era of big government
How should classical liberals respond?
Nov 20th 2021
“KEEP YOUR eye on one thing and one thing only: how much government is spending,” Milton Friedman once said. Today his eyes would be popping. Governments have spent $17trn on the pandemic, including loans and guarantees, for a combined total of 16% of global GDP. On current forecasts, government spending will be greater as a share of GDP in 2026 than it was in 2006 in every major advanced economy. America is about to put $1.8trn into expanding its welfare state; Europe is doling out a €750bn ($850bn) investment fund; and Japan is promising a “new capitalism”, with even more government largesse.
In the coming decades the state’s economic footprint will expand yet further. Four-fifths of the world economy is now subject to a net-zero emissions target, a goal that in Britain is projected to raise the government-debt-to-GDP ratio by 21 percentage points by 2050 as the state subsidises decarbonisation and growth slows. And many countries have ageing populations that will demand vastly more spending on health care and pensions.
It would be easy for classical liberals such as this newspaper to despair at government’s relentless march. As the state has grown during the pandemic, its failures have been on full display. Early in the crisis America’s public-health authorities hindered private labs developing their own tests for the virus; this year they took until October to approve rapid tests that could have been available before the summer. For months Europe’s vaccine roll-out was too slow. China once celebrated its response to the virus as a victory for a strong-state model. Now its zero-covid strategy exemplifies the inflexibility of unchecked centralised power. One of the scandals in which British politics is mired is over whether its leaders took advantage of the crisis to award lucrative contracts to their pals.
The long-term threat of a big state is that such bureaucracy, institutional failure and corruption become routine and widespread, making people poorer and limiting individual freedom. But these dangers are mixed with an opportunity. To understand how, consider why government grows.
As our Briefing this week explains, the state almost always expands relative to GDP over time. Three forces are at work. The first is obviously malign. Inertia and mission creep make government hard to pare back. Voters and lobbyists who benefit from a regulation or item of spending have every reason to work hard at preserving it, whereas the many taxpayers who pay for pork barrels have better things to do than petition politicians to get rid of them. The bureaucrats in charge want to defend their turf and careers. When a programme fails, its supporters say it could still succeed if only it were given more money.
The second force is a fact of life. Prices of the services welfare states provide, such as health care and education, grow faster than the economy because of their high labour intensity and low rates of productivity increase. Though government inefficiency can make things worse, this “cost disease” afflicts the private and public sectors alike. It comes with the territory.
The third force is that governments today have more things to get done. As voters became richer over the 20th century they demanded more education and more of the expensive health care that takes advantage of the latest science. Today, as they age, they want to keep up spending on the elderly. And, increasingly, they want governments to do something about climate change.
These three forces are plain to see in the true impact of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the anti-government free-marketeers who loom largest in the public imagination. They are often said to have laid the groundwork for the “neoliberal era”. In fact, they did not leave a sustained legacy of smaller government. In 2019 America’s federal government spent a higher share of its GDP than in any of the ten years preceding Reagan’s presidency. Three decades after Thatcher left office—one of those decades being defined by austerity—Britain’s Conservative government will soon preside over the highest sustained spending as a share of the economy since the pre-Thatcher era.
The lasting victory of Reagan and Thatcher—and other reformers in Sweden, New Zealand and elsewhere—was over the first of the forces for big government. They realised that the state is at its worst when it is swollen by the distorted incentives of insiders to seek ever more control. Governments rightly sold off nationalised firms, cut back regulations, simplified some taxes and promoted competition. A consensus emerged about the limited role of government in liberal societies. Its adherents welcomed markets in most of the economy, but permitted redistribution and spending on public services to make the world fairer.
Today this consensus is under threat just when it is needed most. As ageing and climate change irresistibly increase government’s size, it is vital to recognise what the state can and cannot do well—and to avoid Leviathan wielding its might to the benefit of insiders and cronies. The argument for limited government should today be about the nature of the state’s interventions, not whether limiting global warming or providing for the elderly are necessary.
One task is to maximise the role of markets and individual choice. Climate change should be fought with a price for carbon, research-and-development subsidies and highly scrutinised public investments, not by rationing flights, promoting green national champions or enlisting central banks to distort financial markets. The welfare state should focus on redistributing cash and letting those in need choose what to do with it, not setting up new bureaucracies such as President Joe Biden’s proposed federal child-care system. Taxes should be broad-based and friendly to investment.
The supersized state
The state must also seek to be nimble and efficient. Income support for households should be automated where possible as the financial sector becomes more digitised. Much form-filling can be eliminated, as Estonia’s war on paperwork has shown. If there were fewer, better-paid bureaucrats, the public sector could attract more talented staff. And politicians should be willing to start afresh when tackling new problems, rather than relying on lacklustre incumbent departments. The biggest successes of governments during the pandemic have come from internal startups like Operation Warp Speed, which helped bring about America’s development of vaccines.
The state should strive to be impartial. Narrow interests, whether the unions and anointed victim groups favoured by the left, or the right’s chums in business, will always seek to capture it. To resist, bureaucrats do not need relentless cynical, self-serving attacks on their integrity from politicians, but transparency and support for the ethos of public service. Though rising total spending on the old is justified, a full-scale gerontocracy is not. Retirees with deep pockets do not need public handouts. On the contrary, they should bear a heavier burden as taxes shift from wages, towards property, inheritance and consumption.
The prize is enormous. The difference between good government and bad will be measured not just in the rapid transition to net zero and the provision of a sustainable safety-net for the old, but in societies that are fairer and a lot more prosperous. In the 20th century classical liberals ensured that the growth of government accompanied the progress of humanity. The same might yet be true in the 21st. ■
4. The Bad Guys Are Winning
A long piece but worthy of a Sunday read.
This covers a lot of ground from Russia and China to the countries they are influencing (and harming).
But this final critique is the national security issue we must ponder and debate.
Conclusion:
This absence of strategy reflects more than negligence. The centrality of democracy to American foreign policy has been declining for many years—at about the same pace, perhaps not coincidentally, as the decline of respect for democracy in America itself. The Trump presidency was a four-year display of contempt not just for the American political process, but for America’s historic democratic allies, whom he singled out for abuse. The president described the British and German leaders as “losers” and the Canadian prime minister as “dishonest” and “weak,” while he cozied up to autocrats—the Turkish president, the Russian president, the Saudi ruling family, and the North Korean dictator, among them—with whom he felt more comfortable, and no wonder: He has shared their ethos of no-questions-asked investments for many years. In 2008, the Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev paid Trump $95 million—more than twice what Trump had paid just four years earlier—for a house in Palm Beach no one else seemed to want; in 2012, Trump put his name on a building in Baku, Azerbaijan, owned by a company with apparent links to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. Trump feels perfectly at home in Autocracy Inc., and he accelerated the erosion of the rules and norms that has allowed it to take root in America.
At the same time, a part of the American left has abandoned the idea that “democracy” belongs at the heart of U.S. foreign policy—not out of greed and cynicism but out of a loss of faith in democracy at home. Convinced that the history of America is the history of genocide, slavery, exploitation, and not much else, they don’t see the value of making common cause with Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Nursiman Abdureshid, or any of the other ordinary people around the world forced into politics by their experience of profound injustice. Focused on America’s own bitter problems, they no longer believe America has anything to offer the rest of the world: Although the Hong Kong prodemocracy protesters waving American flags believe many of the same things we believe, their requests for American support in 2019 did not elicit a significant wave of youthful activism in the United States, not even something comparable to the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s.
Incorrectly identifying the promotion of democracy around the world with “forever wars,” they fail to understand the brutality of the zero-sum competition now unfolding in front of us. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does geopolitics. If America removes the promotion of democracy from its foreign policy, if America ceases to interest itself in the fate of other democracies and democratic movements, then autocracies will quickly take our place as sources of influence, funding, and ideas. If Americans, together with our allies, fail to fight the habits and practices of autocracy abroad, we will encounter them at home; indeed, they are already here. If Americans don’t help to hold murderous regimes to account, those regimes will retain their sense of impunity. They will continue to steal, blackmail, torture, and intimidate, inside their countries—and inside ours.
The Bad Guys Are Winning
If the 20th century was the story of slow, uneven progress toward the victory of liberal democracy over other ideologies—communism, fascism, virulent nationalism—the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse.
Illustrations by Michael Houtz
The future of democracy may well be decided in a drab office building on the outskirts of Vilnius, alongside a highway crammed with impatient drivers heading out of town.
I met Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya there this spring, in a room that held a conference table, a whiteboard, and not much else. Her team—more than a dozen young journalists, bloggers, vloggers, and activists—was in the process of changing offices. But that wasn’t the only reason the space felt stale and perfunctory. None of them, especially not Tsikhanouskaya, really wanted to be in this ugly building, or in the Lithuanian capital at all. She is there because she probably won the 2020 presidential election in Belarus, and because the Belarusian dictator she probably defeated, Alexander Lukashenko, forced her out of the country immediately afterward. Lithuania offered her asylum. Her husband, Siarhei Tsikhanouski, remains imprisoned in Belarus.
From our December 2021 issue
Check out the full table of contents and find your next story to read.
Here is the first thing she said to me: “My story is a little bit different from other people.” This is what she tells everyone—that hers was not the typical life of a dissident or budding politician. Before the spring of 2020, she didn’t have much time for television or newspapers. She has two children, one of whom was born deaf. On an ordinary day, she would take them to kindergarten, to the doctor, to the park.
Then her husband bought a house and ran into the concrete wall of Belarusian bureaucracy and corruption. Exasperated, he started making videos about his experiences, and those of others. These videos yielded a YouTube channel; the channel attracted thousands of followers. He went around the country, recording the frustrations of his fellow citizens, driving a car with the phrase “Real News” plastered on the side. Siarhei Tsikhanouski held up a mirror to his society. People saw themselves in that mirror and responded with the kind of enthusiasm that opposition politicians had found hard to create in Belarus.
“At the beginning it was really difficult because people were afraid,” Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya told me. “But step-by-step, slowly, they realized that Siarhei isn’t afraid.” He wasn’t afraid to speak the truth as he saw it; his absence of fear inspired others. He decided to run for president. The regime, recognizing the power of Siarhei’s mirror, would not allow him to register his candidacy, just as it had not allowed him to register the ownership of his house. It ended his campaign and arrested him.
Tsikhanouskaya ran in his place, with no motive other than “to show my love for him.” The police and bureaucrats let her. Because what harm could she do, this simple housewife, this woman with no political experience? And so, in July 2020, she registered as a candidate. Unlike her husband, she was afraid. She woke up “so scared” every morning, she told me, and sometimes she stayed scared all day long. But she kept going. Which was, though she doesn’t say so, incredibly brave. “You feel this responsibility, you wake up with this pain for those people who are in jail, you go to bed with the same feeling.”
Unexpectedly, Tsikhanouskaya was a success—not despite her inexperience, but because of it. Her campaign became a campaign about ordinary people standing up to the regime. Two other prominent opposition politicians endorsed her after their own campaigns were blocked, and when the wife of one of them and the female campaign manager of the other were photographed alongside Tsikhanouskaya, her campaign became something more: a campaign about ordinary women—women who had been neglected, women who had no voice, even just women who loved their husbands. In return, the regime targeted all three of these women. Tsikhanouskaya received an anonymous threat: Her children would be “sent to an orphanage.” She dispatched them with her mother abroad, to Vilnius, and kept campaigning.
Democratic revolutions are contagious. If you can stamp them out in one country, you might prevent them from starting in others.
On August 9, election officials announced that Lukashenko had won 80 percent of the vote, a number nobody believed. The internet was cut off, and Tsikhanouskaya was detained by police and then forced out of the country. Mass demonstrations unfolded across Belarus. These were both a spontaneous outburst of feeling—a popular response to the stolen election—and a carefully coordinated project run by young people, some based in Warsaw, who had been experimenting with social media and new forms of communication for several years. For a brief, tantalizing moment, it looked like this democratic uprising might prevail. Belarusians shared a sense of national unity they had never felt before. The regime immediately pushed back, with real brutality. Yet the mood at the protests was generally happy, optimistic; people literally danced in the streets. In a country of fewer than 10 million, up to 1.5 million people would come out in a single day, among them pensioners, villagers, factory workers, and even, in a few places, members of the police and the security services, some of whom removed insignia from their uniforms or threw them in the garbage.
Tsikhanouskaya says she and many others naively believed that under this pressure, the dictator would just give up. “We thought he would understand that we are against him,” she told me. “That people don’t want to live under his dictatorship, that he lost the elections.” They had no other plan.
At first, Lukashenko seemed to have no plan either. But his neighbors did. On August 18, a plane belonging to the FSB, the Russian security services, flew from Moscow to Minsk. Soon after that, Lukashenko’s tactics underwent a dramatic change. Stephen Biegun, who was the U.S. deputy secretary of state at the time, describes the change as a shift to “more sophisticated, more controlled ways to repress the population.” Belarus became a textbook example of what the journalist William J. Dobson has called “the dictator’s learning curve”: Techniques that had been used successfully in the past to repress crowds in Russia were seamlessly transferred to Belarus, along with personnel who understood how to deploy them. Russian television journalists arrived to replace the Belarusian journalists who had gone on strike, and immediately stepped up the campaign to portray the demonstrations as the work of Americans and other foreign “enemies.” Russian police appear to have supplemented their Belarusian colleagues, or at least given them advice, and a policy of selective arrests began. As Vladimir Putin figured out a long time ago, mass arrests are unnecessary if you can jail, torture, or possibly murder just a few key people. The rest will be frightened into staying home. Eventually they will become apathetic, because they believe nothing can change.
The Lukashenko rescue package, reminiscent of the one Putin had designed for Bashar al-Assad in Syria six years earlier, contained economic elements too. Russian companies offered markets for Belarusian products that had been banned by the democratic West—for example, smuggling Belarusian cigarettes into the European Union. Some of this was possible because the two countries share a language. (Though roughly a third to half of the country speaks Belarusian, most public business in Belarus is conducted in Russian.) But this close cooperation was also possible because Lukashenko and Putin, though they famously dislike each other, share a common way of seeing the world. Both believe that their personal survival is more important than the well-being of their people. Both believe that a change of regime would result in their death, imprisonment, or exile.
Both also learned lessons from the Arab Spring, as well as from the more distant memory of 1989, when Communist dictatorships fell like dominoes: Democratic revolutions are contagious. If you can stamp them out in one country, you might prevent them from starting in others. The anti-corruption, prodemocracy demonstrations of 2014 in Ukraine, which resulted in the overthrow of President Viktor Yanukovych’s government, reinforced this fear of democratic contagion. Putin was enraged by those protests, not least because of the precedent they set. After all, if Ukrainians could get rid of their corrupt dictator, why wouldn’t Russians want to do the same?
Lukashenko gladly accepted Russian help, turned against his people, and transformed himself from an autocratic, patriarchal grandfather—a kind of national collective-farm boss—into a tyrant who revels in cruelty. Reassured by Putin’s support, he began breaking new ground. Not just selective arrests—a year later, human-rights activists say that more than 800 political prisoners remain in jail—but torture. Not just torture but rape. Not just torture and rape but kidnapping and, quite possibly, murder.
Lukashenko’s sneering defiance of the rule of law—he issues stony-faced denials of the existence of political repression in his country—and of anything resembling decency spread beyond his borders. In May 2021, Belarusian air traffic control forced an Irish-owned Ryanair passenger plane to land in Minsk so that one of the passengers, Roman Protasevich, a young dissident living in exile, could be arrested; he later made public confessions on television that appeared to be coerced. In August, another young dissident living in exile, Vitaly Shishov, was found hanged in a Kyiv park. At about the same time, Lukashenko’s regime set out to destabilize its EU neighbors by forcing streams of refugees across their borders: Belarus lured Afghan and Iraqi refugees to Minsk with a proffer of tourist visas, then escorted them to the borders of Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland and forced them at gunpoint to cross, illegally.
Lukashenko began to act, in other words, as if he were untouchable, both at home and abroad. He began breaking not only the laws and customs of his own country, but also the laws and customs of other countries, and of the international community—laws regarding air traffic control, homicide, borders. Exiles flowed out of the country; Tsikhanouskaya’s team scrambled to book hotel rooms or Airbnbs in Vilnius, to find means of support, to learn new languages. Tsikhanouskaya herself had to make another, even more difficult transition—from people’s-choice candidate to sophisticated diplomat. This time her inexperience initially worked against her. At first, she thought that if she could just speak with Angela Merkel or Emmanuel Macron, one of them could fix the problem. “I was sure they are so powerful that they can call Lukashenko and say, ‘Stop! How dare you?’ ” she told me. But they could not.
So she tried to talk as foreign leaders did, to speak in sophisticated political language. That didn’t work either. The experience was demoralizing: “It’s very difficult sometimes to talk about your people, about their sufferings, and see the emptiness in the eyes of those you are talking to.” She began using the plain English that she had learned in school, in order to convey plain things. “I started to tell stories that would touch their hearts. I tried to make them feel just a little of the pain that Belarusians feel.” Now she tells anyone who will listen exactly what she told me: I am an ordinary person, a housewife, a mother of two children, and I am in politics because other ordinary people are being beaten naked in prison cells. What she wants is sanctions, democratic unity, pressure on the regime—anything that will raise the cost for Lukashenko to stay in power, for Russia to keep him in power. Anything that might induce the business and security elites in Belarus to abandon him. Anything that might persuade China and Iran to keep out.
To her surprise, Tsikhanouskaya became, for the second time, a runaway success. She charmed Merkel and Macron, and the diplomats of multiple countries. In July, she met President Joe Biden, who subsequently broadened American sanctions on Belarus to include major companies in several industries (tobacco, potash, construction) and their executives. The EU had already banned a range of people, companies, and technologies from Belarus; after the Ryanair kidnapping, the EU and the U.K. banned the Belarusian national airline as well. What was once a booming trade between Belarus and Europe has been reduced to a trickle. Tsikhanouskaya inspires people to make sacrifices of their own. The Lithuanian foreign minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis, told me that his country was proud to host her, even if it meant trouble on the border. “If we’re not free to invite other free people into our country because it’s somehow not safe, then the question is, can we consider ourselves free?”
Tsikhanouskaya has acquired many other supporters and admirers. She has not only the talented young activists in Vilnius, but colleagues in Poland and Ukraine as well. She promotes values that unite millions of her compatriots, including pensioners like Nina Bahinskaya, a great-grandmother who has been filmed shouting at the police, and ordinary working people like Siarhei Hardziyevich, a 50-year-old journalist from a provincial town, Drahichyn, who was convicted of “insulting the president.” On her side she also has the friends and relatives of the hundreds of political prisoners who, like her own husband, are paying a high price just because they want to live in a country with free elections.
Most of all, though, Tsikhanouskaya has on her side the combined narrative power of what we used to call the free world. She has the language of human rights, democracy, and justice. She has the NGOs and human-rights organizations that work inside the United Nations and other international institutions to put pressure on autocratic regimes. She has the support of people around the world who still fervently believe that politics can be made more civilized, more rational, more humane, who can see in her an authentic representative of that cause.
But will that be enough? A lot depends on the answer.
Michael Houtz
All of us have in our minds a cartoon image of what an autocratic state looks like. There is a bad man at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.
But in the 21st century, that cartoon bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services (military, police, paramilitary groups, surveillance), and professional propagandists. The members of these networks are connected not only within a given country, but among many countries. The corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country can arm, equip, and train the police in another. The propagandists share resources—the troll farms that promote one dictator’s propaganda can also be used to promote the propaganda of another—and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America.
This is not to say that there is some supersecret room where bad guys meet, as in a James Bond movie. Nor does the new autocratic alliance have a unifying ideology. Among modern autocrats are people who call themselves communists, nationalists, and theocrats. No one country leads this group. Washington likes to talk about Chinese influence, but what really bonds the members of this club is a common desire to preserve and enhance their personal power and wealth. Unlike military or political alliances from other times and places, the members of this group don’t operate like a bloc, but rather like an agglomeration of companies—call it Autocracy Inc. Their links are cemented not by ideals but by deals—deals designed to take the edge off Western economic boycotts, or to make them personally rich—which is why they can operate across geographical and historical lines.
Thus in theory, Belarus is an international pariah—Belarusian planes cannot land in Europe, many Belarusian goods cannot be sold in the U.S., Belarus’s shocking brutality has been criticized by many international institutions. But in practice, the country remains a respected member of Autocracy Inc. Despite Lukashenko’s flagrant flouting of international norms, despite his reaching across borders to break laws, Belarus remains the site of one of China’s largest overseas development projects. Iran has expanded its relationship with Belarus over the past year. Cuban officials have expressed their solidarity with Lukashenko at the UN, calling for an end to “foreign interference” in the country’s affairs.
In theory, Venezuela, too, is an international pariah. Since 2008, the U.S. has repeatedly added more Venezuelans to personal-sanctions lists; since 2019, U.S. citizens and companies have been forbidden to do any business there. Canada, the EU, and many of Venezuela’s South American neighbors maintain sanctions on the country. And yet Nicolás Maduro’s regime receives loans as well as oil investment from Russia and China. Turkey facilitates the illicit Venezuelan gold trade. Cuba has long provided security advisers, as well as security technology, to the country’s rulers. The international narcotics trade keeps individual members of the regime well supplied with designer shoes and handbags. Leopoldo López, a onetime star of the opposition now living in exile in Spain, has observed that although Maduro’s opponents have received some foreign assistance, it’s “nothing comparable with what Maduro has received.”
Like the Belarusian opposition, the Venezuelan opposition has charismatic leaders and dedicated grassroots activists who have persuaded millions of people to go out into the streets and protest. If their only enemy was the corrupt, bankrupt Venezuelan regime, they might win. But Lopez and his fellow dissidents are in fact fighting multiple autocrats, in multiple countries. Like so many other ordinary people propelled into politics by the experience of injustice—like Sviatlana and Siarhei Tsikhanouski in Belarus, like the leaders of the extraordinary Hong Kong protest movement, like the Cubans and the Iranians and the Burmese pushing for democracy in their countries—they are fighting against people who control state companies and can make investment decisions worth billions of dollars for purely political reasons. They are fighting against people who can buy sophisticated surveillance technology from China or bots from St. Petersburg. Above all, they are fighting against people who have inured themselves to the feelings and opinions of their countrymen, as well as the feelings and opinions of everybody else. Because Autocracy Inc. grants its members not only money and security, but also something less tangible and yet just as important: impunity.
How have modern autocrats achieved such impunity? In part by persuading so many other people in so many other countries to play along.
The leaders of the Soviet Union, the most powerful autocracy in the second half of the 20th century, cared deeply about how they were perceived around the world. They vigorously promoted the superiority of their political system and they objected when it was criticized. When the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev famously brandished his shoe at a meeting of the UN General Assembly in 1960, it was because a Filipino delegate had expressed sympathy for “the peoples of Eastern Europe and elsewhere which have been deprived of the free exercise of their civil and political rights.”
Today, the most brutal members of Autocracy Inc. don’t much care if their countries are criticized, or by whom. The leaders of Myanmar don’t really have any ideology beyond nationalism, self-enrichment, and the desire to remain in power. The leaders of Iran confidently discount the views of Western infidels. The leaders of Cuba and Venezuela dismiss the statements of foreigners on the grounds that they are “imperialists.” The leaders of China have spent a decade disputing the human-rights language long used by international institutions, successfully convincing many people around the world that these “Western” concepts don’t apply to them. Russia has gone beyond merely ignoring foreign criticism to outright mocking it. After the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was arrested earlier this year, Amnesty International designated him a “prisoner of conscience,” a venerable term that the human-rights organization has been using since the 1960s. Russian social-media trolls immediately mounted a campaign designed to draw Amnesty’s attention to 15-year-old statements by Navalny that seemed to break the group’s rules on offensive language. Amnesty took the bait and removed the title. Then, when Amnesty officials realized they’d been manipulated by trolls, they restored it. Russian state media cackled derisively. It was not a good moment for the human-rights movement.
Impervious to international criticism, modern autocrats are using aggressive tactics to push back against mass protest and widespread discontent. Putin was unembarrassed to stage “elections” earlier this year in which some 9 million people were barred from being candidates, the progovernment party received five times more television coverage than all the other parties put together, television clips of officials stealing votes circulated online, and vote counts were mysteriously altered. The Burmese junta is unashamed to have murdered hundreds of protesters, including young teenagers, on the streets of Yangon. The Chinese government boasts about its destruction of the popular democracy movement in Hong Kong.
At the extremes, this kind of contempt can devolve into what the international democracy activist Srdja Popovic calls the “Maduro model” of governance, which may be what Lukashenko is preparing for in Belarus. Autocrats who adopt it are “willing to pay the price of becoming a totally failed country, to see their country enter the category of failed states,” accepting economic collapse, isolation, and mass poverty if that’s what it takes to stay in power. Assad has applied the Maduro model in Syria. And it seems to be what the Taliban leadership had in mind this summer when they occupied Kabul and immediately began arresting and murdering Afghan officials and civilians. Financial collapse was looming, but they didn’t care. As one Western official working in the region told the Financial Times, “They assume that any money that the west doesn’t give them will be replaced by China, Pakistan, Russia and Saudi Arabia.” And if the money doesn’t come, so what? Their goal is not a flourishing, prosperous Afghanistan, but an Afghanistan where they are in charge.
The widespread adoption of the Maduro model helps explain why Western statements at the time of Kabul’s fall sounded so pathetic. The EU’s foreign-policy chief expressed “deep concern about reports of serious human rights violations” and called for “meaningful negotiations based on democracy, the rule of law and constitutional rule”—as if the Taliban was interested in any of that. Whether it was “deep concern,” “sincere concern,” or “profound concern,” whether it was expressed on behalf of Europe or the Holy See, none of it mattered: Statements like that mean nothing to the Taliban, the Cuban security services, or the Russian FSB. Their goals are money and personal power. They are not concerned—deeply, sincerely, profoundly, or otherwise—about the happiness or well-being of their fellow citizens, let alone the views of anyone else.
How have modern autocrats achieved such impunity? In part by persuading so many other people in so many other countries to play along. Some of those people, and some of those countries, might surprise you.
Michael Houtz
If the stories told by the young dissidents in Vilnius make you angry, the stories told by the Uyghurs of Istanbul will haunt your dreams.
A few months ago, in a hot, airless apartment over a dress shop, I met Kalbinur Tursun. She was dressed in a dark-green gown with ruffled sleeves. Her face, framed by a tightly drawn headscarf, resembled that of a saint in a medieval triptych. Her small daughter, in Mickey Mouse leggings, played with an electronic tablet while we spoke.
Tursun is a Uyghur, a member of China’s predominantly Muslim Chinese minority, born in the territory that the Chinese call Xinjiang and that many Uyghurs know as East Turkestan. Tursun had six children—too many in a country where there are strict rules limiting births. Also, she wanted to raise them as Muslims; that, too, was a problem in China. When she became pregnant again, she feared being harassed by police, as women with more than two children often are. She and her husband decided to move to Turkey. They got passports for themselves and for their youngest child, but were told the other passports would take longer. Because of her pregnancy, the three of them came to Istanbul anyway; after she and her daughter were settled, her husband returned for the rest of the family. Then he disappeared.
That was five years ago. Tursun has not spoken with her husband since. In July 2017, she spoke with her sister, who promised to take care of her remaining children. Then they lost contact. A year after that, Tursun came across a video being passed around on WhatsApp. Shot at what appeared to be a Chinese orphanage, it showed Uyghur children, heads shaved and all dressed alike, learning to speak Chinese. One of the children was her daughter Ayshe.
Tursun showed me the video of her daughter. She also showed me a picture of her husband standing in an Istanbul mosque. She cannot speak to either one of them, or to any of the rest of her children in China. She has no way to know what they are thinking. They might not know she has searched for them. They might believe she has abandoned them on purpose. They might have forgotten she exists. Meanwhile, time is passing. The child in the Mickey Mouse leggings, who sang to herself while we talked, is the one born in Turkey. She has never met her father, or her brothers and sisters in China. But she knows something is very wrong; when Tursun fell silent for a moment, overcome with emotion, the girl put down her tablet and put her arms around her mother’s neck.
Sinister though it sounds, Tursun’s story is not unique. The translator for my conversation with Tursun was Nursiman Abdureshid. She is also a Uyghur, also from Xinjiang, also married, also with a daughter, also now living in Istanbul. Abdureshid came to Turkey as a student, convinced that she had the backing of the Chinese state. A graduate of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, she had studied business administration, learned excellent Turkish and English, made ethnic-Chinese friends. She had never thought of herself as a rebel or a dissident. Why would she have? She was a Chinese success story.
Abdureshid’s break with her old life came in June 2017, when, after an ordinary conversation with her family back in China, they stopped answering her calls. She texted and got no response. Weeks passed. After many months, she contacted the consulate in Istanbul—she asked a Turkish friend to call for her—and officials there finally told her the truth: Her father, mother, and younger brother were in prison camps, each for “preparing to commit terrorist activities.”
A similar charge was thrown at Jevlan Shirmemet, another Uyghur student in Istanbul. Like Abdureshid, he realized something was wrong when his mother and other relatives stopped responding to texts. Then they blocked him on WeChat, the Chinese messaging app. Nearly two years later, he learned that they were in prison camps. Chinese diplomats accused him of having “anti-Chinese” contacts in Egypt, as well. Shirmemet told them he had never been to Egypt. Prove it, they responded, then added: Cooperate with us, tell us who all of your friends are, list every place you have ever been, become an informer. He refused and—though not temperamentally inclined to be a dissident either—decided to speak out on social media instead. “I had remained silent, but my silence didn’t protect my family,” he told me.
Turkey is home to some 50,000 exiled Uyghurs, and there are dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of such stories there. İlyas Doğan, a Turkish lawyer who has represented some of the Uyghurs, told me that, until 2017, very few of them were politically active. But after friends and relatives began disappearing into “reeducation camps”—concentration camps, in fact—set up by the Chinese state, the situation changed.
Tursun and a group of other women who had lost children staged a protest walk from Istanbul to Ankara, a distance of more than 270 miles, and then stood in front of a UN building, demanding to be heard. Abdureshid spoke at the conference of one of the Turkish opposition parties. “I haven’t heard my mother’s voice for four years,” she told the audience. A video of the speech went viral; when we had lunch at a restaurant in a Uyghur neighborhood, a waiter recognized her and thanked her for it.
In another era—in a world with a different geopolitical configuration, at a time when the language of human rights had not been so comprehensively undermined—these dissidents would have plenty of official sympathy in Turkey, a nation that is singularly linked to the Uyghur community by ties of religion, ethnicity, and language. In 2009, even before the concentration camps were opened, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was then the Turkish prime minister, called the Chinese repression of the Uyghurs a “genocide.” In 2012, he brought businessmen with him to Xinjiang and promised to invest in Uyghur businesses there. He did this because it was popular. To the extent that ordinary Turks know what is happening to their Uyghur cousins, they sympathize.
Yet since then, Erdoğan—who became president in 2014—has himself turned against the rule of law, independent media, and independent courts at home. As he has become openly hostile to former European and NATO allies, and as he has arrested and jailed his own dissidents, Erdoğan’s interest in Chinese friendship, investment, and technology has increased, along with his willingness to echo Chinese propaganda. On the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, his party’s flagship newspaper published a long, solemn article—which was in fact sponsored content—beneath the headline “The Chinese Communist Party’s 100 Years of Glorious History and the Secrets to Its Success.” Alongside these changes, government policy toward the Uyghurs has shifted too.
In recent years, the Turkish government has surveilled and detained Uyghurs on bogus terrorism charges, and deported some, including four who were sent to Tajikistan and then immediately turned over to China in 2019. In Istanbul, I met one Uyghur—he preferred to remain anonymous—who had spent time in a Turkish detention center, along with some of his family, following what he said were bogus charges of “terrorism.” The presence of pro-Chinese forces in Turkish media, politics, and business has been growing, and lately they are keen to belittle the Uyghurs. Curiously, Abdureshid’s speech was cut from the public-television broadcast of the opposition-party conference she attended. After it started circulating on social media, she was publicly attacked by a Turkish politician, Doğu Perinçek, a former Maoist who is pro-Chinese, anti-Western, and quite influential. After Perinçek described her as a “terrorist” on television, a wave of online attacks followed.
The atmosphere worsened in late 2020, when a delayed Chinese shipment of COVID-19 vaccines coincided with Beijing’s pressure on Turkey to sign an extradition treaty that would have made deportation of Uyghurs even easier. After opposition parties objected, both the Turkish and Chinese governments denied that delivery of the vaccine shipment was in any way conditioned on deporting Uyghurs, but the timing remains suspicious. Several Uyghurs in Istanbul told me that corrupt elements in the Turkish police work directly with the Chinese already. They have no proof, and Doğan, the Turkish lawyer, told me that he doubts this is the case; still, he thinks that, despite all of the old cultural ties, the Turkish government might not mind if the Uyghurs stopped protesting or quietly moved elsewhere.
For the moment, the Uyghurs in Turkey are still protected by what remains of democracy there: the opposition parties, some of the media, public opinion. A government that faces democratic elections, even skewed ones, must still take these things into account. In countries where opposition, media, and public opinion matter less, the balance is different. You can see this even in Muslim countries, which might be expected to object to the oppression of other Muslims. Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has stated baldly that “we accept the Chinese version” of the Chinese-Uyghur dispute. The Saudis, the Emiratis, and the Egyptians have all allegedly arrested, detained, and deported Uyghurs without much discussion. Not coincidentally, these are all countries that seek good economic relations with China, and that have purchased Chinese surveillance technology. For autocrats and would-be autocrats around the world, the Chinese offer a package that looks something like this: Agree to follow China’s lead on Hong Kong, Tibet, the Uyghurs, and human rights more broadly. Buy Chinese surveillance equipment. Accept massive Chinese investment (preferably into companies you personally control, or that at least pay you kickbacks). Then sit back and relax, knowing that however bad your image becomes in the eyes of the international human-rights community, you and your friends will remain in power.
Michael Houtz
And how different are we? We Americans? We Europeans? Are we so sure that our institutions, our political parties, our media could never be manipulated in the same way? In the spring of 2016, I helped publish a report on the Russian use of disinformation in Central and Eastern Europe—the now familiar Russian efforts to manipulate political conversations in other countries using social media, fake websites, funding for extremist parties, hacked private communications, and more. My colleague Edward Lucas, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, and I took it to Capitol Hill, to the State Department, and to anyone in Washington who would listen. The response was polite interest, nothing more. We are very sorry that Slovakia and Slovenia are having these problems, but it can’t happen here.
A few months later, it did happen here. Russian trolls operating from St. Petersburg sought to shift the outcome of an American election in much the same way they had done in Central Europe, using fake Facebook pages (sometimes impersonating anti-immigration groups, sometimes impersonating Black activists), fake Twitter accounts, and attempts to infiltrate groups like the National Rifle Association, as well as weaponizing hacked material from the Democratic National Committee. Some Americans actively welcomed this intervention, and even sought to take advantage of what they imagined might be broader Russian technical capabilities. “If it’s what you say I love it,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote to an intermediary for a Russian lawyer who he believed had access to damaging information about Hillary Clinton. In 2008, Trump Jr. had told a business conference that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets,” and in 2016, Russia’s long-term investment in the Trump business empire paid off. In the Trump family, the Kremlin had something better than spies: cynical, nihilistic, indebted, long-term allies.
The list of major American corporations caught in tangled webs of personal, financial, and business links to autocratic regimes is very long.
Despite the raucous national debate on Russian election interference, we don’t seem to have learned much from it, if our thinking about Chinese influence operations is any indication. The United Front is the Chinese Communist Party’s influence project, subtler and more strategic than the Russian version, designed not to upend democratic politics but to shape the nature of conversations about China around the world. Among other endeavors, the United Front creates educational and exchange programs, tries to mold the atmosphere within Chinese exile communities, and courts anyone willing to be a de facto spokesperson for China. But in 2019, when Peter Mattis, a China expert and democracy promoter, tried to discuss the United Front program with a CIA analyst, he got the same kind of polite dismissal that Lucas and I had heard a few years earlier. “This is not Australia,” the CIA analyst told him, according to testimony Mattis gave to Congress, referring to a series of scandals involving Chinese and Chinese Australian businesspeople allegedly attempting to buy political influence in Canberra. We are very sorry that Australia is having these problems, but it can’t happen here.
Can’t it? Controversy has already engulfed many of the Chinese-funded Confucius Institutes set up at American universities, some of whose faculty, under the guise of offering benign Chinese-language and calligraphy courses, got involved in efforts to shape academic debate in China’s favor—a classic United Front enterprise. The long arm of the Chinese state has reached Chinese dissidents in the U.S. as well. The Washington, D.C., and Maryland offices of the Wei Jingsheng Foundation, a group named after one of China’s most famous democracy activists, have been broken into more than a dozen times in the past two decades. Ciping Huang, the foundation’s executive director, told me that old computers have disappeared, phone lines have been cut, and mail has been thrown in the toilet. The main objective seems to be to let the activists know that someone was there. Chinese democracy activists living in the U.S. have, like the Uyghurs in Istanbul, been visited by Chinese agents who try to persuade them, or blackmail them, to return home. Still others have had strange car accidents—mishaps regularly happen while people are on their way to attend an annual ceremony held in New York on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Chinese influence, like authoritarian influence more broadly, can take even subtler forms, using carrots rather than sticks. If you go along with the official line, if you don’t criticize China’s human-rights record, opportunities will emerge for you. In 2018, McKinsey held a tone-deaf corporate retreat in Kashgar, just a few miles away from a Uyghur internment camp—the same kind of camp where the husbands, parents, and siblings of Tursun, Shirmemet, and Abdureshid have been imprisoned. McKinsey had good reasons not to talk about human rights at the retreat: According to The New York Times, the consulting giant at the time of that event advised 22 of the 100 largest Chinese-state companies, including one that had helped construct the artificial islands in the South China Sea that have so alarmed the U.S. military.
But perhaps it’s unfair to pick on McKinsey. The list of major American corporations caught in tangled webs of personal, financial, and business links to China, Russia, and other autocracies is very long. During the heavily manipulated and deliberately confusing Russian elections in September 2021, both Apple and Google removed apps that had been designed to help Russian voters decide which opposition candidates to select, after Russian authorities threatened to prosecute the companies’ local employees. The apps had been created by Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption movement, the most viable opposition movement in the country, which was itself not allowed to participate in the election campaign. Navalny, who remains in prison on ludicrous charges, made a statement via Twitter excoriating American democracy’s most famous corporate moguls:
It’s one thing when the Internet monopolists are ruled by cute freedom-loving nerds with solid life principles. It is completely different when the people in charge of them are both cowardly and greedy … Standing in front of the huge screens, they tell us about “making the world a better place,” but on the inside they are liars and hypocrites.
The list of other industries that might be similarly described as “cowardly and greedy” is also very long, extending even to Hollywood, pop music, and sports. When distributors became nervous about a possible Chinese backlash to a 2012 MGM remake of a Cold War–era movie that recast the Soviet invaders as Chinese, the studio had the film digitally altered to make the bad guys North Korean instead. In 2019, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, along with a number of basketball stars, expressed remorse to China after the general manager of the Houston Rockets tweeted support for the democrats of Hong Kong. Even more abject was Qazaq: History of the Golden Man, a fawning eight-hour documentary about the life of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the brutal longtime ruler of Kazakhstan, produced in 2021 by the Hollywood director Oliver Stone. Or consider what the rapper Nicki Minaj did in 2015, when she was criticized for giving a concert in Angola, hosted by a company co-owned by the daughter of that country’s dictator, José Eduardo dos Santos. Minaj posted two photos of herself on Instagram, one in which she’s draped in the Angolan flag and another alongside the dictator’s daughter, captioned with these immortal words: “Oh no big deal … she’s just the 8th richest woman in the world. (At least that’s what I was told by someone b4 we took this photo) Lol. Yikes!!!!! GIRL POWER!!!!! This motivates me soooooooooo much!!!!”
If the autocrats and the kleptocrats feel no shame, why should American celebrities who profit from their largesse? Why should their fans? Why should their sponsors?
If the 20th century was the story of a slow, uneven struggle, ending with the victory of liberal democracy over other ideologies—communism, fascism, virulent nationalism—the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse. Freedom House, which has published an annual “Freedom in the World” report for nearly 50 years, called its 2021 edition “Democracy Under Siege.” The Stanford scholar Larry Diamond calls this an era of “democratic regression.” Not everyone is equally gloomy—Srdja Popovic, the democracy activist, argues that confrontations between autocrats and their populations are growing harsher precisely because democratic movements are becoming more articulate and better organized. But just about everyone who thinks hard about this subject agrees that the old diplomatic toolbox once used to support democrats around the world is rusty and out of date.
The tactics that used to work no longer do. Certainly sanctions, especially when hastily applied in the aftermath of some outrage, do not have the impact they once did. They can sometimes seem, as Stephen Biegun, the former deputy secretary of state, puts it, “an exercise in self-gratification,” on par with “sternly worded condemnations of the latest farcical election.” That doesn’t mean they have no impact at all. But although personal sanctions on corrupt Russian officials might make it impossible for some Russians to visit their homes in Cap Ferrat, say, or their children at the London School of Economics, they haven’t persuaded Putin to stop invading other countries, interfering in European and American politics, or poisoning his own dissidents. Neither have decades of U.S. sanctions changed the behavior of the Iranian regime or the Venezuelan regime, despite their indisputable economic impact. Too often, sanctions are allowed to deteriorate over time; just as often, autocracies now help one another get around them.
The centrality of democracy in American foreign policy has been declining for many years.
America does still spend money on projects that might loosely be called “democracy assistance,” but the amounts are very low compared with what the authoritarian world is prepared to put up. The National Endowment for Democracy, a unique institution that has an independent board (of which I am a member), received $300 million of congressional funding in 2020 to support civic organizations, non-state media, and educational projects in about 100 autocracies and weak democracies around the world. American foreign-language broadcasters, having survived the Trump administration’s still inexplicable attempt to destroy them, also continue to serve as independent sources of information in some closed societies. But while Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty spends just over $22 million on Russian-language broadcasting (to take one example) every year, and Voice of America just over $8 million more, the Russian government spends billions on the Russian-language state media that are seen and heard all over Eastern Europe, from Germany to Moldova to Kazakhstan. The $33 million that Radio Free Asia spends to broadcast in Burmese, Cantonese, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Mandarin, Tibetan, Uyghur, and Vietnamese pales beside the billions that China spends on media and communications both inside its borders and around the world.
Our efforts are even smaller than they look, because traditional media are only a part of how modern autocracies promote themselves. We don’t yet have a real answer to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which offers infrastructure deals to countries around the globe, often enabling local leaders to skim kickbacks and garnering positive China-subsidized media coverage in return. We don’t have the equivalent of a United Front, or any other strategy for shaping debate within and about China. We don’t run online influence campaigns inside Russia. We don’t have an answer to the disinformation, injected by troll farms abroad, that circulates on Facebook inside the U.S., let alone a plan for countering the disinformation that circulates inside autocracies.
President Biden is well aware of this imbalance and says he wants to reinvigorate the democratic alliance and America’s leading role within it. To that end, the president is convening an online summit on December 9 and 10 to “galvanize commitments and initiatives” in aid of three themes: “defending against authoritarianism, fighting corruption, and promoting respect for human rights.”
That sounds nice, but unless it heralds deep changes in our own behavior it means very little. “Fighting corruption” is not just a foreign-policy issue, after all. If we in the democratic world are serious about it, then we can no longer allow Kazakhs and Venezuelans to purchase property anonymously in London or Miami, or the rulers of Angola and Myanmar to hide money in Delaware or Nevada. We need, in other words, to make changes to our own system, and that may require overcoming fierce domestic resistance from the business groups that benefit from it. We need to shut down tax havens, enforce money-laundering laws, stop selling security and surveillance technology to autocracies, and divest from the most vicious regimes altogether. “We” here will need to include Europe, especially the U.K., as well as partners elsewhere—and that will require a lot of vigorous diplomacy.
The same is true of the fight for human rights. Statements made at a diplomatic summit won’t achieve much if politicians, citizens, and businesses don’t act as if they matter. To effect real change, the Biden administration will have to ask hard questions and make big decisions. How can we force Apple and Google to respect the rights of Russian democrats? How can we ensure that Western manufacturers have excluded from their supply chains anything produced in a Uyghur concentration camp? We need a major investment in independent media around the world, a strategy for reaching people inside autocracies, new international institutions to replace the defunct human-rights bodies at the UN. We need a way to coordinate democratic nations’ response when autocracies commit crimes outside their borders—whether that’s the Russian state murdering people in Berlin or Salisbury, England; the Belarusian dictator hijacking a commercial flight; or Chinese operatives harassing exiles in Washington, D.C. As of now, we have no transnational strategy designed to confront this transnational problem.
This absence of strategy reflects more than negligence. The centrality of democracy to American foreign policy has been declining for many years—at about the same pace, perhaps not coincidentally, as the decline of respect for democracy in America itself. The Trump presidency was a four-year display of contempt not just for the American political process, but for America’s historic democratic allies, whom he singled out for abuse. The president described the British and German leaders as “losers” and the Canadian prime minister as “dishonest” and “weak,” while he cozied up to autocrats—the Turkish president, the Russian president, the Saudi ruling family, and the North Korean dictator, among them—with whom he felt more comfortable, and no wonder: He has shared their ethos of no-questions-asked investments for many years. In 2008, the Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev paid Trump $95 million—more than twice what Trump had paid just four years earlier—for a house in Palm Beach no one else seemed to want; in 2012, Trump put his name on a building in Baku, Azerbaijan, owned by a company with apparent links to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. Trump feels perfectly at home in Autocracy Inc., and he accelerated the erosion of the rules and norms that has allowed it to take root in America.
At the same time, a part of the American left has abandoned the idea that “democracy” belongs at the heart of U.S. foreign policy—not out of greed and cynicism but out of a loss of faith in democracy at home. Convinced that the history of America is the history of genocide, slavery, exploitation, and not much else, they don’t see the value of making common cause with Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Nursiman Abdureshid, or any of the other ordinary people around the world forced into politics by their experience of profound injustice. Focused on America’s own bitter problems, they no longer believe America has anything to offer the rest of the world: Although the Hong Kong prodemocracy protesters waving American flags believe many of the same things we believe, their requests for American support in 2019 did not elicit a significant wave of youthful activism in the United States, not even something comparable to the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s.
Incorrectly identifying the promotion of democracy around the world with “forever wars,” they fail to understand the brutality of the zero-sum competition now unfolding in front of us. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does geopolitics. If America removes the promotion of democracy from its foreign policy, if America ceases to interest itself in the fate of other democracies and democratic movements, then autocracies will quickly take our place as sources of influence, funding, and ideas. If Americans, together with our allies, fail to fight the habits and practices of autocracy abroad, we will encounter them at home; indeed, they are already here. If Americans don’t help to hold murderous regimes to account, those regimes will retain their sense of impunity. They will continue to steal, blackmail, torture, and intimidate, inside their countries—and inside ours.
*Source images (left to right): Sven Creutzmann / Mambo Photo / Getty; Andrea Verdelli / Getty; Mikhail Svetlov / Getty; TPG / Getty; Mikhail Svetlov / Getty
This article appears in the December 2021 print edition with the headline “The Autocrats Are Winning.”
5. Senators Have More Than 900 Ideas To Fix America’s Security
Senators Have More Than 900 Ideas To Fix America’s Security
The proposed amendments to the NDAA include ideas on Afghanistan, China and extremism in the ranks.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., arrives at the U.S. Capitol on Nov. 16. Schumer will help decide which of the hundreds of proposed NDAA amendments will come to a vote. Drew Angerer/Getty Images
The proposed amendments to the NDAA include ideas on Afghanistan, China and extremism in the ranks.
Senior National Security Correspondent
November 21, 2021 08:00 AM ET
Senators have submitted more than 900 amendments to the fiscal 2022 National Defense Authorization Bill in efforts to improve the nation’s security—and, in some cases, to tie unrelated priorities to the must-pass bill.
While most of the proposed amendments relate to the Defense Department, including the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the supply chain’s reliance on China, and whether troops should be forced to get the COVID-19 vaccine, some lawmakers are trying to add unrelated changes, including ideas to end the opioid epidemic and new initiatives within the Department of Health and Human Services.
Not all of these proposals will even be considered on the floor. Dozens of noncontroversial amendments are typically grouped together into a manager’s package that can easily pass the chamber. Senate leaders will then decide how many and which amendments will get hours of debate and an individual vote.
Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has not yet announced which amendments will be considered, but did say that the NDAA is the “logical place” to consider the repeal of the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, which approved military action in Iraq following 9/11.
“The Iraq war has been over for a decade. An authorization passed in 2002 is no longer necessary for keeping Americans safe in 2021,” Schumer said Thursday on the Senate floor. “There is a real danger to letting these legal authorities persist indefinitely.”
Here’s a roundup of some of the top issues other lawmakers are trying to add to the bill:
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Ending reliance on Chinese rare earth minerals: An amendment from Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., would order the government to write four reports on America’s use of Chinese rare earth minerals, which are in most technology systems from cell phones to fighter jets. The reports would look at whether the United States has the right funding and authorities to stockpile enough rare earth minerals and what defense contractors are required to disclose about the sources of the minerals in their products. One report would study the impact of banning the use of Chinese rare earths in contracts signed after Dec. 31, 2026, while another would detail discussions the United States is having with allies about their own supply chains.
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Parental rights for military academy students: Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, is introducing his proposal to ensure that students who become parents while studying at a military academy can both finish their studies and retain their parental rights. The plan won early bipartisan support from Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and has since attracted nine other co-sponsors from both parties.
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Countering extremism in the ranks: Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., would require the defense secretary to tap a defense undersecretary as the “senior official for countering extremism.” The amendment would also develop new training and education programs to eliminate extremism in the ranks and establish a database to track extremist activities in the military.
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Afghanistan: A bipartisan amendment would establish the Afghan Working Group and Afghan Threat Finance Cell, two interagency groups intended to fight the narcotics industry in Afghanistan and eliminate illicit financial networks. The proposal from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., and Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, would authorize the two groups for three years after the bill becomes law. Another Afghanistan-related amendment from Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., would award the Congressional Gold Medal to troops killed in the terrorist attack at the airport in Kabul during the final evacuation from Afghanistan.
- Election security: This amendment would establish a Global Electoral Exchange Program to make sure international allies are sharing best practices on cybersecurity, transparency and how to resolve disputed results to keep elections free and fair. The new office, which is supported by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., would fall under the State Department’s Global Engagement Center.
- Selling military gear to law enforcement: A proposal from Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., would restrict what unused military equipment could be sold or donated to local police units. The amendment would add explosives, firearms, and ammunition that is .50-caliber or larger and asphyxiating gases to the list of things that cannot be sold or donated to police departments.
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Covid-19 vaccine mandate: Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla, is seeking to delay enforcement of the Covid-19 vaccine mandate for troops until Pentagon leaders consider every medical or religious exemption request, and the appeal process for each case concludes. The amendment would also allow troops to take legal action against the military if their religious exemption request is denied without a written reason from the Office of the Chief of Chaplains.
- Keeping Cuba on terrorism list: An amendment from Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, would prohibit the administration from removing Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism until the president himself proves to Congress that the country is no longer a sanctuary for terrorists.
- Fighting for women’s rights: An amendment introduced by Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., would establish the Office of Global Women’s Issues at the State Department to ensure fighting for equal rights for women and girls around the world is a central part of America’s foreign policy. It would also establish another new office, the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Initiative, to ensure women have access to job training and mentorship.
6. Hybrid Warfare in an Age of Wokeness by Srdja Trifkovic
Very interesting analysis.
Excerpt:
I, however, define hybrid warfare as the strategy deliberately pursued by a state, substate, or non-state actor which pursues optimal political objectives with the least possible violence, while maintaining some level of plausible deniability for its actions. In my keynote presentation at the conference, I illustrated this analytical framework by citing the strategies pursued in Afghanistan by the Taliban as a substate entity, and more importantly, by its indispensable abettor and state actor par excellence, Pakistan.
I contended that the endgame in Afghanistan in 2021 was the climax of a long-drawn-out exercise in hybrid warfare by the Taliban—and even more so by its Pakistani protectors. The Taliban strategy, since early 2015, provides us with a textbook exercise of Sun Tzu’s ideal of “winning a war without fighting,” which is an early definition of hybrid warfare. It is remarkable that a numerically inferior irregular force without advanced weaponry managed to survive two decades of the U.S.-led and financed Operation Enduring Freedom.
Hybrid Warfare in an Age of Wokeness
I recently attended a two-day conference in Budapest on hybrid war entitled “The Role and Missions of Armed Forces in Below-Threshold Conflicts.” Hosted by the Hungarian Defense Forces (HDF) Transformation Command, a military think tank with the authority and responsibility to chart the modernization and innovation of the country’s military forces.
Contemporary security challenges include the significant, yet elusive, concept of hybrid war. Its ambiguity is illustrated by the fact that the strategic experts and high-ranking military officers who spoke at the conference could not quite agree on a suitable definition.
I, however, define hybrid warfare as the strategy deliberately pursued by a state, substate, or non-state actor which pursues optimal political objectives with the least possible violence, while maintaining some level of plausible deniability for its actions. In my keynote presentation at the conference, I illustrated this analytical framework by citing the strategies pursued in Afghanistan by the Taliban as a substate entity, and more importantly, by its indispensable abettor and state actor par excellence, Pakistan.
I contended that the endgame in Afghanistan in 2021 was the climax of a long-drawn-out exercise in hybrid warfare by the Taliban—and even more so by its Pakistani protectors. The Taliban strategy, since early 2015, provides us with a textbook exercise of Sun Tzu’s ideal of “winning a war without fighting,” which is an early definition of hybrid warfare. It is remarkable that a numerically inferior irregular force without advanced weaponry managed to survive two decades of the U.S.-led and financed Operation Enduring Freedom.
The Taliban suddenly launched a bid for total dominance in May 2021. Within three months, its actions had resulted in complete victory. The Taliban first captured border crossings to the former Soviet Central Asian countries, then to Iran and Pakistan. What followed was the challenge of securing the ethnically diverse north and west of the country, and finally marching unopposed to the south and east,into the Pashtun heartland. By that point, Kabul was doomed.
The Taliban adopted a hybrid warfare strategy by aiming to win by not losing: to outlast the “infidel” enemy politically and psychologically. The Taliban sought:
• to maintain the coherence of the group’s core cadre,
• to undermine political stabilization of any part of Afghanistan,
• to safeguard its base of support in the Pashtun heartland in the south,
• to gradually expand its influence and control northbound,
• to establish secret communication with the government officials and commanders in Kabul,
• to avoid battle with U.S. forces, especially after early 2015.
The U.S. military had no winning strategy, and no political guidance for developing one. Upon arrival in Afghanistan, brigade and battalion commanders were generally given the same mission: to protect the population and defeat the enemy in their sector. “So they all went in for whatever their rotation was, nine months or six months… and executed that mission,” according to Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a veteran of multiple tours in Afghanistan.
Then they all said, when they left, they accomplished that mission. Every single commander. Not one commander is going to leave Afghanistan and say, ‘You know what, we didn’t accomplish our mission’ … So the next guy that shows up finds it [their area] screwed up… and then they come back and go, ‘Man this is really bad.’
Flynn’s testimony explains how to lose a war by winning missions. At the same time, the Afghan National Army (ANA) and police became operationally ineffective because of their inability to control territory from their fortified but isolated outposts and checkpoints. Although inferior in numbers and weaponry, the Taliban cut off garrisons from their bases of support and prevented supplies and additional forces from coming through. When the Taliban started its final push six months ago, it easily blocked the roads, and airlifted supplies were too little too late to reinforce isolated garrisons. Demoralized by hunger, lack of pay, ammunition shortages, and no prospect of relief, ANA personnel refused to fight. At the same time, the Taliban’s tailored propaganda campaign further undermined morale.
By contrast, a new generation of Afghan youths—many of them indoctrinated in Pakistan’s madrassas, or Islamic educational centers—provided highly motivated fresh recruits to the Taliban. The focus was on quality rather than quantity: wholehearted acceptance of the Caliphate narrative and readiness to die for Islamic dominance. These indoctrinated youth created a countrywide network of sleeper cells and working village-level authorities, even in areas formally under government control.
The Taliban strategy was facilitated by the absence of clear-cut U.S. goals, by intelligence failures, by the ineptitude of government forces, and by corrupt Afghan officials. Nobody wanted to die for President Ashraf Ghani or his kleptocratic form of “democracy.” It is worth noting that when South Vietnam fell in 1975, dozens of senior officers killed themselves in despair. None did so in Afghanistan.
The key to the Taliban success was the continuous, barely concealed military, technical, logistical, and intelligence assistance of Pakistan and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. This aid included vital provision of safe havens in Pakistan’s Northwest Province, out of reach of the U.S. and allied forces, and covert diplomatic support abroad, notably in Beijing. Pakistan’s involvement in Afghanistan is a striking example of a complex, long, and eminently successful hybrid warfare operation. It was aimed directly against the U.S. and indirectly against India, on behalf of Pakistan’s geostrategic interests. All along, a pretense of partnership with the U.S. was successfully maintained due to the willingness of American personnel to pretend that all was well.
Among major state actors, Pakistan is the biggest winner of the US’s Afghan fiasco. The new Taliban government is arguably a client regime of Islamabad. It provides a welcome northwestern strategic depth to Pakistan’s narrow corridor to the Chinese border in the Himalayas. It increases the value of Pakistan to China’s geostrategic designs, including a safe link to the port of Gwadar. It is Pakistan, rather than the Taliban, that provides an excellent case study of hybrid warfare campaign that Pakistan has waged since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Not “knowing thyself” was the failure which made the victory of hybrid warfare possible. Two decades after 9/11, and three months after the jihadist triumph in Kabul, America is still struggling to find itself. Defeating the forces of wokeness at home may be the precondition for containing jihad abroad.
7. The Pandemic’s Next Turn Hinges on Three Unknowns
Excerpts:
Here are the basic numbers: The U.S. has fully vaccinated 59 percent of the country and recorded enough cases to account for 14 percent of the population. (Though, given limited testing, those case numbers almost certainly underestimate true infections.) What we don’t know is how to put these two numbers together, says Elizabeth Halloran, an epidemiologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. What percentage of Americans have immunity against the coronavirus—from vaccines or infection or both?
This is the key number that will determine the strength of our immunity wall this winter, but it’s impossible to pin down with the data we have. This uncertainty matters because even a small percentage difference in overall immunity translates to a large number of susceptible people. For example, an additional 5 percent of Americans without immunity is 16.5 million people, and 16.5 million additional infections could mean hundreds of thousands more hospitalizations. Because unvaccinated people tend to cluster geographically and because many hospital intensive-care units run close to capacity even in non-pandemic times, it doesn’t take very many sick patients to overwhelm a local health-care system.
The Pandemic’s Next Turn Hinges on Three Unknowns
A potential winter surge is up to vaccines, variants, and us.
Winter has a way of bringing out the worst of the coronavirus. Last year, the season saw a record surge that left nearly 250,000 Americans dead and hospitals overwhelmed around the country. This year, we are much better prepared, with effective vaccines—and, soon, powerful antivirals—that defang the coronavirus, but cases seem to be on the rise again, prompting fears of another big surge.
How bad will it get? We are no longer in the most dangerous phase of the pandemic, but we also have not reached the end. So COVID-19’s trajectory over the next few months will depend on three key unknowns: how our immunity holds up, how the virus changes, and how we behave. These unknowns may also play out differently state to state, town to town, but together they will determine what ends up happening this winter.
Here are the basic numbers: The U.S. has fully vaccinated 59 percent of the country and recorded enough cases to account for 14 percent of the population. (Though, given limited testing, those case numbers almost certainly underestimate true infections.) What we don’t know is how to put these two numbers together, says Elizabeth Halloran, an epidemiologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. What percentage of Americans have immunity against the coronavirus—from vaccines or infection or both?
This is the key number that will determine the strength of our immunity wall this winter, but it’s impossible to pin down with the data we have. This uncertainty matters because even a small percentage difference in overall immunity translates to a large number of susceptible people. For example, an additional 5 percent of Americans without immunity is 16.5 million people, and 16.5 million additional infections could mean hundreds of thousands more hospitalizations. Because unvaccinated people tend to cluster geographically and because many hospital intensive-care units run close to capacity even in non-pandemic times, it doesn’t take very many sick patients to overwhelm a local health-care system.
What’s happening in Europe, says Ali Ellebedy, an immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis, is also a “red sign.” Several countries in Western Europe, which are more highly vaccinated than the U.S., are already seeing spikes heading into winter. Cases in Germany, which has vaccinated nearly 70 percent of its population, have increased sharply, overwhelming hospitals and spurring renewed restrictions on the unvaccinated. The U.S. does have a bit more immunity from previous infections than Germany because it’s had bigger past COVID waves, but it still has plenty of susceptible people.
The strength of immunity also varies from person to person. Immunity from past infection, in particular, can be quite variable. Vaccine-induced immunity tends to be more consistent, but older people and immunocompromised people mount weaker responses. And immunity against infection also clearly wanes over time in everyone, meaning breakthrough infections are becoming more common. Boosters, which are poised to be available to all adults soon, can counteract the waning this winter, though we don’t yet know how durable that protection will be in the long term. If the sum of all this immunity is on the higher side, this winter might be relatively gentle; if not, we could be in store for yet another taxing surge.
At the beginning of the pandemic, scientists thought that this coronavirus mutated fairly slowly. Then, in late 2020, a more transmissible Alpha variant came along. And then an even more transmissible Delta variant emerged. In a year, the virus more than doubled its contagiousness. The evolution of this coronavirus may now be slowing, but that doesn’t mean it’s stopped: We should expect the coronavirus to keep changing.
Alpha and Delta were evolutionary winners because they are just so contagious, and the virus could possibly find ways to up its transmissibility even more. But as more people get vaccinated or infected, our collective immunity gives more and more of an edge to variants that can evade the immune system instead. Delta has some of this ability already. In the future, says Sarah Cobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, “I think most fitness improvements are going to come from immune escape.”
The Beta and Gamma variants also eroded immune protection, but they weren’t able to compete with the current Delta variant. There may yet be new variants that can. Whether any of this will happen in time to make a difference this winter is impossible to know, but it will happen eventually. This is just how evolution works. Other coronaviruses that cause the common cold also change every year—as does the flu. The viruses are always causing reinfections, but each reinfection also refreshes the immune system’s memory.
A new variant could change the pandemic trajectory again this winter, but it’s not likely to reset the pandemic clock back to March 2020. We might end up with a variant that causes more breakthrough infections or reinfections, but our immune systems won’t be totally fooled.
The coronavirus doesn’t hop on planes, drive across state lines, or attend holiday parties. We do. COVID-19 spreads when we spread it, and predicting what people will do has been one of the biggest challenges of modeling the pandemic. “We’re constantly surprised when things are messier and weirder,” says Jon Zelner, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan.
The Delta wave in the Deep South over the summer, for example, ebbed in the late summer and early fall even though many COVID restrictions didn’t come back. If anything, you might have expected cases to rise at that moment, because schools full of unmasked and unvaccinated children were reopening. So what happened? One possible explanation is that people became more careful with masking and social distancing as they saw cases rising around them. More people in the South did get vaccinated, though the rates still lag behind those in the highly vaccinated Northeast. Are surges “self-limiting because people are modifying their behavior in response to recent surges?” Cobey says. “That’s just a really open question.” Weather may also drive behavior; as temperatures cooled down in the South, people might have spent more time outdoors.
Another possible factor in ending the summer surge is that the virus may have simply infected everyone it could find at the time—but that is not the same as saying it has infected everyone in those states. The coronavirus doesn’t spread evenly across a region, like ink through water. Instead, it has to travel along networks of connection between people. COVID-19 can run through an entire household or workplace, but it can’t jump to the next one unless people are moving in between them. By sheer chance, the coronavirus may find some pockets of susceptible people but not others in any given wave. “There’s a kind of randomness to it,” Zelner says. This winter, we should expect a local flare-up every time the virus finds a pocket of susceptibility. But it’s hard to predict exactly when and where that will happen. The country’s current COVID hot spots are Michigan, Minnesota, and New Mexico, three states with no obvious connection among them.
By winter’s end, the U.S. will emerge with more immunity than it has now—either through infection or, much preferable, through vaccinating more people. “To me, this winter is the last stand,” Zelner says. However these three unknowns play out this winter, COVID will eventually begin to fade as a disruptive force in our lives as it becomes endemic. We’re not quite there yet, but our second pandemic winter will bring us one step closer.
This story was originally published by The Atlantic. Sign up for their newsletter.
8. Perspective | Weapons tests in space could shut down ATMs and ground your next flight
Excerpts:
Space warfare might not cause visible damage on the ground, but the devastation of the orbital environment would mean a larger, lonelier world than the one currently interconnected by satellites. It would also deepen the inequalities of the Space Age, denying less-powerful nations the opportunity to fairly access a truly global natural resource. War is rarely tidy; fixing a catastrophic mess of destroyed satellites would be all but impossible in the extreme near-Earth environment.
...
There is no internationally binding agreement to limit the creation of orbital debris. It’s up to individual organizations to decide whether to work with or against nature to keep space sustainable. The space environment does a good job of cleaning itself at low orbits, but Kessler Syndrome accelerates when the amount of new debris generated surpasses the quantity removed by natural forces. Recent calculations predict that the debris from Kosmos 1408 may stay aloft for a decade or more before the ASAT effluent drifts downstream. Satellites in similar orbits circle the planet once every 90 minutes, so a decade — with thousands of possible close calls — is a long time to keep fingers crossed.
Perspective | Weapons tests in space could shut down ATMs and ground your next flight
Blowing up satellites creates more hazardous junk in Earth’s orbit
It was a great week for American infrastructure on the ground. It was a terrible one for the global infrastructure surrounding our planet. On Monday, President Biden signed a bill aimed at updating America’s aging bridges, roadways and drinking-water systems, among other projects. The very same day, the Russian military shot a projectile into space, smashing one of its own derelict satellites into a plume of debris and sending astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station scrambling into emergency shelter.
Upon impact, the Kosmos 1408 satellite broke into hundreds of pieces, each traveling faster than five miles per second and quickly spreading to altitudes between 125 and 500 miles above the Earth. At such high speeds, even tiny objects can pack a punch: Per an analogy offered by NASA, a marble-size piece of debris can strike with a force comparable to a bowling ball traveling at 300 mph. This new debris joins functioning satellites in low Earth orbit, whose numbers have rapidly risen in recent years thanks in large part to the private space industry.
If even a small bit of debris from Kosmos 1408 were to hit a satellite, the results could be catastrophic: Fragments of one destroyed spacecraft would strike other objects, creating more potentially destructive debris. Kessler Syndrome — a domino effect in orbit that could yield the loss of a large cross-section of satellites — looms closer to reality than before.
Satellites, including those endangered by the speeding remains of Russia’s antisatellite test (ASAT), are as central to the daily lives of most Americans as electrical lines or sewer systems. Losing our satellites would mean the loss of critical services, from communications and international financial exchanges to disaster relief and climate monitoring, from world-shifting space-based science to everyday activities such as ATM transactions and air travel. By design, we don’t regularly notice satellite infrastructure. But we would certainly notice if it ceased to exist.
We rarely pay attention to infrastructure unless it fails — the lights go out, or a sink backs up, or a pothole wrecks your car’s suspension. Power transmission towers, for example, don’t tend to register as remarkable in modern American landscapes; they have become perching and nesting sites for birds, as convenient a landing spot as any tree. But when a tower breaks, sparking a massive wildfire, such technology becomes horrifyingly visible — as does the destructive potential of its decay. The same holds true in space.
The problem of debris accumulation in orbit reaches back decades. The first satellites to reach orbit in the late 1950s did so alongside the first pieces of space junk, including expended rockets and nose cones. Explosions, accidental collisions and the eventual decay of old and defunct spacecraft have generated an environment that some space policymakers have compared to climate change in scale and severity. The United States and the Soviet Union conducted ASATs during the first decade of the space race. Then, as more countries gained space power in the 21st century, the ASATs started up again: In 2007, China destroyed the drifting Fengyun-1C weather satellite, and in 2008, the United States followed suit with a successful effort to bring down a failing American defense satellite. Both space powers could claim to be acting in good faith to clean up after themselves by removing potentially dangerous junk from orbit. The geopolitical power demonstrated by destroying a satellite was thus shallowly buried in the subtext of supposed nonaggression — in the guise of being a good neighbor, even.
Subtext came to the surface in 2019: After India conducted an ASAT that year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi explicitly identified the test as a demonstration of India’s stature as a significant space power. So far Russian leadership has similarly eschewed any performance of good faith in the wake of Monday’s ASAT. And China has continued to build an arsenal of antisatellite weapons as part of its overall space strategy.
Stated intent does not do much to limit the effects of blowing up a satellite, of course. Debris from the 2007 ASAT, for example, remains aloft nearly 15 years later, periodically endangering spacecraft. Yet the two most recent ASATs nevertheless reflect a troubling shift in space politics. Military technologies have long had a presence in orbit, and less materially destructive efforts to influence satellite operations (such as laser and cyberattacks) have been part of the international defense landscape for years. Still, unambiguous acts of aggression fly in the face of long-standing conventions. The founding of NASA as a civilian agency and the signing of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, crafted in the thick of Cold War hostility, helped establish norms protecting space as a peaceful domain shared by all of humanity. Within the past five years, with the founding of the Space Force and nakedly aggressive ASAT tests, countries have rapidly, intentionally transformed space into a warfaring domain.
Keeping up with the Joneses has long been part of space culture: National space programs once chased milestones in the moon race; today, private companies pursue competing broadband mega constellations. If recent actions signal a shift toward antagonistic norms, we may see further demonstrations by space powers eager to show preparedness for the fight. So far, ASAT-launching nations have targeted only their own satellites, but each test serves as a warning that the next antisatellite weapon could be aimed in a more hostile direction.
Space warfare might not cause visible damage on the ground, but the devastation of the orbital environment would mean a larger, lonelier world than the one currently interconnected by satellites. It would also deepen the inequalities of the Space Age, denying less-powerful nations the opportunity to fairly access a truly global natural resource. War is rarely tidy; fixing a catastrophic mess of destroyed satellites would be all but impossible in the extreme near-Earth environment.
Private and public space industry groups are developing methods to remove large unused objects from orbit, and reusable rockets mean less volatile debris lingering in lower altitudes. Satellites and expendable rockets can be designed for disposal either through controlled reetry into Earth’s atmosphere or in “graveyard orbits.” Right now, however, we rely on the natural environment of near-Earth space to do most of the work of cleaning up fragments of all sizes. Like industrial waste dumped into a river to be carried away and become someone else’s problem, objects in low orbit are drawn into the Earth’s atmosphere by solar energy, atmospheric particles and gravity. There, they typically come apart, with any surviving bits dropping into the ocean or very occasionally crashing onto land.
There is no internationally binding agreement to limit the creation of orbital debris. It’s up to individual organizations to decide whether to work with or against nature to keep space sustainable. The space environment does a good job of cleaning itself at low orbits, but Kessler Syndrome accelerates when the amount of new debris generated surpasses the quantity removed by natural forces. Recent calculations predict that the debris from Kosmos 1408 may stay aloft for a decade or more before the ASAT effluent drifts downstream. Satellites in similar orbits circle the planet once every 90 minutes, so a decade — with thousands of possible close calls — is a long time to keep fingers crossed.
The 2013 film “Gravity” imagined a disaster in which a Russian ASAT starts a chain reaction that destroys all functioning satellites within moments. The film, following two astronauts’ struggle to survive, didn’t even scratch the surface of what would unfold on the ground below. The exact scenario portrayed is physically impossible in our nonfictional universe, but it’s hard not to think of that dramatic scene as an omen. As the task of building back better takes off, citizens of the Space Age might do well to understand the full consequences of infrastructural decay, in the heavens as on Earth.
Twitter: @orbital_decay
9. As Soldiers Abandon Notorious Myanmar Army, a Morale Crisis Looms
Resistance. We must understand all aspects of it, from political resistance to violent resistance.
I wonder what kind of support is being provided to the Civil Disobedience Movement?
As Soldiers Abandon Notorious Myanmar Army, a Morale Crisis Looms
The number of defectors, while not enough to topple the Tatmadaw, is growing, galvanized by the nationwide anti-coup movement.
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Members of the People’s Defense Force, an armed resistance group opposed to the junta in Myanmar, shower at a camp in Kayin State, near the Thai border, in October.
By
Nov. 21, 2021, 3:00 a.m. ET
Aung Myo Htet had always dreamed of being a soldier, and had attained the rank of captain. But when he joined the army in Myanmar, he had thought he would be defending his country, not fighting — and losing — pitched battles against his own countrymen.
In June, he was sent to the front lines in Kayah State to subdue resistance fighters and armed protesters opposing the generals who seized power in a February coup. Three of his fellow soldiers were killed, said Aung Myo Htet, 32.
“Seeing the casualties on our side made me feel so sad,” he said. “We were fighting and sacrificing ourselves for the general’s sake and not for the country.”
The defectors are a small percentage of the Southeast Asian nation’s army, which is estimated to number between 280,000 and 350,000. But they appear to have struck a nerve, and to have contributed to a growing crisis of morale among the troops. The army is struggling to recruit. It has recalled all retirees, threatening to withhold pensions if they do not return. Wives of soldiers say they are being ordered to provide security for the bases, in violation of military law.
For the first time in its 67-year history, the Myanmar Defense Services Academy, the country’s equivalent of West Point, was not able to fill the seats for this year’s freshman class.
Anti-coup fighters during a military training at a camp in Kayah State, in July. The Myanmar army is now struggling to recruit, while the number of defectors joining the armed resistance is growing.
“Never have we seen defections at this level,” said Moe Thuzar, the co-coordinator of the Myanmar Studies Program at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. “What we’re seeing since February is this steady trickle of people leaving, and also publicly stating their support for the C.D.M. That’s unprecedented.”
General Min Aung Hlaing still has the loyalty of his top officers, and there are too few defectors to topple the Tatmadaw. But those who are leaving are being quickly embraced by the resistance. Four of Myanmar’s armed ethnic organizations, which have battled the Tatmadaw since the country became independent from Britain in 1948, have offered food and refuge and the opportunity to combine forces.
“Their seasoned military experience has been invaluable for our armed resistance,” said Naing Htoo Aung, Secretary of Defense for the National Unity Government, a group of deposed leaders that has declared itself Myanmar’s legitimate government and that has been tracking the growing number of defectors. “We all now have a common goal.”
Many defectors have publicized their accounts on social media, encouraging other soldiers to follow them. Most of the people who have left are lower ranking, but some have been officers.
Several defectors are now working with a group of tech activists in a stealth online campaign to get more troops to break ranks. Using stock images of military men and attractive women as profile photos, the activists have created more than a dozen fake Facebook pages to befriend soldiers.
The accounts are used to send direct messages, imploring them not to hurt innocent people. Another group has used Facebook to urge wives to persuade their husbands to leave the military and stop supporting the junta.
Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the general behind the coup in Myanmar, presiding over an army parade on Armed Forces Day in Naypyidaw, the capital, in March.Credit...Reuters
“There’s significance in the propaganda war that’s playing out,” said Richard Horsey, a senior adviser on Myanmar for the International Crisis Group. “I think they make the resistance feel emboldened and confident.”
Soldiers who have left say they have felt compelled to do so after the coup, describing their revulsion at instructions from their superiors to shoot civilians. On Nov. 6, the head of a United Nations body investigating war crimes in Myanmar said the military’s attacks on civilians amount to “crimes against humanity.”
“When I was ordered to shoot, I called the people and told them to run away,” said Htet Myat, a captain who was stationed in Bhamo, a city in northern Myanmar that has been the site of intense fighting between ethnic armed rebels and the army. “The people were saved, but I could not live in such an inhumane place.”
Yet defecting can be as dangerous as any battlefield. People’s Soldiers, a group set up by a former captain who was once a speechwriter for Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, has tried to help.
One night in August, Kaung Htet Aung, a 29-year-old sergeant, watched a fellow soldier, on a Zoom session hosted by People’s Soldiers, debate a major who had defected in March and was speaking from a hidden location. As he lay in his barracks and secretly watched the video, Kaung Htet Aung thought about how much the major had to sacrifice to join the anti-coup movement.
He later contacted People’s Soldiers, which told him they would help him defect, marking the start of a harrowing journey. He left his base on May 9 and got into a motorcycle accident. When he sought help, he was thrown into a military prison, he said. On Sept. 6, he escaped the prison, and made his way on foot into the jungle.
The sergeant, who used to make ammunitions, then took a bus to a “liberated area,” a term that the resistance uses to refer to the ethnic borderlands in Myanmar. “I was very happy to be free,” he said. “Now I don’t have to make bullets to kill people.”
Anti-coup fighters taking part in a military exercise at their camp near the borderlands in July. Defecting can be just as dangerous as battle.
While The New York Times could not independently verify the soldier’s account, the risks of defecting are clear. It carries a jail sentence of three years, and family members are often face retaliation. The journey can be perilous, involving hide-outs in multiple cities before reaching safety in the borderlands.
Defecting also means sacrificing a potentially lucrative future. Officers who are able to rise up through the ranks typically benefit from the Tatmadaw’s vast business holdings, which include the country’s two most powerful conglomerates.
“Most people in the military are brainwashed and can’t see the truth,” said Lin Htet Aung, a captain who defected in March. “Some who see the truth do not want to give up their position.”
Understanding the Chaos in Myanmar
Card 1 of 5
The coup was preceded by a contested election. In the Nov. 8 election, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party won 83 percent of the body’s available seats. The military, whose proxy party suffered a crushing defeat, refused to accept the results of the vote.
Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi could face time in prison. She was detained by the junta and secretly put on trial. If convicted of all 11 charges against her, which include “inciting public unrest,” she could be sentenced to a maximum of 102 years in prison.
One argument that defectors use to persuade others to leave centers on the poor treatment of ordinary soldiers. Zwe Man, a corporal, said he wanted to join the military after seeing people put garlands on troops marching in the southern city of Bago in 2016.
A year later, he graduated from the military academy and became a sniper. He said he earned just $105 a month and that the food was bad. “I joined the army because I wanted to be a soldier who protects the country and is loved by the people,” he said. “But when I joined, I found out that it was a place to torture lower-ranking soldiers.”
An anti-coup fighter holds a homemade gun inscribed with the words “Spring Revolution” in Burmese.
In May, Mr. Zwe Man stumbled across the People’s Soldiers Facebook page and started reading the comments:
“The military is murdering its own people.”
“The military is the big thief.”
“The military is trying to rule the country for their own sake.”
In July, during the height of a Covid-19 outbreak, Mr. Zwe Man said the army did not isolate people who were infected with the virus, resulting in deaths in the barracks. He has also been haunted by violence he has witnessed since the coup: people being arrested and homes being burned down.
He said his girlfriend told him that the army was killing civilians and encouraged him to join the Civil Disobedience Movement. “I decided that what I really needed to do was to stand up for what was right,” he said. “And not be on the wrong side of the people.” On Sept. 17, Mr. Zwe Man asked his army supervisor for permission to leave the base.
His request was approved, he said. And he never returned.
Fighters resting at a camp in Kayin State.
10. Thousands of Afghans evacuated during U.S. withdrawal awaiting resettlement
Excerpts:
As airmen move through the camp each day, children flock to them: to hang on their arms like a jungle gym, toss them soccer balls and try out newly acquired English phrases.
Some of the adults have noted that, with its cloudless blue sky, humming generators and horizon of arid mountains, the pale, gravelly landscape of Aman Omid’s tents and trailers bears a resemblance to Bagram Airfield — the former headquarters of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan. It was a base where many U.S. service members, diplomats and Afghans alike once worked, but has since been abandoned to the Taliban.
Gabrielli told reporters during the tour that being able to serve Afghans who helped the United States is deeply fulfilling for many of his airmen, particularly those who served, who may find “closure” in their participation here.
Asked whether there is much discussion of America’s Afghanistan legacy among airmen and others at the camp, Gabrielli said in an email that it has “personally been a humbling experience for me” to hear from Afghans about the military units they served with, as well as “listening to their stories and looking at the photos of them with American Generals and other leaders.”
He added: “I also encourage Airmen to keep in mind that while guests are happy and grateful for the opportunity to have a safe, new place to make their home, many are still grieving over the circumstances that brought them here.”
Thousands of Afghans evacuated during U.S. withdrawal awaiting resettlement
HOLLOMAN AIR FORCE BASE, N.M. — The U.S. government calls the 50-acre sprawl of tents on this desert Air Force base a “village.” The 4,300 Afghans temporarily housed here are the government’s “guests.” And the landscape of tents and trailers is called Aman Omid, which in Persian means “peace and hope” — the feelings U.S. officials say they are trying to foster here.
More than two months after the United States’ chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the federal government is still in the process of resettling roughly 45,000 Afghans housed in temporary camps on U.S. military bases after they were airlifted from their home country.
Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico is among eight facilities that became hubs for one of the largest humanitarian resettlement operations in U.S. history. Biden administration officials say about 73,000 Afghans have arrived in the United States since the fall of Kabul to the Taliban. Holloman received 7,100, half of them children, between late August and early October. They include Afghans who risked their lives to aid the U.S. government during its two-decade war effort in their country, officials say. Others are relatives of those who served or of U.S. citizens, as well as many others who felt at risk in Taliban-held Afghanistan.
“We are this generation’s Ellis Island,” Curtis Velasquez, the Air Force colonel who serves as the village “governor,” told reporters on a recent tour of the base. Reporters were shown an adult English class in progress, an impromptu cricket game and a cavernous dining hall that serves halal meals labeled in English, Dari and Pashto.
“We take pride in what we are doing here for our Afghan guests,” Velasquez said. He described the camp as “a safe haven where they can transition from that survival mode to a thriving mode.”
But the long-term fates of many Afghan evacuees are uncertain. While officials say all of the Afghans have been heavily vetted, most will start new lives in the United States as short-term “humanitarian parolees,” without an immediate path to permanent residency or the full host of benefits and services offered to refugees. To stay in the United States permanently, many — including those who served the U.S. mission — will need to navigate a severely backlogged visa and immigration system.
More ominous, Afghans and their advocates say, are the fates of the tens of thousands of others who were left behind.
'The U.S. has a legal and moral obligation to take action'
As the name Aman Omid suggests, the official rhetoric at Holloman’s camp for evacuated Afghans centers on optimism, resilience and success.
The Afghans here are heroic and ambitious, say the military commanders and officials who run the camp, many of whom are themselves veterans of the war in Afghanistan.
“These Afghan guests have sacrificed much for America. I’d actually say that the majority of those in the village have risked more for American security than the vast majority of Americans have,” said Daniel E. Gabrielli, the Air Force brigadier general who heads operations at Aman Omid.
Less often acknowledged are the circumstances that brought them here: that America’s once-vanquished enemy, the Taliban, took control of the country as swiftly as the United States removed its last troops, and that American-affiliated Afghans were left acutely vulnerable and feeling betrayed. Officials also avoid dwelling on the fact that the Afghans housed here are the lucky ones — those who made it onto evacuation flights, amid panicked crowds, barricades and violence at Kabul International Airport. When Afghans ask what can be done to rescue the spouses, parents and children who didn’t make it onto a plane, the American officials at Holloman say they have struggled to provide helpful answers.
The U.S. State Department says its priority now is to facilitate the resettlement of those Afghans who are here and to assist any U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents still in Afghanistan.
The Biden administration has asked Congress to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, a bill that would allow those paroled into the country to apply for green cards after a year, making it easier for them to become permanent residents and bring relatives left behind.
A State Department official said the government was working to evacuate some of those left behind, including parents and children separated at the airport, by “both chartering its own flights as well as working with airlines to reserve a certain number of seats on already existing flights.” The official, who declined to confirm the effort on the record, did not say how Afghans who fear persecution from the Taliban might access a Taliban-controlled airport. But the official pointed to Qatar as the administration’s new formal go-between, per a memorandum signed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this month.
“I’ve not met one person who does not have family back there,” said Gabrielli.
“When the guests want to talk about their family back home, I encourage Airmen here to take the time to listen,” he added later in an email. “I will take unlimited time to hear their stories, and feel it builds trust and is cathartic for them as well.”
Those left behind include Rahatullah Doust’s wife and children. The 29-year-old former employee of the United Nations Development Program said his family tried to get into the Kabul airport multiple times, amid a frantic, surging crowd and Taliban sentries who beat people back, before deciding it was too dangerous to try again with a toddler and an infant.
“My daughter is very small — she wasn’t even 1 year old — and I didn’t want to lose her. So I decided that, okay, I’ll go alone,” said Doust, who is now alone at Holloman. It is unclear how or when he’ll be able to bring his family to the United States. “I miss them,” he said, his eyes welling.
A 21-year-old at the camp, who gave her name only as Bibi, described her family’s own battle to reach an evacuation flight. Her father, a prominent Afghan businessman, didn’t make it.
“The Taliban was hitting everybody and they were attacking us. They hit my brother, my mom, my aunt,” she said. “My dad got separated in the airport.” He’s now in hiding “because the Taliban are searching for him,” she added.
'Daily desperate pleas for help'
In Washington, the Biden administration has walked a fine line in its attempts to persuade Americans to welcome tens of thousands of Afghans into their communities — emphasizing their valor and hard work — while also seeking to defend or deflect attention from the many thousands it did not evacuate.
Advocates for Afghans, including attorneys and veterans groups, estimate that there are potentially tens of thousands still in Afghanistan who are at risk because of their or their relatives’ affiliation with the U.S. occupation, and they want the Biden administration to do more.
“The U.S. military and diplomatic presence in Afghanistan may have ended in August but the U.S. government’s obligation did not,” Sunil Varghese, policy director for the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), told reporters on a recent call, in which advocates lamented the Biden administration’s inaction.
“The U.S. has a legal and moral obligation to take action, and vulnerable Afghans cannot afford to wait longer,” Varghese said.
Rick Burns, who founded a nonprofit to assist Afghans and Iraqis and remains in touch with many, said, “We are receiving daily desperate pleas for help.”
“It is heart-wrenching and it is terribly difficult to have these conversations with people who you feel very personal relationships with and yet are in such horrible danger and such desperate situations in Afghanistan,” said Burns, a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
At Holloman’s Aman Omid Village, officials avoid offering predictions on how quickly the Afghan families here will be able to leave and start over with apartments in new cities and short-term assistance from local resettlement agencies.
A couple of thousand have already left. But the task force is authorized to run through March, meaning some of the thousands waiting for resettlement might still be here six months after their arrival — a product, officials and advocates say, of a national resettlement system that was largely dismantled by former president Donald Trump and still is not fully equipped.
In-demand resettlement destinations such as California, Virginia and Texas — where there are already large Afghan diaspora communities — are “saturated,” officials say; the resettlement groups simply can’t accommodate the numbers of Afghans who want to go there.
A screen mounted to the wall in the tent where State Department officials help Afghans navigate their resettlement cases advertises in a rotating slide show less-conventional options — places like Birmingham, Ala., and Chattanooga, Tenn. — that might be able to take them sooner.
In the meantime, camp infrastructure is steadily evolving to ease the long wait. The camp now has WiFi towers and indoor heating. The generators will soon be replaced with standard electricity.
There are communal TVs that play international cricket matches and Bollywood movies; English and cultural orientation classes; toys and art supplies for the children; and abundant dispensers of hot tea. This month, the residents received winter coats and long underwear to prepare them for the months ahead. All of the adults are now vaccinated against the coronavirus, officials say.
As airmen move through the camp each day, children flock to them: to hang on their arms like a jungle gym, toss them soccer balls and try out newly acquired English phrases.
Some of the adults have noted that, with its cloudless blue sky, humming generators and horizon of arid mountains, the pale, gravelly landscape of Aman Omid’s tents and trailers bears a resemblance to Bagram Airfield — the former headquarters of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan. It was a base where many U.S. service members, diplomats and Afghans alike once worked, but has since been abandoned to the Taliban.
Gabrielli told reporters during the tour that being able to serve Afghans who helped the United States is deeply fulfilling for many of his airmen, particularly those who served, who may find “closure” in their participation here.
Asked whether there is much discussion of America’s Afghanistan legacy among airmen and others at the camp, Gabrielli said in an email that it has “personally been a humbling experience for me” to hear from Afghans about the military units they served with, as well as “listening to their stories and looking at the photos of them with American Generals and other leaders.”
He added: “I also encourage Airmen to keep in mind that while guests are happy and grateful for the opportunity to have a safe, new place to make their home, many are still grieving over the circumstances that brought them here.”
11. Collection of U.S. actions inconsistent with words on China
From the Chinese propaganda mouthpiece, Xinhua.
I ask the Global Engagement Center (GEC), what is our response? How are we countering this Chinese propaganda?
Collection of U.S. actions inconsistent with words on China
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Photo taken on Nov. 19, 2021 shows the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., the United States. (Photo by Ting Shen/Xinhua)
BEIJING, Nov. 21 (Xinhua) -- At the international arena, Washington has long been well-known for its hypocrisy of saying one thing while doing another. As for Washington's policies on China, its actions stand in stark contrast to its words in the following aspects:
Photo taken on July 21, 2019 from Xiangshan Mountain shows the Taipei 101 skyscraper in Taipei, southeast China's Taiwan. (Xinhua/Zhu Xiang)
On Taiwan
In words:
The United States has clearly stated in the three China-U.S. joint communiques that it "recognized the Government of the People's Republic of China as the sole legal Government of China" and "acknowledged the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China."
In a telephone conversation in June, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Yang Jiechi, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the CPC Central Committee, that the United States adheres to the one-China policy and abides by the three Sino-U.S. joint communiques.
During a press briefing in February, the U.S. Department of State spokesperson Ned Price said that the United States supports the one-China policy.
In action:
The United States announced a 750-million-U.S.-dollar military sale to Taiwan earlier this year, and in 2020, Washington approved a total of 5 billion dollars in arms sales to the region.
U.S. vessels have repeatedly flexed their muscles to stir up trouble in the Taiwan Strait, threatening cross-Strait peace and stability and sending erroneous signals to "Taiwan independence" forces.
On Oct. 26, Blinken's clamor for Taiwan's "robust, meaningful participation throughout the United Nations system" once again crossed China's red line over the Taiwan question.
Washington has also concocted various bills regarding Taiwan, including the so-called Taiwan Relations Act. A handful of anti-China politicians are also seeking to pass a bill which calls on the U.S. State Department to submit a plan to help Taiwan regain its observer status at the World Health Organization.
Photo taken on Nov. 1, 2018 shows the Lujiazui area at sunrise in Shanghai, east China. (Xinhua/Fang Zhe)
On China's Development
In words:
Senior U.S. officials, including U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, have said that the United States has no intention of containing China's development and will not engage in a "new Cold War."
In October, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said that the U.S. administration aims to build "truly fair international trade," noting that Washington's objective is "not to inflame trade tensions with China." She also proposed a "durable coexistence" between the world's two largest economies.
In action:
Under the pretext of national security, the United States has in recent years spared no effort to crack down on Chinese telecommunications provider Huawei and other Chinese hi-tech companies.
The current U.S. Congress has introduced more than 300 anti-China bills, and the United States has included more than 900 Chinese entities and individuals in various unilateral sanctions lists, which have severely disrupted the normal bilateral exchanges.
Photo taken on Sept. 30, 2021 shows the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., the United States. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)
On U.S. alliances and Asia policy
In words:
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris said during her visit to Singapore and Vietnam in August that "our engagement in Southeast Asia and the Indo-Pacific is not against any one country, nor is it designed to make anyone choose between countries."
U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia Sung Kim said in September that AUKUS, a new trilateral security partnership between the United States, Britain and Australia, was not "directed at any particular country."
In action:
The United States has attempted to form exclusive cliques against China, such as the Quad, which groups the United States, Japan, India and Australia.
And in September, the United States, Britain and Australia announced the creation of the AUKUS pact and a plan to deliver a nuclear-powered submarine fleet to Australia.
The creation of AUKUS has raised concerns across the region. According to Mushahid Hussain Syed, chairman of Pakistani Senate's Defense Committee, the trilateral alliance was set up at the wrong time and for wrong reasons, because it is only sowing seeds of a new Cold War and new conflicts in the Asia-Pacific region, where peace, security and cooperation are what is exactly needed. ■
12. China reduces ties with Lithuania in Taiwan spat
Chinese economic and political warfare.
China reduces ties with Lithuania in Taiwan spat
BEIJING (AP) — China reduced the level of its diplomatic relations with Lithuania to below ambassador level Sunday in retaliation for the Baltic nation allowing Taiwan, the island democracy claimed by Beijing as part of its territory, to open a representative office.
China earlier expelled the Lithuanian ambassador, reflecting its intense sensitivity over the status of Taiwan, which Beijing says has no right to conduct foreign affairs. China also withdrew its own ambassador from Lithuania.
The Foreign Ministry said relations would be downgraded to the level of charge d’affaires, an embassy’s No. 2 official.
Lithuania’s move reflects growing interest among governments in expanding ties with Taiwan, a major trader and center for high-tech industry, at a time when Beijing has irritated its neighbors and Western governments with an increasingly assertive foreign and military policy.
Taiwan and the mainland have been ruled separately since 1949 following a civil war.
The Foreign Ministry accused Lithuania of “undermining Chinese sovereignty and territorial integrity.” It called on the Lithuanian government to “correct the mistakes immediately.”
Beijing refuses to have official relations with governments that recognize Taiwan as a sovereign country. It has persuaded all but 15 countries, most of them small and poor in Africa and Latin America, to switch recognition to the mainland.
Many governments, including the United States and Japan, have official diplomatic ties with Beijing while maintaining extensive commercial ties with Taiwan. Many maintain relations with the island’s democratically elected government through trade offices that serve as informal embassies.
Lithuania broke with diplomatic custom by agreeing that the Taiwanese office in Vilnius would bear the name Taiwan instead of Chinese Taipei, a term used by other countries to avoid offending Beijing.
Lithuania said earlier it plans to open its own representative office in Taiwan.
13. FDD | Biden-Xi Summit Only Highlights Fundamental Differences Between U.S. and China
Excerpts:
Xi’s vision is radically different—even if he doesn’t explicitly say so.
While Xi preached the need to “uphold the international system with the [United Nations] at its core,” it’s obvious that he does not think this system should be geared to protect Western-style freedom. Indeed, Xi claimed that just as “civilizations are rich and diverse … so is democracy.” He tried to deflect Biden’s pro-democracy arguments. “Democracy is not mass produced with a uniform model or configuration for countries around the world,” Xi said. “Whether a country is democratic or not should be left to its own people to decide. Dismissing forms of democracy that are different from one’s own is in itself undemocratic.”
In other words, Xi would have us believe that China is a form of democracy and those who claim otherwise are being “undemocratic.” Obviously, Xi is making hash out of the word “democracy”—expanding its definition to be so elastic that it can even accommodate even the world’s worst autocrats.
Biden assured Xi that the U.S. is not agitating for Taiwan’s independence. But Xi drew a line in the sand just to be clear, saying it “is important that the U.S. properly handle the relevant issues with prudence.” He blamed Taiwanese leaders for the escalating tensions, arguing that the “Taiwan authorities” who “look for U.S. support for their independence agenda” are the ones “playing with fire.” Their moves “are extremely dangerous.”
“Whoever plays with fire will get burnt,” Xi warned.
FDD | Biden-Xi Summit Only Highlights Fundamental Differences Between U.S. and China
fdd.org · by Thomas Joscelyn Senior Fellow and Senior Editor of FDD's Long War Journal · November 19, 2021
Earlier this month, Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai went missing. Peng, an accomplished women’s doubles player, reportedly accused former Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli of inappropriate sexual conduct during what was not always a consensual relationship. The accusation first appeared in a post on Peng’s verified account on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, on November 2. In about 20 minutes, the post had been taken down and Peng has not been seen in public since.
As Peng’s case garnered more attention, Chinese media produced an email that was purportedly written by her, claiming that the allegation against Zhang isn’t true and all is well. Few are buying it. The chairman of the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), Steve Simon, released a strongly worded statement casting doubt on the email. “The WTA and the rest of the world need independent and verifiable proof that she is safe,“’ Simon wrote. “I have repeatedly tried to reach her via numerous forms of communication, to no avail.”
American tennis star Serena Williams and other famous athletes also came to Peng’s defense. Williams tweeted that this “must be investigated and we must not stay silent.” Meanwhile, Simon says that the WTA is willing to forgo hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue if Peng isn’t located and her claims investigated. The WTA held nine tournaments in China in 2019, before the pandemic disrupted travel, and has focused much of its expansion efforts in the country the last several years.
There’s still much we don’t know about Peng’s disappearance. But the WTA and its stars have already demonstrated more moral clarity and courage than others in the professional sports business, including the NBA. Just a few years ago, the world’s premiere basketball league refused to stand by an executive who had the audacity to criticize Beijing’s crackdown in Hong Kong. When then Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey tweeted a message of support for Hong Kongers in 2019, the Lakers’ Lebron James claimed that Morey “wasn’t educated on the situation at hand.” Except, there was nothing wrong about what Morey tweeted—other than it would potentially cost the NBA billions of dollars in revenue. Just yesterday, Enes Kanter of the Celtics, tore into James, accusing him of putting his “money over morals.”
The NBA is hardly the only big business to waffle under Beijing’s pressure. In May, wrestling and movie star John Cena issued a groveling, 68-second apology in Mandarin after he said that Taiwan was a country. Cena may have the body of Captain America, but he doesn’t have the backbone of the fictional comic book character. “Cap” punched the dictator of his day, Adolf Hitler—he didn’t prostrate himself before the German people to make a buck. Cena’s disgraceful video, in which he didn’t actually explain what he had done wrong, was posted on Weibo—the very same social media platform that caught the attention of Peng’s minders in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Xi and Biden meet—virtually.
Which brings us to the virtual meeting between Biden and Xi on Monday, November 15. Understandably, they are searching for ways to avoid direct confrontation. As the sports and entertainment world shows, however, there is really no way to skirt around the fundamental differences between the two nations and their cultures. And although the exchange was civil, there were some points of tension that deserve additional attention.
Xi repeated many of the same buzzwords and phrases that he and other Chinese officials have leaned on for years. As I’ve noted in the past, the CCP’s leaders often mimic progressive-sounding rhetoric. For example, Xi told Biden that the two countries need to work together as part of a “global village,” “coexist in peace,” “pursue win-win cooperation” and engage in “multilateralism.” Xi emphasized that the two sides should work closely together with respect to combating climate change, as they transition to “green and low-carbon” economies.
Xi was keen to frame U.S.-Chinese relations as a boon for humanity. He claimed that the “most important event in international relations over the past 50 years was the reopening and development of China-U.S. relations, which has benefited the two countries and the whole world.”
There’s little doubt that Nixon’s opening to China in the early 1970s generated benefits—mainly economic. But as Xi surely knows, many Americans in Washington and elsewhere have increasingly questioned whether the costs of the relationship—in political, national security, and economic terms—outweigh those benefits. After all, Washington’s shallow assumption was that economic liberalization would lead to some degree of political liberalization. China’s totalitarian intolerance for any speech deemed unacceptable shows why that belief was misplaced.
Xi sought to sidestep this thorny calculation, arguing that the two nations’ are “deeply intertwined” and the “most important event in international relations in the coming 50 years will be for China and the U.S. to find the right way to get along.”
“History is a fair judge,” Xi added. He then proceeded to subtly lecture America’s commander-in-chief: “What a statesman does, be it right or wrong, be it an accomplishment or a failure, will all be recorded by history. It is hoped that President Biden will demonstrate political leadership and steer America’s China policy back on the track of reason and pragmatism.”
That is, Xi hopes that Washington will revert to the old mode of the past—when America’s leaders looked the other way as Beijing used its increasing economic clout to build a war machine and challenge the West’s global standing.
While President Biden is not itching for a fight, there is no indication that he is willing to revert to the old ways. According to the White House’s readout, the president “underscored that the United States will continue to stand up for its interests and values and, together with our allies and partners, ensure the rules of the road for the 21st century advance an international system that is free, open, and fair.”
Free. Open. Fair. Those are the words President Biden chose to describe his vision of the “international system,” which he sees as embroiled in a contest between democracies and autocracies.
Xi’s vision is radically different—even if he doesn’t explicitly say so.
While Xi preached the need to “uphold the international system with the [United Nations] at its core,” it’s obvious that he does not think this system should be geared to protect Western-style freedom. Indeed, Xi claimed that just as “civilizations are rich and diverse … so is democracy.” He tried to deflect Biden’s pro-democracy arguments. “Democracy is not mass produced with a uniform model or configuration for countries around the world,” Xi said. “Whether a country is democratic or not should be left to its own people to decide. Dismissing forms of democracy that are different from one’s own is in itself undemocratic.”
In other words, Xi would have us believe that China is a form of democracy and those who claim otherwise are being “undemocratic.” Obviously, Xi is making hash out of the word “democracy”—expanding its definition to be so elastic that it can even accommodate even the world’s worst autocrats.
Biden assured Xi that the U.S. is not agitating for Taiwan’s independence. But Xi drew a line in the sand just to be clear, saying it “is important that the U.S. properly handle the relevant issues with prudence.” He blamed Taiwanese leaders for the escalating tensions, arguing that the “Taiwan authorities” who “look for U.S. support for their independence agenda” are the ones “playing with fire.” Their moves “are extremely dangerous.”
“Whoever plays with fire will get burnt,” Xi warned.
Thomas Joscelyn is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Senior Editor for FDD’s Long War Journal. Follow Tom on Twitter @thomasjoscelyn. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, non-partisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Thomas Joscelyn Senior Fellow and Senior Editor of FDD's Long War Journal · November 19, 2021
14. Commentary: Placing Terrorism in a Violent Non-State Actor Framework for the Great Power Competition Era
I wonder how we should pronounce the acronym VNSA (violent non state actor). Perhaps "Vanessa?" Operation Vanessa? COunter Vanessa Operations? (apologies for a slight attempt at humor about a very serious subject and proposal).
Conclusion:
The VNSA idea has the potential to alter how the U.S. government thinks of resource allocation among law enforcement, military, and intelligence programs devoted to halting violent non-state threat actors.r Now that terrorism is not the preeminent security concern it once was, it might be time to ask how much the United States should spend to counter terrorism versus violent drug traffickers, for example. Systematic comparison of the two would better inform any such conversations. The VNSA concept could also reshape related budget conversations in the executive branch by establishing a way for policymakers to get a clearer sense of how much the U.S. government spends on GPC programs versus violent non-state threats as a whole. Additionally, the VNSA model could promote comparative discussion related to intelligence collection priorities within the IC. In other words, it would bring together threat actors such as terrorists, drug traffickers, and other organized crime groups under one concept and may facilitate their relative ranking within the National Intelligence Priorities Framework.s
For the VNSA idea to take root, key agencies involved in national security and public safety will have to buy into the idea. The NSC could drive such a realignment in its role to “advise and assist the President in integrating all aspects of national security policy.”50 The council and its subordinate committees serve as the primary tool the president uses to coordinate security-related change in executive departments and agencies and to formulate national security policy and strategic planning. The NSC could use the VNSA framework to organize interagency policy discussions. It could push relevant departments and agencies to adopt the VNSA concept and start breaking down longstanding barriers between programs tackling different sorts of violent transnational groups. Other parts of the government could take up the VNSA concept as well. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence could structure the relevant elements in its annual congressional worldwide threat testimony based on the concept, or key congressional committees could use it to shape hearings and legislation.
In the end, without some sort of catastrophic failure such as 9/11 to motivate change, no single clear path exists for how the U.S. government might consider and potentially adopt the framework.51 What is certain is that, in the short term, it would need a patron to broach it in the U.S. government. Change may follow
Commentary: Placing Terrorism in a Violent Non-State Actor Framework for the Great Power Competition Era – Combating Terrorism Center at West Point
Authors:
Categories:
Abstract: Given that the U.S. national security establishment has taken up great power competition (GPC) as its primary concern recently, and terrorism has slipped from the top position, it is time for the security policy community to place terrorism within a new conceptual framework, one that combines terrorists, violent criminals, drug traffickers, insurgents, and others under the heading of violent non-state actors (VNSA). The framework might help order the non-GPC threat landscape for decision makers, facilitate comparative understanding of violent threats to the United States, and drive better-informed prioritization within national security.
In the last several years, the priorities of the U.S. national security establishment have shifted away from terrorism toward addressing great power competition (GPC). Threats from Russia and China deeply shaped both the 2017 National Security Strategy1 a and the 2018 National Defense Strategy,2 and GPC continues to influence major U.S. security decision making.3 The widely acknowledged importance of Russia and China—as well as other state actors—in the national security mix has not been accompanied by a reimagining of sub-state violent threats long dominated by terrorism. Twenty years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, it may be time for policymakers to re-conceptualize how they handle terrorism and other violent substate (non-GPC) concerns by grouping together terrorism and like threats.
The large landscape beyond the GPC fence line that features violent actors beckons for a reorganization that breaks down the somewhat artificial but long-established boundaries separating policy responses to terrorists, transnational criminals, cross border gangs, insurgents, paramilitary forces, militias, warlords, and drug traffickers. A new conceptual framework could bound the seemingly divergent security concerns in this landscape and help rationalize policy making. The violent non-state actor (VNSA) concept, one that has circulated among academics and think-tanks for years but never truly taken hold in the policy realm, could be a useful tool for understanding some of the most dangerous threats the United States faces outside of the GPC construct.4 Its adoption would invigorate moribund strategic thinking around key national security concerns.
As a class, VNSAs challenge the monopolies of force that states try to maintain. VNSAs, of course, test sovereignty in other ways as well. Transnational criminal organizations control illicit markets and govern turf. Terrorists strive to change political and social structures. Insurgencies vie with states for power and woo citizens to their causes. VNSAs kill, maim, or threaten harm in their attempts to control or influence competitors, including other VNSAs as well as states themselves. Of course, VNSAs do not fill the entire non-GPC terrain. The category, for example, excludes pure cyber actors, such as hackers, who are not violent and not linked to foreign governments.
The U.S. government’s framing of violent substate threats largely has been based on their motives. The superpower formally designates its foreign terrorist enemies—violent, ideologically driven foes—via well-established processes that focus whole-of-government efforts on a core set of dangerous actors.5 Other violent transnational enemies bent on earning illicit profits and as a result endangering the lives of Americans have resided somewhere in the background, and several U.S. efforts to catalog and prioritize key players among drug traffickers and organized criminals exist. These, however, do not necessarily focus federal efforts as clearly as terrorist designations.6 b
Several high-profile instances during the Trump administration blurred the lines between terrorism and other national security concerns. Are Mexican drug trafficking organizations terrorists? In late 2019 and early 2020, members of the Trump administration and a few members of Congress very publicly asked this provocative question and briefly considered designating Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations.c
In July 2020 and January 2021, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced federal terrorism charges cases involving members of the transnational gang known as Mara Salvatrucha (commonly known as MS-13).7 In the July 2020 case, DOJ indicted an MS-13 leader for conspiring to commit acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries, conspiring to finance terrorism, conspiring to provide material support to terrorists, and conspiring to engage in narco-terrorism—among other charges.8 These investigations were products of a major U.S. initiative to dismantle and destroy MS-13.9
In April 2019, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security expanded its terrorism prevention efforts to cover other forms of targeted violence. It established the Office for Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention.d The office was designed to focus on addressing numerous forms of violence regardless of ideology.10 Practitioners have come to understand that terrorism and other types of targeted violence have much in common as problems, and the same or similar preventive tools can be leveraged against them.
The VNSA framework may help drive re-prioritization discussions by combining disparate threats under one structure. This could make it easier to justify shifting resources between thorny policy challenges such as terrorism and transnational organized crime. Said another way, the VNSA framework would get policymakers to rethink mindsets hardwired after 9/11, mindsets that distinguished terrorism from all other violent national security concerns. It would allow for clearer comparative understanding of what exists outside of GPC issues. It would help explain the dynamics involved when weak states—of strategic importance to the United States—are affected by violent groups or movements and how this might shape GPC in those areas. It would help the intelligence community (IC) to map the ways great powers or other strong states might exploit VNSAs to further their own goals.
This essay intends to be policy relevant, not policy prescriptive. It is designed to generate discussion around broad issues affecting interagency national security concerns. Specifically, it walks readers through the concept of violent non-state actors, suggesting how it may be used to reshape thinking regarding threats that exist outside of the great power competition perspective. It proceeds in four parts. The first section focuses on the rise of organized crime and terrorism as distinct national security issues. The second section lays out the VNSA framework. The third section discusses how this framework could be used. The final section discusses key considerations for the future.
1. The Rise of Organized Crime and Terrorism as Distinct National Security Issues
The following discussion focuses on intertwined USG efforts to fight two prominent VNSA threats: international terrorism and transnational organized crime (TOC).e The latter includes drug trafficking; much of the federal government’s focus on TOC since the 1980s has involved addressing drug trafficking, especially in the Western Hemisphere.f In the late 20th century, U.S. policy embraced international organized crime as a national security threat. For a decade and a half after September 11, 2001, however, terrorism eclipsed most other security issues and the U.S. government heavily reworked its intelligence and security structures to address the threat.
From the 1960s through the 1990s, policymakers worked out a shared general view of what eventually came to be known as transnational organized crime.g The federal government refined the basic law enforcement tools that are still used to take down criminal organizations—federal wiretap authority, the use of confidential informants and undercover investigations, federal conspiracy charges, a focused federal counternarcotics effort, and the federal crime of money laundering. The country also promoted to the rest of the world its visions both for policing and how the organized crime threat looked as it pivoted away from the Cold War.11 Organized crime went from being mostly a domestic law enforcement concern to one that was thoroughly globalized and required the resources of the military and intelligence agencies to thwart.12
While organized crime solidified as a national security concern between the 1960s and 2001, the government also took early steps to develop an approach to counterterrorism (CT), particularly confronting international threats. The Department of Justice—specifically the FBI—became the lead agency for investigating acts of terrorism. The Department of State held the primary role abroad. A string of foreign hijackings and hostage situations in the 1980s encouraged the United States to develop long-arm statutes extending American legal jurisdiction to cover terrorists and other criminals who harmed U.S. nationals beyond the country’s boundaries. Rendition of terrorists was developed as a tool to bring such suspects under U.S. control while they were abroad, especially if foreign governments were not willing or able to assist in extradition.13 In the 1980s and 1990s, other fundamental policies and procedures were established, including codifying the State Department’s ability to designate foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs).h FTO designation paved the way for financial sanction and other judicial solutions, such as the possibility of prosecuting individuals for providing material support to the terrorist organizations designated by the Department of State.
The counterterrorism enterprise vastly expanded after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. At home, the FBI quickly shifted focus to terrorism, doubling the number of special agents covering terrorism—adding about 2,000 agents to its national security programs by June 2002, moving resources away from criminal programs such as drug trafficking and organized crime.14 The United States used military resources to aggressively pursue foreign terrorists. The early 2000s saw the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the National Counterterrorism Center, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and expanding efforts to address international terrorism relying on the military and the Central Intelligence Agency.i
2. The VNSA Framework
The violent non-state actor (VNSA) framework includes individuals, groups, or movements who use violence to pursue ends that harm U.S. national interests.15 They operate outside the direct control of foreign countries and include terrorists, insurgents, violent gangs, militias, and transnational criminal organizations, among others. Bringing together what have long been seen as distinct and malevolent actors achieves two broad goals. Namely, it suggests that such actors share much more in common than they do not—undoing a generation of security thinking that has siloed these threat actors.j Relatedly, it facilitates the intertwining of policies and programs designed to address each violent national security threat and facilitates comparison. To that end, any number of themes can be used to collectively assess VNSA networks. This sort of analysis may involve key components that shape a group’s operations. Five such components have been selected as examples and are described below. They are motives, structures, digital footprints, ties to state actors, and the pathways individuals take into each category of violent non-state activity.
First, VNSA motives can be captured on a continuum between profit/self-interest and ideological/altruistic drivers. Terrorists, insurgents, and guerrillas often view their actions as serving specific populations in ideologically related conflicts, while drug smugglers or other organized crime networks engage in illegal collective behavior, pursuing self-interest and financial gain in far-flung illicit markets.16 Studies of the crime-terror nexus17 reveal that violent transnational organizations do not necessarily fit into neat camps purely governed either by profit or ideology, with terrorists engaging in crime to raise funds and criminals often directly involved in shaping the political worlds around them by controlling turf, corrupting officials, and communicating threats.18
Second, VNSAs come in a variety of structures. Few organized criminal groups or terrorist organizations exhibit either highly centralized or completely diffuse organizational structures.19 Likewise, VNSAs can engage in a mix of transnational and localized activity. Some VNSAs can simultaneously exhibit transnational and hyper-local dimensions. For example, the Islamic State spread propaganda and inspired and/or directed action far from the turf it controlled—its “caliphate”—in Syria and Iraq. Drug cartels profoundly affect the local economies of countries in regions where production, transit, and retail of illicit drugs occur.20 The violent gang MS-13 has cliques in Central and North America and operates on the streets and in prisons.21
Third, much like the variety that exists in the structure of VNSA organizations, they can vary in their cyber activity. How much digital activity does a VNSA pursue? How critical is the digital environment to the workings of the group or movement? Such questions are especially important in an age in which the digital realm and social media play big roles in how people craft their own identities. Encrypted communications technologies, social media platforms, and dark-web markets selling drugs such as fentanyl represent just three aspects of the digital realm that VNSAs exploit.22 k Digital activity is just one measure of criminal or terrorist innovation. Comparatively tracking how various organizations pursue complex engineering efforts—chemical weapons development, narco-subs, use of encrypted communication networks, sophisticated tunnel construction—helps policymakers understand why and under what organizational conditions such groups innovate.23
Fourth, VNSAs are sometimes enabled by links to state officials. How collaborative are such relationships? VNSAs corrupting public officials to further specific criminal schemes differs from efforts to establish close, lasting ties with government agencies and leaders. The former involves evading enforcement, the latter verges on collaboration between VNSAs and the state.24 Adversarial interaction also shapes both the states involved and VNSAs as they each violently fight one another, define markets, and vie for influence over public servants.25 VNSAs might alter the levels of violence they employ in response to the persistence of law enforcement pressure. States reshape legal regimens to cope with emerging VNSA threats, and some may fail altogether under the pressures of constant conflict and corruption.26
Fifth, just as important as the phenomena that shape group structures are the things that shape the participation of individuals in those groups. Two decades ago, Vincenzo Ruggiero described “imaginary geographies” that offer underworld groups “social elsewheres” in which they can thrive.27 These fringe locations, whether in the brick-and-mortar or digital world, serve as protected zones that sustain individuals and groups acting outside of society’s legal norms. Such geographies have their own rules, languages, behavioral patterns, norms, and enemies and attract particular people.
Systematic comparison of the pathways that people follow into and out of these “elsewheres” that foster terrorism, organized crime, and insurgency, would inform prevention efforts for each of these phenomena. Likewise, it would boost understanding of how individuals might shift from one type of activity to another. With the rise of the Islamic State, attention was devoted to the terrorist group’s recruitment of petty criminals, especially from Europe.l
For 20 years, the counterterrorism community has studied radicalization in great depth. Vast literatures detail how people become terrorists as well as how they quit.28 Arguably, the only (somewhat) settled items in this arena reflect core challenges scholars face such as the lack of primary data, the widely divergent radicalization pathways individuals take complicated by the specific factors constituting their lives (factors often shared by others who do not radicalize), and the highly heterogenous populations that radicalize.29 Additionally, some scholars have discussed the similarities between terrorist radicalization and criminal offending.30
Researchers have devoted decades to uncovering criminogenic factors that lead young offenders to engage in individualized crime and violence or to join youth gangs. Comparatively little research has gone into understanding the career trajectories of those who enter mafia life or organized crime groups.31 Individuals follow diverse paths into organized crime. Many enter when adults, have previous serious run-ins with the law, and have particular skills or social connections that make them attractive to criminal groups.32 Also, an individual’s proximity to such groups as well as particular early life circumstances feature prominently among risk factors.33
Bullet cases lie on the pavement at a crime scene where several people were killed when gunmen opened fire at government offices in Cancun, Mexico, on January 17, 2017. (Victor Ruiz Garcia/Reuters)
3. Using the VNSA Framework
A VNSA framework would bring some conceptual cohesion to how the government views non-state threats and provide rich context to the strategic study of GPC issues. The framework facilitates 1) broad thinking, 2) agile policy decision making, and 3) a cohesive understanding of the non-GPC threat landscape that the United States faces.
Cross-cutting analysis of VNSAs and the contexts in which they function promotes big thinking. This is especially relevant for government analysts who tend to specialize in narrow fields. One can devote an entire career to a type of threat actor (such as Sunni extremists), even one specific group or movement (al-Qa`ida). A broader perspective is especially relevant after two decades during which CT-focused Western intelligence services favored tactical intelligence, prioritizing individual threat actors over strategic work.34 As Patrick Bury and Michael Chertoff have noted, “In fact, the focus on tactical CT and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have resulted in the deprioritisation of horizon-scanning strategic intelligence in many Western services and hence a lack of engagement between policymakers and strategic analysts.”35
Bringing together non-state violent actors under a holistic model could help intelligence analysts better support policy decisions by forcing them to confront more complex, comparative questions that lack single answers and range far beyond tactical considerations—the kinds of questions presented by today’s security environment. Bury and Chertoff cite Gregory Treverton’s call to move intelligence work away from a “puzzles-based” approach that looks for missing pieces and tends to reduce issues to solvable, tactical problems. Rather, they suggest that current intelligence analysis should include more of what Treverton describes as an open-ended “mysteries-focused” style of thinking. Such a point of view embraces the idea that open-ended mysteries are not solved. Working on them involves accurately describing context and framing how key factors work together to shape the mystery.36 m Understanding why people join violent groups, determining how violent actors engender support or sympathy among broader populations, assessing what regions of the world will be susceptible to VNSA activity in the future—such complex problems full of mystery are the stuff of a VNSA approach.
Current efforts to fight terrorists and drug cartels still emphasize narrowly tactical approaches. Front and center lie the “decapitation strategies” aimed at removing the leaders of such groups. There is a debate about their degree of success.n More holistic approaches that address the social, economic, technological, and political contexts in which VNSAs operate are far more difficult to implement, requiring greater interagency and inter-governmental cooperation to stymie market forces, whether those markets involve illicit goods/services or ideas/ideologies supporting violence. More simply, it is easier to frame threats in terms of good guy versus bad guy storytelling.
Some of the best analysts, investigators, prosecutors, and strategists are good storytellers,o and the nefarious villain is much more captivating than more important but also more abstract market forces, complex systems, or social undercurrents that shape the villain’s illicit realm.37 The VNSA model, inherently comparative and focused on the milieus in which violent actors operate, moves national security away from the highly critiqued and heavily tactical decapitation approach, and focuses policy on the common forces that shape substate violence.
Many of the same social forces, institutional structures, and operational environments shape all VNSAs, sometimes in different ways. Comparative study of such things would greatly inform how all aspects of state power could be used strategically to hinder non-state actors bent on hurting American citizens and the nation’s interests. In a digitized world with interconnected markets, it might be time to move away from policies that promote targeted removals of specific groups and more seriously consider altering the environs that shape all such groups.p Riffing on a tired image—is it time to stop killing mosquitos and drain the swamp?
From a practical perspective, breaking the existing puzzle-oriented, storytelling-driven, and heavily tactical focus that holds sway over intelligence work on terrorists and other violent national security threats might require bringing together the analytic offices or programs within agencies that separately cover the various forms of non-state violence. This could mean co-locating counterterrorism and counter TOC workforces or prioritizing more cross-program analysis under current structures. Such options would encourage more of a strategic perspective among disparate but related programs.
Part of any big picture analysis of VNSAs involves understanding how they interact with GPC concerns. The national security establishment may be especially interested in prioritizing VNSAs that have ties to foreign governments, particularly Russia or China. Such a calculation might rate a group as a higher security threat if it was somehow tied to GPC concerns regardless of whether it is a terrorist, criminal, or insurgent organization. At the very least, this kind of focus would direct more effort toward understanding the intersection of GPC and VNSA activity. For example, a nuanced understanding of how criminal organizations are involved in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a huge infrastructure project designed to foster linkages between East Asia, Africa, and Europe, is likely more important to U.S. policymakers than just thwarting individual criminal groups profiting from the initiative.38 Understanding more precisely how the Kremlin draws on organized crime groups for subcontracting violence, cyber skills, and laundering money, among other things, presumably would be more useful than whack-a-mole efforts to combat the Russian mafia.39
The VNSA framework encourages agile policy development, making it easier to pivot from one violent non-state threat to another as security concerns ebb and flow.q This may be especially useful in contexts that prominently feature a variety of VNSAs. In Afghanistan, prior to the Taliban takeover in August 2021, for example, “most counternarcotics measures [had] been ineffective or outright counterproductive economically, politically, and with respect to counterinsurgency and stabilization efforts.”40 In such a context, a VNSA perspective may have pushed U.S. decision makers to devote more resources to understanding the interrelationships among drug traffickers, insurgents, terrorists, and the needs of the general population. The framework challenges terrorism’s ascendency and exclusivity (i.e., that it is the most important and a wholly distinct substate problem that the United States faces).
Adopting the VNSA framework could help advance discussions about reprioritization of resources already well underway in national security circles. Policymaking could more quickly respond to emerging violent transnational threats if items such as counterterrorism and counternarcotics were not seen as distinct programs and separate budgetary pots. Such change would not be easy and would likely require a significant reconfiguration of the National Intelligence Program and Military Intelligence Program budgets.41
It might be possible, under a VNSA framework, for the policy world to more easily shift U.S. responses to threats, shape its intelligence collection, and reconfigure its resourcing to meet emerging substate concerns. A shift to a VNSA perspective would facilitate strategic analysis across subcategories of violent threat actors. In terms of prioritization, U.S. intelligence and federal law enforcement agencies might consider breaking down the existing segmentation that separates the ways that agencies perceive the threat of terrorists and transnational criminal organizations. Instead of prioritizing foreign terrorist organizations and drug trafficking organizations in isolation from one another, it might be time to create a consolidated and ranked list of VNSAs.
The VNSA concept brings cohesion to the non-GPC threat landscape the United States confronts. The country’s watchlisting, screening, and vetting enterprise offers a good example. It is largely intended to secure U.S. borders, keeping those who would harm American interests from entering.42 As recently refined, the enterprise focuses on six seemingly distinct threat categories: terrorists, transnational criminals, foreign intelligence actors, foreign military members, weapons proliferators, and cyber threat actors.43
The distinctions among the six categories diminish once one sorts them in terms of GPC and VNSAs. The first two (terrorists and transnational criminals) are clearly VNSAs. The next two (foreign intelligence actors and foreign military members) clearly involve state actors especially relevant to GPC concerns. Weapons proliferators most often are state affiliated but might not be, and cyber actors are neither violent nor directly linked to states in many instances. By viewing these threat actor categories from such an angle, the balance between GPC and VNSAs in border security concerns is striking.
As already suggested, the VNSA concept also helps policy discussions move beyond stark “either-or” arguments that result from highly “siloed” current views of violent threat. One such argument describes violent offenders as either focused on profit (transnational criminal organizations) or ideology (terrorists). Along these lines, debate about whether or not Mexican drug cartels merit designation as foreign terrorist organizations by the USG has episodically animated policymakers. Thinking of both terrorists and organized crime groups as violent non-state actors could begin to shift policymakers away from what have been dead-end debates about reclassifying mostly non-ideological violent criminals as ideological actors. It may also move discussions beyond developing a simplistic understanding of the “crime-terror nexus.”
Also as discussed above, the VNSA concept helps policymakers develop a better-informed understanding of the ways in which great power competition plays out in the real world. Collectively, VNSAs significantly affect the environments in which great powers grapple with one another. For instance, legitimate and illegitimate markets interact in interesting ways as the United States copes with synthetic drug addiction and China, a primary exporter of precursor chemicals involved in the production of methamphetamine and fentanyl, favors revenue growth in its biopharmaceutical sector over drug control.44
4. Key Considerations for the Future
U.S. efforts to adopt the VNSA framework would have to address significant conceptual challenges. Also, while the framework could reshape how the U.S. government allocates finite security dollars and other resources, it requires a champion in the executive branch, such as the National Security Council (NSC).
Among the conceptual challenges, as the above commentary suggests, drawing the lines between VNSAs and GPC issues may be tough. Some VNSAs may be coopted by great powers or be involved in destabilizing regions of importance to powerful nations. As already discussed, the VNSA framework could help the U.S. government understand when and why such changes occur. Yet, maintaining analytic integrity—what’s VNSA versus what’s GPC—will be important.
Additionally, an array of serious, non-violent, and non-GPC security concerns exist. These range from cyber crime and non-violent fraud schemes to climate change and pandemics. Such issues, while not driven by states or non-state actors bent on physically hurting people, still can overlap with GPC and VNSA problem sets. Malicious, digitally driven foreign influence campaigns by Russia to disrupt U.S. elections are prime examples.45 Such activity may influence terrorists such as violent white supremacists. Pandemics shape the markets that transnational criminals drive and affect the ideological ferment of terrorist movements. While lockdowns initially disrupted criminal profiteering, many transnational criminal organizations have adapted to COVID-19 realities—some diversifying activities, even prospering.46
A core conceptual challenge revolves around the position of terrorism in the hierarchy of security worries. In other words, while GPC has displaced it, does terrorism still require special and separate treatment as an issue beyond other VNSAs? Some experts have stridently argued that it does not, largely because of its infrequency. (In other words, terrorism has a very low base rate when compared to other criminality.47) Sir Alex Younger, former chief of the United Kingdom’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), has suggested that terrorism’s capacity to undermine the social fabric of a country distinguishes it as a threat.48 Albert Bandura in 2004 posed four overarching reasons why we fear terrorism, despite its infrequency. The terrorist violence is unpredictable. Their actions are grave, killing and injuring people. Also, their actions seem uncontrollable. Finally, the growing centralization of our world and its interdependence make us fear that terrorists can easily disrupt life for many with a single act. They can harm economies, disrupt travel, take down telecommunications, and poison food supplies.49 Whatever security experts decide about the relative place of terrorism among security concerns, 20 years after the al-Qa`ida attacks on 9/11, discussion should not end with simple acknowledgment that other issues, such as GPC, currently surpass it. A much more thorough conversation should be had about terrorism’s relation to other violent non-state threats.
The VNSA idea has the potential to alter how the U.S. government thinks of resource allocation among law enforcement, military, and intelligence programs devoted to halting violent non-state threat actors.r Now that terrorism is not the preeminent security concern it once was, it might be time to ask how much the United States should spend to counter terrorism versus violent drug traffickers, for example. Systematic comparison of the two would better inform any such conversations. The VNSA concept could also reshape related budget conversations in the executive branch by establishing a way for policymakers to get a clearer sense of how much the U.S. government spends on GPC programs versus violent non-state threats as a whole. Additionally, the VNSA model could promote comparative discussion related to intelligence collection priorities within the IC. In other words, it would bring together threat actors such as terrorists, drug traffickers, and other organized crime groups under one concept and may facilitate their relative ranking within the National Intelligence Priorities Framework.s
For the VNSA idea to take root, key agencies involved in national security and public safety will have to buy into the idea. The NSC could drive such a realignment in its role to “advise and assist the President in integrating all aspects of national security policy.”50 The council and its subordinate committees serve as the primary tool the president uses to coordinate security-related change in executive departments and agencies and to formulate national security policy and strategic planning. The NSC could use the VNSA framework to organize interagency policy discussions. It could push relevant departments and agencies to adopt the VNSA concept and start breaking down longstanding barriers between programs tackling different sorts of violent transnational groups. Other parts of the government could take up the VNSA concept as well. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence could structure the relevant elements in its annual congressional worldwide threat testimony based on the concept, or key congressional committees could use it to shape hearings and legislation.
In the end, without some sort of catastrophic failure such as 9/11 to motivate change, no single clear path exists for how the U.S. government might consider and potentially adopt the framework.51 What is certain is that, in the short term, it would need a patron to broach it in the U.S. government. Change may follow. CTC
Jerome P. Bjelopera is an adjunct associate professor in Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies. He has worked in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Prior to this, he was a Specialist in Organized Crime and Terrorism at the Congressional Research Service. Before joining CRS, Bjelopera was a strategic intelligence analyst at FBI Headquarters, where he worked on transnational organized crime and violent gangs. Bjelopera also served as an assistant professor of U.S. history at Bowie State University in Bowie, Maryland, and at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois.
The views expressed in this article are strictly his own and do not necessarily reflect those of his employers, past or present.
© 2021 Jerome P. Bjelopera
Substantive Notes
[a] The strategy acknowledges China and Russia as “attempting to erode American security and prosperity” as it tees up a description of “a competitive world.”
[c] U.S. House, 116th Congress, 1st Session, H.R. 5509, “Identifying Drug Cartels as Terrorists Act,” December 19, 2019, called for seven Mexican cartels to be designated foreign terrorist organizations as defined by section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The idea did not gain traction. This was not the first bill to suggest such a change. See U.S. House, 112th Congress, 1st Session, H.R. 1270, “To Direct the Secretary of State to Designate as Foreign Terrorist Organizations Certain Mexican Drug Cartels, and for Other Purposes,” June 1, 2011. See also Jonathan Landay, Ted Hesson, Arshad Mohammed, “After Cabinet Opposed Mexican Cartel Policy, Trump Forged Ahead,” Reuters, December 26, 2019.
- [e] The most detailed, publicly available definition of transnational organized crime by the U.S. government comes from the 2011 “Strategy to Combat Transnational Organized Crime” released by the Obama administration. It emphasizes violence: “Transnational organized crime refers to those self-perpetuating associations of individuals who operate transnationally for the purpose of obtaining power, influence, monetary and/or commercial gains, wholly or in part by illegal means, while protecting their activities through a pattern of corruption and/or violence, or while protecting their illegal activities through a transnational organizational structure and the exploitation of transnational commerce or communication mechanisms. There is no single structure under which transnational organized criminals operate; they vary from hierarchies to clans, networks, and cells, and may evolve to other structures. The crimes they commit also vary. Transnational organized criminals act conspiratorially in their criminal activities and possess certain characteristics which may include, but are not limited to:
- In at least part of their activities they commit violence or other acts which are likely to intimidate, or make actual or implicit threats to do so;
- They exploit differences between countries to further their objectives, enriching their organization, expanding its power, and/or avoiding detection/apprehension;
- They attempt to gain influence in government, politics, and commerce through corrupt as well as legitimate means;
- They have economic gain as their primary goal, not only from patently illegal activities but also from investment in legitimate businesses; and
- They attempt to insulate both their leadership and membership from detection, sanction, and/ or prosecution through their organizational structure.”
[f] Reagan administration, National Security Decision Directive 221, “Narcotics and National Security,” defined drug trafficking as a national security issue.
[g] In 1983, the Reagan administration established The President’s Commission on Organized Crime. It helped shift policymakers away from a historical focus on Italian organized crime, dividing the field into “traditional” organized crime groups involving Italians and “emerging” organized crime groups, including Asian, Central American, and South American groups. Michael Woodiwiss, Double Crossed: The Failure of Organized Crime Control (London: Pluto Press, 2017): p. 131; Jay S. Albanese, “Government Perceptions of Organized Crime: The Presidential Commissions, 1967 and 1987,” Federal Probation 52 (1988): pp. 58-63; Reagan administration, Executive Order 12435, “President’s Commission on Organized Crime,” July 28, 1983.
[h] The State Department authority to designate FTOs was established under Section 302 of the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (P.L. 104-132), which added Section 219 to the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1189).
[i] The Homeland Security Act of 2002 (P.L. 107-296) created the Department of Homeland Security. The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (P.L. 108-458) codified the National Counterterrorism Center, reorganized the intelligence community, established the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and elevated the position of Director of National Intelligence to an independent, cabinet-level official responsible for leading the intelligence community.
[j] Recent scholarship has suggested that the lines distinguishing terrorists and other sorts of criminals are not as clearly drawn as once thought. See Etienne Rosas, “Fulfilling Clandestiny: Reframing the ‘Crime-Terror Nexus’ by Exploring Conditions of Insurgent Criminal Organizations’ Origins, Incentives, and Strategic Pivots,” Ph.D. dissertation, RAND Pardee Graduate School, 2020; Phil Williams, “The Organized Crime and Terrorist Nexus: Overhyping the Relationship,” Stratfor, April 20, 2018; Tuesday Reitano, Colin Clarke, and Laura Adal, “Examining the Nexus Between Organized Crime and Terrorism and Its Implications for EU Programming,” CT MORSE, April 2017; and Laila A. Wahedi, “Bitter Friends: How Relationships Between Violent Non-State Actors Form, Are Used, and Shape Behavior,” Ph.D. dissertation, Georgetown University, 2017.
[k] The Federal Bureau of Investigation has had longstanding concerns about challenges it faces regarding strong encryption offered by commercial service providers, device manufacturers, and application developers “that can only be decrypted or accessed by the end users or device owners.” The FBI has noted that the inability to access encrypted communications or information stored in locked devices such as computers or cell phones linked to people under investigation potentially hinders investigations. See “The Lawful Access Challenge,” Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Christopher Wray, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation, written statement, Committee on Homeland Security hearing “Worldwide Threats to the Homeland: 20 Years After 9/11,” September 22, 2021. Such issues specifically have emerged regarding iPhones used in terrorist attacks. Apple has pushed back against calls to allow law enforcement “back door” access to such devices. Alfred Ng, “FBI slams ‘Apple problem’ as It Unlocks Pensacola Shooter’s iPhones,” Wired, May 18, 2020; Jack Nicas and Katie Benner, “F.B.I. Asks Apple to Help Unlock Two iPhones,” New York Times, January 7, 2020; Ellen Nakashima, “Inspector General: FBI Didn’t Fully Explore Whether It Could Hack a Terrorist’s iPhone Before Asking Court to Order Apple to Unlock It,” Washington Post, March 27, 2018.
[l] A significant portion of foreign terrorist fighters who joined the Islamic State exhibited criminal behavior before joining the terrorist group. Anne Speckhard and Molly D. Ellenberg, “ISIS in Their Own Words: Recruitment History, Motivations for Joining, Travel, Experiences in ISIS, and Disillusionment over Time – Analysis of 220 In-depth Interviews of ISIS Returnees, Defectors and Prisoners,” Journal of Strategic Security 13:1 (2020) pp. 82-127; Tanya Mehra, “Foreign Terrorist Fighters: Trends, Dynamics, and Policy Responses,” International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, December 2016.
[m] Treverton’s mysteries-focused approach responds to the features that bedevil any understanding of a complex situation or system as laid out by Dietrich Dörner. According to him, complex situations and systems exhibit complexity, largely because things in such systems are interrelated and the same forces affect different things in the system. They also exhibit “intransparence,” meaning one cannot assess and understand everything he or she wants to within the system. Such systems also tend to develop “independent of external control, according to their own internal dynamic.” From a policy-making perspective, this implies that people charged with affecting complex systems might not grasp how they function. They may feel that they have all the requisite pieces of the proverbial puzzle only to misunderstand how they fit together and how the systems actually work. Dörner suggests that these realities put serious demands on decision makers. Dietrich Dörner, The Logic of Failure: Recognizing and Avoiding Error in Complex Situations (New York: Basic Books, 1996), pp. 37-38.
[n] This reality is reflected in the literature on the effectiveness of decapitation strategies aimed at eliminating key VNSA leaders in order to disrupt or dismantle organizations. See Jenna Jordan, Leadership Decapitation: Strategic Targeting of Terrorist Organizations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019); Charles D. Brockett, “The Drug Kingpin Decapitation Strategy in Guatemala: Successes and Shortcomings,” Latin American Politics and Society 61:4 (2019): pp. 47-71; Christopher Woody, “Pablo Escobar’s Death Cleared the Way for a Much More Sinister Kind of Criminal in Colombia,” Business Insider, March 27, 2017; Brian J. Phillips, “How Does Leadership Decapitation Affect Violence? The Case of Drug Trafficking Organizations in Mexico,” Journal of Politics 77:2 (2015): pp. 324-336; Gabriela Calderón et al., “The Beheading of Criminal Organizations and the Dynamics of Violence in Mexico,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 59:8 (2015): pp. 1,455-1,485; Patrick B. Johnson, “Does Decapitation Work? Assessing the Effectiveness of Leadership Targeting in Counterinsurgency Campaigns,” International Security 36:4 (2012): pp. 47-79.
[p] Such a viewpoint implies the value of adopting a complex systems perspective to understand the multilayered and intertwined relationships between the underworld and the legitimate world. J.M. Ottino states, “Complex systems can be identified by what they do (display organization without a central organizing authority—emergence), and also by how they may or may not be analysed (as decomposing the system and analysing subparts do not necessarily give a clue as to the behaviour of the whole).” J.M. Ottino, “Engineering Complex Systems,” Nature 427 (2004). Social networks, neural networks, and the World Wide Web are examples of complex systems. See “About NICO,” Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems website; Martin Neumann and Corinna Elsenbroich, “Introduction: The Social Dimensions of Organized Crime,” Trends in Organized Crime 20 (2017): pp. 1-15; and Thomas Homer-Dixon et al., “A Complex Systems Approach to the Study of Ideology: Cognitive-Affective Structures and the Dynamics of Belief Systems,” Journal of Social and Political Psychology 1:1 (2013): pp. 337-363.
[q] In 2014, RAND released a study based on a seminar involving acting and former senior government and law enforcement officials, practitioners, and experts covering “domestic intelligence operations and information sharing as [they] relate to terrorist threats.” Among other things, the study found that “Categorizing threats by group and compartmenting them by origin (terrorism, domestic terrorism, cyber terrorism, etc.) may unduly limit intelligence sharing and cooperation and pertains more to past threats than likely future threats. The cyber threat, organized crime, narco-traffickers, and terrorists might intersect, yet law enforcement and intelligence agencies are disconnected and not positioned to detect an intersection among disparate groups.” Brian Michael Jenkins, Andrew Liepman, and Henry H. Willis, Identifying Enemies Among Us: Evolving Terrorist Threats and the Continuing Challenges of Domestic Intelligence Collection and Information Sharing (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2014), p. vii.
[s] The National Intelligence Priorities Framework is the Director of National Intelligence’s tool for establishing national intelligence priorities, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and IC elements use the framework to allocate collection and analytic resources. See “Roles and Responsibilities for the National Intelligence Priorities Framework,” Intelligence Community Directive Number 204, January 7, 2021. The framework establishes priorities that “address a diverse range of threats, and a description of these threats is published by the Director of National Intelligence in the annual release of the Worldwide Threat Assessment.” See “Limiting SIGINT Collection and Use,” Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), in “IC on the Record,” a blog run by ODNI (2017).
Citations
[1] National Security Strategy of the United States of America, Trump administration, December 2017, p. 2.
[2] “Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America: Sharpening the American Military’s Competitive Edge,” U.S. Department of Defense, 2018, p. 1. The introduction of this summary documents “[i]nter-state strategic competition, not terrorism” as the “primary concern in U.S. national security.” It highlights China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran.
[3] Ronald O’Rourke, “Renewed Great Power Competition: Implications for Congress,” Congressional Research Service, updated December 17, 2020.
[4] Phil Williams in “Violent Non-State Actors and National and International Security,” International Relations and Security Network, 2008 clearly articulates the concept.
[6] “Transnational Criminal Organizations Sanctions Programs,” U.S. Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control, updated April 14, 2015; “Narcotics Sanctions Program,” U.S. Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control, updated July 18, 2014.
[11] Peter Andreas and Ethan Nadelmann, Policing the Globe: Criminalization and Crime Control in International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
[12] William J. Clinton, Presidential Decision Directive/NSC-42, October 21, 1995. This document coordinated U.S. efforts to combat international organized crime. See also “International Crime Threat Assessment,” Clinton White House, December 2000.
[13] Brian Michael Jenkins, “Bush, Obama, And Trump: The Evolution Of U.S. Counterterrorist Policy Since 9/11,” International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, September 24, 2017; Brendan I. Koerner, The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (New York: Crown Publishers, 2013); Garrett M. Graff, The Threat Matrix: The FBI at War in the Age of Global Terror (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2011).
[14] Robert S. Mueller, III, Director (then), Federal Bureau of Investigation, written statement, Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, U.S. Senate, hearing: “Ten Years After 9/11: Are We Safer?” September 13, 2011. See also Ryan Raffaelli et al., “Transforming the Federal Bureau of Investigation: Outcome and Process Framing in the Context of a Strategic Change Initiative,” Harvard Business School, Working Paper 16-084, September 23, 2019.
[16] Lyubov Grigorova Minchev and Ted Robert Gurr, Crime-Terror Alliance and the State: Ethnonationalist and Islamist Challenges to Regional Security (London: Routledge, 2013): pp. 8-15.
[17] Tamara Makarenko, “The Crime-Terror Continuum: Tracing the Interplay Between Transnational Organized Crime and Terrorism,” Global Crime 6:1 (2004): pp. 129-145 is often the starting point of related discussions.
[19] See Mark H. Haller, “Bureaucracy and the Mafia: An Alternative View,” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 8:1 (1992): pp. 1-10, for a seminal discussion. E. Roger Leukfeldt et al., “Criminal Networks in a Digitised World: on the Nexus of Borderless Opportunities and Local Embeddedness,” Trends in Organized Crime 22 (2019): pp. 324-345; Marcos Alan and S.V. Ferreira, “Brazilian Criminal Organizations as Transnational Violent Non-State Actors: A Case Study of the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC),” Trends in Organized Crime 22 (2019): pp. 148-165.
[20] See Peter L. Bergen, United States of Jihad: Investigating America’s Homegrown Terrorists (New York: Crown, 2016) and Toby Muse, Kilo: Inside the Deadliest Cocaine Cartels—from the Jungles to the Streets (New York: Harper Collins, 2020). For a discussion of the limits of transnational activity among established mafias, see Federico Varese, Mafias on the Move: How Organized Crime Conquers New Territories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011) and Federico Varese, “How Mafias Migrate: Transplantation, Functional Diversification, and Separation,” Crime and Justice 49 (2020): pp. 289-337.
[21] Steven Dudley, MS-13: The Making of America’s Most Notorious Gang (New York: Hanover Square Press, 2020).
[23] Gary A. Ackerman, “Comparative Analysis of VNSA Complex Engineering Efforts,” Journal of Strategic Security 9:1 (2016): p. 133. See also Mauro Lubrano, “Navigating Terrorist Innovation: A Proposal for a Conceptual Framework on How Terrorists Innovate,” Terrorism and Political Violence (April 2021).
[24] Robert Mandel in Transnational Criminal Tactics and Global Security (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011) discusses the interplay between violence, corruption, individual security, and state security in the operational choices criminal organizations make.
[26] Huseyn Aliyev in “Precipitating State Failure: Do Civil Wars and Violent Non-State Actors Create Failed States,” Third World Quarterly 38:9 (2017): pp. 1,973-1,989 discusses the role that rebel groups, warlords, and terrorist organizations have in causing state failure.
[27] Vincenzo Ruggiero, Crime and Markets: Essays in Anti-Criminology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000): p. 1.
[28] Badi Hasisi et al., “Crime and Terror: Examining Criminal Risk Factors for Terrorist Recidivism,” Journal of Quantitative Criminology 36:3 (2020): pp. 449-472.
[29] Lorne Dawson, “Clarifying the Explanatory Context for Developing Theories of Radicalization: Five Basic Considerations,” Journal for Deradicalization 18 (Spring 2019): pp. 146-184.
[30] David Weisburd et al., Understanding Recruitment to Organized Crime and Terrorism (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2020); Shannon E. Reid and Matthew Valasik, Alt-Right Gangs: A Hazy Shade of White (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2020); Luis A. Martinez-Vaquero, Valerio Dolci, and Vito Trianon, “Evolutionary Dynamics of Organised Crime and Terrorist Networks,” Scientific Reports, July 5, 2019; Arie Kruglanski et al., “The Making of Violent Extremists,” Review of General Psychology 22 (2018): pp. 107-120; Mary Beth Altier et al., “Why They Leave: An Analysis of Terrorist Disengagement Events from Eighty-Seven Autobiographical Accounts,” Security Studies 26:2 (2017): pp. 305-332; Tore Bjørgo, Jaap Van Donselaar, and Sara Grunenberg, “Exit from Right-Wing Extremist Groups: Lessons from Disengagement Programmes in Norway, Sweden and Germany” in Tore Bjørgo and John Horgan eds., Leaving Terrorism Behind: Individual and Collective Disengagement (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 135-151; Clark McCauley and Sophia Moskalenko, “Mechanisms of Political Radicalization: Pathways Toward Terrorism,” Terrorism and Political Violence 20:3 (2008): pp. 415-433.
[31] M. Vere van Koppen, “Involvement Mechanisms for Organized Crime,” Crime, Law, and Social Change 59:1 (2013): pp. 1-20; James A. Densely, “Street Gang Recruitment: Signaling, Screening, and Selection,” Social Problems 59:3 (2012): pp. 301-321; Keith Soothill, Claire Fitzpatrick, and Brian Francis, Understanding Criminal Careers (London: Routledge, 2009); Scott H. Decker and Margaret Townsend Chapman, “Roles, Recruitment into, and Remaining Involved in the Drug Smuggling Trade,” in Scott H. Decker and Margaret Townsend Chapman eds., Drug Smugglers on Drug Smuggling: Lessons from the Inside (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), pp. 88-113; Edward R. Kleemans and Christians J. de Poot, “Criminal Careers in Organized Crime and Social Opportunity Structure,” European Journal of Criminology 5:1 (2008): pp. 69-98; Arjun A.J. Blockland and Paul Nieuwbeerta, “The Effects of Life Circumstances on Longitudinal Trajectories of Offending,” Criminology 43:4 (2005): pp. 1,203-1,240; Jay S. Albanese, “The Causes of Organized Crime: Do Criminals Organize Around Opportunities for Crime Or Do Criminal Opportunities Create New Offenders?” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 6:4 (2000): pp. 409-423.
[32] Edward Kleemans and Vere van Koppen, “Organized Crime and Criminal Careers,” Crime and Justice 49 (2020): pp. 385-422.
[37] For a critique of “storyteller” policy making, see Michael Woodiwiss, Double Crossed: The Failure of Organized Crime Control (London: Pluto Press, 2017).
[43] “Integration, Sharing, and Use of National Security Threat Actor Information to Protect Americans,” National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, The White House, October 5, 2017. The annex describes the five threat actor categories other than terrorists.
[44] Chloe Gilroy, “Great Power Competition and Counter Narcotics in the Western Hemisphere,” William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, Occasional Paper, September 2020, p. 16.
[45] “Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Federal Elections,” National Intelligence Council, March 10, 2021.
[46] Robert Muggah and Steven Dudley, “COVID-19 Is Reconfiguring Organized Crime in Latin America and the Caribbean,” Small Wars Journal, March 3, 2021; “The Impact of COVID-19 on Organised Crime in the Western Balkans,” International Institute for Strategic Studies, December 2020; Rebecca Ulam Weiner, “The Growing White Supremacist Menace,” Foreign Affairs, June 23, 2020; Neil MacFarquhar, “The Coronavirus Becomes a Battle Cry for U.S. Extremists,” New York Times, May 3, 2020. For IC concerns related to the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change, see “Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community,” Office of the Director of National Intelligence, April 9, 2021.
[47] Marc Sageman, “The Implications of Terrorism’s Extremely Low Base Rate,” Terrorism and Political Violence 33:2 (2021): pp. 302-311; John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart, “Terrorism and Bathtubs: Comparing and Assessing the Risks,” Terrorism and Political Violence 33:1 (2021): pp. 138-163.
[49] Albert Bandura, “The Role of Selective Moral Disengagement in Terrorism and Counterterrorism,” in F.M. Mogahaddam and A.J. Marsella eds., Understanding Terrorism: Psychological Roots, Consequences and Interventions (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association Press, 2004), pp. 122-123.
[50] “Memorandum on Renewing the National Security Council System,” National Security Memorandum 2, The White House, February 4, 2021.
[51] Dominic D.P. Johnson and Elizabeth M.P. Madin, “Paradigm Shifts in Security Strategy: Why Does It Take Disasters to Trigger Change?” in Raphael Sagarin and Terrence Taylor eds., Natural Security: A Darwinian Approach to a Dangerous World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), pp. 209-238.
15. Enes Kanter: Move the Olympics for Peng Shuai’s Sake
I doubt moving the Olympics is a feasible option. It is either hold them and boycott or cancel them altogether.
Excerpts:
We must also stop giving priority to money over morals. Claiming we are “misinformed” or “not really educated” should no longer be an excuse. Take initiative. Reach out to activists and communities. Try to learn about the Chinese government’s abuses. We can all be better allies, and stand in solidarity.
And we must take a firm stance against the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. While the Women’s Tennis Association has voiced concern for Ms. Peng, the International Olympic Committee has shockingly echoed Chinese state media’s rhetoric about her case. This comes as no surprise, as the IOC has ignored Beijing’s abuses for years. As athletes concerned about human rights and justice, we must pressure the IOC to move the games. All the gold medals in the world aren’t worth selling your values and your principles to the Chinese Communist Party.
I have learned firsthand how precious freedom is. It must be defended at all costs. Together, we can help move the needle in the right direction.
Wake up and speak up. Change is coming, and no one can stop it. They can’t silence us all.
Enes Kanter: Move the Olympics for Peng Shuai’s Sake
The IOC shockingly echoes Beijing’s rhetoric on the tennis star’s disappearance.
Peng Shuai at the Australian Open in Melbourne, Jan. 21, 2020.
Photo: francis malasig/EPA/Shutterstock
Tennis champion Peng Shuai took to social media earlier this month to accuse a former top-ranking official in the Chinese Communist Party of sexually assaulting her. Within 30 minutes the post was scrubbed from the internet in China. She disappeared and no one has heard directly from her since.
For decades, Western athletes, celebrities and corporations have diligently kept silent in the face of Chinese human-rights violations. International hotel chains, airlines, apparel brands, sports leagues and Hollywood studios have steered away from “sensitive topics” such as Tibet’s independence, the Uyghur genocide, Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement and Taiwan’s sovereignty.
The sports community must wake up—and speak up. We need to realize that the authoritarian Chinese government isn’t our friend. The Communist Party is a brutal dictatorship that has weaponized economic power to achieve ideological and political compliance.
Athletes can play a profound role in helping turn the tide toward a more safe and free world. History has shown what is possible. Bill Russell stood up against racial injustice. Muhammad Ali protested the Vietnam War. Arthur Ashe spoke out against apartheid in South Africa.
Western athletes can and should use our global platforms to lend a voice to those being silenced. #WhereIsPengShuai has been trending on Twitter. Let’s keep that up, and keep demanding answers until we know for sure she is safe.
We must also stop giving priority to money over morals. Claiming we are “misinformed” or “not really educated” should no longer be an excuse. Take initiative. Reach out to activists and communities. Try to learn about the Chinese government’s abuses. We can all be better allies, and stand in solidarity.
And we must take a firm stance against the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. While the Women’s Tennis Association has voiced concern for Ms. Peng, the International Olympic Committee has shockingly echoed Chinese state media’s rhetoric about her case. This comes as no surprise, as the IOC has ignored Beijing’s abuses for years. As athletes concerned about human rights and justice, we must pressure the IOC to move the games. All the gold medals in the world aren’t worth selling your values and your principles to the Chinese Communist Party.
I have learned firsthand how precious freedom is. It must be defended at all costs. Together, we can help move the needle in the right direction.
Wake up and speak up. Change is coming, and no one can stop it. They can’t silence us all.
Mr. Kanter is a center for the Boston Celtics.
16. F.B.I. Agents Became C.I.A. Operatives in Secret Overseas Prisons
Sounds like the military's detailee process.
F.B.I. Agents Became C.I.A. Operatives in Secret Overseas Prisons
Lawyers disclosed the unusual arrangement in evidentiary hearings to prepare for the Sept. 11 trial at Guantánamo Bay.
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The F.B.I. headquarters in Washington. The once-secret collaboration between the bureau and the C.I.A. came to light in pretrial proceedings in the death penalty case.Credit...Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times
By
Nov. 19, 2021
GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — In the torturous history of the U.S. government’s black sites, the F.B.I. has long been portrayed as acting with a strong moral compass. Its agents, disgusted with the violence they saw at a secret C.I.A. prison in Thailand, walked out, enabling the bureau to later deploy “clean teams” untainted by torture to interrogate the five men accused of conspiring in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
But new information that emerged this week in the Sept. 11 case undermines that F.B.I. narrative. The two intelligence agencies secretly arranged for nine F.B.I. agents to temporarily become C.I.A. operatives in the overseas prison network where the spy agency used torture to interrogate its prisoners.
The once-secret program came to light in pretrial proceedings in the death penalty case. The proceedings are currently examining whether the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 plot, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and his four co-defendants voluntarily confessed after years in the black site network, where detainees were waterboarded, beaten, deprived of sleep and isolated to train them to comply with their captors’ wishes.
At issue is whether the military judge will exclude from the eventual trial the testimony of F.B.I. agents who questioned the defendants in 2007 at Guantánamo and also forbid the use of reports that the agents wrote about each man’s account of his role in the hijacking conspiracy.
A veteran Guantánamo prosecutor, Jeffrey D. Groharing, has called the F.B.I. interrogations “the most critical evidence in this case.” Defense lawyers argue that the interrogations were tainted by the years of torture by U.S. government agents.
In open court on Thursday, another prosecutor, Clayton G. Trivett Jr., confirmed the unusual arrangement, in which nine F.B.I. agents were “formally detailed” to the agency “and thus became a member of the C.I.A. and worked within C.I.A. channels.”
He said that the agents served as “debriefers,” a C.I.A. term for interrogators, and questioned black site prisoners “out of the coercive environment” and after the use of “E.I.T.s.”
E.I.T.s, or enhanced interrogation techniques, is a C.I.A. euphemism for a series of abusive tactics that the agency used against Mr. Mohammed and other prisoners in 2002 and 2003 — tactics that were then approved but are now illegal. They include waterboarding, painful shackling and isolating a prisoner nude, shivering and in the dark to break his will to resist interrogation.
Mr. Trivett offered no precise time period but made clear that the F.B.I. agents were absorbed by the C.I.A. sometime between 2002, when the black sites were established, and September 2006. On their return to the F.B.I., they took on the status of C.I.A. assets, he said, and so their identities are classified.
Five of the nine agents had roles in the interrogations of some of the defendants in the case, Mr. Trivett said, and their names have been provided to defense lawyers on the basis that they not be disclosed.
The F.B.I. declined to comment on the arrangement, as did the C.I.A.
A defense lawyer, James G. Connell III, added more details in the same court hearing.
He said that the nine agents “stopped being F.B.I. agents and became C.I.A. agents temporarily” under a memorandum of understanding that established a different arrangement than the more typical assignment of a representative of one law enforcement agency to work out of the organization of another.
A former C.I.A. historian, Nicholas Dujmovic, said there was a precedent for “taking employees from another government agency and quickly making them C.I.A. employees for specific functions.”
In the 1950s, Air Force pilots were made employees of the C.I.A. for the U-2 program and then were returned to the Air Force.Credit...C.I.A., via Associated Press
In the 1950s, the C.I.A. transformed U.S. Air Force pilots into C.I.A. employees during their stints flying U-2 spy planes and then returned them to the Air Force without the loss of seniority or benefits. “President Eisenhower thought it was important that U-2s not be piloted by U.S. military pilots,” Dr. Dujmovic said. The process was called “sheep dipping,” he said.
Earlier testimony showed the F.B.I. participating remotely in the C.I.A. interrogations through requests sent by cables to the black sites seeking certain information from specific detainees, including Mr. Mohammed after he was waterboarded 183 times to force him to talk.
The pretrial hearings are in their ninth year and the military judge, Col. Matthew N. McCall of the Air Force, is the fourth judge to hear testimony at Guantánamo. In arguing over potential trial evidence, the prisoners’ lawyers have repeatedly accused prosecutors of redacting information that the defense needs to prepare for the capital trial. In the military commissions, prosecutors are the gatekeepers of potential trial evidence and can withhold information they deem not relevant to the defense’s needs.
In one example, Mr. Connell showed the judge a November 2005 cable the F.B.I. sent to the C.I.A. that contained questions for three of the defendants while they were in a black site — out of reach of the courts, lawyers and the International Red Cross.
The F.B.I. released the cable to the public this month under an executive order by President Biden to declassify information about the F.B.I. investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Mr. Connell had earlier received a version of the same cable from prosecutors. But it was so redacted that it obscured the fact that the F.B.I. wanted Mr. Mohammed and the other defendants questioned in the black sites.
Mr. Trivett sought to play down the disclosure of the F.B.I.-C.I.A. collaboration as routine business at a time when the U.S. government was devoting tremendous resources to investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. “This is not some big bombshell,” he told the judge.
A lawyer for Mr. Mohammed, Denny LeBoeuf, cast the collaboration as part of a conspiracy to portray F.B.I. accounts of interrogations of the defendants at Guantánamo in 2007 as “clean team statements,” a law enforcement expression.
“They were never clean,” Ms. LeBoeuf said. “Torture isn’t clean. It is filthy. It has sights and sounds and consequences.”
17. Special forces testing Black Hawk helicopter with side-mounted electric motorcycles
UAE Special operations forces.
If we could now just get an electric Blackhawk perhaps that would contribute to a stealth like capability. Or at least a lower sound signature.
Special forces testing Black Hawk helicopter with side-mounted electric motorcycles
- Nov. 17th 2021 6:34 am PT
Electric two-wheelers have become an area of intense research and testing for special operations forces around the world. The latest example we’re seeing is a novel application of a helicopter outfitted with a pair of electric motorcycles for stealthy insertion.
The first-of-its-kind application comes to us from the Dubai Airshow 2021, where the UAE Special Operations Command showed off the combo, first photographed by Andrew White of Janes.
Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawks are utility helicopters commonly used for troop transport.
The helicopters include an External Stores Support System (ESSS) commonly used for mounting equipment on the stub wing’s hard points. In this case, carriers for electric motorcycles have been mounted instead.
The electric motorcycles in question appear to be Zero FX models, specifically designed for off-road riding in rugged conditions.
The bikes feature 34 kW (45 hp) peak-rated electric motors and top speeds of around 80 mph (130 km/h).
Image credit: Andrew White/Janes
They are often used in military roles where their low-noise electric motors make them a much stealthier option than gas-powered dirt bikes. Their low sound signature and lack of gas smell make them nearly as stealthy as a bicycle while still offering the benefits of a powerful motorbike.
While it doesn’t always make for an action-packed movie, one of the most common missions conducted by special operations forces is basic reconnaissance. The goal is to insert, observe, and exfiltrate completely unnoticed and without contact.
Since a loud helicopter can make that difficult, special operators are usually inserted far from their objective and hike in on foot. But the use of electric motorcycles can allow farther distances to be covered while carrying a heavy load with less exhaustion.
A representative for the UAE’s SOCOM explained that the electric motorcycle-outfitted Black Hawk was currently undergoing trials for evaluation, and that the unit was also considering other manufacturers of off-road electric motorcycles.
The representative explained that trials currently underway are testing the process of inserting a pair of special operators for reconnaissance missions and quickly detaching the electric motorcycles. Upon completion of the objective, the riders meet the helicopter at an extraction point where the motorcycles are quickly remounted to the helicopter.
Zero FX electric motorcycle
Electric motorcycles and even electric bicycles have been attracting significant attention from armed forces around the world.
Last month we covered multiple special operations forces that were undergoing testing of high-powered electric bikes for tactical use, some even outfitted with solar panels for charging in the field.
While the environmental and convenience advantages of electric vehicles rank high among the benefits list for the general public, militaries are increasingly turning to electric vehicles for their tactical benefits.
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18. These Are the Top 10 War Movies as Picked by an Actual Combat Veteran
Interesting analysis and movie recommendations.
Conclusion:
These movies are not “happy” movies. They are not “feel good” movies, and they have no happy endings. The good guys don’t always win, and when they do, the cost is high. The cost of war is always high; too high. In the United States of America and for our allies, the cost of all our comforts, all our freedoms, all our goods and bad, highs and lows, our mistakes and our successes, our current anger, and division, have all been paid by thousands and thousands of brave men and women. That is always worth remembering.
These Are the Top 10 War Movies as Picked by an Actual Combat Veteran | SOFREP
Among veterans, an enduring debate exists over, “What is the best war movie?” That question is harder than trigonometry to answer. How does anyone pick only one? This is my list of the top war movies: the definitive top 10 war movies of all time.
Picking a favorite is nearly impossible. Also just as difficult as picking the “best” war movie, or even several of the top war movies, especially as a military Veteran. With that in mind, luckily right now, since I am making the rules, I don’t have to pick only one. Or two. Or even three.
The military has a love/hate relationship with Hollywood. Hollywood has a love/hate relationship with the military. Hollywood usually gets it wrong, there is often a spin, or at other times, a seemingly political agenda. Yet at the same time, they love the amount of money that war movies deposit into their corporate bank accounts. Quite often, the war movies that civilians and the critics shape praise on are movies that veterans mock and scorn (Hurt Locker) At times, however, Hollywood gets it right. Some of the top war movies tell amazing stories about incredible people and events.
Top War Movies Criteria
The criteria for this list are based on a few factors. It is important to consider the overall artistic, production, and historical values. The storytelling must be compelling, the story must be factually accurate, or as historical fiction, it must be historically accurate. Overall critical success is factored into some degree, as well, with consideration for awards. That is not the most important factor, however, as a few highly-awarded films are not on this list.
The Hurt Locker, for example, is not included. Although it was critically acclaimed and well-received in Hollywood, the movie is… ridiculous. It holds the dubious distinction of being the lowest-grossing movie ever to win Best Picture, but it’s a terrible story. I am a Jeremy Renner fan, and I like what they tried to do with the film, and the feel of the film, as the costs of war, are explored at a personal, human level. Yet the events and plot in the movie are far-fetched and implausible. It’s difficult to find it representative of what top war movies should be — or could be. The negative indictment of the Iraq war is not why I do not include it, either.
War is both terrible and awesome at the same time, and I do not discount anyone’s ability or right to speak out against it. If that is the goal, accuracy should also be achieved, or it’s just spin. Or, if the intent is satire, it should be clear that it’s not intended to be “representative” and portrayed as accurate. At the same time, the intent of this list is not jingoist war propaganda, either.
Overall, this list is about the story, the authenticity, and the impact of the movie. Most importantly, it’s about the story told about those who have served, their sacrifices, and their legacy in history.
Top War Movies: Honorable Mentions
Because nailing down ten of the top war movies is still like college-level calculus, a few others are worth considering. These epic movies tell the story of an important piece of history and modern warfare.
The Battle of Britain (1969)
Some of the best dogfights ever filmed in cinematic history happen in The Battle of Britain. The story of the British Royal Air Force (RAF) in their desperate struggle to hold off the brutal Nazi Luftwaffe bombing campaign, and potential invasion of the United Kingdom, is nothing less than amazing. Featuring several prominent movie stars such as Sir Michael Caine, Christopher Plummer, Sir Lawrence Olivier, Ian McShane, and Robert Shaw, an all-star cast tells a compelling, heroic story.
A Bridge Too Far (1977)
The largest airborne operation in World War II was not the invasion of D-Day; it was Operation Market Garden. The goal of Operation Market Garden was to seize three key bridges in The Netherlands, in an attempt to break through the Nazi lines and drive towards Germany. As the title alludes, all might not go according to plan, as the Allies run into significant resistance. A Bridge Too Far features several greats including Sean Connery, Sir Michael Caine, Sir Lawrence Olivier, Ryan O’Neal, Gene Hackman, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Robert Redford, and James Caan. It was directed by Richard Attenborough, better known to most people as billionaire investor Hammond, in Jurassic Park. The movie was adapted from the book by Cornelius Ryan whose previous book about the Normandy invasion The Longest Day was made into an epic movie that starred virtually everyone in Hollywood, and even featured actors who were participants in the actual invasion.
Full Metal Jacket (1987)
I know I am going to catch some serious hell for this one. By not putting in the actual list of the top 1o war movies, I probably have a few full metal jacket rounds heading my way. Hear me out. This movie by legendary director Stanley Kubrick is freaking weird. And yes, that’s why so many people love it. But let’s be honest: it’s almost two different movies. Many people love this movie — but still being honest, they love the first half — the US Marine Corps boot camp portion where R. Lee. Ermey gives one of the most memorable performances in movie history as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman. It feels authentic because it is authentic. It seems real because it was real; Ermey was a former drill instructor. This was their goal, and they reached it.
But the first half of the movie isn’t the entire movie. The second half of the movie, unfortunately, is a bit disjointed. Full Metal Jacket, like other movies about Vietnam, is an indictment of the insanity of it all, and there is validity in that. With that said, and where the story breaks down in the second half, makes it hard to put next to some of these other movies. Hopefully, you’ll forgive me in about 15 seconds.
Creating the list of the top war movies is insanely hard; harder than anyone probably realizes until exploring the exercise. It’s even harder to complete when you keep changing your mind because of so many solid options. The rest of this list is full of incredible stories, Academy Award winners, Best Picture or Best Director winners, and even a few on the list of the AFI’s 100 Greatest Films of All Time.
10) The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
Admittedly, it might also fire up a few people to list this stellar movie at #10 on my list of top war movies. The AFI lists it as the 36th best movie ever made, so anyone putting me in their sights would be kinda justified. Starring Willian Holden and Sir Alec Guinness (Obi-Wan Kenobi for the rest of you), and directed by David Lean — one of the best directors ever, and with two movies on this list and the AFI Greatest 100 list — it’s an amazing (but not true) story. Even more, it won seven Oscars in 1958.
With all that said… Bridge on the River Kwai is at #10 mainly because it might not hold up to the test of time quite as well as some of the other films on this list. The other movies on this list are slightly more compelling, more gripping, perhaps, and feel slightly more real (whether good or bad). Do not get me wrong — this movie could easily occupy any spot higher up on the list, and be completely justified. It’s well worth watching, and Alec Guinness is perfect as the British commanding officer captured by the Japanese in Burma during World War II.
9) Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)
It pains me a bit that this movie has not received more attention over the years, both when it was released, and now. Nominated for several Oscars in 2007, including Best Director for Clint Eastwood, Best Picture, and Best Original Screenplay, the movie tells the story of the Battle of Iwo Jima from the point of view of the Japanese. Letters from Iwo Jima is a tale of honor, desperation, loyalty, conflict, leadership, tradition, and a bit of insanity. Ken Watanabe is brilliant as General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the commander of the Japanese Imperial Forces defending the island. This was the second of two movies Clint Eastwood filmed at the same time, about the Battle of Iwo Jima. A film from the point of view of the enemy is also refreshing in terms of perspective and gives pause to the viewer to consider their experience and sacrifice, as well.
8) Glory (1989)
This movie tells one of the most “controversial” stories of any movie on this list, and at the same time, one of the most important. Because of that, it’s easy to overlook. Telling stories about World War II is easy. Telling stories about the Civil War is far more difficult, especially about a regiment of black soldiers. Glory did win several awards, including the first Best Actor Oscar for Denzel Washington. It was also the first time I ever saw Morgan Freeman in a movie, and he was spectacular. Even Matthew Broderick, who at that time was better known for his role as “Bueller,” gave a great performance as the young, Northern, aristocratic white commander of the Massachusetts 54th Infantry Regiment, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw.
Based on a true story, it is as compelling as it is courageous and as emotional as it is inspiring. The sacrifices of the 54th were important, and everyone should know their story.
7) Dunkirk (2017)
Dunkirk is a special movie. It tells an amazing, but relatively unknown story, set amongst the direst of circumstances: the 1940 retreat of British and French forces on the beaches of Dunkirk, France. With the English Channel to their backs, and the German army surrounding them on three sides, 400,000 Allied troops are stranded and need to be evacuated. Knowing a Nazi invasion of the UK is likely, Winston Churchill feared losing the cream of the British Army at Dunkirk if they could not be evacuated. With all of this happening, it portrays the events in a unique and original way. Of course, being written and directed by Christopher Nolan, you can bet it’s anything but conventional. It is subtle and intense, all at the same time. Dunkirk was nominated for eight Academy Awards in 2018, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won three.
6) 1917 (2019)
The most recent movie on this list is also one of the most innovative and creative works of cinematic art in movie history. It is also one of two movies on my list of top war movies, from World War I. The winner of three Academy Awards, it was nominated for ten in 2020, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. 1917 is filmed in such a way, that is it presented as one continuous take; there are no cuts in the film, and the camera never stops moving. It is a masterstroke of cinematography, and while highly artistic, it does add to the storytelling, the tension, and the conflict set in the trenches of World War I. The movie feels more intimate and personal. Even with less combat action than other war movies, the emotion, the stakes, and the suspense all remain high. It did win an Oscar for Best Cinematography, for the brilliant work of the continuous take. If you have not yet seen 1917, add it to your list right away.
5) Patton (1970)
I always have been, and I always will be a fan of General George S. Patton. Because of that, from a personal point of view, it’s hard to know where to list this movie within the rankings of the top war movies. Patton tells an amazing story, about an amazing man, during an amazing time. The winner of seven Academy Awards out of the ten it was nominated for in 1971, it definitely ranks among the top war movies and best movies of all time. George C. Scott was probably more like General Patton than Patton like himself was in real life, and he gives one of the most believable performances in movie history. This biopic comes to life and tells the tale of a controversial, simple yet complicated, brilliant warrior.
By all accounts, General Patton was a larger-than-life figure and personality. He was successful in many ways, and even in his time, also not loved or supported by everyone, either. General Patton was born at the perfect moment in history for one of the most important events in history. This movie captures all of that in an unapologetic way. An interesting fact about the critical reviews of the movie is that it was described by some as a pro-war and by others as an anti-war film.
4) Apocalypse Now (1979)
Also on the AFI list of 100 Greatest Movies of All Time at number 30, this movie is as popular as it is weird. To be perfectly candid, I do not love this movie. Understanding that it is a satirical, biting criticism of war and specifically the Vietnam War, I have always found it a bit over the top. Most of the characters are not believable to me, and less with the litmus test of “authenticity” in a top war movie. That said, with an amazing cast and crew, the story is compelling, clever, creative, and unconventional. It wins critical and audience praise, over and over, and is featured on many lists and “best of’s.” There is something about it; like the train wreck, you can’t look away from — while tripping on LSD. Not that I have ever done LSD, but some of the characters in the movie take LSD, to be clear.
Apocalypse Now has also taught me a very valuable lesson about life and my own wartime experiences. I am sure that is also true for many other military veterans. At the beginning of the movie, when Martin Sheen’s character, Special Forces Captain Willard is in his hotel room his thoughts are actually quite profound. “When I was here, I wanted to be there; when I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle.” This is extremely prescient and real for many veterans: when you are in a war zone, you want to go home; once you are home, you want to go back to the war zone.
While not my favorite, there is no denying the influence and role of Apocalypse Now in the war genre, and it cannot be omitted from a list of top war movies. Including this film on my list, also allows me to pat myself on the back for my objectivity. Win-win.
3) Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
This is the second movie on this list of top war movies, from director David Lean. Lawrence of Arabia is also ranked on the AFI list Greatest Films of All Time at #7. Just based on that list, and the cinematic legacy it enjoys, it could likely be ranked at #1. As the Best Picture winner, this movie can, and does, withstand the test of time. It’s a sweeping, stunning, and powerful epic, based on the true story of T.E. Lawrence, a British Army officer who successfully unites the warring Bedouin tribes of the Arabian Peninsula against the Ottoman Turks of World War I. His role with Arab fighters is part of the direct lineage of working as advisors and fighting with local foreign forces against a common enemy. This is similar to efforts in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
With a 3 hour and 48 minute run time, it will probably be one of the longest movies you might ever see. It even has an intermission — a built-in bathroom break, from way back in the day of 1962. This powerful story does stay interesting, however, and it keeps moving. I include this at #3, because of both the historical and cinematic importance, and for its artistic contribution to the war genre. As a biopic, it’s nearly a perfect vehicle for telling the story of an amazing and pivotal event in time. Lawrence as a man was also a fascinating character, who both loved and abhorred his role in the war, and who was brilliant in that role, all at the same time. Peter O’Toole is perfectly cast as Lawrence. It all feels very believable and is deserving of its place in movie history.
2) Black Hawk Down (2001)
To be fair, Black Hawk Down does not have quite as many awards as many of the other movies on this list. It does have several awards, and Ridley Scott was nominated for Best Director. It is also not quite as popular or critically acclaimed as some of the other movies in this list of top war movies. Why do I choose this movie as #2? Because with the criteria of authenticity, realism, and war-time storytelling, this is hands down one of the absolute best.
This choice is also the most modern film on the list, and so for many people in our generation, it feels the most “real” or identifiable. It also feels extremely relevant, telling the story about US and allied forces working in Somalia in 1993. Although several years before the Global War on terror and September 11th, it’s even more relatable through a modern lens. This event shows both the fallacy of arrogance and poor planning and the superiority of American forces in the fight against overwhelming numbers. A great cast, all of whom when through real military training for their roles, feels both legitimate and authentic. The depiction of the legendary heroics of Delta snipers Shughart and Gordon, both Medal of Honor recipients for their sacrifices during this battle, is extremely moving.
For years, when I am asked for a movie that captures the realism, struggle, brotherhood, and stress of combat, this is always one of two or three top recommends. It’s also better compared to other modern films in production value and quality, acting, and reality. I did not choose Lone Survivor for this list, for example, even though it’s a realistic, good movie telling an important, moving story because at times it feels slightly low budget or lacking. I am a Mark Wahlberg fan much of the time, however, in this case, I think he was miscast as Marcus Luttrell. However, Lone Survivor has probably the best, most realistic battle sounds of any war movie, and one of the most realistic running gunfights in movie history.
American Sniper, Clint Eastwood’s strong movie telling the heroic story of Navy SEAL Sniper Chris Kyle is also a strong, modern, current war movie, but it’s also lacking a bit. It was also nominated for Best Picture but did have some narrative struggles. The “fake baby scene” also hurts the pace and focus as a huge distraction.
Black Hawk Down does not have any of these struggles. The intensity, the human struggle, and the stakes are kept at a “10” the entire time. With only a few slight tweaks for cinematic storytelling by combining a couple of the Delta Force and Ranger characters, for example, it’s very true to the real events as they really happened from the point of view of the Rangers and Delta Force Operators — real people. It’s frustrating, political, intense, emotional, heroic, and at times, hard to watch. That, my friends, is also the point.
1) Saving Private Ryan (1998)
I fully understand this is “expected” as the number one choice of top war movies. I am aware it’s also perhaps a bit cliché. However, after 100 years of movie history, there is still probably not a better movie that captures the horror, intensity, realism, struggle, fear, pain, heroics, brotherhood, courage, doubt, frustration, speed, coordination, challenges, leadership, and… everything else. It really is “credit where credit is due.” Steven Spielberg and his team made an epic movie. They achieved their goals of the authenticity and the intensity of World War II, D-day, and the “every day” American soldier.
For years, the story and plot itself have been a huge debate amongst movie buffs and military members. I have seen online forums debating Captain Miller’s decision to attack a German machine gun emplacement, for example, diverting his team from their real mission: finding Private Ryan. His decision has dire consequences and is not supported by his men. This adds to the conflict, both internally and externally. This raises the stakes even higher. It contributes to the overall theoretical question that always exists in war: do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or even, the one? This movie explores when it does when it doesn’t. Also, when it’s really hard to decide. And it’s superb.
Saving Private Ryan has also been criticized over the years as being “melodramatic.” That is fair to some degree.
Because it is.
Those who use that criticism against the film, have no idea what they are talking about, nor could they. War is melodramatic. It’s punctuated by extreme, emotional highs, and equally extreme, emotional lows. With that said, what more could this movie offer? Not much, really. Perhaps, if anything, being a true story, rather than highly accurate historical fiction.
Top War Movies
Creating this list of top war movies almost feels like going to battle. It’s even a bit emotionally exhausting. Revisiting and rewatching some of these movies brings that emotion to the surface. That response also reinforces my list and approach: what do these moves make you feel? What do these movies make you think when the end credits start rolling?
These movies are not “happy” movies. They are not “feel good” movies, and they have no happy endings. The good guys don’t always win, and when they do, the cost is high. The cost of war is always high; too high. In the United States of America and for our allies, the cost of all our comforts, all our freedoms, all our goods and bad, highs and lows, our mistakes and our successes, our current anger, and division, have all been paid by thousands and thousands of brave men and women. That is always worth remembering.
19. Videos Said to Be of Peng Shuai Don’t Resolve Questions About Her Safety
China's propaganda and agitation department (or whatever it is called) is making every effort to counter the Peng Shai controversy. These videos and emails do not seem credible to me.
Videos Said to Be of Peng Shuai Don’t Resolve Questions About Her Safety
Published Nov. 20, 2021
Updated Nov. 21, 2021, 10:25 a.m. ET
The editor of a state-run newspaper on Saturday shared two clips said to be of the Chinese tennis star on Twitter. But they are unverified, and the head of the WTA called them “insufficient.”
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Peng Shuai had not been publicly seen in nearly three weeks before a pair of videos released by Chinese state-run media on Saturday appeared to show her.Credit...Tim Ireland/Associated Press
Nov. 20, 2021, 6:48 p.m. ET
Nearly two weeks after people across the world began asking “Where is Peng Shuai?,” two questionable videos surfaced Saturday on social media of a person who appears to be the Chinese tennis star at a restaurant.
The videos were shared on Twitter by the editor of a state-run newspaper, but the seemingly unnatural conversation in one video and the unclear location and dates of both raised questions about Peng’s safety and whether she was appearing in the videos of her own free will.
Peng, in a social media post this month, accused a former top government official of sexually assaulting her. After the allegation, the Chinese government removed almost all references of Peng on social media within the country, and Peng disappeared from public life. Her absence prompted outrage across the world, especially from top officials and stars in tennis.
Steve Simon, the chief executive of the WTA, the women’s professional tennis tour, has particularly been strident, demanding verifiable proof that Peng is safe and can move about society as she pleases and that officials fully investigate her allegations. If that does not occur, Simon said the WTA would stop playing tennis tournaments in China.
On Saturday, after the videos surfaced, Simon continued to express frustration with the inability to independently verify Peng’s well-being and said that the organization’s “relationship with China is at a crossroads.”
“While it is positive to see her, it remains unclear if she is free and able to make decisions and take actions on her own, without coercion or external interference,” he said. “This video alone is insufficient.”
Peng, 35, is the only Chinese tennis player to have attained a world No. 1 ranking, in women’s doubles, and she was once heralded by the Chinese government as a model athlete.
The video clips were posted on the Twitter account of Hu Xijin, the chief editor of The Global Times, an influential Communist Party newspaper, who described them as showing Peng having dinner with her coach and friends on Saturday.
He wrote that he had “acquired” the clips but offered no explanation of how, and the clips appeared staged to establish the date.In the first clip, the man said to be Peng’s coach is discussing plans with her and asks, “Isn’t tomorrow Nov. 20?” A woman sitting next to Peng corrects him and says it will be Nov. 21. He then repeats the date twice.
In the second clip, a woman wearing a mask, presumably Peng, is shown walking into a restaurant. The camera pauses on a sign indicating the date of the last cleaning, a common sight in Chinese buildings since the SARS epidemic. But only the month, November, is visible; the date appears to be obscured.
On Friday, a journalist for another Chinese media entity released pictures said to be of Peng in what appeared to be a bedroom, surrounded by stuffed animals. In those photos, Peng appeared younger than she did in more recent images of her and there was nothing to verify when they had been taken.
Also on Friday, Simon wrote to China’s ambassador to the United States to reiterate his complaints and his threat to remove the nine tournaments the WTA holds in China, including the prestigious WTA Finals in Shenzhen. All of the tournaments in China this year were canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic. The WTA Finals were completed on Wednesday in Guadalajara, Mexico.
If Peng is not able to speak freely, Simon wrote, “we have grave concerns that any of our players will be safe in China.”
The men’s tennis tour has voiced its concern but has yet to threaten to pull its tournaments from China.
The controversy surrounding Peng comes a little more than two months before the start of the Winter Olympics in Beijing, raising the specter of one of the world’s largest sporting events taking place in a country where a three-time Olympian tennis star is missing.
The International Olympic Committee has said that it believes “quiet diplomacy” will provide the best chance for resolving the situation. On Friday, Dick Pound, an I.O.C. member, told Reuters that if the situation with Peng is “not resolved in a sensible way very soon, it may spin out of control.” He added: “Whether that escalates to a cessation of the Olympic Games, I doubt it. But you never know.”
Simon has spent more than a week trying to establish personal contact with Peng through a series of phone numbers and other digital contacts but has not been able to speak with her.
The videos on Saturday were the latest media released by a Chinese-controlled entity trying to establish Peng’s safety. Earlier this week, China’s state-owned broadcaster released a message supposedly from her.
“Hello everyone this is Peng Shuai,” it read. It called the accusation of sexual assault, which was made just weeks ago, untrue. “I’m not missing, nor am I unsafe,” the message said. “I’ve been resting at home and everything is fine. Thank you again for caring about me.”
Simon quickly denounced the release of the message.
“I have a hard time believing that Peng Shuai actually wrote the email we received or believes what is being attributed to her,” he said.
Peng has accused Zhang Gaoli, 75, a former vice premier of China, of sexually assaulting her at his home three years ago. In a post on her verified account on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, Peng wrote that the assault occurred after Zhang invited her to play tennis at his home. “I was so scared that afternoon,” she said. “I never gave consent, crying the entire time.”
She also described having had an on-and-off consensual relationship with Zhang.
Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said on Friday that the Biden administration was paying close attention to the situation and was “deeply concerned.” She called on the Chinese government to provide “independent, verifiable proof” of Peng’s whereabouts.
In recent days, several notable names in tennis have joined the chorus of demanding proof that Peng is safe.
“We need to see her in a live video holding up a newspaper from today or better yet, hitting balls,” Patrick McEnroe, the former player and ESPN commentator, said in an interview on Friday. McEnroe coached Peng earlier in her career in World Team Tennis.
“If none of that happens, and people I talk to say if the Chinese really don’t care about what we think, and we never hear from Peng or have a clue, the only real recourse left is for professional tennis to pull all its tournaments from China,” he said.
Martina Navratilova, the former champion who defected from Czechoslovakia in 1975 to escape the communist government, is also speaking out about Peng.
“I don’t believe a word they are saying,” Navratilova said of the Chinese government in an interview on Saturday. “There is a lot of subterfuge going on here.”
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.
