Quotes of the Day:
"Afghanistan was America's shortest war. We won decisively. It was also our longest effort to attempt to force an impossible policy upon a foreign population. That was a miserable failure."
- Robert Jones
“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
- President John F. Kennedy, inaugural address, January 20, 1961.
"Not only politics, but societies and their cultures make war and peace."
- Colin Gray
1. Bin Laden’s Catastrophic Success
2. A Rescue Plan for Afghanistan
3. The Taliban Captured Helicopters. Can They Capture an Air Force?
4. The Afghan Military Was Built Over 20 Years. How Did It Collapse So Quickly?
5. Will Arming ‘Public Uprising Forces’ Stop the Taliban’s Advance?
6. The lost tablet and the secret documents (Russia)
7. Behind the Surprising Jump in Multiracial Americans, Several Theories
8. America once won its wars. Now it just leaves them
9. The U.S. Sea Services (Navy, Marines, Coast Guard) Are Preparing for Great Power War
10. The Right Way to Split China and Russia
11. What The New Census Data Shows About Race Depends On How You Look At It
12. The Kremlin’s Malign Influence Inside the US
13. Opinion | Here are four concrete actions the U.S. should take immediately to help Afghan women activists
14. After the withdrawal: China’s interests in Afghanistan
15. Census Shows a Nation That Resembles Its Future More Than Its Past
16. China threatens fighter jet action if Biden invites Taiwan's president to democracy summit
17. Afghanistan: Old warhorse Rashid Dostum to lead fight against Taliban in the north
18. 9 Abus in Sulu surrender to Army; 1 tagged in Sipadan abductions
19. EXCLUSIVE: China building third missile field for hundreds of new ICBMs
20. Russian hypersonic technology expert accused of high treason
21.DUFFEL BLOG: Army General with 6 minute run time loses war
1. Bin Laden’s Catastrophic Success
A very interesting historical survey which concludes with an important question and an interesting assessment.
When it comes to the next phase of the struggle, all eyes are on Afghanistan. Al Qaeda, ISIS, and a number of other groups maintain operations in the country, but they are overshadowed by the larger conflict playing out between the Afghan government and the Taliban, which are both struggling for control of the country in the wake of the United States’ withdrawal. In 2020, the United States and the Taliban reached a peace agreement in which the Taliban promised “to prevent any group or individual, including al-Qa’ida, from using the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies.”
Will the Taliban make good on their promise? Judging by the Abbottabad papers, not all Taliban members were equal in the eyes of al Qaeda, which had long suspected that some Taliban factions had been seeking rapprochement with the United States. As early as 2007, Atiyah wrote to bin Laden that “forces within the Taliban are distancing themselves from al Qaeda to elude the terrorism accusation.” And in 2010, Zawahiri expressed alarm in a letter to bin Laden that the Taliban seemed “psychologically prepared” to accept a deal that would render al Qaeda impotent. Owing to the Taliban’s factionalism since 9/11, it may be difficult for the group’s leaders to enforce compliance with the terms of their agreement with the United States.
The Taliban’s factionalism may prove to be an intractable problem for the United States. But al Qaeda’s experiences after 9/11 suggest that the same factionalism will also complicate matters for terrorists seeking refuge in Afghanistan. Even a sympathetic host regime is no guarantee of safe haven. Bin Laden learned that lesson the hard way, and Baghdadi later found out that controlling territory was even harder. But Washington and its allies have come to realize (or at least they should have) that an open-ended war on terrorism is futile and that a successful counterterrorism policy must address the legitimate political grievances that al Qaeda claims to champion—for example, U.S. support for dictatorships in the Middle East.
Washington cannot quite claim victory against al Qaeda and its ilk, which retain the ability to inspire deadly, if small-scale, attacks. The past two decades, however, have made clear just how little jihadi groups can hope to accomplish. They stand a far better chance of achieving eternal life in paradise than of bringing the United States to its knees.
Bin Laden’s Catastrophic Success
Al Qaeda Changed the World—but Not in the Way It Expected
September/October 2021
On September 11, 2001, al Qaeda carried out the deadliest foreign terrorist attack the United States had ever experienced. To Osama bin Laden and the other men who planned it, however, the assault was no mere act of terrorism. To them, it represented something far grander: the opening salvo of a campaign of revolutionary violence that would usher in a new historical era. Although bin Laden was inspired by religion, his aims were geopolitical. Al Qaeda’s mission was to undermine the contemporary world order of nation-states and re-create the historical umma, the worldwide community of Muslims that was once held together by a common political authority. Bin Laden believed that he could achieve that goal by delivering what he described as a “decisive blow” that would force the United States to withdraw its military forces from Muslim-majority states, thus allowing jihadis to fight autocratic regimes in those places on a level playing field.
Bin Laden’s worldview and the thinking behind the 9/11 attack are laid bare in a trove of internal communications that were recovered in May 2011, when U.S. special operations forces killed bin Laden during a raid on the compound in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad where he had spent his final years hiding. In the years that followed, the U.S. government declassified some of the documents, but the bulk of them remained under the exclusive purview of the intelligence community. In November 2017, the CIA declassified an additional 470,000 digital files, including audio, images, videos, and text. With the help of two research assistants, I pored over 96,000 of those files, including nearly 6,000 pages of Arabic text that form a record of al Qaeda’s internal communications between 2000 and 2011, which I have spent the past three years analyzing. These documents consist of bin Laden’s notes, his correspondence with associates, letters written by members of his family, and a particularly revealing 220-page handwritten notebook containing transcripts of discussions between members of bin Laden’s immediate family that took place in the compound during the last two months of his life. The documents provide an unparalleled glimpse into bin Laden’s mind and offer a portrait of the U.S. “war on terror” as it was seen through the eyes of its chief target.
By the time of 9/11, bin Laden had been contemplating an attack inside the United States for decades. Many years later, in conversations with family members, he recalled that it was in 1986 that he first suggested that jihadis “ought to strike inside America” to address the plight of the Palestinians, since, in bin Laden’s mind, it was U.S. support that allowed for the creation of the state of Israel on Palestinian land. Bin Laden’s concern for the Palestinians was genuine; their suffering, he often reminded his associates, was “the reason we started our jihad.” But the Palestinians mostly served as a convenient stand-in for Muslims all over the world, whom bin Laden portrayed as the collective victims of foreign occupation and oppression. In his “Declaration of Jihad,” a 1996 public communiqué that came to be known among jihadis as the “Ladenese Epistle,” bin Laden grieved for Muslims whose “blood has been spilled” in places as far-flung as Chechnya, Iraq, Kashmir, and Somalia. “My Muslim brothers of the world,” he declared, “your brothers in the land of the two holiest sites and Palestine are calling on you for help and asking you to take part in fighting against the enemy, your enemy: the Israelis and the Americans.” This collective battle, bin Laden hoped, would be the first step in reviving the umma.
It soon became clear that bin Laden was ready to back his words with deeds. In 1998, al Qaeda carried out simultaneous bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people and wounding more than 4,000. Emboldened by the international attention those strikes received, bin Laden became more ambitious. On October 12, 2000, al Qaeda rammed a small boat filled with explosives into the USS Cole as it was refueling in the port of Aden, Yemen, killing 17 U.S. Navy personnel. Soon after that, bin Laden told a large gathering of supporters that the attacks represented “a critical turning point in the history of the umma’s ascent toward greater eminence.”
The Abbottabad papers include handwritten notes that bin Laden composed in 2002, disclosing “the birth of the idea of 11 September.” They reveal that it was in late October 2000, within weeks of the USS Cole attack, that bin Laden decided to attack the American homeland. They also reveal his reasoning at the time: bin Laden believed that “the entire Muslim world is subjected to the reign of blasphemous regimes and to American hegemony.” The 9/11 attack was intended to “break the fear of this false god and destroy the myth of American invincibility.”
About two weeks after the attack, bin Laden released a short statement in the form of an ultimatum addressed to the United States. “I have only a few words for America and its people,” he declared. “I swear by God almighty, who raised the heavens without effort, that neither America nor anyone who lives there will enjoy safety until safety becomes a reality for us living in Palestine and before all the infidel armies leave the land of Muhammad.” The attack had an electrifying effect, and in the years that immediately followed, thousands of young Muslims around the world committed themselves in various ways to bin Laden’s cause. But a close reading of bin Laden’s correspondence reveals that the world’s most notorious terrorist was ignorant of the limits of his own métier.
Bin Laden’s documents offer a portrait of the “war on terror” as it was seen through the eyes of its chief target.
Bin Laden was born in 1957 in Saudi Arabia. His father was a wealthy construction magnate whose company was renowned not just for the opulent palaces it built for the Saudi royal family but also for its restoration of the Islamic holy sites in Mecca and Medina. Bin Laden was raised in comfort, wanting for nothing. He grew into a poised young man who yearned to take part in political causes around the Muslim world. In his early jihadi exploits, which involved fighting in Afghanistan in the 1980s and helping finance and coordinate the mujahideen battling the Soviet occupation of that country, he demonstrated that he had learned something about entrepreneurship and management from the family business. And yet, although bin Laden’s correspondence indicates that he was well versed in Islamic history, particularly the seventh-century military campaigns of the Prophet Muhammad, he had only a perfunctory understanding of modern international relations.
That was reflected in the 9/11 attack itself, which represented a severe miscalculation: bin Laden never anticipated that the United States would go to war in response to the assault. Indeed, he predicted that in the wake of the attack, the American people would take to the streets, replicating the protests against the Vietnam War and calling on their government to withdraw from Muslim-majority countries. Instead, Americans rallied behind U.S. President George W. Bush and his “war on terror.” In October 2001, when a U.S.-led coalition invaded Afghanistan to hunt down al Qaeda and dislodge the Taliban regime, which had hosted the terrorist group since 1996, bin Laden had no plan to secure his organization’s survival.
The 9/11 attack turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory for al Qaeda. The group shattered in the immediate aftermath of the Taliban regime’s collapse, and most of its top leaders were either killed or captured. The rest sought refuge in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, an autonomous area bordering Afghanistan. Hiding became a way of life for them. Their communications reveal that for the rest of bin Laden’s life, the al Qaeda organization never recovered the ability to launch attacks abroad. (The group did carry out attacks in November 2002 in Kenya but was able to do so only because the operatives tasked with planning them had been dispatched to East Africa in late 2000 and early 2001, before everything fell apart for al Qaeda in Afghanistan.) By 2014, bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, found himself more preoccupied with delegitimizing the Islamic State (or ISIS), the jihadi group that eventually overtook al Qaeda, than with rallying Muslims against American hegemony. Still, it is impossible to look back at the past two decades and not be struck by the degree to which a small band of extremists led by a charismatic outlaw managed to influence global politics. Bin Laden did change the world—just not in the ways that he wanted.
LETTERS TO A MIDDLE-AGED TERRORIST
After fleeing to Pakistan following the Taliban’s defeat, many al Qaeda fighters and operatives were arrested by authorities there. Fearing the same fate, the remaining al Qaeda leaders and many members of bin Laden’s family covertly crossed the border into Iran in early 2002. Once there, they were assisted by Sunni militants who helped them rent houses using forged documents. But by the end of 2002, the Iranian authorities had tracked down most of them and had placed them in a secret prison underground. They were later moved into a heavily guarded compound, along with their female relatives and children.
In 2008, bin Laden’s son Saad escaped from Iran and wrote a letter to his father detailing how Iranian authorities had repeatedly ignored the al Qaeda detainees’ medical conditions and how “the calamities piled up and the psychological problems increased.” When Saad’s pregnant wife needed to be induced, she was not taken to a hospital until after “the fetus stopped moving”; she was forced “to deliver him after he died.” Saad was convinced that the Iranians “were masters at making us lose our nerve and took pleasure in torturing us psychologically.” So desperate were their conditions that when a Libyan jihadi leader, Abu Uns al-Subayi, was eventually released in 2010, he wrote to bin Laden that Iran is where the “greatest Satan reigns.” Detention there felt like being “exiled from religion,” he wrote, admitting that he had even begged his Iranian captors to deport him to “any other country, even to Israel.”
Bin Laden never anticipated that the United States would go to war in response to 9/11.
Bin Laden was completely unaware of these travails while they were happening. The Abbottabad papers show that in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, bin Laden disappeared from the scene and was not in command of al Qaeda for three years, even though he continued to release public statements cheering jihadi attacks in Indonesia, Kuwait, Pakistan, Russia, Tunisia, and Yemen. It was not until 2004 that bin Laden was finally able to resume contact with second-tier leaders of al Qaeda. He was eager to launch a new campaign of international terrorism. In one of the first letters he sent after reestablishing contact, he methodically outlined plans to carry out “martyrdom operations akin to the 9/11 New York attack.” If these proved too difficult, he had alternative plans to target rail lines.
His associates quickly set him straight: al Qaeda had been crippled, and such operations were out of the question. In September 2004, a second-tier leader known as Tawfiq wrote a letter to bin Laden describing just how difficult things had been in the immediate aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan. “Our afflictions and troubles were heart-rending, and the weakness, failure, and aimlessness that befell us were harrowing,” he wrote. He lamented that bin Laden’s “absence and inability to experience [their] painful reality” had itself fed the turmoil. “We Muslims were defiled, desecrated, and our state was ripped asunder,” he reported. “Our lands were occupied; our resources were plundered. . . . This is what happened to jihadis in general, and to us in al Qaeda in particular.”
Another second-tier leader, Khalid al-Habib, explained in a letter to bin Laden that during his three-year absence, their “battlefield achievements were negligible.” He counted a total of three “very modest operations, mostly with [rockets], and from a distance.” Another correspondent told bin Laden that al Qaeda’s “external work”—that is, attacks abroad—had been “halted” because of the unrelenting pressure that Pakistan was exerting on the jihadis. As if this weren’t bad enough, bin Laden learned that al Qaeda had been sold out by most of their erstwhile Afghan sympathizers and the Taliban—“90 percent of whom,” Habib complained, “had been lured by the shiny dollars.”
Osama bin Laden's former compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, April 2012
Akhtar Soomro / Reuters
A Lifeline for al Qaeda
But around the time that bin Laden was able to reestablish contact, things started looking up for al Qaeda. After the U.S.-led coalition had ousted the Taliban from power in Afghanistan, the next phase of Bush’s war on terrorism was the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a country ruled by a secular tyrant, Saddam Hussein, who viewed jihadis with hostility. The U.S.-led invasion put a swift end to Saddam’s brutal reign but also led to the disbanding of the Iraqi army and the hollowing out of other secular government institutions. Initially, Arab Sunnis, the minority group that had dominated Iraq under Saddam, bore the lion’s share of the sectarian violence that followed the invasion. This proved to be a lifeline for al Qaeda and other jihadi groups, which were able to position themselves as the defenders of the Sunnis. As Habib put it in his 2004 letter to bin Laden: “When God knew of our afflictions and helplessness, he opened the door of jihad for us and for the entire umma in Iraq.”
Habib was referring, specifically, to the rise of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian jihadi who had come to prominence in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion. By 2004, Zarqawi, and not bin Laden, was the leader of the world’s most powerful jihadi group. Aside from their shared commitment to violent jihad, the two men had little in common. Bin Laden had enjoyed a privileged upbringing; Zarqawi had grown up poor, had done time in prison, and had emerged not just as a religious extremist but also as a hardened ex-convict and a brutal thug. Despite the vast gulf between the two men, Zarqawi was eager for his group, Jamaat al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, to merge with al Qaeda. In a series of missives to bin Laden, Zarqawi made clear that his followers were “the sons of the Father”—that is, bin Laden—and that his group was a mere “branch of the original.” Zarqawi also assured al Qaeda’s leaders that he was collaborating with and seeking to unite all the jihadi factions in Iraq.
Zarqawi’s enthusiasm pleased bin Laden. “The merger of the group [Jamaat] al-Tawhid wal-Jihad [would be] tremendous,” bin Laden wrote to his deputy Zawahiri and Tawfiq, urging them “to give this matter considerable attention, for it is a major step toward uniting the efforts of the jihadis.” In December 2004, bin Laden formalized the merger by publicly appointing Zarqawi as the leader of a new group, al Qaeda in Mesopotamia (often referred to in Western media as al Qaeda in Iraq).
Zarqawi’s initiative eventually spurred jihadi groups in Somalia, Yemen, and North Africa to formally align themselves with al Qaeda. These groups did not directly grow out of the original organization, but their leaders saw many benefits in acquiring the internationally feared al Qaeda brand, especially the chance to improve their standing in the eyes of their followers and to gain international media attention, which they hoped would help them raise money and recruit new adherents. It worked.
Fixated on al Qaeda, counterterrorist authorities all over the world often subsumed all jihadis under a single umbrella, unwittingly giving individuals who wanted to associate themselves with bin Laden a larger selection of groups to potentially join. Thus, although the al Qaeda organization was broken, its brand lived on through the deeds of groups that acted in its name. All of this flowed from Zarqawi’s alliance with bin Laden. In early 2007, a Saudi jihadi cleric, Bishr al-Bishr, described the merger in a letter to a senior al Qaeda leader as an instance of God having “shown mercy on al Qaeda,” which would have come to an end had it not been for “the amazing jihadi victories in Iraq, which raised the value of al Qaeda’s stocks.” It was a divine intervention, he assessed: “God’s way of repaying the people of jihad for their sacrifices in his path.”
THINGS FALL APART
Bin Laden had assumed that those who pledged their allegiance to him would pursue the kind of attacks against the United States that al Qaeda had pioneered. Their success, he hoped, would “raise the morale of Muslims, who would, in turn, become more engaged and supportive of jihadis,” as he put it in a letter to Zawahiri and Tawfiq in December 2004.
Once again, bin Laden had miscalculated. The decision to bestow the al Qaeda imprimatur on groups that he did not control soon backfired. Zarqawi failed to unite Iraq’s jihadi groups under his banner, and the country’s most established jihadi group, Ansar al-Sunna (also known as Ansar al-Islam) refused to merge with him. Before long, bin Laden and his followers found themselves at the receiving end of letters that chronicled the squabbles among their new associates. “Ansar al-Sunna have been spreading lies about me,” Zarqawi complained in one. “They say that I have become like [Antar] al-Zawabiri,” the leader of a notoriously extremist Algerian group who had been killed in 2002 and whom many jihadis had considered to be overzealous even by their standards. “Can you imagine?!” he fumed.
More disturbing for al Qaeda than Zarqawi’s vain whining, however, were his group’s indiscriminate attacks, which resulted in massive Iraqi casualties, particularly among Shiites. Bin Laden wanted al Qaeda to make headlines by killing and injuring Americans, not Iraqi civilians—even if they were Shiites, whom Sunni jihadis saw as heretics.
The new generation of jihadis, bin Laden concluded, had lost their way.
From their hideouts in Pakistan and the tribal areas, al Qaeda’s leaders struggled to unify the militant groups in Iraq that were now at the center of global jihadism. But the divisions among them became even more entrenched. Zawahiri tried to mediate between Zarqawi and Ansar al-Sunna, but his efforts failed. Ansar al-Sunna made it clear to al Qaeda that unity with Zarqawi was conditional on “correcting the ways of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.” Atiyah Abd al-Rahman (generally referred to as Atiyah), who oversaw al Qaeda’s external contacts and relations at the time, grew ever more dismayed with Zarqawi’s leadership and wrote to bin Laden that “we cannot leave the brother to act on the basis of his judgment alone.” In a December 2005 letter intercepted by U.S. intelligence, Atiyah urged Zarqawi “to lessen the number of attacks, even to cut the current daily attacks in half, even less,” pointing out that “the most important thing is for jihad to continue, and a protracted war is to our advantage.”
Things went from bad to worse for al Qaeda after Zarqawi was killed by a U.S. airstrike in 2006. His successors declared themselves the Islamic State of Iraq without consulting bin Laden, Zawahiri, or any other senior al Qaeda figures. In 2007, ISI leaders stopped responding to al Qaeda’s letters altogether, a silence that reflected, in part, the fact that the Iraqi jihadis had begun losing ground to what became known as the Sunni Awakening, which saw U.S. forces forge ties with Sunni tribal sheikhs in order to confront the terrorists.
ON THE SIDELINES
Al Qaeda’s management struggles were hardly limited to Iraq. In 2009, a group of jihadis in Yemen dubbed themselves al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula without alerting the parent group or even publicly pledging allegiance to bin Laden. They were to prove a persistent source of headaches. In or around 2009, an AQAP leader named Qasim al-Raymi admitted in a letter to al Qaeda’s leadership that he and the group’s other top members suffered from inexperience and “deficiencies concerning leadership and administration.” He conceded that he himself was not equipped “to judge when, how, and where to strike.” But inexperience did not deter AQAP’s top leader, Nasir al-Wuhayshi, from announcing in 2010 that he wanted to proclaim an Islamic state in Yemen. It took a great deal of finesse on the part of senior al Qaeda leaders to dissuade him.
For his part, bin Laden was dismayed that AQAP even considered itself a jihadi group at all, much less an affiliate of al Qaeda. “Did you actually plan and prepare for jihad?” he tartly asked in a draft letter to Wuhayshi. “Or is your presence a result of a few government attacks to which the brothers responded, and in the midst of this reactive battle, it occurred to you that you should persist?” Wuhayshi’s letters to bin Laden show that he was vexed by the guidelines that the leadership had given him. Despite backing down from declaring an Islamic state, Wuhayshi defied senior al Qaeda leaders’ instructions to refrain from sectarian attacks targeting Houthis in Yemen and to curb military confrontations with the Yemeni government.
For bin Laden, the least problematic of the new al Qaeda spinoffs was the North African group al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Unlike the other affiliates, it did not want to proclaim a state and instead focused on taking Westerners hostage for ransom or for the freeing of jihadi prisoners held by Western governments. Bin Laden saw this tactic’s potential for influencing Western publics and seemed to appreciate the pragmatic approach of AQIM’s leader, Abu Musab Abdul Wadud. Still, because bin Laden could not communicate with AQIM in a timely fashion (since his communications depended on the schedule of a courier), his interventions often arrived too late and sometimes even proved counterproductive. On at least one occasion, negotiations over the release of Western hostages that could have benefited AQIM fell apart because of bin Laden’s meddling.
By 2009, most of al Qaeda’s senior leaders were fed up with their unruly affiliates. That year, bin Laden hardly rejoiced when Mukhtar Abu al-Zubayr, the leader of the Somali jihadi group al Shabab, sought a public merger with al Qaeda. Zubayr, too, wanted to proclaim an Islamic state. In a letter to Zubayr, Atiyah delicately explained that it would be best to “keep your allegiance to Sheikh Osama secret.” For his part, bin Laden declined the public merger and suggested that Zubayr downsize from a state to an emirate, and do so quietly. “Our inclination,” he wrote, “is that your emirate should be a reality to which the people grow attached without having to proclaim it.” Zubayr complied with their wishes, but his response shows that he was troubled, rightly pointing out that he and his group were “already considered by both our enemies and our friends to be part of al Qaeda.” A few years later, Zawahiri, who succeeded bin Laden after his death, finally admitted al Shabab into al Qaeda.
During the last year of his life, bin Laden lamented that his “brothers” had become a “liability” for global jihad. Some of their attacks, he bemoaned, resulted in “unnecessary civilian casualties.” Worse yet, “the Muslim public was repulsed” by such attacks. The new generation of jihadis, he concluded, had lost their way.
In the winter of 2010–11, the revolts that became known as the Arab Spring initially gave bin Laden some hope. He reveled in the success of what he called the “revolutionaries” (thuwar) who brought down autocratic regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. But soon, he grew troubled. In conversations with his family, he worried that “the revolutions were born prematurely” and lamented that al Qaeda and other jihadi groups were mostly on the sidelines. He was resigned that “we cannot do anything except intensify our prayers.”
Yet bin Laden was determined to “protect these revolutions” and intent on advising the protesters through his public statements. His one and only response to the Arab Spring went through at least 16 drafts before he made an initial recording of it. And his daughters Sumayya and Maryam, who had effectively co-authored most of the public messages that bin Laden delivered over the years, did much of the heavy lifting in composing the text. In late April 2011, they were planning to give it one more round of edits before the final recording, but they ran out of time: U.S. Navy seals raided the Abbottabad compound before they had a chance to polish it. It was the U.S. government that ended up releasing the statement, probably to help establish that the raid had actually occurred and undermine the claims of conspiracy theorists to the contrary.
The raid was masterfully planned and executed. “Justice has been done,” U.S. President Barack Obama declared in announcing bin Laden’s death. With the man behind the 9/11 attack eliminated and with mostly peaceful and secular protesters on the march against Middle Eastern tyrants, it seemed for a moment that the jihadi movement had run its course. But that moment proved fleeting.
Protesting the killing of bin Laden in Quetta, Pakistan, May 2011
Naseer Ahmed / Reuters
A SHORT-LIVED CALIPHATE
Back in Washington, the Obama administration had dropped Bush’s “war on terror” moniker. But Obama maintained his predecessor’s excessive focus on al Qaeda, and his team failed to discern divisions within jihadism that proved consequential. In choosing to go to war in Iraq, the Bush administration had exaggerated al Qaeda’s connections to the country and overestimated the counterterrorism benefits of toppling Saddam’s regime. The Obama administration, for its part, overestimated the positive effects that bin Laden’s death and the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would have on the fight against jihadism. “The drawdown in Iraq allowed us to refocus our fight against al Qaeda and achieve major victories against its leadership, including Osama bin Laden,” Obama claimed in October 2011. At that very moment, however, the ISI, al Qaeda’s erstwhile ally in Iraq, was being energized by a new generation of leaders. The Obama administration and other Western governments failed to see the growing danger.
In 2010, the ISI had come under the leadership of a formerly obscure Iraqi who called himself Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The Iraqi government’s sectarianism and corruption offered fertile ground for the ISI to rebuild and grow. In 2010–11, Baghdadi unleashed a wave of terrorist assaults on Iraqi Christians and Shiites. This campaign enraged al Qaeda’s leaders. “I do not understand,” Zawahiri chafed in a letter he wrote to bin Laden a few months before the Abbottabad raid. “Are the brothers not content with the number of their current enemies? Are they eager to add new ones to their list?” He urged bin Laden to write to the ISI’s leaders and instruct them to stop “targeting the Shiites indiscriminately” and to “end their attacks against Christians.” But bin Laden no longer had any influence over the ISI. The Iraqi group had moved on.
When it comes to the next phase of the struggle, all eyes are on Afghanistan.
Between 2011 and 2013, the ISI expanded into Syria, inserting itself into the bloody civil war that had begun there after the regime of Bashar al-Assad crushed an Arab Spring uprising. In June 2014, after the ISI had conquered vast swaths of territory in both Iraq and Syria, the group’s spokesperson, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, proclaimed Baghdadi to be the leader of a new caliphate, and the group renamed itself the Islamic State, dropping all geographic references from its name. Its territorial expansion led jihadi groups in more than ten countries to pledge allegiance to the new caliph. In turn, the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) designated these groups as either “provinces” or “soldiers of the caliphate.”
After bin Laden’s death, al Qaeda continued to operate under Zawahiri’s command, but it had now been fully eclipsed by ISIS. Still, just as bin Laden had been ignorant of terrorism’s limits, Baghdadi proved to be clueless when it came to running a state, let alone a “caliphate” that aimed to conquer other countries without possessing so much as a single fighter jet. In September 2014, the Obama administration formed a coalition of 83 countries “to degrade and ultimately defeat ISIS.” By 2016, ISIS had begun to collapse. The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump kept up the fight, and the coalition eventually wrested control of all of ISIS’s territory. Baghdadi had spurned bin Laden’s strategy of fighting from the shadows in favor of empire building and had managed to replace bin Laden as the face of global jihadism. But the two men had similar fates. In October 2019, U.S. forces raided Baghdadi’s compound in Idlib Province, in northwestern Syria. U.S. military dogs chased Baghdadi into a dead-end tunnel. Cornered, the caliph detonated a suicide vest. “The world is now a safer place,” Trump declared.
THE FUTILITY OF TERROR
In the two years since Baghdadi’s demise, Trump’s pronouncement has held up. The jihadi landscape is still divided. Jihadi organizations continue to proliferate, but no group dominates in the way that al Qaeda and ISIS once did. Their capabilities range from merely howling threats, to throwing Molotov cocktails, to carrying out suicide operations or blowing up cars, to seizing control of territory—at least for a time.
When it comes to the next phase of the struggle, all eyes are on Afghanistan. Al Qaeda, ISIS, and a number of other groups maintain operations in the country, but they are overshadowed by the larger conflict playing out between the Afghan government and the Taliban, which are both struggling for control of the country in the wake of the United States’ withdrawal. In 2020, the United States and the Taliban reached a peace agreement in which the Taliban promised “to prevent any group or individual, including al-Qa’ida, from using the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies.”
Will the Taliban make good on their promise? Judging by the Abbottabad papers, not all Taliban members were equal in the eyes of al Qaeda, which had long suspected that some Taliban factions had been seeking rapprochement with the United States. As early as 2007, Atiyah wrote to bin Laden that “forces within the Taliban are distancing themselves from al Qaeda to elude the terrorism accusation.” And in 2010, Zawahiri expressed alarm in a letter to bin Laden that the Taliban seemed “psychologically prepared” to accept a deal that would render al Qaeda impotent. Owing to the Taliban’s factionalism since 9/11, it may be difficult for the group’s leaders to enforce compliance with the terms of their agreement with the United States.
The Taliban’s factionalism may prove to be an intractable problem for the United States. But al Qaeda’s experiences after 9/11 suggest that the same factionalism will also complicate matters for terrorists seeking refuge in Afghanistan. Even a sympathetic host regime is no guarantee of safe haven. Bin Laden learned that lesson the hard way, and Baghdadi later found out that controlling territory was even harder. But Washington and its allies have come to realize (or at least they should have) that an open-ended war on terrorism is futile and that a successful counterterrorism policy must address the legitimate political grievances that al Qaeda claims to champion—for example, U.S. support for dictatorships in the Middle East.
Washington cannot quite claim victory against al Qaeda and its ilk, which retain the ability to inspire deadly, if small-scale, attacks. The past two decades, however, have made clear just how little jihadi groups can hope to accomplish. They stand a far better chance of achieving eternal life in paradise than of bringing the United States to its knees.
2. A Rescue Plan for Afghanistan
Conclusion:
We realize that our advice is a long shot given Mr. Biden’s determination to wash his hands of Afghanistan. But the costs of the bloody defeat that now seems likely will be far greater than the President thinks if the Taliban’s flag soon flies over Kabul.
A Rescue Plan for Afghanistan
It’s not too late to prevent a bloodbath and total Taliban victory.
By The Editorial Board
Aug. 13, 2021 6:40 pm ET
WSJ · by The Editorial Board
Taliban fighters stand guard over surrendered Afghan security members forces in the city of Ghazni, Afghanistan, Aug. 13.
Photo: Gulabuddin Amiri/Associated Press
What an awful, tragic irony. President Biden in April chose Sept. 11 as the deadline for U.S. troops to withdraw from Afghanistan. Now it’s possible that, on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the Taliban that once protected Osama bin Laden and that the U.S. ousted from power could again rule in Kabul.
Mr. Biden would like to absolve himself of responsibility for this looming defeat, but he cannot. He could have withdrawn U.S. forces in a careful way based on conditions and a plan to shore up Afghan forces or midwife an alliance between regional tribal warlords and the government in Kabul. The President did none of that.
Instead his mid-April decision to withdraw, on the eve of the summer fighting season, triggered the May 1 start of the Taliban offensive. The rapid withdrawal timetable meant U.S. forces would be preoccupied with that task rather than assisting Afghan forces. His decision to abandon multiple military bases, and withdraw all air power, has denied the Afghan army crucial support it relied on.
We are now watching the consequences, as the Taliban captures city after city. Soon the group could control or contest more than 90% of the country, including traditional anti-Taliban strongholds in the north. Insurgents have seized Kandahar and Herat—the second and third largest cities—and an assault on Kabul could come soon. The U.S. is evacuating all but a bare-bones diplomatic staff and may even move them from the U.S. Embassy.
***
Even now, however, it’s not too late to stop or slow the slaughter. Outside of well-regarded special forces units, Afghan army troops have retreated willy-nilly as they’ve lost confidence in holding off the Taliban. But allied air power and maintenance assistance were a basic part of Kabul’s defense strategy.
Government forces are more likely to fight, and could stand a chance, if Mr. Biden brings U.S. air assets back to the country. The U.S. will also need to deploy enough troops and contractors to keep the planes flying and Bagram air base secure.
The fall of Kabul may look inevitable, but the Taliban isn’t the Wehrmacht. A display of even modest renewed U.S. support would boost Afghan morale and give the Taliban pause on its march to Kabul. Once a rout is stopped, the U.S. can then work on a strategy that assists Afghans who oppose the Taliban to set up a resistance. This means working with friendly regional leaders who can provide areas of operational control. CIA teams, like Team Alpha that helped to topple the Taliban in 2001, could enter the country now and rally pockets against the Taliban with air power support.
The goal would be to impose costs that would give the Taliban reason to doubt it can regain control of the country. It could also give the Afghan government some negotiating leverage in talks with the Taliban.
Sen. Lindsey Graham suggests reconstituting a version of the bipartisan Afghanistan Study Group to offer ideas for the Biden Administration. In February that group laid out a plan for a small residual U.S. force in Afghanistan that could prevent exactly the kind of rout we’re now seeing. This would need to be done quickly, but there is enough retired military and political expertise on Afghanistan to make it happen.
***
This would be an admission that Mr. Biden’s withdrawal was a mistake, but that would be a small price to avoid strategic disaster and perhaps a bloodbath that will stain America’s reputation and haunt his Presidency. Even the Democratic media has now picked up the Vietnam metaphor—“Biden’s Saigon”—that we warned about weeks ago.
So far Mr. Biden seems determined to stick with his hell-bent withdrawal, and perhaps he thinks Americans won’t care. But they will care if they see in a few weeks or months the revival of safe havens for al Qaeda or Islamic State. They will care if they think the U.S. homeland is threatened.
And they’ll care if China, Russia and Iran see the U.S. defeated in Afghanistan by a militia like the Taliban and conclude that Mr. Biden will fold if they challenge U.S. friends and interests. Each of them drew that conclusion about Barack Obama and exploited it in the South China Sea, Ukraine and Syria, and the broader Middle East. Mr. Biden’s vision to rally an alliance of democracies will find fewer takers.
We realize that our advice is a long shot given Mr. Biden’s determination to wash his hands of Afghanistan. But the costs of the bloody defeat that now seems likely will be far greater than the President thinks if the Taliban’s flag soon flies over Kabul.
WSJ · by The Editorial Board
3. The Taliban Captured Helicopters. Can They Capture an Air Force?
Where has the Taliban been sending its soldiers to flight school and to learn how to maintain such aircraft?
The Taliban Captured Helicopters. Can They Capture an Air Force?
These are the lethal warplanes that could fall under Taliban control.
By MARCUS WEISGERBER and TARA COPP
The Afghan National Security Forces has a long record of losing track of U.S.-supplied guns and rifles. But as the Taliban gains territory following the U.S. troop withdrawal, Afghanistan could lose far more lethal weapons: combat aircraft.
The Pentagon says that has not happened yet, and that the Afghan Air Force continues to fly missions and carry out airstrikes against the Taliban every day. But Taliban fighters reportedly have captured armored vehicles, small surveillance drones, and several unflyable helicopters. Could they capture more?
“We are always worried about U.S. equipment that could fall into an adversaries’ hands,” Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby said Friday. “What actions we might take to prevent that or to forestall it, I just simply won't speculate about today.”
As of June 30, the Afghan Air Force had just over 200 aircraft, but only 167 were available for missions, according to the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Most of the planes operate from two bases, one in Kabul and the other in Kandahar. The Taliban took control of Kandahar earlier today, including the airfield.
Many of the aircraft and helicopters are armed, but the most lethal are a small fleet of just over two dozen propeller-driven attack planes. These A-29 Super Tucanos were supplied to Afghan forces specifically so they can provide close-air support to their ground fighters. They can fire laser-guided and other types of bombs.
The Afghan government also has 50 American-made MD-530 attack helicopters, which are armed with machine guns and rockets. Additionally, the Afghan Air Force flies American-made UH-60 Black Hawks and Russian-made Mi-17 helicopters, as well as C-130 and Cessna transports, and a small fleet of armed Cessnas. The U.S. is continuing to provide financial support for many of these aircraft, Kirby said.
“We have made commitments to help [the Afghan Air Force] improve their capabilities,” he said. “Those commitments remain in place.”
The Taliban reportedly captured an Mi-35 helicopter gifted from India, but video showed the aircraft was missing its rotors. The group also posted a video showing two Mi-17 helicopters in a hangar with spare rotors and parts. It also reportedly captured an MD-530, but that aircraft appeared heavily damaged.
Even if the Taliban captures working aircraft, it would be difficult for them to fly it without proper training, according to people familiar with these types of military planes. A trained pilot could fly it, but they would also need to be familiar with the bombs and missiles and know how to mount them and arm the aircraft. And, because the planes need regular maintenance, it’s unlikely the planes would be flyable for long, even by skilled pilots.
Still, to prevent planes from falling into enemy hands, the U.S. could bomb the aircraft or airfields first. Kirby declined to say what actions, if any, the U.S. military would take.
“I'm not going to speculate about … the destruction of property,” Kirby said. “Going forward, we are going to continue to stay focused on making sure they have the capabilities to use in the field.”
Another possibility is that the Taliban could sell the aircraft to Russia and China, who could try to exploit the technology. And even if they’re unflyable, posting pictures and video of the captured aircraft are a powerful propaganda tool for the Taliban.
The majority of these combat aircraft are based in Kabul and Kandahar, according to Military Periscope, an open source military database owned by GovExec, Defense One’s parent company. The Pentagon announced Thursday the U.S. military had sent 3,000 troops into Afghanistanin part to guard the Kabul Airport.
Even before the Taliban began claiming cities and towns, some were sounding the alarm about the U.S. not properly monitoring the weapons it gave Afghan National Security Forces.
In December, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction said the Pentagon “did not meet enhanced [end use monitoring] requirements to account for all sensitive defense articles transferred to the Afghan government; the requirements are designed to minimize national security risks by preventing the diversion or misuse of defense articles that incorporate sensitive technology.”
Because of the U.S. withdrawal ordered by President Joe Biden, “All aircraft platforms are overtaxed due to increased requests for close air support, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance missions, and aerial resupply now that the ANDSF largely lacks U.S. air support,” SIGAR said.
All aircraft are 25 percent over their recommended scheduled-maintenance intervals, SIGAR said. “This is exacerbating supply-chain issues and delaying scheduled maintenance and battle-damage repair.”
4. The Afghan Military Was Built Over 20 Years. How Did It Collapse So Quickly?
This excerpt kind of sums it up:
Equipped with rifles and machine guns, some dressed in uniforms, others not, the border soldiers beamed when their stubble-bearded captain, Ezzatullah Tofan, arrived at their shell-racked position, a house abandoned during the fighting.
He always comes to the rescue, one soldier said.
Late last month, as the Taliban pushed into Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital of Helmand Province, an outpost called their headquarters elsewhere in the city asking for reinforcements. In an audio recording obtained by The New York Times, the senior commander on the other end asked them to stay and fight.
Captain Tofan was bringing reinforcements, he said, and to hold on a little longer. That was around two weeks ago.
By Friday, despite the Afghan military’s tired resistance, repeated flights of reinforcements and even American B-52 bombers overhead, the city was in the hands of the Taliban.
The Afghan Military Was Built Over 20 Years. How Did It Collapse So Quickly?
The Taliban’s rapid advance has made clear that U.S. efforts to turn Afghanistan’s military into a robust, independent fighting force have failed, with its soldiers feeling abandoned by inept leaders.
An Afghan police special forces soldier at a frontline position in Kandahar this month.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Aug. 13, 2021
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — The surrenders seem to be happening as fast as the Taliban can travel.
In the past several days, the Afghan security forces have collapsed in more than 15 cities under the pressure of a Taliban advance that began in May. On Friday, officials confirmed that those included two of the country’s most important provincial capitals: Kandahar and Herat.
The swift offensive has resulted in mass surrenders, captured helicopters and millions of dollars of American-supplied equipment paraded by the Taliban on grainy cellphone videos. In some cities, heavy fighting had been underway for weeks on their outskirts, but the Taliban ultimately overtook their defensive lines and then walked in with little or no resistance.
This implosion comes despite the United States having poured more than $83 billion in weapons, equipment and training into the country’s security forces over two decades.
Building the Afghan security apparatus was one of the key parts of the Obama administration’s strategy as it sought to find a way to hand over security and leave nearly a decade ago. These efforts produced an army modeled in the image of the United States’ military, an Afghan institution that was supposed to outlast the American war.
But it will likely be gone before the United States is.
While the future of Afghanistan seems more and more uncertain, one thing is becoming exceedingly clear: The United States’ 20-year endeavor to rebuild Afghanistan’s military into a robust and independent fighting force has failed, and that failure is now playing out in real time as the country slips into Taliban control.
American soldiers overseeing training of their Afghan counterparts in Helmand Province in 2016.Credit...Adam Ferguson for The New York Times
How the Afghan military came to disintegrate first became apparent not last week but months ago in an accumulation of losses that started even before President Biden’s announcement that the United States would withdraw by Sept. 11.
It began with individual outposts in rural areas where starving and ammunition-depleted soldiers and police units were surrounded by Taliban fighters and promised safe passage if they surrendered and left behind their equipment, slowly giving the insurgents more and more control of roads, then entire districts. As positions collapsed, the complaint was almost always the same: There was no air support or they had run out of supplies and food.
But even before that, the systemic weaknesses of the Afghan security forces — which on paper numbered somewhere around 300,000 people, but in recent days have totaled around just one-sixth of that, according to U.S. officials — were apparent. These shortfalls can be traced to numerous issues that sprung from the West’s insistence on building a fully modern military with all the logistical and supply complexities one requires, and which has proved unsustainable without the United States and its NATO allies.
Soldiers and policemen have expressed ever-deeper resentment of the Afghan leadership. Officials often turned a blind eye to what was happening, knowing full well that the Afghan forces’ real manpower count was far lower than what was on the books, skewed by corruption and secrecy that they quietly accepted.
And when the Taliban started building momentum after the United States’ announcement of withdrawal, it only increased the belief that fighting in the security forces — fighting for President Ashraf Ghani’s government — wasn’t worth dying for. In interview after interview, soldiers and police officers described moments of despair and feelings of abandonment.
Afghan commandos in Lashkar Gah in May.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
On one frontline in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar last week, the Afghan security forces’ seeming inability to fend off the Taliban’s devastating offensive came down to potatoes.
After weeks of fighting, one cardboard box full of slimy potatoes was supposed to pass as a police unit’s daily rations. They hadn’t received anything other than spuds in various forms in several days, and their hunger and fatigue were wearing them down.
“These French fries are not going to hold these front lines!” a police officer yelled, disgusted by the lack of support they were receiving in the country’s second-largest city.
By Thursday, this front line collapsed, and Kandahar was in Taliban control by Friday morning.
Afghan soldiers near the front line with the Taliban in Kandahar this month.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Afghan troops were then consolidated to defend Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals in recent weeks as the Taliban pivoted from attacking rural areas to targeting cities. But that strategy proved futile as the insurgent fighters overran city after city, capturing around half of Afghanistan’s provincial capitals in a week, and encircling Kabul.
“They’re just trying to finish us off,” said Abdulhai, 45, a police chief who was holding Kandahar’s northern front line last week.
The Afghan security forces have suffered well over 60,000 deaths since 2001. But Abdulhai was not talking about the Taliban, but rather his own government, which he believed was so inept that it had to be part of a broader plan to cede territory to the Taliban.
The months of defeats all seemed to culminate on Wednesday when the entire headquarters of an Afghan Army corps — the 217th — fell to the Taliban at the northern city of Kunduz’s airport. The insurgents captured a defunct helicopter gunship. Images of an American-supplied drone seized by the Taliban circulated on the internet along with images of rows of armored vehicles.
Kunduz last month.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Brig. Gen. Abbas Tawakoli, commander of the 217th Afghan Army corps who was in a nearby province when his base fell, echoed Abdulhai’s sentiments as reasons for his troops’ defeat on the battlefield.
“Unfortunately, knowingly and unknowingly, a number of Parliament members and politicians fanned the flame started by the enemy,” General Tawakoli said, just hours after the Taliban had posted videos of their fighters looting the general’s sprawling base.
“No region fell as a result of the war, but as a result of the psychological war,” he said.
That psychological war has played out at varying levels.
Afghan pilots say that their leadership cares more about the state of the aircraft rather than the people flying them: men and at least one woman who are burned out from countless missions of evacuating outposts — often under fire — all while the Taliban carry out a brutal assassination campaign against them.
What remains of the elite commando forces, who are used to hold what ground is still under government control, are shuttled from one province to the next, with no clear objective and very little sleep.
Afghan commandos on standby at Bost Airfield, a civilian airport in Helmand Province that served as a temporary command center for the special forces.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
The ethnically aligned militia groups that have risen to prominence as forces capable of reinforcing government lines also have nearly all been overrun.
On Friday, another prominent Afghan warlord and former governor, Mohammad Ismail Khan, who had resisted Taliban attacks in western Afghanistan for weeks and rallied many to his cause to push back the insurgent offensive, surrendered to the insurgents.
“We are drowning in corruption,” said Abdul Haleem, 38, a police officer on the Kandahar frontline earlier this month. His special operations unit was at half strength — 15 out of 30 people — and several of his comrades who remained on the front were there because their villages had been captured.
“How are we supposed to defeat the Taliban with this amount of ammunition?” he said. The heavy machine gun, for which his unit had very few bullets, broke later that night.
As of Thursday, it was unclear if Mr. Haleem was still alive and what remained of his comrades.
An Afghan police position in Kandahar this month.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
As the Taliban carry out an almost uninterrupted sweep of the country, their strength has been in question. Official estimates have long sat at somewhere between 50,000 to 100,000 fighters. Now that number is even murkier as international forces and their intelligence capabilities withdraw.
Some U.S. officials say the Taliban numbers have swelled because of an influx of foreign fighters and an aggressive conscription campaign in captured territory. Other experts say the Taliban have taken a bulk of their strength from Pakistan.
Yet even amid what could be a complete surrender by the Afghan government and its forces, there are troops still fighting.
More often than not, as is the case in any conflict since the beginning of time, the soldiers and police are fighting for each other, and for the lower-ranking leaders who inspire them to fight despite what hell lies ahead.
Equipped with rifles and machine guns, some dressed in uniforms, others not, the border soldiers beamed when their stubble-bearded captain, Ezzatullah Tofan, arrived at their shell-racked position, a house abandoned during the fighting.
Capt. Ezzatullah Tofan, second right, arriving at a beleaguered Afghan Border Force position on the front line in Lashkar Gah in May.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
He always comes to the rescue, one soldier said.
Late last month, as the Taliban pushed into Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital of Helmand Province, an outpost called their headquarters elsewhere in the city asking for reinforcements. In an audio recording obtained by The New York Times, the senior commander on the other end asked them to stay and fight.
Captain Tofan was bringing reinforcements, he said, and to hold on a little longer. That was around two weeks ago.
By Friday, despite the Afghan military’s tired resistance, repeated flights of reinforcements and even American B-52 bombers overhead, the city was in the hands of the Taliban.
Taimoor Shah and Jim Huylebroek contributed reporting from Kandahar, Afghanistan. Najim Rahim and Fatima Faizi contributed from Kabul. Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.
5. Will Arming ‘Public Uprising Forces’ Stop the Taliban’s Advance?
Hmmm.... did we leave a resistance operating concept for public uprising forces behind? Or is this organic and naturally developing? I fear we do not have the stomach to support this.
The public uprising forces have been purporting to push back the Taliban, but the battle is to date an apparent losing one. Multiple local leaders and insiders claim that the losses are not due to a lack of will or skill, but a lack of sufficient equipment and firepower.“
The Peace Process must remain the main priority, but today the Doha process is just serving Taliban’s military advance and their victory,” lamented one source closely connected to the Northern political spectrum. Our traditional partners and proven US allies in the North desperately need our supports and, they are the only remaining reliable and effective hope. To help them to protect the Republic and our sacrifices is in the national interest of the USA.”
...
Which is the lesser of two evils? A potentially fractured country drawn along ethnic lines? Or an Islamic Emirate domineered by the Taliban with close ties to terrorist groups?
It’s time for the powers-to-be to decide—and quickly—as Afghanistan crumbles back into a barbaric stone age with the Taliban continuing to capitalize on those very internal tensions.
Will Arming ‘Public Uprising Forces’ Stop the Taliban’s Advance?
Which is the lesser of two evils? A potentially fractured country drawn along ethnic lines? Or an Islamic Emirate domineered by the Taliban with close ties to terrorist groups?
MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan—It’s something of a grim domino effect. Afghanistan is rapidly falling back to Taliban control, as the bulwark insurgency advances into cities across the embattled nation, killing hundreds and displacing hundreds of thousands more.
While much of the U.S.-led, almost two-decade war has focused on Afghanistan’s southeast border with Pakistan, the Taliban this time around has been able to storm through the once iron-clad, anti-Taliban pockets of the northern resistance—dishing up a massive morale blow.
However, all is not lost.
It was the conglomerate of northern warlords dubbed the “Northern Alliance” that the United States relied upon to enter Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, and to then quickly usurp the Taliban government from power.
Today, that rag-tag amalgamation of homegrown, volunteer militias led by hardened anti-Soviet commanders is returning as scores of able-bodied men, not part of the traditional military, flock toward the fight after cradling whatever arms may be lingering on the black market or home closet.
And while the United States is only weeks from leaving, now could well be the crucial time for the Afghan government forces—equipped with air power—to set aside internal grievances and go full-force in bolstering these groups.
The public uprising forces have been purporting to push back the Taliban, but the battle is to date an apparent losing one. Multiple local leaders and insiders claim that the losses are not due to a lack of will or skill, but a lack of sufficient equipment and firepower.
“The Peace Process must remain the main priority, but today the Doha process is just serving Taliban’s military advance and their victory,” lamented one source closely connected to the Northern political spectrum. Our traditional partners and proven US allies in the North desperately need our supports and, they are the only remaining reliable and effective hope. To help them to protect the Republic and our sacrifices is in the national interest of the USA.”
For one, scores of fighters have pledged allegiance to former vice president and Northern Alliance leader, Marshal Abdul Rashid Dostum in the northern provinces. In the key city of Mazar-i-Sharif, which is surrounded by the Taliban and my current location, it’s not the Afghan Forces that are patrolling the city. It’s the young, public uprising forces most visible on the crowded and bustling streets, still teeming with life despite the uncertainty.
Atta Mohammad Noor, also a Northern Alliance commander, is again governing his new generation of fighters in the north. And in and around the Panjshir Valley, some 600 forces are under the tutelage of Ahmad Massoud, son of the late Ahmad Shah Massoud—a pivotal Northern Alliance chieftain strategically killed by the Taliban just days before the September 11 attacks.
While exact numbers are unclear, it is believed that thousands of uprising fighters have joined the fray in recent months as the battle intensifies.
But much of the leadership expresses the same urgent concern: we need arms.
For one, Marshal Dostum met with President Ashraf Ghani in Kabul earlier this week in pursuit of Kabul’s equipment and backing. Those connected to the northern leaders conveyed satisfaction with the meeting, yet what transpires on the ground remains to be seen.
Of course, arming local leaders is a double-edged sword and presents another slate of potential problems for Kabul.
It was the Washington-led military backing of local leaders known as the “mujahideen” in the 1980s to repel the Soviet invasion that splintered and gave rise to the Taliban in the first place. There is also a long history of ethnic gripes, distrust, and marginalization between the majority Pashtuns, Tajiks, and other smaller groups such as the Uzbeks and Hazara.
Sources connected to the Palace and National Security Directorate (NDS) told me that the process is underway to fold the uprising forces into the supervision of the NDS, the leading security and intelligence wing, rather than the military. The forces—which are believed to number more than six thousand—will be given a government salary and are expected to abide by a formal agreement. However, the timing of such a process is not clear and whether the localized fighters—who know their terrain better than anyone and have the zest to defend their own communities—will abide by central government orders.
In a similar sense, comparisons can be drawn to Iraq and the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF). The latter was formed after an urgent fatwa was issued by Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani soon after ISIS rampaged through and seized the country’s second-largest city of Mosul. More than 100,000 men belonging to different militias came together to work alongside Iraqi forces on the ground in the years-long offensive to wrestle ISIS from control.
While the PMF has ricocheted into its own problems for Baghdad given its staunch loyalty to Iran and hostility to Baghdad’s rule, at the time the immediate threat was ISIS.
The secondary problems, defense analysts configured at the time, would have to be dealt with later.
Which is the lesser of two evils? A potentially fractured country drawn along ethnic lines? Or an Islamic Emirate domineered by the Taliban with close ties to terrorist groups?
It’s time for the powers-to-be to decide—and quickly—as Afghanistan crumbles back into a barbaric stone age with the Taliban continuing to capitalize on those very internal tensions.
Hollie McKay is a writer, author, and war crimes investigator.
Image: Reuters.
6. The lost tablet and the secret documents (Russia)
Please go to the BBC link to read the entire article since it will not format for an email message.
The lost tablet and the secret documents
Clues pointing to a shadowy Russian army
By Nader Ibrahim in London and Ilya Barabanov in Moscow
Wagner is a Russian mercenary group whose operations have spanned the globe, from front-line fighting in Syria to guarding diamond mines in the Central African Republic. But it is notoriously secretive and, as such, difficult to scrutinise.
Now, the BBC has gained exclusive access to an electronic tablet left behind on a battlefield in Libya by a Wagner fighter, giving an unprecedented insight into how these operatives work.
And another clue given to us in Tripoli - a “shopping list” for state-of-the-art military equipment - suggests Wagner has probably been supported at the highest level despite the Russian government’s consistent denials that the organisation has any links to the state.
It was late one night in early February when I received the call in London. It was one of my contacts in Libya with some extraordinary news - a Samsung tablet had been retrieved from a battlefield in western Libya.
Russian mercenaries had been fighting there in support of Libyan renegade general Khalifa Haftar, against the UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA). It’s believed the tablet had been left behind when the fighters retreated in the spring of 2020.
There had long been reports that Wagner had been operating in Libya. This surveillance footage, filmed by GNA fighters in December 2019 and shared with the BBC, is believed to show Wagner fighters.
7. Behind the Surprising Jump in Multiracial Americans, Several Theories
It seems to me the data shows we are still a melting pot.
Behind the Surprising Jump in Multiracial Americans, Several Theories
Families across the country have grown more diverse. A design change in the census form also allowed the government to report people’s identity in greater detail.
Kori Alexis Trataros, of White Plains, N.Y., sees generational differences in how Americans think about race. “Our generation is so great at having open conversation,” she said.Credit...Janick Gilpin for The New York Times
Aug. 13, 2021
WASHINGTON — The Census Bureau released a surprising finding this week: The number of non-Hispanic Americans who identify as multiracial had jumped by 127 percent over the decade. For people who identified as Hispanic, the increase was even higher.
The spike sent demographers scrambling. Was the reason simply that more multiracial babies were being born? Or that Americans were rethinking their identities? Or had a design change in this year’s census form caused the sudden, unexpected shift?
The answer, it seems, is all of the above.
Multiracial Americans are still a relatively small part of the population — just 4 percent — but the increase over the decade was substantial and, the data shows, often surprising in its geography. The number of Americans who identified as non-Hispanic and more than one race jumped to 13.5 million from 6 million. The largest increase in non-Hispanic Americans of two or more races was in Oklahoma, followed by Alaska and Arkansas.
Americans who were mixed race recorded a wide range of identities. People who identified themselves as both white and Asian made up about 18 percent of the total number of non-Hispanic multiracial Americans in 2020. Those who reported their race as both white and Black accounted for 20.5 percent. Americans who were both white and Native American were 26 percent of the total, according to Andrew Beveridge, who founded Social Explorer, a data analytics company.
Part of the rise in people identifying as multiracial was simply the growing diversity of the American population. As the newest immigrants, largely from Asia and Latin America, have children and grandchildren, and those Americans form families, they are much more likely to marry outside their racial or ethnic groups than their parents were. Among newlywed Hispanic people who were born in the United States, about 39 percent marry someone who is not Hispanic, according to the Pew Research Center. For Asian people, that number is about the same.
But the increase can also be attributed in part to changing ways in which Americans identify themselves — and the ways the government categorizes them.
Census categories are complicated, because race and its boundaries change over time based on shifts in culture and society. Some argue the census can leave the impression that race is a fixed, naturally occurring category that can be neatly counted. Until 2000, the Census Bureau only recognized one response for race.
Michael Watson of the Bronx is the son of a Jamaican mother and a Puerto Rican father of Scottish and Bajan descent. He welcomes the Census Bureau’s attempt to capture Americans’ identities more precisely.Credit...Ben Zucker for The New York Times
For Michael Watson, 38, the son of a Jamaican mother and a Puerto Rican father of Scottish and Bajan descent, one box was not enough.
“A lot of times you are painted in a box where you have to choose,” said Mr. Watson, of the Bronx, who is director of an analytics company and co-founder of a digital media company. “But as a Black man, I felt uncomfortable having to feel as if I had to pick between both sides.”
For the 2020 census, officials tried to more accurately capture the profusion of complexity in American demographics.
Last year’s census form differed substantially from the one in 2010, Rachel Marks, chief of the racial statistics branch at the Census Bureau, said in an interview. Lines were added under the boxes for Black and for white, where respondents could describe in more nuance their racial backgrounds. Coding capacity improved too, capturing far more detail in people’s written answers than before.
Some of those changes, she said, contributed to the rise in the numbers of people who identified as more than one race — though precisely what share, she could not say.
“It’s not just one thing,” Ms. Marks said in an interview on Friday. “We improved the questions. There were new write-in lines. All in addition to the ways that we processed and coded the data.”
Demographic change was a factor too, though she said it was impossible to say how much of the dramatic growth it accounted for. Asked whether part of the decline in the number of people who identified as non-Hispanic white was related to the changes in the form, Ms. Marks said she could not “say for sure one way or another.”
“We’re still digging into the data,” she said. “I think these improvements and changes could have also contributed to that. But it’s certainly a trend we’ve been seeing for the past several decades.”
The result was a much more nuanced — and accurate — portrait of how Americans see themselves, social scientists said, even if part of the spike in the multiracial category was as much about reclassification as it was about real growth.
Richard Alba, a sociologist who has written about race categorization and the census, said that typically, a large share of Hispanic Americans check the box for white in the race question. Now, he said, they were given the chance to describe their backgrounds more fully, an addition, he said, that could have flipped them into the multiracial category.
“That’s not a change in social reality, that’s a change in the way social reality is being categorized,” he said. “In the long run we will probably be able to say more precisely to what extent is there a real change and to what extent is this a coding change.”
However, the coding change was not simply a statistical blip. It was a meaningful widening of options people had to say who they felt they were.
For Mr. Watson, the fact that more Americans were identifying themselves as multiracial felt like a recognition by society that he had long craved.
“I think it shows that there’s more depth and breadth to us as people of color,” he said. “It’s a testament that our society is moving in the right direction. It goes beyond just the color of our skin.”
Ruby Herrera, 28, can testify to the frustration of being asked to fit herself neatly into just one racial category. She remembers feeling different from most other children when she was in grade school and had to fill out a form indicating her identity.
Ms. Herrera’s mother is white, from Wisconsin, and her father is from Mexico. She loved speaking two languages and knowing that she belonged to two cultures.
But her teacher advised her to just pick one.
“For me as a 7-year-old kid, I was like I can’t just pick one,” she said. “What do you mean? Which one do I pick? If I pick one, does that mean I’m not the other? None of my classmates understood why I was so upset.”
Ms. Herrera and Taylor Clarkson, friends from college, created an online community called Mixed Millennial to bring people of multiracial backgrounds together to share experiences.
Taylor Clarkson, a business school student, co-founded an online group called Mixed Millennial to promote mixed-race awareness.Credit...Allison Dinner for The New York Times
As the children and grandchildren of recent immigrants from Asia and Latin America start families of their own, racial categories in America have again become fluid.
One of the big demographic questions, social scientists said, is what will become of the categories. Particularly salient, they say, is that of white. The declining share of white people as a part of the population has become a part of American politics — as a worry on the right and a cause for optimism on the left.
But while white people have long been at the top of the American social hierarchy, and the category has expanded over time to include the immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe who came at the turn of the last century, the profusion of identities in American society and their growing acceptance is raising the question of how much social power whiteness still holds.
“To me the interesting story is not the decline of white people as a supposed group but the historical advantages of whiteness and how they may be changing,” said Charles King, a political scientist at Georgetown University. “With the greater power and visibility of people who feel they fit uneasily inside the old census boxes, it’s possible to claim a range of identities without feeling you’re harming your chances of success in American society.”
The one group that was never allowed to cross the line into whiteness, African Americans, may not have as many options.
“The whole racial classification system is going to shift in the next few years,” said Douglas S. Massey, a sociologist at Princeton University. “The off-the-shelf standard American is going to be some kind of blend of Asian, Latino and white. The big question always is, how do Blacks fit in.”
Kori Alexis Trataros, a school counselor in the South Bronx, said that she sees hope in the younger generation being more open and accepting of interracial couples and multiracial children.
“Our generation is so great at having open conversation and is willing to unlearn certain things that we were taught when we were younger,” said Ms. Trataros, 30, whose father was Greek and mother is Jamaican.
She remembers not being able to date a white boy she liked in high school because he wasn’t allowed to bring home a Black girl. But she thinks there’s less of that kind of pressure on teens of all races today. And access to social media, she said, has made it easier for biracial and multiracial people to see others who look like them, to claim their identities with pride and to connect with one another.
Ms. Trataros said that though her parents were loving and supportive, talking about race and social justice was a taboo in her broader family, which sometimes made her feel like an outsider in her own family.
In recent years she has distanced herself from some white family members who aren’t willing to engage in conversations about racism and social justice.
“It hurts,” she said, “but I’m not surprised at the same time.”
Charlie Smart contributed reporting.
8. America once won its wars. Now it just leaves them
I have to disagree with one assessment by the author rearing political risk to the administration. Despite the fact that the previous administration supported withdrawal and actually initiated the process, I think the current administration's political opponents will spin the debacle into a "Blame Biden" narrative. Just saying.
Excerpts:
Nevertheless, history offers another possibility.
A rapid takeover of the country by the Taliban, with the subsequent persecution of women and domestic opponents of the regime, may well produce a backlash among millions of Americans who follow foreign policy only episodically and when dramatic events occur.
As much as it might seem that Americans today want to stop their “endless wars,” the humiliation, repression and carnage involved in a Taliban triumph may well cast a profound and damaging shadow over the entire Biden presidency.
America once won its wars. Now it just leaves them
US used to finish its wars decisively with the complete surrender of enemy forces and a sense of total victory. No longer
As headlines proclaim the “end” of “America’s longest war,” President Joe Biden’s withdrawal of the remaining US military personnel from Afghanistan is being covered by some in the news media as though it means the end of the conflict – or even means peace – in Afghanistan. It most certainly does not.
Disengagement from an armed conflict is common US practice in recent decades – since the 1970s, the country’s military has simply left Vietnam, Iraq and now Afghanistan. But for much of the country’s history, Americans won their wars decisively, with the complete surrender of enemy forces and the home front’s perception of total victory.
A clear US victory in the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 let Americans think they had won the War of 1812. Image: US Library of Congress / The Conversation
A history of triumph
The American Revolution, of course, was the country’s first successful war, creating the nation.
That disillusionment led to the strident campaigns to prevent the US from intervening in World War II, with the slogan “America First.” When the US did enter the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt demanded the “unconditional surrender” of both Germany and Japan.
Lasting connections
The US stayed in those defeated nations not with the express purpose of rebuilding them, but rather as part of the post-war effort to contain the expanding influence of its former ally, the Soviet Union.
Nuclear weapons on both sides made all-out war between the superpowers unthinkable, but more limited conflicts were possible. Over the five decades of the Cold War, the US fought at arm’s length against the Soviets in Korea and Vietnam, with outcomes shaped as much by domestic political pressures as by foreign policy concerns.
The evacuation of Saigon in 1975 after the North Vietnamese victory was an iconic embarrassment for the US. Photo: Bettmann via Getty Images / The Conversation
A humbling loss
But all the peace agreement had really done was create what historians have called a “decent interval,” a two-year period in which South Vietnam could continue to exist as an independent country before North Vietnam rearmed and invaded.
But the speed of the North Vietnamese victory in 1975, symbolized by masses seeking helicopter evacuations from the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon, revealed the embarrassment of American defeat.
The postwar flight of millions of Vietnamese made “peace with honor” an empty slogan, hollowed further by the millions murdered in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge, who overthrew the US-supported government as troops withdrew from Southeast Asia.
The choice to withdraw
President George H W Bush thought the decisive American victory in the Persian Gulf War in February 1991 “kicked the Vietnam syndrome,” meaning that Americans were overcoming their reluctance to use military force in defense of their interests.
However, Bush’s 90% popularity at the end of that war faded quickly, as Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein remained in power and the US economic recession took the spotlight. One bumper sticker in the 1992 presidential campaign said, “Saddam Hussein has a job. Do you?”
Head of the US Central Command, General Kenneth McKenzie, speaks during a press conference at the former Resolute Support headquarters in the US embassy compound in Kabul on July 25, 2021. Photo: AFP / Sajjad Hussain
Nevertheless, history offers another possibility.
A rapid takeover of the country by the Taliban, with the subsequent persecution of women and domestic opponents of the regime, may well produce a backlash among millions of Americans who follow foreign policy only episodically and when dramatic events occur.
As much as it might seem that Americans today want to stop their “endless wars,” the humiliation, repression and carnage involved in a Taliban triumph may well cast a profound and damaging shadow over the entire Biden presidency.
This story originally appeared on The Conversation website and is republished with permission. To see the original, please click here.
9. The U.S. Sea Services (Navy, Marines, Coast Guard) Are Preparing for Great Power War
The title of Professor Holmes' essay gets it right. There is a difference between great power competition and great power war.
He concludes with advice we should heed:
So once the maneuver reaches its end next week, naval leaders should critique their approach to designing and conducting it as penetratingly as they critique the sea services’ operational performance in it.
Ruthless self-criticism is a must—just as it was in imperial Germany, and for a long-dead American admiral. War will be even more unsparing.
The U.S. Sea Services (Navy, Marines, Coast Guard) Are Preparing for Great Power War
Its ulterior goal is to make a statement about American power, namely that the sea services can manage multiple challenges posed by the likes of Russia, China, and Iran. The services will try to make believers out of potential foes the United States wants to deter, as well as allies and friends it wants to hearten to stand against these predators.
The basic idea animating the newfangled operating concepts is that the sea services need to spread out and conscript geography to deny a hostile fleet control of the sea and ultimately win control for America and its allies. Concentrating too much of the U.S. fleet’s combat power in a few large ships means that hostile action can nullify a major percentage of the fleet’s fighting prowess by knocking out a single aircraft carrier, cruiser, or destroyer. But by dispersing combat power among swarms of lighter, cheaper warships and warplanes, along with small missile-armed units perched on Pacific islands, sea-service chieftains can field a more resilient force—a force that can battle on to victory despite losing one or a few vessels.
That’s the idea, anyway.
Subjecting these concepts to the stern test of reality is imperative. Distributed operations depend on effective communications and coordination among units that are widely separated from one another in space. That means connecting them using networks that harness the electromagnetic spectrum. But command-and-control networks are a key potential frailty in these concepts as much as they’re an asset. For example, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has devised a concept known as “systems-destruction warfare” that envisions targeting whatever bonds a distributed enemy force together.
Networks in particular.
If the PLA can disrupt U.S. networks, it will have split the U.S. force into isolated clots of combat power it can overwhelm one by one. In effect the idea is to put China’s foes in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation. If U.S. forces mass in space for action, reducing their reliance on the electromagnetic spectrum, they expose themselves to concentrated PLA air or missile attacks. If they disperse in space to avoid the brunt of PLA action, systems-destruction warfare aims to cut the connective tissue that makes a U.S. fleet a cohesive fighting force. Putting adversaries in a hopeless position is a time-tested way to prevail in armed conflict. The victor might not even have to fight if it appears invincible in peacetime.
Suffice it to say that figuring out how to blunt and overcome China’s way of war is a matter of extreme urgency for the Pentagon.
For the latest wisdom on wargames in general and Large Scale Exercise 2021 in particular, why not look back a century or two? Prussian soldier-theorist Carl von Clausewitz pronounces a tepid verdict on peacetime maneuvers, calling them “a feeble substitute for the real thing.” Yet he hastens to add that “they can give an army an advantage over others whose training is confined to routine, mechanical drill.” How well—and how realistically—competitors train in peacetime biases their prospects toward success or failure in wartime.
Therein lies the rub. It’s hard to simulate the climate of war—a climate pervaded by chance, danger, and stark passions such as rage, fear, and spite—when participants know they’re operating in a controlled environment where no enemy will rain down fire on their heads. In other words, exercises have a canned quality that’s largely unavoidable. Still, says Clausewitz, it is possible to design them to “train officers’ judgment, common sense, and resolution” so that real-world battle will not “amaze and confuse” them. They will have some acquaintanceship with the climate of war. And some is better than none.
Rear Admiral Bradley Fiske took a less lukewarm view of wargames than did Clausewitz. A Spanish-American War veteran, Fiske was a U.S. Navy engineering prodigy. In 1942 the New Yorker described him as “one of the notable naval inventors of all time,” having “found time to invent a hundred and thirty-odd improvements to naval equipment” while still shouldering the duties expected of naval officers of his day.
Admiral Fiske discerned two chief determinants of wargames’ efficacy. One, a culture founded on the scientific method fosters the free play of ideas. Argument clashes with counterargument until a synthesis of ideas points the way ahead. He was much taken with the imperial German approach to naval development. The scientific habit of mind was baked into German Navy culture. In his best-known work, The Navy as a Fighting Machine (1916), Fiske hailed German leaders for using Kriegspiele—elaborate and frequent wargames—to design an imperial fleet fit for the times and the major opponent, Great Britain’s Royal Navy.
German fleet designers played “numberless war games” according to Fiske. From these experiments on the game floor, mariners and their political overseers determined “the naval strategy best adapted to Germany’s needs—not only in matters of general principle, not only as to tactics, training, education, cooperation with the army, and the size of fleet required to carry out the policy of the nation—but also as to the composition of the fleet, relative proportions of vessels of the various types, and the characteristics of each type.” Games were enormously beneficial.
But science is a culture of doubt. The science is never settled in politics or warfare, fields of endeavor where dynamism is the watchword. Navies should never accept the results of wargames without question or consider the results permanent—even if verified in real-world trials. For German leaders it was crucial to put ideas to the test before embracing them. That meant reducing ideas generated through gaming to engineering and subjecting ships and weaponry to field trials. As Fiske observes, “experimental work, no matter how promising or alluring, must be recognized as of unproved and doubtful value; and no scheme, plan, or doctrine must be incorporated in the naval machine, or allowed to pose as otherwise than experimental, until successful trials shall have put it beyond the experimental stage.”
A scientific cast of mind behooves the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard as they flex new concepts and technologies today—just as it profited the German Navy in Kriegspiele a century ago.
And two, culture is a product of leadership. Top leadership that refrains from imposing its views on subordinates—and fettering their autonomy of thought—is crucial to an inquisitive culture. German naval overseers set the tone for the service by remaining humble and self-restrained. They not just tolerated but stoked free-range debate among inventive subordinates. They refused to tolerate slipshod game design, but they also refused to use their authority to bias Kriegspiele toward outcomes they preferred on personal or institutional grounds. “Nothing was left to chance; nothing was decided by guessing; no one man’s dictum was accepted,” reports Fiske.
Enlightened senior leadership is central to fruitful gaming. That’s an insight as compelling in 2021 as in 1916.
It’s also possible to detect a warning in Fiske’s writings. A navy that astutely combines leadership with culture can stage a leap from backwardness to the forefront of marine affairs. Culture is a stubborn thing. A newcomer to naval warfare—imperial Germany or Japan in Fiske’s day, or Communist China today—can surpass established powers because it isn’t bound by a seafaring culture of long standing. It can start afresh, fitting itself to the times and circumstances, where an established power must struggle against ingrained customs and practices that hamper efforts to keep pace with the times. Maintains Fiske, “a young and vigorous individual or organization, endowed with proper energy and mentality, can appropriate whatever is valuable for its purposes from its elders, and reject whatever those elders have had fastened on them by circumstances or tradition, and develop a superior existence.”
Beware, America.
Fiske seemed to believe wargames’ chief benefits were economy and speed. They were affordable and quick whereas constructing an experimental fleet would be not just forbiddingly expensive but slow. “The province of the game-board is merely to try out on a very small scale, under proper conventions or agreements, things that could not be tried out otherwise, except at great expense, and very slowly; to afford a medium, halfway between actual trials with big ships and mere unaided reasoning, for arriving at correct conclusions.” Experimentation would lumber along at frightful expense if it meant building squadrons of ships to vet concepts.
180711-N-N0101-368.LAKE MICHIGAN (July 11, 2018) The future littoral combat ship USS Wichita (LCS 13) conducts acceptance trials, which are the last significant milestone before a ship is delivered to the Navy. LCS-13 is a fast, agile, focused-mission platform designed for operation in near-shore environments as well as the open-ocean. It is designed to defeat asymmetric threats such as mines, quiet diesel submarines and fast surface craft. (U.S. Navy photo courtesy of Lockheed Martin/Released)
Games are cheap by contrast.
They’re also iterative. Says Fiske, “the partial advantage of the game-board over the occurrences of actual war, for the purpose of studying strategy, lies largely in its ability to permit a number of trials very quickly; the trials starting either with identical situations, or with certain changes in conditions.” Learning progresses swiftly when one round of gaming cascades into the next into the next.
Large Scale Exercise 2021 is a crucible for ratifying—or amending, or discarding—new ideas and hardware. Let’s hope the sea services made good use of cheap, speedy, iterative wargames before submitting Distributed Maritime Operations, Littoral Operations in a Contested Environment, and Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations to high-seas trials. And let’s hope they manage to replicate the climate of war. Whether they can is open to question. Clausewitz and Fiske might blanch at the exercise’s hybrid, or “synthetic” nature. Many of the players are present at scenes of simulated combat; many are not. For example, the cruiser USS San Jacinto is taking part in “North Atlantic” operations while moored in Norfolk, Virginia. An overlay of artificiality is possible if not probable.
111114-N-KD852-268 SAN DIEGO (Nov. 14, 2011) Sailors and Marines man the rails aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Makin Island (LHD 8) as the ship departs San Diego on a regularly scheduled deployment in support of the Navy’s Maritime Strategy. This will be the maiden deployment for Makin Island, the Navy’s newest amphibious assault ship and the only U.S. Navy ship with a hybrid electric propulsion system. By using this unique propulsion system, the Navy expects to see fuel savings of more than $250 million during the ship’s lifecycle, proving the Navy’s commitment to energy awareness and conservation. (U.S. Navy photo by Chief Mass Communication Specialist John Lill/Released)
So once the maneuver reaches its end next week, naval leaders should critique their approach to designing and conducting it as penetratingly as they critique the sea services’ operational performance in it.
Ruthless self-criticism is a must—just as it was in imperial Germany, and for a long-dead American admiral. War will be even more unsparing.
James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and a Nonresident Fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation & Future Warfare, U.S. Marine Corps University. The views voiced here are his alone.
10. The Right Way to Split China and Russia
Marriage? I assumed they were just courting and dating (and hopefully either having a one night stand or perhaps just "friends with benefits").
I certainly agree with the idea of 'splitting an alliance". (As Sun Tzu said: " Next best is to disrupt his alliances by diplomacy.")
With all due respect to the brilliant Professor Kupchan, can we still be focused on "managing China's rise peacefully and successfully?" Isn't that what we have failed to do over the past few decades? China certainly does not want to be "mangaged" by us.
Conclusion:
U.S. efforts to manage China’s rise successfully and peacefully will be significantly advanced if China faces strategic pressure on more than its maritime flank and can no longer count on Russia’s steady military and diplomatic support. Currently, China is able to focus on expansion in the western Pacific and farther afield in part because it has a relatively free hand along its continental borders and enjoys Moscow’s backing. The United States would be wise to invest in a long-term strategy to change that equation by helping put China’s relationship with Russia back into play. Doing so would be an important step toward building a pluralistic multipolar order and heading off Beijing’s potential efforts to construct a Sinocentric international system.
The Right Way to Split China and Russia
Washington Should Help Moscow Leave a Bad Marriage
As Washington searches for an effective strategy to manage China’s rise, U.S. President Joe Biden is right to lean heavily on one of the United States’ clearest advantages: its global network of alliances. But even as Biden builds a coalition to tame Beijing, he also needs to work the other side of the equation by weakening China’s own international partnerships. He can’t stop China’s rise, but he can limit its influence by trying to lure away from China its main collaborator: Russia.
The Chinese-Russian partnership significantly augments the challenge that China’s rise poses to the United States. Teamwork between Beijing and Moscow amplifies China’s ambition and reach in many regions of the world, in the battle for control of global institutions, and in the worldwide contest between democracy and illiberal alternatives. Piggybacking on China’s growing power allows Russia to punch above its weight on the global stage and energizes Moscow’s campaign to subvert democratic governance in Europe and the United States.
The bond between China and Russia appears to be strong—but there are cracks beneath the surface. It is an asymmetrical relationship, one that pairs an ascendant, confident, and self-regarding China with a stagnant and insecure Russia. That asymmetry gives Biden an opening: to put distance between the two countries, his administration should exploit Russia’s own misgivings about its status as China’s junior partner. By helping Russia redress the vulnerabilities that its relations with China put in stark relief—in effect, helping Russia help itself—Biden can encourage Moscow to drift away from Beijing. Splitting Russia from China would check both countries’ ambitions, making it easier for the United States and its democratic partners to defend their liberal values and institutions and to shape a peaceful international system in an increasingly multipolar and ideologically diverse world.
AN UNEQUAL PARTNERSHIP
China and Russia may be in a marriage of convenience, but it is a very effective one. China generally goes it alone on the international stage, preferring transactional and arm’s-length relationships with other countries. Yet it makes an exception for Russia. Today, Beijing and Moscow have forged a relationship that is “alliance-like,” to use Russian President Vladimir Putin’s term. It encompasses deepening economic ties, including efforts to reduce the U.S. dollar’s dominance in the global economy; the joint use of digital technology to control and surveil Chinese and Russian citizens and sow dissent inside the world’s democracies; and cooperation on defense, such as joint military exercises and the transfer of advanced weapons systems and technology from Russia to China.
Russia’s tilt toward China has accompanied its estrangement from the West, which deepened with the extension of NATO’s eastern frontier to Russia’s western border. Moscow’s outreach to Beijing intensified after the European Union and the United States imposed sanctions on Russia following its 2014 annexation of Crimea and military intervention in eastern Ukraine. Beijing has reciprocated, leaning toward Moscow to magnify China’s influence amid mounting economic and strategic rivalry with the United States. Since Xi Jinping became China’s president in 2013, he and Putin have met or spoken on the phone around 40 times.
The Chinese-Russian relationship is grounded in a realist view of the world, and both countries reap mutual and individual benefits from it. Diplomatic teamwork advances their unifying goal of resisting what they see as the West’s encroaching geopolitical and ideological ambition. The partnership allows Russia to focus its strategic attention on its western frontier and China to focus on its maritime flank. Russia gets substantial revenue from energy and arms sales to China, and China fuels the expansion of its economy and boosts its military capability with the help of Russian weaponry.
The relationship between China and Russia has begun to resemble the close Chinese-Soviet coupling of the 1950s.
But the two countries are not natural partners; historically, they have been competitors, and the sources of their long-running rivalry are hardly gone for good. The Kremlin is acutely sensitive to power realities, and it knows full well that a sluggish Russia of some 150 million people is no match for a dynamic China of nearly one and a half billion people. China’s economy is roughly ten times as large as that of Russia, and China is in an entirely different league when it comes to innovation and technology. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has made deep inroads into Russia’s traditional sphere of influence in Central Asia, and the Kremlin is justifiably worried that China also has designs on the Arctic region.
That Russia still cleaves to China despite such asymmetries is a potent sign of Moscow’s disaffection from the West. Yet the imbalance will only grow over time and will become an ever-larger source of discomfort for the Kremlin. Washington needs to capitalize on that discomfort and convince Russia that it would be better off geopolitically and economically if it hedged against China and tilted toward the West.
Such a gambit will not be easy to pull off. Putin has long strengthened his grip at home by playing to Russian nationalism and standing up to the West. He and his apparatchiks might prove too set in their ways and unwilling to countenance a foreign policy that is not predicated on such posturing. Accordingly, the Biden administration has to approach Moscow with eyes wide open; as it tries to lure Russia westward, it cannot acquiesce to the Kremlin’s aggressive behavior or allow Putin to exploit Washington’s extended hand.
Biden’s challenge will be more complicated than that faced by U.S. President Richard Nixon in the 1970s, when he reached out to China and succeeded in roiling Chinese-Soviet relations and weakening the communist bloc. By the time of Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, Beijing and Moscow had already parted ways. Nixon had it easy; his task was to build on, not initiate, a rift. Biden faces the higher hurdle of prying apart an intact partnership—which is why his best bet is to stoke latent tensions in the Chinese-Russian relationship.
THE ODD COUPLE
China and Russia have long competed over territory and status. The land border between the two countries currently runs more than 2,600 miles, and their disputes over territory, influence in the border regions, and trade go back centuries. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, China held the upper hand and generally prevailed. The tables turned in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with Russia and other European powers resorting to a mix of military predation and coercive diplomacy to wrest control of territory from China and impose exploitative terms of trade.
The coming to power of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949 cleared the way for a historically unprecedented period of strategic cooperation between China and the Soviet Union. Building on their shared commitment to communism, the two countries concluded a formal alliance in 1950. Thousands of Soviet scientists and engineers moved to China, sharing industrial and military technology and even helping the Chinese develop a nuclear weapons program. During the Korean War, the Soviets provided China with supplies, military advisers, and air cover. Bilateral trade mounted quickly, representing 50 percent of China’s foreign commerce by the end of the decade. Chinese leader Mao Zedong asserted that the two countries had “a close and brotherly relationship.” Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev called China’s communist revolution “the most outstanding event in world history.”
Looking like Xi’s sidekick does not play well at home for Putin.
But the alliance soon eroded as quickly as it had come together. Mao and Khrushchev began to part ways in 1958. Their falling-out stemmed in part from ideological differences. Mao sought to mobilize the peasantry, stoking revolutionary fervor and social upheaval at home and abroad. Khrushchev, in contrast, supported ideological moderation, industrialized socialism, and political stability at home and abroad. The two countries began to compete for leadership of the communist bloc, with Mao remarking that Khrushchev “is afraid that the Communist parties . . . of the world will not believe in them, but us.”
Such differences were magnified by China’s discomfort with power asymmetries that decidedly favored the Soviet Union. In a 1957 speech, Mao accused the Soviet Union of “big-power chauvinism.” The following year, he complained to the Soviet ambassador in Beijing that “you think you are in a position to control us.” In Mao’s estimation, the Russians considered China “a backward nation.” Khrushchev, for his part, blamed Mao for the split. After Chinese and Indian troops exchanged fire across their contested border in 1959, Khrushchev commented that Beijing was “craving for war like a cock for a fight.” At at a gathering of party heads from the communist bloc, he derided Mao as “an ultra-leftist, an ultra-dogmatist.”
This rupture between the two leaders resulted in the unraveling of Chinese-Soviet collaboration. In 1960, the Soviets withdrew their military experts from China and broke off strategic cooperation. In the two years that followed, bilateral trade plummeted by some 40 percent. The border was remilitarized, and fighting that erupted in 1969 almost triggered a full-scale war. In the early 1970s, Nixon capitalized on and exacerbated the rift by reaching out to China, a process that culminated in the normalization of U.S.-Chinese relations in 1979. It would not be until after the collapse of the Soviet Union that relations between Moscow and Beijing would recover.
TRYING TO MAKE NICE
Following the end of the Cold War, China and Russia began to patch things up. Over the course of the 1990s, the two countries resolved a number of remaining border disputes, and in 2001, they signed the Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation. They gradually deepened military cooperation and trade ties, with the first oil pipeline from Russia to China completed in 2010. Beijing and Moscow also began to align their positions at the United Nations and collaborated on initiatives meant to counter Western influence, such as establishing the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in 2001 and the so-called BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) economic grouping in 2009.
These incremental steps toward bilateral cooperation deepened and quickened under Xi and Putin, fueled by Moscow’s breach with the West following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the growing rivalry between the United States and China. In recent years, the relationship between China and Russia has begun to resemble the close Chinese-Soviet coupling of the 1950s. Building on the military cooperation that began in the 1990s, Russia has been helping China address its top defense priorities by providing jet fighters, state-of-the-art air defense systems, antiship missiles, and submarines. Some 70 percent of China’s arms imports have come from Russia in recent years. The sale of oil and gas to China buoys Russia’s economy and reduces China’s dependence on more vulnerable maritime supply routes. Russia now rivals Saudi Arabia as China’s top oil supplier, and China has replaced Germany as Russia’s top trading partner. Under Xi and Putin, China and Russia have teamed up to counter liberal norms in international bodies and propagate a brand of governance based on autocratic rule and state control of information platforms. In many parts of the world, Russian disinformation campaigns and intelligence operations are combining with the coercive leverage afforded by Chinese investment to support illiberal regimes.
This cooperation across multiple dimensions is impressive and consequential. But it rests on a fragile base and lacks a foundation of mutual trust—as did the Chinese-Soviet partnership of the early Cold War. In the 1950s, close ties between China and the Soviet Union were highly personalized, making them vulnerable to the vagaries of the relationship between Mao and Khrushchev. Today, Chinese-Russian cooperation depends heavily on the unpredictable relationship between two individuals, Xi and Putin. During the Cold War’s first decade, Moscow sought stability at home and abroad while Beijing favored continuous revolution. Today, Beijing banks on domestic and international stability to speed its rise, whereas Moscow flexes its muscles beyond its borders to foster disorder. During the 1950s, Moscow’s dominance of the partnership bred resentment in Beijing. Today, China enjoys the upper hand and stark power asymmetries rankle Russia.
The power gap is particularly hard for the Kremlin to swallow; looking like Xi’s sidekick does not play well at home for Putin, whose political brand rests on his bid to restore Russia to great-power status. But the disparity between the two countries is glaring and growing. Trade with China accounts for more than 15 percent of all of Russia’s foreign trade, whereas trade with Russia represents around one percent of China’s foreign commerce. And this imbalance is mounting as China’s high-tech sector advances. In Russia’s Far East, some six million Russians live across the border from roughly 110 million Chinese in the three provinces of Manchuria, and the region is becoming increasingly dependent on Chinese goods, services, and labor. Dmitri Trenin, a prominent Russian analyst, has gone so far as to speculate about a potential “Chinese takeover” of the region.
Russia has aided and abetted China’s military modernization—perhaps at its own expense.
It has been a long time since the two countries have openly quarreled over territory and influence in the border regions. But nationalism and ethnocentrism run deep in both political cultures and could reignite long-standing territorial disputes. The South China Morning Post recently ran a commentary arguing that “Xi’s courtship of Moscow makes no sense because it ignores the animosity that has defined Sino-Russian relations since the . . . 17th century.” And anti-Chinese sentiment in Russia continues to get traction—stoked, as elsewhere, by COVID-19’s Chinese origins. But such biases long predate the pandemic, sustained in part by the same racial prejudices that Mao complained about six decades ago.
Russia’s growing economic dependence on China leaves it increasingly exposed to Beijing’s coercive leverage and deepens Russia’s addiction to exporting fossil fuels, the sale of which represents over two-thirds of Russia’s export income and one-third of the federal budget. This hardly represents a good bet on the future as the world turns toward renewable sources of energy. China’s BRI is spreading investment and infrastructure across Eurasia, but the initiative mostly circumvents Russia, providing it few benefits. Only a handful of new border crossings have opened in recent years, and Chinese investment in Russia has been paltry.
The Russians envisage linking their own Eurasian Economic Union to the BRI, but the two systems compete with more than complement each other. In 2017, the EAEU proposed 40 transportation projects to China—and Beijing rejected all of them. Russia’s foreign minister was a no-show at a high-level meeting on the BRI last year, indicating, according to Ankur Shah, an analyst who focuses on Chinese-Russian relations, that Moscow “no longer feels obliged to bow before Beijing’s Belt and Road.” China has effectively replaced Russia as the dominant economic power in Central Asia, and Beijing’s interest in tapping into economic development and new shipping lanes in the high north—what China calls “the Arctic Silk Road”—poses a clear challenge to Russia’s strategy in the region. China’s plans for the Arctic ostensibly complement Russian ones, but as with the EAEU and the BRI, the competing visions stoke unease in Moscow.
Meanwhile, the defense relationship between China and Russia has lost some of its earlier momentum. The Chinese military has benefited from transfers of Russian arms and weapons technology, and Moscow has welcomed the resulting revenue and military cooperation. Yet advances in China’s own defense industry—made possible in part by Chinese companies’ theft of Russian weapons technology—are making China less reliant on Russian imports. China’s acquisition of intermediate-range missiles (ostensibly intended to counter the United States’ forward presence) also poses a hypothetical threat to Russian territory. And Moscow is no doubt closely monitoring China’s expanding arsenal of intercontinental missiles and the construction of new launch silos in western China. Russia has aided and abetted China’s military modernization—perhaps at its own expense.
HELP RUSSIA HELP ITSELF
If Russia is to be drawn westward, it will result not from Washington’s overtures or altruism but from the Kremlin’s cold reassessment of how best to pursue its long-term self-interest. An offer from Washington to reduce tensions with the West will not succeed on its own; after all, Putin relies on such tensions to legitimate his iron political grip. Instead, the challenge facing Washington is to change the Kremlin’s broader strategic calculus by demonstrating that more cooperation with the West can help Russia redress the mounting vulnerabilities arising from its close partnership with China.
Washington’s first step should be to drop its “democracy versus autocracy” framing of U.S. strategy. The United States and its ideological partners of course need to ensure that they can deliver for their citizens and outperform illiberal alternatives. But casting the contest in overtly ideological terms serves only to push Russia and China closer together. Instead, the Biden administration should have a candid discussion with Moscow about areas in which the long-term national interests of the United States and those of Russia overlap, including when it comes to China. To be sure, Russia and the United States remain at odds on many fronts. But rather than settling for continued estrangement, Washington should try to find common ground with Moscow on a wide range of issues, including strategic stability, cybersecurity, and climate change. This dialogue, even in the absence of rapid progress, would signal to Moscow that it has options other than alignment with China.
The Biden administration should press its democratic allies to have similar conversations with Russia; they, too, can probe areas of mutual interest and highlight how China’s growing strength comes at the expense of Russia’s influence and security. Given India’s long-standing ties to Russia and its skeptical view of Chinese intentions, New Delhi may be particularly adept at driving home to Moscow the merits of maintaining strategic autonomy and the potential perils of having too close a relationship with Beijing. To encourage India to help pull Russia away from China, Washington should waive sanctions that are currently pending against India for its purchase of Russia’s S-400 air defense system.
The United States and its allies should also help reduce Russia’s growing economic dependence on China. Although China is now Russia’s biggest single trading partner, Russia’s trade with the EU is far larger than its trade with China, representing almost 40 percent of Russia’s foreign commerce. Biden’s decision to effectively greenlight the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which will carry Russian gas to Germany, was a wise investment in encouraging deeper trade links between Russia and Europe. And although Western sanctions against Russia were a necessary response to Moscow’s aggressive behavior, they have had the effect of pushing Russia further into China’s economic embrace. Accordingly, the United States and its partners should think twice before introducing new sanctions and should lay out a clear set of steps that Russia can take to persuade Washington to scale back existing ones, including committing to a diplomatic resolution to the conflict in eastern Ukraine and reining in Russia-based cyberattacks on U.S. networks.
Washington’s first step should be to drop its “democracy versus autocracy” framing of U.S. strategy.
The United States and its partners should also indicate that they are prepared to help Russia combat climate change and transition its economy away from its dependence on fossil fuels. In the near term, that task entails sharing best practices for capturing methane, assisting with the development of green alternatives to the production of oil and gas, and taking other steps to limit Russian emission of greenhouse gases. In the longer term, the United States should help Russia transition to a knowledge economy—a step that Putin has never taken, to the clear detriment of his country. China rarely shares technology; it is a taker, not a giver. The United States should seize the opportunity to share technological know-how with Russia to facilitate its transition to a greener, more diversified economy.
The United States should build on the conversation about strategic stability that Biden and Putin launched at their meeting in Geneva in June. Russia’s violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty prompted the United States to withdraw from it in 2019. The United States and Russia now need to find a solution to their own looming missile race and also push China to accept a follow-on agreement that would put limits on China’s large and diverse arsenal of intermediate-range missiles. Even if a tripartite pact proved unreachable, trying to negotiate one would likely illuminate fissures between Moscow and Beijing, given China’s traditional reluctance to enter into arms control agreements. Russia also has a vested interest in pulling China into a broader conversation with the United States about nonproliferation—one that addresses nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea, where U.S. and Russian interests overlap.
The Arctic is another area where Washington can help Moscow see the strategic downsides of abetting Beijing’s growing ambitions. Climate change is dramatically increasing the accessibility of the high north, prompting new Russian interest in the region’s economic and strategic importance and stirring Russian discomfort with China’s declaration that it is a “near-Arctic power.” Washington and Moscow hardly see eye-to-eye on the region, but through both the Arctic Council and bilateral dialogue, they should develop a more robust set of rules of the road governing economic and military activity in the Arctic and addressing their mutual concerns about Chinese designs.
Finally, Washington should encourage Moscow to help check China’s growing influence in developing areas, including Central Asia, the broader Middle East, and Africa. In most regions, Russian policy regularly runs counter to U.S. interests; Moscow still sees Washington as its main competitor. Yet as Beijing continues to extend its economic and strategic reach, Moscow will come to see that it is China, not the United States, that regularly undercuts Russian influence in many of these areas. Washington should make that case, helping bring Russian and U.S. interests into greater alignment and creating opportunities for coordinating regional strategy.
Given the antagonism and mistrust that currently plague relations between Russia and the United States, it will take time and purposeful diplomacy for Washington to change Moscow’s strategic calculus. Russia may well stick with its current course—perhaps until Putin eventually leaves office. But in light of the impressive pace and scope of China’s geopolitical ascent, now is the time to begin sowing the seeds of a Chinese-Russian split, especially among the younger cadre of Russian officials and thinkers who will take the reins after Putin departs the scene.
U.S. efforts to manage China’s rise successfully and peacefully will be significantly advanced if China faces strategic pressure on more than its maritime flank and can no longer count on Russia’s steady military and diplomatic support. Currently, China is able to focus on expansion in the western Pacific and farther afield in part because it has a relatively free hand along its continental borders and enjoys Moscow’s backing. The United States would be wise to invest in a long-term strategy to change that equation by helping put China’s relationship with Russia back into play. Doing so would be an important step toward building a pluralistic multipolar order and heading off Beijing’s potential efforts to construct a Sinocentric international system.
11. What The New Census Data Shows About Race Depends On How You Look At It
Please go to the link to see the two interesting graphics.
What The New Census Data Shows About Race Depends On How You Look At It
NPR · by Connie Hanzhang Jin · August 13, 2021
Over the past decade, the United States continued to grow more racially and ethnically diverse, according to the results of last year's national head count that the U.S. Census Bureau released this week.
Since the 2000 count, participants have been able to check off more than one box when answering the race question on census forms. But breakdowns of the country's racial and ethnic makeup often don't reflect a multiracial population that has increased by 276% since the 2010 census. They focus instead on racial groups that are made up of people who marked only one box, with multiracial people sometimes lumped together in a catchall group.
Using the new 2020 census results, here's what a breakdown with a catchall group for multiracial people looks like:
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But a different kind of breakdown can show how racial groups are becoming more heterogeneous. This graphic shows the number of people who said they identified with each race, regardless of how many races they chose. For example, if a person said they identified as Black and Asian, they would appear in both racial categories.
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And there are other ways, of course, to slice the data, including incorporating people who identify as Hispanic or Latino — and who, according to federal standards, can be of any race — into the different racial groups.
To make matters more complicated, research by the Census Bureau has shown that how some people self-report their racial and ethnic identity can change from census to census.
Any analysis of this data represents a different way of understanding race and ethnicity in the U.S., where count after count people have made clear that their identities often cannot fit neatly into check boxes on census forms.
NPR · by Connie Hanzhang Jin · August 13, 2021
12. The Kremlin’s Malign Influence Inside the US
The Kremlin’s Malign Influence Inside the US
This report examines the scale of Russian influence on public opinion, political dynamics and business practices of the United States; assessing specific threats to US national security and to the stability of its political institutions, financial, technological and consumer markets stemming from the Russian presence; as well as offering policy recommendations for US decision-makers.
The report’s chapters take a closer look at:
- The Kremlin’s Interference in the US Energy Sector
- Investments in Critical Infrastructure
- Russian Oligarchs’ Relationships with American Non-Profits
- Kremlin’s Cultivation ofAmerican Far-Right and Separatists
- Social Media Influence inside the United States.
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13. Opinion | Here are four concrete actions the U.S. should take immediately to help Afghan women activists
Opinion | Here are four concrete actions the U.S. should take immediately to help Afghan women activists
The Washington Post · by Opinion by Melanne Verveer and Tanya Henderson Today at 5:38 p.m. EDT · August 13, 2021
Melanne Verveer is executive director of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security and a former U.S. ambassador for Global Women’s Issues. Tanya Henderson is founder and executive director of Mina’s List.
H. hears she is next on the Taliban’s hit list of women activists. It is one of many death threats she has received — that’s why she fled her home in Herat and why we are identifying her by only the first letter of her last name. H. used to help implement U.S. programs to support Afghan women’s participation in society. She is in a safe house in Kabul and is desperately seeking a route out of Afghanistan.
The situation for women in Afghanistan grows more dire by the hour as the Taliban marches toward Kabul. Women are told they can’t leave their homes without a male guardian; some have been flogged in the streets; some have been killed. Hundreds of women journalists, activists and judges have been assassinated in recent years. Unless evacuated, many more are poised to become Taliban victims.
The United States is working on Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs) to protect Afghan interpreters and others who supported the U.S. mission. But women like H. also need our urgent attention.
The State Department announced an expansion of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) on Aug. 2 through a Priority 2 (P-2) designation. The new category provides at-risk Afghans who are not eligible for Special Immigrant Visas an opportunity to permanently resettle in the United States.
However, it remains almost impossible to access the Refugee Admissions Program.
The U.S. government justified its invasion of Afghanistan partly on the basis of women’s rights. We invested heavily in Afghan women to build a democratic society. We must ensure that the worst does not happen to our Afghan women allies.
The U.S. government should urgently take these four steps:
First, charter direct evacuation flights for Afghan women activists most imminently under threat. Already, too many have died in Taliban assassination campaigns.
U.S. refugee admissions guidelines require applicants and their eligible family members to relocate to a third country — at their own expense — before their cases can even begin to be processed. Visas are difficult for Afghan women activists to come by in the best of times. With the twin disasters of covid-19 and war now raging across Afghanistan, most countries have ceased offering visas altogether.
Some U.S. officials have suggested women go to the borders of neighboring countries to claim asylum. But the Taliban is rapidly seizing control of border crossings and closing major roadways. Asking Afghan women to make their way to the border is like leading lambs to a slaughter.
Second, direct a significant portion of the $1.125 billion appropriated for Afghan refugees in the emergency supplemental passed on July 30 to ensure the priority program is strongly implemented. This should include some of the $100 million that President Biden authorized for “persons at risk as a result of the situation in Afghanistan,” for livelihood assistance for women activists who manage to relocate.
Third, establish a special parole program for at-risk Afghan human rights defenders; women’s rights activists; and politicians, journalists and other highly visible women being targeted for their refusal to conform to Taliban-dictated gender norms.
Humanitarian parole, granted due to a compelling emergency or significant public benefit, can temporarily allow into the United States someone who is otherwise inadmissible. For some Afghan women activists, survival has become a matter of weeks — or days. Humanitarian parole can be applied for within Afghanistan; case reviews typically happen within two business days, and the typical three-month processing time can be shortened to days if the emergency situation warrants it.
Fourth, establish a high-level interagency refugee coordinator to manage refugee processing and relocation across the U.S. government and greatly increase processing capacity. The coordinator would manage implementation of refugee policy, including different types of visas and humanitarian parole. Current efforts lack not only processing capacity but also clear communication on what the new U.S. policies mean in practice.
Those Afghans who make it to the United States are often in severe distress. Upon arrival, they face disorganization and an uncertain future. All actors need to collectively mobilize and coordinate to ensure that Afghans can relocate swiftly and with dignity.
The Biden administration has prioritized gender equality and implementing the Women, Peace and Security law. Afghan women are the first real test. Someone needs to stand with those who risk their lives to stand for others. Shouldn’t it be the United States?
The Washington Post · by Opinion by Melanne Verveer and Tanya Henderson Today at 5:38 p.m. EDT · August 13, 2021
14. After the withdrawal: China’s interests in Afghanistan
A European perspective.
After the withdrawal: China’s interests in Afghanistan
ecfr.eu · by Janka Oertel, Andrew Small · August 5, 2021
The security situation in Afghanistan has been worsening since the United States and its European allies decided to withdraw from the decades-long mission in the country. Following conversations between Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Taliban leaders, many observers see an opportunity for China to enhance its influence in the region. ECFR’s Janka Oertel and Andrew Small discuss whether this assessment is correct, what China wants, and what all this means for Europe.
Janka Oertel: Just briefly, to bring everyone on the same page, what is the current development that we are seeing in Afghanistan after the US withdrawal?
Andrew Small: The situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating at worrying speed. The Taliban already controlled significant tracts of rural territory, but they have moved to take control of a number of border crossings, and stepped up their attacks on major cities. The United States is conducting airstrikes to halt the Taliban’s advances, but it is unclear how far even this will continue after the withdrawal is completed at the end of August. There appears to be little serious Taliban engagement with peace talks anymore, given that they see the opportunity to position themselves at least to wield the lion’s share of power in any political settlement or even to achieve an outright victory on the battlefield. Civilian deaths are rising, and the inevitable outflow of refugees has begun.
JO: And what does China make of this? Is this an opportunity – or actually a really bad development that is not in Beijing’s interest at all?
AS: China does not tend to perceive Afghanistan through the prism of opportunities; it is almost entirely about managing threats. The US presence was understood as a geopolitical threat, much like the Soviet military presence in the 1980s, but Beijing had grown to see it as the lesser of two evils. Pushing back Islamic militancy in China’s backyard and killing militants on China’s hit-list ranked above nebulous fears about how the United States might use bases there for strategic ‘containment’ purposes. Beijing certainly hoped that the US would withdraw from the region – but only after a peace deal had been brokered. China is now anxious on multiple counts. Its perennial concern, going back to the Taliban’s last time in power, is the potential for Afghanistan to become a safe haven for militant groups targeting China. Chinese economic and political interests in the wider region have grown considerably since then, though, and Beijing is also worried about the spillover effects in neighbouring countries, particularly Pakistan.
The Chinese government has long sought to reach agreements with the Taliban, largely focused on the question of their ties with Uyghur groups. The recent meeting between Mullah Baradar and Wang Yi in Tianjin was unusually well-publicised, but the two sides have been interacting with each other for a couple of decades. Nonetheless, although Beijing is pragmatic about the power realities in Afghanistan, it has always been uncomfortable with the Taliban’s ideological agenda. China wants to see them hemmed in by compromises with other political forces in the country, not resurgent after a military victory. The Chinese government fears the inspirational effect of their success in Afghanistan for militancy across the region, including the Pakistani Taliban.
China does not tend to perceive Afghanistan through the prism of opportunities; it is almost entirely about managing threats
Beijing is also concerned about the risks of entanglement in Afghanistan, which is seen as a strategic trap that has diminished the other great powers that have involved themselves too deeply. There are endless references to the “graveyard of empires” in Chinese analysis. So, while they see the necessity of taking on a more active political role to deal with the fallout of what is now underway, there is considerable wariness about being sucked in.
JO: But what about the often-touted commercial and economic interests that China has in Afghanistan?
AS: China certainly has substantial commercial and economic interests in the wider region, but they are minimal in Afghanistan itself. Its major investments there, the Aynak copper mine and the Amu Darya energy projects, have been in stasis for many years. There have been numerous discussions about Afghanistan’s involvement in the Belt and Road Initiative, including connections to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, but Beijing’s view has been that, in Afghanistan, stability has to precede serious new economic commitments. Beijing has also chosen not to build any cross-border infrastructure through the Wakhan Corridor, despite Afghan government requests, effectively leaving a physical buffer with its neighbour. If there is a permissive security and political environment in the country, then China would certainly take on a significant investment role – but it will be extremely cautious. Right now, it is very worried about recent attacks on Chinese nationals working on projects in Pakistan, not thinking about hair-raisingly risky new ventures in Afghanistan.
JO: How does all this relate to the situation in Xinjiang and China’s own narrative of terrorism in the region?
AS: The direct connections to Xinjiang are minimal. Virtually every attack in China itself has been entirely indigenous, not tied to international terror networks. The border is locked down and there are no plausible concerns about literal spillover from neighbouring Badakhshan. Any potential cross-border issues have tended to be focused on Central Asia and Pakistan, which is one of the main reasons we have seen a Chinese security presence by the Tajik border with Afghanistan. In the longer narrative, Chinese concerns about the East Turkestan Islamic Movement have tended to be vastly out of synch with the threat posed by any of the Uyghurs caught up in the militant networks in the region.
The picture has shifted in recent years, though. The civil war in Syria saw the Turkestan Islamic Party emerge as a more capable actor than any of its predecessor entities, and it has a presence in Afghanistan too. China has been concerned about the return of more battle-hardened fighters from northern Syria. Since the late 2000s, for reasons partly related to Xinjiang and partly related to Pakistan, China has also been targeted by various other militant and terrorist groups that had previously given it a pass. The Taliban – whatever commitments it makes to the Chinese government and however willing it is to turn a blind eye to the situation in Xinjiang – has engendered an environment in which many of these groups are likely to flourish. Even if it is implausible to expect attacks on the Chinese mainland, it is already clear that threats to soft Chinese targets in the region have grown.
JO: And, finally, what does all this mean for Europe? We are already seeing massive internal displacements and a spike in refugees leaving Afghanistan. Is this an opportunity, as often mentioned, to “cooperate with China” on a question of global concern or will this be left pretty much to the Europeans to deal with themselves?
AS: Evidently, for Europeans, the situation in Afghanistan brings back the spectre of large-scale refugee flows and everything that may follow from that politically. Afghans are already showing up in Turkey in greater numbers as they flee the violence and the potential consequences of a Taliban takeover of urban areas. Unsurprisingly, a number of European states would rather have seen a more graduated, conditions-based US withdrawal rather than the current scenario. Afghanistan is a rare issue where China’s interests and not just European but US interests too have been relatively well aligned. Beijing wants to see a stable political settlement there and, at different points, has played a helpful role on the reconciliation talks. China’s closest partner in the region, Pakistan, has been the Taliban’s chief host and backer, which gives them an additional avenue of influence, even if it’s not one they’ve always been willing or able to use effectively. In the coming period, though, Beijing will be tightly focused on securing their bilateral interests in Afghanistan and channelling their diplomatic energies in the region to deal with the fallout from current events. There will certainly be opportunities for European exchanges with China on Afghanistan. And the two sides are not pulling in different directions. But I wouldn’t expect Beijing to attach such a high priority to any active cooperation with Europe at present, given the nature of the issues at stake.
ecfr.eu · by Janka Oertel, Andrew Small · August 5, 2021
15. Census Shows a Nation That Resembles Its Future More Than Its Past
We need to continue to move forward and not background. There is no going back. There is no country in the world with such a diverse population. It is one of America's many strengths. We should embrace that.
Census Shows a Nation That Resembles Its Future More Than Its Past
news analysis
For Democrats, there was much to cheer in the growth of cities and suburbs. But Republicans, imperiled by the falling white population, are still well positioned for redistricting.
A group supporting President Biden’s campaign in San Antonio, where Hispanic residents now roughly equal non-Hispanic whites. Texas is on the cusp of becoming a true battleground state.Credit...Christopher Lee for The New York Times
By
Aug. 12, 2021
At first blush, Thursday’s release of census data held great news for Democrats. It painted a portrait of a considerably more urban and metropolitan nation, with increasingly Democratic metropolitan areas bustling with new arrivals and the rural, Republican heartland steadily losing residents.
It is a much less white nation, too, with the white non-Hispanic population for the first time dropping in absolute numbers, a plunge that exceeded most experts’ estimates, and the growth in the Latino population slightly exceeding forecasts.
But the census paints a picture of America as it is. And as it is, America is not very Democratic.
Besides the census, the other great source of data on American politics is the result of the 2020 election, which revealed a deeply and narrowly divided nation. Despite nearly the full decade of demographic shifts shown by the census, Joe Biden won the national vote by the same four-point margin that he won by as Barack Obama’s running mate eight years earlier — and with fewer votes in the Electoral College.
Democrats face great challenges in translating favorable demographic trends into electoral success, and the new census data may prove to be only the latest example. While the census shows that Democratic-leaning groups represent a growing share of the population, much of the population growth occurred in the Sun Belt, where Republicans still control the redistricting process. That gives them yet another chance to preserve their political power in the face of unfavorable demographic trends. And they are well prepared to do so.
The new data will be used by state legislatures and commissions to redraw electoral maps, with the potential to determine control of Congress and state legislatures across the country in next year’s midterm election.
Thursday’s release, the most detailed yet from the 2020 census, depicted a nation that increasingly seems to resemble its future more than its past. The non-Hispanic white share of the population fell to 57.8 percentage points, nearly two points lower than expected, as more Americans identified as multiracial. Vast swaths of the rural United States, including an outright majority of its counties, saw their populations shrink.
“Democrats have reason to be happy with this census data set,” said Dave Wasserman, House editor of the Cook Political Report, who cited the higher-than-expected population tallies in New York and Chicago and the steady growth of the nation’s Hispanic population.
Many Democrats had feared that Latino and urban voters would be badly undercounted amid the coronavirus pandemic and the Trump administration’s effort to ask about citizenship status.
It is still possible that the census undercounted Hispanics, but the results did not leave any obvious evidence that the count had gone awry. The Hispanic share of the population was in line with projections. New York City, the epicenter of the pandemic, showed unexpectedly strong population growth.
The surprising decline in the white and rural population is likely to bolster Democratic hopes that demographic shifts might help progressives secure a significant electoral advantage.
But the possibility that demographic changes would doom conservatives has loomed over American politics for more than a decade, helping to exacerbate conservative fears of immigration and even to motivate a wave of new laws intended to restrict access to voting. Tucker Carlson, the Fox News television show host, has repeatedly stoked racist fears of “white replacement,” warning his viewers that it is a Democratic electoral strategy.
Yet despite the seemingly favorable demographic portrait for Democrats depicted by the 2020 census, the 2020 election returned another closely divided result: a 50-50 Senate, one of the closest presidential elections in history, and a House majority so slender that it might be undone by the very data that Democrats were celebrating on Thursday.
The nation’s electoral system — which rewards flipping states and districts — has tended to mute the effect of demographic change. Many Democratic gains in vote margins have come in metropolitan areas, where Democratic candidates were already winning races, or in red states like Texas, where Democrats have made huge gains in presidential elections but haven’t yet won many additional electoral votes.
But Democrats haven’t fared much better over the past decade, as one would have expected based on favorable demographic trends alone. It’s not clear they’ve improved at all. Barack Obama and Joe Biden each won the national popular vote by four percentage points in 2012 and 2020. Demographic shifts, thus far, have been canceled out by Republican gains among nonwhite and especially Latino voters, who supported Mr. Trump in unexpectedly large numbers in 2020 and helped deny Democrats victory in Florida.
The new census data confirms that the nation’s political center of gravity continues to shift to the Republican Sun Belt, where demographic shifts have helped Democrats make huge inroads over the past decade. Georgia and Arizona turned blue in 2020. Texas, where Hispanic residents now roughly equal non-Hispanic whites, is on the cusp of becoming a true battleground state.
Phoenix vaulted ahead of Philadelphia to become the fifth most populated city in the United States since the last census.Credit...Juan Arredondo for The New York Times
Just 50.1 percent of Georgians were non-Hispanic whites, according to the new census data, raising the possibility that whites already represent a minority of the state’s population by now.
But despite Democratic gains in the Sun Belt, Republicans continue to control the redistricting process in most of the fast-growing states that picked up seats through reapportionment.
The relatively robust number of Latino and metropolitan voters will make it more difficult for Republicans to redraw some maps to their advantage, by requiring them to draw more voters from rural Republican areas to dilute urban and metropolitan concentrations of Democratic-leaning voters. It may also help Democrats redraw maps to their favor in Illinois and New York, where they do control the redistricting process.
But there are few limits on gerrymandering, and even today’s relatively favorable data for Democrats are unlikely to be enough to overcome the expected Republican advantages in states where they enjoy full control over the redistricting process.
The Democrats may be relying on the Republicans’ growing bashful about gerrymandering, said Michael McDonald, a political science professor at the University of Florida.
“What the Republicans will have to do is crack the urban areas, and do it pretty aggressively,” he said. “It’s just one of those things we’ll have to see — how aggressive Republicans can be.”
Nick Corasaniti contributed reporting.
16. China threatens fighter jet action if Biden invites Taiwan's president to democracy summit
But Taiwan is a democracy. Why should it not come to a democracy summit (that is a sarcastic comment, I know full well why China opposes a visit to the US and specifically to Washiongton, DC). What fs the "summit" is virtual? How will China respond if President Tsai "zooms"into the summit?
China threatens fighter jet action if Biden invites Taiwan's president to democracy summit
China reacted furiously on Thursday to the possibility that President Joe Biden might invite his Taiwanese counterpart, Tsai Ing-wen, to a virtual pro-democracy summit this December.
Testifying to Congress back in March, Secretary of State Antony Blinken was asked whether he would see that Taiwan was invited to the summit. Blinken responded that he was "absolutely committed to working on it." However one interprets that commitment, the White House is clear about what the summit will involve. Its statement describes a "leaders' summit" involving "heads of state."
When I asked whether Tsai would be invited, a senior administration official said, "We have not extended invitations yet," but added that, "To ensure the Summit captures as many viewpoints as possible, the United States has reached out to a regionally diverse set of countries that includes both well-established and emerging democracies."
China isn't happy about this possible U.S. invite to what it regards as a breakaway province.
In an editorial and video posted to Beijing's propaganda Global Times's website, editor Hu Xijin warned that Tsai's appearance on screen alongside other leaders would "gravely violate" China's red lines on Taiwan. Hu said it would "be a historic opportunity for [People's Liberation Army] fighter jets to fly over the island of Taiwan." This is a threat that China has made before. Still, Hu added, "We must put forward thunder-like measures before the crisis comes. We must be dauntless toward a showdown, and completely knock out the arrogance of the U.S. and Taiwan."
Hyperbolic rhetoric aside, there's no question that Tsai's attendance at the summit would infuriate Beijing. Hu, who should be considered as speaking for China's foreign policy chief, Yang Jiechi, says that "if the Taiwan military dares to open fire on the PLA fighters, the large number of missiles aimed at Taiwan's military targets from the mainland and our bomber fleets will make a decisive answer and write history."
How pleasant.
Even if Taiwan is the particular sore spot, it's not the Chinese Communist Party's only complaint here. Hu says that the democracy summit itself would "definitely divide the world."
This is true, of course, and would appear to be the Biden administration's legitimate objective. After all, those nations that value the democratic rule of law have an interest in standing together against those nations that intend to tear down that order. China being the preeminent power in the latter camp. This summit is a good idea in itself. But the added utility of this summit is that it will force China into either accepting moral isolation, or pressuring democracies into refusing attendance at the summit. It's a catch-22 for Beijing in that, if it makes the latter choice, China will further alienate Western democratic populations.
An example of China's vulnerability in this regard is the escalating political divorce between the elected European Union Parliament and unelected European Union Council over a possible EU-China trade deal. China's bullying of smaller nations such as Lithuania and the Czech Republic is also creating a backlash, fostering broader European skepticism toward China.
Put simply, the Biden administration is right to organize this summit and would be even more right to invite Taiwan to attend.
17. Afghanistan: Old warhorse Rashid Dostum to lead fight against Taliban in the north
I guess what goes around comes around. Will this be full circle? Will we be supporting him again?
Afterall, we won the war with him very quickly the first time. It was just everything after that became a problem.
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Afghanistan: Old warhorse Rashid Dostum to lead fight against Taliban in the north
By Dipanjan Roy Chaudhury Indiatimes3 min
AFP
“The Taliban came to the north, but they were trapped. This time, with the support of God, it will be difficult for them to get out of the north—for instance, what Mullah Fazel faced here, they will face the same fate,” Marshal Abdul Rashid Dostum said.
The Northern Alliance (NA) appears to be on a revival path with one of its erstwhile leaders and close associate of India, Marshal Abdul Rashid Dostum on Wednesday assuring the Afghan people that he will clear Afghanistan's northern provinces of the Taliban.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has assigned Dostum to lead the war and all military affairs in Northern Afghanistan, ET has reliably gathered.
Ghani and Dostum are in Mazar-i-Sharif to strategise offensive against the Taliban surge to the Northern Afghanistan that borders Central Asia.
NA, a united military front backed by India-Iran-Russia with support from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, was the chief resistance force against the Taliban between 1996 and 2001. It was dissolved after the defeat of Taliban.
Trained by the Soviets, Dostum maintains close links with Uzbekistan, besides India, Russia and Turkey.
He told local media in Mazar that the Taliban will face the same fate as their commander Mawlavi Fazel did in 2001. “The Taliban came to the north, but they were trapped. This time, with the support of God, it will be difficult for them to get out of the north—for instance, what Mullah Fazel faced here, they will face the same fate,” he said.
The development comes as Taliban has captured several provincial capitals, including many in the north, over the past week, putting enormous pressure on the Afghan government.
Ghani arrived in Mazar-e-Sharif in Balkh province on Wednesday morning, accompanied by his adviser on security and political affairs Mohammad Mohaqiq and former Mujahideen commander Juma Khan Hamdard.
Sources indicated to ET that the Ghani, in meetings with political leaders in Balkh, has agreed to start operations against the Taliban in the north.
“The president led the security meeting in the north and ordered the necessary directives to the appropriate officials,” said Latif Mahmoud, Ghani’s spokesman.
Mohammad Afzal Hadid, head of Balkh provincial council, said that as per Ghani, “the war will be of two types: guerrilla war and war to recapture the territory”.
The Taliban has captured the centres of Jawzjan, Sar-e-Pul and Samangan provinces in the north. The group has also increased attacks on Mazar-e-Sharif city.
“Mazar-e-Sharif city is a strategic and important city, therefore it should be defended at any cost,” said Ata Mohammad Noor, former governor of Balkh.
Balkh and Faryab provinces in the north are currently under government control.
Meanwhile, Afghanistan has approached the international community, raising grave concerns of over the Taliban's brutal attacks on cities.
An Afghan negotiating team headed by High Council for National Reconciliation chairman Abdullah Abdullah on Wednesday attended an Extended Troika meeting with the participation of Russia, the US, China, and Pakistan in Doha. The raised Afghan people and government’s demands at the meeting, an Afghan foreign ministry statement said.
Abdullah also stressed the need to start meaningful and sincere negotiations to establish an immediate ceasefire and reach a political agreement.
18. 9 Abus in Sulu surrender to Army; 1 tagged in Sipadan abductions
21 years later.
We do not pay enough attention to the surrender operations that have occurred over the years by the Armed Forces of the Philippines. Someone should do a study to see how many terrorists have been taken off the battlefield through surrender versus capture/kill operations. I would argue that while negotiations lead to surrender the foundation for such negotiations rests on effective PSYOP.
Excerpts:
The nine surrendered to the 6th Special Forces Battalion, 21st Infantry Battalion (IB), and 45th IB.
Among those considered high profile is Totoh Engal, 54, a follower of Abu leader Hatib Hajan Sawadjaan.
Engal, who was 25 years old then, was part of the group that snatched at least 40 tourists and resort workers in Sipadan in 2000.
Gonzales said the bandits also surrendered several high-powered firearms.
9 Abus in Sulu surrender to Army; 1 tagged in Sipadan abductions
ZAMBOANGA CITY, Zamboanga del Sur––After 20 years of hiding, one of the suspects in the April 23, 2000 kidnapping of over 40 tourists and resort workers in Sipadan in Malaysia surrendered to authorities.
Major General William Gonzales, commander of the Army’s 11th Infantry Division and head of Joint Task Force Sulu, said the alleged kidnapper is one of the nine suspected members of the terrorist group Abu Sayyaf, who turned themselves in on Monday to the military in Sulu, hoping to restart their lives away from banditry.
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“These people have once gone astray. We are glad that they (now) chose a life of peace instead of hiding,” Gonzales said.
He identified five of the nine as Mannan Abdul, Aldaser Bingkal, Takiyo Imdan, Totoh Engal, and Ahamad Hadjilani.
The other four were identified only by their aliases as Abu Jundi, Ramon, Tisoy, and Madz.
Lt. Jerrica Manongdo, spokesperson of the Joint Task Force Sulu, said the military unit behind the surrender of the bandits “strongly advised not to reveal to the public their identities for security reasons.”
Manongdo added that the four were apprehensive about the safety of their families if their true identities were revealed.
The nine surrendered to the 6th Special Forces Battalion, 21st Infantry Battalion (IB), and 45th IB.
Among those considered high profile is Totoh Engal, 54, a follower of Abu leader Hatib Hajan Sawadjaan.
Engal, who was 25 years old then, was part of the group that snatched at least 40 tourists and resort workers in Sipadan in 2000.
Gonzales said the bandits also surrendered several high-powered firearms.
19. EXCLUSIVE: China building third missile field for hundreds of new ICBMs
Excerpts:
Until the discovery of the DF-41 silos, China‘s land-based, silo-deployed ICBM force consisted of around 20 DF-5 ICBMs.
China‘s military also operates a force of about 100 road-mobile ICBM launchers. Road-mobile ICBMs are considered especially lethal because they are difficult to track.
“The number of new Chinese silos under construction exceeds the number of silo-based ICBMs operated by Russia, and constitutes more than half of the size of the entire U.S. ICBM force,” Mr. Kristensen and Mr. Korda stated.
EXCLUSIVE: China building third missile field for hundreds of new ICBMs
China is building a third missile field that will hold more than 100 new DF-41 intercontinental ballistic missiles, The Washington Times has learned.
Construction of a silo array for DF-41s was identified from satellite imagery by U.S. intelligence agencies in the past several weeks and appears equal in size to two other new Chinese missile fields recently identified, according to Pentagon officials familiar with intelligence reports on the strategic development.
Adm. Charles Richard, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, said Thursday that the first two missile fields being built are part of China‘s “explosive” expansion of nuclear forces.
“We are witnessing a strategic breakout by China,” Adm. Richard told a missile defense conference in Alabama. “The explosive growth in their nuclear and conventional forces can only be what I described as breathtaking,” he said, adding that “frankly, that word ‘breathtaking’ may not be enough.”
Adm. Richard said the two new missile fields recently disclosed in published reports will include silos for more than 100 nuclear land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles. He suggested that additional missile bases are under construction.
“Commercial satellite imagery has discovered what is assessed as two nuclear missile fields in western China,” he said. “Each has nearly 120 ICBM silos.”
The missile silos add to existing ICBMs that the Chinese military has deployed in silos, and scores of road-mobile, long-range missiles and new submarine-launched nuclear missiles.
“If you enjoy looking at commercial satellite imagery or stuff in China, can I suggest you keep looking?” the admiral said Thursday.
The Pentagon officials said China will use the missile field for the DF-41, its newest ICBM, which is believed to accommodate up to 10 warheads carried on multiple, independently targetable reentry vehicles, or MIRVs.
The officials provided no details on the location of the new site.
The Air Force’s China Aerospace Studies Institute, however, reported Thursday that the third new site is located near Hanggin Banner, Ordos City, in Inner Mongolia.
Satellite photos posted by the Air University center reveal the early stages of construction at the third missile base.
Together, the three new missile bases will house 350 to 400 new long-range nuclear missiles, U.S. officials said. If 10 warheads are deployed on the DF-41s, China‘s warhead level will increase to more than 4,000 warheads on its DF-41s alone.
By contrast, the United States has an estimated 3,800 warheads, with 1,357 deployed for use and the rest in storage.
Adm. Richard noted that the United States has a larger warhead stockpile than China but said two-thirds of those weapons are “operationally unavailable” because of treaty constraints, such as provisions of the New START treaty with Russia.
The Pentagon estimated in its annual report on the Chinese military last year that the number of warheads stockpiled by China is in the “low 200s” and will increase by around 200 in the coming years. Adm. Richard told Congress in April that intelligence estimates of Chinese nuclear buildup needed to be updated weekly because of the fast pace of Beijing’s strategic arms development.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned separately last week that the United States is watching China‘s rapid nuclear missile buildup with alarm.
Concern and coercion
Mr. Blinken noted there was “deep concern with the rapid growth of the PRC’s nuclear arsenal, which highlights how Beijing has sharply deviated from its decades-old nuclear strategy based on minimum deterrence,” according to a State Department readout of an address to a virtual meeting of the ASEAN Regional Forum. PRC is the acronym for the People’s Republic of China.
As to why the Chinese are engaged in the rapidly expanding nuclear force, Adm. Richard said they will use the expansion of missiles and warheads for coercion against the United States.
“It really doesn’t matter why China continues to modernize. What matters is they are building the capability to execute any plausible nuclear employment strategy — the last brick in the wall of a military capable of coercion,” he said.
To deter China from using its nuclear and conventional forces for coercion, Adm. Richard said, new concepts of deterrence are needed, along with modernized U.S. nuclear forces. “Business as usual will not work,” he said.
Adm. Richard said nuclear breakout is not easily defined but emphasized that it represents a significant threat. The buildup includes nuclear missiles armed with multiple warheads and precision-strike weapons, as well as six new nuclear submarines equipped with JL-3 missiles, hypersonic missiles capable of evading U.S. missile defenses. H-6 nuclear bombers also are being deployed.
China also is deploying significant numbers of DF-26 intermediate-range missiles, which can fire both nuclear and conventional warheads, he said.
Operationally, Beijing is moving its strategic forces to a higher readiness status and no longer appears to be following a strategy of “minimum deterrence” — fielding a limited number of nuclear arms as a defensive measure to deter attackers.
“China has correctly figured out that you can’t coerce a peer [nation] — in other words, us — from a minimum deterrent posture,” Adm. Richard said. He added that the muscular nuclear buildup is allowing Beijing to change its strategy.
The Chinese have denied a shift in their strategic forces, but “you have to look at what they do, not what they say,” Adm. Richard said.
A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment on the existence of the third missile base in China but noted comments Monday about the nuclear buildup by Pentagon spokesman John Kirby that Beijing’s construction of the ICBM sites was worrisome.
“We have maintained since the beginning of the administration our concerns about the kinds of military capabilities that China is procuring and putting into the field and into the fleet, and the way in which they’re using some of these capabilities to coerce their neighbors,” Mr. Kirby said.
The Pentagon is working with allies and partners in developing “integrated deterrence” of nuclear threats like those posed by China, he said. The objective of the new deterrence is “to provide a credible, viable deterrent capability for any adversary in that part of the world,” Mr. Kirby said.
New strategy?
Adm. Richard said integrated deterrence has not been defined clearly but will be outlined in a forthcoming nuclear posture review. The review will include concepts such as using economic and information operations as part of strategic deterrence.
China‘s buildup is raising anew the prospect that the United States is facing a strategic “missile gap” not seen since the earliest days of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, Pentagon officials say.
The missile gap of the 1950s and 1960s involved growing views in the United States that Moscow was rapidly developing ICBM capabilities earlier, in greater numbers and with far more capability than those of the United States.
Analysts at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, first told The Washington Post in June that commercial satellite photos had revealed the construction of scores of silos near Yumen in China‘s Gansu province for the new missiles. Some missile sites were placed underneath a 230-foot cover in an attempt to conceal the silos from the prying eyes of satellite spies.
Last month, the Federation of American Scientists discovered the second DF-41 field some 240 miles northwest of Yumen near the city of Hami in Xinjiang Province. Xinjiang is also the location of China‘s active nuclear testing site, which the Pentagon said recently had begun increased operations after years of limited, irregular activity.
Mark Schneider, a former Pentagon nuclear policymaker, said the discovery of a new missile field is significant and indicates that Beijing’s ICBM force will soon be more powerful than U.S. nuclear forces were at the height of the Cold War.
“It is now beyond any reasonable doubt that China is going for large-scale strategic nuclear superiority over the U.S.,” said Mr. Schneider, now with the National Institute for Public Policy. “The new silos will give China the ability to deploy thousands of strategic nuclear warheads on DF-41 ICBMs.”
Mr. Schneider said he believes the main motivation for the large buildup is that Beijing is planning some type of military action in the next few years and hopes to deter a U.S. military response to action against one of China‘s neighbors, such as Taiwan.
“The buildup will give China massive nuclear war-fighting capability, which they will use if they have to,” he said.
Hans Kristensen and Matt Korda, analysts at the Federation of American Scientists, who reported the second missile field construction at Hami, said the silos are being built in “an almost perfect grid pattern, roughly three kilometers apart, with adjacent support facilities.”
“Construction and organization of the Hami silos are very similar to the 120 silos at the Yumen site, and are also very similar to the approximately one-dozen silos constructed at the Jilantai training area in Inner Mongolia,” the researchers said. They called it “the most significant expansion of the Chinese nuclear arsenal ever.”
Until the discovery of the DF-41 silos, China‘s land-based, silo-deployed ICBM force consisted of around 20 DF-5 ICBMs.
China‘s military also operates a force of about 100 road-mobile ICBM launchers. Road-mobile ICBMs are considered especially lethal because they are difficult to track.
“The number of new Chinese silos under construction exceeds the number of silo-based ICBMs operated by Russia, and constitutes more than half of the size of the entire U.S. ICBM force,” Mr. Kristensen and Mr. Korda stated.
20. Russian hypersonic technology expert accused of high treason
An intelligence operation compromised.
Russian hypersonic technology expert accused of high treason
MOSCOW — A court in Moscow on Thursday ordered a specialist in hypersonic technologies to be kept in jail pending trial on charges of high treason, in the latest in a series of espionage cases targeting Russian scientists.
The Lefortovo District Court ruled at a hearing behind closed doors that Alexander Kuranov, director general and chief designer of the St. Petersburg-based Hypersonic Systems Research Institute, should remain in pretrial detention for two months. The materials of the case were classified, but Russian media reports said Kuranov was accused of handing over sensitive information to representatives of unspecified foreign countries.
The website of Kuranov’s institute states that it has worked on the concept of the Ajax hypersonic vehicle, a project first proposed in the late 1980s by Soviet engineer Vladimir Freighstadt. Instead of protecting a vehicle flying at hypersonic speed from the heat it generates, Freighstadt suggested assimilating the heat to augment energy resources.
It’s unclear whether Freighstadt’s concept has seen any practical development since he first proposed it.
The website of Kuranov’s institute also contained a program of an international workshop on thermochemical processes in plasma aerodynamics held in St. Petersburg last month.
Russia has prided itself on being the only country to commission hypersonic missiles — traveling more than five times faster than sound. Their development came as Moscow’s relations with the West hit post-Cold War lows after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.
The new weapons include the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, which Russian officials say is capable of flying 27 times faster than sound and making sharp maneuvers on its way to target to dodge the defensive missile shield.
Avangard has been fitted to the existing Soviet-built intercontinental ballistic missiles instead of older type warheads, and the first unit armed with the Avangard entered duty in December 2019.
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Another hypersonic weapon, the Kinzhal, which has been commissioned to arm Russian warplanes, has a range of up to 2,000 kilometers (about 1,250 miles) and flies at 10 times the speed of sound, according to Russian officials.
And later this year, the Russian Navy is set to complete the tests of the Tsirkon hypersonic missile intended to equip cruisers, frigates and submarines. Russian President Vladimir Putin said it would be capable of flying at nine times the speed of sound and have a range of 1,000 kilometers.
Russian officials have charged that Western spy agencies have redoubled their efforts to obtain information on the country’s new technologies. Over the past years, several scientists, including those involved in studies on hypersonic technologies, have been accused of passing classified information to foreign powers.
21. DUFFEL BLOG: Army General with 6 minute run time loses war
Thai is the most irrelevant and funny satire I have read lately.
But, but, that's not possible.
Aug 14
By As for Class
General officers in the Army have long been chosen for their ability to fill out paperwork, say yes, run fast, and not win wars. And the incredible system for selecting military leaders to fight and lose the nation's wars has once again proven successful in Afghanistan.
"The Special Operations folks were winning in Afghanistan," said Gen. George W. Casey Jr. "But we decided to put a guy with a great run time in charge and bring in conventional forces. Then we repeated it for nearly 20 years."
"The silver lining to all of this is that now most of us have some pretty sweet jobs teaching the same academics we didn't listen to, making fat stacks selling weapons to our friends, talking about how awesome we were, and spreading misinformation," Casey added. "So there really weren't any repercussions if you really think about it."
The Department of Defense tried a variety of systems to figure out how to manage talent in the military, according to defense officials. Yet despite differences in promotion systems, most generals along with their seconds-in-command and staff are now promoted based on run times and officer evaluation reports highlighting their brilliant war mismanagement.
In 1916, the Navy introduced its "up or out" model, and more changes came after Congress passed the Officer Personnel Act and Defense Officer Personnel Management Act. Meanwhile, most officers in the Coast Guard are picked through pie-throwing competitions that were made famous throughout the ranks starting in the 1950s.
While Army officials conceded they were unable to succeed in the graveyard of empires, leaders said their decision to select top leaders was based on precedent.
“George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, John J. Pershing, George C. Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and George S. Patton. All of these brilliant men who read history, studied military theory in-depth, and are superb examples of leadership had one thing in common,” said Gen. Mark A. Milley in a recent interview. “They all ran six-minute miles.”
As For Class is a boy named Sue, named Ashley. When he isn’t writing for Duffel Blog he also writes fiction. You can read more at asforclass.com.
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