Quotes of the Day:
In honor of returning to school this semester:
"As a professor of mine used to tell his classes, 'There is, and can be, no direct correlation between the grade you receive on a paper and the amount of time or effort you have spent on the paper; which is not to say that hard work does not produce results, but only that some people can do with great ease what others cannot do at all or can only do with great effort. In an hour, Mozart could produce a piece of music that I would be unable to match even if I spent my whole life working at it.' Also remember that the grade that you get on the paper represents my judgment of the quality of the results – not what you meant to say, but what you actually said."
- Professor Amy Kind,
"I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well."
- Alexander the Great (attributed)
"Education should implant a will and a facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists."
- Eric Hoffer
1. CIA Director William Burns held secret meeting in Kabul with Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar
2. Beijing’s American Hustle by Matt Pottinger
3. In Southeast Asia, Kamala Harris’s Message: You Can Count on the U.S.
4. Why America keeps building corrupt client states
5. Massive veterans group uses intel, satellite images to direct Afghan interpreters around Taliban checkpoints
6. Story Telling and Strategy: How Narrative is Central to Gray Zone Warfare
7. Opinion | The Afghanistan outcome is ugly. Biden was still right to say: Enough.
8. How Will the Taliban Rule?
9. Afghanistan in the 1950s: Back to the Future [Full Documentary] - BBC News
10. More resilient UN system - with Taiwan in it
11. The Taliban’s Aug. 31 ‘Red Line’
12. Taliban may have biometric data of US military aides
13. Twenty Years After 9/11, Are We Any Smarter?
14. Can America’s Withdrawal From Afghanistan Help Its China Strategy?
15. Did the War in Afghanistan Have to Happen?
16. Is the Panjshir Valley the Taliban’s Achilles Heel?
17. Latest on Afghanistan: U.S.-Taliban meeting reported, UN issues warning on human rights
18. UN Rights Body Needs to Investigate Abuses in Afghanistan
19. With Chinese and Russian knives at the throat of GPS, Senate calls for a study, waits for administration to follow law
20. How Afghanistan rattled Asia and emboldened China
21. Afghanistan: The War That Made War Normal
1. CIA Director William Burns held secret meeting in Kabul with Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar
Security must have been interesting for this meeting.
CIA Director William Burns held secret meeting in Kabul with Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar
CIA Director William J. Burns held a secret meeting in Kabul on Monday with the Taliban’s de facto leader Abdul Ghani Baradar in the highest-level face-to-face encounter between the Taliban and the Biden administration since the militants seized the Afghan capital, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.
President Biden’s decision to dispatch his top spy, a veteran of the foreign service and the most decorated diplomat in his Cabinet, comes amid a frantic effort to evacuate people from Kabul international airport in what the president has called “one of the largest, most difficult airlifts in history.”
The CIA declined to comment on the Taliban meeting but the discussions likely involved the impending Aug. 31 deadline for the U.S. military to conclude its airlift of U.S. citizens and Afghan allies.
The Biden administration is under pressure from some allies to keep U.S. forces in the country beyond the end of the month in order to assist the evacuation of tens of thousands of citizens of the United States and Western countries as well as Afghan allies desperate to escape Taliban rule.
Britain, France and other U.S. allies have said more time is needed to evacuate their personnel, but a Taliban spokesman warned that the United States would be crossing a “red line” if it kept troops beyond the 31st, promising “consequences.”
For Baradar, playing the role of counterpart to a CIA director comes with a tinge of irony 11 years after the spy agency arrested him in a joint CIA-Pakistani operation that put him in prison for 8 years.
The Taliban leader, however, is no stranger to Westerners.
After his release from prison in 2018, he served as the Taliban’s chief negotiator in peace talks with the United States in Qatar that resulted in an agreement with the Trump administration on the withdrawal of U.S. forces. In November 2020, he posed for a photo in front of gold-rimmed chairs with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
A close friend of the Taliban’s founding supreme leader Muhammad Omar, Baradar is believed to hold significant influence over the Taliban rank-and-file. He fought Soviet forces during their occupation of Afghanistan and was the governor of several provinces in the 1990s when the Taliban last ruled the country.
Since the Taliban’s takeover of the country, he has struck a conciliatory tone, saying the militant group is seeking “an Islamic system in which all people of the nation can participate without discrimination and live harmoniously with each other in an atmosphere of brotherhood.” But those remarks came amid reports of some girls’ schools being shuttered and the Taliban seizing property and attacking civilians in some parts of the country.
In his meeting with Burns on Monday, Baradar faced one of America’s most seasoned diplomats, a former deputy secretary of state who has also served as U.S. ambassador to Russia.
In April, Burns made an unannounced trip to Afghanistan as concerns mounted about the Afghan government’s ability to fend off the Taliban after the U.S. withdrawal.
As director, Burns oversees a spy agency that trained elite Afghan special forces units who had been viewed as a potent force in the country, but were also implicated in extrajudicial killings and human rights violations.
Burns testified before Congress earlier this year that neither the Islamic State nor al-Qaeda in Afghanistan has the capability to mount attacks inside the United States but said “when the time comes for the U.S. military to withdraw, the U.S. government’s ability to collect and act on threats will diminish, that’s simply a fact."
On Monday, before details of the secret meeting emerged, State Department spokesman Ned Price was asked about why senior U.S. officials hadn’t engaged with Baradar given the stakes in Afghanistan.
Price said “our discussions with the Taliban have been operational, tactical, they have been focused largely on our near-term operations and near-term goals … what is going on at the airport compound … that is what we’re focused on at the moment.”
2. Beijing’s American Hustle by Matt Pottinger
Interesting comment about the Chinese view of interests versus values.
Excerpts:
During a visit to Beijing in 1995, the U.S. democracy activist Dimon Liu met with a former Chinese official sympathetic to democratic reform. He provided Liu with an insight into U.S.-Chinese relations that she never forgot: “If the contest is based on interests, tyranny wins. If the contest is based on values, democracy wins.”
The failure of Beijing’s recent attempt to coerce Australia into compliance with Chinese policy illustrates this point nicely. CCP leaders gambled that Australian businesses, suffering from a targeted trade embargo, would lobby their government to make political concessions to Beijing. But the Australian people—business leaders and exporters included—understood that accepting China’s ultimatum would mean submitting to a dangerous new order. Australian businesses absorbed the losses, weathered the embargo, and found new markets. Australians decided that their sovereignty was more important than lobster sales—no doubt confounding those in Beijing who had assumed that Canberra would put Australia’s economic interests ahead of its foundational values. The CCP, having played this card, will not be able to do so again with much effect in Australia or elsewhere, so long as democracies remain alert to what is at stake.
The CCP has made perfectly clear its desire for global preeminence, and officials in Washington have finally stopped pretending otherwise. Americans, Europeans, and people the world over are now increasingly clear-eyed about Beijing’s intentions and the sources of its hostile behavior. Elected leaders must now take the next step: applying their tough new line not just to Beijing but also to elite institutions in their own societies that need to join the fight against the CCP. Because companies are economic actors, not political ones, it is the government’s responsibility to establish guidelines for engaging with adversaries. With strict new parameters, Washington can level the playing field for all U.S. firms—refreshing their commitment to the United States’ 245-year-old experiment with democracy instead of bowing to the Chinese government’s experiment with neo-totalitarianism. Without such guidelines, however, U.S. firms, money, and institutions will continue to be coerced into serving Beijing’s ends instead of democratic principles.
Beijing’s American Hustle
How Chinese Grand Strategy Exploits U.S. Power
Although many Americans were slow to realize it, Beijing’s enmity for Washington began long before U.S. President Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and even prior to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s rise to power in 2012. Ever since taking power in 1949, the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has cast the United States as an antagonist. But three decades ago, at the end of the Cold War, Chinese leaders elevated the United States from just one among many antagonists to their country’s primary external adversary—and began quietly revising Chinese grand strategy, embarking on a quest for regional and then global dominance.
The United States and other free societies have belatedly woken up to this contest, and a rare spirit of bipartisanship has emerged on Capitol Hill. But even this new consensus has failed to adequately appreciate one of the most threatening elements of Chinese strategy: the way it exploits vital aspects of American and other free societies and weaponizes them in the service of Chinese ambitions. Important U.S. institutions, especially in finance and technology, cling to self-destructive habits acquired through decades of “engagement,” an approach to China that led Washington to prioritize economic cooperation and trade above all else.
If U.S. policymakers and legislators find the will, however, there is a way to pull Wall Street and Silicon Valley back onside, convert the United States’ vulnerabilities into strengths, and mitigate the harmful effects of Beijing’s political warfare. That must begin with bolder steps to stem the flow of U.S. capital into China’s so-called military-civil fusion enterprises and to frustrate Beijing’s aspiration for leadership in, and even monopoly control of, high-tech industries—starting with semiconductor manufacturing. The United States must also do more to expose and confront Beijing’s information warfare, which spews disinformation and sows division by exploiting U.S. social media platforms—platforms that are themselves banned inside China’s own borders. And Washington should return the favor by making it easier for the Chinese people to access authentic news from outside China’s so-called Great Firewall.
Some have argued that because the CCP’s ideology holds little appeal abroad, it poses an insignificant threat to U.S. interests. Yet that ideology hardly appeals to the Chinese people, either, and that hasn’t prevented the party from dominating a nation of 1.4 billion people. The problem is not the allure of Leninist totalitarianism but the fact that Leninist totalitarianism—as practiced by the well-resourced and determined rulers of Beijing—has tremendous coercive power. Accordingly, U.S. leaders should not ignore the ideological dimension of this contest; they should emphasize it. American values—liberty, independence, faith, tolerance, human dignity, and democracy—are not just what the United States fights for: they are also among the most potent weapons in the country’s arsenal, because they contrast so starkly with the CCP’s hollow vision of one-party rule at home and Chinese domination abroad. Washington should embrace those strengths and forcefully remind American institutions that although placating China might help their balance sheets in the short term, their long-term survival depends on the free markets and legal rights that only U.S. leadership can secure.
In past decades, the United States’ failure to reckon with the ways that American society and businesses were being weaponized to serve the CCP’s long-term agenda might have been chalked up to naiveté or Pollyannaish optimism. Such excuses are no longer plausible. Yet Beijing continues to run this play, turning American money and institutions to its own ends—and making the need for real action from Washington all the greater.
THE ART OF POLITICAL WARFARE
The West’s sluggishness in realizing that it has been on the receiving end of China’s elaborate, multidecade hostile strategy has a lot to do with the hubris that followed the United States’ triumph in the Cold War. U.S. policymakers assumed that the CCP would find it nearly impossible to resist the tide of liberalization set off by the collapse of the Berlin Wall. According to this line of thought, by helping enrich China, the United States would loosen the party’s grip on its economy, people, and politics, setting the conditions for a gradual convergence with the pluralistic West.
That was, to put it mildly, a miscalculation, and it stemmed in part from the methods the CCP employs to prosecute its grand strategy. With enviable discipline, Beijing has long camouflaged its intention to challenge and overturn the U.S.-led liberal order. Beijing co-opted Western technologies that Americans assumed would help democratize China and instead used them to surveil and control its people and to target a growing swath of the world’s population outside China’s borders. The party now systematically cultivates Western corporations and investors that, in turn, pay deference to Chinese policies and even lobby their home capitals in ways that align with the CCP’s objectives.
If U.S. policymakers and legislators find the will, there is a way to pull Wall Street and Silicon Valley back onside.
Beijing’s methods are all manifestations of “political warfare,” the term that the U.S. diplomat George Kennan, the chief architect of the Cold War strategy of containment, used in a 1948 memo to describe “the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives.” Kennan credited the Soviet Union with “the most refined and effective” conduct of political warfare. Were he alive today, Kennan would marvel at the ways Beijing has improved on the Kremlin’s playbook.
Kennan’s memo was meant to disabuse U.S. national security officials of “a popular attachment to the concept of a basic difference between peace and war.” He was hopeful that Americans could shed this handicap and learn to fight in the political realm to forestall a potentially catastrophic military conflict with the Soviets. To a great extent, Washington did exactly that, marshaling partners on every continent to contain Soviet influence.
Today, free and open societies are once again coming to terms with the reality of political warfare. This time, however, the campaign is directed by a different kind of communist country—one that possesses not just military power but also economic power derived from its quasi-marketized version of capitalism and systematic theft of technology. Although there are holdouts—financiers, entertainers, and former officials who benefited from engagement, for example—polls show that the general public in the United States, European countries, and several Asian countries is finally attuned to the malevolent nature of the Chinese regime and its global ambitions. This should come as no surprise, given the way the CCP has conducted itself in recent years: covering up the initial outbreak of COVID-19, attacking Indian troops on the Chinese-Indian border, choking off trade with Australia, crushing the rule of law in Hong Kong, and intensifying a campaign of genocide against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in China.
HIDE AND BIDE NO MORE
Those aggressive moves represent merely a new phase of a decades-old strategy. In writing his recent book The Long Game, the U.S. scholar Rush Doshi pored over Chinese leaders’ speeches, policy documents, and memoirs to document how Beijing came to set its sights on dismantling American influence around the globe. According to Doshi, who now serves on the National Security Council staff as a China director, three events badly rattled CCP leaders: the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square; the lopsided, U.S.-led victory over the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s forces in early 1991; and the collapse of the Soviet Union that same year. “The Tiananmen Square protests reminded Beijing of the American ideological threat; the swift Gulf War victory reminded it of the American military threat; and loss of the shared Soviet adversary reminded it of the American geopolitical threat,” writes Doshi. “In short order, the United States quickly replaced the Soviet Union as China’s primary security concern, that in turn led to a new grand strategy, and a thirty-year struggle to displace American power was born.”
China’s new grand strategy aimed first to dilute U.S. influence in Asia, then to displace American power more overtly from the region, and ultimately to dominate a global order more suited to Beijing’s governance model. That model isn’t merely authoritarian; it’s “neo-totalitarian,” according to Cai Xia, who served for 15 years as a professor in the highest temple of Chinese communist ideology: the Central Party School in Beijing. Cai, who now lives in exile in the United States, recently detailed her falling out with the CCP in these pages and has written elsewhere that the CCP’s “fundamental interests and its basic mentality of using the [United States] while remaining hostile to it have not changed over the past seventy years.”
Xi didn’t sire the party’s strategy, argues Cai. He merely shifted it to a more overt and aggressive phase. Had observers more carefully pondered the former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s precept for China to “hide your capabilities, bide your time,” they would have realized that Deng’s approach was always intended as a transitional stage, a placeholder until China was strong enough to openly challenge the United States.
Today, free and open societies are once again coming to terms with the reality of political warfare.
That moment has now arrived, and Beijing is no longer bothering to camouflage its global ambitions. Today, party slogans call for China to “take center stage” in the world and build “a community of common destiny for mankind.” This point was displayed vividly in Alaska in March, during the first face-to-face meeting between senior Biden administration officials and their Chinese counterparts. In their opening statements, the Chinese took advantage of the international TV coverage of the meeting to lecture the Americans. “I don’t think the overwhelming majority of countries in the world would recognize that the universal values advocated by the United States or that the opinion of the United States could represent international public opinion,” the senior Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi said as part of a carefully scripted diatribe. Yang juxtaposed “United States–style democracy” with what he called “Chinese-style democracy.” The latter, he contended, enjoys the “wide support of the Chinese people,” while “many people within the United States actually have little confidence in the democracy of the United States.”
Yang’s soliloquy was so arresting that the most consequential implication was easily lost in the majority of the press coverage: Beijing was using its time in front of the cameras to openly declare its bid for world leadership. Yang was following instructions issued by Xi at the 19th Party Congress, in October 2017, when the Chinese leader called on party cadres to increase their ideological “leadership power” and “discourse power” in defense of Beijing’s totalitarian brand of socialism, according to the China scholar Matthew Johnson. This process of fighting and winning ideological battles on the global stage was also given a name: the “great struggle.”
THE BEST DEFENSE
Kennan considered economic statecraft a vital component of political warfare, and the CCP’s assimilation of economic weaponry into its grand strategy would not have surprised him. Beijing’s economic objectives are couched in a policy called “dual circulation,” which prioritizes domestic consumption (internal circulation) over dependence on foreign markets (external circulation). A close look, however, shows that this Chinese strategy can really be thought of as “offensive leverage”—an approach designed to decrease China’s dependence on high-tech imports (while making the world’s technology supply chains increasingly dependent on China), ensure that China can easily substitute imports from one country with the same imports from another, and use China’s economic leverage to advance the CCP’s political objectives around the globe.
The CCP has tried to spin these moves as defensive. “We must sustain and enhance our superiority across the entire production chain . . . and we must tighten international production chains’ dependence on China, forming a powerful countermeasure and deterrent capability against foreigners who would artificially cut off supply [to China],” explained Xi in a seminal speech last year. In practice, however, China is playing offense. In recent years, Beijing has restricted trade and tourism with Canada, Japan, Mongolia, Norway, the Philippines, South Korea, and other countries in an effort to force changes in their laws and internal political and judicial processes.
The most aggressive of these campaigns is the one the CCP launched against Australia. More than a year ago, Australia proposed that the World Health Organization investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. The idea was supported by nearly all the members of the World Health Assembly, but Beijing decided to punish Canberra for its temerity. China soon began restricting imports of Australian beef, barley, wine, coal, and lobster. Then, the CCP released a list of 14 so-called “disputes” that are, in effect, political demands made of the Australian government—including that Canberra repeal laws designed to counter the CCP’s covert influence operations in Australia, muzzle the Australian press by suppressing criticism of Beijing, and make concessions to China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea. China targeted Australia with precisely the offensive economic strategy that Xi’s speeches and party documents describe. When it comes to grand strategy, at least, Xi is a man of his word.
UNDER THE INFLUENCE
The CCP’s campaign of offensive leverage represents the overt manifestation of Beijing’s grand strategy. But the strategy also relies on covert and invisible activities: information warfare and influence operations designed to subvert the social and political institutions of Chinas’ rivals. The most important element of those efforts is “United Front” work, an immense range of activities that China’s leaders call a “magic weapon” and that has no analog in the world’s advanced democracies. The party’s 95 million members are required to participate in the system, which has many branches, and the United Front Work Department alone has three times as many cadres as the U.S. State Department has Foreign Service officers. Instead of practicing diplomacy, however, the United Front gathers intelligence about and works to influence private citizens and government officials overseas, with a focus on foreign elites and the organizations they run. Assembling dossiers has always been a feature of Leninist regimes, but Beijing’s penetration of digital networks worldwide has taken it to a new level. The party compiles dossiers on millions of foreign citizens around the world, using the material it gathers to influence and intimidate, reward and blackmail, flatter and humiliate, divide and conquer. The political scientist Anne-Marie Brady calls United Front work a tool to corrode and corrupt foreign political systems, “to weaken and divide us against each other, to erode the critical voice of our media, and turn our elites into clients of the Chinese Communist Party, their mouths stuffed with cash.”
Xi inspects an aircraft carrier in Hainan province, China, January 2020
Li Gang / Reuters
Newer to the party’s arsenal is the exploitation of U.S. social media companies. Over the past several years, Beijing has flooded their platforms with overt and covert propaganda, amplified by proxies and bots, that is increasingly focused not only on promoting whitewashed narratives of Beijing’s policies but also on exacerbating social tensions within the United States and other target nations. The Chinese government and its online proxies, for example, have for months promoted content that questions the effectiveness and safety of Western-made COVID-19 vaccines. Research by the Soufan Center has also found indications that China-based influence operations are amplifying online conspiracy theories, including QAnon-related falsehoods. The Soviet Union could never have dreamed of reaching a mass audience in the United States for its agitprop such as the one Beijing reaches daily through the tools provided by Silicon Valley technology giants. “Currently there is no effective path for the [People’s Republic of China] to wage effective global information operations and increase its international discourse power that does not run through American social media platforms like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook,” writes Bill Bishop, the author of the blog Sinocism and a close observer of Beijing’s information warfare.
AN AMERICAN COUNTERSTRATEGY
After decades of naiveté and denialism, Washington’s approach to Beijing finally began to adapt to reality and toughen up during the Trump administration, and the Biden administration has largely maintained its predecessor’s policy. The tariffs Trump imposed to punish China’s theft of intellectual property are still in place, and President Joe Biden is fleshing out a Trump-initiated Commerce Department panel meant to keep dangerous Chinese software and equipment out of U.S. domestic telecommunications networks. The current administration is also deepening diplomatic initatives related to China, such as the Quad—a group of democracies composed of Australia, India, Japan, and the United States.
Despite those corrective steps, there are still several areas in which Washington needs to further strengthen its approach, especially by making sure that powerful private interests in the United States stop undercutting the country’s ability to confront China. The realm of finance is the place to start. The retirement savings of millions of Americans currently finance Beijing’s military modernization and support Chinese companies that are complicit in genocide and other crimes against humanity. Even as Beijing was systematically expelling foreign journalists from China and making the country’s investment climate increasingly opaque, stock index providers such as FTSE Russell and MSCI continued to add Chinese companies to their indexes, sometimes under pressure from Beijing. Because many American funds benchmark their investments to those same indexes, billions of U.S. dollars automatically flow to Chinese companies, including those that Washington has sanctioned or subjected to export controls. For Beijing, there simply is no substitute for U.S. capital markets, whose depth and liquidity outpace those of the rest of the world’s capital markets. Few successful Chinese technology companies exist that were not launched with money and expertise from Silicon Valley venture capital firms. Both Alibaba and Baidu were seeded with U.S. capital.
Although executive orders issued by the Trump and Biden administrations already prohibit U.S. investment in 59 named Chinese companies involved in the Chinese military’s modernization or human rights atrocities, the Treasury Department needs to expand that list by at least an order of magnitude to better encompass the galaxy of Chinese companies developing so-called dual-use technologies—those with both civilian and military or surveillance applications. The Biden administration should also enforce a ban on the purchase of debt instruments from blacklisted companies and clarify that their subsidiaries are off-limits to U.S. investors, as well. The European Union should adopt a similar investment blacklist and permanently abandon the trade agreement it recently negotiated with Beijing. The deal is already on ice after Beijing sanctioned European parliamentarians and think tanks for highlighting Chinese human rights abuses. The EU should now withdraw once and for all.
Beijing is no longer bothering to camouflage its global ambitions.
The United States and European countries should also challenge the naked hypocrisy of some firms that tout investment products they claim will further “environmental, social, and governance” goals. Some money managers who offer such options eschew investing in Western companies that don’t meet a particular set of criteria (called “ESG criteria”) but happily invest in Chinese companies that feature atrocious records in all three categories. There are U.S. university endowments, for instance, that could deliberately decide to invest in only ESG-compliant companies in the United States but simultaneously invest in a raft of Chinese firms that flout all accepted standards of corporate governance and environmental stewardship. Chinese firms contribute more to greenhouse gas emissions, ocean plastic pollution, and illegal fishing than do the companies of any other country on earth. As for social responsibility, a wide variety of Chinese companies—from leading technology firms to manufacturers that export globally—work with Beijing’s security apparatus to track, incarcerate, and extract forced labor from ethnic Uyghur and Kazakh Muslims. With respect to corporate governance, CCP cells, operating mostly in secret, wield significant and often decisive control over Chinese companies—making a mockery of Western standards of corporate transparency and independence.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission needs to fulfill its legal obligations under the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act of 2020, which prescribes an overly generous three-year grace period before Chinese companies are to be delisted from U.S. exchanges if they fail to meet U.S. accounting standards. The SEC has yet even to start the clock on the three-year countdown for noncompliant firms. Having judged the U.S. law hollow, Chinese companies continue to launch initial public offerings in the United States.
Washington also needs to do more to stymie Beijing’s plans to dominate semiconductor manufacturing. Chinese leaders are well aware that most twenty-first-century technologies—including 5G telecommunications, synthetic biology, and machine learning—are built around advanced semiconductors. Accordingly, those leaders have poured more than $100 billion in subsidies into building Chinese chip foundries, with mixed results.
Most of the world’s cutting-edge chips are produced by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. The CCP has many ideological and strategic reasons to consider invading Taiwan; its quest for control of the market for chips represents an economic incentive to do so. Of course, a war could seriously damage Taiwan’s foundries, which, in any case, would struggle to maintain production without Western chip designs and equipment. And such a shock to chip supplies would affect millions of downstream jobs in China, not just those in other large economies. Even so, Beijing might believe that China could recover from a crisis more quickly than the United States. That is precisely the lesson Beijing drew from the COVID-19 pandemic, which has taken a far greater toll on China’s adversaries than on China itself. To be sure, Beijing would not take the fateful step of attacking Taiwan and risking war with the United States based on semiconductor inventories alone. The point is that Chinese leaders may not view the disruption of semiconductor supply chains as an inhibitor to launching a war.
Soldiers in Taipei, Taiwan, October 2008
Nicky Loh / Reuters
Regardless of Beijing’s calculus, Washington should seek to eliminate any potential Chinese advantage in semiconductors by subsidizing new chip foundries in the United States—something the 2020 CHIPS Act and the 2021 U.S. Innovation and Competition Act seek to do. The U.S. Commerce Department must also slow Beijing’s efforts to scale up its foundries by applying sharper restrictions on the export of U.S.-made equipment used to manufacture semiconductors—not just for cutting-edge chips but also for those that are a couple of generations older.
Finally, Washington needs to do more to address Beijing’s information warfare. One of the weirder ironies of our time is the fact that U.S. citizens are sometimes censored and even deplatformed for political speech by the same American social media giants that channel CCP disinformation and agitprop to millions of people worldwide. U.S. companies, Congress, and the courts should act to address both of these phenomena—supporting the free speech of U.S. citizens while exposing the ways in which Beijing boosts its messaging. This can and should be done while still upholding the letter and spirit of the First Amendment. The idea is not to censor Beijing’s statements but to expose government-orchestrated efforts to camouflage propaganda as organic discourse among private citizens through fake accounts and covert schemes. Washington’s best partners in this effort should be the Silicon Valley social media giants themselves. Because they have the means to detect Beijing’s proxies, these firms can take a leading role in tamping down the sheer amplitude of Chinese government influence operations online.
At the same time, free and open societies—and the companies that flourish in them—must make it easier for Chinese citizens to access information from outside China’s Great Firewall, and to communicate with one another away from the watchful eye of Beijing’s digital panopticon. The Great Firewall is formidable but less technologically advanced than many observers often assume. In contrast to the CCP’s information warfare, U.S. efforts need not involve manufacturing disinformation or even generating much content at all. Washington needs only to provide the Chinese people with safer means to exchange news, opinions, history, films, and satire with their fellow citizens and others around the world.
One good place to start would be with the Chinese diaspora. There are very few Chinese-language news outlets left that resist toeing the CCP’s line. Under a new national security law imposed by Beijing, authorities in Hong Kong recently arrested the owner and editors of one of the few that remained: the now-defunct Apple Daily. The U.S. government can help by offering grants to promising private outlets and reenergizing federally funded media such as Radio Free Asia. U.S. universities should also hand a second smartphone to every Chinese national who comes to study in the United States—one free from Chinese apps such as WeChat, which monitor users’ activity and censor their news feeds.
DEMOCRACY vs. TYRANNY
During a visit to Beijing in 1995, the U.S. democracy activist Dimon Liu met with a former Chinese official sympathetic to democratic reform. He provided Liu with an insight into U.S.-Chinese relations that she never forgot: “If the contest is based on interests, tyranny wins. If the contest is based on values, democracy wins.”
The failure of Beijing’s recent attempt to coerce Australia into compliance with Chinese policy illustrates this point nicely. CCP leaders gambled that Australian businesses, suffering from a targeted trade embargo, would lobby their government to make political concessions to Beijing. But the Australian people—business leaders and exporters included—understood that accepting China’s ultimatum would mean submitting to a dangerous new order. Australian businesses absorbed the losses, weathered the embargo, and found new markets. Australians decided that their sovereignty was more important than lobster sales—no doubt confounding those in Beijing who had assumed that Canberra would put Australia’s economic interests ahead of its foundational values. The CCP, having played this card, will not be able to do so again with much effect in Australia or elsewhere, so long as democracies remain alert to what is at stake.
The CCP has made perfectly clear its desire for global preeminence, and officials in Washington have finally stopped pretending otherwise. Americans, Europeans, and people the world over are now increasingly clear-eyed about Beijing’s intentions and the sources of its hostile behavior. Elected leaders must now take the next step: applying their tough new line not just to Beijing but also to elite institutions in their own societies that need to join the fight against the CCP. Because companies are economic actors, not political ones, it is the government’s responsibility to establish guidelines for engaging with adversaries. With strict new parameters, Washington can level the playing field for all U.S. firms—refreshing their commitment to the United States’ 245-year-old experiment with democracy instead of bowing to the Chinese government’s experiment with neo-totalitarianism. Without such guidelines, however, U.S. firms, money, and institutions will continue to be coerced into serving Beijing’s ends instead of democratic principles.
- MATT POTTINGER is a Senior Adviser at the Marathon Initiative and was U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser from 2019 to 2021.
3. In Southeast Asia, Kamala Harris’s Message: You Can Count on the U.S.
Quite a bit of criticism throughout the article.
Key excerpt:
But the trip to Southeast Asia also presented Ms. Harris with an opportunity to address an issue at the center of rare political consensus in Washington, according to Aaron Connelly, a research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore.
“In contrast to Central America, this is a region of opportunities and strategic opportunities,” said Mr. Connelly. “There’s broad political agreement in the United States to address the rise of China, and this is where you would do that.”
In Southeast Asia, Kamala Harris’s Message: You Can Count on the U.S.
The vice president rebuked China and sought to fortify the image of the United States as a credible ally amid growing questions about Afghanistan.
Vice President Kamala Harris in Singapore on Tuesday. It was her second trip abroad as vice president.
By
Aug. 24, 2021, 4:49 a.m. ET
SINGAPORE — Vice President Kamala Harris sought to fortify the image of the United States as a credible ally by offering a sharp rebuke of China during an address on Tuesday in Southeast Asia. Her effort comes as the White House faces growing questions about its reliability as an international partner amid ongoing violence in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
“In the South China Sea, we know that Beijing continues to coerce, to intimidate and to make claims to the vast majority of the South China Sea,” Ms. Harris said in Singapore. She added that China’s “unlawful claims” had continued “to undermine the rules-based order and threaten the sovereignty of nations.”
The White House is aiming to refocus U.S. foreign policy strategy on competing with China’s rising economic influence rather than on continuing to fight “forever wars,” such as the two-decade long conflict in Afghanistan. The chaotic effort to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies from Kabul has overshadowed the vice president’s trip, which began on Sunday in Singapore and will take her to Vietnam.
Ms. Harris’s overseas trip, her second as vice president, gained heightened urgency in the days before she boarded Air Force Two. The journey had been seen as a chance to bolster economic and security ties with key partners in Singapore and Vietnam, a crucial piece of President Biden’s strategy in the South China Sea. But in the wake of the haphazard withdrawal from Afghanistan, her trip became the administration’s first test of the White House efforts to reassure the world that it can still be a trusted international partner.
For Ms. Harris, that has meant reassuring nations in the South China Sea of the administration’s credibility while confronting questions about whether the United States had abandoned its allies in Afghanistan.
A military plane taking off from Kabul, Afghanistan, on Tuesday. The chaotic effort to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies from Kabul has overshadowed the vice president’s trip to Southeast Asia.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
That pressure is likely to increase when Ms. Harris arrives in Vietnam. Her senior aides have faced questions about the historical parallel between the U.S. evacuation of American citizens in 1975 from Saigon and the situation in Kabul — replete with scenes of desperate Afghans running behind U.S. military planes, and of American citizens, Afghan allies and their relatives crowded into the Kabul airport and stuck in limbo.
But in Singapore, Ms. Harris has pressed on with her message.
“I am standing here because of our commitment to a longstanding relationship, which is an enduring relationship, with the Indo-Pacific region, with Southeast Asian countries and, in particular, with Singapore,” the vice president said a day earlier alongside Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong of Singapore during a news conference dominated by questions about Afghanistan. She said that the administration was “singularly focused” on evacuating Americans and Afghan allies from the country.
In a sign of how vast a shadow the situation in Afghanistan had cast over the trip, even Mr. Lee was asked by one of the two local reporters about the U.S. withdrawal.
“We hope Afghanistan does not become an epicenter for terrorism again,” Mr. Lee said. “And post-Afghanistan in the longer term, what matters is how the U.S. repositions itself in the Asia Pacific, engages the broader region and continues the fight against terrorism.”
Ms. Harris’s presence was described by experts as a welcoming sign of renewed focus by the Biden administration in the South China Sea after several Southeast Asian officials in recent months became frustrated over the lack of face-to-face engagement from the United States.
The vice president’s visit came just weeks after the U.S. defense secretary, Lloyd J. Austin, traveled to Singapore, the anchor of the U.S. naval presence in the region, to reassure Southeast Asian nations of the administration’s investment. China has taken advantage of the United States’ absence by courting nations with visits, loans and coronavirus vaccines.
At a news briefing on Tuesday, Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, said, “What is happening in Afghanistan now clearly tells people what rules are touted by the United States and what is the so-called order of the United States.”
“The United States always tries to use rules and order to justify its selfishness and bullying,” Mr. Wang said. “But now how many people will believe it?”
Vietnamese evacuees boarding a helicopter to escape Saigon in 1975. Ms. Harris’s senior aides have faced questions about the historical parallel between the U.S. evacuation from Saigon and the situation in Kabul.
The U.S. administration has attempted to strike a balance in the region by countering China’s investment while not forcing the nations to take sides between the two powers. In a nod to Singapore’s efforts to say neutral in the rising tension between Beijing and Washington, Ms. Harris stressed on Tuesday the United States was not trying to “make anyone choose between countries.”
The South China Sea is a major flash point between Beijing and several Southeast Asian countries. Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam have all accused China of building and fortifying artificial islands in the area and sending vessels to intimidate their militaries and those who fish.
After Ms. Harris met with Mr. Lee in a closed-door meeting on Monday at the Istana, the presidential palace of Singapore, the vice president’s office announced a series of agreements to address climate change, cybersecurity and the pandemic. The two nations also agreed to increase information sharing on cybersecurity threats to financial markets, cooperate on identifying coronavirus variants and convene industry executives to address supply-chain issues, including a global shortage of semiconductors that are used to build cars and computers that has been a point of concern for the Biden administration.
Understand the Taliban Takeover in Afghanistan
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Who are the Taliban? The Taliban arose in 1994 amid the turmoil that came after the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989. They used brutal public punishments, including floggings, amputations and mass executions, to enforce their rules. Here’s more on their origin story and their record as rulers.
Who are the Taliban leaders? These are the top leaders of the Taliban, men who have spent years on the run, in hiding, in jail and dodging American drones. Little is known about them or how they plan to govern, including whether they will be as tolerant as they claim to be.
What happens to the women of Afghanistan? The last time the Taliban were in power, they barred women and girls from taking most jobs or going to school. Afghan women have made many gains since the Taliban were toppled, but now they fear that ground may be lost. Taliban officials are trying to reassure women that things will be different, but there are signs that, at least in some areas, they have begun to reimpose the old order.
Curtis S. Chin, the former United States ambassador to the Asian Development Bank from 2007 to 2011, said those commitments only went so far.
“It’s, of course, an important symbolic trip, but the reality is that what’s more important than these trips is what happens in between,” Mr. Chin said. “That’s why to me what happened in Afghanistan is so important because the reality of U.S. behavior undercuts the rhetoric of U.S. behavior.”
Mr. Chin added, “Our rhetoric is: ‘We are here for a long time. We are steadfast in our engagement.’ The reality is, as Asia well knows from Vietnam to Afghanistan, that rhetoric and reality often do not match.”
Ms. Harris stumbled on rhetoric alone during her first overseas trip, to Guatemala and Mexico, which had been meant to address the factors pushing migrants to flee to the United States, but was instead marred by domestic politics. Her efforts to defend institutions in Central America that aim to root out corruption — one factor pushing vulnerable families to migrate to the United States in record-high numbers — was overshadowed by her fumbled answers on whether she would visit the U.S.-Mexico border.
In a nod to Singapore’s efforts to stay neutral in the rising tensions between Beijing and Washington, Ms. Harris stressed on Tuesday the United States was not trying to “make anyone choose between countries.”Credit...Pool photo by Evelyn Hockstein
“I’ve never been to Europe,” Ms. Harris told the NBC anchor Lester Holt. “I don’t understand the point you’re making.”
David Axelrod, a former top adviser to former President Barack Obama, said Ms. Harris faced heightened criticism because she was a clear candidate in the next presidential election.
“She’s relatively new, doesn’t have that experience, so she’s going to be watched closely on these trips,” Mr. Axelrod said of her foreign policy record. “And the Afghanistan situation just added to her burden.”
But the trip to Southeast Asia also presented Ms. Harris with an opportunity to address an issue at the center of rare political consensus in Washington, according to Aaron Connelly, a research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore.
“In contrast to Central America, this is a region of opportunities and strategic opportunities,” said Mr. Connelly. “There’s broad political agreement in the United States to address the rise of China, and this is where you would do that.”
Sui-Lee Wee contributed reporting.
4. Why America keeps building corrupt client states
Who else should head "interventions" other than the military? But I agree with the comments about funding below. Our "generosity" and our culture of throwing money at problems is often not as helpful as we think, if it is helpful at all.
Excerpts:
Another problem is that American interventions were led by the armed forces, which are biased towards optimistic reporting and short-term thinking. Military officers “are hugely focused on actively doing things within the duration of their nine-month rotation, which is not well suited to solving corruption”, says Mark Pyman of CurbingCorruption, a watchdog. Mr Pyman, who led the Transparency International study, says officers early in the occupation boasted of having pacified their districts by paying off warlords. Aid agencies, meanwhile, have a dubious habit of judging success based on how much money they raise and whether they have spent it all.
This leads to a related problem: spending too much money in poor countries causes corruption. In both South Vietnam and Afghanistan, a vast influx of American dollars caused a surge in inflation, wiping out public-sector salaries. (Afghanistan, with a GDP of about $20bn in 2020, received $145bn in American aid between 2001 and 2021. Inflation averaged 17.5% in 2003-08.) Neither government had the capacity to collect enough taxes for the wages of soldiers and civil servants to keep pace. Even otherwise honest public servants were forced to demand kickbacks to support themselves.
Hence one recommendation of anti-corruption experts is that in countries like Afghanistan aid should be frugal and focus on achievements rather than grant sizes. That is easier said than done. America is simultaneously among the world’s richest and most idealistic nations, and at some point it will probably decide to save another suffering country. If it does not learn that dollars cannot build a real government, it may end up creating yet another fake one.
Why America keeps building corrupt client states
Failure in Afghanistan shows it has not learned the lessons of Vietnam
Aug 22nd 2021
ONCE AMERICA announced that it would not save its client state, things unravelled quickly. As the enemy seized province after province, government soldiers shed their uniforms and ran. On paper the army had hundreds of thousands of well-equipped fighters. In reality its few loyal commanders had to buy ammunition from crooked supply officers and pay in cash for artillery support. The special forces fought well, but regular troops were often commanded by politicians’ incompetent relatives. Soldiers went unpaid as officials pilfered military budgets. Citizens stayed loyal to their families and clans, not to a corrupt government that was as likely to shake them down as to help them. The state was a Potemkin village constructed to please its American sponsors. When they left, it fell.
So it went in South Vietnam in 1975, and again last week in Afghanistan. The similarities between the two collapses are striking. They go beyond intelligence failures, mendacious speeches and abandoned allies. Ultimately, both states fell because they had been hollowed out by corruption, an ancient disease of governance to which America’s nation-building projects are prone. (Think also of Iraq, Kosovo, Bosnia and Haiti.) Political scholars once considered corruption a minor issue, but many now see it as crucial to understanding not just why America’s proxies fail, but how states work in general.
Corruption is usually defined as the abuse of public office for private gain. Its simplest form is bribery, which is ubiquitous in Afghanistan. “From your birth certificate to your death certificate and whatever comes in between, somehow you have to bribe,” says Ahmad Shah Katawazai, a former Afghan diplomat. (He was pushed out of the service after writing an opinion piece denouncing government corruption.) Customs officials, police and clerks routinely demand baksheesh (a “tip”). As the Taliban advanced in recent weeks, the pay-off needed to get a passport rose to thousands of dollars.
But petty bribery is the least threatening type of corruption. More troublingly, getting government approval for big investments requires giving ministers or warlords a piece of the action. Worse yet, a government job with access to bribes is itself a valuable commodity. As Sarah Chayes, an expert on corruption, discovered while running an NGO in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2009, local officials often buy their posts. They must then extort kickbacks to pay off their investment, while sending their superiors some of the take. Mr Katawazai says it can cost $100,000 to become a district police chief.
Such corruption creates patronage networks that threaten the state’s integrity. Officials’ main goal is not carrying out their agency’s mission, but extorting revenue to distribute to their families and cronies. Even before America invaded, Afghanistan was partly run by patronage networks headed by regional warlords.
Yet instead of dismantling these networks, America strengthened them by paying warlords to keep the peace, according to reports by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), an American oversight authority. Afghans soon grew furious at government corruption and more welcoming towards the Taliban. A study in 2015 by Transparency International cited one policymaker’s epiphany: “The guys at the bottom are sending money to the top of the system and the guys at the top are sending protection downwards, which is how a mafia runs.”
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It was not until 2009 that America paid corruption serious attention. Ms Chayes became an adviser to Stanley McChrystal, a reformist general who then headed ISAF, the coalition of NATO-led forces in the country. An ISAF investigation unit known as Shafafiyat (“transparency” in Pashto) was set up under H.R. McMaster, who later served as America’s national security adviser. It made progress in stopping procurement fraud. (The Afghan government’s own anti-corruption authorities mainly prosecuted political enemies.)
But under subsequent commanders the Shafafiyat was cut back. By the time of the Taliban’s final offensive the state had grown so corrupt that most of its governors cut deals with the jihadists to switch sides. The Afghan army was in poor shape to fight: its numbers were inflated by “ghost soldiers”—absentees listed on the payroll so that commanders could steal their salaries.
Americans of a certain age may remember the term “ghost soldiers” from Vietnam, where corrupt commanders used exactly the same system. Perhaps a quarter of the names on South Vietnamese army (ARVN) rosters in the Mekong Delta in 1975 were fictitious. Some ARVN officers were brilliant businessmen: one South Vietnamese colonel used to order aimless artillery barrages in order to hawk the spent shell casings as scrap metal. As in Afghanistan, police and military forces also profited from the heroin trade.
Indeed, the conclusions of a report in 1978 on the fall of South Vietnam by RAND, a security think-tank, foreshadow those in the last SIGAR report on Afghanistan, released on July 31st. South Vietnamese believed corruption was “a fundamental ill that was largely responsible for the ultimate collapse”, the RAND report found. The problem had already been diagnosed in Vietnam by forward-thinking officers in the early 1960s. So why did America refuse to treat it as a grave issue when it invaded Afghanistan decades later?
One answer is that this would require a shift in perspective. Over the past two decades many scholars have come to see corruption as a form of governance in itself. It resembles the pre-modern states that Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist, calls “personalistic” governments, where power is based on ties of family or friendship rather than impersonal institutions. Such states are mainly concerned with placating armed commanders by giving them a share of the economic spoils.
That description applies just as well to mafias, feudal systems such as those of medieval Europe, and the warlord regimes in South Vietnam and Afghanistan. States like these can be reasonably stable. But they lack the loyalty and cohesion needed to beat a disciplined ideological insurgency such as the Vietnamese communists or the Taliban.
Another problem is that American interventions were led by the armed forces, which are biased towards optimistic reporting and short-term thinking. Military officers “are hugely focused on actively doing things within the duration of their nine-month rotation, which is not well suited to solving corruption”, says Mark Pyman of CurbingCorruption, a watchdog. Mr Pyman, who led the Transparency International study, says officers early in the occupation boasted of having pacified their districts by paying off warlords. Aid agencies, meanwhile, have a dubious habit of judging success based on how much money they raise and whether they have spent it all.
This leads to a related problem: spending too much money in poor countries causes corruption. In both South Vietnam and Afghanistan, a vast influx of American dollars caused a surge in inflation, wiping out public-sector salaries. (Afghanistan, with a GDP of about $20bn in 2020, received $145bn in American aid between 2001 and 2021. Inflation averaged 17.5% in 2003-08.) Neither government had the capacity to collect enough taxes for the wages of soldiers and civil servants to keep pace. Even otherwise honest public servants were forced to demand kickbacks to support themselves.
Hence one recommendation of anti-corruption experts is that in countries like Afghanistan aid should be frugal and focus on achievements rather than grant sizes. That is easier said than done. America is simultaneously among the world’s richest and most idealistic nations, and at some point it will probably decide to save another suffering country. If it does not learn that dollars cannot build a real government, it may end up creating yet another fake one.
Read our special series on America's changing geopolitical standing here
5. Massive veterans group uses intel, satellite images to direct Afghan interpreters around Taliban checkpoints
No One Left Behind has been doing, and I expect will continue to do, great work. There could be an "I told you so" here. If the Administration (and State) had listened to No One Left Behind about the SIV process over the past year or more we might be in a slightly better place and have processed more SIV persons through routine practices rather than having to evacuate them under duress as we have been forced to do now.
Massive veterans group uses intel, satellite images to direct Afghan interpreters around Taliban checkpoints
A network of "hundreds of thousands" of people, including analysts using satellite imagery to locate Taliban checkpoints surrounding the Kabul airport, are coordinating to evacuate Afghan interpreters from the country, an Afghanistan war veteran and member of the coalition told Fox News.
These interpreters, now targeted by the Taliban, were essential U.S. allies during the Afghanistan war and played roles much larger than simply acting as translators, according to Matt Zeller. The Biden administration has faced fierce criticism that the U.S. hasn’t made their evacuation more of a priority.
"These people that we’re talking about … they were our eyes and ears on the battlefield," Zeller told Fox News. He said they’d hear Taliban communications ordering fighters to shoot the interpreters first.
"From the Taliban’s perspective, they won," Zeller, a former CIA analyst, continued. The Afghan interpreters "are the people who have been helping us to kill them over the last 20 years."
"They want revenge, they want retribution," he said. "There’s no place for these people in Afghanistan."
There’s estimated to be at least 20,000 Afghan interpreters and family members trapped in Afghanistan.
Zeller described a "digital Dunkirk" campaign working to evacuate the Afghan interpreters. He said "hundreds of thousands" of people joined the movement after just a few weeks, but that it could grow into the millions by the time it’s over.
"If you served in the Afghan war and you still care about these people, chances are you’re probably part of the digital Dunkirk," Zeller told Fox News.
He said it started as an "army of veterans" getting pinged by Afghans, but that the network has grown to include organizations for human rights, faith and political advocacy.
"It’s incredible," Zeller said. "It’s not just veterans. Literally it’s pastors, it’s my mom, it’s my relatives, people who have never served in Afghanistan … widows, widowers, children of people who served."
"We’ve had intel analysts who have come and started doing satellite imagery analysis and actually putting together products for people where they’re mapping out Taliban checkpoints in real time using social media data" to provide safe routes to the airport, Zeller told Fox News.
The Taliban have said it would forgive any Afghans who helped the U.S. during the war. But the extremist group has established checkpoints blocking the path to the airport in Kabul, and numerous reports have indicated that they’re either recording or killing anyone they find that allied against them.
Afghans with direct or familial connections to the U.S. troops "will be disappeared" by the Taliban, the brother of one interpreter previously told Fox News.
"If you have an English document on you in that checkpoint, they take that document," Zeller told Fox News. "And they make note that you’re now on their list."
Immediately after Zeller joined Fox News on a Zoom call, he asked to delay the interview and began tapping on his phone. He apologized and said he was helping someone "get away from the Taliban."
"I’m spending most of my nighttime texting with Afghans, telling them ‘no, this is the gate you now got to try and get to. Oh, well here’s where this Taliban checkpoint is, you gotta take this street to literally get around them,'" Zeller said.
But Afghans’ struggles continue even after they make it past the Taliban and into the airport.
"If you get people who get there, they need to be prepared to wait up to nine, 10 hours, in horrifically hot, humid conditions, with no water, no food no bathroom," Zeller told Fox News. "Just the worst possible conditions you can think of."
"Because on top of that, the Taliban are shooting indiscriminately into the crowd and over everybody’s head," he continued. "It’s just complete and total chaos."
Zeller described one instance where he successfully got a U.S. citizen through a gate at the Kabul airport after talking with a Marine over speaker phone.
"The rest of her family was there behind her," Zeller told Fox News. "They’re not U.S. citizens yet, and they weren’t allowed in."
"She had to make the heartbreaking decision to leave her family behind," he continued. "That is being played out over and over and over again."
"I’ve got friends who have told me that they’ve had literally U.S. citizens standing in the crowd waving their blue passports screaming ‘I’m a U.S. citizen,’ and the Marines can’t come get them," Zeller said.
Zeller said the U.S. has a responsibility to evacuate the Afghan interpreters.
If they aren’t evacuated now, then "they’re gonna be dead, and we’ll regret for the rest of our lives having failed them," Zeller told Fox News.
He explained just how essential they were to the U.S. troops.
"We would roll into a village and [our interpreter] would tap me on the shoulder and say ‘something’s wrong here,’" Zeller said. "’Normally when we come here, that guy comes out with tea, and those kids are over there playing with a soccer ball, and there’s no one around. This is a bad thing. We usually get attacked when it’s like this.’"
"And five minutes later, we’re getting shot at," Zeller continued.
"That type of insight saves lives," he said. "That cultural context cannot ever be replaced other than by standing next to someone who came from there."
Zeller said he promised to someday repay his interpreter for saving the Marine’s life. He was able to help get the interpreter out of Afghanistan.
"I’m thankful I got to fulfill it for him, but there are now thousands of others, who Americans made just as equal and just as important of a promise, who are being betrayed and left behind," Zeller told Fox News.
He said the U.S. faces a moral injury if it fails to evacuate the Afghan interpreters.
"I already know of at least one veteran suicide over this," Zeller told Fox News.
"I would love for someone to call up and say ‘Major Zeller, you need to put your uniform on, you’re being sent to Afghanistan to help out with us,’" Zeller said. "I don’t know of a single veteran that I’ve spoken with who feels any differently."
He said he can’t imagine what it must be like for the U.S. troops at the Kabul airport "who have to stand 50 meters away from the Taliban and watch them be thugs and not be able to do a damn thing about it."
Gunfire could be heard throughout voice memos a female journalist attempting to leave Afghanistan sent Fox News. Based on her location, the U.S. troops at the Kabul airport could likely hear the shots.
Zeller said the campaign to evacuate the interpreters "is a whole of America effort … minus the one guy, the only guy, who can give the order to actually truly save these people," referring to President Biden.
"I was appalled that the secretary of defense said he didn’t have the ability to guarantee the safe movement of Americans to the airport in Kabul," Zeller told Fox News. "He absolutely does."
"He has the United States military," he continued. "What he doesn’t have is the orders to move those people."
"At the end of a war, there are two questions that loom large," Zeller said. "Was it worth it, and how do you end it?"
"History gets to decide the former, we get to decide the latter," he told Fox News. "Right now, we’ve chosen to end it with profound shame."
Prior to publication, Fox News determined this story would not bring additional danger to Afghan interpreters, as the Taliban was already aware of their efforts to escape.
6. Story Telling and Strategy: How Narrative is Central to Gray Zone Warfare
Simply stated, to be effective in the gray zone we must learn to lead with influence. And our values provide the basis for our narrative. And we have good stories to tell!
For our adversaries politics is war by other means. We must understand that embrace it.
Excerpts:
Revisionist states use narrative as both ends and means in gray zone competition. It is not enough to prepare operational contingencies to address gray zone activities; the battlefield starts and ends at the narrative level. Modern Russian and Chinese strategy increasingly gives primacy to information warfare, while the US government has been slow to adapt. These competitors have employed gray zone warfare to great effect in places like the South China Sea, the Sea of Azov, and now Bhutan. To reverse this trend, the United States should seek to undermine competitor deniability, working closely with partners to reinforce messaging, and thoroughly understanding narrative vulnerabilities and risks.
Story Telling and Strategy: How Narrative is Central to Gray Zone Warfare - Modern War Institute
Gray zone warfare can take the form of something as uneventful as building infrastructure. Since 2015, China has built three new villages in an area it claims is in Tibet, but is actually in Bhutan. The Chinese government has also built roads, police outposts, and even military infrastructure in northern Bhutan. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has claimed part of this territory since the 1980s, but has only recently started construction. China’s ultimate goal is to trade land stolen in northern Bhutan for a more strategically-located parcel that it wants to acquire along the northern border of India. The fact that part of the occupied area, Beyul Khenpajong, is one of the most sacred locations in Bhutan, only strengthens China’s gambit.
At first glance, the Bhutan episode seems to be a classic example of China illegally implementing facts on the ground to secure strategic gains. However, the development in Bhutan is also an example of how narrative plays a central role in gray zone warfare. Key to Beijing’s strategy in Bhutan is establishing a narrative that the territory is part of China—or at least that each side’s argument has merit. The stronger that narrative, the less likely international support for Bhutan will coalesce. Last year a local Chinese Communist Party official visited one of the villages to celebrate the settlement of the area—a mundane event. To the international community, this is not a vision of territorial seizure, but an obscure legal dispute that is best left to the two interested parties.
Narrative serves as both ends and means in gray zone warfare. Gray zone actions shape an overall narrative in support of strategic goals. At the same time, gray zone actions are reinforced by narrative and, if the narrative fails to gain traction, the actions have a lower chance of success. Gray zone warfare often relies on deniability, remaining below an adversary’s response threshold, and achieving a cumulative effect through seemingly minor actions. Successful narrative casts doubt on the adversary’s interpretation of events, emphasizes the everyday nature of gray zone activity, and ultimately becomes an accepted or contending explanation.
Four Elements of Gray
Implausible Deniability
Gray zone activities are conducted in ambiguous ways so that the actor or intent are veiled, albeit thinly. For example, in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea, it sent unidentified armed forces (i.e., little green men) to conduct the operation and denied that they were Russian soldiers. On the veiled intent side, during much of its island building in the South China Sea, the Chinese government claimed it was building bases for search and rescue and environmental research. By establishing a thin veneer of deniability, a revisionist state can impede the international community from establishing a shared narrative of malign activities. While the deniability is implausible to most observers, it gives some states, or elements within them, an excuse not to act. This raises the importance of combating an adversary’s narrative and not just its tactical actions. Without a shroud of deniability over tactical actions, strategic intent would be clearer (e.g., Russia is using its armed forces to annex part of Ukraine), giving the international community an opportunity or even a mandate to organize an effective response.
Goldilocks Competition
Gray zone activities are neither too hot nor too cold, falling short of conventional war but involving competition more intense than everyday international relations. Adversaries frame gray zone activities as normal behavior when in fact they are revisionist attempts to change the status quo. For example, in the South China Sea, China employs its maritime militia, with the backing of its muscular coast guard, to strong-arm the fishing fleets of neighboring countries to assert its widely disputed territorial claims. Chinese authorities portray these activities as mundane, but in fact, this narrative is a campaign to normalize China’s territorial ambitions. A central element of the campaign is framing bullying actions as simple enforcement of a well-established border. This is in contrast to the truth, which is that Beijing is using force to push other claimants out of their own territory.
Sub-Provocative Action
Gray zone activities are conducted at a level of intensity or scope that is unlikely to trigger a conventional military response. Narrative helps establish the perception that actions are so limited in scale as to make a conventional response seem unreasonable. For example, Chinese forces have enlarged a number of features in the South China Sea on which they have built significant military facilities to include ten-thousand-foot runways, high-frequency radars, and buried bunkers. Taken after the fact, the actions are a clear threat to other regional actors, who might have considered an armed response: China built military bases on islands in dispute. However, during the course of construction, the limited scope of the work, staged development, and Chinese denials would have made a conventional response seem disproportionate.
Cumulative Effect
Individual gray zone actions have small impact, but collectively they can have strategic effects. For example, China has been flying its military aircraft into Taiwan’s aircraft identification zone in what appears to be a bid to exhaust the much smaller Taiwanese military’s readiness and reinforce PRC claims that Taiwanese independence is disputable. Each time these aircraft approach the island, Taiwan scrambles its jets. From mid-September to mid-December 2020, Chinese military aircraft flew more than one hundred such missions. In April 2021, Chinese sorties reached an all-time monthly high. These activities are meant to signal to the United States that Taiwan has no legitimate—or realistic – claim to independence. Indeed, many of the largest sorties have come after US-Taiwanese senior leader engagements or statements on Taiwan by senior US leaders.
Implications for US Policy
The centrality of narrative in gray zone warfare points to how the US government can confront adversary efforts. At the national level, the United States should focus its efforts at undermining implausible deniability, illuminating the true nature of Goldilocks competition, and illustrating the potential strategic impact of cumulative adversary actions. If the United States can provide clear evidence before too many facts on the ground have accumulated, there might be an opportunity to coalesce the international community behind a response. However, counter-messaging is inherently challenging, so the centrality of narrative also points to the need for the US government to establish and advance its own narrative. This positive narrative, centered on upholding the rule of law and an international system that has resulted in decades of shared prosperity, serves its own purpose in strategic competition. It also provides a stark contrast to the malign activities embraced by revisionist states. Illuminating differences between the two narratives also provides less wiggle room for partners and allies that want to avoid tough decisions regarding China and Russia.
Moving down to the military level, there are a number of implications that DoD leaders should consider when planning military activities. First, the military can support the overall US government effort to undermine the implausible deniability of adversary gray zone activity. A picture (or video) is worth a thousand words and can help drive international opinion more effectively than press releases alone. The military is well-positioned to collect evidence of adversary actions—and it can share it with partner nations and news agencies. The military is already spending some resources in this space. For example, DoD has flown reporters on military reconnaissance aircraft to highlight the military nature of Chinese island building in the South China Sea. Given the strategic nature of adversary gray zone campaigns, DoD leaders should further prioritize these efforts.
Second, the US military spends a lot of time forward, engaging with partners and allies, and signaling adversaries. Activities include theater security cooperation, exercises, freedom-of-navigation activities, and key-leader engagements. When selecting which of these activities to fund, plans should be viewed through lens of reinforcing the US narrative—upholding the rule of law, countering illegal activity, supporting partners and allies—and degrading adversary narratives. A key part of this effort is to work with partners that reinforce the positive US narrative centered on rule of law, so increased vigilance surrounding compliance with Leahy Law standards is needed.
Third, any action that undermines US narratives must be seen as a risk. When a proposed operation undermines a US narrative, such as upholding the rule of law, military leaders must see that action as a risk to a strategic-level goal. In some cases, such as the bin Laden raid, such risk is merited. In other cases, such as drone strikes against low-level fighters in places like Somalia, Yemen, and Afghanistan, it may not be.
Revisionist states use narrative as both ends and means in gray zone competition. It is not enough to prepare operational contingencies to address gray zone activities; the battlefield starts and ends at the narrative level. Modern Russian and Chinese strategy increasingly gives primacy to information warfare, while the US government has been slow to adapt. These competitors have employed gray zone warfare to great effect in places like the South China Sea, the Sea of Azov, and now Bhutan. To reverse this trend, the United States should seek to undermine competitor deniability, working closely with partners to reinforce messaging, and thoroughly understanding narrative vulnerabilities and risks.
Dr. David Knoll is a senior research scientist at CNA, a nonprofit research and analysis organization located in Arlington, Virginia. His work focuses on irregular warfare and competition. He tweets @DLKnoll.
7. Opinion | The Afghanistan outcome is ugly. Biden was still right to say: Enough.
Excerpts:
In going through what I had written over the years about Afghanistan, I found this from a 2011 column: “The United States has done what it could to improve the situation on the ground in Afghanistan. We have to decide whether this commitment will end or whether there will be an endless series of ‘fighting seasons’ in which we need to give it one more try.”
Ten fighting seasons later, Biden decided that giving it one more try was futile. He was right to end the cycle of disappointment and frustration.
Now he must take responsibility for correcting errors of execution. Declaring he was doing so was the point of his detailed comments about the evacuation effort on Sunday. “We’re working hard and as fast as we can, to get people out,” Biden said.
He also carries the burden of showing in the coming months through his policy choices that his decision will — as he insists — make our country stronger, not weaker, and the world safer. It will not be easy. It would not have been easier five, 10 or 20 years from now.
Opinion | The Afghanistan outcome is ugly. Biden was still right to say: Enough.
The Washington Post · by Opinion by E.J. Dionne Jr.Columnist August 22, 2021 at 4:54 p.m. EDT · August 22, 2021
The United States is highly competent at fighting wars when the objective is clear, victory is the only option and a large share of the public supports the engagement.
Our country has rarely been good at sustained commitments in murky conflicts where the goal is a vague “political settlement” that is neither victory nor defeat.
We ought to have learned that lesson long ago. Afghanistan has taught it again. It’s why President Biden finally said: Enough.
Biden’s decision to withdraw is a cold, realpolitik judgment, as he underscored in remarks on Sunday. His prism, he said, rested on the questions: “Where are our national interests? Where do they lie?” However brutal the Taliban is, however reactionary and oppressive it might be toward women in particular and dissenters from its purist religious doctrines generally, U.S. interests would not be served by extending our military commitment any longer.
The U.S. engagement in 2001 was prompted by the Taliban’s harboring of al-Qaeda, an immediate, proportionate response to the attacks of 9/11.
With al-Qaeda routed and Osama bin Laden killed, Biden reiterated Friday, the original mission was accomplished long ago. Now, he said, there is a greater terrorist threat “in other countries … than there is in Afghanistan,” and that’s where our nation’s attention should turn.
For Graham Allison, the veteran foreign policy scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Biden deserves praise, not scorn, for taking a “calculated risk in order to extract the United States from a failing effort in a misguided mission.”
Yes, the ugliness of the aftermath should not distract from the fact that Biden made the right call, the best among the bad choices available.
This does not lessen his obligation to respond forcefully to the humanitarian crisis created by the administration’s costly miscalculations about the astonishing speed with which the Taliban would seize control of the country.
The United States must be aggressive in pulling out not only Americans but also Afghans who risked their lives to support our troops, without imposing an artificial deadline. We can do better than this. And we must make things right with restive NATO allies.
On the withdrawal itself, you can distill all the recriminations around Biden’s decision to one essential argument: You either believe that a small U.S. force in Afghanistan could have maintained the status quo and held the Taliban at bay, or you don’t.
While thoughtful people think we could have pulled it off, Biden has the better of the argument.
The president was operating, after all, in the wake of Donald Trump’s “peace” deal with the Taliban and his drawdown of American troops from about 13,000 in 2019 to 2,500, a number that drifted upward to perhaps 3,500. Even those who think a small force could have been successful acknowledge that more troops would have been needed. The bipartisan Afghanistan Study Group report much cited by Biden’s critics concluded that “around 4,500” were required.
Meaning that Biden would have had to reescalate. And if 4,500 had not been enough, or if our forces had come under attack, would the United States have had to send yet more troops? The answer is almost certainly yes.
The signals Trump sent made clear which way the winds were blowing and enabled the Taliban to strike deals of its own all over Afghanistan for quick surrenders by pro-government troops.
The United States needs to learn from this mess, not just from the past two years but from across the entire two decades of our commitment.
The launching of the Iraq War 17 months after the intervention against the Taliban turned the Afghanistan war into a sideshow. Wars should never be sideshows. And as Post writer Craig Whitlock’s exceptional reporting shows, American officials, including the military, spun deceptively rosy accounts of progress that covered up profound problems that reached a climax this month.
In going through what I had written over the years about Afghanistan, I found this from a 2011 column: “The United States has done what it could to improve the situation on the ground in Afghanistan. We have to decide whether this commitment will end or whether there will be an endless series of ‘fighting seasons’ in which we need to give it one more try.”
Ten fighting seasons later, Biden decided that giving it one more try was futile. He was right to end the cycle of disappointment and frustration.
Now he must take responsibility for correcting errors of execution. Declaring he was doing so was the point of his detailed comments about the evacuation effort on Sunday. “We’re working hard and as fast as we can, to get people out,” Biden said.
He also carries the burden of showing in the coming months through his policy choices that his decision will — as he insists — make our country stronger, not weaker, and the world safer. It will not be easy. It would not have been easier five, 10 or 20 years from now.
The Washington Post · by Opinion by E.J. Dionne Jr.Columnist August 22, 2021 at 4:54 p.m. EDT · August 22, 2021
8. How Will the Taliban Rule?
A simple question: Will the Taliban be able to pacify all of Afghanistan? It does not seem likely especially when so many Afghans in the cities have experienced something better than the likely ruling methods of the Taliban. What is the resistance potential through all of Afghanistan?
And I would say Afghanistan is not conquered until it can be governed.
Excerpts:
For the past 40 years, no ruler has managed to bring stability to Afghanistan. There have been other moments when the Afghan people seemed exhausted by war and violence seemed to have come to an end: the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, the Taliban’s first takeover in 1996, the U.S. intervention in 2001. Each time, violence returned before long, helped by Afghanistan’s internal fissures, rugged terrain, scarce resources, and troublesome neighbors. The same obstacles to stable rule persist today. Even if they seem well positioned to enforce order, the Taliban still face real structural challenges.
For now, the Taliban are, understandably, having their own “mission accomplished” moment. But there is good reason to think that Afghanistan’s 40 years of civil war and trauma may not be over. One way or another, the Taliban are likely to find governing Afghanistan to be far more difficult than conquering it.
How Will the Taliban Rule?
Governing Afghanistan Is More Difficult Than Conquering It
The Taliban’s advance into Kabul and the collapse of the democratic government of Afghanistan unfolded with stunning speed over the course of a few weeks. The dizzying turn of events and the scenes of chaos and desperation that followed have understandably led to a torrent of questions about how things went so wrong so quickly. But the Taliban’s rapid success also has much to tell us about the prospects of their rule—both the considerable freedom the Taliban will likely have to enact their vision over the next few years and the steep challenges that will emerge as time goes on.
The Taliban have shown themselves to be the most effective political organization in Afghanistan. For two decades, while Afghan politicians have bickered and democracy has faltered, the Taliban’s values, organization, and cohesion have proved enduring. Girded by their notions of unity and Afghan identity, the Taliban surmounted two leadership transitions, the rise of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), and a 20-year U.S. military presence. They are now in charge and likely to stay in charge for some time.
But that doesn’t mean their victory represents an end to Afghanistan’s 40 years of war, uncertainty, and trauma. The Taliban face the poverty, internal strife, illicit crops, meddlesome neighbors, and threat of insurrections that are endemic to their country—and have proved the bane of all its rulers.
LONG IN THE MAKING
Although the takeover seemed to come unimaginably quickly, the Taliban had in fact been laying the groundwork for their final offensive for years. Since 2014, they had been pressing government forces out of the countryside and surrounding district centers and provincial capitals. By the end of 2020, almost every provincial capital in Afghanistan was vulnerable to Taliban assault.
The offensive that ended with the fall of Kabul started in May. The Taliban swept up as many as 50 beleaguered district centers. Sometimes the army and police ran, leaving arms and vehicles behind. Sometimes they agreed to hand the district over to the Taliban, to avoid bloodshed and in return for safe passage. Sometimes, in more cases than may be remembered, they resisted—recall reports published by the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations of high levels of violence during the late spring and early summer. A key Taliban strategic move was cutting off the roads or border crossings into major cities: nearly all were effectively surrounded by the time the offensive began.
In the last week of July, the Taliban commenced major assaults on Herat, Kandahar, and the Helmand provincial capital of Lashkar Gah. One Afghan officer on the ground in Lashkar Gah—a veteran of 20 years of combat—described the fighting in early August as the most intense he had ever seen. As those battles raged, the Taliban opened up new assaults on other provincial capitals. Zaranj, on the Iranian border, fell first, without a fight; then Sheberghan, in the north; next Kunduz, also in the north, where government forces had been fighting for six years. Soon provincial capitals across the north were falling into Taliban hands.
From there, events moved at lightning speed. With provincial capitals succumbing left and right, soldiers and commanders decided to run, surrender, or hide rather than fight to the death. They could see which way the wind was blowing. On August 12, the Taliban broke through government lines in Herat and Kandahar and captured the city centers. Mazar-e Sharif, the crown jewel of the north, surrendered on August 14. The next day the government forces, including its vaunted commandos, seemed to stand down around Kabul and let the Taliban in. President Ashraf Ghani vanished into exile.
Seemingly spontaneous collapse is by no means unprecedented in Afghan history. As the anthropologist Thomas Barfield has explained, defeats in the provinces have often caused Afghan regimes to unravel quickly, as supporters switch sides or lay down their arms rather than fight to the death. Both the Taliban’s initial rise to power, in the 1990s, and the Taliban’s fall in 2001 are examples of this phenomenon.
“THEY HAD LITTLE CHOICE”
The speed and extent of the Taliban’s victory mean that the Taliban now have far less reason to share power than publicly announce the restoration of the Islamic emirate. Their victory has put them in the position to disarm the vast majority of opponents, as they are doing now; any political actors currently negotiating with the Taliban over the makeup of a new government, such as former President Hamid Karzai and former Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, are completely vulnerable to Taliban coercion at the barrel of a gun. One Afghan leader explained why northern power brokers accepted the new regime by tersely replying, “They had little choice.”
With such commanding Taliban control, the outlines of the new Taliban state are coming into view. The Taliban say they are drafting a new constitution and Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar is in Kabul discussing the future government with Karzai, Abdullah, and others. Whatever those discussions entail, the new government will likely enshrine Islamic law as the sole basis of the legal system, centralize power under a single Taliban leader, and share a token amount of power with other Afghan leaders (perhaps Karzai or Abdullah, but far more likely lesser-known religious and tribal leaders who have sympathized toward the Taliban cause). The new constitution may allow for elections, but they will be designed in a way that will preserve Taliban control over key functions of the state.
For now, the Taliban are having their “mission accomplished” moment.
In the course of their victory, the Taliban promised adversaries that they would be unharmed if they laid down their arms. They are sure to continue to make such promises in order to build acceptance of the new regime and may even offer a few concessions to buy off old adversaries. The extent of Taliban military control, however, makes commitments along these lines far from credible. Over time, Taliban leaders will have little reason not to use their military power to consolidate and monopolize control.
The Taliban victory has also demonstrated a degree of cohesion that is likely to persist. It has always been difficult to know for certain how unified the Taliban have been: they are composed of the main Taliban movement from southern Afghanistan, the Haqqani network from eastern Afghanistan, and a variety of associated tribal groups and smaller militant cadres. The coordinated offensive across Afghanistan reflects cooperation and cohesion among these different groups. Unlike the mujahideen in 1989, the Taliban did not break into quarreling factions as the foreign occupier withdrew. In fact, it was the previous government that was plagued by division (particularly between Ghani, backed by eastern Pashtuns, and Abdullah and other northern leaders). In the week before the government’s collapse, northern leaders were telling U.S. officials that “no one wants to die for Ashraf Ghani.” The Taliban appear much less vulnerable to factionalism than democracy was.
Such cohesion should help the Taliban impose a degree of order in their territory, especially the southern and eastern provinces where their roots lie. Brutality alone does not explain the Taliban’s ability to instill order. Other Afghan warlords are brutal, too. The difference is that the Taliban can inflict brutality without also fighting among themselves. “The Taliban follow an emir,” a member of the Taliban’s leadership body, the Quetta Shura, lectured me in 2019. “Our system is of obedience. … We are not like other Afghans.”
Perhaps more disturbing, the Taliban’s victory indicates that their new government could enjoy wider popular support than it did when they were in power from 1996 to 2001. Years of fighting in the north means that they have some degree of support from Tajiks and Uzbeks, who opposed them in the past. In the cities, young, clean-shaven men are eagerly taking pictures with the Taliban, and at least some educated urban Afghans now appear to be working with them.
THE CURSE OF AFGHAN GOVERNMENTS
Yet for all the strengths demonstrated by the military victory, there are other challenges and vulnerabilities that will persist—and likely grow over time.
For one, tribal politics and feuds are the curse of all Afghan governments. The Taliban, too, will struggle to manage them. Tribes have long-standing rivalries and often prioritize acts of individual honor over acceptance of mediation. When it comes to land and water issues, the Taliban will try to please the landless farmers who have been a key source of support, but the very same decisions will upset tribal leaders who lose out. Even under Islamic law, tribal leaders will want to defend their land, which is the source of livelihood for their families. Tribal clashes and calls for vengeance are inevitable and will be a headache for the Taliban, as was the case in the 1990s.
The Taliban will also struggle to balance competing imperatives when it comes to poppy cultivation. Taxation of the illicit sector has constituted a major source of Taliban revenue, and permitting its cultivation has generated support among poor farmers—a key factor in their military success, since the refuge offered them by these farmers helped the Taliban close in on district centers over the past six years. In power, the Taliban will face considerable external pressure— possibly including from powerful neighbors such as China and Iran—to crack down (as they briefly did under international pressure in 2000). Given the poppy’s political and economic importance, such international criticism is likely to have marginal impact.
Rapid military success also means that the Taliban will lose out on the international funding that likely would have continued to flow to at least some extent had they come into power through a compromise political settlement. The continuation of such funding does not seem politically feasible for most donors now. That leaves the Taliban all the more dependent on poppy cultivation and funding from China.
The Taliban face the same challenges to stable rule that have proved the bane of all Afghan governments.
Before and during their offensive, the Taliban political leadership worked to strengthen their relations with the outside world. They visited Pakistan, Iran, Russia, and China, none of which offered serious opposition to the Taliban takeover. The desire for regional acceptance is one reason the Taliban are taking great pains to portray themselves as professional, moderate, and neutral. But it is unlikely that the Taliban will continue to receive consistent support from all four regional powers, given the dynamics of regional competition. If history is any guide, at some point one or more of Afghanistan’s neighbors will see reason to oppose the Taliban regime and even to support opposition forces fighting to undermine it.
Such opposition may eventually turn into challenge, however long their odds may look at the moment. Taliban control of Afghanistan is not likely to go uncontested. Already, Ahmad Massoud (son of the famous resistance fighter Ahmad Shah Massoud) and Amrullah Saleh (Ghani’s vice president) claim to be rekindling a resistance movement in the Panjshir Valley. Given the events of the past three months, there’s reason to be pessimistic about their prospects. Such forces were in a much better position to fight a few months ago. At that time, many observers (myself included) wondered if leaders in the north would mobilize their forces and defend their provinces. These leaders had often assured U.S. officials that they were stockpiling weapons and ready to “go to the mountains” to fight another guerrilla war if necessary. But with a few exceptions (Mohammed Atta, Abdul Rashid Dostum, Ismail Khan), the response of these leaders and their forces was weak. Northern militia leaders were at odds with Ghani and thus hesitated when it came to defending him. Equally important, many now have comfortable homes outside the country and supporters who learned to enjoy urban life—they had, in the characterization of one Kabul journalist, become “bourgeois.” (As I write this, Ahmad Massoud is reportedly in talks with the Taliban.)
In Afghanistan, the traditional way of war often involves not confronting an enemy head-on but going to ground to fight a guerrilla war. The British, Soviets, and Americans—as well as the Taliban during their last stint in power—all found themselves on the receiving end of such guerrilla action.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED?
For the past 40 years, no ruler has managed to bring stability to Afghanistan. There have been other moments when the Afghan people seemed exhausted by war and violence seemed to have come to an end: the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, the Taliban’s first takeover in 1996, the U.S. intervention in 2001. Each time, violence returned before long, helped by Afghanistan’s internal fissures, rugged terrain, scarce resources, and troublesome neighbors. The same obstacles to stable rule persist today. Even if they seem well positioned to enforce order, the Taliban still face real structural challenges.
For now, the Taliban are, understandably, having their own “mission accomplished” moment. But there is good reason to think that Afghanistan’s 40 years of civil war and trauma may not be over. One way or another, the Taliban are likely to find governing Afghanistan to be far more difficult than conquering it.
9. Afghanistan in the 1950s: Back to the Future [Full Documentary] - BBC News
This is quite a documentary with fascinating footage. A timely documentary that is worth the 28 minutes to watch especially given the Taliban occupation.
This is a time when Afghanistan appeared to be governed.
Sixty years ago, life in Afghanistan was very different to the battleground it's become in recent decades. America’s relationship with the country was also very different as can be seen from a remarkable treasure trove of films, shot in the 1950s by American Glenn Foster, and his Afghan assistant Hajji Mehtabuddin.
Saeeda Mahmood, born and brought up in southern Afghanistan, explores and introduces the films.
10. More resilient UN system - with Taiwan in it
An OpEd fFrom the ROC forrieng minister in the Korea Times.
Excerpts:
At a time when the world is sounding the clarion call for climate actions and achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, Taiwan is actively charting a roadmap toward the goal, and has drafted dedicated legislation to facilitate this process. Climate change knows no borders, and concerted efforts are necessary if we want a sustainable future. Taiwan knows this, and is working on the best ways to turn the challenges of carbon reduction into new opportunities.
In his oath of office in June this year, U.N. Secretary-General?Antonio Guterres stressed that the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed our shared vulnerability and interconnectedness. He said that the U.N., and the states and people it serves, can only benefit from bringing others to the table.
Denying partners that have the ability to contribute is a moral and material loss to the world as we seek to recover better together. Taiwan is a force for good. Now is the time to bring Taiwan to the table and let Taiwan help.
More resilient UN system - with Taiwan in it
By Jaushieh Joseph Wu
After more than 200 million infections and over 4 million deaths and counting, the COVID-19 pandemic has raged across the globe. This has created a profoundly devastating socio-economic impact on our interconnected world, with virtually no countries spared. The pandemic has disrupted global trade, exacerbated poverty, impeded education and compromised gender equality, with middle- to low-income nations bearing the brunt of the burden.
As many countries brace for another spike of the virus, prompted by the highly contagious Delta variant, the world looks up to the United Nations to ramp up comprehensive efforts to resolve the crisis, ensure better recovery and rebuild sustainably. This daunting task requires all hands on deck. It is time for the global body to welcome Taiwan, a valuable and worthy partner that stands ready to lend a helping hand.
Over the past few months, Taiwan, like many other countries, has been dealing with a surge of COVID-19 cases after almost a year of success in containing the virus. Yet, it got a handle on the situation and emerged even more ready to work with allies and partners to tackle the challenges posed by the pandemic. Taiwan's effective response to the pandemic, its rapid capacity expansion to meet global supply chain demand and its substantive assistance toward partner countries around the world all speak to the fact that there is no lack of compelling reasons for Taiwan to play a constructive role in the U.N. system.
However, under pressure from the People's Republic of China (PRC), the U.N. and its specialized agencies continue to reject Taiwan, citing the 1971 U.N. General Assembly Resolution 2758 as a legal basis for this exclusion. But the language of the resolution is crystal clear: it merely addresses the issue of China's representation in the U.N.; there is no mention of Chinese claim of sovereignty over Taiwan, nor does it authorize the PRC to represent Taiwan in the U.N. system. The fact is, the PRC has never governed Taiwan.
This is the reality and status quo across the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. The Taiwanese people can only be represented on the international stage by their popularly elected government. By falsely equating the language of the resolution with Beijing's "one China Principle," the PRC is arbitrarily imposing its political views on the U.N.
The absurdity doesn't end there. This exclusion also obstructs the participation of Taiwan's civil society. Taiwanese passport holders are denied access to U.N. premises, both for tours and meetings, while Taiwanese journalists cannot obtain accreditation to cover U.N. events.
The only reason for this discriminatory treatment is their nationality. Barring members of Taiwan's civil society from the U.N. defeats the ideal of multilateralism, contravenes the U.N.'s founding principles of promoting respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms and hampers the U.N.'s overall efforts.
For six decades, Taiwan has been providing assistance to partner countries around the world. Since the adoption of the U.N. 2030 Agenda, it has focused on helping partners achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and, more recently, engage in anti-pandemic response and post-pandemic recovery.
Meanwhile, at home, Taiwan has fulfilled its SDGs in gender equality, clean water, sanitation, good health and well-being, among others. Our innovative, community-based solutions are harnessing public-private partnerships for the benefit of society as a whole.
The World Happiness Report 2021, released by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, ranked Taiwan the happiest in East Asia, and 24th in the world. The ranking indicates how the people of a country feel about the social support they receive, and reflects in large part a country's implementation of the SDGs. Taiwan is willing to pass on its experience and work with global partners to build a better and more resilient future for all.
At a time when the world is sounding the clarion call for climate actions and achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, Taiwan is actively charting a roadmap toward the goal, and has drafted dedicated legislation to facilitate this process. Climate change knows no borders, and concerted efforts are necessary if we want a sustainable future. Taiwan knows this, and is working on the best ways to turn the challenges of carbon reduction into new opportunities.
In his oath of office in June this year, U.N. Secretary-General?Antonio Guterres stressed that the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed our shared vulnerability and interconnectedness. He said that the U.N., and the states and people it serves, can only benefit from bringing others to the table.
Denying partners that have the ability to contribute is a moral and material loss to the world as we seek to recover better together. Taiwan is a force for good. Now is the time to bring Taiwan to the table and let Taiwan help.
Jaushieh Joseph Wu is minister of foreign affairs of the Republic of China (Taiwan).
11. The Taliban’s Aug. 31 ‘Red Line’
We cannot be forced out or leave without the evacuation being complete. We cannot leave no one behind and we cannot submit to Taliban threats or red lines. We need to be prepared to fight to get all our personnel, including at-risk Afghans out.
The Taliban’s Aug. 31 ‘Red Line’
Now we know why Biden wants all U.S. troops out of Kabul in a week.
WSJ · by The Editorial Board
U.S. service members provide assistance during an evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Aug. 22.
Photo: Sgt. Victor Mancilla/Associated Press
One of the mysteries of the last 10 days is President Biden’s reluctance to say a discouraging word about the Taliban. He’s been far tougher on our Afghanistan allies than on the jihadists who have taken over the country and humiliated the U.S. The reason is almost certainly that Mr. Biden feels he needs the Taliban’s cooperation to get Americans out of harm’s way in Kabul.
If that wasn’t clear already, a Taliban spokesman made it crystal on Monday when he said the U.S. President had better not extend his deadline for having all U.S. troops out of the country past Aug. 31.
“It’s a red line. President Biden announced that onAug. 31 they would withdraw all their military forces. So if they extend it, that means they are extending occupation while there is no need for that,” Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen told Sky News.
“If the U.S. or U.K. were to seek additional time to continue evacuations—the answer is no. Or there would be consequences,” he said, adding that extending the deadline would “create mistrust between us.” He added that it would “provoke a reaction.”
That sounds like a threat in any language, and it explains why Mr. Biden has been so cagey about that Aug. 31 date, which is only a week from now. The President said on Sunday that there have been “discussions” about extending the deadline, though he didn’t say with whom. If he meant the Taliban, he appears to have received his answer from those negotiations.
This is an incredible position for a U.S. Commander in Chief to be in—all but ordered by the Taliban to leave the country by a near date certain even if it means leaving Americans and Afghan allies behind. Mr. Biden has put himself—and his country—in this position by limiting his deployment of U.S. forces in number and location at the Kabul airport. The airport is vulnerable to attack by the Taliban, or to a terror attack by Islamic State, as national security adviser Jake Sullivan conceded on Sunday.
The British press is reporting that Prime Minister Boris Johnson is going to lobby Mr. Biden to extend the Aug. 31 deadline when the G-7 heads of state meet virtually on Tuesday to discuss Afghanistan. We hope he puts some starch into Mr. Biden, who is so eager to be done with Afghanistan that he may be willing to heed ultimatums from the Taliban.
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WSJ · by The Editorial Board
12. Taliban may have biometric data of US military aides
Very, very dangerous. While the Taliban may not be able to exploit this right away unilaterally, I am sure they will get a lot of help from China and Russia in return for allowing China and Russia access to all the data and technology.
Taliban may have biometric data of US military aides
Devices with all the personal data of Afghans who assisted coalition forces may now be in Taliban hands
In 2007, the United States military began using a small, handheld device to collect and match the iris, fingerprint and facial scans of more than 1.5 million Afghans against a database of biometric data.
The device, known as Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment (HIIDE), was initially developed by the US government as a means to locate insurgents and other wanted individuals. Over time, for the sake of efficiency, the system came to include the data of Afghans assisting the US during the war.
Today, HIIDE provides access to a database of biometric and biographic data, including of those who aided coalition forces. Military equipment and devices – including the collected data – are speculated to have been captured by the Taliban, who have taken over Afghanistan.
This development is the latest in many incidents that exemplify why governments and international organizations cannot yet securely collect and use biometric data in conflict zones and in their crisis responses.
Building biometric databases
Biometric data, or simply biometrics, are unique physical or behavioral characteristics that can be used to identify a person. These include facial features, voice patterns, fingerprints or iris features.
Often described as the most secure method of verifying an individual’s identity, biometric data are being used by governments and organizations to verify and grant citizens and clients access to personal information, finances and accounts.
In a May 2021 report, anthropologist Nina Toft Djanegara illustrates how the collection and use of biometrics by the US military in Iraq set the precedent for similar efforts in Afghanistan.
US soldiers stand guard behind barbed wire as Afghans sit on a roadside near the military part of the airport in Kabul on August 20, 2021, hoping to flee from the country after the Taliban’s military takeover of Afghanistan. Photo: AFP / Wakil Kohsar
Inspired by the US biometrics system, the Afghan government began work to establish a national ID card, collecting biometric data from university students, soldiers and passport and driver license applications.
Although it remains uncertain at this time whether the Taliban has captured HIIDE and if it can access the aforementioned biometric information of individuals, the risk to those whose data is stored on the system is high.
Placing people at increased risk
For many people located in conflict zones or who rely on humanitarian aid in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, biometrics are presented as a secure measure for accessing resources and services to fulfill their most basic needs.
In 2002, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) introduced iris-recognition technology during the repatriation of more than 1.5 million Afghan refugees from Pakistan. The technology was used to identify individuals who sought funds “more than once.” If the algorithm matched a new entry to a pre-existing iris record, the claimant was refused aid.
The UNHCR was so confident in the use of biometrics that it altogether decided not to allow disputes from refugees. From March to October 2002, 396,000 false claimants were turned away from receiving aid.
In 2007, as the US government was introducing HIIDE in Afghanistan, US Marine Corps were walling off Fallujah in Iraq to supposedly deny insurgents freedom of movement. To get into Fallujah, individuals would require a badge, obtained by exchanging their biometric data.
After the US retreated from Iraq in 2020, the database remained in place, including all the biometric data of those who worked on bases.
US Marines calm infants during an evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on August 20, 2021. Photo: AFP / Isaiah Campbell / US Central Command Public Affairs
Protecting privacy over time
Registering in a biometric database means trusting not only the current organization requesting the data, but any future organization that may come into power or have access to the data. Additionally, the collection and use of biometric data in conflict zones and crisis response present heightened risks for already vulnerable groups.
While collecting biometric data is useful in specific contexts, this must be done carefully. Ensuring the security and privacy of those who could be most at risk and those who are likely to be compromised or made vulnerable is critical.
If security and privacy cannot be ensured, then biometric data collection and use should not be deployed in conflict zones and crisis response.
Lucia Naldanbian is researcher, Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration, Ryerson University.
This story first appeared on The Conversation website and is republished with permission. To read the original, please click here.
13. Twenty Years After 9/11, Are We Any Smarter?
An ominous conclusion:
For better and worse, the foreign policy establishment is weaker and more fragmented than it has been since the end of the Vietnam War. But it still exists, and it has tentatively learned some things from the wasteful, counterproductive, and sometimes disastrous U.S. foreign policy performance of the last 20 years. “The real problem with Afghanistan was the decision to try to occupy the country, and to try to eradicate the Taliban, and transform it,” said Kenneth Pollack. “I think that we’ve learned that that was ultimately impossible.”
But even the withdrawal from Afghanistan is highly controversial among some of the elite. And the demonization of other countries and peoples, the inability to understand the worldview of challengers and adversaries, the overreliance on force: these traits remain, because they were ingrained in Washington long before 9/11. Because of its unchallenged international position, the United States was able to make major mistakes for two decades after the Twin Towers fell and still emerge predominant. However, with an emerging China possessing nuclear weapons, a growing economy, the world’s biggest population, and expanding demands, the United States cannot afford another 20 years of failure.
Twenty Years After 9/11, Are We Any Smarter?
Our foreign policy wise people responded to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks by embracing belligerence. What, if anything, have they learned?
On a warm June evening in downtown Manhattan, tourists hoping to visit the National September 11 Memorial & Museum are disappointed. The spot is closed after 5 p.m., a security guard repeats patiently to visitors. From behind a rope, the tourists look at the spaces where the Twin Towers used to be. The names of the 2,977 people killed by Al Qaeda in September 2001 are etched into bronze parapets surrounding two pools. Water flows down 30 feet in clear streams over the walls into the pools. During the day, if you are close enough to the water, the endless noise of the city is drowned out. But on nights like this one, New York’s cacophony makes itself heard here. If you close your eyes, it doesn’t sound very different than it did before the terrorists devastated the buildings.
This September marks the twentieth anniversary of the attacks. “Everybody was traumatized,” remembered Richard Clarke, the chief counterterrorism adviser at the time. In the immediate aftermath, Clarke said, the Bush administration was mainly concerned with reacting swiftly to prevent another attack. “[We were trying] to put ourselves in the heads of Al Qaeda, imagine what they might do next, and that was difficult because there were so many vulnerabilities, particularly back then, and a very long list of things they could do.”
Perhaps inevitably, fear and anger influenced U.S. policymaking in the weeks and months after the attacks. But so did other tendencies with deeper sources in Washington foreign policy establishment circles: delusions of grandeur, threat inflation, faith in the ability of armed force to solve political problems, and a refusal to accept limits and trade-offs. As President George W. Bush’s fatefully termed “Global War on Terror” enters its third decade, its enormous costs proliferate.
The price tag is staggering. More than 7,000 American military personnel have died in the U.S.-led wars worldwide since 9/11, and as of 2015, another 50,000-plus had been wounded. An additional 30,000 active-duty personnel and veterans of these wars have died by suicide. More than 7,402 U.S. contractors were also killed, in Afghanistan and Iraq alone. The direct deaths in the wars were upward of 800,000, but Brown University’s Costs of War project, which supplied the data in this paragraph, found that several times that were killed indirectly through such causes as war-related disease and water shortages. As of last year, the wars have cost about $6.4 trillion, and there will be the future costs of service members’ long-lasting benefits. And finally, the wars have created at least 37 million refugees.
In addition, civil liberties have been curtailed, innocent Muslims have been entrapped and targeted, and the constant drumbeat about defeating Islamists abroad has fueled rampant Islamophobia and white nationalism at home. “The anti-Muslim discourse that arose in the wake of 9/11 was a vector through which open racism and open bigotry was smuggled back into the mainstream of American politics,” said Matt Duss, Bernie Sanders’s foreign policy adviser. Broad, hateful generalizations about Muslims and Islam became permissible because of the trauma of the attacks. “I think it normalized these sorts of claims about different groups of people, immigrants, Latinos, Asians, Black people, or others,” Duss said. Donald Trump exploited that bigotry in his 2016 election campaign.
The United States has been successful in some areas. Most notably, foreign terrorists have not attacked American soil en masse since 9/11. “It’s simply harder for foreign jihadists to attack the United States at this stage,” said Steven Simon, who worked on Middle East affairs at the National Security Council (NSC) during the Clinton and Obama administrations. Clarke said that increased funding for technology, the proliferation of surveillance cameras, and the development of facial recognition technology have reduced American vulnerabilities. Simon agreed, saying, “Ranging from the creation of the Homeland Security Department to much tighter defenses along borders, it’s harder to get into the country.” Cooperation between intelligence agencies and law enforcement is far better than it was.
In addition, Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011, and 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured in 2003. Military strikes and raids have eliminated many other jihadis, notably Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. ISIS is fragile today. And, finally, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was captured.
Even those successes are complicated, however. Hussein’s overthrow created the opening for what became ISIS. Mohammed was tortured repeatedly, and he still awaits trial at Guantánamo Bay, along with 39 other detainees, underscoring America’s inability to counter the terrorist threat while adhering to the rule of law. And while jihadis have not attacked American soil en masse in the past two decades, this could have been achieved at significantly lower costs, by relying mostly on defensive measures after ousting the Taliban and wounding Al Qaeda in late 2001.
There is no consensus on why the United States has remained free of major terrorist attacks for the past two decades. “We do not know why there has been no mass casualty attack in the United States like the 9/11 assault,” said Simon. “We do know that Al Qaeda got very lucky in 2001. We do not know whether there was a workable Plan B. We know that there were many Al Qaeda operatives worldwide when we started to look for them, but we do not know if they were prepared to sustain a campaign against the U.S. homeland.”
Bush had alternatives. He could have targeted Al Qaeda exclusively and explained that terrorism should be dealt with by mostly nonmilitary means. He could have counseled Americans to be resilient and avoid overreacting even as news programs endlessly repeated clips of the planes hitting the towers. “We, the United States, missed an off-ramp which could have been taken a few weeks—at most, a few months—after the initial [Afghanistan] intervention in the fall of 2001,” said Paul Pillar, then the CIA’s national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia.
There was enormous global solidarity with the United States after the attacks, and there was a way to build on that, Duss said. Leaders could have emphasized the shared vulnerability countries have to transnational jihadis and worked with the international community to both contain terrorism and address its root causes. “The Bush administration made a rhetorical head fake in that direction, but the policy of endless global war spoke for itself,” he said.
There are not only retrospective assertions. Astute critics offered these prescriptions contemporaneously. “Massive military force is not a winning weapon against these enemies. It makes the problem worse,” the political scientist John Mearsheimer wrote in The New York Times in November 2001, arguing against the United States sending American troops to Afghanistan. He advocated a patient strategy oriented around “clever diplomacy, intelligence-gathering, and carefully selected military strikes.”
Michael Howard, the eminent British historian, argued that the Bush administration’s war framework would have disastrous implications. “To declare that one is at war is immediately to create a war psychosis,” he said in London in late 2001. “It arouses an immediate expectation, and demand, for spectacular military action against some easily identifiable adversary, preferably a hostile state—action leading to decisive results.” Instead, Howard recommended a policing project—ideally led by the United Nations and international courts, although he had no illusions about that happening—that isolated terrorists rather than elevated their importance.
Instead, the foreign policy establishment almost universally saw 9/11 as a call to arms equivalent to a world war. Intellectuals needed to play a major role. The Weekly Standard, the journalistic home of neoconservatism that would shape the Bush team’s thinking, said, “We have been called out of trivial concerns,” adding, “We live, for the first time since World War II, with a horizon once again.” Christopher Hitchens seemed to speak for many when he declared that, in addition to nausea and anger, he felt “exhilaration” at the attacks. “I realized that if the battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost,” he wrote.
Indeed, while the war on terrorism has devastated countries and killed scores of people, it hasn’t been boring. Unfortunately, it isn’t completed, either. The war on terrorism is now entering its fourth phase. The first and most impactful phase was the Hegemonic: an attempt to use armed force to end challenges to American predominance. The second phase was Internationalist, as first Bush rhetorically and then Barack Obama in practice tried to wage a campaign that balanced democracy promotion, multilateralism, and signature strikes as a counterterrorism strategy. Donald Trump marked the Jacksonian phase, defined by a combination of Islamophobia, nativism, and sporadic uses of force. President Joe Biden looks to be beginning a Moderate Internationalist phase, reflecting some of the limits imposed on the United States after two decades at war.
The good news is that the foreign policy establishment has learned some lessons. In particular, there seems to be a moratorium on trying to build a functioning state elsewhere, particularly in the Middle East. “Most in the foreign policy community would oppose another conflict of choice in the Middle East,” Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan wrote in 2018. If another large terrorist attack occurred, “I am not so confident that we would try a massive state-building effort to build a new government,” said the Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon, who was an important supporter of the Iraq War in real time.
But as Sullivan’s and O’Hanlon’s remarks imply, even skepticism of state-building is tenuous. Our many failures these past 20 years have not led to a widespread rethinking of U.S. foreign policy assumptions. And what’s worse, the toll that the war on terrorism continues to take on American power, prestige, and domestic cohesion makes it significantly harder to compete with China, which appears to be a more vexing and important problem than terrorism ever was.
The PreHistory of the Post-9/11 Era
The sources of America’s post-9/11 conduct date to at least the closing years of the Cold War, when the United States found itself devoid of both an enemy and a strategy. The national security state was constructed after World War II to counter the Soviet Union, so the demise of that empire should have led lawmakers to rethink U.S. foreign policy radically. There was much talk in those days of the “peace dividend” that would help solve domestic ills.
Well ... maybe it was inertia. Or maybe states simply cannot limit themselves. Whatever it was, officials declined a scaled-down global role. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell joked in 1991, “I’m running out of demons, I’m running out of villains.” Instead of reducing capabilities and ambitions commensurate with an unprecedentedly secure environment, Powell approved a strategy that envisioned enlarging U.S. ambitions.
Two Pentagon staffers—I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby and Zalmay Khalilzad, who were influential after 9/11—helped draft a 1992 strategy report for Powell, Defense Undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz, and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, who all signed off on it. “Our first objective is to prevent the reemergence of a new rival,” the policy statement read. Not to protect Americans or secure the republic, but to maintain the country’s supremacy. According to the strategy, the United States needed to “dete[r] competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role” and to use military action unilaterally and preemptively to enforce those aims.
The report and its endorsement of preemptive force were hugely controversial. Presidential hopeful Bill Clinton’s deputy campaign manager charged that the Pentagon was yet again “find[ing] an excuse for big budgets instead of downsizing.” Delaware Senator Biden said that the Defense Department was pursuing “a global security system where threats to stability are suppressed or destroyed by U.S. military power.” Instead, he recommended that the United States pursue “the next big advance in civilization”—“collective power through the United Nations.”
Once Clinton took office, talk of domination receded. The Arkansas governor was less interested in foreign policy than his predecessors had been and had come of age as a post-Vietnam Democrat, cognizant of the limits of U.S. power. Defense budgets were slashed. But as the years passed, Clinton comfortably used military power (in Somalia, Haiti, the Balkans, and Iraq), circumvented the United Nations when needed, and expanded NATO eastward with little regard for Russian sensibilities. “The possibilities seemed endless, in the 1990s, for the ways in which America could reshape the world,” said James Goldgeier, who served on Clinton’s National Security Council. Charles Kupchan, a political scientist who also served on both Clinton’s and Obama’s NSCs, said that “the roots of Trump’s ‘America First’ start sinking into the ground in the 1990s, when the Cold War came to an end, and a sense of triumphalism” emerged.
Clinton was pushed by the coalition of hawks that coalesced around groups like the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), founded in 1997. PNAC connected liberal internationalists with Cheney, Wolfowitz, and other neoconservatives and assertive nationalists advocating a more aggressive foreign policy. “If you go back and look at all the signatories for all the letters, there’s probably an equal number of Democrats that were signatories to various projects,” said Gary Schmitt, PNAC’s executive director in the years it was active. In 1998, the group wrote an open letter calling for regime change in Iraq. When Bush II became president, 10 signatories to PNAC’s various letters joined the administration.
At first, Bush was more reticent to use force than some PNAC types wished. He avoided confrontation with China, for instance, and criticized state-building. When Al Qaeda attacked on 9/11, however, that calculus changed.
Phase One: Hegemony
Hours after the planes hit the Twin Towers, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld strategized. Rumsfeld had signed a PNAC statement urging the Clinton administration to “challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values[,] ... shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire.” Now, an aide noted Rumsfeld’s post-attack requests for intel in a series of notes: “Judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] @ same time. Not only UBL [Osama bin Laden].” “Hard to get good case.” “Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”
Rumsfeld’s thinking defined the administration’s approach to exploit the emergency to accomplish extravagant ambitions. Bush needed a strategy to combat terrorism, and his advisers provided him with some of the ideas first outlined in the 1992 strategy report and by PNAC. “They had to be forward-leaning in a lot of different ways on the national security front than they had thought they were going to have to do when they first came into office,” said Schmitt.
Leading Democratic politicians quickly assented to Bush’s binary rhetoric. “Every nation has to be either with us, or against us,” New York Senator Hillary Clinton said. “Everyone has to support our president.” In joining nearly all other senators in voting for the illiberal USA PATRIOT Act, Biden, then the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, repeatedly observed that he’d anticipated the law with his 1995 anti-terrorism legislation. “The bill [Bush’s Attorney General] John Ashcroft sent up was my bill,” he complained. When in 2002 Bill Clinton urged the Democrats to strengthen their stance on national security, he revealed the cynical reasoning behind his party’s full-throated support for the war on terrorism: “When people are insecure, they’d rather have someone who is strong and wrong than somebody who’s weak and right.”
The swift deposing of the Taliban appeared to vindicate Bush. But then the administration pursued a maximal ambition—building a functional liberal democratic state in Afghanistan—without much debate. “I don’t remember anyone’s seriously laying out a goal of occupying all of Afghanistan, staying there, stabilizing it, and reforming it, trying to establish a Western style of government there,” said Clarke. “We seemed to stumble into that without looking at alternatives.” Even worse, Rumsfeld under-resourced the war in Afghanistan, convinced that the United States should use a light footprint. He then pivoted to Iraq.
As the Bush team campaigned to dethrone Hussein and possibly others in the “Axis of Evil,” dissenters within the establishment appeared. Massachusetts’s Ted Kennedy joined Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold and 21 other senators and 133 House members to vote against authorizing Bush to use force against Iraq. Former national security advisers Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft warned that the Bush administration was acting recklessly and isolating the United States as it geared up for war against Iraq.
But the critics were relatively few in number and weak in influence. Mainstream media outlets—and, quite infamously at the time, this magazine—amplified the administration’s hyperbolic or outright fantastical claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda. From late 2001 to 2003, reporter Judith Miller printed numerous front-page New York Times stories hyping Hussein’s nuclear, chemical, and biological capabilities, information derived from disreputable exiles and manipulated intelligence.
But she was not alone. Years later, in the journal Democracy, Council on Foreign Relations president emeritus Leslie Gelb analyzed the elite press’s war coverage. He found that only rarely did top news outlets “provide the necessary alternative information to Administration claims, ask the needed questions about Administration policy, or present insightful analysis about Iraq itself.” Gelb confessed why he had supported the war. He admitted, “My initial support for the war was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility.”
Those dispositions and incentives remain. If another attack occurred, “there certainly would be a lot of pressure to overthrow the offending government,” said O’Hanlon. That pressure exists not just on policymakers but on the media and think tanks that want to have influence. As long as the United States has a massive military at its disposal and a predominant international position, using force to solve geopolitical problems will be difficult to resist. That has been true since the Cold War’s end. “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” Clinton’s future Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously asked Colin Powell in 1993. A cataclysmic event like 9/11 temporarily removes the safeguards of public opinion and allows members of the foreign policy establishment to be ambitious in shaping the world through U.S. power.
Phase Two: Internationalism
When military intervention proves disastrous—as the Iraq War did within months—public opinion drifts again. That creates opportunities for new approaches. Bush shifted from his macho threatening posture to one focused on freedom, democracy, and “the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world,” as his second inaugural address declared. But the war destroyed his credibility. Barack Obama offered an alternative. As a presidential candidate, he declared his opposition to not just the Iraq adventure but other features of the post-9/11 security state. “I don’t want to just end the war,” he said. “I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place.” In his first days in office, Obama issued an executive order banning torture. It was an important decision, ending one of America’s most glaring human rights violations of the twenty-first century.
However, the president declined to officially examine the formation and execution of Bush’s torture policies, let alone hold anyone accountable for them, saying the country needed to look forward rather than backward. Obama’s commitment to undoing his predecessor’s policies was half-hearted in other ways. The day after he outlawed torture, Obama launched two drone strikes in Pakistan that killed as many as 20 civilians. They were the first of 542 such strikes he would approve during his two terms, in lands from Pakistan to Somalia. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, those attacks killed 3,797 people, including 324 civilians.
A U.S. Marine was trapped in a building in Fallujah, Iraq, during fighting in November 2004.
MARCO DI LAURO/GETTY
Some were undoubtedly terrorist leaders, and their elimination is welcome. But recent scholarship suggests that “drone strikes that kill terrorist leaders may ultimately lead to more, not fewer, terrorist attacks,” the political scientist Anouk Rigterink wrote in Foreign Affairs. That’s because lower-level terrorists can be even more reckless and violent than their leaders, and fragmented terrorist groups are harder to monitor. Rigterink noted that, while drones killed plenty of terrorist leaders in Pakistan between 2004 and 2015, the groups they led committed five times as many attacks in 2015 as they had 11 years earlier. That’s to say nothing of the civilian casualties signature strikes cause.
The strategic logic of drone strikes is at least arguable. Less defensible was Obama’s agreement in 2009 to add 30,000 troops in Afghanistan. It was clear that the war was unwinnable. Obama reportedly felt pressured by the military to support the surge in Afghanistan despite its evident fruitlessness. “Obama, he had some difficulty, because of the position that Democratic presidents often find themselves in, had some difficulty putting forward that proposition, that policy, and so he didn’t,” said Jeremy Shapiro, a former State Department hand who worked with General Stanley McChrystal’s team to develop a new strategy for Afghanistan in 2009.
But Obama also offered a Democratic Party alternative to the GOP’s Hegemonic conception of foreign policy, pushing liberal internationalism as the approach that best defends the United States from terrorism, sustains global acceptance, and protects vulnerable people elsewhere. The ill-fated Libyan intervention was part of that.
It was a well-meaning attempt to avert a massacre of rebels and civilians by leader Muammar Qaddafi, whose son had warned that “rivers of blood” would soon run in Libya. But in addition to exceeding the United Nations mandate to protect civilians, the coalition that invaded the country left behind a failed state marked by jihadis and grievous human rights abuses. Democrats were initially triumphalists in the wake of Qaddafi’s ouster. In 2012, Ivo Daalder, then the U.S. ambassador to NATO, co-wrote an article in Foreign Affairs saying: “By any measure, NATO succeeded in Libya.” This was the liberal version of Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” moment. Daalder, who still believes the initial intervention was justified, concedes now, “I learned from that that it’s hell of a lot easier to start a war than to end it.”
The disaster in Libya—coupled with ongoing failures in Iran and Afghanistan—had spillover effects, rightly convincing Obama that invading foreign countries often backfired. The CIA trained and armed Syrian opposition fighters, but the program was small-scale. After recklessly warning in 2011 that Syria’s President Bashar Al Assad had to step down and later that he would cross a “red line” by using chemical weapons against civilians, Obama learned that Assad’s military had used sarin gas against rebels and civilians. The president nonetheless called off a military strike against the regime. Some liberals—including his close aide, Ben Rhodes—lamented the administration’s Libya policies.
More than 500,000 people have been killed or have disappeared during the Syrian civil war. However, the tragic reality is that the likelihood of the United States being able to secure a good outcome in Syria—while concurrently losing wars elsewhere—was minimal. “The interagency players were conscious of and haunted by the Iraq debacle and to a lesser degree the Afghanistan and Libya interventions,” said Jonathan Stevenson, NSC director for political-military affairs, Middle East and North Africa, from 2011 to 2013. U.S. officials knew that Iran felt Syria was of nearly existential importance to it, and that Hezbollah could save the regime at Iran’s behest. Said Stevenson: “This factor further dampened any taste for even a covert proxy war over Syria with Iran: Its stakes, ergo its motivations and its staying power, were much greater than ours.” He added that, by 2013, ISIS was emerging as the strongest and most effective anti-regime force, which meant that any weapons supplied to the rebels by outside parties—including the United States—could end up in the hands of anti-American jihadis. And indeed, some of those CIA-supplied weapons did find their way to at least one large Al Qaeda–affiliated group. Finally, the opposition groups in Syria were deeply fractured and supported by outsiders. “The mentality of the first decade of the new century, that the Americans can fix things, that really needs to be reexamined,” said Robert Ford, the ambassador to Syria from 2011 to 2012, and the envoy to the moderate Syrian opposition until 2014. He was pulled out of Damascus as the civil war intensified. “We end up going into a place like Syria, or Iraq, places I’ve worked, and we don’t understand them very well, and we don’t understand the history, and we’re not very good dealing with the culture. And we just kind of bumble along, embarrassing our friends, and physically walking into traps exploited by our foes.”
Obama had undeniable successes. The daring May 2011 raid that ended with bin Laden’s death was brilliantly executed. It was a significant blow to Al Qaeda and marked a symbolic victory against Salafi jihadism more generally. The Iran nuclear deal was the most significant diplomatic achievement since the United States helped reunify Germany. The opening to Cuba and the Paris agreement over climate change were similarly wise maneuvers. Obama’s popularity enhanced world opinion of the United States. The Pew Research Center found that America’s favorable rating essentially doubled in some places after Obama was elected and remained positive throughout his two terms.
And yet Obama was unable to undo the mindset that got the United States into Iraq, alas. The urge to intervene in places of peripheral concern to U.S. interests, to overreact to threats, to overutilize military force in dealing with terrorists and others—these outlasted Obama. He was, however, able to revive multilateralism, diplomacy, and the country’s soft power, as well as demonstrate that the United States could track down terrorists anywhere. It was “during this period that the U.S. developed, I think, a phenomenal killing machine,” said Steven Simon. Perhaps too phenomenal.
Phrase Three: Jacksonian
After 9/11, Islamophobic sentiments coursed through the country. Years later, Donald Trump mainstreamed it. Stoking panic about ISIS and Muslims, he exploited the public’s exhaustion after three failed wars. By combining anti-Islamic hysteria, nativism, and belligerency abroad, he resurrected a foreign policy tradition that Bush had flirted with, identified by the political scientist Walter Russell Mead as Jacksonianism. Like their namesake, President Andrew Jackson, Jacksonians are “skeptical about the United States’ policy of global engagement and liberal order building,” but “when an enemy attacks, Jacksonians spring to the country’s defense” with overwhelming force, as Mead wrote.
Severing important institutional ties with the world, Trump undid Obama’s accomplishments, unilaterally withdrawing from the Iran deal and the Paris agreement and ending the rapprochement with Cuba. More generally, he immolated the country’s reputation. “If you look at America’s soft power—defined as the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payment—in 2017, American soft power starts a precipitous decline,” said Joseph Nye, a Harvard professor who served in the Defense Department during the Clinton administration. Rather than just an idealistic notion of international harmony, concern with America’s reputation reflects an understanding that the country’s image matters from a self-interested perspective. “If you’re relying on carrots and sticks and have no attraction, and people are repelled by you; it’s going to cost you more carrots and more sticks,” said Nye. A positive global image entices allies and constricts adversaries, all without using force. Between Bush and especially Trump, the United States has ravaged its soft power.
Trump got some things right. “He’s the first president in ages who didn’t start a new war,” said William Ruger, vice president for research and policy at the Charles Koch Institute and Trump’s final nominee as ambassador to Afghanistan. Trump provided a critique of the consistent interventionism that defined post–Cold War foreign policy. But his administration was disastrous in virtually all other aspects, from inflating the threat from China to hollowing out the diplomatic corps.
To its credit, most of the foreign policy establishment opposed Trump. Democrats, of course, were uniformly horrified by Trump’s contempt for allies, affection for tyrants, and his nativism, ignorance, and impulsivity. But so were most Republican officials. Before he won the 2016 election, 50 GOP national security experts warned that a Trump presidency risked the nation’s security and well-being. Four years later, 70 Republican officials, including two who served in the Trump administration, endorsed Biden for president.
But these and other actions demonstrated the GOP foreign policy establishment’s estrangement from actual Republican voters, who adore Trump. “Part of Trump’s resonance in 2016 for sure, and why a lot of Republican voters are wary of others in the party, is because of the fact that he offered a different approach to thinking about America’s engagement with the world,” said Ruger.
While Trump’s affection for Russian leader Vladimir Putin and erratic outreach to North Korea have no parallel in U.S. history, his xenophobia and militarism are classically Jacksonian.
Phase Four: Moderate Internationalism
Biden is the first president since 9/11 to take office with the public understanding that China, not the Middle East, is the major security challenge for the United States. This reflects reality—the Sino-American competition is on. But the war on terrorism era is not over. From the continued troop presence in Iraq and Syria to widespread Islamophobia to countless wounded warriors to the open-ended congressional laws authorizing the president to use force, the terrorism era continues.
Fortunately, Biden ended the futile 20-year attempt to construct a functioning state in Afghanistan, pulling out American troops. “If we haven’t achieved anything in 20 years, we’re not going to achieve anything in another 20 years,” said Anatol Lieven, a Russia and Middle East specialist at Georgetown University. Biden’s move was an implicit admission of the falseness of the post-9/11 belief that U.S. power was unlimited. California Representative Ro Khanna said, “I think [we progressives have] had a huge impact on foreign policy.” He points to the Afghanistan pullout, an increased reluctance on drone strikes, and momentum to repeal the open-ended 2001 and 2002 authorizations for presidents to use force in Iraq and elsewhere in the name of the war on terrorism.
However, Biden has delayed rejoining the Iran deal, insisting that Iran rejoin the agreement first and be open to a larger pact that addresses other issues, such as Iran’s development of ballistic missiles and support for proxies in Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere. “From the Biden administration’s perspective, simply rejoining without some movement from Iran would appear too concessionary and perhaps lose already brittle support in Congress,” said Jonathan Stevenson, now a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Iran has increased enriched uranium in violation of the deal, which is closer to expiration anyway. “The Trump administration did not leave them with a whole lot of great options,” said the American Enterprise Institute’s Kenneth Pollack, an influential advocate of the Iraq War who also supported the Iran deal. “When Trump pulled us out of the [Iran deal], it enormously advantaged Iran’s hard-liners, justified their entire argumentation, and, as a result of that, it put Iran hard-liners very much in the driver’s seat right now.”
The Biden administration’s approach to terrorism and the Middle East so far looks similar to Obama’s. Indeed, an analysis by the Miller Center at the University of Virginia found that 74 of the 100 key positions in the Biden White House have been filled by individuals who served in the Obama administration. But, so far at least, Biden isn’t replicating Obama’s outreach to adversaries and frequent drone strikes.
The Dawn of Sino-American Competition
Twenty years after 9/11, the War on terrorism is being eclipsed by a greater security challenge. Biden is convinced that China has “an overall goal to become the leading country in the world,” displacing the United States. For its part, the GOP has largely united around overhyping the threat China poses. “Trump really crystallized an ongoing shift in the Republican Party of skepticism vis-à-vis China,” a development that will continue, said Hal Brands of the American Enterprise Institute. “Anybody who comes to the presidency from the GOP side in 2024 or after will be a subscriber to the notion of getting tough with China.”
The bipartisan front has benefits. In June, Congress passed a sweeping bill providing $250 billion in funding for technology research and manufacturing, hoping to bolster America’s ability to compete with China. “There is a surprising degree of agreement between, let’s call it the Trump tribe, and the internationalist tribe,” said Joseph Nye, pointing to this legislation.
Some Democrats say the United States should prioritize human rights, pressuring China to stop its genocide against the Uyghur people and respect individual liberties. “Stressing human rights issues is about stressing the different systems, and the differences between the systems,” said Daalder. “It isn’t used as a cudgel to undermine the Chinese regime’s leadership, or the Chinese regime period, in the way that [former Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo and some other people do.”
But the potential drawbacks to an ideological competition with China are high. Already, anti-Chinese sentiment has spilled over to hostility against Asian Americans. A report from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism found hate crimes spiked during July 2018 when the United States and China disputed tariffs and the Trump administration reveled in anti-Chinese bigotry. “The attempt to tie Covid to China, calling it ‘the China virus’ and all that, that you saw Trump and Trump Republicans doing, has already had a tremendous impact,” said Katrina Mulligan, who worked at the Justice Department and NSC during Obama’s presidency. She pointed out that, unlike Russians, America’s primary foes during the twentieth century, Americans of Asian descent look different than white people, making them easy targets for bigots wanting to act on Sinophobia. It’s extremely difficult to compete with China, opposing its human rights violations and authoritarianism, while simultaneously countering homegrown xenophobia, McCarthyism, and racism. “I don’t think we know how to do it,” said Heather Hurlburt, who leads New America’s New Models of Policy Change project. “The universe of people who are willing to act on both of those ideas is vanishingly small.”
Most alarmingly, the dangers of a nuclear war will grow from increased China-U.S. tensions. Presuming that China continues to gain strength, it will have additional power to assert its interests. That presents challenges to U.S. dominance, particularly in East Asia. “It’s an important moment when one significant power is passing or catching up in overall capabilities with another significant power,” said MIT’s Barry Posen, a leading advocate of a foreign policy forefronting restraint. Flashpoints like Taiwan and Hong Kong are particularly dangerous, since the United States has staked its credibility on defending lands of little strategic importance, but which China considers essential to its territorial integrity. “This requires a kind of subtle foreign and defense policy, and that’s not our strong suit,” he said.
Lessons from the 9/11 Era
In environments like this, modest, prudent, long-term strategy is indispensable. So are prioritizing vital interests, reducing unnecessary conflict, and husbanding resources. Alas, the story of U.S. foreign policy since 9/11 is largely a story of squandering human lives and wealth, recklessly damaging the country’s valuable capabilities and soft power. America’s supreme position in the 1990s meant that it had a huge cushion of power to squander through failed military interventions, trillion-dollar wars, and wasteful defense spending. But that cushion has shrunk. Al Qaeda failed in ejecting the United States from the Middle East—the nation still supports repressive governments in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, and elsewhere. But the 9/11 attacks were wildly successful in pushing the United States to engage in profoundly destructive acts that damaged U.S. security, to say nothing of the lives lost elsewhere.
In small ways, because of the consistent string of failures, Washington has become friendlier to the idea of a foreign policy oriented around restraint or retrenchment. The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think tank founded in 2019, is a vital counterweight in offering the media and lawmakers policy-relevant research from a perspective that sees U.S. power and interests as limited and selective rather than inexhaustible and global. “Restraint is now part of the conversation,” said Andrew Bacevich, the institute’s president. “But I don’t think something like any kind of a deal has been closed.”
There does appear to be at least a temporary injunction in Washington on trying to build states abroad. As Khanna said, the country is now “more cautious about the ability of military interventions to transform societies. Do I think that there could be overreaction still on civil liberties and certain misguided forays of foreign policy? Of course, but I do think that we’ve learned the lesson of Iraq.”
But it’s not clear that members of the foreign policy establishment believe their track record is spotty. “If you do the balance of where we are today and what we’ve done after 20 years, the war on terror certainly has been a lot costlier than we wanted, with very imperfect results in the region, for the quality of life and governance in the Middle East—but it’s actually still been somewhat successful,” said Michael O’Hanlon. Kenneth Pollack noted that, while the Iraq War was horribly mismanaged and the United States made other mistakes, “back in 2001, nobody believed that, over the next 20 years, there wouldn’t be another major terrorist attack.”
These accounts suggest that Al Qaeda’s inability to replicate its attacks means that U.S. strategy has been effective and wise. That assessment underestimates the scale and frequency of foreseeable U.S. failures in favor of praising an outcome that would have been easier to attain without spending trillions of dollars and causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands. It’s like a person needing a car worth $25,000 who spends $1 million on the car at a dealership, has a few drinks while driving it home, receives a few speeding tickets, and causes a hit-and-run that kills somebody—but who declares success because he did, in fact, get the car.
What’s more, policymakers in both parties and some foreign policy intellectuals overlook maybe the key lesson of the past 20 years, which is that the use of armed force often weakens America’s international position. Democrats and Republicans alike worry that reduced U.S. influence globally would be replaced by China, Russia, Iran, or other nefarious actors. But this assumes that the United States is endangered whenever other countries exercise power. “Foreign policy should be about interests, not vacuums,” Barry Posen said. “If your interests don’t lie in a place, why do you care?”
The country could use its power advantageously. Few things would benefit the United States more than converting enemies and challengers through tough-minded diplomacy rather than perpetually trying to coerce them with sanctions, bombastic rhetoric, or armed force. The Iran deal, Russia’s commitment to America’s terrorism project from 2001 to 2003, and China’s continual ideological shifts throughout the decades suggest that skillful, creative diplomacy and due recognition of the interests of other countries can reduce tensions, offer opportunities for cooperation, and prevent the emergence of coalitions that balance against the United States. “Trying to befriend adversaries is an important tool of statecraft that often gets overlooked,” said Charles Kupchan, author of How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace.
Domestic challenges and intense political polarization make robust diplomacy and peacemaking difficult, however, not just with the Taliban circa 2002 but perpetually. “There’s always a nationalist waiting in the wings to say you’re selling out the country, you’re being weak in the face of danger,” Kupchan said. Forefronting diplomacy also would mean acknowledging other countries’ interests, dealing directly with adversaries, and accepting imperfect agreements. Because the best way to secure the United States is to preserve its power, narrow its list of vital interests, and build a better country at home, not squander blood, treasure, and soft power in the futile pursuit of global dominance and armed humanitarianism. That is a view that hasn’t gained prominence in Washington. It certainly didn’t after 9/11. Perhaps one day it will.
For better and worse, the foreign policy establishment is weaker and more fragmented than it has been since the end of the Vietnam War. But it still exists, and it has tentatively learned some things from the wasteful, counterproductive, and sometimes disastrous U.S. foreign policy performance of the last 20 years. “The real problem with Afghanistan was the decision to try to occupy the country, and to try to eradicate the Taliban, and transform it,” said Kenneth Pollack. “I think that we’ve learned that that was ultimately impossible.”
But even the withdrawal from Afghanistan is highly controversial among some of the elite. And the demonization of other countries and peoples, the inability to understand the worldview of challengers and adversaries, the overreliance on force: these traits remain, because they were ingrained in Washington long before 9/11. Because of its unchallenged international position, the United States was able to make major mistakes for two decades after the Twin Towers fell and still emerge predominant. However, with an emerging China possessing nuclear weapons, a growing economy, the world’s biggest population, and expanding demands, the United States cannot afford another 20 years of failure.
14. Can America’s Withdrawal From Afghanistan Help Its China Strategy?
It is complicated. Everything is completed. As Clausewitz said, "In war everything is simple. But even the simplest thing is hard." In conventional war, irregular warfare, hybrid warfare, and political warfare. it is all hard.
Conclusion:
To conclude, although the stated purpose of the Afghanistan withdrawal was to shift focus and resources to better compete with China, in reality it is a more complicated story for reasons outlined above. Time would be the final judge as to whether the withdrawal made strategic sense, but so far all indicators suggest that the U.S. simply fumbled, for reasons perhaps tied to U.S. domestic politics. How the withdrawal fiasco will affect the Biden administration’s domestic and foreign policy agendas remains a very interesting subject to watch in coming months.
Can America’s Withdrawal From Afghanistan Help Its China Strategy?
Despite the intention to refocus U.S. energy and attention on the Asia-Pacific, difficult questions remain as to the benefits for U.S. China policy.
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U.S. President Joe Biden has been severely criticized from all fronts in recent weeks as the United States’ supposedly peaceful and orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan turned into a classic fiasco in front of the whole world. As a consequence, Biden’s approval rating has dropped to its lowest level since his inauguration, with increasing numbers of both Democrats and Republications disapproving of his handling of the Afghanistan situation. Internationally, Biden has not received much support from the publics in many U.S. allies either. For example, half of Britons believe that Biden’s decision to pull out of Afghanistan is wrong. U.S. allies and partners in Asia have expressed similar concerns as to the U.S. commitment to the region, particularly as China’s influence is rapidly increasing.
To be far to Biden, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan makes some sense from a strategic point of view, as the China-U.S. competition seems set to be the dominant theme of international politics in the coming decades. Given the long-term relative decline of U.S. capability and energy, it is wise to shift the focus and resources to China from other areas, such as the greater Middle East, that are no longer vital national interests to the United States. Afghanistan is such an area, as the U.S. has wasted almost $2 trillion and thousands of U.S. lives there after 20 years of occupation.
Can Biden’s China strategy benefit from the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan? There are three broad reasons to be skeptical.
First, it should be remembered that the U.S. decision to withdraw from a failed Afghanistan is not just about great power competition, as the Biden administration sometimes claims. There is also a very strong sentiment among the U.S. public to end such useless “forever war” projects, an idea that is supported by both progressives and some conservatives. One could even argue that the past two presidents (Obama and Trump) and also Biden won their elections mainly because of their anti-war positions. So there has been a strong anti-war and anti-involvement sentiment in the United States overall that is likely to remain so in the future. That casts doubt on the renewed interest and focus within policy circles on a possible fight with China. Thus, a mere withdrawal from Afghanistan would not necessarily help the U.S. to refocus on its competition with China, especially if that competition means a possible war with China.
Second, from a pure strategic perspective, the hurried and chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in front of the whole world has hurt the United States’ global image and credibility, despite the denial from U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. Many in the U.S. are eager to refute the link between Afghanistan and Taiwan, although in Taiwan itself many are getting nervous. The withdrawal fiasco seems to prove three things, and none of these conclusions is good for U.S. credibility in the world. The fiasco in Kabul proves that the United States is, first, incompetent when it comes to an important military and diplomatic mission; second, selfish when it comes to U.S. national interests versus Afghanistan’s human rights and development; and third, disinterested in the long-term prospects of other regions and countries. It could be the case that the United States is more incompetent than selfish and disengaged in this case, and thus Afghanistan does not tell us much about the U.S. commitment to other countries like South Korea and so on. Maybe after three or six months people would forget about the Kabul fiasco and regain their confidence in the United States. Nonetheless it does not help the U.S. message about deterring China’s influence in Asia and elsewhere. U.S. allies and partners will inevitably think about how important they are to U.S. national interests, and we all know from history that any country’s national interests constantly change as circumstances change. Afghanistan certainly was of vital interest to the United States after 9/11, and now is much less important exactly because terrorism concerns are no longer that serious for the U.S.; hence the decision to pull out.
Finally, the U.S. decision to withdrawal from Afghanistan has opened new geopolitical space for China in the greater Middle East region and Central Asia. In a way, the U.S. has willingly given up on the western front of its containment of China by doubling down its efforts on the eastern front. Is this wise from a pure strategic view? There is no doubt that China would gain major benefits in Central Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East now as the U.S. influence in those regions continue to fade. Countries like Russia, Iran, Pakistan, and the Gulf states will more likely welcome a more active China, especially with the expansion of the Belt and Road Initiative. And it remains doubtful that East Asian states like Japan and South Korea would wholeheartedly side with the United States in its strategic competition with China.
To conclude, although the stated purpose of the Afghanistan withdrawal was to shift focus and resources to better compete with China, in reality it is a more complicated story for reasons outlined above. Time would be the final judge as to whether the withdrawal made strategic sense, but so far all indicators suggest that the U.S. simply fumbled, for reasons perhaps tied to U.S. domestic politics. How the withdrawal fiasco will affect the Biden administration’s domestic and foreign policy agendas remains a very interesting subject to watch in coming months.
15. Did the War in Afghanistan Have to Happen?
We could have conducted a punitive expedition employing unconventional warfare and then left Afghanistan to the Afghans. I have often pondered this question: What if we took formal surrenders in both Afghanistan and Iraq?
Excerpts:
“It’s true that it was completely unclear how real those attempts were or if they were the real representatives of Mullah Omar,” said Mr. Malkasian, the former adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “But in a peace deal, you have to include the defeated party — that’s how you negotiate.”
“Even if they represented only one Taliban, you have to ask: Why did we turn it down?” he said.
In those early days, I remember how quickly the Taliban went from imperious to almost apologetic. I was one of a group of journalists whom, in late November 2001 — only weeks before they were driven from power — they invited into the country to project the appearance of still being in control.
But they weren’t, and it was apparent. They did not even control the territory they nominally held, and were unable to guarantee our safety in the Afghan border town of Spin Boldak. When an anti-Western crowd pelted our cars with stones, breaking my windshield, they were helpless to stop them.
The Taliban sent us back to Pakistan after three days of being penned inside their compound, because they feared that if they let us wander, they could not protect us. Their authority was waning, their chapter almost over.
Or so it seemed.
Did the War in Afghanistan Have to Happen?
In 2001, when the Taliban were weak and ready to surrender, the U.S. passed on a deal. Nearly 20 years later, the Taliban hold all the cards.
A soldier with the Northern Alliance celebrating victory over the Taliban in Kabul in November 2001.Credit...Tyler Hicks for The New York Times
By
Aug. 23, 2021
Taliban fighters brandished Kalashnikovs and shook their fists in the air after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, defying American warnings that if they did not hand over Osama Bin Laden, their country would be bombed to smithereens.
The bravado faded once American bombs began to fall. Within a few weeks, many of the Taliban had fled the Afghan capital, terrified by the low whine of approaching B-52 aircraft. Soon, they were a spent force, on the run across the arid mountain-scape of Afghanistan. As one of the journalists who covered them in the early days of the war, I saw their uncertainty and loss of control firsthand.
It was in the waning days of November 2001 that Taliban leaders began to reach out to Hamid Karzai, who would soon become the interim president of Afghanistan: They wanted to make a deal.
“The Taliban were completely defeated, they had no demands, except amnesty,” recalled Barnett Rubin, who worked with the United Nations’ political team in Afghanistan at the time.
Messengers shuttled back and forth between Mr. Karzai and the headquarters of the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, in Kandahar. Mr. Karzai envisioned a Taliban surrender that would keep the militants from playing any significant role in the country’s future.
But Washington, confident that the Taliban would be wiped out forever, was in no mood for a deal.
“We don’t negotiate surrenders,” said Donald Rumsfeld, then the secretary of defense, in 2001.
Almost 20 years later, the United States did negotiate a deal to end the Afghan war, but the balance of power was entirely different by then — it favored the Taliban.
For diplomats who had spent years trying to shore up the U.S. and NATO mission in Afghanistan, the deal that President Donald J. Trump struck with the Taliban in February 2020 to withdraw American troops — an agreement President Biden decided to uphold shortly after taking office this year — felt like a betrayal.
Now, with the Taliban back in power, some of those diplomats are looking back at a missed chance by the United States, all those years ago, to pursue a Taliban surrender that could have halted America’s longest war in its infancy, or shortened it considerably, sparing many lives.
For some veterans of America’s entanglement in Afghanistan, it is hard to imagine that talks with the Taliban in 2001 would have yielded a worse outcome than what the United States ultimately got.
“One mistake was that we turned down the Taliban’s attempt to negotiate,” Carter Malkasian, a former senior adviser to Gen. Joseph Dunford, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during parts of the Obama and Trump administrations, said of the American decision not to discuss a Taliban surrender nearly 20 years ago.
“We were hugely overconfident in 2001, and we thought the Taliban had gone away and weren’t going to come back,” he said. “We also wanted revenge, and so we made a lot of mistakes that we shouldn’t have made.”
Northern Alliance soldiers in November 2001 near Kunduz, then a besieged Taliban stronghold.Credit...James Hill for The New York Times
Little more than a year later, the United States would bring the same air of confidence, and unwillingness to negotiate, to its invasion of Iraq, opening another war that would stretch long past American predictions.
By the time the Trump administration reached a deal with the Taliban, the United States was exhausted by war, with little leverage given that it had announced its intention to leave Afghanistan. Nearly 2,500 Americans had died fighting on Afghan soil, along with almost 1,000 troops from allies like Britain and Canada.
The toll for Afghans has been far higher: At least 240,000 Afghans have died, many of them civilians, according to the Watson Institute at Brown University. By some estimates, American taxpayers had spent nearly two trillion dollars on the effort, with few assurances of anything lasting to show for it.
The Taliban, by contrast, went into the negotiations far stronger than before. Their safe haven in Pakistan, to which they had fled in 2001, had turned into a supply line. And even at the height of the American troop presence, the insurgents were able to keep a growing stream of recruits coming both from Afghanistan and Pakistan, fueled in part by rising profits from the opium trade.
They eventually controlled much of Afghanistan, moving first into rural areas and then poking at cities, occasionally dominating the streets for a few days and then fading back into the countryside. Deaths of Afghan security forces increased, sometimes rising to hundreds in a week.
“When I heard the U.S. were going to meet in Doha with the Taliban and without the Afghan government, I said, ‘That’s not a peace negotiation, those are surrender talks,’” said Ryan Crocker, a former ambassador to Afghanistan.
“So, now the talks were all about us retreating without the Taliban shooting at us as we went,” Mr. Crocker added, “and we got nothing in return.”
The deal the Trump administration struck did not enshrine rights for women, nor guarantee that any of the gains the United States had spent so many years, and lives, trying to instill would be preserved. Nor did it keep the Taliban from an all-out military push to take over the country.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo meeting with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar and other members of the Taliban negotiating team in Qatar last November.Credit...Pool photo by Patrick Semansky
It was not even a peace deal. Instead, it extracted a somewhat vague promise by the Taliban to prevent future attacks against the United States and its allies. And even that language was contested: In the agreement, the Taliban refused to accept the word “terrorist” to describe Al Qaeda.
Now, the Taliban control the country again, are hunting down Afghans who worked with or fought alongside the United States, are violently suppressing protests and, even as they promise to allow women to participate in society, are again starting to limit women’s roles outside the home in some parts of the country.
In short, much that the United States tried to put in place is already at risk of being erased.
Some former diplomats point out that the war did bring tangible improvements. U.S. Special Operations Forces used Afghanistan as a staging point to target Osama Bin Laden, leading to his death in Pakistan in 2011. On the civilian side, the American-led effort brought education to millions of Afghan boys — and, vitally, to many girls. Afghans got cellphones and embraced social media, allowing many of them to see and communicate with the rest of the world.
But from a national security standpoint, once Bin Laden was dead, the strategic reason for the United States to stay in the country declined considerably — a rare point of policy upon which presidents Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump agreed.
There were certainly other barriers to peace talks 20 years ago. At that time, the Pentagon smoldered for days after the 9/11 attackers crashed their plane into the west side of the building, and the World Trade Center lay in ruins, a vast pile of twisted metal and concrete. The sense of a national grief, humiliation and anger was palpable, bringing a passion for revenge that may have also blinded many American officials to the long history of failed invasions and occupations in Afghanistan.
The destroyed Royal Palace in Kabul in December 2001.Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times
On Sept. 11, 2001, Richard Armitage, then the No. 2 person at the State Department, told the head of the Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency that Pakistan was either on America’s side or would be considered an enemy: “It’s black or white,” he said in an interview for PBS in which he recalled the conversation.
Mr. Armitage said that Gen. Mahmood Ahmed, then the I.S.I. chief, had started to explain how the Taliban had come into existence, their history and relationships in Afghanistan — including many who had helped in the U.S.-aided resistance to the Soviet occupation. Mr. Armitage cut him off: “I said, ‘No, the history begins today.’”
Understand the Taliban Takeover in Afghanistan
Card 1 of 5
Who are the Taliban? The Taliban arose in 1994 amid the turmoil that came after the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989. They used brutal public punishments, including floggings, amputations and mass executions, to enforce their rules. Here’s more on their origin story and their record as rulers.
Who are the Taliban leaders? These are the top leaders of the Taliban, men who have spent years on the run, in hiding, in jail and dodging American drones. Little is known about them or how they plan to govern, including whether they will be as tolerant as they claim to be.
What happens to the women of Afghanistan? The last time the Taliban were in power, they barred women and girls from taking most jobs or going to school. Afghan women have made many gains since the Taliban were toppled, but now they fear that ground may be lost. Taliban officials are trying to reassure women that things will be different, but there are signs that, at least in some areas, they have begun to reimpose the old order.
Barely two weeks after Mr. Rumsfeld torpedoed Mr. Karzai’s efforts to find a negotiated end to the fighting, a conference began in Bonn, Germany, to plan a successor government in Afghanistan, without the Taliban.
That process further sealed the Taliban’s role as outsiders — all but ensuring that any efforts to reach a deal with them would be rejected. Most of those invited to the conference were expatriates or representatives of the warlords whose abuses of Afghan civilians in the 1990s had led to the Taliban’s takeover of the country in the first place.
“At the time, there was no discussion of Taliban inclusion,” said James Dobbins, one of the American diplomats at the meeting.
“Frankly, if the Taliban had been invited, no one else would have come,” he said, adding that, in retrospect, “We should have figured the Taliban into the calculation.”
The desecrated graves of Taliban fighters, killed before losing the capital in 2001, near Kabul.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations special envoy for Afghanistan, was adamant that although the Taliban had been left out of Bonn, they should at least be included in the next step in forming a transitional government: a loya jirga, bringing together tribes, sub-tribes and other groups to determine the country’s way forward.
A few people close to the Taliban ideologically, but not part of the group, brought binders with their nominees’ resumes to a United Nations office where rising Afghan leaders were reviewing potential representatives. But some of the potential representatives were dismissed as terrorists and later detained, and one was shipped to the U.S. detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, where he spent more than six years even though he had never supported the Taliban, Mr. Rubin said.
“A number of Afghans with the Taliban offered to surrender and, when they did, we put them in prison, in Bagram and Guantánamo, and there was never any discussion if that was a good idea,” recalled Mr. Dobbins, who worked with the transitional Afghan government.
At the time, he said, “I was dismissive of the idea that the Taliban would ever be a factor in postwar Afghanistan. I thought they had been so beaten and brushed aside that they would never come back.”
Looking back, he said: “I should have known. But what we didn’t understand, didn’t pick up on for five years, was that Pakistan had abandoned the Taliban government, but had not abandoned the Taliban. That was a critical distinction. So they could re-recruit, re-fund, re-train and project themselves back into Afghanistan. That was a major missed opportunity.”
While it is not clear that a deal with the Taliban in 2001 would have been possible — or that the Taliban would have kept their word — some former diplomats say that by repeatedly shutting the door to talks, the United States may have closed off its best chance of avoiding a prolonged and extremely costly war.
Praying as U.S. planes conducted bombing operations in Takhar Province in northern Afghanistan in December 2001.Credit...James Hill for The New York Times
“It’s true that it was completely unclear how real those attempts were or if they were the real representatives of Mullah Omar,” said Mr. Malkasian, the former adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “But in a peace deal, you have to include the defeated party — that’s how you negotiate.”
“Even if they represented only one Taliban, you have to ask: Why did we turn it down?” he said.
In those early days, I remember how quickly the Taliban went from imperious to almost apologetic. I was one of a group of journalists whom, in late November 2001 — only weeks before they were driven from power — they invited into the country to project the appearance of still being in control.
But they weren’t, and it was apparent. They did not even control the territory they nominally held, and were unable to guarantee our safety in the Afghan border town of Spin Boldak. When an anti-Western crowd pelted our cars with stones, breaking my windshield, they were helpless to stop them.
The Taliban sent us back to Pakistan after three days of being penned inside their compound, because they feared that if they let us wander, they could not protect us. Their authority was waning, their chapter almost over.
Or so it seemed.
16.
Will the Taliban be able to rule the entire country and exercise central control. If not, what will happen?
Excerpts:
It goes without saying, should the Panjshir Valley decide to cross swords with the Taliban and offer a resistance they could seriously complicate the latter’s ability to impose a unified government on Afghanistan’s complex mix of regions and ethnicities. It is worth remembering that the Farsi-speaking Tajiks of western and northern Afghanistan, including the Panjshir Valley, have continually opposed the southern and eastern Pashtuns, constituting the core of the Taliban. A free and fighting Panjshir could also motivate other regional strongmen, militia leaders and warlords, now deposed by the Taliban, to offer resistance.
Afghans, throughout their history, have rarely remained unified under a centralizing authority. Despite perpetual existential threats to the state, in the past, never have the country’s many different ethnic groups expressed solidarity to the idea of a national cause. To a great degree, it is this perpetual challenge which contributed to the fall of the government of Ashraf Ghani. Under the circumstances, given the enormity of grievances that various characters, actors and the citizenry harbor, it is unlikely that the Taliban will be able to form a “true” and “inclusive” government of national unity in the foreseeable future. It is this reckoning, that may serve as the ultimate weapon in the arsenal of opponents of the Taliban.
Is the Panjshir Valley the Taliban’s Achilles Heel?
For a very long time, those living in the valley have enjoyed a special kind of infamy. Once again, a resistance movement is forming there.
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Panjshir Valley and its inhabitants have a reputation. Situated some 90-odd miles from Kabul in the north central region of Afghanistan, the valley is something of an oddity. Home to the country’s largest ethnic Tajik population, the 100,000 thousand or so inhabitants who populate the valley are famous for being tenacious underdogs.
For a very long time, those living in they valley have enjoyed a special kind of infamy. Indefatigably, for nearly 50 years, of all the districts and provinces in Afghanistan, it is this region, which successfully defied all malevolent authorities – both internal and external – in its bid to maintain freedom and autonomy for Afghanistan. The Panjshir Valley, for decades, has been the untameable heartland of Afghan guerrilla warfare. To the country’s enemies, if Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires, Panjshir Valley is the heart of that graveyard.
When Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan in 1979, the people of the valley gave them a bloody nose under the leadership of legendary guerrilla commander Ahmad Shah Massoud. The same Massoud stood up against rival militias opposed to the formation of a central government following the departure of the Soviets in 1989. He would again lead his people against the dreaded Taliban until his assassination by al-Qaida on September 9, 2001.
We ought to turn our attention to this same undefeated and free-spirited Panjshir Valley and its people, as a riposte to Afghanistan’s current crisis. While we talk of the Taliban’s widening control of Afghanistan, we tend to forget, of all the districts and provinces of the country, it is the Panjshir Valley which has defied the Taliban takeover. True to its reputation, it stands alone, undefeated. Little wonder the region is now fast attracting a resurgent anti-Taliban movement. But can the valley rise up, once again, against the Taliban juggernaut and live up to its old fame — as the vanquisher of tyranny?
A Thorn for the Taliban
Many routes were taken by the erstwhile leaders of the U.S.-backed Afghan government. While some have fled the country, others have gone underground; a few retreated to the Panjshir Valley. Vice President Amrullah Saleh has made it his refuge and his base. A former pupil of the Lion of Panjshir, Ahmed Shah Masoud, Saleh is now defiantly claiming under Afghanistan’s constitution to be the legitimate acting president following the flight of Ashraf Ghani. Ensconced in the valley, he also speaks of forming a unified resistance against the Taliban. But can the valley and its people live up to their reputation and prove once again catalysts of a future Taliban rout?
If social media feeds are to be believed, there appears to be a slow but steady gathering of various opposition figures in the valley. Prominent among them is former Defence Minister General Bismillah Mohammadi. Then there is also the presence of Ahmad Massoud, the look-alike, urbane and defiant son of Ahmad Shah Massoud.
From this pocket of resistance, Saleh and Ahmed Massoud are calling for retaliation against the Taliban. For his part, Saleh vowed on Twitter, “I will never, ever & under no circumstances bow to d Talib terrorists. I will never betray d soul & legacy of my hero Ahmad Shah Masoud, the commander, the legend & the guide. I won’t dis-appoint millions who listened to me. I will never be under one ceiling with Taliban. NEVER.”
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Similarly, as Ahmed Massoud’s recent opinion piece in The Washington Post makes very clear, “No matter what happens, my mujahideen fighters and I will defend Panjshir as the last bastion of Afghan freedom. Our morale is intact. We know from experience what awaits us.” Saleh and Massoud both hope their sworn allegiance and blood ties to Afghanistan’s most famous hero in recent history will galvanize the population into forming a cohort of resistance. Recognizing the valley’s terrain as ideal for defensive mountain warfare and of course its fabled aura of defiance, thousands of former Afghan soldiers have also retreated to the valley.
While they regroup and plan strategy, the foremost challenges that these opponents of the Taliban face are matters of critical military, economic and logistical support necessary to carry out such a mission. For all its glory, the valley is landlocked and inaccessible. Should the resistance take its fight to the Taliban they would need all manners of help from outsiders sympathetic to their cause. Little wonder the Panjshir leader Ahmed Massoud has made it amply clear to the international community, [in order to be an effective resistance to the Taliban they] “need more weapons, more ammunition and more supplies.” Who could possibly come to their aid?
The Spoilers
Already, there is some external regional resistance against the Taliban takeover. Tajikistan, with its ethnic ties to the valley, could offer critical support should it become the eye of the resistance. Afghanistan’s ambassador to Tajikistan, Lt. Gen. Zahir Aghbar, a former security official before assuming his diplomatic position, has already promised Panjshir would form a base for those Afghans who wanted to fight on against the Taliban. As he put it, “Panjshir stands strong against anyone who wants to enslave people.”
India, having been unceremoniously ejected from Afghanistan following its 20-year effort to build ties, would like nothing better than a resistance movement growing out of the Panjshir Valley. During the civil war of the 1990s, it provided critical military and economic support to the Northern Alliance led by Ahmad Shah Masoud.
The failure of the Taliban to treat fairly the country’s Shia Hazara minority (who have been brutalized by the group in the past), may galvanize Tehran’s anger. Let us not forget, Iran was a key supporter of the Northern Alliance when the Taliban was in power between 1996-2001. Then, there will always be the United States as an option. Should Washington’s interests be undermined by the Taliban, it may again support a domestic front that stands up against the new rulers of Kabul.
A New Civil War?
It goes without saying, should the Panjshir Valley decide to cross swords with the Taliban and offer a resistance they could seriously complicate the latter’s ability to impose a unified government on Afghanistan’s complex mix of regions and ethnicities. It is worth remembering that the Farsi-speaking Tajiks of western and northern Afghanistan, including the Panjshir Valley, have continually opposed the southern and eastern Pashtuns, constituting the core of the Taliban. A free and fighting Panjshir could also motivate other regional strongmen, militia leaders and warlords, now deposed by the Taliban, to offer resistance.
Afghans, throughout their history, have rarely remained unified under a centralizing authority. Despite perpetual existential threats to the state, in the past, never have the country’s many different ethnic groups expressed solidarity to the idea of a national cause. To a great degree, it is this perpetual challenge which contributed to the fall of the government of Ashraf Ghani. Under the circumstances, given the enormity of grievances that various characters, actors and the citizenry harbor, it is unlikely that the Taliban will be able to form a “true” and “inclusive” government of national unity in the foreseeable future. It is this reckoning, that may serve as the ultimate weapon in the arsenal of opponents of the Taliban.
17. Latest on Afghanistan: U.S.-Taliban meeting reported, UN issues warning on human rights
This is what happens when people are left behind.
Excerpt:
The U.N. human rights chief warned Tuesday that she had credible reports of “summary executions” and restrictions on women in areas under Taliban control in Afghanistan, fueling fears of what their rule might hold a week before U.S. forces are set to withdraw.
Latest on Afghanistan: U.S.-Taliban meeting reported, UN issues warning on human rights
| USA TODAY
Biden defends military withdrawal from Afghanistan
President Joe Biden defended his decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.
Associated Press, USA TODAY
Early Tuesday, the White House released its latest evacuation numbers out of Kabul: In the 24 hours ending at 3 a.m., approximately 21,600 people have been evacuated. They flew out on 37 U.S. military flights – including 32 C-17s and five C-130s – carrying around 12,700 people, and 57 coalition flights that flew 8,900 people.
The Biden administration says this brings its evacuation tally to about 58,700 people since Aug. 14.
This comes a week before the Aug. 31 deadline negotiated between the U.S. and Taliban for full U.S. withdrawal. On Monday, the Taliban warned that going beyond that date would provoke a "reaction" because it indicated the U.S. occupation was continuing.
President Joe Biden will meet Tuesday morning with leaders of the G7 nations to discuss the situation in Afghanistan.
Biden is expected speak on that meeting and offer other updates at noon from the White House.
On Monday, press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden has had multiple conversations with world leaders in recent days, including British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron, Spanish President Pedro Sánchez, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, the emir of Qatar, Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, and Crown Prince of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
"We remain in close touch with allies and partners to coordinate the evacuation of their own citizens and their priority personnel, as well as to respond to the ongoing political and security situation in Afghanistan," Psaki said.
– Katie Wadington
WASHINGTON - William Burns, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, held a secret in-person meeting with the Taliban’s acting leader Abdul Ghani Baradar in Kabul on Monday, U.S. officials told the Washington Post.
The meeting was the highest-level meeting between a Biden administration official and the Taliban since the fundamentalist group took full control of the country on Aug. 15. While Burns directs the U.S.’s main spy agency, his longtime background is in diplomacy, making him technically the most veteran diplomat in President Joe Biden’s orbit.
The CIA has not released details of the meeting.
For Burns, the meeting also presented the opportunity to assess Afghanistan’s soon-to-be formal leader. Baradar, who was imprisoned by the CIA for 11 years, the meeting was another opportunity to display the Taliban’s capability as a governing force and negotiating partner.
After his release from prison in 2018, Baradar led talked with the Trump administration in Qatar that negotiated U.S. troop withdrawal from the country. In those meetings, he met face-to-face with then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who had previously also led the CIA.
On Monday, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and State Department spokesperson Ned Price both confirmed the administration is in talks with the Taliban but did not elaborate on what those meetings entailed.
– Matthew Brown
GENEVA - The U.N. human rights chief warned Tuesday that she had credible reports of “summary executions” and restrictions on women in areas under Taliban control in Afghanistan, fueling fears of what their rule might hold a week before U.S. forces are set to withdraw.
Michelle Bachelet urged the Human Rights Council to take “bold and vigorous action” to monitor the rights situation in Afghanistan in the wake of the Taliban's stunning takeover, as she sought to ensure that international attention on the country doesn’t wane.
Taliban leaders have promised to restore security and tried to project an image of moderation, but many Afghans are skeptical and are racing to the leave the country, leading to chaos at Kabul's international airport. Amid scattered reports, it has been difficult to determine how widespread abuses might be and whether they reflect that Taliban leaders are saying one thing and doing another, or if fighters on the ground are taking matters into their own hands.
Leaders from the Group of Seven nations plan to meet later Tuesday to discuss the burgeoning refugee crisis and the collapse of the Afghan government amid wrangling over whether the full U.S. withdrawal of troops could be extended beyond the end of the month to allow more time to evacuate those desperate to leave.
– Associated Press
18. UN Rights Body Needs to Investigate Abuses in Afghanistan
I wonder what is a credible mechanism for human rights in Afghanistan?
Excerpts:
Unfortunately, there are ominous signs that UN member countries may fail to show the leadership needed. A text drafted by Pakistan as leader of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) recommends the weakest possible response, no investigation or monitoring body, just a future discussion on a report by the High Commissioner for Human Rights that was already mandated. For Afghan human rights defenders and women’s rights activists who are watching in horror as the rule of law crumbles around them, the draft resolution is more of an insult than a response. So far no country has stepped forward to lead an initiative to create a strong monitoring mechanism.
...
The council should put in place a credible mechanism immediately.
The Afghan people are looking to the UN to stand up for human rights. The Human Rights Council, the UN’s preeminent human rights body, should not abandon them.
UN Rights Body Needs to Investigate Abuses in Afghanistan
Human Rights Council’s Credibility Hinges on Taking Strong Action at Emergency Session
hrw.org · by Patricia Gossman Associate Asia Director pagossman pagossman · August 23, 2021
Taliban fighters stand guard at a checkpoint in the Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood of Kabul, Afghanistan on August 22, 2021. © 2021 Rahmat Gul/AP Images
As reports mount of grave human rights abuses by the Taliban in Afghanistan, the United Nations Human Rights Council will hold an emergency session this week. It should immediately mandate the strongest possible monitoring mechanism.
Before their takeover of Kabul on August 15, Taliban forces were already committing atrocities, including summary executions of government officials and security force members in their custody. In Kabul since then, they have raided homes of journalists and activists, apparently searching for those who criticized them in the past. In places around the country they have restricted girls’ education and women’s ability to work. This follow years of abuses by all parties to the conflict.
The situation is so grave it merited a special session of the council, to be held on August 24. It’s critical that the council adopt a resolution creating an international monitoring and accountability mechanism to address ongoing abuses.
Unfortunately, there are ominous signs that UN member countries may fail to show the leadership needed. A text drafted by Pakistan as leader of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) recommends the weakest possible response, no investigation or monitoring body, just a future discussion on a report by the High Commissioner for Human Rights that was already mandated. For Afghan human rights defenders and women’s rights activists who are watching in horror as the rule of law crumbles around them, the draft resolution is more of an insult than a response. So far no country has stepped forward to lead an initiative to create a strong monitoring mechanism.
Governments may be preoccupied by the evacuation crisis at Kabul’s airport or prefer a “wait and see” approach while the Taliban consolidates control, but urgent action is needed. With serious abuses already unfolding, any delay will send a message of indifference to the Taliban, with potentially dire consequences. A failure to act now while atrocities mount could indelibly tarnish the council’s credibility not just in Afghanistan, but in other human rights crises.
The council should put in place a credible mechanism immediately.
The Afghan people are looking to the UN to stand up for human rights. The Human Rights Council, the UN’s preeminent human rights body, should not abandon them.
19. With Chinese and Russian knives at the throat of GPS, Senate calls for a study, waits for administration to follow law
With Chinese and Russian knives at the throat of GPS, Senate calls for a study, waits for administration to follow law
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is doing all it can to protect the Global Positioning System, or GPS.
Unfortunately, all they can do is have the Director of National Intelligence write down everything we know about hostile threats to the system.
Protecting GPS is the administration’s responsibility. One reinforced by a law enacted in 2018 that the Trump administration failed to execute and the Biden administration has yet to act on.
The proposed study
Much of the information that will undoubtedly be in the unclassified version of the report is already in the public domain. Here is a preview of the scary things that it will likely say. They are organized by topics the bill requires be addressed.
Vulnerability of the Global Positioning System to hostile actions
It is exceptionally vulnerable.
In just the last couple weeks the Space Force commander, Gen. Jay Raymond, has spoken publicly about Russian “nesting doll” satellites that contain projectiles and “kamikaze” satellites designed to crash into other spacecraft. He also described Chinese “kidnapper” satellites with robot arms that can reach out and damage or destroy other satellites.
Analysts have projected that by the end of the decade China will have enough of these satellites to put one next to every American GPS satellite.
Media reports have described terrestrial lasers that can blind or destroy satellites, space-based microwave weapons, and Russian nuclear powered electronic warfare satellites that could damage huge parts of the GPS constellation.
The easiest ways, though, to damage GPS services has nothing to do with the satellites. Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, criminal syndicates, and individual hackers regularly demonstrate this by jamming GPS signals to deny service, and worse, imitating signals to provide users false, potentially dangerously misleading information.
The potential negative effects of a prolonged Global Positioning System outage, including with respect to the entire society, to the economy of the United States and to the capabilities of the Armed Forces.
Such an outage would be devastating.
GPS signals have been integrated into nearly every technology. They are used to synchronize networks, enable cell phone calls, time stamp ATM and credit card transactions, make farming and every form of transportation much more economical, enable first responders’ radio communications … the list is almost endless.
Our over-dependence and the danger it poses were outlined in a 2012 Department of Homeland Security National Risk estimate:
“The increasing convergence of critical infrastructure dependency on GPS services with the likelihood that threat actors will exploit their awareness of that dependency presents a growing risk to the United States.”
In the nine years since the report was issued, things have only gotten worse.
American society and our economy would be devastated by a prolonged GPS outage. And because China and Russia have terrestrial fallback systems and we don’t, America’s place in the world would suffer dramatically.
All of this is without beginning a discussion of the impact on U.S. armed forces. Even without considering classified material, we can conclude that a prolonged outage would hit very hard. Vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. John Hyten, has repeatedly told Congress the military is critically dependent on GPS.
Alternative systems that could back up or replace the Global Positioning System, especially for the purpose of providing positioning, navigation and timing, to United States civil, commercial and government users.
There are several systems that can do this.
The government has produced at least nine different reports on this subject since 2004 when President Bush mandated a backup capability be established. In January of this year the Department of Transportation reported to Congress on systems from 11 different vendors it had demonstrated and evaluated. Most are technically mature and ready to deploy.
Any actions being planned or undertaken by the intelligence community, the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce and other elements of the Federal Government to mitigate any risks to the entire society, to the economy of the United States and to the capabilities of the Armed Forces, stemming from a potential unavailability of the Global Positioning System.
This, as they say, is the $64,000 question.
Last February the Trump administration issued an executive order warning citizens that GPS signals are vulnerable, and to protect themselves against disruptions. It also called for more study. Just before leaving office they published a policy that called for establishing alternative systems “as appropriate.”
The Department of Defense is developing alternative systems for the armed forces. Congress has mandated that at least one technology be shared with civilian agencies and commercial interests.
And, as mentioned earlier, numerous studies have been completed. More than enough for the administration to proceed ahead and establish a system as an alternative to GPS.
Carry out the law – protect GPS and America
Establishing a terrestrial alternative to GPS, as required by law, would immediately decrease its value as a target for our adversaries making both the system and our nation safer. It could also serve as a technical foundation for military expeditionary systems.
Most importantly, it would be a resilient fall back against the near inevitability of malicious activity, solar storms, accident and other adverse events
Yet, despite two administration promises to Congress that a terrestrial alternative to GPS would be established, and the 2018 National Timing Resilience and Security Act requiring this be done, no action has been taken.
In fairness, Congress and the executive branch share responsibility for perpetuating this danger to the nation — one that Department of Homeland Security officials have called “a single point of failure” for America.
Successive administrations have failed to act to counter threats and fulfill promises. The Trump administration ignored the law requiring establishment of an alternative system and instead just warned Americans to protect themselves.
And, while Congress has expressed its concern in hearings, letters and by passing a law, it has failed to appropriate funds to make the law a reality.
To quote then-Sen. Joe Biden, “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget.” If Congress really wants to protect America, it needs to put its money where its legislation is.
Dana A. Goward is president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation.
20. How Afghanistan rattled Asia and emboldened China
Excerpts:
James Crabtree, executive director of think tank II-SS Asia, noted that Ms Harris' visit was one of several made to Asia in recent months by top US officials.
"The Americans have answered the first set of criticisms which is 'You've forgotten us' - now they are turning up," he said.
"Now the next question is, with all this talk of partnerships, what does this amount to in fact?"
Some believe the US will need to deliver more than just promises. Dr Chong said this may mean getting bipartisan support for US commitments, ratifying the UN's maritime law convention, and re-joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement which the US withdrew from under Donald Trump.
Said Mr Crabtree: "People are going to watch more closely what the US is going to do in Asia from now on, because Afghanistan has primed them to look for signs that they are not reliable.
The US may be more wary of people questioning their commitment and would want to demonstrate it is not the case."
How Afghanistan rattled Asia and emboldened China
By Tessa Wong and Zhaoyin Feng
BBC News, Singapore and Washington
Published
4 hours ago
Like many across the world, millions in Asia have been shocked by the scenes of desperation coming out of Afghanistan - with some asking if America can still be trusted.
On Sunday evening - just a week after the Afghan capital Kabul fell to the Taliban - US vice-president Kamala Harris landed in Singapore for the start of a whirlwind Asian tour.
She has since sought to smooth ruffled feathers by saying the region is a "top priority" for the US.
But is it enough to reassure those concerned in Asia? And can America fend off China's attempts to seize on what some say is a golden opportunity for anti-US propaganda?
Anxious murmurings
On Monday, Singapore's prime minister Lee Hsien Loong warned that many in the region were watching how the US repositions itself in the fallout of Afghanistan.
For two of America's biggest regional allies in particular, South Korea and Japan, public confidence in the US has largely been unaffected - but there have been anxious murmurings from some quarters.
The US presently has tens of thousands of troops stationed in both countries, but former president Donald Trump's America First foreign policy had strained relationships.
In an interview with ABC News last week, US President Joe Biden insisted there was a "fundamental difference" between Afghanistan and allies like South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, saying it was "not even comparable".
image sourceGetty Images
image captionThe Taliban takeover of Afghanistan has unsettled many in Asia
Experts have agreed, pointing out that Afghanistan is not the same as more developed places in Asia which have their own substantial military resources and strong governments.
As Asian democracies, they share similar values as America and have become significant trade and military partners. And with places like South Korea forming the bedrock of US military strategy in Asia, it would be unlikely that the US would pull out its troops any time soon.
'US is destructive'
But as uncertainty swirls, China has ratcheted up its rhetoric.
China's foreign Minister Wang Yi said last week that the US "hasty" pullout from Afghanistan has caused a "serious negative impact "while some hawkish government figures and state media have gone one step further.
Foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian has repeatedly compared it to the fall of Saigon, while his colleague Hua Chunying called the US "destructive", adding that "wherever the US sets foot… we see turbulence, division, broken families, deaths and other scars in the mess it has left."
Nationalist tabloid Global Times carried an editorial urging Taiwan to stop "bonding themselves to the anti-Chinese mainland chariot of the US", arguing that the US would not bother waging a costly war with China over Taiwan.
Its editor-in-chief also posted this tweet:
After the fall of the Kabul regime, the Taiwan authorities must be trembling. Don’t look forward to the US to protect them. Taipei officials need to quietly mail-order a Five-Star Red Flag from the Chinese mainland. It will be useful one day when they surrender to the PLA.
— Hu Xijin 胡锡进 (@HuXijin_GT) August 16, 2021
Taiwan, which buys weapons from the US, considers itself as an independent country, but China sees it as a renegade province that must be reclaimed even by force.
The island has fought back in recent days by repeatedly likening China to the Taliban. Premier Su Tseng-chang said last week that "foreign forces" who wanted to invade Taiwan were "deluded", while foreign minister Joseph Wu had this to say:
Thanks for upholding the wishes & best interests of the people of #Taiwan. They include democracy & freedom from communism, authoritarianism & crimes against humanity. #China dreams of emulating the #Taliban, but let me be blunt: We've got the will & means to defend ourselves. JW https://t.co/p71Mru2RLl
— 外交部 Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ROC (Taiwan) (@MOFA_Taiwan) August 21, 2021
The situation was not helped by Mr Biden who, in his ABC interview, appeared to conflate Taiwan with South Korea and Japan, with whom the US has formal agreements to defend if war breaks out. Unlike the others, Taiwan does not have a defence treaty with the US and only an implicit security guarantee.
US officials later said their "strategic ambiguity" policy on Taiwan had not changed, but the incident only gave Chinese state media more fodder to attack the US.
The Afghanistan exit, in other words, has been a golden opportunity for China to convince the Asian public that the US cannot be trusted, say experts.
"The whole point of this propaganda is to increase public pressure on governments that have close cooperation with US, and weaken that relationship," said Ian Chong, an associate professor of political science with the National University of Singapore.
Treading a fine line
But Afghanistan has not been a total windfall for China either.
Bonnie Glaser, an Asia expert at the German Marshall Fund, believes that Beijing sees the recent changes in Afghanistan as more risky than beneficial. "The Chinese are very worried about the potential for instability and Afghanistan continuing to be a haven for militants and terrorists," she said.
In a pragmatic move, China invited the Taliban over for talks last month, offering economic support for Afghanistan but also stressing that the country should not be used as a staging point for terrorists.
image sourceReuters
image captionChina's foreign minister Wang Yi (right) posed for pictures with the Taliban leader Mullah Baradar (left)
But domestically, it has struggled to sell this cautious alliance to some parts of the Chinese public that are repulsed by the Taliban.
When the Taliban retook power last week, foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said that China respects "the choice of Afghan people". The phrase quickly attracted backlash and accusations of whitewashing on Chinese social media.
At a time of heightened awareness of women's rights in China, many online have criticised the Taliban for their treatment of Afghan women.
There's also the fact that Beijing now has to deal with an Islamist militant group right at its doorstep, at a time when China continues to brutally crack down on its own Muslim minority in the name of combating extremism.
With the clampdown on the Uighurs, "the Chinese central government has been getting people to be wary of religious groups. So this association with the Taliban could be problematic as it's contradictory," said Dr Chong.
"What China is doing now is to garner whatever tactical advantage they can get. But what [kind of gains] it can be transformed into, is up in the air. We don't even know where Afghanistan is going right now."
All eyes on America
Some observers, like Ms Glaser, believe that the Afghan withdrawal is not "the death knell of US leadership", and that US allies will be reassured that Washington would now pay greater attention to the region and its competition with China.
In her speech on Tuesday in Singapore, Ms Harris sold a vision of American faithfulness to Asia.
She said "there should be no doubt we have enduring interests in this region and enduring commitments as well… those commitments also include security", and promised that the US would "invest our time and our energy" in strengthening relationships.
image sourceReuters
image captionMs Harris in Singapore on Tuesday received an orchid that was named after her
James Crabtree, executive director of think tank II-SS Asia, noted that Ms Harris' visit was one of several made to Asia in recent months by top US officials.
"The Americans have answered the first set of criticisms which is 'You've forgotten us' - now they are turning up," he said.
"Now the next question is, with all this talk of partnerships, what does this amount to in fact?"
Some believe the US will need to deliver more than just promises. Dr Chong said this may mean getting bipartisan support for US commitments, ratifying the UN's maritime law convention, and re-joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement which the US withdrew from under Donald Trump.
Said Mr Crabtree: "People are going to watch more closely what the US is going to do in Asia from now on, because Afghanistan has primed them to look for signs that they are not reliable.
The US may be more wary of people questioning their commitment and would want to demonstrate it is not the case."
21. Afghanistan: The War That Made War Normal
Afghanistan: The War That Made War Normal
Green Beret Ryan Hendrickson didn't see any massive fireball from the improvised explosive device that nearly took his right leg during his first deployment to Afghanistan in 2010.
He didn't even really hear an explosion -- just a "pop" in his damaged ears.
But there was one thing he could hear, loud and clear, as he lay on the ground in a cloud of ammonia and with bones sticking out of his shattered leg: The Taliban, celebrating and congratulating one another over intercepted radio traffic, on what they thought was the death of an American soldier.
The memory of their laughter drove Hendrickson over the following 18 months, as he defied the odds to save his leg, recover both physically and emotionally, and then in 2012 return to Afghanistan for several more deployments, eventually earning a Silver Star.
"My mindset was, you bloodied me up, and you hurt me, but you didn't beat me," Hendrickson, who retired as a sergeant first class in 2020, said in an August interview. "And I'm coming back."
Hendrickson was just one of many who experienced trauma, but he signed up to head back into a campaign still going years after his injury in what became a new normal -- 20 years of constant war.
Green Beret Ryan Hendrickson in Afghanistan. (Image courtesy of Ryan Hendrickson)
The war in Afghanistan -- by far the longest in U.S. history -- is all but over, aside from the frantic evacuation of tens of thousands of Americans, Afghans and other civilians from the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul.
But it has changed the U.S. military, in ways that will linger. Those who saw the war up close -- including veterans of Afghanistan and current and retired generals and senior officials -- agree that the war didn't break the military. But it did bend it, testing the men and women sent to fight, and the weapons and hardware they relied upon to survive in Afghanistan's harsh regions.
Retired Gen. Joe Votel, who headed both U.S. Special Operations Command and U.S. Central Command, saw "the fraying of the force" that resulted from the numerous deployments special operators shouldered.
After the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, continual war became a regular part of life for the military, even normalized, in a way it never had before -- or was meant to. When death, trauma, family separations and other sufferings inherent to conflict became part of the day-to-day, the effects on the military extended to everything from family strife to physical and mental wounds. In some rare cases, most notoriously Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales' 2012 massacre of 16 Afghan civilians, that shift to the mundane included a blurring of morality and the lines separating the good guys from the bad.
It led the military to refine the ways it fights and resulted in unprecedented advancements in tactics, technology, medical treatments and equipment.
But it also took a significant toll on the force. There were 2,448 U.S. service members killed in Afghanistan, and at least 20,722 wounded, some of whom will deal with those injuries for the rest of their lives. For some of the troops who deployed, it led to trauma, struggles with mental health and moral injuries, and strained family lives.
That is a price the military has not yet fully reckoned with; it is still struggling to figure out how to do so.
"When you deploy people into continuous combat operations, they're going back to Afghanistan, or back to Iraq, or they've been there multiple times, sometimes they have a tendency to develop the attitude that, 'I have done this before, I know what I'm doing,'" Votel said. "And so they become a little bit detached from the situation. And that's where you begin to have some of these challenges. People forget about the human aspect of this. ... They forget that they're dealing with people on the ground."
The act of taking a life, or firing weapons where civilians are nearby -- the sorts of moral decisions that can be incredibly difficult -- became normal.
"The things that aren't supposed to be routine, become routine, and then you begin to think of them as routine," Votel said. "That's something you really have to guard against."
The Toll of the Conflict
The war exposed some of the military's vulnerabilities, including the alarming growth in deaths by suicide, which have claimed more than four times as many troops and veterans post-9/11 than actual combat -- and how special operators' long and repeated deployments affected them and their families.
In January 2020, in the wake of multiple troubling and embarrassing incidents, Special Operations Command released a "comprehensive review" of its force that concluded the community had grown a culture that prioritized deployments and getting the job done above all else, leading to an environment where ethical lapses could happen.
Votel said the Ranger Regiment dealt with this problem by more aggressively telling Rangers to "sit this one out."
It's often not easy for them to receive the message that they should skip a mission.
"That's why these people join; that's what they want to do," Votel said.
Russell Parker, a Marine Raider who repeatedly deployed to Afghanistan and retired as a lieutenant colonel in June, said there's no question deployments take a toll on families. He was in Afghanistan nearly 11 years ago when his daughter was born, while a family friend was by his wife's side. He met his daughter after he got home, but then left again on another deployment just after her third birthday -- and he said his deployment burdens were light compared to others he served with.
"If you're a guy or gal who's deployed every 12 or even 24 months, for six to 12 months, that's a whole lot of missed birthdays," Parker said. "Which leads to a huge burden on the stay-at-home spouse. ... And either the family can absorb that, or over time, they decide we just can't [and] they have to move on without you."
It was the special operations community and the Air Force that were most consistently called upon to fight on Afghanistan's rocky, dusty terrain, and in the skies above. The cost of that near-constant combat added up.
Aside from the initial invasion of Afghanistan and periodic surges, such as former President Barack Obama's surge that began in 2009 and relied heavily upon conventional forces, special operations troops bore the heaviest burden of the war, said Wesley Morgan, journalist and author of "The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan's Pech Valley."
The reliance on special operations forces in Afghanistan was, in many ways, a double-edged sword, Morgan said. It dealt a significant amount of wear and tear on them, physically and mentally.
But Afghanistan was also a crucible for special operations, in which forces like the Rangers grew in size, responsibilities and capabilities.
The special operations force is "simply unrecognizable from what it was before," Morgan said. "It's so much larger, its capabilities are so much greater. Its combat experience is so much greater, by orders of magnitude, than anything that was there before. And by the same token, of course, the wear and tear is greater as well."
Special operators were in Afghanistan practically constantly from 2001, training Afghan troops, building relationships with village leaders, and going on missions against everyone from the Taliban to al-Qaida to the Islamic State offshoot ISIS-Khorasan.
That "never say no" mindset carried a significant price, in deaths, woundings and the mental toll of deployment after deployment.
The military didn't see "complete, total meltdowns" in special operations organizations due to the high pace of deployments, Votel said -- partly because it recognized the stress it was placing on troops and took steps to better control deployments.
"Maybe we should have done that earlier, a little bit more effectively early on," Votel said. "But I don't think we brought organizations to their knees."
For decades, the military culture had been reluctant at best to encourage troops to look after their mental health properly. Parker said the tremendous mental health needs caused by the war in Afghanistan -- along with shifting generational attitudes toward mental health -- forced a sea change in how the military addresses it.
Programs such as Preservation of the Force and Families -- which brought psychologists, social workers and other mental health professionals into direct contact with special operators to help them deal with the pressures of deployment and the injuries they sustained -- helped, Parker said.
Now if someone is in trouble, he said, "it's all hands on deck. I've got a military family life coordinator, I've got a social worker, I've got a psychologist, I've got a chaplain, I've got an MD -- pick a modality of treatment, and I've either got them sitting around the table with me to advise me on that person right now ... or I have the ability to reach out and find the discipline I need.
"We saved lives with that," Parker said. "We literally arrested suicide[s], right before they happened by getting these reviews done."
War as Opportunity
Perpetual combat wore on both man and machine, but it also served as an unprecedented testing ground. The conflict spurred extraordinary advancements in many elements of fighting war -- everything from tactics and technology, to how the military talks about and treats both mental health and physical wounds, which helped save Hendrickson's leg and allow him to return to the battlefield.
"I don't think there's any question that tactical-level, individual soldier, Marine, sailor, airman, skills are light years beyond where they were when I joined the Marine Corps in 1994," Parker said. "The advances in equipment, the advances in capabilities, the advances in tactics, techniques and procedures ... you almost can't discuss them in the same conversation."
Things like drones went from military afterthought to critical hardware.
"Look at drone technology and where we [were] in 2001, and where we've ended up," Votel said. "You see more and more effort now, of people reaching out and really grabbing onto technology and helping them leverage our ability to pursue our national security objectives."
Over the years in Afghanistan, the Air Force refined its process for delivering airstrikes, with munitions guided to their targets by troops on the ground. Scores of Air Force award citations since 2001 describe the heroism of airmen under heavy fire, simultaneously calling in airstrikes while firing back at Taliban or other foes, sometimes as they helped wounded teammates or while they themselves were injured.
Morgan said the growth of a generation of Army soldiers who came in shortly before or after 9/11, many of whom deployed repeatedly to Afghanistan, has resulted in a cadre of battle-tested leaders, the likes of which have not been seen since Vietnam.
"Afghanistan comes up over and over and over and over again," Morgan said. "The sheer length of experience that certain parts of the Army, in particular light infantry units and the Rangers, have had in Afghanistan really means that for all of these senior leaders, for the infantry in particular, Afghanistan has been a formative experience at many points in their careers and lives. ... If you have stayed in the Army, you've done Afghanistan."
Green Beret Ryan Hendrickson in Afghanistan. (Image courtesy of Ryan Hendrickson)
Hendrickson points to the considerable strides made in medical care -- particularly in treating trauma and saving severely damaged limbs -- that resulted from the war, and saved his own leg.
After his teammates rescued him -- and after hearing the Taliban's rejoicing at his wounding -- Hendrickson flew to the hospital at Landstuhl Air Base in Germany.
When they transferred him to Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas, he was warned he likely would lose his leg.
"I just had a chunk of meatloaf down there," Hendrickson said, not to mention E. coli from the Helmand River. He tried to prepare himself emotionally for life with one leg by placing his undamaged left leg outside his hospital bed covers, and hiding his right leg up to the knee with the blanket.
His right leg will never again be what it once was. But the Intrepid Dynamic Exoskeletal Orthosis, or IDEO -- a brace that provides more support to his damaged leg -- allows him to run, carry heavy loads of gear on a march, or drag wounded teammates out of the line of fire. Without that brace, which he wore on his deployments beginning in 2012, he might have had to have his leg amputated if he wanted to do much beyond walking around the house.
"So many people are getting a second chance at saving a limb," he said.
Flying Aircraft to the Edge
The strain of the war also began to materialize on the Air Force in recent years, as airframes showed their age and airmen found it harder and harder to keep them flying.
The B-1B Lancer bomber in particular, which now has an average age of more than 33 years, became "overextended" in the Middle East, Air Force Global Strike Command head Gen. Timothy Ray said in 2019.
"We saw issues in the B-1 because we're just beating the heck out of them, deploying them, deploying them," Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Hyten told lawmakers during his nomination hearing in August 2019. At that time, Hyten said, just six B-1s out of the fleet of 62 were fully mission-capable.
Though those numbers recovered somewhat, they were still far from where they should be. In 2019 -- the latest year for which statistics are available -- the Air Force recorded a 46% mission-capable rate for the B-1, meaning at any given time, less than half of the fleet was ready to fly and carry out missions.
While that problem may not have been as severe in other airframes, it was a common issue throughout the fleet in recent years as the Air Force conducted a sustained air war, Gen. Herbert "Hawk" Carlisle, who was head of Air Combat Command until his retirement in 2017, said in a July interview. Fighters, bombers, surveillance aircraft, tankers -- practically no type of aircraft was unaffected.
"We flew the wings off of every platform, whether it was AWACS, or JSTARS, or Rivet Joints, or F-15s and F-16s, or B-52s, or KC-135s and KC-10s," Carlisle said. "Did we run them ragged in the Middle East? Yeah. Did they step up? More than you can ever imagine. What our young women and men did in uniform across all the services is extraordinary."
In an Aug. 13 interview, Ray acknowledged the toll so much air combat has taken on his bombers -- but said it's what they were meant to do.
"The safest place for an airplane to be is parked, but that's not why we have them," he said. "It's a very old fleet. What really should impress you is that the team can keep it going, when I think this challenge would have crushed any other Air Force. ... It was difficult, [but] we saved American lives."
Ray said that Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles "CQ" Brown has taken significant steps to balance how the service uses its aircraft by better prioritizing missions.
"We can do anything; we just can't do everything," Ray said.
But the military's continual need for surveillance in the Middle East led the Air Force to make trade-offs on modernization that might not be what's necessary in a war against a major power, Carlisle said.
With the U.S. military's primary foes in the late 2000s being the Taliban and Iraqi insurgents, he said, there was little need for an advanced fighter with stealth capability -- but a tremendous need for drones that could linger over areas and either watch or strike.
"Every corner of the Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria campaign wanted a Reaper overhead to give him the ... 'unblinking eye,'" said Carlisle, who after retiring became president and CEO of the National Defense Industrial Association, which counts defense contractors among its members and describes itself as a nonprofit group looking to educate the public on aspects of national security.
So in 2011, the F-22 Raptor fighter was canceled, with only 186 of the originally proposed 750 stealth aircraft now in the fleet. Meanwhile, the Air Force set a punishing pace for airmen to fly MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper drones, which in 2015 briefly hit a high of 65 combat air patrols per day -- a crushing operations tempo, and a significant investment in resources and manpower.
That balancing act made sense at the time but might not pay off in a war against China, Carlisle said. The Predators are now retired, and Reapers -- though capable drones -- would be slow and easy pickings for Chinese radar and anti-aircraft systems. Meanwhile, an F-22 restart is not in the cards.
A Second Chance in a Long War
After Hendrickson nearly lost his leg, he made jokes about being a pirate with a peg leg the following Halloween. But underneath, he was wracked with guilt and feelings that he had let his brothers in arms down by not being there anymore. The chances of him walking unassisted again were against him, let alone serving as a Green Beret in combat. He began replaying in his mind his steps before the explosion, Monday-morning quarterbacking, and filled up with self-directed anger.
On the ninth anniversary of 9/11, Hendrickson and his unit launched a mission to clear the Chutu Valley in Uruzgan province, along the Helmand River. Early on the next day, as the sky began to lighten, his team moved toward its first set of compounds, which were known to be used by the Taliban.
The team's interpreter had exposed himself to danger, so Hendrickson went over to the compound to pull him back. Something moved fast and caught Hendrickson's eye -- he wasn't sure if it was an animal or a person running -- and he took a step forward in the entryway to see what it was.
His right foot stepped on a pressure plate, and the IED detonated.
He didn't feel anything -- not at first. He hit the ground and couldn't figure out what had happened. The dust and ammonia from the explosive swirled and made it impossible to breathe. If he didn't stand up and get out of there, he thought, he would suffocate to death.
"My brief time on an ODA [Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha] was cut short because I decided to peek around that corner, like an idiot," Hendrickson said. "Then rage sets in -- 'I'm so stupid, why did I do that.'"
Depression set in, and at times, thoughts of suicide even crossed his mind.
But he pushed through his depression, and spent all of 2011 rehabilitating, motivated in part by his memory of the Taliban celebrating, and a question his dad asked him: When he is an old man and looks back, will he be ashamed because he allowed the injury to define him? Or will he be proud because he used the challenge to make himself stronger?
He returned to Afghanistan alongside his fellow Green Berets -- with his leg in his IDEO brace -- in March 2012. On another deployment in February 2016, he rallied his team and fought back against a heavy Taliban ambush in Baghlan Province, through machine-gun, rocket-propelled grenade, sniper and mortar fire, ultimately receiving the Silver Star for his bravery.
Hendrickson first joined the Navy four years before 9/11. He deployed to the Persian Gulf, and later moved to the Air Force and deployed to Iraq. He finally transferred to the Army, became a Green Beret, and deployed to Afghanistan for the first time with the Seventh Special Forces Group in May 2010, during the surge. He continued with deployments to Afghanistan after nearly losing his leg, with the war still going while he rehabbed, and he wore the uniform until January 2020. In his more than 22 years of service, 18 came during years of war.
Like many service members, Hendrickson doesn't describe his combat experience, or even his injury, in terms of shock. They're points that are part of his long history serving in the military, the sorts of experiences that could be recounted by numerous other service members forged in a generation of combat.
They're the new normal.
And Hendrickson views even the near-loss of a limb as having a silver lining.
"Getting blown up was one of the best things that's happened to me," he said. "I used it [the leg situation] to my benefit. Yeah, I got some cool scars and whatnot. But I've become a better man because of the situation I went through."
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
