Quotes of the Day:
"The world isn't black and white, good or bad. The battles that make a real difference are fought in the murky area in between, where the greater good requires brutal sacrifice. Where both the means and the ends are just shadows in a featureless gray landscape. And that was the death of my idealism."
-Rachel Vincent
"There's a gigantic gray area between good moral behavior and outright felonious activities. I call that the Weasel Zone and it's where most of life happens."
- Scott Adams
"The discrepancy between what actually happened and the version of what happened provided by sources is an enormous gray area."
- Edward Jay Epstein
1. The Media Manufactured Biden’s Political ‘Fiasco’ in Afghanistan
2. Winning Ugly: What the War on Terror Cost America
3. Mission Afghanistan: Advice for A US Special Operations Unit (2009)
4. Masters and Commanders: Are Civil-Military Relations in Crisis?
5. $6,500 on a charter plane to escape from Afghan hell
6. CIA, U.S. Troops Conduct Missions Outside Kabul Airport to Extract Americans, Afghan Allies
7. U.S. Still Searching for Americans in Afghanistan as Deadline Closes In
8. Three Aircraft Carriers. Dozens Of Stealth Fighters. A Powerful Allied Battle Group Has Gathered Near China.
9. All Rapport, No Results: What Afghanistan’s Collapse Reveals About the Flaws in US Security Force Assistance
10. Rejecting Covid Inquiry, China Peddles Conspiracy Theories Blaming the U.S.
11. Opinion | ‘Anyone Got Any Helos Sitting Around?’: How a Private Network Is Using a Messaging App to Rescue Afghans
12. The Right Way to Structure Cyber Diplomacy
13. Breaking: Female college student first to graduate from Army's 'toughest' special operations course
14. The 2 lawmakers who secretly went to Kabul said there is 'no way we can get everyone out' by Aug. 31 and the only way to work with the Taliban is leave on time
15. Fix JPME? Look to the Carlisle Scholars Method
16. Spies for Hire: China’s New Breed of Hackers Blends Espionage and Entrepreneurship
17. How exile changed the Taliban
18. U.S. Says 1,500 Americans Remain in Afghanistan as Evacuation Enters Final Days
19. Where the U.S. is taking Afghans evacuated from Kabul
20. Opinion | Biden made the hard choice in Afghanistan, and the right one
21. How China's ultra-loyal web army can silence Beijing's critics
22. Italian military plane fired at as it left Kabul airport - defence source
23. Taliban take over some U.N. premises, curb movement -U.N. report
1. The Media Manufactured Biden’s Political ‘Fiasco’ in Afghanistan
A very interesting critique of the mainstream media.
Excerpts:
The problem with the “imperial bias” of the media’s Afghanistan coverage is not that it has harmed Joe Biden’s approval rating. The problem is that it has compromised the Fourth Estate’s journalism and circumscribed its humanitarianism. One can reasonably argue that safeguarding the rights of Afghan women was worth the costs of prolonging armed conflict (costs that fell quite heavily on Afghan women). But one cannot reasonably leave those costs out of the discussion, or malign those who weigh them heavily as opponents of human rights. One can critically report on concrete failings in the Biden administration’s withdrawal plans. But one cannot presume Biden’s responsibility for every negative consequence that follows from ending a misbegotten war and deserve the title journalist. By privileging the victims of American military withdrawal over those of American military engagement — while presuming the U.S. president’s capacity to decisively shape events in foreign lands — the media has rendered itself objectively pro-war. In allowing personal attachments to dictate its humanitarian concerns, mainstream reporters have concentrated moral outrage on an injustice that the U.S. can’t resolve without resort to violence (the Taliban’s conquest of Afghanistan), while enabling mass indifference to a much larger injustice that the U.S. can drastically mitigate without killing anyone (the global shortfall of COVID-19 vaccines).
Until America’s bleeding-heart correspondents reckon with their field’s endemic biases, their reporting will routinely devolve into advocacy, if not rationalizations, for future bloodshed.
The Media Manufactured Biden’s Political ‘Fiasco’ in Afghanistan
“Straight news” has chosen sanctimony over circumspection.
The evacuated. Photo: Senior Airman Taylor Crul/AP/Shutterstock
In other words, Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan has been a “disastrous” and “humiliating” “fiasco,” in the words of the mainstream media’s ostensibly objective foreign-policy journalists.
This may be an accurate description of what recent events in Kabul have meant for the president, politically. The latest polls have shown sharp drops in Biden’s approval rating, driven in part by widespread opposition to “the way” his administration handled its (otherwise popular) exit from Afghanistan. Yet this political fiasco is not a development that the media covered so much as one that it created.
The Biden administration made some genuine errors of contingency planning. It could have done (and should now do) more to facilitate the mass resettlement of Afghan refugees. But as far as conclusions to multi-decade wars go, America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan is thus far proceeding with relatively little chaos and tragedy. And it’s far from clear that the withdrawal could have been much more orderly had the White House only executed it in a better “way.”
It has long been apparent that America’s exit from Afghanistan would be tantamount to the Taliban’s victory. U.S. intelligence officials may have been excessively optimistic about the Afghan government’s staying power, but even they thought the government in Kabul would collapse within two years of America’s retreat. Simply put, there is no proud way to lose a war to a cult of heroin-dealing child rapists (especially when your side in that war featured no small number of men who fit a similar description). And there probably wasn’t a non-chaotic way of doing so, either. The Biden administration advised all U.S. civilians in Afghanistan to leave the country in May. Forcibly evacuating those who chose to stay, along with every Afghan ally who feared Taliban reprisals — before the Afghan government fell — would have been a Herculean task in terms of pure logistics. And it was an impossible task in terms of geopolitics: Before its collapse, the Afghan government had pressured the United States to limit its evacuation efforts, so as to avoid broadcasting the message that America deemed a Taliban victory inevitable. This was a reasonable concern. Few in the Afghan security forces were eager to die for a lost cause, which is one reason why the Taliban met weak resistance by the time it reached Kabul. Had the U.S. attempted to evacuate all its allies before the capital, the initial stages of that effort would have almost certainly expedited the surrender of the Afghan security forces and thus, left many Afghans who worked with the U.S. in the same basic predicament they find themselves in now.
All of which is to say: Ascertaining how much of the heartache in Kabul today derives from imperfections in Biden’s withdrawal plan — and how much would have occurred under any plausible U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan — is no easy task.
It is also a task that the media has felt no obligation to undertake. Mainstream coverage of Kabul’s fall and its aftermath has been anything but circumspect. Attempts to weigh the benefits of America’s withdrawal (e.g., the humanitarian gains inherent to the cessation of 20 years of civil war) against its costs have been rare; attempts to judge Biden’s execution of that withdrawal against rigorous counterfactuals have been rarer still. Instead, ostensibly neutral correspondents and anchors have (1) openly editorialized against the White House’s policy; (2) assigned Biden near-total responsibility for the final collapse of the proto-failed state his predecessors had established; and then (3) reported on the potential political costs of Biden’s actions, as though they were not actively imposing those costs through their own speculations about just “how politically damaging” the president’s failures of “competence” and “empathy” would prove to be.
Some manifestations of media bias have been overt. Declan Walsh, the New York Times’ chief Africa correspondent (a reporting position, not an opining one) tweeted shortly before the Taliban’s final victory, “Jalalabad gone, only Kabul left. For those who lamented ‘forever wars’ — is the phrase anything more than a comforting cop-out for epic failures of policy and the imagination? — here’s what the end looks like.” It is difficult to read that statement as anything but open advocacy against U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, a policy supported by both the sitting president and a majority of the American public.
Meanwhile, Richard Engel tweeted Friday, “Biden says U.S. in constant contact with Taliban to get safe passage to airport. So, U.S. asking former enemy, the Taliban, to please allow us to get our people out while they take the country.” There were many ways that NBC News’ chief foreign correspondent could have characterized the news that Biden had secured the cooperation of Afghanistan’s reigning regime in the evacuation of U.S. citizens. He chose to portray it — dubiously — as a display of national self-abasement; in Engel’s account, Biden was “asking” an enemy to “please allow” Americans’ safe passage out of the country, as though the U.S. president were groveling at Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar’s feet, rather than threatening ruinous sanctions should harm come to U.S. nationals. This is the sort of commentary one expects from jingoists on right-wing radio, not high-ranking reporters at major networks.
At the same time, CNN’s chief foreign correspondent Clarissa Ward saw fit to present her own pessimistic hunches about the Biden administration’s future performance as established fact, reporting Friday, “I’m sitting here for 12 hours in the [Kabul] airport, 8 hours on the airfield and I haven’t seen a single U.S. plane take off. How on Earth are you going to evacuate 50,000 people in the next two weeks? It just, it can’t happen.” The U.S. evacuated about 21,600 in a 24-hour span between Monday and Tuesday; as of this writing, the U.S. has evacuated more than 82,300 people in the past 11 days.
The most audacious expression of the “straight news” media’s embrace of advocacy journalism may have come from CBS News’ White House reporter Bo Erickson, who chose to disseminate a poll showing Biden’s approval had sunk — as a majority opposed his handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan — like so:
— Bo Erickson CBS (@BoKnowsNews) August 22, 2021
The media’s bias takes slightly subtler form in a Times dispatch from Kabul published Sunday:
Every death at the Kabul airport, every child with a teddy-bear backpack separated from a parent, every Afghan supporter of the United States who is marooned, reinforces the impression of an unplanned United States withdrawal that was too precipitous and based on a disastrous misjudgment of the capacities of the American- and NATO-trained government military forces. They simply melted away.
This piece is presented to readers as straight reportage, not an op-ed or even a “news analysis.” Thus, its author, Times Paris bureau chief Roger Cohen, doesn’t assert that every marooned Afghan ally reinforces the fact that the U.S. withdrawal was too precipitous; he merely asserts that it reinforces that impression. This is, of course, a thin scrim for concealing outright advocacy. Impressions are inherently subjective. Events in Kabul make no direct impression on Americans in Peoria, so Cohen is not describing something that exists beyond his own subjectivity. Rather, he is presenting his own personal impression (and/or the dominant impression among the Western journalists around him) as a disembodied, globe-spanning sense of Biden’s policy. When Cohen’s peers at CNN, NBC, and CBS do the same, the alchemy of mass media turns its subjective impression into what it purports to be: a neutral description of public opinion.
This is not to say that Cohen’s despair at the plight of Afghan translators is not well-founded, or that his opposition to Biden’s withdrawal is necessarily unreasonable. The point is merely that he is presenting editorial judgments as factual ones. In doing so, he is also opining without assuming the burdens of the op-ed columnist: to clearly state one’s thesis (e.g., “The swift collapse of the Afghan army and consequent chaos in Kabul proves that America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan was excessively rapid”); defend that thesis with evidence; anticipate opposing arguments (e.g., “The fact that the Afghan security forces had so little capacity after 20 years of training actually demonstrated the inevitability of the Afghan government’s collapse and thus, the imperative to avoid prolonging bloodshed in a war that was already lost”); and then to rebut those arguments.
I articulated my own substantive views on these matters last week (although I now think that I was a tad harder on the White House than available facts justified). Those views may bespeak the biases of a millennial progressive whose formative years were spent gawking at George W. Bush’s war crimes and reading Noam Chomsky’s lectures. I cannot always prevent my ideological commitments from blinkering my vision. But I can be transparent about those commitments, and test my biased intuitions against the rigors of reasoned argument.
The mainstream media’s most influential opponents of Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan refuse to do the same. This refusal may not be conscious. It can be hard to recognize one’s normative assumptions as ideological when those assumptions are commonsense among one’s peers. There is certainly some diversity of opinion within the broad universe of U.S. foreign-policy reporters. And nearly everything I know about the pitfalls of America’s occupation of Afghanistan I learned from the foreign correspondents of mainstream news outlets. Nevertheless, the widely shared ideological assumptions and personal experiences of elite U.S. foreign-policy journalists biased mainstream coverage of Afghanistan over the past two weeks. The consequent bias is neither liberal nor conservative. One might call it “imperial,” in a not wholly pejorative sense: It is a point of view that (1) assumes the U.S. can and should exert decisive influence over global events; (2) aims to lift Americans out of their parochial nationalism and into a cosmopolitan sense of moral obligation; and (3) privileges suffering caused by American inaction abroad over suffering caused by American military “engagement.”
We’ve already seen that first aspect of the bias in action: The presumption that the U.S. president has both the right and capacity to, in the words of the Times’ Peter Baker, “assert command over world events” is what allowed the mainstream media to condemn Biden’s withdrawal without scrutinizing counterfactuals. The second aspect of this bias — its missionary quest against the median American’s indifference to foreign affairs — can be gleaned from the media’s laudable attempts to put a face on the victims of the Taliban’s violence and misogyny, as well as its not-so-praiseworthy expressions of contempt for Americans who wish to bring their nation’s troops home. Personally, I find this element of elite foreign-policy journalists’ ideology partly congenial and beneficent; Americans’ widespread support for taking in Afghan refugees surely owes something to the humanitarian convictions and narrative gifts of the mainstream press. And yet, that press has ultimately fallen victim to its own parochialism. On Sunday, the great Times reporter C.J Chivers dismissed nefarious explanations for the press’s negative coverage of Biden’s withdrawal by saying, in a now-deleted tweet, “Maybe people who have worked with Afghans, and been helped and protected and welcomed by them for years or even decades, happen to give a shit about them? If these are motivations for outcry that you can’t understand, that’s on you.”
These are indeed humane and understandable motivations for using one’s influence as a “straight news” reporter to advance the cause of one interested party in a contested policy debate. But they are not justifiable grounds for doing so.
In mainstream coverage, the suffering of the U.S.–aligned Afghan translators — whom foreign correspondents have come to know as sources and friends over two decades of occupation — looms large. The suffering of the thousands of Afghan security forces and civilians who’ve been dying each year in a civil war that our government has the wherewithal to prolong but not to win, however, has been all but ignored.
Countless reporters and commentators have cited the relatively low level of U.S. casualties in Afghanistan in recent years as proof that maintaining the status quo was a near cost-free proposition. When doing so, such cosmopolitan correspondents reveal the insularity of their moral vision. Before Biden commenced his withdrawal and the Taliban completed their victory, the 20th year of the war in Afghanistan was set to “witness the highest-ever number of documented civilian casualties in a single year” since the U.N. mission there began keeping records. Meanwhile, civilians unharmed by the war’s violence have endured “elevated rates of disease due to lack of clean drinking water, malnutrition, and reduced access to health care” as a result of the conflict, according to the Watson Institute’s “Costs of War” project. American involvement in Afghanistan has not only harmed civilians indirectly by perpetuating civil war; our nation also directly incinerated and tortured Afghans in the course of defending their freedom.
Every “child with a teddy-bear backpack separated from a parent” may reinforce the impression that America withdrew from Afghanistan too soon. Or every child killed in the course of a doomed counterinsurgency campaign may reinforce the impression that America withdrew far too late. It all depends on where one chooses to look.
The problem with the “imperial bias” of the media’s Afghanistan coverage is not that it has harmed Joe Biden’s approval rating. The problem is that it has compromised the Fourth Estate’s journalism and circumscribed its humanitarianism. One can reasonably argue that safeguarding the rights of Afghan women was worth the costs of prolonging armed conflict (costs that fell quite heavily on Afghan women). But one cannot reasonably leave those costs out of the discussion, or malign those who weigh them heavily as opponents of human rights. One can critically report on concrete failings in the Biden administration’s withdrawal plans. But one cannot presume Biden’s responsibility for every negative consequence that follows from ending a misbegotten war and deserve the title journalist. By privileging the victims of American military withdrawal over those of American military engagement — while presuming the U.S. president’s capacity to decisively shape events in foreign lands — the media has rendered itself objectively pro-war. In allowing personal attachments to dictate its humanitarian concerns, mainstream reporters have concentrated moral outrage on an injustice that the U.S. can’t resolve without resort to violence (the Taliban’s conquest of Afghanistan), while enabling mass indifference to a much larger injustice that the U.S. can drastically mitigate without killing anyone (the global shortfall of COVID-19 vaccines).
Until America’s bleeding-heart correspondents reckon with their field’s endemic biases, their reporting will routinely devolve into advocacy, if not rationalizations, for future bloodshed.
2. Winning Ugly: What the War on Terror Cost America
Excerpts:
Not long after President Joe Biden announced the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, I was speaking with a former colleague at the CIA. He had also fought in Afghanistan and Iraq as a marine, and he, too, was on that mission in the Korengal Valley. But when I left the CIA, he remained and has spent his career prosecuting the war on terror around the world. Today, he runs paramilitary operations at the agency.
We talked about the differences between the withdrawal from Iraq and the withdrawal from Afghanistan. We agreed that the latter felt harder. Why? Unlike Iraq, the war in Afghanistan was predicated on an attack against the United States. This had happened only once before in American history and had led to a decisive U.S. triumph. But unlike the greatest generation, our generation of veterans would enjoy no such victory. Instead, we would be remembered as the ones who lost the United States’ longest war.
When I told him that even though we might have lost the war in Afghanistan, our generation could still claim to have won the war on terror, he was skeptical. We debated the issue but soon let it drop. The next day, I received an email from him. A southerner and a lover of literature, he had sent me the following, from The Sound and the Fury:
No battle is ever won. . . . They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
Winning Ugly
What the War on Terror Cost America
My first mission as a paramilitary officer with the CIA was against a top-ten al Qaeda target. It was the autumn of 2009, and I had been deployed in my new job for a total of two days. But I was no stranger to Afghanistan, having already fought there (as well as in Iraq) as a Marine Corps officer over the previous six years. On this mission, I was joined by the Afghan counterterrorism unit I advised and a handful of members from SEAL Team Six. Our plan was to conduct a raid to capture or kill our target, who was coming across the border from Pakistan for a meeting in the Korengal Valley.
The night was moonless as we slipped into the valley. The 70-odd members of our raid force hiked under night-vision goggles for a couple of hours, taking on hundreds of feet of elevation in silence until we arrived at a village on a rocky outcropping where the meeting was being held. As surveillance and strike aircraft orbited the starry sky, a subset of our force sprinted toward the house where an informant had told us the target was staying. There was a brief and sharp gunfight; none of our men were hurt, and several of our adversaries were killed. But the target was taken alive. Then we slipped out of the valley as expeditiously as we had arrived. By early morning, we had made it safely to the U.S. Army outpost, where our prisoner would soon be transferred to Bagram Air Base.
The sun was breaking over the jagged ridgeline as we filled out the paperwork transferring custody. The mood among our raid force, which had been tense all night, suddenly eased. We lounged in a small dirt parking lot, helmets off, laughing and recounting the details of our mission. A convoy would soon arrive to usher us back to our base, where we would get some much-needed rest and a decent meal. We would then await our next target, continuing what was proving to be a successful U.S. campaign to decapitate al Qaeda’s leadership. We were feeling, in short, victorious.
While we waited, a column of scraggly American soldiers, little older than teenagers, filed past. They lived at the outpost, and their plight was well known to us. For the past several years, they had been waging a quixotic and largely unsuccessful counterinsurgency in the valley. Many of their friends had been killed there, and their expressions were haggard, a mix of defeat and defiance. Our triumphant banter must have sounded to them like a foreign language. They gave us hard, resentful looks, treating us as interlopers. It occurred to me that although our counterterrorism unit was standing on the same battlefield as these soldiers, we were in fact fighting in two very different wars.
At a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush announced a new type of war, a “war on terror.” He laid out its terms: “We will direct every resource at our command—every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war—to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network.” Then he described what that defeat might look like: “We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place until there is no refuge or no rest.”
If Bush’s words outlined the essential objectives of the global war on terror, 20 years later, the United States has largely achieved them. Osama bin Laden is dead. The surviving core members of al Qaeda are dispersed and weak. Bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, communicates only through rare propaganda releases, and al Qaeda’s most powerful offshoot, the Islamic State (or ISIS), has seen its territorial holdings dwindle to insignificance in Iraq and Syria.
Can the United States claim to have won the war on terror while losing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?
Most important, however, is the United States’ success in securing its homeland. If someone had told Americans in the weeks after 9/11—as they navigated anthrax attacks on the Capitol, a plunging stock market, and predictions of the demise of mass travel—that the U.S. military and U.S. intelligence agencies would successfully shield the country from another major terrorist attack for the next 20 years, they would have had trouble believing it. Since 9/11, the United States has suffered, on average, six deaths per year due to jihadi terrorism. (To put this in perspective, in 2019, an average of 39 Americans died every day from overdoses involving prescription opioids.) If the goal of the global war on terror was to prevent significant acts of terrorism, particularly in the United States, then the war has succeeded.
But at what cost? Like that night in the Korengal, could success and failure coexist on the same battlefield? Can the United States claim to have won the war on terror while simultaneously having lost the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? The answers require untangling the many battles the United States has fought since 9/11 and understanding the impact they have had on the American psyche.
US AND THEM
Every war the United States has fought, beginning with the American Revolution, has required an economic model to sustain it with sufficient bodies and cash. The Civil War, for instance, was sustained with the first-ever draft and the first-ever income tax. World War II saw a national mobilization, including another draft, further taxation, and the selling of war bonds. One of the chief characteristics of the Vietnam War was an extremely unpopular draft that spawned an antiwar movement and sped that conflict to its eventual end. Like its predecessors, the war on terror came with its own model: the war was fought by an all-volunteer military and paid for largely through deficit spending. It should be no surprise that this model, which by design anesthetized a majority of Americans to the costs of conflict, delivered them their longest war; in his September 20, 2001, speech, when describing how Americans might support the war effort, Bush said, “I ask you to live your lives and hug your children.”
This model has also had a profound effect on American democracy, one that is only being fully understood 20 years later. Today, with a ballooning national deficit and warnings of inflation, it is worth noting that the war on terror became one of the earliest and most expensive charges Americans placed on their national credit card after the balanced budgets of the 1990s; 2001 marked the last year that the federal budget passed by Congress resulted in a surplus. Funding the war through deficit spending allowed it to fester through successive administrations with hardly a single politician ever mentioning the idea of a war tax. Meanwhile, other forms of spending—from financial bailouts to health care and, most recently, a pandemic recovery stimulus package—generate breathless debate.
If deficit spending has anesthetized the American people to the fiscal cost of the war on terror, technological and social changes have numbed them to its human cost. The use of drone aircraft and other platforms has facilitated the growing automation of combat, which allows the U.S. military to kill remotely. This development has further distanced Americans from the grim costs of war, whether they be the deaths of U.S. troops or those of foreign civilians. Meanwhile, the absence of a draft has allowed the U.S. government to outsource its wars to a military caste, an increasingly self-segregated portion of society, opening up a yawning civil-military divide as profound as any that American society has ever known.
Every war the United States has fought has required an economic model to sustain it.
Last year, in response to nationwide civil unrest, Americans finally had the chance to meet their military firsthand as both active-duty and National Guard troops were deployed in large numbers throughout the country. Americans also got to hear from the military’s retired leadership as a bevy of flag officers—both on the right and the left—weighed in on domestic political matters in unprecedented ways. They spoke on television, wrote editorials that denounced one party or the other, and signed their names to letters on everything from the provenance of a suspicious laptop connected to the Democratic nominee’s son to the integrity of the presidential election itself.
For now, the military remains one of the most trusted institutions in the United States and one of the few that the public sees as having no overt political bias. How long will this trust last under existing political conditions? As partisanship taints every facet of American life, it would seem to be only a matter of time before that infection spreads to the U.S. military. What then? From Caesar’s Rome to Napoleon’s France, history shows that when a republic couples a large standing military with dysfunctional domestic politics, democracy doesn’t last long. The United States today meets both conditions. Historically, this has invited the type of political crisis that leads to military involvement (or even intervention) in domestic politics. The wide divide between the military and the citizens it serves is yet another inheritance from the war on terror.
DEFINING VICTORY
Although it may seem odd to separate the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq from the war on terror, it is worth remembering that immediately after 9/11, the wholesale invasion and occupation of either country was hardly a fait accompli. It is not difficult to imagine a more limited counterterrorism campaign in Afghanistan that might have brought bin Laden to justice or a strategy to contain Saddam Hussein’s Iraq that would not have involved a full-scale U.S. invasion. The long, costly counterinsurgency campaigns that followed in each country were wars of choice. Both proved to be major missteps when it came to achieving the twin goals of bringing the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice and securing the homeland. In fact, at several moments over the past two decades, the wars set back those objectives. This was never more the case than in the months after bin Laden’s death in May 2011.
Few years proved to be more significant in the war on terror than 2011. Aside from being the year bin Laden was killed, it also was the year the Arab Spring took off and the year U.S. troops fully withdrew from Iraq. If the great strategic blunder of the Bush administration was to put troops into Iraq, then the great strategic blunder of the Obama administration was to pull all of them out. Both missteps created power vacuums. The first saw the flourishing of al Qaeda in Iraq; the second gave birth to that group’s successor, ISIS.
If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome, in Afghanistan, the Biden administration has adopted an insane policy, setting itself up for a repeat of President Barack Obama’s experience in Iraq with the ongoing withdrawal. The recommitment of U.S. troops to Iraq in the wake of ISIS’s 2014 blitzkrieg to within 16 miles of Baghdad was a response to the fear not only that the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki might collapse but also that a failed state in Iraq would create the type of sanctuary that enabled 9/11. The United States’ vast counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq were predicated on a doctrine of preemption; as Bush put it in 2007, “We will fight them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America.”
But what makes the war on terror different from other wars is that victory has never been based on achieving a positive outcome; the goal has been to prevent a negative one. In this war, victory doesn’t come when you destroy your adversary’s army or seize its capital. It occurs when something does not happen. How, then, do you declare victory? How do you prove a negative? After 9/11, it was almost as though American strategists, unable to conceptualize a war that could be won only by not allowing a certain set of events to replicate themselves, felt forced to create a war that conformed to more conventional conceptions of conflict. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq represented a familiar type of war, with an invasion to topple a government and liberate a people, followed by a long occupation and counterinsurgency campaigns.
On patrol in Kunar province, Afghanistan, February 2014
Omar Sobhani / Reuters
In addition to blood and treasure, there is another metric by which the war on terror can be judged: opportunity cost. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the depths of American political dysfunction and has hinted at the dangers of a civil-military divide. Perhaps even more important from a national security perspective, it has also brought the United States’ complex relationship with China into stark relief. For the past two decades, while Washington was repurposing the U.S. military to engage in massive counterinsurgency campaigns and precision counterterrorism operations, Beijing was busy building a military to fight and defeat a peer-level competitor.
Today, the Chinese navy is the largest in the world. It boasts 350 commissioned warships to the U.S. Navy’s roughly 290. Although U.S. ships generally outclass their Chinese counterparts, it now seems inevitable that the two countries’ militaries will one day reach parity. China has spent 20 years building a chain of artificial islands throughout the South China Sea that can effectively serve as a defensive line of unsinkable aircraft carriers. Culturally, China has become more militaristic, producing hypernationalist content such as the Wolf Warrior action movies. In the first, a former U.S. Navy SEAL plays the archvillain. The sequel, released in 2017, became the highest-grossing film in Chinese box-office history. Clearly, Beijing has no qualms about framing Washington as an antagonist.
China isn’t the only country that has taken advantage of a preoccupied United States. In the past two decades, Russia has expanded its territory into Crimea and backed separatists in Ukraine; Iran has backed proxies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria; and North Korea has acquired nuclear weapons. After the century opened with 9/11, conventional wisdom had it that nonstate actors would prove to be the greatest threat to U.S. national security. This prediction came true, but not in the way most people anticipated. Nonstate actors have compromised national security not by attacking the United States but by diverting its attention away from state actors. It is these classic antagonists—China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia—that have expanded their capabilities and antipathies in the face of a distracted United States.
How imminent is the threat from these states? When it comes to legacy military platforms—aircraft carriers, tanks, fighter planes—the United States continues to enjoy a healthy technological dominance over its near-peer competitors. But its preferred platforms might not be the right ones. Long-range land-based cruise missiles could render large aircraft carriers obsolete. Advances in cyberoffense could make tech-reliant fighter aircraft too vulnerable to fly. The greatest minds in the U.S. military have now, finally, turned their attention to these concerns, with the U.S. Marine Corps, for example, shifting its entire strategic focus to a potential conflict with China. But it may be too late.
WORN OUT
After two decades, the United States also suffers from war fatigue. Even though an all-volunteer military and the lack of a war tax have exempted most Americans from shouldering the burdens of war, that fatigue has still manifested. Under four presidents, the American people at first celebrated and then endured the endless wars playing in the background of their lives. Gradually, the national mood soured, and adversaries have taken notice. Americans’ fatigue—and rival countries’ recognition of it—has limited the United States’ strategic options. As a result, presidents have adopted policies of inaction, and American credibility has eroded.
This dynamic played out most starkly in Syria, in the aftermath of the August 2013 sarin gas attack in Ghouta. When Syrian President Bashar al-Assad crossed Obama’s stated redline by using chemical weapons, Obama found that not only was the international community no longer as responsive to an American president’s entreaties for the use of force but also that this reluctance appeared in Congress, as well. When Obama went to legislators to gain support for a military strike against the Assad regime, he encountered bipartisan war fatigue that mirrored the fatigue of voters, and he called off the attack. The United States’ redline had been crossed, without incident or reprisal.
After two decades, the United States suffers from war fatigue.
Fatigue may seem like a “soft” cost of the war on terror, but it is a glaring strategic liability. A nation exhausted by war has a difficult time presenting a credible deterrent threat to adversaries. This proved to be true during the Cold War when, at the height of the Vietnam War, in 1968, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, and when, in the war’s aftermath, in 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Because it was embroiled in a war in the first case and reeling from it in the second, the United States could not credibly deter Soviet military aggression. The United States is in a similar spot today, particularly with regard to China. When Americans were asked in a recent poll whether the United States should defend Taiwan if it were confronted with an invasion by China, 55 percent of respondents said that it should not.
Obviously, if the Chinese undertook such an action, particularly if Americans or the citizens of allied countries were killed in the process, public opinion might change swiftly; nevertheless, the poll suggested that the threshold for the use of force has risen among Americans. U.S. adversaries understand this. It is no coincidence that China, for instance, has felt empowered to infringe on Hong Kong’s autonomy and commit brazen human rights abuses against its minority Uyghur population. When American power recedes, other states fill the vacuum.
U.S. adversaries have also learned to obfuscate their aggression. The cyberwar currently being waged from Russia is one example, with the Russian government claiming no knowledge of the spate of ransomware attacks emanating from within its borders. With Taiwan, likewise, Chinese aggression probably wouldn’t manifest in conventional military ways. Beijing is more likely to take over the island through gradual annexation, akin to what it has done with Hong Kong, than stage an outright invasion. That makes a U.S. military response even more difficult—especially as two decades of war have undermined U.S. military deterrence.
A FOREIGN COUNTRY
The war on terror has changed both how the United States sees itself and how it is perceived by the rest of the world. From time to time, people have asked in what ways the war changed me. I have never known how to answer this question because ultimately the war didn’t change me; the war made me. It is so deeply engrained in my psyche that I have a difficult time separating the parts of me that exist because of it from the parts of me that exist despite it. Answering that question is like explaining how a parent or a sibling changed you. When you live with a person—or a war—for so long, you come to know it on intimate terms, and it comes to change you in similarly intimate ways.
Today, I have a hard time remembering what the United States used to be like. I forget what it was like to be able to arrive at the airport just 20 minutes before a flight. What it was like to walk through a train station without armed police meandering around the platforms. Or what it was like to believe—particularly in those heady years right after the Cold War—that the United States’ version of democracy would remain ascendant for all time and that the world had reached “the end of history.”
In much the same way that members of “the greatest generation” can recall where they were when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor or baby boomers can remember where they were when JFK was shot, my generation’s touchstone is where you were on 9/11. Like most of us, I remember the day clearly. But when thinking of that time, the event I return to most often happened the night before.
The war on terror has changed both how the United States sees itself and how it is perceived by the rest of the world.
I was a college student and had requisitioned the television in my apartment because HBO was showing a new series, Band of Brothers. As an ROTC midshipman, I believed my entire future would be spent as part of a band of brothers. As I settled onto the sofa, that iconic title sequence started: sepia-toned paratroopers falling across the sky en route to liberating Europe, the swelling strings of the nostalgic soundtrack. There wasn’t a hint of irony or cynicism anywhere in the series. I can’t imagine someone making it today.
As the United States’ sensibilities about war—and warriors—have changed over two decades, I have often thought of Band of Brothers. It’s a good barometer of where the country was before 9/11 and the emotional distance it has traveled since. Today, the United States is different; it is skeptical of its role in the world, more clear-eyed about the costs of war despite having experienced those costs only in predominantly tangential ways. Americans’ appetite to export their ideals abroad is also diminished, particularly as they struggle to uphold those ideals at home, whether in violence around the 2020 presidential election, the summer of 2020’s civil unrest, or even the way the war on terror compromised the country through scandals from Abu Ghraib prison to Edward Snowden’s leaks. A United States in which Band of Brothers has near-universal appeal is a distant memory.
It is also a reminder that national narratives matter. The day before the United States departed on a 20-year odyssey in the Middle East, the stories people wanted to hear—or at least the stories Hollywood executives believed they wanted to hear—were the ones in which the Americans were the good guys, liberating the world from tyranny and oppression.
WINNING AND LOSING
Not long after President Joe Biden announced the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, I was speaking with a former colleague at the CIA. He had also fought in Afghanistan and Iraq as a marine, and he, too, was on that mission in the Korengal Valley. But when I left the CIA, he remained and has spent his career prosecuting the war on terror around the world. Today, he runs paramilitary operations at the agency.
We talked about the differences between the withdrawal from Iraq and the withdrawal from Afghanistan. We agreed that the latter felt harder. Why? Unlike Iraq, the war in Afghanistan was predicated on an attack against the United States. This had happened only once before in American history and had led to a decisive U.S. triumph. But unlike the greatest generation, our generation of veterans would enjoy no such victory. Instead, we would be remembered as the ones who lost the United States’ longest war.
When I told him that even though we might have lost the war in Afghanistan, our generation could still claim to have won the war on terror, he was skeptical. We debated the issue but soon let it drop. The next day, I received an email from him. A southerner and a lover of literature, he had sent me the following, from The Sound and the Fury:
No battle is ever won. . . . They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
3. Mission Afghanistan: Advice for A US Special Operations Unit (2009)
by SWJ Editors | Wed, 08/25/2021 - 8:52pm |
Ed.: This essay was written in 2009 for a US Special Operations unit that was preparing to deploy to Afghanistan. Given the current events in Afghanistan it is interesting to read this advice and reflect on what has taken place in the past 12 years and what is currently happening with the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. It comes from a former US Special Forces NCO/officer with extensive experience in the region, who speaks the regional languages and works for an international organization.
Mission Afghanistan
Advice for A US Special Operations Unit
The following notes have been prepared from a sense of moral responsibility and duty (as a former U.S. Army Special Forces NCO/officer) to comrades standing on the threshold of opportunity. The crux from which these notes are expressed are founded in my experience working with indigenous populations and host government security forces in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, careful study and first/second person interaction with various threat elements related to the theatre and an appreciation of the task presenting itself to the soldiers of SOF. It is understood that several points herein are in direct contrast and incongruent with current strategic and operational paradigms relating to Afghanistan. I will leave it to the readership of this document to assess if, and/or how, the advice provided is woven into the fabric of a concept of operations.
15 November 2009
Belisarius
Part I – US
To Be or Not to Be…the Once and Future Lawrence
1. Confine infatuations with T.E. Lawrence to the spirit of his philosophy and not the war he fought. He said it himself, in The Arab Bulletin, dated 20 August 1917, “They [his 27 Articles] are meant to apply only to Bedu; townspeople or Syrians require totally different treatment.” Therefore, be mindful not to bastardize his 27 Articles in attempts to fit his specific experience with the Hejaz Bedu to the current situation.
2. Between September 2001 and December 2002, U.S. Army Special Forces were indeed Lawrences. “Their war” [the Afghan civil war], with the advent of Operation Enduring Freedom, was fought with ODAs supporting the anti-Taliban forces against a tyrannical, oppressive regime and their (mostly Arab) allies of Al Qaeda. In that sense, U.S. Army Special Forces lived up to its motto, De Oppressor Liber, and conducted themselves in sound Lawrencian fashion. However, the situation has changed and that must be recognized and accepted. It is no longer “their war.” In the eyes of the Afghan folk, it is YOUR war.
3. In the current phase of this war, the U.S. armed forces are no longer the Lawrences of Afghanistan. That was a bygone era. ISAF is now in the role of the Ottoman Turks. Adjust accordingly.
Don’t Be Martians
4. While adjusting to your new role and striving for the spirit of Lawrence, it’s important to understand that to the Afghans, you are Martians from another planet. So, the first rule is DON’T BE A MARTIAN! Afghans, especially the Pashtuns are the real deal. They live the warrior ethic. They have been living the warrior ethic for more generations than the U.S. has been a nation. Being a land-locked country, they have had to bargain their way through life with some very nefarious neighbors. So the phrase, “you can’t bullshit a bullshitter” applies to the Pashtuns, ten-fold. They must believe you are sincere in what you say and do. They must believe you.
5. Wearing a beard and maybe a local ornamental accessory isn’t enough. Understanding local customs and traditions isn’t enough. When you wear a beard with body armor and sunglasses, you’re a Martian. When you sit down with a Jirga drinking tea, but come off as if this is simply a ritual that you must go through to get something, you’re a Martian (take me to your leader…).
6. Before you can even begin to win hearts and minds, they have to believe you. Watch the 2005 film Walk the Line. Imagine you’re Johnny Cash and the Pashtun Jirga is Sam Phillips and you’re auditioning. You’ll get the picture. Therefore, grow beards…not because they respect men with beards. Grow beards with a complete understanding and acceptance of why Pashtuns grow beards. It’s about attitude, your attitude. Learn Pashtunwali and make it second nature. Help “your” village(s) celebrate their traditions…sincerely and enthusiastically. Ask and learn about the village history and legends/folklore (ask the locals!). You never know what kernel of knowledge will help you in the future.
7. LEARN THE LANGUAGE. It is understood that language learning is difficult, at best, in the current deployment/training cycle…tough. Learn the alphabet, greetings/salutations and key phrases prior to deployment. Once on the ground, spend time with the people each day learning the language by learning the vocabulary of the village (words/phrases describing buildings, terrain, etc.). They will eventually start to believe you’re sincere and, in turn, you will shed your Martianess.
8. Dress like them. That will fly in the face of Force Protection protocols, but this is war and you are there to get a job done. As distasteful as this may be to swallow, if you want to know who the current Lawrences are, look across the border at Al Qaeda in Pakistan. They dress and eat like their hosts. They pray with their hosts. They take part in tribal life and pledge their lives to their hosts through their cause of Jihad. The Pashtun Taliban and their supporters, in turn, believe them. Even though they too view the Arabs as Martians, the Arabs learned that lesson and are doing their best to adjust.
9. Take a lesson from Al Qaeda. Learn/memorize selected verses from the Qur’an that support your efforts and give what you’re doing theological legitimacy. Learn the rituals of local prayer. If you happen to participate in a morning or afternoon congregational prayer without making a big deal about it, they will be amazed. What’s in your heart stays in your heart. You don’t have to convert to Islam. If you are a person of faith and you actually learn the translations of the prayers, you’ll likely find just enough commonalities to give you the right psychological perspective to integrate this as part of your cultural awareness. To the people with whom you work to win hearts and minds, religion is a touchstone to their way of life. Don’t try to bullshit your way through. Just be subtle about it, as if it comes naturally. When asked about your religion, tell them you are a man of God. Take a hint. Go to the Airborne/Special Ops museum on Bragg Boulevard have a look at the 5th Group’s CPT Gillespie participating in a Montagnard tribal ceremony in tribal, ceremonial dress in Vietnam circa 1964. http://shadowspear.com/vb/showthread.php?9925-National-Geographic-January-1965-American-Special-Forces-in-VietNam&s=5072bad39967bd50bd28a159133863f6
Getting Down to Business
10. Once you remove some of the aspects of your Martianess, you will have to contend with the next obstacle, trust. They may start to believe you, but there is a road you must travel for them to trust you, and, in turn, work with you. Unfortunately, many of the road conditions are beset with potholes and craters.
11. By and large, the Afghans: a). don’t support the Taliban; b). hate Al Qaeda; and c). simply want to be left alone. The problem is they hear what’s happening in Iraq with regard to the Awakening Movement and Sons of Iraq. The news is that MNF-I left them behind to fend for themselves without support. Al Qaeda/Taliban propaganda is telling them that the “Crusaders” will leave their supporters behind like they did in Vietnam. Al Qaeda calls it the “Ghost of Vietnam.” They pay attention to events, such as the 4 October battle in Kamdesh and wonder if that, or the next battle with significant American losses, will signal a withdrawal, and wonder what will happen to them, if the Taliban and Al Qaeda return to power. Therefore, you should never try to convince them that you will stay for the long-term. They will not believe you. You must do your best to give them a sense of empowerment that they can protect themselves and their loved ones. This is easier said than done, but the bottom line is the Pashtuns don’t trust the ANA/ANP and they view the Taliban as better fighters. The key to FID with the Pashtuns is forming militias with enough power to aggressively defend their territories and out G the G, so to speak.
12. The ranks of the insurgency are swelled by Afghans who are motivated by local grievances rather than an ideological affinity with the Taliban. Therefore, you must ask yourself a difficult question. Am I prepared to act as an arbiter with my assigned tribe(s)? Can I coordinate with another ODA that is assigned to a tribe with which my tribe has a dispute? There is an emerging Taliban shadow state that rivals the Afghan government in its ability to enforce and govern many parts of the country. You see a greater percentage of tax collection in areas under Taliban control than you do in areas under so-called government control. At the moment the Taliban can offer a far better deal. In return, the Taliban can offer some justice, some stability, some security, but maybe not very much opportunity. Consisting of at least five knowledgeable people, the Taliban provincial authorities are responsible for enforcing discipline on the fighters operating in their provinces. According to Taliban sources, “Every province must make a court with one judge and two Islamic experts so they can solve problems that the leader and elders cannot solve.” The Taliban court for the Sangin area appears to be mobile, traveling to villages where there are disputes, while there is a ‘higher court’ in the northern Helmand district of Baghran. Therefore, are you ready to get involved at this level with the tribes? The Taliban are. If you want to out G the G, you’ve got to make them irrelevant. Sun Tsu’s strategy of the sheathed sword plays into this. The challenge is going to be the coordination of effort at the ODB level, or echelons higher. This goes back to paragraphs 6 and 9.
Part II – THEM
In this section, when I write Exploitable Weakness – that’s a Talib weakness you can exploit!
Enemy Mine
13. While the Taliban has a reputation for being dominated by the Ghilzai (or Khilji) tribal confederation, the Quetta Shura includes four members of the Durrani tribal confederation, the other major branch of the Pashtun people in Afghanistan. The Shura’s personnel has barely changed since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, the only addition being Amir Khan Haqqani, a veteran Taliban commander who filled the slot vacated by Mullah Akhtar Osmani, who was killed in an air strike in December 2006. The table below has been corroborated by multiple sources. It is included here to provide a peek into the tribes from which 10 of the alleged 18 Shura members hail.
The Quetta Shura
Name
Tribe
Position
Mohammed Omar
Ghilzai-Hotak
“Leader of the Faithful”
Abdul Ghani Baradar
Durrani-Popalzai
Deputy Leader
(Former Deputy Defense Minister)
Akhtar Mohammed Mansour Shah Mohammed
Ghilzai-Ishaqzai
Senior Military Advisor
(Former Minister of Aviation)
Obaidullah
Durrani-Alikozai
Logistics
(Former Defense Minister)
Mohammed Rasul
Durrani-Noorzai
Selection of Shadow Governors
(Former Taliban Nimroz Governor)
Abdul Razaq
Durrani-Achikzai
Senior Military Advisor
(Former Minister of Commerce)
Mohammed Zia Agha
Sayed
Justice
Amir Khan Motaki
Gilzai-Tarakai
Information and Culture
Abdul Jalil Haqqani
Ghilzai
Maybe Finance
(Former Deputy Foreign Minister)
Hafiz Aziz
Ghilzai
Unknown
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
14. Mullah Omar’s reputation for piety and asceticism has served the movement well. As the personification of the Taliban movement, he is the most significant figure in the insurgency, even though he typically issues only two or three public statements a year. He is widely respected and admired and his followers say they will gladly die for him. That said, the Quetta Shura (QST) Taliban leadership’s ability to control the insurgency at the tactical level is limited, not least by the need to maintain communications security and the emergence of numerous local commanders who have little need of the leadership’s support or guidance. One way the leadership is trying to enhance its influence is to send in teams of experienced fighters to reinforce certain areas. For example, locals in Helmand noted significant numbers of unfamiliar Taliban cells in the run-up to the large-scale operations conducted by the US Marines in July-August 2009. So-called Action Teams come from Quetta and go to different areas to try to reinforce the leadership. They go around in many ways like traveling salesmen: they set their pitch out for what they wish to achieve. They can offer cash, money, arms and fighters. The ability to redeploy forces to help local groups has the potential to increase the leadership’s influence and bolster the insurgency in key areas. A British military intelligence source told me that local groups that are struggling to establish themselves would probably take advantage of the support and consequently follow orders, but groups with enough funding, fighters and local backing would continue to operate autonomously.
Exploitable Weakness – The use of ‘outsiders’ consequently risks undermining popular support for the insurgents and makes it less likely that local groups will welcome such support in the future.
15. The Taliban supreme leadership in Quetta comes out with large directives on how it would like the insurgency in Afghanistan to be run. Titled “Ibrat,” the 2008 review resulted in a general directive ordering Taliban forces to adopt more asymmetric tactics such roadside bombings, rather than trying to form large fighting units, according to the sources in Kandahar.
Exploitable Weakness – The subsequent dramatic increase in the use of improvised explosive devices suggests Taliban field commanders are following these orders, even though the underhand nature of the tactics conflicts with Pashtun warrior culture. Get the 4th PsyOp folks on this and spread this notion at the local level through the ODAs.
16. The leadership of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has decided to execute new decisive operations under the name of ‘victory’ starting from 30 April 2009, and the victory operations include all the contemporary tactics from “martyrdom operations to explosive canisters, as wekk as booby-trapped cars, infiltration operations, ambushes, surprise attacks, targeting foreign forces bases and their diplomatic centers and [convoys], and the prominent officials in the agent administration, including parliament members, and employees of the defense and interior ministries and security forces.” In an apparent attempt to bolster its authority, the leadership issued a guidance document for all Taliban in May. “The Mujahideen must obey commanders, commanders must obey district general leaders, district general leaders must obey provincial general leaders and the provincial general leaders must obey the imam [Mullah Omar] and deputy imam.” Taliban statements identified the deputy leader as Mullah Baradar.
17. The guidance document proscribes any Talib from taking bribes, extorting money, ransoming prisoners and executing people without the leadership’s permission. In a riposte to the extremists who like to video beheadings, the document says executions should be carried out with firearms and should not be photographed. It states that youngsters without beards are not allowed to fight and that smoking is banned. A fifth of all captured weapons and money should be sent to the leadership, with the fighters responsible keeping the rest. The formation of new, unofficial groups is banned and units should not operate outside their designated areas without permission from higher authorities. Suicide bombers should be well-trained, used to target high-ranking individuals and do their best to avoid civilian casualties. The core of the message is not dissimilar from the ‘population-centric counter-insurgency’ espoused in Gen McChrystal’s report. The Taliban document states: “Mujahideen, commanders and the provincial authority should have good relationships with local people so that the Mujahideen will always be welcomed by local people and they should always help them.” It warns that any Taliban fighter who creates problems for civilians will be warned and then expelled if he does not stop. However, it may have little impact on the ground.
18. There have been indications that Taliban tax collectors in areas such as Sangin are being given performance targets and told to tax wheat farmers as the opiate harvest declines. There has also been some intelligence reporting in Sangin that funds from profitable districts, typically rich agricultural areas in the Helmand River Valley, were to be sent to Khowst to purchase weapons from Pakistan, although this remains uncorroborated.
19. The Quetta Shura tries to exercise control over its shadow state using traveling ‘commissions’, which began around three years ago. Tasked with ensuring the leadership’s commands are carried out, the commissions typically include representatives from various tribes to prevent any institutional bias, according to a senior Afghan intelligence source in Sangin. Intelligence reports in Sangin indicate that two commissioners also accompany tax collection teams, along with two representatives of the shadow district governor and two from the area’s military command. There maybe two different types of Taliban commission. The Quetta Shura has 11 or 12 commissions, each assigned a portfolio such as military affairs, finance or health. He said the commissions probably consisted of five to seven people who “send proposals to the supreme leader and his deputies for decisions”. He said these commissions probably did not travel around Afghanistan as a group due to the risk of being intercepted. The Taliban’s Al Somood online magazine has variously mentioned a military commission and an economic committee, both of which seem to be top-level bodies.
Exploitable Weakness – Shadow governors are keys to the Taliban leadership’s ambition of re-establishing control of Afghanistan, so their loyalty is essential. The leadership’s ability to hire and fire governors presumably ensures some discipline and at the same time provides its appointees with a degree of legitimacy. Take these guys out (one way or another) and you will have gone far in denying the Taliban’s attempt at gun barrel civil affairs. There is a risk to the Taliban that some governors have little real authority if they are ignored by powerful commanders, the highest level examples of such figures being Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Gen McChrystal’s report stated: “The Haqqani Network and Hizbi-Islami Gulbuddin co-exist with, but do not necessarily accept the Quetta Shura Taliban framework and have yet to develop competing governing structures.”
R-E-S-P-E-C-T Your Opponent
20. You must understand that the Global Jihad Movement (of which the Taliban is part) has adopted Al Qaeda’s ideology as its platform. In that regard (and as professed in multiple essays by Al Qaeda military philosophers), they have adopted the method of succession used by the German Army/Waffen-SS of World War II – “Every Corporal Carries a Field Marshall’s Baton in His Rucksack.” This is something that has only recently been taught (since 2005). However, it has served them well. Every leader trains several subordinates in his duties and those of his superior, as well as those of two ranks down. This allows leadership gaps to be filled rather rapidly. That’s why you will only see, at maximum, a 2-month lull in activities, when a key leader is killed in action or eliminated in a targeted strike.
21. In the Af/Pak Theater, Al Qaeda supplies the various Taliban factions, including those under the command and control of the QST with funds, logistics, MTTs, foreign fighters and planning advice. To better appreciate the means in which Al Qaeda has influenced the Taliban’s strategic and operational planning levels, it is necessary to review the theory behind its operational structure. In January 2005, after recovering from its splintering in 2001, Al Qaeda ideologue Abu Musa’ab As Suri (currently in custody) published an essay on the internet titled “The Global Islamic Resistance Call” with a sizeable section devoted to “Nizam, La Tanzeem” (System, Not Organization). The document established the framework for Al Qaeda’s strategic approach to the Global Jihad, which has slowly been put into practice in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Algeria, Pakistan and most recently Yemen. In the essay, As Suri establishes a doctrine for Al Qaeda and the Global Jihad Movement called Fourth Generation Warfare, which allows for a more flexible, decentralized system of command and control and logistical support, a reliance on organizational dispersion, and an emphasis on collapsing an opponent internally through psychological warfare and selecting targets that reduce an opponent’s ability to attain domestic and international support. As Suri gives theoretical credit to an article published in the U.S. Marine Corps Gazette in 1989 titled, “The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation,” by William Lind, and expands upon theories introduced in the book, “Unrestricted Warfare,” by Colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui published by the People’s Liberation Army of the People’s Republic of China in February 1999. So, if you think these cave dwellers don’t read and take notes, think again….
Final Thoughts
22. The Haqqanis are fighting a war and the Taliban are looking to govern. That is why I think Haqqani fits much more comfortably with Al Qaeda than the Quetta Shura. Although Mullah Omar has embraced Al Qaeda and will likely never sever his ties completely. Remember, Osama Bin Ladan and Ayman Al Zawahiri both stated that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and the greater Caliphate of the Karasan are for Mullah Omar to rule. Al Qaeda is merely a supporting entity.
23. Take the initiative with regard to PSYOP/IO. DO NOT get bogged down in trying to defend your position or answer the enemy’s allegations. When U.S. Grant took command of the Army of the Potomac, he told his officers to stop speculating what Bobby Lee will do. He told them to just consider what they were going to do to Bobby Lee. Conversely, Nathan Bedford Forrest told his staff to “put the scare into them.” That said, be relentless in taking the information war to the Taliban. Taunt them. Tell the public that their tactical leaders are still killing civilians and not listening to Mullah Omar. Show Taliban atrocities for what they are. Be relentless. It’s time to seize the initiative and patiently move forward at a steady pace.
24. Stop calling this The Long War. If that’s what you’re going to call it, that’s what you’re going to get. This is a contest of wills and we will win. You need to make it so that we will once again be the Lawrences and pass the role of Ottoman to our adversaries. It's not really about time. It's about the clever application of will. Therefore, I say fight them in the propaganda war, fight them on the field of honor, while intelligently applying sound civil affairs, FID and UW methods in their midst.
END
4. Masters and Commanders: Are Civil-Military Relations in Crisis?
A good discussion with some of the top thinkers on civil-military relations.
Masters and Commanders
Are Civil-Military Relations in Crisis?
Foreign Affairs · by Kori Schake; Peter D. Feaver; Risa Brooks, Jim Golby, and Heidi Urben · August 24, 2021
The Process Is Working
Kori Schake
Risa Brooks, Jim Golby, and Heidi Urben (“Crisis of Command,” May/June 2021) level serious charges against the U.S. military’s leadership, contending that its influence has grown to the point where “presidents worry about military opposition to their policies and must reckon with an institution that selectively implements executive guidance.” “Unelected military leaders,” they argue, “limit or engineer civilians’ options so that generals can run wars as they see fit.” And “even if elected officials still get the final say, they may have little practical control if generals dictate all the options or slow their implementation—as they often do now.” The authors’ grim assessment of the problems leads them to an equally grim conclusion: “Without robust civilian oversight of the military, the United States will not remain a democracy or a global power for long.”
If the military were acting the way Brooks, Golby, and Urben describe, then it would indeed be egregiously violating cherished norms of U.S. civil-military relations. Fortunately for the republic, however, their allegations are not substantiated.
For one thing, the authors airbrush out of the picture the Pentagon’s civilian leadership. Although they describe President Barack Obama as being boxed in by generals during the debate over Afghanistan, the positions taken by the military were supported by the Defense Department’s top civilians. Robert Gates, Obama’s secretary of defense, and Michèle Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, were deeply involved in developing Washington’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan and staunchly supported it both publicly and in interagency debates. In this, they were at odds with some of Obama’s advisers, such as Tom Donilon, his national security adviser, and Joe Biden, his vice president. In other words, the disagreement was the product of a Defense Department–White House schism, not a civil-military one.
Brooks, Golby, and Urben also claim that “military leaders often preempt the advice and analysis of civilian staff by sending their proposals straight to the secretary of defense, bypassing the byzantine clearance process that non-uniformed staffers must navigate.” The secretary of defense, however, already has the tools to prevent that process from affecting policy. He could, for example, simply refuse to review military input without civilian advice. Although the secretary should avoid making decisions without seeking the civilian counsel of his own staff, that failure falls on the secretary, not the military. The best way to address the civil-military imbalance is to strengthen the civilians, not weaken the military.
Separately, most of the examples the authors use to demonstrate failing civilian control—including the role of Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in creating the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and senior military officials’ pushback against President Donald Trump’s orders to withdraw troops from Afghanistan and Syria—are really the policymaking process working as designed. The interagency system rightly gives the military expansive influence. Although the civilian-military relationship is an unequal one by design, with civilians alone possessing the authority to decide policies, the military has the right and the responsibility to contribute its expertise as policies are shaped. This is particularly true as the armed services grow increasingly separate from the general public. In 1980, nearly 20 percent of Americans had served in the military. By 2018, that number had dropped to about seven percent. As specialists, military leaders have important contributions to make in areas of policy in which many civilians lack expertise, such as what makes for success in war and how to foster cohesion within units.
The best way to address the civil-military imbalance is to strengthen the civilians, not weaken the military.
Military influence in the policymaking process, moreover, is predicated on a strong belief that the armed forces will salute and carry out their orders once civilian leaders make a decision. There is little evidence that the military is currently shirking this role. Although the authors make the serious charge that “Obama’s generals signaled that they would accept nothing less than an aggressive counterinsurgency in Afghanistan,” those generals did accept less under both Obama and Trump. And under President Biden, the military has followed the administration’s orders to begin withdrawing all U.S. troops from the country.
Brooks, Golby, and Urben also downplay other sources of civilian oversight beyond the president and the executive branch. Congress, too, has that same authority. What observers sometimes term “insubordination” is often the legislative branch forcing the military to disclose information that the executive would rather avoid being held accountable for. When Obama and Trump complained that the generals were boxing them in on Afghanistan by roping in sympathetic legislators to make their case, it wasn’t a story of the military refusing to implement the president’s orders; it was a story of the president not wanting to pay a political price for a decision that the Pentagon’s military and civilian leaders considered important.
Members of Congress will always use their powers of oversight to make the military’s views public. In February 2003, for instance, congressional leaders forced Eric Shinseki, the army chief of staff, to concede that Washington would need several hundred thousand troops to stabilize post-invasion Iraq—far more than Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had approved. “Congress too rarely demands that the military bow to civilian authority, instead weighing in selectively and for partisan reasons,” Brooks, Golby, and Urben write. But it is unreasonable to expect legislators to act otherwise. Politicians will use military support for their purposes as long as it proves politically expedient.
Finally, the authors are curiously silent on one of the most significant episodes in U.S. civil-military relations: the incident that took place in Lafayette Square during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. On June 1, Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, appeared alongside Trump for a photo op in military fatigues, immediately after police used tear gas and rubber bullets to clear peaceful protesters from a public space. The incident seemed to be of a piece with the Trump administration’s attempt to pit the military against protesters, with helicopters harassing marchers in Washington, D.C., and National Guard soldiers occupying the centers of major American cities. Not surprisingly, in a February poll, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute found that public support for the military fell by 14 percentage points from 2018 to 2021.
The only practical constraint on the politicization of the U.S. military is its own professionalism.
Less noticeable to the public but crucially important for civil-military relations, however, was Milley’s powerful apology—which effectively delineated the boundaries between civilian and military authority. “I should not have been there,” he said flatly. “My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.”
In the end, as Milley’s behavior made clear, the only practical constraint on the politicization of the U.S. military is its own professionalism. Although there is some worrying degradation in this area, it is unreasonable to expect the strident politicization of American society not to affect the military that is drawn from it. It is a tribute to the strength of the U.S. military’s professionalism that partisan politicization in the military remains as limited as it is.
The type of civil-military relationship that Brooks, Golby, and Urben advocate—complete subordination of the armed forces to civilian direction during policy formation and execution—would eliminate any meaningful check on the judgment of civilian officials. The latitude enjoyed by the U.S. military doesn’t prevent elected leaders from determining and achieving their policy preferences. It simply requires those leaders to pay the political price of public scrutiny. That accountability should be welcomed, not shunned.
KORI SCHAKE is Director of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. She served on the National Security Council and in the U.S. State Department in the George W. Bush administration.
A Stormy but Durable Marriage
Peter D. Feaver
The question of whether civilian control over the U.S. military is in crisis is an especially hoary debate in security studies. The political scientist Samuel Huntington’s classic book on the topic, The Soldier and the State, now nearly 65 years old, spoke of a post–World War II “crisis of American civil-military relations.” After the Vietnam War, leaders in Washington debated whether to blame the debacle on too much or too little civilian control. Analysts made different yet related arguments in the aftermath of the United States’ swift victory in the first Gulf War, when the military’s status and influence stood in stark contrast to the supposed dysfunction of the civilian branches of government. It is in this rich tradition that Risa Brooks, Jim Golby, and Heidi Urben have made their case that the current relationship between military officials and civilian leaders is “broken.”
It is tempting to ask how anything could be in a permanent state of crisis, especially when that crisis has never culminated in a military coup. Brooks, Golby, and Urben answer that the decline in civilian control of the military, which they trace back to 1986, when the Goldwater-Nichols Act created an empowered joint staff and chairman, has reached its apex in the present moment. Civilian control, they argue, is even more precarious today, and only dramatic steps can restore it to health.
U.S. civil-military relations, however, are better understood as a stormy but durable marriage, one in which the spouses endlessly bicker and vie for advantage but never destroy each other or the union that binds them together. In theory, divorce is possible, but in practice, all the parties are too committed to the common good to reach a genuine breaking point. Rather than being in a state of crisis, these relations are in constant friction—sometimes severe, sometimes less so.
On a night mission in Kunar Province, Afghanistan, August 2009
Carlos Barria / Reuters
Viewed this way, the United States is indeed approaching a temporary high point in civil-military friction. This cycle’s apogee was January 6, 2021, when the military had to ponder something it had never before seriously considered: the possibility that violent insurrectionists taking over the U.S. Capitol would thwart the peaceful transfer of power. Although the system struggled to find its footing for a few fateful minutes as Defense Department leaders wrestled with how to respond to appeals for help from the Capitol, the relationship never even came close to collapsing.
In hindsight, there are several strong points in the U.S. system that helped keep civilian control intact during the Trump years. A team of senior military leaders, particularly the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the service chiefs, were committed to upholding civilian authority. They kept their collective eye fixed squarely on their oath to the Constitution and eschewed the Trumpian personality cult that a polarized political environment attempted to press on them. A cadre of respected senior military retirees spoke up to defend norms and help the profession police its ranks. Finally, over the last decade, the professional military educational system has renewed its commitment to teaching and reteaching the basics of civil-military relations.
In fact, across three decades of post–Cold War history, examples abound of the system working properly—even when military leaders disagreed with civilian directives. The institution that resisted President Bill Clinton’s efforts to change how gay men and women served in uniform eventually implemented Barack Obama’s repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. The military then adhered to Donald Trump’s reversal of some of the same orders, and it is currently implementing Joe Biden’s reversal of the reversal. The military also worked with civilian leaders to manage Obama’s deep budget cuts, as well as the even more disruptive limits imposed by the 2013 sequestration. Military leaders welcomed the fiscal relief of the Trump years, but they are now preparing for a very different environment under Biden. None of this, however, is new. In the decades after World War II, civilians and military officers wrestled with similar thorny issues.
That said, leaders on both sides of the civil-military relationship must continually shore up the foundations of their partnership. Here, Brooks, Golby, and Urben’s recommendations can serve as an especially reliable guide. Their list—including strengthening civilian officials in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, publicly denouncing retired officers who violate professional norms, and updating regulations and best practices regarding service members’ use of social media—will be vital for getting civil-military relations back on track.
U.S. civil-military relations are best understood as a stormy but durable marriage.
This is only a start, however. Trump’s tenure revealed just how much the U.S. system depends on respect for norms and taboos. The United States’ form of representative democracy gives extraordinary power to elected leaders, unelected political appointees, and career civilian officials. The United States has survived as a functioning republic not because these actors lack the power to destroy its constitutional order but because they generally choose not to test the outer limits of their authority. Nevertheless, when the people elect a president whose stock in trade involves flouting norms and mocking taboos, civil-military relations come under extraordinary strain. The best thing Americans can do in the near term to restore the health of civil-military relations is to inventory those norms and renew the commitment to upholding them. Specialists and generalists alike, both in government and elsewhere, need to review how the U.S. system of civilian control works and what it needs to function more effectively.
Americans should also be clear that civilian control is not synonymous with good policy. Although Brooks, Golby, and Urben avoid this conflation, there is a temptation among some scholars to broaden the definition of healthy civil-military relations to include optimal geopolitical outcomes. This is an understandable error. The purpose of the military is the security of the state, and if a system keeps producing policies that make the state less secure, can that system really be considered healthy?
Perhaps not, but Americans should not ask more of civilian control than it can deliver. Civilian control means that the elected agents of the voting public get to make the decisions, including which decisions they wish to make themselves and which they wish to delegate to others. It does not mean that those leaders will make wise decisions or even merely lucky ones. It is a mistake to claim, as is often done, that civil-military relations are on the rocks because the United States intervened in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya. Each major decision in those wars involved fractious debate, but all were ultimately made by civilians. That includes the original decisions to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, the choices around the post-invasion planning, the decision to surge troops in Iraq in 2007, the judgment to couple a temporary surge in Afghanistan in 2009 with an arbitrary timetable for withdrawal, the resolution to intervene in Libya in 2011, the decision to leave Iraq altogether in 2011, and Biden’s recent choice to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
Leaders on both sides of the civil-military relationship must continually shore up the foundations of their partnership.
The Trump administration’s decision to delay the withdrawal from Afghanistan seems closest to a case of military preferences prevailing over the president’s. Yet even then, civilian control prevailed. If Trump had been truly determined to withdraw from Afghanistan, he could have done so, as he showed in his misguided abandonment of Washington’s Kurdish allies in Syria in 2018. Only in the final days of the Trump administration—with the president promoting bogus claims of electoral fraud while secretly directing a tiny cabal of loyalists to hastily impose poison-pill defense policies—did the system of civilian control truly begin to break down. But even then, Trump’s refusal to work through the formal chain of command allowed military leaders to slow roll his decisions. Although that response may have technically violated civilian control, it paradoxically shored up civilian authority in the long run.
Finally, leaders should direct more energy toward fixing the civilian side of the civil-military equation. Historically, analysts have focused primarily on the military’s voluntary subordination to elected officials. Leaders should, of course, continue to watch for any signs of trouble. The open letter published in May 2021 by a group of retired military leaders calling themselves “Flag Officers 4 America,” which questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, is an appalling example of the erosion of military ethics. Retired senior officers should call out such incidents and top active-duty leaders must remind the rank and file that defending the Constitution means not spreading falsehoods about legitimate constitutional processes. Senior military officers should also take the temperature of their subordinates, particularly in the middle and junior ranks, to ascertain whether the unprofessionalism on display among retired officers has seeped into the active force.
But the weakest component, the one most in need of strengthening, is civilian. Every element of the civilian pillar could be improved. Key steps include educating political appointees at the top of the interagency process, providing professional development to career civil servants, and increasing awareness within the legislative branch of the processes by which civilians at all levels exercise oversight of military policy. Perhaps most important of all, leaders must give due attention to citizens’ understanding of basic civics and the foundations necessary for healthy civil-military relations. Yes, the military should be reminded of its obligations and ultimate subordination. But in the long run, it is the civilian side of the relationship that will dictate the republic’s health.
PETER D. FEAVER is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Duke University. In 1993–94 and 2005–7, he served on the U.S. National Security Council Staff.
Brooks, Golby, and Urben Reply
Both Kori Schake and Peter Feaver provide helpful context for understanding the contentious debate about U.S. civil-military relations. We agree that, for now, there is no acute crisis. We are also sympathetic to Feaver’s claim that civil-military relations are often naturally fractious. Debate can be constructive, and too much agreement is not conducive to healthy military policy.
Even so, we remain convinced that there has been a quiet yet steady breakdown in civilian control of the armed forces over the past 30 years. These problems are more serious and far-reaching than Schake and Feaver describe. The erosion has been incremental and cumulative—a steady process of degradation rather than a single breaking point. It has largely flown under the radar, aided by a lack of public awareness, the military’s extraordinarily high approval ratings, and partisan polarization that discourages meaningful reform.
As both Schake and Feaver note to varying degrees, civilians have played a role in damaging the military’s nonpartisan ethic. The exploitation of military service and symbols by politicians, for instance, continues unabated. In the months since our article was published, there have in fact been new affronts to the military’s neutrality, with some politicians seeking to draw the military into the country’s culture wars. In July, Tom Cotton, a Republican senator from Arkansas, suggested that senior officers’ perspectives on U.S. racial politics should be a litmus test for their promotion to flag rank, saying that he “may start probing nominees” about their views. As long as American politics remain polarized, politicians on both sides of the aisle are unlikely to stop using the military for partisan gain.
U.S. Senator Tom Cotton in Cleveland, Ohio, July 2016
Mike Segar / Reuters
Polarization and negative partisanship, moreover, are not confined to elected representatives. These traits are also evident among the American public. Survey research by one of us (Jim Golby) and Feaver has shown a troubling trend: that voters increasingly want the military to take their side in partisan debates. Such divisions mean that even when the military behaves in a nonpartisan fashion, just about any action it takes can be interpreted as partisan. Although we agree with Feaver that civil-military relations would benefit from a renewed focus on civic education, that will probably not be enough to address the problem. For the public to stop viewing the military as a partisan actor, politicians will need to stop treating it as one.
There are other opportunities to improve civilian control that policymakers can and should pursue. Here, we could not agree more with Feaver’s points. Political appointees would indeed benefit from additional education on civil-military issues, and the civilian civil service should have more opportunities for professional development. As Schake notes, one way to strengthen civilian control is “to strengthen the civilians.” But this does not require weakening the military, as she suggests we advocate. Instead, we argue for institutional parity: organizations such as the Office of the Secretary of Defense should be as strong and effective as the Joint Staff and the combatant commands, which have grown in size and influence in recent decades. Although civilian staffers in the Pentagon do not have independent authority to issue orders, effective civilian control today is impossible without their oversight.
There are also some hopeful signs that Congress is playing a more active role in its oversight responsibilities, as Schake highlights. In June, lawmakers voted to repeal the 1991 and 2002 Authorizations for Use of Military Force, the long-in-place resolutions that allowed, respectively, the first and second U.S. wars against Iraq. Lawmakers have also advanced legislation that would remove decisions about whether to prosecute sexual assault from the military chain of command. Bipartisan support for both measures is particularly encouraging, as it demonstrates that there are areas of common ground where Congress can reassert civilian control.
Reasserting civilian control also includes a role for the military—despite Schake’s claims that there is nothing amiss there. Surveys reveal that a good portion of officers consistently believe that they should have a right to autonomy over operational and tactical matters. When policymakers impose timelines or troop limits that clash with officers’ preferences, some officers view those directives with cynicism. These attitudes need to change. Senior officers owe civilian leaders candid advice about the military consequences of political decisions, but they cannot—and should not—dictate outcomes.
We remain convinced that there has been a quiet yet steady breakdown in civilian control of the armed forces.
Schake also finds no problems with the Pentagon’s current policymaking process, which often gives military leaders a bureaucratic advantage over their civilian counterparts. She notes that the secretary of defense has the prerogative to request advice from his civilian staff. But that the system does not automatically work that way is exactly our point. Unless it becomes common practice for civilian staff to scrutinize policy decisions, the military may too often get its way.
There has also been a well--documented deterioration in military officers’ belief in the importance of nonpartisanship. Although most officers adhere to the rules and avoid partisan debate, problems remain. The letter by retired flag officers that Feaver cites is a particularly egregious example—the result of the military turning a blind eye to 30 years of partisan endorsements by retired officers. Although no active-duty leaders signed the document, such distinctions may ultimately matter little: research shows that the public doesn’t often draw a distinction between active and retired members of the military.
Yes, there have been no acts of overt insubordination regarding a president’s decisions. By that measure, civilian control is indeed intact. But there have been efforts to shape those decisions through questionable means, despite Schake’s contention otherwise. Take the 2009 surge of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Schake is correct that civilian defense leaders sided with the military chiefs in favoring a fully resourced counterinsurgency, as did Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. But noting that some civilian officials agreed with the military or that President Barack Obama made the final decision misses our point. Even if some civilian officials agreed with the military’s recommendation, federal law demands that the military’s advice include more than a recommendation. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—typically with support from the Joint Chiefs and the combatant commanders—is required to prepare “military analysis, options, and plans” consistent with the president’s guidance. Public accounts of the deliberations over the 2009 troop surge indicate that military leaders slow rolled important aspects of Obama’s requests for discrete policy options, including a coherent counterterrorism proposal. Officers effectively kept some alternatives off the table by ensuring they were not developed promptly or fully. That is not a decision-making process operating as designed.
The fact also remains that military leaders did their best to increase the political costs Obama would pay for rejecting their advice, even though they may not have seen it that way at the time. According to the reporter Bob Woodward, General David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command at the time, called a sympathetic Washington Post journalist the day after the paper published an opinion piece skeptical of the surge and suggested that the reporter write a rebuttal. General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan, bluntly told an audience at a British think tank that he would not accept a solely counterterrorism-focused mission in Afghanistan. And a report drafted by McChrystal that called for a large troop commitment was leaked—a move that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates attributed to McChrystal’s office. As Feaver himself wrote at the time in Foreign Policy, “The leak makes it harder for President Obama to reject a McChrystal request for additional troops because the assessment so clearly argues for them.”
Here, Obama’s reflection on the matter in his memoir is worth repeating:
Looking back, I’m inclined to believe Gates when he said there was no coordinated plan by [Mike] Mullen [then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff], Petraeus, or McChrystal to force my hand. I know that all three men were motivated by a sincere conviction in the rightness of their position, and that they considered it to be part of their code as military officers to provide their honest assessment in public testimony or press statements without regard to political consequences. . . . But I also think that the episode illustrated just how accustomed the military had become to getting whatever it wanted.
Although Schake may believe that the military should serve as a “meaningful check on the judgment of civilian officials,” we do not share that view. The institutional checks in the U.S. system of government should come from Congress, the courts, and the executive branch, not the uniformed military—no matter how seasoned, how professional, or how informed they might be.
In the end, the eternal question about civil-military relations—Is it a crisis, or isn’t it a crisis?—distracts from real debate, forcing people into defending one of two extremes at the expense of addressing a far more complex reality. Civilian control varies in degree—not in absolutes. Focusing only on coups or overt military insubordination is unproductive. It makes it harder for the public to see that there is a problem and push for reform through its elected representatives.
Like Schake and Feaver, we were encouraged that the military weathered the political turmoil of the era of President Donald Trump and withstood the test posed by the January 6 attack on the Capitol that he instigated. But the erosion of important civil-military norms long predated Trump, nor has it suddenly disappeared since he left the White House. The United States can do better, and Americans should demand as much—from society, from their elected leaders, and from the military.
Foreign Affairs · by Kori Schake; Peter D. Feaver; Risa Brooks, Jim Golby, and Heidi Urben · August 24, 2021
5. $6,500 on a charter plane to escape from Afghan hell
We should not be confused and equate what Eric Prince is doing with what committed selfless veterans are doing as described in this story. They are not on the same level.
But even at the failure and end of the war there is still a buck to be made by contractors.
$6,500 on a charter plane to escape from Afghan hell
$6,500 on a charter plane to escape from Afghan hell: Private contractors are charging people to get out of Kabul and veterans are scrambling to evacuate thousands with just six days until the August 31 deadline
- Military veterans are running operations to rescue thousands of Afghans
- They fear interpreters and Afghan allies will be left behind when Biden's evacuation ends on Aug 31
- 'We have a lot of friends that we feel a deep debt of loyalty to,' said a former Marine involved with Task Force Dunkirk
- At the same time, the wealthy can buy their way out for $6500
- And non-profit organizations are have their own efforts to rescue women
PUBLISHED: 14:02 EDT, 25 August 2021 | UPDATED: 15:50 EDT, 25 August 2021
Daily Mail · by Rob Crilly, Senior U.S. Political Reporter For Dailymail.Com · August 25, 2021
A vast, informal effort to evacuate thousands of vulnerable people has sprung up in Afghanistan as U.S. military veterans, diplomats and politicians scramble to beat President Biden's August 31 deadline.
The controversial private military contractor Erik Prince is charging evacuees $6,500 to get them safely into the airport and on to flights while former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was part of an effort to charter planes to rescue women.
It is all part of an operation to evacuate foreigners and help thousands of Afghans who worked for the U.S. military, foreign governments or charities that fear death at the hands of the Taliban.
'It's just an estimate, but we have probably facilitated 1500 people out of the country,' said Marine Lt. Col. Russell Worth Parker, of Task Force Dunkirk, a hastily assembled group of special operations and CIA veterans.
His figure includes work done with similar coalitions - including Team America, which uses digital expertise to track and advise people on the ground, and Task Force Pineapple, which began with an operation to rescue an Afghan commando being hunted by the Taliban - and the more established non-profit No One Left Behind.
Thousands of people are still waiting outside Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, many presenting papers they say make the eligible for resettlement overseas
The lucky ones will make it on to a military transport plane for a new life in a safe country
Rescue efforts include former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who was involved in an attempt to charter a plane for vulnerable women, and private military contractor Erik Prince who is offering his company's expertise for a price
They each grew from the same seed.
'Each of us thought: there's one or two guys we have got to get out,' said Parker. 'That is how most of these things started.'
And they are motivated by similar instincts.
'My last time in Afghanistan was supporting Afghan special operators so we have a lot of friends that we feel a deep debt of loyalty to,' added Parker.
That debt fuels an operation that runs on Pentagon contacts, calls to congressional offices and the knowhow of years in Afghanistan.
Their task has taken on added urgency in the past 24 hours.
On Tuesday, the Taliban announced they were closing the airport road for Afghans, who were told they could no longer flee.
Hours later, Biden announced that evacuation efforts were 'on pace' to finish by the end of the month.
The White House said it believed foreigners and Afghans in need could still reach the airport.
The result has been continuing chaos around Hamid Karzai International Airport, where thousands of desperate people are seeking safety.
Biden has stoked the anger of military veterans by refusing to extend the evacuation beyond Aug. 31. They say he is abandoning people who put their lives at risk to help the U.S.
The grizzled veterans leading the informal rescue expressed disbelief at White House claims that the operation was a success and that Afghans could safely get through checkpoints and the crush of thousands of people to reach the airport.
As one put it, it's 'like wading through a 400-yard Metallica mosh pit with five toddlers.'
Expats and Afghans are swapping advice on WhatsApp groups, keeping others informed about the location of Taliban checkpoints or promising leads on flights.
Charities are coordinating with the U.S. military to get charter flights into Kabul, reportedly including one organized by former Secretary of State Clinton.
And congressional offices are fielding hundreds of requests for help, working with the Pentagon and Department of State to reach people on the ground.
'We are working with both congressional offices and networks on the ground in Kabul to facilitate movement and coordinate entry into HKIA, filling in the gaps the State Department has left,' said a spokesman for Rep. Mike Waltz, the first former Green Beret elected to Congress.
Private military contractors are offering their services for those with the money to pay - such as media organizations or private businesses.
Prince, who founded Blackwater, said he could get people into the airport and on to planes for $6500 per person - more if individuals were trapped in their homes.
When the details were published by the Wall Street Journal it triggered accusations of profiteering.
But military experts said it was all just part of the scramble to get people out of a warzone.
'Erik Prince is the press's favorite punching bag,' said Bill Roggio, an Army veteran and editor of the Long War Journal.
'He is making an effort to get people out of country and is taking great risk to do so.'
U.S. soldiers stand guard at the airport tower near an evacuation control checkpoint in Kabul. The Taliban wrested back control of the country 10 days ago as U.S. forces prepared to depart
Taliban fighters search a vehicle at a checkpoint in Kabul. People trying to escape must run a gauntlet of checkpoints to get the airport
The Taliban retook Kabul without a fight last weekend and are now forming a new government
Instead he said veterans were furious at the the Biden administration for potentially leaving behind thousands of Afghan translators, soldiers and other staff by sticking to the Aug. 31 deadline.
And he scoffed at the White House claiming that anyone who needed to get out could still reach the airport.
'The facts speak for themselves. This administration has been spinning the operation as a success,' he said, 'But we know what we are seeing.
'We are hearing story after story from individuals having problems getting to the airport
'I'm aware of families that had to make multiple journeys. Fortunately they got out but only after putting their families lives - we are talking young children - in danger.'
Parker said the work would continue long after August 31, continuing with rescues as well as supporting the evacuees as they arrive in a foreign land.
'The scope of the effort that is going to be required for the people that do get out is going to be enormous,' he said.
'Look at history, people came out of Vietnam for 20 years.
'We are going to have an enormous lift in which we are going to need to support the people who did come out and the people still trying to come out.'
Daily Mail · by Rob Crilly, Senior U.S. Political Reporter For Dailymail.Com · August 25, 2021
6. CIA, U.S. Troops Conduct Missions Outside Kabul Airport to Extract Americans, Afghan Allies
Excerpts:
A CIA spokeswoman declined to comment on agency operations in Afghanistan. The military is subject to different disclosure rules and acknowledges American military operations, but the CIA doesn’t.
Pentagon officials acknowledged Wednesday an operation in which they said the military airlifted “less than 20” Americans overnight into Karzai International Airport, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said at a briefing Wednesday.
Mr. Kirby wouldn’t say where the Americans were moved from, what kind of helicopter was used or why they needed to be flown into the airport compound.
CIA, U.S. Troops Conduct Missions Outside Kabul Airport to Extract Americans, Afghan Allies
Risky operations include helicopter lifts, ground troops as evacuation window closes
WSJ · by Gordon Lubold, Warren P. Strobel and Jessica Donati
A congressional source knowledgeable about the evacuation effort said U.S. troops had gone into Kabul on joint missions with other foreign allies, including Britain and France, to designated locations where they had picked up citizens from all those nations, U.S. green-card holders, and Afghans who hold special visas for helping the U.S. military.
The air and ground operations are considered perilous under the current circumstances in the country as the U.S. has begun to assign priority on evacuating Americans over Afghans who are at risk. Those include the many thousands of Afghan interpreters and others who worked for the U.S. government but remain inside the country and face retribution from the Taliban.
The Pentagon has said it is coordinating with the Taliban on airport security, but it’s unclear if those discussions also included extraction missions.
The Biden administration is poised to stick to the Aug. 31 deadline to extract as many U.S. and Afghans at risk as possible before removing all American troops, which number about 6,000. President Biden has asked defense officials to develop contingency plans if the Aug. 31 date needs to be extended.
The Taliban, who have surrounded the Hamid Karzai International Airport since the city and country fell Aug. 15, have threatened retaliation against Americans and others if the U.S. remains past the deadline. U.S. officials said they thought the Taliban were likely to act on its threat.
Senior U.S. officials and lawmakers have also cited threats near the airport from the small but extremely violent Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan, Islamic State-Khorasan.
“The threat to the airport is very real and very substantial,” specifically from Islamic State-Khorasan, Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) said after an intelligence briefing Monday. “It’s a very real risk to our aircraft, to our personnel, to people who have congregated around the airport.”
A CIA spokeswoman declined to comment on agency operations in Afghanistan. The military is subject to different disclosure rules and acknowledges American military operations, but the CIA doesn’t.
Pentagon officials acknowledged Wednesday an operation in which they said the military airlifted “less than 20” Americans overnight into Karzai International Airport, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said at a briefing Wednesday.
Mr. Kirby wouldn’t say where the Americans were moved from, what kind of helicopter was used or why they needed to be flown into the airport compound.
Within the past week, the military has conducted at least two other operations using helicopters to rescue a total of 185 Americans, officials said. That included one recently from inside Kabul that rescued 16 Americans, officials said. Some extractions have been done on the ground, in which Americans are led by foot into the airport.
Pentagon officials also said on Friday that it had conducted an airlift operation with helicopters in Kabul on Thursday in which 169 Americans were rescued and brought into the airport.
Three Chinook helicopters flew from Karzai International Airport about 200 meters just outside the security perimeter to a makeshift landing zone at the Baron Hotel, where the American citizens had gathered, Mr. Kirby told reporters. The Americans were put on the helicopters and transported the short distance into the airport, Mr. Kirby said.
The original plan for the Americans was to gather at the hotel and enter the Abbey Gate at the airport. But a large crowd stood between the gate and the hotel. U.S. commanders on the ground determined it wasn’t safe for the American citizens and arranged the helicopter transport. It was the first such known airlift operation outside the perimeter of the airport.
—Nancy A. Youssef contributed to this article.
WSJ · by Gordon Lubold, Warren P. Strobel and Jessica Donati
7. U.S. Still Searching for Americans in Afghanistan as Deadline Closes In
I worry about those who may be throughout the countryside. We must leave no one behind.
U.S. Still Searching for Americans in Afghanistan as Deadline Closes In
Pentagon says it will continue evacuations as long as possible, while allowing time to withdraw troops and essential equipment
WSJ · by Nancy A. Youssef, Saeed Shah and Courtney McBride
“U.S. citizens who are at the Abbey Gate, East Gate, or North Gate now should leave immediately,” the alert said. Officials have been warning that members of the Afghan branch of the Islamic State extremist group were trying to mount an attack on military personnel or civilians at the airport.
The Biden administration on Wednesday provided its first count of American civilians in Afghanistan, saying as many as 1,500 U.S. citizens remained in the country.
U.S. officials are trying to evacuate 500 of the Americans, and are in contact with them, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at the State Department. The status of another 1,000 civilian Americans is unclear, said Mr. Blinken, adding that U.S. officials were trying to contact them.
He said some may not be American citizens, others may have left the country already, and some may be planning to stay.
Approximately 4,500 Americans have been evacuated since the collapse of the Afghan government earlier this month, Mr. Blinken said.
The estimate of the number of Americans evacuated and those still in Afghanistan doesn’t include lawful permanent U.S. residents, who are holders of green cards that entitle them to live and work in the U.S.
Biden administration officials, meanwhile, outlined preparations for the likelihood that Afghans and others are likely to remain in the country after the last U.S. troops have left.
“They will not be forgotten,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at the State Department, adding that the U.S. and its allies would “ensure that those who want to leave Afghanistan after the 31st are able to do so.”
Mr. Blinken said there was no deadline on U.S. efforts to help Americans and Afghans leave.
Hundreds of people gathered near an evacuation control checkpoint at the airport in Kabul on Wednesday.
Photo: Associated Press
“That effort will continue every day past August 31st,” he said. “The Taliban have made public and private commitments to provide and permit safe passage for Americans, for third-country nationals and Afghans at risk going forward past August 31st.”
He said the U.S. and other countries would hold the Taliban to that commitment.
President Biden said Tuesday that he has asked the Pentagon and State Department to draft contingency plans for extending evacuation operations beyond the Aug. 31 deadline he had set earlier. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said the Pentagon was crafting those plans but wouldn’t outline any of the possible scenarios.
Mr. Kirby and other military officials said the evacuation operations would need to allow for the removal of military personnel and equipment before the Aug. 31 deadline. But they said the Pentagon is committed to evacuating Afghans until operations conclude, without saying when they would end or when the final military withdrawal would commence.
“We will have to reserve some capacity in those last couple of days to prioritize the military footprint leaving because we want to be able to keep it there as long as possible to do the job it is intended to do,” Mr. Kirby told reporters Wednesday.
In a sign of the shift, Turkey began evacuating its soldiers from Afghanistan, the Defense Ministry said on Wednesday. Turkish troops had played a key role in securing the Kabul airport.
Afghans were on board a Spanish military plane as part of their evacuation on Wednesday.
Photo: spanish ministry of defense/Reuters
Over the past 24 hours, the U.S. evacuated 11,200 people on 42 cargo plane flights, the Pentagon said late Wednesday. In all, the U.S. has moved between 58,000 and 60,000 people since Aug. 14, and roughly 88,000 have left through U.S., allied, chartered and other flights combined, the Pentagon said.
Many aid organizations have been told by Western governments that evacuation flights won’t continue past Friday, as the U.S. military will need the days remaining until Tuesday to remove its own equipment and troops from Kabul. That guidance represented one sign that the window for Afghans desperate to leave the Taliban-controlled country is closing.
Thick crowds gathered around the airport Wednesday as the clock ticked down to catch the last flights out. Many waved their travel papers or signs with their nationalities, hoping to attract the attention of the foreign troops controlling access checkpoints.
One Afghan man, who didn’t want to be identified because he feared for his safety, said he got through the Taliban check posts on the way to the airport with an invitation letter from a European country on Wednesday morning. He tried all day to get through the throng around the airport entrance gates, without success, and returned home after nightfall. He said he would try again Thursday.
“There were so many people there that, if you dropped a needle from the sky, it would not hit the ground,” he said.
Foreign soldiers spaced out on top of the airport wall had the flags of their countries held up, so that those people who had nationalities or visas for that nation could approach them, he said.
One family with connections to the deposed Afghan government has been trying to leave Kabul since last Thursday, making at least two unsuccessful attempts to reach the gates despite communications from the U.S. Embassy saying their visas had been issued.
On one occasion, the father, Mohammad, who had served in the Afghan military, grew a beard and wore dirty clothes in hopes of going unrecognized by the Taliban, but was stopped. The second time, they endured hours in crushing throngs, waving their documents at American soldiers, to no avail, they said.
“This is no way to treat human beings,” said Mohammad’s daughter, Husnia, after the family left the gate the second time and went to hide with a friend.
The Pentagon wouldn’t say when such flights would no longer be available to Afghans, saying it was up to the commanders on the ground.
Mr. Kirby said U.S. troops would continue flying out as many people as possible for as long as they can, and said no Afghan with a U.S. Special Immigrant Visa—the type given to Afghans who worked for U.S. forces or agencies during the war—would be left behind.
“We know there are a lot of desperate people who want to leave, and that is why we are working as fast as we can,” Mr. Kirby said.
The U.S. also said Wednesday it had conducted its third helicopter evacuation overnight of Americans stuck outside the airport. Mr. Kirby wouldn’t provide any details other than to say “less than 20” were flown into the airport compound.
In Kabul, the Taliban continued to try violently dispersing crowds at the airport, shooting in the air and using whips and chains. On Wednesday, footage of a man near the airport, bleeding from the head from an apparent beating from the Taliban as he pleaded that he is an Australian citizen, circulated on social media.
A number of embassies successfully picked up their citizens and preselected Afghans in the city before dawn, and managed to get them in bus or minibus convoys inside the airport and onto flights.
The Pentagon said it was in daily communication with the Taliban to facilitate who should be allowed to enter.
The Taliban announced Tuesday that they would stop Afghans reaching the airport, but at least some with travel documents were allowed through the group’s checkpoints on the way to the airport on Wednesday.
Suhail Shaheen, a spokesman for the Taliban, said Wednesday that Afghans with travel documentation would be allowed to fly out after Aug. 31. He reiterated that U.S. and allied troops should withdraw by that deadline, saying on Twitter that “it will pave the way for resumption of civilian flights.” All commercial flights to Kabul have been suspended since the Taliban took over the city Aug. 15.
The U.S. deployed 5,800 troops to the airport shortly after the Taliban took control of the capital Aug. 15. It took several days for those forces to arrive in Afghanistan. President Biden said Tuesday that he has asked the Pentagon and State Department to draft contingency plans for extending evacuation operations beyond the Aug. 31 deadline he had set earlier. Mr. Kirby said the Pentagon was crafting those plans but wouldn’t outline any of the possible scenarios.
As the last hours wind down for the evacuation operation, some Western officials sought to secure additional time to remove their citizens or Afghans who assisted them. German officials said the Taliban agreed to allow the evacuation to continue through the use of civilian flights after the Tuesday deadline. Markus Potzel, who is negotiating with the Taliban on behalf of Chancellor Angela Merkel, said the group would allow the civilian airport operations in Kabul as a prerequisite for an international diplomatic and humanitarian presence in the country. Mr. Potzel made the comments Tuesday after meeting with the Taliban’s senior leader in Doha, Sher Mohammed Abbas Stanekzai.
—Bojan Pancevski and Michelle Hackman contributed to this article.
WSJ · by Nancy A. Youssef, Saeed Shah and Courtney McBride
8. Three Aircraft Carriers. Dozens Of Stealth Fighters. A Powerful Allied Battle Group Has Gathered Near China.
So, how does China respond to this?
Three Aircraft Carriers. Dozens Of Stealth Fighters. A Powerful Allied Battle Group Has Gathered Near China.
Forbes · by David Axe · August 25, 2021
An F-35B lands aboard USS 'America' in late August 2021.
Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Jonathan D. Berlier/U.S. Navy photo
Three aircraft carriers embarking two different models of F-35 stealth fighter have assembled in the waters around Okinawa.
The three-carrier group, with two American flattops and one British one, is among the most powerful naval formations to appear anywhere in many years.
And it’s not hard to understand the timing and location. The Chinese navy in recent weeks has been rehearsing an invasion of Taiwan. The three carriers are a warning—that an attack on the island democracy could have profound consequences.
The three flattops converged from separate directions. HMS Queen Elizabeth, the Royal Navy’s new conventionally-fueled carrier, along with her British, American and Dutch escorts for several weeks now has been crisscrossing the Western Pacific.
The 919-foot carrier with two squadrons of F-35B jump jets aboard—one from the Royal Air Force and another from the U.S. Marine Corps—departed the United Kingdom for her maiden cruise back in May, sailed through the Mediterranean and across the Indian Ocean to reach the Pacific via the Singapore Strait.
USS America was the first American flattop to join up with Queen Elizabeth. America, an 844-foot amphibious assault ship with a conventional powerplant, functions as a light carrier when she embarks a squadron or two of F-35Bs. She sails from Japan, usually in the company of destroyers and other amphibious ships from the U.S. 7th Fleet.
MORE FOR YOU
America and Queen Elizabeth spent last week refueling each other’s F-35s in a so-called “cross-decking” exercise. “This interaction showcased how quickly and seamlessly the U.S. and U.K. can fold together our combined air power and execute highly intricate and sustained flight operations to devastatingly lethal effect,” said Capt. Ken Ward, America’s skipper.
The San Diego-based, nuclear-powered supercarrier USS Carl Vinson, carrying a squadron of catapult-launched F-35Cs, approached America and Queen Elizabeth from the east on Wednesday.
Together, the three carriers and their escorts possess more firepower than the entire fleets of most countries. The Chinese navy at present deploys just two flattops—both similar to Queen Elizabeth in size and capability.
Queen Elizabeth has 16 F-35Bs aboard. The Japan-based F-35B squadron that embarks on America has 10 jets. It’s not clear how many are aboard America right now. Vinson is the first of the U.S. Navy’s 10 supercarriers to sail with an F-35C squadron, 10 jets strong. The flattop also embarks around three dozen F/A-18E/F fighters and six EA-18G electronic-attack jets.
Add it up. That’s up to 36 F-35s plus another 40 or so F-18s. A three-deck carrier group with nearly 80 fast jets, half of them stealthy. The flattops’ dozen or so escorts and several attached submarines add hundreds of long-range missiles, including potentially scores of land-attack cruise missiles, to the mix.
The F-35 is the most obvious symbol of the group’s destructive potential. “Nothing even comes close!” said Capt. Richard LeBron, commodore of America’s Amphibious Squadron 11. “There is no better aviation platform to support 7th Fleet’s mission to ensure the United States can freely operate wherever and whenever it must, in alignment with international norms, standards, rules and laws.”
Taiwan’s independence is the norm at stake. The Chinese navy this summer has escalated its preparations for a possible assault across the Taiwan Strait. Most alarmingly, the navy has mobilized some of the civilian transport vessels the Chinese military would depend on to carry potentially hundreds of thousands of invading troops.
Forbes · by David Axe · August 25, 2021
9. All Rapport, No Results: What Afghanistan’s Collapse Reveals About the Flaws in US Security Force Assistance
Whoa Professor Tecott. I have to flag this incomplete analysis in this excerpt.. Korea is a unique case of course but if we are going to talk about Security Force Assistance the lesson to learn from Korea is our failure to provide the resources and training to the Korean military capable of defending itself from attack. Instead we severely restrained the Korean military and only allowed the development of a "constabulary force" to defend South Korea from the north's guerrilla attacks and prevent the South from having a conventional military capability because of our fear it would be used to invade the north. We misread the situation and our so-called security force assistance missed the mark because we did not understand the enemy, the threat, or our partners sufficiently. The professor also misses the complexities of the Korean War (Korean forces fighting under UN Command) and the demand for replacements which led to the KATUSA (Korean Augmentee to the US Army) program (which exists to this day).
More fundamentally, the structure of the bureaucratic machinery of advising lies within the military’s control. It is up to the military to design its bureaucracy in such a way as to empower advisors to manipulate levers and incentivize their counterparts to follow their direction. The approach taken by the US Eighth Army and the Korean Military Advisory Group (KMAG) to build the Republic of Korea (ROK) Army during the Korean War provides another example of effective advising. The US Eighth Army commander, General James Van Fleet, worked hard to build interpersonal rapport with ROK President Syngman Rhee and his most senior military leaders. But he also took direct command of the ROK Army, dissolved the entire ROK III Corps when it performed miserably in the Chinese Spring Offensive, and controlled ROK Army personnel appointments. KMAG advisors were taught to build trust and rapport, but they were also taught that it was their responsibility to secure the cooperation of ROK Army officers and the improvement of ROK Army units. They were taught to exercise their control of ROK Army unit supplies and their ability to recommend officers for promotion or relief as necessary to incentivize ROK Army officers to follow their direction. By 1952, the US Eighth Army and the KMAG secured the almost full cooperation of ROK leadership with respect to the development of the ROK Army, and the ROK Army transformed into an effective fighting force by the summer of 1953.
All Rapport, No Results: What Afghanistan’s Collapse Reveals About the Flaws in US Security Force Assistance - Modern War Institute
The swift collapse of the Afghan National Security Forces—despite receiving more than $83 billion in weapons, equipment, and training from the United States over the better part of two decades—has raised hard questions about the Pentagon’s persistent struggle to build stronger militaries in partner states.
By now, most scholars and practitioners recognize that the fundamental barrier to effective security force assistance (SFA) is insufficient local will to fight. Combat effectiveness depends on patterns of decisions political and military leaders make around personnel, command structures, training, and corruption. Recipients of SFA who are not interested in building better militaries will take US assistance while simultaneously implementing policies that keep their militaries weak.
Fundamentally, then, the challenge of SFA is influence. The effectiveness of large-scale US SFA projects depends less on the amount of assistance the United States pours into recipient nations than on the decisions of recipient leaders about what to do with US assistance. The United States builds better militaries when it successfully influences recipient leaders. It fails when US influence fails.
Washington tends to delegate large-scale SFA projects almost entirely to the US military. The US military relies largely on rapport-based persuasion to coax and cajole recipient leaders to build better militaries. But personal diplomacy has failed to move local leaders to build professional militaries in Vietnam, Iraq, and now Afghanistan. Today, the US military has three choices: it can persist with persuasion, pouring resources into partner militaries whose political and military leaders implement policies that undermine the effort; it can combine persuasion with the systematic application of carrots and sticks to incentivize cooperation; or it can abandon security assistance with uncooperative partners and conserve its energies for more productive projects.
The Limits of Personal Diplomacy
US military advising doctrine and training encourages advisors to develop trust and rapport with partner leaders, to inspire them to emulate the American approach through the power of their example, and to convince them to implement US advice on the strength of their logic. Advisors are actively discouraged from using carrots and sticks to incentivize their counterparts to follow their advice.
This preference for persuasion has hardened into institutional ideology. Within the military, teaching and persuasion are considered the appropriate strategies of influence to shape the behavior of allies and partners. This belief is accompanied by a corresponding distaste for incentives, or what the military views as “bribery,” “transactionality,” and “coercion”—influence strategies that it ascribes to US competitors and adversaries. The strength of the norm against using incentives within the military is puzzling. For one thing, incentives are a standard tool of alliance diplomacy, and yet in the context of security assistance partnerships, the military has recoded conditionality as bullying. For another, the aversion to coercion has crowded out other worthy ethical considerations, such as preventing partners’ misuse of American funds to fuel corruption, perpetrate human rights abuses, and persecute political opponents.
The ideology of persuasion that governs US military advising is also characterized by several causal myths. US military advisors generally believe that rapport-based persuasion is an effective strategy of influence, and that an incentives-based approach would undermine the advisory mission.
But rapport-based persuasion alone cannot overcome the motivation problem stymieing US advisory missions. Advisors do often develop genuine rapport with their counterparts. It is difficult to understand, however, why local military officers would decide to strike ghost soldiers from the rolls and pocket less money for themselves and their families, simply because their American friends asked nicely. This might sound facetious, but this is the causal logic currently underpinning American military advising. The logic is all the more problematic given that the advisors, coached to prioritize rapport above actual cooperation, quickly teach their counterparts that they can implement policies that undermine the advisory mission without losing their friendship.
The results of US advising in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan illustrate the ineffectiveness of an approach to advising reliant on personal diplomacy. From commanding generals down to tactical advisors, US military advisors relied almost exclusively on rapport-based persuasion to influence their counterparts to heed their advice. Local leaders generally ignored them, continuing to place politically loyal rather than competent officers in key commands, sell American equipment on the black market, neglect training, ignore the chain of command, and implement a variety of other policies that kept their militaries weak. Every once in a while, an advisor’s counterpart might make a small concession or two, such as agreeing to discipline soldiers for smoking on the job or for failing to wear their helmets. These trivial concessions, irrelevant to the fundamental rot within the partner militaries, give advisors understandably eager for signs of progress something to point at—and something to reinforce the ideology governing their approach.
The military hammers its advisors with the importance of establishing and maintaining interpersonal rapport with their counterparts. If advisors fail to coax and cajole their counterparts to follow their advice, they are taught to prioritize the relationship above actual cooperation, and above the improvement of the unit to which they are attached. Little wonder, then, that many advisors have come to view relationships with partners as the very goal of advising, rather than a tool of influence through which to improve partner military units.
Just as personal diplomacy failed to move the leaders of the government of Vietnam to build a professional Army of the Republic of Vietnam, or to move Iraqi leaders to build a professional Iraqi Army, US military advisors could not persuade Afghan leaders to build a professional military. Over decades of assistance, US advisors embedded in Afghan units observed as their counterparts placed corrupt, incompetent, and apathetic officers in key commands. They watched those officers siphon contracts to friends and family, neglect training, and ignore the ostensible chain of command. They tried to build trust and rapport, and to coax and cajole. When their advice fell on deaf ears, the advisors changed their advice, but not their strategy of influence. They changed the goalposts, looked for small victories, and coded as a success any small step they managed to persuade their counterparts to take, no matter how marginal. They gave up on addressing the rot at the core. Few of them were surprised by the fall of Saigon, the fall of Mosul, or the fall of Kabul.
Return Incentives to the Toolkit
The US military’s ideology of advising preaches the myth that an influence strategy combining persuasion with incentives won’t work. The myth has two main strands. The first strand argues that the United States lacks the bargaining power necessary to incentivize partners to follow US advice. This argument assumes away US agency and mistakes the US military’s doctrinal aversion to bargaining for a lack of bargaining power. It is difficult to think of an alliance or partnership dynamic that affords the United States more leverage than security force assistance. Recipients are highly dependent on the United States, the United States can withdraw without existential risk, and the United States can manipulate a variety of carrots and sticks to increase the credibility of its threats and promises over a long-term relationship—if it chooses to do so.
The second strand argues that the bureaucratic machinery of US military advising is too big and cumbersome for the finely tuned manipulation of incentives. But individual advisors do, from time to time, decide to break the institutional norm and manipulate the bureaucracy to incentivize cooperation. Examples of US military advisors effectively manipulating carrots and sticks to incentivize compliance illustrate that the bureaucracy does not preclude the use of incentives. In Iraq, General David Petraeus broke from the institutional norm, successfully using a threat to cut assistance to the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service to dissuade interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi from placing the elite units under his personal authority. Later, together with Ambassador Ryan Crocker and General James Dubik, Petraeus withheld logistical support from Iraqi National Police units led by sectarian commanders until Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki agreed to replace them. These small successes—too few and far between to have systematic, lasting effects on the Iraqi Security Forces on the whole—illustrate the potential of combining persuasion with conditionality. The fact that Petraeus’s successors returned to the norm of exclusive reliance on persuasion illustrates the imperviousness of the institutional ideology to evidence that could have sparked innovation.
More fundamentally, the structure of the bureaucratic machinery of advising lies within the military’s control. It is up to the military to design its bureaucracy in such a way as to empower advisors to manipulate levers and incentivize their counterparts to follow their direction. The approach taken by the US Eighth Army and the Korean Military Advisory Group (KMAG) to build the Republic of Korea (ROK) Army during the Korean War provides another example of effective advising. The US Eighth Army commander, General James Van Fleet, worked hard to build interpersonal rapport with ROK President Syngman Rhee and his most senior military leaders. But he also took direct command of the ROK Army, dissolved the entire ROK III Corps when it performed miserably in the Chinese Spring Offensive, and controlled ROK Army personnel appointments. KMAG advisors were taught to build trust and rapport, but they were also taught that it was their responsibility to secure the cooperation of ROK Army officers and the improvement of ROK Army units. They were taught to exercise their control of ROK Army unit supplies and their ability to recommend officers for promotion or relief as necessary to incentivize ROK Army officers to follow their direction. By 1952, the US Eighth Army and the KMAG secured the almost full cooperation of ROK leadership with respect to the development of the ROK Army, and the ROK Army transformed into an effective fighting force by the summer of 1953.
To be clear, none of this is to argue that the United States should continue its Sisyphean efforts to build large national armies in stateless nations in the midst of civil war. Had the US military combined rapport-based persuasion with incentives and direct command in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan (as it did in Korea), the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, Iraqi Army, and Afghan National Army would likely have done better, but they would probably still have fallen far short of the United States’ ambitious objectives. Better, however, might still have been enough.
Strategy begins with clear objectives. First and foremost, Washington needs to evaluate threats in the context of the United States’ wider global priorities, and (with the military’s input) develop realistic expectations about what different tools of power can accomplish in a given theater. Washington would be wise to reserve military assistance for states with strong national institutions whose leaders are interested in building better militaries. In practice, this would amount to the cessation of US security assistance projects in most states and a reliance on other tools to manage the threats that come from them. Alternatively, depending on the situation, Washington might accept the limitations of state institutions and weigh the merits of focusing on the development of small elite units that operate with US enablers, as opposed to entire militaries that are ostensibly designed to operate independently. Some of the few success stories of contemporary security assistance can be found in the Iraqi and Afghan special operations forces. In each case, the US military used every tool in the influence strategy toolkit (teaching, persuasion, incentives, and direct command) to create cohesive, highly motivated units insulated from politicization and capable of operating effectively, albeit with American enablers. Depending on the nature of the local government and the threat the United States aims to develop local capacity to combat, this option may be both feasible and sufficient.
To the extent that the US military does continue to engage in SFA, whether to build national militaries or elite units, it should return carrots and sticks to the influence strategy toolkit. Advisor training should make clear that relationships are not the goal. Rather, relationships are a means to an end, and they are just one tool of influence among many. Conditionality is not the strawman constructed by its opponents—a blunt instrument of total cooperation or total abandonment. As the KMAG chiefs taught their advisors in Korea, the US military should teach its advisors today that their job is to secure the cooperation of their counterparts and to improve the military effectiveness of their assigned units. If persuasion fails, advisors should be encouraged and empowered to systematically exercise US leverage to incentivize cooperation. If the US military is unwilling to incentivize recipients of security assistance to use that assistance well, it should get out of the business.
Rachel Tecott (@racheltecott) is an assistant professor at the US Naval War College.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Naval War College, Departments of the Army or Navy, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Spc. Blair Neelands, US Army
10. Rejecting Covid Inquiry, China Peddles Conspiracy Theories Blaming the U.S.
Sigh... admit nothing, deny everything make counteraccusations.
Rejecting Covid Inquiry, China Peddles Conspiracy Theories Blaming the U.S.
A new wave of disinformation follows President Biden’s order for the United States to investigate the origin of the pandemic, including the possibility of a lab leak in Wuhan.
A lab at Fort Detrick in Maryland. Beijing is peddling groundless theories that the United States is the source of the coronavirus.Credit...Andrew Harnik/Associated Press
Published Aug. 25, 2021Updated Aug. 26, 2021, 4:39 a.m. ET
When a conspiracy theory started circulating in China suggesting that the coronavirus escaped from an American military lab, it had largely stayed on the fringe. Now, the ruling Communist Party has propelled the idea firmly into the mainstream.
This week, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman repeatedly used an official podium to elevate unproven ideas that the coronavirus may have first leaked from a research facility in Fort Detrick, Md. A Communist Party publication, the Global Times, started an online petition in July calling for that lab to be investigated and said it gathered more than 25 million signatures.
Officials and state media have promoted a rap song by a patriotic Chinese hip-hop group that touted the same claim, with the lyrics: “How many plots came out of your labs? How many dead bodies hanging a tag?”
Beijing is peddling groundless theories that the United States may be the true source of the coronavirus, as it pushes back against efforts to investigate the pandemic’s origins in China. The disinformation campaign started last year, but Beijing has raised the volume in recent weeks, reflecting its anxiety about being blamed for the pandemic that has killed millions globally.
These theories, promoted by officials, academics, central propaganda outlets and on social media, have gained wider currency in China. They risk further muddying inquiries into the source of the virus and aggravating already frayed relations between the world’s top two powers at a time when cooperation is badly needed.
“This not only contributes to the further deterioration of U.S.-China relations but also makes it even less likely for the two countries to work together to face a common challenge,” said Yanzhong Huang, director of the Center for Global Health Studies at Seton Hall University. “We haven’t seen any bilateral cooperation over the vaccines, tracing the trajectory of the virus or mutations, any of these kind of things.”
Understanding the origin of the virus could help scientists prevent another pandemic. Virologists still largely lean toward the theory that the virus jumped from infected animals to humans outside a lab, but calls are growing to also investigate the possibility that the virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan, the city at the center of the outbreak.
Security personnel gathering near the entrance to the Wuhan Institute of Virology during a visit in February by an investigative team from the World Health Organization.Credit...Ng Han Guan/Associated Press
China has dismissed the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis as an unfounded conspiracy theory. It has also criticized the United States’ pandemic response while highlighting its own success in taming a recent outbreak of the highly transmissible Delta variant, with only a handful of new cases reported this week.
Wary of independent scrutiny, Beijing has tightly controlled efforts by the World Health Organization to investigate the origin of the outbreak, and it rejected the health agency’s recent call for a second phase of an inquiry that would look more closely at the lab theory.
China has been ramping up its disinformation campaign ahead of the results of an investigation by American intelligence agencies, ordered by President Biden. The agencies delivered their report on the origin of the pandemic to the president on Tuesday but have not yet concluded whether the virus emerged naturally or was the result of an accidental leak from a lab.
“The point is to really saturate the airwaves with all of this, which most average Chinese will not be able to see behind,” said Dali Yang, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. “A lot of it is anticipating and trying to fend off, pre-emptively, this potential American study by the intelligence community.”
The Chinese government has argued that Beijing has done its part in the search for the origin of the pandemic by facilitating a visit by experts from the W.H.O. earlier this year, and that scientists should now look at other countries, including the United States. Beijing accuses those pushing for a lab investigation in China of trying to undermine the country’s image at home and abroad.
Wang Wenbin, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, has used routine news briefings this week to air baseless speculation that the virus had emerged in the United States before the first cases were reported in China. He cited an outbreak of lung disease in July 2019 in Wisconsin that American health authorities have already connected to vaping, not Covid. On Wednesday, he said the W.H.O. should investigate labs in Fort Detrick and elsewhere in the United States that research coronaviruses.
“The United States has been accusing China of being opaque on the issue of tracing the origins of the virus and falsely accusing China of using false propaganda,” Mr. Wang said on Tuesday. “Yet it has been making excuses, carefully concealing secrets, avoiding problems passively and constantly setting up obstacles.”
Dr. Michael Ryan, a W.H.O. official, criticized China at a news conference on Wednesday for pushing such unproven ideas. “It is slightly contradictory if colleagues in China are saying that the lab leak hypothesis is unfounded in the context of China, but we now need to go and do laboratory investigations in other countries for leaks there,” Dr. Ryan said.
Yet in a report released this month, several Chinese policy research institutes accused the United States of “manipulating global public opinion by practicing ‘origin tracing terrorism.’” China was being transparent, the report said, while it was American officials who were evading questions about Fort Detrick.
Wary of independent scrutiny, Beijing has tightly controlled efforts by the World Health Organization to investigate the origin of the outbreak.Credit...Aly Song/Reuters
One of the report’s authors, Wang Wen, a professor at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies of Renmin University, said that unsubstantiated suggestions that the coronavirus was created in a laboratory were a form of terrorism because they caused “unnecessary horror to society.”
He defended the report’s allegations about the Fort Detrick lab, saying, essentially, that it was the United States that started it.
“It was American politicians who first said it and expanded on this,” Mr. Wang said. “China could have been cooperative originally, but after facing such smears, it must also raise reasonable questions to the United States.”
Never mind that such claims have been widely dismissed by scientists. (“I don’t think there is any validity to those accusations,” said Prof. Huang of Seton Hall University.) They have been given prominent play in China. This month, the state broadcaster carried several segments on what it called Fort Detrick’s “dark history.” The People’s Daily has recently run a 16-part series on American failures in controlling the coronavirus, with repeated questions about the Fort Detrick conspiracy.
“Why has the United States not invited the W.H.O. to visit Fort Detrick?” the newspaper wrote in an Aug. 6 commentary. “On the issue of traceability, if you can come to China, why can’t you go to the United States?”
The efforts to emphasize American malfeasance have sometimes backfired. After Chinese state media quoted a Swiss biologist who warned that the W.H.O. effort to examine the origins of the pandemic would become a tool of the United States, the embassy of Switzerland in China said the expert appeared to be fictitious.
Outside offices in Beijing for the People’s Daily and Global Times. Both publications have peddled theories about the virus having originated in the United States.Credit...Giulia Marchi for The New York Times
“If you exist, we would like to meet you!” the Swiss Embassy tweeted. “But it is more likely that this is a fake news, and we call on the Chinese press and netizens to take down the posts.”
Still, the coronavirus conspiracies have been widely recirculated on social media.
On Weibo, a popular social media platform in China, hashtags like “the United States must answer” and “debunk the astonishing inside story of Fort Detrick” have been viewed more than 100 million times.
Jenny Zhang, a 21-year-old student in the eastern city of Nanjing, said she signed the Global Times petition for a Fort Detrick investigation after reading multiple reports in Chinese media that suggested the outbreak began much earlier in the United States.
“It’s about the safety of all mankind,” Ms. Zhang said. “If it turns out that the virus did not originate in China, I think it would change other people’s views on China.”
Benjamin Mueller contributed reporting.
11. Opinion | ‘Anyone Got Any Helos Sitting Around?’: How a Private Network Is Using a Messaging App to Rescue Afghans
Innovation by those who live American values. These people represent all that is great about America.
Opinion | ‘Anyone Got Any Helos Sitting Around?’: How a Private Network Is Using a Messaging App to Rescue Afghans
Magazine
Opinion | ‘Anyone Got Any Helos Sitting Around?’: How a Private Network Is Using a Messaging App to Rescue Afghans
Horrified by U.S. government failures to help former colleagues and friends trapped in Afghanistan, the group is using its connections to fill the breach.
Coalition forces assist and escort Afghan evacuees in Kabul, Aug. 24. | Photo by Staff Sgt. Victor Mancilla/U.S. Marine Corps via AP
Opinion by ERIK EDSTROM
08/25/2021 03:30 PM EDT
Erik Edstrom graduated from West Point and deployed to combat in Afghanistan as an infantry officer. He is the author of Un-American: A Soldier’s Reckoning of Our Longest War and a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network. He is currently supporting #AfghanEvac to save American and Afghan lives. His personal views do not represent those of #AfghanEvac, or the greater evacuation coalition of volunteers.
The Signal channel begins to heat up late at night.
In the hours before dawn in Kabul, before the daily crush and chaos resumes at the airport where tens of thousands of desperate Afghans and American citizens vie to reach transport planes on the other side of armed gates, the members of the #AfghanEvac group share information they hope will enable friends and former colleagues to escape the reach of Taliban revenge.
The chat is frantic, a hypnotizing, disorienting kaleidoscope of spy-thriller drama (“anyone got any helos sitting around?” “I have one American citizen who won’t abandon his family of 15. If I secure a private jet, can we get them into the base?”); grinding logistical minutiae (“Can anyone remind me where the petrol station is near Abbey Gate?”); jerry-rigged efforts to paper over failures of traditional leadership (“I’ve been pushing DC admin for solutions…here is a draft of a giant poster we could make to show who is being let in where”, “Use visual markers so people can be picked out of the crowd. Balloons have been working well — kids carry them to the gate and then parents can lift them up for visibility”); and gut-wrenching personal details (“Please delete any tweets with my handle. I am getting death threats and need to have my phone free,” “lone female with no food or water for 48 hours, multiple fainting spells over last 24 hours,” “I have my entire family trying to get in! What do I do? There are 3 babies!!!”)
On balance the desperate appeals far outnumber the responses that proffer actual help. Even former chiefs of staff to Cabinet secretaries find themselves begging for basic info: “any word on what gates are open right now?” Nevertheless, the diverse group of volunteers — veterans, Hill staffers, private sector employees, members of the intelligence community and human rights advocates — persists through disappointment, frustration, and panic. Driven by anger at their own government’s failures and haunted by personal experience in the decades-long conflict, participating in the #AfghanEvac group is a chance at redemption, to wrench something meaningful from the wreckage of “nation-building.” One member describes it as “the finest organization I have been a part of.”
I joined the group on August 20, for much the same reason as the rest of the roughly 100 members of the group: The man who served as my interpreter in 2009 when I led a platoon of soldiers in Kandahar Province, who risked his life for me and my men, is in mortal danger.
I have been in touch with “Rock” (for his safety, I cannot reveal his real name) for years, but the pace of our communication has picked up dramatically since the Taliban came back to power. The members of #AfghanEvac helped me guide Rock from the northern province of Kunduz, past Taliban checkpoints (a map has circulated on the channel that shows Taliban checkpoints around the capital, almost like Waze for refugees) to a safehouse in Kabul where he was able to renew his Afghan passport.
But he remains stuck on the wrong side of the walls at Hamid Karzai International Airport.
One active-duty service member working for #AfghanEvac describes America’s evacuation in Kabul as “a full-blown humanitarian crisis…The reason we care so much is because we have invested so much over the past 20 years. This effort is a part of our identity…It represents the love and affection that people are supposed to have for each other.”
The coordination on Signal is grueling, detailed work.
It includes everything from complex tasks such as chartering planes and advocating for landing rights in foreign countries to more focused goals such as locating a law firm willing to do pro-bono visa applications. Participants on the channel have found safehouses for evacuees; coordinated safe passage for a 7-month-old U.S. citizen to get inside the airport’s barbed wire fences and located medical care for the disabled parents of a visa-pending Afghan interpreter who collapsed from heat exhaustion. The #AfghanEvac volunteers use their network of personal and professional connections to bring issues to the proper authorities where possible, but often they are left to do it themselves.
Had the U.S. government planned for this evacuation properly, the efforts of those supporting #AfghanEvac would have been wholly unnecessary. But instead, as one volunteer describes it, while working to rescue the relatives of an Afghan-American who is currently serving in the U.S. Army, we have “Saving Private Ryan: Kabul Edition.”
In the global coverage, with its gross homogenization of “waves of refugees,” it can be easy to forget that statistics conceal unique and personal stories. (One example of the depth of our ignorance: We haven’t yet determined the number of people whom we have the responsibility to evacuate, and many (most?) remain scattered throughout Afghanistan.) Imagine that you are an Afghan interpreter, like my former colleague “Rock,” with a pending special immigrant visa (SIV). Based on the photos, videos, texts and voice memos from his journey to Kabul, I have a vivid and harrowing picture of what people like him are going through.
To get to the airport, you must first face a brutal, almost entirely unsupported, gauntlet. Your risks in transit, coming from across Afghanistan, remain high and you may not have the means or even the strength to make it the last mile to the airport.
If you are fortunate enough to make it to the airport, you face disorder, fear and confusion, fueled by Taliban harassment, beatings, tear gas, shootings and stampedes. At least seven people died on Sunday during a stampede. This creates a ‘rush-for-the-lifeboats’ sense of pandemonium at entry control points. Amidst the chaos, military personnel at the gates do not apply clear and consistent entry criteria, turning away evacuees — sometimes even American citizens — with appropriate paperwork, further adding to a sense of futility and injustice. By now, you have been standing for days, weighing a mercurial security situation and conflicting rumors to choose the gate where you will wait and, nearly being smothered to death, hope that you just get lucky.
If you are one of the few with influential, dedicated friends and chance on your side, you manage to get through the gates. Inside, you are greeted by shortages of food, water and medical supplies as you wait hours to board a plane. Even in this, the best of all possible scenarios, the outlook is not certain; with significant domestic resistance to bringing Afghan citizens to the U.S., the need is great for third-party countries to take in evacuees and the rights-to-land agreements are insufficient so far.
The Biden administration has begun to trumpet the evacuation as a logistical success — 70,000 people in 10 days — but the emergency drags on and it should never have been allowed to reach this point in the first place. I have appealed to Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) on behalf of my interpreter for years without success. I got this update from Lynch’s office earlier this week: “Administrative processing of Special Immigrant Visas will continue and applicants will continue to be notified about the status of their cases.” In other words, no progress.
The evacuation in Afghanistan did not have to be this disastrous, the Biden Administration can still take steps to save lives:
First, immediately resolve pending visa statuses and have the Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, grant humanitarian parole to others. We must ensure that all eligible Afghans and their immediate families are evacuated, not just those who have been lucky enough finish the State Department’s administratively broken Special Immigrant Visa process.
Second, advocate with other countries for landing rights for Afghan evacuees. The challenge to find places to put evacuees is complex — different countries have different rules about the types of applicants they will take and the duration for which they are allowed to stay — but the burden ultimately rests with us. After all, the reason people who are currently being evacuated need to be evacuated is because they served U.S. interests during our failed war in their country.
The U.S. government failed its veterans by keeping them in an unwinnable, negative-sum war for 20 years; if it abandons our Afghan allies at the end, it will have failed us twice.
In my parting words to Rock, who stood outside the North Gate of Hamid Karzai International Airport until 4:30 a.m. on Monday, I tried to buoy his spirits.
“I imagine you will feel exhausted by the end, but I’ll do whatever I can to get you to the U.S.,” I texted.
“Thanks, sir,” he replied. “We’ll be here.”
12. The Right Way to Structure Cyber Diplomacy
Excerpts:
The new bureau would also have to contend with the challenges of prioritization. The Cyber Diplomacy Act lists a wide variety of issues — including internet access, internet freedom, digital economy, cybercrime, deterrence, and international responses to cyber threats — that would become a cyberspace bureau’s responsibilities. Even without giving it emerging technology topics to handle, consolidating just cyberspace policy issues will require careful planning to determine which pieces get pulled from existing bureaus. To allow a new bureau to adequately deal with digital economy matters, for example, policymakers would need to decide which aspects of that issue get moved from the purview of the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs. The new bureau would have a good case for inheriting responsibility for portfolios like investment in information communications technology infrastructure abroad, particularly as it relates to cyber security capacity building, but there is a strong argument for other pieces like e-commerce to remain in their existing homes. The more bearing a particular team’s work has on preserving an open, interoperable, reliable, and secure internet, the more it should be considered a strong candidate for incorporation into a new bureau.
Moving the responsibility for particular policy matters is not the only tool available, however. The Cyber Diplomacy Act creates an avenue for the new bureau’s personnel to engage other State Department experts to ensure that concerns like human rights, economic competitiveness, and security have an influence on the development of U.S. cyber policy. The proposed Cyberspace Policy Coordinating Committee would ensure that officials at the assistant secretary level or higher from across the department can weigh in on matters of concern for their respective portfolios.
With a new cyberspace policy bureau, a coordinating committee, and enhancements to emerging technology capacity in its existing regional and functional bureaus, the State Department would be structured to handle the digital age effectively.
The Right Way to Structure Cyber Diplomacy - War on the Rocks
Today, the State Department is once again confronting the challenge of how to organize itself to cope with new international challenges — not those of wartime, but ones created by rapid technological change. There are ongoing conversations about how the department should handle cyberspace policy, as well as concerns about emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, quantum computing, next generation telecommunications, hypersonics, biotechnology, space capabilities, autonomous vehicles, and many others.
As Ferial Ara Saeed recently emphasized, the department is not structured in a way that makes sense for addressing these matters. She is not alone in having this view, and others have also offered ideas for reform. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s proposal for a Bureau of Cyberspace Security and Emerging Technologies focused too narrowly on security, as Saeed correctly diagnoses. As an alternative, she proposes consolidating all technology policy issues under a new under secretary, who would report to the deputy secretary of state for management and resources.
The State Department should be restructured so that it can conduct effective cyber diplomacy, but establishing one bureau for all things technology-related is not the way to proceed. Conceptually, the core challenges for cyberspace policy are different from those related to emerging technology issues, and creating one all-encompassing bureau would generate multiple practical problems. Instead, the department should establish a Bureau of International Cyberspace Policy, as proposed in the Cyber Diplomacy Act. Consolidating cyberspace policy issues in a single bureau would provide greater coherence to overarching priorities and day-to-day diplomatic activities. Emerging technology issues should remain the responsibility of the appropriate existing bureaus. If they are provided with greater resourcing and if appropriate connective tissue is created, those bureaus will have greater flexibility in crafting individualized strategies for a very diverse array of technologies. At the same time, the department would be able to prioritize and adopt a strategic approach to technology diplomacy.
Cyberspace Matters Are Different from Other Technology Issues
Unlike other technologies, cyberspace has created a new environment for international interaction. As Chris Demchak describes, cyberspace is a “substrate” that “intrudes into, connects at long range, and induces behaviors that transcend boundaries of land, sea, air, institution, nation, and medium.” Since the early 2000s, as one brief has put it, states have recognized “cyberspace and its undergirding infrastructure as not only strategic assets, but also a domain of potential influence and conflict.” At the same time, a lack of international agreement or clarity on key definitions compounds the difficulties of dealing with cyberspace as a new arena of state-to-state interaction.
A U.N. Group of Governmental Experts produced a consensus report outlining norms of responsible state behavior in cyberspace that was welcomed by the U.N. General Assembly in 2015. However, U.N. members were by no means agreed on how international law applies to cyberspace. Although that issue was addressed more successfully in 2021, diplomats are still negotiating critical questions like what counts as cybercrime, critical infrastructure, espionage, or many of the other foundational concepts in this area. All of these questions, and many others beyond the negotiations of the United Nations, have long-term implications for the future of the internet, as cyberspace policy experts navigate a path between security and surveillance, and between openness and authoritarianism. To be successful in this diplomacy, the State Department should prioritize these issues and provide its diplomats with organizational structures that will support America’s proactive leadership. In short, the State Department should have a dedicated cyberspace policy bureau.
The focus and activities of such a bureau would be functionally very different from what will be involved in addressing other technology issues. A Bureau of International Cyberspace Policy would be responsible for implementing a relatively established policy for cyber diplomacy. The head of the bureau would be working to ensure an open, interoperable, reliable, and secure internet, pushing back on authoritarian leanings in internet governance, and advocating for a multi-stakeholder model for the future of cyberspace. Certain details may change, but the core elements of this policy have been consistent across administrations and Congresses. Accordingly, the real added value of a cyberspace policy bureau is not in defining policy, but rather implementing that policy, which will require extensive engagement with “non-aligned” countries to help sway the balance of opinion toward an open internet, and international capacity-building efforts to help drive progress toward greater global cyber security.
By contrast, the challenge U.S. policymakers confront on emerging technologies is a question of establishing what America’s international policies and diplomatic strategies should be. As the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence observed in relation to the State Department, a lack of clear leadership on emerging technology “hinders the Department’s ability to make strategic technology policy decisions” as part of a larger reorientation toward strategic competition.
Policymakers and officials working on emerging technologies will also face the challenge of adapting overarching policies as technologies emerge, develop, and ideally stabilize over time. Emerging technologies do not remain “emerging” indefinitely, and so an organizational structure that allows the development of cohesive strategies around these technologies should have the flexibility to shift between topics. Of course, cyberspace policy and the strategic considerations that guide it will also certainly need to adapt to changes, but its basic focus is likely to remain more stable. Much of America’s work in outlining cyberspace policy has already been done, and thus the missions that remain — for example working with partners and allies on joint attribution of cyber attacks, rallying votes in the United Nations, and managing capacity building projects — are unlikely to change dramatically any time soon.
Undoubtedly, there will be many areas of overlap between the work of those handling emerging technology issues and the responsibilities of a cyberspace policy office. But there will also be overlap between efforts on emerging technologies and matters handled by the Bureau of Economics and Business Affairs, the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, and many others. The fact that there is overlap between two organizational constructs should not be taken as a justification to merge them, and while technology obviously plays a central role in both cyberspace policy and emerging technologies policy, the actual work required to address them is very different.
It also makes sense to keep some technology issues in their current bureaucratic homes because of their historical legacy and the subsequent development of specialized expertise within those homes. No one would suggest, for example, that emerging issues in nuclear technology should be pulled out of the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation and made the responsibility of a new emerging technology bureau. And some technologies might only have globally significant implications for a relatively short period of time. Advanced robotics, for example, might have a major impact on manufacturing and broader economic areas, which could require the sustained attention of policymakers as they grapple with the initial implications of such technology. But once advanced robotics become a routine part of industrial operations, it would make less sense to have brought the issue under a new bureau when the pre-existing functional and regional bureaus might be best poised to address the relevant challenges.
Making every technology policy the responsibility of one under secretary would not solve the State Department’s current problems. Instead, it would result in unclear prioritization, strained resources, and would leave one leader handling two very different mission sets.
The Importance of Avoiding a Security-Focused Approach to Cyberspace
In creating a Bureau of International Cyberspace Policy, the State Department should also avoid limiting that bureau’s focus solely to security-related matters. That was one of the flaws with the previous administration’s efforts to create the Bureau of Cyberspace Security and Emerging Technologies. While that bureau never materialized, the Government Accountability Office roundly criticized the State Department for failing to provide data or evidence to support its plans and for its lack of consultation with other federal agencies. Rep. Gregory Meeks, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, emphasized that the proposed office would not have been in a position to “coordinate responsibility for the security, economic, and human rights aspects of cyber policy.”
Any reorganization of the State Department should ensure that diplomats can take into account all dimensions — political, economic, humanitarian, and security — of cyberspace policy and elevate them within the department. That would allow a new bureau to lead the way in promoting a free and secure internet. Some of the reform proposals that have been put forward reflect this approach. For example, the Cyber Diplomacy Act, which has already passed in the House, would create an ambassador-at-large position, with rank equal to that of an assistant secretary, to lead a new cyber bureau. That person would report to the under secretary for political affairs or an official of higher rank, which leaves open the possibility that the position would report directly to the secretary of state or one of the department’s two deputy secretaries. While some have proposed the deputy secretary for management and resources for this reporting chain, that position has a history of going unfilled, and having a new cyberspace bureau report to it is a recipe for undercutting the fledgling bureau before it can even get off the ground. A better alternative would be to allow the State Department some flexibility in determining a new bureau’s reporting structure, which might include the more natural choice of reporting to the other deputy secretary.
An overly narrow focus on security is not the only trap to avoid in creating a new cyber bureau. Orienting it around the idea of strategic competition with China would also be a problem. No doubt China will remain a key driver of U.S. policy for years to come, but global threats and opportunities may look very different in future decades than they do now. Cyber diplomacy should not be oriented around one adversary specifically and the structure and functioning of a new cyberspace policy bureau should stand the test of time.
The Devil Is in the Details, But a Cyberspace Policy Bureau Is the Best Approach
The unfortunate political reality is that reorganizing the State Department is hard. That alone is not a reason to forgo reform, but it does introduce constraints on what may be feasible. Any new office or bureau will need leaders, but current law strictly limits the rank that they can hold. Creating a new under secretary, or even a new assistant secretary, would require significant changes to the State Department Basic Authorities Act, and there is limited political momentum for that particular undertaking. The law currently authorizes the appointment of 24 assistant secretaries and six under secretaries. Although the Cyberspace Solarium Commission initially recommended creating an assistant secretary position to lead a new cyber bureau — and although it has been clear for two decades that the State Department’s structure should be overhauled — making such drastic changes to the necessary legislation may be a nonstarter on Capitol Hill for the foreseeable future. The Cyber Diplomacy Act provides the best available work-around by placing an ambassador-at-large at the head of the new bureau, ensuring that the position has the stature necessary for effective leadership.
The new bureau would also have to contend with the challenges of prioritization. The Cyber Diplomacy Act lists a wide variety of issues — including internet access, internet freedom, digital economy, cybercrime, deterrence, and international responses to cyber threats — that would become a cyberspace bureau’s responsibilities. Even without giving it emerging technology topics to handle, consolidating just cyberspace policy issues will require careful planning to determine which pieces get pulled from existing bureaus. To allow a new bureau to adequately deal with digital economy matters, for example, policymakers would need to decide which aspects of that issue get moved from the purview of the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs. The new bureau would have a good case for inheriting responsibility for portfolios like investment in information communications technology infrastructure abroad, particularly as it relates to cyber security capacity building, but there is a strong argument for other pieces like e-commerce to remain in their existing homes. The more bearing a particular team’s work has on preserving an open, interoperable, reliable, and secure internet, the more it should be considered a strong candidate for incorporation into a new bureau.
Moving the responsibility for particular policy matters is not the only tool available, however. The Cyber Diplomacy Act creates an avenue for the new bureau’s personnel to engage other State Department experts to ensure that concerns like human rights, economic competitiveness, and security have an influence on the development of U.S. cyber policy. The proposed Cyberspace Policy Coordinating Committee would ensure that officials at the assistant secretary level or higher from across the department can weigh in on matters of concern for their respective portfolios.
With a new cyberspace policy bureau, a coordinating committee, and enhancements to emerging technology capacity in its existing regional and functional bureaus, the State Department would be structured to handle the digital age effectively.
Natalie Thompson is a Ph.D. student in political science at Yale University. Previously, she was a research analyst for the U.S. Cyberspace Solarium Commission and a research assistant and James C. Gaither junior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, working with the Technology and International Affairs Program on projects related to disinformation and cyber security. She tweets at @natalierthom.
Laura Bate is a senior director with the U.S. Cyberspace Solarium Commission and a 2021 Next Generation National Security Fellow with the Center for a New American Security. Previously, she was a policy analyst with New America’s Cybersecurity Initiative and remains an International Security Program Fellow. She tweets at @Laura_K_Bate.
13. Breaking: Female college student first to graduate from Army's 'toughest' special operations course
Wow. Hooah to the ROTC student graduating from CDQC as the honor graduate.
Breaking: Female college student first to graduate from Army's 'toughest' special operations course
sandboxx.us · by Stavros Atlamazoglou · August 25, 2021
Today, a female college student is set to make history by graduating from one of the toughest special operations courses in the entire U.S. military.
Sandboxx News has learned that on Thursday a female cadet will become the first woman to ever graduate from the Army Special Forces Underwater Operations School (SFUWO).
A rising junior at a state school and a member of the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC), the female student has also been chosen as the class honor graduate, a remarkable distinction reserved for the best student who has distinguished him or herself through his or her physical and mental fortitude.
“The news is a very big deal. [Combat] Dive school is arguably the toughest school in the military with the highest attrition rate. It demands perfection and attention to detail every single day. The course is long and wears down everyone,” John Black, a retired Special Forces warrant officer and combat diver, told Sandboxx News.
Students as the Combat Diver Qualification Course (CDQC) during an underwater exercise. A female cadet is set to become the first-ever woman combat diver (U.S. Army).
Graduating from one of the toughest special operations schools in the military will set the female cadet up for success in her military career, whether she pursues a conventional or special operations path.
Located in Key West, Florida, SFUWO trains Army special operators, such as Rangers, Green Berets, and even Delta Force operators, to become combat divers, dive supervisors, or dive medical technicians. Although SFUWO is an Army school, commandos from other services, such as from the Air Force Special Operations Command, also attend from time to time.
GET MORE MAIL DURING TRAINING
INVITE YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY TO WRITE TO YOU WHILE YOU’RE GONE.
DOWNLOAD SANDBOXX
A six-week course, the CDQC graduates approximately 300 students every year. It teaches surface and subsurface waterborne infiltration, including the use of the Draeger closed-circuit/ semi-closed-circuit underwater rebreather.
Admission to the Combat Diver Qualification Course (CDQC)—the flagship course of the SFUWO and the one that the female cadet will be graduating from—is highly selective. A special operator must have already excelled at his home unit and passed several in-house assessment and training courses before getting orders to Key West.
It isn’t uncommon for seasoned Rangers and Green Berets to fail CDQC. It’s also not uncommon to have fatalities in what is, by all accounts, a very difficult course, both physically and mentally. Only a few weeks ago, a Green Beret from the 10th Special Forces Group died during the CDQC.
“Dive school is extremely difficult. To endure the physical and mental aspects of the course, it’s a huge achievement. To be the honor grad is a big deal. She’s the fastest and the best. Big congratulations to her and those that will follow,” Black added.
The Army Special Forces Underwater Operations School (SFUWO), arguably one of the hardest special operations schools in the entire military (U.S. Army).
This isn’t the first time an ROTC cadet has graduated from the Combat Diver Qualification Course (CDQC). Several universities send ROTC cadets to the schoolhouse during the summer, with a rare few making it through. However, up to this point, no female, regardless of service status, had ever graduated.
Although this is a high point for the Army special operations combat diver community, not everything is rosy within their ranks. The community has been suffering from some degree of neglect throughout the past two decades of fighting terrorism in the Middle East and Southwest Asia.
Feature image: A 1st Marine Special Operations Battalion critical skills operator surfaces from the ocean and advances up a beach, completing a combat dive exercise in Key West, Fla., Feb. 18, 2015. (DoD Photo)
Stavros Atlamazoglou
Greek Army veteran (National service with 575th Marines Battalion and Army HQ). Johns Hopkins University. You will usually find him on the top of a mountain admiring the view and wondering how he got there.
Follow Stavros Atlamazoglou:
sandboxx.us · by Stavros Atlamazoglou · August 25, 2021
14. The 2 lawmakers who secretly went to Kabul said there is 'no way we can get everyone out' by Aug. 31 and the only way to work with the Taliban is leave on time
I am surprised and disappointed to read this from the two Congressman: leave on time, cooperate with Taliban, and leave people behind.
The 2 lawmakers who secretly went to Kabul said there is 'no way we can get everyone out' by Aug. 31 and the only way to work with the Taliban is leave on time
Rep. Seth Moulton.
AP Photo/Cheryl Senter
- The two lawmakers that secretly visited Kabul said Biden's August 31 deadline is needed.
- They said they previously wanted it extended, but saw that getting everyone out is impossible.
- They said keeping the deadline means having a "working relationship with the Taliban after our departure."
10 Things in Politics: The latest in politics & the economy
The two lawmakers who made an unannounced trip to Kabul as the US was desperately trying to evacuate people said the trip convinced them that Biden's August 31 military-withdrawal deadline for evacuations was necessary.
Democrat Rep. Seth Moulton and Republican Rep. Peter Meijer chartered a plane to Kabul airport and stayed there for several hours on Tuesday. In a statement, they said they went to conduct "oversight" on the efforts to evacuate Americans and allies.
Moulton said: "Almost every veteran in Congress wants to extend the August 31 deadline, including us, and our opinion on that was changed on the ground, because we started the evacuations so late.
"There's no way we can get everyone out, even by September 11. So we need to have a working relationship with the Taliban after our departure. And the only way to achieve that is to leave by August 31."
Meijer added: "It is utterly bizarre and baffling that we're in this position. To go from having the Taliban as an adversary we're seeking to kill, to relying upon them for security, coordinating to make sure things run smoothly.
"It's a complicated situation that's impossible to understand if you're not on the ground and yet critical to saving the lives of tens of thousands.
"There are tireless diplomatic officials there who have been working around the clock to clear backlogs, to work on the permissions needed to land in order to make sure all of this goes smoothly."
15. Fix JPME? Look to the Carlisle Scholars Method
Note the author's background and experience. He is uniquely qualified to make this recommendation.
Key excerpt:
The true power of CSP’s model is that it allows sufficient time for reflection, intellectual exploration, and increased rigor in the work produced by students. CSP features much reduced student-instructor contact time, providing students with more discretionary time for committee work and time to reflect on what they are learning or to explore various aspects of the curriculum more deeply. Furthermore, the primary core courses in the War College curriculum all overlap in CSP, setting conditions for students to make linkages between important strategic topics. Finally, CSP reinforces academic rigor through quick turn research projects and strategic surveys, relying on scholarly and non-scholarly research to gain perspectives on current national security problems and to produce practical joint warfighting research.
Fix JPME? Look to the Carlisle Scholars Method
The vision calls for senior service colleges to “ruthlessly reduce coverage” of topics that are not focused on the “ingenuity, intellectual application, and military professionalism in the art and science of warfighting.”
In the spring of 2020, as I prepared to relinquish battalion command and enroll at the U.S. Army War College, the Joint Chiefs of Staff released a strikingly bold vision for joint professional military education. It was nothing short of a call to action; the Joint Force needs to drastically change its approach to developing joint officers so as to gain “intellectual overmatch” of future adversaries. The vision calls for senior service colleges to “ruthlessly reduce coverage” of topics that are not focused on the “ingenuity, intellectual application, and military professionalism in the art and science of warfighting.” I read this document and other commentary with a strong sense of dread for the year to come.
My trepidation was not unfounded. I had a similar experience while attending the Command and General Staff Officer Course at Fort Leavenworth. Prior to beginning the “best year of my life,” a common refrain for the course, there was a movement to increase the “academic rigor” of the curriculum. The result was excruciatingly full days consisting largely of busy work, limited time for reflection, and little serious study. The best year of my life turned out to be anything but that. I was ultimately frustrated with the curriculum and felt that, for all the work put in over the year, I had actually learned little.
In general, the challenge with professional military education curriculum development, especially under pressure to produce high-quality education in a short time, is that it ends up becoming an over-decorated Christmas tree. Well intentioned requirements are added more quickly than others are discarded. As a result, the Christmas tree approach to curriculum development often leads to officers passing through military education bewildered by what they are learning, why they are learning it, and if or how it’s all even connected.
When I arrived at Carlisle Barracks, I fully expected the Army War College’s curriculum tree to be distending in response to the Joint Chiefs’ vision statement. My experience, however, has not been the soul crushing endeavor that I feared. I was assigned to the Carlisle Scholars Program (CSP) seminar and based on what I have observed, the program’s approach is a viable framework to achieve the Joint Chiefs of Staff vision for joint professional military education.
As the Joint Chiefs of Staff intimate in their vision, strategic decision-making is most often about choosing what not to do. By design, CSP is structured to remove ornaments from the curriculum tree without sacrificing learning outcomes. A special program at the War College, CSP aims to provide an accelerated core curriculum in the first half of the academic year to create time for students to conduct client-based research in the spring. Carlisle Scholars must still complete the major graduation requirements expected of all students, including a Strategy Research Project, an oral comprehensive exam, and a public speaking engagement. To accomplish this, the program uses a committee-based approach that in the past has produced strategic thinkers like General Dwight D. Eisenhower.
One of the principal benefits of the committee-based approach is that learning occurs primarily by doing. For a typical block of instruction, the seminar of 15 students is divided into three to four committees who are then assigned an aspect of the block’s theme. Students are then given a week or more to investigate, research, and develop a high-quality presentation that serves to teach fellow students about their topic and to facilitate dialogue amongst the greater group. The committee-based approach exemplifies self-directed and transformative adult learning theories at their best, combining collaborative, self-directed research and peer learning.
The true power of CSP’s model is that it allows sufficient time for reflection, intellectual exploration, and increased rigor in the work produced by students. CSP features much reduced student-instructor contact time, providing students with more discretionary time for committee work and time to reflect on what they are learning or to explore various aspects of the curriculum more deeply. Furthermore, the primary core courses in the War College curriculum all overlap in CSP, setting conditions for students to make linkages between important strategic topics. Finally, CSP reinforces academic rigor through quick turn research projects and strategic surveys, relying on scholarly and non-scholarly research to gain perspectives on current national security problems and to produce practical joint warfighting research.
Past students have conducted comprehensive studies of joint all-domain command and control for the Joint Staff, war termination studies to inform the Department of State’s reconciliation strategy in Afghanistan, and even a readiness wargame.
Beyond individual student learning outcomes, however, CSP presents a significant opportunity for the Army War College to deepen its connection and value to the greater Army and Department of Defense through client-based research. Past students have conducted comprehensive studies of joint all-domain command and control for the Joint Staff, war termination studies to inform the Department of State’s reconciliation strategy in Afghanistan, and even a readiness wargame. In the spring of 2021, students will research and propose policies regarding great power competition for the Office of the Secretary of Defense and develop a competition-based wargame for the Center for Army Analysis and United States Africa Command, among several other projects. These are exactly the types of projects that the Joint Chiefs prescribe in their vision statement. Over time, this body of work will also serve to increase the prestige of the Army War College.
The framework is not without criticisms, however. Some critics argue that expansion of the model college-wide is untenable as too many officers would view the reduced contact time intended for collaborative research and reflection as but an opportunity to “take a knee.” These arguments, however, would suggest a problem not with CSP or its framework but with how the Army selects senior service college students.
While the Army War College does not select its students directly, each Army officer has already been through a centralized selection board after serving in a command or equivalent key billet as a lieutenant colonel. People that are unmotivated or lack initiative are generally not competitive for the War College – selection is typically limited to less than the top 15% of eligible officers. There is nothing inherently special about CSP students aside from the fact that, with limited information beyond past student testimonials, they volunteered for a special program prior to arrival. If we can trust War College students to command battalions, brigades, or beyond, can we not trust them to be responsible enough to self-direct their own learning with appropriate guidance from faculty?
The CSP model is a validated proof of concept to implement the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s vision for improving joint professional military education. While maintaining current curriculum requirements, CSP has already begun to take steps toward this vision. In addition to in-depth strategic surveys, the program also focuses on historical analyses of joint warfighting through the lens of current doctrine and continues to examine the efficacy of joint warfighting doctrine. To expand the model college-wide, Army War College leadership could easily adapt the CSP framework, focusing the client-based research phase on joint wargaming, warfighting, and concept development to more fully achieve the Joint Chiefs’ vision.
Going forward, the War College and broader senior service college community should look for ways to leverage and expand the methods of the Carlisle Scholars Program to develop an even more effective approach to intellectually preparing joint warfighters to lead on future battlefields.
Marc Sanborn is a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army and graduate of the AY21 Resident Class at the U.S. Army War College. In addition to his military education, he holds a doctorate in civil engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and has several postsecondary teaching experiences.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Army War College, the U.S. Army, or the Department of Defense.
Photo Description: Products created by individual study programs within the Carlisle Scholars Program. Left to right: Map from CSP playing Eisenhower’s command and staff team for the planning for D-Day; CSP work doing a military geographic survey of West Africa/the Sahel; CSP product looking at the INDOPACOM theater, in this case producing a theater strategy for the Pacific theater in the mid-1930s. Front cover of the May 2020 Joint Chiefs of Staff Vision and Guidance for Professional Military Education & Talent Management.
Photo Credit: Provided by Carlisle Scholars Program faculty
16. Spies for Hire: China’s New Breed of Hackers Blends Espionage and Entrepreneurship
The many forms of Chinese capitalism (or capitalism with Chinese characteristics).
Excerpts:
This new group of hackers has made China’s state cyberspying machine stronger, more sophisticated and — for its growing array of government and private-sector targets — more dangerously unpredictable. Sponsored but not necessarily micromanaged by Beijing, this new breed of hacker attacks government targets and private companies alike, mixing traditional espionage with outright fraud and other crimes for profit.
China’s new approach borrows from the tactics of Russia and Iran, which have tormented public and commercial targets for years. Chinese hackers with links to state security demanded ransom in return for not releasing a company’s computer source code, according to an indictment released by the U.S. Department of Justice last year. Another group of hackers in southwest China mixed cyber raids on Hong Kong democracy activists with fraud on gaming websites, another indictment asserted. One member of the group boasted about having official protection, provided that they avoid targets in China.
“The upside is they can cover more targets, spur competition. The downside is the level of control,” said Robert Potter, the head of Internet 2.0, an Australian cybersecurity firm. “I’ve seen them do some really boneheaded things, like try and steal $70,000 during an espionage op.”
Spies for Hire: China’s New Breed of Hackers Blends Espionage and Entrepreneurship
The state security ministry is recruiting from a vast pool of private-sector hackers who often have their own agendas and sometimes use their access for commercial cybercrime, experts say.
China has changed its tactics since cyberhacking responsibilities were transfered to the Ministry of State Security from the People’s Liberation Army. Credit...Alex Plavevski/EPA, via Shutterstock
Aug. 26, 2021Updated 7:16 a.m. ET
China’s buzzy high-tech companies don’t usually recruit Cambodian speakers, so the job ads for three well-paid positions with those language skills stood out. The ad, seeking writers of research reports, was placed by an internet security start-up in China’s tropical island-province of Hainan.
That start-up was more than it seemed, according to American law enforcement. Hainan Xiandun Technology was part of a web of front companies controlled by China’s secretive state security ministry, according to a federal indictment from May. They hacked computers from the United States to Cambodia to Saudi Arabia, seeking sensitive government data as well as less-obvious spy stuff, like details of a New Jersey company’s fire-suppression system, according to prosecutors.
The accusations appear to reflect an increasingly aggressive campaign by Chinese government hackers and a pronounced shift in their tactics: China’s premier spy agency is increasingly reaching beyond its own ranks to recruit from a vast pool of private-sector talent.
This new group of hackers has made China’s state cyberspying machine stronger, more sophisticated and — for its growing array of government and private-sector targets — more dangerously unpredictable. Sponsored but not necessarily micromanaged by Beijing, this new breed of hacker attacks government targets and private companies alike, mixing traditional espionage with outright fraud and other crimes for profit.
China’s new approach borrows from the tactics of Russia and Iran, which have tormented public and commercial targets for years. Chinese hackers with links to state security demanded ransom in return for not releasing a company’s computer source code, according to an indictment released by the U.S. Department of Justice last year. Another group of hackers in southwest China mixed cyber raids on Hong Kong democracy activists with fraud on gaming websites, another indictment asserted. One member of the group boasted about having official protection, provided that they avoid targets in China.
“The upside is they can cover more targets, spur competition. The downside is the level of control,” said Robert Potter, the head of Internet 2.0, an Australian cybersecurity firm. “I’ve seen them do some really boneheaded things, like try and steal $70,000 during an espionage op.”
The Microsoft breach was unlike China’s previously disciplined strategy, said Dmitri Alperovitch, the chairman of Silverado Policy Accelerator, a nonprofit geopolitical think tank.
“They went after organizations they had zero interest in and exploited those organizations with ransomware and other attacks,” Mr. Alperovitch said.
China’s tactics changed after Xi Jinping, the country’s top leader, transferred more cyberhacking responsibility to the Ministry of State Security from the People’s Liberation Army following a slew of sloppy attacks and a reorganization of the military. The ministry, a mix of spy agency and Communist Party inquisitor, has used more sophisticated hacking tools, like security flaws known as zero days, to target companies, activists and governments.
President Xi Jinping was embarrassed by revelations of the People’s Liberation Army’s hacking activities.Credit...Ng Han Guan/Associated Press
While the ministry projects an image of remorseless loyalty to the Communist Party in Beijing, its hacking operations can act like local franchises. Groups often act on their own agendas, sometimes including sidelines in commercial cybercrime, experts said.
The message: “We’re paying you to do work from 9 to 5 for the national security of China,” Mr. Alperovitch said. “What you do with the rest of your time, and with the tools and access you have, is really your business.”
Let Us Help You Protect Your Digital Life
-
With Apple’s latest mobile software update, we can decide whether apps monitor and share our activities with others. Here’s what to know.
-
A little maintenance on your devices and accounts can go a long way in maintaining your security against outside parties’ unwanted attempts to access your data. Here’s a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online.
-
Ever considered a password manager? You should.
A grand jury indictment released last year charged that two former classmates from an electrical engineering college in Chengdu, in southwest China, marauded through foreign computer servers and stole information from dissidents and engineering diagrams from an Australian defense contractor. On the side, the indictment said, the two tried extortion: demanding payment in return for not revealing an unidentified company’s source code on the internet.
Under this system, Chinese hackers have become increasingly aggressive. The rate of global attacks linked to the Chinese government has nearly tripled since last year compared with the four previous years, according to Recorded Future, a Somerville, Mass., company that studies the use of internet by state-linked actors. That number now averages more than 1,000 per three-month period, it said.
“Considering the volume that’s going on, how many times has the F.B.I. gotten them? Precious few,” said Nicholas Eftimiades, a retired senior American intelligence officer who writes about China’s espionage operations. “There’s no way you can staff up to be able to contend with this type of onslaught.”
Though their numbers make them hard to stop, the hackers don’t always try hard to cover their tracks. They sometimes leave clues strewn online, including wedding photos of agents in state security uniforms, telltale job ads and boasts of their feats.
Hainan Xiandun was set up to recruit young talent and create a veneer of deniability, prosectors said. It posted job ads on the message boards of Chinese universities and sponsored a cybersecurity competition.
The operations from Hainan — an island jutting into the South China Sea — sometimes reflected local priorities, like stealing marine research from a university in California and hacking governments in nearby Southeast Asian countries, according to the May indictment. Its job ad for Cambodian speakers was placed three months before Cambodian elections.
While some targets had clear espionage goals, others appeared less focused. The hackers tried to steal Ebola vaccine data from one institution, prosecutors said, and secrets about self-driving cars from another.
The Department of Justice unsealed an indictment in July detailing the exploits of a Chinese hacking group.Credit...Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times
In January 2020, a mysterious blog with a track record of exposing Chinese state security hackers picked up the scent. The blog, “Intrusion Truth,” was already known in Washington cybersecurity circles for naming Chinese intelligence officers well before they appeared in U.S. indictments.
The operators of “Intrusion Truth” scoured job boards for Hainan companies advertising for “penetration testing engineers,” who secure networks by exploring how they could be hacked.
One posting from Hainan Xiandun stood out. The ad, on a Sichuan University computer science hiring board from 2018, boasted that Xiandun had “received a considerable number of government-secret-related business.”
The company, based in Hainan’s capital, Haikou, paid monthly salaries of $1,200 to $3,000 — solid middle-class wages for Chinese tech workers fresh out of college — with bonuses as high as $15,000. Xiandun’s ads listed an email address used by other firms looking for cybersecurity experts and linguists, suggesting they were part of a network.
Chinese hacking groups are increasingly “sharing malware, exploits and coordinating their efforts,” the operators of “Intrusion Truth” wrote in an email. The operators have not disclosed their identities, citing the sensitivity of their work.
Xiandun’s registered address was the library of Hainan University. Its phone number matched that of a computer science professor and People’s Liberation Army veteran who ran a website offering payments for students with novel ideas about cracking passwords. The professor has not been charged.
Other records and phone numbers led the blog authors to an email address and a frequent-flier account owned by Ding Xiaoyang, one of the managers of the company.
The indictment asserted that Mr. Ding was a state security officer who ran the hackers working at Hainan Xiandun. It included details the blog did not find, like an award Mr. Ding received from the Ministry of State Security for young leaders in the organization.
Mr. Ding and others named in the indictment couldn’t be reached.
Though trackable for now, China’s state security apparatus may be learning how to better hide its footprints, said Matthew Brazil, a former China specialist for the Department of Commerce’s Office of Export Enforcement who has co-written a study of Chinese espionage.
“The abilities of the Chinese services are uneven,” he said. “Their game is getting better, and in five or 10 years it’s going to be a different story.”
Nicole Perlroth contributed reporting.
17. How exile changed the Taliban
More worldly?
Excerpt:
As part of the withdrawal agreement signed with the US, the Taliban committed not to co-operate with groups that threaten US security. A UN report in July found that the Taliban remained “closely aligned” with al-Qaeda.
The Taliban has given itself plenty of wriggle room in its public statements. Many fear that its promise to respect “the rights of women within the framework of sharia” will fall far short of international expectations.
An even bigger red flag, warned one western diplomat, is its fondness for the phrase “Afghan traditions and customs” which it says will have to be adhered to.
Few expect the talk of an inclusive government to amount to much, beyond a few holdovers from the now-defunct republic being given figurehead roles in the forthcoming emirate.
Baradar hinted at the limits of his warmth towards former enemies when he met Karzai at a peace conference in Moscow in March. According to a western official, Baradar did not respond well to Karzai’s flattery.
He said he would never forget how his children had been forced to flee a raid by US forces. They had “run barefoot through the thorns of the desert”, he growled at the former Afghan president.
How exile changed the Taliban
Decades abroad made the militant group’s leaders more worldly, but they may struggle to control their foot soldiers
It was fear of history repeating itself that prompted Ashraf Ghani, Afghanistan’s former president, to flee the country as the Taliban entered Kabul.
As Ghani later explained on Facebook, he did not want Afghans to see “the president hanged once more” — a reference to Mohammad Najibullah, the communist-era leader who was strung up soon after the Taliban stormed the capital in 1996.
But the Taliban leaders who reoccupied Kabul this month are displaying little interest in a straight rerun of the past. Instead of lynching ex-presidents, delegations of portly Talibs have called on Hamid Karzai, Ghani’s predecessor as president, for drawing-room discussions about the creation of an “inclusive Islamic government”.
The movement’s spokesman has promised to respect the rights of women, not seek vengeance on Afghans who worked for the previous government and not allow Afghanistan to be used as a base to harm other countries.
Taliban officials have had meetings aimed at reassuring Kabul’s Shias and Sikhs — two communities fearful of Taliban rule.
Hamid Karzai, right, during a meeting with tribal leaders in Kandahar in 2001 © Jerome Delay/AP
Karzai, centre left, and senior Haqqani group leader Anas Haqqani, centre right, during a meeting in Kabul on August 18 © Taliban via AP
Nonetheless, there are serious doubts whether the government will be truly inclusive. The UN has received reports of executions of civilians, restrictions on women and the prevention of protests. On Tuesday, the Taliban closed the road to Kabul airport for Afghans.
But some optimists dare to hope that the Taliban is a changed organisation. Omar Samad, a former Afghan ambassador to Canada and France, said there was no doubt that “some level of transformation” had taken place among the Taliban’s leadership.
Exile alters outlook of mullahs
The experience of exile, after the fall of their regime in 2001, altered the outlook of traditionalist mullahs who had only ever known village life.
They moved to cities in Pakistan or the Gulf. Some spent time in jail, including Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s deputy leader and co-founder, or were detained in Guantánamo Bay. For the past 10 years the Taliban’s “political commission” has operated from the gleaming modernity of Qatar.
They have been continuously badgered in Doha by foreign diplomats who urged them to break ties with al-Qaeda, endorse rights norms and commit to other changes that would make them palatable to the international community.
The Taliban’s deputy leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, left, and other members of the Taliban in Moscow in May 2019 © Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP
“They travel the world and are welcomed by foreign leaders,” Samad said. “They paid close attention to other countries in the Islamic world, particularly Pakistan, but also Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. It’s given them a much broader range of experiences and made them more worldly.”
But for all their exposure to the outside world, they still lack the skills needed to administer a state far more developed and complex than the war-shattered emirate they once controlled.
‘They realise they don’t have expertise’
Afghanistan now has thousands of miles of roads to maintain, electricity imports from neighbouring countries to pay for, and a population used to a stable exchange rate and access to consumer goods and mass education.
Legend has it that Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s deceased founder, used to keep the national reserves in 44-gallon drums in his compound in Kandahar. Last week, officials at the central bank had to explain to a group of Talibs that the country’s $9bn in foreign reserves was unavailable for inspection because it is held with the Federal Reserve Bank in New York — and anyway had been frozen by the US government.
Tanks manned by Taliban fighters in front of the presidential palace in Kabul in 1996 © B K Bangash/AP
Taliban fighters take control of the Afghan presidential palace last week © Zabi Karimi/AP
“They realise they don’t have the expertise that they need,” said Samad. “They are reaching out to technocrats and renowned Afghans. They know they are going to need these non-Taliban figures in their government.”
Discreet efforts have been made in recent years by the international community to help the Taliban’s political leadership grasp the intricacies of running a government utterly reliant on international funding.
The results have not always been encouraging. One western official involved in a training initiative on modern governance said the top Talibs appeared unconcerned about how billions of dollars of direct financial assistance were contingent on commitments to curb corruption and protect human rights.
“They assume that any money that the west doesn’t give them will be replaced by China, Pakistan, Russia and Saudi Arabia,” the official said.
Thomas Ruttig, a founder of the Kabul-based Afghanistan Analysts Network, said the Taliban had always been a “learning organisation” well aware of its past failures. Some former officials of the Taliban’s 1990s government admit their time in power was disastrous.
Taliban soldiers in Kabul in February 1995 © Robert Nickelsberg/Gamma-Rapho/Getty
Taliban fighters stand guard at the main gate leading to the presidential palace last week © Rahmat Gul/AP
The determination of then-leader Mullah Omar to continue to host al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan split the movement and guaranteed global isolation. The imposition of harsh rules also made the Taliban unpopular, including among Afghans who had at first welcomed them.
“They understand now that they cannot rule the entire country with repression,” said Ruttig. “But that doesn’t mean they are the Liberal party of the UK.”
A movement that once banned television has come to master social media, video production and websites in multiple languages. It still disapproves of both television and smartphones, Ruttig said. But the technologies are now too pervasive and too useful not to use.
Reaching out to other communities
Perhaps the Taliban’s most consequential change has been its efforts to win support beyond its traditional constituency of Pashtuns, Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group.
The backing of some Tajik and Uzbek communities helped the Taliban make spectacularly rapid territorial gains this summer in northern Afghanistan, a largely non-Pashtun area long assumed to be immune from Taliban infiltration.
“They made a real effort to reach out to disenfranchised communities and also intimidate them,” said Ashley Jackson, a researcher who has interviewed many Taliban figures. “The government made it easy for them by being absolutely terrible. Local militias victimising people are incredibly unpopular.”
When a member of the Hazaras, a community brutally persecuted in the 1990s by the Taliban, took up a minor role as a Taliban official in an obscure district last year, the movement’s media outlets gave it blanket coverage.
But for all that the Taliban’s leadership may have changed, many of its foot soldiers have regressed to an even more radicalised state than anything seen in the 1990s.
In the chaos outside Kabul airport this week, they resorted to using whips against women and children. Many remain awestruck by the high-rise development of Kabul, the biggest city they have ever seen.
A Taliban fighter threatens a woman waiting to get access to the international airport with her family in Kabul on August 18 © Jim Huylebroek/New York Times/Redux/eyevine
The neat, middle-aged leaders having tea with Karzai may struggle to sell reforms to this unkempt rank and file.
“Controlling these people will be one of the biggest challenges for the leadership,” said Samad. “Somehow they are going to have to maintain cohesion whilst managing the extreme viewpoints of their followers.”
A movement that remains factionalised
Critics say the limit of the leadership’s power has already been exposed by reports of abuses in areas under Taliban control. On Tuesday, Michelle Bachelet, the UN’s high commissioner for human rights, described credible reports of incidents that included summary executions of civilians, restrictions on women and the prevention of demonstrations by people opposed to Taliban rule.
The factionalised nature of the movement has been highlighted by the decision to give responsibility for Kabul’s security to the Haqqani network, a Taliban affiliate with deep ties to al-Qaeda and subject to US sanctions.
Residents flee after Kabul fell to the Taliban in 1996 © Patrick Robert/Sygma/Getty
An Afghan family rushes to the international airport as they flee Kabul last week © Anadolu Agency via Getty
As part of the withdrawal agreement signed with the US, the Taliban committed not to co-operate with groups that threaten US security. A UN report in July found that the Taliban remained “closely aligned” with al-Qaeda.
The Taliban has given itself plenty of wriggle room in its public statements. Many fear that its promise to respect “the rights of women within the framework of sharia” will fall far short of international expectations.
An even bigger red flag, warned one western diplomat, is its fondness for the phrase “Afghan traditions and customs” which it says will have to be adhered to.
Few expect the talk of an inclusive government to amount to much, beyond a few holdovers from the now-defunct republic being given figurehead roles in the forthcoming emirate.
Baradar hinted at the limits of his warmth towards former enemies when he met Karzai at a peace conference in Moscow in March. According to a western official, Baradar did not respond well to Karzai’s flattery.
He said he would never forget how his children had been forced to flee a raid by US forces. They had “run barefoot through the thorns of the desert”, he growled at the former Afghan president.
18. U.S. Says 1,500 Americans Remain in Afghanistan as Evacuation Enters Final Days
Will we leave them behind?
U.S. Says 1,500 Americans Remain in Afghanistan as Evacuation Enters Final Days
The State Department is frantically trying to track down U.S. citizens. Tens of thousands of Afghan allies will all but certainly be left behind.
People waiting to gain access to the international airport on Wednesday in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Aug. 25, 2021
WASHINGTON — At least 1,500 American citizens remain in Afghanistan with just days left before the scheduled U.S. withdrawal from the country, but officials on Wednesday acknowledged the reality that tens of thousands of Afghan allies and others at high risk of Taliban reprisals would be left behind.
The sound of gunfire, and clouds of tear gas and black smoke, filled the air around the international airport in Kabul, the capital, as thousands of Afghans massed at the gates on Wednesday, desperate to escape ahead of the American military’s final departure on Aug. 31, after 20 years of war.
The U.S. Embassy warned Americans later in the day to stay away from the airport and told anyone outside the perimeter to “leave immediately.” The British and Australian governments issued similar warnings.
A senior U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe confidential assessments, confirmed that the United States was tracking a “specific” and “credible” threat at the airport from the Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan, which has carried out dozens of attacks in recent years and is a rival of the Taliban.
As military and government charter flights took off every 45 minutes as part of an airlift, Biden administration officials said they had evacuated about 82,300 people since Aug. 14, the day before Kabul fell to the Taliban. Around 4,500 of them were American citizens, with 500 more expected to depart soon.
But Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said the government was trying to track down around 1,000 American citizens still believed to be in Afghanistan who had not responded to a frantic flurry of emails, phone calls or other messages offering to evacuate them.
“In this critical stretch, we’re focused on getting Americans and their families onto planes, out of Afghanistan, as quickly as possible,” Mr. Blinken said at the State Department.
He also sought to assure Afghans who had worked with the U.S. military or embassy, and potentially hundreds of thousands of people who challenged the Taliban’s extremist ideology, that “they will not be forgotten.”
Likening images and reports of Afghans being trampled at the Kabul airport in the crush to evacuate to “getting punched in the gut,” Mr. Blinken said it would be incumbent on the Taliban to guarantee their safe passage.
He signaled that such an arrangement could be reached with a mix of economic and diplomatic pressure, and the lure of international aid, but he would not discuss his level of confidence in the Taliban to keep their word beyond vaguely citing what he called their public and private commitments to allow people to leave.
“Let me be crystal clear about this: There is no deadline on our work to help any remaining American citizens who decide they want to leave to do so, along with the many Afghans who have stood by us over these many years, and want to leave, and have been unable to do so,” Mr. Blinken said. “That effort will continue every day past Aug. 31.”
A Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said on Wednesday that Afghans with valid travel documents would not be prevented from entering the airport if they were allowed in by American and Afghan forces there.
In his first sit-down interview with a Western media organization since the Taliban’s arrival in Kabul, Mr. Mujahid disputed reports that the group would begin to keep Afghans away from the airport, which had been based on his statements during a news conference a day earlier.
“We said that people who don’t have proper documents aren’t allowed to go,” he said. “They need passports and visas for the countries they’re going to, and then they can leave by air. If their documents are valid, then we’re not going to ask what they were doing before.”
He also insisted that the Taliban would forgive those who fought against them, and that women would be allowed to attend school and work, within what he described as Islamic principles. Human rights officials have dismissed such assurances as disingenuous, and many Afghans have hidden in their homes, fearing harassment and violence.
Mr. Mujahid acknowledged that women would need a male guardian on journeys of three days or longer. He said that rumors that the Taliban would force women to stay in their homes or cover their faces were baseless, but he confirmed that music would not be allowed in public.
“Music is forbidden in Islam,” he said, “but we’re hoping that we can persuade people not to do such things.”
White House officials said on Wednesday that 90 U.S. and allied planes had flown out an estimated 19,200 people in a 24-hour period.
At least 500 were American citizens and their families, Mr. Blinken said, joining Afghans who were employees of the now-shuttered U.S. Embassy in Kabul and others who had worked for the American military and other government agencies, some since 2001, who qualify for a special immigration visa to live in the United States.
Congressional officials said earlier this week that the Biden administration had identified an estimated 50,000 Afghans who were eligible for the special visa. Former security forces, government officials and people who advocated women’s rights, the rule of law and other pillars of democracy also have been evacuated.
A new estimate from the Association of Wartime Allies released on Wednesday concluded that at least 250,000 Afghans — and perhaps more than a million — could be eligible for expedited immigration status. The advocacy group worked with American University to analyze employment contracts and other documents that those Afghans would need to prove their eligibility.
Mr. Blinken could not offer a more precise number, and noted the difficulty that even tracking down how many Americans might be in Afghanistan had been a challenge for the U.S. government.
He said the State Department had identified at least 6,000 Americans — many of them with dual Afghan citizenship — by searching various databases. Officials have sent more than 20,000 emails and placed 45,000 phone calls across Afghanistan to offer U.S. citizens a chance to leave, he said.
Thousands more American citizens may live in Afghanistan, but had not registered with the U.S. Embassy and otherwise could not be found, a senior State Department official later acknowledged.
“The reporting I’m getting on the ground are that our American citizens are trying to get out,” said Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “Our Afghan partners and interpreters who served with our special forces, put their life on the line. We have a moral obligation to save them.”
Mr. Blinken would not discuss whether any semblance of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul — once one of the largest American diplomatic missions in the world — would remain open after the military exits next week. A small group of U.S. diplomats remain in Afghanistan, on a secure base at the airport in Kabul, to oversee the evacuation and continue negotiations with the Taliban.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken arriving at a briefing on Afghanistan on Tuesday at the U.S. Capitol in Washington.Credit...Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times
As the evacuation mission played out, world leaders — and millions of Afghans — waited with anxiety to discern the true shape of Taliban rule.
During the group’s last turn in power, Afghan women risked being beaten, tortured or executed if they left their homes. In the two decades since American-led forces ousted the militants from power, many young women have come to expect basic rights.
Zabihullah Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman, interacting with journalists after a briefing on Tuesday in Kabul.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
In the first days after the Taliban seized Kabul, and national power, on Aug. 15, Afghan protesters have demanded that the militants accept their demands for greater freedom. Among the protests was a march by women demanding that their right to education and jobs not be harmed.
One activist, named Fariha, said she had taken part in the demonstration last week “to show the Taliban that they have to change, because we will not.”
“We cannot breathe if we are deprived of our rights to education and work, and if we are not present in the society,” she said through sobs.
“There are women who haven’t gone to Europe or the U.S. — they have stayed and are ready to fight until death,” she said. “We have worked hard for 20 years to gain education and work. We will not let anyone ignore us.”
Despite Taliban efforts to reassure Afghans of their safety, ominous signs suggest that they have not abandoned their brutal tactics. On Tuesday, the United Nations’ top human rights official cited “harrowing and credible” reports that the Taliban had executed civilians and noncombatant soldiers.
With the future of international aid to Afghanistan unclear, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said on Wednesday that her country would maintain its support for the Afghan people after the U.S. troop withdrawal. She also called for talks with the Taliban.
“Our goal must be to preserve as much as possible what we have achieved in terms of changes in Afghanistan in the last 20 years,” Ms. Merkel told a session of Parliament convened to discuss the Taliban’s rapid takeover of Afghanistan. “This is something the international community must talk about with the Taliban.”
Germany pulled its last contingent of about 570 troops out of Afghanistan in June, but several hundred Germans were still engaged in development work funded by their government.
Adding to the concerns about Afghanistan is its foundering economy, which had been propped up for the past generation by American aid, but is now in free fall. Banks are closed. Cash is growing scarce, and food prices are rising. Fuel is becoming harder to find. Government services have stalled as civil servants avoid work, fearing retribution.
Afghans waiting in line at an A.T.M. on Wednesday in Kabul.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
People trying to flee, if they make it past Taliban checkpoints, have been met with chaotic scenes at Kabul’s airport. At least seven Afghan civilians, including a toddler, have been trampled to death.
On Wednesday, the Taliban brought what looked like about 200 people to a fenced-off area, where they were crammed together under a beating afternoon sun.
People waiting to gain access to the international airport on Wednesday in Kabul.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
John F. Kirby, the chief Pentagon spokesman, told reporters on Wednesday that American officers in Kabul, including Rear Adm. Peter G. Vasely, the top commander, and Maj. Gen. Christopher Donahue, the head of the 82nd Airborne Division, were talking to their Taliban counterparts every day to ensure safe passage of Americans and Afghan allies with proper credentials to flights leaving Kabul.
Mr. Kirby said that the Pentagon would prioritize the evacuation of American troops and equipment in the mission’s final days. About 5,400 American troops are now at the airport after 400 troops not essential to the evacuation left the country in recent days, he said.
Still, there have been numerous reports of Afghans with proper paperwork being turned away at Taliban checkpoints and even at the airport gates, where some 30 U.S. consular officials and Marines are checking credentials. Throughout the past week, many gates have closed intermittently to clear backlogs.
Lara Jakes reported from Washington, and Michael Levenson from New York. Reporting was contributed by Eric Schmitt from Washington; Matthieu Aikins and Jim Huylebroek from Kabul; Sharif Hassan from Kyiv, Ukraine; Melissa Eddy from Berlin; and Lauren Leatherby from New York.
19. Where the U.S. is taking Afghans evacuated from Kabul
Where the U.S. is taking Afghans evacuated from Kabul
The U.S. has been scrambling not only to evacuate thousands of people each day from Kabul's international airport, but also to find and prepare places for them to go.
Why it matters: Insufficient processing capacity was a major hurdle early in the evacuation process, and is still an issue as the number of evacuees rises. But the Pentagon says 14 "temporary safe havens" are now available in the Gulf and Europe, and that number is likely to grow.
The big picture: The U.S. has evacuated over 80,000 people from Kabul since Aug. 14, most of them Afghans. But they have not been taken directly to the U.S.
- Most U.S. military flights out of Kabul go to one of three hubs in Qatar, Bahrain or Germany. There are also secondary sites in the UAE and Kuwait and at U.S. military installations in Germany, Italy and Spain.
-
Overcrowded and unsanitary conditions at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar forced the administration to accelerate its efforts to open additional facilities and to establish Ramstein Air Base in Germany as a second major hub.
While at those temporary facilities, Afghans will be vetted for security concerns and to ensure their eligibility to enter the U.S. or other third countries.
- Those who hold U.S. visas or have completed the Special Immigrant Visa application process can be quickly cleared.
- It remains unclear how long others might wait. The administration is dispatching diplomats as well as intelligence, law enforcement and counterterrorism officials to expedite the process.
Those who are cleared to travel to the U.S. are being flown to Dulles airport near Washington, D.C., and then on to one of four U.S. military bases in New Jersey, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin. Additional U.S. bases are expected to be added.
- The administration has not provided updated numbers of how many Afghans have entered the U.S.
Details: Asked by Axios for a full list of the facilities in Europe and the Gulf that are or will be temporarily hosting Afghans, a Pentagon spokesman referred Axios to a list of the participating countries but did not provide additional details.
- According to various media reports, they include Rhine Ordnance Barracks and Grafenwoehr Training Area in Germany; Naval Air Station Sigonella and Aviano Air Base in Italy; Naval Station Rota and Moron de la Frontera in Spain; Al-Dhafra Air Base in the UAE and Ali Al Saleem Air Base in Kuwait in addition to the larger hubs.
20. Opinion | Biden made the hard choice in Afghanistan, and the right one
The post mortems will be brutal.
Excertps:
The national interest will also be served by an after-action review of the withdrawal. Exiting a country long nicknamed the “graveyard of empires” was never going to be easy, but we should not have been caught flat-footed by the speed of the Taliban takeover or the collapse of Afghan willpower. There should be special focus on the U.S. transfer of Bagram air base to the Afghans, a key counterterrorism installation now in Taliban hands.
Congress must exercise oversight, too. We must investigate, in a bipartisan manner, the entirety of Operation Enduring Freedom. We should declassify the decision-making. We should look at the good: the Afghan people’s gains in education, electrification and equality. The bad: the corruption of Afghan central governance. And the ugly: the years of lies from Washington about the war.
My generation, which fought this conflict, must now learn its lessons. And be ready to prevent another endless war.
Opinion | Biden made the hard choice in Afghanistan, and the right one
Jake Auchincloss, a Marine veteran, is a Democrat representing Massachusetts’s 4th district in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Before serving in Congress, I was an infantry platoon commander in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province. In the summer of 2012, we patrolled three Taliban-contested villages on the Helmand River. On each patrol I would visit a tribal elder. They would serve me hot, sweet goat-milk tea. I would sip it in the 100-degree heat and smile politely. They would listen to me talk about the American mission and smile politely. Neither side could stomach it.
These Pashtun elders, veterans of the Soviet invasion and the civil war, were in a familiar bind. Taliban to their south, Americans to their north. Taliban conscripting their sons to plant IEDs; Americans demanding to know who planted them. My platoon and I were there for a summer, but the villagers would live with their decisions. One elder conveyed their wariness in an often-used expression: “You have the watches, but they have the time.” The Taliban could not outfight Americans, but it could outlast us, because we had no political endgame.
Counterinsurgencies are a political initiative with a military component. They require the regime in power to counter the insurgents with better governance. The Western-backed government in Kabul offered corruption and incompetence instead.
In situation room after situation room, the U.S. national security establishment made decisions based on sunk cost bias, not clear-eyed assessments of the national interest. For nearly two decades, the refrain was “more time, more troops, more treasure.” But they always knew better. The special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction was blunt: “The American people have constantly been lied to” about Afghanistan.
What began as a counterterrorism mission — to bring to justice the architects of 9/11 and deny terrorists a base of operations in Afghanistan — mutated under President George W. Bush into a counterinsurgency and a boondoggle. By the time the two-trillion-dollar effort reached President Biden’s desk, he faced a stark choice: go big or go home. He could surge U.S. troops ahead of the summer fighting season or he could fully hand over Afghanistan to the Afghans.
The status quo of a small military footprint was not an option. Leaving a couple thousand troops would break President Donald Trump’s deal with the Taliban. The troops would require substantial reinforcements to battle the Taliban, which was at peak post-9/11 strength. The United States would be starting a third decade of warfare, still with no political endgame.
Biden made the right decision. There’s no glory in it, but there is integrity. He saw above the politics in Washington, beyond the news cycle, through the challenges of the withdrawal. Biden looked, instead, to the national interest. The United States must focus its foreign policy on countering the Chinese Communist Party and on leading coalitions to address the climate and pandemic emergencies.
The national interest will also be served by an after-action review of the withdrawal. Exiting a country long nicknamed the “graveyard of empires” was never going to be easy, but we should not have been caught flat-footed by the speed of the Taliban takeover or the collapse of Afghan willpower. There should be special focus on the U.S. transfer of Bagram air base to the Afghans, a key counterterrorism installation now in Taliban hands.
Congress must exercise oversight, too. We must investigate, in a bipartisan manner, the entirety of Operation Enduring Freedom. We should declassify the decision-making. We should look at the good: the Afghan people’s gains in education, electrification and equality. The bad: the corruption of Afghan central governance. And the ugly: the years of lies from Washington about the war.
My generation, which fought this conflict, must now learn its lessons. And be ready to prevent another endless war.
21. How China's ultra-loyal web army can silence Beijing's critics
Even China blames trump.
Excerpt:
US hostility to China, made worse under the Trump administration, was partly to blame, Mr Wang said. "There's nationalism in the US that's at an all-time high and that in turn has pushed Chinese nationalism, as well," he said.
How China's ultra-loyal web army can silence Beijing's critics
By The Straits Times5 min
BEIJING (BLOOMBERG) - Chinese virologist Zhang Wenhong, is among a slew of recent high-profile targets in a campaign by nationalist web users to harass anyone they deem critical of China's government and pressure officials and websites to censor them.
They say Mr Zhang undermined Beijing's Covid-zero strategy by suggesting that China must learn to live with the virus. Internet users dug up his 20-year-old thesis and accused him of plagiarism. His alma mater, Fudan University in Shanghai, later said the allegation was false.
Mr Zhang's case shows the widening scope of China's keyboard nationalists who scour the web for posts or individuals they deem unpatriotic or subject to foreign influence. Among their targets are celebrities, scientists, feminists and public figures, who can suffer censorship, blacklisting or loss of income. Frequently, the irate netizens are backed by government agencies that endorse the extra-judicial shaming.
"To some extent it is a cyber-Cultural Revolution - mass mobilization, abusive language, 'conviction' by the mob without any proper evidence or logic, canceling people's right to speech just because they have been labeled by the mob as bad guys," said Fang Kecheng, an assistant professor at the school of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
But there's also a commercial interest: "Many nationalistic social media accounts gain traffic by participating in these kinds of attacks." As with Western platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, Chinese social media is very much polarized, but the nationalists are increasingly gaining the upper hand.
This Chinese take on cancel culture has been fueled by growing national pride - showcased this year as the Communist Party celebrates its centennial - and by increasing hostility toward criticism from abroad, fueled by the pandemic and the trade war with the US.
Yet it runs counter to President Xi Jinping's stated aim that China should portray a "lovable and respectable" image abroad. "Encouraging expressions of anti-foreign nationalism at home undercuts the CCP's efforts to cultivate a benign international image," said Kacie Kieko Miura, an assistant professor of political science and international relations at the University of San Diego. "But the CCP doesn't really have a choice. Nationalism is a critical pillar of the CCP's domestic legitimacy. On the other hand, stability in China's foreign relations is essential to its continued rise."
Negative views of China remain near record highs across the developed world, according to the latest Pew survey. That polarization is likely to get worse as nationalists in China marginalize individuals and organizations that are trying to find common ground.
"The CCP legitimates its policies by promising its population a strong China, and many nationalists now demand hawkish foreign policy from their leaders as a consequence," said Florian Schneider, senior lecturer in the politics of modern China and director of the Leiden Asia Centre. "Chinese officials cannot afford to look weak." Social media platforms such as Weibo or Wechat have been quick to close accounts of those being criticized. Often the reasons for the censorship are unclear.
Last month, WeChat shut accounts for LGBTQ associations at top universities including Tsinghua and Peking for violating unspecified rules. Web users praised the removals, suggesting the groups were being hijacked by foreign countries and were anti-China.
Like the anti-communist political witch hunt of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the US in the 1940s and '50s, the underlying justification for many of the attacks is the broad allegation of being anti-China.
"We can easily understand why China would become more nationalistic as it succeeds economically," said Frank Tsai, a lecturer at the Emlyon Business School's Shanghai Campus and founder of Shanghai-based consulting firm China Crossroads. "The danger is that China overreaches. China's economy may end up suffering from the hubris of a regime that thinks it really can go it alone, when figures show that any economic bloc that China leads is still much smaller than the West's."
Foreign celebrities like NBA general manager Daryl Morey and American actor John Cena, and businesses such as Dolce & Gabbana Srl and Hennes & Mauritz AB, are familiar with such "cyber expedition." Increasingly, so are journalists. After floods caused the deaths of more than 300 people in Henan province last month, the local Communist Youth League's Weibo account encouraged viewers to record the behavior of a BBC journalist reporting on the event, and a correspondent for German broadcaster Deutsche Welle was confronted by a crowd of people for "smearing China."
But it's China's own citizens and organizations that are increasingly under the microscope. Even Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of the nationalist tabloid Global Times, and some of his subordinates were labeled "traitors" by internet users after the paper criticized a photo comparing China's rocket launch to funeral pyres in India.
In other cases, even association with someone deemed unpatriotic is enough to start a tirade as the Beijing-based Center for China & Globalization discovered. Founded by Wang Huiyao, a former adviser to China's cabinet, the CCG was set up to act as a bridge between China and the rest of the world, explaining Beijing's position on everything from alleged forced labor in Xinjiang to the national security law for Hong Kong. But during a CCG forum in Beijing last month, Chu Yin, a professor at the University of International Relations, criticized Chinese scholars and diplomats for communication methods that might not be readily understood by an overseas audience. Some online commentators targeted both Chu and the CCG. Soon, media posts related to the event began to disappear as well as from accounts of prominent commentators.
Mr Wang said the "very extreme opinions" that appear online were the work of irrelevant small-time players. "We don't want to amplify that. They are really too low to look at," he said in an interview. "We get push-back in China saying we're pro-Western, and push-back from some in the West."
Sometimes the evidence used against a target is years old. China's top anti-graft body, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, criticized actor Zhang Zhehan this month for photographs taken years ago in front of Japan's Yasukuni shrine, a symbol to the Chinese of Japan's past military aggression.
The Ministry of Culture's China Association of Performing Arts called for a boycott of the actor, dozens of brands said they would stop working with him and Weibo and ByteDance's Douyin erased his personal social media accounts.
US hostility to China, made worse under the Trump administration, was partly to blame, Mr Wang said. "There's nationalism in the US that's at an all-time high and that in turn has pushed Chinese nationalism, as well," he said.
22. Italian military plane fired at as it left Kabul airport - defence source
Vulnerable and dangerous.
Italian military plane fired at as it left Kabul airport - defence source
ROME, Aug 26 (Reuters) - Shots were fired at an Italian military transport plane on Thursday as it flew out of Kabul airport, a source at Italy's Defence Ministry said.
The plane was not damaged in the incident, the source added.
An Italian journalist traveling on the flight told Sky 24 TG that the plane had been carrying almost 100 Afghan civilians when it came under fire minutes after take off.
Reporting by Angelo Amante, writing by Stephen Jewkes; Editing by Crispian Balmer
23. Taliban take over some U.N. premises, curb movement -U.N. report
The UN's Afghanistan programs and offices are in a tough spot and very vulnerable to the Taliban.
Taliban take over some U.N. premises, curb movement -U.N. report
The United Nations logo is seen on a window in an empty hallway at United Nations headquarters during the 75th annual U.N. General Assembly high-level debate in New York, U.S., September 21, 2020. REUTERS/Mike Segar
NEW YORK, Aug 24 (Reuters) - Taliban fighters have taken over some U.N. compounds in Afghanistan, searching and ransacking offices and in one case demanding the guards provide meals for a commander and his men, according to an internal U.N. report seen by Reuters.
"We have also been advised by the Taliban to remain in our compound 'for our safety' which equates to 'ask permission before thinking about leaving'," the Department for Safety and Security (UNDSS) wrote in the Aug. 21 risk assessment report.
It said the Taliban has been inconsistent in dealing with United Nations staff and that some Afghan personnel had been prevented from entering some U.N. premises.
The Taliban did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on the U.N. security report. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told a news conference on Tuesday that the Islamist group wished for good diplomatic relations with other countries and wanted foreign embassies to remain open.
The United Nations had some 300 international staff and 3,000 Afghan staff when the Taliban seized power on Aug. 15. The world body has started moving about 100 of them to Kazakhstan to continue working.
Liam McDowall, spokesman for the U.N. political mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), declined to comment on "alleged leaked documents," especially those tied to staff safety and security.
He said U.N. premises have not been occupied by the Taliban, but acknowledged that some U.N. buildings - where no staff were present - "have been broken in to and looted, with security personnel subjected to unacceptable intimidation, but no harm."
The UNDSS report said that the U.N.'s Afghan staff were often reporting house searches by the Taliban and "they are terrified and left alone in dealing with this new reality."
McDowall said that "no U.N. staff member has reported a single house search, detention or other serious incident involving the Taliban," but the U.N. remains "mindful" of staff fears and that "the security situation may further deteriorate."
He said "extensive security arrangements" were in place.
The Taliban spokesman on Tuesday denied reports that the group were conducting house searches to find targets for reprisals, saying: "We have forgotten everything in the past."
'NO COHERENT COMMAND, CONTROL'
The UNDSS report rated the present security risk as "very high" that any U.N. security convoy will be deliberately "targeted by gunfire" and U.N. staff will be killed or injured. It rated the risk as "very high" that Taliban will enter a U.N. compound and kill, injure or abduct U.N. personnel.
The UNDSS states that now the Taliban is the ad-hoc Afghan authority it is "the governing element responsible for the security of our personnel and premises."
"However, at present, there is no coherent command and control with which we can liaise to discuss security requirements or problems. Neither is there a competent force that can or will provide security response in the event of a problem," the UNDSS warned.
It did note that "in some instances, staff have been politely treated and our facilities and compounds respected and secured" by the Taliban.
Three Afghans who work for the United Nations told Reuters they were concerned the world body was not doing enough to help national staff - who have approval to travel to another country - to get to Kabul airport.
The speed with which the Taliban retook the country, as foreign forces withdrew after a 20-year war, has led to chaotic scenes at the airport as diplomats and Afghans try to leave.
McDowall said the United Nations is trying its best despite "very real limitations right now on what can be done regarding access to Kabul Airport."
"The U.N. in Afghanistan is an entirely civilian, and unarmed, entity," he said, adding that the United Nations was in contact with certain member states to urge them to provide visas or support the temporary relocation of Afghan staff.
Reporting by Ned Parker and Michelle Nichols; Additional reporting by Rupam Jain; editing by Grant McCool
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.
