Quotes of the Day:
“Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”
- Benjamin Franklin
"The lowest form of popular culture—lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives—has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage."
- Carl Bernstein
"And that's probably one of my biggest gripes with the Internet, that it settles for mediocrity and disinformation, which puts all information on the same level. Everything has the same value, whether it's Albert Einstein speaking, or [email protected]."
- Harlan Ellison
1. Enabling the Fifth Column and the Relevancy of Unconventional Warfare
2. America's New Great-Power Strategy | by Joseph S. Nye, Jr.
3. Biden needs to get China to cooperate with the pandemic’s origins investigation
4. The Irony of Misinformation and USIA
5. How Terrorists Could Proceed with the Next Physical Attack on Energy Infrastructure
6. The Delta Variant Could End the Chinese Communist Party
7. Austin misses an opportunity in Singapore but scores big in Philippines
8. Opinion | New congressional report says covid-19 likely emerged in Wuhan months earlier than originally thought
9. The Trouble With Washington’s ‘Rules-Based Order’ Gambit
10. A New Bill Seeks to Patch the Flaws in the Arms Export Control Act
11. Continuity and Change in China’s Strategy to Protect Overseas Interests
12. Repression by Any Other Name: Xinjiang and the Genocide Debate
13. A Marine's new book is a 'deeply lyrical account' of infantry life in the Post 9/11 age
14. Rising cry for civil war in Myanmar
15. Taliban Commander Who Led Attack on Afghan City Was Released From Prison Last Year, Officials Say
16. Germany wades warily into South China Sea fray
17. Taliban tells China what it wants to hear on ETIM
18. China can destabilize Taiwan without firing a shot
19. Biden puts Southeast Asia in U.S. sights — at last
1. Enabling the Fifth Column and the Relevancy of Unconventional Warfare
An important contribution to the discussion on unconventional warfare.
Tue, 08/03/2021 - 8:43pm
Enabling the Fifth Column and the Relevancy of Unconventional Warfare
By Mark Grdovic
“During the Spanish Civil War in 1936, a journalist asked Nationalist General Emilio Mola how he planned to take Madrid with his four columns of troops. The General commented that a "fifth column” of supporters inside the city would support him and undermine the Republican government from within.”
Although the concept of enabling resistance movements as a supporting effort to a broader military campaign is centuries old, the concept did not formally appear in U.S. military doctrine as Unconventional Warfare until 1955[1]. The concept gained reluctant acceptance within the United States military, largely as a result of the Korean War, and remained a staple in various contingency plans throughout the Cold War. Although unconventional warfare played a vital role in the campaigns in Afghanistan in 2001 and Northern Iraq in 2003, the benefits to those campaigns was quickly eclipsed by the gapping deficiencies of the ensuring counterinsurgency campaigns. Additionally, there have been several other instances since 1990, where the concept of unconventional warfare failed to materialize as a viable operational effort in support of large-scale military operations[2]. Subsequently the topic continues to suffer from a variety of inaccurate perceptions that inhibit its application as a part of the U.S. military tool kit.
When considering the mixed results of these efforts over the last 30 years, it can be a convenient rationalization to conclude that the concept itself must be outdated and unsuited to the challenges of “modern warfare”[3]. Conversely, it would be equally inaccurate to portray unconventional warfare as a secret panacea capable of solving all problems or a euphemism for all things “not conventional”. It is a unique type of special operation that, like all military capabilities, has limited application to specific scenarios and conditions. If unconventional warfare is to remain a viable capability within the U.S. Department of Defense, it requires a clear and realistic understanding (particularly from theater planners), not only of the topic, but when it is applicable and what its successful application requires.
Perhaps one of the biggest contributing factors that has complicated the affective development, incorporation and employment of unconventional warfare concepts is that many aspects associated with the concept are very distinct compared with other types of special operations, to include very unique planning requirements[4]. Subsequently, it’s not uncommon for planners and operational personnel to either omit or replace these procedures and default to more familiar, albeit inappropriate, methods gained from experiences during other types of special operations.
Many of these requirements and procedures are not clearly captured or articulated in doctrine, not part of professional military education and largely unfamiliar to the joint special operations and conventional force communities. Despite the popular rhetoric within the special operations community about “returning to an unconventional warfare focus as part of strategic competition” it’s almost impossible to find any meaningful operational lessons or critical academic analysis of successful or unsuccessful unconventional warfare efforts from within the past 30 years. This lack of honest intellectual analysis and integration of lessons greatly inhibits the likelihood of successful application in the future.
During the Cold War, theater plans, that were largely contingent on Soviet aggression and defensive in nature. As a result, the plans could be developed to a significant level of detail, thereby enabling subordinate special forces units to maintain a very specific focus for the required capabilities, planning and preparations (exercises and rehearsals). With the end of the Cold War, this highly structured construct essentially became irrelevant. In 1990, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait became the first post-Cold War opportunity for unconventional warfare to contribute to a major theater campaign. Without the benefit of a pre-existing plan, theater planners did not start planning for unconventional warfare in earnest until almost three months after the Iraqi forces invaded. Following the conflict, the Theater Special Operations Command’s assessment indicated that the U.S. Special Operations Forces and staffs involved in planning generally lacked the ability to develop concepts and plan against an unscripted scenario, which greatly contributed to the inability to effectively support the resistance.
In 2003 the Pentagon deliberately moved away from the more rigid planning process associated with these Cold War standing plans to a more “adaptive” planning process[5]. While predetermined theater Operations Plans (OPLANs) and Contingency Plans (CONPLANs) still apply to a few very specific scenarios, the post-Cold War era has largely not afforded military planners the luxury of relying on premediated defensive war plans. It has required Geographic Combatant Commands (GCCs) and their respective Theater Special Operations Commands (TSOCs) to more rapidly and reactively develop campaign plans (and the full spectrum of supporting special operations plans) in response to emerging crisis or situations, e.g. the Gulf War in 1990, Bosnia in 1995, Kosovo in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011 and Syria in 2013.
As a result, Special Operations and Joint Conventional Force HQs need to understand the specific requirements associated with planning for unconventional warfare and not expect emerging opportunities to conform with predetermined plans and scenarios. If these unique aspects are not addressed during the conception of special operations supporting plans, at the Geographic Combatant Command level during campaign plan development, the result will likely be unconventional warfare being discounted as a viable option or subordinate headquarters (most likely to the Theater Special Operations Command or TSOC) being given tasks to conduct “unconventional warfare” that are not viable or realistic.[6]
Broadly speaking, the procedures that are unique to planning for unconventional warfare include; determining the existence of UW potential, establishing a realistic and acceptable concept for “resistance” (prior to generating an order at the Geographic Combatant Command/ theater level) and developing and conveying how this concept will integrate with the greater campaign plan. These requirements are linked to critical decision points at the highest levels of command early in the Joint Planning Process and cannot be reverse engineered by the tactical headquarters (JSOTF and below).
Ensuring SOF remain prepared to effectively plan and integrate unconventional warfare efforts in support of large-scale military interventions (e.g. an invasion or liberation) is the means by which unconventional warfare remains a relevant and viable capability for the Joint Conventional Force. While there are other scenarios in which UW could potentially play a role, understanding these specific requirements serves as a critical foundation for Special Operations Forces, as it represents the most complex scenario for planning and potentially the most important one to the Department of Defense. Subsequently, the relevancy of unconventional warfare is not linked to its frequency of use but rather its potential impact or contribution during those rare situations involving large-scale overt military campaigns, particularly against peer and near-peer adversaries.
Determining Potential
Perhaps the most immediate planning challenge that an operational level staff will encounter is determining the feasibility of unconventional warfare for a given campaign. More specifically, this entails identifying a viable resistance partner force and determining whether providing them with support would be beneficial to the campaign. This can be particularly challenging when conducted simultaneous to a rapidly developing scenario and subsequent campaign plan. In simple terms, there is a rapidly approaching expiration date on the value of this assessment (for US planners and for the resistance element that is trying to remain alive). Planners need to remain cautious about not skewing the results in favor of an emerging operational concept. If the operational concept proceeds in the hopes of correcting any shortcoming from the feasibility assessment process, the likelihood is either a resistance element that may prove to have ideology and long-term objectives not aligned with our own or a force that cannot make good use of the (limited) resources to enable them due to environmental or organizational limitations.
There are essentially three ways this assessment can occur; US personnel infiltrate the denied territory; indigenous agents infiltrate the territory on behalf of the U.S. government or U.S. representatives meet with an emissary for the resistance element outside of denied territory. Each of these means comes with a different degree of potential accuracy and corresponding risk. It’s also likely that a scenario might rely on a combination of these means to determine the feasibility to support a specific group. Depending on the approach to the assessment, it can resemble a diplomatic mission, an intelligence operation, or a compartmented special operation. The assessment needs to answer the following questions. Does the entity in question have a desire to work with the United States government and have objectives that are in line with our own? Is their ideology and (battlefield) behavior acceptable to be considered a partner?[7] Additionally, do they have legitimate and capable indigenous leadership and is their environment conducive to resistance? With regard to the environmental conditions, this specifically refers to factors such as safe haven(s) and favorable (restrictive) terrain, passive support from some percentage of the population and an adversary that has some weakness of control over the populations? If these environmental factors do not exist in some capacity, the likelihood for successful operations will be low[8].
Personnel involved in assessment need to understand these criteria as well as what is and is not acceptable and available from the United States government (in terms of policy and possible aid) to effectively negotiate for a favorable position. If the assessment determines that there is potential for resistance, an agreement for support is made with the entity. When this occurs, the entity is formally identified as a partner (similar to an ally) with their own recognized indigenous chain of command (that may reside internal or external to the country)[9].
Developing an Acceptable and Realistic Concept for Resistance
At the inception of any concept to “enable resistance”, it’s critical to clarify the intent and scope for any resistance activities as a common reference point for further planning. There are many things a resistance can do to contribute to a campaign effort. However, these potential contributions are not necessarily intuitive or obvious. Theater campaign planners may not see the potential value from enabling resistance or ask special operations planners to consider highly unrealistic tasks not appropriate for resistance forces. Theater special operations planners need to be prepared to speak to these scenarios with a high degree of familiarity. The concept for resistance should include the anticipated scope of the proposed actions for the Guerrillas and the Underground that correspond with the campaign objectives as well as ensuring the appropriate requisite legal authorities are in place before being tasked to a subordinate headquarters with broad generic terms such as “conduct unconventional warfare”. If this is not done, there is a potential for various levels of command to develop different and potentially inaccurate or incomplete perceptions of exactly what “resistance” includes.
Guerrillas traditionally operate in small decentralized bands focusing on vulnerable targets and avoiding decisive engagements. This is commonly the case when the resistance is in a defensive posture fighting for its very survival. However, in certain circumstances where the enemy forces and the guerrilla force have reached a state of near parity, the guerrillas could operate as militias in which they operate in a manner closer to mobile infantry columns rather than traditional guerrilla forces. This was the case in Afghanistan in 2001 with the Northern Alliance and Northern Iraq in 2003 with the Kurdish Peshmerga. It’s critical that planners and operational elements understand the distinction between these two scenarios and when these tactics are permissible and when they are not[10].
If the concept includes providing lethal aid to guerrillas or elements of the underground, this should be quantified with a description for the type of activities to be conducted and the type of material that is acceptable and available. A similar example could be made for the conduct of subversion through the Underground. If this is not articulated clearly during the theater planning process, it can lead to a breakdown in subordinate’s planning, categorized by the units continuously submitting requirements back to their higher headquarters and requesting authorities for the tasks they have been assigned. This dynamic has a potential to cause the concept to become overly guerrilla-centric and substantially less effective.
When developing a concept of how resistance could contribute to a larger invasion there are essentially two options; support to a second front that diverts enemy resources and attention or direct support to an invasion area. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 offers two examples of these types of efforts. The Kurdish resistance efforts in the north diverted much of the Iraq’s resources away from the main invasion area in the south while efforts to enable the Shia resistance in the south would have theoretically supported the main invasion maneuver efforts coming from Kuwait. The southern effort did not materialize as it proved to be a much more challenging if not potentially unfeasible due to a lack of resistance potential among the population.
Examples of Potential Resistance Contributions
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Situational Awareness and Intelligence Collection.
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Attacks on vulnerable enemy forces and capabilities (whether by sabotage of guerrilla activity) – attacks on lines of communications, rear area infrastructure and other selected vulnerable enemy capabilities.
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Subversion (undermining the enemy’s authority and legitimacy)
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Unconventional Assisted Recovery (UAR) (recovery of isolated personnel through resistance infrastructure)
- Deception Operations
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Reception of General-Purpose Forces (GPF). Reception of GPF can be highly valuable in terms of retaining control of newly liberated territory and facilitating a more rapid advance.
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Rear Area/ LOC security. Population control measures, assistance with civil military operations, distribution of humanitarian aid and securing lines of communications (by trusted indigenous forces with US advisors)
Conveying How the Concept for Resistance Integrates into the Campaign Plan
Once a concept for resistance is developed, the theater headquarters needs to convey the task to enable resistance with enough context and detail that enables the subordinate headquarters to develop a viable operational and tactical level plan. This becomes particularly challenging when the concept calls for resistance in support of an undisclosed D-day/H-hour event (time and location). The order must describe the required effects in relation to an unknown date (e.g. D-day). Special operations forces may be given a “no later than” date to have a resistance capability in place and ready to conduct operations, indicating a minimum amount of time from their known deployment date into the theater to establish a capability (e.g. establish the required capability NLT C+60). Additionally, the special operations forces should be given a required length of time to maintain their activities once they initiate a broader scale of resistance operations (e.g. BPT sustain resistance operations from D-D+4). This enables the special operations personnel to determine how much risk they can sustain in their operations based on the expectation of link-up with advancing conventional maneuver forces[11].
Perhaps a last conceptual detail that requires clarification up front is timing and method of notification of any expanded resistance operations. If the details of the invasion are compartmented and (rightly so), not shared with the special operations forces operating in denied territory, when and how should they receive notification to execute operations? How much lag time should be expected between receiving notification execution by resistance forces? These details are not obvious or intuitive and must be agreed to at the earliest stages of concept development. The theater level command needs to develop a common understanding of when resistance efforts would rise up in relation to the start of D-day.
Operational elements conducting unconventional warfare are expected to operate under a system of decentralized command and control, largely due to the unique constraints associated with operating from denied territory. This implies they must be empowered to determine the specific resistance activities that would achieve the required effects. To enable subordinate units, orders need to focus on the required effects rather than overly specific tasks (such as specific targets for attack). Specific resistance operations cannot be determined from friendly territory and without consultation with the actual resistance force.
Similarly, when operations are conceived from within the denied territory, their coordination cannot be conducted in the same manner as those during an unrestrictive counterinsurgency environment (e.g. submitting detailed CONOPs for approval to the higher command). Without the required detail at the start of planning, the requirements cannot be tasked and conveyed to subordinate forces. This would make developing and executing a viable plan “to enable resistance” incredibly difficult if not impossible.
Conclusion
Individually, resistance activities may not appear to make an overly significant contribution to a campaign in comparison to the added complexity and risk that comes with them. However, when the potential contributions and subsequent benefits are clearly understood by planners, the cost benefit analysis is much clearer. Unconventional Warfare provides the greatest contribution or value during scenarios in which the US military does not have the benefit of its normal superiority advantage (as was the case when unconventional warfare played a critical role in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003). While these scenarios are rare, the potential consequences make them the most important.
While the benefits to these campaigns is obviously significant, there are secondary benefits, that are no less significant and cannot be replicated or accomplished by advanced weaponry or foreign liberating forces. Enabling resistance invests the population in their own liberation. These seemingly small efforts provide a critical source of national pride that is desperately needed in the wake of a hugely traumatic event such as an enemy invasion and eventual liberation. It transforms the collective psyche of the post conflict population from one of a “helpless victim” to “a victim that fought back”. Secondly, the presence of indigenous forces as part of a coalition enables the liberating forces to reestablish order and essential services more rapidly and effectively and relinquish control to back to representatives of the population and government. Both aspects greatly accelerate the population’s psychologically and physically recovery and return to normalcy.
If the Joint Conventional Force and the Special Operations Force cannot evolve to more effectively plan, integrate and execute these types of operations (in those rare opportunities when they are appropriate), there will likely be a continued atrophy of unconventional warfare, rationalized by the flawed notion that it just isn’t suited to “modern warfare”. However, if the Joint Conventional and Special Operations communities can evolve to collaborate on education and training, develop and retain the required skills and knowledge and effectively apply them when required, the Department of Defense will be in a much better position to meet a wider array of possible scenarios and threat.
[1] FM 21-30 Special Forces Operations 1955
[2] SOCCENT After Action Review of Support to the Kuwaiti Resistance, Mar 1991. USSOCOM History Office Archies. UW failed to materialize as a viable concept with the Kuwaiti resistance during the Gulf War in 1991, the Shia resistance in southern Iraq in 2003, the Libyan resistance in 2011 and the Syrian rebels in 2013.
[3] In some cases, this has led to misguided attempts to ensure the relevancy of unconventional warfare by seeking to broaden it to encompass other (existing) operational concepts such as “resistance” against insurgents or terrorists (aka COIN and CT). When this occurs, it has the opposite effect, obscuring the procedural issues and further miring the Special Operations and Joint Conventional Force communities in confusion.
[4] Unconventional Warfare is normally conducted in denied territory alongside irregular partner resistance forces, without the benefit of established LOCs and for extended periods of time. This creates unique requirements for decentralized control, minimal external communications, and collaboration with and recognition of a partner chain of command and the transfer of non-standard lethal aid.
[5] William M. Arkin, Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs and Operations in the 9/11 World, 2005, Steerforth Press
[6] This challenge is exasperated within newly designated Joint Task Force Headquarters (e.g. a Combined Joint Task Force functioning on behalf of the Geographic Combatant Command and a Special Operations Task Force or SOJTF, functioning on behalf of the Theater Special Operations Command or TSOC) that may not have the benefit of established staff relationships.
[7] In certain cases, a potential resistance partner’s behavior can be altered (restrained) by negotiations for certain aid, thereby making their conduct more acceptable for sponsorship and support.
[8] Some of these factors can be influenced slightly such as the implementation of “no-fly” zones or information operations to the population. While they can be influenced, they cannot be manufactured, overlooked, or compensated for by other factors.
[9] If the resistance force is aligned with an allied government in-exile then they are regarded as an Ally. If they are an irregular force and aligned with the accepted leadership for the resistance (such as the case with the Kurdish Peshmerga in Iraq in 2002 or the Free Syrian Army in 2014) then they are legally a “Partner”. In either case they are accountable to an indigenous chain of command and not the United States. Operational elements from the United States may provide operational advice, facilitate, and coordinate their efforts and monitor their conduct to ensure compliance to the agreement. This should not be confused with operations using surrogate forces (under US control). Resistance forces are not considered surrogates.
[10] Understanding the status or phase of the resistance is critical in understanding the appropriate tactics. The incorporation of US air support in some cases can tip the balance to create a state of near parity and allow the guerrillas to operate like quasi-infantry. However, it’s critical for planners and advisors to understand that the guerrillas may not be prepared to operate in this manner and the environment may not support these tactics. When this occurs, there can be a tendency to over-focus on the mobile guerrilla column supported by a disproportionate amount of air support and overlook the other aspects or contributions of a broader resistance to the detriment of the overall potential effects.
[11] An example description for the task of UW to a subordinate SOF HQs could include “be prepared to commence resistance operations no earlier than 60 days from C-day (arrival in theater). Expect to receive notification simultaneous to the commencement of H-Hour /Day. Once D-Day occurs be prepared to sustain combat operations with resistance forces for 96 hours (D-D+4).
About the Author(s)
Mark Grdovic retired as an Army Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel in 2012. He has served with 10th and 5th Special Forces Groups, as a Small Group Instructor and Company Commander with the 1st Special Warfare Training Group and Chief of Special Forces Doctrine with the U.S. Army JFK Special Warfare Center and School. He also served as the Deputy Commander for the Joint Operations Group Central (JOG-C) in SOCCENT. His service includes multiple deployments to Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan and various crisis response operations in Africa. Since his retirement he has worked as a Strategic Planner at U.S. CENTCOM, a sensitive activities advisor in SOCCENT and an adjunct faculty member and course director for the Joint Unconventional Warfare Course at the Joint Special Operations University (JSOU). He is currently the Senior International SOF Advisor within the USSOCOM J3-International Division.
2. America's New Great-Power Strategy | by Joseph S. Nye, Jr.
I think there are many (probably a few million people inside China) who may not agree with this statement comparing Xi and Stalin.
Excerpt:
Chinese President Xi Jinping is no Stalin, and the Chinese system is not Marxist-Leninist but “market Leninist” – a form of state capitalism based on a hybrid of public and private firms subservient to an authoritarian party elite.
America's New Great-Power Strategy | by Joseph S. Nye, Jr. - Project Syndicate
During the Cold War, US grand strategy focused on containing the power of the Soviet Union. China’s rise now requires America and its allies to develop a strategy that seeks not total victory over an existential threat, but rather managed competition that allows for both cooperation and rivalry within a rules-based system.
CAMBRIDGE – During the four decades of the Cold War, the United States had a grand strategy focused on containing the power of the Soviet Union. Yet by the 1990s, following the Soviet Union’s collapse, America had been deprived of that pole star. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, US President George W. Bush’s administration tried to fill the void with a strategy that it called a “global war on terror.” But that approach provided nebulous guidance and led to long US-led wars in marginal places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Since 2017, the US has returned to “great-power competition,” this time with China.
As a grand US strategy, great-power competition has the advantage of focusing on major threats to America’s security, economy, and values. While terrorism is a continuing problem that the US must treat seriously, it poses a lesser threat than rival great powers. Terrorism is like jujitsu, in which a weak adversary turns the power of a larger player against itself. While the 9/11 attacks killed more than 2,600 Americans, the “endless wars” that the US launched in response to them cost even more lives, as well as trillions of dollars. While President Barack Obama’s administration tried to pivot to Asia – the fastest growing part of the world economy – the legacy of the global war on terror kept the US mired in the Middle East.
A strategy of great-power competition can help America refocus; but it has two problems. First, it lumps together very different types of states. Russia is a declining power and China a rising one. The US must appreciate the unique nature of the threat that Russia poses. As the world sadly discovered in 1914, on the eve of World War I, a declining power (Austria-Hungary) can sometimes be the most risk-acceptant in a conflict. Today, Russia is in demographic and economic decline, but retains enormous resources that it can employ as a spoiler in everything from nuclear-arms control and cyber conflict to the Middle East. The US therefore needs a Russia strategy that does not throw that country into China’s arms.
A second problem is that the concept of great-power rivalry provides an insufficient alert to a new type of threat we face. National security and the global political agenda have changed since 1914 and 1945, but US strategy currently underappreciates new threats from ecological globalization. Global climate change will cost trillions of dollars and can cause damage on the scale of war; the COVID-19 pandemic has already killed more Americans than all the country’s wars, combined, since 1945.
Yet, the current US strategy results in a Pentagon budget that is more than 100 times that of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and 25 times that of the National Institutes of Health. Former US Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers and other economists recently called for the establishment of a $10 billion annual Global Health Threats Fund, which is “miniscule compared to the $10 trillion that governments have already incurred in the COVID-19 crisis.”
Meanwhile, US policymakers are debating how to deal with China. Some politicians and analysts call the current situation a “new Cold War,” but squeezing China into this ideological framework misrepresents the real strategic challenge America faces. The US and the Soviet Union had little bilateral commerce or social contact, whereas America and its allies trade heavily with China and admit several hundred thousand Chinese students to their universities. Chinese President Xi Jinping is no Stalin, and the Chinese system is not Marxist-Leninist but “market Leninist” – a form of state capitalism based on a hybrid of public and private firms subservient to an authoritarian party elite.
In addition, China is now the largest trade partner to more countries than the US is. America can decouple security risks like Huawei from its 5G telecommunications network, but trying to curtail all trade with China would be too costly. And even if breaking apart economic interdependence were possible, we cannot decouple the ecological interdependence that obeys the laws of biology and physics, not politics.
Since America cannot tackle climate change or pandemics by itself, it has to realize that some forms of power must be exercised with others. Addressing these global problems will require the US to work with China at the same time that it competes with its navy to defend freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. If China links the issues and refuses to cooperate, it will hurt itself.
A good great-power-competition strategy requires careful net assessment. Underestimation breeds complacency, while overestimation creates fear. Either can lead to miscalculation.
China is the world’s second-largest economy, and its GDP (at market exchange rates) may surpass that of the US by the 2030s. But even if it does, China’s per capita income remains less than a quarter that of the US, and the country faces a number of economic, demographic, and political problems. Its economic growth rate is slowing, the size of its labor force peaked in 2011, and it has few political allies. If the US, Japan, and Europe coordinate their policies, they will still represent the largest part of the global economy and will have the capacity to organize a rules-based international order capable of shaping Chinese behavior. That alliance is at the heart of a strategy to manage China’s rise.
As former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd argues, the objective for great-power competition with China is not total victory over an existential threat, but rather “managed strategic competition.” That will require America and its allies to avoid demonizing China. They should instead see the relationship as a “cooperative rivalry” that requires equal attention to both sides of the description at the same time. On those terms, we can cope successfully, but only if we realize that this is not the great-power competition of the twentieth century.
3. Biden needs to get China to cooperate with the pandemic’s origins investigation
Excerpts:
Biden announced in late May that he ordered a 90-day intelligence community review of the pandemic’s origins that should be completed in late July or early August. But the review will not succeed unless Biden details his plans to compel China’s compliance with the WHO’s legitimate requests. Thus, Biden’s announcement was an attempt to kick the can down the road. Unfortunately for him, the voices calling for a complete origins review have only become louder, increasing the urgency for Biden to get tough with Beijing.
The debate over whether the virus occurred naturally or via a lab leak has obscured the reality that everyone agrees that China is obstructing the origins investigation. Biden has a responsibility to the people who lost their lives to COVID-19 to lead the world in forcing China to cooperate and prevent the next pandemic.
Biden needs to get China to cooperate with the pandemic’s origins investigation
August 3, 2021 - 12:00 AM
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, acknowledged in mid-June that there was a “premature push” to dismiss the theory that COVID-19 initially spread from a Chinese lab. Tedros also urged Beijing to provide additional data that will aid in determining the origins of the pandemic. Belatedly, Tedros is pushing the WHO in the right direction, but the Biden administration has no strategy for compelling China’s cooperation on the origins investigation.
Tedros contributed to the current impasse when he gave the Chinese Communist Party a veto over the contents of the initial March COVID-19 origins report. Thus, it was not surprising when the report parroted Beijing’s propaganda.
That first report called the lab origin theory “extremely unlikely,” but Tedros, to his credit, immediately rejected that conclusion. He went further earlier this month, saying, “I have worked in [a] lab, and lab accidents happen. It’s common; I have seen it happening, and I have myself had errors, so it can happen.”
His comments mirror President Joe Biden’s late May statement calling the lab origin theory one of two “likely” scenarios along with natural transmission. Further review has led senior officials including national security adviser Jake Sullivan to believe the lab origin theory to be at least as plausible as the alternative. Supporters of both theories agree that China is obstructing a credible investigation of the pandemic’s origins.
Story continues below
Tedros even took a direct shot at Beijing, saying that we need “direct information on what the situation of these labs was before and at the start of the pandemic.” His comments convey the frustration with Beijing’s obstruction, including its continued denial that researchers at the Wuhan lab became ill in November 2019, and why the lab’s previously public database was taken offline in September 2019.
The WHO has completed the design for the second phase of its origins review, including audits of laboratories and research institutes in Wuhan. Tedros called on “China to be transparent, open and co-operate especially on the information, raw data that we asked for in the early days of the pandemic.”
Despite serious flaws, the March 2021 origins report provides clues about the data that Beijing has not provided, including information related to more than 76,000 cases of individuals who had illnesses similar to COVID-19 in October to December 2019. There are also 200,000 blood donations collected annually in Wuhan, including samples from fall 2019, that could be tested for antibodies. This data could be used to determine whether the virus was circulating earlier than the first known cases in December 2019. The longer Beijing does not provide such key evidence, the more we should assume that China knows the information is derogatory in some way.
In that vein, China’s foreign minister dismissed Tedros’s requests for transparency, saying that the joint mission had “accessed substantive data and info and fully understood that some info could not be copied or taken out of China due to privacy issues.”
At a press conference last week, the deputy head of China’s National Health Commission called Tedros’s plans “impossible” for China. He also said that serious consideration of the lab origin in the review was a “disrespect for common sense and the arrogant attitude toward science revealed in this plan.” Prior to that press conference, a China Foreign Ministry spokesman requested an investigation of the military research lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland, noting that 5 million Chinese had signed a petition requesting the investigation. Directing this kind of baseless accusation at the United States has become a staple of Beijing’s efforts to distract from its own intransigence.
Beijing is ignoring requests from Biden, the G-7, and now Tedros to cooperate with the WHO’s origins review. Yet so far, the Biden administration has not articulated a plan for how it will elicit China’s cooperation.
Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman met China’s foreign minister last month. Determining how a virus emerged in China and eventually killed more than 600,000 Americans was on the agenda, but it is unclear whether the Biden administration prioritized it among the other issues in the U.S.-China relationship. Sherman raised concerns about China’s noncooperation with a comprehensive origins review. But Beijing rejected those requests, so what’s the plan now?
Biden announced in late May that he ordered a 90-day intelligence community review of the pandemic’s origins that should be completed in late July or early August. But the review will not succeed unless Biden details his plans to compel China’s compliance with the WHO’s legitimate requests. Thus, Biden’s announcement was an attempt to kick the can down the road. Unfortunately for him, the voices calling for a complete origins review have only become louder, increasing the urgency for Biden to get tough with Beijing.
The debate over whether the virus occurred naturally or via a lab leak has obscured the reality that everyone agrees that China is obstructing the origins investigation. Biden has a responsibility to the people who lost their lives to COVID-19 to lead the world in forcing China to cooperate and prevent the next pandemic.
Anthony Ruggiero (@NatSecAnthony) is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He previously served in the U.S. government for more than 19 years, most recently as senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense on the U.S. National Security Council.
4. The Irony of Misinformation and USIA
A long and important read from one of our nation's experts, Matt Armstrong, on information and influence, public diplomacy, PSYOP and propaganda, and the history of influence in the US to include the USIA.
Conclusion:
USIA was the manifestation of segregating information from policy; USIA’s authorities were less than the organization it replaced; and, USIA was not charged with nor did it conduct an anti-/counter-political warfare mission. Today, the organizational chart as-is has the potential to surpass the relevance, integration, and effectiveness of USIA if the White House and Secretary of State would appreciate this function, hire the right person, and support and hold accountable this office and its role. It is profoundly mind-numbing that the abundant “bring back USIA” pieces are so anchored in misinformation in their well-intentioned fight against misinformation.
Maybe a new USIA is the best course of action, but the supporting arguments to date are dangerous by their distraction from the core organizational problems we face today. I remain unconvinced that changing the organizational chart, in the absence of leadership and strategy, will magically create leadership and strategy and align organizational behavior and budgets and policy and personnel accordingly. It did not happen in the 1950s or 1960s (or the 1970s or the 1980s) when the White House and Congress were largely aligned in appreciating the threat to the US from Russian political warfare, why do some people think alignment will magically happen today when the government is far more complex, not to mention that today’s Defense Department is vastly more engaged directly with foreign public opinion than before? The “bring back USIA” not just ignores the past but encourages this ignorance at the risk of us failing to fix the problems that led to USIA. In other words, “bring back USIA” reveals that not only too many do not understand the true deficiencies of today, but encourage us to repeat the mistakes of yesterday. The mantra “bring back USIA” is strategy of hope, the hope leadership, accountability, and policy will magically integrate information; the problem is hope is still not a strategy.
The Irony of Misinformation and USIA
A clear absence of research, making arguments incongruent with history and facts, and unsubstantiated if-then statements are the kind of malpractice that at some point is more than mere accidental misinformation. With the rare exception, modern calls to reincarnate the United States Information Agency that skirts beyond malpractice and misinformation and into the realm of disinformation. Calls to “bring back USIA” are prevalent enough to be a genre of its own. And this genre, while well-intentioned, is a Pavlovian reaction based almost entirely on demonstrably false mythologies.
The most recent entry into this steady stream of malpractice is a piece entitled “It’s Time to Bring Back USIA” by Mr. Shay Khatiri. There is certainly a need for broader discussion and debate around the broad topics under and near the umbrella of “public diplomacy” and the role of public opinion in foreign policy, but this article, like the whole of the genre, lacks a basic awareness of the underlying “facts” it invokes and upon which its argument is built. That it was written this way, that experts who may have reviewed a draft did not catch the gaps in the arguments, and even retweets of the article by “public diplomacy” advocates, reveal the shallowness of the discourse around USIA and “public diplomacy.”
That the debate is this shallow at this date should, sadly, surprise no one. USIA mythology is not the exclusive domain of pundits who parachute into the topic. They are likely recalling the superficial history taught in their cold war studies or national security class or some book they read on “strategic communication” and the good ole days. Academia perpetuates the mythology, and it lives in the minds of many. I was a board member of a non-profit group relevant to this subject when a former practitioner-cum-academic suggested an event we were planning should start with the founding of USIA because, as their logic went, that was the modern beginning of US public diplomacy. No, just no. I had to interject that USIA came eight years after these “public diplomacy” operations were operated wholly within the State Department and later authorized by the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948. So, again, I do not fault Mr. Khatiri for his lack of knowledge, his article is just the product of a profound misunderstanding of history likely conveyed to him in school, in articles and books, and in various discussions all of which combined continue to limit the quality of the discourse today on this important topic. Put another way, he is an (unfortunate) proxy for my frustration that is really aimed at all the people and resources that contribute to this genre and led him to write his article as he did.
We need change, but this will only come from an informed debate based on facts if we are to learn from our past actions, and more importantly, past mistakes. If past organizations are to be invoked, we need an honest understanding of those agencies’ trajectories. I am all for and welcome a debate on the topic of the US government’s continuing failure to integrate international information operations with foreign policy, but the misinformation around USIA – and related organizations like the Active Measures Working Group – coupled with the surprising lack of awareness of the Psychological Strategy Board and Operations Control Board in discussions about centering information policy and leadership in the NSC, is profound and disturbing.
I appreciate the author linked to my 2015 “No, We Do Not Need To Revive The U.S. Information Agency” but I have the feeling he did not read it, certainly he did not respond to it. Mr. Khatiri may have been better served – and developed better arguments – if in addition to that article he read my 2017 “The Past, Present, And Future Of The War For Public Opinion.” He would have learned in that latter piece that what he thinks he knows about USIA may not be accurate, at the very least it would have challenged his preconceived ideas. A longer, footnoted version of this article is my chapter “The Politics of Information Warfare in the US” in the 2018 book Hybrid Conflicts and Information Warfare: New Labels, Old Politics. (Contact me if you want a PDF of that chapter; also see this post for the endnotes to the 2015 “No, We Do Not Need…” article.) Mr. Khatiri may have also benefited from reading my chapter “Operationalizing Public Diplomacy” in the 2020 edition of the Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy in which, among the broader defects around USIA and the State Department’s poor support of public diplomacy, I speak directly on the origin of the term “public diplomacy” as a product of reinforcing the segregation of information from policy. There is also the video of my January 2021 presentation “Neglected History, Forgotten Lessons: The Struggle for Minds and Wills Relies on Leadership First, Organization Second” (launching SMA’s Integrating Information in Joint Operations Speaker Series) and the recent podcast “Episode 49: Armstrong On The Smith-Mundt Act” of the Cognitive Crucible series by the Information Professionals Association. These options, among others, could have helped create a more informed article, even if he disagreed with my arguments. However, these may not have come up in a Google search since they are not USIA-focused but rather broadly focused on integrating, or rather the failure to integrate, international information operations into US foreign policy with the focus on leadership.
For a semblance of brevity, which is relative since you’ve already read 900 words, my response below to Mr. Khatiri’s article is in three parts. First up is why was USIA created? I will show that USIA’s creation story is a myth and that USIA replaced an organization that wielded more authorities across a greater range of operations and resided within, and not outside of, the foreign policy bureaucracy. The second part looks into Mr. Khatiri’s “punching bag” comment. This part counters the misinformation that imagines USIA had a greater leadership role and integration with US foreign policy than it did. Within a few years of establishment, USIA faced twenty years of reports urging that if USIA was not part of US foreign policy decision-making that it must be reintegrated into the State Department. The third point reveals the emptiness of the “bring back USIA” genre. Considering USIA’s real impact was not in DC but the programs the agency ran on the ground abroad, what does “bring back USIA” really mean when the arguments ignore the field operations and are wrongly based on the agency’s DC role?
In the end, the reader should see the “bring back USIA” genre as an ill-informed hope that a new, or in this case old, organization chart will magically create and instill leadership, policy, direction, and accountability in integrating information with policy independent of whatever the White House on down may do (or not do). A new box on the chart will not compensate for bad leadership or the lack of leadership.
Point One: Why was USIA Created?
To think more clearly about this question, let’s look back at the history of USIA. The agency was created in 1953 to counter Soviet propaganda by telling the truth about the world and representing a better picture of America and American principles. It absorbed several extant government programs, including Voice of America (launched during the Second World War) and Radio Europe (launched in 1950), as well as various activities that had been performed by other departments and agencies. New programs were begun under USIA’s auspices, including Radio Liberty (directed at the USSR, launched in 1953), Radio Martí (directed at Cuba, begun in 1983), and a number of cultural and educational exchanges.
Khatiri, Shay. “It’s Time to Bring Back USIA”. The Bulwark, July 21, 2021 (accessed 26 July 2021).
The history of USIA is a good place to start as it is the root from which the misinformation and mythology of the organization rises. The conventional wisdom is USIA’s creation was a progressive step of consolidating the government’s international information programs into a single agency, under singular leadership, and with clearly defined appropriation from Congress in the face of a growing Russian threat. The reality is a bit different.
(If you were triggered by the USIS reference, yes, USIS predated USIA. You may have been taught, as I was, that USIS was USIA’s name abroad because, as the story went, the “A = agency which is too close to CIA.” The reality is USIS, leaving aside its initial run of 1917-1919, was launched two decades before USIA. USIS was in State for years as the umbrella name of news and information products sent to State Department posts abroad to be shared at the post’s discretion with local people and organizations before USIS was transferred to USIA in 1953. In other words, in some countries, USIS was a known entity for many years, even decades, before USIA appeared on the scene. Here’s a link to a USIS product from September 1945.)
While Rep. Karl Mundt’s bill of January 1945 focused on building international understanding through educational exchanges, the threat of Russian propaganda and political warfare caused the scope of the bill and the rhetoric supporting the bill to shift and become more urgent. The Smith-Mundt subcommittee, a special joint House and Senate bipartisan committee that toured Europe in September and October 1947, recommended immediate passage of the bill because of the situation in Europe:
Europe today has again become a vast battlefield of ideologies in which words have replaced armaments as the active elements of attack and defense. The USSR and its obedient Communist parties throughout Europe have taken the initiative in this war of words against the western democracies.
Mundt, Karl E. “We Are Losing the War of Words in Europe.” New York Times, 1947. See also House Committee on Foreign Affairs. “The United States Information Service in Europe: Report of the Special Mundt Subcommittee of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Pursuant to the Provisions of H.Res 295.” (1948).
See also “The Past, Present, And Future Of The War For Public Opinion” (2017). This quote first appeared in the committee’s draft report of November 1947.
In 1951, the Senate ratcheted up the warnings:
Whereas the first weapon of aggression by the Kremlin is propaganda designed to subvert, to confuse and to divide the free world, and to inflame the Russian and satellite peoples with hatred for our free institutions…
Senate Resolution 74 on Overseas Information Programs of the US, June 1951. See 2017 “The Past, Present, And Future Of The War For Public Opinion” or, better, see the chapter “The Politics of Information Warfare in the US” in the 2018 book Hybrid Conflicts and Information Warfare: New Labels, Old Politics.
The international information operations in the State Department were good but overwhelmed by the volume, frequency, and aggression of Russian, and to later and to a lesser degree Chinese, propaganda and political warfare. But the biggest problem was the department itself. The personalities that drove the State Department’s mission to expand under the premise that the “nature of present-day foreign relations makes it essential for the United States to maintain informational activities abroad as an integral part of the conduct of our foreign affairs” moved on, leaving increasing room for the “pin-striped” foreign service traditionalists and the department’s bureaucracy to increase their direct and indirect (including leaks to the press) opposition to directly engaging the public abroad. Dean Acheson, who experienced this first hand as an assistant secretary and later as the under secretary helping move the Mundt bill along, had some choice words about how the department “muffed its intelligence role” (his words) that he also applied to the information mission:
In all of these cases, either the Department was not imaginative enough to see its opportunity or administratively competent enough to seize it, or the effort became entangled in red tape and stifled by bureaucratic elephantiasis, or conflict with enemies in Congress absorbed all the Department’s energies. Then, in the stock market phrase, the new function was ‘spun off’ to live a sort of bloodless life of administration without policy, like the French bureaucracy between Bonaparte and de Gaulle.
Acheson, Dean. Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department. New York, NY: Norton, 1969, 127.
In January 1952, Acheson, now the Secretary of State, insulated USIS and the rest of the international information programs by creating the quasi-independent International Information Administration inside the department. The purpose was to consolidate leadership, programs, authorities, budgets, personnel, and accountability under a single point of contact, the IIA Director, who had direct access to the Secretary of State and the rest of the government’s foreign policy establishment. (If you thought of the Global Engagement Center after reading the first sentence, the second sentence should disabuse you of any similarity between the two organizations.) The IIA was an operational organization with official agreements and links to agencies across the government. IIA described itself as managing the “psychological activities of the US Government in the Cold War, which are generated by Public Law 402.” (Public Law 402 was the Smith-Mundt Act. The use of “psychological” is noteworthy as the November 1947 draft report of the Smith-Mundt subcommittee, see the quote “Europe today…” above, originally wrote, “The United States Information Service is truly the voice of America… To be effective it must… (5) be a ready instrument of psychological warfare when required.” This fifth point did not appear in the publicly released report and public perceptions of the Act discount this psychological angle.)
So why was USIA created if IIA was already a one-stop shop supporting US foreign policy in the face of Russian propaganda against America’s interests abroad? There were two reasons. The first reason was the State Department did not want the responsibility and refused the mission. The second reason is Acheson’s successor, John Foster Dulles, refused the mission and wanted the whole operation separated from the department.
In 1951, the US Advisory Commission on Information, established by the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 to provide expert oversight and advice to the President, the Secretary of State, and Congress on the information programs, stated had this comment on where the information program resided:
If we were persuaded that it could function more effectively outside the State Department, we would feel obliged to say so. But our experience has led us to have grave doubts that the program in the hands of a separate agency would operate as well as it does now… One vital requisite in the handling of the information is that it shall not be remote from policy-planning. Another equally significant need is that the United States abroad should speak with a single voice. There can be separate tones and modulations in that voice, and a choice of vocabularies, but the voice should not contridict itself. We do not believe that [the Office of War Information] operations were altogether happy as far as policy-coordination is concerned… No [information program] can be stronger than the policy from which it springs. Thus the infromation specialists should be at all times and at all levels [be] just as close as they possbily can be to the making of policy… Since most foreign policy is made by the State Department, the closer the information program can be to the State Department, the more effective [the program] will be.
United States Advisory Commission on Information. “Fourth Semiannual Report to the Congress, April 1951.”
What changed two years later? In addition to a new Secretary of State objecting to the information mission, the Eisenhower administration promised the separated operation would have cabinet-level status, or at least operate as a cabinet-level agency. In support of this promise, the commission revised its position in its February 1953 and recommended that “IIA be lifted out of the Department of State and placed in a new agency of Cabinet-level in which there is vested authority to formulate psychological strategy and to coordinate information policies of all Government agencies and consolidate all overseas information programs.” The commission’s comment that the program would no longer be “buried in the huge State Department” hinted at the real real cause.
IIA and the broader information mission were seen as a distracting administrative burden for the Secretary of State. Testifying in support of the separation at a hearing on the Eisenhower administration’s Reorganization Plan No. 8 to create USIA, the Under Secretary of State, Walter Bedell Smith (the modern equivalent to the Under Secretary then is today’s Deputy Secretary of State), emphasized the theme of a “huge State Department” that was unwieldy in its present form:
Since the end of the war it has been increasingly difficult for the Secretary of State to deal with the steadily mounting responsibilities placed upon him and still have enough time so that he and his principal assistants could concentrate on basic foreign policy functions.
Reorganization Plans Nos. 7 and 8 of 1953 (Foreign Operations Administration) (United States Information Agency): Hearings. Eighty-Third Congress, First Session on H.J. Res. 261 and H.J. Res. 262. June 22, 23, and 24, 1953, 34.
(Outside of the scope of this paper is a discussion on the point the Secretary of State is not hired to be the chief administrator of the foreign affairs bureaucracy in the same way the Secretary of Defense is hired to be the chief administrator for military readiness and the conduct of military affairs.)
The point that international information activities was an “integral part” of foreign affairs was rejected; information was not a “basic foreign policy functions.” As to the “huge State Department,” creating USIA resulted in a forty (40!) percent reduction in personnel at the department as personnel moved to the new agency, were fired, or moved to the new agency and then fired. In VOA’s first year under USIA, seven language services were eliminated. In 34 remaining languages, program hours were reduced from 33 to 28 a day. By the way, the USIA Director reported that 42% of the programming was “straight news” with the remaining 58% as “news analysis and features.”
Eisenhower’s blue-ribbon President’s Committee on International Information Activities, more commonly referred to as the Jackson Committee after its chairman, C.D. Jackson, preferred retaining IIA in the department as an autonomous operation with administrative and fiscal autonomy and a higher rank for its chief. Another alternative by the Jackson Committee was an independent IIA under the National Security Council. Since Secretary of State Dulles wanted to be rid of IIA, this scenario was adopted, though the relationship to the NSC was dropped (and apparently forgotten by those who invoke the Jackson Committee’s support for USIA). Recall the Advisory Commission report supporting USIA if it were Cabinet-level agency. Thought USIA would not be a Cabinet agency and not under the NSC, Under Secretary Smith said the independent USIA would be closely integrated with the diplomatic, military, and economic agencies and with the objectives of the nation. When pressed by a skeptical Congress on the absence of a firm foundation for this relationship, Smith said this structure was clear in President Eisenhower’s instruction to the relevant Secretaries regarding USIA:
The Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of the Treasury as appropriate, shall review plans and policies relative to military and economic-assistance programs, foreign-information programs and legislative proposals of the Foreign Operations Administration and the United States Information Agency to assure that in their conceptions and execution, such plans, policies, and proposals are consistent with and further the attainment of foreign policy, military policy, and financial and monetary policy objectives
Eisenhower, Dwight D. “Memorandum on the Organization of the Executive Branch for the Conduct of Foreign Affairs.” June 1, 1953.
Some Members of Congress remained concerned the separation of information from policy would become a problem. The President’s message to the executive heads was not, in their view, an adequate safeguard to ensure USIA and information remained integrated with policy. This was true for a while, but despite Smith’s assurances and the President’s memo, the segregation would become the norm. The separation of USIA from policy grew with exceptions being wholly dependent on personalities, interests, and immediate requirements.
Coinciding with the separation was a further consolidation of information programs under a single roof. There were primarily the international information programs of the aptly-named Mutual Security Agency (which managed the government’s foreign aid) and some of the Defense Department’s information programs in Germany and Austria. However, this consolidation could have been done with IIA under the State Department, an independent USIA was not needed to “absorb” these operations.
The separation also created an opportunity for reduce the portfolio. Many of the exchange programs, which were intentional influence operations aimed at creating mutual understanding to undermine adversarial propaganda and political warfare activities, were blocked from going to USIA because Sen. Fulbright did not want them associated with VOA or, more broadly, associated with “information” programs. (The Fulbright-Hayes Act of 1961 further separated exchanges from the Smith-Mundt Act and removed Mundt’s name from the whole project of exchanges, and erased the inconvenient fact Fulbright exchanges had up to that point relied on the Smith-Mundt Act. Broadly speaking, Sen. Fulbright was one of the severest enemies to “public diplomacy” as he rejected the threat of Russia and communism and argued the information programs unfairly antogonized Russia.)
One last point on the history. Mr. Khatiri’s historical statement on USIA that has the word “absorbed” doing a lot of work (see the quote above that USIA “absorbed several extant government programs”). When USIA was created, VOA had been in the State Department since August 1945 (that the radio broadcast operation was to be moved out of the government and into a government-funded non-profit with a full-time chief executive overseen by a board of trustees nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate, a structure that may sound familiar to some, is a separate topic). Radio Free Europe (not “Radio Europe”) was launched in 1949, not 1950, and it was never “absorbed” by USIA. Arguably (only by me, as far as I know), RFE was launched because VOA was not aggressive enough (and I argue that RFE may not have been created if VOA had been spun out into a separate entity as planned). The same is arguably true for Radio Liberty, launched in 1951, and possibly also the case for Radio Free Asia (1951-1955, today’s Radio Free Asia was established in 1996). RFE and RL merged in 1976 to form RFE/RL, this organization was later placed under USIA during the Clinton administration. Mr. Khatiri’s use of “absorbed” infers USIA was a cohesive whole for US international information programs, which it was not. (The Broadcasting Board of Governors was certainly not a cohesive entity when I joined the board in 2013, I can only imagine the situation earlier. A 1976 report on whether VOA, RFE, and RL should be in the same organization was clear on the opposition of all parties involved.)
Though the “bring back USIA” genre is anchored in the assertion USIA was a holistic enterprise integrated with policy-making, USIA was further removed from policy making than its predecessor and had a small portfolio than its predecessor. The promises that USIA would have a seat at the foreign policy table were empty, wholly dependent on the leaders of the moment and not structural, a concern voiced by Congress and dismissed by the Eisenhower administration because the Secretary of State did not want to be “distracted” with this operational responsibility. eventually lost its seat at the policy-making table, as was feared, and wielded fewer authorities over fewer programs and than the organization it replaced. President Eisenhower’s completely forgotten memo and the conditions of the Advisory Commission’s recommendation had no lasting effect. This eventually created the need for the high-profile Edward R. Murrow to be brought in to lead USIA in 1961 and why he famously lamented the agency needed to be in on the take-offs of policy, not just its crash landings. But Murrow’s lament also held no sway, which was later on full display as President Nixon’s National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, effectively told USIA, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
Point Two: the “punching bag”
USIA was a political punching bag, knocked about by Congress and presidential administrations alike. Following a 1978 reorganization, it operated for a few years under a different name before becoming USIA again. Finally, it was dismantled in 1999, with its non-broadcasting responsibilities largely handed off to the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and its broadcasting responsibilities to the new, independent Board of Broadcasting Governors (later renamed the U.S. Agency for Global Media, USAGM).
Khatiri, Shay. “It’s Time to Bring Back USIA”. The Bulwark, July 21, 2021 (accessed 26 July 2021).
The “punching bag” framing by Mr. Khatiri is difficult to reconcile. Was USIA doing such a bang-up job that Congress and the White House were constantly taking potshots at it? Is Mr. Khatiri’s implication that USIA was awesome even if contemporary policy-makers did not get it but they will today? Or, are we to interpret the line to mean that USIA would have been more successful if the President, the chief policy-maker, on down just got out of USIA’s way? While each of these interpretations seem absurd, they are part of the logic undergirding “bring back USIA” that the loss of this effective agency was tragic. By the time it was on the chopping block in 1997, we had long forgotten what had come before and the segregation of information from policy was entrenched in our minds. We latched onto it because something was better than nothing, but is that really the standard we should be reaching for?
To be sure, some of criticisms of USIA were not entirely justified. The first serious questioning of USIA’s independence came in 1957 and stemmed primarily from concerns (expressed through Congress but really from the commercial media) that the agency “was engaged in undue competition with the regularly established press.” Interestingly, this was addressed directly and prohibited in the Smith-Mundt Act. Concerns over USIA’s effectiveness, tone, and lack of integration with policy nudged the same White House that split the information agency from foreign policy department to consider whether the two should be reintegrated. John Foster Dulles, however, stuck to his earlier position saying such a merger would “distract me from foreign policy formulation, advice, and execution.”
Returning to the “political punching bag” comment, I suspect that Mr. Khatiri is referring to questions over the effectiveness and utility of USIA. Concerns that removing closing IIA and creating USIA was the right move reached the White House in 1957, the same administration that created USIA four years earlier. The USIA Director was in the hotseat with Congress, as was the agency, and the question of reintegrating the agency with the State Deaprtment was discussed in a cabinet meeting. John Foster Dulles opposed the idea, still holding to the position it would distract he and the department from its primary mission of foreign policy.
(Incidentally, back in 1948, Dulles supported the idea of a separate Department of Peace, which was a proposal in a June 1945 House bill focused on “nonmilitary defense” that would presumably be charged with running the government’s international information programs. Personally, I thought that the job of “nonmilitary defense” was that of the State Department.)
Concerns over USIA did not stop, however. In 1959, the Brookings Institution, at the request of the Senate Relations Committee, recommended remaking the State Department into three autonomous departments, including one for Information and Cultural Affairs led by the Cabinet-rank Secretary for Information and Cultural Affairs. In 1959, Eisenhower appointed a blue-ribbon committee to examine USIA and its role in the foreign policy community. Unlike other analyses, this recommended retaining USIA as a “semi-autonomous” agency while emphasizing the need to “cease the continuous reorganization and review of USIA.” Later that year, President Kennedy appointed his own blue-ribbon committee at the same time two in-house studies were completed by USIA. All of the studies urged increased inclusion of USIA in policy-making. One of the in-house studies, led by USIA’s Assistant Director, urged the agency “to persuade, not just to inform.” The agency was not a “punching bag,” but it was not performing as needed with the lack of integration the continual common theme.
Reports would continue to be written, many of which were restatements or refinements of previous recommendations. One proposed placing the “strictly information” functions into the department’s geographic bureaus and move the other operations into some different form of independent entity. Another recommended moving more functions from the State Department, and the Commerce Department, to USIA. A 1973 report by a commission chaired by the then-former chairman of the US Advisory Commission on Information (and current president of CBS and former president of RAND Corporation) recommended if the USIA Director did not gain direct access to the President, the Secretary of State, and the National Security Council, and did gain full control over its budget, personnel, and operations, then the agency “should no longer be independent.”
The degree of the political fights in DC, with the State Department rejecting the relevance of information to foreign policy and any incursion into their lane of foreign policy (cf. the Freedom Academy, see also my chapter “The Politics of Information Warfare in the US” in Hybrid Conflicts and Information Warfare: New Labels, Old Politics, 2018) and the White House too often ambivilant and acquiesing to the separation is too often ignored. The very term “public diplomacy” is both a representation and manifestation of this fight. For twenty years, there was no need to label the international information program with a new term, but in the mid-1960s, as USIA was facing reintegration with a State Department that rejected the information mission, a public relations campaign was needed to argue for parity between the two entities. (See my Operationalizing Public Diplomacy chapter, specifically the section “Creating Public Diplomacy,” for more on this.) The result is a term adopted to apply to an agency and not methods or outcomes, which contributes to the gross confusion over what is and is not “public diplomacy” today (hence my frequent use of quotes around the phrase). More than once I had a person tell me that some activity or another was not “public diplomacy” exclusively on the basis that the effort was not run by a certain element in the State Department. (I also had more than one person literally, not figuratively, yell at me that my work to “undo” the Smith-Mundt Act and its “firewall” was the “only protection public diplomacy” had in the State Department, and without that “firewall” the department would diminish its international outreach in favor of domestic communications. No, that is not how the Act worked/works.)
What Mr. Khatiri seemed to refer to was frustrations over the lack of integration with foreign policy and lack of focus on influence, and even counter-disinformation and counter-political warfare, by USIA. The agency was not charged with, funded for, or staffed for a counter-political warfare role, leading to the Freedom Academy proposal, and did not take a serious position on counter-disinformation, which lead to the Active Measures Working Group. Exceptions proved this rule, including when in 1965 a USIA Associate Director exercised temporary operational command over the 1st Psychological Operations Battalion during Operation POWER PACK in the Dominican Republic.
Point Three: What does “bring back USIA” look like
One comments on Mr. Khatiri’s inexplicable reference to the 1978 name change as I cannot see the relevance to such a short piece. Surely he could have replaced it with a more important sentence. (Yes, in 1978, the Carter administration did change the name of USIA to the International Communication Agency, a move President Reagan reversed.) Also not entirely important is the Broadcasting Board of Governors was five years old and not new in 1999. It was established under USIA in 1994 but it was made into an independent federal agency when USIA was abolished (into an intentionally divided structure constantly at war with itself over resources). But it’s Mr. Khatiri’s interesting misstatement of the title of the heir to the Director of USIA. This position is the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Now, perhaps Mr. Khatiri intended a subtle comment here by leaving off “and Public Affairs” since while the modern Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs is nominally a subordinate to the under secretary, the reality is they operated like peers. Or, it could be that Mr. Khatiri is referencing the original legislation that abolished USIA and directed the executive branch to establish an Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, which the Clinton administration responded to by creating the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. This title may suggest a return to the past when the equivalent position in December 1944 had the duty “to direct the information policies and activities of the department at home and abroad.” The reality had been something else with the office of the chief international information operations officer left largely vacant four of ten days since 1999, but I will return to this.
Ignorance of the current organization chart is apparently a requirement in this genre. Mr. Khatiri’s passing reference to this under secretary is more than what is found in similar articles. For example, the two articles (besides mine) Mr. Khatiri linked to at the start of his piece – “Bring Back the United States Information Agency” (2017) and “How to Stop Losing the Information War” (2018) – both fail to mention the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. One these two articles does mention the Global Engagement Center, which is notionally subordinate to the under secretary, but fails to consider both why GEC exists and its limits.
But at the same time, the arrangement has significantly weakened the U.S. government’s ability to communicate its message and its ideas. There is no longer a single government entity tasked with USIA’s multifarious responsibilities. The distinct but overlapping terms “public diplomacy,” “public information,” “information warfare,” and “counterpropaganda” describe the kinds of work USIA did. Because USIA was, in large part, a dedicated P.R. shop, it could get out America’s message in ways that straightforward journalists cannot.
Khatiri, Shay. “It’s Time to Bring Back USIA”. The Bulwark, July 21, 2021 (accessed 26 July 2021).
Mr. Khatiri’s mention of this under secretary is followed by this statement: “There is no longer a single government entity tasked with USIA’s multifarious responsibilities.” While accurate, it is misleading, especially when Mr. Khatiri wants to keep separate the broadcast operations of the US Agency for Global Media, formerly the Broadcasting Board of Governors, from his new “USIA.” It is worth noting that before the board in the Broadcasting Board of Governors was abolished, contributing to the need for the name change to the US Agency for Global Media, the under secretary had a seat at the management table as the Secretary of State’s proxy. There, the under secretary could help shape the direction of the BBG’s operations. With USAGM now headed by a single political appointee and no longer insulated by the political whims of Congress or the White House, the relationship of the Secretary, and thus this under secretary has changed. Setting this aside, the broadcast element is a relatively small piece targeting and engaging a discrete audience (basically where a free press cannot or does not operate). This under secretary, however, still has notional influence, sometimes even authority, over some of the former USIA’s “multifarious responsibilities.” This has diminished however in light of the failure to appoint a capable and engaged under secretary to lead from this high office within the foreign policy machinery.
It is worth noting Mr. Khatiri’s description of USIA as “in large part, a dedicated [public relations] shop.” This seems to undermine what I interpreted as his key argument: that someone needs to lead the “multifarious responsibilities.” Is it that we just need a bigger megaphone? At the end of this piece, like so many others, this seems to be a key objective. It is not that the informational element of policy needs to be considered, whether it is the information generated by policy or the information necessary to support the policy. It seems “bring back USIA” is not well thought out.
A relaunched USIA would necessarily be different from the old one. The USAGM ought to remain intact and separate, retaining the various journalistic subsidiaries that were part of the old USIA. The new USIA would be smaller and more nimble than its predecessor. It would have more of a tech focus, too. In addition to countering foreign disinformation campaigns, the new USIA ought to focus on finding ways to bypass autocratic censorship and increase access to unrestricted internet and broadcast media—including finding ways to keep social media tools and communication apps available in repressed countries, so that political oppositions can use them to organize, and so that the people can find out what is going on in their countries.
Khatiri, Shay. “It’s Time to Bring Back USIA”. The Bulwark, July 21, 2021 (accessed 26 July 2021).
How would it be different? What does “small and more nimble” mean? Does this mean the new “USIA” would not gain direct access to the public affairs sections at Embassies and Consulates and not control the information resource centers (sometimes referred to as libraries) and not “own” the speaker’s tours and not own the Bureau of International Information Programs, the largest rump of USIA after the BBG, since integrated into a new Global Public Affairs office? Considering USIA’s primary impact was its ground game, as mentioned earlier, what is this new “USIA” really about, especially if USAGM is kept separate? I agree on the separation of USAGM from whatever this new “USIA” looks like, as USAGM is a surrogate press for discrete audiences that lack a free press. Access to international press via the internet is not the same as a press speaking in your language and providing news and information from your perspective and “so that the people can find out what is going on in their countries,” in their region, globally, and with the United States. But Mr. Khatiri’s laudable “focus on finding ways to bypass autocratic censorship and increase access to unrestricted internet and broadcast media” is and has been squarely within USAGM’s current mission. USAGM also has a long history, and is well-known for not just making “social media tools and communications apps available” in this markets, but USAGM also funds the development of these tools and apps for these markets. The lack of knowledge of these current programs (other agencies delve into the space, too, among them USAID) is not adequate to demand a new “USIA” but it does suggest a lack of research that is prevalent across the “bring back USIA” genre.
Ultimately, it is unclear what “bring back USIA” really means if it does not entail removing various elements from the State Department and (or) creating lines of authority from State Department offices to this new organization. And this does not even get into thhe fact the government is far more complex with the public facing contours far more numerous than in USIA’s time. Without the ground operations the former USIA controlled or led, and now realizing the lack of centrality and inclusion of USIA in foreign policy making, what does “bring back USIA” really mean?
Conclusion
USIA was the manifestation of segregating information from policy; USIA’s authorities were less than the organization it replaced; and, USIA was not charged with nor did it conduct an anti-/counter-political warfare mission. Today, the organizational chart as-is has the potential to surpass the relevance, integration, and effectiveness of USIA if the White House and Secretary of State would appreciate this function, hire the right person, and support and hold accountable this office and its role. It is profoundly mind-numbing that the abundant “bring back USIA” pieces are so anchored in misinformation in their well-intentioned fight against misinformation.
Maybe a new USIA is the best course of action, but the supporting arguments to date are dangerous by their distraction from the core organizational problems we face today. I remain unconvinced that changing the organizational chart, in the absence of leadership and strategy, will magically create leadership and strategy and align organizational behavior and budgets and policy and personnel accordingly. It did not happen in the 1950s or 1960s (or the 1970s or the 1980s) when the White House and Congress were largely aligned in appreciating the threat to the US from Russian political warfare, why do some people think alignment will magically happen today when the government is far more complex, not to mention that today’s Defense Department is vastly more engaged directly with foreign public opinion than before? The “bring back USIA” not just ignores the past but encourages this ignorance at the risk of us failing to fix the problems that led to USIA. In other words, “bring back USIA” reveals that not only too many do not understand the true deficiencies of today, but encourage us to repeat the mistakes of yesterday. The mantra “bring back USIA” is strategy of hope, the hope leadership, accountability, and policy will magically integrate information; the problem is hope is still not a strategy.
5. How Terrorists Could Proceed with the Next Physical Attack on Energy Infrastructure
Conclusion:
The purpose of my research was to examine the likelihood that sub-state actors will attack EI. The work quantified some of the common assertions that the risk of an attack to the power grid is serious. The research focused heavily on a set of decision influences believed to shape target selection. These decision influences were identified and validated through a review of the literature and applied to a statistical analysis of EI attacks.
Through this analysis, a set of research questions was addressed, and hypotheses were tested. The use of this research method was presented as a heuristic to model an estimation of future attacks. This work was intended to further the protection of the electric power grid from malicious physical attacks.
How Terrorists Could Proceed with the Next Physical Attack on Energy Infrastructure – Homeland Security Today
August 3, 2021 James Madia
Power outages across much of Texas and rotating blackouts in California over the past year are reminders of the critical importance of reliable electric power. Past large-scale outages in the U.S. have resulted in loss of life, serious injury, social unrest, and economic impacts in the billions of dollars. The 2003 Northeast and 1977 New York blackouts are examples of consequences on this scale. What about intentional attacks on critical infrastructure? Could a malicious attack of the power grid lead to these types of catastrophic consequences? Are threat actors even motivated to conduct physical attacks against electric infrastructure (EI)? If so, can the experts quantify that threat and possibly predict which actors are most likely to conduct such attacks? I spent five years exploring these questions, which ultimately led to the completion of my doctoral dissertation at the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California. The following summarizes a portion of what I uncovered during my journey.
Over the past decade, the anecdotal evidence has suggested that the threat of a grid attack is serious, if not imminent. Experts from a wide range of disciplines have asserted that a host of terrorist groups and other sub-state actors are plotting to bring down the U.S. power grid with a coordinated attack. These claims have become a common theme in government reports, industry journals, and academic articles. The Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, in its 2014 report Securing the U.S. Electrical Grid, called the nation’s power grid “an obvious target to a range of actors who would seek to strike at the U.S. homeland” (p. 4). The National Energy Technology Laboratory (2007) wrote, “The threat of both physical and cyber-attack is growing and a widespread attack against the infrastructure cannot be ruled out” (pp. A3-16). The National Research Council (2012) said that “terrorists could destroy key elements of the electricity generation and delivery system, causing blackouts that are unprecedented in this country in duration and extent” (p. 7). These and other alarming reports have influenced much of the electric utility industry’s current regulation.
I was not satisfied with these anecdotal reports to support the underlying argument, as these reports did little to establish the scope of the threat or quantify the likelihood of future attacks. A more empirically based analysis was needed to better understand the threat, using a statistically valid sample of actual EI attacks.
Is the threat real and serious?
I researched terrorist attack data from 1970-2018 available through the University of Maryland National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) Global Terrorism Database (GTD). This included 192,211 documented terrorist attacks against a wide range of targets worldwide. During that period, terrorist groups were responsible for 4,310 attacks against electric utilities. Considering the geopolitical shifts immediately preceding the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the trends since that time, I focused my specific analysis on the 1,198 EI attacks since 2000. This is not an insignificant number of attacks, which seems to support the assertion that the threat is serious, but this number is only about 1 percent of the 121,628 total terrorist attacks conducted during the same period. However, this only accounts for attacks involving groups defined by START as “terrorist groups” and does not include many attacks by nation states, lone wolves, other sub-state actors, or activist groups.
Some pundits have argued that these attacks only occur in conflict zones or countries described as failed states, with few or no attacks occurring in the United States. Conflict zones such as Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen come to mind as locations where there have been many EI attacks. My primary research data sample identified attacks conducted by 71 different sub-state groups in 38 different countries located in 10 distinct regions of the world, including North America, Western Europe, the Middle East and Levant, North Africa, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, South America, Eastern Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia.
Aside from the statistical analysis, I found value in the examination of U.S. attacks from open-source reporting. The following table is a sample of attacks that have occurred in the United States since the 1980s. These and other attacks in the U.S. and other developed nations further support the theory that the threat is real.
Date Location Attack Summary August 1987 Independence, Calif. Million-volt transmission line carrying power across Pacific Intertie to Southern California was sabotaged when two transmission towers were toppled (Associated Press, 1987). April 1990 Santa Cruz, Calif. Pacific Gas & Electric transmission poles toppled over a two-day period, leaving 95,000 customers in Santa Cruz County and 92,000 customers near Watsonville without power. Group calling itself Earth Night Action Group claimed responsibility, citing Earth Day as its motive (Parrish, 1990). October 2003 Oregon / California Bolts removed from 500 kV transmission towers on the Pacific DC Intertie. FBI arrested a man who was sentenced to 27 months in federal prison (Lerten, 2003). October 2004 Oak Creek, Wis. High-voltage transmission towers knocked over, causing 17,000 customers to lose power and interrupted train service from Milwaukee to Chicago for 24 hours (Associated Press, 2004). August – October 2013 Little Rock, Ark. Transmission towers toppled and high-voltage line struck a moving train. Fire started at a substation causing outage to 10,000 customers. FBI arrested a man who was sentenced to 15 years in prison (FBI Bulletin, November 2013). June 2014 Nogales, Ariz. A homemade bomb found near a 50,000-gallon diesel storage tank at the Valencia power generation facility (Patel, 2014). July 2013 – January 2014 New Jersey Eight separate acts of sabotage committed at facilities in New Jersey over a seven-month period (N.J. ROIC, 2014). November 2014 Franklin Township, Pa. The shooting of electrical transformer results in $357,000 in damage (Associated Press, 2014). March 2016 Tyngsborough, Mass. Incendiary devices placed on high-voltage transmission lines, which detonated and caused a brush fire. Man is arrested and facing 20 years in prison. (U.S. Department of Justice, 2016). September 2016 Kanab, Utah Sniper attack on Garkane Energy substation affects 13,000 customers and costs $1 million (Walton, 2016). April 2018 Lake Worth, Fla. Possible shooting of a large transformer at a major substation causing blackout of 27,000 customers (Capozzi, 2018). January 2019 Asheboro, N.C. Man charged with shooting electrical transformer and causing power outage (Strange, 2019).The most serious U.S. electric utility incident occurred on April 16, 2013, when the Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) Metcalf Transmission Substation near San Jose, Calif., was attacked by a group of unknown armed assailants. Using what authorities determined to be assault rifles, the attackers severely damaged ten 500-kilovolt (kV) transformers, three 230kV transformers, and six 115kV circuit breakers. The attack cost PG&E $26 million in repair costs and environmental cleanup efforts and nearly blacked out parts of the Silicon Valley. Experts have debated the motivation for the attack since the attackers have never been identified. There has been no determination as to whether the attack was a terrorist operation, insider action, or something else (Department of Homeland Security & Department of Energy, 2014; Cicale, 2014; Parfomak, 2014; Smith, 2014; Pagliery, 2015). The Metcalf attack exposed the vulnerability of our nation’s electric infrastructure and reignited longstanding fears that terrorists and other actors sought to attack the power grid.
Is the threat increasing?
During the analysis of the energy infrastructure and electric utility attacks occurring between 2000-2018, I identified a trend of increasing attack frequency. The graph below illustrates the rising number of global terrorist attacks against electric infrastructure specifically and energy infrastructure attacks more generally (gas, oil and electric combined) since 2000. At the beginning of the millennium, the frequency of attacks remained mostly unchanged year-over-year until 2008. In 2008, EI attacks increased by 244 percent from the previous year. After 2008, the overall statistical trend reflected a steep rise in attacks, peaking in 2016 with 209 EI attacks or 2,512 percent more attacks than in 2000. Even the highest year in the first decade of the millennium (2009 with 72 attacks) was 190 percent lower than the 2016 total. The number of overall energy and EI-specific attacks declined in 2017 and 2018, yet even after the peak, the number of attacks remained well above the millennium’s early years. This 19-year attack trend can reasonably support a prediction of increasing threat.
Which factors influence decisions to attack electric infrastructure?
Numerous factors influence sub-state groups when they consider targets of interest. This is true of many targets, which includes decisions to attack EI. My research involved the use of an extensive list of decision factors synthesized from the terrorism literature. The literature included a range of quantitative and qualitative sources spanning a 40-year period. The most salient decision factors were identified using a form of blended meta-analysis. The analysis utilized a scoring method, conditioned upon a subjective numeric score (1-5) for each of three criteria. The overall scores were the sums of those individual criterion scores. The list below depicts the decision factors with the highest scores.
Decision Factors with Highest Scores Group ideology Past attacks of similar targets Group size Security environment in the region Age/maturity of the group Level of target protection Leadership structure Group’s stated interest in the target Terrorist group’s operational resources Target proximity to group’s area of operationFactors that scored high in the analysis include a group’s stated interest in the target, the security level at the target, and the proximity of the target to the group’s area of operation. Unfortunately, the START-GTD data did not capture this information, and the research necessary to code for these would have required more resources than were available for this work. Given the size of the dataset, it was impractical to code for all these factors. The remaining five factors (e.g., ideology, age, size, operational resources, and previous attacks of similar targets) were identified as the independent variables for the research and tested against the attack dataset.
Which groups attack electric infrastructure?
The research yielded some insights regarding which groups tend to select EI as a target for attack. The analysis focused on the ideology, age, size, and operational resources of terrorist groups and how those factors influenced target selection, particularly attacks of EI. Similar analysis included the number of repeat attacks on EI targets by individual groups.
When quantifying EI attacks by ideology, most attacks were conducted by ethno-nationalist/separatist groups (35 percent) or blended groups that were a combination of ethno-nationalist/separatist and religious (45 percent) as depicted in the two graphs below.
This propensity of ethno-nationalist and similar hybrid groups to conduct EI attacks appeared to increase over time in comparison to other ideological groups. The time series below depicts this increase compared to homogenous religious groups.
The vast majority of EI attacks were committed by groups that had been in existence for over 5 years, with groups 6-10 years old and those over 40 years old accounting for the greatest number of attacks. The graph below depicts the increase over time of EI attacks by groups more than 5 years old compared to the attack frequency of younger groups, which appears to have remained flat.
Large terrorist groups (more than 3,000 members) were responsible for 65 percent of EI attacks, which far exceeded the small terrorist groups (1-1,000 members) and medium-sized terrorist groups (1,000-3,000 members). This distribution is depicted in the graph below.
The literature strongly supported the notion that terrorist groups tend to repeat attacks on similar targets (Drake, 1998a; McCormick, 2003; Ackerman et al., 2007; Hoffman, 2017). It is common to find stories in the media of groups repeatedly striking similar targets. The findings in my research supported this assertion. Terrorist groups in the research sample were far more likely to conduct EI attacks if they had two or more previous attacks on similar targets. The analysis showed that 80 percent of the EI attacks were conducted by groups with two or more previous attacks, as depicted in the graph below.
My analysis also examined the role of a group’s operational capabilities and resources related to targeting decisions. Specifically, the question examined here is whether the lack or abundance of operational resources influenced the selection of EI as a target for attack. This question was analyzed using the frequency of previous EI attacks by groups with varying levels of operational resources. Each EI attack in the known subset was coded for the group’s operational resources level.
Each group’s operational resources were ranked using a 1-10 scale. The rankings were based on a subjective assessment and aggregation of the following elements:
- Annual revenue ($USD) – if known
- Sources of revenue
- Number of members
- Strength of leadership
- Access to weapons/type of weapons used
- State sponsorship
- Alliances w/other groups
- Support from the local population
- Access to and use of technology
The rankings exposed a wide disparity of monetary resources, including annual revenue ranging between tens of thousands of dollars up to over $1 billion per year. Similarly, some groups had only a few hundred fighters and poor access to weapons, while other groups had thousands of members and access to armored vehicles and guided rockets. These inequalities included differences in local support, patronage, state sponsorship, and access to sophisticated technologies. The assigned numeric value for each group was compared against the known attack subset to determine the statistical frequency of past attacks.
The largest proportion of EI attacks was conducted by terrorist groups with high operational resources (182 attacks). Groups with high resources (levels 8-10) accounted for 50 percent of the attacks and were much more likely to conduct attacks than any other single category, as depicted in the graph below.
Are EI attacks predictable?
The short answer is no. However, my research experimented with a Bayesian probabilistic tool to quantify estimated values, reduce uncertainty, and assess the threat from any specific group against a specific target, including EI, if the underlying statistical research is performed to establish prior probabilities and conditional probabilities. That said, in the absence of prior statistical frequency of previous attacks, these values can also be established through the elicitation of intelligence experts that have been well-calibrated to estimate probabilities. Experts will be well-calibrated when they can estimate probability ranges where they have at least 90 percent confidence that the actual probability for each factor falls within their stated range (Vogt, 2005; Hubbard & Seiersen, 2016).
Whether using the statistical frequency of past attacks, expert elicitation with a 90 percent confidence interval, or a combination of both techniques for establishing prior and conditional probabilities, the Bayesian tool shows promise for future application. The Bayesian tool also has the potential to predict the estimated timing of attacks or the likely tactics to be employed by the group(s) under consideration. The foundational statistics must be researched and established to identify the group’s tendencies for when to conduct attacks or which tactics to employ. Once these steps are completed, the statistical frequencies can be combined with expert estimates to employ the tool.
Which groups will likely conduct EI attacks?
The statistical findings in my work suggest patterns concerning the proportion of previous EI attacks based on the decision factors. The analysis of the data specifically related to the age, size, and operational resources of a terrorist organization revealed discernible statistical tendencies. Similar observations were made when examining the number of repeat attacks on EI targets by individual groups.
The most likely future EI attacks will be conducted by large ethno-nationalist groups that have been in existence more than 5 years and demonstrate a high level of operational resources. Looking beyond political ideology, many terrorist groups that conducted EI attacks also tended to seize and control geographic territory, set up internal forms of government structure, and provide social services to the populations under their control. These groups will have strong central leadership and have committed EI attacks in the past. The EI targets will be geographically close to the group’s area of operation and will have security vulnerabilities that the groups can exploit.
How is the research useful for homeland security?
Intelligence analysts can use this research to apply greater scrutiny to terrorist groups that score high in most or all the categories. This allows for more efficient resource allocation. Security personnel and planners can build better risk models using design-basis threat models to simulate potential attacks. Better intelligence, vulnerability assessment, risk modeling, and planning logically contribute to harder targets and better-prepared infrastructure operators.
Conclusion
The purpose of my research was to examine the likelihood that sub-state actors will attack EI. The work quantified some of the common assertions that the risk of an attack to the power grid is serious. The research focused heavily on a set of decision influences believed to shape target selection. These decision influences were identified and validated through a review of the literature and applied to a statistical analysis of EI attacks.
Through this analysis, a set of research questions was addressed, and hypotheses were tested. The use of this research method was presented as a heuristic to model an estimation of future attacks. This work was intended to further the protection of the electric power grid from malicious physical attacks.
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JAMES MADIA
Dr. James D. Madia is a senior security & risk management professional with 35 years of experience in the emergency response community. He currently serves as a manager of business operations, infrastructure security, and regulatory compliance at a major electric utility, and as an independent consultant to government and business. Dr. Madia retired from the Inglewood Police Department in 2014 at the rank of Captain, serving as a command staff executive. During his 29-year law enforcement career, he served in executive and senior management roles directing the Emergency Response Team, Special Operations Division, Scientific Services, Media Relations, and the Hostage Negotiations Team. Dr. Madia is a subject-matter expert in homeland security, including critical incident response, infrastructure protection, and emergency management. Dr. Madia holds a Doctorate in Policy, Planning & Development from the University of Southern California Sol Price School of Public Policy and a Master of Arts in Security Studies (Homeland Security and Defense) from the United States Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security.
6. The Delta Variant Could End the Chinese Communist Party
Be careful what you ask for. But assuming we could possibly see the end of the CCP, what comes next? How do you prepare for a China without the CCP?
The Delta Variant Could End the Chinese Communist Party
The Delta variant is spreading across the country fast, and Beijing has no answer to the new strain other than draconian, totalitarian brute-force measures—and blaming foreigners.
Millions of Chinese residents are now in various forms of lockdown. The recent infections constitute the most widespread coronavirus outbreak since the disease first hit China, sometime in late 2019.
The new flare-up, which quickly slipped beyond the control of the authorities, is undermining core Communist Party propaganda narratives.
Chinese authorities trace the latest series of infections to a flight landing at the Nanjing Lukou International Airport from Russia on July 20. Nine Chinese airport workers tested positive after cleaning the plane.
Since then, the disease has ripped through China, infecting people in almost half of the country’s 33 provinces and provincial-level cities and regions. “Delta has broken through the country’s virus defenses, which are some of the strictest in the world,” notes Bloomberg News.
Delta is now appearing in places with no reported cases for months. Of particular concern for the regime is the cluster in Wuhan, the original epicenter of the disease. The city’s infection-free status has been, as Bloomberg reports, “a source of pride in China.”
Covid has also reached Beijing, the heart of Chinese power. There, travel restrictions are strict. Tourists are now not admitted to the city. Only “essential travelers” are allowed in, but only if they produce negative Covid tests. Government and state enterprise employees may not leave the city. Beijing residents have been told not to travel elsewhere “unless necessary.”
There have been more than 30 outbreaks around China after the initial cases in Wuhan of last year, including a particularly devastating flare-up hitting Guangdong province ports beginning in late May. Draconian measures were seemingly successful in isolating China’s COVID-19 cases, however. The Party, beginning early last year, used its handling of the virus as proof of the superiority of its system over, among others, “Western democracy.”
Totalitarian-style tactics, unfortunately for China’s rulers, have not worked with the hardy Delta variant. The coronavirus, unlike other pathogens, has become more transmissible and more virulent over time. Delta, as a result, is now killing off the triumphalism of the Communist Party.
Therefore, a nationwide spread of the disease is a potentially existential threat to the Party. At the moment, Delta is running through many societies around the world, but China appears to be the only one where the variant could end the ruling group’s tenure.
Therefore, it should be no surprise that Party propagandists went berserk for a few days last month when Bloomberg named the U.S. No. 1 in the world in its “Covid Resilience Ranking.” “What a joke,” People’s Daily, the most authoritative publication in China, remarked.
Denigration of the U.S. cannot solve the Party’s main problem, however. None of China’s five coronavirus vaccines are particularly effective.
Beijing, claiming to have administered more than 1.5 billion doses of its vaccines in China, reports 40% of Chinese citizens are fully vaccinated. China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention says Chinese vaccines “can still have good preventative and protective effects” against the Delta strain, but that seems unlikely as countries turn their backs on the Chinese jabs if they have an alternative. Most of the new cases in Nanjing were vaccinated.
No society will fully recover from this disease until it has an effective and safe vaccine, and Beijing is a long way off from developing one of them, even though its researchers had months of head start in coming up with a good jab.
Until China can administer an effective vaccine across the country, its regime will have no choice but to fall back on propaganda. Narrative control has been key from the very beginning of the epidemic. This became clear when the Communist Party on January 26 of last year announced the formation of its Central Leading Small Group for Work to Counter the New Coronavirus Infection Pneumonia Epidemic, China’s task force. There was only one public health official on the nine-person roster, which was heavy with political hacks and propaganda officials. The Party’s propaganda czar, Wang Huning, was vice-chair. Maintaining control of the narrative and Xi Jinping’s dictatorial rule were—and remain—the Leading Group’s primary goals.
A Chinese soldier guarding the southern entrance of the Forbidden City in Beijing, dominated by a giant portrait of Mao Zedong.
The Party’s propagandists evidently believe blaming foreigners for the Delta outbreak is good politics. They were quick to say the origin of the most recent contagion was passengers on the plane from Russia to Nanjing, for instance, implying Russia was the source. Media also attributes a cluster of cases in Zhengzhou to two hospital cleaners in contact with patients from abroad.
In the most irresponsible move of all, China’s foreign ministry in March of last year publicly maintained that the global coronavirus pandemic started in the United States. Since then, Chinese propagandists have continually pushed the notion that the coronavirus was hatched in Frederick, Maryland, in the U.S. Army’s Fort Detrick.
China’s rulers have run out of options when it comes to the uncontrolled—and perhaps uncontrollable—spread of the newest variant of COVID-19.
Is their fate now in the hands of a virus named “Delta”?
Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China and The Great U.S.-China Tech War. Follow him on Twitter @GordonGChang. He is also a 1945 Contributing Editor.
7. Austin misses an opportunity in Singapore but scores big in Philippines
Excerpts:
Austin did not include Taiwan at all in his general litany of common dangers, and paid it only sparse attention in his speech. After describing the important examples of regional security cooperation — with Japan, Singapore, Australia, Korea — he added, “And meanwhile, we’re working with Taiwan to increase its own capabilities and to increase its readiness to deter threats and coercion — upholding our commitments under the Taiwan Relations Act, and consistent with our One China policy.”
The Taipei Times reported the statement of appreciation from Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs that tactfully described Washington’s security support a bit differently: “The Biden administration has repeatedly said that its commitment to Taiwan is ‘rock solid’ under the Taiwan Relations Act and the ‘Six Assurances,’ while engaging with its allies to underscore the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.”
In addition to skipping the “Six Assurances” that President Reagan gave Taiwan, Austin considered only one of the two security mandates of the Taiwan Relations Act — the U.S. obligation to provide weapons for Taiwan’s self defense. He failed to mention the requirement that Washington will “maintain the capacity of the United States to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion” against Taiwan.
Every administration since Jimmy Carter’s has downplayed that language because it implies the U.S. will directly defend Taiwan. It is precisely the subject of the Taiwan Invasion Prevention Act (TIPA), which Trump let die in the last Congress — and which Biden is leaving to languish so far in this one. TIPA means deterrence.
Austin did have one solid achievement on his Indo-Pacific visit. After meeting with Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, the two announced that the termination letter for the Visiting Forces Agreement was now withdrawn and bilateral security cooperation will proceed uninterrupted.
Austin misses an opportunity in Singapore but scores big in Philippines
The Hill · by Joseph Bosco, opinion contributor · August 3, 2021
In his speech last week in Singapore on the security situation in Southeast Asia, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin reiterated the Biden administration’s emphasis on the need for multinational cooperation to meet the challenges from China and North Korea.
“I’m here to represent a new American administration, but also to reaffirm enduring American commitments,” he said. “… I’ve come to Southeast Asia to deepen America’s bonds with the allies and partners on whom our common security depends. Our network of alliances and friendships is an unparalleled strategic asset. And I never take an ally for granted.”
The latter point reflected the charge that the Trump administration ignored America’s allies and strategic partners in the region. While Trump may have seen them as burdensome freeloaders, the people he chose and empowered to implement U.S. national security policy certainly did not share that view.
Austin’s speech was an opportunity to mitigate some of the doubt about his own stewardship of Pentagon policy. He acknowledged when appointed that his Army experience in the Middle East left him unfamiliar with security challenges in the Indo-Pacific, and he promised to be a quick learner of our “pacing threat” or, more recently, our “pacing challenge” from China.
But one of Austin’s first major policy decisions was a serious step back from the firm Trump administration pushback against Communist Chinese espionage and technology theft. In May, he reversed his predecessor’s listing of Chinese technology giant Xiaomi as one of the “Communist Chinese military companies” no longer eligible for direct or indirect investment in the United States.
Then, in June, Austin appeared before the House Armed Services Committee with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley. Milley essentially dismissed China’s “near-term, next 12, 24 months” threat to Taiwan because, he said, China was not yet capable of a full-scale land invasion, the only aggressive Chinese move that he, and presumably Austin, envisioned.
Beyond capabilities, Milley was asked about Beijing’s intentions. “Do they have the intent to attack our seas in the near term to fight us in the next year or two? My assessment, and based on what I’ve seen right now, is no,” he said. “That can always change. Intent is something that can change quickly.”
He said Taiwan is not just China’s core concern. “It’s also a core national security interest of the United States to ensure that whatever happens, with respect to Taiwan, happens peacefully and we don’t have a general conflict in the region or globally. We support, with the Taiwan Relations Act, et cetera ... a peaceful resolution of the issue between Taiwan and China.”
Milley noted the Trump-Biden administrations’ continuity on China policy: “China is the pacing threat for us in uniform, the United States. And it’s been directed now by the secretary of Defense, the president, and the previous, as well. So we are gearing our capabilities, our programs, our training, our skills, our activities, et cetera, militarily with China in mind.”
Austin concurred with Milley’s overall assessment and was asked why the Biden defense budget did not include funding requests for “many of the top needs identified in the . . . [Indo-Pacific Command] report.” Austin replied that the Department of Defense (DOD) intends to fund all Indo-Pacific Command requests.
“China is the most challenging competitor that we’ll face, and so we have to prepare. … As we do that … it also prepares us well for other things. We’ll see threats from Russia, Iran, North Korea, and we’ll continue to see a threat from transnational terrorism. … There’s always something that we weren’t really sighted on, but we were prepared to address because we prepared for the most challenging threat.”
In Singapore, he said, “[W]e face a range of challenges in this region that demand common action ... the specter of coercion from rising powers ... the nuclear dangers from North Korea ... the struggles against repression inside countries such as Myanmar ... and leaders who ignore the rule of law and abuse the basic rights and dignity that all people deserve.”
Left unsaid was that China, which Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman was then visiting, is implicated in all of those issues. Austin noted, “President Biden has made clear that the United States will lead with diplomacy. And the Department of Defense will be here to provide the resolve and reassurance that America’s diplomats can use to help prevent conflict from breaking out in the first place.”
It is not known whether Sherman felt fortified by Biden’s defense strategy in her “frank and open” talks with the Chinese. But neither she in Beijing nor Austin in Singapore delivered the one deterrent message that would accomplish the greatest good on the most dangerous military flashpoint in the region — that America will defend the Southeast Asian country of Taiwan against Chinese aggression.
Austin did not include Taiwan at all in his general litany of common dangers, and paid it only sparse attention in his speech. After describing the important examples of regional security cooperation — with Japan, Singapore, Australia, Korea — he added, “And meanwhile, we’re working with Taiwan to increase its own capabilities and to increase its readiness to deter threats and coercion — upholding our commitments under the Taiwan Relations Act, and consistent with our One China policy.”
The Taipei Times reported the statement of appreciation from Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs that tactfully described Washington’s security support a bit differently: “The Biden administration has repeatedly said that its commitment to Taiwan is ‘rock solid’ under the Taiwan Relations Act and the ‘Six Assurances,’ while engaging with its allies to underscore the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.”
In addition to skipping the “Six Assurances” that President Reagan gave Taiwan, Austin considered only one of the two security mandates of the Taiwan Relations Act — the U.S. obligation to provide weapons for Taiwan’s self defense. He failed to mention the requirement that Washington will “maintain the capacity of the United States to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion” against Taiwan.
Every administration since Jimmy Carter’s has downplayed that language because it implies the U.S. will directly defend Taiwan. It is precisely the subject of the Taiwan Invasion Prevention Act (TIPA), which Trump let die in the last Congress — and which Biden is leaving to languish so far in this one. TIPA means deterrence.
Austin did have one solid achievement on his Indo-Pacific visit. After meeting with Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, the two announced that the termination letter for the Visiting Forces Agreement was now withdrawn and bilateral security cooperation will proceed uninterrupted.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He is a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies and a member of the advisory board of the Global Taiwan Institute. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.
The Hill · by Joseph Bosco, opinion contributor · August 3, 2021
8. Opinion | New congressional report says covid-19 likely emerged in Wuhan months earlier than originally thought
I remember having a meeting with a Taiwnese risk analysis expert in January 2020 before COVID really took off. He told us there was evidence of COVID in September -October 2019 in Wuhan.
Excerpts:
The new GOP congressional report contains no smoking guns that will settle the debate over the origins of covid-19, but it presents a convincing case that the lab leak theory must be investigated thoroughly, with or without the Chinese government’s permission. As McCaul argues, that investigation must begin here at home.
The Biden administration’s 90-day intelligence review will not be sufficient. Calls for a 9/11-style commission are increasing. Without investigating the Wuhan labs and all U.S. collaboration with them, there’s no way to claim we have done our best to learn how the pandemic started, so we can prevent the next one. Uncovering the truth is crucial to our national security and our public health.
Opinion | New congressional report says covid-19 likely emerged in Wuhan months earlier than originally thought
The Washington Post · by Opinion by Josh RoginColumnist Today at 7:27 p.m. EDT · August 2, 2021
Nineteen months after the start of the pandemic, the Chinese government continues to actively thwart a real investigation into the origins of covid-19. Now, a new GOP congressional report alleges that Beijing was covering up the outbreak for months longer than previously assumed.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee minority staff, led by ranking Republican Michael McCaul (Tex.), released Monday an 84-page addendum to their previously issued report on the origins of covid-19. Their new research focuses on whether the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the world’s leading bat coronavirus research center, as well as other labs in Wuhan, could have been the source of the outbreak. The report also presents extensive evidence that the international community may need to revise its timeline of the outbreak.
“It is our belief the virus leaked sometime in late August or early September 2019,” McCaul said in a statement accompanying the release of the report. “When they realized what happened, Chinese Communist Party officials and scientists at the WIV began frantically covering up the leak. … But their coverup was too late — the virus was already spreading throughout the megacity of Wuhan.”
In January 2020, Chinese researchers reported that the first confirmed cases of covid-19 occurred in December of 2019, some of which were linked a seafood market in Wuhan (although not the earliest cases). In March 2020, China traced its first case back to Nov. 17, 2019. But since then, more and more evidence has emerged that suggests that the virus was circulating in Wuhan well before that time.
As the committee’s report notes, the Wuhan Institute of Virology took its main public virus database offline on Sept. 12, 2019. Dozens of athletes from several countries who attended the 2019 Military World Games in Wuhan in late October reported they came down with covid-like illnesses either while they were in Wuhan or shortly after returning home. The committee report also references commercially available satellite imagery that shows significantly increased activity at the six Wuhan hospitals closest to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in September and October of 2019.
The committee staff also unearthed an archived version of a contract competition for a new $1.3 million “Security Service Procurement Project” that was issued by the Wuhan Institute of Virology on Sept. 12, the same day the virus database went mysteriously offline. Four days later, the Wuhan Institute of Virology announced a new contract competition to completely renovate its air conditioning system for an estimated $606 million. Both contract announcements were later scrubbed from the Chinese Ministry of Finance website.
“Based on the material collected and analyzed by the Committee Minority Staff, the preponderance of evidence suggests SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory sometime prior to September 12, 2019,” the report states.
Understanding the timeline of the outbreak is crucial to getting to the truth about the origins of the virus. In an interview with CNN that aired in March, Robert Redfield, who directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the outbreak, said, “If I was to guess, this virus started transmitting somewhere in September, October in Wuhan.” Redfield also said he believed the virus originated from research at the Wuhan lab.
The committee report goes into extensive detail about the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s documented research modifying bat coronaviruses. It accuses American scientists of deliberately working to further the Chinese government’s coverup by bullying other scientists who wanted to investigate the lab leak hypothesis and misleading the world about the nature of the work U.S. scientists were doing in collaboration with the Wuhan labs.
The report singles out Peter Daszak, the head of the U.S. government funded nonprofit organization EcoHealth Alliance, who awarded several subgrants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and worked closely for many years with their main bat coronavirus team, led by Shi Zhengli. Daszak was instrumental in organizing a letter in February 2020 in the Lancet “condemn[ing] conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” and he has consistently defended the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“We have uncovered strong evidence that suggests Peter Daszak is the public face of a CCP disinformation campaign designed to suppress public discussion about a potential lab leak,” the report states, pointing to emails between Daszak and other scientists the committee says were part of his effort to steer the narrative away from the Wuhan labs.
Daszak was the sole American on the World Health Organization’s study mission to China, which declared the lab leak hypothesis “extremely unlikely.” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus later admitted that its team did not properly investigate the possibility of a lab accident origin and that more work needed to be done.
The Lancet commission on covid-19 removed Daszak from its team focusing on the origins of the pandemic after Daszak filed an updated conflict of interest statement about his collaboration with the Wuhan labs. McCaul wants him to be subpoenaed to testify and is demanding the EcoHealth Alliance hand over its relevant records to Congress. (The EcoHealth Alliance did not respond to a request for comment. Daszak also did not respond to a request for comment.)
The new GOP congressional report contains no smoking guns that will settle the debate over the origins of covid-19, but it presents a convincing case that the lab leak theory must be investigated thoroughly, with or without the Chinese government’s permission. As McCaul argues, that investigation must begin here at home.
The Biden administration’s 90-day intelligence review will not be sufficient. Calls for a 9/11-style commission are increasing. Without investigating the Wuhan labs and all U.S. collaboration with them, there’s no way to claim we have done our best to learn how the pandemic started, so we can prevent the next one. Uncovering the truth is crucial to our national security and our public health.
The Washington Post · by Opinion by Josh RoginColumnist Today at 7:27 p.m. EDT · August 2, 2021
9. The Trouble With Washington’s ‘Rules-Based Order’ Gambit
Excerpts:
In his recent speech in Singapore, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin began to deliver this message. He noted that “Beijing’s claim to the vast majority of the South China Sea has no basis in international law” and supported Southeast Asian nations’ efforts to “protect their sovereignty… as well as the fishing rights and the energy resources afforded them by international law.”
This message would, of course, carry more weight if the United States itself ratified UNCLOS. Its failure to do so makes it easy for China to portray the U.S. as hypocritical. The fact that the U.S. accepts UNCLOS as customary law is legally significant, but of limited help in the court of public opinion.
The Biden administration clearly recognizes that demonstrating success at home is the key to international defense of the democratic model. Similarly, improved U.S. compliance with international norms would greatly enhance U.S. defense of the rules-based international order.
Liberal internationalists have long maintained that U.S. leadership of the post-war order has been distinguished from that of previous hegemons by its restraint. They argue that by complying with the rules, Washington was able to win wider support for the U.S.-led liberal order. The extent to which the United States has actually been restrained and compliant is still actively debated. But, either way, it’s not too late for the U.S. to attempt this model of leadership and strengthen its claim to the moral high ground. And the need is growing.
The Trouble With Washington’s ‘Rules-Based Order’ Gambit
Improved U.S. compliance with international norms would greatly enhance U.S. defense of the rules-based international order.
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Washington sees the rules-based order as a winning card in its competition with Beijing. U.S. President Joe Biden forecast “extreme competition” early in his term but added, “I’m not going to do it the way [former President] Trump did. We’re going to focus on international rules of the road.” Similarly, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has emphasized that “our purpose is not to contain China, to hold it back, to keep it down. It is to uphold this rules-based order that China is posing a challenge to.”
Why so much talk about the rules? Partly because the Biden administration genuinely believes that the order must be defended. But partly because, more than ever, the United States needs allies and partners. Washington’s friends are leery of escalatory rhetoric and unrealistic objectives such as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s goal of “ensuring that China retains only its proper place in the world.” They are more likely to rally in support of defending an order from which they have all benefited.
In the contest for international legitimacy it makes sense for the United States to target a Chinese vulnerability: Its disregard of accepted international norms. At the China-U.S. meeting in Anchorage, Blinken listed some of the most egregious violations – “Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyberattacks on the United States and economic coercion toward our allies” – but made no mention of the South China Sea.
Yang Jiechi, director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs, responded with an audacious bid for the moral high ground. He declared that “what China and the international community follow or uphold is the United Nations-centered international system and the international order underpinned by international law, not what is advocated by a small number of countries of the so-called rules-based international order.”
Yang’s riposte correctly identified a U.S. vulnerability. The “rules-based order” is a novel and vague description of how the world should work. More established and legitimate descriptions refer to the United Nations and international law. Although the U.S. shaped the U.N. and much of international law, its relationship to these institutions has become increasingly vexed, especially since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. That’s partly why it fallen back on the “rules-based order.”
Can China make a better claim to identify itself with the U.N. and international law? For anyone familiar with recent Chinese behavior, Yang’s claim strains credulity. But there are reasons to think his argument might be more be more internationally persuasive than Washington appreciates.
As the United States has pulled back from the U.N., China has stepped up. It is now the second-largest contributor to both the U.N.’s regular budget and the peacekeeping budget. Chinese nationals head four of the U.N.’s 15 specialized agencies. China provides more personnel to peacekeeping operations than any other permanent member of the Security Council.
Whether or not China is using this engagement to “uphold is the United Nations-centered international system” is a matter of perspective. A detailed survey by Ian Johnston has shown that Beijing can plausibly claim to be supporting many elements of the existing international order. For example, it usually votes with U.N. General Assembly majorities and uses its U.N. Security Council veto sparingly. But other scholarship has shown how China is steadily bending international institutions and norms to accord with its preferences and remove the liberal values they often embody.
But even if the United States and its allies can demonstrate how China is changing the rules-based order from within, it is questionable how many countries would care. Many “swing states” care much less about liberal values than they do about defending their sovereignty from external interference. Beijing’s stated commitment to non-interference sounds attractive, even if it is only rhetorical. This desire to protect sovereignty and avoid external scrutiny partly explains the reluctance of many states to criticize China’s massive oppression of Muslim minorities in western China.
In the contest for international legitimacy, the United States should avoid sweeping and exaggerated claims of U.S. compliance with, and Chinese violations of, the rules-based order. These lower the bar for Beijing.
More fine-tuned U.S. messaging would be more effective. Rather than characterizing China’s conduct in the South China Sea as undermining the liberal rules-based order, Washington should identify it as a specific and especially egregious violation of international law. The U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea – which China negotiated, signed and ratified – is fundamental building block of international law. The gravity of this violation can be underscored without referring to liberal values.
In his recent speech in Singapore, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin began to deliver this message. He noted that “Beijing’s claim to the vast majority of the South China Sea has no basis in international law” and supported Southeast Asian nations’ efforts to “protect their sovereignty… as well as the fishing rights and the energy resources afforded them by international law.”
This message would, of course, carry more weight if the United States itself ratified UNCLOS. Its failure to do so makes it easy for China to portray the U.S. as hypocritical. The fact that the U.S. accepts UNCLOS as customary law is legally significant, but of limited help in the court of public opinion.
The Biden administration clearly recognizes that demonstrating success at home is the key to international defense of the democratic model. Similarly, improved U.S. compliance with international norms would greatly enhance U.S. defense of the rules-based international order.
Liberal internationalists have long maintained that U.S. leadership of the post-war order has been distinguished from that of previous hegemons by its restraint. They argue that by complying with the rules, Washington was able to win wider support for the U.S.-led liberal order. The extent to which the United States has actually been restrained and compliant is still actively debated. But, either way, it’s not too late for the U.S. to attempt this model of leadership and strengthen its claim to the moral high ground. And the need is growing.
10. A New Bill Seeks to Patch the Flaws in the Arms Export Control Act
Congress trying to reassert its influence in national security matters?
This will significantly affect security assistance and foreign military sales:
The National Security Powers Act would flip the script on arms sales by requiring Congress to approve every sale before it can move forward. This move would eliminate the two major weaknesses of the AECA and give Congress a much stronger voice in the arms sales process. This system would promote at least two important positive outcomes.
A New Bill Seeks to Patch the Flaws in the Arms Export Control Act
By A. TREVOR THRALL and JORDAN COHEN
The proposed legislation would help Congress regain a measure of sway over weapons sales.
In the years after Vietnam, a Congress grown wary of presidential mismanagement of foreign policy passed several pieces of legislation, including the Arms Export Control Act, or AECA, and War Powers Resolution, which gave them the power to exercise more authority on foreign policy. Despite these laws, however, the White House increasingly has managed to limit congressional involvement in the foreign policymaking process.
Last month, Sens. Chris Murphy, Mike Lee, and Bernie Sanders proposed legislation aimed at reining in this “imperial presidency.” Their National Security Powers Act legislation seeks to restrict the president’s ability to declare war and unilaterally sell weapons abroad.
Nowhere is the current imbalance of power more obvious than in arms sales. Over the past 20 years, the White House has sold weapons worth more than $888 billion to 167 countries, including countries mired in conflict, countries whose governments routinely turn weapons on their own people, and countries in which corruption makes it impossible to know where American weapons will wind up being used, or by whom. Over that period, Congress has tried on numerous occasions to exert its influence to halt weapons sales, with little to show for it. The National Security Powers Act would fix the two major flaws in the AECA, and thereby provide Congress more power to restrict weapons sales.
The first flaw is that it requires Congress to move too quickly. The AECA gives Congress the ability to halt weapons sales, but only if it can pass a resolution of disapproval within thirty days of being notified of the sale by the executive branch. As anyone who has been watching Congress lately can imagine, this is a next-to-impossible feat regardless of the issue. In fact, in more than 40 years since the AECA became law, Congress has never managed to halt a weapons sale through this mechanism.
Second, the AECA requires Congress to be too united to exert any influence. Over the past two years, members of Congress have tried and failed to prevent sales to Israel, the Philippines, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. In the first three cases, the resolutions failed to gain enough support largely because members of Congress knew they had no chance to pass. In the Saudi Arabia case, resolutions to halt sales actually passed in both houses, only to be vetoed by President Trump. In short, the bar for exerting influence is so high that Congress rarely tries to block arms sales, and when it has, it has always failed.
The National Security Powers Act would flip the script on arms sales by requiring Congress to approve every sale before it can move forward. This move would eliminate the two major weaknesses of the AECA and give Congress a much stronger voice in the arms sales process. This system would promote at least two important positive outcomes.
First, this will force the president and defense lobbyists to justify these sales publicly. Today the president can avoid debate about unpopular sales by linking them to popular ones or by burying sales in other kinds of legislation. And because it is so difficult today for Congress to prevent arms sales, Congress has far less incentive to raise concerns than it would under the new system. Requiring approval for arms sales in Congress will give members the opportunity to press the president to explain to the public why controversial sales should take place. Presidents will be less likely to pursue risky arms sales and the American public will be better informed.
The second positive outcome is that it gives Congress the ability to ensure sales will not help enable human rights violations. In just the past two years, the United States has sold weapons to the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The latter two countries have been involved in the war in Yemen, and they have all committed violence against their citizens. Under the current AECA, however, Congress has been able to exert little influence over sales to such countries. As an example, the Leahy Laws make it illegal to provide weapons to specific military units that have been involved in human rights abuses, but do nothing to prevent American arms from going to that military’s government, or even to other units in the military itself. With the ability to prevent the president from forcing arms transfers through Congress and increased salience of weapons transfers debate, the National Security Powers Act can work to supplement the things like Leahy laws’ current capabilities.
The National Security Powers Act will face resistance. Whether or not Congress manages to replace the War Power Resolution, however, the proposed revisions to the AECA should move forward. The new legislation will help prevent the United States from selling weapons to countries engaged in violent conflict, countries where corruption feeds black markets for weapons, and countries with records of harming their own citizens.
If Congress does pass the legislation, it should find a warm welcome in the White House. In September 1986, then-Senator Joe Biden stated in a defense of flipping the script on arms sales, “the major foreign policy business of the United States must be conducted on the basis of far stronger support from the Congress. If a president’s tools of leadership and persuasion cannot prevail, there is sound reason for reconsideration of the policy.”
A. Trevor Thrall is associate professor at the Schar School of Policy & Government at George Mason University and senior fellow at the Cato Institute.
Jordan B. Cohen is a Ph.D. candidate at the Schar School of Policy & Government at George Mason University.
11. Continuity and Change in China’s Strategy to Protect Overseas Interests
Excerpts:
Chinese foreign policy remains vulnerable to shocks caused by sudden threats to the country’s interests overseas. Although important changes took place after 2011 in order to ensure that the People’s Liberation Army can play a more active role in protecting Chinese nationals and assets in unstable regions, policymakers in Beijing have maintained a pragmatic and cautious approach. After all, the best way to deal with difficult choices is avoiding situations in which one is forced to make them. There is no doubt that the evil attacks against Chinese citizens in Mali, Pakistan, and South Sudan will not be the last to happen. However, apart from Libya-like incidents involving large a large number of Chinese nationals (not simply material assets), we should not expect People’s Liberation Army operations overseas outside the U.N. framework to become the new normal.
This assessment has important implications for Western officials. While China will likely continue pushing to expand its influence, and socialize local elites and security forces overseas through training and exchange programs to ensure that its interests are protected, that is vastly different from the far more malign and threatening scenarios that some imagine. My research shows that Chinese decision-makers have been pragmatic and cautious, well aware of the risks and costs that a more active use of the military to protect their country’s interests overseas would entail. Against this background, it is very difficult, for instance, to believe that there is a master plan to threaten America’s East Coast from Africa.
Of course, things could change, especially in the event of another sudden large-scale crisis. As shown in Libya, Western military intervention can antagonize China in the U.N. Security Council and destabilize key regions, thereby threatening Chinese companies and nationals. As China’s human and economic footprint overseas expands, it will naturally become more vulnerable to this type of instability. Therefore, if Western officials are concerned about a shift in China’s strategy, it is crucial that they appreciate that whether that will happen depends in part on them.
Continuity and Change in China’s Strategy to Protect Overseas Interests - War on the Rocks
This summer has not been an easy one for the officials working at China’s Centre for Consular Assistance and Protection of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In May, a Chinese national was killed in South Sudan, along a major road linking the capital Juba to the town of Rumbek. In July, nine more Chinese citizens died and one was wounded in terrorist attacks in Pakistan. Gunmen abducted three Chinese workers and two Mauritanians from a construction site in northern Mali less than a week later.
While the Chinese embassy in Bamako issued a warning to Chinese companies and nationals in Mali to pay extra attention to their safety, the Global Times, defined by China scholar and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Susan Shirk as “a tabloid, but an authoritative one,” published an unusually thunderous editorial in response. It warned that, though China will provide assistance to Pakistan, if that country’s “strength is insufficient, China’s missiles and special forces could also directly participate in operations to eliminate threats against Chinese in Pakistan with the consent of Pakistan. We will set an example as a deterrent.”
How China approaches the protection of its interests overseas is no trivial thing. Its decision to deploy its military (including the People’s Armed Police) overseas to protect Chinese nationals or companies might easily be perceived by the United States and others as the first step in establishing a Chinese sphere of influence outside Asia. This is already happening. For example, in an interview with the Associated Press, the commander of the U.S. Africa Command, Gen. Stephen Townsend, conflated China’s real attempts to protect its interests in Africa with speculations about a broader strategy that includes the establishment of a stable military presence in West Africa to threaten America’s eastern coast.
As I show in my recently published book on this topic, however, the situation is much more complex and, more importantly, less threatening. Although there is a consensus in Beijing that the military should play a role in the protection of Chinese companies — and especially nationals — in case of danger abroad, that consensus was the result of responding to a series of crises, rather than grand strategizing. Moreover, the existence of that consensus does not necessarily mean that the Chinese military is, or will become, the main actor in dealing with this thorny problem.
Who’s Responsible for Protecting Chinese Overseas Interests?
Unsurprisingly, the Chinese government has long looked at the foreign ministry as the main agency charged to manage what scholar William Norris defined as the “security externalities” of China’s economic activities in unstable regions. Since the early 2000s, the foreign ministry has been working with other ministries and agencies of the State Council, especially the Ministry of Commerce, to codify into regulations the principle that “[whoever] sends personnel abroad is responsible for them” (谁派出, 谁负责). Essentially, the goal is to make Chinese companies responsible not only for the economic success of their activities, but also for the safety of their employees. As is made explicit in the many warnings the foreign ministry and Chinese embassies and consulates abroad issue, Chinese nationals who travel to, or who remain in, highly dangerous places against the opinion of the foreign ministry have to pay all the costs associated with their protection and rescue.
The encouragement to spend more money on security training, insurance, and consulting services has also created opportunities for the private security sector in China. However, Chinese policymakers have refused to eliminate the current legal gray zone that impedes Chinese security contractors from playing a significant role overseas. According to some Chinese scholars, allowing private security companies to become more similar to their international counterparts, especially in terms of using force abroad, risks creating significant diplomatic risks that would outweigh the possible security gains. The real problem is that many Chinese contractors and investors simply spend too little on risk prevention and risk management in the first place, and do not keep in touch with Chinese embassies and consulates overseas. For example, China was forced to evacuate roughly 36,000 Chinese nationals from Libya amidst a raging conflict and NATO bombing campaign.
China’s leadership started thinking about the possible role of the military to protect overseas assets and resources necessary for their country’s economic development many years ago. In 2004, terms like “development interests” (发展利益) and “new historic missions” (新阶段的历史使命) began appearing in official statements by leading officials and in the defense white paper released that year. However, my analysis of important developments, such as the joining of international antipiracy efforts in the Gulf of Aden in 2008 and the deployment of peacekeepers to Darfur in 2007, show that diplomatic considerations, such as projecting the image of a “responsible great power” (负责任大国), were still the main, albeit not the only, driver of the expansion of China’s military footprint outside Asia.
A real change in Chinese thinking took place in the aftermath of the 2011 evacuation from Libya. As shown in my book, the discussion among Chinese military experts and officers started to focus on what’s necessary for the military to operate overseas, from the legal framework to new training requirements and so on. At the same time, a number of crucial steps were made at home and abroad to make it possible for the People’s Liberation Army to play a larger role beyond Asia. At home, the government issued new laws and regulations like the Provisions for the Participation of the People’s Liberation Army in U.N. Peacekeeping Missions, the National Security Law, the Antiterrorism Law, and the National Defense Transportation Law in order to clarify key aspects related to Chinese military operations overseas. Since the publication of the 2013 edition of The Science of Military Strategy, the military has also revised its doctrine, especially in regards with “military operations other than war” (非战争军事行动) overseas. These changes took place in parallel with the Chinese navy’s acquisition of new platforms, such as the Type 071 landing platform dock and the Type 075 landing helicopter dock, and the reorganization of the People’s Liberation Army Navy Marine Corps.
Two other key developments took place abroad that demonstrated China’s interest in exploring how the military could contribute to the protection of its interests overseas. As detailed by scholar David Styan, the first was the signing of a security cooperation agreement with Djibouti, and the sending of the first Chinese military attaché to the country in the aftermath of the 2012 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation. Djibouti was surely on the top of the list of the places that could possibly host a Chinese military base because of the familiarity of the Chinese navy with the country. Moreover, the presence of other foreign militaries made opening a base there less eye-catching, and these moves should be seen as the first steps toward the opening of the base there on Aug. 1, 2017, the 90th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army.
The second important development was the decision to deploy combat troops as part of the U.N. peacekeeping missions in Mali and South Sudan in 2013 and 2015, respectively. These ongoing deployments serve two purposes. Firstly, like previous small detachments of “guard units” (警卫部队) in Darfur and South Sudan, they allow the Chinese military to familiarize itself with foreign environments and gain operational experience. Courtney J. Fung, an expert on China and the United Nations at Hong Kong University, has analyzed this process in detail. Secondly, though Chinese peacekeepers play an extremely limited role in directly protecting Chinese assets and workers, they allow Beijing to gain important diplomatic capital that can be invested in shaping the mandate of peacekeeping missions wherein they are deployed. The most prominent example of this was the inclusion in mid-2014 of oil installations in South Sudan among the facilities that (non-Chinese) peacekeepers protected.
Yet, despite these important changes, the actual, direct role the People’s Liberation Army plays in China’s strategy to protect its interests overseas has not changed much. China still has no network of bases overseas. As far as it is publicly known, investment in foreign port facilities has not come with additional agreements that grant special rights to the Chinese military. On the contrary, in recent years, China has significantly strengthened what Zhong Feiteng, a researcher at National Institute of International Strategy of the State Council-affiliated Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, defines as “policy communication” (政策沟通) with other countries. This is evident if one looks at the numerous trips Zhao Kezhi, the state councilor and minister of public security, made during which the protection of Chinese projects was explicitly mentioned as part of law enforcement cooperation.
The goal is to work with, and support, local security forces so that they can ensure the safety of Chinese interests. Besides the famous case of Pakistan creating new units specifically with that purpose, a recent example of this trend is the inking of an accord between Demelash Gebremichael, the commissioner-general of the Ethiopian Federal Police Commission, and Zhao Zhiyuan, China’s ambassador to Ethiopia, aimed at improving the protection of projects taking place in the East African country within the framework of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Ethiopian forces escorted hundreds of Chinese nationals out of the Tigray region just a few months earlier.
China’s approach to the protection of its interests overseas, one that is centered on diplomatic cooperation while also including a limited military option, is a sensible strategy. This is especially true for a country that has an enormous economic and human footprint in many unstable regions of the world. Although many think about the deployment of troops overseas almost solely in terms of soldiers sent to kill someone, it is important to remember that the military also possesses unique auxiliary capabilities that allow it to react more quickly and more effectively than civilian agencies in case of non-traditional security crises. This was evident to some extent during the 2011 evacuation from Libya, and even more so when Chinese nationals were evacuated from Yemen in 2015. Chinese soldiers did not shoot a single bullet, but naval warships and long-range transport aircraft proved instrumental in bringing Chinese nationals to safety.
At the same time, China has accumulated political capital, especially in the developing world, by avoiding the militarization of its foreign policy beyond what concerns its “core interests” (核心利益), especially territorial integrity in the case of the South and East China Seas, territorial disputes with India, and reunification with Taiwan. This is even more important today than 10 years ago because diplomatic support from the non-Western world is crucial for China in the context of increasingly competitive relations with the United States. Indeed, my research shows that Chinese military officers are aware of the fact that the use of force overseas, even in the context of peacekeeping missions, is not a simple tactical event but, instead, has critical diplomatic implications. Both the 2015 and 2020 editions of The Science of Military Strategy emphasize that a “diplomatic constraint” (外交因素制约) strongly shapes the use of the military overseas. Moreover, a number of scholars, such as Noel Maurer, Eugene Gholz, and Daryl G. Press, have shown that the military is not the most effective tool to protect a country’s interests overseas. Chinese policymakers and/or their advisers are likely aware of this dynamic. Indeed, Niu Xinchun, the director of the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies at the influential China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, has recently made this same point very clear in an article published by the Global Times.
Of course, this might change. Pippa Morgan and I found that Chinese companies in the Middle East and North Africa usually evacuate their workers only in the aftermath of large-scale events, rather than when the Chinese foreign ministry tells them to do so. Worryingly, this dangerous behavior has not changed after the Libyan crisis. As shown by data collected by the researchers of the ChinaMed Project, those regions are increasingly important markets for Chinese exporters and engineering contractors. The number of Chinese workers in the regions remains high — around 70,000 as of December 2019 — despite the downward trend since the post-2011 peak of about 115,000 workers in 2015. Therefore, the risk of major crises, and, especially, small incidents like those in South Sudan and Mali, remains constant. At the same time, it would be naïve to think that Chinese policymakers look at the military only to carry out evacuations, and they surely want Chinese soldiers to be able to perform higher-intensity missions if necessary. After all, safeguarding China’s interests overseas has officially become one of the strategic tasks of the Chinese armed forces (including the People’s Armed Police) since 2015.
The Chinese government appears to have a strong preference for finding ways to prevent crises from happening through the employment of regulatory tools to push Chinese companies to invest more in risk prevention and risk management, and through relying on cooperation with other countries. As of today, the efforts made in the aftermath of the Libyan crisis to include a military option in the policy menu have not changed this approach in a significant way. There are good diplomatic, and to a minor extent, economic reasons for that. In fact, tensions with the United States actually provide a strong incentive against the expansion of China’s military presence abroad because the presence of soldiers in a foreign country could quickly erode the precious diplomatic capital that, as mentioned above, China has accumulated over the years by keeping its military presence at minimum and within a multilateral framework.
Looking Ahead
Chinese foreign policy remains vulnerable to shocks caused by sudden threats to the country’s interests overseas. Although important changes took place after 2011 in order to ensure that the People’s Liberation Army can play a more active role in protecting Chinese nationals and assets in unstable regions, policymakers in Beijing have maintained a pragmatic and cautious approach. After all, the best way to deal with difficult choices is avoiding situations in which one is forced to make them. There is no doubt that the evil attacks against Chinese citizens in Mali, Pakistan, and South Sudan will not be the last to happen. However, apart from Libya-like incidents involving large a large number of Chinese nationals (not simply material assets), we should not expect People’s Liberation Army operations overseas outside the U.N. framework to become the new normal.
This assessment has important implications for Western officials. While China will likely continue pushing to expand its influence, and socialize local elites and security forces overseas through training and exchange programs to ensure that its interests are protected, that is vastly different from the far more malign and threatening scenarios that some imagine. My research shows that Chinese decision-makers have been pragmatic and cautious, well aware of the risks and costs that a more active use of the military to protect their country’s interests overseas would entail. Against this background, it is very difficult, for instance, to believe that there is a master plan to threaten America’s East Coast from Africa.
Of course, things could change, especially in the event of another sudden large-scale crisis. As shown in Libya, Western military intervention can antagonize China in the U.N. Security Council and destabilize key regions, thereby threatening Chinese companies and nationals. As China’s human and economic footprint overseas expands, it will naturally become more vulnerable to this type of instability. Therefore, if Western officials are concerned about a shift in China’s strategy, it is crucial that they appreciate that whether that will happen depends in part on them.
Andrea Ghiselli (@AGhiselliChina) is an assistant professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs of Fudan University. He is also the head of research of the TOChina Hub’s ChinaMed Project. His research revolves around Chinese foreign policy and China’s role in the wider Mediterranean region, with a special focus on Sino-Middle Eastern relations. Andrea is the author of the book Protecting China’s Interests Overseas: Securitization and Foreign Policy that was published by Oxford University Press in 2021.
12. Repression by Any Other Name: Xinjiang and the Genocide Debate
Excerpts:
China’s steadfast refusal to permit monitoring, along with its portrayal of happy Uyghurs merrily folk dancing, testifies to its position on alternative facts. More important, any regime that ventures anywhere near the neighborhood of genocide has forfeited a presumption of good faith. At the very least, it is hard to see how leveling the charge would make a regime more genocidal.
As for leverage, asserting a plausible charge of genocide has demonstrably upped the pressure on China. Rightly or wrongly, genocide resonates with a power that other human rights violations cannot match. One measure is the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, which Xi Jinping desperately wants to match China’s 2008 showcase. The growing campaign to boycott the #genocideolympics threatens to dash that hope. The campaign could not have gained anything like the momentum it has achieved under any other banner.
That truth nonetheless has a downside. There are other violations that China has more obviously committed, and which in many ways can be even worse than some forms of genocide. Foremost among these are crimes against humanity, defined as a “systematic attack” on a civilian population through, among other things, forcible transfer of population; imprisonment in violation of international law; and persecution based upon ethnic, religious or cultural groups. The definition of crimes against humanity, like genocide, arose from World War II, but does not require proof of intent.
The international human rights lawyer Philippe Sands points out that not only do China’s actions in Xinjiang clearly amount to crimes against humanity, but that this charge should trigger the world’s anger no less than genocide. But so long as it does not, the alternative remains. In the end there is more than enough reason to err, if error it be, on the side of holding China accountable for a 21st century genocide.
Repression by Any Other Name: Xinjiang and the Genocide Debate
Is what’s going on in Xinjiang genocide? The answer is a qualified yes, but no hedging is needed for the equally serious accusation of crimes against humanity.
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China can’t seem to shake the charge of committing genocide of the Uyghur Muslim population of Xinjiang. Yet its accusers cannot seem to make the charge stick. Skeptics, and not just those affiliated with the Chinese government, question whether the repression in Xinjiang amounts to genocide. Even if it is, many argue, asserting the charge can only make matters worse.
The truth is that the skeptics are wrong on both counts. The irony is, even if they were right, the debate shouldn’t matter.
The genocide charge will not go away anytime soon. It will instead dog the People’s Republic so long as it continues to engage in its massive and systemic violation of the Uyghurs’ basic human rights.
Among China’s well documented measures targeting the Uyghurs: unprecedented mass surveillance of the population, the destruction of mosques and cemeteries, bans on religious practices, forced labor, placing officials to live in the homes of Uyghur families, coerced marriages of Uygur women to Han Chinese men, and — not least — the incarceration of over a million Uyghurs in “reeducation camps.”
An array of nations and organizations have concluded that the worst of these policies amount to genocide. Canada, the U.K., Lithuania, and the Netherlands are among the states that have joined the United States in advancing that conclusion. An even larger group of NGOs have made the same determination. If anything, use of the “G word” will grow more intense as China’s hosting of the 2022 Winter Olympics approaches.
But even as these calls grow, there has been pushback from unexpected quarters. Earlier this year The Economist magazine applied its own version of a “simple” dictionary definition to deny any a genocide in Xinjiang. Likewise, the otherwise progressive economics scholar Jeffery Sachs took a giant step beyond his fields of expertise to argue that China’s actions are not genocide even under accepted legal definitions.
Is what’s going on in Xinjiang genocide? The answer is a qualified yes, though one that is becoming less qualified as evidence and events unfold.
The answer begins with the accepted legal definitions. Those definitions are found in the principal treaties on the subject: the Convention on Genocide and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. These pacts reflect years of drafting, dialogue, and negotiation by diplomats and legal experts around the world. They have been accepted as binding law by the vast majority of the world’s nations. They carry considerably more authority than the views of a group of editors in London misusing a dictionary.
These treaties define genocide as certain acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” The specified conduct includes: killing; causing serious bodily or mental harm; subjecting a group to harsh conditions calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures to prevent births; and forcibly transferring children of the targeted group to another group.
There is ample evidence that China’s government has subjected Xinjiang’s Uyghur Muslim population to more than one of the named genocidal actions. No credible person or organization alleges killing, still less of the sort that conjures up Nazi extermination of Jews. But there is strong evidence of several of the other actions that constitute genocide. Mass detention, pervasive surveillance, and the denial of culture and religion are hard to view as anything other than causing serious mental and even physical harm. Bounties for marriage that “dilute” the Uyghur population and the apparent reduction of the Uyghur birthrate qualify as measures to prevent births. It is also hard to see how the harsh concentration camps in this context exist without seeking a “collateral” benefit of decreasing the numbers of the disfavored group.
The closer question, most commentators agree, turns on intent. Are Beijing’s policies designed merely to turn the Uyghurs into patriotic Chinese citizens? Or do they aim for the added benefit of reducing their number – destroying them in part as an ethnic and religious group?
Neither the Chinese government nor the Chinese Communist Party has been careless enough to make clear public statements expressing a desire to destroy the Uyghur Muslims. Certain officials have made certain comments that come perilously close. One official, for example, did post a Weibo message declaring: “Break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins. Completely shovel up the roots of ‘two-faced people,’ dig them out, and vow to fight these two-faced people until the end.” But if Chinese officials have approved the idea of reducing the Uygur Muslim population, the evidence remains shrouded by the secrecy and censorship of an authoritarian regime.
Yet intent, in international law as in daily affairs, can be inferred. As evidence leaks out and mounts, it becomes increasingly difficult to believe that the brutality, scale, and results of Beijing’s campaign against Uyghur Muslims does not have, among its goals, the desire of the government and party to reduce what it sees as a historically alien and disloyal population. That desire qualifies as an intent to destroy a disfavored group in part. And that is sufficient to meet the standard.
Then again, a charge may be valid and still best not be made. Some argue that even if China’s government is engaging in genocide, the accusation will do more harm than good. Talk of genocide can only insult and enrage any regime, not least China. Better to err on the side of caution to allow for engagement and negotiation that might ameliorate the situation.
The very heinousness of genocide belies this approach. Engagement may work in certain situations, such as trade wars. But the possibility requires some combination of leverage, good faith, and common rejection of “alternative facts.”
China’s steadfast refusal to permit monitoring, along with its portrayal of happy Uyghurs merrily folk dancing, testifies to its position on alternative facts. More important, any regime that ventures anywhere near the neighborhood of genocide has forfeited a presumption of good faith. At the very least, it is hard to see how leveling the charge would make a regime more genocidal.
As for leverage, asserting a plausible charge of genocide has demonstrably upped the pressure on China. Rightly or wrongly, genocide resonates with a power that other human rights violations cannot match. One measure is the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, which Xi Jinping desperately wants to match China’s 2008 showcase. The growing campaign to boycott the #genocideolympics threatens to dash that hope. The campaign could not have gained anything like the momentum it has achieved under any other banner.
That truth nonetheless has a downside. There are other violations that China has more obviously committed, and which in many ways can be even worse than some forms of genocide. Foremost among these are crimes against humanity, defined as a “systematic attack” on a civilian population through, among other things, forcible transfer of population; imprisonment in violation of international law; and persecution based upon ethnic, religious or cultural groups. The definition of crimes against humanity, like genocide, arose from World War II, but does not require proof of intent.
The international human rights lawyer Philippe Sands points out that not only do China’s actions in Xinjiang clearly amount to crimes against humanity, but that this charge should trigger the world’s anger no less than genocide. But so long as it does not, the alternative remains. In the end there is more than enough reason to err, if error it be, on the side of holding China accountable for a 21st century genocide.
13. A Marine's new book is a 'deeply lyrical account' of infantry life in the Post 9/11 age
A profound insight here from Worth Parker and quite a strong recommendation for this new book (which is an understatement if he hopes it will be alongside Sledge's work):
O’Brien’s discussion of “happening truth” and “story truth” was incredibly liberating for me, freeing me from a self-imposed obligation to write stories totally accurate from every individual perspective. But to me, even more valuable than O’Brien’s validation of letting truth arise from the ashes of accuracy is constructing a greater “story truth” built upon a foundation of brutal, honest, “happening truth.”
That is what Kacy Tellessen accomplishes with Freaks of a Feather: A Marine Grunt’s Memoir and, if there is such a thing as literary justice, you will eventually find Tellessen’s truth shelved alongside Sledge and Leckie and O’Brien.
...
What is unique about Tellessen, at least in a machine gun squad, is his deep love for literature, particularly the Greek Classics. That background gives his tale both context and depth often lacking in other post-9/11 stories. It is the layer beneath the tattoos and desert grit and all the male affectations that come with life in the dog pack of a Marine infantry company that makes the book stand out compared to other post-9/11 combat memoirs.
The military is filled with young men and women desperate to prove themselves, to deserve the deference and respect that only time, experience, and wisdom can bring. Kacy Tellessen was no different. In the Marine Corps, the most direct path to elevation is as a grunt. There he sought the things he found. Some he still treasures, some he deeply regrets. Regardless, he lived the fullness and bore the brunt of those experiences. He lost friends and killed enemies. He endured mind-numbing boredom, rode rocket ships fueled by combat, and came home burdened.
He experienced many of the issues of post-combat veterans and is honest about all of them, neither asking for, nor offering excuses. His deeply lyrical account of all the highs and lows of grunt life strikes the perfect balance of deep personal reckoning and unrestrained honesty. His writing is neither spare nor overwrought. That balance is important. It is the truth of the experience of most of the combat veterans amongst whom I’ve spent the last two decades; we are neither broken nor fully whole. We simply are and some days that’s easier than others. That Tellessen neither minimizes nor plays for effect that truth makes Freaks of a Feather a particularly valuable combat memoir. As a first offering, it is deeply impressive. One hopes it is not the last for, as Tim O’Brien reminds us, “But this too is true: stories can save us.”
A Marine's new book is a 'deeply lyrical account' of infantry life in the Post 9/11 age
If there is such a thing as literary justice, you will eventually find Tellessen’s truth shelved alongside Sledge and Leckie and O’Brien.
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On March 28, 1990, publisher Houghton Mifflin released Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried.” Four months later, on August 2, Iraq invaded Kuwait. Two months after that, my mother, ever a careful student of things her baby boy might appreciate, sent me O’Brien’s book. I was 17 years old, primed for an “I was there” combat tale, and I understood neither the book nor the fact that Tim O’Brien and Saddam Hussein had set in motion for me parallel chains of events that would twist through Iraq and Afghanistan before intersecting when I re-read “The Things They Carried” in anticipation of seeing O’Brien speak in 2019.
O’Brien’s discussion of “happening truth” and “story truth” was incredibly liberating for me, freeing me from a self-imposed obligation to write stories totally accurate from every individual perspective. But to me, even more valuable than O’Brien’s validation of letting truth arise from the ashes of accuracy is constructing a greater “story truth” built upon a foundation of brutal, honest, “happening truth.”
Very little of the literature arising from the post-9/11 wars has struck a literary “X ring.” Our Tim O’Brien is yet to arise. Phil Klay’s Redeployment comes closest to fiction that tells the truth. By the third story of Redeployment I could smell the odors that characterize Iraq for me; saffron and donkey shit; cigarette smoke and body odor. But though Klay is a Marine and an incredibly talented writer who achieves “story truth,” he does not write entirely from the authority of experience. Unlike O’Brien, he did not live many of the facts he re-arranges. That’s not a disparagement, merely a reflection of time, place, and duties.
There are memoirs that dance around the bullseye as well. Benjamin Busch’s Dust to Dust is so akin to poetry that it likely defies readers who cannot appreciate its complexities. Nathaniel Fick’s One Bullet Away is an engaging instruction manual for young Marine infantry officers but it does not fully transport a reader to the places about which he writes. Tellessen stands astride the line between the two: he writes a “happening truth” that meets the traditional definition but does so with enough artistic inspiration that the reader absorbs broader “story truths” about young men and war as viscerally as one smells burning shit and the ammonia stench of body armor worn for six months straight.
Reading Tellessen’s description of an IED strike upon a Humvee I am fully transported to places I only partially left. They’re not places many of us care to go again but must because we owe it to the people we left there. Telleson writes:
“The Humvee was a twisted skeleton of its former self. The only thing that told me it was a vehicle was the still-spinning tire that stuck straight up. My eyes moved from the spinning tire to the palm trees. They were painted in varying shades of human. I watched a beige chunk of someone slide off a tree and fall with a wet smack.
Someone’s torso had crashed into a yellow Toyota micro truck. The impact had forced both doors open. I thought I saw an infant’s footprint tattooed over the heart of the torso. I swallowed vomit.
We formed a defensive perimeter around the explosion, hoping the enemy would send a wave of insurgents at us. That way, we would have something to fight besides the horror that smoldered behind us. We wouldn’t be so lucky. The insurgents must have thought we had been through enough for one day, but the day wasn’t over. The day would never be over.
We had to pick them up. They deserved to go home as whole as we could make them. They were placed in parts on ponchos. There was a small segment of face that stared at everyone who walked past, the calm eyes not realizing the part they played in this macabre nightmare. I was silent as I watched gloved hands place the head of a drinking buddy into a plastic sack.”
The strength of Freaks of a Feather, and the majority of Tellessen’s attention, is found in his first deployment to Iraq. The scene-setting affected by his recounting of pre-Marine Corps life and the trials of boot camp, the School of Infantry, and a subsequent assignment to Second Battalion, Third Marine Regiment are necessary to make us understand who Kacy Tellessen is but break little new ground. That is as it should be. Neither Tellessen’s presentation of pre-Marine Corps life nor the comedic absurdity of barracks life in an infantry battalion are particularly unique to his tale. Those aspects are the threshold across which all poets must cross to become warriors and their telling cannot be ignored.
Machine Gunner Lance Cpl. Jason P. Cogley, a 20-year-old Rocky Mount, N.C. native, peers into a humvee windshield for a moment before returning to supply route observation, one of the many different missions performed by the Military Police Company, Combat Logistics Regiment 15, 1st Marine Logistics Group (Fwd). (Official USMC photo by: Lance Cpl. Geoffrey P. Ingersoll (060829-M-8187I-001) (Released)
What is unique about Tellessen, at least in a machine gun squad, is his deep love for literature, particularly the Greek Classics. That background gives his tale both context and depth often lacking in other post-9/11 stories. It is the layer beneath the tattoos and desert grit and all the male affectations that come with life in the dog pack of a Marine infantry company that makes the book stand out compared to other post-9/11 combat memoirs.
The military is filled with young men and women desperate to prove themselves, to deserve the deference and respect that only time, experience, and wisdom can bring. Kacy Tellessen was no different. In the Marine Corps, the most direct path to elevation is as a grunt. There he sought the things he found. Some he still treasures, some he deeply regrets. Regardless, he lived the fullness and bore the brunt of those experiences. He lost friends and killed enemies. He endured mind-numbing boredom, rode rocket ships fueled by combat, and came home burdened.
He experienced many of the issues of post-combat veterans and is honest about all of them, neither asking for, nor offering excuses. His deeply lyrical account of all the highs and lows of grunt life strikes the perfect balance of deep personal reckoning and unrestrained honesty. His writing is neither spare nor overwrought. That balance is important. It is the truth of the experience of most of the combat veterans amongst whom I’ve spent the last two decades; we are neither broken nor fully whole. We simply are and some days that’s easier than others. That Tellessen neither minimizes nor plays for effect that truth makes Freaks of a Feather a particularly valuable combat memoir. As a first offering, it is deeply impressive. One hopes it is not the last for, as Tim O’Brien reminds us, “But this too is true: stories can save us.”
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Russell Worth Parker is a retired U.S. Marine Special Operations Officer. His more than 27 years of service included infantry and special operations assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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14. Rising cry for civil war in Myanmar
Who is going to support this effort? What external support does it have?
If the analysis below is accurate we are going to see unprecedented levels of violence in Burma:
As such, many people feel like they have nothing to lose and are eager to fight. That’s especially true among tech-savvy Generation Z youth who came of age during the quasi-democracy era and aren’t willing to give up the freedoms denied to their forebears.
The Tatmadaw is keenly aware of the passion driving Generation Z and has intentionally targeted them with violence, repression and assassination by snipers at protest sites. According to PDF trainee Thakhin Daung, the military “is seeking to destroy the younger generation and doesn’t care about us.”
While a coordinated nationwide armed uprising may still be wishful anti-military thinking, local PDFs have instilled a degree of shadowy fear in the regime through growing small-scale hit-and-run attacks against Tatmadaw forces and assassinations of military or military-allied officials at the grassroots level.
Indeed, violence against local ward administrators has become so widespread that the Tatmadaw has been forced to barricade ward administration offices with sandbags and deploy soldiers to guard them.
This lack of control at the local level underscores the military’s failure to consolidate its power over the country and has given some breathing room to citizens, many of whom reportedly feel safer knowing that military-appointed administrators likewise fear for their personal security when roaming their neighborhoods.
Indeed, if the vast majority of the country opposes the military regime, there is not much the Tatmadaw can do to impose its will. The Tatmadaw had killed at least 946 people and imprisoned 5,478 people as of August 3, but the military can’t kill or imprison the entire country.
Thakhin Daung said the military’s ultimate lack of control is another big difference between this year’s and the 1988 coup. “After the coup in 1988, the military took control of the whole country quickly, but today the military can’t control us. They only have total control over their bases, not the civilian areas.”
Rising cry for civil war in Myanmar
Shadow National Unity Government says it's readying for all-out war against coup regime but its battlefield prospects are uncertain
As Myanmar’s crisis deepens amid a spiraling Covid outbreak, collapsing economy and repressive military coup, rising anger and insecurity are galvanizing calls for the shadow National Unity Government (NUG) to launch a nationwide armed uprising against the coup regime.
The NUG, comprised of activists, ethnic minorities and politicians from Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party which was ousted from elected power in a February 1 coup, is preparing to answer that call with an armed response.
The NUG’s armed wing, known as the People’s Defense Force (PDF), is bidding to unify various resistance groups into a unified nationwide armed insurrection. Recruitment to the force is underway, with one PDF trainee communicating with Asia Times under the pseudonym Thakhin Daung.
“The economy has crashed since 2020 and is twice as worse this year due to the coup, so people want PDF action quickly,” he claimed, noting that many of his civilian colleagues are eager for a full-scale war in response to the nation’s tri-pronged crisis.
To be sure, desperation is spreading far and wide. In April, the UNDP predicted that nearly half of the population, or some 26 million people, could be plunged into poverty by 2022. Since that downbeat forecast, the socio-economic situation has deteriorated significantly due to a fast-spreading third wave of Covid-19 cases.
The UN now estimates that half of Myanmar’s population could be infected with Covid-19 within the next two or three weeks, turning Myanmar into a “super-spreader state” that could threaten the entire region. The country’s health care system, already among the region’s most rudimentary due to decades of military mismanagement, is by any measure in a state of collapse.
All of this is leading to a rising sense of despair that is fueling civil war cries. In a recent Facebook post, NUG Defense Minister Yee Mon acknowledged the people’s widespread desire to topple the regime, saying “We are prepared for the end game of the revolution,” referring to the massive anti-coup opposition movement known as the “Spring Revolution.”
Yet Yee Mon is walking a fine line between satisfying an impassioned public’s desire for quick action and the practical challenge of a huge power imbalance between the Tatmadaw and the PDF in terms of weapons and soldiers.
NUG Defense Minister Yee Mon on the campaign trail in 2020 before the February 1, 2021 coup. Photo: Facebook
In a Radio Free Asia interview last month, Yee Mon urged local PDF fighters across the country to keep up their morale while saying everyone should “wait for his signal” on when to launch the much-anticipated nationwide uprising.
Whether the NUG is really prepared for full war is an open question. The coronavirus outbreak, the rainy season, and widespread flooding are also complicating the NUG’s efforts to organize armed resistance to the junta. If the UN has it right and half the country becomes infected with Covid in the coming weeks, it’s hard to imagine large-scale armed resistance will materialize any time soon.
At the same time, the pandemic has intensified the people’s misery, woes that are driving many Myanmar people to embrace the idea of civil war. Indeed, the situation has become so dire that Human Rights Watch researcher Manny Maung recently told media “The country has fallen into chaos and is close to complete collapse.”
Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced since the coup, including villagers who have fled armed conflict and military aerial bombardments, dissidents who are being actively hunted by the military and civil servants forced into hiding after being threatened with reprisal including imprisonment for refusing to work as part of the anti-military Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM).
Jonathan Nield, a British medical doctor who has spent several years working on the Thai-Myanmar border, said via email that many displaced people are still hiding in fields and forests, where they are “in great distress from lack of food, clean water, and shelter and at great risk of water and mosquito-borne disease.”
If the NUG does move decisively to organize a national armed resistance, there will be plenty of disenfranchised people they can seek to recruit. But a move to full-scale civil war, one that adds to ongoing armed conflicts in various ethnic areas including Shan and Kachin states, will exacerbate the nation’s intensifying humanitarian catastrophe.
Yet there are signs that this is where the situation is soon headed. In preparation for war, the NUG announced on May 5 the creation of the PDF, which the NUG hopes will take the lead in fighting against the Myanmar military, known as the Tatmadaw.
Even before the PDF’s creation, small groups of resistance forces armed with rudimentary weapons had sprung up across the country in local areas and engaged in sporadic fighting with the Tatmadaw. They are also believed to be behind a fast-growing number of hit-and-run attacks on military soft targets and assassinations of military coup affiliated officials and suspected agents.
Anti-coup protesters wearing signs in support of the People’s Defence Force (PDF) during a demonstration against the military coup in Dawei, May 21, 2021. Photo: AFP via Dawei Watch
These local resistance groups also refer to themselves as PDF. The NUG now hopes to unite all these local PDF groups under the banner of a national PDF controlled by the NUG’s Ministry of Defense.
The NUG’s ultimate goal is to combine all the PDFs with the country’s various ethnic armed organizations to form a “Federal Army” that will take the fight to the Tatmadaw in a multi-front war. The end goal of the fight would be to establish a federal democratic union that provides a high degree of autonomy to ethnic states, a goal for which ethnic armies have fought for decades.
The PDF trainee interviewed by Asia Times, Thakhin Daung, is among thousands of mostly young people from central Myanmar who have flocked to Myanmar’s border areas for military training conducted by these ethnic armed groups.
Although Thakhin Daung said he gave up a comfortable life in Yangon to “join the revolution,” he was upbeat about the situation and said joining the armed movement was his “duty.” He said there was no choice but to take up arms faced against a military regime that has shown no signs of compromise since the coup.
“Some people still believe in soft power, but I’ve chosen hard power,” he said.
Thakhin Daung said that his friends who remained behind in central Myanmar are pinning their hopes on the PDF trainees to return soon and launch what some are cryptically referring to as a “D-Day” massive coordinated attack on the Tatmadaw.
While the NUG has reportedly received hefty public donations, it still likely lacks the funds to wage a national war. And an arms embargo on Myanmar imposed since the coup has made it doubly difficult to acquire modern weapons and ammunition to challenge the Tatmadaw.
In an interview, NUG representative Linn Thant cautioned that patience was needed before a nationwide uprising could defeat the Tatmadaw. “Even if we had money for weapons, we couldn’t buy them due to the arms embargo, and we don’t want to engage in illegal arms sales,” he said.
Linn Thant said the NUG is encouraging the international community to support the revolution, provide humanitarian aid and officially recognize the NUG as Myanmar’s legitimate democratic government.
As of now, the national PDF would be far out-manned and out-gunned by the Tatmadaw. Moreover, the various local PDF and ethnic armed groups are too geographically spread out to effectively coordinate with each other. The junta has also restricted phone and internet services to limit the ability of resistance forces to organize and coordinate their activities online.
Myanmar’s Tatmadaw flexes in an Armed Forces Day parade in Naypyitaw, March 27, 2021. Photo: Agencies
Even with those limitations, organized resistance against the coup has been robust, marking a significant difference between this year’s coup and the last military putsch met by a national uprising in 1988.
After the 1988 coup, neighboring Thailand allowed refugees fleeing the Tatmadaw’s bloody crackdown to take refuge on its territory. It also allowed armed resistance groups to operate in border areas as part of a wider “buffer state” policy vis-à-vis Myanmar’s military government.
The times have changed, though, as Thailand’s current military-aligned leaders have drawn closer to the Tatmadaw. The two nation’s economies have also become more integrated, not least through Thailand’s crucial imports of Myanmar natural gas which are used to fuel the nation’s electricity supply.
There have already been reports of Thailand forcing refugees back across the border. The refugee situation has been complicated by the coronavirus pandemic, which has prompted Thailand to close its official border and crack down hard on illegal border crossings that previously received a blind eye.
Duncan McArthur, Myanmar Program director for The Border Consortium, told Asia Times that “Thai security forces have increased border security to mitigate against the spread of Covid-19 and reports suggest the detention of undocumented migrants has increased. However, it’s a long and porous border with thousands of informal border crossing points.”
However, as the humanitarian crisis intensifies in Myanmar, Thailand will find it increasingly difficult to stop a rising tide of refugees from illegally crossing the border. The combination of the coronavirus, the coup, and an economy forecast to contract by 18% this year has pushed Myanmar to the breaking point.
Critics say the coup government’s ineptitude in managing the economy, state administration and the pandemic has only been outdone by its cruelty. The junta has been hoarding oxygen tanks, deny people access to hospitals and physically attacking and imprisoning doctors who have treated people at underground clinics after quitting their jobs at government-run hospitals as a gesture of dissent.
Hla Hla Win, who founded the popular 360ed virtual reality learning app in Myanmar, said in an interview that “The military is using the coronavirus as a weapon to attack people” and is just sitting back and watching the pandemic happen.
Myanmar military chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing has shown no regret for his coup. Photo: AFP / Sefa Karacan / Anadolu Agency
Coup leader Min Aung Hlaing’s announcement on August 1 that elections—which he initially promised would be held within a year—would be delayed until 2023 has only reinforced fears that military rule will be extended indefinitely.
As such, many people feel like they have nothing to lose and are eager to fight. That’s especially true among tech-savvy Generation Z youth who came of age during the quasi-democracy era and aren’t willing to give up the freedoms denied to their forebears.
The Tatmadaw is keenly aware of the passion driving Generation Z and has intentionally targeted them with violence, repression and assassination by snipers at protest sites. According to PDF trainee Thakhin Daung, the military “is seeking to destroy the younger generation and doesn’t care about us.”
While a coordinated nationwide armed uprising may still be wishful anti-military thinking, local PDFs have instilled a degree of shadowy fear in the regime through growing small-scale hit-and-run attacks against Tatmadaw forces and assassinations of military or military-allied officials at the grassroots level.
Indeed, violence against local ward administrators has become so widespread that the Tatmadaw has been forced to barricade ward administration offices with sandbags and deploy soldiers to guard them.
This lack of control at the local level underscores the military’s failure to consolidate its power over the country and has given some breathing room to citizens, many of whom reportedly feel safer knowing that military-appointed administrators likewise fear for their personal security when roaming their neighborhoods.
Indeed, if the vast majority of the country opposes the military regime, there is not much the Tatmadaw can do to impose its will. The Tatmadaw had killed at least 946 people and imprisoned 5,478 people as of August 3, but the military can’t kill or imprison the entire country.
Thakhin Daung said the military’s ultimate lack of control is another big difference between this year’s and the 1988 coup. “After the coup in 1988, the military took control of the whole country quickly, but today the military can’t control us. They only have total control over their bases, not the civilian areas.”
Peter Morris is a journalist and lawyer who has been working on Myanmar-related projects since 2008. He’s on Twitter at @burmablues
15. Taliban Commander Who Led Attack on Afghan City Was Released From Prison Last Year, Officials Say
A high level of recidivism among the Taliban. Go figure.
There are always second and third order effects. Could this not be foreseen? Or were other considerations of greater importance?
T.E. Lawrnece had something to say about this: "An opinion can be argued with; a conviction is best shot." The Taliban will not give up their beliefs and probably cannot be rehabilitated (though I am not advocating shooting prisoners only pointing out how important are religious and ideological beliefs and that we need to understand that).
WSJ News Exclusive | Taliban Commander Who Led Attack on Afghan City Was Released From Prison Last Year, Officials Say
U.S. pressed Kabul government to free thousands of Taliban fighters in bid to encourage peace talks and many have returned to the battlefield
WSJ · by Alan Cullison and Saeed Shah
Afghan officials said fierce fighting continued Tuesday in Lashkargah, the provincial capital of Helmand province, after heavy U.S. airstrikes and a counterattack by U.S.-trained Afghan commandos overnight. Under Mr. Talib’s command, hundreds of Taliban have pushed toward the city center over the past week. On Tuesday they launched an attack on Lashkargah’s prison in a bid to release more inmates and recruit them into the fight.
Mawlavi Talib, the Taliban’s ‘shadow’ deputy governor of Helmand province, was arrested last year.
The fighting in Lashkargah is part of a wider countrywide Taliban offensive that had captured half of the country’s remote districts by last month and now threatens provincial capitals. On Tuesday, the government said that its commandos launched a counterattack in the western city of Herat, whose defenses were teetering. Taliban forces last month pierced defenses in Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second largest city, but government forces are holding steady there.
Afghanistan’s Defense Ministry said Tuesday its forces killed around 375 Taliban and wounded 193 in fighting across the country in the last 24 hours. Eleven improvised explosive devices were discovered and defused, the ministry said. The Afghan government has stopped releasing statistics on its own military casualties to avoid demoralizing its troops.
In Kabul, attackers set off a car bomb near a guest house of Afghanistan’s acting defense minister Tuesday night, then stormed a nearby residence. The attack set off a gun battle with responding security forces that lasted hours.
The minister, Bismillah Khan, wasn’t home at the time of the attack. Hamid Noori, a spokesman for the ministry of interior, said dozens of civilians were evacuated from the area. A nearby hospital reported at least four people were killed and 11 admitted with wounds.
Before a special session of parliament called in response to the Taliban offensive, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani assured the country Monday that the U.S. still supports the government. But he offered a rare public criticism of the U.S., saying, “the current situation is due to a sudden decision on the withdrawal of international troops.”
Afghan security forces fought Tuesday in Lashkargah, the provincial capital of Helmand province.
Photo: Abdul khaliq/Associated Press
On Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke with Mr. Ghani to “reiterate the strong and enduring U.S. commitment to Afghanistan,” the State Department said. The leaders both condemned the Taliban attacks, which they said “show little regard for human life and human rights.”
Afghan forces’ dependence on U.S. air power for airstrikes and logistics rendered them ill-prepared for the U.S. pullout. Afghan officials say privately that their ground and air forces have been stretched thin in the fighting. The Afghan Air Force, which the U.S. has called the government’s most potent weapon against the Taliban, has been unable to fill the vacuum.
The U.S. pullout from Afghanistan follows an agreement signed with the Taliban last year under which the Taliban promised not to allow al Qaeda or other international jihadist groups to use Afghan soil to attack other countries.
The U.S. agreed to the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners as part of that agreement, in an effort to encourage the Taliban to talk to the Afghan government and agree to a cease-fire. However, Kabul was reluctant to free the prisoners and, Afghan officials say, only did so under pressure from Washington. Talks between the Taliban and Afghan government started but never gained momentum and instead of a cease-fire, the insurgents have unleashed a countrywide offensive.
“The decision to release prisoners was a difficult decision for the Afghans to make,” said a State Department spokesperson. “Prisoner releases are often a challenging but necessary step in ending armed conflict.”
Before their release, prisoners signed promises not to engage in fighting with the government, but most of the freed prisoners are now back on the battlefield, said Fawad Aman, a spokesman for Afghanistan’s Ministry of Defense.
“These freed Taliban are playing a very critical role in Helmand. They are among the fiercest Taliban terrorists,” said Mr. Aman.
Mr. Talib served for years under the Taliban, first as a military commander and later as the Taliban’s unrecognized, or “shadow,” deputy governor of Helmand province. The province, the site of heavy fighting between U.S. and British troops and the Taliban, is a center for poppy cultivation for the narcotics trade, so is particularly prized by the insurgents.
Government commandos launched a counterattack on Tuesday in the western city of Herat.
Photo: jalil rezayee/EPA/Shutterstock
Last year Mr. Talib was arrested by Afghan soldiers who recognized him as he tried to pass through a checkpoint on a road in the Sangin district in eastern Helmand, Afghan officials said. He was sent to Kabul for confinement, but within months was freed in the prisoner release, the officials said.
He soon resumed his old post of shadow deputy governor of Helmand, officials said. In June fighters overran remote districts in the province, and last month Mr. Talib collected fighters from throughout Helmand and adjacent provinces to surround Lashkargah for an attack.
Taliban fighters have seized most of the city in recent weeks, including a government television station, and this week began their own radio and television broadcasts.
A counterattack by commando units appeared to stem the advance by Tuesday. But Mr. Aman said the Taliban was using civilians and homes as shields in Lashkargah, slowing down the operation.
Afghans displaced by fighting received relief supplies from the U.S. Agency for International Development in Kandahar last month.
Photo: m. sadiq/EPA/Shutterstock
The civilian population was asked Tuesday by the Afghan army general leading the battle, Sami Sadat, to vacate their houses. Local residents questioned how it was safe for them to go outside their homes.
“I am fighting for the future of my people,” said Gen. Sadat, in a message to the population of Lashkargah. “We will not leave the Taliban alive.”
—Frotan Ghousuddin contributed to this article.
WSJ · by Alan Cullison and Saeed Shah
16. Germany wades warily into South China Sea fray
Excerpts:
Two years ago, China went so far as to disinvite France from its 70th anniversary of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy celebrations after French frigate Vendemiaire (F734) conducted freedom of navigation operations across the Taiwan Straits.
China has similarly threatened Britain against deployment in the region, but both European powers have continued to step up their naval deployments in the contested area.
It’s not clear if Germany will face similar threats, particularly considering the scale of its investment in China, but Beijing is likely hoping that the more commercially oriented and pragmatic voices in Berlin would eventually prevail.
For now, though, it seems Germany’s China hawks are gaining the upper hand amid a major shift in Western attitudes towards Beijing.
Both Merkel and her Social Democratic coalition partners initially opposed the naval deployment plan to the Indo-Pacific, especially across China’s adjacent waters, as overly provocative. They worried about the consequences for large-scale bilateral trade and investment ties with the Asian superpower.
“That Germany [would] send this frigate under Merkel’s watch is a small miracle and a big achievement for Defense Minister Kramp-Karrenbauer, who very much pushed for this,” Thorsten Benner, founder of the Global Public Policy Institute think tank, told the South China Morning Post.
Germany wades warily into South China Sea fray
German Navy frigate launches on seven-month journey through Indo-Pacific that could churn relations with China
Germany has deployed a warship into Asian waters for the first time in nearly two decades, reflecting the European power’s growing ambitions in shaping the 21st century global order. On Monday, the German Navy’s frigate, Bayern, set sail from the port of Wilhelmshaven in the North Sea for a seven-month-long journey across a dozen ports in the Indo-Pacific.
According to German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the German warship is expected to make port calls from Djibouti and Karachi in the Arabian Sea to Diego Garcia and Perth in the Indian Ocean as well as Singapore in the Malacca Straits, then all the way to Guam and Tokyo in the Western Pacific.
Though seen as largely symbolic, the German deployment is meant to signal the European power’s commitment to uphold freedom of navigation in international waters, protect “open societies” across the Indo-Pacific, and express solidarity with fellow democratic countries.
To China’s chagrin, Bayern is also set to sail through the hotly disputed South China Sea with port calls in Vietnam, a newly-minted European Union defense partner, which happens to be China’s fiercest rival in the contested maritime area.
The much-anticipated voyage is taking place on the final days of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s long tenure, reflecting a certain victory for more hawkish elements within the country’s ruling party. No less than German Green Party’s standard-bearer Annalena Baerbock, among top contenders to succeed Merkel, has vowed to take a tougher stance against China than the outgoing chancellor.
Bayern’s deployment comes after similar moves by other major European powers this year, with a French nuclear submarine and, more recently, Britain’s Carrier Strike Group already passing through Asia’s contested waters. It also coincides with the conclusion of US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s maiden visit to Southeast Asia, where he touted the importance of an “integrated deterrence” against China.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomes China’s President Xi Jinping to the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, July 7, 2017. Photo: AFP / Odd Anderson
Perturbed by the growing naval presence of external powers, Beijing has snubbed Berlin’s request for a port call in Shanghai as part of a broader effort “to maintain dialogue” with the Asian superpower. Instead, the Chinese Foreign Ministry warned the German frigate to “refrain from doing things that harm regional peace and stability” and “earnestly abide by international law.”
Up until recently, Germany was a relatively marginal player in Indo-Pacific affairs. Unlike Britain and France, it holds no territories in the area, nor does it have advanced aircraft carriers and well-established “blue water” naval capabilities. Nor is Germany a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.
Boasting the world’s third-largest military up until the 1980s, post-Cold War Germany oversaw a dramatic reduction in its military strength and deployments in recent decades. If anything, Berlin, now overseeing a unified Germany, emphasized domestic political consolidation, growing leadership with the European Union, and pragmatic “change through trade” (“Wandel durch Handel”) policy vis-à-vis authoritarian powers, most especially Russia.
During her high-profile visit to China in 2015, Merkel warned her hosts against “serious conflict” amid the “territorial dispute in the South China Sea” To Beijing’s dismay, the German leader also emphasized her support for international arbitration as “an option for a solution” for resolving the disputes.
The following year, Germany supported an arbitral tribunal at The Hague, which openly rejected China’s expansive claims in the South China Sea as incompatible with prevailing international law in ruling in the favor of the Philippines.
Over the succeeding years, under Merkel’s foreign minister Heiko Maas, Germany would also be at the forefront of global efforts to shed light on China’s atrocities against minority groups, most especially in Muslim-majority Xinjiang. The European power has also been openly critical of Beijing’s crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.
In a potential game-changer, Berlin unveiled a new 40-page policy guideline last year, announcing its plans to join the ongoing scramble in the Indo-Pacific with an eye on China. Berlin made it clear that it’s seeking to “promote a European Indo-Pacific strategy” and provide “active contribution to shaping the international order in the Indo-Pacific.”
The crew waves from aboard the frigate “Bayern”, which is setting off on a voyage lasting several months in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Photo: AFP via DPA / Sina Schuldt
Foreign Minister Maas has emphasized Germany’s commitment to help “shape…the international rules-based order of tomorrow” and espouse “international cooperation” rather than “the law of the strong.” In an unprecedented move, Germany joined fellow European powers Britain and France in a strongly-worded joint note verbale to the United Nations (UN) concerning the South China Sea disputes.
The three European nations emphasized the importance of preserving the “the integrity” of international law as well as “underline[d] the importance of unhampered exercise of the freedom of the high seas, in particular the freedom of navigation and overflight, and of the right of innocent passage” across the disputed South China Sea.
They also reiterated the 2016 arbitral tribunal award, which rejected Beijing’s “historic rights” claims and coercive actions in adjacent waters as “not comply[ing] with international law.”
Germany’s concomitant plans to deploy a warship to the Indo-Pacific, however, were disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Bayern’s deployment this week reflected Berlin’s desire to act on its earlier pledge to play a more proactive role in the region, including assistance in enforcement of UN sanctions against North Korea as well as expanded show-of-force and joint naval operations with allies in critical sea lines of communications.
Earlier this year, Germany also concluded its first-ever “two plus two” meeting with foreign and defense ministers of Japan, underscoring the rapid expansion in spoke-to-spoke cooperation among top US allies in recent years.
Similar to France and Britain, Germany is also expected to double down on defense and strategic cooperation with democratic powers such as Australia, India, Singapore, Vietnam and South Korea.
Down the road, the US, along with other major regional rivals of China, hopes that Germany will eventually become more comfortable with regularly contributing to an alliance-based, “integrated deterrence” initiative against Beijing’s perceived expansionism.
However, Germany’s newfound sense of purpose, and its more overt strategic alignment with the US and allies on global issues, have not gone down well in Beijing.
“The German side has made requests to the Chinese side to arrange for its warship to visit Shanghai through multiple channels,” said a foreign ministry spokesperson in response to Bayern’s deployment this week.
A German marine stands on board the corvette “Magdeburg” during the naval autumn maneuver “Northern Coasts” on September 11, 2019. Photo: AFP via DPA/Bernd W Stneck
“But regarding this warship operation, the information released by the German side before and after is too confusing. China will make a decision after the German side has fully clarified the relevant intentions,” warned the Chinese diplomat.
Two years ago, China went so far as to disinvite France from its 70th anniversary of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy celebrations after French frigate Vendemiaire (F734) conducted freedom of navigation operations across the Taiwan Straits.
China has similarly threatened Britain against deployment in the region, but both European powers have continued to step up their naval deployments in the contested area.
It’s not clear if Germany will face similar threats, particularly considering the scale of its investment in China, but Beijing is likely hoping that the more commercially oriented and pragmatic voices in Berlin would eventually prevail.
For now, though, it seems Germany’s China hawks are gaining the upper hand amid a major shift in Western attitudes towards Beijing.
Both Merkel and her Social Democratic coalition partners initially opposed the naval deployment plan to the Indo-Pacific, especially across China’s adjacent waters, as overly provocative. They worried about the consequences for large-scale bilateral trade and investment ties with the Asian superpower.
“That Germany [would] send this frigate under Merkel’s watch is a small miracle and a big achievement for Defense Minister Kramp-Karrenbauer, who very much pushed for this,” Thorsten Benner, founder of the Global Public Policy Institute think tank, told the South China Morning Post.
17. Taliban tells China what it wants to hear on ETIM
Both sides playing each other?
Excerpts:
While China is concerned about the Taliban’s true intent regarding the ETIM, the Taliban has so far taken a pragmatic, rational and reciprocal policy vis-à-vis China, which unlike the US has never fought against the militant group.
While the Taliban may not terminally uproot the ETIM, as Beijing wishes, it can be expected to try to restrain the group from attacking Chinese territory, though much will come down to the Taliban’s internal cohesion in the months ahead.
Taliban tells China what it wants to hear on ETIM
Taliban promise Beijing it will break with Uighur terror outfit bent on attacking Xinjiang but that will be easier said than done
Afghanistan’s Taliban and China are drawing closer together as the militant group drives to seize power through force in the wake of America’s troop withdrawal. Whether the two sides can build a mutually beneficial alliance, however, will come down to the Taliban’s ability and willingness to rein in extremist groups that so far have been instrumental to its battlefield successes.
When Taliban co-founder Mullah Baradar recently led a delegation to Beijing, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi specifically asked the group to “make a clear break” with terror outfits. These include chiefly the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), a militant group of ethnic Uighurs with a history of launching attacks in China’s western Xinjiang region.
Designated by the United Nations as a terror outfit, ETIM aims ultimately to make Xinjiang into an independent state of “East Turkestan.” Xinjiang’s stability is particularly sensitive for Beijing as the geographic hub of its Belt and Road Initiative’s link connecting to Pakistan and beyond.
Xinjiang is also where China holds as many as one million ethnic Uighurs in “vocational camps” critics have likened to concentration camps, allegations that have provided fuel to ETIM’s anti-Beijing fires. A UN Security Council report published in May said the ETIM has a “transnational agenda” to target Xinjiang as well as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor in Pakistan.
The report said approximately 500 of the group’s fighters operate in north and northeast Afghanistan, primarily in northern Badakhshan province’s Raghistan and Warduj districts, and that ETIM collaborates closely with other Islamic militant groups like the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan and Lashkar-e-Islam, both of which are known for launching attacks in Pakistan.
ETIM also has a strong presence in Kunduz and Takhar provinces while its logistics chief and religious leaders are based in Paktika province.
In return for “cutting ties” with ETIM, China is dangling to the Taliban not only recognition as a “genuine political force”, legitimacy the militant group with a history of terrorism clearly craves, but also pledged to invest heavily in the war-torn country’s devastated infrastructure and inclusion in the BRI via Pakistan.
President Ashraf Ghani, whose government is backed by the US, has mostly spurned Beijing’s BRI advances.
Nine Taliban representatives meet with Chinese officials in Tianjin. In the center are Taliban co-founder Mullah Baladar and Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Photo: Chinese Foreign Ministry
The Taliban’s leadership is no doubt interested in Beijing’s offers of largesse but is clearly now more concentrated on its war effort, where battlefield successes are improving its negotiating leverage vis-à-vis Ghani by the day. It’s not clear to most analysts the Taliban are currently willing to tackle the militant and terror outfits, including the ETIM, that are now aligned with its fight against Kabul.
But Beijing is clearly concerned by the ETIM’s known presence in northern Badakhshan province, which borders on China and is now under nominal Taliban control. It will be lost on few in Beijing that the Taliban similarly promised to cut ties with al-Qaeda as part of its February 2020 deal with the US, but by all accounts failed to actually sever connections with the global terrorist outfit.
The UN report indicates that the Taliban continued to fight alongside al-Qaeda militants after the Doha agreement, including in a late 2020 attack on Bagram Air Base. The Taliban also agreed to a broad reduction in violence in the lead-up to the US troop withdrawal, which likewise hasn’t been honored. That is a reflection in part of internal Taliban divisions on political-military, tribal and regional lines.
Whether the ETIM could seek to exploit those divisions to maintain its transnational agenda against China from Afghan territory is yet to be seen.
Yet it is an open secret that the Taliban’s Political Office, led by Abdul Ghani Baradar Abdul Ahmad Turk and tasked with foreign negotiations and relations, is often at odds with a more hard-line group of rank-and-file fighters close to Sher Mohammad Abbas Staekzai that is less keen to interact with the international community and show moderation.
The UN report says the Taliban leadership had not initially fully disclosed the details of the US Doha agreement, namely regarding the commitment to cut ties with al-Qaeda and other foreign fighters like ETIM, for fear of a backlash.
The report said the cutting ties commitment is a “matter that had surfaced repeatedly as a topic of acrimonious debate.” Al-Qaeda, like ETIM, is also active in northern Badakhshan province bordering China, as well as 11 other provinces, according to the UN.
Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters on the march in Afghanistan in a file photo. Image: Facebook
To be sure, Beijing has realpolitik motivations to engage the Taliban. As a recent commentary published in Global Times, the Chinese Communist Party’s official mouthpiece, said: Chinese policymakers tend to believe that making an enemy of the Taliban will only worsen the situation for Beijing. While the Taliban sympathizes with the ETIM, it would not allow the group to mount attacks inside China, the op-ed said.
While the ETIM is believed to have a large enough presence in Afghanistan to stage cross-border attacks in Xinjiang, with the UN report counting their numbers as high as 500 in border regions, it has notably not attacked mainland China since Beijing started its preliminary engagements with the Taliban in 2018.
How much the Taliban have been a restraining influence on the ETIM is unclear. What is clear is that the Taliban feels it can do business with China, firstly because it does not share the West’s democratizing agenda, and secondly because it appears willing to tolerate the formation of a Taliban-led Islamic Emirate on its border without interfering in its internal political matters as long as its core interests are met.
To be sure, the Taliban is unlikely to break with the ETIM until it has secured a clear military and political victory in Afghanistan. As recent Taliban battlefield victories show, the militant group continues to use transnational groups like the ETIM to extend control beyond its traditional heartland in southern Afghanistan.
Ghani recently described the Taliban as markedly different from its 1990s incarnation. “These are not the Taliban of the 20th century… but the manifestation of the nexus between transnational terrorist networks and transnational criminal organizations,” he said.
Given the Taliban’s transnational composition, disbanding non-Taliban, foreign terrorist outfits, including the ETIM, would run the risk of breaking the cohesion among foreign fighters it is now leveraging to devastating effect against the Afghan National Security Forces.
Once in power in Kabul, the Taliban’s calculus could quickly and dramatically change as it will no longer need foreign fighters to defeat the Afghan army and will instead need foreign allies like China to rebuild the economy and secure foreign aid. The Taliban leadership have recently declared that China is a “friendly” country and that it will not allow the ETIM to use Afghan territory against China. It’s not clear if rank-and-file commanders in the field agree, though.
ETIM fighters on the march in northern Afghanistan. Image: Twitter
While the Taliban did provide territorial sanctuary to al-Qaeda after coming into power in the mid-1990s, it did not itself pursue a transnational terror agenda. While known for its extremely orthodox and hard-core extremist ideas, the Taliban has never pledged or sought to extend its previous and now envisioned new emirate beyond Afghanistan’s borders.
As their various pronouncements show, the Taliban is primarily interested in re-establishing and consolidating its own rule in Afghanistan and to date has shown no interest in pursuing a regional agenda that could turn neighboring powers, namely China, Russia, Iran and Pakistan, against them.
Given the fact that major Muslim countries, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have wilfully chosen to stay mute on China’s persecution of ethnic Uighurs, the Taliban know that the ETIM is unlikely to receive the kind of logistical, financial and military support from abroad it did back in the 1990s.
While China is concerned about the Taliban’s true intent regarding the ETIM, the Taliban has so far taken a pragmatic, rational and reciprocal policy vis-à-vis China, which unlike the US has never fought against the militant group.
While the Taliban may not terminally uproot the ETIM, as Beijing wishes, it can be expected to try to restrain the group from attacking Chinese territory, though much will come down to the Taliban’s internal cohesion in the months ahead.
18. China can destabilize Taiwan without firing a shot
That is what political warfare with Chinese characteristics is all about: unrestricted warfare and the "three warfares:" psychological warfare, legal warfare, and media warfare of which cyber operations are an inherent part in the modern world.
Taiwan can benefit from developing resilience through the employment of a resistance operating concept to establish unconventional deterrence and counter chinese malign activities. Of course this would be one small line of effort as part of an integrated deterrence strategy (but it is the one I focus on obviously, given my area of study and experience).
China can destabilize Taiwan without firing a shot
An all-out invasion is less likely than sowing discontent with cybertattacks
Tsai Ing-wen and Xi Jinping. Chinese cyberattacks have targeted Taiwan's Presidential Office Building in recent years. (Source photos by Taiwan Presidential Office and Xinhua/Kyodo)
HIROYUKI AKITA, Nikkei commentatorAugust 2, 2021 22:05 JST | Taiwan
TOKYO -- U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman's visit to China on July 25-26, the first such trip by a Biden administration diplomat, illustrated, as many predicted, what a quagmire the tensions between the U.S. and China have become.
Foreign Minister Wang Yi put forward three demands -- do not plot to subvert China, lift all of Washington's unilateral sanctions and do not infringe on China's territory and sovereignty -- with a particularly strong message regarding Taiwan.
Beijing, he said, will quell pro-independence "provocations" by "any means necessary."
The question is, how much of a danger is there of open warfare?
Adm. Philip Davidson, then commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, caused a global stir in March with his warning that China could take action against Taiwan by 2027.
Lightly defended remote islands could provide inviting targets to Chinese soldiers. © CCTV/Kyodo
Since then, there has been increasingly heated discussions about the risk of a U.S.-China conflict in the Taiwan Strait. Some American and Japanese security experts say Davidson exaggerated the threat somewhat, while others agree with his assessment.
Looking merely at the military balance between Washington and Beijing, the latter view is not entirely unsubstantiated. China's breakneck expansion has upended U.S. military superiority in Asia.
The Chinese military has about five times as many fighter jets deployed in the Indo-Pacific as the U.S., for example, and that difference is projected to rise to eightfold in 2025, according to an estimate by the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. The defense gap is expected to widen in other areas as well. China is on pace to triple its number of carriers compared to the U.S. by 2025, with more than sixfold the total of submarines and ninefold the tally of warships by that year.
But, as for Davidson's specific reference to 2027, analysts more often than not say it is unlikely China will mount a full-fledged invasion of Taiwan by then.
For starters, bringing Taiwan into the fold by military force would require taking control of the Taiwan Strait, then sending the vast quantities of weapons, personnel and materiel needed for an invasion, which could take weeks or months. The Chinese military lacks the capabilities to guarantee that such an operation would succeed.
And even if China initially defeated the U.S., Washington would likely mobilize its forces from around the world to launch counterattacks against Chinese transport ship convoys, military ports and airports. Taiwan's own forces have hardened their defenses at key locations, making it difficult to occupy the entire territory at once.
In addition, Chinese President Xi Jinping's goal at this point is to thwart efforts advancing Taiwanese independence. He has not completely given up on the idea of peaceful unification.
That said, if the U.S. military does not step in, the basis for these arguments is moot.
Washington has maintained strategic ambiguity about its official stance on the matter, but the Pentagon will probably not stand idly by if China invades Taiwan.
Former U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd takes a seat near Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen during a meeting in Taipei on April 15. (Photo courtesy of Taiwan Presidential Office)
The U.S. military has been deepening its involvement in Taiwan. It has sent personnel there on multiple occasions in recent years to quietly provide guidance to the island's forces, according to American security experts. It reportedly has also observed drills and tabletop exercises and offered advice.
Short of Taiwan seeking independence, China is more likely to ratchet up pressure on the island for the time being, rather than launch an all-out invasion that would trigger a U.S. intervention.
These dynamics present two potential flashpoints over the next five or six years. Taiwan controls numerous remote islands, including Taiping Island and the Matsu Islands in the South China Sea, as well as the Pratas Islands to the southwest of the Taiwan Strait.
Specifically, the Chinese military could target a lightly defended island. But from Beijing's perspective, invading a remote island controlled by Taiwan presents challenges.
Although it would serve to rattle Taiwan, an invasion is certain to draw a sharp response from the U.S. and others. This would lead to greater assistance for Taiwan's defense, making unification that much more difficult.
The second flashpoint involves the possibility of China sowing social unrest in Taiwan, whether through cyberattacks or propaganda.
Stoking the public's discontent with Taiwanese authorities and leveraging its economic clout to further draw in the island's pro-Beijing element would erode governance.
Russia relied on similar tactics against Ukraine in annexing Crimea in 2014. There are indications China has already initiated such hybrid warfare.
Cyberattacks have targeted Taiwan's Presidential Office Building and defense ministry, while misinformation aimed at fostering domestic dissent has intensified in recent years, according to Taiwanese security officials.
Reports recently emerged that a Chinese agent is suspected to have approached a former senior official who held the Taiwanese defense ministry's third-highest post until June, obtaining sensitive information.
Considering these tactics alone are unlikely to lead to China's unification with Taiwan, Beijing continues to reserve the option of taking the island by force.
As U.S. and Chinese military aircraft and warships patrol the Taiwan Strait, the risk of a sudden escalation remains. A U.S. intelligence aircraft and a Chinese fighter jet collided midair off the coast of the island province of Hainan in 2001.
What is distressing is that reliable lines of communication between the U.S. and Chinese militaries seem to be fraying, making it difficult for them to contact one another in an emergency.
Top U.S. and Chinese military officials were scheduled to hold an online dialogue in December 2020, but American sources say the Chinese side never showed up. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin repeatedly suggested talks over the phone, but the Chinese military turned these overtures down.
As seen in the 1937 Marco Polo Bridge incident that precipitated the Sino-Japanese war, history is rife with skirmishes on the front lines developing into full-blown warfare. If that mistake is repeated in the Taiwan Strait, the global impact could be immense and immeasurable.
19. Biden puts Southeast Asia in U.S. sights — at last
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In some ways, Biden has it easy. He only has to avoid Trump’s most egregious mistakes — like publicly dissing ASEAN — to score points. Reports indicate that Biden will be attending the annual regional get-togethers that will be held later this year. He can reverse the more questionable moves by the Trump administration. For example, ending the Section 301 investigation into alleged currency manipulation by Vietnam launched by his predecessor was a smart move and made Austin’s Hanoi meetings much more pleasant.
Biden should also work more closely with Japan in the region. Japan has deep political and economic relationships with regional elites and the ISEAS surveys consistently show Japan is the most trusted outside power. Washington is doing that but it can rely more on Tokyo to promote its interests in Southeast Asia. That is the sort of partnership that befits the alliance in an era of wide-ranging competition and will help compensate for Biden’s slow start in Southeast Asia.
Biden puts Southeast Asia in U.S. sights — at last
It’s a little late, but the Biden administration has finally launched its Southeast Asian diplomatic offensive.
The delays aren’t all the new administration’s fault: Engagement has been stymied by technical glitches and the COVID-19 pandemic. But the gaping hole between rhetoric that prioritized the region and a failure to follow through jeopardized its strategic ambitions. The Biden team has shifted into high gear, dispatching officials and announcing policies to reinforce U.S. ties with the region and promote vital cooperation on shared concerns.
The embrace of the Indo-Pacific as a strategic framework highlights the importance of Southeast Asia: It’s the geographic nexus of the Indian and Pacific oceans. All U.S. governments talk about the region’s importance and tout their eagerness to engage, but the particularities of Southeast Asian diplomacy, especially the unwieldy creature that is ASEAN, are frustrating and other issues invariably get in the way. Regional governments are quick to notice — and point out — the discrepancies.
Southeast Asian governments were, for the most part, happy to see the end of the Trump presidency. The former president had little time or energy for the rituals that define the region’s foreign policy. His failure to show up for their meetings was a slap in the face — with the low-level representatives he sent in his place compounding the insult — and his failure to appoint an ASEAN ambassador throughout his four years in the White House was an unmistakable show of indifference.
They were troubled by Trump’s “America First” rhetoric and his insistence on rebalancing trade accounts in favor of the United States and at their expense. While the region’s realists were pleased by his administration’s readiness to call out China as a revisionist power, they were alarmed by the demand that they pick sides in that great power confrontation and concerned that his disdain for alliances and transactionalism meant that the U.S. could no longer be counted on to provide public goods, especially security.
For Devi Anwar Fortuna, one of the region’s leading voices on foreign policy, this “contributed to a lack of confidence in the United States as a reliable strategic partner among Southeast Asian countries.”
Biden’s election was greeted with relief. In the 2020 edition of “The State of Southeast Asia,” the authoritative annual survey of elite opinion by the ISEAS-Yusok Ishak Institute, a Singapore think tank, 77% of respondents believed that U.S. engagement with Southeast Asia declined under Trump from the Obama years. A year later, more than two-thirds, or 68.6%, expected U.S. engagement to pick up under Biden, and more than half, or 55.4%,deemed the U.S. a reliable strategic partner and provider of regional security.
Those hopes were frustrated in the first six months of the Biden term. Engagement with ASEAN was hampered by the coup in Myanmar, which forced the U.S. to step back as it debated how to do diplomacy with the group without seeming to approve of the military junta. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was supposed to hold a virtual meeting with ASEAN counterparts in May, but it was canceled because of technical problems. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was scheduled to attend the IISS Shangri-la Dialogue in Singapore, always a high-profile event with lots of side meetings, but the conference was called off because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Biden has not spoken to a single Southeast Asian head of state, nor has he appointed ambassadors to many regional capitals or ASEAN itself. That lack of representation is always taken as a slight, but it assumes even more importance when those governments read about Biden’s “Build Back Better” policy and need an authoritative U.S. voice to explain why it will not come at their expense.
The administration has recognized that it needs to pick up its game. In recent weeks, some ambassadorial appointments have been made and senior officials are visiting the region. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman visited Indonesia, Cambodia and Thailand in May and June; Austin was in Singapore, Vietnam and the Philippines last week; Blinken is holding five consecutive days of virtual meetings with Southeast Asian counterparts this week; and Vice President Kamala Harris announced her own visit to Singapore and Vietnam.
Austin’s trip was especially valuable. He reiterated U.S. support for ASEAN centrality, the idea that the regional forum is the preferred venue for engagement, which isn’t necessarily true but is a piety that all outside powers must mouth. He called the region his department’s “top strategic priority” and repeated U.S. defense commitments.
The day after Austin met Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte in Manila, the Philippine government announced that it would not abrogate the U.S.-Philippines Visiting Forces Agreement, which is the legal foundation of the alliance. It isn’t clear what prompted Duterte, who has delighted in upending the alliance and promoting relations with China, to reverse course, but it could be that he senses a shift in the balance of power between Beijing and Washington.
Austin emphasized that “We know no one can go it alone.” He talked about helping regional powers beef up their capacity to protect their own sovereignty but insisted that the U.S. would not ask countries in Southeast Asia to choose between the U.S. and China.
COVID-19 diplomacy has become a pillar of U.S. engagement. Donating vaccines is one of the most effective ways to make a tangible difference in the lives of billions of people around the world — and challenge China as it aggressively promotes its own COVID-19 diplomacy. Washington has sent 23 million doses to Southeast Asian countries, an impressive number — except for the fact that the region is home to more than 600 million people. The U.S. pledged to provide 1 billion doses through the “Quad” — which includes Japan, Australia and India — but the COVID-19 surge in India prompted Delhi, which was manufacturing the doses, to ban all vaccine exports.
The Quad’s failure to deliver underscores a tactical mistake to push that forum over ASEAN. Most observers expected priorities to be reversed, but the issues that hindered progress with ASEAN motivated the U.S. to pursue the other option, especially when the Quad was viewed as a more efficient and quick-moving forum. The problems in Delhi, of which the COVID-19 crisis is only the most obvious, should remind the U.S. that for all its frustrations, ASEAN may still be the better bet.
Two issues are key to U.S. progress with Southeast Asia. The first is economic engagement. Regional governments want the U.S. to balance their growing economic reliance on China, in both trade and investment. China’s Belt and Road Initiative will enhance Chinese economic influence in the region, and the U.S. has been slow to develop a counterbalance.
Washington, in partnership with Tokyo and Canberra, launched the Blue Dot Network in 2019 to spur infrastructure investment, but it remains vague and underfunded. The G7 backed the initiative at its June summit, but skepticism remains high. And, as noted, regional governments know that Biden’s priority is to build back better at home; it isn’t clear what monies will be available for regional investment.
The second problem is the Biden administration’s focus on democracy and values, along with its readiness to draw a sharp line between liberal and illiberal governments. Southeast Asian governments are uneasy with any emphasis on democracy and human rights — not only because those issues could become the thin wedge of an effort to forge a coalition against China, but because they fear that their own records may be criticized as well.
In some ways, Biden has it easy. He only has to avoid Trump’s most egregious mistakes — like publicly dissing ASEAN — to score points. Reports indicate that Biden will be attending the annual regional get-togethers that will be held later this year. He can reverse the more questionable moves by the Trump administration. For example, ending the Section 301 investigation into alleged currency manipulation by Vietnam launched by his predecessor was a smart move and made Austin’s Hanoi meetings much more pleasant.
Biden should also work more closely with Japan in the region. Japan has deep political and economic relationships with regional elites and the ISEAS surveys consistently show Japan is the most trusted outside power. Washington is doing that but it can rely more on Tokyo to promote its interests in Southeast Asia. That is the sort of partnership that befits the alliance in an era of wide-ranging competition and will help compensate for Biden’s slow start in Southeast Asia.
Brad Glosserman is deputy director of and visiting professor at the Center for Rule-Making Strategies at Tama University as well as senior adviser (nonresident) at Pacific Forum. He is the author of “Peak Japan: The End of Great Ambitions” (Georgetown University Press, 2019).
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.
