Quotes of the Day:
“Propaganda ... serves more to justify ourselves than to convince others; and the more reason we have to feel guilty, the more fervent our propaganda.”
- Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
“It is almost safe to say that no government is likely to be overthrown until it loses the ability to make adequate use of its military.”
- Crane Brinton
“A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.”
- Robert A. Heinlein, Friday
1. Some Climate-Change Effects May Be Irreversible, U.N. Panel Report Says
2. Is Taiwan Next?
3. As Afghan Cities Fall to Taliban, Brutal New Chapter Unfolds
4. As Taliban Capture Cities, U.S. Says Afghan Forces Must Fend for Themselves
5. The Propaganda War Intensifies in Afghanistan as the Taliban Gain Ground
6. The Taliban fly their flag in Kunduz as exhausted Afghan troops regroup.
7. Why the next major war is likely to start in Taiwan
8. U.S. says plot against Myanmar U.N. envoy fits 'disturbing pattern'
9. Unconditional Surrender: China's Long Game Is Dominance, Not Competition
10. Group wants US to stop military assistance to PH
11. Chinese sleeper agents are trying to enter the UK through a scheme designed for Hong Kongers fleeing the city, report says
12. Eight trends in online militia movement communities since the US Capitol Riot
13. Answers begin to emerge about FBI probe of Saudi complicity in 9/11
14. 2 women make military history by trying to become first to pass SAS selection
15. Meet Hoot, the legendary Delta Force operator from 'Black Hawk Down'
16. Proponents of $50 billion defense infrastructure amendment weigh back-up plan
17. Olympic Chief’s Deep Ties to Uyghur Slave Labor Revealed
18. Applying Machiavellian Discourses to the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
19. Opinion | The U.S. government is designed for failure. And, a new study shows, it’s getting worse.
20. FDD | The Taliban Has a Military Solution for Afghanistan
21. Support is needed for women warriors living with PTSD
22. Mindanao medal rush: How the region turned into an Olympic hotbed
23. US falling further behind China in STEM PhDs
24. Fourth Generation Espionage: The Making of a Perfect Storm
1. Some Climate-Change Effects May Be Irreversible, U.N. Panel Report Says
The reporting on this new UN report will dominate the news cycle for the next few days which will likely be dominated by political criticism rather than thoughtful logic based discussion of the issues and challenges to the science.
Excerpts:
The report “connects the dots in a way we really haven’t seen before,” said climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, who wasn’t involved with the report. “The message eerily resonates with what we’re seeing this summer in Canada, the U.S. and Europe as extreme weather events play havoc on us and our infrastructure.”
The report highlights human responsibility for record heat waves, droughts, more intense storms and other extreme weather events seen around the world in recent years. It also sharpens estimates of how sensitive the climate is to rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases—a key metric in forecasting the rise of global temperatures in the years ahead.
Some Climate-Change Effects May Be Irreversible, U.N. Panel Report Says
Report highlights human responsibility for record heat waves, droughts, more intense storms and other extreme weather events seen around the world in recent years
“We’ve known for decades that the world is warming, but this report tells us that recent changes in the climate are widespread, rapid and intensifying, unprecedented in thousands of years,” said Ko Barrett, vice chair of the panel and the senior adviser for climate at the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Further, it is indisputable that human activities are causing climate change.”
Flooding last month in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou killed dozens of people.
Photo: noel celis/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Dan Lunt, a climate scientist at the U.K.’s University of Bristol and one of 234 co-authors of the report, said, “It is now completely apparent that climate is changing everywhere on the planet.”
The report “connects the dots in a way we really haven’t seen before,” said climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, who wasn’t involved with the report. “The message eerily resonates with what we’re seeing this summer in Canada, the U.S. and Europe as extreme weather events play havoc on us and our infrastructure.”
The report highlights human responsibility for record heat waves, droughts, more intense storms and other extreme weather events seen around the world in recent years. It also sharpens estimates of how sensitive the climate is to rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases—a key metric in forecasting the rise of global temperatures in the years ahead.
Levels of carbon dioxide released into the air by the burning of fossil fuels, cement production and deforestation and other land-use changes reached a modern seasonal high of 419 parts per million in May. That is higher than at any time in the past 3.6 million years, according to NOAA.
Battling the Dixie Fire in California’s Lassen National Forest last month
Photo: Noah Berger/Associated Press
Atmospheric levels of methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas, are now about 2½ times their preindustrial levels and steadily rising, according to the International Energy Agency.
The report establishes scientific baselines for COP26, a key climate-change summit to be held in Glasgow in November. Representatives from 197 countries are expected to present updated plans for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.
A global agreement resulting from a 2015 climate summit in Paris called on nations to take steps to limit future global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). But the efforts are falling short.
“This report tells us that we probably need even more action by all the major economies to work together to avoid even worse impacts than we’re already seeing now,” said Jane Lubchenco, deputy director for climate and the environment at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She wasn’t involved in the IPCC effort.
A cooling shelter set up in Portland, Ore., as a June heat wave sent temperatures above 110 degrees Fahrenheit.
Photo: maranie staab/Reuters
Greenhouse-gas emissions from human activity have raised global temperatures by 1.1 degrees Celsius since around 1850, the report said. Without rapid reductions in emissions, global temperatures could rise more than an additional 1.5 degrees Celsius over the next 20 years, the report forecasts.
“We know there is no going back from some changes in the climate system, but some can be slowed or stopped if emissions are reduced,” said NOAA’s Dr. Barrett.
The report reflects new scientific methodologies honed in an era of growing climate disturbances. It draws on a better understanding of the complex dynamics of the changing atmosphere and greater stores of data about climate change dating back millions of years, as well as a more robust set of satellite measurements and more than 50 computer models of climate change.
Elsa, by then downgraded from hurricane to tropical storm, hitting Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic last month.
Photo: Orlando barria/Shutterstock
“We are now much better at integrating all the information,” said Gavin Schmidt, NASA’s senior climate adviser and director of the Goddard Institute for Space Sciences in New York, who wasn’t involved with the report.
Last year, global temperatures tied for the warmest on record, capping the warmest decade in modern times. Oceans are warming, and sea level is increasing by 3.7 mm, or about 0.1 inch, a year, the scientists said in the report. Mountain glaciers, sea ice and polar ice sheets are steadily melting. Weather around the world has grown more extreme by many measures, the scientists said, with more frequent heat waves and prolonged droughts in some regions and heavier rainfall and flooding in others.
“When you see what has happened this summer with heat waves in Canada and the heavy precipitation in Germany, I think this is showing that even highly developed countries are not spared,” said Sonia Seneviratne, a senior scientist at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and a lead co-author of the report. “We don’t really have time to adapt anymore because the change is happening so quickly.”
The disastrous flooding of Germany’s Ahr River last month destroyed thousands of cars.
Photo: Thomas Frey/Zuma Press
2. Is Taiwan Next?
A long read. A human perspective.
Is Taiwan Next?
In Taipei, young people like Nancy Tao Chen Ying watched as the Hong Kong protests were brutally extinguished. Now they wonder what’s in their future.
Nancy Tao Chen Ying outside Taipei.Credit...An Rong Xu for The New York Times
In Taipei, young people like Nancy Tao Chen Ying watched as the Hong Kong protests were brutally extinguished. Now they wonder what’s in their future.
Nancy Tao Chen Ying outside Taipei.Credit...An Rong Xu for The New York Times
By
- Published Aug. 4, 2021Updated Aug. 8, 2021
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Under the sharp light of Taiwan’s Taoyuan International Airport, the 19-year-old was easy to find. He stood alone where Nancy Tao Chen Ying had instructed.
Nancy was at her office when she received the message. It was a hot and humid Friday afternoon in July 2019, and a friend in Hong Kong asked if she could get to the airport: A young anti-government protester was fleeing the semiautonomous Chinese territory; could she pick him up once he landed? Nancy had never done this before, but when she agreed, the protester sent her an encrypted message with his flight details, and she left work to meet him.
This article was created with support from the Pulitzer Center.
Slightly less than five feet tall and 26 years old, Nancy wore her long dark hair side swept, the layers framing her face. She dressed well, often in pastels, changing styles like moods. As Nancy approached him, the boy seemed unsettled. Tall and slim, he loomed over her, clutching a small backpack. He told her that while he had brought some clothes, he had little money. “It’s OK,” Nancy told him, leading him to the metro. “Let’s just go to Taipei first.”
Because they were introduced through mutual friends, Nancy assumed she was the only person in Taiwan the Hong Konger could trust, the only person in Taiwan he probably even knew, but the nearly hourlong metro ride downtown was quiet. The boy didn’t strike up a conversation and was indifferent to Nancy’s questions.
“What should I call you?” she asked.
“Call me —.”
“What happened to you in Hong Kong?”
“The police came to arrest me and searched my house.”
Nancy didn’t push for more details; she was familiar with the contours of his story. There was proof that he attended an anti-government protest — something incriminating. He had either posted bail or not been charged yet, and within 48 hours, he decided to flee. Looking to blend in with other travelers, he took little with him. Dozens upon dozens of versions of the same story had been playing out in Taiwan for the last few weeks.
Months earlier, in the spring of 2019, Hong Kong’s chief executive proposed an extradition bill that would have allowed Hong Kongers to face trial in mainland courts, further solidifying China’s control over the semiautonomous territory. Mass peaceful marches demanding the bill’s withdrawal were answered with volleys of tear gas. Skirmishes erupted. As violence escalated, many young protesters feared they would be arrested on rioting charges that carried up to 10 years of prison time. Unsure of the future, they fled alone or in small clusters to Taiwan.
The Taiwanese, themselves separated from China by only 81 miles of water and living with 70 years of the Chinese Communist Party’s threats of forceful annexation, overwhelmingly supported Hong Kong’s protest movement. Many ordinary Taiwanese citizens had been moved to send money or donate supplies, like hard hats, gas masks and goggles, to the front lines. Taiwan’s democratically elected government issued grandiose statements of solidarity, but when the Hong Kong escapees started to arrive, the same politicians did little to help. Taiwan could see a version of its future in Hong Kong and worried that coming to its aid too overtly would hasten that scenario’s arrival.
Instead, an ad hoc network of civil-society organizations and individuals tried to take care of the new arrivals — they would need housing, food, money and medical care. Some Taiwanese, like Nancy, had links with Hong Kong activists or politicians who funneled people to them. Other times Hong Kongers plugged into networks in Taipei.
Once she picked up the first protester, Nancy started escorting more, sometimes heading to the airport as often as three times a day. She devoted hours after work as a producer at a television station to helping them settle into their new lives. Many of the arrivals were deeply traumatized, unable to sleep or process what had happened to them. They had left their real names, their photos, their families behind. Nancy’s shuttling and companionship was itself a small act, but she believed it was part of a greater struggle.
Protesters in Hong Kong in August 2019, during months of opposition to its controversial extradition bill. Credit...An Rong Xu
China had always denied that Taiwan existed as a separate country, dismissing it as a wayward province and using its increased global clout to gradually erase Taiwan’s existence. It had successfully pushed Taiwan out of a variety of institutions, from the World Health Organization to BirdLife International. “Taiwan” was removed from airline booking websites and boarding announcements by major U.S. and international carriers, leaving only the option to book a flight to “Taipei, Taipei” or “Taipei, China.” A country of 24 million, more populous than all of Scandinavia and roughly on par with Texas, did not exist on maps, in Interpol or at the United Nations. Its government is recognized by only 14 countries and the Holy See.
Nancy, like many of her generation in Hong Kong and Taiwan, had undergone a gradual and reluctant political awakening, spurred in part by the threat of Xi’s authoritarianism in the region. In these contested polities, on the edges of China’s empire, which had flourished outside Beijing’s direct control, young people came together to try to understand: How do you fight against Goliath’s denial of David’s very existence? For Nancy and her friends, this was existential. The challenge from China would determine the future of their countries and their lives.
Ever since Nancy was little, she was a contrarian — unafraid to rebel against things she thought were stupid or unfair, like how teachers seemed to favor students who got good grades, even if they had been misbehaving along with the rest of the class. When she was growing up in Taipei, there were lots of things that just did not make sense to her. It did not quite add up that her schoolbooks said Taiwan was a province of the greater Republic of China (R.O.C.), which comprised mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, and that its capital was Nanjing. Nanjing was a city in the People’s Republic of China, where Nancy had never been, so why was it listed as the capital of her country? When she challenged her teacher, she told her to just do what everyone else was doing — write the correct answer and move on.
Indeed, it was confusing. The R.O.C. is typically referred to internationally as Taiwan; it is by and large not recognized as a country and is instead referred to by many media organizations, including this one, as a “self-governing democracy.” But the archipelago, of which Taiwan is the biggest island, has a Constitution, a president and a Legislature. Its citizens have voted for their representatives in free and fair elections since 1992, the year before Nancy was born. They serve in their own armed forces and carry a green Republic of China passport when they travel, though in 2003, after they complained they were being confused with Communist China, the government changed the passport to say both “Republic of China” and “Taiwan.”
This Gordian knot of identity was a product of a contested history. For centuries, Taiwan had been at the whims of colonizers, settlers, warlords and dictators. As far back as 1544, when a Portuguese vessel passed the island and a passenger exclaimed “Ilha Formosa” — beautiful island — outsiders had decided even its name. It was originally populated by Indigenous Austronesians, but Han migration from China increased with the arrival of European traders, including the Dutch East India Company. The Qing empire took control in 1683, but after a humiliating defeat by the Japanese in 1895, it ceded Formosa to the victors. The Japanese made the island their model colony to prove they could rival white European imperial powers, setting up Japanese schools and much of the island’s infrastructure.
The Republic of China, meanwhile, was established far away in Nanjing in 1912 after revolutionaries overthrew the Qing empire, but it was quickly torn apart by Japan’s invasion and internal conflicts between the ruling nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) and the Communists. After Japan lost World War II, Formosa was given to the R.O.C. by the decree of the Allied powers. Residents were not consulted, but after 50 years of Japanese control, many held genuine enthusiasm for their Chinese liberators. Their hopes to speak their own language, practice their own culture and elect their own leaders quickly vanished. The KMT governed Taiwan with an iron fist, regarding the locals as Japanese collaborators and pillaging the island’s resources for the ongoing civil war on the mainland.
In 1949, the Communists defeated the nationalists and established the People’s Republic of China. The remnants of the R.O.C., led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, fled to Taiwan. Each government proclaimed itself the rightful ruler of all of China. The tsunami of around 1.5 million exiles who accompanied Chiang to Taiwan produced two castes: benshengren — people from this province — and waishengren — people from outside this province. Nancy’s paternal grandmother grew up under Japanese rule and watched the newcomers take the best jobs and resources. Later she married one of these new arrivals, but he ran up gambling debts and then ran back to the mainland, leaving her to settle his tab. She sold their house and moved the family to Taipei, supporting Nancy’s father and his three siblings by selling sliced fruit and shaved ice, a traditional dessert, on the street.
The KMT embarked on a campaign of forced Sinicization — Mandarin was made the official government language instead of Hokkien, which Nancy’s grandmother spoke along with a vast majority of the six million locals. Streets in Taipei were renamed after Chinese cities, and schoolbooks taught mainland geography and R.O.C. history. The benshengren were written out of their own existence. Chiang’s secret police ensured no one stepped out of line.
By 1987, under pressure at home and abroad, Chiang’s son and successor, Chiang Ching-kuo, lifted martial law. It had been in effect for 38 years. In the previous decades, Taiwan’s economy soared, driven by petrochemicals, light manufacturing and a growing focus on technology. After the younger Chiang’s death in 1988, the first benshengren president, Lee Teng-hui, became the head of the government and accelerated Taiwan’s transition to democracy. In 1992, Taiwan held its first direct election for Parliament; the first presidential election was in 1996. Lee touted a new national identity to try to unify the country: People were neither waishengren or benshengren but “New Taiwanese” instead.
By the time Nancy was born, her grandmother had invested in small plots of land that she turned into parking lots. She bought three apartments, including the one Nancy lived in with her parents, her older sister and her younger brother. Her grandmother had sent all her children to school, including, unconventionally for the time, her daughters. Nancy worshiped her as a feminist role model, and her grandmother favored her back. Nancy went to her grandmother’s apartment every day after school.
At her grandmother’s, Nancy was a princess — fed, adored and spoiled — but at home, things were different and often difficult. The middle child, Nancy was both eager for attention and frustrated with her family. Her father was a Taishang — a Taiwanese entrepreneur in China — and was often absent for long periods. (After the West issued sanctions against China in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre, many Taishang went to the People’s Republic to make their fortunes. Taiwanese-owned factories and local labor would primarily be responsible for the meteoric rise of Chinese manufacturing.) Nancy’s father identified as Chinese, waishengren from Jiangxi Province, like his father before him. When he was home, he was volatile. Nancy hated it and him.
As a teenager, Nancy was apathetic about a lot of things, including school and politics. She had always been headstrong and independent. She quit after-hours cram school to hang out with her boyfriend, got poor grades and took her college entrance exams only because her mom and sister frog-marched her to the doors of the building. Her mother was so worried she wouldn’t be admitted anywhere that she had Nancy’s exam entrance ticket blessed at multiple temples. Her family was ecstatic when Nancy barely gained admission to a private college outside Taipei.
After Taiwan democratized, the KMT began to compete in free elections against the Democratic Progressive Party (D.P.P.), which was formed by many of the previous dissidents the KMT oppressed during its nearly 40-year military reign. Each party was known by its affiliated colors — blue for KMT and green for D.P.P. There would be no real national reconciliation.
Throughout Nancy’s childhood, the D.P.P. and KMT traded the presidency between them. The parties had different ideas of what Taiwan was and should be. The KMT, once the implacable enemy of Communist China, had begun to advocate working with the C.C.P. — deep blues claimed this economic cooperation would eventually democratize China and allow for reunification under the R.O.C. Moreover, it would benefit Taiwan’s economy.
The D.P.P. believed somewhat the opposite. The deep greens advocated for dropping the antiquated R.O.C. label and declaring outright independence as a country called “Taiwan.” They would cease any claims to the mainland, Hong Kong and Macau, for which the greens never felt affinity. In this case, they could work with China, but as equals.
And so the debate over Taiwan’s future would always hinge on the somewhat muddled construct of “independence” or “unification.” Most Taiwanese, however, fell somewhere in between. A majority favored keeping the status quo, in which the “Republic of China (Taiwan)” was de facto independent. This was preferable to risking an all-out war with their larger neighbor.
The Yin Yang Sea, a bay of contrasting colors. Protesters have arrived in Taiwan by boat. Credit...An Rong Xu for The New York Times
For its part, China encouraged the blue-green divide, working with the cooperative KMT when it was in power and isolating the more autonomous-minded D.P.P. when it was at the helm. In 1992, during closed-door meetings between the KMT and the Communist Party in British Hong Kong, they reached an agreement that Taiwan and China were part of the same country. The KMT would later tell the Taiwanese public this was open to different interpretations, allowing for the possibility that it was all the R.O.C. It would become known as the 1992 Consensus. When Beijing perceived slights to this arrangement, it retaliated.
After President Lee, who was wildly popular, visited Cornell University in 1995, the Chinese Communist Party, furious that Taiwan was asserting its own relationship with the United States, conducted rounds of military exercises and missile tests near the island that continued into 1996. Bill Clinton responded by sending two carrier groups near the Taiwan Strait. In 2005, Beijing passed an “anti-secession law,” which vowed to use force if the R.O.C. ever “seceded” — casting off the R.O.C. title and officially identifying as Taiwan.
In late 2012, Xi became general secretary of the Communist Party. By 2013, he had also collected the mostly nominal title of president. Though he accelerated a clampdown on mainland freedoms, Xi was popular, starting an anti-corruption drive that endeared him to a population fed up with the excesses of the cadre class. In a famous speech in 2013, Xi declared China would “strive to achieve the Chinese dream of great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” What exactly this meant was amorphous — but Xi vowed it would be accomplished by 2049, the year marking the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. It would undo the hundred years of national humiliation China had been subjected to by foreign powers. This would not be complete without returning the map to the borders of the Qing empire, which included, however briefly and loosely, Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Nancy wasn’t unique in ignoring these vague threats; most young Taiwanese were politically disengaged. Though the younger generation implicitly recognized Taiwan as a sovereign state, it was not discussed as much as it was just obvious — if you were born in this place called Taiwan, you were Taiwanese, not Chinese in multigenerational exile like your parents. Nancy didn’t care much about whatever Xi was saying either. It was a world away from her all-consuming high school romance or watching reruns of “Gossip Girl.”
The first time Nancy went to China, she was flying to visit her boyfriend, who was studying abroad in Shanghai. Nancy entered the customs channel for foreigners and completed the foreign entry form. When the border patrol officer looked at her passport, she was told Taiwanese should go to the nationals line.
“Taiwanese are not Chinese,” Nancy said indignantly. “Why should I go to the nationals’ path?”
“Taiwanese are Chinese,” the officer told her. “Get in that line.”
“I’m standing here right now, why don’t you just let me go through this path?” she asked, looking back at the long queue in the nationals channel.
“No,” the officer said.
On a Friday night in 2014 during Nancy’s junior year of college, a friend told her there was something happening at the Parliament in downtown Taipei. People were gathering, and they needed manpower. Nancy had no idea what he was talking about, but it was the weekend, and she was mourning a serious breakup, so she decided to go with him to check it out.
It was dark when they arrived. Young people had assembled on the broad boulevard outside the Legislative Yuan’s unassuming white brick building, shouting and chanting. The crowd started to move, everyone pushing, then running, so Nancy decided she should run too. When people around her climbed the fence, she started climbing. When they got to the other side, they rushed into the building. At first, everyone was yelling, moving furniture and damaging the interior. Nancy also did some graffiti; it was fun. Things quieted down, and that night, hundreds of young people, mostly college students, began to strategize about the occupation.
Nancy learned they were opposing a sweeping trade liberalization pact that the KMT, the party in power at the time, was trying to push through without normal review. The agreement, which the KMT negotiated in Shanghai with the C.C.P., would open more than 60 Taiwanese service sectors — like tourism, movies and construction — to direct Chinese investment. Since the KMT won back the presidency in 2008, relations between China and Taiwan had become closer, and the young Taiwanese protesters distrusted what they saw as an attempt to buy their country. It felt like the first step in a broader plan to move across the strait. The more control Beijing had of their economy, the more control it would have over their government and their lives.
The 24-day occupation came to be known as the Sunflower Movement, which took its name from a florist’s gift to the students. They left only after the government promised a proper review of the bill, successfully derailing the trade pact. For Nancy and many Taiwanese her age, the Sunflower Movement marked a political awakening. She was mesmerized by what she saw — people had really used their power to be heard.
Afterward, Nancy started reading more about her own country’s history. In a crackdown following a violent benshengren uprising on Feb. 28, 1947 — known as 2/28 — the KMT regime killed as many as 28,000 people over the course of several weeks. It arrested civil servants, doctors, lawyers and anyone else perceived as a threat to KMT control of Taiwan, strung them together by threading metal wires through their palms, marched them to ditches or water and shot them in mass graves. Two years after 2/28, in the wake of the KMT’s full relocation to Taiwan, martial law was declared, initiating a period known as the White Terror. Over a hundred thousand people were imprisoned, and several thousand were executed. Waishengren who had come to Taiwan with the KMT would suffer as well, persecuted as suspected Communist agents or sympathizers.
Nancy learned of the murder of the imprisoned dissident Lin Yi-hsiung’s mother and 7-year-old twin daughters in 1980, which most people suspected was the work of the security services. She read about Nylon Cheng, who self-immolated in 1989 while advocating for a Constitution of the Republic of Taiwan. It was unimaginable that he would sacrifice his life for her country’s freedom when he had a family, Nancy thought. It dawned on her that her past understanding of history was so narrow — Taiwan’s nascent democracy was steeped in so many people’s blood.
When she tried to convey her thoughts to her family, it was hard. Her father was a vehement KMT supporter, a dark blue to her burgeoning light green. Nancy felt he didn’t respect her choices and often dismissed her political opinions as youthful rebellion. Her mother just did whatever her coercive father told them. These are the same tactics authoritarians use, Nancy raged to herself. Strong people oppress minorities and expect you to obey their will. If her family was a microcosm for oppression, how much more unbearable true authoritarianism must be, she thought.
Nancy began attending local protests and thinking about broader issues — marriage equality, nuclear power and the environment. Six months after the end of the Sunflower Movement, she saw on the news that thousands of Hong Kongers had occupied major thoroughfares, in what would become known as the Umbrella Movement, demanding the right to directly elect their chief executive — instead of relying on a 1,200-person-strong committee that was understood to be rigged in favor of Beijing. On a whim, she bought a flight to Hong Kong for the weekend and contacted a friend from college who now lived there. She didn’t book a hotel and camped out overnight on the street with protesters. She wanted to be a part of history.
Nancy watched as a 17-year-old named Joshua Wong stood on the main stage and addressed the crowd. Her friend translated his Cantonese speech into Mandarin for her. Nancy knew Joshua became famous when he was just 14, after he rallied Hong Kongers to oppose a government plan to introduce “moral education” as Communist indoctrination, and the government capitulated. Nancy thought he was truly heroic, fighting for democracy and critical thinking at such a young age. She flew home the next day further convinced of the power of people.
For decades, Hong Kongers who opposed British colonialism had considered themselves ethnically Chinese. Many were children of refugees who fled during the Chinese civil war of 1927-49 or after the C.C.P’s victory. They still had family on the mainland, would travel to their ancestral home for tomb-sweeping rituals and had donated goods and food to their poorer cousins during the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. The British encouraged this identification, as it made it less likely that their subjects would call for outright independence.
The Qing ceded Hong Kong Island in perpetuity to the British in 1842 following the first Opium War and would later do the same with the adjacent Kowloon Peninsula. In 1898, the British leased the New Territories, which today constitute the bulk of Hong Kong, including vital ports and reservoirs, for 99 years. The New Territories’ importance to the colony of Hong Kong, as well as the decline of the British Empire, gave Margaret Thatcher little leverage when negotiating Hong Kong’s future with Deng Xiaoping in Beijing in 1984. In the end, Britain agreed to hand over everything to the People’s Republic of China. The territory would be administered under an arrangement known as “one country, two systems,” which was supposed to allow Hong Kong to preserve its unique economic and legal system after a century of British colonization, making it a “special administrative region.” (The arrangement was first floated by Deng as a way to entice Taiwan.)
On a rainy day in 1997, Hong Kong was returned to China with pomp and fireworks. The Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-Constitution, handed down by British and Chinese negotiators with minimal input from Hong Kongers, was to function for the following 50 years, promising Hong Kong a “high degree of autonomy” but never defining what that was exactly — setting the stage for the protests to come. The Basic Law enshrined an independent judiciary and an indirectly elected chief executive, as well as a Legislative Council, known as the LegCo, whose members needed permission to introduce legislation. The council would be made up of 70 members, half of whom were elected by the people and half who were elected by “functional constituencies,” occupation and interest groups designed to be controlled by the colonizer. Beijing had the final say. Hong Kong and China had until 2047 to figure out what came next. From Hong Kong’s perspective, it was a system created by one master who handed the keys to another and walked away.
For a time, Hong Kong was allowed to retain its distinctiveness. Hong Kongers held an annual vigil for the victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre, which was taboo to even discuss on the mainland. There was a rambunctious free press, uncensored internet and the right to private property. In return, Hong Kong served as an orderly and efficient financial conduit to the opaque Chinese market and a popular destination for corrupt Chinese officials to park wealth offshore. It was also a useful political pressure release valve for the growing repression of the mainland, a place where dissidents could run and not cause too much trouble for the C.C.P., and where mainlanders could buy political books banned at home.
After Xi came to power, he expanded the party’s control over China’s periphery — any perception of dissent or separatism was answered with harsh securitization. Young people in Hong Kong and Taiwan believed he would be coming for their freedom next. By 2014, they were chafing at the day-to-day expressions of the party’s meddling in their lives, and mass protests followed. If in Taiwan, China was trying to buy influence through the trade deal, in Hong Kong, China had begun to impose itself outright. “Hong Kong today, Taiwan tomorrow” had turned from a chant to a harbinger.
In the fall of 2016, Nancy had just begun working as an associate producer at a news show when she booked Ray Wong, the founder of Hong Kong Indigenous, a localist group demanding preferential policies for Hong Kongers and autonomy from China. After they met in Taipei, Nancy messaged him in advance of a weekend trip to Hong Kong and asked if he wanted to meet for a meal while she was in town. She had started spending time with Taiwanese independence activists and was interested in Hong Kong’s analogues.
The year before, Ray organized protests against Chinese merchants who came to Hong Kong daily to buy better quality baby formula, medicine and other household goods to bring back to the mainland, disrupting life in districts near the border. The campaign was ugly at times, with protesters harassing and cursing mainlanders, but it prompted the C.C.P. to limit visits to once per week.
Localism grew out of an ideology that most originally considered too nativist. But it gained mainstream acceptance as Hong Kong’s government became more subservient to Beijing, and Hong Kongers felt the toll of millions of Chinese tourists, traders and transplants the C.C.P. pushed into the territory to make up for Hong Kong’s economic losses after the SARS epidemic.
‘For the first time I felt the sadness of being Taiwanese.’
Nancy and Ray met one night at a traditional Hong Kong tea shop. Over her next few trips, he introduced her to Edward Leung, a charismatic philosophy graduate and spokesman for Hong Kong Indigenous, and Sixtus Leung, a tall digital marketer who went by Baggio and started Youngspiration, another localist group. Ray and Edward were facing serious criminal charges for their roles in the Fishball protests, a major clash during the 2016 Chinese New Year over police attempts to shut down unlicensed street vendors.
Whenever Nancy went to Hong Kong for the weekend, she always tried to meet with Ray and his friends for a meal or a drink. They were passionate and smart and had interesting insights into the political scene. Nancy learned that after the failure of the Umbrella Movement, Hong Kong’s pro-democratic opposition fractured further. One camp carefully demanded more rights within the existing “one country, two systems” arrangement. Another increasingly frustrated group was turning to open confrontation, using “any means necessary” to expose what they saw as the C.C.P.’s lies. These localists went as far as to advocate for Hong Kong’s total independence, a previously fringe notion that had been gaining in popularity, particularly among the younger generation, and was guaranteed to infuriate Beijing.
When Nancy was back in Taipei, she kept up with the news from Hong Kong. She watched as Edward began a campaign for a seat in the LegCo but was disqualified for his position on independence. Baggio ran in his place and won. During his oath-taking ceremony, Baggio refused to read the official pledge of allegiance to the “Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China” and instead read his own vow to serve the “Hong Kong nation.” He replaced the word “China” with “Chee-na,” an insulting term used by the Japanese during World War II. Though legislators had previously made performative jabs during the ceremony and been allowed to take their seats, Baggio was disqualified by the courts, and two charges were brought against him: one for obstructing the proceedings and another for refusing to pay back the one-month parliamentarian salary he earned before he was disqualified.
When Nancy heard news about her Hong Kong friends, she would send what she called “messages of caring.” Simple, small notes that said she was thinking of them in this difficult time. She remembered how hard it was for her during the Sunflower Movement, when her family didn’t support her and when her friends weren’t with her. She believed that if somebody was showing care for you and soothing you, the impact was huge. Though she’d never asked her friends or her family outright to agree with her politically, deep down in her heart, she wished they could support her.
On a mild February day in 2017, cloudy and slightly cool, Nancy was on a visit to Hong Kong when she decided to go to Macau, an hour’s ferry ride away. After she disembarked, she was stopped by the customs authorities and taken to a small room. They took her passport and started interrogating her.
Like a lot of young people, Nancy had covered the R.O.C. portion of her passport with a “Republic of Taiwan” sticker, in a patriotic gesture that was also a protest of what they view as a colonial government that still rules Taiwan. The authorities forced her to rip off her sticker and write “Taiwan, China” on official papers. Afterward, they deported her. The reason of her rejection, they claimed, was that they could not verify the authenticity of her identity.
How is that possible? Nancy wondered. I have my passport.
The Macau police accompanied her on the ferry back to Hong Kong, keeping her separate from other passengers like some kind of dangerous criminal. All this because of some stickers?
“I’m really dumbfounded,” Nancy later wrote on Instagram. “For the first time I felt the sadness of being Taiwanese.”
From the roof of the Prudential Hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui, on the tip of Hong Kong’s peninsula, Nancy could see Victoria Harbor. When she went to Hong Kong, she often stayed at the Prudential, near the famous Star Ferry and across the road from one of her favorite tea shops, the Australia Dairy Company — a tourist trap her Hong Kong friends refused to go to but where Nancy went every day and ordered scrambled eggs. She loved the megapulse of Hong Kong compared with Taipei’s more sedate pace. In the evenings, she could watch the city lights and the sea at the same time. Over the years, she visited often, developing an attachment to the streets themselves.
In June 2019, Nancy was in Taipei when all the Hong Kong-related channels on Telegram started to erupt. The new extradition bill would be voted on the next day, and activists were calling for protests. Nancy booked a flight to Hong Kong for the following morning.
After she arrived, she met up with Baggio. Over the years, Nancy and Baggio had become good friends — she tried to see him whenever she came to Hong Kong. They talked politics, went out for meals or beers and joked around. Ray had fled Hong Kong because of his charges in the Fishball protests and was living in exile in Germany, while Edward had been sentenced to six years for his role. Nancy worried Baggio would be next.
Sixtus Leung, known as Baggio, who helped funnel protesters to Taipei. Credit...An Rong Xu for The New York Times
On the street that day with Baggio and his group, Nancy was staggered by the number of people who were protesting — one million people in a city of seven million. When Nancy was about to leave around 9 p.m. to go to the airport, it was so crowded Baggio asked a friend to walk her to the MTR station, concerned that Nancy would get lost in the crush. By the time Nancy disembarked the plane in Taipei, Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, had dismissed the protesters’ demands. Plans were immediately made to take to the streets again. The following week, the numbers doubled to two million. There was a cautious optimism; in 2003, mass protests had defeated a national-security-law proposal.
Protests quickly became a weekly affair — citizens thronged the city’s main thoroughfares, walking the same protest route, peacefully calling for their rights. Everyone expected that the march on July 1 would be big — it was the anniversary of the British handover to China and an annual day of protest against Communist Party rule. Nancy arrived a few days early. Baggio was worried about how determined she was to participate. He knew the police targeted weaker protesters, especially women, and Nancy was small and not athletic. She didn’t know the streets the way a local did. “You cannot run, you cannot fight, so stay back!” he kept insisting, but he couldn’t stop her.
In the afternoon on July 1, Nancy found herself outside the LegCo. “Make a banner that says you are Taiwanese and hang it on yourself,” a friend advised. Nancy didn’t speak Cantonese, and Hong Kongers usually did not speak Mandarin well enough to differentiate her accent from that of the Chinese. Anytime Baggio introduced Nancy, he explained that she was Taiwanese. Everyone was always delighted — thanking her for the solidarity and support. But her friend had just seen a guy speaking Mandarin get seriously beaten. The streets were becoming too tense.
A friend escorted Nancy to the relative safety of a pedestrian overpass nearby, where she watched the chaos as protesters broke into the LegCo that evening. Inside, in graffiti, someone wrote: “Hong Kong is not China yet” and “It was the government who taught us that peaceful protest is useless.” It was a radicalization that was perhaps inevitable. If we burn, you burn with us! the protesters said, quoting “The Hunger Games.” The next morning, Nancy flew home feeling helpless. She was worried. This would not end well for the Hong Kongers, she thought.
When she was back in Taipei, she couldn’t leave the movement behind. At work, it dominated the on-air discussion. After work, she would come home and watch livestreams of the protests. She couldn’t stop herself. It reminded her of Taiwan’s period of White Terror. She’d always found it hard to imagine the acts of brave defiance she’d read about, but now her friends in Hong Kong were doing the same things. It was almost unbelievable.
When she was with her Taiwanese friends, she felt lonely. She didn’t mind meeting up and complaining about the high cost of Taipei rents, lack of job prospects or the brain drain in which many of her dynamic peers went overseas to pursue careers. But they never discussed the things she was concerned about — human rights, politics, the C.C.P. She reasoned that perhaps her friends didn’t understand the stakes because they were too comfortable. They voted in free elections already. The threat of China was ubiquitous; everyone had stopped paying attention. Besides, Taipei’s Michelin-starred night-market stalls, connoisseur coffee shops, crowded bars, Japanese izakaya restaurants and infinite variations on bubble tea were so far removed from the struggle for freedom in Hong Kong.
She wanted her Taiwanese friends to pay more attention to what was happening, to value their own democracy and maintain their independence from China. Sometimes she tried to explain it to them: “To you guys, this is just something on the news, but to me it’s not. These are my friends. They are actually experiencing these things.”
In the weeks after the LegCo storming, the police arrested hundreds of protesters, and many sought refuge in Taiwan — some having fled straight from the police station after being released on bail. It was seen as an easy place to escape, lie low.
Often Baggio would alert Nancy that someone was coming. Sometimes other friends got in touch with her, and she would pick protesters up at the airport or direct them to NGOs who could help them. Sometimes Baggio didn’t actually know the people he was funneling to her — they got his contacts, and he sent them on to Nancy.
Nancy wasn’t sure how many people she had shuttled from the airport to the NGOs in the summer of 2019. Maybe as many as a dozen. There were others, about 40, whom she would help settle in their new lives after they arrived. One 19-year-old woman even moved into Nancy’s house for two weeks. Her father found the whole thing baffling. Nancy worried he was making the young woman uncomfortable with questions and opinions gleaned from pro-C.C.P. media.
Nancy was concerned about the arriving exiles. Her country did not have a refugee law. Since the fleeing Hong Kongers arrived on tourist visas, which would expire after three months, they were not allowed to work — how would they support themselves? Many were still in high school, but if they lacked official status, how could they enroll in schools? How could they receive medical help when Taiwan’s universal health care system is tied to residency?
Nancy hoped her government would do something to protect them. The D.P.P. had themselves been dissidents under authoritarianism recently enough. But the government often pointed out that the sheer numbers of P.R.C. citizens could overwhelm any asylum system Taiwan instituted. And even if there were a refugee law, it would not apply to Hong Kongers because under the Republic of China Constitution, Hong Kongers were already compatriots and fell under different laws than actual foreigners. (Vestiges of the R.O.C.’s claim to all of China create strange legal contortions — for example, Taiwan’s relations with China are handled by the Mainland Affairs Council, not the Foreign Ministry.) Given the sensitive situation Taiwan was in, many Taiwanese agreed, preferring to receive the young Hong Kongers slowly, even secretly.
In August, Nancy went to Hong Kong for Baggio’s 33rd birthday. The mood in the city was grim. One of his cases was still making its way through the courts; the other resulted in a one-month prison sentence, which he had yet to serve. They went to dinner but didn’t buy a cake or candles to celebrate. Nancy previously asked Baggio if he was interested in leaving. He told her he might one day in the future, but certainly not now.
“Thirty-seven thousand people voted for me,” he told her. He couldn’t just abandon them.
Nancy asked him if he had a birthday wish.
“To stay alive at least until next year.”
“Let me make a wish for you,” she offered. “I hope that you can go to prison quickly, get released quickly and then come to Taiwan quickly.” As a birthday wish, Nancy thought it sounded pathetic, but it was true.
Over the summer, Nancy continued to go to Hong Kong to join the protests, though she was becoming increasingly anxious that she could be arrested. She felt guilty about the strain her absences put on her colleagues at the television station. She quit her job at the end of August. After that, she had more time to host the arriving exiles in Taipei and could spend even more time in Hong Kong. Nancy knew it wasn’t exactly her fight — it was perhaps one step removed — but it meant something to her to be there in solidarity against the C.C.P.
Her Taiwanese friends worried: Your entire life is only for Hong Kong, they said. Nancy couldn’t help it. She was already in so deep.
Nancy flew to Hong Kong a few days before the protest scheduled for Oct. 1, 2019, the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic’s founding. Beijing would be celebrating, and protesters wanted to shut down the city — split-screen news coverage of a national parade while young people were being tear-gassed would surely mar Xi’s plans for the festivities. When Nancy landed, officials scanned her passport and pulled her out of the queue. She was escorted to a small room, where they took her passport and documents. She waited for a long time.
The officials searched her bags and her wallet, checking her credit card and how much cash she was carrying. They asked where she was staying, whom she was meeting with and the purpose of her trip. Nancy gave them a fake hotel and told them she was meeting friends, refusing to divulge specifics. The officials claimed they were just worried about her and let her go.
The next morning, Nancy’s phone started buzzing with messages.
“Are you OK?”
“How are you?”
“Are you safe?”
Nancy had been doxxed by HK Leaks, a large pro-Beijing website hosted in Russia that targeted protesters, journalists and activists, detailing their supposed “crimes.” Nancy was among a dump of eight well-known Taiwanese N.G.O. workers and politicians. She had no idea why the leakers would bother including her, but they had posted her photograph, her birthday, passport information, Baggio’s name, the dates of her last visit in August. They said she had “discussed helping thugs escape to Taiwan.”
Nancy had planned to stay in Hong Kong for two weeks, but her friends told her to leave early. If she stayed any longer, she might be arrested, too. Nancy changed hotels three times in one week, trying to make sure she wasn’t being followed, but the damage had been done. She received threats on her Facebook account. “Don’t assume that you’ll be fine by hiding yourself,” one message read. “I will kill you every time I see you. HK Pro-Independence dogs will only face one consequence — die a painful death. ... Be careful of your life.” It listed Nancy’s phone number and address. People kept trying to hack her phone and email.
The next time Nancy tried to apply for a visa to visit Hong Kong, she was rejected.
Cut off from Hong Kong, Nancy threw herself into the growing exile community in Taipei. Baggio continued to send fleeing protesters her way. The immediate confusion over what to do with them had given way to an “under the table” system in which young protesters who arrived on three-month tourist visas were encouraged to transition to student visas.
Over the summer, Nancy met a jovial, hulking protester named Gam, who fled after he was arrested on weapons charges and released on bail. He had worked installing electronics in Hong Kong and needed help settling into his new life. Without a residency permit, it was impossible to buy a SIM card that lasted longer than 30 days. Nancy registered for one under her name. He arrived with some savings and was looking for a cheap place to rent. Nancy explained Taipei’s neighborhoods and directed him to the Judicial Reform Foundation, which assisted protesters with pro bono lawyers and gave them an allowance raised from private donations. He ended up staying in a church dormitory.
In the fall, Gam got back in touch with her and asked if they could have dinner. At the end of their meal, he offered to take care of the bill. Nancy was surprised. She rarely let any Hong Kongers pay. Gam explained he was working for an online business, designing and selling protest paraphernalia for a Hong Kong-based Facebook store. He was hoping to open a branch in Taipei and asked Nancy how to establish a company legally in Taiwan. He wanted to get a Taiwanese bank account; Nancy knew it would be impossible without a Taiwanese business partner. “Are you really serious about this?” she asked him. “Once you start doing it, you won’t give up halfway?”
Gam, a former electronics installer who fled Hong Kong.Credit...An Rong Xu for The New York Times
“Yeah, I’m going to do it,” Gam told her. “I will stay here for more than 10 years. I can’t rely on people’s donations forever. I need to depend on myself to survive.” Nancy agreed to help.
Gam had already considered other ways of making money — import-export, 3-D printing — but nothing seemed to fit. He missed Hong Kong often, the food, the city and his mother, whom he left there all alone without warning, not wanting to endanger her. In case the police questioned her, she could truthfully say she had no idea where he was. In his mind sometimes, he wandered the streets of Hong Kong and traced his favorite foods — milk tea from one shop, noodles from another, barbecue meat from somewhere else. A barrage of Hong Kong-flavored restaurants had been opened in Taipei by wealthier Hong Kongers who could afford to pay roughly $200,000 for an investment visa, but Gam thought their foods were pale replicas. Taiwan’s own milk tea was much weaker than Hong Kong’s. The closest he could find to anything resembling a familiar flavor was the egg tart at KFC.
Many Hong Kong protesters had assumed they would feel culturally and linguistically comfortable in Taiwan, which often made the differences between the two places even more jarring. Hong Kong was serious, ruthless, efficient. Taiwan was hierarchical, subtle, ploddingly bureaucratic. In Hong Kong, Gam told Nancy, setting up a bank account took no time; in Taiwan, they waited a month.
Gam was shocked by things Nancy considered totally normal. One day, they took 50 packages of merchandise to the post office. Beforehand, Gam had typed the shipping information into the website. But when they arrived, the staff had no idea what he was talking about. They asked them to hand-write the forms again. “Who does this by hand?” Gam exploded. “In Hong Kong, we will just scan a bar code, and it will take three minutes!”
Many Hong Kongers shared Gam’s confusion. For them, coming to Taiwan had been a difficult decision and an even more difficult adjustment. Most aching was their sense of isolation — of not being able to trust the Taiwanese or even other Hong Kongers. They didn’t know what names they would be going by or who their friends would be. Many of them broke down when talking about their families, how they knew they could not be there when their grandparents or parents got sick or died. They found it difficult to relate to their Taiwanese peers, who had not lived with this trauma and who didn’t understand what it was like to really fight for your homeland. Nancy tried her best to provide the only thing she could: friendship.
Most new arrivals felt that Taiwan itself wasn’t safe from China’s reach — activists on visits to Taipei were followed, their trips detailed on the front pages of the pro-Beijing Hong Kong press. Famous Hong Kong exiles and activists in Taiwan had red paint thrown at them. Aegis, a restaurant that supported Hong Kongers and employed those in exile, was vandalized when a man threw a bucket of chicken excrement and feathers at the kitchen and staff.
Working with Gam gave Nancy a sense of purpose and tethered her to Hong Kong, where protests continued. In November 2019, the violence escalated in a bloody 12-day siege at Polytechnic University. Nancy barely slept. She was glued to the livestream, watching as riot police encircled the high school and college students hunkered inside the campus. The protesters slung arrows, gasoline bombs and bricks at the security services. The police advanced with water cannons and threatened to starve the protesters out. Many had to escape by crawling through the sewers or rappelling down pedestrian overpasses. Over 1,300 protesters were arrested. Another big wave of asylum seekers flooded into Taiwan.
Nancy often dreamed about the police detentions — in her nightmares, she would see lists, hazy names slated for arrest. She would know her friends were on the lists, but which friends in particular, she wasn’t sure. She woke up and checked Telegram, scrolling and scrolling instead of sleeping, to make sure her friends had not been taken.
As arrests increased, it was getting harder to leave Hong Kong. Since the summer, smugglers had been running fishing vessels to Taiwan for protesters who were banned from traveling. By the fall, smugglers had increased the rates astronomically, and the network Baggio was part of started to put together a D.I.Y. operation. They considered buying fishing boats, but the fishermen circle was small, and everyone would know if someone sold them a secondhand vessel. They bought speedboats — it would be a risker journey, but they would be safer to source. They needed gasoline, but if they bought it from a gas station, they would be caught on camera. They found a place that let them siphon fuel. People on each vessel would have to learn navigation and how to drive.
They started sending the boats out that winter. Gathering early in the morning at an appointed spot near Hong Kong harbor, protesters who had never met before put their lives in one another’s hands. There weren’t enough vessels. Wait lists formed, and con artists promised seats that didn’t exist. Protesters desperate to leave contacted Baggio. He would ask them to do a cost-benefit analysis of staying in Hong Kong. “The maximum penalty you are facing is a year or two years,” he’d tell them. “You know the risk for taking a boat? The consequence might be you are killed or you die on the ocean. If you are facing something that is really not serious, it is not worth taking the boat.” Nancy urged Baggio to get on one of the boats.
“You send all the Hong Kongers in the world here, why not send yourself?” she asked.
“It’s not time yet,” he said.
“Now you can go, but you choose not to. Maybe in the future, you will want to go, but you will be unable to do so,” she told him. “You can help Hong Kong only if you’re alive!”
As the Taiwanese watched Hong Kong, they debated their own future. The incumbent president, the D.P.P.’s Tsai Ing-wen, facing re-election in January 2020, had been quick to throw her support behind the movement. If the Taiwanese voted the KMT back in power, Tsai said, they would be moving closer toward China. Did they want to risk Hong Kong’s fate, or did they want to continue to assert Taiwanese autonomy under her leadership?
When Tsai first assumed office in 2016, she refused to acknowledge the 1992 Consensus. Tsai instead offered dialogue based on mutual respect. She was known for being a careful, calculating technocrat who would not disturb the fragile equilibrium with China. Still, Xi cut the limited channels of communication with Taiwan and resumed the threats of a military takeover. In the run-up to Tsai’s election, the People’s Liberation Army constructed a replica of Taiwan’s presidential palace and trained for an invasion of the island. The regime had already begun to modernize the military, reorganizing the armed forces, overhauling doctrine and upgrading weapons. In the years after Tsai’s victory, the R.O.C. government hemorrhaged official allies — seven diplomatic partners flipped to the People’s Republic by 2020. The campaign to erase Taiwan entered a higher gear.
Before the protests erupted in Hong Kong, Tsai lagged behind KMT opponents by double digits, but the more Xi attacked Taiwan and Hong Kong, the more Tsai’s popularity grew — it became difficult to question her politics, even slightly, without being tarred as pro-C.C.P.
Nancy was furious with what she saw as Tsai’s hypocrisy — she campaigned on supporting the protesters but did little when they arrived in Taiwan. The lack of official asylum protections was essentially rendering arriving Hong Kongers stateless.
“The D.P.P. is trying to navigate a really cautious middle course,” Ming-sho Ho, a professor of sociology at National Taiwan University, explained. “On the one hand, it has the moral obligation to help Hong Kongers, but also at the same time, they understand that any big move will antagonize Beijing, so they try to have it both ways. That’s the typical Tsai approach. They try to do something ‘under the radar’ and don’t want to make a big fanfare out of that, and that actually raises criticism from a lot of people.”
‘The biggest enemy is not the Chinese Communist Party, it is ourselves.’
The Hong Kongers themselves felt they couldn’t critique the Taiwanese government overtly. They had precarious status — completely at the whim of those in power, guests who could not make demands of their hosts. Exiled Hong Kongers had formed their own civil-society groups, which spent time trying to court domestic public opinion, but there was not a lot they could do.
“Right now, we need to depend on the friendly attitude from the government, but we hope for a clear legal framework for this mechanism,” said Chun-hung Lin, spokesman for the Judicial Reform Foundation and a Taiwanese lawyer who helped protesters navigate the legal vacuum.
Tsai and the D.P.P. were facing a barrage of Chinese disinformation, a familiar strategy of dividing the population along pre-existing cleavages. Conspiracy theories flooded the internet on both sides, though most targeted the D.P.P.: The C.I.A. had sent agents with invisible ink to doctor ballots in favor of Tsai; Tsai had six abortions; her Ph.D. thesis was fake. It was often easy to spot disinformation: Chinese write Mandarin with simplified characters, while Taiwanese use traditional characters, and the fake posts often used the wrong traditional characters. In response, young Taiwanese started online fact-checking efforts to correct the record but struggled to keep pace. Fake news, incipient rumors, rash politicized takes were rampant.
Tsai was also balancing relations with the Trump administration. For decades after the Chinese civil war, the United States served as the KMT’s ultimate protector and recognized the R.O.C. as the only government of China. Richard Nixon was the first president to visit the People’s Republic in 1972. Neither the P.R.C. government in Beijing nor the R.O.C. government in Taipei permits official diplomatic ties with a country that recognizes their rival across the strait. On Jan. 1, 1979, Jimmy Carter broke official relations with the R.O.C. in order to recognize the government in Beijing.
Since then, the United States has tried to balance China’s demands with its support of Taiwan’s existence, creating a byzantine patchwork of legislation. The United States passed the Taiwan Relations Act in April 1979 to provide a legal basis for a relationship with the place it would now refer to as Taiwan (not the Republic of China). The act laid the foundation for U.S. “strategic ambiguity” toward Taiwan, which does not require America to come to Taiwan’s defense in the case of an attack from China but leaves open the possibility that it might. The legislation was designed to show support for Taiwan, while discouraging the country from formally declaring independence.
After the break in official relations, no American president had spoken to a Taiwanese leader until President-elect Trump spoke to Tsai in 2016. Trump would go on to fill many key positions in his administration with China hawks and friends of Taiwan. Congress would approve more than $12 billion in arms sales, including fighter jets the United States hadn’t sold to Taipei since 1992. But it was clear to most observers that Trump’s devotion to Taiwan was proportional to his growing feud with Xi.
The situation was unpredictable from China’s side as well. In 2018, the party eliminated presidential term limits, paving the way for Xi to rule for life, and analysts wondered if he might manipulate a larger conflict with Taiwan in order to cement his power. There would be no great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation without solidifying control over the historic territories China considered inherently its own. The policies of Tibetan resettlement, Xinjiang concentration camps, clamping down on Hong Kong and “reunification” with Taiwan were all popular at home.
Most experts thought an imminent invasion of Taiwan was unlikely but impossible to rule out completely. Perhaps a serious domestic crisis would push Xi to make a move, but it would be incredibly costly. More pressing were the party’s attempts to deter Taiwan’s desire or ability to assert its independence as “Taiwan” — to ensure Taiwan, and the global community, would believe it was only a matter of time before the archipelago was integrated with the mainland.
The C.C.P.’s “game plan for Taiwan is to convince the rest of the world that resistance is futile, that the P.R.C. version of history is correct and will prevail,” Shelley Rigger, East Asia politics professor at Davidson College, said. “Therefore, sinking a lot of resources into helping Taiwan resist incorporation into the P.R.C. is a waste of your resources because you are pressing against the tide of history.”
China effectively added hostage taking to commercial threats after Beijing detained two Canadians in 2018 in retaliation for Canada’s arrest of the telecom giant Huawei’s chief financial officer at America’s behest. The men were kept for more than two years before being put on trial in closed courtrooms with no witnesses. Afterward, they returned to prison, and the verdicts were never released. The detentions crossed a line the C.C.P. had not breached before — but there were no substantive repercussions. The cases served as a warning that Taiwanese citizens in China or Hong Kong, or any citizens for that matter, could meet the same fate.
Tsai was re-elected with a historic share of the vote, but Nancy was sure there were still risks on the horizon. Her father and more than five million other Taiwanese had voted for the KMT; moving away from China once and for all seemed elusive. “The biggest enemy is not the Chinese Communist Party, it is ourselves,” Nancy said.
On Jan. 21, 2020, Taiwan announced its first case of Covid-19, and in March, it fully sealed its borders. At first, Nancy was relieved. With the world on lockdown, she could take a break from arriving Hong Kongers. But after a few months, contact tracing had eliminated local transmission, and life returned to normal. From mid-April to late December, there were no domestic Covid cases in Taiwan. In Hong Kong, meanwhile, pandemic precautions throttled protests — shutting down schools and banning public gatherings of more than four people.
In May 2020, China’s Legislature, the National People’s Congress, announced a vote on a national-security law for Hong Kong — it would ban whatever the C.C.P. defined as treason, sedition and subversion. The message was clear: Instead of extraditing Hong Kongers to Chinese courts as the 2019 protesters feared, Beijing would impose Chinese law on Hong Kong, crushing the independent judicial system. The law went into effect on June 30, 2020, at 11 p.m. “One country, two systems” was effectively over. Hong Kong was now basically just another city in China.
Within days of the announcement, years of activism unraveled — Joshua Wong’s Demosisto, Baggio’s Youngspiration and other pro-democracy groups disbanded to avoid likely persecution. Books critical of Xi or other party leaders, or those written by members of the opposition, vanished off bookstore and library shelves. Shops that had been openly “yellow”— in favor of the protests — removed their supporting paraphernalia. People changed their names on social media profiles. They took down any remaining personal posts. They downloaded VPNs, Signal and WhatsApp and started carefully considering anything they put in writing. Those who had routinely given interviews to journalists begged off. They started watching what they said aloud among strangers. Hong Kongers did not grow up with overt oppression. They didn’t intuitively know where the redlines were; everything required second-guessing. Not everyone agreed on what was or wasn’t safe. Even those who had never been at the front lines of protests started talking about fleeing — for the sake of their children or themselves.
Wealthy Hong Kongers could apply for an investment visa to Taiwan. Younger people with means could apply for a student visa, and those who could finagle a job offer could apply for a work visa, but that still left plenty of young protesters without the money or connections to qualify for these categories. According to a New York Times investigation, more than 200 at-risk protesters who were fleeing arrest or sentencing, like Gam, sought asylum in Taiwan before the borders shut — the government refused to disclose the official figures.
The Xinyi district of Taipei.Credit...An Rong Xu for The New York Times
In June 2020, the Taiwanese government finally released an official policy to deal with the Hong Kong exiles almost a year after they began to arrive. It avoided any use of words for “asylum” or “refugee,” relying instead on Article 18 of the Act Governing Relations with Hong Kong and Macau, which vowed to assist those “whose safety and liberty are immediately threatened for political reasons” on a case-by-case basis. It established a new office staffed by a dozen people helping the exiles with school or work applications, as well as distributing financial support. There was no clarity on what standard asylum-seekers would be judged on, what would happen if they were rejected, on what legal grounds the Hong Kongers who were already there could stay and whether they would ever be granted citizenship.
The government insisted that if it revealed any details, China would use the information to inundate Taiwan with spies posing as refugees. “We believe the existing regulations and law has provided enough space for this government to provide humanitarian assistance for the Hong Kong people,” Chiu Chui-Cheng, deputy minister of the Mainland Affairs Council, told me. More than 10,800 Hong Kongers were granted residency permits in Taiwan in 2020, almost double the previous year’s total.
Many Taiwanese felt that the policy was enough — this was not their problem to solve. They themselves existed in a liminal stasis. A 2021 poll showed that 80 percent of Taiwanese wanted to continue their country’s ambiguous status, neither declaring outright independence nor unifying with China but deciding things later. A growing number of young Taiwanese felt differently — 13.5 percent, Nancy among them, believed Taiwan should announce independence as soon as possible, even if it risked an attack by China.
Nancy was enraged by her government’s response. It wasn’t as if she wanted Hong Kongers flooding into Taiwan either — that made it even more important to establish a proper mechanism to filter out impostors or spies. “Whether or not we publicize that we are saving Hong Kongers, this is not going to stop the C.C.P. from attacking us, and this is not going to stop the Chinese infiltration of Taiwan,” she said. “They have never stopped oppressing us, over the table and under the table. Why should we do it in secret if this is something that is right?”
In October 2020, Nancy got the message she’d been waiting for. Baggio wanted out. He had been released from his one-month sentence, and almost immediately, he noticed he was being followed. The national-security law had changed all calculations — the Communist Party was effectively controlling Hong Kong the way it controlled the mainland, imposing an atmosphere of silence. Even when he spoke out in interviews, journalists chose not to publish his remarks, whether to protect him or themselves. Previous lawmakers had been arrested after being tailed, and Baggio worried the regime was planning to arrest him again. So he asked Nancy to help him plan his own escape to Taiwan.
Finally, Nancy thought. They couldn’t rely on the boats — the route was compromised when a group of 12 protesters were caught trying to make the crossing by the Chinese Coast Guard in August. Nancy appealed to contacts in the government to try to get Baggio a work visa — he seemed to be exactly the kind of at-risk protester Article 18 was supposed to protect. But after a monthlong wait, her attempts had gone nowhere. Her contacts didn’t flat out deny him, but they didn’t help either. She could read the air. Nancy told Baggio that getting asylum in Taiwan was not an option.
Nancy began pressing Baggio to consider other countries where he could be useful to the cause. She was sure he was running out of time. Their friend Tony Chung, a 19-year-old activist, had been charged with inciting secession, money laundering and conspiracy to publish seditious material under the national-security law and was detained in late October.
First Tibet, then Xinjiang, then Hong Kong — the edges of empire had been dutifully absorbed. Taiwan was the only one remaining.
Tony started Studentlocalism, a group to campaign for Hong Kong independence on high school and middle school campuses, in 2016, when he was only 15. Gangly, bespectacled, with thick straight cut bangs, he barely even looked his age. One time in Taipei, Nancy took him to a group dinner and watched as he became absorbed in a book about dinosaurs someone’s 10-year-old had brought. Another time, at an interview with Radio Free Asia, the journalist asked if there was anything he wanted to drink, and Tony asked for hot cocoa. Nancy had taken to thinking of him as a little brother.
During his last visit to Taiwan in January 2020, Nancy had begged him to stay. She promised she had a network to get him to America, but Tony declined. “It’s not like I’m going to be the first person arrested under a national-security law,” he joked.
Tony was right. He was not technically the first person arrested for violating the national-security law. He was the second to be charged. In July 2020, the security services arrested him at his house and accused him of writing a Facebook post in support of Hong Kong’s independence.
Nancy had given up on Tsai’s government helping the Hong Kongers outright, but if there was anyone they might assist quietly under Article 18, it would be Tony: a teenager facing up to a lifetime in prison for a supposed Facebook post. But the authorities did nothing.
By October, Tony had grown so desperate that he made a plan to plea for asylum at the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong while he was out on bail. But as he waited in a nearby coffee shop for the consulate to open, three plain-clothed security officers arrested him. (He hadn’t realized that he needed to be physically in America to apply.)
Nancy was devastated. A thousand times in her head, she had imagined picking Tony up at the airport. She had daydreamed about helping him get on a boat. Now he was in Pik Uk Correctional Institution, a maximum-security juvenile prison, where he had been held in solitary confinement. She could have saved him, but he slipped through her fingers. That frustration was always on her periphery, a failure she couldn’t escape. She wouldn’t let the same thing happen to Baggio.
In late November, Nancy and I were standing on a street in downtown Taipei eating oyster vermicelli when she told me she thought she had finally found a way to get Baggio to America. We talked for hours during my three months in Taiwan; equally patient was the interpreter who helped us communicate. That night, she was bouncing with anticipation — maybe she could succeed with Baggio where she previously failed.
Baggio didn’t tell many people he was leaving Hong Kong; he didn’t want to implicate anyone or tip off the authorities. Neither he nor Nancy were sure he would actually be able to get out. He could be on a no-fly list he didn’t know about; he could be detained at the airport or taken off the plane. Nancy was so nervous she didn’t even tell her contacts in America when to expect him. Baggio checked in with her from the airport, from the plane, when he arrived in Los Angeles for a layover and finally when he landed in Washington in December.
When I met him there a few months later, he told me he was grateful for everything Nancy had done for Hong Kongers and for helping him get to the United States safely, how passionately she always tried to do the right thing — regardless of the consequences. “It is also how lucky I am to have such a friendship,” he said. “In Cantonese, it is like, jyun fan, it means fate.”
Plenty of Taiwanese had supported the Hong Kong protest movement, but none had thrown themselves into it the way Nancy did. “In the very beginning of my participation in the Hong Kong incident, my thoughts were very simple. I wasn’t supporting Hong Kong; I was supporting freedom and democracy,” Nancy told me. “To me, defending Hong Kong’s democracy is the same as defending my own democracy. I can’t just stand by and watch everything happen.”
Nancy knew that her life had changed. “I’m nobody, but I’m one of the first Taiwanese people exposed by the Hong Kong government,” she said. She felt that traveling to some places might now be dangerous. The Chinese government was suspected of orchestrating the kidnapping of a Hong Kong bookseller in Thailand in 2015, and China reserves the right to impose its national-security law for “crimes” committed anywhere. “I can no longer get a visa. I don’t even know if I can enter some pro-China countries in the future. Will I be arrested when I go on vacation to Thailand?” she continued. “If I were a public figure, I would have no complaints. I’m not a public figure, and I don’t want to be a public figure. I just want to be the most authentic friend of those people in real life.”
Contrary to many Taiwanese fears, the incoming Biden administration maintained Trump’s pressure on China and actively enlisted other countries to speak up on Taiwan’s behalf. For the first time since 1979, Taiwan’s de facto ambassador to the United States was invited to a presidential inauguration, and high-level U.S. delegations continued to visit Taipei. China responded with military posturing — amphibious-landing drills and live-fire exercises coincided with official U.S. visits. Academics and experts dismissed these maneuvers as saber-rattling that more likely reflected the deterioration of the U.S.-China relationship than an impending plan to invade Taiwan.
But Taiwan’s fate was far from certain. China’s actions were now being portrayed by U.S. foreign policy hawks as a national-security threat and Taiwan as an impending flash point to possible war. In progressive American foreign-policy circles, meanwhile, China’s eventual control of Taiwan is often a foregone conclusion — a sheepish shrug at the end of an exhausted, over-rung forever war. Some even floated trading it outright for better relations with the C.C.P.
The campaign to erase Taiwan continued in the face of the pandemic. “Taiwan has no escape — the pressure is there already,” Taiwan’s foreign minister, Joseph Wu, told me. “The Chinese government is powerful in blocking Taiwan’s international participation, grabbing our diplomatic allies. They’re also trying to threaten Taiwan militarily in a very direct way. We don’t want the situation in between Taiwan and China to get any worse than what it is right now.”
In May 2021, after more than a year with virtually no local transmission, Taiwan experienced its first domestic Covid surge. Tsai explained that the government was unable to sign a deal for the Pfizer vaccine because BioNTech, under pressure from China, asked Taiwan to remove the word “country” in the news release about the purchase. Despite Taiwan’s compliance, the deal stalled. China had offered to donate its own vaccine to Taiwan, backing the D.P.P. government into a corner. The Covid spike had already hurt Tsai’s popularity, and vaccine politics increased polarization, with the KMT suggesting the D.P.P. was politicizing lives in refusing Chinese-made vaccines, while the D.P.P. maintained it was China who cut off their Pfizer imports to begin with. In the end, two Taiwanese companies, the electronics manufacturer Foxconn and the chip maker TSMC, purchased the vaccine from BioNTech and donated it to the Taiwanese government.
It was hard to know what to make of Taiwan’s precarity — when the act of existing was itself a provocation. It was a country still in transition from one authoritarian regime that could soon be subsumed by another. During this brief moment of respite, Taiwan was flourishing, but would the Taiwanese themselves ever have the chance to decide their own fate?
Nancy embodied so many of Taiwan’s unique contradictions. Her grandmother identified as Japanese, her father identified as Chinese and Nancy identified as Taiwanese. Yet they all shared the same apartments and rights to a ballot box. “Taiwan hasn’t figured out who Taiwan is yet,” Lev Nachman, postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, explained. “They can’t start letting in refugees and immigrants in and giving them citizenship, because we don’t even know who’s Taiwanese here yet.”
“When you’re contested, every other political issue is secondary.” Nachman continued. “It’s not that people don’t care about things like minimum wage or economics, but those things get filtered through this lens of ‘Who are we? How do I feel about China? How does that impact my identity? Am I Taiwanese? Am I Chinese? Am I both? What does that mean politically? Where does that mean my loyalties lie?’”
Both Hong Kong and Taiwan were conservative societies, made up of waves of ethnic Han migrants, locked into economic dependence on China. They had shared little by way of identification, until they found themselves pushing back against an encroaching Beijing.
“Hong Kong today, Taiwan tomorrow” had receded from the headlines. First Tibet, then Xinjiang, then Hong Kong — the edges of empire had been dutifully absorbed. Taiwan was the only one remaining. The Taiwanese carried the mantle — holding memorial protests, selling banned books and maintaining censored websites for the Hong Kongers who no longer could.
Nancy herself teetered between nihilism about Taiwan’s future and the most fervent belief that Hong Kong’s democratic spirit would someday be reborn, somewhere. Impending erasure had bred a kind of earnest patriotism — an attempt by the Taiwanese to assert their existence in any space that would tolerate them. It was trendy to take photos with a green “I support Taiwan Independence” flag during international travels and post them online. Nancy carried one wherever she went on vacation — posing with it in Japan, Germany and the Netherlands. In Paris in 2018, she was mobbed by a group of Chinese tourists who tried to grab her flag and shouted at her, “Taiwan is a part of China!”
Nancy Tao Chen YingCredit...An Rong Xu for The New York Times
Across the region, young people were undergoing versions of the same story — trying to grow up, build a life in a city, in a culture, in a country whose values existed on borrowed time. Pan-Asian solidarity had been minimal until the party’s punitive response to the yearlong Hong Kong protest movement brought a sense of collective generational crisis to the forefront.
For the last year, the #MilkTeaAlliance has abounded online, partly as a symbol of young people in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Myanmar and Thailand standing up for their freedoms, often either directly against China or regimes perceived to be propped up by China. They had all harbored the dream that they could change their geopolitical fate — tiny tops spinning in unison until they ran out of momentum.
In late June, when I called Nancy, she told me she had stepped back while Gam had taken more of a management role in the online shop they started together. They decided he would use the profits to pay for his product-design degree. His Mandarin was improving, and he was trying to settle more fully into his Taiwanese life. When he thought it would no longer endanger her, he had contacted his mother. Now they talked all the time. He hoped he could bring her to Taiwan one day.
Nancy had written a letter to Tony in prison for his 20th birthday — part of a campaign to let him know he hadn’t been forgotten. There were so many things she wanted to tell him, but she knew her words were being monitored. “Sister always remembers the days when you came to Taiwan and ate with me,” she wrote to him. “Keep fighting,” she signed it. “Never forget your own worth and beliefs.”
Nancy had given up her career to help Hong Kongers in exile. She wanted to protect Taiwan’s own nascent democracy, but she wasn’t sure where that had really gotten her. Still, she was happy she had. She didn’t think she could have lived with herself if she hadn’t stood by her beliefs. She had started taking Cantonese classes and had a weekly family-style dinner with Hong Kong friends in Taipei. Would they stand up for her, the way she stood up for them? She wasn’t sure.
3. As Afghan Cities Fall to Taliban, Brutal New Chapter Unfolds
Excerpts:
On Sunday evening, Afghan security forces began a military operation to flush Taliban fighters out of Kunduz in a bid to retake the city, officials said. But battered by weeks of intense fighting, the chance of a victory was anything but certain.
“We are so tired, and the security forces are so tired,” said Sayed Jawad Hussaini, the deputy police chief of a district in Kunduz city. “At the same time, we hadn’t received reinforcements and aircraft did not target the Taliban on time.”
As the front lines are pushed deeper into cities, Afghan civilians have been trapped amid these escalating levels of violence — including government airstrikes, shelling and the Taliban fighting from people’s homes — causing civilian casualties to soar.
In Kunduz, up to 70 civilians a day are brought to Kunduz Regional Hospital, according to Mohammed Naim Mangal, the facility’s director. Between Saturday and Sunday alone, the hospital triaged nearly 100 wounded people.
As Afghan Cities Fall to Taliban, Brutal New Chapter Unfolds
By Christina Goldbaum, Najim Rahim, Sharif Hassan and Thomas Gibbons-Neff
“This is now a different kind of war, reminiscent of Syria.” The seizure of five capitals has amplified fears about Afghanistan’s future after the U.S. withdrawal.
The Taliban flag flying in the main square in Kunduz on Sunday.Credit...Abdullah Sahil/Associated Press
By Sharif Hassan and
Aug. 8, 2021
KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban seized three Afghan cities on Sunday, including the commercial hub of Kunduz, officials said, escalating a sweeping offensive that has claimed five provincial capitals in three days and shown how little control the government has over the country without American military power to protect it.
Never before in 20 years of war had the Taliban directly assaulted more than one provincial capital at a time. Now, three fell on Sunday alone — Kunduz, Sar-i-Pul and Taliqan, all in the north — and even more populous cities are under siege, in a devastating setback for the Afghan government.
The fall of these cities is taking place just weeks before U.S. forces are set to complete a total withdrawal from Afghanistan, laying bare a difficult predicament for President Biden.
Since the U.S. withdrawal began, the Taliban have captured more than half of Afghanistan’s 400-odd districts, according to some assessments. And their recent attacks on provincial capitals have violated the 2020 peace deal between the Taliban and the United States. Under that deal, which laid the path for the American withdrawal, the Taliban committed to not attacking provincial centers like Kunduz.
By Scott Reinhard
On Sunday, administration officials said that Mr. Biden had been briefed on the events in Afghanistan but was not changing course on the final troop pullout.
The Taliban’s rapid victories have amplified fears about the Afghan security forces’ ability to defend what territory remains under government control. Since May, the insurgents have swept across the country’s rural areas and, in late June, they began assaulting major Afghan cities for the first time in years.
Damaged shops in Kunduz on Sunday.Credit...Abdullah Sahil/Associated Press
Provincial capitals are often the last islands of government presence in provinces flush with Taliban fighters, and they shelter hundreds of thousands of Afghans who have been recently displaced by fighting. Adding to many Afghans’ unease, the Taliban have trumpeted their recent victories on social media in a concerted effort to promote the sense that their return to power is inevitable.
The string of Taliban victories has intensified both the strategic and psychological encircling of Kabul, the nation’s capital. While the Taliban have continued their assassination campaign against Afghan officials and civil society figures in the capital in recent days, they have not yet begun any intense military operations around Kabul, perhaps waiting to gauge the American and government reaction to their recent triumphs.
The simultaneous sieges on provincial hubs have exhausted Afghan security forces and stretched military resources dangerously thin. Overwhelmed, the Afghan forces have concentrated on defending key cities like Lashkar Gah and Kandahar in the south, Herat in the west and Kunduz in the north in recent days — leaving others vulnerable to capture.
On Friday, the Taliban seized on that opening: In Zaranj, a provincial capital near the border with Iran, insurgents faced little resistance upon entering the city. A day later, they captured another capital, Sheberghan, the northern stronghold of the warlord Marshal Abdul Rashid Dostum, whose militia forces were overrun. On Sunday, Taliban forces broke through in three more provincial capitals, including Kunduz, a vital commercial hub that the group has long coveted as both a strategic and symbolic prize.
The shift in the Taliban military offensive to capturing Afghan cities is the beginning of a bloody new chapter unfolding in Afghanistan, experts say.
“This is now a different kind of war, reminiscent of Syria recently or Sarajevo in the not-so distant past,” Deborah Lyons, the special representative of the U.N. secretary-general for Afghanistan, said at a special session of the United Nations Security Council on Friday. “To attack urban areas is to knowingly inflict enormous harm and cause massive civilian casualties.”
Ratcheting up the pressure on another front, the insurgents have also highlighted their ability to make targeted strikes within Kabul: This week the Taliban claimed responsibility for an hourslong attack on the residence of a top military official and the assassination of a senior government official in Kabul.
The Taliban’s siege of Kunduz, a city of 374,000 people, began in late June, and they wore down government soldiers and police units in clashes that raged around the clock. On Saturday night, the fighting intensified as the Taliban made a final push against exhausted government troops.
On Sunday evening, Afghan security forces began a military operation to flush Taliban fighters out of Kunduz in a bid to retake the city.Credit...Abdullah Sahil/Associated Press
Ahmad Shokur Ghaznawi, a Kunduz resident, said he had heard a barrage of gunfire as security forces and Taliban fighters clashed in the alley just outside his home. As the fighting intensified, about 50 members of the Afghan security forces massed in the alley. But the government soldiers appeared worn down.
“They said that they were hungry — they had run out of bread,” Mr. Ghaznawi said.
By Sunday morning, the security forces had retreated to a town south of the city and Taliban fighters flooded into the streets on motorcycles, in police vehicles and in Humvees.
As the Taliban raised their flag over Kunduz’s main square and released hundreds of inmates from the central prison, a sense of unease rippled across the city: Plumes of black smoke billowed into the sky, after two of the city’s main markets caught fire. Fearing their stores would be looted, shopkeepers moved their goods into their homes.
“The people just want to flee alive and leave all their belongings behind,” said Sulaiman Satarzada, 28, a businessman in Kunduz.
By the day’s end, the Taliban had also captured the northern city of Taliqan, the capital of Takhar Province, and Sar-i-Pul, the capital of the northern province with the same name. With Sar-i-Pul Province now mostly under their control, the insurgents have positioned themselves to attack Mazar-i-Sharif, the economic hub and capital of Balkh Province, from two different directions: Sar-i-Pul and Jowjzan in the west and Kunduz in the east.
By Sunday evening, no central government officials — including President Ashraf Ghani — had commented on the capture of the five provincial capitals; the Afghan Ministry of Defense simply said that Afghanistan’s security forces were fighting around the country, killing scores of Taliban fighters.
President Biden speaking about the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan at the White House last month.Credit...Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times
For nearly two decades, the United States and NATO have engaged in the nation-building pursuit of training, expanding and equipping Afghanistan’s police, army and air forces, spending tens of billions of dollars to build government security forces that can safeguard their own country.
But the Taliban’s offensive has revealed the fragility of those forces.
Thousands of soldiers have surrendered or deserted in recent months. The country’s fate has rested in the hands of air and commando forces who have served as the nation’s firefighters, sent to hot spots with hopes of turning the tide against the insurgent group. In reality, what were once considered elite forces have transformed into foot soldiers who are some of the only troops capable of defending territory under attack by the Taliban.
The United States, despite pledging to end military operations by Aug. 31, has committed more aircraft and drones — now based outside the country — to help beat back the Taliban through airstrikes. The last-ditch effort to prop up the Afghan security forces helped in some areas including Kandahar, a linchpin of the South and a former Taliban stronghold where fighting intensified in recent weeks.
On Sunday evening, Afghan security forces began a military operation to flush Taliban fighters out of Kunduz in a bid to retake the city, officials said. But battered by weeks of intense fighting, the chance of a victory was anything but certain.
“We are so tired, and the security forces are so tired,” said Sayed Jawad Hussaini, the deputy police chief of a district in Kunduz city. “At the same time, we hadn’t received reinforcements and aircraft did not target the Taliban on time.”
Afghan commandos during fighting against the Taliban in Kunduz last month.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
As the front lines are pushed deeper into cities, Afghan civilians have been trapped amid these escalating levels of violence — including government airstrikes, shelling and the Taliban fighting from people’s homes — causing civilian casualties to soar.
In Kunduz, up to 70 civilians a day are brought to Kunduz Regional Hospital, according to Mohammed Naim Mangal, the facility’s director. Between Saturday and Sunday alone, the hospital triaged nearly 100 wounded people.
But with intense fighting in the streets, many others who were wounded could not make it to medical centers. The hospital itself was hit by four mortars on Saturday.
By Sunday evening, as the city braced for more violence as government forces began an operation to retake the city, only two doctors remained at the hospital. The rest of the staff fled.
4. As Taliban Capture Cities, U.S. Says Afghan Forces Must Fend for Themselves
A sad headline to read.
As Taliban Capture Cities, U.S. Says Afghan Forces Must Fend for Themselves
The muted American response to the Taliban siege shows in no uncertain terms that the U.S. war in Afghanistan is over.
Afghans inspected damaged shops after fighting between Taliban and Afghan security forces in Kunduz city, northern Afghanistan, on Sunday.Credit...Abdullah Sahil/Associated Press
Published Aug. 8, 2021Updated Aug. 9, 2021, 4:52 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON — If the Taliban had seized three provincial capitals in northern Afghanistan a year ago, like they did on Sunday, the American response would most likely have been ferocious. Fighter jets and helicopter gunships would have responded in force, beating back the Islamist group or, at the very least, stalling its advance.
By Scott Reinhard
The muted American response on Sunday showed in no uncertain terms that America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan is over. The mismanaged and exhausted Afghan forces will have to retake the cities on their own, or leave them to the Taliban for good.
The recent string of Taliban military victories has not moved President Biden to reassess his decision to end the U.S. combat mission by the end of the month, senior administration officials said Sunday. But the violence shows just how difficult it will be for Mr. Biden to extract America from the war while insisting that he is not abandoning the country in the middle of a brutal Taliban offensive.
In a speech defending the U.S. withdrawal last month, Mr. Biden said the United States had done more than enough to empower the Afghan police and military to secure the future of their people. U.S. officials have acknowledged that those forces will struggle, but argue they must now fend for themselves.
So far, the administration’s sink-or-swim strategy has not shown promising results.
Over the past week, Taliban fighters have moved swiftly to retake cities around Afghanistan, assassinated government officials, and killed civilians in the process. Throughout this, American officials have publicly held out hope that Afghan forces have the resources and ability to fight back, while at the same time negotiating a peace deal with the Taliban that seems more unlikely by the day.
Leon E. Panetta, who served as defense secretary under President Barack Obama, said he had expected to see more U.S. air support on Sunday, but he did not expect the situation would improve markedly even with the help of American forces.
“Let’s face it,” Mr. Panetta said. “The most you can hope for now is some kind of stalemate” between Afghan forces and Taliban fighters, who have demonstrated little interest in reaching an accord since the American troop withdrawal was announced.
At the Pentagon, where senior leaders have reluctantly cut off most military support to Afghanistan, officials were on phone calls Sunday about the unfolding events around Kunduz, a city of more than 350,000 people. The United States has twice in the past intervened to retake Kunduz from the Taliban.
But defense officials said there were no plans to take action this time beyond limited airstrikes. Over the past three weeks, the United States has used armed Reaper drones and AC-130 aerial gunships to target Taliban equipment, including heavy artillery, that threaten population centers, foreign embassies and Afghan government buildings, officials said.
One official acknowledged that with only 650 American troops remaining on the ground in Afghanistan, a concerted air campaign was unlikely to undo the advances the Taliban had made.
Although the American military mission will formally conclude at the end of this month, American troops and their Western allies are mostly gone already. The U.S. handed over Bagram Air Base — once the military’s nerve center — to the Afghans last month, effectively ending major U.S. military operations.
Now, air support for the Afghan forces and overhead surveillance arrives from outside the country, from bases in Qatar or the United Arab Emirates, or from an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea.
Wesley Clark, the former top NATO general under President Bill Clinton, called the weekend’s events “a tragedy for the people of Afghanistan, and a consequence of American misjudgments and failures.”
Civilian casualties have skyrocketed. Nearly 2,400 civilians have been killed or injured between May 1 and June 30, according to a United Nations report released last month, the highest number recorded for that period since monitoring began in 2009.
When asked about the Taliban’s advances on Friday, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told reporters that Mr. Biden had long been prepared to make “difficult choices” as part of his commitment to disengaging from Afghanistan.
Ms. Psaki speaking to reporters at the White House, on Friday.Credit...Tom Brenner for The New York Times
“The president made clear: After 20 years at war, it’s time for American troops to come home,” Ms. Psaki said. “He also feels and has stated that the Afghan government and the Afghan National Defense Forces have the training, equipment and numbers to prevail, and now is the moment for the leadership and the will in the face of the Taliban’s aggression and violence.”
Ms. Psaki’s comments echoed a prevailing view among the progressive national security wing of Mr. Biden’s party that Afghan troops would fight back if given no other option.
“Like in Iraq, at a certain point the training wheels have to come off,” said Jon Soltz, an Iraq war veteran and the chairman of the progressive veterans group VoteVets. “That’s when the Iraqi Army stepped up, and it will be when the Afghan Army does.”
“They may have their backs against the wall as things move closer to Kabul, but that’s precisely when they’ll fight the hardest and hold the line,” said Mr. Soltz, who helped to train the Iraqi army. “We have done all we can to prepare them for this moment.”
So far, no senior Pentagon official has expressed exasperation publicly with Mr. Biden over the Taliban surge, which Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III predicted this past spring, when he and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both counseled Mr. Biden against the complete withdrawal of American troops.
“We’ve seen this movie before,” Mr. Austin told his boss, in a reference to the Obama-era withdrawal from Iraq, which was followed by the rise of the Islamic State. The United States ended up returning to Iraq and launching five years of airstrikes in Iraq and Syria to help Iraqi security forces beat back that insurgent group.
Mr. Biden has argued for pulling out of Afghanistan for years. In 2009, while serving as vice president, he argued for a minimal force, only to be overruled as Mr. Obama ordered a surge of forces, then a rapid drawdown.
But a dozen years later, as president, he made the decision to withdraw, one of the most significant decisions of his presidency so far. And despite the likelihood that the White House will confront terrible images of human suffering and loss in the coming weeks and months, Mr. Biden has vowed to press ahead regardless of the conditions on the ground.
Polls show that large numbers of Americans in both parties support leaving Afghanistan.
Mr. Biden, declaring that the United States had long ago accomplished its mission of denying terrorists a haven in Afghanistan, said in April that all American troops would leave the country by Sept. 11. That date has since been moved up to Aug. 31, giving the Pentagon — and Afghan forces — just over a month to slow the Taliban surge.
Administration and military officials have voiced conflicting views on whether the United States will continue airstrikes after Aug. 31 to prevent Afghan cities and the Afghan government, led by President Ashraf Ghani, from falling. But even if the airstrikes continue, they can only do so much; the bulk of the effort will have to come from Afghan forces on the ground.
In any event, Kunduz was never going to be the Afghan city that might prompt Mr. Biden to rethink his strategy, two U.S. officials said on Sunday on condition of anonymity.
Helene Cooper and Katie Rogers reported from Washington, and Thomas Gibbons-Neff from Kabul. Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.
5. The Propaganda War Intensifies in Afghanistan as the Taliban Gain Ground
All war is a propaganda war. But we rarely consider that. It is about breaking will and influencing behavior and decision making.
The Propaganda War Intensifies in Afghanistan as the Taliban Gain Ground
By Adam Nossiter and Fahim Abed
The effort to fend off panic and minimize losses has taken on outsize importance following the seizure of five provincial capitals by the Taliban.
The Taliban flag, right, flying over the Pakistani-Afghan border crossing in Chaman, just across from Spin Boldak, on July 14.Credit...Akhter Gulfam/EPA, via Shutterstock
Published Aug. 8, 2021Updated Aug. 9, 2021, 5:58 a.m. ET
KABUL, Afghanistan — First, a remote provincial capital in Afghanistan’s southwest fell. The next day, it was a city in Afghanistan’s north. By Sunday, Taliban fighters had taken three more cities, including their biggest prize yet, the major provincial capital of Kunduz.
All the while, the Afghan central government has acknowledged very little of it.
In three days, at least five provincial capitals have been seized by the Taliban, in a ruthless land offensive that has led many local officials to abandon their posts and flee the cities they run.
But the nation’s government, still trying to promote the impression that it has the upper hand against the Taliban, has been relatively silent on the enormous losses suffered across the country. Rather than admitting that the cities have fallen, the government has simply said that Afghanistan’s brave security forces were fighting in several capitals around the country, and that airstrikes have resulted in scores of dead Taliban fighters.
“The country’s security and defense forces are always ready to defend this land,” the Afghan Ministry of Defense tweeted Sunday as Kunduz was under siege. “The support and love of the people for these forces increases their motivation and efforts.”
With cities falling and the American military campaign mostly finished, the propaganda war in Afghanistan has taken on outsize importance. For the Taliban, it is an effort to communicate a drumbeat of victories, large or small, and to create an air of inevitability about their return to power. For the government, it is an all-out effort to stave off panic, boost morale and minimize losses.
Members of the Taliban with a seized military Humvee after they took control of the Spin Boldak border crossing last month.Credit...Akhter Gulfam/EPA, via Shutterstock
In recent days, the Taliban have shared videos of cheering crowds welcoming them into provinces (though some say Afghans are doing this only to avoid being harmed by the Taliban later). On social media, Taliban spokesmen have been blaming civilian casualties and infrastructure damage on the Afghan government, rather than on the group’s aggressive takeover of vast segments of the country.
Their posts call on Afghan security forces to surrender, with promises that they will be treated humanely, accompanied by photos of seized weapons and security forces who have given up. Notably missing from any Taliban messaging is any mention of reconciliation with the government.
The government’s information strategy has sought to create the opposite impression, with often exaggerated and sometimes false claims about military victories, retaken districts and assertions of Taliban casualties.
This approach emerged this summer as a stand-in for something much more concrete: a publicly enunciated plan to defeat an enemy that seems on the verge of crushing Afghanistan’s fragile government institutions. Instead, Afghan leaders offer assurances, meeting regularly for an elegant group photograph at the presidential palace, conveying an image of stability and calm in the face of the violence.
But the news outside of Kabul, the capital, has created a disconnect, particularly as alarming reports filter in from provincial officials of Afghan security forces — exhausted, hungry and under-resourced — being overtaken by insurgents, or surrendering altogether.
By Scott Reinhard
In the north, the key city of Mazar-i-Sharif is now largely surrounded, as the capitals of three neighboring provinces fell to the Taliban Sunday. In the south, the economic hub of Kandahar has been under siege for a month, despite an escalation in U.S. airstrikes to slow the insurgents’ advance.
By Sunday, senior government leaders still had not publicly acknowledged the seizure of any provincial capital; instead, tweets from the Afghan Ministry of Defense touted the deaths of hundreds of Taliban fighters, but the government has inflated these casualties in the past.
A fledgling plan to slow down the Taliban’s string of victories does now exist, U.S. and U.N. diplomats and officials say, and it hews closely to longstanding U.S. recommendations that the Afghans consolidate their remaining forces around crucial roads and cities, as well as key border crossings, effectively abandoning most of the dozens of districts already seized by the Taliban.
Mr. Ghani alluded to this plan in a speech to Parliament on Aug. 2: “The Afghan Army is going to focus on strategic objectives,” he said. “Afghan police officers must provide cities and strategic districts with security.”
President Ashraf Ghani speaking in Parliament in Kabul last week.Credit...Reuters
But the Ministry of Defense continues to insist that the government intends to retake all of the hundreds of Taliban-captured districts within six months.
“Our strategy is to increase the number of airstrikes on the Taliban,” said Fawad Aman, the Ministry of Defense spokesman — though in recent weeks it has been U.S. airstrikes that have been playing a major role in slowing down the Taliban. “First, we will recapture the districts that are very important. Then we will try to recapture all the districts in the control of the Taliban.”
That would run directly counter to what Americans have advised for months: not to defend the rural districts. This is in effect what has been happening anyway, as Afghan forces, in district after district, have surrendered or fled, at times without a fight.
Men in Herat watching a battle between Afghan security forces and Taliban fighters on Thursday. Credit...Jalil Rezayee/EPA, via Shutterstock
And despite counter messaging from the government that it’s killing Taliban fighters at astonishing numbers, any casualties they have incurred appear to have had a limited effect on the group’s military campaign. Since the beginning of May, the Taliban have captured about 200 districts, putting them in control of more than half of the 400-plus districts in Afghanistan.
At times, the government has claimed to have recaptured districts that never actually fell to the Taliban — like Pashtun Kot in Faryab Province and Ahmadabad in Paktia Province. At other times, the government’s contentions appear clearly wrong to the people in the supposedly reclaimed districts.
“There was no operation,” said Lutfullah Mashal, a delivery truck driver in Balkh district in the north, which the government falsely claimed to have recaptured after it was overtaken by the Taliban in June. “The Taliban are moving freely around the district. They tax people and they have implemented all their old rules.”
The driver’s observation was confirmed by an official at the provincial police headquarters who was not authorized to speak to the media.
Where the government fails to hold a district it has recaptured, if only briefly, the consequences can be severe for the residents.
People who fled fighting in Kandahar and neighboring districts sheltering in a compound run by the Afghan Department of Hajj and Religious Affairs last week.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
On July 18, members of a pro-government militia recaptured Malistan district in the province of Ghazni, populated by Hazaras, a largely Shiite ethnic group persecuted by the Sunni Taliban. The next day, the Taliban pushed the militia members out. Some 20 of the district’s Hazara civilians were killed by the Taliban; dozens more fled to Kabul. The government never publicly acknowledged the renewed loss of Malistan district.
The government’s fitful narrative appears to have convinced few. “The government does have the capability to recapture districts,” said Mirza Mohammad Yarmand, a former deputy interior minister. “But the main point is, what are they going to do after recapturing them?”
“The districts will soon collapse again,” he added.
A senior officer in the country’s military, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the situation, noted that many Taliban conquests are carried out by a small force of 10 or so fighters from whom it should be easy to take back districts. Yet even if they were to do so, he said, Afghan security forces would be unlikely to hold them because of weak defenses, weak local leaders and a lack of central government support.
People stranded at the border at Chaman, days after the Afghan government falsely reported it had retaken the area from the Taliban.Credit...Akhter Gulfam/EPA, via Shutterstock
Bashir Ahmad Nemani, a local police commander in the northern province of Badakhshan, saw those weaknesses firsthand. The province, including his district of Khwahan, is now almost entirely in the hands of the Taliban — a bitter pill for the government as it was the one area in Afghanistan that resisted the insurgents throughout their reign in the late 1990s.
This time, faced with a Taliban onslaught, Badakhshan’s provincial police chief “promised reinforcements,” said Mr. Nemani. “They never came.” The local militia working with the government quickly collapsed.
“There was no option,” he said. “Everything was destroyed. The police collapsed.” Mr. Nemani fled across the border to Tajikistan with six of his men.
Flown to Kabul by the Tajiks, he said he wants to continue to fight and is only awaiting word from the government to return and take up arms again.
“There is a lot of pain in my heart,” Mr. Nemani said. “Who could be happy with this brutal situation?”
Faizabad, the capital of Badakhshan Province, much of which is now controlled by the Taliban.Credit...Kiana Hayeri for The New York Times
Najim Rahim contributed reporting.
6. The Taliban fly their flag in Kunduz as exhausted Afghan troops regroup.
Excerpts:
Since the U.S. withdrawal began, the Taliban have captured more than half of Afghanistan’s 400-odd districts, according to some assessments. Their attacks on provincial capitals have violated the 2020 peace deal between the Taliban and the United States. Under that deal, which precipitated the American withdrawal from the country, the Taliban committed to not attacking provincial centers like Kunduz.
The Taliban fly their flag in Kunduz as exhausted Afghan troops regroup.
Kunduz was the first major city to be overtaken by the Taliban since their military offensive began in May. It was the third provincial capital to be captured in three days.Credit...Abdullah Sahil/Associated Press
By Sharif Hassan and
KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban seized a major strategic and propaganda prize early Sunday, capturing the crucial northern commercial hub of Kunduz and then breaking through in two other regional capitals later the same day.
The rapid fall of Afghan cities on Sunday — including Kunduz, Sar-i-Pul and Taliqan, all northern capitals — comes just weeks before U.S. forces were set to complete a total withdrawal from Afghanistan. It is a crucial challenge for President Biden, who in recent weeks has insisted the American pullout would continue despite the Taliban’s advances.
After sweeping through the country’s rural areas, the insurgents’ military campaign has shifted to brutal urban combat in recent weeks. They have pushed into the edges of major cities like Kandahar and Lashkar Gah in the south and Herat in the west.
By The New York Times
The strategy has exhausted the Afghan government’s forces and overwhelmed the local militia forces that the government has used to supplement its own troops.
Kunduz, the capital of a province of the same name, is a significant military and political prize. With a population of 374,000, it is a vital commercial city near the border with Tajikistan, and a hub for trade and road traffic.
“All security forces fled to the airport, and the situation is critical,” said Sayed Jawad Hussaini, the deputy police chief of a district in Kunduz city.
Clashes between government forces and Taliban fighters were continuing in a small town south of the city, where the local army headquarters and the airport are situated, security officials said.
“We are so tired, and the security forces are so tired,” Mr. Hussaini said. “At the same time we hadn’t received reinforcements and aircraft did not target the Taliban on time.”
Security forces, who had retreated to the town earlier in the morning, began an operation to flush Taliban fighters out of the city on Sunday evening, according to security officials.
In the two preceding days, the Taliban had taken two other provincial capitals: Sheberghan, the capital of Jowzjan Province in the north, and Zaranj, the capital of Nimruz Province on the Afghanistan-Iran border.
Since the U.S. withdrawal began, the Taliban have captured more than half of Afghanistan’s 400-odd districts, according to some assessments. Their attacks on provincial capitals have violated the 2020 peace deal between the Taliban and the United States. Under that deal, which precipitated the American withdrawal from the country, the Taliban committed to not attacking provincial centers like Kunduz.
7. Why the next major war is likely to start in Taiwan
The PSYOP professionals and the Global Engagement Center should be listening to people like Dean Cheng to help develop themes and messages. We will need our own form of Dau Tranh (and third "van" - the war among the enemy's people) that we faced from the north Vietnamese.
Dean asks a good question which I would flesh out - will the growing nationalism of China outweigh the family cost? And all the PLA sons are a result of the one child policy which also means the end of a family's bloodline when he dies in vain in what will be the blackhole of Taiwan - what goes into Taiwan may never come out.
Excerpts:
But mounting casualties could also affect the morale of China’s civilian population because every member of the People’s Liberation Army killed would likely be an only child, he said. From 1979 until 2015, Chinese families were not allowed to have more than one child.
“Every casualty is going to produce at a minimum two parents and four grandparents who just lost their old age care,” Cheng said. “That’s huge; and yes, they will have died to unify the motherland – when it’s your only grandson; when it is your only daughter who is dying, how well does that go over? We don’t know.”
Why the next major war is likely to start in Taiwan
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If the United States and China get into a shooting war, there is a good chance it would start in Taiwan, which the Chinese communists view as a renegade province.
It’s no secret that China has long wanted to conquer the island nation, where nationalist forces retreated in 1949 after losing to the communists in China’s civil war. The U.S government provides Taiwan with military equipment, much to China’s chagrin.
“China will resolutely take legitimate and necessary counter-measures in light of the development of the situation,” the spokesperson said.
Should the United States and China go to war, U.S. troops would face combat on a scale not seen since World War II.
Soldiers from China’s People’s Liberation Army march toward Red Square during the Victory Day military parade marking the 75th anniversary of the Nazi defeat in Moscow, Russia, Wednesday, June 24, 2020. (AP Photo/Pavel Golovkin, Pool)
“There are three significant challenges the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] could pose to U.S. forces seeking to respond to an attack on Taiwan: hypersonic cruise missiles launched both at sea and from shore bases against U.S. warships; cyberattacks against the U.S. command and control networks (including against space-based systems); and offensive strikes against forward U.S. Pacific bases, including Guam,” said retired Navy Adm. James Stavridis, who served as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander from 2009 to 2013.
“Such attacks would significantly raise the stakes for Beijing, and their calculus at the moment leans against such a confrontation,” Stavridis continued. “Over time, that deterrent effect may be reduced if the U.S. does not invest in systems to counter.”
It is important to note that while the U.S. military is training and preparing in case it is called upon to defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion, the United States is not treaty-bound to come to Taiwan’s aid if it is attacked.
FILE PHOTO: Taiwan’s military fires an 8 inch Howitzer canon during a live fire exercise Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2008, on the Taiwan island of Kinmen, formerly Quemoy, just 2 kilometers (1.24 miles) off of the coast of China. (AP Photo)
Since 1979, U.S. relations with the island nation have been governed by the Taiwan Relations Act, which somewhat ambiguously states the U.S government would “consider any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States.”
That could give the U.S. government the option of imposing sanctions on China and taking other non-military actions in response to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, said Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
“In a hypothetical scenario in which a president of Taiwan took an action that was seen by the U.S. as potentially destabilizing, such as holding a referendum on revising the constitution so the language suggested that Taiwan is not part of China, and if the U.S warned the president not to take that action, but he/she went ahead and did it anyway, the U.S. might decide not to intervene militarily,” Glaser said.
She also noted that the Taiwan Relations Act requires the president to work with Congress on how to respond to any threat to Taiwan and U.S. interests.
FILE PHOTO: M60A3 Patton main battle tanks in a line fire during the 36th Han Kung military exercises in Taichung City, central Taiwan, Thursday, July 16, 2020. (AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying)
If China decided to invade Taiwan, it would likely try to conquer the island before U.S. leaders decided whether to launch a military response, said Scott W. Harold, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation.
Alternatively, China could take a page from Japan’s 1941 playbook and attack the United States first by hitting bases in the Asia-Pacific region – possibly including Okinawa, Guam, Hawaii, Alaska, and even San Diego, Harold said.
In a war over Taiwan, the People’s Liberation Army would have the advantage of operating closer to home and they would be able to bring more weapons to bear against Taiwan’s military, he said.
But the Chinese military has never waged a war in which all military components have fought as a joint force, while the U.S. military has fought many such wars over the past 30 years, Harold said.
FILE PHOTO: In this photo taken Feb. 10, 2020, and released by the Republic of China (ROC) Ministry of National Defense, a Taiwanese Air Force F-16 in foreground flies on the flank of a Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) H-6 bomber as it passes near Taiwan. (Republic of China (ROC) Ministry of National Defense via AP)
Additionally, Chinese troops would have to steam for several hours to get across the Taiwan Strait, during which time their invasion vessels would be vulnerable to aircraft, cruise missiles, submarines, and mines. Once the Chinese troops reached Taiwan, they would come in range of the island’s defenses, including the self-propelled howitzers that the U.S. government just sold the Taiwanese.
Also, the longer a war between China and the United States lasts, the more likely that America’s allies in the region and in Europe will get involved, he said.
Meanwhile, the United States would face major logistical challenges as it tried to move vast quantities of precision guided munitions, fuel, spare parts, and other vital supplies across the vast distances in the Asia-Pacific region, Harold said. These supply issues would be compounded by the fact that the U.S. military relies on private contractors that are more vulnerable to Chinese cyberattacks than the Defense Department.
Getting to the fight would also be perilous because the Chinese have sophisticated anti-ship and air defense systems with ranges of up to 1,000 nautical miles, he said.
FILE PHOTO: In this photo taken on Saturday, May 24, 2014, China’s Harbin (112) guided missile destroyer takes part in a week-long China-Russia “Joint Sea-2014” navy exercise at the East China Sea off Shanghai, China. (AP Photo) CHINA OUT
In a war over Taiwan, the U.S. military’s naval and air forces would be heavily engaged while Taiwan would be expected to provide most of the ground forces, said Dean Cheng, an expert on Chinese military and foreign policy with the Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington, D.C.
“So, the one area where we have an advantage – combat experience – is the one area where, arguably, we are less needed,” Cheng said.
Unlike any opponent U.S. troops have faced this century, China has extensive surveillance capabilities including spy satellites, so the Chinese military would be able to track and possibly destroy U.S. warships on their way to the Taiwan Strait, he said,
China has a vast arsenal of highly sophisticated weapons that it can use against American forces, including anti-ship missiles, cruise missiles, and submarines, Cheng said. The resulting number of killed and wounded U.S. troops would be immense, especially if the Chinese attacked an aircraft carrier.
FILE PHOTO: (June 3, 2020) The aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) flies a replica of Capt. Oliver Hazard Perry’s “Don’t Give Up the Ship” flag as Theodore Roosevelt approaches Apra Harbor, Guam June 3, 2020. (U.S. Navy photo by Naval Air Crewman (Helicopter) 1st Class Will Bennett)
“One carrier has 5,000 people on it,” Cheng said. “So, even a mission kill – you don’t sink it, you just screw up the entire topside – you’re probably talking hundreds of casualties, if not more. So, yes, we are talking about lots and lots of casualties.”
But mounting casualties could also affect the morale of China’s civilian population because every member of the People’s Liberation Army killed would likely be an only child, he said. From 1979 until 2015, Chinese families were not allowed to have more than one child.
“Every casualty is going to produce at a minimum two parents and four grandparents who just lost their old age care,” Cheng said. “That’s huge; and yes, they will have died to unify the motherland – when it’s your only grandson; when it is your only daughter who is dying, how well does that go over? We don’t know.”
More great stories on Task & Purpose
is the senior Pentagon reporter for Task & Purpose. He has covered the military for 15 years. You can email him at [email protected], direct message @JeffSchogol on Twitter, or reach him on WhatsApp and Signal at 703-909-6488. Contact the author here.
8. U.S. says plot against Myanmar U.N. envoy fits 'disturbing pattern'
Excerpts:
The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said on Saturday that the threat "fits a disturbing pattern of authoritarian leaders and their supporters reaching across the globe ... to persecute and repress journalists, activists, and others who dare speak or stand against them."
Thomas-Greenfield cited Krystsina Tsimanouskaya, a Belarusian athlete who refused to return home from the Tokyo Olympics and sought refuge in Poland, and a thwarted plot by several Iranians to kidnap a New York journalist and rights activist who was critical of Iran. read more
"These are only the most recent acts of transnational repression, and they must be met with the condemnation of the world and with full and certain accountability," Thomas-Greenfield said in a statement.
U.S. says plot against Myanmar U.N. envoy fits 'disturbing pattern'
Myanmar's ambassador Kyaw Moe Tun addresses the Human Rights Council at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, March 11, 2019. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse/File Photo/File Photo
NEW YORK, Aug 7 (Reuters) - The United States on Saturday condemned a thwarted plot to attack Myanmar's U.N. ambassador in New York, saying it fits a "disturbing pattern" of authoritarian leaders and their supporters seeking to persecute opponents around the world.
Two Myanmar citizens have been arrested in New York state for plotting with an arms dealer in Thailand - who sells weapons to the Burmese military - to kill or injure Myanmar's U.N. ambassador, U.S. authorities said on Friday. read more
Ambassador Kyaw Moe Tun, who represents Myanmar's elected civilian government which was overthrown by the military in February, told Reuters on Wednesday that a threat had been made against him and U.S. authorities had stepped up his security. read more
The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said on Saturday that the threat "fits a disturbing pattern of authoritarian leaders and their supporters reaching across the globe ... to persecute and repress journalists, activists, and others who dare speak or stand against them."
Thomas-Greenfield cited Krystsina Tsimanouskaya, a Belarusian athlete who refused to return home from the Tokyo Olympics and sought refuge in Poland, and a thwarted plot by several Iranians to kidnap a New York journalist and rights activist who was critical of Iran. read more
"These are only the most recent acts of transnational repression, and they must be met with the condemnation of the world and with full and certain accountability," Thomas-Greenfield said in a statement.
Reporting by Michelle Nichols; Editing by Daniel Wallis
9. Unconditional Surrender: China's Long Game Is Dominance, Not Competition
Per the subtitle: True. China won't make the same mistake. But it has far more financial resources than the USSR ever had (or dreamt of having). But what if China is taking a page from the Cold War playbook and would like to see us spend our resources on missile defenses? Perhaps it will not bankrupt the US but what if the Chinese want us to build defenses against the wrong threat? (and it is a nice thing (for China) that north Korea, Iran and Russia as well contribute to developing the threat perception).
Unconditional Surrender: China's Long Game Is Dominance, Not Competition
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union bankrupted itself with an obsessive need to match U.S. capabilities such as ballistic missile defense. China won't make that same mistake.
Key Point: China's military isn't just aiming for mere parity or deterrence with the U.S., but rather military victory in a potential Sino-American war.
"The PLA [People's Liberation Army] is focused not merely on competing with the United States or other nations as a goal in and of itself, but instead on competing as a means to achieving the policy outcomes identified by the CCP [Communist Party of China] -- deterring U.S. intervention and defeating the U.S. military if the United States and China do come into open conflict," writes RAND Corp. researcher Scott Harold in a new study.
The study paints a picture of a nation with a focus on goals and what it needs to achieve them. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union bankrupted itself with an obsessive need to match U.S. capabilities such as ballistic missile defense. China won't make that same mistake. "The PLA appears not to compete in certain areas because it does not need certain capabilities to accomplish its directed mission, or it has other means to address the military problem at hand," Harold writes.
The RAND study focused on the impressive growth in Chinese air and missile power over the last decade, an achievement fueled partly by relentless copying -- or stealing -- foreign technology, whether Russian carrier-based jets or the American F-35. Staggered by the success of U.S. smart weapons in Desert Storm, China has also switched from a Maoist mass army to a high-tech force that much more resembles current Western practice.
But even here, imitation is selective. "The PLA does not blindly copy the USAF (or the U.S. military or other foreign militaries more generally) but instead studies foreign military experiences to learn what works and what does not, what can be adopted and adapted to serve China’s goals, and what should be ignored or discarded as irrelevant to the missions set before the PLA by the CCP," Harold writes. "When the PLA finds problems that it cannot solve through copying, it has proven sufficiently resourceful to develop innovative solutions to its operational challenges, creating entirely new capabilities or operating in new and creative ways to frustrate the ability of the United States and other advanced militaries to operate in proximity to Chinese shores."
Thus, China has only recently enhanced its aerial refueling and air transport capabilities, or has flown long-range bomber over the Pacific. Until a few years ago, Beijing wasn't trying to project its power, but when it did, it started acquiring the capabilities it needed.
Several nations, including Iran and North Korea, like to boast that they can defeat the U.S. in a war. But whether they actually mean that, or how they define victory, is another matter. So, does China believe it can militarily best the U.S.?
“Chinese analysts often project an image of strength and confidence oriented at foreign audiences that is not always reflective of their genuine assessments of their own remaining weaknesses,” Harold told the National Interest. “Such an approach enables them to capture some deterrent or compellence advantages before such are really due to them if they can create an outsized image of their capabilities in the minds of adversaries.”
“I’ve not seen anything that indicates that the PLA believes it has definitive air/space or overall military dominance over the US military today,” Harold added. “I think it is what they seek and are planning to try to achieve.”
Michael Peck is a contributing writer for the National Interest. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook.
Image: Reuters.
10. Group wants US to stop military assistance to PH
Excerpts:
“We are not imposing. We’re not trying to impose anything for electorally, we’re not trying to change domestic policy, we’re not trying to do things like that other than say we don’t want US military aid being used for human rights abuses by the Duterte administration,” he told ANC’s “Rundown.”
“This is US money, US aid, this is an issue of US sovereignty and what is being done with our money and it is our decision as US citizens to say no, we do not want our money being used for these kinds of human rights violations,” he said.
Ashton says the Philippine Human Rights Act is a stop-gap measure and that their group would like to see more of a human rights focus foreign policy within the United States.
“If anyone is committing human rights violations, clearly we should not be selling weapons to them,” he said.
Group wants US to stop military assistance to PH
ABS-CBN News
Posted at Aug 09 2021 09:20 AM | Updated as of Aug 09 2021 09:42 AM
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MANILA – A group wants the United States to stop military assistance to the Philippines amid alleged human rights violations during President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs.
“For us here in the United States, we don’t want US taxpayer dollars to be used to, you know, fund and be used against the people of the Philippines and used to commit human rights violations,” International Council for Human Rights and Policy legislative coordinator Miles Ashton said.
Ashton said they are in no way stepping on the Philippines’ sovereignty by lobbying for the passage of the Philippine Human Rights Act, a proposal that could stop taxpayer-funded arms sales and other US security assistance to the Duterte administration.
“We are not imposing. We’re not trying to impose anything for electorally, we’re not trying to change domestic policy, we’re not trying to do things like that other than say we don’t want US military aid being used for human rights abuses by the Duterte administration,” he told ANC’s “Rundown.”
“This is US money, US aid, this is an issue of US sovereignty and what is being done with our money and it is our decision as US citizens to say no, we do not want our money being used for these kinds of human rights violations,” he said.
Ashton says the Philippine Human Rights Act is a stop-gap measure and that their group would like to see more of a human rights focus foreign policy within the United States.
“If anyone is committing human rights violations, clearly we should not be selling weapons to them,” he said.
-- ANC, 9 August 2021
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Int'l Council for Human Rights and Policy, war on drugs, human rights, US, United States, military
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11. Chinese sleeper agents are trying to enter the UK through a scheme designed for Hong Kongers fleeing the city, report says
Chapter 13. Art of War. The Use of Spies:
Thus, what enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is FOREKNOWLEDGE.
Now this foreknowledge cannot be elicited from spirits; it cannot be obtained inductively from experience, nor by any deductive calculation.
Knowledge of the enemy's dispositions can only be obtained from other men.
Hence the use of spies, of whom there are five classes: (1) Local spies; (2) inward spies; (3) converted spies; (4) doomed spies; (5) surviving spies.
When these five kinds of spy are all at work, none can discover the secret system. This is called "divine manipulation of the threads." It is the sovereign's most precious faculty.
Chinese sleeper agents are trying to enter the UK through a scheme designed for Hong Kongers fleeing the city, report says
Hong Kong protesters rally against China's national security law.
Billy H.C. Kwok/Getty Images
- Chinese agents are trying to enter the UK with a visa designed to give refuge to Hong Kongers.
-
Sources told The Times agents try use the visa introduced after China's new national security law.
- It is not clear if any have been successful, and the UK government said it has a strict vetting process.
10 Things in Politics: The latest in politics & the economy
The UK government this year opened a new visa program for Hong Kongers with British National Overseas (BNO) passports after China imposed a draconian national security law on the city last year. More than 300,000 people have applied for that visa, The Times reported.
UK government sources told The Times that Chinese sleeper agents have applied for the visa. It is not clear if any have been able to access the UK as a result.
The sources told The Times: "There are stringent background checks in place for the visa applications — and they're in place for a reason. The vetting process for the BNO visa scheme is much more thorough than any other."
The UK Home Office told the Times: "There are safeguards in place throughout the application process to ensure it is free from abuse and helps those most in need. The BNO visa route reflects the UK's historic and moral commitment to the people of Hong Kong."
Earlier this month President Joe Biden also signed a memorandum to offer Hong Kongers in the US safe haven from China.
The security law punishes whatever China deems is secession, subversion, terrorism, or collusion with foreign forces. Those convicted under the law could face up to life in jail.
The Hong Kong police has arrested numerous pro-democracy activists under the law already.
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12. Eight trends in online militia movement communities since the US Capitol Riot
Eight trends in online militia movement communities since the US Capitol Riot
Medium · by @DFRLab · August 3, 2021
In the months since January 6, militia movement supporters have shifted their approach to propaganda and organizing
Supporters of the America First ideology and U.S. President Donald Trump listen to white nationalist Nick Fuentes as they participate in a “Stop the Steal” protest in Washington, DC, November 14, 2020. (Source: REUTERS/Leah Millis)
By Avani Yadav and Jared Holt
Unlawful militia movement groups appeared more prominently in the public spotlight after several individuals affiliated with organized movement groups were criminally charged for their participation in the insurrectionist attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. The increased public attention and scrutiny bearing upon domestic militias since the Capitol attack has prompted large swaths of its supporters to alter their approaches in the digital arena as it concerns organizing and propagandizing.
The DFRLab identified eight notable trends currently present in the movement’s online nexus since the Capitol attack: three pertain to shifts in the layout of networked militia supporters online and five pertain to propaganda narratives echoing throughout the content within those networks. The DFRLab is providing a representative set of examples in this article to illustrate what these trends take when translated into online content. These trends exist in addition to longstanding narratives in the militia movement predicting imminent widespread civil disorder and opposing any form of gun control.
Political narratives within militia movement communities online have in many aspects returned to a state predating the 2020 election, a time period during which militia organizing online saw a surge in participants and militia groups made headlines for self-deploying to racial justice protests. In 2020, three major trends increased the foothold of militia movements in the United States: opposition to COVID-19 restrictions on businesses and gatherings; outcry over racial justice protest movements following the police murder of George Floyd; and right-wing mis- and disinformation about the 2020 election. In many respects, militia movements have been replaying the hits that brought them successes prior to the storming of the Capitol.
Fears resulting from increased federal attention to militia groups and their activities have driven some supporters of the movement to alternative social media platforms. Smaller groups have utilized chat rooms that only allow users to join after they have been vetted by existing members. Elsewhere online, authoritative voices within the militia movement have emphasized a perceived need to organize discreetly at the local and regional levels without drawing the attention that nationwide efforts often do. On smaller scales, these groups have sought to fundraise money for their efforts and have gravitated toward attending real-world events organized by entities other than their own.
The militia movement has been severely disrupted by the fallout of the Capitol attack, de-platforming actions of major social media platforms, and increased attention from federal law enforcement agencies. Though the effectiveness of the trends identified by the DFRLab remain to be seen, they provide insights into the movement’s current strategy for survival.
Three trends in online organizing
Splintering, dissolving, and regrouping at a smaller scale
In the fallout of the January 6 riot at the US Capitol, several organized militia movement groups have fractured and a handful of new groups have attempted to recruit online.
One nationally organized group, The Three Percenters Original (TTPO), formally disbanded and surrendered control of its forum board, directing the traffic of its tens of thousands of registered users from nearby militia groups toward a “coalition” of likeminded individuals who emphasize “prepping” in their messaging. After TTPO announced its disbandment, some former members fanned out to other venues online looking for other organizations into which to merge their groups.
In addition to these newer groups, other groups have emerged as spin-offs of preexisting organizations. In Arizona, for example, a former Oath Keepers chapter in the state has partially rebranded under a nonprofit organization called Yavapai County Preparedness Team (YCPT). As Militia Watch reports, the group is autonomous from the national anti-government Oath Keepers group led by Stewart Rhodes but still “call themselves Oath Keepers and use Oath Keepers iconography and ideology to describe themselves.”
The DFRLab identified several militia groups that have appeared on Facebook since March with the intent to “regroup” and recruit new members. These groups often use Facebook to attract interested individuals and have predicted they will eventually need to migrate to spaces on alternative social media platforms, like Telegram, where they will be subject to less scrutiny.
Screengrabs of descriptions of and posts to three different militias’ Facebook groups, all of which state an attempt or need to recruit, from June 14, April 15, and July 5, respectively. (Source: Facebook, top left; Facebook, bottom left; Facebook, right)
On MyMilitia, a forum board dedicated to connecting users to local and state militia groups, users have emphasized to each other that it is wiser to join local groups instead of national ones. A March 2 post in a thread on the forum states: “A word to the wise, speaking out of experience, keep it local and don’t join a national organization.” The user goes on to caution that members of national organizations “fold” and “roll over” to evade scrutiny. “Concealment is a big part of survival,” the user wrote.
Screengrab of a post to a militia organizing forum board in which the author advises other users to “keep it local” when forming and joining militia groups. (Source: MyMilitia)
Selling merchandise and fundraising
Some militia movement groups have used their presences online to hawk products with messages they believe to be supportive of their cause. The amount of revenue generated by these efforts appears to be small, and the companies producing the merchandise are often one-trick ventures. One shirt design shared to a militia page identified by the DFRLab declares “I’d love a mean tweet and $1.79 gas right now,” a reference to Donald Trump’s Twitter usage and the low gas prices during his presidency. Would-be buyers are directed to a TeeSpring storefront where other similarly styled designs retail. Another page plugged a pro-gun rights shirt from the National Association of Gun Rights, following the trend of militia affiliated pages supporting larger right-skewed organizations.
The MyMilitia forum board has sought to raise funds by utilizing affiliate links to online retailers. Using a service called Flex Offers, the site offers users more than 45 links to retailers including sellers of clothing, firearms, ammunition, firearm accessories, camping gear, power tools, and cellphone services. The forum receives a portion of sales from buyers who use the links.
Directing audiences toward real-world events organized by other groups
Militia movement communities online have continued trends of directing their supporters to real-world events. Though some groups openly advertise field training exercise events (often listed with the shorthand FTX), many have sought to direct attention to events organized by third parties. Many such events promote a distinct pro-Donald Trump flare, and some have focused specifically on reimagining the events of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, in part by pretending the attack on the Congress was a peaceful event and claiming that federal officials are now exaggerating what happened to justify the prosecution of Trump supporters.
The #FreePoliticalPrisoners rallies that took place across the country on July 17, 2021 presented a recent, large-scale example. Look Ahead America, an “America First” organization run by Matt Braynard and Witold Chrabaszcz, former data strategists for the Trump campaign, was responsible for organizing the rallies. Forty former advisors to Trump preside as board members of the organization, and it has been known to spread conspiracy theories about voter fraud and “illegal votes.” The aim of the #FreePoliticalPrisoners rallies was to protest on behalf of those detained by the US Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation for their affiliation with the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. A page on Facebook claiming to be ready to “protect ourselves and the homeland locally” in its About section shared graphics with details on the event, while another page linked to the Look Ahead America website.
Screengrab of posts to two different Facebook pages. The first, at left, shared a flier for the #FreePoliticalPrisoners rally organized by Look Ahead America, and the second, at right, was for a 4th of July “MAGA Independence Day on the Beach & Voter Registration” event to be held on July 1. (Source: Facebook, left; Facebook, right)
In militia-sympathetic communities, users have also directed attention toward events staged by organizations they perceive to be adversarial to their own causes, including demonstrations from African American armed groups and left-wing activist groups.
Five trends in online narratives
Mounting opposition to COVID-19 vaccines and pandemic-related public health initiatives
Militia movement communities online have sought to undermine confidence in COVID-19 vaccines, echoing the broader anti-government sentiments that fueled their outcries against restrictions on business and public gathering meant to curb the spread of coronavirus. Citing sources notorious for misinformation, users in these communities have railed against what they have perceived as government overreach and social control.
Screengrabs of two posts to militia pages on Facebook on July 7 and April 2, respectively. The first, at left, villainizes Dr. Fauci, while the second, at right, shares conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 vaccine. (Source: Facebook, left; Facebook, right)
Many militia pages on Facebook have parroted COVID-19 conspiracy theories from far-right conspiracy pages and publications. These narratives often hyper-focus and villainize Dr. Anthony Fauci, current director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the chief medical advisor to President Biden. Posts also urge viewers to resist vaccinations, amplifying the false narrative that COVID-19 vaccines are a dangerous ploy to control the masses.
On MyMilitia, a thread posted in May cited an article published by a conspiracy theory website notorious for health misinformation to allege that the “deep state” was planning false-flag style attacks to target individuals opposed to the COVID-19 vaccines. In this scenario, the government would orchestrate a national tragedy and attribute the tragedy’s cause to vaccine skeptics. A reply in the thread, which was “liked” by an administrator on MyMilitia, claims that vaccines are part of a broader conspiracy to depopulate the Earth. Another reply puts forward the idea that 5G cellphone towers may “trigger something” in the vaccines that causes harm to its recipients.
Screengrab of a post to a militia organizing forum board in which the user shares an article from a conspiracy theory website. The shared article alleges a “false flag” attack designed to damage the reputation of individuals opposed to coronavirus vaccines was in the planning process. (Source: MyMilitia)
Cross-pollinating propaganda from extremist sources
On Facebook, militia pages and groups frequently amplify posts and articles from a plethora of far-right pages and publications, such as Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire. This is the primary method by which narratives spread in these spaces. Shared posts are often rife with disinformation, serving the two-fold purpose of furthering polarization and accumulating engagement for hard-right news blogs. As NPR reported on July 19, far-right outlets dominate Facebook, contradicting conservative claims that their voices are overly censored by social media companies. Popular themes include the supposed indoctrination of our children with critical race theory, claims of election fraud, and mocking the Democratic Party. Using militia pages as a news source is a part of a larger trend online, where consumers are growing to rely on non-news platforms for their information, such as WhatsApp.
Militia communities have also seized on blogs published by sites like Revolver News, which is operated by white nationalist sympathizer Darren Beattie, that have trafficked in conspiracy theories surrounding the US Capitol attack. The claims in the articles have been received by community members who have cited them to validate their broader conspiratorial claims about the government orchestrating the attack. Conspiracy theory websites have also circulated articles to validate a plethora of broader false claims about the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government’s attitude toward white Christians, and racial justice initiatives.
In some cases, groups online calling themselves “militias” have circulated extremist content with antisemitic, racist, and violent messages. On Telegram, a group chat named “Tyrant X Illinois Militia” has increasingly tilted toward extremist ideology. Its owner, under the name “Cody Fury,” has shared neo-Nazi imagery and memes containing antisemitic tropes.
Encouraging anti-government sentiment in response to anti-extremism programs
In the face of heavy backlash against the proliferation of virulent content on its platform, Facebook ramped up content moderation against militia groups and pages. Recent efforts include an extremism warning, as well as increased user takedowns. Militia pages on Facebook regularly express outrage at these initiatives, echoing paranoid claims from far-right celebrities that these initiatives purposefully stifle conservative voices. They also link moderation decisions made by private tech companies to Democratic lawmakers, implying the two are working together to hide the “truth” and usher in an era of apocalyptic totalitarianism. The DFRLab identified multiple fearmongering disinformation narratives, including the debunked theory that the Democratic National Committee will “censor text messages” from COVID-19 extremists. This distrust propels the militia movement’s shift to alternative platforms, like Gab and Telegram.
Screengrabs of posts to militia pages on Facebook expressing outrage over anti-extremism measures from June 24, March 7, and July 19, respectively. (Source: Facebook, left; Facebook, center; Facebook, right)
In a blog post, Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes vented about an anti-extremism video that was allegedly shown to US military members. “Keep in mind that when the left uses the term ‘white supremacist’ they really mean populist, patriot, Christian, conservative,” Rhodes wrote in a post on the Oath Keepers website. “White supremacy is just the label they apply to anyone who opposes their totalitarian globalist agenda. It’s a smear tactic.”
As the Biden Administration and federal government agencies consider options for combatting domestic extremism, extremist movements have sought to preemptively discredit and fearmonger around any such efforts.
Attacking racial justice movements and initiatives
Most militia movement narratives surrounding racial justice efforts on Facebook pages, websites, forums, and alternative social media platforms originate from far-right media sources not directly related to any militia movement. The pattern reflects broader trends on social media sites and media narratives, over which right-wing publications have established a degree of dominance. In line with scores of other right-wing movements, militia movement groups have shared and circulated content related to critical race theory with an almost universal negative slant.
One narrative within militia movement communities claims that individuals with conservative views are systematically targeted by racial justice efforts to be kept from participating in society, citing narratives and content popular in broader conservative communities online. For example, an article published by The Federalist claimed in March that a proposed California bill will “[remove] cops who express religious or conservative beliefs” and was shared in a small Facebook group with “militia” in its title. As The Sacramento Bee reported, the bill’s wording has been contested by experts on both sides of the aisle, a fact that the Federalist article and title omit.
Screengrab of an article by far-right blog The Federalist with a misleading title claiming a California Bill aims to “[remove] cops who express religious or conservative beliefs” next to a screengrab of a post on Facebook on March 17 sharing the piece. (Source: The Federalist, left; Facebook, right)
Rehashing 2020 election conspiracy theories
Mirroring trends in far-right and conspiratorial social media communities, militia movement supporters have remained fixated on claims that President Joe Biden was elected illegitimately.
On Facebook, militia pages have pushed conspiracy theories alleging that the 2020 presidential election was rendered illegitimate by widespread fraud and illegal votes. Regional groups online labeling themselves with “militia” shared claims of alleged voter fraud in their area. For example, the group Arizona First Militia shared a post from Merissa Hamilton, who lost the race for mayor of Phoenix in 2020, citing claims of voter fraud in Arizona. According to The Guardian, counties in the state have found very few instances of fraud, and this is just the continuation of a narrative that has been rehashed multiple times since November 2020.
Screengrab of a post shared to the Arizona First Militia page on July 13 from Merissa Hamilton in which the latter alleges voter fraud had occurred in Arizona. (Source: Facebook)
Similarly, in an Oath Keepers group on Gab, on May 28, one user shared a link to a website calling for the 2020 election results to be investigated and subjected to a “forensic audit” in Pennsylvania.
Screengrab of a post in a Gab group dedicated to the Oath Keepers militia movement group in which the user shared a link to a website advocating for 2020 election vote counts in Pennsylvania to be subjected to a “forensic audit.” (Source: Gab)
Medium · by @DFRLab · August 3, 2021
13. Answers begin to emerge about FBI probe of Saudi complicity in 9/11
I thought the FBI 9-11 commission answered this question.
Page 101
Answers begin to emerge about FBI probe of Saudi complicity in 9/11
A security camera captured the explosion as American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon after being hijacked by Nawaf al-Hazmi, Khalid al-Mihdhar and three other Saudi men on September 11, 2001.
By Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org
Piece by piece, the puzzle of the heavily censored FBI 2012 Summary Report about Operation Encore, the bureau’s once-hush-hush probe of Saudi government involvement in 9/11, appears to be giving up its secrets.
On the vast, often-underground docket of the enormous New York civil case that pits 9/11 victims against Saudi Arabia, court records recently have appeared like answers floating to the surface of an upended Magic 8-Ball.
For the first time, witnesses cited in the 2012 report as having had contact with the suicide hijackers during their early days in the U.S. have been publicly identified. Named, too, is an apparent target of a federal grand jury the report says was then investigating a suspected U.S. support network for the hijackers.
The records also reveal the grand jury was shut down abruptly in 2016 while actively hearing testimony from witnesses.
The four-page report, released to Florida Bulldog in late 2016 amid Freedom of Information litigation, was the first confirmation of an active FBI investigation into questions of Saudi government involvement in the attacks since the 9/11 Commission closed down in 2004. The report was so thickly redacted that even the investigation’s code name, Operation Encore, was blanked out.
The U.S. government has taken extraordinary steps to keep a lid on what else is in that FBI report and related records. In 2019 and again last year, Attorney General William Barr blocked release of additional “classified national security information” in the report by personally asserting the state secrets privilege in the case. The Biden Administration has been asked to reconsider that assertion.
Focus on Saudi hijackers in Southern California
Many of the new details are contained in two similar sworn declarations made by former FBI Special Agent Catherine M. Hunt in 2018 and again last year. Hunt, of Lakeland, is a veteran foreign counterintelligence and anti-terrorism agent who resigned in 2006 after a 12-year FBI career. Her last 17 months were spent in Iraq. She and now works as a consultant for a New York law firm that’s helping to spearhead the 9/11 lawsuit.
Suspected Saudi agent and friend to two 9/11 hijackers Omar al-Bayoumi, right, and former Saudi diplomat and former Los Angeles Imam Fahad al-Thumairy
Previously, the presiding judge in the case sharply curtailed the plaintiffs’ efforts to investigate what happened in advance of the Sept. 11, 2001 al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington. So while significant events occurred in more than a half-dozen states, including Florida, the court has only authorized discovery on the limited question of whether two Saudi men, Fahad al-Thumairy and Omar al Bayoumi, knowingly assisted 9/11 hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar in Southern California after their arrival in January 2000.
Hazmi and Mihdhar were among five Saudis who seized control of American Airlines Flight 77 and crashed it into the west wall of the Pentagon. A total of 184 people were killed, not counting the hijackers, including 59 passengers and crew aboard the jetliner and 125 men and women on the ground.
Thumairy was a Saudi diplomat and religious leader at a Los Angeles-area mosque. Bayoumi was an apparent Saudi intelligence agent who has acknowledged innocently befriending the two hijackers after chancing to meet them at a Mediterranean restaurant.
According to Hunt’s declarations, she focused her investigation on events in Southern California and relied heavily on the limited declassified information disclosed in the FBI 2012 Summary Report.
She notes that the report states that Thumairy was a Saudi diplomat and the Imam at the King Fahd Mosque near Los Angeles when the two hijackers first arrived in the U.S. and that “Thumairy immediately assigned an individual to take care of them.” That person’s name was blanked out, but Hunt wrote that in August 2018 she identified a Cincinnati, Ohio man, Mohamed Johar, as possibly that person.
‘I’m not hiding’
In a meeting at which Johar’s attorney was present, Johar “told me that he had been interviewed by the FBI on multiple occasions in 2007, 2010 and 2016. He told me that in 2007, the FBI flew him to Los Angeles to point out specific locations of interest, such as the restaurant where al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar met with al-Bayoumi. During the interview Mr. Johar’s attorney stated, ‘surely you have access to the interviews’ and ‘you can get this information from the FBI.’ Mr. Johar stated, ‘I’m not hiding … I told the FBI.’ ”
Johar told Hunt that he frequently attended the King Fahd Mosque and “confirmed that in January 2000, he met al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar and personally witnessed al-Thumairy have contact” and conversations with them at the mosque.
Ex-FBI Special Agent Catherine M. Hunt
“Johar assisted the hijackers with regard to their lodging during the first two weeks they were in Los Angeles. Johar admitted that he took the hijackers to the Mediterranean restaurant which was located down the street and around the corner from his home, where the hijackers had their ‘chance meeting’ with al-Bayoumi,” Hunt wrote in her April 2020 declaration filed in court earlier this year.
Johar told Hunt he was subpoenaed by a New York grand jury and was scheduled “to appear in February 2016. But at a meeting one month before, an assistant U.S. Attorney told Johar’s attorney “that Johar did not need to appear before the grand jury…The meeting ended and neither Johar nor his attorney heard anything further from the government regarding Johar’s contact with the hijackers.”
A source has told Florida Bulldog that the grand jury assisting Operation Encore was dissolved in early 2016. The New York Times and Pro Publica jointly have reported that Operation Encore, which caused an internal schism at the FBI, was shut down about the same time.
Hunt’s 2018 declaration contains additional information that is not mentioned in her 2020 declaration. She wrote then that “the grand jury subpoena involved the 9/11 related investigation of an employee of Saudi Arabia working at its Los Angeles Consulate named Smail Mana aka Ismail Mana,” who “regularly spoke at the mosque.”
“You can get the information from the prosecution of Smail Mana – those documents are public information – surely you must have them,” Johar’s unidentified attorney told Hunt.
A grand jury subpoena
Hunt located and met with Mana in September 2018. “He immediately referred me to his lawyer. I had a telephone conversation with Mr. Mana’s lawyer…who confirmed that Mr. Mana had been served with a Grand Jury subpoena.”
The October 2012 FBI report states that two months earlier, a lead was sent to the Los Angeles Joint Terrorism Task Force seeking confirmation of two possible addresses for “REDACTED individual who was known to have extremist views and was identified as having met with Omar al Bayoumi in private on the same day as Bayoumi’s alleged ‘chance’ first meeting with 9/11 hijackers Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar.”
U.S. visas of al Qaeda members Khalid al Mihdhar, left, and Nawaf al Hazmi. Congress’s Joint Inquiry into 9/11 determined they were obtained at the U.S. Consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in April 1999.
The paragraph further says the FBI planned to interview REDACTED regarding his role “aiding Bayoumi in facilitating the hijacker’s arrival and settlement in California, for which REDACTED has never provided an adequate explanation.”
Hunt concluded, “I believe Smail Mana is the individual referenced in the paragraph and that the FBI has evidence that he met with al-Bayoumi at Saudi Arabia’s Los Angeles Consulate on February 1, 2000, just prior to the meeting of al-Bayoumi with the hijackers.”
Hunt’s declarations say Johar identified two other men as having had contact with the hijackers. The name of one, Mohdar Abdullah, was not redacted from the 2012 FBI report. The second is new: Yemeni native Akram Alzamari. “Johar stated that Akram Alzamari had a closer relationship with the hijackers than he did,” Hunt said.
Alzamari, a California resident, told Hunt he had previously spoken to the FBI and other government officials. “You must have seen the write-ups of my interviews,” Hunt wrote.
“Alzamari confirmed that Johar introduced him to al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar but took issue with Johar’s statements that he provided ‘assistance’ to the hijackers, saying this was not true,” Hunt’s declaration says. Alzamari declined to elaborate, saying “he was very uncomfortable discussing the topic of Johar and the hijackers because it made him sad.”
‘Squeeze him for all he’s got’
However, Alzamari did acknowledge that he was a friend of Thumairy and that Thumairy “trusted Alzamari and felt comfortable sharing frustrations with his job. While Alzamari was working at Circuit City, al-Thumairy would send him mosque visitors who were hosted by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Los Angeles Consulate. Alzamari would provide these individuals with Toshiba computers and other electronics that were then paid for by the mosque,” says Hunt’s 2020 declaration.
“Alzamari said he did not understand why the U.S. government deported al-Thumairy [in 2003 for suspected terrorist links] and that the U.S. should have held onto al-Thumairy after 9/11 to ‘squeeze him for all he’s got’ and then deport him. He said he thought it was stupid of the U.S. to deport him,” the declaration says.
Musaed Ahmed al-Jarrah
“Alzamari said he had more information but would not share it unless compelled by some authority,” the declaration says. He “said he supports the lawsuit against Saudi Arabia and that he dislikes the Saudis because they are ‘responsible for a lot of problems for Muslims and non-Muslims’ ” and that “the entire Islamic community carries the burden for what the hijackers did.”
Hunt’s 2018 declaration states, “There are at least six other individuals employed by the Saudi government who the FBI investigated in relation to the 9/11 attacks,” and that each worked with Thumairy and/or Bayoumi. The name of one of those is Musaed Ahmed al-Jarrah. Jarrah’s name declassified by the FBI after an order by former President Trump and later released in court papers as a person the 2012 FBI says “tasked” Thumairy and Bayoumi with assisting the hijackers.
Jarrah is a former Saudi Foreign Ministry official who worked at the Saudi embassy in Washington in 1999-2000.
Jarrah, Thumairy, Bayoumi and the others were all recently deposed in the New York litigation. What they had to say is subject to an FBI protective order that has thrown a blanket of secrecy over much of what’s unfolding in the case.
Oddly, Alzamari, despite his statement of support for the lawsuit, retained a high-powered New York law firm and fought a subpoena to testify in the case. Ultimately, the court ordered him to provide an unusual written deposition in answer to questions submitted in advance. That was done on March 11, 2020.
Plaintiffs’ lawyers later asked the court to allow them to conduct an additional oral deposition and cross-examine Alzamari “in the interests of justice” after they said he “recanted specific factual statements he made previously to federal investigators under penalty of imprisonment.”
“He implausibly claimed that several FBI agents from multiple offices, while investigating the worst terrorist attack ever committed on U.S. soil, included detailed, false statements in their interview reports in violation of federal law. His answers also contradicted statements he made to SA [ex-special agent] Hunt,” the plaintiffs’ lawyers said in a motion that was filed under seal in January.
U.S. District Judge George Daniels rejected the plaintiffs’ request in a May order. The motion was then made public.
14. 2 women make military history by trying to become first to pass SAS selection
Best wishes to these two women who must be incredibly tough, disciplined, and motivated.
Excerpt:
Top Special Forces commander General Sir Patrick Sanders said: “We need female operators.”
2 women make military history by trying to become first to pass SAS selection
The Sun · by Jerome Starkey · August 8, 2021
TWO super-troopers have made military history by becoming the first women to attempt to join the SAS.
The unnamed pair smashed pre-selection tests to get on the gruelling six-month course.
Combat roles were only opened to women in 2018Credit: Shutterstock
An SAS source said: “No women have got this far before.”
Top Special Forces commander General Sir Patrick Sanders said: “We need female operators.”
Women have served with the SAS, formed in 1941, after transferring from covert surveillance units such as the Special Reconnaissance Regiment.
Some have even worn the regiment’s badge — a winged dagger with the motto Who Dares Wins.
But none has tried the full selection course, which starts with the hills stage in the Brecon Beacons and includes escape tests, resistance to interrogation and jungle warfare training.
The SAS badge with the motto Who Dares WinsCredit: Stephen Mulcahey
Female candidates, with at least two years’ service, get nine months’ mentoring to get them in shape to face selection.
Only one in ten male applicants pass the test. Combat roles were opened to women only in 2018.
The MoD said: “We are proud there are no bars to women playing a full role across our Armed Forces.”
TikToker shows how you can fall asleep in just TWO minutes using the 'military method'
The Sun · by Jerome Starkey · August 8, 2021
15. Meet Hoot, the legendary Delta Force operator from 'Black Hawk Down'
Advice from an operator worth re-reading.
Meet Hoot, the legendary Delta Force operator from 'Black Hawk Down'
Don't panic.
If there’s one thing to remember in combat it’s this: Whatever you do, don’t panic.
Norm Hooten knows this better than most.
“It’s never as good as it seems and it’s never as bad as it seems, but keep your head and there’s always a way out,” said Hooten, who was portrayed by actor Eric Bana in Black Hawk Down, Ridley Scott’s 2001 military drama about the battle.
“That’s the most important thing: Keep your head, don’t panic. Never ever panic, it’s the worst thing you can do.”
(Editor’s note: This article was originally published on Aug. 13, 2020.)
In the summer of 1993, a contingent of U.S. Army Rangers and Delta Force soldiers were dispatched to Mogadishu as part of a task force to capture or kill Mohamed Farrah Aidid, a Somali warlord responsible for numerous civilian deaths and human rights violations.
On Oct. 3 of that year, the task force had its chance to deal a decisive blow. Though Aidid was believed to be out of the country, his top lieutenants were going to be meeting in person, and so Operation Gothic Serpent was launched. The mission was to assault the building where Aidid’s men were meeting, seize them, load them into trucks, and then get the hell out before anyone was the wiser.
If everything went according to plan, it would’ve been all over within an hour. However, after a Black Hawk helicopter was shot down, it led to a chain reaction of events that transformed the operation into a running battle through enemy-occupied streets that stretched between two days, leaving 18 Americans dead, dozens wounded, and hundreds of Somali militants killed.
Hooten has long since put his uniform away, though, in many ways, he still serves — he works as a pharmacist with the Department of Veterans Affairs as a way to “help the kinds of people I had worked with in the military for over 20 years,” he said.
After enlisting in the Army in 1980 and serving with 5th Special Forces Group, Hooten joined Delta Force in 1987, where he remained until retiring as a master sergeant in 2001. During his career, he served across the globe, running counter narco-terrorism operations in South and Central America, to missions in Lebanon, Jordan, as well as the Balkans.
These days, when he’s not working at the VA, he makes and sells his own cigars through Hooten Young, a company he launched with his long-time friend Tim Young. They recently announced a 12-year-aged whiskey that they specifically crafted to pair with their stogies.
Retired U.S. Army Master Sgt. Norm Hooten.
“We decided to make our own whiskey because we just wanted something that went well with cigars,” Hooten told Task & Purpose. “We weren’t finding a lot of things that paired well with our cigars, so we decided to do our own thing.”
Task & Purpose recently had a chance to speak with Hooten, who’s very much the military’s version of the most interesting man alive. After a storied career that spanned two decades over multiple continents that saw him participating in some of the most intense combat operations of the ’90s, he now spends his retirement helping out other vets and smoking his own brand of cigars while sipping on his own brand of whiskey.
So, we decided to barrage Hooten with the kinds of questions only a veteran would ask.
The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and style.
Task & Purpose: Now, I understand that you probably can’t or won’t go into a lot of detail on what you did in Delta Force, but can you tell me what it is like to serve in that community? What are some things that nobody knows or realizes about Delta?
Norm Hooten: The things that I look back on, when I was a young guy contemplating going over to Delta, you know, I thought ‘I’m gonna be over with a bunch of guys that look like they came out of the NFL, and they’re gonna be these superb athletes, and that’s kind of what separates them from everybody else.’
But I got over there and they were certainly physical specimens, but really what set them apart, and what I think was the biggest adjustment that I had to make when I was over there, was the work ethic that they have and the pace at which they operate.
When you were in a regular Army unit back then, you could go on a deployment, come home and have a little time before you go on the next deployment. You could kind of relax a little bit. [With Delta] there was never, ever, in the 15 years I spent in that unit, there was a never a day that I went home where I didn’t check to make sure my gear was packed, that my weapons were ready to go, because at any minute you could be called out.
So it was just the stress of being on what we called ‘the short string’ all the time, where you have got to be ready — which means you have to be physically fit all the time; you have to be up on your marksmanship, and all your tactics have to be straight, and you can never let your guard down. That is what, I think, separates them from every other unit I’ve ever worked with.
And now, I know that there’s a lot of people out there that say ‘well, I’m just as good as Delta Force,’ but I’ll tell ya, I’ve worked with every one of them and nobody maintains the lifestyle that those guys maintain. Nobody.
Norm Hooten front row, bottom right, after completing Delta Force selection
Personally, how did you balance that stress and op-tempo?
You know, I really worked hard to get there, and I was very proud of the people that I worked with. I really truly loved those guys and never wanted to let them down, so every day of my life, I had to focus on what I could to make sure I was never going to be the guy that let them down.
When I first got there I was single, so I didn’t have the burden of a wife and kids. A lot of guys had families, and when you’re gone 300 days a year, and even when you’re home, you’re not really home, because you’re training.
It’s very very difficult for families, and so I think it was beneficial for me to be single for the first eight years of my life there, and I just adapted to it. I had very good leadership, who dated back to special operations in Vietnam and they really taught me how to manage my life, and I think the trick is: you just don’t let things get out ahead of you so that you’re playing catchup. You always try to be ahead of what’s coming next.
Okay, so you work in the medical field now as a pharmacist. What led you to healthcare?
After I got out of the Army, I worked for the Air Marshals for a while, but then one of my jobs as a civilian was working as the deputy director for the King Abdullah Special Operations Training Centre — the acronym for it is KASOTC — and it’s in Amman, Jordan. It’s a jointly funded and operated U.S.-Jordanian facility.
“I could either throw up my hands and walk away and be discouraged by it, or I could just try to do my part to help out.”
My job over there was staffing, so I hired a bunch of American retired military personnel to go over there and staff that facility; also, we ran contractors through there. Prior to going into Iraq, they’d run training over there, get issued gear, and use it as a stepping-off point into Iraq or Afghanistan.
I noticed there was a trend that was very disturbing, and it was the rise of opioid addiction in the ranks of Special Forces soldiers. They had all been injured — a lot of them wounded in combat — many of them were legitimately prescribed opioids for legitimate pain, and then they continued to use them long after the initial pain had gone away because they became dependent upon those medications just to have a normal day.
I had friends who died of overdoses and who died of suicides that were related to those drugs, and so I had a choice: I could either throw up my hands and walk away and be discouraged by it, or I could just try to do my part to help out.
And my part was going to pharmacy school, learning as much as I could about the problem, and positioning myself at the VA to be in a spot where I could help the kinds of people I had worked with in the military for over 20 years.
Switching gears, I’m going to run through a bunch of rapid-fire questions that only a veteran would ask, starting with: What’s the dumbest thing you ever did as a private?
Oh, man. The dumbest thing I ever did as a private was while I was on staff duty. I think the statute of limitations is probably gone on this, but I was answering the phones one night and decided I was going to take the commander’s jeep out joyriding with a buddy of mine — I won’t say his name, but he ended up being the command sergeant major of 5th [Special Forces] Group later on, but we were both privates.
And we flipped it on one of the range roads on Fort Bragg and it took us all night to get it unflipped.
Norm Hooten, left.
The zombie apocalypse kicks off. What’s the first thing you do?
10,000 rounds of green tip and an M4 with infrared optics on it.
Wow, you had that answer at the ready. Okay, now finish this sentence: you shouldn’t join the military if…
… you don’t like getting up early in the morning or using portajohns.
What’s your favorite war film and why?
It’s a war series: Band of Brothers. I just think that it captures everything you could ever hope to be as a soldier. It’s really more about the leadership aspects of those guys and the things they went through, but every time I watch the series I learn more and more from it.
I think any soldier that really aspires to be a leader should watch that series. But if I had to pick a movie other than a series, it’d probably be Saving Private Ryan for all the same reasons.
What’s your go-to MRE?
We used to call it “green eggs and ham,” but it was called, I think, omelet with cheese. It was really a terrible meal, but it came with almost every other thing so it had the most calories in it. I don’t know what they have now. Those guys are probably eating, like lobster thermidor or something, those guys are spoiled nowadays (laughter).
I’m sure they’re not spoiled, but the omelet is good because you get all the other stuff to go with it.
Do you ever miss being deployed?
I miss the guys. I don’t miss being deployed, but I do miss the camaraderie of being deployed. I don’t miss the bad food. I don’t miss the cot. I don’t miss the Conex boxes. I don’t miss the sandbags. I don’t miss the flies. I don’t miss any of that stuff. But I do miss the people.
Yeah, that’s generally the prevailing sentiment, right? You miss the guys you were with, but not all the bullshit.
Yeah, better them than me (chuckle), but anything I can do to support them from here with cigars and whiskey I’m all for it, but I don’t want to go back out there and live in the sandbox again.
I mean, I feel like this guy has more than earned his retirement.
Fair. Now, if you could go back in time and talk to yourself at the Army recruiting station, what would you say?
Do it all again, man. I’m telling you, I don’t look back with regret on anything in my career. I think I was just blessed and lucky every step of the way. I couldn’t have asked for a better experience than I had in the Army.
I wouldn’t change anything.
What was your single scariest experience in the military?
Oh man, I had a lot of them. I think, if I had to pick just one, I had a dual main and reserve deployment on my very last jump in the military.
I remember thinking as it was happening — I was already getting out of the Army and one of my buddies came up and says ‘hey we’re jumping today, you’re gonna come with us,’ and I said ‘hey, I’m already signing out man,’ and he goes ‘no, one more jump’ and they basically strong-armed me into it, put me in a car and drove me out to the drop zone, everybody else was already on the airplane and I got [inspected] very quickly, got on the plane, jumped out, and had my only malfunction ever on a parachute jump and it was one of the worst ones, which is when your main and your reserve come out at the same time, and when that happens there’s a really strong chance both will become entangled, and then you don’t have either parachute.
Luckily, I came out of it okay, but I was thinking at the time ‘isn’t this the way it goes? Your last jump,’ so as it was happening the thoughts that were going through my mind were, ‘How ironic: on your last jump you finally have a malfunction.’
Yeah, that sounds terrifying.
You really don’t have time to think about it being scary, but after you get to the ground you think ‘man, just a stroke of luck you came out of it.’ I had a lot of other stuff, but that was probably the one that stands out the most.
What’s your proudest military moment?
My proudest military moment really would be passing Delta Force’s selection. You know, when you work so hard for something and when you get accepted there, to that unit, you realize it comes with a lot of responsibility, but just sitting down in front of the commander’s board after you go through that grueling selection process and they look at you and say ‘welcome to Delta Force’ that was a pretty powerful moment for me as a young man.
What’s the one thing to always remember in a firefight?
Keep your head. It’s never as good as it seems and it’s never as bad as it seems, but keep your head and there’s always a way out.
That’s the most important thing: Keep your head, don’t panic. Never ever panic, it’s the worst thing you can do.
Editor’s note: A version of this article was originally published on March 21, 2021.
16. Proponents of $50 billion defense infrastructure amendment weigh back-up plan
Shouldn't all defense spending be in the defense authorization and appropriation bills?
Excerpts:
“I support the Wicker amendment, I haven’t had a chance to support the other one,” Van Hollen said, adding the Wicker amendment “would help with the Maryland Coast Guard [facility], which is one of the major centers.”
Still, the lead Republican negotiator for the infrastructure bill, Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, said he anticipates Democrats will deny unanimous consent for a floor vote for the defense amendment. He and other members of the bipartisan gang of supporters for the infrastructure bill have pledged to fend off poison pill amendments.
Whether $50 billion for defense would jeopardize the larger bill is unclear. However, Win Without War Executive Director Stephen Miles speculated in a tweet Thursday that it will cost Democratic support in the House, where the party holds a slim majority.
“Hearing rumblings that Senate Republicans are trying to jam $50 BILLION for the Pentagon at the last second into the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill,” the tweet read. “There’s no universe where that doesn’t cost a pile of House Dem votes, who already weren’t happy about the bill. Sheer madness.”
Proponents of $50 billion defense infrastructure amendment weigh back-up plan
WASHINGTON ― A Republican proposal to add $50 billion in defense infrastructure spending to the bipartisan infrastructure legislation faces headwinds in the Senate — but proponents are already discussing backup plans.
Bipartisan talks on the $1 trillion bill fell apart Thursday night, sending the defense amendment and others into limbo and highlighting the hurdles to passage. The defense amendment would need unanimous consent of all 100 Senators to receive a floor vote and then would likely require 60 votes to be added to the bill.
With billions proposed for shipyard rehabilitation projects, supply depots, nuclear infrastructure and 5G telecommunications gear, the stakes are high. And the sponsors have high profiles: Senate Appropriations Committee Vice Chairman Richard Shelby, R-Ala., is leading the amendment effort along with senior Senate Armed Services Committee Republicans Roger Wicker, R-Miss.; Jim Inhofe, R-Okla.; Mike Rounds, R-S.D., and Thom Tillis, R-N.C.
“We’re negotiating it right now, we’re getting to the waning hours, we’re hoping we’ll get it done,” Tillis told Defense News Thursday evening.
“If not, we’ll probably take another crack at it on another vehicle,” he added, noting that could mean the National Defense Authorization Act.
At the time, the defense amendment was one of 16 amendments in contention during lengthy closed-room negotiations over which would receive a floor vote before the larger bill receives a vote.
“We’re hoping it’s gonna make the cut,” Tillis said, “but we’ve also got to be respectful of other amendments that may be closer to the nexus of the infrastructure bill.”
The next key moment will come Saturday, when the Senate is expected to resume consideration of the bill and the bill’s backers will attempt to overcome a filibuster to end debate. (The Senate won’t consider the NDAA until after it returns from its August recess.)
A recorded vote could help raise the proposal’s profile before broader bipartisan negotiations over government spending this fall. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has warned there will have to be equal levels of growth on defense and non-defense spending, though he hasn’t filled in plans for added defense spending.
Republican supporters of the Shelby package see national defense infrastructure as historically neglected and argue defense spending is being shortchanged as Democrats propose massive investments in domestic priorities. According to an aide to one supporter, the military has a $135 billion facilities maintenance deficit.
On Thursday, supporters were frustrated that talks to include the amendment seemed to have stalled.
“I just think it’s absolutely crucial infrastructure and national security assets so it’s entirely justifiable,” Wicker said of the amendment.
“We’re not agreeing to a lot, we’re not agreeing to anything,” said Shelby. “We need to let the people vote on it. Defense infrastructure is important — shipyards, everything.”
With $25.4 billion for shipyards, the amendment would represent a significant windfall for the Defense Department and some of the communities that host its facilities. Of that, $21 billion would be for Navy public shipyards in Norfolk, Va.; Pearl Harbor, Hawaii; Portsmouth, Maine, and Puget Sound, Wash., ― with another $2 billion for private shipyards and $350 million for the Coast Guard yard in Baltimore.
The amendment would also provide $4.5 billion to modernize supply depots; nearly $4 billion to improve nuclear weapons facilities at Los Alamos, N.M., and Savannah River, S.C.; $4 billion to modernize test and training ranges, and $4 billion to address facilities sustainment, restoration and modernization.
Some $2.5 billion would modernize ammunition plants; another $2.5 billion would fund fifth-generation networking at military bases; $2 billion would fund high-priority military construction projects and $1.5 billion would remediate chemicals used by the military known as PFAS.
The overall proposal dwarfs the $10 billion appropriation House Democrats have proposed for military construction and the $11 billion the Senate Appropriations Committee approved on a bipartisan basis.
The U.S. Navy's Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Plan may need more funds to accommodate a larger fleet.
By: Joe Gould, David Larter
At least one Democrat was flabbergasted at Shelby’s proposal.
“The defense budget is already too high, the [Senate] NDAA is already $25 billion larger than President Biden requested and President Biden’s request was to cover operations and infrastructure,” said Senate Armed Services Committee member Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
“I am not going to support further increases of the defense budget, whether its through regular channels or back channels,” she added.
That doesn’t mean all Democrats object to it. Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen had not seen the $50 billion plan, but said he supports an earlier amendment from Wicker that contained the $25.4 billion for shipyards ― including the Coast Guard project in his state.
“I support the Wicker amendment, I haven’t had a chance to support the other one,” Van Hollen said, adding the Wicker amendment “would help with the Maryland Coast Guard [facility], which is one of the major centers.”
Still, the lead Republican negotiator for the infrastructure bill, Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, said he anticipates Democrats will deny unanimous consent for a floor vote for the defense amendment. He and other members of the bipartisan gang of supporters for the infrastructure bill have pledged to fend off poison pill amendments.
Whether $50 billion for defense would jeopardize the larger bill is unclear. However, Win Without War Executive Director Stephen Miles speculated in a tweet Thursday that it will cost Democratic support in the House, where the party holds a slim majority.
“Hearing rumblings that Senate Republicans are trying to jam $50 BILLION for the Pentagon at the last second into the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill,” the tweet read. “There’s no universe where that doesn’t cost a pile of House Dem votes, who already weren’t happy about the bill. Sheer madness.”
17. Olympic Chief’s Deep Ties to Uyghur Slave Labor Revealed
I wonder what kind of "incidents" we will see during the Beijing winter games. Of course the Chinese security focus will have everything locked down to prevent any protests but surely there are activists who will try to create some kind of incidents to embarrass China? Maybe online mostly? Also, what about athletes? What will be the protest symbol for the Uyghurs? Will they appropriate the 3 finger Hunger Games salute as they have done in Burma? Will we see such a gesture or something like it on the podiums? Of course, the big risk will not be sanctions by the IOC but most likely arrest and incarceration by the PRC.
But we should be reviewing the 198 nonviolent resistance actions from Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy, Appendix One, page 79 (HERE) to anticipate what we might see at the Games.
Olympic Chief’s Deep Ties to Uyghur Slave Labor Revealed
Juan Mabromata/AFP via Getty
A top Olympics official who said he’s “dead serious” about human rights has allowed his sports charity to take wads of cash from a Chinese sportswear company using Xinjiang cotton made by slave laborers.
Juan Antonio Samaranch Salisachs, the chairman of the IOC's coordination commission for the 2022 Beijing Olympics, also runs the Samaranch Foundation, a sports charity. The charity is funded by major Chinese companies such as ANTA Sports, a sportswear company that pledged in March to “continue to purchase and use” cotton from Xinjiang despite forced labor concerns.
The Chinese brand secured major Olympics sponsorship deals after Salisachs ascended to the IOC’s vice presidency in 2016. During Salisachs tenure, the IOC announced that ANTA Sports will provide uniforms for IOC officials for the 2021 Tokyo Summer Olympics, the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, and other sport events. Those high profile endorsements fueled ANTA Sports’ meteoric rise to become the third largest sportswear company in the world by revenue.
The IOC has so far refused to drop ANTA Sports despite its pledge to keep using Xinjiang cotton, telling Axios in April that it will “continue its due diligence efforts with ANTA.” Neither the IOC nor the Samaranch Foundation responded to The Daily Beast’s requests for comment about whether Salisachs’ personal ties to ANTA Sports factored into the organization's decision-making.
Salisachs’ relationship with ANTA Sports is just one of his many ties to Chinese entities, many of them in Xinjiang—a far-western region of China where the Chinese government has rounded up more than 1 million Muslim Uyghurs in concentration camp, forcing many of them into slave labor regimes in the region’s cotton fields. Those relationships might prove a liability for Salisachs as he struggles to fend off growing calls to boycott the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics over human rights concerns.
Salisachs refused to relocate the 2022 Games during an October 2020 meeting with activists. He instead pledged that he will be “dead serious” about protecting human rights in the Olympics, according to meeting minutes provided to The Daily Beast by the attendants. “Within our frame of influence, you better have no doubt that all human rights are more than being respected,” he told them.
But Salisachs’ personal ties to a brand that is “boasting the use of slave labor in Xinjiang” clearly violates that pledge, according to Human Rights Watch researcher Yaqiu Wang. “The IOC has totally made a mockery of its own human rights commitment,” she told The Daily Beast.
The revelation that Salisachs’ foundation worked directly with ANTA Sports will likely add fuel to the bipartisan push in U.S. Congress to boycott the Olympics. In July, the Congressional Executive Commission on China (CECC) asked the IOC to postpone the Beijing Olympics and publicly shamed its U.S. sponsors for backing the sport event. ANTA Sports also has few supporters on the hill; Republicans have demanded NBA athletes sever endorsement deals with the sporting brand.
“The news that [Salisachs’] foundation profits off of forced labor in Xinjiang is stomach churning,” Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR), chair of the CECC, told The Daily Beast.
Salisachs is not the first in his family to build a close relationship with China. His father and former IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch—the namesake of the Samaranch Foundation— whipped votes to help China win the bid for the 2008 Summer Olympics. In gratitude, the Chinese government built a 144,000 square feet memorial park dedicated to the late Samaranch in Tianjin, China.
The Samaranch Foundation “attache[d] great importance” to the “development of sports culture in Xinjiang,” since the region was one of the most remote areas in the country, according to a 2018 article written by the foundation. That objective is in line with that of the General Administration of Sports in China, the official government organ “in charge” of the Samaranch Foundation.
“Beijing 2022 will be the next Genocide Games, and they will be the figures responsible.”
— Peter Irwin, Uyghur Human Rights Project
The Samaranch Foundation also proved more than willing to help advance the goals of the Xinjiang government, a region-level government unit in China whose leaders are appointed by Beijing to carry out the will of the Chinese Communist Party. In September 2018, the foundation’s representatives met with bureaucrats from the Xinjiang sports bureau to discuss the promotion of youth soccer in Xinjiang. One month later, the foundation hosted a youth soccer event in the autonomous region titled “One Belt One Road Soccer time.” One Belt One Road is the name of China's multi-trillion dollar initiative that seeks to build infrastructure, and by extension Chinese influence, in Central Asia, a region accessible through Xinjiang.
The Chinese government’s repression of the Muslim Uyghurs—which involves detention, forced sterilization, torture, and other crimes against the minority group—has pushed the U.S. government and several others to declare a genocide in the region. As global scrutiny over the Uyghur genocide grew, Xinjiang officials recognized the Samaranch Foundation as a tool to divert attention away from their brutal crackdown. When a Xinjiang official heard about an ethnically Uyghur motorcyclist supported by the foundation, he said that such stories are an opportunity to tell “a wonderful real story of Xinjiang, and China!” “Telling China's story well” is a common dog whistle referring to Chinese propaganda efforts—Chinese Leader Xi Jinping coined the phrase in 2013.
Salisachs’ personal relationships to ANTA and the Xinjiang government is just another signal that the IOC officials have “no interest even acknowledging atrocities faced by Uyghurs,” said Peter Irwin, a senior program officer at the Uyghur Human Rights Project. “Beijing 2022 will be the next Genocide Games, and they will be the figures responsible.”
18. Applying Machiavellian Discourses to the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
Machiavelli is much more complicated than the caricature of the evil man acting "Machiavellian" to try to manipulate a situation for his own ends. The Prince and the Discourses have always been two of the most difficult books for me. I much prefer Sun Tzu and Clausewitz (and Mahan and Corbett and even Douhet!). But they must be studied.
Conclusion:
The U.S. is not the first to encounter many of the issues that it faced in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Machiavelli’s Discourses are replete with examples of similar situations, from ancient times through the Renaissance. His analysis and the lessons he derived from these examples remain pertinent to warfare and statecraft in the 21st century. As the U.S. strives to learn lessons from its recent wars, it may be valuable to contextualize these conflicts as part of recurring patterns of human affairs. Studying Machiavelli and others who have thought deeply about history might help the U.S. avoid future calamities by imbibing insights from its own experiences and the wider historical pageant.
Applying Machiavellian Discourses to the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
After 20 years of war without victory in both Afghanistan and Iraq, it is time to derive key lessons from both conflicts to avoid repeating the same mistakes. Niccolò Machiavelli, whose insights on statecraft have endured for five centuries, is a valuable guide in analyzing those lessons.
Although he has often been misperceived as malevolent, Machiavelli's writings provide potent reminders of how analysis of historical events can inform responses to contemporary challenges. Machiavelli's best-known work is The Prince, but his perceptive comments on political and military affairs are not confined to that slim volume. In particular, his book Discourses on Livyoffers a range of sage political advice, frequently referencing Titus Livy's books on the history of early Rome and other ancient sources. Many of these discourses are highly applicable to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and with the benefit of hindsight, they could have improved the way they were conducted.
For example, Machiavelli highlighted the danger of believing the promises of exiles who offer to help an outside power take over their native countries since these individuals inevitably have their own agendas. Their characterization of the situation within their country may be tinged by their own hopes of return, as well as by their hunger to overthrow the existing government. This observation was exemplified by the Bush administration's interactions with Iraqi exiles prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, such as Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi and the informant code-named "Curveball."
They and other exiles not only peddled lies about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs and contacts with terrorists but also told American interlocutors that invading forces would be greeted as liberators. This worked, in part, because members of the Bush administration may have wanted to believe what they were being told, but their failure to adequately question the accuracy and motives of Iraqi exiles helped them justify the ill-fated invasion of Iraq.
In a key passage of the Discourses, Machiavelli warned leaders against using an inadequate number of forces in a situation that puts the state at risk; in another, he recommended the use of massive, overwhelming force to ensure that wars are short. The long durations and failures of both wars may be, at least in part, a testament to the relatively small numbers of forces conducting each at any given time.
The scale of the U.S. invasion of Iraq was deliberately limited at the outset, despite the protests of then Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki that many more personnel were needed, and despite Secretary of State Colin Powell's doctrine not to go to war without overwhelming force. The improvised invasion of Afghanistan was unavoidably small at the beginning but was not scaled up to reflect the vast, challenging terrain and a substantial population that had to be secured. Even at the peak of U.S. strength in both countries, there was roughly one American for every 200 Iraqis and one for every 300 Afghans, too few to counter their respective insurgencies, even with allied help.
Machiavelli also described the challenges of creating a free state in a place that has long been steeped in corruption and the need to install a strong central government to counter that culture of corruption. Separately, he advised that when reforming a state, at least some of the trappings of the prior government should be retained to make the reforms more palatable. The decision to rapidly dissolve Iraqi government entities in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. invasion ran counter to both of these points: it angered those who had lost their jobs and made reconstitution of a new Iraqi government—let alone a strong one—far harder than it needed to be.
Like Sun Tzu, Machiavelli enjoined commanders to acquire a detailed knowledge of geography, together with an understanding of how it influences military operations. The nature of Afghanistan's military geography may have been underappreciated by the U.S. political leaders who declared victory in late 2001. They had apparently overlooked the long history of nations thinking that they had conquered Afghanistan, only to find themselves defeated by its physical and human geography. The same rugged mountains and fiercely independent communities that had defied Alexander the Great, Victorian Britain, the Soviet Union, and many other invaders remained intractable to U.S. and allied forces. The complexity of Iraq's human geography also may have eluded leaders at multiple levels, being caricatured as a simple divide among Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs and Sunni Kurds. The tribal, factional and ideological divides within these communities and the existence and vulnerability of numerous smaller minorities were largely ignored.
The U.S. is not the first to encounter many of the issues that it faced in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Machiavelli’s Discourses are replete with examples of similar situations, from ancient times through the Renaissance. His analysis and the lessons he derived from these examples remain pertinent to warfare and statecraft in the 21st century. As the U.S. strives to learn lessons from its recent wars, it may be valuable to contextualize these conflicts as part of recurring patterns of human affairs. Studying Machiavelli and others who have thought deeply about history might help the U.S. avoid future calamities by imbibing insights from its own experiences and the wider historical pageant.
Scott Savitz is a senior engineer at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation.
19. Opinion | The U.S. government is designed for failure. And, a new study shows, it’s getting worse.
The Constitution is designed to ensure sufficient friction with separation and powers and checks and balance. That is not designed for failure. The Constitution is also designed for one other thing that we too often overlook or forget: It is designed to be corrected. What has made American great is that we correct our mistakes and we have had to correct some terrible ones throughout our history. But that is what makes our Constitution so strong and enduring even if we are still conducting the great American experiment to achieve a more perfect union.
But this article is not about the Constitution. It is really about the bureaucracy that is supposed to implement the Constitution to ensure national defense and regulate commerce (ensure national prosperity), and protect individual liberty and freedom.
These are some extremely troubling statistics:
Sixty years later, despite efforts at reform and widespread recognition of the irrationality, President Biden needs Senate approval for 1,237 positions — an increase of 59 percent, as a new report from the Partnership for Public Service discloses.
We’ve gone from irrational to just plain crazy.
How crazy? The Post and the Partnership are tracking 799 of those positions (leaving out some advisory boards and less essential jobs). As of this week, only 112 of them have been filled.
More than six months into his presidency, in other words — more than an eighth of the way through his term — Biden hardly has the beginning of an executive team in place.
Is this result of partisan politics where legislators put party before country? Or is the problem systemic?
Opinion | The U.S. government is designed for failure. And, a new study shows, it’s getting worse.
The Washington Post · by Opinion by Fred HiattEditorial page editor Today at 6:02 p.m. EDT · August 8, 2021
When President John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, he needed Senate approval for 779 of his appointments.
That was a highly irrational way to run a government.
Sixty years later, despite efforts at reform and widespread recognition of the irrationality, President Biden needs Senate approval for 1,237 positions — an increase of 59 percent, as a new report from the Partnership for Public Service discloses.
We’ve gone from irrational to just plain crazy.
How crazy? The Post and the Partnership are tracking 799 of those positions (leaving out some advisory boards and less essential jobs). As of this week, only 112 of them have been filled.
More than six months into his presidency, in other words — more than an eighth of the way through his term — Biden hardly has the beginning of an executive team in place.
Recently, a visiting diplomat told me he was struck by the disconnect between Biden’s ambitious rhetoric — about rebuilding alliances, promoting democracy, standing up to China — and his meager agenda. “Where are the policies?” he asked.
This isn’t entirely fair; there are policies. But it’s difficult to put meat on the bones of any agenda without ambassadors, assistant secretaries of state and defense for different regions in the world, and more.
At about this point of every administration, you start to see stories assigning blame for the empty offices. Republicans will ask why Biden has nominated only 323 of the 799. Administration officials would say there’s not much point in stacking up another few hundred nominees for obstructionists such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who has been holding up State Department nominees to grandstand his opposition to the administration’s stance on a Russia-Germany natural gas pipeline.
But the better question is, why do things this way in the first place?
Start with the 4,000 political positions every administration has to fill. This is totally out of line with every other democracy, says Max Stier, who heads the Partnership. It undercuts the professional civil service and promotes a kind of short-term thinking, since the average tenure for Senate-confirmed appointees is about two years.
Unfortunately, most of the challenges facing our society, and so our government, can’t be solved in two years. In 1997, the General Accounting Office cited cyber policy as a high-risk area for the federal government. Are we surprised that, 2½ decades later, it remains so?
Climate change, equipping the government with appropriate technology, retraining the workforce for a changing economy — these all demand long-range thinking. So, as we’ve sadly been reminded, does preparing for public health emergencies.
Requiring that 1,237 of those 4,000 political positions win Senate confirmation compounds the damage.
It discourages qualified people from serving. The Partnership reports that nominees during the Reagan administration waited an average of 56 days to be confirmed. By the Obama and Trump administrations, the waiting time had doubled, to 112 days and 117 days, respectively. And that doesn’t count the excruciating pre-nomination months when prospective appointees are being vetted by the White House.
During the Obama administration, nominees spent a cumulative 452 years bogged down in the confirmation process. Torture for them, but bad for the Senate, too, which has to take time away from legislating.
And debilitating for the government. Even after two years, many of the jobs will be unfilled. According to Vanderbilt University professor David E. Lewis, 30 percent of positions in the past three administrations never received a nomination in the first half of a term.
“I’m not saying you solve this problem and everything else disappears,” Stier says. “But if you don’t solve this problem, everything else stays infinitely harder.”
How do you solve it? You could start by abolishing some of the jobs altogether. One study found an average of 83 layers “between top leadership and essential workers” in federal agencies, the report says. The report found at least 40 positions that have been vacant since June 2016. If we’ve managed this long without anyone in those jobs, let’s take a look at those positions.
But more to the point: The Senate and the executive branch could agree to radically diminish the number of political positions and the number requiring confirmation. Have the change take place in the future, so everyone’s political calculation is uncertain.
The Senate could insist on true accountability: Confirm the truly senior positions, let those officials appoint the teams they want, and then hold those executives responsible for results.
In turn, those executives would have an experienced, empowered civil service to rely on, with institutional memory and long-term commitment.
The country would have a government capable of taking on complex problems.
Imagine the board of directors of a large corporation appointing a new chief executive and then forcing that executive to operate without a team for months and even years.
Shareholders wouldn’t stand for such absurdity. Why should taxpayers?
The Washington Post · by Opinion by Fred HiattEditorial page editor Today at 6:02 p.m. EDT · August 8, 2021
20. FDD | The Taliban Has a Military Solution for Afghanistan
A sobering assessment:
The Taliban has made it clear that it will continue to hunt down Afghan officials in the weeks and months to come. This is yet another indication, as if it were needed, that the group isn’t preparing for a negotiated settlement with Afghan officials. It is actively trying to kill them.
President Ashraf Ghani and the members of his government cannot afford to entertain America’s servile diplomacy with the Taliban. Nearly all American and NATO forces have been withdrawn. The Afghans must now lead the fight against the jihadis. If they fail, subjugation awaits.
American diplomats and military leaders alike are fond of saying there is no “military solution” for the war in Afghanistan. That’s because the U.S. gave up on any possibility of victory years ago.
The same cannot be said for the Taliban.
FDD | The Taliban Has a Military Solution for Afghanistan
fdd.org · by Thomas Joscelyn Senior Fellow and Senior Editor of FDD's Long War Journal · August 6, 2021
As the Taliban and its al-Qaeda allies wage jihad to conquer Afghanistan, the Biden administration clings to the fanciful idea that a negotiated settlement to the war is possible. On Tuesday, State Department spokesperson Ned Price produced a short summary of Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s most recent conversation with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.
As Ghani’s forces fight for their lives, this is what the U.S. government decided to say:
The Secretary and President Ghani emphasized the need to accelerate peace negotiations and achieve a political settlement that is inclusive, respects the rights of all Afghans, including women and minorities, allows the Afghan people to have a say in choosing their leaders, and prevents Afghan soil from being used to threaten the United States and its allies and partners.
In reality, there are no “peace negotiations.” The Taliban has no interest in a “political settlement,” other than one in which Kabul surrenders and the jihadists’ totalitarian Islamic emirate is resurrected. The Taliban certainly isn’t going to respect “the rights of all Afghans, including women and minorities.” There is nothing in the group’s history or current behavior to indicate that is even remotely possible. Instead, the Taliban is waging a violent campaign against Afghanistan’s civil society, attempting to roll back the “rights” ordinary Afghans have enjoyed since the end of the Taliban’s authoritarian rule in late 2001. Nor is the Taliban going to allow the “Afghan people to have a say in choosing their leaders.” The jihadists reject any form of democracy, because it is anathema to them. And the Taliban remains closely allied with al-Qaeda, which continues to threaten the U.S.
Price’s summary did condemn “the ongoing Taliban attacks, which show little regard for human life and human rights,” noting that the group’s offensive had led to “the loss of innocent Afghan lives and displacement of the civilian population.” And, as reported by CNN, Price did acknowledge that the Taliban’s behavior is at odds with the idea that a settlement is in the cards. But Price also said this:
“It is self-evident that the Taliban seek a durable solution. It is not in their interest to attempt to wrest power by force and only to be displaced down the road after some period of conflict.”
Self-evident?
Delusional is more like it.
Here are some basic facts about the current state of the war.
The U.S. and Afghan government have repeatedly begged the Taliban for a ceasefire. The State Department’s hashtag campaign—#CeasefireNow—is part of a desperate attempt to persuade the Taliban to halt its violence. Unsurprisingly, it hasn’t worked. The Taliban has never agreed to a meaningful ceasefire. This fact, alone, should give pause to anyone holding out for a broader political settlement.
Around May 1, the Taliban launched a massive offensive throughout the country. The insurgents seized about half of Afghanistan’s territory. This is mostly rural, sparsely-populated terrain. But the insurgents’ objective was to surround a number of provincial capitals and capture some other strategic points, including several lucrative border crossings. They then began laying siege to a number of more densely populated provincial capitals.
Zaranj, the small capital of the remote Nimruz province, which sits on the Iranian border, has just fallen to the insurgents. Zaranj is the first provincial capital seized by the Taliban since the current offensive began. It likely won’t be the last. While Afghan security forces—buttressed by unannounced American airstrikes—have prevented any larger provincial capitals from falling, the cracks in Kabul’s defense are noticeable. The Afghan government is relying heavily on special forces to contain the jihadists’ advances, but those commandos are stretched thin.
Defying America’s hashtag and in-person diplomacy, the Taliban’s jihad has taken a heavy toll since the beginning of the year. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) documented 5,183 civilian casualties (1,659 killed and 3,524 injured) during the first six months of 2021. This is a 47 percent increase over the same timeframe for 2020. According to UNAMA, the main culprit has been the Taliban, which has caused approximately 39 percent of the civilian casualties. Other anti-government actors have tried to take advantage of the chaos as well. In sum, actions taken by the Taliban and other anti-government “elements” have accounted for 64 percent of the civilian casualties.
According to UNAMA, the Afghan government has unintentionally killed and wounded innocents, too, causing 23 percent of the civilian casualties. But the government’s actions are part of a desperate attempt to stymie the advancing jihadis. If it were up to Kabul, the two sides would be engaged in meaningful talks under a ceasefire. The Taliban isn’t having it.
Targeted killings are among the three deadliest tactics documented by UNAMA. The Taliban and other jihadists have been hollowing Afghanistan’s civil society, deliberately assassinating human rights activists, civilian and humanitarian workers, tribal elders opposed to the jihadi project, as well as media personalities and employees. Of course, none of this is consistent with Price’s claim that the Taliban’s interest in a “durable solution” is “self-evident.” The Taliban isn’t preparing for a diplomatic reckoning with the people who support the Afghan government. It is attempting to conquer them.
Just this week, the Taliban’s campaign of targeted killings expanded into the Afghan capital of Kabul. The acting defense minister, Bismillah Mohammadi, narrowly escaped a suicide assault mission by one of the Taliban’s “martyrdom” units on the evening of August 3. Dawa Khan Menapal, the director of the Afghan government’s information and media center, wasn’t so lucky. The Taliban gunned him down in a car traveling through Kabul earlier this morning. Menapal wasn’t a military man—he was a media spokesman whose main task in recent months has been to combat the Taliban’s propaganda.
The Taliban has made it clear that it will continue to hunt down Afghan officials in the weeks and months to come. This is yet another indication, as if it were needed, that the group isn’t preparing for a negotiated settlement with Afghan officials. It is actively trying to kill them.
President Ashraf Ghani and the members of his government cannot afford to entertain America’s servile diplomacy with the Taliban. Nearly all American and NATO forces have been withdrawn. The Afghans must now lead the fight against the jihadis. If they fail, subjugation awaits.
American diplomats and military leaders alike are fond of saying there is no “military solution” for the war in Afghanistan. That’s because the U.S. gave up on any possibility of victory years ago.
The same cannot be said for the Taliban.
Thomas Joscelyn is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Senior Editor for FDD’s Long War Journal. Follow Tom on Twitter @thomasjoscelyn. FDD is a nonpartisan think tank focused on foreign policy and national security issues.
fdd.org · by Thomas Joscelyn Senior Fellow and Senior Editor of FDD's Long War Journal · August 6, 2021
21. Support is needed for women warriors living with PTSD
Excerpts:
An essential aspect of WWP programs and services is to get women warriors engaged with others. For example, female-focused connection events empower women warriors to take the next step in their recovery. We offer women-only peer support groups — led by women veterans — that help foster bonds many report are missing after leaving service. WWP also provides clinical care referrals through our Warrior Care Network®, a program that provides lifesaving mental health care for veterans managing PTSD, traumatic brain injury, and combat stress. Since the inception of Warrior Care Network, nearly 500 women have benefited from intensive outpatient treatment, with one-third treated through MST-specific cohorts.
Despite facing tremendous challenges, women warriors remain resilient and seek support, resources, and connections with other female veterans. Our responsibility as a nation is to work together to provide them the care that will meet their unique needs now and in the future.
Support is needed for women warriors living with PTSD
Women service members are expanding their service in the military. Since the Defense Department opened all military roles to all service members in 2016, there have been many female “firsts” across military forces. Women are taking on prominent command leadership roles – Air Force Gen. Lori J. Robinson became the first woman to lead a U.S. military combatant command, U.S. Northern Command, in 2016. Women are also stepping into more combat arms details. Recently, the Navy graduated its first female Special Warfare Combatant-Craft Crewman. Women are the fastest growing cohort in the veteran community, representing just over 16 percent of today’s active-duty and about 10 percent of those separated.
As the population of women veterans grows, we learn more about the visible and invisible wounds these women experience from their time in service, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD is a prevalent condition for many veterans after military service. Symptoms can include disturbing thoughts, feelings, or dreams related to the events; mental or physical distress; difficulty sleeping; and changes in how a person thinks and feels.
A deeper look into PTSD and women veterans
· Women veterans in the 2020 AWS report deploying an average of three times. Of those, 84 percent deployed to a combat zone. We learned that these forward-deployed women warriors are more likely to experience moderate to severe PTSD than other service women who did not deploy to a combat zone.
· Three out of four (78 percent) women reported MST. The special report shows that women warriors who were MST survivors are nearly three times as likely to experience moderate to severe symptoms of PTSD compared to women warriors who did not experience MST.
· From the survey, we also know 91 percent of wounded women warriors have more than one mental health condition. These women warriors are nearly five times as likely to experience moderate to severe PTSD symptoms than those only coping with one mental health condition.
The influx of women in the military means that more women veterans need adequate support and access to treatment to promote mental health care. Already, more than 80 percent of women warriors report experiencing PTSD in the most recent survey. Like other types of traumas, PTSD can negatively affect a person’s mental and physical health. Still, the analysis concluded that nearly half of women warriors with PTSD experience challenges accessing mental health care.
We must do more to support wounded women warriors during and after their service to our country.
WWP developed the Women Warriors Initiative to understand, empower, and advocate for women warriors who have served our nation. We will continue to work with other organizations and Congress to share insights from our research and recommend practical policy solutions to improve care for women warriors.
An essential aspect of WWP programs and services is to get women warriors engaged with others. For example, female-focused connection events empower women warriors to take the next step in their recovery. We offer women-only peer support groups — led by women veterans — that help foster bonds many report are missing after leaving service. WWP also provides clinical care referrals through our Warrior Care Network®, a program that provides lifesaving mental health care for veterans managing PTSD, traumatic brain injury, and combat stress. Since the inception of Warrior Care Network, nearly 500 women have benefited from intensive outpatient treatment, with one-third treated through MST-specific cohorts.
Despite facing tremendous challenges, women warriors remain resilient and seek support, resources, and connections with other female veterans. Our responsibility as a nation is to work together to provide them the care that will meet their unique needs now and in the future.
Jennifer Silva serves as chief program officer of Wounded Warrior Project® (WWP). She is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and served in the Army as a logistics officer. Before coming to WWP, Jennifer worked in the financial field, owned her own business, and was a secondary school educator.
Editor’s note: This is an Op-Ed and as such, the opinions expressed are those of the author. If you would like to respond, or have an editorial of your own you would like to submit, please contact Military Times senior managing editor Howard Altman, [email protected].
22. Mindanao medal rush: How the region turned into an Olympic hotbed
For all of us who have served in Mindanao and Zamboanga (and those still working down there!). There must be some useful themes and messages the PSYOP professionals in the AFP and GRP can develop to support operations throughout Mindanao against insurgents and terrorists.
Mindanao medal rush: How the region turned into an Olympic hotbed
In the Philippines’ best Olympic showing ever, the four athletes who delivered the goods all came from Mindanao, the southern island long battling poverty and security threats.
It is in this poorest island where the country’s champions emerged, with Diaz leading the way as the weightlifting star captured the Philippines’ first Olympic gold medal.
“Galing po kasi kami sa hirap talaga,” Diaz told Rappler. “Lahat naman siguro mahirap. Pero mas grabe 'yung determinasyon ng pagiging Mindanaoan.”
(We really came from poverty. I guess everything is difficult. But the determination of Mindanaoans is different.)
Diaz, who already made history in 2016 when she became the first Filipina to win an Olympic medal in the 2016 Rio Games, grew up in Barangay Mampang, Zamboanga City, where her father worked as a tricycle driver.
A young Diaz also helped sell fish and vegetables as her parents tried to raise a family of six children.
It’s quite a similar storyline lived by the three Filipino boxers who also made history in the Tokyo Olympics.
All three also came from Mindanao. And like Diaz, all three took up boxing to fight their way out of poverty.
Growing up, Petecio and her siblings also picked up chicken droppings to be sold as fertilizer.
Paalam copped the Olympic men's flyweight silver. The 23-year-old fighter – the youngest in the Philippine boxing delegation – comes from a family of 10 in Talakag, Bukidnon, before they eventually relocated to Barangay Kauswagan, Cagayan de Oro.
As a boy, Paalam scavenged for scraps in a stinking sanitary landfill in Barangay Carmen, earning him the nickname “Pipi Lata” or tin-can crusher from one of his early coaches.
Marcial, a Zamboangueño like Diaz, won an Olympic bronze in the men's middleweight class. He was only seven when he got into boxing and made it into the national team as a teen.
Then a junior national boxer, Marcial received a basic allowance – which he sent to his parents who are raising five children. This eventually helped his mother put up Eumir Store, a retail store located at the crossing of Barangay Lunzuran and the city highway.
Diaz noted that their Olympic journeys all started from the grassroots, from the local government which paved the way for them to be discovered, and eventually honed by the rigid training in the national sports programs.
“Nagma-matter ito (athletes' development) sa programa ng LGU (local government units),” said Diaz, who started in local tournaments in Zamboanga.
“Ang alam ko kasi maganda na ang LGU project ng Zamboanga City dahil kasi dalawa na kami [na naging Olympic medalists].”
(The program of an LGU matters to the athletes. I know Zamboanga City has a good LGU project because they’ve now produced two Olympic medalists.)
Marcial also got discovered by slugging it out in local bouts as a young boy, winning his first fight at the “Beer na Beer Tournament” at Plaza Pershing in downtown Zamboanga.
A pre-teen Paalam similarly joined weekly matches in Cagayan de Oro and was discovered in 2009 when he fought at the local "Boxing at the Park."
Petecio was also just 11 years old when she boxed against boys in local bouts in “Araw ng Davao.”
"We are encouraged by this. We will produce more Carlo Paalams," said Cagayan de Oro Mayor Oscar Moreno, whose local boxing program turned into a launching pad for several boxers from the province.
Zamboanga also prides itself for being home to two Olympic medalists, with Mayor Maria Isabelle Climaco-Salazar noting that the incredible feat underscored “the resiliency, bravery, and determination of the Zamboangueños to win life.”
The Philippine Sports Commission led by chairman William “Butch” Ramirez has often emphasized the importance of grassroots projects. It’s a system, he said, coupled with investments in identified elite national athletes, that boosted the national sports program to pull off the historic Olympic campaign.
“I think it gives everyone more impetus to plan and start their preparations,” said Ramirez.
“Being in government, we had to take the first steps to ensure a rich ground for a successful elite sports level by strengthening grassroots sports,” the PSC said in a statement.
“The government, from scouting, identifying, developing and nurturing our athletes in the grassroots and grooming them for the national team at the elite level, plays an active role. In this role, the PSC is not alone.”
Some pointed out, however, that it’s no coincidence that all four Olympic winners hail from Mindanao, alluding perhaps to a preferential treatment, with President Rodrigo Duterte a proud Mindanaon, and Ramirez, the sports chief, also hailing from Davao.
Diaz, though, was quick to counter.
“Sa sports kasi kahit taga-Mindanao ka o hindi, walang ganoon,” she said. (In sports, it doesn't matter whether you are from Mindanao or not.)
The 30-year-old weightlifting star, in fact, pointed out how she even had to ask for financial assistance even after winning a historic Olympic silver in 2016.
“After winning the Olympics sa Rio, noong nagsalita ako, parang iba 'yung dating sa kanila,” she said. “Naninibago sila na when nagsalita na ako, natuto akong i-voice out kung ano 'yung pangangailangan namin, medyo parang nanibago sila.”
(After winning in the Olympics in Rio, I started speaking out and it came across differently. They weren’t used to it, that I was speaking out, that I learned to voice out our needs. It was kind of unusual for them.)
That she came across as demanding and difficult hurt Diaz, but she tried to understand that maybe the situation is just all new for most sports officials.
While the sporting row eventually got sorted out, Diaz also got help from private corporations, with tycoon Manny Pangilinan’s MVP Sports Foundation, she said, the first to answer her plea.
“Sinubukan ko intindihin, baka hindi nila alam paano nga ba, paano i-build ang isang atleta para manalo sa Olympics,” said Diaz. “Kasi siyempre, for how many years ako 'yung first athlete na after winning a silver medal in the Olympics, nagpatuloy pa rin akong maglaro. 'Yung next goal ko is the gold for the Philippines.”
(I tried to understand, maybe they just don’t know how it’s like, how to build an athlete to win in the Olympics. Of course, after how many years, I was just the first athlete who won an Olympic silver medal who decided to continue competing. My next goal was to win a gold for the Philippines.)
“Para sa akin na-frustrate lang ako kasi siyempre, gusto 'nyo ako manalo ng gold, akala ko ibibigay na kung ano 'yung request, pero nahirapan ako ipaintindi. Buti na lang naintindihan nila later on na kailangan ko ng team.”
(I got frustrated of course because you wanted me to win a gold, I thought you’d grant my request, but I had a hard time making them understand. Good thing, they eventually understood that I needed a team.)
The PSC eventually granted Diaz’s request as she emphasized that even for an individual sport like weightlifting, she needs a support crew.
“We have limited resources but we saw her potential so we took the chance,” said Ramirez.
With one less worry, Diaz focused on training with Team HD (Team Hidilyn Diaz), which is composed of Chinese coach Gao Kaiwen, strength and conditioning coach Julius Naranjo, nutritionist Jeaneth Aro, and sports psychologist Karen Trinidad.
“Hopefully, it will serve as a lesson sa sports leaders natin na sana pakinggan kung ano ang pangangailangan ng isang atleta,” said Diaz. “Sana suportahan natin ang bawat Filipino athlete hindi lang sa laro, kung hindi sa preparasyon din.”
(Hopefully, it will serve as a lesson for our sports leaders to listen to the athletes’ needs. Hopefully we can support the Filipino athletes not just when they’re competing, but also when they’re preparing.)
In the end, of course, it still all boils down to the athletes on how far their hard work and drive could propel them.
For the four Mindanaon Olympic medalists, there was clearly no lack of motivation. They all wanted to make the country and their families proud, so a victory always hits home. And of course, there’s that longtime hope that sports could be their ticket out of poverty.
"Itong medal na ito ay simbolo ng buhay ko. Isa akong mangangalakal at itong medalya ay gawa sa mga sirang gadget po," said an emotional Paalam as he held his Olympic silver medal, which the Tokyo Games made from recycled electronic devices.
(This medal symbolizes my life. I was a scavenger before and this medal was made from broken gadgets.)
"Sa basura siya galing, kaya nai-connect ko po siya sa buhay ko." (It came from trash so I am able to connect it to my life.)
More than just a victory in the sporting arena, it’s really a triumph in life for Diaz, Petecio, Paalam, and Marcial.
And as the much deserved cash incentives and rewards continue to pour in for the four Filipino sport heroes, their shiny Olympic medals have truly been symbolic of how they’ve turned their lives around from their humble beginnings in Mindanao.
"For me, this bronze is gold,” said Marcial.
It couldn’t be any more true. – with a report from the Mindanao Bureau/Rappler.com
23. US falling further behind China in STEM PhDs
Excerpts:
Clearly, the scale and diversity of university excellence in the West, the rise of East Asian university education and the educational weakness of other regions are phenomena as significant as the relative decline of the US.
As Winston Churchill put it in a speech at Harvard in 1943: “The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.” In this regard, Britannia still rules the waves.
But physical empires still exist. China is evolving from cheap hand assembly to fully automated manufacturing and has a huge internet sector. It has built the world’s largest high-speed train network, put a rover on Mars and launched its own space station.
All this requires first-rate STEM education, which in China is supported by a government of engineers rather than lawyers. Most likely, when it comes to nation-building, the education data will continue to evolve in its favor.
US falling further behind China in STEM PhDs
New study shows Chinese universities will produce nearly twice as many STEM PhD graduates than US by 2025
This change is not readily apparent. A large share of the best universities in the world are in the United States and they have a deserved reputation for excellence.
For example, the seventh annual ranking of the Best Global Universities conducted by US News & World Report and published in October 2020 found that 19 of the top 25 schools were American.
However, the arguably more internationally-minded QS World University Ranking published by UK company Quacquarelli Symonds in July this year found that 12 of the top 25 universities were in the US, five in the UK, three in China, two each in Singapore and Switzerland and one in Japan.
Then, at the beginning of August, the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) at Georgetown University in Washington issued a report entitled “China is Fast Outpacing US STEM PhD Growth,” which concluded that: “Based on current enrollment patterns, we project that by 2025 Chinese universities will produce more than 77,000 STEM PhD graduates per year compared to approximately 40,000 in the United States.”
Of course, Chinese universities primarily educate Chinese students while American universities are geared to educating the world. Thus, the Georgetown study found, “if international students are excluded from the US count, Chinese STEM PhD graduates would outnumber their US counterparts more than three to one.”
China overtook the US in the number of STEM PhDs in 2007 and was 47% ahead by 2019. The change has been rapid and it remains so. In 2000, the US produced more than twice as many STEM PhDs as China.
The quality of Chinese university-level STEM education is also improving.
“Most of the recent and rapid growth in Chinese PhD enrollments comes from universities within the higher-quality tiers,” the CSET study found, and “because more than three-quarters of Chinese doctoral graduates specialize in STEM fields, this evidence indicates China’s STEM talent pipeline is becoming more robust.”
And, not surprisingly: “Given the scale of China’s investments in higher education and the high-stakes technology competition between the United States and China, the gap in STEM PhD production could undermine US long-term economic and national security.”
High school students visiting the Tsinghua University campus pose in front of the university’s memorial gate in Beijing. Photo: AFP / Goh Chai Hin
Remco Zwetsloot, one of the authors of the CSET report, was quoted in Axios as warning: “If this continues, there seems to be no way the US can continue competing with China on the talent front without immigration reform. It is just a numbers game.”
Because a large percentage of American students are not prepared for graduate studies in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the US depends on foreign students to fill its universities and pay the bills.
And it has been alienating foreign students – particularly Chinese students, who accounted for about one-third of foreign students in the US before Donald Trump’s anti-China rhetoric and tighter immigration controls.
Efforts under both Trump and President Biden to exclude potential Chinese spies from advanced STEM research also have had an impact.
And according to Xiaofeng Wan, Amherst College associate dean of admission and coordinator of international recruitment, there’s also been a considerable impact from “the physical and verbal violence that ultimately resulted in … over 6,600 reported racially motivated attacks against the Asian community, especially the elderly and women.”
Wan notes that Chinese students contributed US$15 billion to the US economy in the 2018-19 school year when enrollments of foreign students peaked.
Another report says foreign student enrollments kept American universities afloat, rising by 55% from 2011 to 2019 while domestic enrollment stagnated.
After that, the Covid-19 pandemic caused international student numbers to crash worldwide, and the Delta variant puts recent signs of recovery at risk.
President Biden’s election has led to a notable improvement in how the US is regarded overseas and a more open immigration policy. But Amherst’s Wan is probably correct when he says that “a full recovery to pre-pandemic levels will take time. For the Biden administration, to simply distance itself from Trump-era anti-immigrant rules and ideologies may not be enough to fully rebuild many Chinese families’ lost sense of confidence.”
Commonwealth’s attraction
Studee, a UK-based organization that specializes in study abroad programs, repeats a common refrain on its website: “For decades, the US has reigned supreme as the world’s most popular study abroad destination.”
But a closer look at its own data shows that while the US is the country that attracts the largest number of foreign students, in 2019 only 26% of the total number attracted by the top 10 countries surveyed studied in the US.
The UK, Canada and Australia together accounted for 32% and China for 12%. The number of international students in China was almost the same as the number in the UK, while Canada and Australia were close behind.
The Red Building of Peking University. Photo: AFP / cnsphoto / Imaginechina
China attracted 46% as many students as the US despite its short history as an open country with modern universities. Most foreign students in China are from other Asian countries, led by South Korea, but there are substantial numbers from the US, Russia and France.
Finally, let’s return to the CSET ranking, which includes 100 universities in total. Of these, 29 are in the US, 17 in the UK, 17 in continental Europe, 12 in China (five of those in Hong Kong and one on Taiwan), eight in Australia and New Zealand, six in South Korea, five in Japan, three in Singapore and Malaysia combined, two in Canada and one in Argentina.
Grouping them culturally and politically shows 29 in the US, 30 in the British Commonwealth (which does not include Hong Kong), 17 in continental Europe, 12 in Greater China, 11 in South Korea and Japan and one in Latin America.
Or 73 in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand; 26 in East Asia; one in Latin America and none at all in South Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
Clearly, the scale and diversity of university excellence in the West, the rise of East Asian university education and the educational weakness of other regions are phenomena as significant as the relative decline of the US.
As Winston Churchill put it in a speech at Harvard in 1943: “The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.” In this regard, Britannia still rules the waves.
But physical empires still exist. China is evolving from cheap hand assembly to fully automated manufacturing and has a huge internet sector. It has built the world’s largest high-speed train network, put a rover on Mars and launched its own space station.
All this requires first-rate STEM education, which in China is supported by a government of engineers rather than lawyers. Most likely, when it comes to nation-building, the education data will continue to evolve in its favor.
A graduate of Stanford University and the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, Scott Foster is an analyst with Lightstream Research, Tokyo.
24. Fourth Generation Espionage: The Making of a Perfect Storm
Excerpts:
Traditional tradecraft is already being publicly proven inadequate for today’s new operating environment, reinforcing that the arrival of the fourth industrial revolution is an inflection point for many intelligence services; separating those that harness advancing technology to their advantage from those that fall victim to it.
American intelligence services must also “evolve or die” to maintain the degree of effectiveness and relevance they’ve had up to the present. First, they must make their workforces aware of the impact of the modern technologies upon their respective missions and then invest the necessary resources to develop ‘next generation tradecraft’ methodologies, capabilities and solutions to counter or harness specific technologies against their operational goals. Given that the technological advancement we’re witnessing is predicted to only accelerate under its own momentum into the coming decades, falling behind on these responses will have long lasting impact to each organization’s capacity to execute mission and the overall strength of the United States Intelligence Community.
Fourth Generation Espionage: The Making of a Perfect Storm - ClearanceJobs
In a rare December 2018 public address, British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) Chief Alex Younger used the term ‘fourth-generation espionage’ to describe the new mindset that intelligence leaders needed to address the challenges of the fourth industrial revolution. He noted that “The digital era has profoundly changed our operating environment. Bulk data combined with modern analytics make the modern world transparent. We need to ensure that technology is on our side, not that of our opponents”.¹
New Technologies = Changing Espionage Tactics
Younger’s concerns are well founded. The Fourth Industrial Revolution includes many new technologies that complicate clandestine activity, including “mobile devices, Internet of things (IoT) platforms, location detection technologies (electronic identification), advanced human-machine interfaces, authentication and fraud detection, smart sensors, big analytics and advanced processes, multilevel customer interaction and customer profiling, augmented reality/wearables, on-demand availability of computer system resources, and data visualization.”²
In fact, the combination of ubiquitous digital surveillance and powerful data analytics is changing espionage in ways that we are only starting to understand. What we do know is that widespread automated recognition and monitoring of individuals is now possible, ‘blind spots’ are quickly being eliminated, events can be forensically examined to the degree never known, and an individual’s future actions quickly and accurately predicted.
This comes through expansive closed-circuit television (CCTV) camera placement, ‘smart city’ technologies, ad-tech data, vehicular telemetry, IoT, and 5G networks enabling omnipresent personal data collection and the data analytics to make sense of it all; machine learning that enables massive data aggregation, facial recognition for real-time monitoring and post-event investigation and pattern analysis for identifying anomalies and predicating behavior.
Finally, the artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, ‘multi-intelligence fusion’ methodologies and correlation engines currently under development will certainly enable counterintelligence by further empowering aggregation and seamlessly integrating different sensor types.
Digital Storm Clouds Building
Law enforcement and counterintelligence elements now have an exponentially growing array of digital sensors and robust analytics to collect and turn massive data pools into usable information, allowing them to increase accountability within their governments, prevent external and internal actors’ activity, and quickly investigate suspect activity.
This ‘perfect storm’ of exploding data collection, powerful data analytics and even virus tracking creates what some have called ‘an existential threat’ to the ability of intelligence agencies to conduct mission. To better understand these challenges and what intelligence agencies need to do to address them, it is helpful to examine the impact of the new operating environment on select human intelligence activities:
First, think about widespread personal data collection and the impossibility of privacy and effective cover. Advanced data analytics, machine learning (ML) and AI enable the aggregation of massive data sets, the correlation of activity and the real time and forensic exposure of operations. High-speed/high-density 5G cell networks, IoT devices and vehicle telemetry provide refined triangulation and location of an individual’s movement, further complicated by emerging issues like DNA mapping and virus tracking.
Second, think about the massive expansion of the virtual domain where many people now spend more time than the physical world. The ability to operate safely, securely, sustainably, and successfully online are ‘table stakes’ for any modern-day service, underpinning a wide spectrum of activity like information collection, targeting, influencing, and recruiting. COVID’s restrictions have only accelerated and reinforced this point. Meanwhile, cyberspace is becoming more active, unforgiving, and hostile. Data providers and social media platforms are monetizing their access through stronger authentication and adversary services are increasingly aware of traditional methodologies. Emerging national Internet networks in Russia and China challenge the ability of intelligence agencies to electronically travel there. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are enabling advanced deepfakes and impairing the ability to detect false information/personas and tailored social engineering.
Finally, blockchain technologies and cryptocurrency enable non-attributed payments and complicate the ability to “follow the money” and quantum computing can threaten communication security tools and enable the decryption of what was one secure data collected by adversaries.
Now think of these not as single problems you have the luxury of time to address one at a time, but as concurrent challenges simultaneously undermining traditional tradecraft methodologies. The challenge is daunting.
Bottom line, these challenges require a new approach and innovation. The speed of change in this domain is remarkable, meaning that operators constantly need increasingly sophisticated support for an increasing breadth and depth of challenges.
New Operating Environment REquires Intelligence to Evolve
Specifically, different solutions are needed for different missions to identify, quantify, and mitigate digital surveillance risk ranging from growing big data aggregation to street level ‘smart city’ applications. For virtual operations, intelligence agencies need to counter ever-changing and evolving authentication measures by social media platforms, including biometrics and liveliness tests. These changes further test their ability to look real to platforms, targets, and adversaries and achieve scalability, and practice an ‘art form’ that requires a choreographed blend of technology, talent, and tradecraft.
That said, the news isn’t all bad. Some elements of this new tradecraft should come naturally as intelligence agencies leverage ‘technological reciprocity’; offensive solutions enabling defensive solutions and vice versa. For example, by developing refined digital targeting one can inform the development of digital surveillance countermeasures, by developing specialized payment mechanisms one can strengthen one’s understanding of adversary payment tradecraft, by applying new data analytics one can reveal adversarial data methodologies and vulnerabilities, and by red teaming one’s processes one can reveal indicators for adversary activity identification.
Traditional tradecraft is already being publicly proven inadequate for today’s new operating environment, reinforcing that the arrival of the fourth industrial revolution is an inflection point for many intelligence services; separating those that harness advancing technology to their advantage from those that fall victim to it.
American intelligence services must also “evolve or die” to maintain the degree of effectiveness and relevance they’ve had up to the present. First, they must make their workforces aware of the impact of the modern technologies upon their respective missions and then invest the necessary resources to develop ‘next generation tradecraft’ methodologies, capabilities and solutions to counter or harness specific technologies against their operational goals. Given that the technological advancement we’re witnessing is predicted to only accelerate under its own momentum into the coming decades, falling behind on these responses will have long lasting impact to each organization’s capacity to execute mission and the overall strength of the United States Intelligence Community.
1 Alex Younger, 3 December 2018 https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/mi6-c-speech-on-fourth-generation-espionage.
2 Wikipedia, June 2021
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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.
