Quotes of the Day:
“The idea that war is a secular crusade and involves the smiting of the wicked pervades how Americans discuss it. If you want to save your soul go to church. There is no holiness to be found on a battlefield and nations seek it at their own peril. War always amounts to a failure of normal ‘politics’ to resolve a contention, which is why it is ‘politics by other means.’ People are often willing to be cynical about normal politics but drop such skepticism when it comes to politics and organized violence, which is usually infinitely more ethically murky than normal politics often is.”
- Adam Elkus
"No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility."
- Simone de Beauvoir
“Anger is “a movement generated by decision” that “can be eliminated by decision.” What these Stoic-inspired teachers are trying to teach is control at that pivotal first moment of decision—the “assent to an evaluative impression.” It’s that assent to an impression of having been cheated in the case of these young kids, that gets the impulse of anger going.”
- Nancy Sherman, Stoic Wisdom: Ancient Lessons for Modern Resilience
1. Top US commanders in Afghanistan wrestle with mistakes and regrets as America's longest war ends
2. ‘Imminent Threat’ or Aid Worker: Did a U.S. Drone Strike in Afghanistan Kill the Wrong Person?
3. Those Still Left Behind in Afghanistan
4. Afghan American woman’s escape highlights secretive CIA role in Kabul rescues
5. Retired two-star general opens up about bipolar disorder; now his mission is to save lives
6. Opinion | What the U.S. Withdrawal From Afghanistan Means for Taiwan
7. Opinion | What we still don’t know about Americans in Afghanistan
8. Jarhead elites: Marine Raiders are aiming high
9. Nuclear Terrorism: A Plausible and Pestilent Threat
10. The Pentagon’s Army of Nerds: Why the military needs Silicon Valley, now more than ever
11. Disinformation Wars: Retired Indian Army Officer Becomes Butt Of Jokes After Sharing Photo From A Movie Set As ‘Truth’ Of Pakistan Army in Panjshir
12. Read former President George W. Bush's speech at the Flight 93 memorial service
13. How Equipment Left In Afghanistan Will Expose US Secrets
14. Thoughts on 11 September: A Special Operations Perspective
15. The Lie of Nation Building
1. Top US commanders in Afghanistan wrestle with mistakes and regrets as America's longest war ends
I watched this last night. I recommend it. It was an amazing discussion with mostly the senior leadership with a few lower ranking personnel and the former Afghan Ambassador to the US. She gave the most fitting tribute to our veterans and their efforts in Afghanistan. And Jake Tapper's conclusion remarks were very appropriate and respectful to all those who served and especially to those who gave all.
Top US commanders in Afghanistan wrestle with mistakes and regrets as America's longest war ends
CNN · by Nicole Gaouette, Jake Tapper and Jessica Small, CNN
Watch 'America's Longest War: What Went Wrong in Afghanistan' on Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on CNN
(CNN)US commanders who led the war in Afghanistan are wrestling with the country's collapse to the Taliban, with some ruing the "pretty horrible mistakes" the US military made along the way and one of them flatly declaring America's longest war was not worth the price.
"The 20-year war in Afghanistan was -- for the results that we have achieved -- not worth the cost," Karl Eikenberry, both a commander in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007 and ambassador to the country from 2009 to 2011, tells CNN's Jake Tapper in a two-hour documentary that airs Sunday.
In "America's Longest War: What Went Wrong in Afghanistan," Tapper conducts in-depth interviews with eight US commanders who led the war effort over two decades and four administrations, and who speak with new candor about decisions made by their commanders-in-chief that they believe undermined the war effort and might have prevented its success.
In the interviews with the former military leaders and others, Tapper examines the mission and the missteps, how political decisions hurt the ability of service members to succeed, whether the Pentagon misrepresented the Afghan military's abilities to the public, and how after 20 years of sacrifice, the US withdrawal resulted in the return to power by the Taliban in August.
After nearly two decades and more than $2 trillion in US taxpayer funds, after the deaths of more than 6,000 Americans and 100,000 Afghans, the bipartisan debacle that was the war in Afghanistan ended much like it began, leaving Americans -- especially those directly involved in the conflict -- struggling to understand how it all fell apart.
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No longer in uniform, Gens. Stanley McChrystal, David Petraeus, Joseph Dunford, John Allen, David McKiernan, Dan McNeill, and Lt. Gens. Eikenberry and David Barno, speak frankly.
Resentment, frustration, regret
They describe their resentment about the way politicians scaled back resources for Afghanistan to fuel the war in Iraq, their frustrations about squandered opportunities and their regrets. They question long-celebrated strategies and -- in a preview of the painful national reckoning about Afghanistan that is only just beginning -- grapple with whether the mission was worth the cost.
"My first impulse is to say, yes, it was worth it, but I no longer am certain of that," retired four-star general McNeill, who led coalition forces in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2003 and then US troops from 2007 to 2008, says. "Before I go to my grave, I hope to have that question answered."
Eikenberry observes, "There really was no clear political end state. That leads to deep questions. Was it worth it? What was it all about?"
Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, who commanded the US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, spoke during an interview with The Associated Press at the ISAF headquarters in Kabul in August 2013.
Dunford says he believes the US accomplished its mission "to prevent al Qaeda from attacking the United States, to prevent Afghanistan from being a sanctuary and also mitigate the risk of mass migration."
He adds, however, "We shouldn't confuse the outcome with saying that we did that at an appropriate level of investment." He would have liked to see "fewer young men and women having lost their lives, families suffering, casualties, there's no question about it. But at the end of the day, I'm not willing to say it wasn't worth it."
The documentary also features veterans of the war -- the tiny percentage of Americans who have shouldered the risks and sacrifices to execute the mission in Afghanistan -- who share their anger about being trained to fight but then asked to nation-build, about the disconnect between political messaging out of Washington and realities on the ground, and most searingly, about the loss of so many comrades-in-arms, both on the battlefield and to suicide.
Diplomats and journalists who closely followed the war's fortunes underscore rampant corruption in Afghanistan and Trump administration moves that strengthened the Taliban. They also point to politicians who "just couldn't bring themselves to tell the truth," and give the American people a clear picture of what was really happening half a world away.
'We didn't understand'
The mistakes began before the US even entered Afghanistan, the commanders say.
"We didn't understand the problem," says McChrystal, who led international forces from 2009 to 2010. "The complexities of the environment, I think, weren't appreciated. We went for what we thought would work quickly over what would have likely worked over the longer term."
McChrystal argues that in hindsight, right after the September 11, 2001, attacks that triggered the invasion of Afghanistan, the US should have held its fire -- "no bombing, no strikes" -- though he acknowledges that would have been almost impossible. Instead, he would have spent a year building a coalition to counter al Qaeda and training Americans in Arabic, Pashto, Urdu and Dari languages "to get ourselves ready to do something that we knew would be very, very difficult."
McChrystal points out that no one was thinking in the long term, either. "I don't think we sat around a table, ever, and talked about where's this going to be in 20 years."
Commander General Stanley McChrystal sits in the helicopter after a lengthy conference meeting with military officials in October 2009 at forward operating base Walton, outside of Kandahar, Afghanistan.
That may be because very quickly, President George W. Bush and his administration switched their focus to a new, elective war in oil-rich Iraq -- so intensely that in October 2002, Bush didn't even know who his commander in Afghanistan was.
The commanders suggest that shift to Iraq redirected personnel and equipment away from Afghanistan that could have saved lives and potentially changed the outcome of the war.
"I personally resented the war in Iraq," Barno, the senior US commander in Afghanistan for 19 months over 2003 to 2005, says.
"Much of our strategic attention and much of our strategic capacity was diverted into Iraq, to the detriment of the war," Allen says.
Since many of the military's helicopters were sent to Iraqi front lines, combat outposts in eastern Afghanistan were placed at the bottom of valleys to make for easier resupply. That also left troops vulnerable -- surrounded by armed militants in the mountains above them.
US Army General Dan McNeill, the commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, speak to reporters in July 2002. McNeill had just met with local elders in the village of Deh Rawud in southern Afghanistan.
McNeill, the commander Bush didn't know in 2002, recalls meeting the President at the White House in 2007, during his second tour as a commander in Afghanistan. "'Tell me exactly what you need'," McNeill remembers Bush saying, before adding a caveat: " 'You're not going to get it, because I got to take care of this Iraq thing'."
McKiernan recalls that in the summer of 2009, troops in Afghanistan were facing a terrible problem with improvised explosive devices. They had three "route clearance companies" to clear roads. Iraq, which faced far fewer issues with IEDs and mines at the time, had some 90 route clearance companies. That didn't change for eight years, until President Barack Obama ordered a surge in troops.
"What happens in that eight years?" McKiernan asks. "You have a Taliban, which has generally a safe haven in the frontier provinces and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in Pakistan. They become resurgent. And eight years, we don't grow fast enough and well enough [the] capabilities of the government in Afghanistan and the army. And there you are."
'We couldn't give that Afghan army a soul'
The commanders agree on Iraq. There's less consensus in other areas, differences that point to the difficulties ahead in the national conversation about what went wrong.
Petraeus argues that counterinsurgency -- a strategy he co-wrote a book about -- worked. "It actually did work during the period that we had the resources to do that," he says. McKiernan disagrees. "I think in rural Afghanistan, which is most of Afghanistan, it has not worked," he says.
McChrystal suggested a massive surge of troops that Obama approved. Then-Vice President Joe Biden opposed the move. Eikenberry privately did as well, concluding it wouldn't solve the problems in Afghanistan. He outlined his thinking in a classified cable to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, starting with his belief that President Hamid Karzai was "not an adequate strategic partner."
"We could provide advice," Eikenberry says. "We could provide training support. But we couldn't give that Afghan army a soul. Only the political leadership and people of Afghanistan could do that. And that was a failure. The Afghan government remained extraordinarily corrupt."
Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, a commander in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007, speaks with Afghan National Army soldiers at their remote firebase near the Pakistani border in the Barmal district of southeastern Paktika province, in October 2006.
Afghanistan's former ambassador to the US, Roya Rahmani, echoes the charges about political corruption and the army's lack of leadership. She also criticizes Trump administration steps that strengthened the Taliban -- and raises the prospect of a secret deal between Trump and the militant group that might have hastened the Afghan army's collapse.
All the former commanders review mistakes they believe the US made in Afghanistan. All look back at the toll in American blood and treasure.
McChrystal "saw good people with good intentions working hard, but I don't think we did very well. We made a lot of mistakes that we made in prior efforts, like Vietnam and others. And I find that sad as well. We could have done better."
McKiernan wonders aloud whether there were better ways to retaliate for September 11. He concludes that, there are "probably lots of things we could have done differently."
'Soul searching'
McNeill is introspective. "I am doing soul searching to determine -- is it fair to say I did my share of the task?" he asks. "Did I come up short in some way? What's the duty owed to those who came home, not carrying their shields, but on their shields?"
When asked what he would say to Gold Star families or veterans who wonder if the sacrifices of Afghanistan were worth it, McNeill speaks about his pride in everyone who stepped up to fight there or in Iraq before continuing.
"I would just simply say that for what I have failed to do, I'm sorry," McNeill says. "I did the best I could."
Tapper asks why he blames himself.
"The commander is responsible for what his unit does or fails to do," McNeill answers. "If this is a failure, then I carry my share of it."
CNN · by Nicole Gaouette, Jake Tapper and Jessica Small, CNN
2. ‘Imminent Threat’ or Aid Worker: Did a U.S. Drone Strike in Afghanistan Kill the Wrong Person?
Very interesting analysis in an 11 minute video presentation. Sad and tragic is accurate. But this type of analysis is likely the way of the future (or at least a tool in the toolkit) for the investigative journalist.
‘Imminent Threat’ or Aid Worker: Did a U.S. Drone Strike in Afghanistan Kill the Wrong Person?
By Christoph Koettl, Evan Hill, Matthieu Aikins, Eric Schmitt, Ainara Tiefenthäler and Drew Jordan•September 10, 2021
The New York Times obtained exclusive security camera footage and witness accounts to show how the military launched a drone strike that killed 10 people in Kabul on Aug. 29 without knowing whom it was hitting.
3. Those Still Left Behind in Afghanistan
Yes, more needs to be done. But there are a lot of people and organizations trying to make things happen.
Here is an organization that is working to connect all of the organizations working on the problem, share information, and enable organizations to continue to do the good work they are doing.
Shona ba Shona (Shoulder to Shoulder)
Our organization is personally and professionally invested in this effort. Many of us enjoyed protection from and endured hardship with our Afghan friends. We also understand what it will take to successfully integrate those affected into a safe haven. Many of our members have personally watched both the successes and failures of previous refugee assistance from Vietnam to Somalia and Iraq and we will see this one through to success. We are in it from the cradle to the grave.
Our board and our operators are directly tied to hundreds of flag officers, dozens of think tanks, major media outlets, and many if not most of those on the ground providing safe passage for our Afghan allies. We can direct both material and personnel support to the very front line. We can provide a direct conduit of information from the ground to the highest levels of our national executive and to the executive branches of many of our allies. We can share information and best practices, and cross level knowledge among all the credible and legitimate organizations operating in this space.
Those Still Left Behind in Afghanistan
The U.S. isn’t doing nearly enough to free those who are trapped.
WSJ · by The Editorial Board
Afghan Border National Police personnel stand guard outside the airport in Kabul, Sept. 12.
Photo: karim sahib/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
The Taliban finally let more than 100 Americans, Canadians, Brits, U.S. permanent residents, and others fly out of Afghanistan Thursday and Friday. The State Department said it expects more departures, but the Biden Administration still isn’t doing nearly enough to save thousands of Afghans who earned the right to emigrate to the U.S.
Americans, U.S. residents and endangered Afghans are still scattered throughout the country. The Taliban have effectively taken hundreds hostage at the airport in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif. Some Americans have been told to travel to Kabul, but no one knows how many can do so safely.
“The United States has pulled every lever available to us to facilitate the departure of these charter flights from Mazar,” a State Department spokesman said Thursday, adding that “we were very clear” they should be allowed to leave. This helplessness is humiliating, and across Afghanistan a massive tragedy is unfolding.
The Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program offers a path to U.S. citizenship for Afghans who worked with the American government for at least a year during the war. The process can take years, and hundreds of applicants and family members have been killed over time. A State Department official acknowledged that “the majority” of SIV applicants remained after U.S. forces departed. This is one of the worst wartime betrayals in U.S. history.
“There are about 18,000 so-called principal applicants in the system. Of the 18,000, half are at the very early stages,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in June. “Then there is another 9,000 who are much further along.” Mr. Blinken played down the risk of a quick Afghan government collapse, and Foggy Bottom did little to avert the nightmare now unfolding for thousands of SIV applicants.
James Miervaldis of the nonprofit No One Left Behind says that his organization is aware of some 200 approved SIV applicants and their families hiding throughout the country. Fully vetted with paperwork in hand, they were told by the State Department to remain in place during the chaotic evacuation. Then the last American planes left.
Organizations like No One Left Behind have the financial wherewithal to pay for their flights out of the country, but they’re at the mercy of the Taliban to allow safe passage. Remember these families whenever the White House brags about the scale of the August airlift.
The thousands more still in the 14-step application process should have been evacuated to a secure location months ago. Politicoreports that only 705 SIV applicants left during the evacuation. Some U.S. officials have denied that number but declined to provide their own. Mr. Blinken is testifying before the House and Senate this week, and Congress should demand exact numbers.
The Taliban said last week that it will let only foreign passport- or visa-holders leave the country. Are the thousands of endangered Afghans supposed to wait for the process to play out from Washington? And if they survive long enough to get a visa, who expects the Taliban to grant safe passage? The new government’s security forces are run by a leader of the terrorist Haqqani Network wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The State Department says “we are considering and we are developing additional processing alternatives so that we can continue to deliver important consular services, including to these American citizens, these LPRs, these Afghans at risk.” Consular services? No wonder the Taliban feel free to humiliate the Biden Administration.
The White House needs to tell—not ask—the Taliban that whoever wants to leave can do so at America’s invitation. If the Taliban refuse, the U.S. can oppose the new government economically and diplomatically, as well as assisting the internal opposition. Second, the U.S. needs to take every action possible—overt and covert, overland and in the air—to get people out. The State Department should commend and work with private groups on rescue missions, not treat them as a nuisance.
The Biden Administration wants nothing more than to wash its hands of the debacle in Afghanistan, and it has a political incentive to play down or obfuscate the number of trapped Afghans eligible to come to America. But the world shouldn’t forget that thousands of would-be Americans—men, women and children—face arrest, torture or death because of the White House rush to the Afghan exits.
WSJ · by The Editorial Board
4. Afghan American woman’s escape highlights secretive CIA role in Kabul rescues
Not a secret anymore.
But some great work by the CIA, Afghan partners, and the US military. The question is, could we have done more? And I hope this reporting does not compromise future operations.
Excerpts:
Birashk did not know it at the time, but her rescue had been orchestrated in part by the CIA, which played a pivotal role — alongside elite U.S. troops and Afghan counterterrorism forces — in the dangerous extraction of Americans, Afghans and foreign nationals facing threats of reprisal from the Taliban due to their affiliation with the U.S. government. A spokeswoman for the agency, Tammy Thorpe, declined to detail the operation, saying only that CIA personnel, in concert with other U.S. agencies, supported the broader evacuation effort “in various ways.”
Five current and former U.S. officials familiar with the missions said the CIA used a compound known as Eagle Base, located just a few miles from Hamid Karzai International Airport, to carry out rescues like the white-knuckle nighttime drive through Taliban-controlled territory to deliver Birashk from her high-rise Kabul apartment building. Like others in this story, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive aspects of the chaotic two-week effort to evacuate 124,000 people from Afghanistan.
...
The extractions were conducted as the U.S. military hewed to narrow parameters on its own set of rescues. Elite members of Joint Special Operations Command, including Delta Force and helicopters from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, were at Kabul airport. But ground operations into the city were not permitted, frustrating those who wanted to do more to help, three officials said. On occasion, these troops ventured only short distances outside the airport to escort American citizens inside the base, those officials said.
A defense official with knowledge of the operations said there was no “blanket policy” prohibiting elite U.S. troops from leaving Kabul airport. But he said that when they did leave facility’s gates, they “usually went short distances.”
The U.S. military has acknowledged carrying out two unilateral helicopter missions outside the airport to rescue a combined 185 American citizens, and a mission partnered with German forces to rescue 21 German citizens. U.S. Special Operations troops helped 1,064 American citizens, 2,017 Afghans and 127 people from other countries reach the airport through “phone calls, vectors and escorting,” the defense official said.
Afghan American woman’s escape highlights secretive CIA role in Kabul rescues
The Washington Post · by Dan Lamothe and Ellen Nakashima Today at 5:00 a.m. EDT · September 13, 2021
Five days after Afghanistan’s fall, Shaqaiq Birashk, holed up in her Kabul apartment, was contacted by a stranger offering to have her picked up and escorted to the airport for evacuation. The man claimed to work for the U.S. government, said Birashk, an American citizen who, until the Taliban’s takeover, worked on a USAID project.
After some trepidation and encouragement from a friend who had already gone through the process, she accepted.
That night, dressed in a flowing abaya that concealed a backpack stuffed with clean clothes, Birashk, 37, nervously walked past the Taliban guards who had taken over security at her building and climbed into the back seat of a green Toyota Corolla, hopeful it would lead to her freedom.
“We were driving against the traffic,” she recalled in an interview. “You would see male and female, young and old, all walks of life, just walking towards the airport.”
Birashk did not know it at the time, but her rescue had been orchestrated in part by the CIA, which played a pivotal role — alongside elite U.S. troops and Afghan counterterrorism forces — in the dangerous extraction of Americans, Afghans and foreign nationals facing threats of reprisal from the Taliban due to their affiliation with the U.S. government. A spokeswoman for the agency, Tammy Thorpe, declined to detail the operation, saying only that CIA personnel, in concert with other U.S. agencies, supported the broader evacuation effort “in various ways.”
Five current and former U.S. officials familiar with the missions said the CIA used a compound known as Eagle Base, located just a few miles from Hamid Karzai International Airport, to carry out rescues like the white-knuckle nighttime drive through Taliban-controlled territory to deliver Birashk from her high-rise Kabul apartment building. Like others in this story, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive aspects of the chaotic two-week effort to evacuate 124,000 people from Afghanistan.
The rescues traveling through Eagle Base involved multiple helicopter flights to Kabul’s airport. These missions, officials said, were separate from other aerial rescues conducted by the U.S. military to save Americans from having to brave increasingly treacherous roads outside the facility, where Taliban checkpoints had been established and an Islamic State suicide bombing on Aug. 26 killed more than 200 people, including 13 U.S. troops. U.S. troops carried out some flights from Eagle Base, three U.S. officials said.
The CIA rescues relied in part on Afghan counterterrorism forces trained by the agency, one senior administration official said. After the central government’s collapse, the counterterrorism forces worked with U.S. troops to help pluck people from the crowd at the airport, as reported previously by the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. In some instances, they also picked up people at their apartments or on prearranged street corners while receiving “encouragement and guidance” from the U.S. government, the senior official said.
Birashk’s account, aspects of which she shared with the Financial Times, reveal new details about how the operations worked and the secrecy involved.
The extractions were conducted as the U.S. military hewed to narrow parameters on its own set of rescues. Elite members of Joint Special Operations Command, including Delta Force and helicopters from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, were at Kabul airport. But ground operations into the city were not permitted, frustrating those who wanted to do more to help, three officials said. On occasion, these troops ventured only short distances outside the airport to escort American citizens inside the base, those officials said.
A defense official with knowledge of the operations said there was no “blanket policy” prohibiting elite U.S. troops from leaving Kabul airport. But he said that when they did leave facility’s gates, they “usually went short distances.”
The U.S. military has acknowledged carrying out two unilateral helicopter missions outside the airport to rescue a combined 185 American citizens, and a mission partnered with German forces to rescue 21 German citizens. U.S. Special Operations troops helped 1,064 American citizens, 2,017 Afghans and 127 people from other countries reach the airport through “phone calls, vectors and escorting,” the defense official said.
Birashk, who said she was unaware for days that she was taken to a CIA base, was advising Afghan officials through an Afghan nongovernmental organization when the Taliban began to threaten Kabul. Family members and some of her friends had pressured her to flee, but she told them she wanted to go on her own terms rather than repeating the trauma of leaving as she did in 1989, when as a kindergartner she and her family fled a civil war.
“I had returned to Afghanistan with respect, and I wanted to leave it with respect,” she said.
On Saturday, Aug. 14, after the Taliban seized several major cities, Afghan officials encouraged Birashk to leave, she said. She booked a flight for Aug. 18, the first ticket she could find, and registered with the U.S. Embassy in Kabul for possible evacuation, she said.
It was too late. The following day, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and a coterie of senior Afghan officials fled the country, leaving a power vacuum in Kabul that the Taliban quickly filled. The U.S. military scrambled to secure the airport for evacuations, but the Taliban established checkpoints across the city.
Birashk, already worried about violence at the airport, learned Aug. 17 that her flight had been canceled. As she assessed the safest way out of Kabul, she received the call from the U.S. government early in the evening Aug. 19.
Birashk said she initially told the government official that she did not want to leave without several other Afghans she knew.
“The gentlemen very kindly and actually professionally said something along the lines of, ‘Well, our priority is you. Whenever you are ready to leave on our own, let me know and give me a call,” she recalled.
A friend called later that evening and told her she’d regret it if she didn’t escape while she could.
Birashk left her apartment at about 11 p.m. She asked an Afghan neighbor to accompany her outside, to where the Taliban guards were, and they shared an emotional goodbye.
“She said, ‘Can you please take me with you?’ She was an Afghan nationaI. And I just broke down at that point,” Birashk said. “I was already shattered that I couldn’t even help the 11 people that I wanted to. And then here, you know, to the last second, she was in a way begging me to take her with me. Just the guilt overcame me.”
Birashk said that when she got into the car, two other evacuees were inside. An Afghan man drove them through the Taliban checkpoints, speaking to Taliban fighters in the Pashto language many of them favor. As they drove, she sent her location through a messaging platform to her U.S. government contact, who corrected them by text message when they made wrong turns, she said.
“I said: ‘When do I know that I have reached you?' And he said, ‘You will meet my friends first,’" she said.
When their vehicle stopped, Afghan forces directed her and the other evacuees to change cars. They were driven less than a mile to the CIA camp. The U.S. representative confiscated their phones after allowing them to notify their families they were safe, she said.
“We were told not to disclose our locations,” Birashk said. If people started showing up to the base looking to evacuate, the man warned, they wouldn’t be able to help anyone else.
The evacuees stayed overnight at Eagle Base, and were moved to the airport the following afternoon in a group of about 90 to 100 people. They traveled aboard three helicopters, Birashk said.
She was turned over to the Hungarian military, which flew her by plane to Uzbekistan. She spent three days there at the airport, and was moved again to Budapest, she said. She remained in touch with the same U.S. government representative and turned over names of other people who needed evacuation, she said.
Birashk was reunited with her family in Colorado on Aug. 26.
Birashk said she is grateful for the rescue and the kindness with which she was treated. But she is heartbroken for Afghan youth, who have been brought up to have dreams that are no longer possible under the Taliban, and angry with President Biden for the way in which the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan, she said.
“It’s a foreign policy failure. It’s an embarrassment,” she said. “I had to hear it as an Afghan American from the Afghans: ‘Oh, you’re privileged.’ But now it’s even more than that. Now it’s, ‘You guys that destroyed us.”
Shane Harris contributed to this report.
The Washington Post · by Dan Lamothe and Ellen Nakashima Today at 5:00 a.m. EDT · September 13, 2021
5. Retired two-star general opens up about bipolar disorder; now his mission is to save lives
I recall hearing the stories about difficult challenges at NDU during this time. I hope his experience can help remove the stigma with mental health and save lives.
Retired two-star general opens up about bipolar disorder; now his mission is to save lives
Gregg F. Martin, Ph.D., Major General, US Army (Retired)Special to FLORIDA TODAY
In July 2014, I was in my 36th year of military service, a 2-star general, combat veteran, and president of the National Defense University (NDU), located in Washington D.C.
I worked for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation's highest-ranking military officer, General Martin Dempsey.
After decades of success, I had become a manic: extremely disruptive and erratic.
Finally, the Chairman, who was a long-time mentor, boss and friend, summoned me to his office and said, "Gregg, I love you like a brother, but your time at NDU is done. You have until 5 p.m. today to resign, or you're fired… and you need to get a mental health exam."
Unbeknown to myself and the Army, my genetic predisposition for bipolar disorder was triggered by the intense stress of the Iraq War in 2003, where I commanded a combat engineer brigade of thousands of soldiers.
My brain responded by producing and distributing excessive amounts of dopamine and endorphins, sending me into a euphoric, high-performing mania that made me feel fearless, hyper-energized and like I was Superman.
Unfortunately, this mania damaged my brain circuitry and launched me into a life dominated by unrecognized bipolar disorder.
After a year of thrilling combat, with rushing adrenaline, surging bio-chemicals in my brain, and a powerful, natural "high," I redeployed to Germany, where the moon of depression eclipsed my sun of mania.
Unfortunately, the under-production of these same chemicals caused a months-long depression. I reported my depression, but because I was not suicidal and had no intention of hurting anyone, medical personnel declared me "fit for duty" — but I wasn't.
After months of hard work at my job, the depression lifted naturally. The structure of Army life was key in getting me through this difficult period.
This completed my first full up/down cycle of mania/depression, which would become my life pattern.
My bipolar remained unrecognized by everyone from 2003 to 2014. Meanwhile, I was promoted twice and assigned to ever-tougher assignments, where the norm was complexity, budget cuts and high stress.
Yet, mania helped my performance in many ways by providing ever-higher levels of energy, drive and creativity. It fueled my career ascendance, until it didn't.
My mania went higher, and my depression sank lower until I rocketed into acute, full-blown mania in 2014.
Spinning out of control, I became disruptive, erratic, and over-the-top in virtually everything I thought, did or said.
Thankfully, the Chairman removed me from command. It was the absolute best decision for myself, my family and my health.
After this, I crashed into dark, crippling, hopeless depression, accompanied by terrifying delusions.
My mind was filled with morbid, vivid imagery of violent death and dying, what psychiatrists call "passive suicidal ideations."
But, for me, they were anything but passive. Instead, they were real, powerful and life-consuming.
For the next two years, I fought for my life. It wasn't until a friend helped get me into the VA that I had a feeling that my condition could change.
The clinical staff of the VA provided me with excellent care, and it was the combination of professional treatment, along with the love and support of my wife and family, that prevented me from falling into the abyss.
After months of treatment, numerous medications, weeks in a VA psychiatric ward and electroconvulsive therapy, the addition of the natural element Lithium, a salt, took my recovery to the next level and stabilized me in Sept. 2016.
My bipolar disorder is now under control, but not gone.
To keep it at bay, I must take medications, meet with my doctors and live a healthy life — mind, body and spirit.
My self-care includes exercise, healthy diet, plenty of sleep and water, little to no alcohol, no drugs, a network of friends, fun activities, faith, and as much as possible, minimizing stress, anxiety, and anger.
As a former Army officer, I know that one of the keys to victory in combat is vigilance.
The same holds in my battle with bipolar. As long as I remain faithful to the task at hand, I will have the high ground and avoid an attack by the fiercest enemy I have ever faced — bipolar disorder.
More than 10 million Americans have bipolar disorder. Another 50 million have depression, post-traumatic stress (PTS), traumatic brain injuries (TBI), or other mental health disorders that often lead to suicide.
Thus, it is likely that nearly every person in America is affected in some way by mental illness: either themselves, a family member, friend or colleague.
That's the bad news.
The good news is, these medical conditions are treatable.
Correctly diagnosed and treated, people can live healthy, happy, successful lives.
I didn't want bipolar, but it wanted me.
It nearly destroyed everything I value. But, thanks to the help of a great many others, I've been able to transform my "gift" of bipolar into my mission: "sharing my bipolar story to help stop the stigma and save lives."
I share my experiences, providing knowledge and hope. My purpose is to help save lives, marriages, families, friendships, careers and more.
My vision is that everyone who has a mental health disorder gets medical help free of stigma. There is no stigma with cancer or diabetes, and neither should there be for mental illness.
Science has validated that mental disorders are physiological and not due to a lack of character or willpower. It's not a person's fault they are ill, so we shouldn't blame them. Instead, we must understand and accept this scientific truth.
We must all learn to identify the basic symptoms of mental health disorders. Then, if you or another display them, get medical help, just as you would for a heart attack.
But, don't wait; it could be a matter of life and death.
Battling mental illness has been my most brutal fight. It's incumbent upon all of us to learn about it and help educate and encourage others. Join me in helping to stop the stigma!
Gregg Martin is a 36-year Army combat veteran, retired 2-star general, and bipolar survivor. He is a qualified Airborne-Ranger-Engineer and Strategist. He holds degrees from West Point (BS) and MIT (MS and PhD). He is a father, author, and speaker who lives with his wife in Cocoa Beach. His forthcoming book is entitled “Battling bipolar — my war with mental illness.”
This piece represents the views of the author. It does not represent the official views of the U.S. government or Department of Defense, nor do they vouch for its accuracy.
Note: September is National Suicide Prevention month. The national Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255 (TALK). For more information, visit www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org
6. Opinion | What the U.S. Withdrawal From Afghanistan Means for Taiwan
Conclusion:
So, while there may be other reasons to oppose the end of the war in Afghanistan, the impact on China’s Taiwan calculus is not — and should not be — one of them.
Opinion | What the U.S. Withdrawal From Afghanistan Means for Taiwan
Guest Essay
What the U.S. Withdrawal From Afghanistan Means for Taiwan
Sept. 13, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
Credit...Ann Wang/Reuters
By
Ms. Mastro is an expert on China’s military and security policy.
Some critics of President Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan argue the move will embolden Beijing because it telegraphs weakness — an unwillingness to stick it out and win wars that China will factor in when deciding whether to attack Taiwan, which it considers to be part of its territory.
The reality is, though, that the U.S. departure from Afghanistan will more likely give pause to Chinese war planners — not push them to use force against Taiwan.
Luckily for Beijing, the Afghan war — along with Iraq and other American misadventures in the Middle East — distracted Washington for two decades. While China was building roads and ports from Beijing to Trieste, Italy, fueling its economy and expanding its geopolitical influence, the United States was pouring money into its war on terrorism. While Beijing was building thousands of acres of military bases in the South China Sea and enhancing its precision-strike capabilities, the U.S. military was fighting an insurgency and dismantling improvised explosive devices.
In many ways, it was just dumb luck that Mr. Xi and his predecessors, thanks in part to the war in Afghanistan, could build national power, undermine international norms, co-opt international organizations and extend their territorial control all without the United States thwarting their plans in any meaningful way.
But the end of the war in Afghanistan could bring these good times — which the Communist Party calls the “period of important strategic opportunities” — to an abrupt end. Sure, over the past 10 years American presidents tried to get back into the Asia game even as the war continued. Barack Obama asserted we would pivot to Asia back in 2011. Donald Trump’s national security team made great power competition with China its top priority.
Such a refocusing comes not a moment too soon. Chinese expansion and militarization in the South China Sea, deadly skirmishes with India, its crackdown in Hong Kong and repression in Xinjiang all point to an increasingly confident and aggressive China. In particular, Chinese military activity around Taiwan has spiked — 2020 witnessed a record number of incursions into Taiwan’s airspace. The sophistication and scale of military exercises has increased as well. These escalations come alongside recent warnings from Mr. Xi that any foreign forces daring to bully China “will have their heads bashed bloody” and efforts toward “Taiwan independence” will be met with “resolute action.”
Some have argued that America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan undermines efforts to signal U.S. support for Taiwan. On the surface, it may seem as if the U.S. withdrawal would be a good thing for China’s prospects at what it calls “armed reunification.” Indeed, this is the message the nationalist Chinese newspaper The Global Times is peddling: The United States will cast Taiwan aside just as it has done with Vietnam, and now Afghanistan.
However, the American departure from Afghanistan creates security concerns in China’s own backyard that could distract it from its competition with the United States. Beijing’s strategy to protect its global interests is a combination of relying on host nation security forces and private security contractors and free-riding off other countries’ military presence. Analysts have concluded that China is less likely than the United States to rely on its military to protect its interests abroad. Beijing appears committed to avoiding making the same mistakes as Washington — namely, an overreliance on military intervention overseas to advance foreign policy objectives.
Now there will be no reliable security presence in Afghanistan and undoubtedly broader instability in a region with significant economic and commercial interests for China. Chinese leaders are also worried that conflict in Afghanistan could spill across the border into neighboring Xinjiang, where Beijing’s repressive tactics have already been the cause of much international opprobrium.
The reality is, the United States stayed much longer in Afghanistan than most expected. This upsets China’s calculus about what the United States would do in a Taiwan crisis, since conventional wisdom in Beijing had been that the painful legacy of Somalia would deter Washington from ever coming to Taipei’s aid.
But U.S. interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq have called these assumptions into question. Taiwan, with its proportionately large economy and semiconductor industry, is strategically important to the United States. U.S. power and influence in East Asia are reliant on its allies and military bases in the region and America’s broader role as the security partner of choice. If Taiwan were to fall to Chinese aggression, many countries, U.S. allies included, would see it as a sign of the arrival of a Chinese world order. By comparison, Afghanistan is less strategically important, and yet the United States stayed there for 20 years.
This does not bode well for any designs Beijing might have for Taiwan.
It’s true that China would benefit from a home-field advantage given Taiwan’s proximity, and that Beijing’s arsenal is far greater than Taiwan’s. China, too, would likely enjoy more domestic public support for any conflict than the U.S. would for yet another intervention.
But if China has any hope of winning a war across the Strait, its military would have to move fast, before the United States has time to respond. Chinese planners know that the longer the war, the greater the U.S. advantage. Unlike Chinese production and manufacturing centers, which can all be targeted by the United States, the American homeland is relatively safe from Chinese conventional attack. China is far more reliant on outside sources for oil and natural gas, and thus vulnerable to U.S. attempts to cut off its supply.
And the Chinese economy would suffer more: Since the war would be happening in Asia, trade would be bound to be disrupted there. The United States would need to stick it out for only a short time — not 20 years — for these factors to come into play.
Chinese leaders already expected a tense relationship with the Biden administration. Now they are faced with the fact that the United States might have the will and resources to push back against Chinese aggression, even if it means war.
So, while there may be other reasons to oppose the end of the war in Afghanistan, the impact on China’s Taiwan calculus is not — and should not be — one of them.
Oriana Skylar Mastro (@osmastro) is a center fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
7. Opinion | What we still don’t know about Americans in Afghanistan
A sacthing critique of the administration and its actions regarding the evacuation.
Opinion | What we still don’t know about Americans in Afghanistan
The Washington Post · by Opinion by Hugh HewittContributing columnist Yesterday at 8:00 a.m. EDT · September 12, 2021
The phrase “credibility gap” was popularized during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson. Democratic Sen. J. William Fulbright of Arkansas used it to describe his inability to get straight answers from LBJ and his minions on the escalating Vietnam War. To all subsequent presidents has come some charge of a credibility gap.
President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and press secretary Jen Psaki now all suffer from a credibility gap born of obfuscation over the Afghan catastrophe. Though the State Department can count the minimum number of “Americans” — defined by me as all U.S. passport holders, whether citizens or Legal Permanent Residents with “green cards” known to its teams by text, email and phone calls — no one at State or the White House can seem to agree on what that number is.
This past Sunday, White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain told CNN there were “around 100” Americans left in Afghanistan. On Thursday, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said “hundreds” are still stranded. The Post’s Afghanistan and Pakistan bureau chief Susannah George told my radio audience Friday morning there is simply no way to know, as some passport holders are cut off and most of the country is out of contact with anyone.
We have a right to know the scale of this crisis: the minimum number of U.S. passport holders known by our authorities to be in Afghanistan. And it is a crisis. It is America Held Hostage 2.0, and though a cohort of Americans escaped Thursday, many remain behind. Psaki, with astonishing indifference to the worries of families and friends across the country, said on Wednesday that there were a “handful” of Americans still in Afghanistan.
A “handful.” It is shocking to hear that. Americans do not come in “handfuls.” They come in ones. Each one matters. One American abandoned is a crisis. We need to know the denominator against which the “ongoing efforts” can be measured. We celebrate every American who escapes, but we cannot forget and dare not accept the minimization of Americans left behind.
We must also learn the state of the president’s robustness. I believe my eyes. The president is, in my opinion, infirm. He is old. Soon to be 79, Biden shows his years every time he appears in public.
Biden is not incapacitated. He’s not sidelined. He is simply lacking the “energy in the Executive” that Alexander Hamilton identified in the Federalist Papers as the key ingredient in the president’s competence and the federal government’s success. This isn’t an issue of chronological age, but simply of energy. Biden lacks it. The press fails the people when it refuses, absolutely and repeatedly refuses, to discuss what this means for the country given the urgent issue of hostages, and the menace of emboldened enemies who must see in the president’s infirmity a vast field of opportunities.
On Tuesday, Chris Wallace spoke to me with the sort of candor we need, but his target was Blinken. It is worth quoting Wallace at length.
“I’m very unimpressed by the State operation,” Wallace began. “I’m very unimpressed by Antony Blinken,” he continued. “You know, Blinken had a news conference, I guess it was, well, it was last Friday. It was when he refused to say how many people, Americans and Afghans, had gotten out. And you know, he was speaking with all the passion of somebody reading the telephone book.”
Wallace grew animated. “And you know, it’s not a matter of politics. It’s a matter of presence and gravitas. When Mike Pompeo or Hillary Clinton or, you know, you can go on and on, Colin Powell, spoke for the United States of America, there was, you know, there was a ‘Don’t mess with us, guys, we’re the United States of America.’ Blinken, I think, is a great staff man, but I’m not, I’m very doubtful as to whether he should be … the voice of America’s presence in the world.”
That is a blunt and devastating assessment of American leadership, and if a broadcaster says it, imagine what the Taliban, Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping must think. We are in deep, deep trouble.
That trouble is compounded by legitimate questions, all unanswered, about the president’s energy and capacity. Merriam-Webster defines “infirm” this way: “of poor or deteriorated vitality.” The first step to repairing our crisis is a strong secretary of state, one whom the world pauses to watch when he or she speaks. There are many candidates. Time to make a change, Mr. President. American lives depend upon it. As does your credibility with the people.
The Washington Post · by Opinion by Hugh HewittContributing columnist Yesterday at 8:00 a.m. EDT · September 12, 2021
8. Jarhead elites: Marine Raiders are aiming high
Additional article based on previous reporting.
Excerpts:
The concept — the focus for future iterations of the Cognitive Raider Symposium — includes a wide array of skills and equipment to provide shaping and influence effects to be achieved through a hybrid approach utilizing selected special operations core activities and programs applied through intelligence operations, direct and indirect actions, and persistent development of ally and partner relations.
If you’re puzzled by all those big fancy military terms, so am I.
Essentially, I think it means “a thinking man’s” Marine Raiders.
“Semper Fi” with an added sting.
Jarhead elites: Marine Raiders are aiming high
MARSOC is linking its elite Special Forces squadron with its new 'Cognitive Raider' initiative
“I’m not satisfied. There is more out there. There are ways to be better. There are ways to be more efficient. There are ways to be more lethal. And there are better ways to accomplish what we’re trying to accomplish.”
— Col. John Lynch, MARSOC deputy commander
We know about the US Army Rangers and the illustrious Green Berets.
Elite special forces, who have seen action throughout Southeast Asia, the Middle-East and other theatres of war. They are legendary.
And then we have the famous US Navy SEALs, the guys who got Bin Laden, and, of course the top of the pyramid, the secretive Delta Force.
Britain’s renowned SAS as well — who might actually be the best of the bunch — Russia’s deadly Spetsnaz, and, Canada’s small but effective JTF2.
Elite warfighters that are highly trained and thoroughly tested, experts in weapons and combat, counterterrorism, direct action (small raids and ambushes), reconnaissance, aerial and marine infiltration, hostage rescue and recovery, covert missions and more.
Not to be outdone, the US Marine Corps Special Operations Command (MARSOC) is now pushing its elite squadron, the Marine Raiders — the best of the best of the famed “leathernecks” — with its “Cognitive Raider” initiative.
Much like Britain’s specialized “Increment” unit within the Special Air Service (SAS), Marines sent into future special ops environments “must be able to understand them and then adapt their approaches across an expanded range of solutions,” Scott R. Gourley of National Defense reported.
We’re not talking about a group of jar-heads, sent to defend a beach, hold it at all costs and take heavy casualties. This is normally what the Marines do.
Rather, according to the Marine Corps Special Operations Forces (MARSOF) 2030 strategic vision outlining the Cognitive Raider innovation pathway:
“While tough, close-in, violent actions will remain a feature of future warfare, MARSOF must increasingly integrate tactical capabilities and partnered operations with evolving national, theater and interagency capabilities across all operational domains, to include those of information and cyber.”
To facilitate that understanding and adaptation, MARSOC has implemented an annual event called the Cognitive Raider Symposium, also known as CRS.
Co-hosted with the Naval Postgraduate School’s Defense Analysis Department, the multi-day gatherings provide myriad learning venues designed to hone the Marine Raiders’ “tactical edges,” Gourley reported.
A Marine Raider with Marine Forces Special Operations Command conducts high-value target detainment and evacuation operations during a multipurpose canine handler training course at Camp Pendleton. U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Angela Wilcox.
And I don’t think this means going without sleep for a week, sitting in cold ocean water, or carrying a heavy “tree of woe” for hours on end, as Navy SEALs must do.
The symposium not only addresses the Cognitive Raider pathway, but also illustrates MARSOF as a true connector of ideas and concepts.
Opening the third iteration of the symposium, Col. John Lynch, MARSOC deputy commander, identified several key traits: “It starts with being a problem solver, one that never becomes complacent but instead remains adaptable and forward thinking.”
He described an “edge” where the Marine Raider asserts, “I’m not satisfied. There is more out there. There are ways to be better. There are ways to be more efficient. There are ways to be more lethal. And there are better ways to accomplish what we’re trying to accomplish.
“I cannot pick a single period of time in my career … where we have been challenged to evolve at the pace we’re being challenged to evolve right now,” he added.
“It is remarkable how fast we have to do it.”
Douglas Borer, chair of the Defense Analysis Department at the Naval Postgraduate School, noted the conference’s focus on “frontier technologies,” offering both low-tech and high-tech examples while discussing how the technologies might alter strategic realities in great power competition with China and Russia.
“When I asked what frontier technologies a Cognitive Raider mostly followed, the list included things like automation, AI, advanced manufacturing, biotech, quantum computing, 5G, next-gen hardware robotics and space,” said Matt Stafford, a State Department representative.
“These largely follow State’s concerns. I know we both have much longer lists that we’re also paying attention to, but it’s good to hear that we share these worries.
“We also share some of your background worries about how these things will get used, or combined with each other, or just combined with existing technologies.”
U.S. Marine Corps Lance Cpl. James Fritch, a fire direction control Marine with 3rd Battalion, 12th Marines, 3rd Marine Division, sights in during expeditionary advanced base operations as part of Exercise Talisman Sabre 21, in Queensland, Australia. Photo by Lance Cpl. Ujian Gosun.
One example of that was provided by Chief Master Sgt. John Bentivegna, senior enlisted leader for Space Operations Command.
Bentivegna emphasized the criticality of space domain awareness at a time when “space is becoming congested.”
In the evolving era of great power competition, he expressed the command’s desire to explore partnering with MARSOC and Special Operations Command, observing:
“China has a satellite in space with a grappling arm. And Russia has anti-satellite weapons in orbit that could kinetically kill satellites. It’s all in that grey area. What is an act of war in space and where is space going in the future?”
Dr. Ryan Maness, assistant professor in the school’s Defense Analysis Department and director of the DoD Information Strategy Research Center, asserted that China is indeed the biggest threat, Gourley reported.
But, he also cautioned that the US government might be “over-hyping” that threat, citing some early evidence indicated that China “might be hitting a wall.”
While he characterized Russia as “outmatched in the conventional domain but punching above their weight in the cyber and information domains,” he noted of Chinese efforts to obtain rather than develop critical technologies, “It’s difficult to innovate when you’re cheating.”
SOCOM has come a long way, since its inception in 2006 — a reaction to the 9/11 attacks in New York. Reportedly, was created to fill what the Pentagon prudently saw as a future gap in special-operations forces.
“The early years were tough. In the beginning, we didn’t have jack shit. No weapons, no ammo, no ranges, no mission, no nothing. Both the Corps and SOCOM shunned us, while the SEALs [Naval Special Warfare Command] wanted to control us. We were the red-headed stepchild,” a former Marine Raider told Business Insider.
“What we did have, however, was a solid bunch of guys, about 100 operators and support Marines. All of them were as solid as they come because the leadership had handpicked them. We’re talking senior Recon men with years of experience and numerous deployments under their belts.
“Same goes for the support and intel guys. Top-notch Marines on their respective fields who could probably outperform grunts on basic infantry skills because they went through much of our training,” the former Raider added.
During the Global War on Terror, MARSOC contributed to the fight, but as the wars concluded or drew down, Marine Raiders have found themselves competing for missions and funds with units such as US Army Rangers or the SEAL Teams.
Since MARSOC is the new kid on the block, it tends to be relegated to less active areas of operations — ironically, however, these regions can get quite busy, and Marine Raiders have participated in some important operations, such the response to al-Shabab’s attack on the Kenyan military base at Manda Bay in January 2020.
Meanwhile, Marine Raiders recently completed RAVEN unit readiness exercises alongside Marines from across the Fleet Marine Force as well as US Army Special Forces, earlier this spring.
RAVEN is MARSOC’s pre-deployment unit readiness exercise, designed to evaluate Marine Special Ops Teams as well as provide valuable training and experience.
“This exercise has evolved over time to encompass a broad range of military operations,” said a Marine special opes commander. “It stresses interoperability with partner nation forces, other services, and government agencies and departments.”
Going forward, symposium attendees explored how the MARSOF 2030 vision links to a focus on an operating concept identified as Strategic Shaping and Reconnaissance, or SSR.
The concept — the focus for future iterations of the Cognitive Raider Symposium — includes a wide array of skills and equipment to provide shaping and influence effects to be achieved through a hybrid approach utilizing selected special operations core activities and programs applied through intelligence operations, direct and indirect actions, and persistent development of ally and partner relations.
If you’re puzzled by all those big fancy military terms, so am I.
Essentially, I think it means “a thinking man’s” Marine Raiders.
“Semper Fi” with an added sting.
Yes, they may still take that beachhead and hold it, but they just might have some surprises up their sleeve.
Sources: National Defense, Business Insider, Marine Corps.
9. Nuclear Terrorism: A Plausible and Pestilent Threat
I look forward to the nuclear experts commenting on this article.
NUCLEAR TERRORISM
A Plausible and Pestilent Threat
Two decades after the attacks of 9/11, preventing and countering terrorism continues to be one of the main challenges faced by policy makers. The threat of nuclear terrorism, however, is often dismissed as unlikely or not imminent. The mere circumstance that it seems unthinkable does not mean it should not be actively prevented. In fact, there are both examples of threats and feasible pathways to conduct nuclear terrorism. Therefore, countering it can no longer be met with ignorance or negligence.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that reshaped how Western governments thought about security and terrorism. Measured by the number of causalities, they remain among the most severe terrorist events that have ever occurred. Yet, that day, the threshold to another, even more devastating form of attack was alarmingly low: According to the 9/11 Commission Report, although the perpetrators chose more feasible and symbolic targets in the end, they had considered targeting the Indian Point Energy Center – a nuclear power plant 40 kilometers north of Manhattan – to create a massive release of radioactivity.
While the human and environmental consequences of a terrorist attack with nuclear or radiological materials are barely imaginable, the threat of nuclear terrorism is real. Several terrorist groups – including Al Qaeda, North Caucasian terrorists, and the so-called Islamic State (IS) – have demonstrated their nuclear ambitions as a means of communicating with and targeting their “enemies.” Al Qaeda generally targets “the West”; North Caucasian terrorists have chosen Russia as a less abstract enemy. As a more recent example, the perpetrators of the 2015 attacks in Paris gathered information about nuclear research facilities in Belgium and Germany. Generally, European countries that engage in international counterterrorism campaigns and operate nuclear power or research programs, such as France and Germany, present high-risk targets for potential nuclear terrorist attacks.
Assessing the Feasibility of Nuclear Terrorism
There is more than one way to cause terror with radioactivity. Nuclear terrorism can take at least four forms: detonation of an intact nuclear weapon, an improvised nuclear device, a radiation-dispersal device or “dirty bomb”; or the release of radioactivity.
The first is relatively unlikely as terrorist groups face tremendous obstacles to obtaining a functioning nuclear weapon. Even with the possibility of so-called insider threats – terrorists receiving help from a sympathetic employee – trespassing into a relevant military facility to acquire an operational nuclear weapon is extremely difficult. Stealing components to construct a functioning nuclear weapon is also improbable as that requires professional expertise and equipment. Therefore, and because civilian facilities and their staff present easier targets, the other three categories are more feasible forms of nuclear terrorism.
Creating the second option, an improvised nuclear device, requires fissile material. To obtain it, perpetrators would need to either break into protected facilities – such as nuclear power plants and related facilities that handle, store, or transport nuclear fuel – or acquire it through other criminal means such as black-market networks. While fabricating a device that employs fissile material to cause a nuclear explosion is technically sophisticated, it is feasible.
The term “dirty bomb” in the third option refers to a device whose primary purpose is to spread dangerous levels of radiation. Combining conventional explosives with radioactive material, dirty bombs are relatively unsophisticated when compared to those used for targeted nuclear explosions. Consequently, there is a broader range of potential sources for the radiological materials used in them: Some medical and research facilities handle materials with lower levels of radioactivity; nuclear power generation creates materials of intermediate and high levels of radioactivity. If a dirty bomb used high-level radioactive waste, for example, it could disperse high levels of radiation. Perpetrators could acquire such radiological materials through physical breach and theft, insider support, or black-market networks.
The fourth form of nuclear terrorism aims to disperse radioactivity even more indiscriminately – with no explosive devices required. Instead of opting for detonation, perpetrators could attack a facility handling nuclear or radiological materials in order to disrupt, sabotage, or manipulate its operations, resulting in the release of radioactivity.
Impairing International Prevention Efforts Nationally
According to nuclear policy experts, knowledge on how to build explosive devices or release radioactivity is relatively freely available. Therefore, the only effective prevention strategy involves making it harder for terrorists and malicious actors to obtain nuclear and radiological materials. That, in turn, means strengthening nuclear security, which concerns the protection of fissile and other radioactive materials from illicit access – including the protection of nuclear facilities from illicit breach.
The level of nuclear security worldwide matters to both international and European security. Given the transnational dimensions of crime, terrorism, and other illicit networks, nuclear security incidents and a lack of high standards can pose direct or indirect threats to Europe. Although nuclear security is one of the key principles in the international nuclear policy field, the relevant recommendations and regulations are patchwork and largely non-binding. The upcoming review conference of the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material (CPPNM) and the CPPNM Amendment in late March 2022 presents an opportunity to fill the gaps and strengthen the global nuclear security regime.
Responsibility for implementing international and national regulatory frameworks for nuclear security lies entirely with the respective state actors. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) does not have the mandate to offer more than advice. The IAEA joins other actors, including those from civil society, in bringing national, public, and private stakeholders together to share best practices and cooperate on research. Ultimately, though, the degree to which states invest in legal and technical implementation, as well as research and improvements, is primarily a question of political will.
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The international architecture to counter and prevent terrorism is likewise partially impaired by states such as Russia, which hold crucial seats and misuse counterterrorism structures to pursue their own geostrategic and geopolitical agendas. Expert groups and special committees in international institutions do concentrate on the threat of nuclear terrorism. But if the participating states do not agree on the basic principles of counterterrorism – for example, on strengthening civil society participation as a crucial pillar – one can only surmise the attention they give to a seemingly distant and controversial threat like nuclear terrorism.
Taking the Threat of Nuclear Terrorism Seriously for a Safer Future
Yet, the threat of nuclear terrorism is neither distant nor theoretical in the current security landscape that is defined by intensifying geopolitical conflicts, regional instabilities, and diminishing nuclear security efforts worldwide. Simultaneously, interest in and the development of nuclear and radiological technologies for energy production or other applications is increasing around the globe and could potentially heighten the feasibility and, thereby, the threat of nuclear terrorism.
And nuclear terrorism is already a transnational threat. High-level radioactive material stolen from one place can end up in a dirty bomb in another. Even those states that do not engage in international counterterrorism campaigns or possess radioactive materials can be targeted or affected by nuclear terrorism. To make things worse, the devastating consequences of nuclear terrorism and spreading radioactivity do not “respect” national borders. Accordingly, national and international efforts and investments into nuclear security are needed – regardless of respective national interests, for example those concerned with nuclear technologies or other geopolitical conflicts.
Awareness of the threat of nuclear terrorism and its plausibility is only a first – albeit much-needed – step in the right direction to prevent it. Terrorist groups and other malevolent actors should not be given an opportunity to bring their capabilities and resolve to fruition.
10. The Pentagon’s Army of Nerds: Why the military needs Silicon Valley, now more than ever
Excerpts:
Technology companies have the expertise that makes technology applications possible and reliable. But it is also important for technology companies to have the autonomy to decide how their relationship with the national-security community will proceed, and to develop clear principles for how what they build can be used. If they have an objection to specific applications of AI that they feel pressured to develop, it is worth voicing those objections, in a way that other companies and policy makers alike can weigh.
“Now more than ever, we need to bring technologists into a place where they can help shape and craft the policies and the direction of not only how these technologies will be built, but how they will be used,” Lynch said. “If the conversation is only happening in the Department of Defense, that is not a long-term strategy. If the conversation is only being had in a coffee shop in San Francisco with a bunch of people who have never spent a moment thinking about the mission of defense, those people are failing just as much. If you don’t bring those two sides together, there is one thing I am 100 percent certain of, and that is that nobody will be happy with the outcome. If you don’t have that discussion, and if you don’t participate in that discussion, we end up in complete and total failure.”
The Pentagon’s Army of Nerds
Why the military needs Silicon Valley, now more than ever
SEPTEMBER 12, 2021
The Pentagon is not the most inviting place for first-time visitors, and it was no different for Chris Lynch. When he rode the escalator out of the Pentagon metro station, Lynch was greeted by guard dogs and security personnel wearing body armor and toting machine guns. He lost cell service upon entering the building and was forced to run through more than a half mile of hallways to make his meeting in the office of the secretary of defense. He showed up late and out of breath, his hoodie and gym shoes soaked with sweat.
It was a surreal experience, Lynch told me, and it marked the beginning of “the most delightful detour of my entire life.”
Lynch had just completed a 45-day posting in the United States Digital Service, an organization formed in 2014 to fill what many officials viewed as a crucial gap in the government’s technology expertise. That year, the White House had launched HealthCare.gov to help enroll Americans in government health insurance, but it had been a technological debacle that almost derailed the Affordable Care Act. The website was so buggy that on its first day, only six people were able to sign up through the site. In response, and to prevent similar flops from occurring in the future, the White House created the USDS. The group is meant to act as a SWAT team of technologists who can come in whenever a government system needs fixing.
Lynch’s first project at the USDS involved building software to let the Pentagon and the Veterans Affairs Department more reliably share veterans’ medical records. The problem his team sought to solve was simple but had severe consequences—the VA could accept the records only in PDF format, but sometimes the Pentagon would send them as JPEGs. As a result, doctors sometimes mistreated patients and overlooked underlying conditions merely because they had incomplete records. “If you have cancer,” Lynch said, “it could be literally the difference between life or death.”
Lynch and his team set about building file-conversion software that would reformat such misfiled records, and the effort was a success—so much so that when Defense Secretary Ash Carter wanted to spin up his own military-focused branch of the USDS, the Defense Digital Service, he tapped Lynch to lead it.
The Defense Digital Service was the reason Lynch found himself at the Pentagon that day in the summer of 2015. Before moving to Washington, D.C., Lynch knew nothing about the military. The closest he had come to the national-security world was watching Saving Private Ryan and Full Metal Jacket. He does not fit the stereotype of the military man, either. Lynch is 5-foot-9, slim, and in his own words, “very, very average for a human being.” He smiles often and boasts a pair of geometric tattoos, a Fibonacci spiral on his left biceps and a spiro-graph down the length of his right arm. His dog—a miniature pinscher named after the film producer Dino De Laurentiis—is afraid of motorcycles. When I went on a walk with Lynch and Dino in March 2020, Chris wore a black fitted T-shirt, white Ray-Bans, and gym shoes with tie-dye laces. The look spoke more to his background in the Seattle start-up scene than his current role as one of the top technologists in U.S. national security.
Lynch also came in with the skepticism of the government that many in the tech industry share. There is a perception that “you can’t do anything in government because bureaucrats don’t care about technologists … it’s a waste of your talents,” Lynch told me. When a friend of Lynch’s shared that he was going into government through the U.S. Digital Service, Lynch told him flat out, “That is the dumbest fucking idea I’ve ever heard.”
Chris Lynch ran the Defense Digital Service before founding Rebellion Defense, one of a new breed of government contractors. (Courtesy of Christopher Michel).
It wasn’t until Todd Park, the White House’s chief technology officer, personally flew to Seattle to recruit Lynch that he was persuaded to join the organization. And after spending a month and a half building file-conversion software for military doctors, Lynch had a change of heart.
“I realized that having a mission is meaningful work,” he said. “Just because a bunch of nerds did the most seemingly simple project, somebody would not potentially die.”
But it also showed just how far the American military had fallen behind the rest of the world in its technology expertise. The same year Facebook released software that could describe images to the blind, the Pentagon needed help converting JPEG files to PDFs. If a small team of programmers could make this much of a difference in 45 days, Lynch thought, something was very wrong.
Lynch was right. Traditionally, a military’s power has been defined by its strength in air, on land, and on sea. For decades, the United States had raised a military that could outmatch any other global fighting force in each of these domains. However, over the past 20 years, we have seen a paradigm shift in the domain of national security. No longer is a country’s military strength defined solely by the size of its fleets, the speed of its vehicles, or the destructive power of its munitions, as it was in the 20th century and every era before. In the 21st century, militaries must also project their strength in a new domain: cyberspace.
Today’s militaries can deal a physical blow with a digital signal. With the right lines of code, you can disable a nuclear reactor, destroy a munitions factory, or knock out power to an entire country. You can infiltrate the computer networks of your enemy, surveil their every move, and stop them from launching attacks on you. The digital warrior never needs to look up from their keyboard.
Cyberweapons are not the only digital technology that is transforming national security. Artificial intelligence is also revolutionizing how militaries do battle and spy agencies conduct espionage. Using AI systems, governments can spot individuals in a crowd, locate facilities to attack, detect intrusions on a computer network, predict civil uprisings, and identify potentially violent extremists.
Although the United States can best any other country in the traditional physical domains, it faces a much more level playing field in cyberspace. The Pentagon has been slower to adopt national-security technologies like artificial intelligence than certain other countries, including China. One major reason is that the leading developers of these new digital tools are not members of the traditional military-industrial complex—companies such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, and Northrop Grumman. Instead, they are in the technology industry.
This is a significant difference. Traditional military contractors have worked for decades in lockstep with the Pentagon. The connection was not just financial; it was political and cultural. Many executives and board members of companies within the traditional military-industrial complex had previous jobs in the military or CIA. “The mission continues” is a typical sign-off in emails between contractors from .com email addresses to their counterparts with .mil and .gov email addresses. But the leaders in the tech industry were people like Chris Lynch, skeptical of government bloat and bureaucracy, whose hackles were raised by the ways that the same technology they were making could be turned toward destructive ends.
In 2015, Lynch became the director of the Defense Digital Service, and in 2019, he left to found his own company, Rebellion Defense. His company is one of several to emerge in recent years to provide countries with the technologies needed to protect national security in the 21st century. This industry includes a handful of big-name players such as Microsoft and Palantir, as well as countless smaller companies that few people outside the national-security world would know, like Rebellion Defense. This new breed of government contractor is changing the way the U.S. and its allies conduct foreign policy around the globe, and they are upending the traditional relationship between sovereign nations and their defense businesses.
Lynch’s overall aim with Rebellion Defense is to provide the U.S. military with much-needed digital tools while also helping young technologists reach the same epiphany about public service that he did. His strategy is encapsulated in the name of the company.
While leading the Defense Digital Service, Lynch fashioned the organization into something of a haven for Star Wars geeks. Team members gave projects names like “Boba,” “AT-AT,” and “Jedi.” The group had an office in Augusta, Georgia, called Tatooine. Lynch’s going-away party from Defense Digital Service was attended by a group of Pentagon staff dressed up as Star Wars characters. During our walk, he showed me a photo from the party that included him, his dad, Chewbacca, General Paul Selva (who was at the time the nation’s second-highest-ranking uniformed officer), and a fully robotic R2-D2.
But what really set the tone for the group was the sign outside Lynch’s office, which read Defense Digital Service, Rebel Alliance. According to Lynch, the plaque was intended to signify to the team that they were the “rebels” bringing change to the bureaucracy that surrounded them. There is a certain irony in naming a defense-technology company after the destroyers of the Death Star, and Lynch himself is quick to acknowledge it. Still, it has helped bridge the gap between Washington and Silicon Valley, he said. “Who doesn’t want to be part of the Rebel Alliance?”
Lynch also acknowledged that in today’s world, the line between good and evil is much less cut-and-dry than it was a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Even compared with the Cold War era, the landscape that Rebellion and its counterparts navigate today contains many shades of gray. Arms controls are not nearly as clear-cut for digital technology as they are for old-fashioned ballistics, so modern defense companies have much more that they need to figure out on their own.
Throughout the Cold War, the United States created a broad regulatory framework to limit the export of weapons and national-security technologies to foreign countries. For example, the International Traffic in Arms Regulations prohibits non–U.S. citizens from accessing technical data or physical materials for certain defense-related technologies. Other measures—such as the Arms Export Control Act and Export Administration Regulations—restrict the export and use of national technologies to foreign countries. The goal behind such standards is clear: to prevent national-security technologies developed by the United States from winding up in enemy hands. The government can customize its arms-control agreements to fit its relationships with different countries. The regulations for the United Kingdom differ from those with Turkey, which differ from those with Iran. During the Cold War, these laws cemented the lines between militaries of liberal democracies and communist states, and in the post–Cold War period, they have (mostly) prevented traditional weapons from falling into the hands of terrorists and adversarial nations.
But the arms-control regime of the 20th century largely does not apply to the national-security technologies of the 21st century. One of the main reasons is that digital tools like AI are more difficult to categorize than traditional defense technologies.
Fighter jets and warships are used for one thing: the projection and exercise of military power. But artificial intelligence is a general-purpose technology with both national-security applications and completely benign commercial uses. A computer-vision algorithm can be trained to spot enemy combatants on a battlefield, but it can also be used to tag friends in social-media posts and power self-driving cars. AI takes on the values and intentions of its human masters. The same AI-enabled facial-recognition technology that can identify known terrorism suspects can just as easily profile and track members of an ethnic minority. The technology is also imperfect. The accuracy of artificial intelligence depends on the quality of the data used to train it, and how the software reaches a particular conclusion is not always clear. Although you can tolerate a certain number of errors in a system that provides online shopping recommendations, the consequences of an error on the battlefield can be lethal.
These are core concerns of Rebellion Defense’s work. It makes traditional IT and cybersecurity tools, but its bread and butter is AI. This includes software that can read text, classify images, analyze video, and process the enormous amount of information flooding into the Pentagon from every corner of the globe.
However, when it comes to arms control, the “dual use” nature of artificial-intelligence software creates a conundrum for U.S. policy makers. Subject all AI systems to the same regulations that apply to nuclear warheads, and you stifle innovation and hamper the American tech industry. But leave them completely unregulated, and you could enable terrorists and enemy militaries to get their hands on powerful weapons of war, made in the USA.
To effectively regulate the sale of AI and other emerging technologies, policy makers must first agree on which narrow applications pose a national-security threat if they wind up in enemy hands. But today, the definition of “security-sensitive” technology varies widely based on whom you ask, according to MIT’s R. David Edelman, a former White House senior official who led policy making at the intersection of technology and national security.
“That question about what’s really sensitive is a fundamental debate that is taking place … at the government level, which is not always informed by technology; at the industry level, which is certainly not always informed by government; and at the researcher level, which is sometimes not informed by either of them,” Edelman told me. “You’ve seen little blips where these communities get out of sync.” The blips cited by Edelman can become blowups, as has been the case with AI technologies including drones, autonomous vehicles, and facial recognition.
Edelman continued, “If you were to go ask researchers what constitutes an AI technology, they would give you exactly as many answers as the number of researchers you asked, possibly plus five or six. The reality is that [the label] AI means everything and nothing.”
The confusion is compounded by the lack of technical expertise in the halls of government. Today, the 30 students in my son’s high-school class have far more technological savvy than all but a handful of the 535 members of the U.S. Congress. Informed policy decisions require informed policy makers, and most of the government is still interpreting the national-security challenges of the 21st century through the lens of 20th-century technology.
In January 2020, the U.S. Commerce Department issued its first export-control regulation on an artificial-intelligence system. The rule limits the sale of AI software that can automatically analyze geospatial imagery, ostensibly collected by military drones and satellites. Although this is a significant step, the government did not exactly break new ground. Geospatial technology was already highly regulated. Companies could not sell imagery above a certain resolution, and both drones and satellites are themselves subject to International Traffic in Arms Regulations and other export controls. Policy makers simply amended an old framework to accommodate a new technology.
However, there are many applications of AI for which there is no precedent in the existing arms-control framework. AI systems can help authoritarian regimes consolidate power within their own borders. Although facial-recognition and surveillance technology may not fit the traditional description of national-security technologies, they are no less threatening to free and open societies. Yet Western companies have exported these technologies for years, Edelman said, and “I think most members of the American public and certainly a lot of public policy makers wish they hadn’t.” Beyond this gray area, there are algorithms that can be even more consequential. Today, companies are developing systems that can identify enemy combatants on the battlefield, power semiautonomous weapons, and coordinate drone swarms.
Erik Carter.
Edelman explained that certain types of AI can be more easily weaponized than others and that “those are the sorts of implementations that it is entirely appropriate to regulate, and frankly, government’s a little bit behind the ball in identifying them.”
U.S. military leaders have begun to stress the importance of AI ethics, and in 2020, the Pentagon signed on to a set of five broad principles for the ethical application of the technology. However, these principles are vague, and contain platitudes such as that “personnel will exercise appropriate levels of judgment and care” when developing and using AI.
Today’s geopolitical landscape is not as binary as it was during the Cold War, and countries cannot be classified as either “allies of democracy” or “allies of communism.” Political and economic models fall on a spectrum from open to closed, with lots of gradations in between, and national alliances are not as fixed as they once were.
Chris Lynch and other members of the cyber-military-industrial complex are navigating this new world largely on their own. This puts them in a position where they need to formulate clear principles for the types of technology they are willing to develop, and what goes too far. This is a lot to ask of a company, and it cannot handle those tasks wholly on its own. The challenge is exacerbated when the technology executive is young and may be a great engineer but does not have much experience in the world of geopolitics. There is a difference between intelligence and wisdom, and I have seen too many mistakes made by technology executives who are very intelligent but not yet wise. I recall an example from my own time in government when a mobile app developed in California became a favorite tool of the Assad regime, which used it to identify political enemies. In another case, a well-intentioned mobile video program unwittingly gave conflict-zone intelligence to militias in the east Congo.
At the same time, when the technology sector has so much more expertise than the traditional defense sector, it is worth harnessing that expertise and ensuring that technology companies shoulder the responsibility for what they are making. A system that allows companies to weigh in and even lead allows more informed innovation and implementation—and provides more checks and balances than a system in which the government decides and drives everything.
For Rebellion Defense founder Chris Lynch, that sense of responsibility is a motivating force. “If you have strong opinions about national defense and security and the utilization of all these technologies that are ultimately going to change the world over the next 50 years, you have an obligation to show up at the table,” Lynch said. “You are providing the things that people need, and you’re helping craft the strategy, the policy, the implementation, and the execution of how those technologies will be used.”
At Rebellion Defense, employees meet once a month to discuss the types of projects and customers the company would refuse to take on. For example, Lynch said, the company has already determined that it will not build domestic surveillance technology, nor will it aid U.S. officials in rounding up undocumented immigrants. Lynch was reluctant to disclose Rebellion’s other lines in the sand, though he said the company has turned down multiple offers based on feedback from employees.
In a world of self-regulation, these decisions and the processes that produce those decisions will vary widely from company to company.
In September 2017, Google began working with the Pentagon on a broad artificial-intelligence initiative called “Project Maven.” Google’s particular project sought to build AI software that could sift through the troves of footage collected each day by military drones. The system would save intelligence officers from the tedious task of analyzing the footage frame by frame. (This is the sort of geospatial-analysis software that would fall under the government’s January 2020 export controls.)
Within months, Google employees began protesting the project, which they argued would help the Pentagon better target its drone strikes. In April 2018, some 3,100 employees signed a letter demanding that Google stop participating “in the business of war.” Soon after, Google declined to renew its contract with the Pentagon.
Chris Lynch disagreed with the decision by Google’s management to give in to employee pressure. As he saw it, Google forfeited an opportunity to directly influence how the Pentagon uses artificial intelligence. Instead, the contract went to Anduril Industries, a defense-technology company co-founded by Palmer Luckey, a controversial libertarian in his 20s who helped invent the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset.
Anduril was contracted to build an AI-powered sensor network that would provide troops with a virtual view of the front lines. The sensors would be mounted on drones, fixed towers, and troops themselves, and used to identify potential targets and direct autonomous military vehicles into combat. The software helps troops in the field make real-time operational decisions. It might not directly decide who lives and who dies, but it will significantly influence how troops arrive at that answer.
Anduril went on to build a similar AI-sensor network to help U.S. Customs and Border Protection to coordinate operations along the U.S.-Mexico border. When asked in 2018 whether there were any Pentagon projects Anduril would turn down, Luckey punted, saying, “That’s not really totally up to us. We are working with the U.S. government.”
That said, Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf told me there was one thing the company would not do: It would not build systems that execute “lethal force” without a human in the loop. In other words, Anduril will not create robots that can kill on their own accord.
“This is a military decision-making responsibility—it can’t be outsourced to a machine,” he said. “Everything else is one of these questions where I think it’s mostly a matter of the controls on how the technology is employed. There are very few other technology areas that I think have those sort of bright lines.”
Schimpf thinks it is the responsibility of military leaders to set those controls, and he trusts them to make the right call in the end. “Any of these [applications] that are too out-there, they eventually get shut down, they eventually get stopped. The U.S. system may take a while, but it is quite robust to keeping a lot of these overreaches in check.” That all three companies ended up resolving on different principles in the development of AI might seem worrying—but that is also part of the debate that needs to happen with such new technologies. There are no clear-cut ethical answers at the start.
Realistically, the Pentagon does not have much choice in whether to develop its artificial-intelligence capabilities. China and Russia are investing heavily in military AI, and the national security of the U.S. and its allies will suffer if it does not do the same. Russian President Vladimir Putin recently remarked to a group of students, “Artificial intelligence is the future not only of Russia but of all mankind,” and added that “whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.”
For companies that build facial-recognition and other technologies that can empower authoritarian regimes, that also means being responsible about their customer base. Claiming ignorance is no longer a valid justification, said R. David Edelman, the former White House senior official. “It is no longer an acceptable excuse for a tech CEO to say, ‘Well, I didn’t know what use they were going to put it to.’ The sort of near-criminal negligence that we heard from tech CEOs of even three years ago is simply no longer plausible in today’s era.”
Technology companies have the expertise that makes technology applications possible and reliable. But it is also important for technology companies to have the autonomy to decide how their relationship with the national-security community will proceed, and to develop clear principles for how what they build can be used. If they have an objection to specific applications of AI that they feel pressured to develop, it is worth voicing those objections, in a way that other companies and policy makers alike can weigh.
“Now more than ever, we need to bring technologists into a place where they can help shape and craft the policies and the direction of not only how these technologies will be built, but how they will be used,” Lynch said. “If the conversation is only happening in the Department of Defense, that is not a long-term strategy. If the conversation is only being had in a coffee shop in San Francisco with a bunch of people who have never spent a moment thinking about the mission of defense, those people are failing just as much. If you don’t bring those two sides together, there is one thing I am 100 percent certain of, and that is that nobody will be happy with the outcome. If you don’t have that discussion, and if you don’t participate in that discussion, we end up in complete and total failure.”
11. Disinformation Wars: Retired Indian Army Officer Becomes Butt Of Jokes After Sharing Photo From A Movie Set As ‘Truth’ Of Pakistan Army in Panjshir
"There but for the grace of God go I." I have been duped before but fortunately I did not receive this much ridicule.
"Intelligent people learn from their mistakes and wise people learn from the mistakes of others." I am trying to be intelligent and wise.
Disinformation Wars: Retired Indian Army Officer Becomes Butt Of Jokes After Sharing Photo From A Movie Set As ‘Truth’ Of Pakistan Army in Panjshir
A retired Indian army officer got caught in the storm of disinformation after he claimed that a photo, showing Pakistani actors dressed as soldiers, was a picture of Pakistani military men martyred in Afghanistan’s Panjshir valley
Since the fall of the Pansjhir province to the Taliban last week, the Indian media seems to have launched a disinformation campaign on Pakistan’s alleged military support to the new regime in Afghanistan and main victims of this campaign seem to be the Indian audience.
It appears that a retired Indian army officer got caught in this storm of disinformation after he claimed that a photo, showing Pakistani actors dressed as soldiers, was a picture of Pakistani military men martyred in Afghanistan’s Panjshir valley.
Earlier, Maj Gen GD Bakshi, another former Indian army officer, posted a tweet claiming that the Pakistan Army had “suffered very heavy casualties” in Panjshir. Bakhsi claimed that dozens of Pakistani soldiers were killed and many others were wounded while supporting the Taliban in Panjshir.
He added that a certain “Maj Gen Adil Rehmani has come back to organise discreet funerals in [the] dead of night.”
The Indian media has often picked Bakshi’s tweets even though his account is not verified by Twitter. An article by Indian publication The Print last year referred to him as the “shrillest warmonger in the media.”
Responding to his latest claims about Pakistani soldiers, a Pakistani account shared a picture from the set of the 2017 Pakistani movie Yalghaar to poke fun at the Indian ex-officer, and wrote: “My class fellow from school days Maj Aijaj 2nd from left and Capt Jufar 1st from left embraced martyrdom in Panjshir. They were buried yesterday in Peshawar. ISPR is trying to hide these casualties. They fought bravely and should be honored as such. This is injustice by Pak Army.”
The two uniformed men he was referring to are renowned Pakistani actors Shaan Shahid and Umair Jaswal. Neither is a member of the armed forces.
My class fellow from school days Maj Aijaj 2nd from left and Capt Jufar 1st from left embraced martyrdom in Panjshir. They were buried yesterday in Peshawar. ISPR is trying to hide these casualties. They fought bravely and should be honoured as such. This is injustice by Pak Army pic.twitter.com/sOx16xpAol
Unaware of this and apparently without having done any background check, former Indian Major General Harsha Kakar shared a screenshot of this tweet and wrote “the truth on #PanjshirValley and Pak casualties.”
This is the truth on #PanjshirValley and Pak casualties. As expected @YusufMoeed lied and Pak disowned its dead. This shameful nation with a shameful leadership refuses to honour its dead. Instead buries them at night to avoid publicity. Nothing can be more degrading for soldiers pic.twitter.com/OlANAWJ0a5
Many Pakistanis were amused by the Indian ex-officer’s tweets. Actor Shaan, who was in the photograph, replied to Bakshi’s original tweet with posters from Yalghaar. “Hello from the other side,” he wrote.
Jaswal was also greatly amused. He responded to Bakshi with a picture of himself in commando gear and wrote: “Hello dear from Pakistan.”
This prompted other Pakistani social media users to join in the discussion; they also shared images of Pakistani actors in uniforms to add to the joke.
Last week, while the Taliban fighters were advancing into Panjshir, Indian media outlets ran unverified claims of Pakistan Air Force planes hovering over Panjshir valley and dropping bombs on resistance fighters in support of the Taliban.
At least two Indian TV channels showed footage claiming Pakistani drones were attacking anti-Taliban fighters in Panjshir. But a fact-check website Boom clarified that the viral clip was taken from a longer video recording of the video game Arma-3.
Some Twitter users also shared a picture of a fighter jet claiming it showed a PAF plane that was shot down by resistance fighters in Panjshir. But fact checkers showed that the picture is actually from 2018 in the United States.
12. Read former President George W. Bush's speech at the Flight 93 memorial service
"This is the nation we know."
Read former President George W. Bush's speech at the Flight 93 memorial service
CNN · by Updated 12:49 PM ET, Sat September 11, 2021
Watch CNN's "Shine A Light," a commercial-free 9/11 20th anniversary tribute, hosted by Jake Tapper and featuring musical performances by Maroon 5, H.E.R., Brad Paisley, and Common on Saturday, September 11 at 8 p.m. ET.
(CNN)Thank you very much. Laura and I are honored to be with you. Madam Vice President, Vice President Cheney. Governor Wolf, Secretary Haaland, and distinguished guests:
Twenty years ago, we all found -- in different ways, in different places, but all at the same moment -- that our lives would be changed forever. The world was loud with carnage and sirens, and then quiet with missing voices that would never be heard again. These lives remain precious to our country, and infinitely precious to many of you. Today we remember your loss, we share your sorrow, and we honor the men and women you have loved so long and so well.
For those too young to recall that clear September day, it is hard to describe the mix of feelings we experienced. There was horror at the scale -- there was horror at the scale of destruction, and awe at the bravery and kindness that rose to meet it. There was shock at the audacity -- audacity of evil -- and gratitude for the heroism and decency that opposed it. In the sacrifice of the first responders, in the mutual aid of strangers, in the solidarity of grief and grace, the actions of an enemy revealed the spirit of a people. And we were proud of our wounded nation.
In these memories, the passengers and crew of Flight 93 must always have an honored place. Here the intended targets became the instruments of rescue. And many who are now alive owe a vast, unconscious debt to the defiance displayed in the skies above this field.
It would be a mistake to idealize the experience of those terrible events. All that many people could initially see was the brute randomness of death. All that many could feel was unearned suffering. All that many could hear was God's terrible silence. There are many who still struggle with a lonely pain that cuts deep within.
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In those fateful hours, we learned other lessons as well. We saw that Americans were vulnerable, but not fragile -- that they possess a core of strength that survives the worst that life can bring. We learned that bravery is more common than we imagined, emerging with sudden splendor in the face of death. We vividly felt how every hour with our loved ones was a temporary and holy gift. And we found that even the longest days end.
Many of us have tried to make spiritual sense of these events. There is no simple explanation for the mix of providence and human will that sets the direction of our lives. But comfort can come from a different sort of knowledge. After wandering long and lost in the dark, many have found they were actually walking, step by step, toward grace.
Watch George W. Bush's full 9/11 20th anniversary memorial speech 09:07
As a nation, our adjustments have been profound. Many Americans struggled to understand why an enemy would hate us with such zeal. The security measures incorporated into our lives are both sources of comfort and reminders of our vulnerability. And we have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders, but from violence that gathers within. There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.
After 9/11, millions of brave Americans stepped forward and volunteered to serve in the Armed Forces. The military measures taken over the last 20 years to pursue dangers at their source have led to debate. But one thing is certain: We owe an assurance to all who have fought our nation's most recent battles. Let me speak directly to veterans and people in uniform: The cause you pursued at the call of duty is the noblest America has to offer. You have shielded your fellow citizens from danger. You have defended the beliefs of your country and advanced the rights of the downtrodden. You have been the face of hope and mercy in dark places. You have been a force for good in the world. Nothing that has followed -- nothing -- can tarnish your honor or diminish your accomplishments. To you, and to the honored dead, our country is forever grateful.
In the weeks and months following the 9/11 attacks, I was proud to lead an amazing, resilient, united people. When it comes to the unity of America, those days seem distant from our own. A malign force seems at work in our common life that turns every disagreement into an argument, and every argument into a clash of cultures. So much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear, and resentment. That leaves us worried about our nation and our future together.
I come without explanations or solutions. I can only tell you what I have seen.
On America's day of trial and grief, I saw millions of people instinctively grab for a neighbor's hand and rally to the cause of one another. That is the America I know.
At a time when religious bigotry might have flowed freely, I saw Americans reject prejudice and embrace people of Muslim faith. That is the nation I know.
At a time when nativism could have stirred hatred and violence against people perceived as outsiders, I saw Americans reaffirm their welcome to immigrants and refugees. That is the nation I know.
At a time when some viewed the rising generation as individualistic and decadent, I saw young people embrace an ethic of service and rise to selfless action. That is the nation I know.
This is not mere nostalgia; it is the truest version of ourselves. It is what we have been -- and what we can be again.
Twenty years ago, terrorists chose a random group of Americans, on a routine flight, to be collateral damage in a spectacular act of terror. The 33 passengers and 7 crew of Flight 93 could have been any group of citizens selected by fate. In a sense, they stood in for us all.
The terrorists soon discovered that a random group of Americans is an exceptional group of people. Facing an impossible circumstance, they comforted their loved ones by phone, braced each other for action, and defeated the designs of evil.
These Americans were brave, strong, and united in ways that shocked the terrorists -- but should not surprise any of us. This is the nation we know. And whenever we need hope and inspiration, we can look to the skies and remember.
God bless.
CNN · by Updated 12:49 PM ET, Sat September 11, 2021
13. How Equipment Left In Afghanistan Will Expose US Secrets
Wow.
Excerpts:
To understand how big a potential loss this is for the United States, look beyond the headlines foretelling a Taliban air force. Look instead to the bespoke and relatively primitive pieces of command, control, and communication equipment sitting around in vehicles the United States left on tarmacs and on airfields. These purpose-built items aren’t nearly as invincible to penetration as even your own phone.
“The only reason we aren’t seeing more attacks is because of a veil of secrecy around these systems,” said Josh Lospinoso, CEO of cybersecurity company Shift5. “Once you pierce that veil of secrecy…it massively accelerates the timeline for being able to build cyber weapons” to attack them.
Lospinoso spent ten years in the Army conducting penetration tests against radios, small computers, and other IT gear commonly deployed in Afghanistan.
Take the radios and communications equipment aboard the Afghan Air Force C-130 transport plane captured by the Taliban. The Pentagon has assured that the equipment was disabled. But if any of it remains on the plane an adversary with time and will could pick those apart one by one.
How Equipment Left In Afghanistan Will Expose US Secrets
Even rendered inoperable, equipment now in the hands of the Taliban will yield troves of information about how the U.S. builds weapons and uses them.
The ultimate winner of two decades of war in Afghanistan is likely China. The aircraft and armored vehicles left behind when U.S. forces withdrew will give China—through their eager partners, the Taliban—a broad window into how the U.S. military builds and uses some of its most important tools of war. Expect the Chinese military to use this windfall to create—and export to client states—a new generation of weapons and tactics tailored to U.S. vulnerabilities, said several experts who spent years building, acquiring, and testing some of the equipment that the Taliban now controls.
To understand how big a potential loss this is for the United States, look beyond the headlines foretelling a Taliban air force. Look instead to the bespoke and relatively primitive pieces of command, control, and communication equipment sitting around in vehicles the United States left on tarmacs and on airfields. These purpose-built items aren’t nearly as invincible to penetration as even your own phone.
“The only reason we aren’t seeing more attacks is because of a veil of secrecy around these systems,” said Josh Lospinoso, CEO of cybersecurity company Shift5. “Once you pierce that veil of secrecy…it massively accelerates the timeline for being able to build cyber weapons” to attack them.
Lospinoso spent ten years in the Army conducting penetration tests against radios, small computers, and other IT gear commonly deployed in Afghanistan.
Take the radios and communications equipment aboard the Afghan Air Force C-130 transport plane captured by the Taliban. The Pentagon has assured that the equipment was disabled. But if any of it remains on the plane an adversary with time and will could pick those apart one by one.
“You now have some or all of the electronic components on that system and it's a representative laboratory; it’s a playground for building, testing, and iterating on cyber-attacks where maybe the adversary had a really hard time” until he obtained actual copies of the gear, Lospinoso said. “It is the playground for them to develop attacks against similar items.”
Georgianna Shea, who spent five years at MITRE helping the Pentagon research and test new technologies, said the loss of key equipment to the Taliban “exposes everything we do in the U.S., DOD: our plans of action, how we configure things, how we protect things. It allows them unlimited time and access to go through and find vulnerabilities that we may not be aware of.”
“It’s not just a Humvee. It’s not just a vehicle that gets you from point A to point B. It’s a Humvee that’s full of radios, technologies, crypto systems, things we don’t want our adversaries getting a hold of,” said Shea, now chief technologist at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’s Transformative Innovation Lab.
Of particular concern are the electronic countermeasures gear, or ECMs, used to detect improvised explosive devices.
“Imagine the research and development effort that went into develop those ECM devices that were designed to counter IEDs,” said Peter Christensen, a former director of the U.S. Army’s National Cyber Range. “Now, our adversaries have them. They’re going to have the software and the hardware that goes with that system. But also develop capabilities to defeat or mitigate the effectiveness of those ECM devices.”
Gear that has been “demilitarized” or “rendered inoperable,” as U.S. officials described the planes and vehicles left behind, can still reveal secrets, Shea said.
“In some cases, this equipment was fielded with the assumption we would have gates and guards to protect it. When it was developed, no one thought the Chinese would have it in their cyber lab, dissecting it, pulling it apart.”
Once an attacker has physical control of a device, little can stop her from discovering its vulnerabilities—and there are always vulnerabilities, Shea said.
Under current acquisition practices, most new defense gear is not tested for vulnerabilities until late in the design process. Testers often receive far too little time to test comprehensively. Sometimes they get just two weeks, she said, and yet “they always find something. Always.”
“Regardless of the previous testing that’s been done on compliance, they always find something: always… “They’re very backlogged and don’t have an unending amount of resources,” she said. So you have to schedule development with these testers. There’s not enough resources to test it to the depth and breadth that it should be to understand all of the vulnerabilities.”
Plans to fix newly discovered vulnerabilities “were often inconsistent or inadequate,” Christensen said.
Lospinoso, who spent years conducting such tests for the Army, still performs penetration testing for the U.S. military as a contractor. He says a smart hacker can usually find useful vulnerabilities in hardware “within hours.”
When such a network attack disables a radio or a truck, troops are generally not trained to do anything about it. They may not even realize that they have been attacked, and may chalk up problems to age or maintenance problems.
“Every time we run an attack against a system, knocked out a subcomponent or have some really devastating effect that could cause loss of an asset—every time, the operator in the cockpit says, ‘We do not have operating procedures for what you just did,’” Lospinoso said.
Little of this is new. In 2017, the Government Accountability Office highlighted many of these concerns in a blistering report.
More than just insight into network vulnerabilities, the abandoned vehicles and gear will help China understand how U.S. forces work with partner militaries, said N. MacDonnell Ulsch, the CEO and chief analyst of Phylax Analytics.
“If you were to take all of the technology that was currently deployed in Afghanistan by the [United States] and you made an assessment of that, you have a point in time and a point in place reference of what the status quo is; what technology is being used, how much it costs, what’s it capable of doing and you realize it’s going to a developing nation,” Ulsch said.
China can use the knowledge to develop their weapons and tactics, but also to give their arms-export sales team an edge, he said. The Taliban have highlighted their nascent partnership with China as perhaps their most important foreign diplomatic effort. China, meanwhile, has already begun giving millions in aid to the new regime.
Whatever vulnerabilities China does discover will likely imperil U.S. troops for years to come, Lospinoso said.
“There is a zero percent chance we will go back and re-engineer” all of the various systems with serious cyber vulnerabilities, he said. “We are stuck with billions and billions in weapon systems that have fundamental flaws.”
14. Thoughts on 11 September: A Special Operations Perspective
Thoughts on 11 September: A Special Operations Perspective • The Havok Journal
by Maj Gen (Ret.) Buck Elton and LTC Mike Kelvington
September 11th, 2001 was the day our generation realized our world had forever changed. At 0846 New York Time, American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles impacted the 93rd floor of the World Trade Center North Tower at 500 miles per hour, instantly killing the 87 passengers and crew and hundreds of people working on the upper floors. We all watched one of our nation’s iconic buildings burn and wondered how a commercial airliner could accidentally fly into this enormous landmark on a clear, blue-sky morning. Millions of Americans were virtually paralyzed 17 minutes later as it became shockingly obvious we were under attack when we watched the second aircraft, United Airlines Flight 175, collide into the upper South Tower. We were attacked again 34 minutes later when American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the western side of the Pentagon, killing the 59 passengers and 125 military and civilian personnel working near the Fifth Corridor. Reports of more hijacked airliners headed for the nation’s capital forced the hasty evacuation of the White House and Capitol buildings.
Most of us clearly recall the events on that morning, the airliners crashing into the massive buildings, the hellish fireballs and flying debris, the exposed and crumbled walls of the Pentagon, the clouds of concrete dust exploding down the streets of New York, and the dreadful images and sounds of hundreds of our fellow citizens making the impossible choice to escape the suffocating smoke and unbearable flames by jumping and falling to their death. 2,977 men and women, including 343 firefighters, and 72 policemen, EMTs, and security guards were murdered by 19 Islamic extremists. For our younger generations, this has now become an essential history lesson all must understand to process our 21st-century world. On this 20th anniversary, we honor and remember the innocent people who were murdered without understanding the sheer hatred, determination, and ruthlessness of the evil men responsible for planning and executing this attack. We also remember the heroes of that day, both uniformed and civilian, who rushed into the fire, chaos, and uncertainty, saving lives while risking and many times sacrificing their own.
We remember Todd Beamer, who immortalized the fighting spirit of United 93 passengers refusing to be victims, by saying “Are you guys ready? Let’s roll.” Armed only with the knowledge of the hijacker’s true intent, these heroes engaged the enemy to forcibly take back control of the aircraft and stop this attack on innocent people. The hijackers chose a cowardly end, deliberately crashing the plane into a Pennsylvania field. These were the first Americans engaged in hand-to-hand combat against this enemy. We remember Navy SEAL Commander Craig Powell, who fearlessly rescued people from the devastated Pentagon by literally holding up the burning ceiling with his six-foot five-inch towering frame. We remember the 24-year-old equities trader Welles Crowther who repeatedly carried people down the smoke-filled stairwell in the WTC South Tower until he was eventually crushed by the collapsing structure. And we remember our military and interagency heroes who later responded to this attack by fearlessly taking the fight to the enemy in their Afghanistan safe haven. We must remember and honor the sacrifice of those killed: the innocent victims, the first responders, and our combat forces. We owe them our memories and reflection.
We must also understand our enemy and the intentions of those who want to destroy us. In 1996, al-Qaeda declared jihad against Americans, and in 1998 they issued a fatwa for all Muslims to kill Americans and their allies, civilians, and military. Al-Qaeda attacked the world trade center in 1993, our Embassies in Africa in 1998, our Naval ship in 1999, and finally the symbols of our financial and military strength on Sep 11, 2001. We did not understand al-Qaeda and we did not prepare to defend ourselves against their attacks. Even after 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, al-Qaeda continued to conduct horrific terrorist attacks in London, Madrid, Indonesia, Yemen, Somalia, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Pakistan, as well as two attempted attacks on airliners bound for the United States from Europe.
For the past 20 years, we disrupted and almost destroyed and other terrorist organizations by killing tens of thousands in their networks. Terrorist leaders including Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Anwar al-Awlaki, and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of the Islamic State were killed after massive efforts to find, fix and finish them. We built international coalitions, targeted facilitators and enablers, seized finances, limited travel, denied safe havens, intercepted and disrupted communications and complicated logistics. We countered the extremist ideology in the war of ideas, promoted tolerance, the rule of law, equality amongst women, and encouraged political and economic openness in Muslim nations. We put our lives on the line to build, finance, and enlighten Islamic governments and to protect and educate their citizens to counter this threat.
Since 9/11, more than 6,800 Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, and government civilians were killed and almost 53,000 wounded while defending our nation in Iraq and Afghanistan to protect our nation, shield their citizens, and help build modern, just, and representative governments. Dozens of coalition allies contributed combat and support forces to the Global War on Terror and lost almost 1,500 of them. We also lost tens of thousands of host nation partner security forces serving shoulder to shoulder with our teams, fighting a common enemy.
Despite our sacrifices and our efforts, this hateful extremist ideology that motivated al-Qaeda to attack us in 2001 still exists today. Evil men are plotting murderous attacks now, in 2021, from under-governed nations, on the internet, and around the world. They inspire followers by beheading journalists and Christian children. They fill mass graves by executing non-believers. They force compliance and instill fear by raping women and selling families as slaves. And they are planning devastating attacks with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons against major western population centers.
In 2005, we learned of al-Qaeda’s twenty-year, seven-phase strategy planned from 2000 to 2020. They completed the first four phases on their planned timeline. The first, “Awakening”, the desire to provoke the U.S. into declaring war on the Islamic world and awakening Muslims was completed shortly after the 9/11 attacks. The second phase, “Opening Eyes” developed the base into a networked organization. The third phase, “Arising and Standing Up”, provoked western attacks in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan. The fourth phase, to Collapse Hated Arab Governments, saw success in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, and Egypt. Recently, they watched their close ally, the Taliban, topple the government of Afghanistan. Many experts say ISIS came close to accomplishing the fifth phase, establishing the Islamic State, about seven years ago in 2014.
Jihadists then believed the final two phases, Total Confrontation or all-out war between the Islamic Army and the unbelievers and Definitive Victory were attainable by 2020. Thanks to our combined efforts with allies in the region, we destroyed the physical caliphate in Iraq and Syria, delaying the Total Confrontation phase. Al-Qaeda has been degraded, and ISIS destroyed, but successes against these terrorist organizations are temporary if we lack proper consolidation of these gains tied to a holistic strategy. With the recent departure of western military forces and diplomats from Afghanistan, the rapid collapse of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, and the establishment of the Taliban-controlled “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” al-Qaeda will most likely advance its strategy into the fifth phase again. We should be concerned about jihadists and extremists moving to Afghanistan from Iran, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, and Northern Africa to join the Islamic Army and attempting to achieve Definitive Victory, just as they described in their strategy.
This enduring conflict between those who value freedom, tolerance, and liberty and those who desire oppression, compliance, and destruction will not be over anytime soon. This fight has come full circle in Afghanistan, with the likelihood of it becoming a safe haven for terrorists who wish to attack the west again. The Taliban and al-Qaeda ties have always been strong, and the Taliban will most likely not comply with the terms of the agreement to bring peace to Afghanistan. In exchange for agreeing to remove all foreign forces from Afghanistan, our negotiators wanted the Taliban to agree to prevent al-Qaeda and others from attacking the United States and its allies from Afghanistan soil.
The Taliban refused to specifically name al-Qaeda but agreed to prevent the use of the soil of Afghanistan by any group or individual against the security of the United States and its allies. However, their actions recently indicate they have no intention of holding up to their end of the bargain. Osama bin Laden’s former, head of security, Amin al Haq, triumphantly returned home to eastern Afghanistan in mid to late August. Just this week, the Taliban also named Siraj Haqqani to be their new Minister of the Interior, a terrorist on the FBI’s most wanted list that arguably has more American blood on his hands than almost anyone else alive on the planet. We may be hopeful, but hope isn’t a strategy, and we must be prepared for their failure to comply with the terms of our agreement.
Over the past 20 years, we have built a strong, internationally integrated, technologically advanced, and extremely effective counterterrorism capability. But our enemies have also improved their networks and capabilities. Our complete loss of robust intelligence infrastructure in Afghanistan, which gave us deep insights into al-Qaeda and ISIS-K, will put us at a disadvantage. Al-Qaeda and affiliate use of encrypted applications and secure communications methods have drastically improved. The Taliban now control the entire opium and meth drug trade within the country, rather than relying on smuggling, extortion, and taxes. They have a massive stock of conventional weapons abandoned by Afghan National Defense Security Forces. The U.S. Treasury, for now, has blocked the Taliban from accessing billions of dollars held by the Afghanistan central bank but located in U.S. institutions. Ironically, the authority to freeze these reserves in 2021 was authorized by executive order shortly after the 9/11 attacks. The Taliban is better resourced, more organized, more motivated, and more dangerous than they have ever been. Al-Qaeda and other belligerents will undoubtedly attempt to exploit this opportunity.
This enduring and existential conflict will require our nation and our allies to be resolute by remembering how we were attacked, why we were attacked, and how we responded to the attacks. Although National Defense Strategy directs shifting resources and focus from counterterrorism to near-peer threats and strategic competition, our enemy’s resolve has remained steadfast. We may have lost interest in counterterrorism, politically exhausted by the high cost of blood and treasure, but al-Qaeda and other like-minded networks who attacked us on 9/11 and over the past two decades have lost neither the will nor the focus. They are more emboldened, and they will attack again.
The brave men and women of our military, our intelligence agencies, and our diplomats will continue to serve on the front lines of this conflict. They will continue to sacrifice by deploying far from loved ones, by precisely and reliably executing their missions, and by directly targeting and killing those who threaten our families. Our nation needs us to continue this fight to dismantle and ultimately destroy al-Qaeda and their affiliates, and any other belligerent who tries to threaten our freedom in the future.
Periodically, we all should take the time to remember why we serve, why we sacrifice, and why we fight. This twentieth anniversary of 9/11 gives us the opportunity to remember those who were killed, to honor our heroes who responded and sacrificed, to understand who attacked us and why, to study and improve weaknesses in our defenses, and to fully commit to defending our nation against those who wish us harm. Take the time to remember, honor, and understand so it doesn’t happen again.
About the Authors:
Maj Gen Buck Elton retired in October 2020 after 31 years of service. He flew MC-130H, MC-130E and MQ-1s in AFSOC, commanded the 7th SOS at RAF Mildenhall, UK, the 1st SOG at Hurlburt Field, the 27th SOW at Cannon AFB, and the Special Operations Joint Task Force in Afghanistan. He also served as the Deputy Commanding General of the Joint Special Operations Command, the Deputy Director for Special Operations and Counterterrorism on the Joint Staff, and the J3 of the U.S. Special Operations Command. He currently works as a Strategic Consultant for Avantus Federal. Buck and his wife, Karen, live in Medford, Oregon.
LTC Mike Kelvington is an Infantry officer in the U.S. Army with experience in special operations, counterterrorism, and counterinsurgency operations over fourteen deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, including with the 75th Ranger Regiment. He’s been awarded the Bronze Star Medal with Valor and two Purple Hearts for wounds sustained in combat. He is currently the Professor of Military Science for The Ohio State University Army ROTC as well as a Non-Resident Fellow of the Modern War Institute. Mike and his wife, Meg, now live in Columbus, Ohio with their 4 children.
The opinions expressed above are their own and do not represent the official position of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.
15. The Lie of Nation Building
Quite a critique in this conclusion:
The Americans running the show there were never convinced by the performance. They just could not stir themselves to do much about it. They watched the notion of a democratic republic they had conjured for a suffering people slip away bit by bit until it collapsed catastrophically. They settled into a strange pattern of dazed powerlessness. Successive American administrations, Republican and Democratic, became spectators at a drama in which the follies and dangers of their own domestic polity were played out in exotic foreign costumes. They failed to see that this story was also about themselves.
The Lie of Nation Building
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Reviewed:
by Craig Whitlock
Simon and Schuster, 346 pp., $30.00
by Carter Malkasian
Oxford University Press, 561 pp., $34.95
The great question of America’s twenty-year war in Afghanistan was not whether the Afghans were fit for democracy. It was whether democratic values were strong enough in the US to be projected onto a traumatized society seven thousand miles away. Those values include the accountability of the people in power, the consistent and universal application of human rights, a clear understanding of what policies are trying to achieve, the prevention of corrupt financial influence over political decisions, and the fundamental truthfulness of public utterances. In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the American republic was fighting, and often losing, a domestic battle to uphold those values for its own citizens.
It is grimly unsurprising that the US could not infuse them into a very foreign country. While the political system of the US was approaching the crisis that culminated in the presidency of Donald Trump and the Capitol riots, its most enduring external adventure could not avoid moving in tandem toward the grim climax of the flight from Kabul. Afghanistan became a dark mirror held up to the travails of American democracy. It reflected back, sometimes in exaggerated forms, the weaknesses of the homeland’s political culture. Critics of the war argued that the US could not create a polity in its own image on the far side of the world. The tragic truth is that in many ways it did exactly that.
The easiest way to cope with the reality that the longest war in US history (longer than World War I, World War II, and Vietnam put together) has ended in defeat and an ignominious and deadly evacuation is to fall back on the belief that the Afghans were never capable of creating or sustaining a modern nation-state. The US, after all, spent $143 billion on “nation building” in Afghanistan. Adjusted for inflation, that is more than it spent on the Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe after World War II. Why did it not achieve similar results? The problem, it is comforting to conclude, must lie with the Afghans themselves: too backward, too poor, too inextricably entangled in medieval tribalism and obscurantist religion.
But even five years after the US-led invasion overthrew the Taliban regime in 2001, it was clear to those Americans who were paying close attention that the dichotomy between a regressive and recalcitrant people on the one hand and a progressive Western project of liberation and development on the other was entirely false. Sarah Chayes, who went to Afghanistan as an NPR correspondent covering the invasion and then stayed to live among Afghans in Kandahar, wrote in her brilliant 2006 book The Punishment of Virtue:
I have often been asked whether we in the West have the right to “impose democracy” on people who “just might not want it,” or might not be “ready for it.” I think, concerning Afghanistan at least, this question is exactly backward…. I have found that Afghans know precisely what democracy is—even if they might not be able to define the term. And they are crying out for it. They want from their government what most Americans and Europeans want from theirs: roads they can drive on, schools for their kids, doctors with certified qualifications…, a minimum of public accountability, and security…. And they want to participate in some real way in the fashioning of their nation’s destiny….
But Afghans were getting precious little of any of that…. American policy in Afghanistan was not imposing or even encouraging democracy, as the US government claimed it was. Instead, it was standing in the way of democracy. It was institutionalizing violence.
From the very beginning, the problem with the US involvement in Afghanistan lay essentially in the deficits in American democracy. A well-functioning republic makes decisions—especially those as serious as starting a war—by an open process of rational deliberation. It asks the obvious questions: What are we doing? Why are we doing it? What is the human and financial cost? What are the benefits? How and when does it end? The original sin of the Afghan war—one that would never be expiated—was the failure of American political institutions to meet these most basic standards of scrutiny.
The congressional mandate for the war was an “authorization for use of military force” that allowed the president to attack any entity “he determines” to have some connection with the September 11 attacks on the US. Just one member of Congress, Barbara Lee, voted against it. Her plea—“Some of us must say, ‘Let’s step back for a moment…and think through the implications of our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control”—was dismissed as verging on the treasonous. The aim of the US intervention in Afghanistan was, as President George W. Bush put it in October 2001, “to bring al-Qaeda to justice.” Whether this necessitated the defeat and banishment of the Taliban regime that had allowed Osama bin Laden’s network to plan the attacks on Afghan soil, and what government might take its place, were questions never even asked.
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How could a project to create an Afghan democracy be founded on such a patent failure of democratic process? Without scrutiny, there could be no clarity of purpose. As Craig Whitlock puts it in The Afghanistan Papers—a gripping chronicle based on his own tenacious gathering for The Washington Post of hundreds of accounts given privately by American participants to the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) and on other official testimonies—after the initial phase the war was “waged against people who had nothing to do with 9/11.”
US troops entered Afghanistan on October 19, 2001, in alliance with the indigenous warlords whose chaotic misrule had been ended by the triumph of the Taliban in the late 1990s. By the time the Taliban was overthrown in December 2001, there were only 2,500 Americans serving in all of Afghanistan. When the last US soldiers left Kabul on August 30, 2021, 775,000 of them had served there and 2,300 had been killed. Throughout this time, Congress allowed the mission to become unmoored from its stated purpose of rooting out Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda and to drift into waters that the administrations of neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama even managed to chart.
There was almost no understanding that the US was inaugurating what would turn out to be the second half of a civil war that has now lasted for more than forty years. On September 11, 2001, Richard Armitage, then the deputy secretary of state, by his own account cut off General Mahmood Ahmed, the head of the Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Intelligence, who was trying to explain to him who the Taliban were: “I said, ‘No, the history begins today.’”
This was the US version of Year Zero. There were two blank slates: Afghanistan and the official American mind. The SIGAR testimonies are remarkably frank in their admissions of near-total ignorance. “We did not know what we were doing,” says Richard Boucher, the Bush administration’s chief diplomat for the region, as assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia with responsibility for Afghanistan policy between 2006 and 2009. “We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking,” says Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, the White House “war czar” in both the Bush and Obama administrations.
To grasp the depth of the institutional ignorance from which this undertaking sprang, it is necessary merely to recall that not much more than a year before the US-led invasion of 2001, President Bill Clinton had decided that it would be a good idea to encourage Russia, whose occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989 had turned it into a failed state riven by civil wars and drowned in blood, to launch a bombing campaign against the Taliban. As Roy Gutman wrote in How We Missed the Story (2008), a study of US Afghan policy in the years immediately before the invasion, “for the United States to endorse another Russian-led armed intervention barely a decade after the debacle that caused such suffering begged credulity.” But in a mindset in which “history begins today,” even the very recent Afghan past could be wiped from official American consciousness.
When the US took control of the country, the literal terms of engagement—the language used to define the entire project—were fuzzy and shifting. Was it a war? The answer would seem to be obvious, but the word itself was slippery. Some of the NATO armies involved in the mission were authorized only to take part in peacekeeping operations, so they were anxious that the idea of war be avoided. (It was not until 2010 that the German chancellor Angela Merkel admitted that her country’s troops were indeed at war in Afghanistan.) Whitlock quotes a senior NATO commander: “We checked with the legal team and they agree it’s not a war.” To bridge the semantic divide, the US commander of Afghan operations Stanley McChrystal added a line in an official report to describe the conflict as “not a war in the conventional sense.”
Was it then “nation building”? No and yes. Ryan Crocker, who briefly served as the US ambassador in Kabul after the defeat of the Taliban, explained to SIGAR that the mindset of Donald Rumsfeld and the other neoconservatives in the Bush administration was that “our job is about killing bad guys, so…we’re not going to get involved in nation-building.” As early as June 2002, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Joe Biden (who has recently claimed that nation building “never made any sense to me” even though he consistently supported it) reported that an aide to Bush had asked him, after a meeting with the president, “You are not going to mention nation-building, are you?”
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Biden insisted at the time that the administration’s reluctance to use the phrase was “an incredible hang-up.” Yet in 2009 Barack Obama, whom Biden was then serving as vice-president, stressed that he opposed a drawn-out nation-building project while announcing the surge of US troop numbers to 100,000. And six months after that, when the then US head of Central Command David Petraeus was asked by the House Armed Services Committee whether the US was engaged in nation building, he replied, “We are indeed.” He added that “I’m just not going to evade [the question] and play rhetorical games.” This was an implicit acknowledgment that rhetorical games had become almost compulsory in official parlance. The US was spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a project that dared not speak its name.
This linguistic obfuscation attained the zenith of sinister absurdity in 2015 when Obama changed the name of the Afghanistan mission from Operation Enduring Freedom (the Bush administration’s term) to Operation Freedom’s Sentinel. Behind this shift lay what Whitlock calls “among the most egregious deceptions and lies that US leaders spread during two decades of warfare”—the illusion that American combat operations were ending when in fact they were carrying on pretty much as before.
The degradation of language hollowed out one of the most important words in the lexicon of the Western mission in Afghanistan: progress. The nation-building exercise was cast above all as progressive, and in certain respects—the rights of women and girls, rising life expectancy, improved levels of education, the flourishing of independent media and urban civil society—it was. But “progress” was also the word that, after the first flush of triumph, replaced the idea of military victory. The resumed war against the Taliban, which quickly regrouped in Pakistan before infiltrating rural Afghanistan again, was never being won; it was always “making good progress.” In 2003 Rumsfeld boasted that “signs of progress are everywhere.” Three years later Major General Robert Durbin, the commander in charge of training the Afghan security forces, told reporters that they “continue to show great progress each day.”
In 2007 Bush reassured Americans that “over the past five years, we’ve made real progress.” John Walters, the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under Bush, boasted of the “enormous progress” being made in the elimination of opium poppy cultivation. “We’ve made a lot of progress,” said Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in 2011. And so ever onward in a progress that was going nowhere except around in a circle. There was in this a contagion of meaninglessness: when the same word was used to disguise military failure as to hail real and tangible improvements in the lives of many Afghans, even justified claims about the latter could come to seem doubtful.
But progress was America’s party line, and it was rigorously enforced. Just one of the fifteen US generals who commanded in Afghanistan (that number itself a mark of the inconsistency of leadership) crossed that line. In May 2009, at a press conference in Kabul, General David McKiernan said, truthfully, that the war was “stalemated” in the south and a “very tough fight” in the east. Hours later, Defense Secretary Robert Gates told him that he was being fired. McKiernan had earlier remarked dryly to one of his regional commanders that “we may have done too good a job explaining how bad it is over here.” His mistake, according to Whitlock, was that “unlike other commanding officers, he did not deceive the public with specious language.” His sacking made it clear to other US officials, both military and civilian, that mastery of speciousness was part of the job description. The mobilization of “alternative facts” that came to be associated with the era of Trump was already well underway in US statecraft, and it was heavily deployed in Afghanistan.
The misadventure may have begun in ignorance, but it morphed into something more complex—a deliberate unknowing. It is commonplace to characterize US policy in Afghanistan as self-deception. But whoever was being deceived, it was not those who were running the war. The Afghanistan Papers shows that, certainly after the first two years, very few of those at the top of the military and diplomatic establishments were deluded. They knew well that the Taliban was not defeated; that the Afghan national and local governments, police, and army were deeply corrupt; that military gains were fragile and often temporary; and that vast amounts of American money were being wasted and stolen. They knew that the Afghan state they were supporting was never any closer to being able to sustain itself independently.
But for two decades they all carried on regardless. In his SIGAR interview Crocker, who returned to Kabul as US ambassador in 2011, said of a vastly expensive dam project outside Kandahar that “I made the decision to go ahead with it, but I was sure it was never going to work.” The statement could stand for the entire US project in Afghanistan. Cognitive dissonance was not pathology—it was policy.
Afghanistan was not, of course, a blank slate. Nor, however, was it a timeless world of ancient and unchanging tribal allegiances. As a polity, it had in fact undergone radical and traumatic change since the Communist coup of 1978, the invasion by the Soviets, and the hideous civil war among the mujahideen that defeated them. Under all that pressure, traditional structures of authority had largely been replaced by the mandate of the gun.
In his rueful and melancholy The American War in Afghanistan: A History, Carter Malkasian, who worked closely with General Joseph Dunsford when he was US commander in Afghanistan and then, from 2015 to 2019, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, points out that the new tribalism was not at all the same as the old version. The tribal and religious leaders who came to power during and after the war against the Soviets were “not the old nobility or revered scholars,” but rather
commanders who had gained their position through military prowess, guns, and money…. Within the religious leaders, younger scholars trained in Pakistani madrasas or militarized in the war, filled the role of older scholars who had fled or died.
Chayes, writing in 2006, eloquently evoked the results of this process:
All the invisible bonds that weave a country together into a single polity had been dissolved. All the renunciations of personal sovereignty in exchange for the comforts and protections of a joint destiny had been retracted. Anyone claiming the allegiance of a few armed men felt entitled to strike out for himself. Scores of petty commanders fell to preying on their countrymen. This version of [Afghanistan] was a metastasized cancer; it had grown beyond the capacity of traditional tribal structures to contain it.
The recreation of a functioning state out of this implosion of nationhood was thus not primarily a matter of rooting out ancient and backward traditions. What it demanded, rather, was a confrontation with this new system of gangster fiefdoms. The Taliban, ironically, did this job very well. It created a state—albeit a viciously repressive and misogynistic one—that could take power back from the predatory warlords. It established a powerful notion of a “joint destiny” based on resistance to foreign invaders, the violent repression of internal ethnic minorities (especially the Hazara people, who allegedly descend from the Mongols), and an extremist version of Islam.
If the US was to succeed in creating for Afghans a similarly powerful idea of shared national enterprise, it had to do what the Taliban had done, except with democratic values as its binding force. It had to show that it was at least as capable as the Taliban had been at fending off the predators. That it utterly failed to do. This was, in a sense, a failure of faith. The Taliban believes passionately in its own worldview. The US did not really believe in the democratic virtues it espoused. It did not tell the truth. It was not committed to preventing corruption. Instead of breaking the power of the warlords, it restored them to power.
As Chayes pointed out, just five years after the US-led invasion there was already a contrast in the minds of ordinary Afghans between life as it had been under the Taliban and as it then was under the new regime. The Taliban was seen, undoubtedly, as more oppressive, but also more predictable. Its rules were outlandish and stultifying—everything from playing chess to cheering at sporting events to flying kites was banned—but everyone knew what they were. Under the American-backed government, by contrast, everything seemed arbitrary. A governor might be a decent public servant, or a thief and a thug.
An army checkpoint might be a genuine security operation, or it might be merely a shakedown in which anyone who wished to pass had to pay a bribe. In 2010 the United Nations estimated that Afghans were paying $2.5 billion every year in bribes—almost a quarter of the country’s official GDP—to soldiers and militia, to judges and government officials, even to doctors, nurses, and teachers. For Afghans, arbitrary government—by definition the opposite of republican democracy—was not a theoretical evil. It was a daily experience of random rapacity.
The US enabled this sense of the unpredictability of power by giving wildly different answers to the question at the center of the whole modernizing project. That question was wrapped up in another slippery word: culture. Was it or was it not okay for powerful Afghan men to own the bodies of others on the grounds that this was “their culture”? In relation to the rights of women, the Western powers decreed that it was not. The moral case for the occupation rested largely on the insistence that organized misogyny could not be tolerated just because it was deeply rooted in indigenous cultural practice.
The Taliban’s assault on women’s autonomy had been an all-out war. In her 2002 memoir The Sewing Circles of Herat, Christina Lamb has a long list of the laws that erased women as public beings, including: any woman showing her ankles must be whipped; no woman is allowed outside the home unless accompanied by a close male relative; women must be fully covered by the burqa; windows must be painted over so women cannot be seen from the outside; any woman with painted nails should have her fingers cut off. There was a “ban on laughing in public. No stranger should hear a woman’s voice.” Girls were prevented from attending even elementary school. Women were removed from all jobs outside the home.
To free women from this brutal gender apartheid—and to prevent the return to power of those who had imposed it—was undoubtedly a noble aim. But it always stood on shaky ground. Firstly, it was, as Malkasian acknowledges, a “moral cause for Americans” but “not an explicit strategic goal.” This goes to the heart of the difficulty: the moral argument for an open-ended American presence was never the same as the strategic purpose of the mission. Indeed, it is well to remember that, under the Clinton presidency, the US was prepared to recognize and work with the Taliban, vicious misogyny and all. When the Taliban took Kabul in 1996, the US drew up seventeen “talking points” for negotiations. As Gutman laconically noted, “The talking points omitted any mention of the sudden loss of women’s rights.” The establishment and defense of those rights were collateral effects of a counterterrorism operation. They were never defined as the primary goal of long-term American engagement.
Equally shaky was the American commitment to the principle underlying its insistence on equal dignity for Afghan women. That principle had to be instituted against the traditions of the rural Pashtun heartlands: men could not do what they pleased to women merely because that was part of an established way of life. But organized pedophilia was also a traditional practice, and the Americans tolerated and enabled it.
It is striking that in his history of the war, Malkasian mentions this issue in passing as one of the reasons why many Afghans welcomed Taliban rule, but returns to it as a post-2001 problem only in a single footnote, explaining local hostility to Dad Mohammed Khan, the warlord who was appointed chief of police in the town of Sangin: “The police chief and his men were also rumored to kidnap little boys out of the bazaar.” In fact, as The Afghanistan Papers confirms, the kidnapping and rape of boys by senior Afghan army and police officers was not a rumor. It was well known to American officials as an institutionalized practice. Whitlock summarizes the evidence from the official records:
Afghan military officers, warlords and other power brokers proclaimed their status by keeping tea boys or other adolescent male servants as sex slaves. US troops referred to the practice as “man-love Thursday” because Afghan pederasts would force boys to dress up or dance on Thursday evenings before the start of the Afghan weekend. Although American soldiers were sickened by the abuse, their commanders instructed them to look the other way because they didn’t want to alienate allies in the fight against the Taliban.
In 2015 Joseph Goldstein reported in The New York Times that US soldiers were instructed not to intervene in the kidnapping and rape of boys, even when the crimes were being committed on their own military bases. He interviewed a former Special Forces captain, Dan Quinn, who beat up a US-backed militia commander who had a boy chained to his bed. Quinn was relieved of his own command and sent home from Afghanistan. In response to the story, an army spokesman blithely confirmed that “there would be no express requirement that US military personnel in Afghanistan report” child sexual abuse by allied forces.
Apart from being morally abhorrent, the facilitation of these crimes exposed deep fault lines. One was the idea that it was best not to “alienate allies in the fight against the Taliban.” It suggests that these allies were not seen as the ordinary people of Afghanistan, the families whose children were kidnapped or the villagers who lived under this terror. As early as 2002, Jon Lee Anderson, in The Lion’s Grave, perhaps the most widely read American book about the US-led invasion, wrote that “one of the first things the Taliban did—a popular move—was to punish mujahideen commanders who were accused of rape or pederasty.” If this was known to be a popular move by the Taliban, did it not occur to American policymakers that taking the opposite approach might be unpopular and indeed alienating?
More broadly, the arbitrariness of the decision to disregard child rape undermined the principle of the universality of human rights on which US support for female equality was based. One US officer is recorded in The Afghanistan Papers explaining American tolerance of child abuse by saying, “You have to accept what they do and don’t interject your personal feelings about their culture.” But if this was so, why object to the Taliban’s confining women to their homes or banning music or destroying ancient images? The US, which has never managed to consistently apply human rights and the rule of law to its own citizens, could not do so for Afghans either.
The overlap between the failures of America’s own democracy and of its mission in Afghanistan is nowhere clearer than in the creation of a kleptocracy. One of the most basic functions of a democratic system is ensuring accountability for the use of public money. The Americans knew when they entered Afghanistan that corruption was already widespread. Their main response was to feed it with billions of taxpayers’ dollars. This was not naive or innocent. It too was policy. It was based on an article of faith for conservative Americans: trickle-down economics. If, in the US, you believed that it did not matter if some people became filthy rich by dubious means because some of their wealth would leak out to ordinary folk, why not apply that to Afghanistan?
In his SIGAR interview, Boucher said that it was better to funnel the vast sums of US aid to Afghan power brokers who “would probably take 20 percent for personal use” than to give it to “a bunch of expensive American experts.” He said, “I want it to disappear in Afghanistan, rather than in the Beltway. Probably in the end it is going to make sure that more of the money gets to some villager, maybe through five layers of corrupt officials, but still gets to some villager.”
Particularly striking here is Boucher’s assumption that genteel corruption is as endemic in Washington as the more flagrant kind is in Afghanistan. A democracy that cannot create accountability for the use of public money at home could not do so in a faraway society. This was also, for the entire project of building an Afghan democracy, ruinous. The villager who gets the last drops of aid after most of it has been filtered through five layers of corrupt officials knows all too well that he or she is not an equal citizen.
What was corrupted in all of this was the sense of an ending. “What,” as Major Joseph Claburn rather plaintively asked in 2011, “does it look like when it comes time for us to leave?” Because the ends being pursued were so ill-defined, the idea of an ending could not be fixed either. Twice—in 2003 and in 2014—the US officially declared an “end to combat operations” in Afghanistan. On neither occasion was this real or truthful or reflected on the ground. Finality, for the US, was something to be declared, not to be accomplished. Those who do not know what the last stage of their mission is will be outlasted, as America has been by the Taliban. It is an iron law that what cannot be concluded will be abandoned. That has been Afghanistan’s bitter fate.
Biden’s fate is to be the one who gave up the pretense of endless progress. It fell to the mournful man of compassion and empathy to deliver a heartless coup de grace. And even that parting shot was botched. It is a bleak commentary on the whole twenty-year episode that the US, on its departure, was almost as much in the dark as it had been on arrival, and no less concerned to keep up appearances. On July 23 Biden told his Afghan counterpart Ashraf Ghani that the critical question was the “perception” that “things are not going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban.” He suggested that “there is a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.”
Less than a month before Ghani fled from Kabul, the US could not break the long-established habit of valuing a positive story more than the realities revealed by its own intelligence reports. This attitude extended even to the plight of Afghans whose lives were known to be in danger because they had worked with the Americans. The White House delayed for months the process of getting them to safety because it wanted to maintain the fiction that Afghan government forces would hold out against the Taliban. The great cloud of unknowing enveloped even the obvious truth that the circular progression of the war was about to close in on itself, forming a great hollow 0.
What is also unknown is how much this failure of American democracy will recoil on the politics of the homeland. Defeat in war has been, for some nations, the beginning of radical political change. It prompts reflection on the nature of the political order that has failed so badly. But the problem with the defeat in Afghanistan may be that, for America, it does not matter enough to make such self-examination imperative. Malkasian concludes that “the bigger story is probably how little the war featured in national life. Failure or success, Afghanistan was unimportant. Less than 0.3 percent of the population, including diplomats and contractors, served there.”
This is not a national trauma like Vietnam. There will be no great Maya Lin memorial to the Americans who gave their lives, still less to the 200,000 or so Afghans and Pakistanis who died. (Whitlock writes that the US started to count Afghan civilian deaths only in 2005, but then abandoned the database “for unspecified reasons.”) The shame and terror of the botched withdrawal has already become mere fodder for the tribal warfare of American politics, with Donald Trump recasting his own abject surrender to the Taliban—when he went over the heads of the supposedly sovereign Afghan government to negotiate an unhindered withdrawal—as Biden’s fault, and moreover as the “dumbest move ever made in US history.”
When it has served its partisan purpose, the collective impulse will be to write the whole thing off as an embarrassment. Since the US was so successful at not paying attention when the war was actually going on, it is hard to be optimistic about its capacity to do so in the long, dark aftermath.
Yet it should reflect, if only for its own sake. The war was not just a projection of American power into a troubled part of Asia. It was a test of the nature of that power. It showed that if war is the continuation of politics by other means, what was continued over twenty years in Afghanistan was a dangerous American nonchalance about the difficulty and fragility of democracy. The prevailing assumption over those years was that a stable democracy could be created and sustained without a commitment to telling the truth, without controlling the distorting effects of money, without standing up to the avidity of the rich, without proper mechanisms for open scrutiny and rational deliberation, without a commitment to moral standards that apply as much to our allies as to our enemies. Democracy without those values and systems has no substance. It will fall—and not just in Afghanistan.
The Americans running the show there were never convinced by the performance. They just could not stir themselves to do much about it. They watched the notion of a democratic republic they had conjured for a suffering people slip away bit by bit until it collapsed catastrophically. They settled into a strange pattern of dazed powerlessness. Successive American administrations, Republican and Democratic, became spectators at a drama in which the follies and dangers of their own domestic polity were played out in exotic foreign costumes. They failed to see that this story was also about themselves.
—September 8, 2021
Fintan O’Toole is a columnist for The Irish Times and the Leonard L. Milberg Professor of Irish Letters at Princeton. His new book, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland, will be published in the US in March. (October 2021)
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
