Quotes of the Day:
"War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collision in critical moments that man measures man. On its own scale, on the virtues it loves, it endures no counterfeit, but shakes the whole society until every atom falls into the place its specific gravity assigns it. It presently finds the value of good sense and of foresight, and Ulysses takes rank next to Achilles. The leaders, picked men of a courage and vigor tried and augmented in fifty battles, are emulous to distinguish themselves above each other by new merits, as clemency, hospitality, splendor of living."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Thus it has come about that our theoretical and critical literature, instead of giving plain, straightforward arguments in which the author at least always knows what he is saying andthe reader what he is reading, is crammed with jargon, ending at obscure crossroads where the author loses its readers. Sometimes these books are even worse: they are just hollow shells. The author himself no longer knows just what he is thinking and soothes himself with obscure ideas which would not satisfy him if expressed in plain speech.”
- Major General Carl von Clausewitz
“America doesn’t lose wars, it loses interest.” - Hussain Haqqani, former Pakistani Ambassador to the U.S.
1. Inside Biden’s Afghanistan Withdrawal Plan: Warnings, Doubts but Little Change
2. U.S. Embassy contractors, visa applicants among Afghans left behind after one of the largest airlifts in history
3. Report: Army official’s secret texts said, ‘We're f-ing abandoning Americans,' as US withdrew from Afghanistan
4. Corporate boards, consulting, speaking fees: How U.S. generals thrived after Afghanistan
5. The Appeal of Covert Action: Psychology and the Future of Irregular Warfare
6. State Department Press Briefing – September 2, 2021
7. As they did on the battlefield, the Taliban outlasted the U.S. at the negotiating table
8. Taliban say U.N. promises aid after meeting with officials in Kabul
9. How a Long Island Man Became the ‘Forrest Gump of Jihad’—and Then Flipped
10. American Spies Are Fighting the Last War, Again
11. Assessing Shortcomings of the U.S. Approach for Addressing Conflict Below the Threshold of War
12. Afghanistan: 'Everyone got it wrong' on Taliban takeover - armed forces chief
13. The Afghanistan Meltdown Proves Vietnam Taught Us Nothing
14. OPINION | RICHARD MASON: A smarter way to dominate enemies
15. Ritchie Boys: The secret U.S. unit bolstered by German-born Jews that helped the Allies beat Hitler
1. Inside Biden’s Afghanistan Withdrawal Plan: Warnings, Doubts but Little Change
This is the most comprehensive and objective reporting on what took place over the past few months. This shows where we made mistakes along the way. and the differences in views, assessments, assumptions, and planning among the White House, DOD and DOS.
The President simply needs to own this and stop making excuses. We blew it on a number of levels. That said, I cannot say I would have gotten it right and I do not know many who could say they would (though I would hope I would have made sound assumptions for planning and changed them when I observed they were not going to become facts). But as we criticize what happened while sitting at our desks and computers, we should keep in mind the man (and woman) in the arena as well as keeping the words o Jim Ludes in mind: "If your hot take on Afghanistan views these events through an exclusively partisan frame, reducing the human rights calamity happening before our eyes to the latest in American partisan fights, you are part of the problem."
Inside Biden’s Afghanistan Withdrawal Plan: Warnings, Doubts but Little Change
U.S. strategy put Defense and State departments on divergent paths: The troops pulled out but the diplomats stayed—and were left exposed when the Taliban took over
WSJ · by Michael R. Gordon, Gordon Lubold, Vivian Salama and Jessica Donati
As the process of closing Bagram neared the point of no return, the military paused the shutdown on June 18 so the White House could ponder the ramifications of giving up the U.S.’s premier air base in the country. On June 22, President Biden signed off on the plan to close the base on July 2 and keep only a limited military presence on the ground.
A consequence of the Biden administration’s push to quickly draw down the military was to keep the Defense and State departments on divergent paths. The accelerated military exit contrasted with the State Department mission of maintaining a robust embassy and full-scale diplomatic support for Kabul well after American forces left.
That reflected the administration’s assumptions and initial intelligence estimates that the Afghan government could hold off the Taliban for as long as two years after U.S. troops were gone. The strategy became untenable as the Taliban swept across the country and the Afghan government and military crumbled.
While many factors, recent and long past, contributed to America’s drive to leave Afghanistan, among the problems, interviews with a wide range of officials suggest, was the difficulty the Biden administration had in quickly adjusting to changing circumstances as the Taliban advanced, as more-pessimistic intelligence assessments arrived and as military officials raised alarms that Washington was moving too slowly to help Afghan allies.
Ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan had long been an overriding objective for Mr. Biden and something he campaigned on. After he announced in April that the last 2,500 or so U.S. troops would leave by Sept. 11, the military leadership, although recommending keeping those troops there longer, fell in line. Top civilian aides maintained hope, fortified by optimistic intelligence assessments about how long the Afghan government could hold out against the Taliban.
In the final weeks, the administration switched course and reinserted thousands of troops, to conduct a hurried evacuation of civilians. While the effort it undertook with its allies got more than 124,000 civilians out, it left behind as many as 200 American citizens and the majority of tens of thousands of Afghans who had worked for the U.S. or its NATO allies.
Administration officials vow to help Americans and former Afghan allies who want to get out of Afghanistan to leave the country, without providing details, emphasizing that the effort would rely on economic leverage and diplomatic means.
Afghans trying to flee clamored to show their credentials to authorities at the Kabul airport on Aug. 26.
Photo: akhter gulfam/EPA/Shutterstock
Overseeing the steady glide to withdrawal was a president with decades of foreign-affairs expertise and a tight circle of advisers who included Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a retired general who oversaw the U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq, and on the civilian side Mr. Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken —two men with long experience in policy-making but little in managing war-zone crises.
The National Security Council “and the upper echelons of government are neither trained or constituted to execute complex operations. Their job is to set and monitor policy,” said Ronald Neumann, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan who is president of the Academy of Diplomacy, an association of ex-ambassadors. “In this case, understanding execution was essential for making realistic decisions, and they fell well short of their own goals.”
Defending his administration’s handling of the withdrawal, Mr. Biden said this past week that his national-security team planned for “every eventuality” and that the end of the U.S. military presence was bound to be chaotic whenever it occurred. “There is no evacuation from the end of a war that you can run without the kinds of complexities, challenges and threats we faced,” Mr. Biden said on Tuesday.
Mr. Sullivan declined through a spokesman to discuss his role in internal deliberations. Mr. Austin, when asked by reporters, said the U.S. government’s slow process for dealing with Afghans eligible for special immigrant visas compounded the problems. He declined to pinpoint any Pentagon mistakes, saying this would be the subject of after-action reviews.
“No operation is ever perfect....We want to make sure that we learn every lesson that can be learned from this experience,” Mr. Austin said.
A spokesman for Mr. Blinken had no comment. A State Department official defended the administration’s performance given, he said, the unprecedented circumstances.
“If there was an expectation that this team could prevent crises, that’s not how it works,” the official said. “People will question certain decisions, but the fact is no one has been confronted by a situation like this.”
Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan in July after the American military left.
Photo: Paula Bronstein for The Wall Street Journal
Though Mr. Biden reversed other Trump policies, he was inclined to go through with the Afghan agreement, while extending its withdrawal date about four months. The alternative, he has since said, would be inflaming relations with the Taliban and more fighting, with U.S. troops at risk.
The military argued for keeping 2,500 troops in the country, the stated size of the force at the time, although the actual number ranged toward 3,500 when classified and some other units were included, according to U.S. military officials. Bagram air base was central to the military’s plans because it would provide a staging area for drones, other aircraft and special-operations forces to conduct counterterrorism operations in case terrorist and other dangers grew.
Before Mr. Biden’s April announcement, military officials sensed that he wanted to bring the military role in Afghanistan to an end. When Mr. Austin traveled to Afghanistan in March, the top U.S. commander there, Gen. Scott Miller, told him he could get all American forces out in two months if he had to, according to U.S. officials.
While first setting a withdrawal deadline of the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that precipitated the war, Mr. Biden later cited the swiftness of the Pentagon’s drawdown in advancing the date to Aug. 31.
The day after the president’s April 14 announcement, Mr. Blinken visited Kabul and committed to providing the country with a full “diplomatic, economic, and humanitarian toolkit to support the future the Afghan people want, including the gains made by Afghan women,” including after American forces left.
Securing the embassy, with some 4,000 American, foreign and Afghan staff, during the drawdown became an immediate priority. State and Defense officials settled on a plan to retain 650 troops to guard the embassy and secure Hamid Karzai International Airport, and the White House approved, officials said. Following the decision, the embassy ordered nonessential staff to leave Afghanistan, in what would become the first of several rounds of reductions.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, right, in April with Afghan Foreign Minister Mohammad Hanif Atmar outside the presidential palace in Kabul.
Photo: Afghan presidential palace/Shutterstock
On May 8, the Pentagon hosted a meeting in its basement auditorium to be sure that it, the National Security Council, the State Department and other parts of the administration were aligned on winding down the U.S. role. Chief among the topics, officials said, was conveying the military’s plan for rapid withdrawal to minimize the risk to troops.
Mr. Austin and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley told the group—which included Mr. Sullivan and Deputy Secretary of State for management Brian McKeon, who was overseeing the U.S. Embassy in Kabul—that the military would be out by the first week in July, except for the 650 troops guarding the embassy and airport. A PowerPoint presentation on the withdrawal included the planned closing of Bagram air base, nearly 40 miles north of Kabul, and Camp Dwyer, an air base in Helmand province.
“We realized the need to bring everyone in physically and communicate this,” said a defense official.
The Pentagon wanted a discussion on an emergency evacuation of the embassy and how to plan to remove Afghans at risk, but White House officials asked that those issues be removed from the agenda, saying they should be discussed separately, according to U.S. officials.
Within the administration and the U.S.-led coalition, worries rose. In policy coordination meetings, Samantha Power, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, raised mounting concerns that Afghan groups that carried out her agencies’ aid programs could be caught in the crossfire, officials said.
A new intelligence assessment, prepared in mid-June at the request of Gen. Milley, said Kabul could fall six months after the U.S. military left.
That was when Mr. Sullivan at the NSC raised questions about shutting down Bagram, according to U.S. officials. With only two weeks before most of the military was due to leave, the Pentagon, which was also cognizant of the significance of the impending move, paused the shutdown for several days so Mr. Biden and his aides could reconsider the timing of closing the base. Keeping it open would preclude the Pentagon from carrying out Mr. Biden’s plan to remove the vast majority of American troops.
Working with the administration’s troop limit of 650, military commanders had to choose between keeping open Bagram or the Kabul airport, which was thought ready to handle a large evacuation. Briefed about it, U.S. officials said, Mr. Biden backed the military plan, affirming Bagram’s closing.
“Securing Bagram is a significant level of military effort of forces, and it would also require external support from the Afghan Security Forces,” Gen. Milley said at a Pentagon press conference last month. “Our task was protect the embassy in order for the embassy personnel to continue to function.”
“So we had to collapse one or the other, and a decision was made,” Gen. Milley added. Operating out of the Kabul airport, he said, “was estimated to be the better tactical solution in accordance with the mission set we were given and in accordance to getting the troops down to about 600, 700 number.”
Gen. Scott Miller, center, the former top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, right, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, left.
Photo: Alex Brandon//Press Pool
The military in Kabul for weeks pushed American diplomats there to shrink the size of the embassy to reduce the exposure to danger if the capital fell to the Taliban, fearing that the thousands of people still living and working in the complex would be hard to protect or evacuate in a crisis, officials said. State officials were reluctant to do so, according to U.S. officials.
Embassy officials were already overseeing some reductions, another official said. Over the course of July, the embassy sent home an additional 400 Americans, according to this official.
“By then, everything was blinking red,” said a U.S. official familiar with the cable. “It takes a lot for folks to go around leadership.”
With the Afghan forces faltering, the Biden administration resumed manned airstrikes, which had been curtailed with the closure of Bagram, by flying from bases in Arab Gulf states. To do so, the U.S. secretly sent a team to the Kabul airport that could carry out search-and-rescue missions if an American aircraft ran into maintenance problems and crashed, a military official said.
The State Department also looked to speed up the process of getting Afghan allies out of the country. The 14-step process of issuing these special immigrant visas took two years on average.
The program had seen multiple disruptions over the past year when Covid-19 outbreaks forced the embassy to suspend the service and eventually to relocate application processing to Washington. Only 750 out of more than 20,000 pending applications were in the final stage.
The administration announced a new effort to support the relocation of interested and eligible Afghan nationals and their immediate families. A 24-hour task force was set up in Washington on July 19 to step in, and the first group landed in the U.S. on Aug. 1.
Ross Wilson was the acting U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan in the last days of the U.S. military presence.
Photo: wakil kohsar/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
The State Department then broadened the pool of Afghans potentially eligible for resettlement in the U.S., announcing a new visa designation for any Afghan who had worked for U.S. government contractors, U.S.-funded programs or media organizations. The expanded effort raised expectations, contributing to the crush of Afghans who would later descend on the Kabul airport.
A senior State Department official said that the program’s lengthy processing is due to constraints imposed by Congress and couldn’t be cut. The decision to bring applicants to the U.S. or third countries before completing it, he said, required weeks of planning and approval from the president.
But those plans were crafted, the official said, when intelligence assessments suggested the U.S. still had more time to get allies out before Kabul risked falling to the Taliban.
On Aug. 6—the day the Taliban captured the first provincial capital at the start of a lightning, 10-day sweep that would bring them into Kabul—senior administration officials gathered to discuss the situation, focusing on whether to undertake an emergency evacuation of the embassy. Military officials urged coordination and emphasized to the others that the longer the U.S. waited to begin evacuating the embassy, the riskier it would become.
The embassy drew up plans to further reduce its size, officials said, and more staff left.
A Chinook helicopter flying over the U.S. embassy in Kabul in mid-August.
Photo: Rahmat Gul/Associated Press
With the Taliban making rapid advances, the Pentagon began to send troops back to Afghanistan to evacuate the embassy and Afghan allies. All told, it moved 5,000 troops back, about twice as many as were initially taken out. They were positioned at the Kabul airport and prompted the U.S. to turn to the Taliban, its longtime adversary, for help with security arrangements.
In Doha, Qatar, U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad negotiated a deal with the Taliban to remain on the outskirts of Kabul for two weeks while the U.S. completed its military withdrawal, officials said. During that period, a delegation of Afghan officials and power brokers was set to travel to Qatar to negotiate the handover of power to an interim government.
That never happened. Ashraf Ghani, the president of the U.S.-backed government, fled, and the Taliban entered Kabul on Aug. 15. The Taliban said they needed to take control of the city to prevent it from descending into chaos after the government fled. U.S. troops relied on the Taliban to maintain security on the outer edge of the airport while Afghans, Americans and others swarmed in to be evacuated.
WSJ · by Michael R. Gordon, Gordon Lubold, Vivian Salama and Jessica Donati
2. U.S. Embassy contractors, visa applicants among Afghans left behind after one of the largest airlifts in history
Heartbreaking stories. This is why there are so many veteran and private groups that continue to work on getting people out.
The question is will State provide support to these groups and assist them in getting clearance for flights to enter other countries and land? A large extra governmental support network is being created to help all those at risk still in Afghanistan. They seem to be developing many capabilities beyond what State can do. But one of the key things they cannot do is get diplomatic clearance for flights out of Afghanistan to other countries. There appears to be an opportunity here not only for a whole of government effort, but a whole of society effort. Will State embrace that effort? I think we can all agree the scale and scope of this effort far exceeds State's organic capabilities. But the critical state capabilities, the things State is best at, such as diplomatic coordination with other countries could be put to effective use to support a whole of society effort to evacuate remaining Americans and at-risk Afghans to safe havens around the world. We should exploit the comparative advantages of all participants and create synergistic effects to get people out.
U.S. Embassy contractors, visa applicants among Afghans left behind after one of the largest airlifts in history
KABUL — The day Afghanistan’s capital fell, a contractor who had worked at the U.S. Embassy for six years was dismissed from work early.
Embassy staff had collected his family’s information weeks before in preparation for a possible evacuation. But after he was told on Aug. 15 to leave the embassy’s grounds, “nobody called, nobody emailed.”
“Everyone knows where I worked, that I worked with the Americans,” said the contractor, who ran a shop at the embassy and who, like others in this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisals. He eventually fled to the home of a relative in a neighboring province. “I gave my mother my embassy badges and told her to put them in a box and bury it in the garden.”
Roughly 2,500 U.S. Embassy employees were among the 120,000 people the U.S. evacuated by air from Afghanistan, according to President Biden. But the operation left “many of our longtime partners” behind, according to a State Department spokesperson. One person familiar with the matter said they included about 2,000 U.S. Embassy contractors and immediate family members, some of whom who had worked at the embassy for more than a decade. The State Department declined to comment on that number.
For those who were not evacuated, Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland said at a recent news conference, “we’re looking at all possible options, but we’re also conveying to them that their safety and security is of paramount concern to us.”
Biden described the operation as an “extraordinary success,” but thousands of Afghans considered vulnerable and eligible for evacuation fell through the cracks. They include American University of Afghanistan students and graduates, applicants for Special Immigrant Visas and members of Afghanistan’s Special Forces who fought closely with the United States.
With the departure of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, many Afghans who felt threatened by the Taliban takeover now say they are in greater danger.
Among the tens of thousands who managed to reach the airport and get on planes out of the country were 5,500 Americans, thousands of citizens and diplomats of U.S. allies, and thousands of Afghans who worked for the United States as interpreters, translators or other roles, according to Biden.
Planning for the evacuation began weeks before Kabul fell to the Taliban in mid-August, but the effort began to stumble almost as soon as it started.
Ghani’s departure as the Taliban entered Kabul on Aug. 15 is “really what threw a wrench into the whole thing,” said a person familiar with evacuation planning.
“We made every effort to know who we were dealing with and what the numbers were, making sure we had proper resources on the ground to try to assist them. But the whole situation kind of spiraled into chaos,” said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
The airlift is now complete, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, but other evacuation efforts are ongoing. “We’ve gotten many out, but many are still there,” he said. “We will keep working to help them. Our commitment to them has no deadline.”
When the last U.S. evacuation plane left Afghanistan, Azada said, she became a prisoner in her own home.
The 23-year-old had recently graduated from the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul, a distinction she fears has placed her name is on a Taliban “kill list.” Now, she’s too afraid to walk down the street.
Over the past two weeks she held out hope as her university repeatedly emailed advisories for an evacuation that never came.
The American University, funded largely with U.S. government money, attempted to evacuate thousands of students, faculty and graduates but was mostly unsuccessful. Afghans associated with the school are considered “at risk” and were eligible for U.S. evacuation flights, according to a person coordinating evacuation efforts in Kabul who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter. A deadly 2016 Taliban attack on the institution killed 15.
But those connected to the university were not prioritized as “high risk,” meaning it was up to the school to navigate Taliban checkpoints without U.S. or NATO help and make it into the military side of the airport, the person said.
Azada received a message directing her to get to the airport. She waited for hours, she said, only to be turned back. The last message she received read simply: “The operation has been canceled. Wait at home; we are working on another plan.”
“I can’t just sit at home and wait for the Taliban to come impose their rules,” said Azada, who spoke on the condition she be identified by a nickname because of fears for her safety. “What is going to happen to us?”
Azada once led a life full of work and weekends with friends meeting up at Kabul’s trendy restaurants and cafes. Now she spends her days in her bedroom on her phone chatting with friends or reading.
“Most of the time we are just talking about how do we get out of here and save our lives,” she said of her Facebook and WhatsApp groups. “But we also share memories about how life was beautiful.” She spoke of the dorm room dance parties she threw with her girlfriends.
“Those days will never happen again,” she said, “but I’m really thankful we had them.”
Ian Bickford, president of the American University of Afghanistan, said efforts to relocate students, graduates and faculty continue. “It has becomes a more gradual and incremental effort, but we are in it for the long haul,” he said. “And we continue to appeal for U.S. support.”
Asked about the American University students, the State Department spokesman said he couldn’t “speak to specific cases … for privacy and other considerations.” He said the U.S. evacuation was aimed at addressing “the needs of those most at risk, including women and girls, journalists, members of religious and ethnic minorities, and others.”
On the day Kabul fell to the Taliban, an engineer who worked for the U.S. Army was scheduled to have his final interview at the U.S. Embassy for an expedited visa.
The interview was set for 10:45 a.m., but the embassy had begun dismissing staff an hour before, as news broke that the militants had reached the city’s gates.
The engineer, in the final stages of processing for a Special Immigrant Visa, should have been eligible for an evacuation flight. His family camped outside the airport for three nights, he said, sleeping in an open park littered with garbage. He managed to reach the airport gates twice but was turned away both times. Taliban leaders had barred Afghans who didn’t hold foreign passports or green cards from leaving the country.
“It felt like after all that time [the United States] just doesn’t care about us,” he said.
Neighbors warned him that local Taliban fighters were asking questions about who he worked for and whether he was still in Kabul. The inquiries were enough to scare him off the streets. But unable to leave his home, his family is running dangerously low on food. “For days all we have had is bread, tea and sugar,” he said.
“My children, they don’t understand,” he said. His son is 3; his daughter is 1. “But my wife is just crying: Why did you work with those people? Look how you brought us under threat!”
A State Department spokesman declined to comment on the engineer’s case, citing privacy. The spokesman said the evacuation prioritized U.S. citizens, legal permanent residents, Special Immigrant Visa applicants and other Afghans at risk.
“After 20 years of investment in Afghanistan, this was a very large pool of people,” the spokesman said. U.S. troops and others on the ground “did the best they could, working around-the-clock to evacuate as many people as possible,” despite “many constraints” including the threat of Islamic State attacks to the Kabul airport.
Moving forward, the spokesman said, “we will hold the Taliban to its pledge to let people freely depart Afghanistan.”
An Afghan Special Forces officer was on the list of people to evacuate but wasn’t able to get inside the military side of the airport. He said U.S. forces tried to extract him and a few hundred other Afghan commandos, but the logistics repeatedly fell apart.
“The Americans would call us and tell us to gather here. And then they would say, ‘No, that is the wrong place. Go to another location.’ And then they would say, ‘Come back tomorrow,’ ” he said.
“Of course I’m angry. We were on the front line for the United States in this war,” he said. “They told us you will be the best of the best in the Afghan army, and now look.”
When Kabul fell, the officer said, he did not want to flee. “I called my [foreign] sources and told them, if you support us, we can fight against the Taliban in Kabul. We have the training, we have the ability, we can be the resistance.”
But he said there was no response to his offers. As the Taliban tightened its grip on his neighborhood, he fled to a friend’s house and then, a few days later, to another home. The night the last U.S. evacuation plane took off, he and a friend went to watch the Taliban gunfire from the roof.
“He said to me: ‘Everything is finished. Now what?’ ”
After his experience of the last two weeks, he said, he can’t imagine trusting the United States enough to partner with its military again.
The U.S. Embassy employee said the silence from his longtime employer is unnerving. “We are still waiting to see what they will do for us,” he said. “We don’t know, exactly.”
But while the withdrawal has left him “heartbroken,” he said, he remains proud of his former employment.
“It was not a mistake,” he said. “I will never say that. Even if the Taliban threaten to kill me, I wouldn’t. No one has helped me the way the Americans have.”
Azada has been consuming all the books in her home since the United States withdrew. Years ago, she was given a copy of “The Diary of Anne Frank.” The book had never interested her. But last week, she began reading it.
“I feel like it’s really relatable to my situation,” she said. “The girl was really strong. I admire how she adapted to a life that she didn’t deserve.”
Azada hasn’t finished the book, but she thinks she knows how it ends.
“I heard she doesn’t make it.”
3. Report: Army official’s secret texts said, ‘We're f-ing abandoning Americans,' as US withdrew from Afghanistan
This is a follow-up to a previous report I sent. A friend did some due diligence for us and learned that there is apparently no Colonel Matt Rogers assigned to the 82d Airborne Division.
His note to me:
I looked up the name Matt Rogers on Fort Bragg - only one, in USAREC and he isn't a COL. Further, the whole global directory lists only one COL Matt Rogers, and he is an Ass't Professor at West Point - likely not the guy in this story.
Maybe it is a nickname, but seeing the guy's whole title in the texts is also odd, IMO.
The only explanation I can think of is the global directory has not been updated in a timely manner and Matt Rogers did go from West Point to the 82d.
The bottom line is we should be skeptical if not suspicious of the report below. It of course does support certain narratives that some want advanced.
Report: Army official’s secret texts said, ‘We're f-ing abandoning Americans,' as US withdrew from Afghanistan
A U.S. Army colonel on the ground at the Kabul airport said U.S. troops were knowingly leaving behind U.S. citizens, according to a series of private texts leaked this week. In one text, the Army colonel wrote “Yes, we are fucking abandoning American citizens.”
The texts were reportedly shared between 82nd Airborne Col. Matt Rogers and Michael Yon, a former Special Forces soldier and war correspondent. Yon was among a number of private citizens who worked in private groups to help evacuate Americans stranded in Afghanistan.
Yon wrote that he had been working with a man by the name of Rick Clay who “had three jets on ground in Kabul.” Yon said, “I had arranged Taliban bringing American mother and three American children all the way to gate. Turned away by American Army.”
Rogers’ texts with Yon came as the veteran and war correspondent encountered difficulties getting people through to the Kabul airport.
Rogers wrote, “Everyone is having a hard time getting in the gate. [American citizens] can’t get past [Taliban] checkpoints.” Rogers then texted, “Are you trying to get people in?”
Yon responded “Any [American citizens]?”
Rogers texted back “Yes. All of them.”
Two minutes later, Rogers texted, “Yes, we are fucking abandoning American citizens.”
In a post on his subscription-based Locals account, Yon wrote “We had Americans at the gate in plenty of time. U.S. Army abandoned Americans to Taliban. I was personally involved in the rescue as was Rick Clay, David Eubank, Taliban helped us, until Colonel Matt Rogers from US Army said he cannot take them in.”
“Taliban actually delivered the American mother and children for us and stayed with them for hours until she told Taliban to go home,” Yon added.
Yon also told Just The News that the family stood waving passports, screaming that they are Americans once they got to the Kabul airport gate, but American forces would not come out to get them.
“You guys left American citizens at the gate of the Kabul airport,” Yon wrote Tuesday to the commander. “Three empty jets paid for by volunteers were waiting for them. You and I talked on the phone. I told you where they were. Gave you their passport images. And my email and phone number. And you left them behind.”
“Great job saving yourselves,” Yon added. Probably get a lot of medals.”
Just The News reported Yon’s account is backed by three dozen text and email exchanges with frontline Army officials in Afghanistan.
In an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Biden said, “If there’s American citizens left, we’re gonna stay to get them all out.”
On Tuesday, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said “we have Americans that get stranded in countries all the time.”
The effort to bring Americans who are still stranded is now in what the Biden administration is referring to as the “diplomatic phase.”
After the last U.S. military flight left Kabul, U.S. Marine Corps Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, the commander of the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), said “While the military evacuation is complete, the diplomatic mission to ensure additional U.S. citizens and eligible Afghans who want to leave continues.”
4. Corporate boards, consulting, speaking fees: How U.S. generals thrived after Afghanistan
Ouch. A hit job on General McChrystal. But is this criticism really deserved? Or should a broad brush be used to condemn all GOFOs? Don't they have a right to work in the private sector and be adequately compensated for the experience and experience? But most importantly many GOFOs operate well out of the limelight, do not sign political letters, and continue to make quiet behind the scenes contributions.
Corporate boards, consulting, speaking fees: How U.S. generals thrived after Afghanistan
When Stanley A. McChrystal was the top general in Afghanistan, he would ask his troops a question: “If I told you that you weren’t going home until we win — what would you do differently?”
McChrystal recalls that question in his 2015 management manual, “Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World,” which says his wartime leadership techniques can guide organizations far from the battlefield toward “successful mission completion.”
The failure of the American mission in Afghanistan became deadly apparent last month when the Afghan army collapsed as the Taliban took control.
But the generals who led the mission — including McChrystal, who sought and supervised the 2009 American troop surge — have thrived in the private sector since leaving the war. They have amassed influence within businesses, at universities and in think tanks, in some cases selling their experience in a conflict that killed an estimated 176,000 people, cost the United States more than $2 trillion and concluded with the restoration of Taliban rule.
The eight generals who commanded American forces in Afghanistan between 2008 and 2018 have gone on to serve on more than 20 corporate boards, according to a review of company disclosures and other releases.
Last year, retired Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., who commanded American forces in Afghanistan in 2013 and 2014, joined the board of Lockheed Martin, the Pentagon’s biggest defense contractor. Retired Gen. John R. Allen, who preceded him in Afghanistan, is president of the Brookings Institution, which has received as much as $1.5 million over the last three years from Northrop Grumman, another defense giant. David H. Petraeus, who preceded Allen and later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for providing classified materials to a former mistress and biographer, is a partner at KKR, a private equity firm, and director of its Global Institute.
Petraeus said several firms “aggressively sought” him for his military and CIA experience. As for his leadership in Afghanistan, he said, “I stand by what we did and how I reported it during my time.” Dunford said he pushed no policy in Afghanistan but “did exactly what the president directed me to do,” and that 80 percent of his time now is devoted to nonprofits, several serving veterans. Allen, through a spokeswoman, declined to comment.
McChrystal is the runaway corporate leader. A board member or adviser for at least 10 companies since 2010, according to corporate filings and news releases, he also leverages his experience to secure lucrative consulting contracts on topics distant from defense work, such as managing the coronavirus pandemic for state and local governments. The general, who was dismissed after being quoted in 2010 disparaging then-Vice President Joe Biden, has made millions from corporations, governments and universities, commanding six-figure salaries for some of his board positions and high five-figure speaking fees.
For a position on JetBlue’s board between 2010 and 2019, he was paid a total of more than $1.3 million, disclosures show. He made roughly the same amount between 2011 and 2018 from Navistar International, a vehicle and engine manufacturer. One of its subsidiaries agreed this spring to pay $50 million to resolve claims it defrauded the U.S. Marine Corps more than a decade ago by inflating the prices of armored vehicles used in Afghanistan and Iraq. McChrystal said he had been unaware of the dispute, which did not involve allegations of wrongdoing on his part. Navistar denied the allegations and admitted no wrongdoing in the settlement.
Corporations seek out ex-military officials because they’re thought to hew to ethical codes and conduct themselves well in crisis, said Megan Rainville, a specialist in corporate finance and governance at Missouri State University. At the same time, her research has found that companies advised by board members with military experience are less likely to invest in research and development and have lower value than firms whose board members lack such experience, said Rainville, a former defense industry financial analyst.
“Team of Teams,” drawn from McChrystal’s experience helping large organizations function more like small teams, presents the pitch his consulting firm, McChrystal Group, makes to clients as disparate as ExxonMobil and public health agencies confronting covid-19. The book also contains the lessons he delivers to students at Yale University. The retired general teaches a course called, simply, “Leadership.”
Now that the war’s failures have been laid bare, the leadership capabilities of those who perpetuated it should be reevaluated, said Daniel L. Davis, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who served two tours in Afghanistan. Military strategies used in Afghanistan will not aid U.S. businesses or governments, he argued.
“For years it’s been payday for the generals while the war itself has been a complete disaster,” said Davis, a senior fellow at Defense Priorities, a think tank urging military restraint. “At what point do we hold anyone accountable?”
McChrystal, 67, rejected that view, saying in a more than hour-long video interview with The Washington Post that he stood by his military decisions as well as his post-military earnings.
“I have built a business which has given a place for some of my old comrades to work and for a bunch of young people to have a special experience,” he said.
The retired general, whose father served in Germany during the American occupation after World War II, said his personal measure is whether there’s anything about his career that would disappoint his wife or, one day, his grandchildren. “And there’s not,” he said.
McChrystal, who endorsed Biden last fall, said it was too soon to draw conclusions about the president’s move to end the war. He allowed that the 20-year conflict “has had a very disappointing outcome,” but said, “I don’t think that means that necessarily many of the decisions made and the strategies pursued were wrong. I think in many cases they were the best strategy that could have been.”
Senior military leaders who choose to sit on corporate boards or run businesses — after commanding “thousands and thousands of people” — are acting appropriately, he said.
“It’s not a bunch of people getting their snout in the trough and just trying to get rich,” McChrystal said. “If you’ve risen to that level, you develop that skill level, that’s what the opportunities that come are. And I don’t think that’s wrong.”
‘The good guys in the equation’
The University of Nebraska at Lincoln was facing the prospect of curtailing research programs because of budgetary pressure in 2013 when it invited McChrystal to campus. For a keynote address at the university’s “Building the 22nd Century” conference, the university proposed what it understood to be his standard speaking fee: $62,500.
There was a hitch. Because of a board meeting in Chicago earlier that day, McChrystal required a private jet, a representative from the general’s speakers bureau, Leading Authorities, told university officials in emails obtained as part of a public records request. The fee would have to be higher: $80,000.
The university agreed, ultimately paying only $70,000, the emails show, because he made do without the jet. Asked about the fee, McChrystal said it sounded high but declined an invitation to review the contract, noting that he gives some speeches pro bono but has less control when his speakers bureau is involved.
McChrystal’s value to the university, the emails specify, came from his “efforts in leadership, statesmanship, innovation, change management, and international affairs.”
He brings the same insights to the boardroom, according to business executives close to the 1976 U.S. Military Academy graduate who rose through the ranks while winning academic fellowships and gaining a reputation as an ascetic, eating just one meal a day. After earning plaudits for reforming the elite counterterrorism unit known as the Joint Special Operations Command, and then directing the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, he took command in Afghanistan in 2009.
But one year later, he was ousted over a bombshell Rolling Stone profile depicting him as a “runaway general” who condoned contempt for civilian leaders. He apologized at the time for his “poor judgment” and told The Post in a 2015 interview that the episode taught him to prepare for the unexpected and not put too much stock in the judgments of others.
Despite the scandal, he remained in the business world’s favor partly because of then-President Barack Obama’s decision to let him retire with four stars, said former military colleagues — a move that also left him with an annual, taxpayer-funded pension of at least $149,700, according to Pentagon estimates at the time.
At Deutsche Bank, he has conducted leadership training, according to two former executives, leading to a seat on the board of the bank’s U.S. holding company. “Senior management is much more likely to listen to military commanders because they’re cool and they’ve killed people than to a McKinsey guy in a pinstripe suit,” said a former senior Deutsche Bank executive who, like some others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss human resources issues. A Deutsche Bank spokesman declined to comment.
A former vice president at Knowledge International, an Alexandria-based affiliate of an Abu Dhabi company that says it “exports close to $500 million annually in defense services and products,” mostly to the United Arab Emirates, said McChrystal was “valued for his name and gravitas that he brought to the board.”
McChrystal said he joined the board of Knowledge International, which did not respond to a request for comment, because a former boss, retired Gen. Bryan D. “Doug” Brown, asked him to. In an interview, Brown said the board members, by handling the authorizations for overseas defense work, were “the good guys in the equation — making sure everyone is moral, legal and ethical going over there.” He called McChrystal “one of the finest officers and people I’ve ever known.”
McChrystal’s obligation in Chicago that led his speakers bureau to request a private jet was a meeting of the board of Navistar International, the manufacturer based in Lisle, Ill., he said. When McChrystal was named to the board in 2011, Navistar’s chairman said, “His years of military leadership and service will be of great value to Navistar as we further expand our global and military businesses.”
While commercial vehicles represent the heart of Navistar’s business, McChrystal said, the company began making mine-resistant vehicles, known as MRAPs, “during the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, when suddenly there was this need.” Its traditional trucking sales began contracting in 2005, he said, but revenue from the military-grade equipment “hid that problem” during the height of the two wars.
In 2013, a Navistar contract director filed a whistleblower complaint alleging the company had forged invoices and pricing information for MRAPs sold to the U.S. government between 2007 and 2012. McChrystal, who joined the board in 2011, was on its finance committee at the time of the complaint, and earned about $200,000 annually, corporate filings show.
The U.S. intervened in the whistleblower suit in 2019, arguing in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that the fraudulent documents had duped the government and cost it at least $1.28 billion.
The matter had come into public view before then. In 2016, Navistar divulged in an annual report that it had received a subpoena from the Pentagon’s inspector general related to its sales of military vehicles to the government. The company did not respond to a question about what it told the board about the underlying complaint, pointing instead to public filings that spell out the board’s responsibilities. McChrystal, who left the board in 2018, said he was unaware of the claims until this spring, when he read about the settlement in the news.
An attorney for the whistleblower, H. Vincent McKnight Jr., said he remains troubled by what he sees as ill-gotten gains, especially because the scheme exploited the American military and taxpayer.
“The company profited from that behavior and so did the board members,” he said.
‘People have to feed their families’
As coronavirus cases surged in Virginia earlier this year, state officials went shopping for books. The health department ordered 53 copies of McChrystal’s “Team of Teams,” for a total cost of more than $1,000, July procurements records show.
The supplier was McChrystal Group, the boutique consulting firm founded in 2011 by the retired general. It has since grown to about 85 employees, he said.
The firm, built on the idea that McChrystal and his colleagues “could capture the lessons they learned in counterterrorism and translate them into the private sector,” has advised clients including Bank of America, the National Basketball Association, Monsanto and MedStar Health. Its government work began two years ago, McChrystal said, when the firm ran leadership training for the Department of Homeland Security’s cyber unit and for the U.S. Secret Service.
Then a new opportunity arose. Last year, the firm began advising state and local governments on covid-19 response — one of many consulting companies that secured no-bid contracts to fill gaps in public health agencies overwhelmed by the crisis.
McChrystal Group’s services focused especially on leadership development based on the principles in “Team of Teams,” state records show. A Virginia health spokeswoman, Tammie Smith, said McChrystal’s books were purchased for the department’s work on “culture change dynamics.” All told, McChrystal Group has billed the state more than $5.7 million over the last 20 months, records show.
The firm also consulted on pandemic response for the city of Boston and the state of Missouri, for fees of more than $1.1 million and about $2.2 million, respectively.
In those cases, hardly any of the consultants identified in the contracts had public health experience, as indicated by their LinkedIn profiles. Two were recent Yale graduates and members of the football team, which McChrystal takes on a trip each year to the battlefield at Gettysburg.
“We weren’t experts in public health,” McChrystal acknowledged. “But we’re good at getting networks to communicate and come out with the right answer and implement.”
He added, “The problem in covid has never been a lack of public health knowledge. The problem in covid has been the inability of larger organizations to share information, and the lack of political leadership to do what we already know is the right answer.”
Marissa Levine, a former Virginia health commissioner who now directs the University of South Florida’s Center for Leadership in Public Health Practice, questioned that premise. Leadership training for public health requires specialized expertise, she said, because it differs from a business, being accountable not to shareholders but to “everyone in a community.”
But some officials said the firm’s services were crucial. The consultants served as the “nerve center of our response,” said Brian P. Golden, director of the Boston Planning and Development Agency. They led an 8 a.m. call and then managed tasks arising from the conversation, he said. “McChrystal Group was the enforcer all day.”
“We certainly could have figured this stuff out ourselves, but we had no time to waste,” Golden said.
The firm’s responsibilities were sweeping. The contract provided that McChrystal Group would “review and advise of all city plans.”
A spokeswoman for Marty Walsh, the former mayor who hired McChrystal’s team in Boston and now serves as Biden’s labor secretary, did not respond to a request for comment about the firm’s performance or the “weekly one-on-one executive consultation” promised to him in the contract. McChrystal said Walsh recently dined at his home in Alexandria, Va.
The retired general said his firm comes comparatively cheap. “We cost a fraction of what a traditional consulting firm comes in,” he said. His own pay is a “fraction” of what he would make in a larger company, he said, while declining to say how much he earns.
The fees in Missouri, about $250,000 per month, struck a former senior state official as too high for a small number of consultants. The former official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to address the response candidly, said the consultants interfered with the ordinary chain of command, causing more disruptions than upgrades. Kelli Jones, a spokeswoman for the governor, said the consultants helped “pull teams together within our state government to drive quick and effective action across every line of effort in the covid-19 response.”
Many of the firm’s recruits come from Yale, where McChrystal has taught since 2010. “You fish in the pond you’re standing around,” he said.
McChrystal’s course on leadership is “almost legendary,” said James A. Levinsohn, who directs the Yale institute where McChrystal teaches. Student evaluations reviewed by The Post reflect that status. One said it was useful “if you have any aspirations to climb a corporate ladder, serve in a leadership position, or just be a valuable member of team.” Complaints were sparse, but one bemoaned the complexity of the text assigned from Confucius, the ancient Chinese philosopher.
Central to McChrystal’s philosophy is the belief that all Americans should serve their country, inspiring his pro bono work as board chairman for Service Year Alliance, a nonprofit seeking to expand opportunities for a year of paid, full-time service. The retired general’s support has been a major asset, said John Bridgeland, the nonprofit’s vice chairman and a former director of the White House Domestic Policy Council.
Bridgeland said it was only natural for McChrystal to take on corporate work as well.
“People have to feed their families,” he said.
Alice Crites contributed to this report.
5. The Appeal of Covert Action: Psychology and the Future of Irregular Warfare
Just as an aside, I think covert action is not only all about deposing regimes. There is much more to covert action than that.
Excerpts:
...So why do leaders sometimes embark on risky overt interventions, while at other times they prefer to rely on covert operations?
In a recently published article in Security Studies, I develop a theory that accounts for this puzzle. The basic argument is that leaders’ tolerance for risk depends upon their objectives. Leaders’ appetite for risk is much higher when they launch interventions that seek to prevent the status quo from deteriorating, as in the case of rescuing a friendly regime in danger of collapse; their risk tolerance is much lower when they intervene to actively improve the status quo, as in the case of seeking regime change of a hostile government. If decision makers wish to insulate the policymaking process from cognitive biases—and to understand what drives rival states to launch different types of operations against the United States and its allies—they would do well to understand the psychological drivers of covert action.
...
And when US policymakers consider launching their own interventions abroad, they would do well to understand and anticipate their own possible psychological biases. Ideally, assessments of the pros and cons associated with deposing a hostile regime or supporting a friendly one would be based on rational cost-benefit calculations. But as decades of work in behavioral economics and the cases examined in my research demonstrate, leaders do not always calculate risks and rewards dispassionately; they sometimes see the world through loss aversion–tinted glasses. With the return of great power competition, it is more important than ever for policymakers to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of covert and overt interventions using clearheaded analysis. There is no guarantee that understanding the psychological biases that affect decision making will help policymakers avoid them. But at the very least it should help them make more informed decisions about how—or whether—to intervene next time.
The Appeal of Covert Action: Psychology and the Future of Irregular Warfare - Modern War Institute
Meddling in foreign countries is a risky business. This is especially true when the meddling is overt. If a covert operation goes wrong, plausible deniability can protect leaders from the most severe costs. And if plausible deniability becomes implausible, it can be embarrassing or politically damaging. But if an overt intervention goes wrong, it can go very wrong indeed: overt interventions can stoke nationalism, wreck a country’s international reputation, and even lead to unwanted and potentially disastrous escalation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, a growing body of research suggests that leaders turn to covert action—to secrecy, deception, and plausible deniability—to circumvent the risks associated with overtly toppling or rescuing regimes.
But there are notable exceptions. Vietnam, for example, stands out as a case in which US decision makers embarked on a long and costly conflict despite knowing in advance that the risks were high. And before invading Afghanistan in December 1979, Soviet leaders sought to head off a burgeoning insurgency discreetly before deploying tens of thousands of troops. So why do leaders sometimes embark on risky overt interventions, while at other times they prefer to rely on covert operations?
In a recently published article in Security Studies, I develop a theory that accounts for this puzzle. The basic argument is that leaders’ tolerance for risk depends upon their objectives. Leaders’ appetite for risk is much higher when they launch interventions that seek to prevent the status quo from deteriorating, as in the case of rescuing a friendly regime in danger of collapse; their risk tolerance is much lower when they intervene to actively improve the status quo, as in the case of seeking regime change of a hostile government. If decision makers wish to insulate the policymaking process from cognitive biases—and to understand what drives rival states to launch different types of operations against the United States and its allies—they would do well to understand the psychological drivers of covert action.
A Psychological Theory of Foreign Intervention
The claim that leaders’ risk tolerance during interventions varies according to the objective they are pursuing is based on a concept known as loss aversion. The political scientist Robert Jervis summarizes its central logic as follows: “Losing ten dollars . . . annoys us more than gaining ten dollars gratifies us.” It may not be entirely rational, but it is a powerful human tendency. And importantly, people will accept greater risk to prevent losses than they will to secure gains.
This basic but powerful insight has significant implications when applied to forcible regime promotion. Consider first the case of foreign-imposed regime change. Confronted by a hostile foreign government, leaders can either try to improve the status quo by replacing a hostile regime with a friendly one, or they can leave things alone. Practically speaking, regime change represents a net gain for states—if it succeeds.
The dynamics are flipped for interventions to save foreign governments, or regime rescue. In these cases, leaders are confronted with the prospect of protecting the status quo by preventing a friendly regime from falling. In this sense, regime rescue is meant to forestall a loss, rather than secure a gain.
All else held equal, then, since people tend to be loss-averse, leaders should be more willing to take risks to save regimes than they will be to topple them. And in general, overt action tends to be riskier than covert action. If all goes well, an overt intervention can depose a hostile regime or save a friendly one while signaling strength and resolve. But if things go wrong, they may go catastrophically wrong. Possibilities include not simply failing at the immediate objective of regime change or rescue, but getting sucked into a quagmire, suffering a loss of reputation, and triggering escalation with a powerful adversary. A foreign actor’s presence in another country may also erode the legitimacy of the supported government.
Covert operations tend to have less variability in their potential outcomes. If successful, interveners may topple or save another regime without dirtying their hands, at least publicly—the essence of plausible deniability. To be sure, covert action is often more likely to fail in its immediate objective than overt action. But the secrecy that surrounds these operations may still shield leaders from the fallout. This is why covert action is usually a less risky option than overt action.
In other words, leaders should be more likely to reach for the quiet option when undertaking regime change, and to stick with it even when it appears to be failing. Conversely, they should be more willing to pursue overt intervention, despite high risks, during regime rescue.
A Tale of Two Cold War Interventions
To see how this works in practice, consider two episodes of forcible regime promotion from the Cold War era: President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s covert attempts to depose the leftist regime in Syria between 1956 and 1957, and his overt intervention in Lebanon in 1958 to prop up a pro-US government.
In the mid-1950s, the Syrian regime was relatively hostile toward the United States, preferring closer relations with the Soviet Union and Egypt, led at the time by Gamal Abdel Nasser. A combination of economic interests, including Syria’s capacity to affect regional oil flows, and fears that Syria would become a bastion of communism drove the American decision to intervene.
But why did policymakers settle on covert action? Surprisingly, many of the details surrounding this operation remain classified more than six decades later. Nevertheless, there are clues that offer key insights. For one thing, policymakers feared that overtly interfering in Syria would damage the United States’ reputation because they would be violating a core tenet of the UN Charter, namely the nonintervention principle enshrined in Article 2(4). For another, they feared that overt intervention would “antagonize the Arab world.” At one point in August 1957, policymakers contemplated some form of overt intervention but eventually decided against it. Instead, they kept trying to secretly foment unrest to bring down the regime—to no avail.
This case stands in stark contrast to what transpired in Lebanon in 1958. Unlike Syria, the Lebanese regime in the years leading up to US intervention was extremely friendly to the United States. The president, Camille Chamoun, was among the first to embrace the Eisenhower Doctrine, which committed the United States to supporting governments threatened by “international communism.” Lebanon was also strategically located in the Middle East and was of economic interest to the United States.
In the spring and summer of 1958, Lebanon descended into civil war with Christians and Muslims on opposing sides. In July 1958, Eisenhower deployed roughly fourteen thousand troops to save Chamoun. The risks of intervention were remarkably similar to what the same administration had faced in Syria just one year earlier. Policymakers at the highest levels understood that overt intervention by the United States could generate widespread anti-American sentiment in the region, harm the country’s reputation, delegitimize Chamoun, and more. And yet they opted to intervene openly anyway. The psychological theory of intervention described above explains why policymakers were willing to take this gamble in Lebanon but not in Syria. In Lebanon, they were trying to limit their losses and preserve the status quo; in Syria, they were trying to strengthen their position and improve the status quo.
There are several practical implications to this argument. As the 2020 Summary of the Irregular Warfare Annex to the National Defense Strategy points out, “China, Russia, and Iran are willing practitioners of campaigns of disinformation, deception, sabotage, and economic coercion, as well as proxy, guerrilla, and covert operations.” Better understanding the conditions under which America’s chief rivals are most likely to reach for the quiet option—or, alternatively, abandon it—can help policymakers anticipate potential outcomes more accurately.
American adversaries, this framework suggests, are most likely to use covert action when they are pursuing potential gains relative to the status quo. But when adversaries’ interests are threatened, and their international position looks like it may be deteriorating, they may be more likely to accept significant risks and abandon secrecy.
And when US policymakers consider launching their own interventions abroad, they would do well to understand and anticipate their own possible psychological biases. Ideally, assessments of the pros and cons associated with deposing a hostile regime or supporting a friendly one would be based on rational cost-benefit calculations. But as decades of work in behavioral economics and the cases examined in my research demonstrate, leaders do not always calculate risks and rewards dispassionately; they sometimes see the world through loss aversion–tinted glasses. With the return of great power competition, it is more important than ever for policymakers to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of covert and overt interventions using clearheaded analysis. There is no guarantee that understanding the psychological biases that affect decision making will help policymakers avoid them. But at the very least it should help them make more informed decisions about how—or whether—to intervene next time.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, Department of Defense, US government, or any organization with which the author is affiliated, including the US Naval War College and Department of the Navy.
6. State Department Press Briefing – September 2, 2021
I wonder if Mr. Price regrets the excerpt below he provided as part of an answer to this question:
QUESTION: There’s been some reporting out there to the effect that the administration viewed planned efforts to evacuate Afghans by individuals or veterans’ groups or advocacy organizations as sort of an impediment, that, at times, it may have caused problems at Kabul airport. Can you speak to that? Is that the case?
MR PRICE:
...
Now, however, we’re in a different phase. We understand the concern that many are feeling as they try to facilitate charters and other forms of passage out of Afghanistan. The fact of the matter now is that we do not have personnel on the ground. We do not have air assets in the country. We do not control the airspace, whether over Afghanistan or anywhere else in the region. And so the misimpression that is out there that we are preventing or even the idea that we could prevent a charter flight from taking off – that is simply untrue. We could not and we are not.
These seven sentences, and especially the three I have highlighted, explain why it was a major strategic error to withdraw US forces and to do it before all Americans and at-risk personnel were evacuated. These seven sentences are probably the strongest indictment of the Administration's strategic planning and execution.
According to reports that I have read, we actually had charter flights depart Mazar but had to return because they did not have diplomatic clearance to land in neighboring countries. Hopefully in the future (as in immediately) State will work to get diplomatic clearance for these humanitarian evacuation flights that are being coordinated by veteran and private organizations. State's Afghan evacuation task force should take requests for coordinating diplomatic clearance for immediate action and facilitate these flights to nearby countries to get Americans and at-risk Afghan to safe haven.
This is why we need a whole of society approach to evacuating remaining Americans and at-risk Afghans and State must assist these many organizations that are working in areas well beyond the capacity of State.
Department Press Briefing – September 2, 2021
SEPTEMBER 2, 2021
MR PRICE: Good afternoon. Welcome to the 100th State Department press briefing under the Biden-Harris administration. That is more a piece of trivia than a topper, but it is all I have come with today. So happy to turn it over to your questions.
QUESTION: (Off-mike.)
QUESTION: That was Andrea. (Laughter.)
MR PRICE: That was Andrea. That was Andrea. Let the record show.
QUESTION: A hundred days, okay. Wow, that kind of took me aback.
I want to get two logistical things that were raised before but I just wonder if you’ve gotten – managed to get answers to them. One is in terms of Afghan evacuees, all – not just SIVs, all of the Afghans, not Americans. What happens to those Afghan evacuees who get flagged for security reasons?
MR PRICE: Matt, as you know, before anyone who is evacuated from Afghanistan comes to this country, they undergo a rigorous vet from counterterrorism professionals, Homeland Security professionals, law enforcement professionals, with the aid and assistance of our Intelligence Community. Unless and until they complete that vet, they will not be in a position to come to the United States. When it —
QUESTION: Right, but that’s not my question.
MR PRICE: When it comes to individuals who are still undergoing that vet, over the course of our work to establish this network of countries who have agreed to partner with us in our evacuation and transit efforts, we have been in a position to ensure that we have adequate facilities for individuals who are not yet in a position to come to the United States while they undergo that vetting process. So we are doing everything we can to expedite the vetting process; in many cases we are able to move people from a transit point in the Middle East to one in Europe to the United States in a matter of days. In some cases, the vetting process may take longer. We do have adequate solutions for those cases that are going to be handled on a case-by-case basis.
QUESTION: Well, but – yeah, but what happens if you fail and don’t get vetted?
MR PRICE: Again, these are hypotheticals. I would rather not entertain a hypothetical. But we are —
QUESTION: Well, but certainly —
MR PRICE: We are confident that we have what we need in terms of capacity to have people undergo vetting, and for those for whom vetting may take longer, we are confident that we have solutions in those cases, too.
QUESTION: And solutions that will comply with host country regulations, in terms of time —
MR PRICE: All of these operations are in compliance and are, in fact, done with the full knowledge, consent, and partnership with the countries with whom we’ve worked on this.
QUESTION: And then my second logistical one is just on the P-2 – the P-2 issue that I had raised earlier. Why is Turkey not an eligible country for P-2 applicants to present their cases? It seems to be semi-convenient, not really that far away, and it’s a NATO Ally. It still has an embassy in Afghanistan. So why not? And is there any thought to that being changed?
MR PRICE: So Turkey is, in fact, a NATO Ally. Turkey is, in fact, an important partner of ours. Turkey has been an important partner of ours in the NATO context in Afghanistan as well. And recently we have spoken of our cooperation and support to various Turkish efforts when it comes to Afghanistan.
At present, we are working with a number of countries to facilitate P-2 processing. This was a program, as you know, that we announced several weeks ago to provide a refugee referral basis for individuals who may not have worked directly with U.S. Government, but who supported the American people over the years, including by, in many cases, working with media organizations or NGOs.
When it comes to the ability of any particular country, we’d refer you to the Government of Turkey for information on its refugee processes.
QUESTION: Well, this doesn’t have anything to do with – this doesn’t have anything to do with the Government of Turkey, I don’t think. This has to do with whether the embassy – look, when the P-2 program was established, there were only two countries where there were actually U.S. embassies operating: Afghanistan and Turkey, or Afghanistan at that point, where a P-2 applicant could not submit their application. The others were places – North Korea, Iran, Yemen, Syria – places where there’s no U.S. embassy.
So now that the Afghanistan embassy is closed, why is Turkey now the only place in the world, apparently, where an Afghan evacuee cannot submit a P-2 application? Why is that? Is it because of the embassy, or is it because of the Turkish Government?
MR PRICE: Matt, Turkey is playing an important role in a number of arenas when it comes to Afghanistan. We have spoken of the airport. We have spoken of our cooperation with the Turks in the context of NATO and bilaterally over the years vis-a-vis Afghanistan.
There are a number of places where the United States can support and can process P-2 applicants. In the first instance, there were a number of countries in the region that were able to process P-2 applicants. Now we are in a different position, where some P-2 eligible individuals have been evacuated by the U.S. military through the course of our evacuation operations over the past 2-plus weeks, and there are a number of countries that don’t border Afghanistan where we can process P-2 eligible individuals, individuals who either were referred for P-2 status or individuals who may be eligible for P-2 status. We’re very fortunate to have many countries partnering with us on that. When it comes to the capabilities, when it comes to the role of any particular country, we would need to refer you to that country.
QUESTION: Well, Ned, but is it a problem with the embassy or is it – what – the embassy can’t handle it? Or is it a problem with the country?
MR PRICE: We feel that we have adequate P-2 processing capacity.
QUESTION: All right. Let me ask you this then, and I’ll stop after this. How many countries in the world can – where there are actual U.S. embassies and consulates – can a P-2 applicant not submit their papers?
MR PRICE: I don’t —
QUESTION: And can you name the one that it is?
MR PRICE: I don’t have a list in front of me, Matt. But what I would tell you —
QUESTION: I think actually that you do.
MR PRICE: What I will tell you is that there are now a number of additional countries where it is feasible for P-2 eligible individuals —
QUESTION: Is Turkey one of them?
MR PRICE: — or P-2 referred individuals to be processed that were not feasible just a couple of weeks ago. And it is —
QUESTION: And is Turkey one of them?
MR PRICE: It is feasible now because of the heroic work of the U.S. military, in coordination with the Department of State, in coordination with our partners, to bring about 125,000 individuals, including many P-2 eligible and P-2 referred individuals to safety.
Simon.
QUESTION: I’m wondering if you can give us an update on the situation for aid to Afghanistan. You’ve sort of talked about the conditions that there are going to be on a future Afghan government getting international recognition, so it’s – there is no government yet, but when there is one, then they have to meet certain criteria for you to recognize them.
But in the meantime, there’s warnings of humanitarian crisis and calls to make sure that aid can get there, make sure sanctions aren’t getting in the way, make sure these recognition issues are not blocking aid organizations from getting in. So at the moment, have you – I understand bilateral aid is not going to the Afghan government, but what aid is the U.S. able to provide to Afghanistan at this moment? Is there – are there still programs with U.S. aid funding still going on, and where do we stand in terms of being able to provide that?
MR PRICE: Sure. It’s important to be very specific in a case like this. When you’re referring to aid, what we have made very clear is that our humanitarian assistance to the people of Afghanistan – that will be enduring. We remain unwavering in our commitment to provide humanitarian assistance to the people of Afghanistan. I believe you heard from the Department of the Treasury only recently that they put forward what is known as a specific license to ensure that we can do that in ways that are appropriate and effective. We can continue to do that precisely because some of our humanitarian partners, with whom we’ve worked in Afghanistan and in some cases other countries, and other countries over the years, are still present on the ground in Afghanistan. We have been in contact with these humanitarian providers. We are comfortable and confident that these providers can continue to fulfill the services that, in many cases, they’ve been doing over the courses of – over the course of years or longer.
Now, we distinguish humanitarian assistance from bilateral aid. That, of course – or bilateral assistance. That, of course, is a very different question. And right now what we have said over the course of the past several weeks is there is a review of our assistance to the Afghan government. Now we’re in a position where there is not yet a new government formed. So in the first instance, we’ll need to see government formation take place. That is a mere technicality.
What is not a technicality will be the composition of that government and I think most importantly the behavior of that government. We’ve made the point any number of times that statements from the Taliban, statements from individuals who may be in any future Afghan government are one thing.
What we will be looking to when it comes to the issues that you’ve raised, including the potential for any forms of assistance, will be the actions, the actions of any new Afghan government, especially vis-a-vis the areas we care profoundly about; that is: safe passage; respect for the rights of the people of Afghanistan, including women and girls and minorities; a government that is inclusive, a government that follows through on its counterterrorism commitments, and a government that respects the universal and international norms that – it’s not only the United States – that not only the United States seeks to uphold, but together with our international partners we collectively do as well.
QUESTION: But on humanitarian aid specifically, what proportion of the aid – the humanitarian aid that was being done before can still be done? You said some partners are still able to carry that out, but obviously, it’s not 100 percent because a lot of these people have left the country. A lot of the people who were providing that aid have left the country for sure. So —
MR PRICE: We are still in the position of assessing what that might look like. I think it’s premature for us to put a number on it, but what I can say is that we have been in touch with our operational partners on the ground. We’re not going to speak to them, of course, for security reasons, but we are confident that there remain partners on the ground who are in a position to make good use of such aid for the benefit of the Afghan people.
Yes.
QUESTION: On the government, it seems that the formation of this government is imminent. Can you tell us a little bit what the U.S. would consider an inclusive government? You’ve been saying that for a while, but what are the criterias you think should be met to the government to be inclusive and to be a first step towards recognition?
MR PRICE: Well, it is not so much what we think, in terms of what the United States thinks. There have been, as you know, any number of statements from broad and vast coalitions of countries. We have done this with our closest allies and partners, whether it’s NATO, whether it’s the G7, whether it is in the form of multilateral statements, including one on women and girls that was issued a couple weeks ago, a couple on safe passage that have been put together by the United States more recently.
But I would actually point you to a statement that may not carry 114 signatures but a statement that carries at least – that carries the imprimatur of the United Nations Security Council. The UNSCR that was put forward just a few days ago had some consensus language in there that I think is reflective of what the international community expects to see from any future Afghan government. It says that – it encourages all parties to seek an inclusive, negotiated political settlement with full, equal, and meaningful representation of women that responds to the desire of Afghans to sustain and build on Afghanistan’s gains over the last 20 years in adherence to the rule of law, and underlines that all parties must respect their obligation.
So that was an emphasis on the sort of inclusivity that the United Nations Security Council, at least, expects to see. There are other paragraphs in this UNSCR that speak to safe passage, which is something that we have underlined ourselves with more than half of the world’s countries on a couple of occasions now, and also the counterterrorism commitments, the CT commitments that the Taliban signed up to, signed its name to early last year under the U.S.-Taliban agreement and has since reaffirmed that it will pursue. So there are a series of expectations and a series of principles not so much that are in our own voice or in our voice alone, but that carry the weight of the broad international community in a meaningful way.
QUESTION: And just one other one on the airport. Would you think that a suggestion by Turkey that private companies take care of the security would be a welcome development? And do you urge the Taliban to accept some kind of external actors, security – private security forces or external forces to take care of the security of the airport? Do you think this is a condition to reopening operations?
MR PRICE: Well, it seems here that our interests are broadly aligned with the international community. We know for certain that the United States, that those that participated in the ministerial that Secretary Blinken convened earlier this week, and it seems to be the case that the Taliban also want to see a functioning commercial airport in Kabul.
We want to see such an airport for a couple reasons. One is the ability to – to Simon’s question before, to provide the sort of humanitarian assistance that we will continue to send to Afghanistan, but also, importantly, is the fact that a functioning commercial airport will be – will provide our citizens, lawful permanent residents of United States, SIV visa holders, those other Afghans at risk, a means by which to leave the country should they choose to do so.
But before you can have a functioning airport, you have to have a few things. Number one, you have to have an element or an entity that is capable of running the airport, and we know that in recent weeks and certainly after the U.S. military left, the third-country contractors – third-country national contractors that previously were running the airport are no longer in a position to do so.
We also know that you need an airport that is not in a state of profound disrepair, and so we have supported the efforts of the Qataris and the Turks together with the private sector to assess the state of the airport. As I told you several days ago now, there was an assessment that was done before the U.S.-led evacuation concluded on August 31st. We also know that after the conclusion of that evacuation, there will need to be a re-evaluation to see to it that the condition that it was found in at that time – late last week, I believe it was – is consistent with the condition it is in now. And we’ve seen video footage of Taliban forces on the airport compound, and so we – so presumably those who have – who are on the ground working this want to make sure that the airport is in a similar condition.
But you raised another condition. It’s that of security, and in order for charters; ultimately, in order for commercial airliners and commercial entities, certainly, to fly into an airport like Kabul, they will want a level of assurance that their operations will be safe and secure. And this is something that, from their public statements, it seems the Turks and the Qataris are working on, something they’re focused on. It’s also something that we have sought to support in every which way because we know that this issue of security is fundamental to the ability to have a commercial airport that is operational, that is functioning, that is capable of receiving humanitarian provisions, and capable of being a source of departure for those —
QUESTION: And does that require an external actor? Sorry, just —
MR PRICE: Again, it is – I wouldn’t speak of it in terms of what we are requiring. This is something we have sought to support with our partners, in this case the Qataris, in this case the Turks. Obviously, they are working this very closely with the Taliban as well.
Yes, Nick.
QUESTION: Just to follow up on Matt’s question, you referred to it as a hypothetical, but, I mean, I would assume the State Department has a policy for what happens with those applicants whose vetting is not successful. What happens to those people? Do they get returned to Afghanistan? What does the United States do with them?
MR PRICE: We do have a plan, but again, these aren’t always plans that we can detail publicly. We also wouldn’t want to wade into a hypothetical. In many cases, as I said before, the vetting will be quick and the rigorous checks can be fulfilled in rather short order, given that we surged resources to these transit countries to do just that. DHS is working very closely with other interagency partners to expedite these security checks consistent with the rigor with which they need to be conducted.
QUESTION: And then just a quick follow-up on —
MR PRICE: Yeah.
QUESTION: — the SIV program. Obviously, there were the comments from the Secretary of Defense, where he essentially acknowledged that the SIV program was not up to the task that we saw it trying to be used for in the last two weeks. Is there any effort to overhaul the SIV program to make it faster to process people?
MR PRICE: Well, it is absolutely true that the SIV program was not intended to be conducted in the course of an evacuation. But that is precisely why from literally day one of this administration, in January of this year, long before the Taliban were on the outskirts of Kabul, we prioritized this program, a program that had been left in a unfortunately decrepit state by the previous administration.
You don’t have to take my word for that; you can take the word of the State Department inspector general that concluded an investigation of the program in 2020 and found that it was suffering from chronic shortages in staffing, a lack of a responsible coordinating official, a bureaucratic 14-step process, and the fact that there had not been a single SIV interview conducted in Kabul since March of 2020. Now, of course, COVID certainly had a say in that, but so too did the previous administration that sought to starve refugee programs and other immigrant visa programs of resources that were needed. That is just a fact.
Within two weeks of this administration coming into office, interviews had restarted in Kabul. We surged resources. Even as we went into ordered departure within our embassy in Kabul, we actually sent additional consular officers to Kabul to expedite SIV processing. Secretary Blinken sent an additional 50 people here to expedite processing at the chief of mission stage. We moved operations from Kabul that could be done more effectively here without people having to potentially be in harm’s way as well.
And you can see the efficiencies that we were able to achieve. In March of this year, we were processing about a hundred SIV applications per week. By mid-August of this year, we were processing a thousand SIV applications per week. If my math is right, that’s a tenfold increase. In doing so, we were able to shave more than a year off the average processing time. So this was a program that literally from the start we prioritized, we took from a state of decrepitude and turned into a program that was operating much more efficiently.
Now, what is also true – and I think you’ve heard this from Chairman Milley, you have heard this from the President, you’ve heard this from the Secretary, you’ve heard this from the Intelligence Community – we were all under the impression that we would have had more time. I don’t think there was – there certainly was not widespread consensus that the Taliban would be at the gates of Kabul in August of this year.
And so when you take where we were in August, processing a thousand visas per week, and you look forward as to how many we could have processed going forward if we had the time that just about everyone expected, you can see how those gains would be quite valuable. Those gains will be quite valuable though, because many of them are still relevant to the ongoing SIV processing. Just because we do not have a presence on the ground while our operations in Kabul are suspended, we can still take advantage of those significant processing gains to continue working through cases that remain open for Afghans who have worked for us over the years.
Yes, Andrea.
QUESTION: I’ve got a couple of questions about that. A thousand a week would take 80 weeks to accommodate what we estimated to be applicants and families according to some of the original estimates that came from this building. So clearly great progress, but not nearly enough, surging not enough. So —
MR PRICE: So that 80,000 figure is not correct.
QUESTION: So —
MR PRICE: That —
QUESTION: And families.
MR PRICE: That figure is not correct.
QUESTION: Okay. But —
MR PRICE: So —
QUESTION: But you all have acknowledged that a majority were left behind.
MR PRICE: But —
QUESTION: It was acknowledged from this room.
MR PRICE: What we have said —
QUESTION: And given that, why wasn’t the whole program abandoned? It was a failed program you inherited from —
MR PRICE: Abandon the SIV program?
QUESTION: Yes. And I know it was congressionally mandated. That’s not an explanation right now, because there’s criticism from the Pentagon, there’s criticism from Congress, there’s plenty of after-action criticism of this – of this building for not having properly accommodated so many thousands of people. And the fact is that program didn’t work – a broken program that you inherited. Why not start over, figure out how to do it out of country, surge more people? I mean, this was an emergency that you could have foreseen because you knew that there was going to be a withdrawal. You didn’t know exactly when and Kabul, but you knew there was going to be a withdrawal, and clearly it was – it was absolutely not enough to even begin to get – I also had another question.
How are you now getting ground truth about what’s happening with the Taliban, whether they’re living up to the commitments? Because we are hearing horror stories from veterans’ groups who are getting calls from their SIV translators, people who are stuck there, and people are dying while we are waiting to get them accommodated.
MR PRICE: So to your first question, why didn’t we abandon the SIV program, I would take that in a couple different ways. Number one, the commitment that successive administrations have had to those who have stood with us, those who have worked with us, this is something that President Biden, something that Secretary Blinken —
QUESTION: I mean replace it. Replace it with something better.
MR PRICE: Well, but there seems to be a tension in your question, because if time is of the essence, which, of course, we know now it was, I don’t foresee a possibility that we could have abandoned an entire program and started one from scratch and expected to have been – expected to have achieved more, better results than we did.
I think speaking to the results that we achieved – again, we went from a program that, as you said, was decrepit, as you said, was starved of resources, as the State inspector general said was starved of resources.
QUESTION: Deliberately so.
MR PRICE: Deliberately so. We took that from a hundred visas per week to 800 visas per week – to a thousand visas per week. Now, we were not content to stop there, of course. The efficiencies that we had achieved we hoped to have continued to build on, and right now we will continue to take advantage of those efficiencies to process SIVs who remain in the pipeline.
But it is not accurate – there have been lots of numbers thrown around. The 80,000 figure is not an accurate figure. When it comes to the number of SIVs who have – who we were able to evacuate, I know there’s been intense focus on this. Again, we are determined to give you numbers that are both timely but also accurate. And so what we can tell you right now, the best data we have is from the processing that DHS is doing of arrivals who are here in this country. And right now, as of yesterday, there were just over 31,000 individuals who had arrived from Afghanistan. These are individuals who are this country that we can see for ourselves and therefore have the best sense of. About 14 percent of those are U.S. citizens; 9 percent of those are lawful permanent residents; 77 percent of those are Afghans at risk. And so it’s within that broad category of Afghans at risk that SIV holders and SIV applicants would fall into.
But I’ll make an additional point here. We’ve said that there were approximately 5,500 American citizens who were evacuated safely on U.S. military flights; another 500 made their way out of the country via other means. Those numbers are likely to continue to increase, but the number I gave you here was 14 percent of 31,000, which is 4,446. So that is a vast majority of American citizens. And I make that point because these initial figures probably overcount American citizens because they were our first priority, they are our first priority, they were on some of the first flights out. We suspect that as we receive more individuals who were evacuated here in this country, and as that number grows from 31,000 to tens of thousands more, we will find that this category of at-risk Afghans, which again now is at 77 percent of this total, will also grow in time.
So I don’t want to get ahead of where the data is. I think the fact that we will have evacuated tens of thousands of at-risk Afghans – the vast majority of the 124,000 individuals will fall into this category – I think speaks to our ability to keep our commitment to the individuals who have worked with us, who have worked with the United States Government over time.
The other point and the final point I’ll make on this is that that commitment didn’t end on August 31st. I didn’t end yesterday. It will continue into the future.
QUESTION: How are you going to live up to it?
MR PRICE: We will continue to process individuals. We will – we are looking at all possible options that we can use to continue to process individuals and, as necessary, to provide them with documentation if they lack it. Again, the President has spoken of our commitment to bring as many of these individuals who wish to leave Afghanistan to safety. That is not something that we take lightly, and it’s not something – and the SIV program was not something that this President took lightly from day one as well.
Michele.
QUESTION: Ned – Ned —
QUESTION: And the Taliban question —
QUESTION: The numbers that you just gave ones are the same ones that you gave yesterday.
MR PRICE: Same ones from yesterday. That’s right.
QUESTION: And the Taliban question?
QUESTION: But there’s no change?
MR PRICE: I don’t have an update for today.
QUESTION: The question about judging the Taliban’s – whether they’re living up to their promises?
MR PRICE: So there are any number of ways we have, any number of sources of information that we have that will give us a clear – rather clear picture of the Taliban’s behavior. We have partners on the ground. There are other countries, and we’ve spoken of a couple of them, who retain a presence on the ground. We have sources of information that we don’t speak about publicly; we have sources of information that are available to all of us, and we can see reports on social media. We can – we are regularly in touch with not only American citizens or lawful permanent residents who may remain in Afghanistan, but also SIV holders, other Afghans at risk. So we will use all sources of information available to us to determine whether and how the Taliban is living up to its commitments going forward.
Michele.
QUESTION: Yeah, I wanted to ask about another group of people that were priority I think early on in this, and that’s the U.S-funded journalists, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Voice of America. What are you telling them today? What should they be doing?
MR PRICE: We are – everyone to whom we have a commitment – and certainly the men and women of USAGM, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, we have a commitment to them. We did everything we could to prioritize their departure in the first instance on a U.S. military plane – when that was no longer possible or looked improbable, on charter flights. The fact is that we were working on their safe evacuation just as the attack struck the airport perimeter. The operational environment changed markedly, unfortunately. It stood in the way of our ability to bring these individuals to safety before August 31st. But I am telling you, we have told them that we have a commitment to these individuals. They have served the American people with their journalism, with their work. We absolutely do have a commitment to them. That is a broad statement of fact.
When it comes to guidance that we are providing them – and this applies to any American citizens who may wish to law, any lawful permanent residents who may wish to live, any Afghans at risk who may wish to leave – we will provide them tailored guidance. But that is not something we will provide to all of you, and we won’t do that for their safety, and we won’t do that because it is tailored to them. And we are working on all possible options to effect their safe departure from Afghanistan.
Will.
QUESTION: Can I follow up on the numbers? How many of those USAGM employees were there – or contractors, rather, and how many family members are there?
MR PRICE: So I don’t have a firm figure with me. It has been reported publicly that there are several hundred involved in that group.
QUESTION: Can I go back to something for a second?
MR PRICE: Yep.
QUESTION: You talk about a plan and hypotheticals. Are you saying that that plan has not been enacted and that people who have been flagged, who have red flags for things like terrorism, have not been sent places yet?
MR PRICE: What I’m saying is that in most cases the vetting process is efficient because, again, we’ve surged resources, and in many cases we’ve been able to move people from the Middle East to Europe and, as appropriate, to the United States in the course of – in the course of days.
In cases where that vetting may take longer, we do have options available to us to ensure that only those individuals who have cleared this rigorous security vetting are able to – are able to enter the United States. But I’m just not in a position to detail it.
QUESTION: Can I —
MR PRICE: Yeah.
QUESTION: Sorry. Just on children, to what extent have you found that children have been separated from their parents or are coming – or are traveling by themselves? Can you put any sort of figure on it both outside the United States and those who arrived here?
MR PRICE: Sure. What I can say is that there are very few Afghan children currently arriving to the United States who are not accompanied by an adult known to them. As soon as a minor child is identified as being without any trusted adult, we immediately begin working to reunite these identified minors with their families and with their loved ones. Overseas, unaccompanied minors are referred to international organizations to assess their best interest and to promote family reunification when that’s possible.
Once they arrive to the continental United States, normal protocols for unaccompanied children apply. And in those cases, CBP or another federal agency refers them to the Office of Refugee Resettlement at HHS, and HHS then works to find extended family or other appropriate sponsors to care for the child using established sponsor assessment procedures. Unaccompanied minors not immediately unified with an appropriate caregiver are placed in culturally and aged – age-appropriate facilities. ORR, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, has identified sites that have Dari and Pashtu speakers and that are culturally appropriate in addition to the standing resources we have for all unaccompanied minors.
QUESTION: Right. Can I just ask what – I just want to know what the definition of – what is an adult who is not known to them? Does that have to be a blood – a blood relative?
MR PRICE: I don’t want to be categorical about it.
QUESTION: There are a lot of adults that a child might know who are not savory, for example, characters. So what exactly does that mean?
MR PRICE: I think, Matt, it refers to an adult that is supposed to be the custodian of a child, that is supposed to be traveling with the child. Obviously, it’s difficult for me to be categorical about this because —
QUESTION: Well, I know. But when they show up, does it have to be an aunt, an uncle, a mother? Obviously a mother, father, a brother, a cousin. What —
MR PRICE: The fact is that there —
QUESTION: Or can it be some random person who the kid – like a teacher? Is that – I mean —
MR PRICE: That is not our expectation that that will be the norm. I think what we have —
QUESTION: Whose definition is it? Is it yours, or is it DHS, or HHS?
MR PRICE: What we have said is that we refer —
QUESTION: No, no, I mean —
MR PRICE: We refer them to international organizations, organizations like UNICEF that work with us to assess the child’s condition, who that child may be traveling with, to ensure that that child is safely cared for.
QUESTION: Well, so – okay. So it’s up to whatever organization you designate to determine who an adult that is not known to them or is known to them is, who is an appropriate accompanying person?
MR PRICE: Matt, this is something that adjudicated on a case-by-case basis.
QUESTION: Fair enough. But I just want to know who is making the decision. Is it you guys? Is it DHS? Is it HHS? Is it UNICEF? Is it the Norwegians? Who is it?
MR PRICE: So we are working closely with our partners on the ground. That includes DOD. It includes DHS. But these are judgment calls that are made in the first instance in the first transit point, so in many cases individuals will go to – will go to Qatar, where a first assessment would take place. When a UNICEF referral or when a referral to another NGO is merited, that’s when that would take place.
Yes.
QUESTION: Ned, can you just go back very quickly to the specific question about the incoming Taliban government? Because I think it is imminent, the announcement of this. And I know it’s too early to say, I know, whether the Biden administration will recognize that government or not, but my question is: Will the administration authorize the delivery of any assistance, humanitarian or otherwise, to an Afghan government or governing council that has on it individuals who are currently designated by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control for sanctions because of their involvement in terrorist activity?
MR PRICE: So there is a very important point here that around the world we have mechanisms in place to deliver humanitarian assistance through providers on the ground in a way that bypasses any government or de facto government entity. So we are confident – again, going through these providers on the ground – that we can continue to provide humanitarian assistance to the Afghan people in a way that, if inappropriate, would not benefit any future Afghan government.
QUESTION: I understand the nuance, but the reason you cannot name any of those organizations that are on the ground is because you’re afraid that naming them publicly could make them a target for that Taliban government? Is that —
MR PRICE: It is not in our interest and it is not in their interest for us to name them.
QUESTION: Okay, thanks.
QUESTION: I have one question on Afghanistan and one on China. Secretary Blinken has talked to his Chinese counterpart twice within two weeks. Does the State Department feel there is an urgency to seek China’s cooperation on Afghanistan? And during the last phone calls, Chinese State Councilor Wang Yi called all sides to contact and proactively guide the Taliban. Is this approach that you agree on?
MR PRICE: We think it is an urgent priority for the entire international community to be engaged on this. This is why we have galvanized not only the region but the broader community from the earliest moments of this administration and certainly during the earliest moments of this current phase to see to it, to the best of our ability, that the international community was speaking with one voice, that was acting in unison.
We’ve also made the point that it is important for Afghanistan’s neighbors – it is especially important for Afghanistan’s neighbors to play a constructive – to be constructive forces. We have made that clear before the events of August 14th and what has occurred since, and that remains the case now.
So the PRC is an important regional stakeholder. There are certainly areas where our interests are aligned with the PRC when it comes to Afghanistan. The fact that an UNSCR and a statement was able to emanate from the UN Security Council suggests that there is at least some degree of alignment when it comes to the United States and the PRC on these issues.
So it is true that we have engaged our Chinese counterparts, State Councilor Wang, Director Yang. Deputy Secretary Sherman engaged in discussions of Afghanistan when she was in Tianjin last month, I believe it was. So we have done this on a number of occasions knowing the importance of this issue and knowing that we do – there are some areas where our interests are aligned.
QUESTION: So Climate Envoy John Kerry is currently in China, actually in Tianjin. Could you please update us on how is that meeting going? And China is concerned that the climate cooperation is at risk over the political tension. Do you share the concern?
MR PRICE: Well, I believe the special envoy is now in Seoul. I believe he’s concluded his meetings in Tianjin.
What we know is that we are committed to working with the international community and with the PRC on climate as an urgent issue, and we certainly hope that Beijing will engage with us on the same basis on this issue. And we say this because we know we don’t have a choice: There has to be some degree of cooperation on this existential threat. We are the world’s two largest polluters. If we are not able to find a way to cooperate and to work together to achieve greater climate ambitions, it’s not only to our mutual detriment; it is to the broader detriment of the international community.
Without significant additional action by the PRC, whose emissions represent almost 30 percent of that global number, we will be in a much more difficult spot. That is precisely why earlier this year at the climate summit that President Biden convened he announced an ambitious climate target for the United States as well. The world needs us to cooperate together on issues like climate. We think there is certainly space for cooperation. We’ve been able to do it before, and we hope the PRC is able and willing to continue that cooperation.
QUESTION: And just lastly, the White House has indicated that this administration actually is looking forward to engage China at the highest level, like the upcoming G20. Is this still the diplomatic effort that you are pursuing?
MR PRICE: We have said that we will engage the PRC when it is in our interest to do so. Climate is manifestly one of those areas where it is in our interest to do so. But it is a relationship that you’ve heard us say before is multifaceted. It is one that is dominated by competition, and we intend – and our policy towards the PRC is predicated on this idea of competition. And that’s why you’ve heard us in the first instance talk about the investments we’re making here at home when it comes to our own economy, our own workforce, our own infrastructure, our own R&D, our own technological capabilities.
It is also why we have worked concertedly arm-in-arm with our partners and allies around the world. The first international travel Secretary Blinken took was to the Indo-Pacific, where we met with two of our important treaty allies there.
It is also a relationship that is characterized in some areas by adversity and with an adversarial approach, and we all know what those areas are. And then, of course, where there are areas where it’s in our interest, where it’s in the interest of the United States to cooperate with the PRC, we will seek to do that as well. And climate is a good example of that.
Yes.
QUESTION: Thank you. So Germany today called upon the European Union to enable a coalition to rapidly deploy a military force. That call came after a meeting, discussed the lessons from Afghanistan withdrawal. Do you have any comment on that, and do you believe that coalition, that force, does affect the NATO or the relationship with the U.S.?
MR PRICE: Well, we are aware of the EU discussions on this, and we continue to believe that a stronger, more capable Europe is in our shared interests. It’s in Europe’s interests; it’s in our interests as well. Given the overlapping transatlantic challenges, we won’t succeed without enhanced NATO-EU cooperation. And that’s something that we continue to strongly support. When the democracies that make up NATO, when the democracies that make up the EU stick together, they constitute a tremendous force for a stable and open international order. That is even more the case when the United States is working hand-in-hand with NATO and the EU, who are in turn working with one another.
NATO and the EU must forge stronger and institutional links and leverage each institution’s unique capabilities and strengths to avoid duplication and potential waste of scarce resources. When it comes to the details of this arrangement, we’d, of course, refer you to the EU.
QUESTION: A quick question on Yemen. Today, Secretary Blinken spoke with his Saudi counterpart – according to the readout – says he expressed the United States strong commitment to its longstanding strategic partnership, also the commitment to helping Saudi Arabia defend its people and territories. Does that mean any change in the kind of support that the Saudis get from the U.S., or is it the same? And if it’s the same, how do you support them?
MR PRICE: Well, as you know, the Saudis recently endured another attack from Houthi militants in Yemen. This one was on August 30th, when the Houthis struck against a civilian airport and Abha, wounding eight civilians and damaging a commercial airliner. The fact is that our partner, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, does face a threat from Yemen. We are standing with our partner. We obviously have robust security and counterterrorism cooperation. And if there are any changes we have to announce, we will.
Conor.
QUESTION: There’s been some reporting out there to the effect that the administration viewed planned efforts to evacuate Afghans by individuals or veterans’ groups or advocacy organizations as sort of an impediment, that, at times, it may have caused problems at Kabul airport. Can you speak to that? Is that the case?
MR PRICE: Well, I think you have to speak about this looking back and looking forward. There’s been a lot of misreporting out there on the issue of charters. The fact is that the Secretary has said the department is prepared to help U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, and at-risk Afghans – those Afghans to whom we have a special commitment – depart the country if they so choose. We have said that we are looking at all possible options to assist these priority groups to depart the country, again, if they so choose to do that.
When it comes to the charters – and this gets to your first – the first element of your question – we facilitated the evacuation of thousands of these individuals aboard charter aircraft from Hamid Karzai International Airport during the U.S. military-led operation. The U.S. military, the State Department, we were constantly coordinating with charter companies, with groups that sought to bring in charters to HKIA during that period. And it was a successful effort that, again, was able to evacuate thousands upon thousands of individuals, including on these charters.
Now, however, we’re in a different phase. We understand the concern that many are feeling as they try to facilitate charters and other forms of passage out of Afghanistan. The fact of the matter now is that we do not have personnel on the ground. We do not have air assets in the country. We do not control the airspace, whether over Afghanistan or anywhere else in the region. And so the misimpression that is out there that we are preventing or even the idea that we could prevent a charter flight from taking off – that is simply untrue. We could not and we are not.
What we are doing is we are expediting and providing all support and documentation within the department’s authority to facilitate landings in third countries. But again, this is not something we control. This is not in our hands. And so given these constraints, I also want to mention the fact that there are added complexities because we don’t have a reliable means to confirm the basic details of charter flights, including who may be organizing them, the number of American citizens or other priority individuals on board, the accuracy of the rest of the manifest, where they plan to land – there are a whole host of issues that, again, are just outside of our control.
There’s also the issue of where these flights would go, and we know that ISIS-K, as we have seen of late, has a keen interest in attacks and a keen interest in attacks against aviation targets. And so if these charters are seeking to go to a U.S. military installation, for example, we have to weigh not only the threat to those who may be on board – especially if they’re American citizens, LPRs, other Afghans to whom we have a special commitment – but also to the safety and security of State Department personnel, U.S. military personnel, Department of Homeland Security personnel, other U.S. personnel on U.S. military installations. These are among the risks that the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and the host government – which, of course, has an important say in all this – must consider.
So there are a range of factors to consider, but the idea that we are preventing charters or could prevent a charter is simply untrue. In fact, we are doing all we can to facilitate where we can.
QUESTION: Can I just follow up on the first part of that question? Just – so to go back to the evacuation operations themselves, though, did you view their role at any point in time as an impediment, as some reporting has said?
MR PRICE: Again, this would be a question better posed to DOD, because the air traffic control operations —
QUESTION: Not just the air traffic control, but getting people through the gates, getting them to the airport.
MR PRICE: What we said – and we tried to be very clear in our messaging here – is that the – what we tried to prevent was large groups of people, uncoordinated groups, coming to the gates of the airport. And unfortunately, we all saw the peril associated with that several days ago. So certainly, we welcomed the efforts of nongovernmental organizations, of advocacy groups, of those who were – just like us, just like our partners on the ground – seeking to facilitate the safe evacuation of their citizens, of their partners. We welcomed that. What we discouraged were large, uncoordinated movements to the airport that in fact posed a severe, profound danger to the safety and security of the very people these groups were seeking to evacuate.
Andrea.
QUESTION: Can I just ask another follow-up, then, on the second part of your first answer? So what is your recommendation now, then? Given all the complexities that you laid out, are you advising these groups to not try to carry out missions of some kind to evacuate folks?
MR PRICE: We – and I will tell you this as someone who was on a call as recently as 12:30 a.m. last night, 1:00 a.m. this morning – we are advising groups on a case-by-case basis. We are advising them to ensure that they know what we’re in a position to do, what we’re not in a position to do, the risks that are associated with this. And where it is possible for us to help facilitate, where it is appropriate for us to help facilitate, that is something we stand ready to do.
Andrea.
QUESTION: Can I follow up on people who are not on your priority list? There is a group of more than a hundred journalists, many supported by U.S. grants – Afghan journalists who are not P-1s or P-2s because they were not working for American companies but they were doing what we encouraged them to do, which is to start working in television, in print, in radio, and social media in Afghanistan. They were vetted by a number of women’s groups that you know very well. They never got to the gates because they never got approval because they were never priority. We had planes ready to take them out. They’re still stranded there. What do people in that category, who aren’t on the U.S. priority, do?
MR PRICE: So Andrea, there are going to be a number of Afghans at risk, people who may not fall into the SIV category, people who may not necessarily fall into the P-1 category, but people who may be eligible for P-2 referral, for example, or other categories —
QUESTION: Well, if they didn’t work for American companies, how are they P-2 eligible?
MR PRICE: So P-2 eligible, you can work for an NGO, you can work for an American media company, you can be an affiliate. There are a number of ways.
It’s also not just the United States that is seeking to facilitate the safe departure of individuals from Afghanistan. There are a number of other countries that are doing this, and we have, in fact, been coordinating very closely with our partners. We did that during the U.S. military-led evacuation and we’re doing that now, coordinating very closely in this current phase, where we’re seeking to facilitate the safe departure of those who wish to leave Afghanistan.
Thank you all very much.
(The briefing was concluded at 3:06 p.m.)
7. As they did on the battlefield, the Taliban outlasted the U.S. at the negotiating table
Can't help but think of the old adage about time and watches. But it was of course much more than that.
Excerpts:
“For me, the mistakes were made very, very early,” as the Americans tried to find solutions that “took it out of the hands of the Afghans,” said Thomas Ruttig, a German expert on the Taliban and co-director of the Afghan Analysts Network, an independent research organization based in Kabul.
The Taliban had long known it was playing a waiting game it was likely to win, Ruttig said. “These are not super-Afghans,” either on the battlefield or at the negotiating table, he said. “But they were much more consistent than everyone else,” and they understood Western politics and the need to “achieve” something.
That, and the fact it did not see the need to “ask their own people if they wanted to be killed or not,” gave the Taliban a huge advantage, Ruttig said.
As they did on the battlefield, the Taliban outlasted the U.S. at the negotiating table
On the day he was to begin peace talks with the Trump administration in the fall of 2018, Taliban co-founder and senior leader Abdul Ghani Baradar found himself in a luxury villa at a Qatari resort. His uncovered windows overlooked the swimming pool, where bikini-clad women lay in the Persian Gulf sun.
Zalmay Khalilzad, the Afghan-born U.S. diplomat negotiating for the administration, noted the scene when he showed up to greet Baradar, who had recently been released from years of imprisonment in Pakistan. It was, Khalilzad said lightly in the Pashto language they shared, a vision of heaven.
Baradar quickly walked to the windows and closed the curtains. It was time to begin.
Less than 18 months later, after what President Donald Trump called “very successful negotiations,” Baradar and Khalilzad struck a deal to end the 20-year war in Afghanistan with the full withdrawal of U.S. troops. After another year and a half, under the same agreement but a different U.S. president, the last American forces made a hasty, chaotic exit, leaving the Taliban in full charge of the country.
It was not the ending the United States wanted. In its wake, political blame has been lobbed across partisan lines. Democrats, and President Biden, accuse Trump of sticking them with a bad deal. Republicans, and Trump, charge Biden with botching the agreement and rushing the withdrawal. International allies are upset, adversaries are preening, and many Afghans feel betrayed.
Many others, even as they anxiously watch events unfold in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, believe the endgame was inevitable. “Whether we stretched the timeline, or we condensed the timeline, I think the only difference was the pace of events. We would have arrived at the same results,” said a person in the region closely familiar with the matter.
Like a number of current and former U.S. and foreign officials with direct knowledge of events who were interviewed for this article, this person spoke on the condition of anonymity about sensitive U.S. diplomacy with the Taliban that started more than a decade ago.
“For me, the mistakes were made very, very early,” as the Americans tried to find solutions that “took it out of the hands of the Afghans,” said Thomas Ruttig, a German expert on the Taliban and co-director of the Afghan Analysts Network, an independent research organization based in Kabul.
The Taliban had long known it was playing a waiting game it was likely to win, Ruttig said. “These are not super-Afghans,” either on the battlefield or at the negotiating table, he said. “But they were much more consistent than everyone else,” and they understood Western politics and the need to “achieve” something.
That, and the fact it did not see the need to “ask their own people if they wanted to be killed or not,” gave the Taliban a huge advantage, Ruttig said.
Interpreted as weakness
It took the United States almost a decade from the 2001 start of the war to conclude that a negotiated end was far more likely than a military victory. But some U.S. allies opened early channels of communication with the Taliban. German intelligence, which began tentative talks in 2005, helped the Americans finally establish contacts five years later, when State Department official Frank Ruggiero and Jeff Hayes, a defense intelligence official at the National Security Council, met with the militants.
Even as it began those baby steps toward negotiations, President Barack Obama’s administration had already moved to expand U.S. involvement in the war itself. By the end of 2009, after lengthy internal reviews, Obama had announced troop surges that would bring the total number of U.S. forces, numbering 36,000 at the start of his administration, to more than 100,000.
He would, Obama promised, “bring this war to a successful conclusion” by building the capacity of Afghanistan’s own military forces to take over the fight, and of its government to effectively run the country. The bloated U.S. presence wouldn’t last forever, he said. U.S. withdrawals would begin in July 2011 and be completed, with an unspecified training and counterterrorism force remaining, in 2014.
As with many such U.S. announcements, the Taliban had its own analysis of what the Americans meant. “It’s a surge, but we’re already telling you when we will leave,” Ruttig said. “They interpreted it as weakness.”
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put more meat on the bones of what she said was a three-pronged, “mutually-reinforcing” Obama strategy in a speech at the Asia Society in February 2011.
The expanded U.S. military presence would crush both the al-Qaeda terrorists who had plotted the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in Afghanistan, and the Taliban who had harbored them. An expanded U.S. government civilian presence would “bolster the governments, economies and civil societies of Afghanistan and Pakistan to undercut the pull of the insurgency.” There would also be “an intensified diplomatic push to bring the Afghan conflict to an end.”
The choice for the Taliban, she said, was a clear one — reject al-Qaeda and terrorism, or “face the consequences.”
“They cannot wait us out,” Clinton said. “They cannot defeat us.” But crucially, Clinton said that although breaking ties with al-Qaeda remained the U.S. bottom line, there were no preconditions to begin diplomacy.
Marc Grossman, a veteran U.S. diplomat who had left the Foreign Service, was asked to return to lead the diplomatic effort. Within weeks after Clinton’s speech, he was in Doha, the Qatar capital, shaking hands with and sitting across a table from Tayyab Agha, head of the political wing of the Taliban, and a close aide to its reclusive leader, Mohammad Omar.
Qatar was viewed by both sides as the perfect place for talks. Seeking to punch above its weight as a regional foreign policy player, it also was seen, despite hosting the major U.S. air base in the region, as having no particular stake in the Afghanistan conflict.
“As a small state, Qatar does not pose any threat to any countries,” Assistant Foreign Minister Lolwah al Khater said in a recent interview. “This puts us in a very flexible position where we can maneuver through the cracks.”
Grossman began by making clear to Agha that he was not there to make peace with the Taliban, but rather to open the door to direct talks between the militants and the Afghanistan government of then-President Hamid Karzai. Agha, who spoke English he had learned at a refugee school in Pakistan but preferred to speak to the Americans through an interpreter, indicated that the Taliban had no interest in talking to the U.S.-backed “puppets” in Kabul.
In general, the insurgents wanted to open a political office in Doha where they could speak to the international community. More specifically, they wanted the release of five senior Taliban imprisoned by the American military at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Although Grossman outlined a sequence of reciprocal actions, the talks quickly boiled down to what amounted to a prisoner swap. In exchange for the Guantánamo five, the Americans wanted the release of the only U.S. service member held by the Taliban.
An Army soldier deployed to Afghanistan in the spring of 2009, Bowe Bergdahl, for reasons that would be disputed years later at his military court-martial, had wandered away from his battalion based in Paktika province, along the Afghanistan border with Pakistan. Five months after his disappearance, he showed up as a prisoner in a Taliban video.
Grossman and Agha and their teams held four or five meetings in Doha, attended by Qatari mediators.
“Most of the discussions were not the mega discussions” about ending the war, recalled a senior Qatari official. “They were more transactional discussions about specific topics . . . it was all about managing the situation rather than resolving the situation.”
While they came close to agreement, the negotiations ended abruptly after Karzai, angered that his government had not been included, demanded in December 2011 that they be shut down.
For the Taliban, notified by Qatar that the Americans were not coming back, the episode did nothing to enhance U.S. credibility.
A gift for the Taliban
Indirect and sporadic U.S.-Taliban contacts followed, and the Americans eventually asked Qatar to allow the Taliban to establish a more permanent office in Doha. Karzai finally agreed, but exploded in rage on the day the mission was set to open in the summer of 2013. Under their black-and-white flag, the militants had hung a banner and affixed a plaque on the wall reading “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” making the office what the Afghan president argued was an alternative embassy.
After then-Secretary of State John F. Kerry scrambled to defuse Karzai’s anger, and the Qataris intervened with the Taliban, the plaque was removed and a statement issued saying the venue would be known officially as the “political bureau of the Taliban Afghan” in the Persian Gulf state.
But it was not until the spring of 2014, under new U.S. negotiators James Dobbins from the State Department and Douglas Lute from the National Security Council, that a deal to exchange the prisoners was finally struck. Under its terms, the five Taliban were transferred from Guantánamo to Qatari custody. Bergdahl, who had been held on the Pakistani side of the border, was handed over to a U.S. Delta Force Special Operations team near Khost, just inside Afghanistan.
While the three-pronged U.S. policy remained in force, there had been little negotiation beyond the prisoner swap as the war raged on between the Taliban and the surged U.S. forces, along with thousands of other troops from NATO and non-NATO coalition forces. With little to show for that effort, some allies began to withdraw and Obama, as promised, began to downsize the U.S. troop presence and turn “combat operations” on the ground over to the Western-trained and equipped Afghan forces.
During a news conference in July 2016, Obama said the U.S. presence would be reduced to 8,400 troops when his presidency was over by the end of that year. But the United States would continue backing the Afghan military, he said. “It’s in our national interest — after all the blood and treasure we have invested — that we give our Afghan partners the support to succeed,” he said.
Six months into his presidency, Trump announced his own vision for the war. There would be no more “nation-building,” the second prong of Clinton’s strategy, and there was no talk of negotiations. Instead, despite his campaign pledges to pull out U.S. forces, he endorsed a Pentagon plan to again boost troop levels. The Americans, he said, would “fight to win.”
Hamdullah Mohib, Afghanistan’s ambassador to Washington under the new government of President Ashraf Ghani in Kabul, said Trump’s message was “exactly what we wanted.” Much as Karzai had, Ghani opposed any direct U.S. talks with the Taliban that excluded his government.
When Qatar came under diplomatic attack by its Persian Gulf neighbors, led by Trump allies Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Trump joined them in charging Qatari support for international terrorism, pointing to the Taliban office in Doha as one example.
It wasn’t until 2018 — as the Taliban had grown stronger rather than weaker on the ground, and his goal of complete withdrawal seemed further away — that Trump was convinced of the wisdom of negotiations.
That summer, Khalilzad — a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq and the United Nations under the George W. Bush administration who had spent the Obama years out of government — was contacted by then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Pompeo explained that the president was concerned about how things were going in Afghanistan, and wanted to restart negotiations, according to U.S. officials at the time. Priorities included Taliban commitments to break its ties with al-Qaeda, to start peace talks with the Afghan government, and to begin a cease-fire.
But what came across most clearly to Khalilzad was that Trump’s primary goal — shared by the Taliban — was to get U.S. forces out.
Ghani, who had known Khalilzad since they were teenagers and suspected he sought his own position of power in their shared homeland, was not happy about the appointment, or the fact that the Afghan government was again being left out. The Americans were merely spinning their wheels in negotiations, he told them, and the Taliban representatives they met with — Agha had resigned as negotiator in a factional dispute among the militants in 2015, and the reported death of Omar — had never been representative of the group’s true power brokers, who resided in Pakistan.
Before Khalilzad began, he and Pompeo traveled to Pakistan and asked for the release of Baradar — arrested there in 2010, reportedly at the request of Karzai — as did Qatari Foreign Minister Mohammed al Thani. In November 2018, Baradar arrived in Doha.
In his State of the Union address to Congress the following February, Trump said negotiations were accelerating, as Khalilzad and Baradar had reached preliminary agreement to gradually withdraw all U.S. forces — at that point numbering 14,000 — in return for a Taliban pledge not to allow al-Qaeda or other global terrorist groups to operate on Afghan soil.
“The other side is also very happy to be negotiating,” Trump said.
The talks in Doha were arduous. Like Iran, in its negotiations with the Obama administration over a nuclear agreement, Baradar and his team frequently delivered long, passionate speeches about how the Americans had destroyed Afghanistan, killed civilians and destroyed homes, installed a puppet government and done nothing positive for the country, people familiar with the talks said.
Khalilzad responded in kind, recalling that the Taliban had hosted al-Qaeda, which attacked the United States and killed nearly 3,000 Americans on 9/11. It had run a brutal and cruel government when it was in charge of Afghanistan, and had killed more Afghans than the Americans had. The militants didn’t even know Afghanistan any more, Khalilzad taunted Baradar at one point, inviting them on a tour of a modern Kabul they had not seen in 20 years.
Sometimes the sessions grew so contentious that they were abruptly suspended.
But much of time, the Taliban negotiators were serious and painstaking, meticulously going over every word of proposed documents. While they argued meanings among themselves, the U.S. team concluded that their strength was in an ability to reach consensus and stick with it.
By late summer of 2019, a full draft was in place. Trump was pleased, and after Khalilzad finished briefing the White House team by video at a National Security Council meeting, the president announced that he wanted to bring the Taliban leadership to Camp David for a signing ceremony. Jaws dropped in silence around the table at the proposal, which Trump later announced on Twitter.
While none of his advisers thought Camp David was a good idea, they were far from agreement with each other over the draft agreement. Pompeo — echoing Trump’s determination to get the troops out, especially before the 2020 presidential election — was all for it, U.S. officials said at the time. National security adviser John Bolton, and many in the Pentagon, opposed it.
In early September, however, those divisions gained widespread media coverage when Trump announced the Taliban negotiations were finished after a series of attacks and bombings by the militants, including one that killed a U.S. soldier.
“They’re dead, as far as I’m concerned,” he told reporters outside the White House. Asked later whether plans to withdraw an initial 5,000 troops in early 2020 were also off the table, Pompeo told television talk-show hosts the next day, “I hope not. . . . I can’t answer that question. Ultimately, it’s the president’s decision.”
In Doha, the Taliban was dismissive. It had already rejected Trump’s Camp David idea, at least until after an actual agreement was signed. And why was Trump so upset about the death of one American soldier? The Taliban had never agreed to a cease-fire, Baradar told Khalilzad and Gen. Austin “Scott” Miller, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, in a meeting at the home of the Qatari foreign minister. Negotiations had first begun years ago, he said, and the fighting had never stopped.
American airstrikes, Baradar noted, had killed hundreds, if not thousands of Taliban in airstrikes since the supposed withdrawal from combat operations in 2014.
But by November, Khalilzad was again talking to Baradar, asking him in a meeting in Pakistan whether the Taliban would agree to a brief “reduction in violence” to prove both good faith and the leadership’s ability to control its forces on the ground.
The Taliban “wants to make a deal. And we’re meeting with them and we’re saying it has to be a cease-fire,” Trump told U.S. troops in Afghanistan during a Thanksgiving Day visit.
The Taliban was initially noncommittal, reminding that the draft deal abandoned in September called for a cease-fire only after the withdrawal deal was completed. By February, however, the agreement abandoned the previous September was again ready to be completed. Trump had agreed, provided a seven-day pause in the fighting that had been negotiated took place. The pause, observed by both sides for the most part, took place the last week in February.
Pompeo announced that the “deadlock” had been broken, and flew to Doha to witness the signing between Khalilzad and Baradar on Feb. 29. The Taliban team broke into applause, shouting “Allahu akbar.”
Trump, declaring “there hasn’t been a moment like this,” said he would be “meeting personally with Taliban leaders in the not-too-distant future,” maybe even at Camp David.
Not everyone was happy with the terms of the deal, which set a May 2021 departure date for the last U.S. troops, in exchange for a Taliban promise not to attack American forces while they were headed out the door. Everything else — a Taliban pledge to keep al-Qaeda from plotting or launching attacks against the United States and its allies, a plan to begin talks between the militants and the Kabul government, with a cease-fire at the top of their agenda — was only vaguely stipulated. Ghani, under heavy U.S. pressure, released 5,000 Taliban prisoners; the Taliban turned over about 1,000 captured Afghan soldiers.
“The agreement was really a gift for the Taliban,” Ruttig said. “And they actually fulfilled it to the letter. There wasn’t much for them to fulfill.”
There were no attacks against the departing Americans, whom Trump started to pull out, at one point publicly promising, until he was reined in by military and White House advisers, that they would all be home by Christmas 2020. Trump gained little if any political advantage from the deal, as his Democratic opponent that year, Joe Biden, also promised to pull out the troops and end the war.
Talks with the Ghani government did not begin until the fall, then sputtered inconclusively. Far from a cease-fire, the Taliban, as if the withdrawal agreement had freed it from all constraint, began a massive spring offensive against Afghan security forces. By the time Biden had finished his own policy review, with fewer than 3,000 U.S. troops remaining, the militants had taken over much of the country and were poised for a final surge.
Biden decided to keep Khalilzad in place and the U.S.-Taliban talks with Baradar continued in Doha. But at the end of the day, U.S. negotiators later reflected, the militants had outlasted the Americans and both Trump and Biden had simply wanted to leave.
In April, after Ghani refused last-ditch U.S. entreaties to resign and offer the Taliban a power-sharing government, Biden announced the full withdrawal of U.S. troops by Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the al-Qaeda attacks that started the war.
By Aug. 31, two weeks after Ghani fled the country and the triumphant Taliban marched into the capital, they were gone.
8. Taliban say U.N. promises aid after meeting with officials in Kabul
I would be worried, very worried, about the security of UN aid workers.
"The U.N. delegation promised continuation of humanitarian assistance to the Afghan people, saying he would call for further assistance to Afghanistan during the coming meeting of donor countries," Shaheen said on Twitter.
Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world, has been plunged into crisis by the abrupt end of billions of dollars in foreign aid following the collapse of the Western-backed government and the victory of the Taliban last month.
Shaheen said the Taliban assured the U.N. delegation of "cooperation and provision of needed facilities."
Taliban say U.N. promises aid after meeting with officials in Kabul
Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen leaves after a news conference in Moscow, Russia July 9, 2021. REUTERS/Tatyana Makeyeva
Sept 5 (Reuters) - Senior Taliban officials met in Kabul on Sunday with the U.N. undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, who promised to maintain assistance for the Afghan people, Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen said.
Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, head of the Taliban's political office and other officials met Martin Griffiths as Afghanistan faces a potentially catastrophic humanitarian crisis caused by severe drought and a collapsing economy.
"The U.N. delegation promised continuation of humanitarian assistance to the Afghan people, saying he would call for further assistance to Afghanistan during the coming meeting of donor countries," Shaheen said on Twitter.
Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world, has been plunged into crisis by the abrupt end of billions of dollars in foreign aid following the collapse of the Western-backed government and the victory of the Taliban last month.
Shaheen said the Taliban assured the U.N. delegation of "cooperation and provision of needed facilities."
The United Nations is expected to convene an international aid conference in Geneva on Sept. 13 to help avert what U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called a "looming humanitarian catastrophe". read more
Reporting by James Mackenzie; Editing by Peter Cooney
9. How a Long Island Man Became the ‘Forrest Gump of Jihad’—and Then Flipped
Another fascinating story seemingly confirming truth is stranger than fiction.
How a Long Island Man Became the ‘Forrest Gump of Jihad’—and Then Flipped
Politico · by Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back From Extremism.
Magazine
What Bryant Neal Viñas can teach us about the lessons from Afghanistan the U.S. still hasn’t learned.
Photo by John Moore/Getty Images
By CARLA POWER
09/05/2021 06:50 AM EDT
Carla Power is a journalist and author. Her first book, If the Oceans Were Ink, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. This article is adapted from her forthcoming book,
In late summer 2008, in an Al Qaeda safe house in Waziristan, Bryant Neal Viñas found himself explaining to a senior commander that a bomb on the Long Island Rail Road could cripple New York City. Viñas was a native of Long Island himself. A recent convert to Islam and a recent recruit in the terror organization, he had already floated other plans—bombing a Walmart, setting up training camps in Peru—but the LIRR plot was the only one to pique his commanders’ interest.
Late one night, over dinner with senior commander Younis al-Mauritani, Viñas sketched a map of his native Long Island, explaining the key stations, the most crowded times, and crucially, the way all the trains bound for Manhattan merged into a single tunnel. The best plan of attack for a suicide bomber, he explained, was to blow up the tunnel from a train inside it. Al-Mauritani was intrigued. The importance of a bombing like that lay in not the number of casualties, he told Viñas, but in how it could wreck the economy.
That was enough to interest Al-Mauritani.
The story of how Viñas came to plan to blow up the LIRR can be summed up in one word: blowback. Not that long ago, blowback was a favored buzzword among American foreign policy pundits. Coined by an American CIA analyst in 1954, the year after Washington ousted Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, in order to protect British oil interests, it refers to the unintended fallout from covert government actions overseas.
Blowback’s exhibit A is the Afghan mujahideen, whom the United States armed to fight the Soviets during the 1980s, some of whom then morphed into global jihadis in the following decade. Human rights organizations and military analysts have long argued that America’s targeted drone strikes in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan are producing contemporary versions of blowback. In 2002, the Bush administration pioneered the use of predator drones to target overseas terrorists. Their use grew exponentially under the Obama administration, and Trump expanded the acceptable area for their use beyond the battlefield to any “area of active hostilities.”
But human rights organizations, security analysts and military figures—those who’ve watched drone fallout from up close—argue that drone warfare is counterproductive. Strikes that accidentally kill civilians, coupled with the anxiety and fear that drones produce, serve only to alienate populations and stoke militancy. Erik Goepner, a retired U.S. air force colonel and an adjunct scholar at the CATO Institute, found that countries the United States invaded had 143 more terror attacks annually than other countries; those where the United States used drone strikes averaged 395 more terror attacks a year than those with no drone strikes. A former U.S. diplomat in Yemen estimates that for every drone strike there that kills an Al Qaeda operative, Americans create between 40 and 60 new enemies.
Drone strikes “cause enemies for the United States that will last for generations,” warned George W. Bush’s counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke. “All of these innocent people that you kill have brothers and sisters and tribal relations. Many of them were not opposed to the United States prior to some one of their friends or relatives being killed. And then, sometimes, they cross over, not only to being opposed to the United States, but by being willing to pick up arms and become a terrorist against the United States. So you may actually be creating terrorists, rather than eliminating them.” In 2015 four veteran U.S. Air Force drone pilots wrote to President Barack Obama, declaring that “this administration and its predecessors have built a drone program that is one of the most devastating driving forces for terrorism and destabilization around the world.”
The same warnings about blowback continue today amid the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. Reports that the August 29th US drone strike in Kabul killed ten civilians, eight of them under 18, will doubtless be used as recruiting propaganda for violent extremist groups. What’s more, poverty, factionalism, a weak government and circling foreign interests will only stoke Afghanistan’s potential as an exporter of violent extremism.
Among the people radicalized by drone strikes was Viñas himself. As he tells it, it was an American drone strike that led him, in 2008, to plot to blow up the Long Island Rail Road.
I took that same rail line from Manhattan to Bayside, Queens, to meet him at his lawyer’s office. Walking the avenue lined with pizza joints and cheap nail salons, my LIRR ticket still in my pocket, I wondered how somebody decides to destroy a train line they’d traveled in their youth, with the aim of wounding the economy of the city where they were born. We were meeting at the office of his lawyer in part because he doesn’t have much of a home; he rents a room in a woman’s house in Flushing. He’s not speaking to his family or to any of his childhood friends. “He’s not my son no more,” his mother told the New York Daily News after his arrest. “I don’t know him if he’s able to do this. He has no family anymore.”
Viñas arrived at our meeting late, full of apologies: He’d been kept overtime at his job scrubbing pots at an Italian restaurant. His baby face, his gray T-shirt, and the baseball cap perched over the do-rag on his head made him look more like a teenager than a 35-year-old man. He has a round face, slightly hooded eyes, and a subdued, studiously polite air. Nothing in Viñas’ upbringing predisposed him to join Al Qaeda, let alone explained the fact that in just seven months with the group, he managed to get access to top commanders. American counterterrorism officials called him “the Forrest Gump of jihad” for his uncanny ability to show up at key Al Qaeda meetings. Here was a guy with a high school education, who’d headed out from Long Island with few contacts and no Arabic, Pashto, or Dari, yet was determined to die as a martyr.
Born in 1982, Viñas had been raised Catholic in Medford, Long Island, by his father, an engineer from Peru, and his mother, from Argentina. When he was 14, his father left his mother, who a few years later renounced custody of him. Moving in with his father and his stepmother only created more tensions, and for a time, he lived in his car and bunked with a neighborhood family. He started taking some courses at a technical college but didn’t finish them. Six months after 9/11, gripped by fervent patriotism, he enlisted in the U.S. Army as a petroleum supply specialist, but left after three weeks. He received a chapter 11 discharge, which meant he’d failed to adapt to life in the military.
Bouncing between jobs as a truck driver, a forklift operator and a car wash attendant, Viñas filled his free time with boxing. He first encountered Islam at a Long Island mall, after flirting with a girl working at a T-shirt kiosk. When he asked her out, she said she couldn’t, because her family said that Muslims shouldn’t date. Viñas started asking around about Islam; a Pakistani friend gave him a child’s primer about it. Attracted by the discipline of regular prayers, the avoidance of pork and alcohol, and the emphasis on keeping your body strong, he toyed with the idea of converting. He even fasted during Ramadan in solidarity with Muslims. One day he stopped by a mosque to make a Ramadan donation. Standing at the entrance with his checkbook, he was invited in by a group of guys, and before he knew it, they had him reciting the shahada, the phrase whose recitation makes one a Muslim. “Now, you’re Muslim,” said the man. Viñas wanted to convert but was not ready yet. “I still had a lot of sinful stuff I wanted to do,” he told me. For the first time in the half hour we’d been talking, he flashed the most fleeting of smiles.
In the years following his conversion, his outrage at American actions in Muslim countries grew. He watched the influential YouTube talks by the New Mexico-born extremist Anwar al-Awlaki, who denounced the evils of nonbelievers and American oppression in idiomatic English from his base in Yemen. (In 2011 Al-Awlaki was killed, along with his sixteen-year-old son, by an American drone strike.)
The ultimate impetus for Viñas’ departure for Pakistan, however, was an email exchange with a friend about the Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. “You’re one of those people who just talks,” the friend accused him, “and never really does anything about the stuff they see as wrong.” The accusation cut deep, and Viñas became convinced it was his duty to defend his fellow Muslims from foreign occupation.
He asked a Pakistani-American friend for contacts in Pakistan, telling him he wanted to study Islam at a madrassa. In fact, he was secretly planning to join a militant group. His hope was to end up dead on an Afghan field, a martyr in a fight against a Western army.
On Sept. 10, 2007, he flew to Lahore, and made his way up to Peshawar. Soon he had a nom de guerre, Bashir al-Amriki—Bashir the American—and an introduction to join the Shah-Shab, a group affiliated with both the Taliban and the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service.
When Viñas joined, Shah-Shab had been tasked with waging attacks in Afghanistan’s Kunar province, so that the Afghan government couldn’t build a dam stopping the flow of water to Pakistan. Suddenly the religious purity he’d hoped to find among the militants didn’t seem so pure. He’d joined the group hoping to expel foreign occupiers; instead, he found himself asked to risk his life for a regional skirmish over resources. Moreover, he found that the group was using him “like a mascot,” touting its young American recruit as a talking point to raise funds. “Once I found out they were ISI, I was like, ‘I gotta get out of here,’” he told me. “I didn’t want to do their dirty work. That wasn’t for me.” He left, hoping to find a group to take him to fight on the flatlands of Helmand, in Afghanistan.
“Why Helmand?” I asked.
“I was a disaster in the mountains,” he said, his vowels New York–long. “The altitude was terrible; I got so sick. I’m from Long Island. I’m used to sea level!” He felt so wretched that he offered to undertake a suicide mission, figuring that martyrdom would be an honorable way to end his misery.
He was turned down. In March 2008, he made his way to North Waziristan, where he was able to join another group. He didn’t know its name until he asked a fellow recruit, a Kuwaiti, who told him. He was shocked. “I was like, ‘This is Al Qaeda? Really? It’s not like the stuff I saw in the videos.’” When he was back on Long Island, he’d thrilled to the Al Qaeda propaganda videos he’d seen on YouTube, with their scenes of men in black crawling under barbed wire and firing AK-47s. But life in the mud-brick house in Waziristan was boring.
He spent his days waiting, usually in vain, for deployment on a mission, choking down a diet of okra, potatoes, and rice and killing time talking to fellow volunteers. “Most of them were nerds and bookworms, not the vampire killers who drink blood you read about in the media,” he said. Nights, he slept in a flea-infested sleeping bag.
When the house radio could get a signal, the men caught bits of news on the BBC. Viñas heard about Usain Bolt’s victory at the Beijing Olympics, and John McCain and Barack Obama’s bids for the U.S. presidency. The wealthier volunteers, usually from the Gulf States, had money to spend on goats, chickens and specialized combat training. Viñas didn’t, so he had to settle for the three courses required for Al Qaeda volunteers: basic training, projectile weapons theory and explosives theory. To avoid the U.S. drones overhead, classes were conducted inside the house. Viñas learned how to take apart an AK-47 and how to prepare shrapnel for a bomb, sticking glue and ball bearings together “like a sandwich.” By July, his training was complete, and not long afterward he was assigned to a group tasked with launching a mortar attack on a U.S. army base in Afghanistan. But the first time they tried, the radio spotter wasn’t at his post. The second day, the rockets didn’t reach the base, and the mission was aborted.
***
Talking to Viñas was an exercise in cognitive dissonance. I could discern no trace of an aspiring suicide bomber in this guy from Queens. Nor could I see in him any anger, let alone enough to want to bomb the LIRR. “What made you propose it?” I asked “Was it to impress your commanders? Was it that you hated Americans? New Yorkers?”
Viñas paused, and then spoke in his low, even voice. “When you’re in a war zone,” he said, “you hear about violence all the time.” Its low hum helped to normalize it, he said.
I pressed on, trying to tease out what made him change from someone who would attack Western targets in Pakistan to someone who would attack New York commuters.
Finally he told me: It was the U.S. drones. At first, the Predators and Reapers flying overhead were simply annoying and anxiety-producing. “Sometimes you could hear them,” he said. “On a clear day, you could see them. There’s always that awareness that any day could be your last day.”
One day while traveling through Waziristan, he and a few other militants stopped at an orphanage to drink tea. Not long afterward a drone bombed the orphanage. On hearing the news, and imagining the dead children, something hardened in him. His notion of jihad shifted from fighting local battles to targeting American civilians. He wanted to get back at the people who had done it, he explained, his voice steady. “It’s not something I’m proud of, but in that environment, it becomes normal.”
A beat later he added softly, “War is very ugly.”
That ugliness prompted him to broach blowing up the LIRR to the Al-Qaeda commander.
***
The plot never came to fruition, though in the run-up to Thanksgiving 2008, I remember hearing on the radio that New York City travelers were warned of “plausible but uncorroborated information” that an Al Qaeda plot was planned for the holidays.
That information, I later learned, was not about Viñas. It was from Viñas.
If the first part of Viñas’ story was a lesson about blowback, the second was about the complexities of his homecoming. He turned out to be what even the U.S. government acknowledged was probably the greatest source of Western intelligence on Al Qaeda during his time there. “To say that the defendant provided substantial assistance to the government is an understatement,” wrote U.S. government prosecutors in court documents.
Viñas was arrested in the fall, in Peshawar, where he was waiting until the militants’ fighting season started again in spring. One day while he was haggling with a shopkeeper over a riflescope in a Peshawar bazaar, Pakistani police picked him up. They handed him over to the Americans, who took him to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and, from there, to the United States. Don Borelli, the FBI supervisor of his case, recalled watching the FBI plane land in Newburgh, New York, and “a skinny, frail-looking kid” disembark.
Nearly immediately after his arrest, Viñas began telling the authorities what he knew. When I pressed him on why he cooperated so quickly, he struggled a bit, hedging that he gave “some info when I first started, but wasn’t willing to give them everything.”
When you talk to people working to rehabilitate militants, they will stress that it is a slow, multipronged and highly personalized process. Rehabilitation usually takes years, with the individual zigzagging between minor successes and setbacks. The best programs draw on teams of people who are carefully selected for the person’s needs. For the guy hung up on radical theology, they will enlist an imam, a social worker and a psychologist. For the neo-Nazi
addicted to pills, they will use a drug counselor, as well as a mentor familiar with the local white
supremacist scenes.
In his rehabilitation, Viñas had none of these. Indeed, it’s difficult to talk about his transition as real disengagement. It seems more like opportunism, that he flipped sides simply to survive.
When I asked him to pinpoint the moment when he started to seriously think about cooperating with U.S. intelligence, he described sitting in his cell in the solitary lockdown section of a Brooklyn prison, freezing, listening to the screams of other inmates, and thinking back through past disappointments, “all the people that ratted on me, the promises that were
made.”
One day two detectives signed him out of the prison, put him in a car and drove him to Nathan’s Famous, where he got a hot dog and some fries. Knowing he was a lifelong Mets fan, they then took him to the stadium where the team’s minor league affiliate, the Brooklyn Cyclones, played. One of the detectives knew the general manager and asked if they could walk around the diamond, explaining the inmate’s situation in the broadest of terms: “Hey! Bryant here just got back from Afghanistan! He was in the mountains up there.” Viñas chuckled as he recalled the scene. “The look on the general manager’s face was like—what?”
With his handcuffs attached to a chain around his waist, Viñas walked around the diamond. The moment gave him a sense of contentment, even joy, “like a kid seeing something that he loves.”
Later, as he was waiting in the parking lot for one detective to get the car to drive him back to prison, the other turned to him. “Do you want to go back to maximum security for the rest of your life?” he asked. “Or”—spreading out his arms, looking around the parking
lot—“do you want to have a life again? Not many people get a second chance at life.”
It was at that moment, said Viñas, that “they got me.”
As soon as Viñas began to talk to the FBI, the U.S. Army swung into action. Based on his information, CIA-operated drones bombed the places he’d trained and lived, including the mud-brick safe house in Waziristan. It’s highly likely that the information he shared resulted in the deaths of his former comrades.
Was it painful to think about? I asked him.
“A little bit, but the way I look at it, if I’m going to leave my old life behind, they can’t be my friends anymore.” He shrugged. “It was a little tough, but I figured that this is the way it’s going to be now.”
Viñas wore his allegiances lightly even in retelling his story. Repetition had buffed his story to a sheen; he answered my questions courteously, but without much emotion. The ease with which he had moved from one militant group to another, serving as an informant first for Al Qaeda, then for the Americans, proved that not every jihadi harbors an ideology, let alone unshakable political beliefs.
Viñas’ lawyer, Steve Zissou, insisted his client was not quite as glib as he sounded. “I don’t think he ever felt good about it,” he said. Knowing that you caused some of their deaths is a difficult thing to live with.” There’s no way of knowing how many people died because of what Viñas told the FBI, but given how important the U.S. government deemed his information to be, Zissou inferred that “a lot of people died.”
When I asked Viñas exactly when he truly gave up his former goals as a militant, he shrugged and said: “When you plead guilty, that’s when you renounce your old life.”
“But did your worldview change?” I persisted. “I mean, you’re helping the same army you went out to fight to bomb your former buddies. Did you change how you viewed the injustices that you wanted to fight in the first place?”
He said he still believed it’s wrong for Western powers to meddle in Muslim countries, but “now I’ve seen the other side, and it gives me a better understanding that both sides are wrong.”
I remained mystified by how Viñas managed to shift so seamlessly from a would-be suicide bomber to a U.S. intelligence asset. The judge in his case, Nicholas G. Garaufis, implied a similar bewilderment, noting that the man’s spectacular volte-face complicated his sentencing: “The juxtaposition of Mr. Viñas’s atrocious crimes and his remarkable post-arrest cooperation is what makes the task of sentencing Mr. Viñas so difficult.”
Later, when I asked Zissou why he thought his client changed allegiances so quickly and completely, the lawyer exhaled slowly. “Well … yeah. I’m not sure. It may be as simple as not wanting to spend the rest of his life in prison.”
It’s not uncommon, the FBI’s Borelli told me later, for captured militants to start talking within days, even hours. Many are simply eager to tell their stories. There’s often a void within them, the one that was previously filled by joining a group. “When that’s taken away, when they’re caught, sometimes telling their story may keep it alive for them,” he said. “Or it may fill some other void, give them some kind of purpose.”
Over the nine years he spent in prison, he participated in 100 interviews, reviewed 1,000 photographs, and helped in more than 30 law enforcement investigations, both in the United States and overseas. “The number of faceless, nameless victims he has saved,” Steve said, hitting the desk for emphasis. “Soldiers! Muslims! Non-Muslims! Men, women, children, people who never knew they’d be victims!”
Viñas and Zissou had both expected that his cooperation with the government would earn him a place in a witness protection program. When Zissou learned, a day before Viñas’ prison release, that he’d been denied entry into the program, he was incandescent. “Now what the f--- to we do?” he wondered. Without a family, friends, or money, Viñas had nowhere to go.
Zissou got the authorities to agree to pay for him to spend a month in a hotel. Farbod Azad, the FBI agent assigned to his case, visited, bringing him a box of Fruity Pebbles and some milk—then told him the bureau was finished paying for his room. Another government agency paid for a month, and after that he was sent to a three-quarters house for former offenders. He was on his own, needing to look for work. “It was like, ‘Goodbye, thanks. Good luck in the homeless shelter,’” Zissou said, still a little bitter one year on. “It’s almost like they were trying to get him go back to extremism.”
Avuncular and silver-haired, a veteran of numerous terrorism cases, Zissou has been a support for Viñas since his release from prison.
Lacking a way to create a future for themselves, former jihadis “aren’t just at risk of committing another crime,” he says, “but of committing a crime of insane violence.” He believes mentoring ex-militants to be “a moral and professional responsibility.”
The lawyer’s relationship with Viñas goes well beyond the duly diligent. Over takeout lunch in his office, he and Viñas talked about history and philosophy and tried to puzzle out the future for a guy who had barely graduated from high school, who had no support from family or friends but did have a major felony charge. Zissou calls Viñas “son.” “When I haven’t heard or seen him in two or three days, I send him a text message: ‘What the f--- is wrong with you? Where the f--- are you?’ ” Zissou grins fondly. “He’ll say, ‘Whaddaya mean?’ And I’ll tell him, ‘You don’t go this long without checking in!’ ”
The terms of his probation ban Viñas from owning a computer, so he checks his email at Steve’s law office. He’s a familiar figure there, running out for coffee for the office, photocopying, or helping install wireless routers. “Everybody loves him here,” said Zissou. “There’s nothing he wouldn’t do.” Midway through our conversation, he put his head around the door to josh Viñas: “Don’t talk about the stuff you want to want to blow up, okay?”
I laughed nervously, but the warmth between them was palpable. More than that, it was clearly crucial to the rickety strategy devised to keep Viñas from sliding back toward extremism.
Zissou hopes that Viñas will eventually transition into counterterrorism work. Initially, he resisted. “All he wanted to do is get into the witsec”—witness protection—“and kind of disappear,” he told me. It took the lawyer weeks to coax his client to accept the potential benefits of living in the open. “I said to him, ‘Listen, you’re 35 years old. Do you really want to live a life of fear? Or do you want to live a life that has some meaning? Do you really want to hide out with a different name? Here’s an opportunity for you to make a difference in your life.”
Despite his social stigma, and the potential danger of retaliation from Al Qaeda, living out in the open gave Viñas the possibility of doing meaningful work. Mitchell Silber, the NYPD’s former director of intelligence analysis, hired him as a part-time consultant at Parallel Networks, and the two of them have coauthored an article and given talks at D.C. think tanks. There’s also hope that Viñas might eventually make some money from Hollywood: Zissou’s been talking to some people in L.A. about dramatizing his life story.
Until then, the former militant supports himself by working as a lead and asbestos remover for New York City. Asbestos removal is a bizarrely appropriate job, jokes Zissou—just an extension of his work exposing Al Qaeda’s toxicity for U.S. intelligence services.
***
Walking back to the LIRR station, I reflect that Viñas’ path, powered not by ideology but by survival and opportunism, was profoundly American. That this country essentially abandoned him at the prison gates, after he spent eight and a half years inside, speaks to the lack of a rehabilitation strategy here. More broadly, being cut free so abruptly is simply part of life in a nation where individuals are left very much on their own. He can’t expect help from a welfare state or a government-funded safety net, as he could in Northern Europe. He can’t get support from his tribe or extended family, as he could in many Muslim countries. If you’re from suburban Long Island, you have no village to go home to, no elders to steer you. Except perhaps your lawyer, if you’re lucky.
Viñas’ solo route into—and out of—militancy reflects aspects of his American upbringing. Ours is a culture in which the rootless thrive, and which prizes dynamism and individualism over tradition or kinship. More than any militant I interviewed, he was self-made, propelling himself into Al Qaeda on luck and his wits, then using those wits in prison to become a high-level FBI asset. His story’s third act was quintessentially American, too: he was denied help from the witness protection program, then left to exit prison without family, money or formal rehabilitation.
But then, we can be a careless nation, particularly when it comes to the potential fallout of faraway wars. The United States is country whose own power is such that it doesn’t seem to learn much about blowback, to connect the dots between the fear it rouses overseas and the fear of terrorism many of its citizens feel at home. When we fly our drones out from the base in the Nevada desert to Waziristan, we know they’ll fly home again. With our eyes trained on our own political dramas at home, what happens in Waziristan stays in Waziristan.
From the book HOME, LAND, SECURITY: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism by Carla Power. Copyright 2021 by Carla Power. Published by One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
Politico · by Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back From Extremism.
10. American Spies Are Fighting the Last War, Again
This is quite a claim:
I found that organizational weaknesses led the CIA and the FBI to miss 23 opportunities to penetrate and possibly stop the 9/11 plot. Among them are the facts that CIA officers had identified two suspected terrorists attending an al-Qaeda planning meeting in Malaysia, learned their full names, and discovered that one held a U.S. visa and the other had traveled to the United States. More than 50 CIA officials had access to this information, yet nobody told the State Department or the FBI for more than a year. Until 9/11, there was no formal training, no clear process, and no priority placed on warning other government agencies about dangerous terrorists who might travel to the United States. When the CIA finally did tell the FBI, 19 days before 9/11, the bureau designated its manhunt for the two suspected terrorists as “routine,” the lowest level of priority, and assigned it to a special agent who had just finished his rookie year. This wasn’t a mistake, either: For the FBI, catching perpetrators of past crimes had always been far more important than gathering intelligence to stop a potential terrorist attack.
American Spies Are Fighting the Last War, Again
When the Cold War ended, the intelligence community failed to adapt. Today it faces a similar challenge.
About the author: Amy Zegart is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. She is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University, and the author of the forthcoming book Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence (Princeton University Press).
Twenty years ago, al-Qaeda hijackers carried out the worst-ever terrorist attack on American soil, killing nearly 3,000 innocents, terrifying the nation, and forever changing the course of history—ushering in America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Yet September 11 was also something else: our worst intelligence failure in more than half a century. It was a surprise attack that should not have been a surprise. The agonizing truth is that American intelligence agencies saw the danger coming but failed to stop it because they were hardwired to fight a different enemy from a bygone era. My research found that when the Cold War ended and the threats shifted in the 1990s, America’s intelligence community failed to adapt.
Today, we face a similar challenge. Since 9/11, spies have become adept at countering al Qaeda but al Qaeda is no longer the overarching problem it once was. The global threat landscape has become much more crowded and complex, encompassing escalating cyberattacks, a rising China, Russian aggression, nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea, the fallout from climate change, and more. And once again, spy agencies are struggling to keep up.
Like generals, intelligence officials are often left fighting the last war even when new dangers are evident. Why? Because no matter what politicians and agency leaders say, no matter how clearly they see new adversaries looming over the horizon, government agencies are tailored to fight the enemy they already know. Bureaucracies are designed to last, not adapt. Businesses go under if they fail, but government agencies almost never die. Instead, over time, organizations harden, budgets balloon, capabilities and cultures become ingrained. Early innovations grow obsolete. Even when reports are issued, warnings are raised, and courageous champions press for action, change comes slowly. The old ways endure. Meanwhile adversaries grow stronger, and the nation is left vulnerable once again.
Throughout the 1990s, even as America’s spy agencies warned of al-Qaeda’s growing danger, these institutions were stuck in the Cold War. Money poured into technological platforms that could count Soviet warheads from space instead of human intelligence efforts better suited for penetrating terrorist groups on the ground. George Tenet, the CIA director on September 11, had tried but failed to upgrade his agency’s counterterrorist capabilities and better coordinate counterterrorism intelligence across the federal government. Although the FBI formally declared terrorism its No. 1 priority years before 9/11, in 2001 only 6 percent of FBI personnel were working on counterterrorism issues and FBI special agents received more time for vacation than for counterterrorism training. A massive effort to reform the bureau’s counterterrorism capabilities across the FBI’s U.S. field offices ended in disaster: Just weeks before 9/11, an internal report gave all 56 offices failing grades. The assessment was considered so embarrassing, it was highly classified and only a handful of copies were ever produced.
I found that organizational weaknesses led the CIA and the FBI to miss 23 opportunities to penetrate and possibly stop the 9/11 plot. Among them are the facts that CIA officers had identified two suspected terrorists attending an al-Qaeda planning meeting in Malaysia, learned their full names, and discovered that one held a U.S. visa and the other had traveled to the United States. More than 50 CIA officials had access to this information, yet nobody told the State Department or the FBI for more than a year. Until 9/11, there was no formal training, no clear process, and no priority placed on warning other government agencies about dangerous terrorists who might travel to the United States. When the CIA finally did tell the FBI, 19 days before 9/11, the bureau designated its manhunt for the two suspected terrorists as “routine,” the lowest level of priority, and assigned it to a special agent who had just finished his rookie year. This wasn’t a mistake, either: For the FBI, catching perpetrators of past crimes had always been far more important than gathering intelligence to stop a potential terrorist attack.
The pair should not have been that hard to find. They were hiding in plain sight inside the United States, using their true names on identifiers such as rental agreements and credit cards. One was even listed in the San Diego telephone directory. And while living in San Diego, they made contact with several targets of FBI counterterrorism investigations, at one point living with an FBI informant.
The two operatives went on to crash American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. They didn’t need secret identities or clever schemes to succeed. They just needed the CIA and the FBI to operate as they usually did.
In the 20 years since 9/11, American intelligence agencies have been retooled and revamped to combat terrorism. Reforms include the creation of a director of national intelligence, the National Counterterrorism Center, and the Department of Homeland Security—in sum, the largest restructuring of American intelligence since 1947. Budgets have skyrocketed, and integration between intelligence and military operations has reached new levels, yielding stunning counterterrorism successes, including the operation against the 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.
But the threat landscape never sleeps. Today, American intelligence agencies face another moment that requires rapid adaptation. This time, the dangers arise from technology. Technologies such as artificial intelligence, the internet, biotechnology, and satellite miniaturization are profoundly changing global economics and politics, empowering old adversaries, unleashing new threats, and challenging every facet of the intelligence business. Never have so many technological advances converged so quickly and changed so much.
In the old days, power and geography protected America. Not anymore. Cyberspace is enabling adversaries to attack us across long distances without firing a shot, hacking machines as well as minds. China has prosecuted a sustained and successful campaign to steal huge amounts of American intellectual property for economic and military advantage. Russia is using cyber-enabled information operations to interfere in elections and undermine democracies from within. Criminal groups are waging ransomware attacks against American cities, energy suppliers, and other crucial infrastructure. The array of threats facing the country has never been greater because cyberspace is strengthening the weak and weakening the strong. Advanced industrial democracies are exceptionally vulnerable to cyber breaches of all kinds because they are the most digitally connected and because their freedom of speech enables nefarious actors to deceive at scale.
Technology is also disrupting the ability of American intelligence agencies to make sense of the world. Intelligence has always been a business of finding needles in haystacks to generate insight. Now the haystacks are everywhere and growing exponentially, because the amount of data on Earth doubles about every two years. Connective technologies are driving this data overload, with no end in sight.
The U.S. intelligence community needs a radical reimagining to succeed in this new era. In the past, advantage came from stealing secrets. Secrets still matter, but advantage more and more derives from harnessing open information available to anyone and from human thinking, augmented by machines, that can sift through enormous troves of data to find hidden patterns.
Success requires three key ingredients. The first is the creation of a new, independent intelligence agency dedicated to open-source intelligence. The CIA, the National Security Agency, and other elements of the intelligence community have open-source efforts under way, but secret agencies will always favor secrets. The U.S. will never be able to win the race for insight so long as open-source intelligence remains trapped inside agencies that believe more in their secret missions.
The second necessary ingredient is talent. Our intelligence community was designed for an era when intelligence officers were expected to be lifers. Today’s best and brightest typically move jobs multiple times in their career. What’s more, our greatest talent needs are in science and technology, precisely the areas with the toughest private-sector competition. Attracting the right workforce for the digital era starts by enabling technologists to move much more easily into and out of government at all stages of their career.
The third ingredient is strategy. We need to rethink what intelligence is and who it serves. Today, the policy makers who need intelligence to protect the nation don’t just live in Washington and hold security clearances. They include chief executives whose companies own and operate 85 percent of crucial American infrastructure—much of it vulnerable to a cyberattack—and tech leaders whose platforms have become disinformation superhighways.
Navigating the era of digital threats will not be easy. The private sector answers to global shareholders, not American voters. Our national security does not rest in the hands of the government as it once did. Protecting the nation from the next surprise attack requires faster action and a far-reaching transformation of intelligence.
11. Assessing Shortcomings of the U.S. Approach for Addressing Conflict Below the Threshold of War
Conclusion:
While conventional war is the purview of the military, conflict below that threshold is far more calculated and nuanced. In order to retain its position of power and influence in the future, the United States will be required to synchronize its national resources in pursuit of security goals within the greater geopolitical context. The RMA-inspired Cold War paradigm will be supplanted by one with renewed emphasis on operating environment variables instead of arbitrary strategic means.
Assessing Shortcomings of the U.S. Approach for Addressing Conflict Below the Threshold of War
Joe McGiffin has served in the United States Army for seven years. He is currently pursuing a M.A. in International Relations prior to teaching Defense and Strategic Studies at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He can be found on Twitter @JoeMcGiffin. Divergent Options’ content does not contain information of an official nature nor does the content represent the official position of any government, any organization, or any group.
Title: Assessing Shortcomings of the U.S. Approach for Addressing Conflict Below the Threshold of War.
Date Originally Written: August 13, 2021.
Date Originally Published: September 6, 2021.
Author and / or Article Point of View: The author is an active-duty service member. This article is written from the point of view of the U.S. toward the anticipated operating environment of the next thirty years.
Summary: The current U.S. national security approach is not suitable for addressing threats below the threshold of war. This approach focuses on achieving security through military superiority. A more effective approach would achieve national security objectives derived from an analysis of geopolitical trends. This new approach will allow for more unified, synergistic use of national resources in the defense of U.S. interests.
Text: By its own estimate, the United States is losing global influence as a result of strategic atrophy, permitting other actors the freedom to reshape the weakening world order through “all-of-nation long-term strategy[1].” However, myopia, not atrophy, has eroded U.S. advantages. A new approach, one that can frame its national security problems within the changing geopolitical context, will result in a more resilient and agile security strategy.
The current U.S. approach is a dangerous misinterpretation of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) theory that originated from Soviet observations of the United States’ Second Offset Strategy which ended the Cold War[2]. Nuclear weapons created a conflict threshold, which neither power would cross, and spurred a race to tactical dominance in conflict below that level. Between their own success and the proliferation of assets which promised dominant battlefield knowledge, maneuver, and precision[3], the United States concluded that military supremacy was synonymous with national security. Though the defense community rebrands it as a new concept every decade (i.e., Transformation and Defense Innovative Initiative), the intellectual underpinnings do not change[4].
While RMA theory is appealing, history proves two points: that superior weaponry rarely equates directly to a strategic advantage; and that overemphasis on such advances disregards other critical factors of national security[5]. While military advancements have had profound impacts on the rise and fall of global powers in the past, those innovations were seldom developed in isolation from revolutionary change in society or culture[6]. For example, it was the socioeconomic isolation of the East and West that created the conditions for an arms race to determine the victor of the Cold War, not the weapons themselves. Near-exclusive focus on the military aspect of national security has left the United States committed to the pursuit of tactical superiority at the expense of strategic flexibility.
The Third Offset Strategy (3OS) and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program both illustrate this issue. The 3OS hinges entirely on having a technological advantage to negate adversary Anti-Access/Area Denial Operations: industrial espionage or an adversary’s own disruptive innovations could plausibly neutralize the 3OS rapidly enough to significantly disrupt U.S. foreign policy[7]. The F-35, for its part, demonstrates another issue. While the apex of air power for now, it came at exorbitant cost and will continue to be a resource strain on the U.S. defense budget[8]. Furthermore, whether or not the F-35 was worth the price is an important question with implications for future strategy. While military supremacy has continued to fill a pivotal role in deterring war between major actors, it is not a fungible advantage; that is, military innovations can be used only in military conflicts or to deter them. While the F-35 may be the best fighter available, it is important to consider what measurable security advantages it has or has not achieved for the United States and its other investors.
Today’s environment requires the United States to adopt a more inclusive framework for achieving security goals. Instead of focusing resources into a single element of power (i.e., the military), it could use a more comprehensive approach grounded in geopolitical analysis. Instead of preparing for future war, it could focus on the threats posed by the present: subversive tactics and strategic maneuvers by aggressors deliberately avoiding the overt use of military force. The new paradigm would strive for synergy across as many public and private stakeholders as possible in order to achieve a unified effort to secure national interests.
As an example, use of space assets, because of their extreme expense, has only been possible through close cooperation of the private and public sector. Co-usage of platforms between the military, government, and private sector continues to be a hallmark of this domain[9]. That synergistic use of resources to achieve specific goals, if applied to national security means across the other domains, will offer far more flexibility and resiliency than strict reliance on what military power can achieve.
While conventional war is the purview of the military, conflict below that threshold is far more calculated and nuanced. In order to retain its position of power and influence in the future, the United States will be required to synchronize its national resources in pursuit of security goals within the greater geopolitical context. The RMA-inspired Cold War paradigm will be supplanted by one with renewed emphasis on operating environment variables instead of arbitrary strategic means.
Endnotes:
[2] Beier, J.M. (2006). Outsmarting Technologies: Rhetoric, Revolutions in Military Affairs, and the Social Depth of Warfare. International Politics, 43(2), 266-280. DOI:10.1057/palgrave.ip.8800144. See also; Louth, J. & Taylor T. (2016) The US Third Offset Strategy. The RUSI Journal, 161(3), 66-71. DOI: 10.1080/03071847.2016.1193360
[3] Mowthorpe, M. (2005). The Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA): The United States, Russian and Chinese Views. The Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies, 30(2), 137-153.
[4] Jensen, B.M. (2018). The Role of Ideas in Defense Planning: Revisiting the Revolution in Military Affairs, Defence Studies, 18(3), 302-317. DOI: 10.1080/14702436.2018.1497928
[5 Gray, C.S. (2003). Strategy for Chaos: Revolutions in Military Affairs and the Evidence of History. Routledge.
[7] Wellman, A. (2019). Parity Avoidance: A Proactive Analysis of the Obsolescence of the Third Offset Strategy. Homeland Security Affairs. https://www.hsaj.org/articles/15337
[8] United States Government Accountability Office (2021). F-35 Sustainment: DOD Needs to Cut Billions in Estimated Costs to Achieve Affordability. Report to the Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-505t
[9] Madry, S. (2020). Disruptive Space Technologies and Innovations: The Next Chapter. Springer Nature.
12. Afghanistan: 'Everyone got it wrong' on Taliban takeover - armed forces chief
Except the Taliban and I suspect many analysts whose assessments and recommendations were not heeded by decision makers.
Afghanistan: 'Everyone got it wrong' on Taliban takeover - armed forces chief
By Francesca Gillett
BBC News
Published
1 hour ago
"Everybody got it wrong" on how quickly the Taliban would take over Afghanistan, the head of Britain's armed forces has said.
Gen Sir Nick Carter said: "It was the pace of it that surprised us and I don't think we realised quite what the Taliban were up to."
Asked whether military intelligence was wrong, he said the government received intelligence from a variety of sources.
"It's not purely about military intelligence," he said.
The last British and US troops left Afghanistan a week ago, bringing their 20-year military campaign in the country to an end.
There has been criticism of the way the West withdrew from Afghanistan, with questions over how the Taliban was able to seize control of the country at such speed.
Speaking to the BBC's Andrew Marr show on Sunday, Gen Sir Nick was asked how the predictions had been wrong.
"I think everybody got it wrong is the straight answer," he said. "Even the Taliban didn't expect things to change as quickly as they did.
"I don't think we realised quite what the Taliban were up to. They weren't really fighting for the cities they eventually captured, they were negotiating for them. And I think you'll find a lot of money changed hands as they managed to buy off those who might have fought for them."
The chief of defence staff added: "I don't think what anybody predicted was how fragile that Afghan government was and how fragile it was in relation to the command of its armed forces."
Asked whether military intelligence was wrong, Gen Sir Nick said: "No... many of the assessments suggested it wouldn't last the course of the year and, of course, that's proven to be correct."
He said: "It's a much broader thing than just strictly military intelligence.
"The way it works in this country is we have the joint intelligence committee which sits inside the Cabinet Office. So what they do is pull together the sources from the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office, the inter-agencies and the secret intelligence services and wider open source material."
media captionDominic Raab tells MPs intelligence suggested Kabul was unlikely to fall this year
The Taliban is expected to announce a new government in the coming days, meaning foreign powers will have to adapt to the prospect of dealing with a Taliban administration.
Currently, Taliban soldiers are fighting resistance groups in Panjshir Valley, the last remaining part of Afghanistan which the Taliban does not yet control.
On Saturday, the top US general said that civil war was likely to erupt in Afghanistan, and those conditions could lead to a resurgence of terrorist groups there.
Gen Mark Milley told Fox News: "The conditions are very likely that you could see a resurgence of terrorism coming out of that general region within 12, 24, 36 months."
Gen Sir Nick told the BBC the risk of terrorism will depend on whether an effective government can be formed in Afghanistan.
He said it was "too early to say" how the Taliban will govern - but there was a possibility the militant group will be less repressive than it was in the past.
"On the face of it, it doesn't look good at the moment. But let's see what happens. It may well change," he said.
"I also think they're not stupid enough to [not] know the Afghan people have changed and they want a slightly different sort of governance."
The Taliban are "trying to find their feet" and the international community should encourage them to govern in a different way, he added.
"They're going to need a bit of help to run a modern state effectively," he said. "If they behave, perhaps they'll get some help."
media captionBrigadier James Martin speaks about the UK's evacuation operation from Afghanistan
Labour's shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy said there was a strong possibility that Britain may now be less safe because of the events in Afghanistan.
"The urgent task for the government... is to make sure Afghanistan doesn't collapse once again into a haven of terrorism," she said.
She called on the UK to work with other countries - not just its allies - to take a common approach towards the Taliban, and use their leverage to demand rights for women and girls living in Afghanistan.
13. The Afghanistan Meltdown Proves Vietnam Taught Us Nothing
Let the post-mortems begin. (and I guess this is a post-post-mortem since we did not get the Vietnam post-mortem right!).
This is why Joe Collins and Rich Hooker titled their study of Afghanistan and Iraq, "Lessons Encountered" since we do not often seem to learn the lessons (and even worse we do not apply the lessons even if we learn them!)
The Afghanistan Meltdown Proves Vietnam Taught Us Nothing
Working from the same playbook used in Vietnam, the U.S. assumed it could export democracy to Afghanistan. The Taliban, like the Viet Cong, knew all they had to do was wait.
James A. Warren
Published Sep. 06, 2021 4:29AM ET
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
The American war in Afghanistan came to a long-overdue end on the evening of Aug. 30, when the last U.S. military plane, a C-17 transport, lumbered into the skies above the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. Among its passengers was the last American soldier to depart this hard, mountainous, war-ravaged country, Maj. Gen. Chris Donahue, the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division. Shortly thereafter, the Taliban’s senior spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, announced to the Afghan people: “This victory belongs to us all.”
The harried American withdrawal, replete with scenes of desperate Afghans clinging to the rear of a giant U.S. Air Force transport as began its takeoff, parents passing a baby to Marine guards on the tense perimeter of the airport, and horrific mayhem following two massive suicide bombings by Islamic State of Khorasan terrorists, succeeded in evacuating about 123,000 people—an astonishing feat, carried out with great skill and courage by the American military.
Nonetheless, the evacuation will be seen by historians for generations for what it was: the sobering last act in yet another lost American war.
Inevitably the exhausting saga of the final U.S military operation in Afghanistan evokes memories of another grim evacuation: Operation Frequent Wind, the dramatic, last-ditch effort to evacuate the last Americans remaining in Saigon, along with their South Vietnamese allies on April 29-30, 1975. That operation, also carried out with extraordinary cool-headedness by U.S. Marines under intense pressure, succeeded in bringing out every American, but thousands of South Vietnamese who had worked for the United States as faithful servants of the cause were left to fend for themselves. Many ended up serving multiple-year tours in communist re-education camps, or drowning in rickety boats in the South China Sea as they tried to make their escape.
The Marines who took the last chopper off the embassy roof around 7:50 a.m. on April 30, 1975, were blinded for a few minutes by tear gas they had fired to keep desperate Vietnamese from trying to jump into their overloaded aircraft. It was somehow fitting that the last Americans who left Vietnam did so when they were for all intents and purposes blind.
Any soldier or Marine can tell you that orchestrating a “retrograde movement” is among the trickiest and most delicate of military maneuvers. In Kabul, this extremely difficult operation was unnecessarily complicated and compromised by the failure of senior decision-makers in the White House and State Department to anticipate the rapid collapse of the Kabul government’s armed forces and government in the face of a determined and well-organized adversary, the Taliban. Their failure is all the more inexplicable in light of the fact that both the CIA and the State Department provided the president with sound intelligence estimates during the last weeks of the Taliban’s stunning advance.
The same thing happened in 1975, more or less, as the ambassador to South Vietnam, Graham Martin, mysteriously refused to give the order to evacuate when the writing was on the wall, and CIA operatives had already begun evacuating their Vietnamese allies surreptitiously.
The forced withdrawal from Afghanistan ranks among the most humiliating episodes in all of America’s 400-year history, for it symbolizes in dramatic fashion the end of a horrendously destructive failed crusade to export American-style democracy by arrogant policymakers transfixed by their own country’s raw military power.
It is depressing, to say the least, but we failed in Afghanistan for many of the same reasons we stumbled in Vietnam, almost 50 years ago.
At the outset of each conflict, U.S. policymakers were woefully ignorant of the political and cultural dynamics of the nation they aimed to transform. And so, to a greater degree than is usually realized, the United States went into both conflicts half-blind, convinced that the righteousness of the cause would compensate for ignorance, and ensure success.
The Johnson administration made the absurd assumption that deep in the heart of every Vietnamese there was an American yearning to be born. George W. Bush and his advisers made the same assumption about the Afghan people. Time proved the utter bankruptcy of this assumption in both cases, as well several others, including the idea that the United States possessed the wisdom and wherewithal to crush a well-organized insurgency while it simultaneously built an entirely new government apparatus.
Like Vietnam, Afghanistan was an “irregular war,” a brutal counterinsurgency struggle in which the United States failed to find a way to counter the ingenious protracted war strategy adopted by its adversary. The Taliban’s way of war, much like the Vietcong’s, pivoted largely on hanging on and outlasting the Americans and their vast array of war machines. They were willing to suffer innumerable tactical setbacks—including being driven out of Afghanistan entirely back in 2002—sure in the knowledge that eventually the United States would weary of supporting a corrupt and dysfunctional government, pack up, and go home. Like the Vietcong, the Taliban drew comfort and sustenance from its possession of a sanctuary, in this case Pakistan, and from the inability of the United States or its allies to seal off the flow of enemy fighters into Afghanistan.
Once America grew tired of the fighting, the Taliban high command reckoned, it would be a relatively simple matter to conquer the broken and illegitimate administration that the United States had tried to create and support. So it was.
The strategy worked brilliantly, just as it had in Vietnam.
In both wars, the United States had enormous military power at its disposal, but very little political power, and even less understanding of how politics actually functioned locally. But as the history of irregular war tells us again and again, in conflicts between powerful conventional armies and local insurgencies, politics, political organization, and mobilization are invariably more important factors in determining the outcome than battles.
In irregular warfare, coercive politics—assassination, terrorism, subversion, propaganda, the methodical construction of a shadow government—figure prominently, and cannot be countered by strictly military means alone. Human relationships and political mobilization are more important than military technology, and restraint in the use of armed force, rather than sheer firepower, is often critical to success. In these kinds of conflicts, said a prominent recent U.S. Army Special Forces officer, “You can’t kill your way to victory.”
When Major Harry Summers told his North Vietnamese counterpart on a small team of officers who were negotiating the terms for the American evacuation of Saigon that the communists had never defeated the Americans in a major battle, the officer, a Colonel Tu, replied, “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.” How right he was!
The United States never lost a multi-battalion battle in Afghanistan, but in light of the failure to build a legitimate, functional government, the Americans’ tactical victories were essentially “irrelevant.”
In both of these tragic counterinsurgency conflicts, the lion’s share of the nation-building work fell by default on the U.S. military, which is neither properly trained to undertake such work, nor temperamentally suited for it. The efforts of the State Department, USAID, and other civilian agencies and NGOs were notoriously disjointed and ineffective. In both Afghanistan and Vietnam, billions were spent each year on ambitious social engineering projects, but the host governments remained dysfunctional, corrupt and utterly unresponsive to the needs of the population.
As both conflicts morphed from stalemate to quagmire to looming disaster, the American public was fed a steady, unremitting diet of upbeat assessments of progress being made on the ground, served up by presidents, their advisers, and commanding generals. These assessments, it is now all too clear, were fairy tales, born of a lethal amalgam of wishful thinking, obtuseness, and outright dissembling.
As the futility of the fighting became more and more apparent in both these conflicts, American ground forces were ultimately withdrawn, and the American people were assured by the White House that the cause was not lost, that the good fight would be carried on by our local allies.
But this, too, was dissembling.
Only the most naïve observers of the scene in Vietnam in 1973 on the eve of the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces believed the South Vietnamese Army could stand up to the combined forces of the North Vietnamese army and the Vietcong on its own. They had invariably been bested by the enemy during the war with the Americans. How could they be expected to survive against such powerful, well-motivated forces as the Vietnamese communists without them?
Even granting that, the South Vietnamese managed to hang on for more than two years after the last Americans departed Vietnam in March 1973, and they were defeated by a powerful conventional army force of more than 20 divisions, several of them amply supplied with tanks. So corrupt and hollow was the regime in Kabul that it folded just four months after President Biden announced the final American withdrawal.
“Where these two failed wars differ fundamentally is on the question of their impact on American society.”
This precipitous collapse of the Kabul government certainly has no upside for the long-suffering Afghan people, who seemingly cannot escape the curse of devastating civil war. Indeed, it may not be long before the country’s warlords resume the fight against the Taliban. But the failure of the government or the army to put up much a fight, I think, go a long way toward confirming the wisdom of President Biden’s decision to withdraw. The Kabul government was fatally, irrevocably shaky, and had been kept on life support by the United States troops and dollars. Yet the very presence of the world’s largest, most powerful foreign army only served to erode the government’s sliver of legitimacy in the eyes of its own people.
Where these two failed wars differ fundamentally is on the question of their impact on American society. Vietnam was at the heart of a tumultuous social revolution in America in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The war pervaded every aspect of American life, and came perilously close to tearing the social fabric of the country irrevocably. “Nothing did more than the conflict in Vietnam to alter the course of post–World War II society and politics, or unleash the emotions that polarized the nation after 1965” than Vietnam, writes Brown historian James T. Patterson. Few historians would disagree. More than any single event of this time, the war broke the trust between the government and the people. It was the first war the United States had ever lost.
Afghanistan has aroused no such passions, nor has it altered significantly the lives of many Americans outside the relatively small universe of the American military and their families. The conflict went on and on, and Americans in general seemed to care less and less about it. In truth, the major reason the war lasted so long is that the American people didn’t care enough about it to demand that it end.
The collective weight of three lost wars—Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan—surely demands a searching re-examination of how the United States goes about making the decision to go to war, and how it develops strategies for achieving its objectives. It would also seem to call for a less activist foreign policy—a foreign policy of military restraint that would focus on the use of the United States’ economic and political power rather than the military to shape the world.
But don’t count on any of this happening soon. As Mary L. Dudziak, a law professor at Duke who has written extensively about war, told The New York Times, “In our toxic political environment, Republicans are likely to use this moment to undermine President Biden, and partisanship may foreclose the deeper re-examination of American war politics that is sorely needed now, and was also needed after the war in Vietnam.”
14. OPINION | RICHARD MASON: A smarter way to dominate enemies
An opinion from the father of Green Beret. He drank the koolaide.
OPINION | RICHARD MASON: A smarter way to dominate enemies
Haven't we seen this before? The only differences in Afghanistan and Vietnam are bigger airplanes, and that the South Vietnamese put up a fight. The Afghan army just walked away.
After we routed the Taliban 20 years ago, we were going to lead Afghanistan down the path of Western democracies. We trained a national Afghan army complete with elite units, an army that on paper looked as if it could easily handle the ragtag Taliban. My son, as a Green Beret (U.S. Army Special Forces), spent a year in a warlord's compound doing part of the training. (His interpreter has managed to flee.)
Flash back to March 6, 1836, when 180 Texans are holed up in Mission San Antonio de Valero, aka the Alamo. (Yes, fuel producer Valero is headquartered in San Antonio.) They are being attacked by 1,500 Mexican troops and face certain death when the Mexican general raises the no-quarter flag. They choose to fight and die rather than surrender.
Now to the present. The Taliban's quick takeover certainly wasn't because the Afghan forces were hit with a blitz of armor and thousands of crack troops. It was a bunch of bearded guys riding in the backs of Ford pickups. They took most of the villages by simply showing up, and after the regional towns fell, all that was left was Kabul.
That caused our panicked pullout, which is turning out to be horrible. Have we learned anything? It was a total loss, but the screwup started by simply going in. Russia and the United States should learn they can't impose their lifestyles and systems of government on people whose deep religious convictions are at odds with the new government.
Since recorded history, countries have used a mass military to impose their will on others. Our country should draw back from engaging in military missions, which require large numbers of on-the-ground soldiers.
The U.S. is the only true superpower in the world militarily, economically, technologically, and socially. It is obvious that if we want to impose our will on another nation, we have the clout to do so. In the past we have rushed to use our military might without giving our non-military strength enough time to bring about the desired position our country wants to achieve.
We have passed the time when evil madmen rule with the desire to dominate vast amounts of land. If a Hitler or Mussolini turns up, they must be met with overwhelming force and eliminated. However, a Saddam Hussein, Moammar Gadhafi or other low-rent dictator can be handled without committing American ground forces. It is time to declare an end to large numbers of American troops being used to eliminate the threat of these people.
We have the clout to bring about the desired results without sacrificing the lives of our citizens. As a parent, when my son was in Afghanistan, I did not think it was in our national interest to have him killed. We could have accomplished much more by an economic blockade, severe aerial bombardment, and clandestine Special Forces and Navy SEAL attacks.
I do not think the wars that killed thousands of Americans in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kuwait were worth the sacrifice. And if we survey the recent military intervention, I believe better results could have been achieved by not using our on-the-ground military.
In the past, one million American heroes have died as the result of on-the-ground conflicts around the world. An overview of these wars would place only World War II as needed to defend North American democracy.
Our nation has reached an unheard-of plateau. We have the obligation to every American to protect freedom, but in doing so we have another obligation: to protect the lives of every American. We can do both.
This is not a call of isolationism, but a call to save American lives. Why subject thousands of young Americans to the dangers of modern warfare when we don't have to?
If we really believe we are economically connected to the rest of the world, as New York Times columnist Tom Friedman said we are in "The World is Flat," then simply being an economic powerhouse enables us to impose our will on other nations. We must have the patience and courage to tighten the economic strangulation of a rogue nation until submission is achieved.
We could prevent Iran from exporting a drop of oil; some of our allies who are illicitly profiting from skirting the embargo might object, but we could isolate Iran into submission. As the screws tighten economically, it would be only a matter of time.
The same is true with North Korea. If we subject it to total economic strangulation, its leaders might threaten to use their nuclear weapons, but they wouldn't; it would be a total annihilation of their country. They may be crazy, but not that crazy.
Our latest major on-the-ground military action was Afghanistan because it was harboring Osama bin Laden, who attacked us on 9/11. We did finally get him, but it was with a SEAL team, and not a single American was killed.
SEALs and Green Berets are the future of military action in this country, along with all the other non-military ways to impose our will on countries or individuals who would attack America. It is time to call an end to war.
15. Ritchie Boys: The secret U.S. unit bolstered by German-born Jews that helped the Allies beat Hitler
Another piece to show truth is stranger than fiction.
Ritchie Boys: The secret U.S. unit bolstered by German-born Jews that helped the Allies beat Hitler
The Ritchie Boys were responsible for uncovering more than half the combat intelligence on the Western Front during World War II. For the many German-born Jews in their ranks, defeating the Nazis was heartbreakingly personal.
- 2021 Sep 05
- Correspondent Jon Wertheim
The story of the Ritchie Boys
For as casually as we often toss around the word "hero," sometimes no lesser term applies. Tonight we'll introduce you to members of a secret American intelligence unit who fought in World War II. What's most extraordinary about this group: many of them were German-born Jews who fled their homeland, came to America, and then joined the U.S. Army. Their mission: to use their knowledge of the German language and culture to return to Europe and fight Naziism. As we first reported in May, the Ritchie Boys, as they were known, trained in espionage and frontline interrogation. And incredibly, they were responsible for most of the combat intelligence gathered on the Western Front. For decades, they didn't discuss their work. Fortunately, some of the Ritchie Boys are still around to tell their tales, and that includes the life force that is Guy Stern, age 99.
Guy Stern
Jon Wertheim: You work 6 days a week, you swim every morning, you lecture, any signs of slowing down?
Guy Stern: Well I think not (laugh) but I don't run as fast, I don't swim as fast but I feel happy with my tasks.
A few months shy of turning 100, Guy Stern drips with vitality. He still works six days a week and if you get up early enough, you might catch him working out at his local park in the Detroit suburbs.
But ask him about his most formative experience - and he doesn't hesitate. It was his service in the military during World War II.
Jon Wertheim: What was it like for you, leaving Nazi Germany, escaping as a Jew, and the next time you go back to Europe it's to fight those guys? What was that like?
Guy Stern: I was a soldier doing my job and that precluded any concern that I was going back to a country I once was very attached to.
Guy Stern: I had a war to fight and I did it.
Stern 80 years ago
This is Guy Stern 80 years ago. He is among the last surviving Ritchie Boys - a group of young men – many of them German Jews – who played an outsized role in helping the Allies win World War II. They took their name from the place they trained - Camp Ritchie, Maryland – a secret American military intelligence center during the war.
Starting in 1942, more than 11,000 soldiers went through the rigorous training at what was the army's first centralized school for intelligence and psychological warfare.
David Frey: The purpose of the facility was to train interrogators. That was the biggest weakness that the army recognized that it had, which was battlefield intelligence and the interrogation needed to talk to sometimes civilians, most of the time prisoners of war, in order to glean information from them.
David Frey is a professor of history and director of the Center for Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
Jon Wertheim: How effective were they at gathering intelligence?
David Frey: They were incredibly effective. 60-plus percent of the actionable intelligence gathered on the battlefield was gathered by Ritchie Boys
Jon Wertheim: 60% of the actionable intelligence?
David Frey: Yes
David Frey: They made a massive contribution to essentially every battle that the Americans fought - the entire sets of battles on the Western Front.
Recruits were chosen based on their knowledge of European Language and culture, as well as their high IQs. Essentially they were intellectuals. The largest set of graduates were 2,000 German-born Jews.
David Frey: If we take Camp Ritchie in microcosm, it was almost the ideal of an American melting pot. You had people coming from all over uniting for a particular cause.
Jon Wertheim: All in service of winning the war?
David Frey: All in service of winning the war. And there's nothing that forges unity better than having a common enemy.
David Frey
David Frey: You had a whole load of immigrants who really wanted to get back into the fight.
Immigrants like Guy Stern. He grew up in a close-knit family in the town of Hildesheim, Germany. When Hitler took power in 1933, Stern says the climate grew increasingly hostile.
Guy Stern: My fellow students – it was an all male school – withdrew from you.
Jon Wertheim: because you were Jewish you were ostracized?
Guy Stern: That is correct.
Guy Stern: I went to my father one day and I said "classes are becoming a torture chamber"
By 1937, violence against Jews was escalating. Sensing danger, Stern's father tried to get the family out. But the Sterns could only send one of their own to the U.S. They chose their eldest son.
Jon Wertheim: Do you remember saying goodbye to your family?
Guy Stern: yes
Jon Wertheim: What do you remember from that?
Guy Stern: Handkerchiefs (pause), I couldn't know at that point that I would never see my siblings or my parents again nor my grandmother and so forth and so on.
Guy Stern arrived in the U.S. alone at age 15, settling with an uncle in St. Louis. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, Stern, by then a college student, raced to enlist.
Guy Stern: I had an immediate visceral response to that and that was this is my war for many reasons. Personal, of course, but also this country - I was really treated well.
In New York, Paul Fairbrook had a similar impulse. Now 97, Fairbrook is the former dean of the Culinary Institute of America. His Jewish family left Germany in 1933 when he was 10.
Paul Fairbrook
Jon Wertheim: Why did you want to enlist initially?
Paul Fairbrook: Look I'm a German Jew. And there's nothing that I wanted more is to get some revenge on Hitler who killed my uncles, and my aunts and my cousins and there was no question in my mind, and neither of all the men in Camp Ritchie. So many of them were Jewish. We were all on the same wavelength. We were delighted to get a chance to do something for the United States.
At the time though, the military wouldn't take volunteers who weren't born in the U.S. But within a few months the government realized these so-called enemy aliens could be a valuable resource in the war.
Paul Fairbrook: You can learn to shoot a rifle in 6 months but you can't learn fluent German in 6 months. And that's what the key to the success was
Paul Fairbrook: You really know an awful lot of the subtleties when you're having a conversation with another German and we were able to find out things out in their answers that enabled us to ask more questions. You really have to understand it helps to have been born in Germany in order to – in order to do a good job.
Both refugees like Fairbrook and Stern, as well as a number of American born recruits with requisite language skills, were drafted into the Army and sent to Camp Ritchie.
Jon Wertheim: How did you find out you were going to go to Camp Ritchie?
Guy Stern: I was called to the company office and told you're shipping out. and I said "may I know where I'm going?" and he said "no, military secret".
Jon Wertheim: They swore you to secrecy?
Guy Stern: Yes.
Originally a resort, Camp Ritchie was a curiously idyllic setting to prepare for the harshness and brutality of war. Nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Maryland – it was away from prying eyes and prying spies – but close enough to decision makers at the pentagon.
Jon Wertheim: Give us a sense of the kinds of courses they took.
David Frey: Well the most important part of the training was that they learned to do interrogation, and in particular of prisoners of war.
David Frey: techniques where you want to get people to talk to you. You want to convince them you're trustworthy.
David Frey: But they also did terrain analysis, they also did photo analysis, and aerial reconnaissance analysis. They did counterintelligence training.
Jon Wertheim: This was really a broad range of intelligence activities.
David Frey: It was a very broad range. And they did it all generally in 8 weeks
Jon Wertheim: What you describe, it almost sounds like these were precursors to CIA agents.
David Frey: They were in fact. Some of them were trained as spies and some of them went on to careers as spies
Victor Brombert: My parents were pacifists so the idea of my going to war was for them calamitous, however they realized that it was a necessary war, especially for us.
Victor Brombert
Victor Brombert, now 97 years old, is a former professor of romance languages and literature at Yale and then Princeton. He was born in Berlin to a Russian Jewish family. When Hitler came to power, the Bromberts fled to France, and then to the U.S., eager to fight the Nazis, he, too, joined the Army. After recruiters found out he spoke 4 languages, they dispatched him to Camp Ritchie, where strenuous classroom instruction was coupled with strenuous field exercises.
Victor Brombert: There were long and demanding exercises and close combat training. "How to kill a sentry from behind." I thought, "I'm never going to do that," but I was shown how to do it.
Jon Wertheim: So physical combat training as well as intelligence?
Victor Brombert: yes, well with a stick. You sort of swing it around the neck from behind and then pull.
Among the unusual sights at Ritchie: a team of U.S. Soldiers dressed in German uniforms. The Ritchie Boys trained for war against these fake gGermans with fake German tanks made out of wood. Another unusual sight: towering over recruits, Frank Leavitt, a World War I veteran and pro wrestling star at the time, was among the instructors.
Training was designed to be as realistic as possible. The Ritchie Boys practiced street-fighting in life-size replicas of German villages and questioned mock civilians in full scale German homes. Some of the prisoners were actual German pows brought to the camp so the ritchie boys could practice their interrogation techniques.
Jon Wertheim: I understand you – you had sparring partners. You playacted
Victor Brombert: One had to playact with some of the people were acting as prisoners and some of them were real prisoners.
By the spring of 1944, the Ritchie Boys were ready to return to Western Europe – this time as naturalized Americans in American uniforms.
Still, if they were captured, they knew what the Nazis would do to them.
Some of them requested new dog tags – with very good reason.
Jon Wertheim: This dog tag says Hebrew. Did your dog tag identify you as Jewish?
Guy Stern: I preferred not having it. I asked them to leave it off.
Jon Wertheim: You didn't want to be identified as Jewish going back to Western Europe.
Guy Stern: No because I knew that – the contact with Germans might not be very nice.
On june 6, 1944, D-Day, the Allies launched one of the most sweeping military operations in history. A mighty onslaught of more than 160,000 men, 13,000 aircraft, and 5000 vessels.
Guy Stern: We were on a PT boat taking off from Southampton. And we all were scared. We were briefed that the Germans were not going to welcome us greatly. As a Jew, I knew I might not be treated exactly by the Geneva rules.
Divided into 6-man teams the Ritchie Boys were attached to different Army units. When they landed on the beaches of Normandy, Wehrmacht troops were waiting for them – well-armed and well prepared.
Victor Brombert was with the First American Armored Division to land on Omaha Beach. He is still haunted by what he experienced that day.
Victor Brombert: I saw immense debris. Wounded people. Dead people.
Victor Brombert: I remember being up on a cliff the first night over Omaha Beach. And we were strafed and I said to myself, "now, it's the end" because I could-- you could feel the machine gun bullets
Jon Wertheim: Is that when you first realize – I'm – I'm in a war here?
Victor Brombert: Yes, I realized that I was afraid. I never calculated that there is such a thing as terror, fear. So I experienced viscerally, fear.
On the front lines from Normandy onwards, the Ritchie Boys fought in every major battle in Europe, collecting tactical intelligence, interrogating prisoners and civilians, all in service of winning the war.
In 1944, the Ritchie Boys headed to Europe to fight in a war that was for them, intensely personal. They were members of a secret group whose mastery of the German language and culture helped them provide battlefield intelligence that proved pivotal to the allies' victory. The Ritchie Boys landed on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day and helped liberate Paris. They crossed into Germany with the Allied armies, and witnessed the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps. All the while, they tracked down evidence and interrogated Nazi criminals, later tried at Nuremberg. It was also in Europe that some of them, like Guy Stern, learned what had happened to the families they left behind.
By the summer of 1944, German troops in Normandy were outnumbered and overpowered. The allies liberated Paris in August and drove Nazi troops out of France. But Hitler was determined to continue the war. In the Ardennes region of Belgium, the Germans mounted a massive counteroffensive, which became known as the Battle of the Bulge.
Jon Wertheim: I see a tent in the background of that photo right in front of you
Guy Stern: Yes, that's my interrogation tent
Jon Wertheim: So this is you on the job. You're in Belgium?
Guy Stern: Yes, doing my job interrogating. Right.
Amid the chaos of war, Guy Stern and the other Ritchie Boys had a job to do. Embedded in every army unit, they interrogated tens of thousands of captured Nazi soldiers as well as civilians – extracting key strategic information on enemy strength, troop movements, and defensive positions. They then typed up their daily reports in the field to be passed up the chain of command.
Victor Brombert: Our interrogations - it had to do with tactical immediate concerns. And that's why civilians could be useful and soldiers could be useful, "where is the minefield?" very important because you save life if you know where the mine – "where is the machine gun nest?" "How many machine guns do you have there?" "where are your reserve units?" and if you don't get it from one prisoner, you might get it from the other.
97-year-old Victor Brombert says they relied on their Camp Ritchie training to get people to open up.
Victor Brombert: We improvised according to the situation. According to the kind of unit, according to the kind of person we were interrogating. But certainly what did not work was violence or threat of violence. Never. What did work Is complicity.
Jon Wertheim: What -What do you mean?
Victor Brombert: By complicity I mean, "Oh we are together in this war. You on one side and we on this side. Isn't it a miserable thing? Aren't we all sort of, tired of it?"
Jon Wertheim: The shared experience?
Victor Brombert: The shared experience, exactly. Giving out some cigarettes also helps a lot. A friendly approach - trying to be human.
The Ritchie Boys connected with prisoners on subjects as varied as food and soccer rivalries but they weren't above using deception on difficult targets. The Ritchie Boys discovered that the Nazis were terrified of ending up in Russian captivity and they used that to great effect. If a German POW wouldn't talk, he might face Guy Stern dressed up as a Russian officer.
Guy Stern: I had my whole uniform with medals. Russian medals and I gave myself the name Commissar Krukov.
Jon Wertheim: That's what you called yourself?
Guy Stern: That was my pseudonym.
Jon Wertheim: How did you do commissar?
Guy Stern: Thank you for asking (laugh) I gave myself all the accouterments of looking like a fierce Russian commissar.
Guy Stern: And some we didn't break but 80% were so darned scared of the Russians and what they would do.
Jon Wertheim: So there's a real element of - costumes and deception and accents.
Guy Stern: Yes and it's theatrics in a way yes.
Their subjects ranged from low-level German soldiers to high ranking Nazi officers including Hans Goebbels, brother of Hitler's chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels.
Another bit of indispensable Ritchie Boy handiwork: the order of battle of the German Army. Paul Fairbrook helped write this compact manual - known as the red book – which outlined in great detail the makeup of virtually every Nazi unit, information every Ritchie Boy committed to memory.
Paul Fairbrook: When the soldiers said "I'm not going to talk" they could say "wait a minute. I know all about you. Look, I got a book here and it tells me that you were here and you went there and your boss was this." And they were impressed with that.
Jon Wertheim: So it sounds like this gave the officers in the field a guide to the German Army so they could then interrogate the German POW's more efficiently.
Paul Fairbrook: That's exactly right.
The Ritchie Boys earned a reputation for delivering important tactical information fast, making a major contribution to every battle on the Western Front.
Jon Wertheim: Their work saved lives?
David Frey: Absolutely. They certainly saved lives. I think that that's quantifiable.
David Frey teaches history to cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
David Frey: Part of what the Ritchie boys did was to convince German units to surrender without fighting.
Jon Wertheim: And you're saying some of that originated at Camp Ritchie?
David Frey: Much of it originated at Camp Ritchie because it had never – it hadn't been done before. How do you appeal to people in their own language? Knowing how to shape that appeal was pretty critical to the success of the mobile broadcast units.
In trucks equipped with loudspeakers, Ritchie Boys went to the front lines under heavy fire, and tried, in German, to persuade their Nazi counterparts to surrender. They also drafted and dropped leaflets from airplanes behind enemy lines.
Jon Wertheim: This was one of the leaflets that was dropped out?
Guy Stern: Out of a plane. I have some that were shot.
Guy Stern: This one was our most effective leaflet and why was that? Because Eisenhower had signed it and the Germans had an incredibly naïve approach to everything that was signed and sealed.
Jon Wertheim: And you think because it had that signature, somehow that certified it.
Guy Stern: Yes, that carried weight and the belief in the printed matter was very great.
Jon Wertheim: That's the kind of thing you would know.
Guy Stern: Yes.
Jon Wertheim: As a former German who understood the psychology and the mentality.
Guy Stern: That's correct.
Apart from the fighting, there were other threats confronting the Ritchie Boys. Given their foreign accents, they were in particular danger of being mistaken for the enemy by their own troops, who instituted passwords at checkpoints.
Victor Brombert: What happened to one of the Ritchie Boys - at night on the way to the latrine, he was asked for a password and he gave the name - the word for the password - but with a German accent. He was shot right away and killed.
Jon Wertheim: Did you ever worry your accent might get you killed?
Victor Brombert: Yes of course. You know, I don't talk like an Alabama person or a Texan.
By the spring of 1945, Allied Forces neared Berlin and Hitler took his life in his underground bunker. Germany surrendered on May 8 of that year.
Jon Wertheim: What do you remember feeling that day?
Guy Stern: Elated.
Guy Stern: It was absolutely, "we won kid!" (laugh)
Jon Wertheim: And those are your – those are your comrades.
Guy Stern: Yes.
Jon Wertheim: Those are your guys.
Guy Stern: Yes.
But joy turned to horror as Allied soldiers - and the world - learned the full scale of the Nazi mass extermination.
Guy Stern recalls arriving at Buchenwald Concentration Camp three days after its liberation, alongside a fellow American sergeant.
Guy Stern: We were walking along and you saw these emaciated, horribly looking, close to death people. And so I fell back behind because I didn't want to be seen crying to a hardened soldier and then he looked around to look where I was, how I was delayed, and he, this good fellow from middle of Ohio was bawling just as I was.
A few days later, Stern returned to his hometown, hoping to reunite with his family. But Hildesheim was now in ruins. A childhood friend described to Stern how his parents, younger brother and sister had been forced from their home and deported.
Guy Stern: They were killed either in Warsaw or in Auschwitz.
Guy Stern: None of my family survived. I was the only one to get out.
Jon Wertheim: Did you ever ask yourself why me? Why were you the one that made it to the United States?
Guy Stern: Yes, even last night. And I said "Well, huh, in slang, there ain't nothing special about you, but if you were saved, you got to show that you were worthy of it. And that has been the driving force in my professional life.
Jon Wertheim: So as a way to honor your family that perished.
Guy Stern: Yeah.
After the war, Guy Stern, Victor Brombert and Paul Fairbrook came home, married, and went to Ivy League schools on the G.I. Bill. Guy Stern became a professor for almost 50 years.
They all rose to the top of their fields, as did a number of other Ritchie Boys, says history professor David Frey.
Jon Wertheim: I understand there are some Ritchie boys (that) became fairly prominent figures.
David Frey: There are a whole variety of prominent Ritchie boys.
It turns out author J.D. Salinger was a Ritchie Boy. So was Archibald Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore Roosevelt. As was philanthropist David Rockefeller.
David Frey: Some became ambassadors. Some became critical figures in the creation of the CIA. Others were actually really important in American science.
Jon Wertheim: So there's all sorts of impact years and years and years after the war from this-- this camp in Maryland?
David Frey: It was not only the short term impact on the battlefield. It was an impact on war crimes. They were critical in terms of arresting the - some of the major figures and gathering the evidence for Nuremberg, then shaping the cold war era, they really played a significant role.
Jon Wertheim: How do you think we should be recalling the Ritchie Boys?
David Frey: I think we look at this group and we see true heroes. We see those who are the greatest of the greatest generation. These are people who made massive contributions. Who helped shape what it meant to be American and who – in some cases – gave their lives in service to this country.
Jon Wertheim: This - This is a remarkable story. Why do so few Americans know about this?
David Frey: Because it involves military intelligence, much of it was actually kept secret until the - the 1990's.
David Frey: A lot of what was learned and the methods used are important to keep secret. And only in the early 2000's did we begin to see reunions of the Ritchie boys.
Now in their late 90s, these humble warriors still keep in touch, swapping stories about a chapter in American history now finally being told.
Jon Wertheim: What is it like when you get together and reflect on this experience going on 80 years ago?
Guy Stern: We always find another anecdote to tell. (laugh)
Jon Wertheim: You have a smile on your face when you think back.
Guy Stern: Yes, this is what happens.
It was hard for us not to notice that beyond the stories runs a deep sense of pride.
Paul Fairbrook: (laugh) You bet your life I'm proud of the Ritchie Boys. It was wonderful to be part of them!
Paul Fairbrook: I was proud to be in the American army and we were able to do what we had to do. I don't think we're heroes. But the opportunity to help fight and win the war was a wonderful way. I can look anybody straight in their eye and say I think I've earned the right to be an American. And that's what – that's what it did for me.
Produced by Katherine Davis. Associate producer, Jennifer Dozor. Broadcast associate, Elizabeth Germino. Edited by Stephanie Palewski Brumbach and Robert Zimet.
© 2021 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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.
