Quotes of the Day:
"Each part of the American war machine had its own mission, and was going to do what it did regardless of the facts on the ground. The DEA wanted to destroy opium, the human rights bureaucracy pushed women's rights, and the military wanted to keep the war going. Nobody was there to force these disparate parts to work towards a common goal in a way that made sense. Theoretically, the president should have done so, but the American system clearly rewards political competence more than it does the ability to build stable democracies on the other side of the world. Often extremely self-aware, American officials were not as stupid or incompetent as they were self-interested cogs in a system filled with misaligned incentives."
- Richard Hanania
"One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion."
- Simone de Beauvoir
"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
- Cicero
1. A former Chinese soldier turned artist explains how a song on Radio Australia changed his life
2. Meet the Texas Secessionist Movement: Brought to You by Russia
3. A Big, Dumb Machine: The problem in Afghanistan wasn't mere incompetence. The problem was a broken system.
4. Biden expected to nominate first woman as Army Cyber chief
5. Afghanistan’s Looming Catastrophe
6. Elon Musk Needs China. China Needs Him. The Relationship Is Complicated.
7. How Migrants Got Weaponized
8. U.S. to Urge Democracies to Sanction Corrupt Foreign Officials, Human-Rights Abusers
9. This is how to rescue a hostage from terrorists in under a minute
10. Collusion or Collision? Turkey-Russia Relations Under Erdogan and Putin
11. FDD | U.S. and Europe Must Counter Potential Weapons-Grade Enrichment by Iran
12. A woke military is no defense at all — why Defense bill in current form must not pass
13. To Deter China, Invest in Non-Strategic Nuclear Weapons
14. Understanding the Pro-China Propaganda and Disinformation Tool Set in Xinjiang
15. Leaked papers link top Chinese leaders to Uyghur crackdown
16. #StopXinjiangRumors: the CCP’s decentralised disinformation campaign
17. Philippine military says Muslim rebel leader killed in clash
18. Stanley McChrystal Accidentally Reveals the Dishonesty of U.S. Generals
19. In Afghanistan, ‘Who Has the Guns Gets the Land’
20. Veterans Are Being Recruited by Extremist Groups. How Do We Help Them Say No?
21. Sophia Glock divulges her secretive life as a child of CIA officers in 'Passport'
1. A former Chinese soldier turned artist explains how a song on Radio Australia changed his life
There are so many anecdotes from around the world about the power of information from the outside world in authoritarian regimes. We must learn to lead with influence and information. We must develop and support comprehensive information and influence campaigns. And separately but related (because we must have a firewall between influence campaigns and our information organizations) we must fully resource the US Agency for Global Media. We just need USAGM (e.g, Voice of America, RFA, RFE/RL, etc) to simply report the news (good AND bad), explain US policy, and provide access to ideas and culture to foreign target audiences who are oppressed under authoritarian regimes.
Kudos to Australia.
A former Chinese soldier turned artist explains how a song on Radio Australia changed his life
It was 1979 and Jian Guo was stationed at a military camp in Yunnan, a province in south-western China bordering Vietnam, when he listened to Radio Australia for the first time.
The then-17-year-old was patrolling the base one night when he saw a group of fellow People's Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers tuning radio equipment on the back of a truck.
He initially thought they were intercepting enemy signals, but, as he got closer, he realised they were listening to a radio broadcast.
China was at war with Vietnam when Jian Guo joined the PLA.(Supplied: Jian Guo)
It was the ABC's international broadcasting service, which was considered an "enemy channel" at the time.
"The so-called 'enemy channels' included almost every station outside mainland China," Guo told the ABC.
"The biggest ones were the VOA [Voice of America] from the US, Voice of Free China from Taiwan, and Radio Australia."
Guo had joined the PLA in 1979 during the peak of the Sino-Vietnamese War but, thanks to his talent in the arts, he was chosen to be a secretary of his company, so he could avoid fighting on the battlefield.
Apart from painting propaganda materials, he also looked after weapons and communication equipment like the radios, which was an extraordinary privilege.
Started in 1939, Radio Australia offered Chinese listeners a different view of the world in the wake of the Cultural Revolution.(ABC News: Australia Calling)
He was not supposed to use the equipment he maintained, and was fearful of breaking the rules, but after seeing his comrades listening to the Australian broadcast the curiosity grew inside him.
One night, alone in his room, he turned on a radio.
It took a while for him to find the right frequency, because of the interference put out by China, but then suddenly he was listening to Radio Australia and the song that would change his life.
"It was broadcasting The Moon Represents My Heart by Teresa Teng," Guo said.
"That was the first time I knew such music existed in the world."
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'If we get in trouble, it's my fault not yours'
Taiwanese singer Teresa Teng was hugely popular in Taiwan, Japan and South-East Asia in the 1970s, but the Chinese government had officially banned her songs because they were "bourgeois" and "explicit".
Many mainland Chinese would still secretly listen to her songs but Guo went even further.
Entranced by the music, he dubbed almost every one of Teresa Teng's songs from the radio with a tape recorder.
It was a night during Moon Festival when his secretly recorded tapes were played publicly for the first time.
"Many soldiers who came back from the battlefield were very homesick," Guo said.
"Our company slaughtered a pig and prepared wine for us, but everyone looked very stressed and upset.
"Our company commander asked me to cheer them up. He asked if I could get the soldiers to sing some revolutionary songs together, but I didn't think it would work."
Teresa Teng was wildly popular in Asia in the 1970s, but banned in China. (Wikimedia Comomns)
Guo suggested playing Teresa Teng's music instead, but his commander refused.
"I was almost yelling at him, 'If we get in trouble, it's my fault not yours!', so he agreed," Guo said.
When the music started, the crowd immediately quieted down, and when The Moon Represents My Heart came on, all the soldiers began to sing along.
"Someone shed tears, and someone really cried," Guo said.
"Many years later, whenever I talk about this with my friends, we all feel like the humanity of Chinese people was so suppressed back then, but once you get a vent, the emotion will burst out."
Hopes dashed at Tiananmen Square
Jian Guo enrolled to study art at a university in Beijing in 1985. (Supplied: Jian Guo)
After being discharged from the army, Guo enrolled at a university in Beijing in 1985 to study art.
China had changed a lot by then.
"I actually think that 1985 to 1989 was the most open period in modern Chinese history, to an extent I couldn’t have imagined," he said.
People could buy books by Western philosophers from stalls in the street.
"You could buy books and magazines [brought over] from Hong Kong, even some works by [activist writer and Nobel Peace Prize laureate] Xiaobo Liu," he said.
"Many foreign bands and singers held concerts, and Teresa Teng's songs were playing everywhere."
However, this freedom did not last long.
When the Tiananmen demonstrations broke out in 1989, Guo was among those protesting.
Jian Guo was among the students protesting at Tiananmen Square in 1989 before the infamous massacre. (Supplied: Jian Guo)
"At the beginning of the march, we sang different songs, like The Internationale, the national anthem of China and so on," he said.
"No-one thought of singing Teresa Teng's songs.
"But when it came to the sit-in and hunger strike, it was a completely different story. We sat arm-in-arm and it was cold in the night. We were nervous, scared and hungry."
Later, Guo and other students camped out on a bus, and in the evening, one of the students on the bus began softly humming The Moon Represents My Heart.
"I heard it right away and immediately sang along. And then more and more people chimed in, then the whole bus was singing," he said.
"Someone outside the bus started too. I don’t know how many people, but you could hear the tidal wave of singing."
Guo said he became convinced such romantic melodies must have a special healing power under such stressful circumstances, and was so touched by the scene.
The Tiananmen protest then turned into a massacre. The army entered, then came the tanks.
Jian Guo was detained in China after making a sculpture of Tiananmen Square out of mince meat. (Supplied: Jian Guo)
For the former PLA soldier, nothing could have been more devastating.
"It was just a crushing feeling in my heart," he said.
"Before the shooting, I had a glimmer of expectation and hope that it was impossible for the army to really shoot at ordinary people.
"I was there when the shooting started. I was almost killed. After witnessing all this, I felt unusual despair. I sat on the roadside, too sad to even cry.
"For a long time after that, I didn't want anyone to know I joined the army. I didn't even want to look at those photos of myself as a soldier.
"I had nightmares almost every day.
"It is sad to look back, because for a while we thought China was becoming democratic. We didn't expect it would go backwards like it did."
The Tiananmen massacre has been a continuing theme in Jian Guo's work throughout his career. (Supplied: Jian Guo)
A new beginning in Sydney
A year after the Tiananmen massacre, then-Australian prime minister Bob Hawke made a speech, and offered 42,000 permanent visas for the Chinese students.
One of the first places Jian Guo visited in Australia was the Art Gallery of NSW. (Supplied: Jian Guo)
As soon as he was able to get a passport, three years later, Guo took up the offer.
"I just took a bag with some clothes and cash and got on a plane," he said.
"It was my first time travelling by air, and I was both nervous and excited."
After taking off from Beijing, he sat quietly on the plane during a stopover in Shanghai, and then for five hours in the airport in Hong Kong, worrying that he would be grabbed at the last moment.
"I sat in a corner and waited silently," he said.
"I thought this is my last chance to leave China."
When his flight took off from Hong Kong, he felt relieved and asked the flight attendant for a beer, then quickly fell asleep.
The next morning, he arrived in Sydney and his friends already there took him out for lunch at a Chinese restaurant run by a woman from Taiwan.
There was a karaoke machine and a lot of records.
Among them, Guo found Teresa Teng.
Then, fresh off the plane in a new country, in front of a group of strangers, he sang the song that kicked off his journey, The Moon Represents My Heart.
Jian Guo says he found a home in Australia's art scene.(Supplied: Jian Guo)
"I felt unprecedented freedom in Sydney and thought 'Australia is my home'," he said.
Today, Guo is an established artist whose works feature in galleries and institutions around Australia.
But still whenever he hears The Moon Represents My Heart, his journey begins to play like a film in his mind.
"There have been many nights I dreamt about the scenes when I was a soldier and listened to Teresa Teng's songs on that radio," Guo said.
"When I was young, I lived in the age when people were hungry for information, and I was lucky enough to encounter Teresa Teng's songs along the way of pursuing freedom.
"It changed my life forever."
2. Meet the Texas Secessionist Movement: Brought to You by Russia
Our adversaries lead with influence. They believe politics is war by other means. They are actively conducting subversion which is of course the foundation of unconventional and political warfare.
Meet the Texas Secessionist Movement: Brought to You by Russia - The Bulwark
The Kremlin continues its care and feeding of American extremist groups.
A couple weeks ago Senator Ted Cruz was speaking at Texas A&M University when someone asked him his thoughts on the Texas secessionist movement. He replied that he wasn’t “there, yet.” It is important to understand that the modern secession movement is not a product of Lone Star pride. It’s an idea that has been force fed into the American conservative movement by Russia.
Secession is one of the Kremlin’s “active measures” campaigns: Promote fringe wackos abroad and hope that, eventually, they break something. This may not sound like much of a plan, but it sometimes works. Putin has been openly building his portfolio of wackos for a while. And the wackos have begun breaking things.
The shiny ball that caught Cruz’s attention was The Texas Nationalist Movement (TNM). TNM is Texas’s most prominent secessionist organization. In 2015, TNM attended a St. Petersburg gathering of worldwide extremists organized by Rodina—that’s “Motherland” in Russian—the fascist-adjacent offshoot of Putin’s United Russia party.
That gathering was a safe space where the likes of German Neo-Nazis, the KKK, Greece’s Golden Dawn, and Roberto Fiore (the Italian terrorist responsible for a 1980 bombing in Bologna that killed 85), could gather and praise Putin’s defense of Western (read: “white”) culture. Here, featured on Rodina’s website, is Nate Smith, TNM’s executive director, in attendance. Howdy! Russia’s info warriors were very pleased with his comments at the event. This skulduggery got so bad and Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russians who were working with the Texas secessionist movement in 2016 to—please put down your coffee—spread misinformation about Ted Cruz during the presidential primary in order to help Donald Trump.
There’s a nice symmetry there. Some day when when Hollywood comes calling the film can be titled, “From Victim to Dupe: The Ted Cruz Story.”
Podcast · December 03 2021
It's not just The Bulwark saying the Democrats have a branding problem — Democrats are saying it too. So, cool it with t...
One of the nastier conferees at Putin’s 2015 conclave was the Council of Conservative Citizens, a group who was credited by Charleston shooter Dylann Roof in his manifesto for inspiring him to “take it to the real world.”
There’s a white nationalist group called Atomwaffen which venerates Roof as a hero. Atomwaffen was founded by a teenager in Florida using a messaging platform created by a Russian. You can find Roof’s manifesto—along with manifestos from other white nationalist killers—on 8chan, which has been relaunched as 8kun, by two Russians.
Fortunately for us, secessionists aren’t killing people—they’re not “there, yet”—but Putin’s propaganda can be convincing. Casey Michel notes that the fake Russian secessionist “Heart of Texas” Facebook page, which had more likes than the GOP and Democrat Facebook pages combined, organized a rally of white nationalists and AR-15 enthusiasts in downtown Houston in 2017.
Putin invests broadly in his pet extremist wackos. Richard Spencer used to appear regularly on RT where he commented as an expert on everything from Syria to U.S. cultural affairs. David Duke lived in Russia. The circular nature of this web can border on parody: Bringing it full circle to Texas A&M, Duke once rented his Moscow apartment to another American neo-Nazi named Preston Wiginton. Wiginton—a proud Aggie—organized presentations on the Texas A&M campus—the same place where Cruz was asked about secession!—for both Richard Spencer and Russian ultra-nationalist Alexander Dugin, a man who befriended Duke in Russia.
The only way to understand the neo-Nazi mob and the secessionist movement is as Vladimir Putin’s weapons. And Ted Cruz—despite having been on the receiving end of this in 2016—has no problem cozying up to them today.
In 2020, the FBI began cracking down on a nationalist group called The Base—that would be the English translation of “Al Qaeda.” Several members were for plotting to murder anti-fascist protesters in their sleep in Richmond. They also wanted to instigate a race war by killing cops and then blaming Antifa. They also carried out something they called “Operation Kristallnacht,” during which they tagged synagogues with swastikas. Where does The Base’s leader live?
Moscow.
Ted Cruz seems to think that the job of a United States senator is to shitpost on Twitter and own the libs. But playing at culture war can get people killed.
Cruz either does not know, or does not care, that this is exactly what Putin is trying to achieve.
3. A Big, Dumb Machine: The problem in Afghanistan wasn't mere incompetence. The problem was a broken system.
Quite a book review. This first paragraph in the excerpt is quite an indictment of our national security apparatus. What it seems to say is that we have no capacity to understand, plan, and conduct political and irregular warfare at the national level. We just have a series of stovepipes working on the problems they perceive to be important.
Excerpts:
Each part of the American war machine had its own mission, and was going to do what it did regardless of the facts on the ground. The DEA wanted to destroy opium, the human rights bureaucracy pushed women's rights, and the military wanted to keep the war going. Nobody was there to force these disparate parts to work towards a common goal in a way that made sense. Theoretically, the president should have done so, but the American system clearly rewards political competence more than it does the ability to build stable democracies on the other side of the world. Often extremely self-aware, American officials were not as stupid or incompetent as they were self-interested cogs in a system filled with misaligned incentives.
While this system has an almost unlimited capacity to excuse egregious corruption and incompetence, it comes down hard when its own interests are threatened. In May 2009, Gen. David McKiernan was fired as commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, a historically rare event for a leadership class that almost never faces real accountability. McKiernan's misstep was being too honest with the media—he had told them the war was stalemated. He was replaced by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who could be relied upon to issue optimistic predictions. The violence in Afghanistan got worse, and McChrystal is now a well-regarded author and corporate consultant.
A Big, Dumb Machine
Reason · by Richard Hanania · December 4, 2021
The problem in Afghanistan wasn't mere incompetence. The problem was a broken system.
| 12.4.2021 6:30 AM
(Simon & Schuster)
It is common to chalk up America's failures in Afghanistan to incompetence, ignorance, or stupidity. Yet The Afghanistan Papers, by The Washington Post's Craig Whitlock, shows an American government that, although it had no idea what it was doing when it came to building a democracy in Afghanistan, did an excellent job manipulating the public, avoiding any consequences for its failures, and protecting its bureaucratic and financial interests. The problem was a broken system, not a generalized incompetence.
In 2016, Whitlock received a tip that the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction (SIGAR) had interviewed hundreds of participants in the war, including top American and Afghan officials, military leaders, and outside consultants. When the paper tried to get its hands on the results, SIGAR fought it every step of the way; it took a three-year legal battle to get the documents. The Post then published them on its website—along with some related items, such as memos from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld—and those formed the basis of this book.
Ultimate responsibility must start on top. No matter what he told himself, President George W. Bush acted as a man who simply didn't much care what happened to Afghanistan beyond how it influenced his political fortunes. One of Rumsfeld's memos notes that in October 2002, Bush was asked whether he'd like to meet with Gen. Dan McNeil. The president asked who that was, and Rumsfeld answered that he was the man leading the war in Afghanistan. Bush responded that he didn't need to see him. The president was presumably preoccupied with the Iraq war he would launch five months later. (That is, he was preoccupied with selling the war. He didn't really think much about what the U.S. would be doing in that country either.)
The bureaucracy beneath the president comes across as a big dumb machine that was unclear about what it ultimately wanted, and whose different limbs sometimes worked at cross purposes. Many parts of that machine were extremely aware of how hopeless the mission was. As Gen. McNeil said, "There was no campaign plan. It just wasn't there." The British general who headed NATO forces in the country from 2006 to 2007 similarly remarked that "there was no coherent long-term strategy." American military personnel would be sent to Afghanistan on more than one occasion over the two decades of conflict and, in Whitlock's words, "the war made less sense each time they went back."
To fight the Taliban, the U.S. empowered brutal warlords, who would often rape and terrorize the local populations. One of the most prominent of these, Abdul Rashid Dostum, was such a destructive force that one American diplomat offered to make him the executive producer of a movie just to get him out of the country. At the same time, the CIA was paying him $70,000 a month. Whitlock's account includes an endless number of similar stories, in which one part of the American government was doing things that completely negated the actions of others. Anand Gopal's No Good Men Among the Living documented this on the ground, showing how the same individual might be an ally to the CIA and an enemy to the military, and how ultimately this hurt the Afghan people more than anyone else.
As of 2006, Afghanistan had one successful industry: growing up to 90 percent of the world's opium. Under pressure from the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and members of Congress, and over the objections of the military, the Bush administration decided to start destroying those crops. This only fueled the insurgency, even as opium production increased. When the U.S. tried paying farmers not to grow opium, more had an incentive to start planting the crop—and many of them still sold the harvest on the open market anyway after taking American money. According to one official, "urging Karzai to mount an effective counternarcotics campaign was like asking an American president to halt all U.S. economic activity west of the Mississippi."
The Bush administration was convinced that opium was funding the insurgents. Yet even if it was, that wasn't a good reason to destroy the most successful industry in a country where the U.S. was trying to bring economic stability and growth. Helmand province, an area that had been quiet through the first few years of the conflict, erupted in insurgency only when NATO brought the drug war to the region. Legalizing the opium trade, which the Taliban had stamped out, seems like it would have been the perfect way to win hearts and minds and build the Afghan economy. But of course such a possibility was never seriously considered in a system more concerned with rules, procedures, and vested interests than actually winning the war.
Even more absurdly, many of those profiting from the drug trade were the warlords that the U.S. was using to fight the Taliban. Fahim Khan, a Tajik commander who was appointed defense minister after the U.S. invasion, became angry when he heard American forces had destroyed a drug lab in northern Afghanistan, only to be relieved to find out that they had actually eliminated his competition. American officials had to balance their desire for ending the opium trade with their need to placate leaders who often were also drug kingpins.
They faced a similar dilemma when they tried to go after corruption. Corruption made the government more dysfunctional, but fighting it often meant going to war with the very men the U.S. needed to keep order and fight the Taliban.
Each part of the American war machine had its own mission, and was going to do what it did regardless of the facts on the ground. The DEA wanted to destroy opium, the human rights bureaucracy pushed women's rights, and the military wanted to keep the war going. Nobody was there to force these disparate parts to work towards a common goal in a way that made sense. Theoretically, the president should have done so, but the American system clearly rewards political competence more than it does the ability to build stable democracies on the other side of the world. Often extremely self-aware, American officials were not as stupid or incompetent as they were self-interested cogs in a system filled with misaligned incentives.
While this system has an almost unlimited capacity to excuse egregious corruption and incompetence, it comes down hard when its own interests are threatened. In May 2009, Gen. David McKiernan was fired as commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, a historically rare event for a leadership class that almost never faces real accountability. McKiernan's misstep was being too honest with the media—he had told them the war was stalemated. He was replaced by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who could be relied upon to issue optimistic predictions. The violence in Afghanistan got worse, and McChrystal is now a well-regarded author and corporate consultant.
The transition from Barack Obama to Donald Trump shows how flexible the Pentagon could be to keep the war going. When working for the former law professor, the generals used more rhetoric about human rights and became experts at manipulating statistics to show how they supposedly were making people's lives better. Under Trump, they realized that they could maintain his support for the war by talking of victory and killing bad guys. In both cases, the generals successfully resisted a president who was skeptical about their mission. The military seemed relatively indifferent to whether it was spending its time building girls' schools or undertaking a more expansive bombing campaign, as long as it could keep the war going. Joe Biden watched the generals box in Obama, and he came into the White House determined not to be similarly manipulated.
The waste that accompanied the surge in the early Obama presidency is staggering. Of the $2.3 billion that the U.S. spent on the Commander's Emergency Response Program, which allowed commanders to spend on infrastructure projects, an audit found that only $890 million could be accounted for. It is unclear what good even that money did. In the words of one Special Forces advisor, "we were building schools next to empty schools," even when it was clear that the locals didn't want them. Whitlock attributes such waste to carelessness and to the nature of the mission; he does not consider American corruption as a possible explanation of how $1.4 billion disappeared. All the while, as the CIA bought off warlords and parliamentarians, Americans lectured Afghans leaders that their corruption was undermining the government.
Afghanistan is not the only place where American leaders have done a better job protecting their own interests than solving social problems. The U.S. government has morphed into a machine with the power and resources to destroy, but with little accountability and few if any mechanisms to ensure that its actions serve a greater purpose. Let's keep that in mind as the war machine pivots toward treating China as its main justification for large budgets and foreign entanglements.
Richard Hanania is president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology and a research fellow at Defense Priorities.
Reason · by Richard Hanania · December 4, 2021
4. Biden expected to nominate first woman as Army Cyber chief
Biden expected to nominate first woman as Army Cyber chief
President Joe Biden is expected to pick Maj. Gen. Maria Barrett to be the first female leader of U.S. Army Cyber Command, according to two people familiar with the decision.
Barrett is currently head of the Army’s Network Enterprise Technology Command (NETCOM), a subordinate unit to Army Cyber Command. The outfit, headquartered at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, operates and defends the service’s portion of the massive Defense Department Information Network, or DODIN, which is targeted millions of times daily by foreign adversaries trying to gain unauthorized access to military systems.
Army Cyber Command is looking for a new chief as its existing leader, Lt. Gen. Stephen Fogarty, is slated to retire from active duty — potentially before the end of the month.
Selecting Barrett, who took the reins of NETCOM in 2018, would place someone who boasts a breadth of cybersecurity experience and deep ties to U.S. Cyber Command atop the Army’s digital warfighting arm.
Before taking over NETCOM, Barrett served as deputy of operations at Cyber Command. Prior to that, she was the deputy commanding general at Cyber Command’s Joint Force Headquarters-Cyber — an organization that provides intelligence, planning and digital capabilities to DoD combatant commands around the globe — and deputy commander for operations for the command’s Cyber National Mission Force, which conducts offensive operations to defend the U.S.
Barrett also served as U.S. Southern Command’s chief information officer and the director of operations for the White House Communications Agency, a military support unit that assists the president, vice president and the Secret Service by providing them with secure communications.
Speaking at an event hosted by the Association of the U.S. Army earlier this year, Barrett stressed the need for the service to recruit top talent in the future, regardless of gender.
“The race for talent is real,” she said.
“As a leader, I think you have to look at the full lifecycle spectrum of your workforce and understand where you might have a gap or a weak area … and get after it quickly and consistently.”
Barrett, who was commissioned through the Army ROTC program as a second lieutenant in 1988, is a veteran of both Iraq wars. She and Brig. Gen. Paula Lodi are believed to be the first pair of sisters to become Army generals in the service’s history.
If nominated, and confirmed by the Senate, Barrett would become the fifth chief of Army Cyber Command since it was established in 2010. She would replace Fogarty, who assumed the post in 2018 and has led the digital warfare unit longer than any other commander.
During his tenure, Fogarty saw the organization, which boasts over 16,000 personnel, relocate from Fort Belvoir in Virginia to Fort Gordon in Georgia. The area has become a major hub for the Pentagon’s cyber and signals intelligence work and training in recent years, playing home to NSA Georgia and the Army’s Cyber Center of Excellence, among others.
Fogarty was at the helm in 2018 when the Army handed responsibility for Joint Task Force Ares — a special unit that was created in 2016 to develop digital weapons to fight the Islamic State online — over to Marine Forces Cyberspace Command, where its mission has expanded to focus on nation-state actors, most notably those in the greater Indo-Pacific region.
The three-star, who joined the Army in 1983, also fostered a relationship with the Defense Digital Service, which recruits the nation’s top tech talent for a tour of duty at Pentagon in order to solve the department’s biggest IT headaches.
In 2018, DDS opened its first satellite office — named “Tatooine,” after Luke Skywalker’s home planet in the Star Wars series — at the state-owned Georgia Cyber Center. The two organizations have since gone on to work on a variety of projects together.
It’s unclear when the administration might formally announce Barrett’s nomination, but the two people — who requested anonymity to talk about the nomination — believe it could come within the next few weeks.
In a statement, an Army spokesperson said it is the service’s policy not to comment on general officer nominations “until after Senate confirmation.”
Martin Matishak
Martin is a cybersecurity reporter for The Record. He spent the last five years at Politico, where he covered Congress, the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community and was a driving force behind the publication's cybersecurity newsletter.
5. Afghanistan’s Looming Catastrophe
Excerpts:
Given the deep and justified concerns about the Taliban deriving benefit from international assistance, expanding the scope for assistance will not be easy. The Taliban’s long—and recent—record of repressive actions, their affiliation with international terrorist groups, and the presence of sanctioned terrorists in their government cannot be waved away. For the United States and its allies, which only recently evacuated their troops, embassies, and citizens from Kabul, there is a strong sense that a humanitarian response to Afghanistan’s crisis must coincide with corresponding pressure on the Taliban.
Without immediate action, however, there is the risk of a humanitarian disaster of historic proportions by mid-winter. Such an outcome would not only cause great suffering to the Afghan people but also heighten the contradictions of the 20-year international engagement in Afghanistan. We should not wait for that disaster to respond to the challenges that are evident now. The United States and its allies cannot undo the failures that led to the fall of Kabul in August. But they can ensure that ordinary Afghans know we will not turn our backs on them at a time of extraordinary need.
Afghanistan’s Looming Catastrophe
Why the United States and Its Allies Must Act Now to Prevent a Humanitarian Disaster
On December 1, a United Nations official said that Afghanistan may be facing the most rapid economic collapse in modern history. Since the Taliban takeover in late August, government revenues have all but disappeared and the country’s cash-based economy has shrunk at dizzying rates. The World Food Program estimates that up to 23 million Afghans—more than half the population—may not have enough to eat by the end of the year. Public-sector workers have not been paid in months, and three million children under the age of five face acute malnutrition, an almost unfathomable number. As winter begins, Afghanistan is on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.
The challenge is providing relief on the necessary scale to meet the unprecedented needs of the Afghan people. The United States and its allies rightly seek to deny the Taliban government any legitimacy or funding until it provides guarantees for the rights of women, girls, and minorities and unequivocally cuts its ties to international terrorism. The U.S. Treasury, international donors, and organizations have frozen billions of dollars of Afghan assets and seek to channel humanitarian aid through UN relief agencies and the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) still operating, with difficulty, inside the country. Meanwhile, despite the growing crisis, the Taliban have shown little sign of changing their behavior.
Confronted with this impasse, Western governments and international organizations are being forced to reconsider how they can deliver assistance more effectively. Doing so requires broadening the definition of basic humanitarian activities that are permitted under the sanctions regime and addressing the all-consuming question of cash liquidity for emergency operations. The time for decision is now: the window is closing for millions of Afghans as the humanitarian emergency on the ground intensifies by the day.
A Different Kind of Crisis
In contrast to the Taliban takeover, Afghanistan’s humanitarian situation has unfolded with far less media attention, in part because there are not millions of refugees fleeing across the country’s borders; there is no raging civil war; the country on the surface appears to be relatively peaceful; and some members of the former political elite are still inside the country.
The view from the ground, however, is very different. Even before Kabul fell on August 15, the Afghan economy was precarious. Under the democratically elected government, Western governments and aid agencies provided billions of dollars in humanitarian and development assistance, funds that amounted to more than 40 percent of the country’s GDP and 75 percent of public spending. Yet even with this support, per capita income remained one of the very lowest in the world, declining from $642 in 2012 to $509 in 2020. Then, large parts of the country were stricken by one of the worst droughts in years as well as deteriorating security, and, by mid-2021, almost half the population, or 18.4 million people, required humanitarian assistance. The UNDP is now estimating annual per capita income could drop further to a disastrous $350 by next year, which would place Afghanistan at or near the bottom of the World Bank low-income country rankings.
In the three months since the Taliban took power, these problems have dramatically escalated. Millions more now require humanitarian assistance. And with international aid flows cut off and the banking system largely frozen, the International Monetary Fund estimates that the economy will shrink by as much as 30 percent by the end of the year. The financial collapse is compounded by a Taliban government that seems to have no coherent plan for running the economy and has devoted much of its sparse revenues to paying Taliban fighters, as a recent report by the Afghanistan Analysts Network has suggested. At the same time, the regime has been unwilling to make concessions on human rights and security to receive international assistance. Afghanistan’s financial links to the world have been severed, almost literally from one day to the next.
The effects on the population have already been stark. Noting that “food security has all but collapsed,” a recent World Food Program report finds that millions of Afghans will have to choose this winter between migration or starvation. Across Afghanistan, there is a high risk of famine, both in cities and in the countryside. In large urban centers such as Kabul, and in provincial capitals, hundreds of thousands of civil servants, teachers, and health workers are no longer being paid, leaving their families with little or no basic income; in rural areas, drought, the lack of cash and markets, and now the onset of winter threaten disaster.
Making Room for Relief
In responding to the crisis, Western governments and international organizations are faced with difficult choices. Any expanded assistance to Afghanistan risks the charge that it is consolidating the Taliban in power and weakening leverage to influence their behavior, thereby provoking a likely political backlash in the United States and elsewhere. There is also the risk of inadvertent sanctions violations as international organizations provide emergency relief inside Afghanistan.
Of course, diplomatic and political preconditions on engagement with the Taliban can and should remain in effect. But it should also be possible for the United States and its international partners to augment their emergency response to help ordinary Afghans without making concessions to Afghanistan’s new rulers. The pledges already made by donors to UN agencies and NGOs are important to ensuring humanitarian operations can proceed. Given the outsize dimensions of the crisis, however, these organizations will need clearer authorization and guidance from the international community if they are to respond quickly and effectively to the country’s urgent and multiple needs.
To address these challenges, the existing international framework for dealing with the Taliban needs to be adjusted. UN Security Council Resolution 1988, which established the Afghan sanctions regime, was passed in 2011, but built on over a decade of measures targeting the Taliban and their finances. In current circumstances, with the Taliban now in control of the country, the UN could make it clearer that UNSC 1988, although still in effect, does not apply to humanitarian work.
Discussions at the Security Council are currently underway, and the creation of a humanitarian exception to the 1988 sanctions regime may soon emerge. But to be effective, it must allow relief organizations to address the collapse of the country’s health services and the Taliban’s systematic restrictions on female education and women in the workforce, which have added another terrible dimension to the crisis. Such action, however, would require these organizations to deal with the Taliban regime in these areas. To reach the girls and women who are most vulnerable in the current crisis, there must be room for international aid efforts to operate in the spheres that affect them most.
Afghanistan's spreading food crisis
Reuters
Some donors, such as the World Bank, Germany, and the Netherlands, have suggested waivers that would allow workers in the health sector to be paid, with the World Bank reportedly considering releasing up to $500 million in funding. The lack of salaries for medical personnel has deeply hampered the most basic health services, a problem that has had a particularly direct impact on vulnerable children.
In such a new resolution, the “carve out” language could authorize UN agencies and NGOs to work in these defined sectors as well as providing more traditional humanitarian relief. Without such specified areas in which to operate, relief organizations and the World Bank will be at continual risk of the application of sanctions to their activities in Afghanistan. As the humanitarian strategist and former senior U.S. official Sue Eckert proposed in her recent testimony to the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, the Department of the Treasury also has tools—General License Nos. 14 and 15—that could provide broader authorizations for humanitarian operations in this situation. The Treasury Department has previously used this approach in Yemen, Ethiopia, and Venezuela, defining humanitarian relief to include working in multiple sectors such as education and the provision of health services.
Creating Cash Flows
But it is not enough to broaden the scope of emergency relief. Getting funds into Afghanistan has become extremely challenging in part because financial institutions themselves are fearful of running afoul of sanctions. Humanitarian operations require a regular cash flow to sustain themselves: to pay for transport; to pay for shelter; to pay the salaries of those who work with relief agencies or in the education and health-care sectors; to pay for the establishment of distribution centers; to pay for fuel and medicine. Yet in the current situation, it has been tough for aid operations to access and distribute such funds.
The challenge remains daunting. Afghanistan’s $9 billion in reserves will and should remain frozen for the foreseeable future. Transferring any currency into the country faces numerous difficulties, and engaging with what remains of the private banking system is highly risky for correspondent banks. And flying in U.S. currency is neither a safe nor a sustainable option.
Cash could be brought in through Afghanistan’s private sector.
There are, however, short-term options that could promote emergency assistance for humanitarian relief through the winter. Safe payment mechanisms to ensure the transfer of funds for humanitarian operations are necessary. Among recent proposals to address the cash-flow problem, those made by former World Bank economist William Byrd and former Treasury official Alex Zerden stand out. have both suggested, for example, working through private banks that still operate in Afghanistan.
Although not all their proposals may be feasible, they suggest creative approaches to bring funds into the country by working through the private sector banks and companies that still operate in Afghanistan, introducing Afghan banknotes, using digital transfers to individual households, and facilitating the commercial imports of essential goods under the Treasury Department’s General License No. 15. The Afghan-American Chamber of Commerce has also proposed that the United States and the International Monetary Fund unfreeze $1 billion in assets belonging to Afghan private citizens.
Whichever approach is taken, the United States and other donors must act quickly. In late November, the UN warned that the breadth of the Afghan crisis—the lack of currency and inability to access private accounts, take out loans, or pay for the imports that the economy depends on and that were previously financed by external aid money—will lead to a complete collapse of the country’s financial system within months.
A Chance to Act—Before It Is Too Late
Given the deep and justified concerns about the Taliban deriving benefit from international assistance, expanding the scope for assistance will not be easy. The Taliban’s long—and recent—record of repressive actions, their affiliation with international terrorist groups, and the presence of sanctioned terrorists in their government cannot be waved away. For the United States and its allies, which only recently evacuated their troops, embassies, and citizens from Kabul, there is a strong sense that a humanitarian response to Afghanistan’s crisis must coincide with corresponding pressure on the Taliban.
Without immediate action, however, there is the risk of a humanitarian disaster of historic proportions by mid-winter. Such an outcome would not only cause great suffering to the Afghan people but also heighten the contradictions of the 20-year international engagement in Afghanistan. We should not wait for that disaster to respond to the challenges that are evident now. The United States and its allies cannot undo the failures that led to the fall of Kabul in August. But they can ensure that ordinary Afghans know we will not turn our backs on them at a time of extraordinary need.
6. Elon Musk Needs China. China Needs Him. The Relationship Is Complicated.
Excerpts:
Long term, Tesla is likely to lose ground in China to domestic competitors, industry analysts say. Earlier this year, Morgan Stanley analysts forecast that Tesla would make up roughly 15% of China’s all-electric vehicle market this year but that this would fall below 7% by 2030 as homegrown companies gain traction.
Tesla’s position in the domestic Chinese market will be substantially diluted over time through competition and policies to encourage local players,” the analysts said.
Mr. Musk remains personally popular in China, where people accustomed to conformity admire his maverick behavior in the U.S. Aspiring Chinese tech entrepreneurs look to him for inspiration, tracking moves of the “Silicon Valley Iron Man.” Some Chinese businesses have even trademarked products using the Chinese translation of his name, Ma Si Ke.
Mr. Musk may have to settle for a sizable, though not dominant, position in the Chinese market, some analysts suggest. Tesla sold more than 73,000 vehicles in China in the three months ended in September, not including exports, a record quarterly performance, China Passenger Car Association data show. Yet in a recent survey of roughly 1,600 Chinese consumers, Tesla ranked among the top auto brands to avoid, signaling that the company could be hitting a ceiling on market share, Bernstein Research analysts said.
Mr. Musk has maintained his deferential tone. In September, when China held an internet conference aimed at pushing its alternative version of the web—at a time when the government was pressing a regulatory crackdown on tech—not many of the country’s tech stars attended.
Mr. Musk spoke via video, describing how Tesla had set up a data center in China to store the digital records gathered from its production, sales, service, charging and other activities in the country.
“At Tesla, we’re glad to see a number of laws and regulations that have been released to strengthen data management,” Mr. Musk said.
Elon Musk Needs China. China Needs Him. The Relationship Is Complicated.
To attract Tesla, the government rewrote its rules for foreign auto businesses, but now, the company is entering bumpier terrain
By Lingling Wei, Rebecca Elliott and Trefor Moss
Dec. 4, 2021 12:00 am ET
With the U.S. tightening technology exports to China in 2018, President Xi Jinping defiantly pledged to make China the world’s future innovation and industrial center. Key to his plan was Elon Musk.
Mr. Xi viewed the South African-born entrepreneur as a technology utopian with no political allegiance to any country, according to officials involved in policy-making, and saw his Tesla Inc. as a spearhead that could make China a power in new-energy cars.
Mr. Xi rewrote the rulebook to allow foreign companies sole ownership of auto ventures so Mr. Musk would open an electric-vehicle factory in Shanghai. Authorities showered him with cheap land, low-interest loans and tax incentives, expecting in return that Tesla would groom local suppliers and bolster lagging Chinese electric-vehicle players, say people with knowledge of the talks between Beijing and the company.
Today Tesla likely makes more than half its vehicles in China, suggest calculations based on the company’s third-quarter production and delivery figures and China Passenger Car Association data. Chinese sales helped propel Tesla to its first full year of profitability in 2020 and provided roughly a fourth of Tesla’s revenue in the first nine months of 2021. Mr. Musk, meanwhile, has cemented his place as the world’s wealthiest person.
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But Tesla is facing an increasingly difficult business environment in China now. It has drawn wrath from domestic rivals over what they see as preferential treatment, suffers criticism of its vehicle quality from drivers and Chinese officials, and has been caught up in the government’s sweeping crackdown on big tech.
China is pressing foreign companies to meet an ever-more-stringent policy on data security. Tesla now must retain inside the country all digital records gathered from local customers, and it must ask authorities for approval before updating certain software on cars in China.
Tesla’s Shanghai factory under construction in May 2019. Chinese authorities provided cheap land and low-interest loans, expecting in return that Tesla would groom local suppliers and spur the Chinese electric-vehicle industry.
PHOTO: IMAGINECHINA/ASSOCIATED PRESS
“The economic prosperity that China has achieved is truly amazing, especially in infrastructure!” Mr. Musk tweeted when the party celebrated its centenary on July 1.
Mr. Musk has hailed China’s toughened data laws, and his company issued a humbling apology in April. A driver at an auto show publicly blamed Tesla brakes for an accident, after which China’s top legal-affairs agency chimed in, calling the company arrogant. A short time later, Tesla said on China’s Twitter -like Weibo platform: “We apologize for failing to resolve the problem of the car owner in time. We will try our best to learn the lessons of this experience.”
Tesla thus finds itself falling within a familiar historical pattern, in which Beijing uses a grant of access to its vast market to advance China’s own industrial capability.
After Apple Inc. brought its iPhone supply chain to China years ago, many of the Chinese companies Apple trained also became suppliers to Chinese smartphone manufacturers, which now lead the world in sales.
“China’s game isn’t to let Tesla win,” said Bill Russo, founder of Automobility, a Shanghai-based consulting firm. “China’s game is to make the domestic industry compete.”
The Information Office of the State Council, China’s top government body, didn’t answer questions for this article. Mr. Musk and Tesla didn’t respond to requests for comment. Microsoft said it would continue to have a strong presence in China. Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment.
From the outset, officials in Beijing made clear they wanted something in return for throwing open the country to Tesla, according to the people with knowledge of the parties’ 2018 talks.
Chinese leaders had grown frustrated with domestic electric-vehicle companies’ performance and saw Tesla as an opportunity to reset the country’s auto industry. Tesla would be expected to localize its supply chain and groom Chinese manufacturers, steps that could accelerate the domestic industry.
A Tesla car seen through an electric-vehicle charger, displayed during the Auto Shanghai show in April.
PHOTO: ALY SONG/REUTERS
Miao Wei, who negotiated on the deal with Mr. Musk, openly discussed how Tesla could propel underachieving local EV startups. He likened it to lobbing a predatory catfish into a pond full of sluggish fish. Representatives for the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which Mr. Miao then led, didn’t respond to questions.
Mr. Musk long expressed interest in a plant in China that would help Tesla sell cars for less in the world’s largest auto market, but he didn’t want to take on a Chinese partner in a joint venture as other foreign auto makers had.
In July 2018, Tesla signed a deal to build a factory in Shanghai. Chinese authorities lauded the deal for the jobs it would create and for the roughly $345 million in annual taxes Tesla is expected to start generating at the end of 2023, according to regulatory disclosures. Beijing’s embrace of Mr. Musk was so warm that at a meeting in 2019, Premier Li Keqiang offered to give him a “Chinese green card.” Mr. Musk let the premier take a Tesla for a spin within the gated Zhongnanhai leadership compound.
Some at Tesla bristled at aspects of the push into China, concerned about issues including a risk of intellectual-property theft, a person familiar with the matter said.
As in the West, Tesla’s arrival whetted people’s interest in electric vehicles. The 2019 launch of the made-in-China Tesla Model 3 helped convince consumers such vehicles were a viable alternative to gasoline cars.
Tesla proved an effective “catfish,” too: Its Chinese-made cars restored the confidence of Chinese investors in the electric-vehicle market, helping supercharge domestic startups that had struggled.
NIO Inc., for instance, was close to collapse but secured investment in April 2020 and saw a revival in its share price that led to further fundraising. It has thrived in Tesla’s slipstream, as have two Chinese peers that sell premium electric vehicles, Li Auto Inc. and XPeng Inc. The three companies’ electric-vehicle sales are likely to total more than 270,000 this year, up from around 12,000 in 2018, according to a forecast by consulting firm ZoZo Go LLC.
“Pre-Tesla, nobody believed that a Chinese brand could be riveting,” said Michael Dunne, chief executive of ZoZo Go and a former General Motors Co. executive. ZoZo Go expects overall sales in China of new-energy vehicles—including electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles—to be roughly 3.1 million this year, more than double last year’s.
A spokeswoman for NIO said the company appreciates Tesla’s efforts to spur the development of the electric-vehicle industry.
Robotic arms operate on an assembly line in Hefei, China, of Nio Inc., a once-struggling electric-vehicle company that has benefited from Tesla’s presence in China.
PHOTO: QILAI SHEN/BLOOMBERG NEWS
The Tesla effect also lifted the supply chain, meeting a key goal of China’s leaders. Tesla has sent engineers to train workers, help with design and research and impart know-how at firms ranging from a battery maker to die-casting processors.
“There were previously a ton of parts that were made in other parts of the world that were being shipped to Shanghai,” Mr. Musk said in a July 2020 earnings call. “Just locally sourcing those components makes a massive difference to the cost of the vehicle.”
Tesla engineers worked with Chinese battery maker Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd. , known as CATL, to tailor products to Tesla’s needs. A 2020 supply deal with Tesla affirmed the company’s place as a top-tier battery maker.
A supplier of housings for components and hydraulic systems relies on Tesla for roughly half its business. Ningbo Xusheng Auto Technology Co. said in its 2020 annual report that through its cooperation with Tesla, it has “accumulated technologies relating to the design, R&D and production of electric-vehicle parts,” helping it “occupy a top position in the electric-vehicle parts industry.” Ningbo’s 2020 revenue tripled its 2016 level.
Rival electric-vehicle companies in China are now taking aim at Tesla, many of them unhappy about what they perceive as officials’ preferential treatment of a foreign car maker. Some rivals have done so by leveraging Beijing’s broader clampdown on how data is handled by tech behemoths.
They include a company called 360, which started out as a cybersecurity firm, and state-owned vehicle giant SAIC Motor Corp. The two companies in March urged China’s legislature to address national-security concerns associated with foreign electric-vehicle makers. Their target was Tesla, according to people with knowledge of the discussions between the companies and officials.
Tesla vehicles at a showroom in Shanghai.
PHOTO: SUN YILEI/REUTERS
Zhou Hongyi, 360’s founder, suggested that China adopt laws and regulations limiting the collection of geographic information from users of electric vehicles, according to state media reports. State media also said Chen Hong, SAIC’s Communist Party secretary and chairman, proposed that the collection, storage and commercial use of data collected by these vehicles be filed and managed by the Chinese government.
Media representatives at 360 and SAIC didn’t respond to inquiries.
Beijing restricted the use of Tesla cars on military bases and other sensitive government premises. Aided by a public backlash against Tesla, triggered by the driver’s complaints in April, the government in May proposed strict regulations on automotive data collection, limiting the kind of data electric-car makers could collect and forbidding them to transfer outside China any information gathered from users on China’s roads and highways.
These proposals became final in August, as per formal guidelines issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology then. A personal-data protection law that took effect on Nov. 1 could further restrain the company’s ability to gather digital information from Chinese consumers.
The new requirements likely will make it harder for Tesla to develop and deploy autonomous vehicles in China, because these rely on an array of sensors that collect vast amounts of data, according to analysts and current and former industry executives. Tesla’s current driver-assistance features don’t make vehicles autonomous.
“The sweeping data regulation was intended, at least in part, to address escalating public debate about Tesla,” said Paul Triolo, head of global technology policy at Eurasia Group, a New York-based consulting firm, who consults with Chinese officials.
A sore point for local rivals of Tesla is a government policy aimed at encouraging auto makers to produce more electric vehicles. Companies that don’t build enough must purchase credits from those that do. Tesla has been one of the chief beneficiaries of this rule.
“A lot of Chinese companies are very upset by the system,” said Scott Kennedy, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
Tesla has used savings from having domestic suppliers to hold vehicle prices low enough for buyers to qualify for Chinese government subsidies. In July, Tesla launched a Model Y compact sport-utility vehicle that costs less than 300,000 yuan (about $47,000), enabling buyers to get these subsidies.
The Shanghai plant now is Tesla’s main export hub and helped the company introduce its Model Y to Europe, Chief Financial Officer Zachary Kirkhorn told investors in October. The factory makes more vehicles than Tesla’s plant in Fremont, Calif., Mr. Musk said in October, and underpinned the company’s record global deliveries in the third quarter.
Screens show Elon Musk speaking during the China Development Forum in Beijing in March. Mr. Musk has praised China’s prosperity as “amazing” and said Tesla is happy to see the country’s new laws on data management.
PHOTO: WU HONG/SHUTTERSTOCK
Long term, Tesla is likely to lose ground in China to domestic competitors, industry analysts say. Earlier this year, Morgan Stanley analysts forecast that Tesla would make up roughly 15% of China’s all-electric vehicle market this year but that this would fall below 7% by 2030 as homegrown companies gain traction.
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“Tesla’s position in the domestic Chinese market will be substantially diluted over time through competition and policies to encourage local players,” the analysts said.
Mr. Musk remains personally popular in China, where people accustomed to conformity admire his maverick behavior in the U.S. Aspiring Chinese tech entrepreneurs look to him for inspiration, tracking moves of the “Silicon Valley Iron Man.” Some Chinese businesses have even trademarked products using the Chinese translation of his name, Ma Si Ke.
Mr. Musk may have to settle for a sizable, though not dominant, position in the Chinese market, some analysts suggest. Tesla sold more than 73,000 vehicles in China in the three months ended in September, not including exports, a record quarterly performance, China Passenger Car Association data show. Yet in a recent survey of roughly 1,600 Chinese consumers, Tesla ranked among the top auto brands to avoid, signaling that the company could be hitting a ceiling on market share, Bernstein Research analysts said.
Mr. Musk has maintained his deferential tone. In September, when China held an internet conference aimed at pushing its alternative version of the web—at a time when the government was pressing a regulatory crackdown on tech—not many of the country’s tech stars attended.
Mr. Musk spoke via video, describing how Tesla had set up a data center in China to store the digital records gathered from its production, sales, service, charging and other activities in the country.
“At Tesla, we’re glad to see a number of laws and regulations that have been released to strengthen data management,” Mr. Musk said.
—Raffaele Huang contributed to this article.
Copyright ©2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the December 4, 2021, print edition.
7. How Migrants Got Weaponized
Excerpts:
Nonetheless, for Europe, the events on the Polish border should serve as a wake-up call. This tactic is unlikely to end with Belarus, even if few governments are likely to pursue it so brazenly in the near future. The EU itself has greatly facilitated the weaponization of migration by showing how the threat of migrant inflows can be used to extort billions in aid and political indulgence. And as many European countries struggle with populist movements that mobilize around anti-immigration sentiment, the pressure on their leaders to pay authoritarian governments to keep the flow of migrants at a manageable level is unlikely to go away.
More and more, the EU also seems willing to use external countries to do its dirty work on migration and in the process risks undermining the values that Western societies are meant to espouse. Although the conduct of the Polish government may have hit the headlines, the outsourcing of migration policing in North Africa has often meant turning a blind eye to overcrowded detention centers, huge numbers of deaths at sea, authoritarian regimes, and endemic corruption.
The lesson of Minsk’s cynical ploy is that as conflict leaves the battlefield and moves into every other realm of life, migration has become another weapon in an arsenal that ranges from strategic disinformation and the deliberate use of investment for political pressure to controlling access to water or power. Lukashenko is in many ways a very old-fashioned dictator, but his migrant war is a sign of things to come.
How Migrants Got Weaponized
The EU Set the Stage for Belarus’s Cynical Ploy
Over the past month, as thousands of migrants gathered on Belarus’s border with Poland and tried to cross into the European Union, some European leaders accused Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko of engaging in a “hybrid war.” In an effort to put pressure on the EU, they asserted, Lukashenko intentionally sent the migrants to the border with Poland and left them exposed in a freezing forest. Ylva Johansson, the European commissioner for home affairs, called it a new way of “using human beings in an act of aggression.” But if the strategy was extreme, the forces driving it have long been in play. What EU leaders failed to acknowledge was that Lukashenko was drawing on a dynamic of state-manipulated migration that has become common in many parts of the world—and which the EU itself has helped shape.
Without a doubt, the Poland-Belarus crisis has been exceptionally sordid. The migrants in question were not from Belarus or even from surrounding countries but largely from Iraq and Kurdistan. Starting in June, they had been lured to Belarus on tourist visas, with the false promise that they would then have easy access to the EU. When they arrived in Minsk, they were bused straight to the Lithuanian and, especially, Polish borders. In essence, Lukashenko was staging an artificial humanitarian crisis in an effort to get concessions out of Brussels. Ever since rigged elections in 2020, European leaders have dismissed the authoritarian Belarusian regime as lacking “any democratic legitimacy,” and Lukashenko was signaling that he was prepared to use any means possible to force them to the negotiating table and get them to lift sanctions.
Although Lukashenko’s gambit failed, he did succeed in sullying the EU. The Polish government sent troops to defend its border, even using tear gas and water cannons. During the standoff, at least ten migrants died of exposure, including a one-year-old Syrian child. Meanwhile, by supporting Poland’s hard-line tactics and deflecting its ire on Belarus, the EU appeared not just callous but hypocritical: instead of upholding EU asylum law and the principles of human rights, it looked on as migrants were pushed back into Belarus. But the response was squarely in keeping with recent European policies aimed at controlling cross-border migration as much as possible, although usually conveniently farther from its frontiers and out of its immediate sight. Even with the Belarus situation still unfolding, The New Yorker has reported that the EU has paid $500 million to Libya to fund brutal militia-run detention centers, where thousands of African migrants trying to cross into Europe are now being held.
The events on the Belarusian border may have been unusually dispiriting, but the political calculations behind them are hardly new. As the number of migrants, displaced people, and refugees has exploded in recent years, advanced economies in Europe and elsewhere have resorted to increasingly harsh measures to keep them out. In turn, gateway countries such as Libya, Turkey, and now Belarus have new incentives to use the threat of mass migration to extract aid money and other concessions. Increasingly, migration has become a matter not of policy and diplomacy but of coercion, blackmail, and dirty deals. Far from an anomaly, the Belarus case is simply the next stage in the weaponization of migrants.
Paying to Keep the Gates Shut
Authoritarian governments have used migrants as weapons in the past. When Moscow began to permit Jews to emigrate from the Soviet Union in 1971, it deliberately allowed criminals, many of whose claims to Jewish identity were bogus, to join them. The Cuban leader Fidel Castro used the same tactic to an even greater extent when he opened his country’s ports during the 1980 Mariel crisis. Most of the 125,000 Cubans who fled to the United States were genuinely seeking freedom and opportunity, but the Castro regime sent convicted criminals and even patients from psychiatric hospitals to join the exodus.
Since the end of the Cold War, however, migration has taken on a powerful political dimension in advanced democracies as well. Over the past two decades, civil wars, famines, and other upheavals, from the Balkans to Yemen to Afghanistan, have led unprecedented numbers of people to seek refuge in the wealthier economies of western Europe and North America. According to the International Monetary Fund, by 2019 there were 270 million migrants in the world, a figure that had more than doubled since 1990.
Confronted with this onslaught, the EU came up with a novel solution: it would pay countries huge amounts of money to prevent migration. In 2008, the Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi struck a deal with Italy in which the Italian government agreed to pay $5 billion in “reparations” to Libya to stop the flow of Africans heading north into Europe. When the Arab Spring revolts erupted in 2011, bringing a major uprising to Libya, Qaddafi tried to deter EU forces from providing military support to the rebellion by warning that they were “bombing a wall which stood in the way of African migration to Europe.”
The EU's migrant deals have empowered authoritarian regimes.
Qaddafi’s argument was not unfounded. The unseating of dictatorships in both Libya and neighboring Tunisia resulted in the rapid increase in migrants traveling from North Africa to Europe, especially via the Italian island of Lampedusa. In the summer of 2011, 48,000 migrants reached the island; by 2014, the number had risen to over 170,000. Among them were people from all over the Middle East and North Africa who had chosen to make the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean via Libya because of its postrevolution reputation as an uncontrolled gateway to Europe.
The warlords of Libya’s civil war soon saw an opportunity of their own. In 2017, the Government of National Accord—the UN-recognized regime, albeit one whose reach was neither national nor met with much accord—signed a deal that offered it further recognition, credits, and even equipment in return for intercepting would-be migrants. Instead of having the opportunity to reach Europe, Africans have been held in Libyan detention camps that Amnesty International called a “hellscape” for their unsanitary and dangerous conditions. The European Union has struck similar deals with Sudan and Egypt, underscoring a fundamental point, that authoritarian regimes can get not only a free pass from the EU on many issues but also lucrative assistance, so long as they continue to keep migrants out.
War by Other Means
Of course, such deals have also given these same authoritarian regimes the ability to threaten uncontrolled migration as a form of blackmail. After being flooded with refugees from the Syrian civil war in 2015, the EU agreed to pay the Turkish government six billion euros (some $6.8 billion) to host refugees on its own soil and not let them head farther into Europe. In the process, Brussels made its worries obvious, which Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had no qualms about exploiting. When the EU began criticizing the conduct of Turkish operations in northern Syria, he threatened to “open the gates and send 3.6 million refugees your way” if they did not stop calling his Syrian offensive “an invasion.” The EU duly caved, watering down both its planned embargo on arms sales to Ankara and its language: the “invasion” was turned into a “unilateral military action.”
Likewise, when the Indonesian government became infuriated by Australian pressure to show clemency to two of its citizens facing the death penalty for drug trafficking in 2015, it threatened to stop cooperating to combat migration across the Timor Sea and unleash a “human tsunami.” The overall lesson was, after all, that migrants could serve as just another bargaining chip.
In an age of interconnected economies, shooting wars have been too costly, both politically and economically, for most countries. In their place have emerged a series of tools that can be readily turned into weapons, from sanctions to cyberattacks to the disruption of energy markets. Among these new tactics, the threat of unleashing migrants has become especially attractive.
The Power of Disinformation
In bringing Iraqis and Kurds to the Polish border, Lukashenko was not just turning migrants themselves into political weapons. He was also weaponizing several other components of modern interstate relations: communications, crime, and law. Whereas once migrants were more likely to head to neighboring countries or to follow well-established migration routes, in the age of social media and the Internet, rumors about new routes and potential destinations are able to spread extremely rapidly, and people smugglers actively spread disinformation to drum up business. What made Belarus distinctive was that there was not a naturally occurring flow of migrants but one that was generated by the government itself using information networks.
At the same time, Belarus drew on the role of criminal gangs in facilitating cross-border migrations. Although travel agencies and other commercial agencies played a key part in Minsk’s efforts to recruit would-be migrants, in at least some cases they were essentially front companies for well-established people-smuggling rings. When Minsk began to make it known through online channels that it was willing to issue short-term group tourist visas for the flimsiest of reasons and bus people from the airport to the Lithuanian or Polish border, it was these local facilitators—in some cases tipped off by agents of the KGB, Belarus’s infamous security service—who spread the word and drummed up business. Since they were fully or partially paid up front for their services, typically $7,000 to $15,000 a head, these smugglers didn’t care whether the migrants made it to Europe. They simply spotted a market opportunity and exploited it.
What made these migrants think they would be allowed to enter Europe? Whether genuinely fleeing oppression or simply looking for better lives, many of them planned to claim asylum and put their faith in legal processes, especially in Germany, which privileges the rights of people at risk. These aspirations were also exploited by Minsk, in a textbook example of “lawfare”—the use of law as a weapon—to the point of Belarusian officials actually advising migrants how to make the case for asylum once they were on EU soil.
On one level, then, this manufactured crisis is an example of the cynical malice of Lukashenko’s regime, seeking to punish the EU for its support for Belarus’s opposition movement and to force it to accept the legitimacy of his regime. In this particular instance, the strategy may have backfired. In mid-November, outgoing German Chancellor Angela Merkel agreed to talk to Lukashenko to defuse the crisis, marking the first direct contact with him by any Western leader since Belarus’s fraudulent election. But Belarus seems to have gained no strategic advantage. Even Belarus’s close ally, Russia, has been increasingly exasperated by Lukashenko’s capriciousness. Russian President Vladimir Putin has publicly called for him to talk to the opposition, and Russian officials privately contemplate how they could be rid of him.
The Border Battles To Come
Nonetheless, for Europe, the events on the Polish border should serve as a wake-up call. This tactic is unlikely to end with Belarus, even if few governments are likely to pursue it so brazenly in the near future. The EU itself has greatly facilitated the weaponization of migration by showing how the threat of migrant inflows can be used to extort billions in aid and political indulgence. And as many European countries struggle with populist movements that mobilize around anti-immigration sentiment, the pressure on their leaders to pay authoritarian governments to keep the flow of migrants at a manageable level is unlikely to go away.
More and more, the EU also seems willing to use external countries to do its dirty work on migration and in the process risks undermining the values that Western societies are meant to espouse. Although the conduct of the Polish government may have hit the headlines, the outsourcing of migration policing in North Africa has often meant turning a blind eye to overcrowded detention centers, huge numbers of deaths at sea, authoritarian regimes, and endemic corruption.
The lesson of Minsk’s cynical ploy is that as conflict leaves the battlefield and moves into every other realm of life, migration has become another weapon in an arsenal that ranges from strategic disinformation and the deliberate use of investment for political pressure to controlling access to water or power. Lukashenko is in many ways a very old-fashioned dictator, but his migrant war is a sign of things to come.
8. U.S. to Urge Democracies to Sanction Corrupt Foreign Officials, Human-Rights Abusers
For those who oppose sanctions on human rights abusers, what actions do you propose? (and yes I know leaving them alone and not interfering in "internal affairs" is a recommendation from those with certain political perspectives).
U.S. to Urge Democracies to Sanction Corrupt Foreign Officials, Human-Rights Abusers
Biden administration will unveil sanctions in run-up to Summit for Democracy
WSJ · by Ian Talley and Dustin Volz
White House officials have said they see the sanctions as an important tool in the Biden administration’s efforts to spark what it calls a Democratic renewal around the globe. The administration has also said it would give priority to securing coordinated international action as critical to ensuring the sanctions are effective.
The U.S. will impose the sanctions under a variety of authorities, including the so-called Global Magnitsky powers, named after a Russian whistleblowing lawyer who died in a Moscow jail after accusing the government of corruption.
“Over the course of the week, Treasury will take a series of actions to designate individuals who are engaged in malign activities that undermine democracy and democratic institutions around the world including corruption, repression, organized crime, and serious human-rights abuse,” an official said.
U.S. officials haven’t said whom the new sanctions would target. Lawmakers and activists outside the government have called for the administration to sanction more Russian oligarchs, Chinese officials, and other notable alleged corrupt actors and human-rights abusers. Iran is also a possible target, given the widespread allegations in the West of corruption in the government and torture and killing of dissidents.
The Treasury Department, which oversees sanctions policy, is also taking other actions to counter corruption, the official said, including closing loopholes that allow corrupt officials to exploit the real-estate market and increasing transparency of corporate ownership.
Australia on Thursday adopted new rules enabling it more easily to sanction accused human-rights abusers, becoming the latest U.S. ally to pass a law styled after the U.S.’s Magnitsky laws. Canada, the European Union and the U.K. have also updated their rules to better target human-rights violators.
President Biden will host the virtual Summit for Democracy next Thursday and Friday.
Photo: Oliver Contreras/Zuma Press
Coordinated international Magnitsky sanctions are part of a broader set of commitments and initiatives the administration aims to secure at the summit, a senior administration official said. Some of those initiatives include safeguarding media rights and fair elections, fighting corruption, and encouraging political leadership of women, girls and marginalized populations.
In addition, the Biden administration aims to limit export of surveillance tools and other technologies that authoritarian governments can use to suppress human rights, the Biden administration said, an alleged practice in China.
Daniel Fried, a former State Department diplomat who crafted several of the Obama administration’s sanction policies, said the White House believes tackling corruption is an essential element of reinvigorating democracy.
“We expect its commitments to be more focused there than in other issue areas,” he said.
The summit offers the administration a good opportunity to expand the number of countries coordinating action against corruption and human-rights abuse, said Mr. Fried, now a fellow at the Washington-based Atlantic Council think tank.
“This could look like other nations adopting versions of the United States’ Russia-specific Magnitsky Act and the subsequent Global Magnitsky Act, or even creating a broader mechanism for coordinated, multilateral sanctions,“ he said.
Administration officials say corruption and human-rights abuse are scourges of democracy, activities committed by authoritarian regimes and their supporters to preserve their power and enrich themselves at the expense of their citizens.
The blacklisting of government and military officials and their allies in the private sector is meant to stem abuse and corruption by both the targets and other offenders around the world.
The Magnitsky sanctions involve freezing any assets individuals have within U.S. jurisdiction and complicating their financial and real estate dealings overseas. By detailing allegations justifying sanctions, the action is also intended to discredit them at home and abroad.
Among those targeted in the past include Saudi Arabian officials and entities involved in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Chinese gangster known as “Broken Tooth” allegedly involved in corruption in Myanmar and other Asian nations, and an Israeli businessman involved in corrupt mining and oil deals in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
WSJ · by Ian Talley and Dustin Volz
9. This is how to rescue a hostage from terrorists in under a minute
The cries will come about the release of another video about special operations. But it is now out there in the twitterverse and beyond.
If I am ever held hostage I know who I want to come rescue me.
This is how to rescue a hostage from terrorists in under a minute
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A video posted online this week of special operations training shows soldiers dashing from a helicopter to a target house, shooting multiple ‘bad guys,’ and rescuing a hostage in the time it takes most people to tie their shoes.
The video was captioned on Twitter as a “mock hostage rescue” performed by CAG, or Combat Applications Group, the generic name for what is commonly known as the elite “Delta Force,” though it remains unclear whether that is actually the case. Nevertheless, it shows how well-trained special operations soldiers can rescue a hostage from terrorists in under a minute.
— Travis (@GWOT5822) December 1, 2021
“These guys are so good,” said Ben Bunn, a former Army infantry officer and enlisted Green Beret who has conducted similar hostage rescue missions during training. After watching the video, Bunn said it appeared that this training mission called for the rescue of a lone hostage, and the operators were given at least some indication of the layout of the house and what sort of threat they faced.
That makes sense since it’s crucial during real hostage rescue operations to mitigate risks that may lead to the captive being killed before rescuers arrive. Usually, that means conducting extensive surveillance on the target, learning the habits and movements of everyone inside — as well as how many there are — long before the door is kicked in. And that seemed to be what the training scenario called for here, according to Bunn, a graduate of an advanced Special Forces course that emphasizes room-clearing procedures similar to what is seen in the video.
“They were getting there fast as possible inside the house and retrieving that person,” Bunn said. “They knew where he was sleeping, they knew everything.”
In the video, which features helmet camera footage from the lead operator, the soldiers exit the helicopter and launch into a full sprint toward the target house. Just 13 seconds later, the point-man raises his rifle and fires at the first ‘bad guy’ standing by the door with paintball-like “simunition” rounds. The man portraying an armed terrorist has two well-aimed rounds fired in his direction while the operator is still running. Then the operator uses the tree in front of him as cover from any return fire before edging closer and taking him out for good.
Once the lead operator reaches the house, he quickly enters the side door and clears the right side of the room before dropping another bad guy hiding in a corner. He then moves efficiently through the kitchen and nails another bad guy before clearing the living room as others flood in behind him with their rifles raised. Their main objective? Look for threats in their view so they can, as one Army field manual put it, “completely dominate the room.” And they indeed dominate: none of the bad guys appear to return fire since everything happens so fast.
Notably, the lead operator, known in close quarters battle (CQB) parlance as the “number one man” in the “stack” upon entry, seamlessly transitions to being the third man in a side bedroom and the second into where the hostage is being held. This indicates extensive CQB training and shows how special operators can “work through [a] house exceptionally fast,” Bunn said. The video stands in stark contrast to footage from February of soldiers in the 10th Mountain Division clearing rooms and showing exactly what not to do.
By the time the special operators get into the room holding the hostage, they have ‘killed’ several bad guys. But it’s not as simple as saying, surprise, we’re here to save you. This is “one of the most dangerous” points in a hostage rescue, Bunn said, because it’s a terrifying situation to be in and people being rescued often react in unpredictable ways. So it’s not uncommon to see a rescue force use zip-tie restraints on a hostage or shout commands from behind the barrel of a rifle.
“I’ve been the hostage at SFARTAEC [Special Forces Advanced Reconnaissance, Target Analysis, and Exploitation Techniques Course]. It’s exceptionally unpleasant,” Bunn said. “The best thing you can do for that individual is get them the fuck out of there as quickly as humanly possible.”
Unpleasant could describe the experience of hostages in October 2015, when Delta Force operators and Kurdish forces conducted a joint raid on an Islamic State group prison in Northern Iraq. That raid, which freed about 70 hostages, was also captured on helmet camera video and showed frantic, terrified prisoners presumably being searched for suicide vests before filing out of the prison with their hands up.
“Time was of the essence,” Army Sgt. Maj. Thomas “Patrick” Payne, who received the Medal of Honor for his heroism during the raid, said later. “There were freshly dug graves. If we didn’t action this raid, then the hostages were likely to be executed.”
In the training video, operators command the hostage to stand up before grabbing him and taking him to safety. And just like that, a potentially chaotic operation to rescue a person from several armed terrorists is over in no time at all.
“These motherfuckers cleared a house they had never been in before in under 40 seconds,” Bunn said. “It’s crazy.”
More great stories on Task & Purpose
is the Editor in Chief of Task & Purpose and a Marine Corps veteran. Reach out via email or find him on Twitter at @paulszoldra. Contact the author here.
10. Collusion or Collision? Turkey-Russia Relations Under Erdogan and Putin
December 3, 2021 | Monograph
Collusion or Collision?
Turkey-Russia Relations Under Erdogan and Putin
Foreword
By Ambassador Eric S. Edelman
U.S. relations with Turkey and Russia have soured over the last two decades. Once a staunch ally anchoring NATO’s southern flank, Turkey has increasingly drifted from the West. With Russia, post-Cold War hopes for strategic partnership between Moscow and the West have given way to renewed strategic competition and confrontation.
Meanwhile, despite a long history of fraught relations dating back to the 16th century, Turkey and Russia have moved closer. This report serves as an indispensable guide to the relationship between Ankara and Moscow.
To be sure, their differences are many, and mutual suspicion still runs deep. Yet the authors carefully document how the regimes of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Vladimir Putin have managed to compartmentalize their relationship, mixing competition with substantial — if transactional — cooperation across a range of areas. Many in Washington continue to see Turkey as a bulwark against Russia, yet this report capably demonstrates that such notions are fanciful, at least for as long as Erdogan remains in charge.
Economic ties, particularly in the energy sector, drove Russian-Turkish rapprochement following the Soviet Union’s collapse. These ties remain a key pillar of their relationship, helping to buffer against growing Russian-Turkish geopolitical competition across multiple regions.
But there are also broader and deeper forces at play. Erdogan and Putin both reject the post-Cold War liberal international order and view Turkish-Russian cooperation as a means of advancing their revisionist geopolitical agendas. Cultivating ties with Moscow helps Ankara achieve independence from the West. For the Kremlin, Turkey’s drift from the West supports Moscow’s longstanding efforts to undermine NATO, as seen with Ankara’s purchase of the Russian-made S-400 surface-to-air missile system.
Turkey and Russia’s alignment also reflects domestic factors. Neither strongman chastises the other for his democratic shortcomings or kleptocracy. In both countries, large swathes of the elite reject liberalism and associated visions that root their country’s national identity and strategic vocation within the West. Indeed, Erdogan’s alliance with Turkey’s “Eurasianist” faction, which eschews the West and prioritizes relations with Russia and other non-Western powers, has helped fuel Ankara’s alignment with Moscow. For Putin, Russia’s “Eurasianist” thinkers have provided useful political cover for his authoritarian and kleptocratic regime.
In Washington, both political parties have come to recognize that America and its allies face growing threats from authoritarian powers that seek to undermine the interests and values of free societies. This report is among the best works that show how such autocratic regimes are able to cooperate effectively despite their unresolved differences.
For the United States and its allies, successfully navigating the Turkey-Russia relationship will require an accurate picture of today’s Turkey. Thankfully, the analysis here reflects a deep understanding of Turkish politics and the subtle ways in which ideology, strategy, and economic interests blend together to shape foreign policy.
As the authors note, Ankara’s drift from the West reflects a fundamental shift in Turkish foreign policy: Although Erdogan does not seek to exit NATO, he seeks to balance between East and West, making Erdogan’s Turkey unlikely to reprise its former role as a stalwart transatlantic ally. The foreign policies of both Moscow and Ankara have deep domestic roots, and both Washington and its allies will need to develop a coordinated strategy to deal with the consequences of the Turkish-Russian entente. This monograph offers a nuanced set of policy recommendations to inform that effort. They deserve careful consideration by policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Former U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Policy
Former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey
Chairman, FDD’s Turkey Program; Senior Advisor, FDD’s Center on Military and Political Power
11. FDD | U.S. and Europe Must Counter Potential Weapons-Grade Enrichment by Iran
Excerpt:
Washington and its European partners are sorely overdue in scheduling a special IAEA board meeting to censure Iran for its nuclear advances and other safeguards violations to date. Such censure ought to include a deadline after which Tehran’s failure to comply would result in board referral of Iran’s case to the UN Security Council.
FDD | U.S. and Europe Must Counter Potential Weapons-Grade Enrichment by Iran
fdd.org · by Andrea Stricker Research Fellow · December 3, 2021
Israel has shared intelligence with the United States and other allies indicating the Islamic Republic of Iran plans to enrich uranium to 90 percent purity, the level necessary for nuclear weapons. This unprecedented move would test whether there is any Iranian nuclear advance that would spur the Biden administration and its European allies to impose punitive measures rather than pursue negotiations regardless of Tehran’s provocations.
Both Axios and CNN reported Jerusalem’s warning, yet the only specific basis they identified for the Israeli conclusion was a broad finding that Iran is taking “technical steps” to prepare for 90 percent enrichment. Israeli analysts further assess that Tehran’s plan represents an effort to gain leverage at the indirect talks between Iran and the United States aimed at reviving the 2015 nuclear deal. The talks resumed in Vienna on Monday.
Separately, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported on Wednesday that Iran has begun enriching uranium to 20 percent purity in a cascade of advanced centrifuges at the deeply buried Fordow plant. At Fordow, separate cascades of 1,044 early-model centrifuges known as IR-1s already enrich uranium to 20 percent purity. The new model, or IR-6, is far more efficient, thus reducing the number of centrifuges required. The new arrangement at Fordow could enable Iran to quickly enrich 20 percent uranium to weapons-grade purity in a facility that is fortified against air strikes. Twenty percent enrichment represents more than 90 percent of the effort required to make weapons-grade material.
Since May 2019, Tehran has deliberately escalated its violations of the 2015 nuclear accord, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), from which the Trump administration withdrew in May 2018. During U.S. and European efforts to revive the JCPOA over the past year, Iran’s nuclear advances have become more egregious and its appetite for brinkmanship more pronounced.
In January 2021, Iran resumed enriching uranium to 20 percent purity, which it had not done since 2013. Just days after nuclear negotiations started in early April, Tehran began enriching uranium to 60 percent, which it had never done before.
At its quarterly meetings, however, the IAEA Board of Governors has declined to admonish Iran. The board has the authority to demand Iranian compliance with its nonproliferation obligations and, if necessary, to refer Tehran to the UN Security Council. Prior to each IAEA gathering this year, Iran has threatened to reduce international monitoring of its nuclear activities, destroy IAEA safeguards data, or refrain from negotiating restraints.
The passivity of the international community contrasts with its response to earlier provocations. In 2010, for example, when Tehran first began producing 20 percent enriched uranium, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1929, which imposed far-reaching sanctions, including arms and missile embargos and a ban on Iranian missile tests.
Iran’s 20 percent enrichment also set off a wave of U.S. sanctions, including key penalties against Tehran’s petroleum and financial sectors. The European Union followed suit with measures of its own. Arguably, this resolute response and the subsequent roiling of the Iranian economy led Tehran to negotiate an interim nuclear deal by 2013.
Washington and its European partners are sorely overdue in scheduling a special IAEA board meeting to censure Iran for its nuclear advances and other safeguards violations to date. Such censure ought to include a deadline after which Tehran’s failure to comply would result in board referral of Iran’s case to the UN Security Council.
fdd.org · by Andrea Stricker Research Fellow · December 3, 2021
12. A woke military is no defense at all — why Defense bill in current form must not pass
Political yes, but thai obviously has national security implications.
Similarly, the NDAA was voted on in the House earlier this year. In that vote, 37 Democrats voted against the NDAA, and Republicans gave the NDAA the winning margin, despite inclusion of provisions that those same Republicans have regularly opposed. Republicans now have a second chance to control the NDAA. If Republicans look at the bill in its entirety, not just at the parts that fund our military, they will see the social engineering advocacy by the left.
If Republicans unitedly oppose the NDAA in this go-around, the Democrats will be unable to pass the bill by themselves. Only with the help of Republicans can the woke NDAA bill get enough votes to pass.
Taking this bill down is our only opportunity to “de-woke” the NDAA. Taking it down is Republicans’ leverage to protect our military men and women from the social engineering advancing in our military at the direction of President Biden.
If we stop this version of the NDAA we can end the military vax mandates and produce a defense spending package that focuses on national security.
A woke military is No Defense At All.
A woke military is no defense at all — why Defense bill in current form must not pass
The proposed National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) will encourage critical race theory indoctrination and other “woke” policies while reducing our military preparedness.
Forty-one Republican senators can stand together against the blinding liberal programs in the NDAA per the Senate rules. They can make sure that vaccine mandates go away before they agree to forward the bill to the House.
Republicans in the House also have the leverage to prevent passage of the bill because Democrats need Republican votes to pass the bill. We should stand united against the NDAA until the elimination of vax mandates. Our military will still be adequately funded, but freed from the woke nonsense from the left.
Military spending is a constitutionally authorized obligation. But, that obligation should not be diluted by the “wokeness” that has infected the current NDAA.
Currently thousands of military men and women, in whom we place significant trust and in whom we have invested heavily, are at risk of being tossed from the military because they do not want to receive Biden’s mandated COVID vax.
We are about to lose tremendous men and women from our military, many of whom are
highly trained. This is to be expected from an administration that has opened our border and encouraged our enemies around the world.
The unconstitutional vax mandates are bad enough, but the Biden administration and some of our military leaders have become missionaries of the left. They are focused on finding white supremacy in the military. They are convinced that our biggest national threat is climate change. Not the Chinese, not North Korea, nor any other of the increasingly bellicose international actors.
The NDAA perpetuates the woke, CRT indoctrination, funding for transition surgeries, and drafting of women, and lacks accountability for the Afghanistan debacle. There is a path to slow this down. In the Senate 60 votes are required to pass the NDAA.
That means if 41 of the Republican senators stick together, they will have leverage to end vax mandates, and other bad policies in the Democrats’ version of the NDAA.
In the House, there have been two significant pieces of legislation that Republicans aided Democrats in passing. The first was the “infrastructure” bill, which would have failed but for Republican votes. When Democrats did not have enough votes to pass that bill, Republicans in Congress crossed over to provide the winning vote margin for the “infrastructure” package that was more Green New Deal than roads and transportation.
Similarly, the NDAA was voted on in the House earlier this year. In that vote, 37 Democrats voted against the NDAA, and Republicans gave the NDAA the winning margin, despite inclusion of provisions that those same Republicans have regularly opposed. Republicans now have a second chance to control the NDAA. If Republicans look at the bill in its entirety, not just at the parts that fund our military, they will see the social engineering advocacy by the left.
If Republicans unitedly oppose the NDAA in this go-around, the Democrats will be unable to pass the bill by themselves. Only with the help of Republicans can the woke NDAA bill get enough votes to pass.
Taking this bill down is our only opportunity to “de-woke” the NDAA. Taking it down is Republicans’ leverage to protect our military men and women from the social engineering advancing in our military at the direction of President Biden.
If we stop this version of the NDAA we can end the military vax mandates and produce a defense spending package that focuses on national security.
A woke military is No Defense At All.
Andy Biggs represents Arizona’s 5th District and is chairman of the House Freedom Caucus. Freedom Caucus members Jody Hice represents Georgia’s 10th District, Michael Cloud represents the 27th District of Texas, Warren Davidson represents Ohio’s 8th District and Ralph Norman represents South Carolina’s 5th District.
13. To Deter China, Invest in Non-Strategic Nuclear Weapons
Excerpts:
Until the United States takes the threat of Chinese and Russian theater nuclear strategies seriously and responds accordingly, our rivals will be competitively attracted to limited nuclear employment and will assiduously attempt to exploit that asymmetry.
To keep the peace, we should adapt. Guns, not knives, deter gunfights.
To Deter China, Invest in Non-Strategic Nuclear Weapons
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Escalation. It’s Indiana Jones pulling out a revolver in response to the whirling blades of the Arabian fighter. It’s also Russia or China employing ultra-low-yield theater nuclear weapons in conflict to stun the United States and our allies into submission to achieve ambitious strategic goals. Escalation is funny in a movie but deadly serious in real life.
The U.S. has suddenly awoken to the realization that it is in the unenviable situation of facing two nuclear-armed peer competitors who have positioned themselves favorably regarding the net nuclear balance and are looking to exploit that for strategic gains.
Russia has, of course, maintained its parity with the U.S. in the area of so-called “strategic” (that is, treaty accountable) nuclear weapons, also retaining a more rapid and sizable upload capacity while also developing new exotic intercontinental-range nuclear weapons outside of the NST treaty. But it has also finished the bulk of a vast modernization program for its “non-strategic” nuclear weapons, none of which are treaty accountable, developing and fielding several thousand such warheads across an enormous variety of weapon systems with the plans for credible employment.
Recently, China’s own nuclear breakout – termed "breathtaking" by USSTRATCOM Commander ADM Richard – has come to light as several previously unknown missile fields have revealed unexpected near-term strategic parity, together with a surge of unknown size in its theater nuclear forces. China has accelerated development, production and deployment of advanced, precision, theater-range, dual-capable missile systems while massively expanding its secretive nuclear warhead production site, Pingtung. None of China’s 800+ nuclear weapons (our private, detailed estimate) are treaty accountable, and some of them may well soon be arming their newest hypersonic missiles.
The clear outlines of a coercive new “theory of victory,” which locates limited theater nuclear employment at its core, are now in full view.
If one of our rivals crosses the nuclear threshold into discriminate, extremely low yield, theater nuclear strikes, the consequences for the U.S. and allies would be grim.
Such “light” selective employment would almost assuredly focus on purely military targets with essentially zero collateral damage and fallout, designed to simultaneously compel U.S. capitulation and avoid galvanizing our resolve.
Strikes on targets such as airfields, logistics nodes and missile defense sites could debilitate the allied war effort, particularly the immediate effort to establish air dominance.
Illustrating this, a Russian ultra-low-yield Kinzhal strike on the Romanian missile defense site at Deveselu would only kill a civilian motorist if they had the misfortune of driving by the base at that exact instant.
The adversary would then begin vigorously conducting an information operation, supporting horrified voices calling for an immediate ceasefire, advising strenuously against entering into nuclear escalation, and questioning the “real value” of the political objective. The pressure to seek accommodation of any sort would be very high. The few “proportional responses” that exist are either non-nuclear, thus deprived of the same psychological effect, or involve strikes into our ally-less adversary’s homeland, thus opening up the U.S. homeland to counterstrikes.
And, in this tripolar nuclear reality, either of our rivals might also opportunistically take advantage of a limited nuclear conflict between us and the other to attempt a fait accompli of its own, underscoring the weaponized, coercive threat of limited nuclear employment.
Grim indeed.
But this unenviable imbalance didn’t happen overnight. During the past three decades, if there is one area in which the U.S. has made it abundantly clear that it refuses to compete, it is in theater nuclear weapons.
The evidence: wholesale divestment of previous theater nuclear weapons; alarmist editorials opposing even the modest introduction of a very small number of low-yield, counter-escalatory warheads into the U.S. strategic submarine force; asymmetric adherence to a “zero yield” testing policy; vigorous Congressional resistance to funding relevant activities; political statements emphasizing U.S. desire to “reduce the role of nuclear weapons” even as great power competitors engaged in precisely the opposite.
Americans may be rightfully disgusted by the prospect of having to compete in the area of theater nuclear weapons, but the alternative of leaving this field of competition to our rivals could spell catastrophe.
Building a capability to credibly respond at that specific level of escalatory intensity will deter the very violence that is most feared.
It is clear that prompt U.S. modernization of the entire nuclear Triad should be seen as the necessary floor of nuclear posture adjustments, not the ceiling.
The 2018 nuclear posture review rightly concluded that not only would the low-yield W76-2 be required as a force posture adjustment, but that the nation should also pursue a sea-launched, nuclear-armed, theater cruise missile (SLCM-N). Together, the W76-2 and a suitable SLCM-N would most assuredly provide a survivable, penetrable and prompt response option with adaptability and scalability in both numbers and yield options while retaining sovereign basing. The U.S. should re-commit to the acquisition of fielding of the highly credible SLCM-N.
Fielding additional theater nuclear capabilities to provide a sufficient and enduring deterrent, as we did in the 1980s with the theater-ranged Pershing II IRBM and Gryphon GLCM, would also hopefully open the door to a multilateral arms control treaty that captures all nuclear warheads, rather than just so-called “strategic” warheads. Absent that deterrent leverage, we have little hope of future success in meaningful nuclear arms control.
Until the United States takes the threat of Chinese and Russian theater nuclear strategies seriously and responds accordingly, our rivals will be competitively attracted to limited nuclear employment and will assiduously attempt to exploit that asymmetry.
To keep the peace, we should adapt. Guns, not knives, deter gunfights.
Christopher Yeaw is a research director at the National Strategic Research Institute. The views expressed here are his own.
14. Understanding the Pro-China Propaganda and Disinformation Tool Set in Xinjiang
Excerpts:
China’s propaganda efforts around its treatment of the Uyghurs and the country’s attempts to undermine Western criticisms of its atrocities are well known and still ongoing. China is driven to maintain face and, as its focus on cotton suggests, defend its economic interests. The social media disinformation campaign we have described here, however, illustrates the steps China is willing to take not only to propagate its own version of reality but also to undermine others’ attempts to engage with the truth. China’s troll army not only reinforces China’s narrative but also limits the ability of journalists, activists, and victims to organize and employ social media as the tool of free speech it was once lauded for being. As China’s propaganda and disinformation networks adapt, those who try to break through the chaff will need to as well.
Understanding the Pro-China Propaganda and Disinformation Tool Set in Xinjiang
In early October, the Twitter account of a vice president at an international private bank based in Monaco tweeted several times about life in Xinjiang, China. She shared videos of the white birch forests that beautify the region and spoke of her love of Xinjiang-style fried pork noodles. The account also posted a video of the Xinjiang cotton harvest, saying, “Mechanization helps the cotton industry improve quality and efficiency, and increase farmers’ income #Xinjiang.” This banker had not recently returned from a trip to Xinjiang. She was not tweeting praise for Xinjiang culture and economy out of genuine affection or self-interest. She was not even doing the tweeting. Hackers had stolen her account some weeks before to join a chorus of other Twitter accounts discussing Xinjiang’s cuisine and cotton. This banker’s Twitter account had become the smallest cog in a vast, state-backed, defensive-disinformation campaign.
In the past several years, inauthentic social media accounts attributed to China have been identified as operating as part of several disinformation campaigns. China’s trolls first made headlines when they worked to undermine Hong Kong democracy protests. Since then, actors linked to the Chinese government have expanded the use of similar accounts. The cybersecurity firm FireEye and Google’s threat analysis group have identified an ongoing Chinese information operation involving social media. They have identified elements of this campaign in various languages across 30 different social media platforms and 40 different websites and found it targeted a range of issues, including attempts to undermine the dissident Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui. More recently, researchers from Oxford University’s Programme on Democracy and Technology revealed China-linked accounts that spread an absurd story that the coronavirus originated with Maine lobster shipped to Wuhan.
Our research at the Clemson University Media Forensics Hub has been tracking an extensive pro-China propaganda and disinformation operation, extending the work done by FireEye, Google and Oxford. Understanding the full strategy, tactics and motivation behind current and future Chinese disinformation campaigns requires an understanding of the full Chinese tool set.
China, generally with a broader range of critics than allies, faces serious political and public relations challenges, from conflict over the South China Sea to Hong Kong to Taiwan. With the approach of the 2022 Beijing Olympics, China has developed an extensive, multifaceted media apparatus to compete for influence on the world stage to combat these critics. The country’s capacity to smooth over its PR problems by defensively projecting its own version of reality into the media ecosystem may be more important than ever. One issue challenging China’s global image is the Chinese government’s treatment of the Uyghur Muslim minority in the northwestern region of Xinjiang. Human rights groups have accused China of detaining more than 1 million Uyghurs in state-run “reeducation camps” where they are victims of forced labor—and perhaps even forced sterilization. Amnesty International has labeled China’s actions as “crimes against humanity.” China has responded to these accusations with propaganda and disinformation, as these criticisms threaten the nation’s economy.
Cotton is an important Chinese export. As the world’s second largest producer of cotton, China is close behind its rival India. Xinjiang accounts for 85 percent of Chinese cotton production and 20 percent of total world supply. Xinjiang cotton is used by many of the world’s best known fashion retailers, including H&M, Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein. Human rights organizations say the fields and factories of Xinjiang are run using forced labor from Uyghur Muslims, but industry efforts to motivate reform so far have been silenced by concerted Chinese economic pressure. Global attention remains focused, however, and the voices of those critical of China’s treatment of the Uyghurs won’t be swayed by brute economic measures. Threats to boycott Xinjiang cotton persist, so China has ramped up its communication and disinformation machine to drown out criticism.
If the Twitter account from Monaco is a small cog in China’s communication machine, the central mechanism is state media. China engages in a great deal of traditional propaganda driven by a range of state-controlled media outlets that push content in several languages across every form of media. These outlets have worked to undermine accusations of human rights violations made by “anti-China forces.” China Daily, in one of many such examples, suggested that accusations of abuse are based on fake testimonies and fabricated documents, quoting Chinese spokesperson Xu Guixiang: “As more and more people learn about the real situation in Xinjiang, they can see clearly that those allegations are made up to curb China’s development.”
Caption: A tweet from an inauthentic Twitter account undermining the accusations of an "anti-China force."
Chinese media have been working diligently to construct and portray “the ‘real’ situation in Xinjiang,” and many of these efforts have been well documented by Western media. With 12.3 million followers, the Chinese Xinhua News Twitter account exemplifies this, posting in English twice a day about Xinjiang. Xinhua News shares Travel Channel-worthy drone shots of breathtaking landscapes alongside video that invites the viewer to experience the food and culture of the region. One recent video invites users to go shopping “with a young Xinjiang lady and her friend in this #RealLifeXinjiang #vlog.” Another video introduces users to Zufati, a 6-year-old who is the “fruit of love of a mixed-race marriage” and whose mother is lovingly teaching him Mandarin. And, of course, Xinhua News wants users to understand how thoroughly mechanized the Xinjiang cotton fields are. Xinhua tells in one post, for instance, how Xinjiang farmers are celebrating the cotton harvest, saying, “Watch how smart technologies help them free from arduous physical labor and increase income.”
State media’s messaging is supported by other official government Twitter accounts. Zhao Lijian, deputy director of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, messaged his 1 million followers an average of once a day in English about Xinjiang throughout October and early November 2021. His feed is filled with videos of Xinjiang’s primary school children at play and of Xinjiang’s elderly citizens dancing in the streets. “Is this what you called ’genocide‘?” proclaims one such tweet. And, of course, many of his tweets are about Xinjiang cotton.
Alongside these overt propaganda efforts, China has invited foreign journalists and other guests to view the Xinjiang province firsthand. Some Western journalists have come away from these trips clearly very skeptical. Others, however, have taken up the party’s line and are eagerly magnified by state media. Xinhua News told of one Italian’s journey, quoting him saying, “I do see a situation which is pretty much normal and similar to the rest of China.” A Ugandan Muslim journalist had his story of religious acceptance in Xinjiang told by Chinese state channels and across social media.
In addition to individual journalists, China has recruited entire publications to help propagate its messages. The Helsinki Times, for instance, which proclaims in its own header to be “News from Finland,” has a large portion of its content supplied in English “in cooperation” with China’s People’s Daily—likely often unbeknownst to the reader.
Caption: The disclaimer on the Helsinki Times "China News" header.
With a swarm of inauthentic social media accounts, China’s efforts move from old-fashioned propaganda to 21st century disinformation. The ways in which China employs inauthentic troll accounts in this case, however, differ from what is typically seen in the context of Russian troll accounts. Analysis of Russian disinformation has shown that, in the past, Russian trolls have used social media offensively, attacking the West by integrating themselves into identity groups and working to undermine institutions while pulling conversations in more extreme directions. The Chinese trolls talking about Xinjiang, and arguably most troll accounts from past Chinese campaigns, are defensive trolls. They don’t work to attack the West; rather, they attempt to defend China’s interests.
Our research has been monitoring conversations around the hashtags employed by users engaged in discussions of Chinese treatment of the Uyghurs. Sampling these messages, we can see clear signs of platform manipulation. On Twitter, troll accounts engaging in these conversations are specialized and serve a variety of functions. First, and most obviously, they spam conversations by repeating talking points and filling space on the platform. It is difficult to pin down exactly how many accounts across social media the Chinese employ, but they number in the thousands. We found that the hashtag “#Xinjiang” appeared in 60,516 tweets in October. Of these, 3,310 tweets were the first tweet a given account ever made, suggesting the possibility these 3000+ accounts were purpose-built. Nearly 40 percent of these 60,000+ tweets originated from accounts that had zero followers, another sign of potential inauthenticity. The disinformation researcher @conspirator0 identified that many of these accounts were created simultaneously, in batches.
These accounts mostly copy and paste content, much of which discusses Xinjiang and, naturally, Xinjiang cotton. A typical post is like this recently suspended one from an account named Tanya Williams. It includes a 13-second video of a cotton field in Xinjiang and shares the message “#humanrights #cotton #xinjiang #forcedlabor #uyghur A good harvest of beautiful cotton.” Users searching for conversations using any of those hashtags are somewhat less likely to find content critical of China and a little more likely to land on a video of a cotton field. These tactics make it incrementally more difficult for users’ messages expressing genuine concerns about, or evidence of, China’s actions in Xinjiang to break through.
Caption: A pro-China tweet from the, now suspended, Twitter account of Tanya Williams.
This tactic of flooding a hashtag is akin to what is called “barrage jamming” in the context of electronic warfare—blinding a system by filling the display with noise. On social media, flooding a hashtag is a tactic made famous by Korean boy-band fans in June 2020 when they took over the use of “#whitelivesmatter.” K-pop fans did this as an anti-racist act, hoping to ensure white supremacists could not organize around the hashtag. China’s hashtag flooding is not similarly altruistic.
Another important function these accounts serve is that they frequently retweet posts from Chinese state officials, giving these government channels the appearance of legitimacy offered by high retweet counts. It’s important to remember, China doesn’t allow its citizens to freely use Western social media platforms.
Most of the Chinese troll accounts are not intended to stand up to scrutiny. They have handles such as “@HeidiBI79426365” and “@Brittan67692139.” Their profiles are poorly crafted, and their English is weak and repetitive. They are not created to last. As of Nov. 1, Twitter had suspended about 75 percent of the newly created accounts that operated in October. But these accounts’ purpose has been fulfilled, and the accounts themselves are expendable. The hashtag was flooded; the retweets and likes were given (and remain).
Caption: A tweet from the pro-China account called "Hitler 2" and the repost from an account called "garyhorton," both with either 0 or 1 followers/following.
But the banker from Monaco was not one of these newly created throwaway accounts. Her account had existed and been active for several years, although her interest in Xinjiang was relatively newfound, starting only weeks before Twitter suspended the account at the end of October. And she wasn’t alone. There are hundreds more accounts with profiles that looked much like hers—a book translator from France, a defunct business in New York City and a Korean comic book fan. These accounts were older, spread all over the world and were mostly dormant before acquiring a sudden interest in Xinjiang economic development (preceded by, in some cases, strong negative opinions about Steve Bannon, Guo Wengui and Li-Meng Yan). A little digging revealed that many of these accounts shared one further feature—a username that appeared in an email address included in a database of hacked accounts maintained by DeHashed.
These accounts played a third role in this propaganda operation, halfway between the raw burner accounts and the official spokespeople like Zhao Lijian. More difficult to identify relative to their newly created co-conspirators, they give a veneer of authenticity to their messaging. These less immediately suspicious accounts were often supported in their messaging by a phalanx of retweeting and liking from brand-new burner accounts to make them look even more legitimate, forming a small inauthentic propaganda cell.
China’s propaganda efforts around its treatment of the Uyghurs and the country’s attempts to undermine Western criticisms of its atrocities are well known and still ongoing. China is driven to maintain face and, as its focus on cotton suggests, defend its economic interests. The social media disinformation campaign we have described here, however, illustrates the steps China is willing to take not only to propagate its own version of reality but also to undermine others’ attempts to engage with the truth. China’s troll army not only reinforces China’s narrative but also limits the ability of journalists, activists, and victims to organize and employ social media as the tool of free speech it was once lauded for being. As China’s propaganda and disinformation networks adapt, those who try to break through the chaff will need to as well.
15. Leaked papers link top Chinese leaders to Uyghur crackdown
Leaked papers link top Chinese leaders to Uyghur crackdown
A newly published cache of documents directly links top Chinese leaders including President Xi Jinping to the state's crackdown on Uyghur Muslims.
The documents include speeches which analysts say prove senior government leaders called for measures that led to mass internment and forced labour.
China has consistently denied that it is committing genocide against Uyghurs.
Some of the documents were the subject of an earlier report, but the latest leak has previously unseen information.
They were passed to the Uyghur Tribunal - an independent people's tribunal in the UK - in September, but have not previously been published in full. The tribunal asked three academics who specialise in the field - Drs Adrian Zenz, David Tobin and James Millward - to authenticate the documents.
The documents, branded the 'Xinjiang Papers', after the region which is home to most of China's Uyghurs, reveal how Chinese Communist party (CCP) leaders including Mr Xi and Premier Li Keqiang made statements which directly led to policies affecting the Uyghurs and other Muslims.
These include forced internments, mass sterilisations, forced assimilation, "re-education", and coercion of detained Uyghurs to work in factories.
The New York Times had reported on an identical set of documents that were leaked to them in 2019, but not all were made available to the public.
In a report on the documents, Dr Zenz said his analysis showed that the links between statements made by top government figures and subsequent policies that were implemented against the Uyghurs were "far more extensive, detailed and significant than previously understood".
China has come under massive international pressure over allegations of human rights violations in Xinjiang. A marked shift in China's approach to the region can be traced back to two brutal attacks on pedestrians and commuters in Beijing in 2013 and the city of Kunming in 2014, blamed by China on Uyghur Islamists and separatists.
Its response from 2016 onwards has been the building of so-called "re-education" camps for Uyghurs and other Muslims, and the targeting of Xinjiang residents deemed to have displayed any behaviour viewed as a sign of untrustworthiness.
In addition, reports have emerged of China forcibly mass sterilising Uyghur women to suppress the population, separating children from their families, and attempting to break the cultural traditions of the group.
Several countries, including the US, Canada and the Netherlands, have accused China of committing genocide and crimes against humanity.
China has vehemently denied these allegations, saying the crackdown in Xinjiang is necessary to prevent terrorism and root out Islamist extremism, and the camps are an effective tool for "re-educating" inmates in its fight against terrorism.
16. #StopXinjiangRumors: the CCP’s decentralised disinformation campaign
The referenced report can be downloaded here:
Excerpts:
This report also demonstrates the value of innovative cross-sectoral partnerships and of open-source data analysis. Our industry partners at Twitter have taken the enforcement action to disrupt these assets. But ASPI identified the connection between social media accounts or channels and a local company contracted by the regional government in Xinjiang to distribute international-facing propaganda, which was an important element in Twitter’s attribution of one of these two datasets to the Chinese state. Whole-of-society responses to hybrid threats necessitate these kinds of partnerships to create the resilience we need to counter propaganda and disinformation from authoritarian regimes.
#StopXinjiangRumors: the CCP’s decentralised disinformation campaign | The Strategist
Video testimonials from Uyghurs saying they’re content with the economic opportunities provided for them through Chinese Communist Party re-education programs; promotion of Xinjiang as an idyllic tourism destination; commentary on the positive impact of CCP policies on the health and life expectancy of the region’s Uyghur population; content distributed in multiple languages on US and Chinese social media platforms: these are all efforts revolving around the hashtag #StopXinjiangRumors to recalibrate international perceptions of life in the Xinjiang region.
The content is distributed by social media networks that previously focused on porn and Korean soap operas but also—curiously—by CCP diplomats. Yet these networks are run by the Chinese state, directly or by outsourcing to state-directed companies linked to state and regional propaganda departments.
ASPI’s new report on Xinjiang disinformation linked to the Chinese party-state highlights how different strands of CCP online and offline information operations now interweave to create an increasingly coordinated propaganda ecosystem made up of Chinese government officials, state and regional media assets, outsourced influence-for-hire operators, social media influencers and covert information operations.
The two datasets analysed by ASPI’s disinformation team demonstrate that international criticism of CCP policy in Xinjiang continues to be acutely sensitive for the party-state and that this is driving investment in international-facing disinformation at multiple levels in the party’s propaganda apparatus.
Twitter’s state actor information operations datasets offer the most substantive evidence base for analysing the trajectory of the Chinese party-state’s online disinformation since its attribution on US social media platforms in 2019. Twitter has undertaken three major disruptions of on-platform manipulation by assets it linked with high confidence to the Chinese state through a combination of technical and behavioural signals. And Twitter is forward-leaning in making state actor information operations datasets available to the public.
ASPI’s disinformation team is one of the small handful of research teams internationally that are capable of analysing these datasets. For this report, we had advance access to the data prior to Twitter’s public release. By integrating analysis of these datasets and the CCP’s own directives and rhetoric, we learn more about how the party apparatus operationalises the CCP’s strategy for public opinion warfare.
Within the data we see overlaps that reflect different strands of pro-CCP online and offline influence activity. There are multiple intersections that suggest coordination across the party-state’s propaganda assets. Some of this is clearly directly coordinated—for example, where we see this covert information operation’s interactions with, and reciprocal amplification of, the CCP’s state and local media. Other interactions with the party’s propaganda assets, however, may be more opportunistic—for example, the engagement with prominent pro-CCP social media influencers and diplomats.
Yet cumulatively they point to the building of a propaganda ecosystem for projecting the party’s discourse power at international audiences.
The data offer insights into how propaganda directives from the top of the party structure are operationalised and suggest that there are likely to be multiple strands of CCP online information operations underway at any given time, each directed by different elements from within the party structure.
Analysis of procurement documents shows that the party is increasingly outsourcing propaganda work to a range of Chinese media, marketing and internet companies. Private-sector innovation is diversifying the CCP’s propaganda ecosystem. While publicity campaigns are generally acceptable in Western countries and not necessarily coercive, the Chinese party-state views publicity and propaganda as perfectly compatible. The datasets we analysed for our report are a good illustration of this point. They highlight how the Chinese government’s efforts to portray a positive version of Xinjiang are interwoven with disinformation denying human rights abuses.
The campaigns are also reflective of what is likely to be the future direction of the CCP’s online information operations.
Following a Politburo collective study session in May, President Xi Jinping urged the party to expand its ‘circle of friends in international public opinion’. The CCP’s recent propaganda efforts have adapted to incorporate and appropriate a more expansive circle that includes influencers and other proxies that align in projecting the party-state’s preferred narratives into international political discourse. The party is clear that this effort is an important part of its public-opinion struggle to ‘shape a more just and equitable international order and forge a new type of international relations’.
This doctrinal element adds a valuable layer to how we understand the scale, persistence and diversity of pro-CCP online influence activity. The party’s incentive structures may be driving at-scale online information operations that have performance metrics based on their ideological value on the party’s own terms—rather than on their capacity to deliver effects—as leaders of various party organs compete to demonstrate allegiance to contemporary party doctrine.
The coordination between covert information operations and other CCP propaganda assets that we identify highlights the emergence of an increasingly complex system of international-facing propaganda distribution that comprises overlapping strands of activity by diverse elements of the party-state. The CCP is leveraging asymmetric advantage in the information domain as its officials, state media and their proxies exploit the open access to international audiences that US social media platforms provide. That access, of course, isn’t reciprocal, as the CCP exercises an extensive system of control, manipulation and censorship over its domestic internet.
This report also demonstrates the value of innovative cross-sectoral partnerships and of open-source data analysis. Our industry partners at Twitter have taken the enforcement action to disrupt these assets. But ASPI identified the connection between social media accounts or channels and a local company contracted by the regional government in Xinjiang to distribute international-facing propaganda, which was an important element in Twitter’s attribution of one of these two datasets to the Chinese state. Whole-of-society responses to hybrid threats necessitate these kinds of partnerships to create the resilience we need to counter propaganda and disinformation from authoritarian regimes.
17. Philippine military says Muslim rebel leader killed in clash
I am always skeptical when military leaders say the terrorists are on the brink of defeat.
Excerpts:
The military said troops retrieved the body of Karinda, an alleged bomb maker. Also known as Abu Azim, he took over Daulah Islamiya after its leader, Salahudin Hasan, died in an army offensive Oct. 29 in Maguindanao’s Talayan town.
Another fighter of the Daulah Islamiya, which has been blamed for deadly bombings and assaults on government forces, was killed by troops in a clash on Tuesday in Shariff Saydona Mustapha town, also in Maguindano, the military said.
“Our series of successes in countering these terrorist elements is an indication that they are on the brink of defeat,” said Col. Pedro Balisi, who leads an army mechanized brigade.
The Daulah Islamiya along with the violent Abu Sayyaf and other jihadi groups backed a 2017 siege of southern Marawi city, which government forces quelled five months later with the help of U.S. and Australian surveillance aircraft. The violence left more than 1,100 mostly militants dead and sparked fears that the Islamic State group’s violent ideology could be gaining a foothold in Southeast Asia.
Philippine military says Muslim rebel leader killed in clash
FILE PHOTO: This photo taken on March 8, 2018 shows Philippine soldiers standing next to their armoured personnel carriers as they man a checkpoint along a highway near the clash site between government troops and islamic militants in Datu Saudi Ampatuan town, Maguindanao province on the southern island of Mindanao. (Photo: FERDINAND CABRERA/AFP via Getty Images)
COTABATO, Philippines (AP) — Philippine troops killed an Islamic rebel leader and four of his men in fighting in the volatile south in the latest setback for insurgent forces aligned with the Islamic State group, military officials said Friday.
Army troops gunned down Asim Karinda and four others in a gunbattle in a rural village near Mamasapano town on Thursday, just over a month after he took over Daulah Islamiya, an armed Islamic group whose previous leader was killed in an army offensive, regional military commander Maj. Gen. Juvymax Uy said.
The military did not report any army casualties in the hourlong firefight in Maguindanao province.
Small bands of Muslim rebels, who have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group, remain in the country's south despite a 2014 peace pact between the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the largest guerilla group, which dropped its secessionist bid and embraced Muslim autonomy in the southern third of the largely Roman Catholic nation.
The military said troops retrieved the body of Karinda, an alleged bomb maker. Also known as Abu Azim, he took over Daulah Islamiya after its leader, Salahudin Hasan, died in an army offensive Oct. 29 in Maguindanao’s Talayan town.
Another fighter of the Daulah Islamiya, which has been blamed for deadly bombings and assaults on government forces, was killed by troops in a clash on Tuesday in Shariff Saydona Mustapha town, also in Maguindano, the military said.
“Our series of successes in countering these terrorist elements is an indication that they are on the brink of defeat,” said Col. Pedro Balisi, who leads an army mechanized brigade.
The Daulah Islamiya along with the violent Abu Sayyaf and other jihadi groups backed a 2017 siege of southern Marawi city, which government forces quelled five months later with the help of U.S. and Australian surveillance aircraft. The violence left more than 1,100 mostly militants dead and sparked fears that the Islamic State group’s violent ideology could be gaining a foothold in Southeast Asia.
18. Stanley McChrystal Accidentally Reveals the Dishonesty of U.S. Generals
Not a surprising review from Peter Maas.
Stanley McChrystal Accidentally Reveals the Dishonesty of U.S. Generals
McChrystal’s new book is so stuffed with mendacity and banality that it serves as an exposé on America’s generals after 9/11.
It is time to make a strange addition to the shortlist of essential documents on the dishonesty of America’s generals: a new book from retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal titled “Risk: A User’s Guide.”
McChrystal was removed from his command by President Barack Obama but afterward created a thriving consulting firm and often appears on TV to talk about war and politics. His new book is intended to be a primer for corporate leaders trying to navigate the perils of doing business in America. The conceit is straightforward: Hello, I am a retired four-star general who bravely led troops into battle, and I can tell you everything you need to know about managing risk.
There is a lot that McChrystal might teach us, because he was responsible for a series of consequential errors from which valuable lessons could be learned. Those errors include the concoction of a plan in 2009 to defeat the Taliban insurgency by flooding Afghanistan with as many as 80,000 additional U.S. soldiers. This was the kind of troops-and-money strategy that succeeded mainly in killing lots of civilians and helping the Taliban return to power.
A cover of Stanley McChrystal’s latest book, “Risk: A User’s Guide”.
On a less catastrophic scale, McChrystal actively participated in the cover-up of the friendly fire killing of NFL player-turned-soldier Pat Tillman, whose 2004 death the Pentagon initially blamed on the Taliban, knowing that this was untrue. McChrystal also took the ill-advised risk of allowing a Rolling Stone reporter to embed with his entourage on a trip around Europe, and the resulting article, which conveyed the general’s disdain for America’s elected leaders, led to his early retirement in 2010.
I am not arguing that McChrystal should abstain from writing about risk or suggesting that he didn’t have wartime successes. A book that intelligently drew from both sides of his military career could be useful. But that is not the book McChrystal chose to write, and for that we should be grateful, because he has instead provided us with a far more important document. “Risk” is stuffed with so many displays of dishonesty, ignorance, and banality that it’s the ultimate self-own for a generation of generals who led America into disaster after 9/11 — and profited from it.
With his new book, McChrystal turns himself into an accidental whistleblower.
Fighting the Truth
There is a basic question to ask before buying a general’s advice book: Why are we listening to this guy?
America treats its generals as revered proxies for its ordinary soldiers, loving them even though the wars they’ve presided over have been catastrophic. There has been more than $14 trillion in defense spending since 9/11, more than 7,000 U.S. soldiers dead in Iraq and Afghanistan, and at least several hundred thousand civilians killed (which is a conservative estimate). Throughout these calamities, the generals lied about what was happening, telling Congress and the American public that things were going well when they knew it wasn’t true. The breathtaking scale of their deceit was revealed in classified documents that the Washington Post published in an award-winning 2019 series titled “At War With the Truth.”
Their failures have occurred outside the battlefield too.
One of the most venerated generals of recent times is James Mattis, who commanded U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and went on to become President Donald Trump’s first defense secretary. Before joining the Trump administration, Mattis was on the board of directors of Theranos to provide advice on “building elite teams.” He received an annual stipend of $150,000 and continued to defend Theranos even after the Wall Street Journal revealed in 2015 that the company’s blood-testing machines were fraudulent. Testifying in September at the trial of the company’s founder, Elizabeth Holmes, Mattis avidly threw her under the bus, saying that he was “disappointed at the level of transparency from Ms. Holmes.”
A different type of flameout happened to retired Gen. David Petraeus, another famous commander of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan who served as Obama’s director of the CIA. Petraeus didn’t last long at Langley because he was having an affair with his biographer and shared classified information with her. The tradecraft he employed to covertly communicate with her was amateurish: They used the drafts folder in a shared Gmail account. And while in Afghanistan, his military aides were excluded from helicopter trips so that his secret girlfriend could ride along. Petraeus resigned from the CIA and pleaded guilty to mishandling classified information, but he’s still respected and has a lucrative partnership at KKR, a private equity firm.
One more item from the annals of generals gone bad:
There’s retired Gen. Michael Flynn, who headed the Defense Intelligence Agency and briefly served as Trump’s national security adviser until it was realized that he had deceived Vice President Mike Pence about his contacts with a Russian diplomat. After pleading guilty to lying to the FBI, Flynn became a star of the QAnon conspiracy crowd and called for America to have one religion (no prizes for guessing which one). His leap into the world of the unhinged is not unique. Retired Brig. Gen. Donald Bolduc, who served 10 tours in Afghanistan and led the Joint Special Operations Command, is a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in New Hampshire and has described the state’s governor, also a Republican, as a “Chinese communist sympathizer.”
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You get the point. Putting aside the conspiracy theories, corporate frauds, and the sharing of classified documents with persons not authorized to receive them (your girlfriend), there is little evidence that the experience gained by generals translates into business acumen. In fact, there is evidence that companies with military officers on their boards have worse outcomes than their competitors. It’s hard to imagine two cultures more different. In the military, a general can order the court-martial of a subordinate for disobeying orders. In the corporate world, Elon Musk is powerful, but he can’t send lazy workers to prison. The skills used to organize a sales team for another round of cold calls are not what you need to lead Delta Force operators into mortal combat. And lest we forget, the U.S. military has a culture of sexual assault and harassment that has resisted decades of reform efforts.
Gladwell for Dummies
McChrystal appears to have the distinction of making more money from his military service than any U.S. general of his generation.
According to a recent investigation by the Washington Post, McChrystal has served as a board member or adviser to at least 10 companies since leaving the military. He was paid more than $1 million for serving on the board of just one firm, Navistar International, which also paid $50 million to the government to settle accusations that it fraudulently overcharged the Marine Corps for armored vehicles. McChrystal also drew $70,000 for a single speech at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and $50,000 for an engagement at California Polytechnic State University. Both are public institutions not known to be awash with funds.
The engine of McChrystal’s business endeavors is his eponymous McChrystal Group, which has more than 50 employees and provides consulting services to corporate and government clients. While “Risk” is written in the first person, McChrystal has a co-author, Anna Butrico, who is an associate at his firm. References to the firm are scattered throughout the book, and its acknowledgments section gives credit to about a dozen employees who provided ideas and assistance. The book is prominently featured on the website of McChrystal Group.
The handful of pages about Afghanistan skate past colossal failures in which McChrystal was deeply complicit.
The book is dishonest because it ignores or distorts the risks undertaken by McChrystal that failed. This includes the Tillman episode but most crucially the disastrous war strategies in Afghanistan and Iraq. While there are boastful passages about military missions in Iraq that are portrayed as successful — special forces would “identify and engage enemy fighters with stunning speed,” McChrystal claims — the abundant errors made there are basically unmentioned. More to the point, the handful of pages about Afghanistan skate past colossal failures in which McChrystal was deeply complicit. Violent raids by forces under his command are described only as creating “extraordinary political controversy” because they were “antithetical to the Afghan culture.” Nowhere does McChrystal admit the actual reason for the controversy: U.S. and Afghan forces killed an unconscionable number of civilians, and in some instances, the violence constituted war crimes.
Much of the book is not lies, just utter banality. It is a torrent of platitudes like this: “Fear of change is only natural — adaptability requires the ability, willingness, and, I’d argue, courage to dare to become something different.” Or this assemblage of clichés: “Knowing that transformation is inevitable, we can ensure that we’re asking the right questions of ourselves and our teams to calibrate to our new reality in order to be successful in an increasingly digitized world.” And this insight: “Against the greatest threats, winning is most often the product of teamwork.”
The book moves from one bromide to another with eighth grade-level graphics, and one of its key messages is perplexing from a grammatical perspective: that “the greatest risk to us — is us.” It evokes famous events or personalities to make points that are manifestly self-evident, with references to the Alamo, Google, Apollo 13, Aunt Jemima, Martin Luther King Jr., Joseph Goebbels, Blockbuster, Enron, Lehman Brothers, “The Wizard of Oz,” the Bay of Pigs, Greta Thunberg, Napster, Gettysburg, the Maginot Line, Coco Chanel, Hurricane Katrina, and the Fosbury Flop, among others. One can imagine McChrystal’s agent pitching the germ of this book as “Malcolm Gladwell for Dummies.”
Stanley McChrystal, chairman of Siemens Government Technologies Inc., speaks during the annual Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, Calif., on May 2, 2016.
Photo: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Manufacturing Fame
It’s harmless, you might think. What could be so terrible about a retired general making a few bucks with potted wisdom from West Point and the Sunni Triangle? We can even enjoy a cynical laugh, if we wish, watching a grift come to life as corporate executives make bulk purchases of “Risk” and do calisthenics at dawn with Navy SEALs hired by McChrystal Group. The gullible marks get what they deserve, which is nothing. But I can’t steer my thoughts away from the sacrifices of the soldiers and civilians I met while covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think few of them are pleased or amused by the ease with which fortune and fame are showered on generals who got so many people killed and maimed. Many would regard it as an injustice.
The villain in this story isn’t really McChrystal or his book. He’s doing what Americans are encouraged to do: Swim toward available commercial opportunities and make as much money as you can without breaking the law. Maybe he doesn’t need all that extra cash — generals can receive more than $250,000 in annual retirement pay, after all — but how many people would turn down the partnerships and board seats that are offered to former generals?
The deeper problem, I think, is the adulation that McChrystal and other military leaders get from media organizations. They manufacture the fame that is so misplaced. Here, for instance, is a partial list of the outlets that gave fawning coverage to the rollout of “Risk”: Axios, CNN, PBS, the Washington Post, Time magazine, Forbes, MSNBC, NPR, CBS News, Yahoo Finance, and Foreign Policy. It seems that there was just one news outlet in the U.S. that published a critical take — the National Review, with an article by military veteran Bing West that was scathingly headlined “A General Who Failed in War Assesses Risk.”
19. In Afghanistan, ‘Who Has the Guns Gets the Land’
In Afghanistan, ‘Who Has the Guns Gets the Land’
A decades-long fight over land has been reinvigorated as Taliban leaders look to reward their fighters with property, even if that means evicting others.
Sheep herders in Musa Qala, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in October.
A decades-long fight over land has been reinvigorated as Taliban leaders look to reward their fighters with property, even if that means evicting others.
Sheep herders in Musa Qala, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in October.Credit...
Photographs by Jim Huylebroek
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — For decades, roughly a thousand families called the low-slung mud-walled neighborhood of Firqa home. Some moved in during the 1990s civil war, while others were provided housing under the previous government.
Soon after the Taliban takeover on Aug. 15, the new government told them all to get out.
Ghullam Farooq, 40, sat in the darkness of his shop in Firqa last month, describing how armed Taliban fighters came at night, expelling him at gunpoint from his home in the community, a neighborhood of Kandahar city in southern Afghanistan.
“All the Taliban said was: ‘Take your stuff and go,” he said.
Those who fled or were forcibly removed were quickly replaced with Taliban commanders and fighters.
Thousands of Afghans are facing such traumatic dislocations as the new Taliban government uses property to compensate its fighters for years of military service, amid a crumbling economy and a lack of cash.
Over decades, after every period of upheaval in Afghanistan, property becomes a crucial form of wealth for those in power to reward followers. But this arbitrary redistribution also leaves thousands displaced and fuels endless disputes in a country where the land ownership system is so informal that few people hold any documentation for the ground they call their own.
Ghullam Farooq’s shop, left, in Firqa, a neighborhood of Kandahar city.
A farm’s fields cultivated to grow opium poppies, irrigated via solar-powered pumps, in Musa Qala.
Just as during past changes in government, distributing property to Taliban disciples in swaths of rural farmland and in desirable urban neighborhoods has turned into at least a short-term recourse to keep stability within the Taliban ranks.
“Who has the guns gets the land,” said Patricia Gossman, the associate Asia director for Human Rights Watch. “It’s an old, long continuing story.”
In a largely pastoral nation split by rugged mountain ranges, dotted with deserts and little forest, land is one of the most important assets and a flashpoint, fueling blood feuds between neighbors, ethnic groups and warlords as power has changed hands. Conflicting legal systems dictating land ownership and a lack of documentation have further destabilized the property market through the generations.
Afghanistan Under Taliban Rule
With the departure of the U.S. military on Aug. 30, Afghanistan quickly fell back under control of the Taliban. Across the country, there is widespread anxiety about the future.
The country is slightly smaller in land area than Texas, with a population that has grown in past decades to around 39 million people. Yet, only one-eighth of Afghanistan’s land is farmable and shrinking under a crippling drought and changes wrought from climate change.
Today’s land disputes in Afghanistan can be largely traced to the Soviet-backed regime that came to power in the late 1970s, which redistributed property across the country. This quickly fueled tensions as land was confiscated and given to the poor and landless under the banner of socialism.
Land redistribution continued to play out, first during the civil war in the early 1990s, and then under the rise of the Taliban. After the U.S. invasion in 2001, those same commanders who were once defeated by the Taliban went about distributing and stealing land once more, this time with the backing of the newly installed U.S.-supported government. American and NATO military forces contributed to the problem by seizing property for bases and doing little to compensate landowners.
Harvesting opium from poppies in Musa Qala, last month.
Mullah Abdul Salam at his field in Musa Qala.
Attempts by the Western-backed government over the past two decades to formalize land ownership and property rights ultimately proved futile as the incentives to take advantage of the system overwhelmed efforts to regularize it.
Now more than three months after the Taliban’s rise to power, its administrators are in a similar position, but with no official policy regarding land ownership.
“We are still analyzing and investigating how to honor land deeds and titles for people,” Bilal Karimi, a Taliban spokesman, said.
Local Taliban leadershave been seizing and reallocating property for years in districts they captured to reward fighters and the families of their dead with land to farm or sell for profit.
In 2019, when the Taliban arrived at Mullah Abdul Salam’s modest poppy farm in Musa Qala, in Helmand Province, he faced an impossible choice. Like many poor farmers in rural Afghanistan, he had no legal deed to prove he owned the ground he had cultivated for years.
So the Taliban gave him an ultimatum: Either pay a lump sum to keep his land or give it up.
“We came early and we had the right to the land,” Mr. Salam recalled, standing on the edge of his poppy field in Musa Qala, shovel in hand. “It had to be ours.”
Opium at a market in northern Helmand Province.
A street in Musa Qala.
For some time, the land in Musa Qala was unclaimed, undocumented and written off as unfarmable, except by a few farmers such as Mr. Salam. Then the ground became more fertile with the widespread growth of solar power that enabled farmers to run well pumps, at far lower expense than use of conventional fuel. The Taliban tried to strike a balance by allowing the poor farmers to remain at relatively small cost, while allocating unclaimed plots to its fighters.
Khoi, a brother of a Taliban fighter who goes by one name, was among the family members of the militants who received land in Musa Qala two years ago. Since then, he said, fellow Taliban veterans had profited by selling portions of the property gifted to them.
“There is no more land for the Taliban to distribute here, if they could, they would,” he said.
With no official guidance, Taliban officials have now resorted to the same practices throughout the country that carved up the area around Mr. Salam’s farm.
But as the Taliban distribute property, parts of the population have been left confused and angered by the actions of their new government, which suspiciously resemble the behavior of its predecessors.
In Takhar Province, a historically anti-Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan’s north, Taliban fighters have evicted people — including some who had lived there for more than 40 years — in several districts, saying the land was unfairly distributed by previous governments, said a former Afghan lawmaker on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation against her family.
Takhar residents, the former lawmaker said, have started to question whether Taliban administrators can run the country any more effectively than their predecessor, given how they are following the same practices as past governments.
Khoi outside his farm, which operates on solar energy, in Musa Qala.
The Kajaki lake, part of the Helmand River. Much of rural Afghanistan is suffering a prolonged drought.
“The greatest issue for the Taliban going forward will be to deal with land documentation and legalization,” said Fazal Muzhary, a former researcher at Afghanistan Analysts Network, a policy research group, who focused on land ownership in Afghanistan. “So when the Taliban want to legalize or demarcate lands, they will also need to take back the lands from people who grabbed them in any period, in the 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s and so on. This will be very challenging for them.”
In central Afghanistan, property disputes of another nature are playing out: the marginalization and displacement of ethnic minorities in order to seize their arable land. Taliban leaders have long persecuted and antagonized the Hazaras, a mostly Shiite minority, and in recent months, the new government has watched as local strongmen evicted hundreds of families.
In September, Nasrullah, 27, and his family fled their village in Daikundi Province, along with around 200 families who left nearly everything, he said.
Such displacements have upended more than a dozen villages in central Afghanistan, affecting more than 2,800 Hazaras, according to a Human Rights Watch report.
In recent weeks, local courts have overturned some seizures, allowing some families to return. But for most, the evictions have been traumatic.
“In each village the Taliban put a checkpoint, and the people aren’t allowed to take anything but our clothes and some flour,” said Nasrullah, who goes by one name, during an interview in September. “But I brought only my clothes.”
Praying by the Helmand River in Sangin, Helmand Province
Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar; Victor J. Blue from Kabul; Jim Huylebroek from Musa Qala; and Sami Sahakfrom Los Angeles.
20. Veterans Are Being Recruited by Extremist Groups. How Do We Help Them Say No?
Veterans Are Being Recruited by Extremist Groups. How Do We Help Them Say No?
Training must start while people are on active duty, experts said.
The “small but growing problem” of extremism among veterans is illustrated by the facts that they account for 15 percent of the people charged so far in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol—and that those charges figure heavily in the 350 percent increase in extremist-related crimes committed by veterans in the past decade, one terrorism expert said.
“But it's not just a numbers problem,” William Braniff, director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, said during a Brookings Institution panel on Friday. “This is a problem regarding American democracy. And it's a problem for which we have to put a preventative ecosystem in place now before the numbers do get more concerning.”
Since 1990 through the first nine months of 2021, at least 424 U.S. veterans “committed criminal acts that were motivated by their political, economic, social, or religious goals,” said a fact sheet released in October by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, an academic effort led by the University of Maryland. That includes 99 veterans who have been charged with crimes related to the breach of the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Getting ahead of the problem is not a matter of prevention—it’s a matter of “pre-prevention,” said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who runs American University’s Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab.
“We focus on the rhetorical strategies and narratives of persuasive tactics that extremist groups and propaganda use to try to recruit people. And then we design, in the lab, interventions that we test to see if we can interrupt those processes at the really early stage,” Miller-Idriss said. “It’s not even deradicalization or disengagement, but how do you prevent people from being persuaded by some of those extremist rhetorical strategies.”
That work needs to be part of their military service, said Shawn Turner, a senior advisor at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
“It needs to be baked into the training,” Turner said. “From the time that someone enters military service, we need to approach this issue with an understanding that whether it is while they're on active duty at one of our major bases around the country or whether it's during that time in their transition, or after they are out of the military—at every point of their career, they are in some way vulnerable to the rhetoric of these groups.”
Training people to be less vulnerable comes down to information.
“One of the things we have to do is invest during active duty...to actually have a stronger period of time where people are really coached to recognize propaganda, conspiracy theories, persuasive extremist tactics, scapegoating,” Miller-Idriss said.
There’s also the question of how to make the training stick long-term. The average time between when someone leaves the service and when they engage in criminal extremist activity is 10 years, Braniff said, so preventative training during service might not be enough.
“Our theory of change is that if we can harness the incredible strengths and talents of the veteran and military family community, and build on the foundation of civics, not politics, we can crowd out vulnerabilities related to extremism and polarizing mis- and dis-information,” he said.
And for those who do get pulled into extremist behavior or organizations, there must be resources for helping them get back out.
“We need to create an environment where people who want to leave conspiratorial or extremist movements can do so,” Braniff said. “They can find another veteran to help pull them back into prosocial behavior. Now, this requires resources, but it's an essential part of this overall risk mitigation strategy.”
“When it becomes patriotic to be against your government, then there's a problem there,” said Scott Cooper, non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council. “We have a number of people, especially veterans, that are seeking some kind of meaning and purpose after they leave the service...and I think reestablishing that purpose in something meaningful is the challenge before us.”
21. Sophia Glock divulges her secretive life as a child of CIA officers in 'Passport'
Sophia Glock divulges her secretive life as a child of CIA officers in 'Passport'
NPR · by Scott Simon · November 27, 2021
Scott Simon speaks with author Sophia Glock about her graphic novel, "Passport," about a young girl's experience with her parents' careers with the CIA.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Adolescence - it's rough. You don't know where you fit into this world. It's hard to make friends. You worry about boys and girls and parties, your safety, your future. And you realize that your parents - God bless them - aren't the people you thought they were. That's even before you find out they work for the - well, let's just keep that agency confidential for the moment.
The last part, at least, is true for the narrator of "Passport," a graphic memoir for young readers by Sophia Glock and based on her own true story. She joins us now from Austin. Thanks so much for being with us.
SOPHIA GLOCK: Thank you so much for having me. This is quite a thrill.
SIMON: Well, and let's explain. Your parents worked for the CIA. They were intelligence officers. You moved around to six different countries, which seems to be - book seems to be mostly set in Central America. Is that fair to say?
GLOCK: Yes. I grew up across Europe and Latin America in general, and the book takes place in an unspecified Central American country.
SIMON: And moving around so much, did you always feel like an American or an American in exile? What was that like?
GLOCK: Oh, I definitely always felt very American. It was so central to what made us different. Even if I was in a international setting, you know, everybody sort of related to their country of origin, even if they had not originated there technically.
SIMON: But what did your mother tell you to say if anybody asked?
GLOCK: You know, I could talk about being an American because that was an obvious fact about me, perhaps. But we were taught from a very early age how to deflect and demur questions that got too pointed. But it really helped that we were kept in the dark, especially as small children.
SIMON: Well, tell us about this quality that is called deflection. What did that mean? Or are you going to deflect that question?
GLOCK: (Laughter) No. It's a really useful skill. You just ask questions back. Most people are pretty much interested in themselves and happy to (laughter) - and happy to talk about things that they can talk about. So...
SIMON: Yeah.
GLOCK: ...Being vague and broad and then sort of shifting the focus of the conversation. And usually you can do that with a pretty pointed question in the direction that you would like the conversation to go.
SIMON: So if somebody - if one of your friends would say something like, do you like Coca-Cola, you would say, do you like Coca-Cola? What's your favorite soft drink?
GLOCK: Who doesn't like Coca-Cola? What do you like the most? You know, in fact, even later in life, a good example would be, you know, people would ask specific about my parents' careers because it was obvious that I'd grown up overseas. It would come up. And they'd be like, yeah, but what did they do? And I'd pretend to be ignorant. I'd be like...
SIMON: Yeah.
GLOCK: ...Who understands what their parents do? You know, what they did was so boring, you know?
SIMON: (Laughter) Yeah.
GLOCK: Oh, so boring and dry - government stuff, you know? And then you just move on.
SIMON: Well, and with respect and even love that can develop by reading this book for your parents, is that a healthy thing for you to - for someone to teach their children?
GLOCK: Not necessarily. There were some things that we were taught by the nature of their work that I think are useful social skills. I think that there's a cost to living a secret life. I think there's an emotional cost and a social cost. I think my parents paid that cost, and me and my brothers and sisters paid it to a certain extent. But, you know, we were never asked to follow in their footsteps. And - you know, and ultimately, they asked me to keep a secret my whole life, and in my adulthood, they allowed me to tell the secret. If it's unhealthy, it was out of necessity. And I think those are choices that probably every family makes to a certain extent.
SIMON: At the heart of the story, of course, an older sister who leaves to go to school in America. How does that affect the younger sister?
GLOCK: I adored my sister. And she was sent away actually quite young. And a lot of it was simply jealousy because she had freedom. And my parents took us all over the world, so they gave us something huge and broad in that way.
SIMON: Yeah.
GLOCK: But we also led a very secluded, isolated, constrained life. There were concerns about safety. There were concerns about, you know, controlling information and controlling their children in environments that they did not feel fully in control of. So to watch my sister go back to the states and experience what I saw as freedom from this lifestyle, that was very heady.
SIMON: Do you resent your parents for deceiving you?
GLOCK: Absolutely not, actually. They were working on something that was bigger than our family and bigger than themselves. They modeled something else in their deception, which was a life in service to something that they truly believed in. And that ultimately is more powerful than the fact that they had to keep their kids in the dark.
SIMON: And how did you find comics as your form of expression?
GLOCK: Like most people, I grew up reading the funnies and "Calvin And Hobbes" and all sorts of comics. But they sort of came into the forefront, and I realized that it might actually be the thing that motivated my whole artistic experience. When I was a 12-year-old, I started reading "X-Men" comics. And I was very into superheroes until I began to sort of, like, be dissatisfied with the tropes of superhero comics - especially in the '90s, were not written for young women. They were written for adult men, even though they were ostensibly kid lit, right? So then I discovered that there was this whole world of independent comics and comics about everything, and that sort of became my mission in life was just to write comics. I found it to be the most exciting medium of self-expression.
SIMON: I mean, it's kind of hard not to observe that you went from a life in the shadows to writing graphic.
GLOCK: Yes. Yeah (laughter). That is the appeal of comics. And graphic is such a great term for comics because they are so visceral. They are so tactile. There is so much texture in them. And in this sense, I think, actually, comics were perfect for a memoir about adolescence because everything when we're adolescents is visceral and immediate. So I felt it was a good match.
SIMON: Sophia Glock - her new graphic memoir for young readers is "Passport." Thanks so much for being with us.
GLOCK: Thank you so much for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
NPR · by Scott Simon · November 27, 2021
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
